THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.

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In Pagan religion woman was a passive receptacle and channel for the transmission of all life, physical and spiritual. When she married her father passed her from the charge of his own family deity into the keeping of her husband’s family deity. And the worship of the male heads of the family after death, ancestor worship in its purest and most powerful form, made her subordination a part of her most vital religious life. The Pagan philosophy, indeed, which had for its leaders men of the most exalted char­acter and of as high thinking upon great problems as the world has known, penetrated the veiled individuality of some women before Christianity was born. The noble stoics were not all men. And the growth of the plebeian class in Roman civilization, the growth of this class in learning, wealth and all national power cut deeply into the patrician stronghold of the religious subordination of women; so much so that the plebeian divorced wife of a patrician noble acquired with that divorce a social and legal independence unparalleled in history. But these influences, strong beyond measure in the few, penetrated so slightly the great mass of womanhood in the ancient world, that I hold it true to history to say that until the advent of the Christian religion, the sense of individuality was not a part of the consciousness of women in general. The family sense was theirs, the sense of high worth and use as humble purveyors of spiritual and physical life forces, the sense of dignity as loyal guardians of ancient virtues and powers, the sense of social service wherein all personal wish or vagary is swallowed up in devotion to superior ideals of inherited order. But to the woman passionately devoted to the old Pagan religions of Greece and Rome there was, there could be, no glimmering of the modern sense of rightful individual choice, of personal responsibility, of that spherical unity of the single soul which is the core of today’s religion.

The Christian appeal in religion was to the single soul, the separate individuality; not to family feeling, not to state allegiance, not to linked bonds of any sort of.human association. And this religious appeal, always the most potent in effect upon the feminine nature, woke women generally to a sense that their souls were their own. And in spite of bad laws of Christendom, in spite of priestcraft and formal literalism, in spite of insults heaped upon the woman nature during the Middle and Dark ages, in spite of church intolerance, which puts woman in an inferior position professedly by the will of God, in spite of all this, the call of the Christian religion to each soul of man or woman, of bond or free, to work out its own salvation, was womanhood’s Declaration of Independence, for our inherited civilization at least. Therefore, we may say that sense of individuality in woman, which is the only patent of her co-oper­ative power in modern life, was born when she learned that her soul was her own. At first, and for long generations, she knew nothing of aught save purely religious applications of that truth. She had no refuge from oppression in family or state but the martyr’s death, or the devotee’s renunciation. But gradually, very slowly, the soul that owns itself has come to believe that it has right to some freedom of growth and expression. At first the growth of women in these directions was strictly along the line of the newly awakened individualism. The great persons among the mass of women lifted themselves to freedom and power. And the practical result has been that the individualism, which once awoke the few women to revolt for their own sakes, has now touched with stimulating power the multitude of women to organization for personal development and world service.

And just as soon as the main body of womanhood began to sense the freedom and opportunity which the specially endowed had procured for them, the principle of voluntary organization began to permeate all departments of woman’s thought and work. So today, to take a leap in history, what have we? We have the general benevolence of women organized for independent,or well-nigh independent, action, so far as man’s control is concerned. We have the intellectual craving of women organ­ized in clubs of women, in collegiate alumnae associations from women’s colleges. We have the desire for full freedom among women organized in woman suffrage associations and leagues, and in special combinations for securing juster laws. We