learned or holy presume to teach a man in a public assembly.” To this
Canon may be ascribed the obstacles thrown in the way of women even
during the present century, who have come before the world as public
teachers in the pulpit, at the bar, in medicine, or the more customary
branches of instruction. Advancing civilization of the present century
is still hampered by the laws of an imperfect church, enacted many
hundred years since. The trial of Mistress Anne Hutchinson in New
England, during the XVII century, was chiefly for the sin of having
taught men.
All modern legislation can be referred to the church for its origin
although most especially noticeable in reference to women legislated
for as a class, distinct and separate from men. Under Church laws,
the humble, the ignorant, the helpless have been the most oppressed,
because of their powerlessness, but upon no part of humanity has this
oppression so heavily fallen as upon her whom the church has declared
to be the author of all the misery of human life.[41] The laws of
bastardy and illegitimacy still extant in Christian countries which
decree that a child born outside of marriage shall be known by its
mother’s name and she alone responsible for its support, and which
do not allow it to inherit its putative father’s property even when
he acknowledges the child as his own, are of ecclesiastical origin.
Enacted by the Church in its most powerful days, as protection to a
celibate priesthood against all claim by mother or child, they are
still a reminder of the Matriarchate when the sole right of the mother
to the child was unquestioned. But under Church ruling this law that
the child should follow the condition of the mother, herself but a
slave, was the source of great injustice both to women and to thousands
of innocent children. Under feudalism and during slavery the child of
the feudal lord or powerful master by a serf woman, became at birth
subject to all the restrictions of the mother while the father was
freed from accountability of any nature. The Antonelli case referred
to in the second chapter, in which the Countess Lambertini claimed
heirship of Cardinal Antonelli’s property as his daughter, was decided
against her not upon denial of her paternity which was most fully
proven, but because under church law this daughter had no claim upon
her priestly father. Under Canon Law she was no more to be regarded as
his child than as the child of any other man. She was “fatherless.” She
was “a sacrilegious child” having violated sacred things by coming into
existence. Her “holy” father under Canon Law was entirely irresponsible
for her birth.[42]
The reformation proved itself in many ways as restrictive towards
woman as Catholicism. The commencement of modern law dates to the
reign of Elizabeth, who established the reformation upon a firm basis.
The oppression of her reign exceeded all that had been experienced
under Catholicism. No cottager in England was permitted to shelter
his homeless mother or sister under penalty[43] because she was
“masterless.” The greatest amount of legislation both religious and
secular under the Patriarchate has had woman for its object, and this
is especially noticeable in all countries where Christianity has been
the dominant power, because she has not been regarded by the church
as a component part of humanity, but as an offshoot whose rights and
responsibility were entirely different from those of man. Although
among the Anglo-Saxons the priesthood possessed great influence yet
after the Norman Conquest ecclesiasticism gained much greater control
in England, and Canon Law began to influence legislation, as has been
shown, exercising its chief restrictive force upon woman. While under
old Common Law,[44] a husband was compelled to leave his wife one-third
of his property and could leave her as much more as he pleased, by
Canon Law he was prohibited from leaving her more than one-third and
could leave her as much less as he pleased. Thus ecclesiasticism
presumed to control a husband’s affections and placing its slimy
fingers upon common law, allowed the husband to leave his wife in
absolute poverty, notwithstanding that her property upon marriage, and
her services under marriage, belonged exclusively to him. As early as
the twelfth century, Glanville laid it down as a law of the British
Kingdom that no one was compelled to leave another person any portion
of his property, and that the part usually devised to wives was left
them at the dictate of affection and not of law. Thus early did the
Church in England override Common Law to the detriment of woman. While
thus legislating in opposition to family rights, the church continually
favored its own increase of its own property.[45] The world has
produced no system so thoroughly calculated to extend its own power and
wealth, as this vast celibate organization which, under the guise of
religion, appealed to man’s superstition, and ruled his will under the
assumption of divine authority, the family being its chief objective
point of attack.
