The story of my life ; or, The sunshine and shadow of seventy years / by Mary A. Livermore ... with hitherto unrecorded incidents and recollections of three years' experience as an army nurse in the great Civil War, and reminiscences of twenty-five years' experiences on the lecture platform ... to which is added six of her most popular lectures ... with portraits and one hundred and twenty engravings from designs by eminent artists ...

CONCERNING HUSBANDS AND WIVES.

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cilious contempt, as his inferior. He must have had some
spiritual comprehension of the relation of the man to the
woman, and of the husband to the wife. But in modern
Egypt all this is lost, and the status of the husband there is
the same as elsewhere in the Orient,- he is the master.
When the phrase "Oriental degradation of woman is
used, it expresses the very ne pls ultra of debasement.
There is for women nothing lower or deeper
Those who are familiar with the Koran will remember
that Mohammed promises the Mohammedan wives of the
faithful, admission to heaven, because of their marriage
with Mohammedans. The Mohammedan and Mormon
theologies are alike in this particular, for in Mormondom no
unmarried woman can enter heaven. And when a Mormon
maiden dies she is hurriedly married by some hocus pocus
to some man, dead or living, that she may be whisked into
heaven when her husband enters.
The most grimly Orthodox of the Mohammedan teachers in the East to-day declare that no women can enter
heaven, as it is already peopled with most beautiful women
who await the coming of the faithful. They emphasize the
teaching of the Koran, that no dog, pig, woman, or other
impure thing can enter a mosque,- that no drunkard, madman, decrepit person, or woman can call the hour of prayer.
And the woman who should attempt to violate either of
these laws would pay the forfeit of her life.
The elevated table-land of Central Asia, now known as
"the plateau of Iran," appears to have been the early homestead of the human race. "It was at least," says Samuel
Johnson, a scholarly writer, "the ancestral abode of thos3
races which have hitherto led the movement of civilization." They called themselves the Aryas, or "noble
people," and from them have descended the principal mood