priestly, the emotions rather than reason, are constantly invoked;
ambition, love of power, hope of reward, fear of punishment, are the
incentives presented and in no instance are such incentives more fully
made use of than for purposes of sustaining the supremacy of man over
woman. The teaching of the church cannot fail to impress woman with
the feeling that if she expects education, or even opportunity of
full entrance into business, she must not heed the admonitions of the
priesthood, when, as by Dr. Dix, she is contemptuously forbidden to
enter the professions on the ground that God designed these offices
alone for man. When women sought university honors at Oxford, a few
years since, many “incredibly foolish” letters, said _London Truth_,
were written by its opponents who were chiefly clergymen. Canon
Liddon’s influence was against the statute; the Dean of Norwich
referred to it as “an attempt to defeat divine Providence and Holy
Scripture.” Dr. Gouldbourne thought it would “unsex woman.”[33]
“There is no sin,” said Buddha, “but ignorance,” yet according to
Rector Dix, Rev. S. W. Turnstall, Dr. Craven and the priesthood of
the present day, in common with the earlier church, woman’s normal
condition is that of ignorance, and education is the prerogative of
man alone; and yet the dangers of ignorance have by no means been
fathomed, although the latest investigations show the close relation
between knowledge and life. That as intelligence is diffused, there is
a corresponding increase of longevity, is proven; the most uneducated
communities showing the greatest proportion of deaths. Ignorance and
the death rate are parts of the same question; education and length of
life are proportionately synonymous. Statistics gathered in England,
Wales and Ireland a few years since showed the percentage of infantile
deaths to be much greater in those portions where the mother could not
read and write, than where the mother had sufficient education to read
a newspaper and write her own name. In districts where there was no
other appreciable difference except that of education, the mortality
was the largest in the most ignorant districts.
In deprecating education for women, no organized body in the world has
so clearly proven its own tyrannous ignorance as has the priesthood,
and no body has shown itself so fully the enemy of mankind. Church
teaching and centuries of repression acting through the laws of
heredity have lessened woman’s physical size, depressed her mental
action, subjugated her spirit, and crushed her belief in her right to
herself and the proper training of her own children. The church, in
its opposition to woman’s education through the ages, has literally
killed off the inhabitants of the world with much greater rapidity
than war, pestilence, or famine; more than one-half the children born
into the world have soon died because of the tyranny and ignorance
of the priesthood.[34] The potential physical energy of mankind thus
destroyed can in a measure be estimated, but no one can fathom the
infinitely greater loss of mental and moral force brought about through
condemnation of knowledge to woman; only by induction can it even be
surmised. Lecky points out the loss to the world because so many of
its purest characters donned the garb of monk or nun. That injury was
immediately perceptible, but in the denial of education and freedom to
woman more than ninety per cent of the moral and physical energy of the
world has literally been suffocated, and owing to ignorance and lack of
independent thought this loss is as yet scarcely recognized. So dense
the pall of ignorance still overshadowing the world that even woman
herself does not yet conjecture the injury that has been done her, or
of what she and her children have been deprived. Nor has the world
yet roused to a full consciousness of the mischief to mankind that
has been perpetrated through the falsehood and ignorant presumption
of those claiming control over its dearest rights and interests.
Resistance to the wrong thus done the world has been less possible
because perpetrated in the name of God and religion. It has caused tens
of thousands of women to doubt their equality of right with man in
education, to disbelieve they possess the same authority to interpret
the Bible or present its doctrines as man; neither, having been
deprived of education, do they believe themselves to be man’s political
equal, or that they possess equal rights with him in the household.
This degradation of woman’s moral nature is the most direful result of
the teaching of the church in regard to her. A loss of faith in one’s
own self, disbelief in one’s own right to the fullest cultivation of
one’s own powers, proceeds from a debasement of the moral sentiments.
Self-reliance, self-respect, self-confidence, are acquired through
that cultivation of the intellectual faculties which has been denied
to woman. Rev. Dr. Charles Little, of the Syracuse University, says:
“In the report of a sermon of a distinguished theologian which appeared
not long ago, this striking passage occurred: If I were to choose
between Christianity as a life and Christianity as a dogma, I would
choose Christianity as a dogma.” Judging from its treatment of woman
and the many recent trials for heresy, dogma rather than life is the
general spirit of the churches everywhere. It is dogma that has wrecked
true religion; it is dogma that has crushed humanity; it is dogma that
has created two codes of morals; that has inculcated the doctrine
of original sin; that has degraded womanhood; that has represented
divinity as possessing every evil attribute.
