Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/128

112 beautiful ornament of a beautiful face." Her seducer was punished with lashes, yet she was the "charmer." Among the Hindoos the woman was publicly torn to pieces by dogs, and the seducer was fastened upon a red-hot iron bedstead and roasted alive. Among the Jews the adulteress was stoned, but the adulterer was punished only when he had committed the act with a married woman and had thus (by a violation of "property") offended another man. According to the laws of Solon, the Athenian could sell the adulterous woman as a slave. The Romans permitted the husband to kill both the wife surprised in the act of adultery and, with her, the adulterer. Mohammed granted the husband the right to incarcerate the sinful woman in an especial apartment of his house "until either death released her or God gave her a means of escape." Among the old Teutons the woman, with hair cut off, and disrobed, was cast out of the house by her husband and whipped through the town.

What a list of brutalities and barbarities! And what for? For an imaginary crime against imaginary masters who called themselves husbands and were nothing but despots and barbarians.