CHAPTER XV.
WOMAN, CHURCH, AND STATE.
BY MATILDA JOSLYN GAGE.
Woman under old religions--Woman took part in offices of early
Christian Church Councils--Original sin--Celibacy of the
clergy--Their degrading sensuality--Feudalism--Marriage--Debasing
externals and debasing ideas--Witchcraft--Three striking points
for consideration--Burning of Witches--Witchcraft in New
England--Marriage with devils--Woman's Right of property not
recognized--Wife ownership--Women legislated for as
slaves--Marriage under the Greek Church--The Salic
law--Cromwellian era--The Reformation--Woman under monastic rules
in the Protestant home--Polygamy taught by Luther and other
Protestant Divines--The Mormon doctrine regarding woman its
logical result--Milton responsible for many existing views in
regard to woman--Woman's subordination taught to-day--The See
trial--Right Rev. Dr. Cox--Rev. Knox-Little--Pan-Presbyterians--
Quakers not as liberal as they have been considered--Restrictive
action of the Methodist Church--Offensive debate upon
ordaining Miss Oliver--The Episcopal Church and its
restrictions--Sunday-school teachings--Week-day-school
teachings--Sermon upon woman's subordination by the President
of a Baptist Theological Seminary--Professor Christlieb of
Germany--"Dear, will you bring me my shawl?"--Female sex looked
upon as a degradation--A sacrilegious child--Secretary Evarts,
in the Beecher-Tilton trial, upon woman's subordination--Women
degraded in science and literature--Large-hearted men upon
woman's degradation--Wives still sold in the market-place as
"mares," led by a halter around their necks--Degrading servile
labor performed by woman in Christian countries--A lower
degradation--"Queen's women"--"Government women"--Interpolations
in the Bible--Letter from Howard Crosby, D.D., LL.D--What is
Truth?
Woman is told that her present position in society is entirely due to
Christianity, and this assertion is then made the basis of opposition
to her demands for exact equality with man in all the relations of
life. Knowing that the position of every human being keeps pace with
the religion and civilization of his country, and that in many ancient
nations woman had secured a good degree of respect and power, as
compared even with that she has in the present era, it has been
decided to present this subject from a historical standpoint, and to
show woman's position under the Christian Church for the last 1,500
years.
If in so doing we shall help to show man's unwarranted usurpation over
woman's religious and civil rights, and the very great difference
between true religion and theology, this chapter will not have been
written in vain, as it will prove that the most grievous wound ever
inflicted upon woman has been in the teaching that she was not created
equal with man, and the consequent denial of her rightful place and
position in Church and State.
Woman had acquired great liberty under the old civilizations. In Rome
she had not only secured remarkable personal and property rights,[178]
but she officiated as priestess in the most holy offices of religion.
Not only as Vestal Virgin did she guard the Sacred Fire, upon whose
preservation the welfare of Rome was held to depend, but at the end of
every consular period women officiated in private worship and
sacrifice to the _Bono Dea_, with mystic ceremonies which no man's
presence was suffered to profane. The Eleusinian mysteries were
attributed to Ceres herself, and but few men had the courage to dare
initiation into their most secret rites. In ancient Egypt, woman
bought and sold in the markets, was physician, colleges for her
instruction in medicine existing 1,200 years before Christ; she
founded its literature, the "Sacred Songs" of Isis being deemed by
Plato literally 10,000 years old; as priestess she performed the most
holy offices of religion, holding the Sacred Sistrum and offering
sacrifices to the gods; she sat upon its throne and directed the
civilization of this country at the most brilliant period of its
history; while in the marriage relation she held more than equality;
the husband at the ceremony promising obedience to the wife in all
things, a rule which according to Wilkinson, wrought no harm, but, on
the contrary, was productive of lasting fidelity and regard, the
husband and wife sitting together upon the same double chair in life,
and lying together in the same tomb after death. Crimes against women
were rare in olden Egypt, and were punished in the most severe manner.
In Persia, woman was one of the founders of the ancient Parsee
religion, which taught the existence of but a single God, thus
introducing monotheism into that rare old kingdom. The Germans endowed
their wives upon marriage with a horse, bridle, and spear, emblematic
of equality, and they held themselves bound to chastity in the marital
relation. The women of Scandinavia were regarded with respect, and
marriage was held as sacred by both men and women. These old
Berserkers reverenced their Alruna, or Holy Women, on earth, and
worshiped goddesses in heaven.
All Pagandom recognized a female priesthood, some making their
national safety to depend upon them, like Rome; sybils wrote the Books
of Fate, and oracles where women presided were consulted by many
nations. The proof of woman's also taking part in the offices of the
Christian Church at an early date is to be found in the very
restrictions which were at a later period placed upon her. The Council
of Laodicea, A.D. 365, in its eleventh canon[179] forbade the
ordination of women to the ministry, and by its forty-fourth canon
prohibited them from entering into the altar.
The Council of Orleans, A.D. 511, consisting of twenty-six bishops and
priests, promulgated a canon declaring that on account of their
frailty, women must be excluded from the deaconship.
Nearly five hundred years later than the Council of Laodicea, we find
the Council of Paris (A.D. 824) bitterly complaining that women serve
at the altar, and even give to the people the body and blood of Jesus
Christ. The Council of Aix-la-Chapelle, only eight years previously,
had forbidden abbesses from taking upon themselves any priestly
function. Through these canons we have the negative proof that for
many hundred years women preached, baptized,[180] administered the
sacrament, and filled various offices of the Church, and that men took
it upon themselves to forbid them from such functions through
prohibitory canons.
A curious old black-letter volume published in London in 1632,
entitled "The Lawes and Resolutions of Women's Rights," says, "the
reason why women have no control in Parliament, why they make no laws,
consent to none, abrogate none, is their Original Sin."
This doctrine of her original sin lies at the base of the religious
and political disqualifications of woman. Christianity, through this
doctrine, has been interpreted as sustaining man's rights alone. The
offices held by her during the apostolic age, she has been gradually
deprived of through ecclesiastical enactments. To Augustine, whose
early life was spent in company with the most degraded of woman-kind,
is Christianity indebted for the full development of the doctrine of
Original Sin, which, although to be found in the religious systems of
several ancient nations, was not a primitive one of the Christian
Church.[181] 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.
To this doctrine of woman's created inferiority 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. All was sunk in superstition; men
were bound by Church dogmas, and looked only to aggrandizement through
her. The priesthood, which alone possessed a knowledge of letters,
prostituted their learning to the basest uses; the nobility spent
their lives in warring upon each other; the peasantry were the sport
and victim by turns of priest and noble, while woman was the prey of
all; her person and her rights possessing no consideration only as
they could be made to advance the interest or serve the pleasure of
noble, husband, father, or priest--some man-god to whose lightest
desire all her wishes were made to bend. The most pronounced doctrine
of the Church during this period was, that through woman sin had been
introduced into the world; that woman's whole tendency was toward
evil, and that had it not been for the unfortunate oversight of her
creation, man would be dwelling in the paradisical innocence and
happiness of Eden blessed with immortality. The Church looking upon
woman as under a curse, considered man as God's divinely appointed
agent for its enforcement, and that the restrictions she suffered
under Christianity were but parts of a just punishment for having
caused the fall of man. Christian theology thus at once struck a blow
at these old beliefs in woman's equality, broadly inculcating the
doctrine that woman was created for man, was subordinate to him and
under obedience to him. It bade woman stand aside from sacerdotal
offices, forbidding her to speak in the church, commanding her to ask
her husband at home for all she wished to know, at once repressing all
tendency toward her freedom among those who adopted the new religion,
and by various decretals taught her defilement through the physical
peculiarities of her being. It placed the legality of marriage under
priestly control, secured to husbands a right of divorce for causes
not freeing the wife, and so far set its ban upon this relation as to
hold single women above the wife and mother in holiness. After having
forbidden woman the priestly office, it forbade her certain benefits
to be derived therefrom, thus unjustly punishing her for an
ineligibility of its own creation; offices in the Church, learning,
and property rights, freedom of thought and action, all were held as
improper for a being secondary to man, who came into the world, not as
part of the great original plan, but as an afterthought of the
Creator.
