spiritual good of women, in thus refusing to recognize their equality
of rights to the offices of that church, resolved itself as a whole
into a political convention, adjourning in a body to Chicago before
its religious business was finished, in order that its presence might
influence the National Republican Convention there assembled, to
nominate General Grant for a third term to the presidency of the United
States; General Grant being in affiliation with the Methodist church.
The Congregational church is placed upon record through laws, governing
certain of its bodies, which state that:
By the word “church” is meant the adult males duly admitted
and retained by the First Evangelical church of Cambridgeport,
present at any regular meeting of said church and voting by a
majority.
The New York _Independent_, of February 24, 1881, commenting upon this
official declaration that only “adult males” are to be considered the
“church,” says:
The above is Article XIV of the by-laws of the society
connected with the aforesaid church. It is a matter of
gratitude that the society, if it forbids females to vote in
the church, yet allows them to pray and to help the society
raise money.
The Rev. W. V. Turnstall, in the _Methodist Recorder_, a few years
since, gave his priestly views in regard to woman, and by implication
those of the Methodist church. He declared woman to be under the curse
of subjection to man, a curse not removable until the resurrection. He
said that under the Mosaic law woman had no voice in anything; that she
could hold no office, yet did so in a few instances when God wished to
especially humiliate the nation; that she was scheduled as a higher
piece of property; that even the Bible was not addressed to her but to
man alone; woman finding her salvation even under the new covenant, not
directly through Jesus, but approaching him through man; his points
were:
First: That woman is under a curse which subjects her to man.
Second: This curse has never been removed, nor will it be
removed until the resurrection.
Third: That woman under the Mosaic law, God’s civil law, had
no voice in anything. That she was not allowed her oath;
that she was no part of the congregation of Israel; that her
genealogy was not kept; that no notice was taken of her birth
or death, except as these events were connected with some man
of providence; that she was given no control of her children;
that she could hold no office; nor did she, except in a few
instances, when to reproach and humiliate the nation, God
suspended his own law, and made an instrument of women for
the time being. That she offered no sacrifices, no redemption
money was paid for her; that she received no religious rites;
that the mother’s cleansing was forty days longer, and the
gift was smaller for a female child than for a male; and that
in the tenth commandment—always in force—she is scheduled as a
higher species of property; that her identity was completely
merged in that of her husband.
Fourth: That for seeking to hold office Miriam was smitten
with leprosy; and that under the new covenant she is only
permitted to pray or prophesy with her head covered, which
accounts for the fashion of wearing bonnets in public to this
day; that she is expressly prohibited from rule in the church
or usurpation of authority over the man.
Fifth: That to vote is to rule, voting carrying with it all
the collaterals of making, expounding, and executing law; that
God has withheld from woman the right to rule, either in the
church, the state or the family; that He did this because of
her having “brought sin and death into the world, and all our
woe.”
Sixth: That the Bible is addressed to man and not to woman;
that man comes to God through Jesus, and woman comes to Jesus
through man; that every privilege the wife enjoys she but
receives through the husband, for God has declared that woman
shall not rule man, but be subject unto him.
A more explicit statement of the opinion of the church regarding
woman is seldom found. Later action of the Methodist body proves its
agreement with Rev. Mr. Turnstall. The General Conference of that
church convened May 1, 1888, in the Metropolitan Opera House, New York,
numbering delegates from every part of the United States as well as
many from foreign lands. Among these delegates were sixteen women.
The question of their admission came up the first day. The senior
bishop, Rev. Thomas Bowman, in his opening remarks, declared that
body to stand in the presence of new conditions, in that they found
names upon the roll of a class of persons whose eligibility had never
been determined by the high tribunal of the church. A committee was
appointed to report upon their admission. Bishop Merrill, occupying
the chair upon the second day, said that “for the first time in the
history of the conference, women had been sent as delegates,” but
the bishops did not think the women were eligible. The report of the
committee was submitted, which declared that after a serious discussion
they had become convinced that, while the rule was passed relating to
the admission of lay delegates to the General Conference, the church
contemplated admission only to men as lay delegates and that under the
constitution and laws, women were not eligible. The committee agreed
that the protest against women should be sustained, and the conferences
from which they were sent be notified that their seats were vacant.
A long discussion ensued. Rev. John Wiley, president of the Drew
Theological Seminary of the New York Conference, spoke against woman’s
admission, saying:
That if the laws of the church were properly interpreted they
would prove that women are not eligible and then, besides, no
one wanted them in the General Conference.
Rev. J. R. Day, the New York Conference, argued against the admission
of women, saying:
When the law was passed for the admission of lay delegates
it was never intended that women should be delegates to the
General Conference. It is proposed today to make one of the
most stupendous pieces of legislation that has been known to
Christendom. I am not opposed to woman doing the work that she
is capable of doing but I do not think that she should intrude
upon the General Conference. Woman has not the necessary
experience; this is a tremendous question.