From all these incontrovertible facts in church and state, we see that
both religion and government are essentially masculine in their present
forms and development. All the evils that have resulted from dignifying
one sex and degrading the other may be traced to one central error, a
belief in a trinity of masculine gods, in one from which the feminine
element is wholly eliminated; and yet in the scriptural account of the
simultaneous creation of man and woman, the text plainly recognizes
the feminine as well as the masculine element in the Godhead, and
declares the equality of the sexes in goodness, wisdom and power.
Genesis i, 26-27.
And God said, Let us make man in our own image, after our
likeness, and so God created man in his own image; in the
image of God created He him, male and female created He them,
and gave them dominion over the fish of the sea and over the
fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon
the earth.
In nothing has the ignorance and weakness of the church been more
fully shown than in its controversies in regard to the creation. From
time of the “Fathers” to the present hour, despite its assertion and
its dogmas, the church has ever been engaged in discussions upon the
Garden of Eden, the serpent, woman, man, and God as connected in one
inseparable relation. Amid all the evils attributed to woman, her loss
of Paradise, introduction of sin into the world and the consequent
degradation of mankind, yet Eve, and through her, all women have found
occasional defenders. A book printed in Amsterdam, 1700, in a series of
eleven reasons, threw the greater culpability upon Adam, saying:
First: The serpent tempted her before she thought of the tree
of knowledge of good and evil, and suffered herself to be
persuaded that not well understood his meaning.
Second: That believing that God had not given such prohibition
she eat the fruit.
Third: Sinning through ignorance she committed a less heinous
crime than Adam.
Fourth: That Eve did not necessarily mean the penalty of
eternal death, for God’s decree only imported that man should
die if he sinned against his conscience.
Fifth: That God might have inflicted death on Eve without
injustice, yet he resolved, so great is his mercy toward
his works, to let her live, in (that) she had not sinned
maliciously.
Sixth: That being exempted from the punishment contained in
God’s decree, she might retain all the prerogatives of her sex
except those that were not incidental with the infirmities to
which God condemned her.
Seventh: That she retained in particulars the prerogative of
bringing forth children who had a right to eternal happiness
on condition of obeying the new Adam.
Eighth: That as mankind was to proceed from Adam and Eve,
Adam was preserved alive only because his preservation was
necessary for the procreation of children.
Ninth: That it was by accident therefore, that the sentence of
death was not executed on him, but that otherwise he was more
(justly) punished than his wife.
Tenth: That she was not driven out from Paradise as he was,
but was only obliged to leave it to find out Adam in the
earth; and that it was with full privilege of returning
thither again.
Eleventh: That the children of Adam and Eve were subject
to eternal damnation, not as proceeding from Eve, but as
proceeding from Adam.
In 1580, but three hundred years since, an inquiry set on foot as to
the language of Paradise, resulted in the statement that God spoke
Danish; Adam, Swedish; and the serpent, French. Eve doubtless was
conceded to have spoken all three languages, as she conversed with
God, with Adam, and with the serpent. Hieronymus, a Father of the
Church, credited Eve with possessing a much finer constitution than
Adam, and in that respect as superior to him.[35] Thus, during the
ages, the church through its “Fathers” and its priests has devoted
itself to a discussion of the most trivial questions concerning woman,
as well as to the formation of most oppressive canons against her,
and although as shown she has found an occasional defender, and even
claimants for her superiority upon certain points, yet such discussions
have had no effect upon the general view in which the church has
presented her, as one accursed of God and man.
_Chapter Ten_
+Past, Present, Future+
The most important struggle in the history of the church is that of
woman for liberty of thought and the right to give that thought to the
world. As a spiritual force the church appealed to barbaric conception
when it declared woman to have been made for man, first in sin and
commanded to be under obedience. Holding as its chief tenet a belief
in the inherent wickedness of woman, the originator of sin, as its
sequence the sacrifice of a God becoming necessary, the church has
treated her as alone under a “curse” for whose enforcement it declared
itself the divine instrument. Woman’s degradation under it dating back
to its earliest history, while the nineteenth century still shows
religious despotism to have its stronghold in the theory of woman’s
inferiority to man. The church has ever invoked the “old covenant” as
authority, while it also asserts this covenant was done away with at
the advent of the new dispensation. Paul, whose character as persecutor
was not changed when he veered from Judaism to Christianity, gave to
the church a lever long enough to reach down through eighteen centuries
in opposition to woman’s equality with man. Through this lengthy
period, his teaching has united the christian world in opposition to
her right of private judgment and personal freedom.