While it took many hundred years to totally exclude woman from the
priesthood, the strict celibacy of the male clergy was during the same
period the constant effort of the Church. At first its restrictions
were confined to a single marriage with a woman who had never before
entered that relation. A Council of A.D. 347, consisting of twenty-one
bishops, forbade the ordination of those priests who had been twice
married, or who had married a widow. A Council of A.D. 395, ruled that
a bishop who had children after ordination, should be excluded from
the major orders. The Council of A.D. 444, deposed Chelidonius, Bishop
of Besancon, for having married a widow; while the Council of Orleans,
A.D. 511, consisting of thirty-two bishops, decided that any monk who
married should be expelled from the ecclesiastical order.
In the sixth century a Council was held at Macon (585), consisting of
forty-three bishops with sees, sixteen bishops without sees, and
fifteen envoys. At this Council the celebrated discussion took place
of which it has often been said, the question was whether woman had a
soul. It arose in this wise. A certain bishop insisted that woman
should not be called "homo"; but the contrary was argued by others
from the two facts that the Scriptures say that God created man, male
and female, and that Jesus Christ, son of a woman, is called the son
of man. Woman was, therefore, allowed to remain a human being in the
eyes of the clergy, even though considered a very weak and bad one.
The Church held two entirely opposing views of marriage. Inasmuch as
it taught that the fall came through marriage, this relation was
regarded by many priests with holy horror as a continuance of the evil
which first brought sin into the world. It was declared that God would
have found some method of populating the world outside of marriage,
and that condition was looked upon as one of peculiar temptation and
trial. Another class taught its necessity, though in it woman was
under complete subordination to man. These views can be traced to the
early fathers; through clerical contempt of marriage, the conditions
of celibacy and virginity were regarded as those of highest virtue.
Jerome respected marriage as chiefly valuable in that it gave virgins
to the Church, while Augustine, although he admitted the possibility
of salvation to the married, yet spoke of a mother and daughter in
heaven, the mother shining as a dim star, the daughter as one of the
first magnitude.
In the "Apostolic Constitutions," held by the Episcopal Church as
regulations established by the apostles themselves, and which are
believed by many to be among the earliest Christian records, there are
elaborate directions for the places of all who attend church, the
unmarried being most honored. The virgins and widows and elder women
stood, or sat first of all. The Emperor Honorius banished Jovinius for
asserting the possibility of a man being saved who lived with his
wife, even though he obeyed all the ordinances of the Church and lived
a good life.
St. Chrysostom, whose prayer is repeated at every Sunday morning
service of the Episcopal church, described woman as "a necessary evil,
a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic peril, a deadly
fascination, and a painted ill." The doctrine of priestly celibacy
which was early taught, though not thoroughly enforced until the
eleventh century, and the general tenor of the Church against
marriage, together with its teaching woman's greater sinfulness, were
the great causes of undermining the morals of the Christian world for
fifteen hundred years. With these doctrines was also taught the duty
of woman to sacrifice herself in every way to man. The loss of
chastity in a woman was held as a light sin in comparison to the
degradation that marriage would bring upon the priesthood, and young
girls ruined by some candidate or priest, considered themselves as
doing God service by refusing a marriage that would cause the
expulsion of their lovers from this order. With woman's so-called
divine self-sacrifice, Heloise chose to remain Abelard's mistress
rather than destroy his prospects of advancement in the Church.[182]
To the more strict enforcement of priestly celibacy, the barons were
permitted to make slaves of the wives and children of married priests.
While by common law children were held as following the condition of
their fathers, under Church legislation they were held to follow the
condition of their mothers. Serf mothers have thus borne serf children
to free-born fathers, and slave mothers have borne slave children to
their masters; while unmarried mothers still bear bastard children to
unknown fathers, the Church thus throwing the taint of illegitimacy
upon the innocent. The relations of man and woman to each other, the
sinfulness of marriage, and the license of illicit relations employed
most of the thought of the Church.[183] The duty of woman to obey, not
only her husband, but all men by virtue of their sex, was sedulously
inculcated. She was trained to hold her own desires and even her own
thoughts in complete abeyance to those of man; father, husband,
brother, son, priest, alike held themselves as her rightful masters,
and every holy principle of her nature was subverted in this most
degrading assumption. A great many important effects followed the full
establishment of priestly celibacy. The doctrine of woman's inherent
wickedness took new strength; a formal prohibition of the Scriptures
to the laity was promulgated from Toulouse in the twelfth century; the
canon law gained control of the civil law; the absolute sinfulness of
divorce, which had been maintained in councils, yet allowed by the
civil law, was established; the Inquisition arose; the persecution of
woman for witchcraft took on a new phase, and a tendency to suicide
was developed. The wives of priests rendered homeless, and with their
children suddenly ranked among the vilest of the earth, were powerless
and despairing, and not a few of them shortened their agony by death
at their own hands. For all these crimes the Church was directly
responsible.
Priestly celibacy did not cause priestly purity of life,[184] but
looking upon themselves as especially sanctified and set apart by
virtue of that celibacy, priests made their holy office the cover of
the most degrading sensuality.[185] Methods were taken to debauch the
minds of women as well as their bodies. As late as the seventeenth
century it was taught that a priest could commit no sin. This was an
old doctrine, but received new strength from the Illumines. It was
said that "The devout, having offered up and annihilated their own
selves, exist no longer but in God. Thenceforth they can do no wrong.
The better part of them is so divine that it no longer knows what the
other is doing." The doctrine of some Protestant sects, "Once in
grace, always in grace," is of the same character. The very
incarnation was used as a means of weakening woman's virtue. An
enforcement of the duty of an utter surrender of the soul and the will
was taught by the example of the Virgin, "who obeyed the angel Gabriel
and conceived, without risk of evil, for impurity could not come of a
spirit."[186] Another lesson, of which the present century has some
glimpse, was "that sin could be killed by sin, as the better way of
becoming innocent again." The result of this doctrine was seen in the
mistresses of the priests, known as "The Hallowed Ones."
Under such religious teaching as to woman, naught could be expected
but that the laity would closely imitate the priesthood. Although
Church and State may not be legally united, it is impossible for any
religious opinion to become widely prevalent without its influencing
legislation. Among the Anglo-Saxons, the priesthood possessed great
influence; but after the Norman Conquest, ecclesiasticism gained
greater control in England. Previous to this, a man was compelled by
law to leave his wife one-third of his property, and could leave her
as much, more as he pleased. Under ecclesiastical law he was not
permitted to will her more than one-third, and could leave her as much
less as he pleased. Glanville laid it down as a law of the 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.
Women were not permitted to testify in court unless on some question
especially concerning themselves. It is but twenty years since this
law was annulled in Scotland, and but three years since, that by the
influence of Signor Morelli,[187] the Parliament of Italy repealed the
old restriction upon woman's testimony.
Sisters were not allowed to inherit with brothers, the property,
according to old ecclesiastical language, going "to the worthiest of
blood." Blackstone acknowledges that this distinction between brothers
and sisters reflects shame upon England, and was no part of the old
Roman law, where the children of a family inherited equally without
distinction of sex. It is but two years since the old law of
inheritance of sons alone was repealed in one of the Swiss Cantons.
Even in this enlightened age its repeal met much opposition, men
piteously complaining that they would be ruined by this act of justice
done their sisters.
