From Judaism, Christianity borrowed Eve, with her eternally operative sin, and thus placed all women under a perpetual load of suspicion and guilt.  The Founder of the new faith never assumed the responsibilities of a family, and he included no woman among his disciples.  Example, even negative example, is often more powerful than precept.  Paul, the most learned of the disciples, in his writings, and as an organizer of the Church, emphasized the older Jewish position.  In the new organization, women filled only lesser places, while the men settled all points of dogma, directing and mainly conducting the services of worship.  Meantime each woman’s soul remained her own, to be saved only by her individual actions; therein lay her hope for the future, both on earth and in heaven.

But it was those later developments of belief and practice that gathered around Christian asceticism which placed woman and her special functions under a cloud of suspicion from which she is not even yet entirely freed.  Celibacy became exalted; virginity was a positive virtue; chastity, instead of a healthful antecedent to parenthood, became an end in itself; and monasteries and convents multiplied throughout Christendom.  Something of shame and guilt gathered around conception and birth, as representing a lower standard of life, even when sanctified by the ceremonies of the Church.  From the second century to the sixth, the ablest of the Church Fathers, Greek and Latin alike, formulated statements in which woman became the chief ally of the devil in dragging men down to perdition.  We still hear ancestral reverberations of these teachings in all our discussions of woman’s place in civilization.

But ideas can only for a time overcome or divert the primitive human hungers, and slowly Mary, Mother of Jesus, won first place among the saints.  Celibate recluses who feared to walk the streets for fear of meeting a woman, and who spent the nights fighting down their noblest passions, starving them, flagellating and rolling their naked bodies in thorny rose hedges or in snow-drifts to silence demands for wife and children, threw themselves in an ecstacy of adoration before an image of the Virgin with the Baby in her arms.  So Maryolatry came to bless the world.

But even this blessing was not without alloy, for it gave us an ideal of woman, superhuman, immaculate, bowing in frightened awe before the angel with the lily, standing mute with crossed hands and downcast eyes before her Divine Son.  She represented, not the institution of the family, but the institution of the Church.  Even when she appeared in representations of the Holy Family, Joseph, her husband, was not the father of her child, but his servant.

Chivalry took up this conception, and shaped for us the fantastic lady who stands back of much of modern romantic love.  Robbed of her simple, human, pagan passions, she became often an anaemic and unfruitful, if angelic, creature.  For the direct and passionate assurances of a virtuous and noble love she substituted sighs and tears, languishing looks and weary renunciations.  This sterile hybrid, bred of human passions and theological negations, must be finally banished from our literature and from our minds before we can have a healthy eugenic conscience among us.[20]