While under feudalism his lord was to receive the best gift at the
villein’s death, the church the second best, in time the demands of the
church overpowered those of the lord, as well as those of the family.
So rapacious did the church at last become in its demand for valuable
gifts and its claim of one third of a man’s property upon his decease,
that the civil law ultimately interfered, not however in the interests
of wives, but of creditors. Canon Law nearly everywhere prevailed,
having its largest growth through the pious fiction of woman’s created
inferiority. Wherever it became the basis of legislation, the laws of
succession and inheritance, and those in regard to children, constantly
sacrificed the interests of wives and daughters to those of husbands
and sons. Church legislation created numerous and stringent enactments
which rendered it impossible for woman to succeed to any considerable
amount of property, forcing her to entire dependence upon man, either
as a wife, or as a resident of a religious house; thus she entirely
lost the freedom possessed by her in pagan Rome.[46]
While under Canon Law the dower of the wife was forfeited by attainder
of the husband, yet the husband did not lose his right to the wife’s
property in case she was attainted of treason. Under Canon Law if for
recognized just cause of the husband’s cruelty the wife separated from
him, she was returned upon his demand provided he gave security for
treating her well.
Canon Law gave to the husband the power of compelling the wife’s return
if, for any cause, she left him. She was then at once in the position
of an outlaw, branded as a runaway who had left her master’s service,
a wife who had left “bed and board” without consent, and whom all
persons were forbidden “to harbor” or shelter “under penalty of the
law.” The absconding wife was in the position of an excommunicate from
the Catholic Church, or of a woman condemned as a witch. Any person
befriending her was held accessory to the wife’s theft of herself from
her husband, and rendered liable to fine and other punishment for
having helped to rob the husband (master) of his wife (slave). The
present formula of advertising a wife, which so frequently disgraces
the press, is due to this belief in wife-ownership.
Whereas my wife ... has left my bed and board without just
cause or provocation, I hereby forbid all persons from
harboring or trusting her on my account.
By old English law, in case the wife was in danger of perishing in a
storm, it was allowable “to harbor” and shelter her. It is less than
fifty years since the dockets of a court in New York city, the great
metropolis of the United States, were sullied by the suit of a husband
against parties who had received, “harbored” and sheltered his wife
after she left him, the husband recovering $10,000 damages.
In losing control, upon marriage, of her person and her property,
woman’s condition became that of an infant. No act of hers was of legal
value. If she made a bargain her husband could repudiate it and the
person with whom she had contracted was held to have taken part in a
fraud. The denial under Common Law of her right to make a contract grew
out of the denial of her right of ownership. Not possessing control of
her inheritance or of her future actions, she was consequently held
unable to make a binding contract.[47] Forbidden the right of acting
for herself; deprived of the ownership and control of her own property
or earnings, woman had little opportunity to prove her business
capacity. Since the time of Aristotle the control of property has been
recognized as the basis of social and responsible conditions. The
great school of German jurists[48] teach that ownership increases both
physical and moral capacity, and that as owner, actual, or possible,
man is a more capable and worthy being than he would otherwise be.
Inasmuch as through both the ecclesiastical and civil laws of
Christendom, woman was debarred from giving testimony in courts of
law; sisters prohibited from sharing a patrimony with brothers; wives
deprived of property rights both of inheritance and earnings, it is
entirely justifiable to say that even the boasted Common Law, that
pride of English speaking peoples, has greatly injured civilization
through its destruction of woman’s property rights. Canon or Church
laws were enacted upon the principle of protection for men alone
and upon these civil laws gradually became wholly based. Herbert
Spencer[49] has not failed to recognize this fact in England. No less
in law than in religion is woman dealt with as a secondary being, for
whom equal religious rights or equal civil rights are not designed.