The minds of people having been corrupted through centuries by Church
doctrines regarding woman, it was an easy step for the State to aid in
her degradation. The system of Feudalism rising from the theory of
warfare as the normal condition of man, still further oppressed woman
by bringing into power a class of men accustomed to deeds of violence,
and finding 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 even, unless she held power in her own
right, or was acting in place of some feudal lord. The whole body of
villeins and serfs were under absolute dominion of the Feudal Lords.
They were held as possessing no rights of their own: the Priest 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 the half or more of everything even to
one-half the wool shorn from the flock,[188] 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 its women, who were struck, tortured,
were great, while their sense of security was slight, it was upon and
made the sport of the ribald soldiery, "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 law known as _Marchetta_, or Marquette, compelled newly-married
women to a most dishonorable servitude. They were regarded as the
rightful prey of the Feudal Lord from one to three days after their
marriage, and from this custom, the oldest son of the serf was held as
the son of the lord, "as perchance it was he who begat him." From this
nefarious degradation of woman, the custom of Borough-English arose,
in which the youngest son became the heir. The original signification
of the word borough being to make secure, the peasant through
Borough-English made secure the right of his own son to what
inheritance he might leave, thus cutting off the claim of the possible
son of his hated lord. France, Germany, Prussia, England, Scotland,
and all Christian countries where feudalism existed, held to the
enforcement of Marquette. The lord deemed this right as fully his as
he did the claim to half the crops of the land, or to the half of the
wool sheared from the sheep. More than one reign of terror arose in
France from the enforcement of this law, and the uprisings of the
peasantry over Europe during the twelfth century, and the fierce
Jacquerie, or Peasant War, of the fourteenth century in France owed
their origin, among other causes, to the enforcement of these claims
by the lords upon the newly-married wife. The Edicts of Marly securing
the Seigneural Tenure in Lower Canada, transplanted that claim to
America when Canada was under the control of France.
To persons not conversant with the history of feudalism, and of the
Church for the first fifteen hundred years of its existence, it will
seem impossible that such foulness could ever have been part of
Christian civilization. That the crimes they have been trained to
consider the worst forms of heathendom could have existed in Christian
Europe, upheld by both Church and State for more than a thousand five
hundred years, will strike most people with incredulity. Such,
however, is the truth; we can but admit well-attested facts of history
how severe a blow soever they strike our preconceived beliefs.
Marquette was claimed by the Lords Spiritual[189] as well as by the
Lords Temporal. The Church, indeed, was the bulwark of this base
feudal claim. With the power of penance and excommunication in its
grasp, this feudal demand could neither have originated nor been
sustained unless sanctioned by the Church.
In Scotland, Margaret, wife of Malcolm Conmore, generally known, from
her goodness, as St. Margaret,[190] exerted her royal influence in
1057, against this degradation of her sex, but despite the royal
prohibition and the substitution of the payment of a merk in money
instead, the custom had such a foothold and appealed so strongly to
man's licentious appetite it still continued, remaining in existence
nearly seven hundred years after the royal edict against its practice.
These customs of feudalism were the customs of Christianity during
many centuries.[191] These infamous outrages upon woman were enforced
under Christian law by both Church and State.[192]
The degradation of the husband at this infringement of the lord
spiritual and temporal upon his marital right, has been pictured by
many writers, but history has been quite silent upon the despair and
shame of the wife. No hope appeared for woman anywhere. The Church,
which should have been the great conserver of morals, dragged her to
the lowest depths, through the vileness of its priestly customs. The
State, which should have defended her civil rights, followed the
example of the Church in crushing her to the earth. God Himself
seemed to have forsaken woman. Freedom for the peasants was found
alone at night. Known as the Birds of the Night, Foxes and Birds of
Prey, it was only at these night assemblages they enjoyed the least
happiness or security. Here, with wives and daughters, they met
together to talk, of their gross outrages. Out of these foul wrongs
grew the sacrifice of the "Black Mass," with woman as officiating
priestess, in which the rites of the Church were travestied in solemn
mockery, and defiance cast at that heaven which seemed to permit the
priest and lord alike to trample upon all the sacred rights of
womanhood in the names of religion and law.
During this mocking service a true sacrifice of wheat was offered to
the Spirit of the Earth who made wheat to grow, and loosened birds
bore aloft to the God of Freedom the sighs and prayers of the serfs
asking that their descendants might be free. We can not do otherwise
than regard this sacrifice as the most acceptable offering made in
that day of moral degradation, a sacrifice and prayer more holy than
all the ceremonials of the Church. This service, where woman, by
virtue of her greater despair, acted both as altar and priest, opened
by the following address and prayer: "I will come before Thine altar,
but save me, O Lord, from the faithless and violent man!" (from the
priest and the baron).[193] From these assemblages, known as "Sabbat,"
or "the Sabbath," from the old Pagan Midsummer-day sacrifice to
"Bacchus Sabiesa," rose the belief in the "Witches' Sabbath," which
for several hundred years formed a new source of accusation against
women, and sent tens of thousands of them to the most horrible death.
Not until canon or Church law had become quite engrafted upon the
civil law, did the full persecutions for witchcraft arise. A witch was
held to be a woman who had deliberately sold her soul to the Evil One,
who delighted in injuring others, and who chose the Sabbath day for
the enactment of her impious rites, and who was especially connected
with black animals; the black cat being held as her familiar in many
countries.
In looking at the history of witchcraft, we see three striking points
for consideration:
_First._ That women were chiefly accused, a wizard being seldom
mentioned.
_Second._ That man, believing in woman's inherent wickedness, and
understanding neither the mental nor the physical peculiarities of her
being, ascribed all her idiosyncrasies to witchcraft.
_Third._ That the clergy inculcated the idea that woman was in league
with the devil, and that strong intellect, remarkable beauty, or
unusual sickness, were in themselves a proof of that league.
Catholic and Protestant countries alike agreed in holding woman as the
chief accessory of the devil. Luther said, "I would have no compassion
for a witch; I would burn them all." As late as 1768, John Wesley
declared the giving up of witchcraft to be in effect giving up the
Bible. James I., on his accession to the throne, ordered the learned
work of Reginald Scot against witchcraft, to be burned in compliance
with the act of Parliament of 1603, which ratified a belief in
witchcraft over the three kingdoms. Under Henry VIII., from whose
reign the Protestant Reformation in England dates, an act of
Parliament made witchcraft felony; this act was again confirmed under
Elizabeth. To doubt witchcraft was as heretical under Protestantism as
under Catholicism.
Even the widely extolled Pilgrim Fathers brought this belief with them
when they stepped ashore at Plymouth Rock. With the "Ducking-Stool"
and the "Scarlet Letter" of shame for woman, while her companion in
sin went free, they also brought with them a belief in witches.
Richard Baxter, the "greatest of the Puritans," condemned those who
disbelieved in witchcraft as "wicked Sadducees," his work against it
adding intensity to the persecution. Cotton Mather was active in
fomenting a belief in this doctrine.
So convinced were those in power of the tendency of woman to diabolism
that the learned Sir Matthew Hale condemned two women without even
summing up the evidence. Old women, for no other reason than that they
were old, were held as most susceptible to the assaults of the devil,
and most especially endowed with supernatural powers for evil, to
doubt which was equivalent to doubting the Bible. We see a reason for
this hatred of old women, in the fact that woman was chiefly viewed
from a sensual stand-point, and when by reason of age or debility, she
no longer attracted the physical admiration of man, he looked upon her
as of no farther use to the world, and as possessing no right to life.
At one period it was very unusual for an old woman in the north of
Europe to die peaceably in her bed. The persecution against them raged
with special virulence in Scotland, where upon the act of the British
Parliament in 17--, abolishing the burning and hanging of witches, the
assembly of the Calvinistic Church of Scotland "confessed" this act of
Parliament "as a great national sin." Looked upon as a sin rather than
a crime, the Church sought its control, and when coming under its
power, witchcraft was punished with much greater severity than when
falling under lay tribunals. It proved a source of great emolument to
the Church, which was even accused of fostering it for purposes of
gain. A system of "witch finders" or "witch persecutors" arose.