Rev. Jacob Rothweiler, of the Central German Conference, asserted that:
The opponents of the report are trying to override the
constitution of the church, and are making an effort to strike
at the conscientiousness of 90 per cent of the Christian
church which has existed for the last 1,800 years. The history
of Christianity shows that women were never intended to vote.
The conference was seriously divided upon this question. Although
eventually lost, yet many clergymen permeated with the spirit of
advancing civilization, voted in its favor, among them Rev. Dr.
Hammond, of Syracuse, New York, a delegate for the episcopacy; while
arrayed in bitter opposition was Rev. Mr. Buckley, editor of _The
Christian Advocate_, also a candidate for the bishopric, and the man
that when the question of the ordination of Miss Oliver came up a few
years since, declared he would oppose the admission of the Mother of
the Lord to the ministry. His remark recalls that of Tetzel, the great
Catholic dealer in indulgences, given in another part of this work,
and illustrates to what extent of blasphemy the opponents of women’s
equality proceed. It was not until the seventh day of the conference
that the question of woman’s admission was decided in the negative, and
the great Methodist Episcopal church put itself upon record as opposed
to the recognition of more than one half of its members. The women
delegates were not even allowed seats upon the floor during the debate.
Mrs. Nind, president of the Woman’s Foreign Missionary Society, arose
to vote, but was not counted, although the Woman’s Foreign Missionary
societies are making converts where men cannot reach—in the zenanas.
The action of the Conference was foreshadowed by that of Baltimore
a few weeks previously, when it was decided that women missionaries
should not be permitted to administer communion in the zenanas as it
would open the door for their ordination to the ministry and this
despite the fact that women alone are admitted to the zenanas. At the
Methodist minister’s bi-monthly meeting, Syracuse, N.Y., near time of
the General Conference, Rev. Thomas Tinsey, of Clyde, read a paper
entitled “Is it advisable to make women of the church eligible to all
the ecclesiastical councils and the ministerial order of the church,”
quoting Paul in opposition to giving her a voice, saying:
What can our modern advocates of licensing and ordaining women
and electing them to annual conferences, do with the command
to the Corinthians, “Let your women keep silence in the
church;” or to Timothy: “Let the women learn in silence and
all subjection,” Paul certainly meant something by such
teaching. The position taken by the Fathers of Methodism
appears to me to be the only tenable one, viz: that the
prohibition applies to the legislation or official business
of the church—precisely the kind of work contemplated in the
effort to make them eligible to the General Conference, and to
Methodist orders. Concerning these things, “Let them learn of
their husbands at home.”
Rev. Mr. Tinsey farther gave his opinion as to the comparative
uselessness of woman. He was able to conceive of no good reason for
her creation, aside from that of burden bearer in the process of
reproduction, saying:
Woman is that part or side of humanity upon which the great
labor, care and burden of reproduction is placed. We can
conceive of no good reason for making women aside from this.
Man is certainly better suited to all other work.
After discussion, the ministers present generally agreed that, because
of motherhood, woman should be debarred from such official recognition.
The final ground of women’s exclusion as delegates to the General
Conference, is most noticeable inasmuch as appeal was ultimately
made to the State. Upon the seventh day’s session it was resolved to
suspend the rules and continue the debate on the admission of women as
lay-delegates. So anxious were men to speak that forty-one delegates at
once sprung to their feet and claimed the floor. Judge Taylor, a lay
delegate from the St. Louis conference, walking down the aisle with a
number of law books under his arm, proceeded to argue the question on
constitutional grounds, saying:
It would do much harm to admit women at the present time.
There are bishops to be elected and other important matters to
be voted on, and if women are admitted and allowed to vote,
and it should subsequently be decided that women should not be
entitled to seats, the acts of the present General Conference
would be illegal and unconstitutional.
While claiming, personally, to favor women’s admission, he quoted law
to sustain their rejection, and wished the question to be submitted
to a vote of the church. The “vote of the church,” as shown by the
adoption of Rev. F. B. Neely’s amendment, signifying the ministers
present at annual conferences.[25] The vote upon this amendment, which
excluded women from seats in the General Conference, submitting their
eligibility to the decision of ministers of the annual conferences, was
adopted 237 to 198. It thus requires three-fourths vote of the members
present and voting at the annual conferences, this vote to be ratified
by a two-thirds vote of the General Conference in order to woman’s
acceptance as lay delegate to such General Conference.[26] Aside from
the fact of an appeal to the civil law for the exclusion of woman, thus
showing the close union of church and state, one other important point
must be noticed. In the declaration that the church should be consulted
in regard to such an important matter, that body was defined as the
ministers of the annual conference, laymen not here ranking as part of
the church. The lay delegates, unnarrowed by theological studies were,
as a body, favorable to woman’s admission. Nor did they refrain from
criticising the clergy, declaring that the episcopacy did not interpret
the law of the church, this power resting in the General Conference.