While under the Matriarchate justice and purity prevailed, and the
inherent rights of man were preserved, we find an entirely contrary
condition under the Patriarchate, that system enacting laws solely
with intent to man’s interest regardless alike of mother, sister, wife
or daughter. The entire destruction under Canon and civil law, of
woman’s property rights, has not alone lessened her responsibility,
but has also diminished her self-respect. As in common with a child,
or a slave, her business agreements were held as of no binding force,
she ultimately came to regard herself as incapable of business
transactions. In England until a very recent date, and in the United
States until when in 1839, Mississippi first placed the control of her
own property in a married woman’s hands (to be followed in 1848, by
Pennsylvania, New York, and about the same period by Rhode Island),
it was in the husband’s power in every part of christian Europe and
America, to repudiate any bargain, sale or gift made by the wife as
of no binding legal force, and this, even though she had brought the
entire property into the marital firm.[50] Therefore under Christian
laws the person with whom the wife made a contract, or to whom she
made a gift was held as a criminal, or participant in a fraud. The
wife under Canon Law belonged to the husband, and as a sequence to
not owning herself she could not own property, and in her condition
of servitude could possess no control over either her present or her
future actions. Such is Common Law warped and changed by Canon Law.[51]
Property is a delicate test of the condition of a nation. It is
a remarkable fact in history that the rights of property have
everywhere been recognized before the rights of person. The American
Revolution arose from an attack upon property rights and although
the Declaration of Independence assumed the rights of person to be
primal, this unique foundation for a system of government has not
yet fully been admitted in practice, and woman is still denied its
advantages and responsibilities. While the property owner unwittingly
becomes a hostage for the security of the state itself, it needs
governmental recognition of the rights of person, in order to create
firm self-reliance and a feeling of strength and freedom. A proper
self-respect cannot inhere in any person under governmental control of
others. Unless the person so governed constantly maintains a system
of rebellion in thought or deed, the soul gradually becomes debased,
and the finest principles of human nature suffer a rapid process of
disintegration. The integrity of elementary principles disappears,
bad citizenship results, the general rights of humanity are ignored,
selfish, personal, or family interests taking their place. Good
citizenship requires individual personal responsibility in affairs of
the state.
That property rather than person still receives recognition in
governmental matters, owes its origin to the period when the rights
of the common people in both property and person were ignored. The
effort of the peasant was chiefly directed to securing property. To
his clouded vision, the wealth of the lord created his power, and to
a great extent such was the fact. Intuitively he felt that property
rights were the basis of the rights of persons. The Church possessed
enormous wealth, as did all his oppressors, and the peasant could but
see that control of rights of property was a dangerous assault upon
their rights of person. The foremost element of all slavery is the
denial to the slave of right to the proceeds of his own labor. As soon
as a colored slave in the United States, was permitted to hire his
time, the door of freedom began to open for him. Thus when Canon Law so
influenced Civil and Common Law that it forbade woman’s inheritance and
ownership of property, it placed its final touch upon her degradation;
she virtually became a slave to her husband. Sir Henry Maine is
outspoken in declaring that Christianity has thus deeply injured
civilization, an injury from which he asserts there can be no recovery
as long as society remains christian. As a man of profound thought he
does not fail to see that the prevailing religious sentiment created
by the teachings of the church as to woman’s created inferiority and
subjection to man, was the cause of that destruction of her property
rights. The priests of pagan Rome held juster view regarding woman than
did the Christian Church. Before the establishment of Christianity they
had conferred the rights of woman to property; daughters inherited
equally with sons. To such extent was woman’s rights of property
carried that at one period, as has been heretofore stated, the greater
part of the real-estate of the empire was in woman’s possession.[52]
The slavish condition of woman greatly increased through denial of
her rights of inheritance, was more fully established through denial
to her of the fruits of her own labor in the marriage relation. Under
church law the wife was the husband’s personal slave, all her time was
absolutely his. Civil and ecclesiastical law held her as completely
under his authority. Her property, her person, her time and services
were all at the husband’s disposal. Nor did the Reformation effect
a change in this respect. Luther’s ninety Theses nailed against the
church door in Wittemberg did not assert woman’s natural or religious
equality with man. It was a maxim of his that “no gown or garment
worse became a woman than that she will be wise.” The home under the
reformation was governed by the laws in force before that period.