Cardan, a famous Italian physician, said of them: "In order to obtain
forfeit property, the same persons acted as accusers and judges, and
invented a thousand stories as proof."
Witchcraft was as a sin almost confined to woman; a wizard was rare,
one writer saying: to every 100 witches, we find but one wizard. In
the time of Louis XIII. this proportion was greatly increased; "to one
wizard, 10,000 witches," another person declared there were 100,000
witches in France alone. Sprenger, the great Inquisitor, author of
"The Witch Hammer,"[194] through whose persecutions many countries
were flooded with victims, said, "Heresy of witches, not of wizards,
must we call it, for these latter are of very small account." No class
or condition escaped Sprenger; we read of witches of fifteen years,
and two "infernally beautiful"[195] of seventeen years.
The Parliament of Toulouse burned 400 witches at one time. Four
hundred women at one hour on the public square, dying the horrid death
of fire, for a crime which never existed save in the imagination of
those persecutors, and which grew in their imagination from a false
belief in woman's extraordinary wickedness, based upon a false theory
as to original sin. Not a Christian country but was full of the
horrors of witch persecution and violent death. Remy, Judge of Nancy,
acknowledged to having himself burnt 800 in sixteen years. Many women
were driven to suicide in fear of the torture in store for them. In
1595 sixteen of those accused by Remy, destroyed themselves rather
than fall into his terrible hands. Six hundred were burnt in one small
bishopric in one year; 900 during the same period in another. Seven
thousand lost their lives at Treves; 1,000 in the province of Como in
Italy in a single year; 500 were executed at Geneva in a single month.
Under the reign of Francis I. more than 100,000 witches are said to
have been put to death, and for hundreds of years this superstition
controlled the Church. In Scotland the most atrocious tortures were
invented, and women died "shrieking to heaven for that mercy denied
them by Christian men." One writer casually mentions seeing nine
burning in a single day's journey.
When for "witches" we read "women," we shall gain a more direct idea
of the cruelties inflicted by the Church upon woman. Friends were
encouraged to cast accusations upon friends, and rewards were offered
for conviction. From the pulpit people were exhorted to bring the
witch to justice. Husbands who had ceased to care for their wives, or
in any way found them a burden, or who for any reason wished to
dissolve the marriage tie, now found an easy method. They had but to
accuse them of witchcraft, and the marriage was dissolved by the death
of the wife at the stake. Mention is made of wives dragged by their
husbands before the arch-Inquisitor, Sprenger, by ropes around their
necks. In Protestant, as in Catholic countries, the person accused was
virtually dead. She was excommunicated from humanity; designated and
denounced as one whom all must shun, with whom none must buy or sell,
to whom no one must give food or lodging or speech or shelter; life
was not worth the living.
Besides those committing suicide, others brought to trial, tired of
life amid so many horrors, falsely accused themselves, preferring a
death by the torture of fire to a life of endless isolation and
persecution. An English woman on her way to the stake, with a
greatness of soul all must admire, freed her judges from
responsibility by saying to the people, "Do not blame my judges, I
wished to put an end to my own self. My parents kept aloof from me; my
husband had denied me. I could not live on without disgrace. I longed
for death, and so I told a lie."
Of Sir George Mackenzie, the eminent Scotch advocate, it was said:
He went to examine some women who had confessed,[196] and one of
them told him "under secrecie" that she had not confessed
because she was guilty, but being a poor wretch who wrought for
her meat, and being defined for a witch, she knew she would
starve, for no person thereafter would give her either meat or
lodging, and that all men would beat her and hound dogs at her,
and therefore she desired to be out of the world, whereupon she
wept most bitterly, and upon her knees called upon God to witness
what she said.
The death these poor women chose to suffer rather than accept a chance
of life with the name of witch clinging to them,[197] was one of the
most painful of which we can conceive,[198] although in the diversity
of torture inflicted upon "the witch," it is scarcely possible to say
which was the least agonizing.
Not only was the persecution for witchcraft brought to New England by
the Puritans, but it has been considered and treated as a capital
offense by the laws of both Pennsylvania and New York. Trials took
place in both colonies not long before the Salem tragedy; the peaceful
Quaker, William Penn, presiding upon the bench at the time of the
trial of two Swedish women accused of witchcraft. The Grand Jury
acting under instruction given in a charge delivered by him, found
bills against them, and his skirts were only saved from the guilt of
their blood by some technical irregularity in the indictment.
Marriage with devils was long one of the most ordinary accusations in
witch trials. The knowledge of witches was admitted, as is shown in
the widely extended belief of their ability to work miracles. A large
part of the women termed witches were in reality the profoundest
thinkers, the most advanced scientists of those ages. For many hundred
years the knowledge of medicine, and its practice among the poorer
classes was almost entirely in their hands, and many discoveries in
this science are due to them; but an acquaintance with herbs soothing
to pain, or healing in their qualities, was then looked upon as having
been acquired through diabolical agency. Even those persons cured
through the instrumentality of some woman were ready when the hour
came to assert their belief in her indebtedness to the devil for that
knowledge. Not only were the common people themselves ignorant of all
science, but their brains were filled with superstitious fears, and
the belief that knowledge had been first introduced to the world
through woman's obedience to the devil. Thus the persecution which for
ages raged against witches, was in reality an attack upon science at
the hands of the Church.
The entire subordination of the common law to ecclesiasticism, dates
in England to the reign of Stephen, who ascended the throne in 1135.
Its new growth of power must be ascribed to avarice, as it then began
to take cognizance of crimes, establishing an equivalent in money for
every species of wrong-doing. The Church not only remitted penalties
for crimes already perpetrated, but sold indulgences for the
commission of new ones. Its touch upon property soon extended to all
the relations of life. Marriages within the seventh degree were
forbidden by the Church as incestuous, but those who could buy
indulgence were enabled to get a dispensation. No crime so great that
it could not be condoned for money.
Canon law gained its greatest power in the family relation in its
control over wills, the guardianship of orphans, marriage and divorce.
Under ecclesiastical law, marriage was held as a sacrament, was
performed at the church door, the wife being required to give up her
name, her person, her property, her own sacred individuality, and to
promise obedience to her husband in all things. Certain hours of the
day were even set aside as canonical after which no marriage could be
celebrated.[199] 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. Ecclesiastical law ultimately secured such a
hold upon family property and became so grasping in its demands, that
the civil law interfered, not, however, in the interests of wives and
children, but in the interests of creditors. Canon law had its largest
growth through the pious fictions of woman's created inferiority.
To the credit of humanity it must be said that the laity did not
readily yield to priestly power, but made many efforts to wrest their
temporal concerns from ecclesiastical control. But in the general
paucity of education, together with the abnegation of the will,
sedulously taught by the Church, which brought all its dread power to
bear in threats of excommunication and future eternal torment, the
rights of the people were gradually lost. The control of the
priesthood over all things of a temporal, as well as of a spiritual
nature, tended to make them a distinct body from the laity, and rights
were divided into those pertaining to persons and things, the rights
of persons belonging to the priesthood alone; but inasmuch as every
man, whatever his condition, could become a priest, and no woman,
however learned or pious or high in station, could, the whole tendency
of ecclesiastical law was to separate man and woman into a holy or
divine sex, and an unholy or impious sex, creating an antagonism
between those whose interests are by nature the same. Thus canon law,
bearing upon the business of ordinary life between man and man, fell
with its greatest weight upon woman; it not only corrupted the common
law in England, but perverted the civil law of other countries. The
denial under common law of the right of woman to make a contract, grew
out of the denial of her right of ownership. Not possessing control
over her own property or her future actions, she was held as legally
unable to make a binding contract.
