Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/39

Rh immoral through abstinence. As regards women in particular, the era of hypocrisy, of the suppression and false conception of their nature, was already announced in the story of the woman who bore a son without the intervention of a man, and in which the functions of the male sex are transferred to doves and ghosts. Christianity, which the priests have made into a paragon of abnormity and hypocrisy, is a real war-sermon against the recognition of the feminine sex, for that which makes woman truly woman Christianity regards for the most part with disgust. Even though Christ pardoned adulteresses and Magdalens, the story of his origin, his abstinence morality, his promises of heaven, and the consequences of Mosaic barbarism which permeate Christianity (it is disgusting to treat these things at large ), have prepared a lot for woman which can only be traced to a suppression of nature, want of sense, and barbarity.

These monstrous teachings, which in the first place caused men to shun woman, logically led to her persecution and maltreatment during the rise of barbarism in the Middle Ages. In the Council of Macon (in the sixth century) a long dispute