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 ...

68

CONCERNING HUSBANDS AND WIVES.

religious opinion among the Greeks or Romans was very
small. But they did solid work in the early diffusion of
Christianity Jesus himself manifested great regard for the
faith in him, and the aid given him by women. The apostle
John addressed his second letter, or " epistle " to a woman
convert, "the elect lady and her children." And Paul,
writing a last letter before his death, remembers affectionately, and by name, the noble women who had worked with
him, and incidentally reveals his great indebtedness to them.
Men began to realize that women throbbed with the same
high aims, and were instinct with the same life as themselves; that whatever their claims as men, their wives and
daughters had just the same. Most of the great teachers of
the early church fully recognized the equality of woman
with man, and the new religion silently advanced her to a
real partnership with him, and also rendered him worthier
such companionship. A new era had dawned for women.
For a time, it seemed as if Christianity, with all the gains
it brought the race, would dominate the world. But reforms
do not advance to.complete fruition, without retrogression
and halting step. The downfall of Rome destroyed all
strong, central European government, and the phenomenal
period, called "the dark ages", set in. The world retrograded steadily, and seemed to forget what it had learned.
Christianity remained the nominal religion of Europe, but so
grossly perverted, and so wickedly misinterpreted, that a respectable paganism would have done it better service. And
in the sixteenth century, wife-whipping had become so universal, that in many houses the stick hung over the door,
with which the husband was expected to keep his wife in
order.
The Welsh law declared "that a husband might whip
his wife when she lied to him, cursed him, or disobeyed