Property is a delicate test of the condition of a nation. It is a
singular fact of history that the rights of property have everywhere
been recognized before the rights of persons, and wherever the rights
of any class to property are attacked, it is a most subtle and
dangerous assault upon personal rights. The chief restrictive element
of slavery was the denial to the slave of the proceeds of his own
labor. As soon as a slave was allowed to hire his time, the door of
freedom began to open to him. The enslavement of woman has been much
increased from the denial of the rights of property to her, not merely
to the fruits of her own labor, but to the right of inheritance.
The great school of German jurists[200] 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 under canon law woman was debarred from
giving testimony in courts of law, sisters were prohibited from taking
an inheritance with brothers, and wives were deprived of property
rights, it is entirely justifiable to say ecclesiastical law injured
civilization by its destruction of the property rights of women.[201]
The worst features of canon law, as Blackstone frankly admits, are
those touching upon the rights of woman. These features have been made
permanent to this day by the power the Church gained over common
law,[202] between the tenth and sixteenth centuries, since which
period the complete inferiority and subordination of the female sex
has been as fully maintained by the State as by the Church. The
influence of canon law upon the criminal codes of England and America
has but recently attracted the attention of legal minds. Wharton,
whose "Criminal Law" has for years been a standard work, did not
examine their relation until his seventh edition, in which he gave a
copious array of authors, English, German, and Latin, from whom he
deduced proof that the criminal codes of these two countries are
pre-eminently based upon ecclesiastical law.
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 run-away 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.
Whereon 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 thirty years since the dockets of a court in New York
city, the great metropolis of our nation, 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.
Although England was Christianized in the fourth century, it was not
until the tenth that a daughter had a right to reject the husband
selected for her by her father;[203] and it was not until this same
century that the Christian wife of a Christian husband acquired the
right of eating at table with him. For many hundred years the law
entered families, binding out to servile labor all unmarried women
between the ages of eleven and forty.
For more than a thousand years women in England were legislated for as
slaves. They were imprisoned for crimes that, if committed by a man,
were punished by simple branding in the hand; and other crimes which
he could atone for by a fine, were punished in her case by burning
alive. Down to the end of the eighteenth century the punishment of a
wife who had murdered her husband was burning[204] alive; while if the
husband murdered the wife, his was hanging, "the same as if he had
murdered any stranger." Her crime was petit treason, and her
punishment was the same as that of the slave who had murdered her
master. For woman there existed no "benefit of clergy," which in a man
who could read, greatly lessened his punishment; this ability to read
enabling him to perform certain priestly functions and securing him
immunity in crime. The Church having first made woman ineligible to
the priesthood, punished her on account of the restrictions of its own
making. We who talk of the burning of wives upon the funeral pyres of
husbands in India, may well turn our eyes to the records of Christian
countries.
Where marriage is wholly or partially under ecclesiastical law,
woman's degradation surely follows; but in Catholic and Protestant
countries a more decent veil has been thrown over this sacrifice of
woman than under some forms of the Greek Church, where the wife is
delivered to the husband under this formula: "Here, wolf, take thy
lamb!" and the bridegroom is presented with a whip, giving his bride a
few blows as part of the ceremony, and bidding her draw off his boots
as a symbol of her subjugation to him. With such an entrance ceremony,
it may well be surmised that the marriage relation permits of the most
revolting tyranny. In Russia, until recently, the wife who killed her
husband while he was chastising her, was buried alive, her head only
being left above ground. Many lingered for days before the mercy of
death reached them.
Ivan Panim, a Russian exile, now a student in Harvard College, made
the following statement in a speech at the Massachusetts Woman
Suffrage Convention, held in February, 1881:
A short time ago the wife of a well-to-do peasant came to a
justice of one of the district courts in Russia and demanded
protection from the cruelty of her husband. She proved
conclusively by the aid of competent witnesses, that he had bound
her naked to a stake during the cold weather, on the street, and
asked the passers-by to strike her; and whenever they refused, he
struck her himself. He fastened her, moreover, to the ground, put
heavy stones and weights on her and broke one of her arms. The
court declared the husband "not guilty." "It cannot afford," it
said, "to teach woman to disobey the commands of her husband."
This is by no means an extreme or isolated case. Few, indeed,
become known to the public through the courts or through the
press.[205]
Canon law made its greatest encroachments at the period that chivalry
was at its height; the outward show of respect and honor to woman
keeping pace in its false pretense with the destruction of her legal
rights. Woman's moral degradation was at this time so great that a
community of women was even proposed, and was sustained by Jean de
Meung, the "Poet of Chivalry," in his Roman de la Rose. Christine of
Pisa, the first strictly literary woman of Western Europe, took up her
pen in defense of her sex against the general libidinous spirit of the
age, writing in opposition to Meung.
Under Feudalism, under Celibacy, under Chivalry, under the
Reformation, under the principles of new sects of the nineteenth
century--the Perfectionists and Mormons alike--we find this one idea
of woman's inferiority, and her creation as a subject of man's
passions openly or covertly promulgated.
The Salic law not only denied to women the right to reign, but to the
inheritance of houses and lands. One of its famous articles was:
"Salic land shall not fall to women; the inheritance shall devolve
exclusively on the males." The fact of sex not only prohibited woman's
inheritance of thrones and of lands, but there were forms in this law
by which a man might "separate himself from his family, getting free
from all obligations of relationship and entering upon an entire
independence." History does not tell us to what depths of degradation
this disseverance of all family ties reduced the women of his
household, who could neither inherit house or land. The formation of
the Salic code is still buried in the mists of antiquity; it is,
however, variously regarded as having originated in the fourth and in
the seventh century, many laws of its code being, like English common
law, unwritten, and others showing "double origin." But our interest
does not so greatly lie in its origin, as in the fact that after the
conversion of the Franks to Christianity the law was revised, and all
parts deemed inconsistent with this religion were revoked. The
restrictions upon woman were retained.
Woman's wrongs under the Reformation, we discover by glancing at
different periods. The Cromwellian era exhibited an increase of piety.
Puritanism here had its birth, but brought no element of toleration to
woman. Lydia Maria Child, in her "History of Woman," says:
Under the Commonwealth society assumed a new and stern aspect.
Women were in disgrace; it was everywhere reiterated from the
pulpit that woman caused man's expulsion from Paradise, and ought
to be shunned by Christians as one of the greatest temptations of
Satan. "Man," said they, "is conceived in sin and brought forth
in iniquity; it was his complacency to woman that caused his
first debasement; let him not, therefore, glory in his shame; let
him not worship the fountain of his corruption." Learning and
accomplishments were alike discouraged; and women confined to a
knowledge of cooking, family medicines, and the unintelligible
theological discussions of the day.
A writer about this period, said: "She that knoweth how to compound a
pudding is more desirable than she who skillfully compoundeth a poem."
At the time of the Reformation, Luther at first continued celibate,
but thinking "to vex the Pope," he suddenly, at the age of forty-two,
gave his influence against celibacy by marriage with Catherine Von
Bora, a former nun. But although thus becoming an example of priestly
marriage under the new order of things, Luther's whole course shows
that he did not believe in woman's equality with man. He took with him
the old theory of her subordination. It was his maxim that "no gown or
garment worse becomes a woman than that she will be wise." Although
opposing monastic life, the home under the reformation was governed by
many of its rules for woman.
_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
head.
_Fourth_. This masculine family head was a general father confessor,
to whom she was held responsible in thought and deed.
_Fifth_. Neither genius nor talent could free woman from such control,
without consent.
