Page:Annie Besant, Marriage A Plea for Reform, second edition 1882.djvu/13

 The Old Testament expressly sanctions polygamy; but while the New Testament does not proscribe it—except in the case of bishops and deacons—ecclesiastical Christianity has generally been in favour of monogamy; at the same time, both the New Testament and the Church have insisted on the inferiority of the female sex; "the husband is the head of the wife" (Eph. v. 23); "wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands" (Col. iii. 18); "your women . . . are commanded to be under obedience" (I Cor. xiv. 34); "ye wives, be in subjection to your own husbands . . . even as Sara obeyed Abraham, calling him lord, whose daughters ye are as long as ye do well" (I Pet. iii. 1, 6). The common law of England is quite in accordance with this ancient Eastern teaching, and regards men as superior to women; "Among the children of the purchaser, males take before females, or, as our male lawgivers have expressed it, the worthiest of blood shall be preferred" ("Comm. on the Laws of England," J. Stephen, 7th ed. vol. i. p. 402).

The feudal system did much, of course, to perpetuate the subjection of women, it being to the interest of the lord paramount that the fiefs should descend in the male line: in those rough ages, when wars and civil feuds were almost perpetual, it was inevitable that the sex with the biggest body and strongest sinews should have the upper hand; the pity is that English gentlemen to-day are content to allow the law to remain unaltered, when the whole face of society has changed.

Let us now turn to the disabilities imposed upon women by marriage.

Blackstone lays down, in his world-famous "Commentaries on the Laws of England," that the first of the "absolute rights of every Englishman" is "the legal and uninterrupted enjoyment of his life, his limbs, his body, his health, and his reputation" (9th ed., bk. I, p. 129). The second right is personal liberty, and he says: "the confinement of a person in anywise is an imprisonment. So that the keeping a man against his will in a private house. . . . is an imprisonment" (Ibid, 136). The third is property, "which consists in the free use and enjoyment of all his acquisitions, without any control or diminution, save only by the laws of the land" (Ibid, 138). A subordinate right, necessary for the enforcement of the others, is "that of applying to the courts of justice for redress of injuries." I shall proceed