Among savages, women are treated as things or at best as



vi PREFACE,

animals, and are subjected to all the incidents of movable
chattels. From that position to their position in modem
Christendom a regular progress may be detected. At one
end of the scale are women, such as those of Tahiti, unable,
under pain of death, to eat the same food or in the same
houses as the men,^ and at the other are those of Utopia,
enjo3ring an absolute equality with men, capable of the same
rights and subject to the same liabilities. The extent to
which the most civilised countries approximate this ideal
terminus, the distance they have travelled from the savage
one, and the relics they retain of it, will, it is hc^ed, easily
appear from the chapters that follow.
