The world of Today and Reality

The two basic errors of both Communism and Historical Liberalism on the subject of women are:  (1) that women were never emancipated until modern times, since religion particularly kept them in servitude;  (2) that equality means the right of a woman to do a man's work. It is not true that women began to be emancipated in modern times and in proportion to the decline of religion. Woman's subjection began in the seventeenth century, with the breakup of Christendom, and took one positive form at the time of the Industrial Revolution. Under the Christian civilization women enjoyed rights, privileges, honours, and dignities which have since been swallowed up by the machine age. No one has better dissipated the false idea than Mary Beard in her scholarly work: Woman as Force in History. She points out that, of eighty-five guilds in England during the Middle Ages, seventy-two had women members on an equal basis with men, even in such professions as barbers and sailors. They were prob