But one more favoring vote would have tied the question. Gen. Samuel H.
Hurst, dairy and food commissioner of Ohio, the first layman to gain
the floor, defended the right of women to admission. He alluded to the
opponents of the women as “old fogies.” He criticized the bishop’s
address.
The episcopacy does not interpret the law of the church, but
the General Conference does. Woman does not come here as a
strong-minded person demanding admittance, but she comes as
representative of the lay conference. The word “laymen” was
interpreted to mean all members of the church not represented
in the ministry. That is the law, and if women are “laymen”
they are entitled to admission.
The Southern Baptist Association, meeting in New Orleans in July of the
same year, refused to admit women by a vote of 42 to 40. The church as
of old, is still strenuous in its efforts to influence legislation.
An amendment to the National Constitution is pressed by the National
Reform Association, recognizing the sectarian idea of God; another
placing marriage and divorce under control of the general government
by uniform laws; while priestly views upon the political freedom
of woman are thrust into the very faces of our law makers.[27] The
following portions of a sermon preached at the Cathedral of the Holy
Cross, Boston, February 21, 1886, by the Rev. Father J. P. Bodfish,
were printed and distributed among the members of the Massachusetts
Legislature that spring by the opponents of woman suffrage:[28]
Not that I would have woman step out of her sphere; the man
is the natural protector, the father, the lawgiver, of his
family; not would I counsel wives to usurp the places of their
husbands at the polls. I believe this to be one of the errors
of modern times, to try to unsex woman, and take her from
the high place she occupies and drag her into the arena of
public life. What has she to do there? We might as well try
to drag down the angels to take part in the menial affairs of
this world as to take woman from the high place she occupies
in the family, where ’tis her privilege and duty to guide,
to counsel and to instruct—to lead that family in the way of
righteousness. It is but offering her a degradation; Almighty
God never intended it. The charm, the influence of woman, is
in that purity that comes from living in a sphere apart from
us. God forbid that we should ever see the day that a man, a
husband or a father, is to find his will opposed and thwarted
at the polls by his daughter or his wife. Then farewell to
that reverence which belongs to the character of woman.
She puts herself on an equal footing with man when she
steps down from that place where every one regards her with
reverence, and becomes unsexed by striving to make laws which
she cannot enforce, and taking upon herself duties for which
she is altogether unfitted.
Decrees of various characters presenting woman as a being of different
natural and spiritual rights from man, are constantly formulated by
the churches. The Plenary Council of Baltimore, 1884, busied itself in
the enactment of canons directly bearing upon marriage and divorce,
re-affirming the sacramental character of marriage and declaring
that marriages under civil rites should be resented by the whole
Catholic world. This council was preceded by an encyclical from the
Pope, laying out its plans by work yet leaving it within the power
of the diocesan bishops to promulgate its canons according to their
own wisdom. Consequently, not until three years later were those upon
marriage published on the Pacific Coast, at which time the archbishop
of San Francisco, the bishops of Monterey, Los Angeles and Grass
Valley, addressed a pastoral letter to the Catholics of those regions,
condemning civil marriage as a sin and sacrilege, illegal, and a
“horrible concubinage.” It was farther stated that marriage unblessed
by a priest, subjected the parties to excommunication. At the still
later Catholic Congress, in honor of the hundredth anniversary of the
Catholic Hierarchy in America, divorces were affirmed to be the plague
of civilization, a discredit to the government, a degradation of the
female sex, and a standing menace to the sanctity of the marriage bond.
In noting these canons of the Plenary Council and the resolutions of
the Catholic Congress, it should be borne in mind that the chief secret
of the long-continued power of the Catholic church has been its hold
upon marriage and the subordination of woman in this relation. To these
celibate priests, nothing connected with woman is sacred. Celibacy and
the sacramental nature of marriage are each of them based upon the
theory of woman’s created inferiority and original sin. Priestly power
over marriage, and the confessional, through which means it is able to
wrest all family and state secrets to its own use, are powers that will
not be peaceably relinquished. Their destruction will come through the
growing intelligence of people, and the responsibility of political
self-government. These will insure confidence in the validity of civil
marriage and a belief in the personal rights of individuals. To woman,
the education of political responsibility is most essential in order to
free her from church bonds, and is therefore most energetically opposed
by the church. In 1890, a number of Catholic ladies of Paris formed
a union for the emancipation of woman from different kinds of social
thraldom.[29] Their first attack was upon the priesthood, whom they
declared the mortal adversary of woman’s advancement, affirming that
every woman “who abets the abbés is an enemy of her sex.” This open
rebellion of Catholic ladies against the power of the hierarchy, is a
significant sign of woman’s advancing freedom.
