making her to be either timorous, frivolous, or artful. Her amusements
were trivial, her taste vitiated, her education neglected, her rights
violated, her aspirations scorned. The poets represented her as
capricious, fickle, and false. She rose only to fall; she lived only to
die. She was a victim, a toy, or a slave. Bedizened or burdened, she was
either an object of degrading admiration or of cold neglect.

The Jewish women seem to have been more favored and honored than women
were in Greece or Rome, even in the highest periods of their
civilization. But in Jewish history woman was the coy maiden, or the
vigilant housekeeper, or the ambitious mother, or the intriguing wife,
or the obedient daughter, or the patriotic song-stress, rather than the
sympathetic friend. Though we admire the beautiful Rachel, or the heroic
Deborah, or the virtuous Abigail, or the affectionate Ruth, or the
fortunate Esther, or the brave Judith, or the generous Shunamite, we do
not find in the Rachels and Esthers the hallowed ministrations of the
Marys, the Marthas and the Phoebes, until Christianity had developed the
virtues of the heart and kindled the loftier sentiments of the soul.
Then woman became not merely the gentle nurse and the prudent housewife
and the disinterested lover, but a _friend_, an angel of consolation,
the equal of man in character, and his superior in the virtues of the
heart and soul. It was not till then that she was seen to have those
qualities which extort veneration, and call out the deepest sympathy,
whenever life is divested of its demoralizing egotisms. The original
beatitudes of the Garden of Eden returned, and man awoke from the deep
sleep of four thousand years, to discover, with Adam, that woman was a
partner for whom he should resign all the other attachments of life; and
she became his star of worship and his guardian angel amid the
entanglements of sin and cares of toil.