Article October 29, 1921 ISSUE

Emancipation

HARRIET BRADFORD

When tribal chieftains counted their women among their goods and chattels, when medieval knights rode to holy wars inspired by towered ladies, when women themselves were content to languish in boudoirs reading tomes of long-drawn-out sentimentality, the world was still firmly in the grasp of the traditional account of creation as given in the second and following chapters of Genesis. Therein "the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose." The supposedly divine right of the Adam-man to take what he chose, and the supposedlu divine obligation of the Eve-woman to be fair, and to obey a human lord, constituted the original separation of powers and privileges which later became the rule in every new development of human civilization.

But alongside all material history goes the search for God, the divine Principle of being, and many women, out of their greater necessity, and with whatever light they have had, have sought the better way with their whole heart. The result has been a striving upward through the centuries, and as upward striving brings its due measure of freedom, so the history of the human race reveals for women a steady march toward freedom from the restrictions imposed upon them while as yet they were not sufficiently alert to resist them and to replace them with woman's birthright. So much of the upward march has been paced off since the day of tribal chieftains, knights-errant, and ladies languishing, that the human mind to-day deems women emancipated.

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October 29, 1921
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