Luther, though free from the lasciviousness of the old priesthood, was
not monogamic in principle. When applied to by the German Elector,
Philip,[206] Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel, for permission to marry a
second wife, while his first, Margaret of Savoy, was still living,
Luther called a synod of six of the principal reformers, who in joint
consultation decided that as the Bible nowhere condemned polygamy, and
as it had been invariably practiced by the highest dignitaries of the
Church, the required permission should be granted. History does not
tell us that the wife was consulted in the matter. She was held as in
general subordination to the powers that be, as well as in special
subordination to her husband; but more degrading than all else is the
fact that the doctrine of unchastity for man was brought into the
Reformation, as not inconsistent with the principles of the
Gospel.[207]
Many Protestant divines have written in favor of polygamy. John Lyser,
a Lutheran minister, living in the latter part of the seventeenth
century, defended it strongly in a work entitled "Polygamia
Triumphatrix." A former general of the Capuchin Order, converted to
the Protestant faith, published, in the sixteenth century, a book of
"Dialogues in Favor of Polygamy." Rev. Mr. Madan, a Protestant divine,
in a treatise called "Thalypthora," maintained that Paul's injunctions
that bishops should be the husbands of one wife, signified that laymen
were permitted to marry more than one. The scholarly William Ellery
Channing could find no prohibition of polygamy in the New Testament.
In his "Remarks on the Character and Writings of John Milton," he
says: "We believe it to be an indisputable fact, that although
Christianity was first preached in Asia, which had been from the
earliest days the seat of polygamy, the apostles never denounced it as
a crime, and never required their converts to put away all wives but
one. No express prohibition of polygamy is found in the New
Testament." The legitimate result of such views is seen in Mormonism,
the latest Protestant sect, which claims its authority from the Bible
as well as from the Book of Mormon. We give the remarks recently made
in defence of polygamy by Bishop Lunt of the Mormon Church, to a
reporter of _The San Francisco Chronicle_:
God revealed to Joseph Smith the polygamous system. It is quite
true that his widow declared that no such revelation was ever
made, but that was because she had lost the spirit. God commanded
the human race to multiply and replenish the earth. Abraham had
two wives, and the Almighty honored the second one by a direct
communication, Jacob had Leah and Zilpah. David had a plurality
of wives, and was a man after God's own heart. God gave him
Saul's wives, and only condemned his adulteries. Moses, Gideon,
and Joshua had each a plurality of wives. Solomon had wives and
concubines by hundreds, though we do not believe in the concubine
system. We leave that to the Gentiles. Virtue and chastity wither
beneath the monogamic institution, which was borrowed from the
pagan nations by the early Christians. It was prophesied that in
the latter days seven women would lay hold of one man and demand
to bear his name, that they might not be held in dishonor. The
Protestants and Catholics assail us with very poor grace when it
is remembered that the first pillars of the religion they claim
to profess were men like the saints of Utah--polygamists. The
fact can not be denied. Polygamy is virtually encouraged and
taught by example by the Old Testament. It may appear shocking
and blasphemous to Gentiles for us to say so, but we hold that
Jesus Christ himself was a polygamist. He was surrounded by women
constantly, as the Scriptures attest, and those women were His
polygamous wives. The vast disparity between the sexes in all
settled communities is another argument in favor of polygamy, to
say nothing of the disinclination among young male Gentiles to
marrying. The monogamic system condemns millions of women to
celibacy. A large proportion of them stray from the path of
right, and these unfortunates induce millions of men to forego
marriage. As I have said, virtue and chastity wither under the
monogamic system.
There are no illegitimate children in Utah; there are no
libertines; there are no brothels, excepting where the presence
of Gentiles creates the demand for them. Even then our people do
what they can to root out such places. There is a positive
advantage in having more than one wife. It is impossible to find
a Gentile home, where comforts and plenty prevail, in which there
is only one woman. No one woman can manage a household. She must
have assistance. Hence we claim that when a man marries a second
wife, he actually benefits the first one, and contributes to her
ease, and relieves her of a large burden of care. The duties of
the household are divided between the two women, and everything
moves on harmoniously and peacefully. The whole thing is a matter
of education. A girl reared under the monogamic system may look
with abhorrence on ours; our young women do not do so. They
expect, when they marry a man, that he will some day take another
wife, and they consider it quite natural that he should do so. In
wealthy Gentile communities the concubine system largely takes
the place of the polygamous system. Any man of intelligence,
observation, and travel, knows that such is the case. The fact is
ignored by general consent, and little is said about it, and
nothing is written about it. It is not regarded as a proper
subject of conversation or of publication. How much better to
give lonely women a home while they are uncontaminated, and honor
them with your name, and perpetually provide for them, and before
the world recognize your own offspring! The polygamous system is
the only natural one, and the time rapidly approaches when it
will be the most conspicuous and beneficent of American
institutions. It will be the grand characteristic feature of
American society. Our women are contented with it--more, they are
the most ardent defenders of it to be found in Utah. If the
question were put to a vote to-morrow, nine-tenths of the women
of Utah would vote to perpetuate polygamy.
The Mormons claim that polygamy is countenanced by the New Testament
as well as by the Old. They interpret Paul's teaching in regard to
bishops, while commanding them to marry one wife, as also not
prohibiting them from marrying more than one; their interpretation of
this passage slightly varying from that of Rev. Mr. Madan.
Rev. C. P. Lyford, of the Methodist Church, long a resident of Utah,
in a letter of February 19, 1881, to _The Northern Christian
Advocate_, a Methodist paper published in Syracuse, says:
We read of the stories of India and China, and the wonder of
their existence is lost in their antiquity. Mohammedanism, with
its 1,200 years of existence, amazes us that it should have
obtained such a footing. But here, in our day, surrounded with
all the advantages of the nineteenth century, that a people
should have come up from nothing; that a man of low family,
himself a worthless character, should have come up with a lie in
his mouth and a stolen manuscript in his hand, and be found
dictating terms to a strong government, and become an absolute
despot in a republic, is the most amazing fact of history. It
took the Methodist Church forty years to get a membership of
138,000. Mormonism in forty-four years counted 250,000. It seems
incredible, nevertheless it is a fact. In this brief space of
time it has also been able to nullify our laws, oppose our
institutions, openly perpetrate crimes, be represented in
Congress, boast of the helplessness of the nation to prevent
these things, and give the Church supremacy over the State and
the people. Bills introduced in Congress adequate to their
overthrow have been year after year allowed to fall to the ground
without action upon them.
Our public men can only pronounce against the crime of polygamy;
the press can see only polygamy in Utah; the public mind is
impressed with only the heinousness of polygamy. Back of polygamy
is the tree that produces it and many kindred evils more dear to
the Mormon rulers. They do not care for all the sentiment or law
against this one fruit of the tree, if the tree itself is left to
stand. The tree--the prolific cause of so many and so great evils
in Utah, the greatest curse of the territory, the strength of
Mormonism, and its impregnable wall of defence against
Christianity and civilization, is that arbitrary, despotic, and
absolute hierarchy known as the Mormon Priesthood.
Mr. Lyford has partial insight into the truth when he says "back of
polygamy is the tree that produces it and many kindred evils"; but in
defining that tree as the hierarchy--the priesthood--he has not
reached the entire truth. He does not touch the ground which supports
the tree. Polygamy is but one development of the doctrine of woman's
created inferiority, the constant tendency of which is to make her a
mere slave, under every form of religion extant, and of which the
complex marriage of the Oneida Community was but another logical
result.
When woman interprets the Bible for herself, it will be in the
interest of a higher morality, a purer home. Monogamy is woman's
doctrine, as polygamy is man's. Backofen, the Swiss jurist, says that
the regulation of marriage by which, in primitive times, it became
possible for a woman to belong only to one man, came about by a
religious reformation, wherein the women, in armed conflict, obtained
a victory over men.
