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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If they declared for peace, all hostile demonstrations
ceased, and the warriors occupied themselves with peaceful
pursuits. If they pronounced for war, fierce conflicts followed, in which women engaged equally with men. For
the Northern women not only marched with the men in
their migrations, and endured with them continual hardships and dangers, but they accompanied them in their warlike expeditions, and cared for the horses and chariots at
the rear, while the men engaged the enemy in front. Not
unfrequently, they were placed in line of battle behind the
fighting men, as a reserve force. Tacitus tells us that women
defeated the Roman legions under the great general Marius,
not only once, but in five separate engagements. Not only
did they drive back the Romans, but they utterly routed
them, and turned the defeat sustained by the men into an
overwhelming victory.
Although these experiences developed in the Northern
women, to a high degree, the characteristics of courage,
strength of will, endurance, and fortitude, they were admired and beloved by their husbands, who held them in
high esteem, and seemingly placed them on a footing of
equality with themselves. Plutarch, Tacitus, and Strabo,
all Roman writers, and enemies of the Northern people, who
were perpetually at war with Rome, made the Northern
women the subject of eulogy, because of their beauty, chastity, pure morals, and wifely qualities. They were never
degraded to the abject position of the early Greek and Roman women, but asserted their natural influence in family
life, in which they were sustained by their husbands.
Almost coeval with the downfall of the Roman empire,
and its moral and social disorganization, there came a decay
of the polytheistic religions, and a decline of the Greek philosophy. The ancient religions of Greece and Rome passed