First: She was to be under obedience to the masculine head of the
household.
Second: She was to be constantly employed for his benefit.
Third: Her society was strictly chosen for her by her master and
responsible head.
Fourth: This masculine family head was regarded as a general
father-confessor to whom she was held as responsible in word and deed.
Fifth: Neither genius nor talent could free women from such control
without his consent.
The Cromwellian period while exhibiting an increase of piety brought
no amelioration to woman. The old Church doctrine of her having
caused the expulsion of men from Paradise was still proclaimed from
the pulpit, and warnings against her extreme sinfulness lost none of
their invective strength from the lips of the new gospel. All kinds
of learning and accomplishments for her fell under new reprobation
and the old teaching as to her iniquities and the necessity for her
to feel shame from the fact of her existence took new force after the
rise of Melancthon, Huss, and Luther.[53] About this period it was
said “she that knoweth how to compound a pudding is more desirable
than she who skilfully compoundeth a poem.”[54] Men thought it no
shame to devote themselves to the pleasure of the table. Epicures and
gluttons abounded, but to women was forbidden a seat at the world’s
intellectual board; she who secured learning did so at the peril of her
social and religious position. Under no other system of religion has
there been such absolute denial of woman’s right to directly approach
the divinity; under no other religious system has her debasement been
greater.[55]
It cannot be asserted that the religious system teaching restrictive
moral and civil laws regarding woman, is of the past. Its still great
living influence is shown by the thousands of pilgrims who visited
Italy during the Pope’s Jubilee and the presents of incalculable
value that by tens of thousands poured into the papal treasury in
commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the entrance of Pope
Leo XIII into the priesthood. These were received from almost every
civilized nation, Christian, Mohammedan, Catholic, Protestant. Even
the President of the United States, head of a form of government
which recognizes religion as entirely disconnected with the State,
so far catered to superstition, so far conceded the assumptions of
this system, as to send an elegant copy of the Federal Constitution
to the Pope, through Cardinal Gibbons.[56] No stronger proof is
required of the still powerful influence of that system based upon
the degradation of woman, than the fact that the President of the
United States, temporary head of a nation professedly based upon
a recognition of equal civil, political and religious rights; the
Queen of England head of the Anglican Church; the Sultan of Turkey
representative of Mohammedanism; Sadogara, the celebrated Rabbi of
Vienna, known as the “Pope of the Hebrews,” were all found among the
number of persons outside of Catholicism who by gifts recognized this
occasion. It was but ten years previously that Pope Pius IX celebrated
his jubilee entrance into the Episcopal office with great pomp and
ceremony, but the jubilee of Leo XIII exceeded in splendor and popular
interest anything of the kind ever before known as the history of the
church. With a religious clientele of 200,000,000 behind him, and
the ten thousand magnificent testimonials as to the justice of his
claim as vicar of Jesus Christ, the world cannot fail to be impressed
by the danger to human liberty still connected with this powerful
organization; an organization that in its control of human thought and
human will has ever been of incalculable injury to mankind. Portions of
the daily press saw the continuing danger, declaring that:
These facts are truly impressive indicating as they do the
tremendous hold which the Roman ecclesiastical system has
gained over the hearts and minds of men. Very striking, too,
is the contrast between all this magnificence and pomp and
manifest aspiration for temporal power on the part of one who
claims to be the representative on earth of the “meek and
lowly Jesus,” and the poverty, unostentation and self-denial
of the “Son of Man,” who had not where to lay his head.
