After witnessing the marriage ceremony of the Episcopal Church, the other
day, I walked down the aisle with the young rector who had officiated. It
was natural to speak of the beauty of the Church service on an occasion
like that; but, after doing this, I felt compelled to protest against the
unrighteous pledge to obey. "I hope," I said, "to live to see that word
expunged from the Episcopal service, as it has been from that of the
Methodists. The Roman Catholics, you know, have never had it."
"Why do you object?" he asked. "Is it because you know that they will not
obey?"
"Because they ought not," I said.
"Well," said he, after a few moments' reflection, and looking up frankly,
"I do not think they ought!"
Here was a young clergyman of great earnestness and self-devotion, who
included it among the sacred duties of his life to impose upon ignorant
young girls a solemn obligation, which he yet thought they ought not to
incur, and did not believe that they would keep. There could hardly be a
better illustration of the confusion in the public mind, or the manner in
which "the subjection of woman" is being outgrown, or the subtile way in
which this subjection has been interwoven with sacred ties, and baptized
"duty."
The advocates of woman suffrage are constantly reproved for using the terms
"subjection," "oppression," and "slavery," as applied to woman. They simply
commit the same sin as that committed by the original abolitionists. They
are "as harsh as truth, as uncompromising as justice." Of course they talk
about oppression and emancipation. It is the word _obey_ that constitutes
the one, and shows the need of the other. Whoever is pledged to obey is
technically and literally a slave, no matter how many roses surround the
chains. All the more so if the slavery is self-imposed, and surrounded by
all the prescriptions of religion. Make the marriage tie as close as church
or state can make it; but let it be equal, impartial. That it may be so,
the word _obey_ must be abandoned or made reciprocal. Where invariable
obedience is promised, equality is gone.
That there may be no doubt about the meaning of this word in the marriage
covenant, the usages of nations often add symbolic explanations. These are
generally simple, and brutal enough to be understood. The Hebrew ceremony,
when the bridegroom took off his slipper and struck the bride on the neck
as she crossed his threshold, was unmistakable. As my black sergeant said,
when a white prisoner questioned his authority, and he pointed to the
_chevrons_ on his sleeve, "Dat mean guv'ment." All these forms mean simply
government also. The ceremony of the slipper has now no recognition, except
when people fling an old shoe after the bride, which is held by
antiquarians to be the same observance. But it is all preserved and
concentrated into a single word, when the bride promises to obey.
The deepest wretchedness that has ever been put into human language, or
that has exceeded it, has grown out of that pledge. There is no misery on
earth like that of a pure and refined woman who finds herself owned, body
and soul, by a drunken, licentious, brutal man. The very fact that she is
held to obedience by a spiritual tie makes it worse. Chattel slavery was
not so bad; for, though the master might pervert religion for his own
satisfaction, he could not impose upon the slave. Never yet did I see a
negro slave who thought it a duty to obey his master; and therefore there
was always some dream of release. But who has not heard of some delicate
and refined woman, one day of whose torture was equivalent to years of that
possible to an obtuse frame,--who had the door of escape ready at hand for
years, and yet died a lingering death rather than pass through it; and this
because she had promised to obey!
It is said of one of the most gifted women who ever trod American soil,--
she being of English birth,--that, before she obtained the divorce which
separated her from her profligate husband, she once went for counsel to the
wife of her pastor. She unrolled before her the long catalogue of merciless
outrages to which she had been subject, endangering finally her health, her
life, and that of her children born and to be born. When she turned at last
for advice to her confessor, with the agonized inquiry, "What is it my duty
to do?"--"Do?" said the stern adviser: "Lie down on the floor, and let your
husband trample on you if he will. That is a woman's duty."
The woman who gave this advice was not naturally inhuman nor heartless: she
had simply been trained in the school of obedience. The Jesuit doctrine,
that a priest should be as a corpse, _perinde ac cadaver_, in the hands of
a superior priest, is not worse. Woman has no right to delegate, nor man to
assume, a responsibility so awful. Just in proportion as it is consistently
carried out, it trains men from boyhood into self-indulgent tyrants; and,
while some women are transformed by it to saints, others are crushed into
deceitful slaves. That this was the result of chattel slavery, this nation
has at length learned. We learn more slowly the profounder and more subtile
moral evil that follows from the unrighteous promise to obey.