Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 8.djvu/721

Rh her freedom and passed into the child-bearing chattel to be bought from her father in exchange for arms or cattle. For under this more settled form of life her services were useful in many ways, and the possessor of cattle and lands desired a lawful son to be his heir. Therefore the tie of marriage originated in no lofty ethical motive, but arose, like slavery and at the same period, for economic causes. The discussion next briefly touches the status of women in the oriental nations, in Greece and in Rome. And here Frau Braun's writing is less clear and impressive than usual. She seems for once to be working with secondary material and to have little first-hand acquaintance with the subject which she treats.

Her description of the Middle Ages, on the other hand, gives distinct evidence of original investigation. She discusses with much skill the relation between Christianity and the position of women; showing that at first Christianity aimed no more at emancipating the woman than at freeing the slave, and that indeed the fathers of the church and the canon law treated the woman as an unclean temptress, and therefore rightly subordinate to the man. But in two ways this attitude was modified: First, by the influence of the German views of women. The Wehrgeld of a murdered woman was twice that of a murdered man, "because" says Frau Braun, "they honored the mother in every woman." In the second place, the sight of many holy women living useful and even learned lives in the cloisters increased public opinion of women's powers and capabilities. The chapter specially devoted to the economic position of women in the Middle Ages is unusually interesting. It shows that the concentration of many workers in one establishment is not an invention of the industrial Revolution, as people so often assume, and it traces the close connection between the waxing and waning of prostitution and the economic prosperity of the independent woman worker. Another well-written chapter deals with the women of the French and American Revolutions. A short account is given of Mercy Otis Warren and Abigail Smith Adams, Die ersten Vorkämpferinnen der Gleichberechtigung des weiblichen Geschlechts; and there follows a somewhat detailed narrative of the work and writings of Olympe de Gouges, and of the woman's movement during the French Revolution—a movement, it may be noticed, which greatly influenced Mary Wollstonecraft, and so through her the world of educated English-speaking women.

But while this sketch of historical and economic development is well done, by far the most interesting part of the book is that which