Woman, and Her Place in a Free Society by Edward Carpenter

What a word is this ! In its brief compass what thousand-year-long tragedies He enshrined! Since the far-back time when in the early societies the thought of inequality had hardly arisen, and the female in her own way—as sole authenticator of birth and parentage, as guardian of the household, as inventress of agriculture and the peaceful arts, as priestess or prophetess or sharer in the councils of the tribe—was as powerful as man in his, and sometimes even more so; down to to-day, what centuries of suffering, of repression, of slave-hood, of dumbness and obscurity have been the lot of woman!