education with men; for a chance to enter the liberal professions; for
a fair share of the world of work; for equal pay in that work; for all
demands of equality which make the present a noted age in the world’s
history, have met their greatest opposition from this protective
spirit. No less than during the darkest period of its history does
the church still maintain the theory that education[3] and public
life are not fitting for woman—indelicate for herself and injurious
to the community. During the Christian ages, the church has not alone
shown cruelty and contempt for woman, but has exhibited an impious and
insolent disregard of her most common rights of humanity. It has robbed
her of responsibility, putting man in place of God. It has forbidden
her the offices of the church and at times an entrance within its
doors. It has denied her independent thought, declaring her a secondary
creation for man’s use to whom alone it has made her responsible.
It has anathematized her sex, teaching her to feel shame for the
very fact of her being. It has not been content with proclaiming a
curse upon her creative attributes, but has thrust the sorrows and
expiations of man’s “curse” upon her, and in doing these things the
church has wrought her own ruin. A religious revolution of the most
radical kind, has even now assumed such proportions as to nearly
destroy the basic creeds of various sects, and undermine the whole
fabric of christendom. It everywhere exists although neither the world
nor the church seem to realize the magnitude of its proportions. As a
legitimate result of two opposing forces, a crisis in the life of the
church is at hand; nay, even upon it. While we see it making organized
effort for extension of power and entire control of the state, we also
find great increase of radical thought, and development of individual
conscience and individual judgment. With thought no longer bound by
fear of everlasting punishment, mankind will cease to believe unproved
assertions, simply because made by a class of men under assumed
authority from God. Reason will be used, mankind will seek for truth
come whence it may, lead where it will, and with our own Lucretia Mott,
will accept “truth for authority and not authority for truth.”
In knocking at the door of political rights, woman is severing the
last link between church and state; the church must lose that power it
has wielded with changing force since the days of Constantine, ever
to the injury of freedom and the world. The immeasurable injustice of
woman, and her sufferings under christianity, her intellectual, moral
and spiritual servitude, will never be understood until life with its
sorrows shall be opened to our vision in a sphere more defined than the
present one. The superstitions of the church, the miseries of woman,
her woes, tortures, burnings, rackings and all the brutalities she
has endured in the church, the state, the family, under the sanction
of christianity, would be incredible had we not the most undeniable
evidence of their existence, not alone in the past but as shown by
the teachings, laws and customs of the present time.[4] “She has
suffered under a theology which extended its rule not only to her
civil and political relations, but to her most significant domestic
and personal concerns, regulating the commerce of husband and wife,
of parent and child, of master and servant, even prescribing her diet
and dress, her education and her industries.” Edmund Noble speaks in
like manner of the ancient Russians under the tyrannical provisions
of the Greek church, saying, “clearly, such a system of theocratic
supervision and direction as this, is compatible only with the lowest
possible spiritual condition of the subject, or the lowest possible
conception of God.” Possessing no proof of its existence, the church
has ever fostered unintelligent belief. To doubt her “unverified”
assertion has even been declared an unpardonable sin. The supreme
effort of the church, being maintenance of power, it is but recently
that woman has been allowed to read history for herself, or having read
it, dared to draw her own conclusion from its premises. Ignorance
and falsehood created a sentiment in accord with themselves, crushing
all her aspirations. In the family, man still decides the rights and
duties of the wife, as of old. As legislator and judge, he still makes
and executes class laws. In the church, he yet arrogates to himself
the interpretation of the bible; still claims to be an exponent of
the Divine will, that grandest lesson of the reformation, the right
of private interpretation of the scriptures, not yet having been
conceded to woman. The premises upon which the church is based being
radically false, and this, most especially in everything related to
woman. Trained from infancy by the church to a belief in woman’s
inferiority and incapacity for self-government, men of the highest
station have not hesitated to organize societies in opposition to her
just demands. As early as 1875, an anti-woman’s franchise association
was formed in London, under the name of “Association for Protecting the
Franchise from the Encroachment of Women;” Hon. Mr. Bouverie, a leading
opponent of Woman Suffrage in the House of Commons, being its chairman.
