Note 13 — Chapter VII · FALLACIES IN POPULAR ARGUMENTS

Bad as the position of woman was under the influence of the early Church teaching, it was, in many respects, still worse during the Middle Ages. “Life-long seclusion in the inner apartments of the house of a man she has not chosen, or internment in a nunnery—that is, either degraded or unnatural—is the choice (within limits) of the daughter of the wealthy. Life-long drudgery, with few and coarse pleasures, with a long vista of sticks and whips, and scold’s bridles, and ducking stools—with, perhaps, the brutal ‘ordeal’ on the slightest suspicion, or the ghastly death of the witch, is the prospect of the daughter of the poor.”13 Even the Reformation altered more than it improved the condition of woman. How could it be otherwise when the Reformers were nothing if not Bibliolaters?