This jubilee is an event of great moment to the XIX century, at once
a warning and a proof of the life and strength of that scheme which
has for its real end, not alone the spiritual but also the temporal
subjugation of the entire human race. Since Italy under King Humbert
secured its release from the temporal power, thus severing the last
authoritative grasp of the pope upon temporal kingdoms, the attempt has
been sedulously made to create a fictitious sympathy for the pope under
claim of his imprisonment in the Vatican. Nor at the least supreme
moment of his pride and glorification did the pope forget to call
attention of the world to his temporal claims, by a refusal to receive
the offered gifts of the king and queen who occupy the worldly throne
he maintains to be especially his own.[57]
The doctrine of original sin and woman as the original sinner,
transplanted from Judaism into Christianity by Paul in the statement
that “Adam, first created, was not first in sin,” was developed to
its present evil proportions by the early Christian Fathers. To St.
Augustine, whose youth was spent in company with the most degraded
of womankind, is the world indebted for the full development of the
doctrine of original sin. Taught as one of the most sacred mysteries
of religion, which to doubt or to question was to hazard eternal
damnation, it at once exerted a most powerful and repressing influence
upon woman, fastening upon her a bondage which the civilization of the
nineteenth century has not been able to cast off.
Reverence for the ancient in customs, habits of life, law, religion, is
the strongest and most pernicious obstacle to advancing civilization.
To this doctrine of woman’s created inferiority[58] and original sin
we can trace those irregularities which for many centuries filled
the Church with shame, for practices more obscene than the orgies of
Babylon or Corinth, and which dragged Christendom to a darkness blacker
than the night of heathendom in pagan countries—a darkness upon which
the most searching efforts of historians cast scarcely one ray of
light—a darkness so profound that from the seventh to the eleventh
century no individual thought can be traced.
Rev. Charles Kingsley, a canon of the English Church, declared that from
the third to the fifteenth centuries, Christianity had been swamped
by hysteria in the practice of all those nameless orgies which made a
by-word of Corinth during the first century. Every evil was traced to
woman. A curious old black letter volume published in London, 1632,
declares that “the reason why women have no control in Parliament, why
they make no laws, consent to none, abrogate none, is their original
sin.”
_Chapter Four_
+Marquette+
The minds of people having been corrupted through centuries by the
doctrines of the Church in regard to woman, it became an easy step for
the State to aid in her degradation. The system of feudalism arising
from the theory that warfare was the normal condition of man, still
oppressed woman by bringing into power a class of men accustomed to
deeds of violence, who found their chief pleasure in the sufferings
of others. To be a woman appealed to no instinct of tenderness in
this class. To be a woman was not to be protected unless such woman
held power in her own right, or acted in place of some feudal lord.
The whole body of villeins and serfs were under absolute dominion
of the feudal lords. They were regarded as possessing no rights of
their own; the priests had control of their souls, the lord, of their
bodies. But it was not upon the male serfs that the greatest oppression
fell. Although the tillage of the soil, the care of swine and cattle
was theirs, the masters claiming half or more of everything, even to
one-half of the wool shorn from the flock,[1] and all exactions upon
them were great while their sense of security was slight, it was upon
their wives and daughters that the greatest outrages were inflicted. It
was a pastime of the castle retainers to fall upon peaceful villages,
to the consternation of the women, who were struck, tortured, and made
the sport of ribald soldiers.[2] “Serfs of the body,” they had no
protection. The vilest outrages were perpetrated by the feudal lords
under the name of “rights.” Women were taught by church and state
alike that the feudal lord or seigneur had a right to them not only as
against themselves, but as against any claim of husband or father. The
custom known by a variety of names, but more modernly as “marchetta,”
or “marquette,” compelled newly married women to a most dishonorable
servitude. They were regarded as the rightful prey of the feudal lord
for from one to three days after their marriage,[3] and from this
custom, the oldest son of the serf was held as the son of the lord, “as
perchance it was he who begot him.”