Among the promoters of the movement were Sir Henry James, formerly
attorney-general (for the Crown), Hon. Mr. Claflin and Mr. Leathers,
correspondent of the _New York Tribune_.
Since this period, a number of women distinguished as “the wives of”
have petitioned legislative bodies for protection against freedom for
themselves, and all others of their sex, in asking that legislatures
shall not recognize woman’s self-governing right. The deepest depth of
degradation is reached when the slave not only declares against his
own freedom, but strives to tighten the bonds of fellow slaves; and
the most cruel wrong resulting from such slavery is the destruction of
self-respect in the enslaved, as shown by the course of these women
petitioners. The protective theory reached its lowest depth for woman
by an attack upon her already vested rights of the ballot, in the
former territory, now State of Washington, on the Pacific coast, in
case of Nevada M. Bloomer (a woman) against John Wood and others, to
have the women of that territory deprived of their already existing
right of suffrage.[5] In line with the general opposition to the
enfranchisement of woman, men of even the most liberal tendencies
declare that her political freedom will be used to sustain the church,
apparently forgetting that man alone has placed the church in power
and that man alone holds it in power. And proof of man’s complicity
is even greater than this. Despite what is said of the larger church
membership of women, the most noted modern evangelist, Moody, recently
declared that he “found men tenfold, aye, an hundred-fold” more
receptive of his preaching than women. While speaking in Farwell Hall,
Chicago, 1886, he said, “For fifteen years I have preached to women
in the afternoon and very often as near as I could, have preached the
same sermon to men at night, and in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred
have had five times more result in preaching to men than to women.”
This pseudo-argument, as to woman’s susceptibility to church teaching,
brought up by the enemies of her freedom, possesses no more real value
than the pseudo-political argument sometimes presented in opposition
to woman’s admission into active politics; that is, her emotional
temperament. To one who has been present at four great presidential
nominating conventions and several large state conventions, knowledge
upon this point is practical. When one has seen a cordon of police
enforced by the mayor upon the platform, protecting the officers of
such convention, while its members, standing upon seats, stamped,
shouted, gesticulated, threatened with revolvers, acting more like
uncaged wild beasts than like men,[6] when one has witnessed the
wildest enthusiasm at the mention of a name, the waving of flags,
of hats, of handkerchiefs, the shaking of umbrellas, chairs, canes,
with violent stamping, amid a hubbub of indistinguishable voices, all
shouting; screaming so loud that people for blocks away are roused from
slumber[7] in affright of a fire, or the approach of an ungovernable
mob, such objections to woman’s freedom as her “emotions” fall to their
lowest value.
In Church and in State, man has exhibited the wildest passions, the
most ungovernable frenzy—has shown himself less controlled by reason
than possible for woman under the most adverse circumstances. Judaism,
and its offspring, Christianity, show the results of the Patriarchate
in some of its most degenerate forms; industrial servitude, educational
restrictions, legal thraldom, political slavery, false religious
teachings, are but a portion of the evils existing under its most
enlightened forms, and equally with the more pronounced polygamy and
infanticide they show a total perversion of moral ideas. Woman dearly
pays for the rights she has secured. Labor opposes, in less pay for the
same work; literature, at first welcoming her only through the cook
book, next compelled her to conceal her sex under a male pseudonym,
in order that her writings might be received with the same respect as
those of man; art has given her similar experiences, and while today
admitting her to the same advantage of study with man, yet compels her
to pay twice the price for the same instructions.
