Probably the most ungrateful of the restrictions on females is that
forbidding them to hold office in churches. This has been put on all
sorts of high grounds, chief among them being that women could do so
much abler work in little auxiliaries of their own. This contention
was challenged about two years ago in the House of Commons, by Maud
Royden, the English Lay Evangelist to whom the pulpits of London are
forbidden, with one or two exceptions. Miss Royden, whose preaching
was being bitterly opposed by several members of the House, annoyed
them all considerably by saying that the Church of England had already
had two women as its absolute head. This was denied in a great
sputter, to which Miss Royden replied, "How about Queen Elizabeth and
Queen Victoria?" Well, this happened to be something that nobody could
gainsay, but into the wrathy silence which followed, one member of the
House rose to his feet and let the cat right out of the bag. If women
were given church authority, he said, they would refuse to accept
their husbands' authority in their homes, and England would go to rack
and ruin. This is one of the few recorded occasions when a taboo-er so
far forgot himself, and American church potentates do not like to be
reminded of it. Within a month, one of the Protestant sects in this
country has given women the right to hold minor offices, but three
others, in general convention, refused even to consider it.

Again we are going to rest our case on selected instances, and return
to a consideration of how these walled-in women have learned to live
comfortably and with some self-respect behind the garrison wall. It is
this, after all, which they must now teach their men.

The first thing that happened to the woman who married was that she
became legally non-existent. But though she was scratched off the
public books, she couldn't exactly be scratched out of her husband's