Based upon
the primitive habit of felling the woman with a blow, stunning her
by repeated strokes of the club or spear, and dragging her off by
the hair of her head as a slave to her captor's hut or rock-shelter,
this ugly and barbaric form of serfdom has come in our own time by
some strange caprice to be regarded as of positively divine origin.
The Man says now to himself, "This woman is mine. Law and the Church
have bestowed her on me. Mine for better, for worse; mine, drunk or
sober. If she ventures to have a heart or a will of her own, woe
betide her! I have tabooed her for life: let any other man touch
her, let her so much as cast eyes on any other man to admire or
desire him--and, knife, dagger, or law-court, they shall both of
them answer for it." There you have in all its native deformity
another monopolist instinct--the deepest-seated of all, the
grimmest, the most vindictive. "She is not yours," says the moral
philosopher of the new dispensation; "she is her own; release her!
The Turk hales his offending slave, sews her up in a sack, and casts
her quick into the eddying Bosphorus.
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