The careful student of history will discover that christianity has
been of very little value in advancing civilization, but has done a
great deal toward retarding it.[8] “Civilization, a recognition of the
rights of others at every point of contact,” has been carried forward
by means of rebellion against church teaching and church authority. The
experience of science is familiar to all, even school children quoting
Galileo and Dr. Faust. What are called reformations in religion, the
work of Huss, of Luther, of the Waldenses, the Huguenots, are equally
familiar instances to the youngest student, of rebellion against the
church. These and a myriad of others known to the historian, have all
been brought about by refusal to accept the authority of the church as
final. The Peasant War, in France, the struggles of Wat Tyler and of
Hampden in England, the French and the American revolutions looking
toward equality of rights; and a thousand minor forms of political
progress have all been opposed by the church as rebellions against its
teachings, yet all have been marked steps in civilization. The church
and civilization are antipodal; one means authority, the other freedom;
one means conservatism, the other progress; one means the rights of
God as interpreted by the priesthood, the other the rights of humanity
as interpreted by humanity. Civilization advances by free-thought,
free speech, free men. The uprising of the women of all peoples in
assertion of their common humanity with man, is exemplification of that
fact recognized in the Declaration of Independence, that while patient
endurance of wrongs to which persons are accustomed, always long borne
rather than by change perhaps to meet evils they know not of, shows
its absolutely certain ultimate effect, no matter how long delayed, in
rebellion. A time comes in the history of souls, as of nations, when
forbearance ceases to be a virtue, and self-respecting life is only
to be retained through defiance of and rebellion against, existing
customs. The soul must assert its own supremacy or die. It is not one
woman, or the women of one nation that have thus suddenly shown desire
to rule themselves—to act for themselves alone. A strange identity of
thought pervades all parts of the world—India, China, Japan, Russia
and all of Europe, North and South America, the vast continents of the
southern seas and the isles thereof, and even barbaric Africa, all
evince proof of the wide psychic under-current which seething through
women’s souls, is overthrowing the civilizations built upon the force
principles of the patriarchate, and will soon reinstate the reign of
truth and justice. During those long ages of priestly intolerance, of
domestic and governmental tyranny, in which woman seemed to accept
the authority of the priest as that of God, there still existed
a consciousness hardly perceptible to herself, that she was an
independent being to whom by virtue of her humanity all opportunities
in life belonged. From century to century mothers transmitted this
scarcely developed perception to daughters, until suddenly within the
past fifty years, these dominant ideas woke to thought, and the women
of all nations began to proclaim their same right to self-control as
that claimed by man.
It is impossible to write of the church without noticing its connection
with the great systems of the world, during its course of life. The
history of christendom is the history of the myriad institutions which
have arisen through its teachings, or that have been sustained by its
approval. The world has not grown wise under it, except with a wisdom
that is leading the purest humanitarian thought in a direction contrary
to its footsteps. Slavery and prostitution, persecutions for heresy,
the inquisition with its six hundred modes of torture, the destruction
of learning, the oppression of science, the systematized betrayal of
confiding innocence, the recognized and unrecognized polygamy of man,
the denial to woman of a right to herself, her thought, her wages, her
children, to a share in the government which rules her; to an equal
part in religious institutions, all these and a myriad more, are parts
of what is known as christian civilization. Nor has the church ever
been the leader in great reforms. During the anti-slavery conflict,
the American Church was known as “the bulwark of American slavery.”
Its course continues the same in every great contest with wrong.
A memorial history of the American Episcopal church, an extensive
work in two volumes of seven hundred pages each, published within
the past few years, devotes but seven pages to “the Attitude of the
Church during the Civil War,” and the general refusal of the church
to take part in the great struggle for national life, is referred to
with complacent satisfaction. Penitentiaries and prisons, asylums and
reformatories, all institutions of a repressive character which the
church prides herself as having built up, are no less evil than the
convents, monasteries and religious orders belonging to it. They have
all risen through perversion of nature. Crimes and criminals are built
up and born because of the great wrong first done to mothers; they
are the offspring of church and state. Science now declares crime to
be a disease, but it has not yet discovered the primal cause of this
disease. It is an inheritance from centuries of legalized crime against
woman, of which the church in its teachings is prime factor.