Each great division of christianity alike proclaims the supreme
sinfulness of woman in working for the elevation of her sex. In this
work she has been left outside of religious sympathy, outside of
political protection, yet in the interest of justice she claims the
right to tear down the barriers of advancing civilization and to rend
asunder all beliefs that men hold most sacred. Freedom for woman
underlies all the great questions of the age. She must no longer be
the scapegoat of humanity upon whose devoted head the sins of all
people are made to rest. Woman’s increasing freedom within the last
hundred years is not due to the church, but to the printing-press, to
education, to free-thought and other forms of advancing civilization.
The fashions of the christian world have changed but not its innermost
belief. The power of the pulpit, built up by a claim of divine
authority, with the priest as an immediate representative of God,
has been reacting upon the priesthood itself, and now while vainly
struggling for light this order finds itself bound by chains of its
own creating. Today the priesthood is hampered by creeds and dogmas
centuries old, yet so fully outside of practical life that the church
has become the great materialistic force of the century; its ideas of
a God, its teachings of a future life all falling within the realm of
the physical senses; the incorporeal and spiritual are lost in the
grossest forms of matter.[1] Although a body professing to inculcate
pure spiritual truths, the church teaches the grossest form of
materialism. It asserts principles contradictory to natural laws; it
presents chaos as the normal condition of the infinite; it bids people
live under faith outside of evidence, and in thus doing is guilty of
immeasurable evils to mankind. A bark without compass, it steers upon a
sea of night no star illumining the darkness; the control and guidance
by humanity of the psychic part of being, generally spoken of as
“supernatural,” although the truest to nature, has become nearly lost
through the materialization of spiritual truth by the church, the worst
form of idolatry. Christianity was a stern reality to the men of the
early and middle ages, who believing themselves to have been created
nearer to God than woman also believed themselves to have lost earthly
immortality through her. Permeated with this idea, it is not strange
that men through many hundred years taught that woman was especially
under control of the Evil One. The devil was an objective form to the
clergy and people alike. Nor under such belief, is it strange that
priests should warn their flocks from the pulpit against the wiles of
woman, thus degrading her self-respect and teaching men to hold her
in that contempt whose influence is felt today. The result of this
teaching has been deplorable to humanity; men equally with women having
sunk under this degradation of one-half of the race.
The most stupendous system of organized robbery known has been that
of the church towards woman, a robbery that has not only taken her
self-respect but all rights of person; the fruits of her own industry;
her opportunities of education; the exercise of her own judgment,
her own conscience, her own will. The unfortunate peculiarity of the
history of man, according to Buckle, is that although its separate
parts have been examined with considerable ability, hardly any one
has attempted to outline them into a whole and ascertain the way they
are connected with each other. While this statement is virtually true
as regards the general history of mankind, it is most particularly
so in reference to the position of woman in its bearings upon race
development. A thorough investigation of her connection with our
present form of civilization, or even with that of the past, as
compared with each other, or as influencing the whole, has never yet
been authoritatively undertaken. This failure has not been so largely
due to willful neglect as to incapacity upon the part of man to judge
truly of this relation. Woman herself must judge of woman. The most
remote feminine personality is not less incomprehensible to man than
the woman of today; he now as little understands the finer qualities
of her soul or her high intuitive reasoning faculties as in the past.
Reason is divided into two parts, theoretical and practical; the former
appertains to man; the latter, composed of those intuitive faculties
which do not need a long process of ratiocination for their work,
inhere in woman. Although the course of history has given many glimpses
of her superiority, and the past few decades have shown in every land
a new awakening of woman to a recognition of her own powers, man as
man is still as obtuse as of yore. He is yet under the darkness of
the Patriarchate, failing to recognize woman as a component part of
humanity, whose power of development and influence upon civilization
are at least the equal of his own. He yet fails to see in her a factor
of life whose influence for good or for evil has ever been in direct
ratio with her freedom. He does not yet discern her equal right with
himself to impress her own opinions upon the world. He still interprets
governments and religions as requiring from her an unquestioning
obedience to laws she has no share in making, and that place her as
an inferior in every relation of life. Ralph Waldo Emerson with keen
insight into the fallibility of law-makers, declared that “good men
must not obey the laws too well.” Woman is showing her innate wisdom
in daring to question the infallibility of man, his laws, and his
interpretation of her place in creation. She is not obeying “too
well,” and yet man fails to analyze her motives in this defection.
The church and the state have long done man’s thinking for him, the
ideas of the few, whose aim is power, have been impressed upon the
many; individualism is still characterized as the essence of evil;
self-thought, self-control as heretical. The state condemns both as a
crime against itself, the church as a sin against heaven. Both church
and state claiming to be of divine origin have assumed divine right of
man over woman; while church and state have thought for man, man has
assumed the right to think for woman.[2]
As man under fear of eternal damnation surrendered to the irresponsible
power of church and state, so woman yielded to that power which
closed every external avenue of knowledge to her under pretext of her
sinfulness. One-tenth of the human race, within the period covered
by modern civilization, has compelled the other nine-tenths to think
their thoughts and live lives according to their commands. This has
been the chief effort of governments and religion. The most formidable
general evil under which woman has suffered during the Christian ages
has been that of protection; a non-recognition of her ability to care
for herself, rendering watchful guardianship over her a recognized part
of man’s law; not alone to prevent her sinking into depths of vice
but to also prevent her entire subversion of government and religion.