All canons, decrees, resolutions and laws of the church, especially
bearing upon the destinies of woman are promulgated without the hearing
of her voice, either in confirmation or rejection. She is simply
legislated for as a slave. Two of the later triennial conclaves of
the Episcopal church of the United States, energetically debated the
subject of divorce, not, however, arriving at sufficient unanimity
of opinion for the enactment of a canon. When Mazzini, the Italian
patriot, was in this country, 1852, he declared the destruction of the
priesthood to be our only surety for continued freedom, saying:
They will be found as in Italy, the foes of mankind, and
if the United States expects to retain even its political
liberties, it must get rid of the priesthood as Italy intends
to do.[30]
Frances Wright, that clear-seeing, liberty-loving, Scotch free-thought
woman, noted the dangerous purpose and character of the Christian
party in politics, even as early as 1829; and the present effort of
this body, now organized as the “National Reform Association” with
its adjunct “The American Sabbath Union,” officered by priests and
influential members of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, and
kindred bodies, is a perpetual menace to the civil and religious
liberties of the United States. Its effort for an amendment to the
Federal Constitution which shall recognize the United States as a
Christian nation, is a determined endeavor toward the union of church
and state; and its success in such attempt will be the immediate
destruction of both civil and religious liberty. That such a party now
openly exists, its intentions no secret, is evidence that the warnings
of Italian patriot and the Scotch free thinker were not without assured
foundation.
As a body, the church opposes education for woman, and all the
liberalizing tendencies of the last thirty-five or forty years, which
have opened new and varied industries to women and secured to wives
some relief from their general serf condition. Bishop Littlejohn, of
the Episcopal church, at the Triennial Conclave of bishops, 1883,
preached as his “triennial charge” upon “The Church and the Family,”
presenting the general church idea as to woman’s inferiority and
subordination. He made authoritative use of the words “sanctities of
home,” a phrase invented by the clergy as a method of holding woman in
bondage; directed the church to “strictly impose her doctrines as to
marriage and divorce, clash as they may with the spirit of the times
and the laws of the state” (thus emulating the Catholic doctrines of
the supremacy of the church). He declared that in any respect to change
the relation established by God himself between husband and wife, was
rank infidelity, no matter what specious disguise such change might
assume, explicitly declaring the authority of the church over marriage,
as against the authority of the state; protesting against omission of
the word “obey” from the marriage service, and the control of the wife
over her own earnings and expenditures, saying:
If it be outside the province of the states to treat marriage
as more than a contract between a man and a woman, the church
must make it understood, as it is not, that it is inside
her province to treat it as a thing instituted of God.
Practically, we have reached a point where the wife may cease
to have property interests in common with her husband, may
control absolutely her own means of living, and determine for
herself the scale of expenditures that will suit her tastes or
her caprices. The man is no longer the head of the household,
the husband. It has been made an open question whether the
man or his wife will fulfill that function, and “a community
of interests, with the recognized authority of the husband to
rule the wife, and the recognized duty of the wife to obey
that authority, is no longer deemed expedient or necessary.”
This rebellion against the old view of marriage is so strong
that in many cases the word “obey” is omitted from the
marriage service.
Even among Christianized Indians we find different laws governing man
and woman. In 1886, the governor of Maine paid a visit to the governor
of the Passamaquody Indians, at a time when a large council was in
progress upon the St. Croix reservation. This council first assembled
at the chapel, where the Revised Statutes—the whole basis of government
of the Passamaquodies—are posted. These statutes having been approved
by Bishop Healy, of Portland, are also looked upon as canons of the
church.[31]
The statutes principally affecting women, are:
Third: No woman who is separated from her husband shall be
admitted to the sacrament, or to any place in the church
except the porch in summer and the back seat in winter, unless
by the consent of the bishop.
Fourth: Any woman who admits men into her house by night shall
be treated as a criminal and delivered to the courts.
Fifth: Any woman who is disobedient to her husband, any common
scold or drunkard, shall not be permitted to enter the church,
except by permission of the priest.
It will be noted that these statutes forbid the sacrament to the
woman who is separated from her husband, not even permitting her an
accustomed seat in church. She must remain in the porch during the
summer and in a back seat during the winter, except “the bishop”
otherwise permits. Also the woman not rendering obedience to her
husband, is denied permission to enter the church except under priestly
permit. The Christian theory of woman’s inferiority and subordination
to man, is as fully endorsed by these statutes as in the mediaeval
priestly instruction to husbands.[32]