In Christian countries to-day, the restrictions on woman in the
married relation are much greater than upon man.[208] Adultery, which
is polygamy outside of the married relation, is everywhere held as
more venial in man than in woman. In England, while the husband can
easily obtain a divorce from his wife, upon the ground of adultery, it
is almost impossible for the wife to obtain a divorce upon the same
ground. Nothing short of the husband's bringing another woman into the
house, to sustain wifely relations to him, at all justifies her in
proceeding for a separation; and even then, the husband retains
control of the wife's property. A trial[209] in England is scarcely
ended in which a husband willed his wife's property to his mistress
and illegitimate children. The courts not only decided in his favor,
but to this legal robbery of the wife, added the insult of telling her
that a part of her own money was enough for her, and that she ought to
be willing that her husband's mistress and illegitimate children
should share it with her.
Milton's "Paradise Lost" is responsible for many existing views in
regard to woman. After the Reformation, as women began to waken to
literature, came Milton, a patriot of patriots--as patriots were held
in those days, a man who talked of liberty for men--but who held man
to stand in God's place toward woman. Although it has been affirmed
that in his blindness Milton dictated his great epic to his daughters,
and a Scotch artist has painted the scene (a picture recently
purchased by the Lenox Library), yet this is one of the myths men call
history, and amuse themselves in believing. This tale of blind Milton
dictating "Paradise Lost" to his daughters, is a trick[210] designed
to play upon our sympathies. Old Dr. Johnson said of Milton, that he
would not allow his daughters[211] even to learn to write. Between
Milton and his wives, we know there was tyranny upon one side and
hatred on the other. He could not gain the love of either wife or
daughter, and yet he is the man who did so much to popularize the idea
of woman's subordination to man. "He, for God; she, for God in
him"--as taught in the famous line: "God thy law, thou mine."
That the clerical teaching of woman's subordination to man was not
alone a doctrine of the dark ages, is proven by the most abundant
testimony of to-day. The famous See trial of 1876, which shook not
only the Presbytery of Newark, but the whole Synod of New Jersey, and
finally, the General Presbyterian Assembly of the United States, was
based upon the doctrine of the divinely appointed subordination of
woman to man, and arose simply because Dr. See admitted two
ladies[212] to his pulpit to speak upon temperance; which act, Rev.
Dr. Craven, the prosecutor, declared to have been "an indecency in the
sight of Jehovah." He expressed the general clerical and Church view,
when he said:
I believe the subject involves the honor of my God. I believe the
subject involves the headship and crown of Jesus. Woman was made
for man and became first in the transgression. My argument is
that subordination is natural, the subordination of sex. Dr. See
has admitted marital subordination, but this is not enough; there
exists a created subordination; a divinely arranged and appointed
subordination of woman as woman, to man as man. Woman was made
for man and became first in the transgression. The proper
condition of the adult female is marriage; the general rule for
ladies is marriage. Women without children, it might be said,
could preach, but they are under the general rule of
subordination. It is not allowed women to speak in the Church.
Man's place is on the platform. It is positively base for a woman
to speak in the pulpit; it is base in the sight of Jehovah. The
whole question is one of subordination.
Thus, before a large audience composed mainly of women, Dr. Craven
stood, and with denunciatory manner, frequently bringing his fists or
his Bible emphatically down, devoted a four hours' speech to proving
that the Bible taught woman's subordination; one of his statements
being that "in every country, under every clime, from the peasant
woman of Naples with a handkerchief over her hair, to the women before
him with bonnets, every one wore something upon her head in token of
her subordination." Dr. Craven's position was fully sustained by many
brother clergymen, some of whom enthusiastically shouted "Amen!"
Dr. Ballantine considered the subject too simple for an argument. Dr.
Few Smith, although he admired Miss Smiley, more than almost any other
orator he had ever listened to, did not want her or any other woman to
permanently occupy the Presbyterian pulpit. Dr. Wilson rejoiced to see
so many women crowding in the lecture-room; but Brother See should not
take all the glory to himself. He was glad to see the women take so
deep an interest in the subject under discussion; but as he looked at
them he asked himself, "What will all the little children do, while
these women are away from home?"[213]
The Christianity of to-day thus continues to teach the existence of a
superior and an inferior sex within the Church, possessing different
rights, and held accountable to a different code of morals, when even
woman's dress is held as typical of her inferiority. Not alone did Dr.
Craven express this idea, but the Right Rev. Dr. Coxe refused the
sacrament to the lady patients at the Clifton Springs Sanitarium in
1868, whose heads were uncovered. This same Right Rev. Dr. Coxe, in a
speech at his installation as first President of Ingham Seminary for
young ladies, declared "the laws of God to be plainly Salic."
Rev. Knox-Little, a High-Church clergyman of England, spent a few
weeks in the United States during the fall of 1880. In the course of
his stay in Philadelphia he preached a "Sermon to Women," in the large
church of St. Clements. The following extract from the report in the
Times of that city shows its teachings:
"God made himself to be born of a woman to sanctify the virtue of
endurance; loving submission is an attribute of woman; men are
logical, but women lacking this quality, have an intricacy of
thought. There are those who think women can be taught logic;
this is a mistake. They can never by any power of education
arrive at the same mental status as that enjoyed by men, but they
have a quickness of apprehension, which is usually called leaping
at conclusions, that is astonishing. There, then, we have
distinctive traits of a woman, namely, endurance, loving
submission, and quickness of apprehension. Wifehood is the
crowning glory of a woman. In it she is bound for all time. To
her husband she owes the duty of unqualified obedience. There is
no crime which a man can commit which justifies his wife in
leaving him or applying for that monstrous thing, divorce. It is
her duty to subject herself to him always, and no crime that he
can commit can justify her lack of obedience. If he be a bad or
wicked man she may gently remonstrate with him, but refuse him
never. Let divorce be anathema; curse it; curse this accursed
thing, divorce; curse it, curse it! Think of the blessedness of
having children. I am the father of many children and there have
been those who have ventured to pity me, 'Keep your pity for
yourself,' I have replied. 'They never cost me a single pang.' In
this matter let woman exercise that endurance and loving
submission which with intricacy of thought are their only
characteristics."
Such a sermon as the above, preached to woman, under the fall blaze of
nineteenth century civilization, needs few comments. In it woman's
inferiority and subordination are as openly asserted as at any time
during the dark ages. According to Rev. Knox-Little, woman possesses
no responsibility; she is deprived of conscience, intelligent thought,
self-respect, and is simply an appendage to man, a thing. As the
clergy in the middle ages divided rights into those of persons and
things, themselves being the persons, the laity, things, so the Rev.
Knox-Little and his ilk of to-day divide the world into persons and
things,--men being the persons and women the things.
It should require but little thought upon woman's part to see how
closely her disabilities are interwoven with present religious belief
as to her inferiority and pre-destined subordination. If she needs aid
to thought, the Knox-Littles will help her. Have protests against his
blasphemous doctrine been made by his brother clergymen? Not one. Has
a single church denied his degrading theory? Not one. He has been
allowed in this sermon to stand as the representative, not only of
High-Church theology in regard to woman, but as expressing the belief
of all churches in her creation and existence as an inferior and
appendage to man.
There is scarcely a Protestant sect that has not, within a few years,
in some way, placed itself upon record in regard to woman's
subordination. The Pan-Presbyterian Council that assembled in
Edinburgh a few years since, refused to admit a woman even as a
listener to its proceedings, although women constitute at least
two-thirds of the membership of that Church. A solitary woman who
persisted in remaining to listen to the discussions of this body, was
removed by force; "six stalwart Presbyterians" lending their ungentle
aid to her ejection. The same Pan-Presbyterian body when in session in
Philadelphia in the summer of 1880, laughed to scorn the suggestion of
a liberal member, that the status of woman in the Church should
receive some consideration. The speaker referred to the Sisters of
Charity in the Catholic Church, and to the position of woman among the
Quakers; but although the question was twice introduced, it was as
often met with derisive laughter, and no action was taken upon it. A
vote of the New England Society of Friends at their meeting in
Newport, 1878, proves that as liberal as they have been considered
toward woman, even they have not in the past held her as upon a plane
of perfect equality. This body voted that hereafter "women shall be
eligible to office in the management of the Society, shall sign all
conveyances of real estate made by the Society, and shall be
considered equal to the opposite sex."