Buckle and other writers have recognized the protective spirit as
the greatest enemy to civilization, its influence causing the few
to establish themselves as guardians of the many in all affairs of
life. The American Revolution in proclaiming the rights of humanity
struck a blow at the protective system. This system has ever based
itself upon a declaration of the supreme rights of a God, and certain
rights as pertaining to certain classes of men by virtue of authority
from that God. The defense of such authority has ever been the chief
business of church and state, and thus religions and governments have
neither found time nor inclination to uphold the rights of humanity.
Under the christian system, woman as the most rebellious against
God in having eaten a forbidden fruit, has found herself condemned
through the centuries to untold oppression in order that the rights
of God might be maintained. Yet while constantly teaching that woman
brought sin into the world, the church ever forgets its own corollary;
that if she brought sin she also brought God into the world, thus
throwing ineffable splendor over mankind. The whole theory regarding
woman, under christianity, has been based upon the conception that
she had no right to live for herself alone. Her duty to others has
continuously been placed before her and her training has ever been that
of self-sacrifice. Taught from the pulpit and legislative halls that
she was created for another, that her position must always be secondary
even to her children, her right to life, has been admitted only in so
far as its reacting effect upon another could be predicated. That she
was first created for herself, as an independent being to whom all
the opportunities of the world should be open because of herself, has
not entered the thought of the church; has not yet become one of the
conceptions of law; is not yet the foundation of the family.
But woman is learning for herself that not self-sacrifice, but
self-development, is her first duty in life; and this, not primarily
for the sake of others but that she may become fully herself; a
perfectly rounded being from every point of view; her duty to others
being a secondary consideration arising from those relations in life
where she finds herself placed at birth, or those which later she
voluntarily assumes. But these duties are not different in point of
obligation, no more imperative upon her, than are similar duties upon
man. The political doctrine of the sovereignty of the individual,
although but partially recognized even in the United States, has
been most efficacious in destroying that protective spirit which has
so greatly interfered with the progress of humanity. This spirit
yet retains its greatest influence in the family, where it places a
boundary between husband and wife. Of all circumstances biasing the
judgment and restricting the sympathies, none have shown themselves
more powerful than physical differences, whether of race, color or
sex. When those differences are not alone believed to be a mark of
inferiority, but to have been especially created for the pleasure and
peculiar service of another, the elements of irresponsible tyranny
upon one side, and irremediable slavery upon the other, are already
organized. If in addition, that inferior is regarded as under an
especial curse for extraordinary sin, as the church has ever inculcated
in reference to women; and when as in the case of woman and man an
entire separation of interests, hopes, feelings and passions is
impossible, we have reached the extreme of injustice and misery under
the protective system. Consequently no other form of “protection”
has possessed so many elements of absolute injustice as that of man
over woman. Swedenborg taught, and experience declares, that morality
cannot exist except under conditions of freedom. Hence we find much
that has been called morality is the effect of dependence and lessened
self-respect, and has really been immorality and degradation. While
in every age, the virtues of self-sacrifice have been pointed to as
evidence of the highest morality, we find those women in whom it has
been most apparent, have been those doing least justice where justice
first belongs—to themselves. Justice as the foundation of the highest
law, is a primal requirement of the individual to the self. It is
none the less a serious impeachment of the religious-moral idea, that
the doctrine of protection and the duty of woman’s self-sacrifice,
were taught under the theory of divine authority. No faith was more
profound, none could be more logical if resting on a true foundation,
than the church theory regarding woman. Life assumed a sterner reality
to men who believed themselves in point of purity and priority nearer
their Creator than woman. Thereafter, she was to be protected from
herself, the church and man cheerfully assuming this duty. Under the
protective spirit it is not so very long since men sold themselves and
their families to some other man in power, either lay or religious,
under promise of protection, binding themselves to obey the mandates
of such lord evermore. The church protected and directed the thought
of the world. To think for one’s self is not even now the tendency
of mankind; the few who dare, do so at great peril. It will require
another hundred years of personal and political freedom for men to
appreciate what liberty really is—for them to possess confidence in
their own judgment upon religious questions—for the man of humble
station to fully believe in himself and in his own opinions when
opposed to the authority of church or state.