Woman will gain nothing by a compromising attitude toward the church,
by attempt to excuse its great wrong toward her sex, or by palliation
of its motives. On the contrary, a stern reference to facts, keeping
the face of the world turned toward its past teachings, its present
attitude, is her duty. Wrongs of omission equal in magnitude those of
commission.
Advance for woman is too well established, woman has had too much
experience, has borne too much ridicule, misrepresentation and abuse
to now hesitate in an attack upon the stronghold of her oppression—the
church. She possesses too full knowledge of its subtle touch upon
civil law to dare leave it alone; it has become one of woman’s first
duties, one of her greatest responsibilities, to call public attention
to its false doctrines and false teachings in regard to the origin,
condition and subjection of woman. She has engaged in too many battles,
weathered too many storms to longer hesitate in exposure of its
stupendous crimes toward one-half of humanity. Let those who fear,
hide themselves, if they will, until the storm is past. Let those who
dare, defiantly rejoice that they are called upon to bear still more,
in order that woman may be free. A brighter day is to come for the
world, a day when the intuitions of woman’s soul shall be accepted as
part of humanity’s spiritual wealth; when force shall step backward,
and love, in reality, rule the teachings of religion; and may woman
be strong in the ability and courage necessary to bring about this
millennial time. The world is full of signs of the near approach of
this period; as never before is there an arousing sense of something
deeper, holier in religion than the christian church has given. The
world has seemingly awaited the advent of heroic souls who once again
should dare all things for the truth. The woman who possesses love for
her sex, for the world, for truth, justice and right, will not hesitate
to place herself upon record as opposed to falsehood, no matter under
what guise of age or holiness it appears. A generation has passed
since the great struggle began, but not until within ten years has
woman dared attack upon the veriest stronghold of her oppression, the
Church. The state, agent and slave of the church, has so long united
with it in suppression of woman’s intelligence, has so long preached
of power to man alone, that it has created an inherited tendency, an
inborn line of thought toward repression. Bent in this line before
his birth, man still unwittingly thinks of woman as not quite his
equal, and it requires a new creation of mind to change his thought. A
second generation has arisen, in whom some slight inherited tendencies
toward recognition of a woman’s right to herself are seen. In the next
generation this line of inherited thought will have become stronger,
both Church and State more fully recognizing woman’s inherent right to
share in all the opportunities of life; but at what cost to all who
have taken part in the great struggle.
Has woman no wrongs to avenge upon the church? As I look backward
through history I see the church everywhere stepping upon advancing
civilization, hurling woman from the plane of “natural rights” where
the fact of her humanity had placed her, and through itself, and its
control over the state, in the doctrine of “revealed rights” everywhere
teaching an inferiority of sex; a created subordination of woman to
man; making her very existence a sin; holding her accountable to a
diverse code of morals from man; declaring her possessed of fewer
rights in church and in state; her very entrance into heaven made
dependent upon some man to come as mediator between her and the
Saviour it has preached, thus crushing her personal, intellectual and
spiritual freedom. Looking forward, I see evidence of a conflict more
severe than any yet fought by reformation or science; a conflict that
will shake the foundations of religious belief, tear into fragments
and scatter to the winds the old dogmas upon which all forms of
christianity are based. It will not be the conflict of man with man
upon rites and systems; it will not be the conflict of science upon
church theories regarding creation and eternity; it will not be the
light of biology illuminating the hypothesis of the resurrection of the
body; but it will be the rebellion of one half of the church against
those theological dogmas upon which the very existence of the church
is based. In no other country has the conflict between natural and
revealed rights been as pronounced as in the United States; and in this
country where the conflict first began, we shall see its full and final
development. During the ages, no rebellion has been of like importance
with that of Woman against the tyranny of Church and State; none has
had its far reaching effects. We note its beginning; its progress will
overthrow every existing form of these institutions; its end will be a
regenerated world.
