COMPLETE FREEDOM FOR WOMEN.

By MISS AGNES M. MANNING.

I advocate freedom for the woman because it will elevate her politically, socially, financially and morally. It has been well said that without it, on the roll of her country she has no recognized status. She is classified with minors, idiots, Indians and criminals.

Man has followed the words liberty and equality through seas of blood in his attempts to wrest their meaning to apply to himself. The woman, however, who stood by his side, who endured his hardships and followed him into all his dangers, who was his patient slave, his uncomplaining victim, for six thousand years, he has never allowed to share either his liberty or equality. In the earlier ages he made no explanation for this wrong. He did what the Sioux and the Apache does today—he condemned her to be a mere beast of burden, performing the menial task he con­sidered beneath himself.

Among the Hebrews, a woman who had given birth to a child was excluded from the sanctuary for forty days if it were a son, but if it were a daughter she must remain away eighty days. In Athens the father of a girl ordered in disgust that a distaff should be suspended outside of his door, instead of the garland of olive with which he had hoped to announce the birth of a boy. In Sparta, of every ten children abandoned because the state did not choose to rear them seven tvere girls. In Rome every newly born child was placed at its father’s feet. If he took it up it was the signal of life and care. When too many daughters came, he turned away, and the unwelcome girl was condemned to death.

Under the Feudal system, the birth of a girl was considered a misfortune. When Jeanne de Valois was presented to her father, Louis XI., being his first child, he would not even look at her, and forbade all public rejoicing.

We know how the Salic law of France came to shut a daughter out from the throne. It was an old barbaric law that had not been enforced since the Franks were converted to Christianity. It was suddenly sprung upon the legitimate heir, a defense­less baby girl. She was defrauded by the relative that should have been the first to protect her. Nature, as if in revenge, gave him only a daughter, and by his own decreed law she could not succeed him. Napoleon divorced the faithful Josephine, but the son he coveted never reigned in France. Fate here, too, placed the grand­child of the wronged Josephine, by her first marriage, on the temporary throne.

In England, in every entailed estate, great is the disappointment at the birth of a girl instead of a boy and heir.

“ In France,” says a well-known writer, “ If you ask a peasant about his family, he answers: ‘ I have no children; I have only daughters.’” The Breton farmer says to this day when a daughter is born, “ My wife has had a miscarriage.”

The old religion of our Bible, while it lifted women to the level of the prophets with one hand, branded her as inferior with the other. The harem began with the Patriarchs. They took the vile institution from Babylon. The early kings added to their wives as a man adds to his acres. They w 7 ere the visible signs of his wealth.

Miss Agnes M. Manning is principal of the Webster School, San Francisco, Cal. She has lived so long in the Golden täte that, although not a native daughter, she calls herself a Californian. Her first signed literary work was for the “ Oak­land Monthly,” when Bret Harte was editor. Some of her poems have been published in a volume of “ Californian Writers.”

' e ^ as written sketches of travel, essays, various poems and short stories. She is a member of the Century Club, one of the oard of Directors of the Pacific Coast Woman’s Press Association, and also member of the California Botanical Club. Her Postoffice address is 1215 Sutter street, San Francisco, Cal.

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