To Our Lady of Pity, whether called Virgin or Mary or Madonna, were built in those centuries scores of churches and cathedrals in a spontaneous outburst of French ardor for a feminine arbitrament of cases requiring a sympathetic response to appeals for aid and comfort. In the designs and decorations of these churches and cathedrals every detail expressed the infinite respect and adoration for the Virgin which moved the people. At Chartres the rivalry of great families for dynastic supremacy was painted into the very windows โ evidences that their claims, contentions, and sanctions were being submitted to Mary for adjudication.
As such, her position made trouble for the Church; but the Papacy, if it had been so minded, could scarcely have suppressed the urge of the people to Virgin worship, however successful it was in excluding women from the priesthood and the musical services of its choir.
In the popular devotion to Mary was asserted a passionate attachment to the feminine qualities so directive in the long history of the human race. Its inner nature is veiled, but some hints may be obtained by a study of his life and letters. Adams taught history for several years at Harvard and after his retirement from that institution he wrote many volumes on American history, without displaying in any of his pages this particular interest in woman as force in history.
In , in the midst of a great panic that threatened the disruption of American capitalism, Henry Adams renewed his intimate associations with his brother, Brooks Adams, who was then working on the manuscript of his The Law of Civilization and Decay. At his home in Washington he observed the representatives of American society, urban and rural, engaged in politics, and the army of government employees, men and women, running in and out of offices. Supplementing his previous travels in the Old World and the Orient, Henry went on almost endless journeys in the Americas, in Europe, Africa, and Western Asia, studying human beings at first hand and reading books and documents that recorded the doings of humanity.
Amid such circumstances and experiences he reached the conviction that history without woman was pedantry and that the force of woman in history was a subject deserving all the solicitude that critical scholarship could give to it.