Notes
CHAPTER ONE
[1] The first state of primitive man must have been the mere
aggregation. The right of the mother was therefore most natural; upon
the relationship of mother and child the remotest conception of the
family was based.—_Wilkin_, p. 869.
[2] Where a god and goddess are worshiped together they are not husband
and wife, but mother and son. Neither does the god take pre-eminence,
but the mother or goddess. This condition dates from the earliest days
of society, when marriage in our sense of the word was unknown, and
when kinship and inheritance were in the female line. The Babylonian
Ishtur of the Izdobar legend is a deity of this type.—_W. Robertson
Smith_: _Kinship in Ancient Arabia_.
[3] Dr. Th. Achelis.—_Article on Ethnology_: (_The Open Court_).
[4] In a country where she is the head of the family, where she decides
the descent and inheritance of her children, both in regard to property
and place in society in such a community, she certainly cannot be the
servant of her husband, but at least must be his equal if not in many
respects his superior.—_Wilkin_.
[5] _Motherright._
[6] Lubbuck.—_Pre-Historic Times and Origin of Civilization_. _Wilkin_.
[7] Among many people the father at birth of a child, especially a son,
loses his name and takes the one his child gets. Taylor—_Primitive
Culture_. Also see _Wilkin_.
[8] “Thus we see that woman’s liberty did not begin at the upper,
but at the lower end of civilization. Woman in those remote times,
was endowed with and enjoyed rights that are denied to her but too
completely in the higher phase of civilization. This subject has a very
important aspect, i.e. the position of woman to man, the place she
holds in society, her condition in regard to her private and public
(political) rights.”
[9] “Among the monogamous classic nations of antiquity, the maternal
deity was worshiped with religious ceremonies.”
[10] We find the mother’s right exclusively together with a
well-established monogamy.—_Bachofen_.
[11] _Documentary History of New York_.
[12] Alexander: _History of Women_.
[13] _History of the United States, Vol. I._
[14] _Cushing_.
[15] “What is most to be considered in this respect are the political
rights which women in time of the Matriarchate shared with the men.
They had indeed the right to vote in public assemblies still exercised
not very long ago among the Basques in the Spanish provinces.”
[16] That the Veddas are the aborigines of Ceylon may be assumed from
the fact that the highly civilized Singalese admit them to be of noble
rank. _Pre-Historic Times_.—Lubbuck.
[17] “We find in some instances this independence of the maiden in
regard to disposing of her hand, or selecting a husband as a memento
of the time of the Matriarchate.... The most remarkable instance of
the self-disposition of woman we find among the ancient Arabs and the
Hindoos; among the latter the virgin was permitted to select her own
husband if her father did not give her in marriage within three years
after her maturity.”
[18] _Account of the Religion, Manners, etc., of the People of Malabar,
etc._, translated by Mr. Phillips, 1718.
[19] Among the illustrative types of interior realities and the
elementary geometric forms, point, direct line and deflected line,
the last of which is a true arc produces the circle when carried to
its ultimate, this circle representing the triune order of movement;
the point in the line, the line in the curve, and the curve in the
circle—_The Path_.
[20] The phallus and lingum (or lingum and yoni), the point within the
circle or diameter within the circle.—_Volney’s Ruins_.
[21] _Chips from a German Work-Shop_.—Max Muller.
[22] All mythology has pertinently been characterized as ill-remembered
history.
[23] In the Rig-Veda, a work not committed to writing until after that
movement of the Aryans, which resulted in the establishment of Persia
and India ... there is nothing more striking than the status of woman
at that early age. Then the departed mothers were served as faithfully
by the younger members of the family as departed fathers. The mother
quite as often, if not more frequently than the father conducted the
services of the dead ancestry, which took place three times a day,
often consisting of improvised poetry.—_Elizabeth Peabody on the
Aryans_.
[24] There are but few of the United States in which the authority of
the father to bind out a living child or to will away an unborn one, is
not recognized as valid without the mother’s consent.