The Congregational Church is placed upon record through laws governing
certain of its bodies:
"By the word 'church' is meant the adult males duly admitted and
retained in the First Evangelical Congregational Church in
Cambridgeport, present at any regular meeting of said church and
voting by a majority."[214]
In the Unitarian and Universalist churches, which ordain women to
preach and administer the ordinances, these women pastors are made to
feel that the innovation is not universally acceptable.
The Methodist Church, professing to stand upon a broad basis, still
refuses to ordain its most influential women preachers, and, within
the year, has even deprived them of license, though one of them[215]
has brought more converts to the Church than a dozen of its most
influential bishops during the same period. To such bitter lengths has
the opposition to woman's ordination been carried, that a certain
reverend gentlemen, in debating the subject, declared that he would
oppose the admission of the mother of our Lord into the ministry, the
debate taking on a most unseemly form. The _Syracuse Sunday Morning
Courier_ of March 4, 1877, reported this debate as follows:
WOMEN AS PREACHERS.
The subject of permitting women to preach in Methodist pulpits
was incidentally, but rather racily discussed at the Methodist
ministers' meeting in New York city a few days since. A Miss
Oliver--a more or less reverend lady--had been invited to preach
to the ministers at their next meeting, and the question was
raised, by what authority she was invited? Thereupon Brother
Buckley took the floor and gave expression to his dissent in the
following terms:
I am opposed to inviting any woman to preach before this meeting.
If the mother of our Lord were on earth I should oppose her
preaching here. [Sensation and murmurs of disapproval]. Oh, I do
not mind that, I like at the beginning of a speech to find that
there are two sides to my question. There is no power in the
Methodist Church by which a woman can be licensed to preach; this
is history, this is the report made at the last General
Conference. It is, therefore, not legal for any quarterly
conference to license a woman to preach, nevertheless here is a
woman who claims to have such a license, and we are asked to
invite her to preach.
A BROTHER: We have the right!
BROTHER BUCKLEY: Oh, you have the right to believe the moon is
made of green cheese, but yet have no right to commit the
ministers of this city on an unsettled Church question. [Laughter
and applause]. The tendency of men--now here is a chance to
hiss--the tendency of men to endeavor to force female preachers
on the Church, and the desire to run after female preachers, is,
as Dr. Finney said to the students at Oberlin, an aberration of
amativeness. [Roars of laughter and applause]. When men are moved
by women, then by men under the same circumstances, it is
certainly due to an aberration of amativeness. [Applause and
more laughter]. For some time the male and female students at
Oberlin used to have their prayer-meetings together, but after a
time they divided, and the young men complained to Dr. Finney
that the Holy Ghost no longer came with equal force. Dr. Finney
said this showed amativeness, or that the men were back-sliding.
[Applause].
BROTHER DICKINSON: As to the talk of amativeness, what about our
holiness meetings and seaside meetings, where we go to hear
woman, and to be moved by her words and her personality?
[Applause]. Why are there so many women in the Church? It must be
amativeness which urges them to go and hear men preach.
[Laughter].
Dr. ROACH: If this meeting has any dignity, has any Christian
intelligence, has any weight of character, it ought not to take
this action. [Laughter]. What wildness, what fanaticism, what
strange freaks will we not take on next? [Laughter and applause].
Brother McAllister and others took part in the discussion, and
finally, amid cries of "Motion," "Question," points of order, and
the utmost confusion, the question was put, and the meeting
refused to invite Miss Oliver to preach by a vote of 46 to 38.
The result was received with ejaculations of "Amen" and "Thank
God" and "God bless Brother Buckley." The Chair announced that
Brother Kittrell will preach next Monday on "Entire
Satisfaction," and the meeting adjourned.
Miss Oliver appealed to the General Conference of the Methodist
Episcopal Church in session in Cincinnati, May, 1880, for full
installment and ordination. In this appeal she said:
I am so thoroughly convinced that the Lord has laid commands upon
me in this direction, that it becomes with me a question of my
own soul's salvation. I have passed through tortures to which the
flames of martyrdom would be nothing, for they would end in a
day; and through all this time, and to-day, I could turn off to
positions of comparative ease and profit. I ask you, fathers and
brethren, tell me what you would do in my place? Tell me what you
would wish the Church to do toward you, were you in my place?
Please apply the golden rule, and vote in Conference accordingly.
As answer to this appeal, and in reply to all women seeking the
ministry of that Church, the Conference passed the following
resolution:
_Resolved_, That women have already all the rights and privileges
in the Methodist Church that are good for them, and that it is
not expedient to make any change in the books of discipline that
would open the doors for their ordination to the ministry.[216]
An Episcopal Church Convention meeting in Boston in the summer of
1877, busied itself in preparing canons upon marriage and divorce,
thus aiming to reach the finger of the Protestant Church down to a
control of this most private family relation. The Diocesan Convention
of South Carolina, in the spring of 1878, denied women the right to
vote upon Church matters, although some churches in the diocese
counted but five male members.
Not alone in her request for ordination has woman met with opposition,
but in her effort for any separate church work. The formation of
woman's foreign missionary societies was bitterly opposed by the
different evangelical denominations, although they have raised more
money than the male societies have ever been able to do--even helping
them pay old debts--and have reached large classes of their own sex
whom the male societies were powerless to touch. By thus supplementing
men's work, they have made themselves acceptable.
Not only do councils, convocations, conferences, conventions, synods,
and assemblies proclaim woman's inferiority, but Sunday-schools teach
the same doctrine. A letter from a correspondent of _The National
Citizen and Ballot-Box_ (Syracuse, N. Y.), in August, 1880, said:
Our Sunday-schools here have just finished the lesson on the
creation and fall of man, and those of us who are capable of
feeling, felt keenly the thrusts at woman for her infidelity to
God's laws, and her overpowering influence in dragging man from
his exalted position in life into a bondage of sin and death, and
that she is to be held responsible for all the accumulated sins
of the ages. One man said that "had not Eve been _lurking_ around
where she had no business, the devil would never have tempted
her." Another said, "Had it not been for woman, we might to-day
be living in ease and splendor," and I listened to hear them say
the fallen angel was a woman.
This same doctrine is taught in the public schools. _The Republican_,
of Havre de Grace, Maryland, in its issue of August 6, 1880, gave the
following report of a speech at that time:
Thus spoke Master Showell at the Berlin (Wicomico County)
High-School commencement: "By woman was Eden lost and man cursed.
If you trust her, give up all hopes of heaven. She can not love,
because she is too selfish. She may have a fancy, but that is
fleeting. Her smiles are deceit; her vows are traced in sand. She
is a thread of candor with a web of wiles. Her charity is
hypocrisy; she is deception every way--hair, teeth, complexion,
heart, tongue, and all. Oh, I hate you, ye cold composition of
art!"
Sermons are frequently preached in opposition to woman's demand for
equality of right in Church and State. On the Sunday following the
Thirtieth Anniversary Woman Suffrage Convention, held in Rochester,
1878, the Rev. A. H. Strong, D.D., President of the Baptist
Theological Seminary of that city, preached upon "Woman's Place and
Work," saying:
In the very creation of mankind in the garden of beauty, God
ordained the subordination of woman.
This president of a theological seminary, where Christian theology is
taught to embryo Christian ministers, said that woman's subordination
would be most perfectly seen in the "Christian humility and gentleness
and endurance of her character, and in her indisposition to assume the
place or do the work of man," forgetting, apparently, that
subordination, humility, and endurance are precisely the qualities
which tend to destroy nobleness of character.
The sermon was especially directed against the following resolutions
of this Convention, which throughout the country met much clerical
criticism and opposition:
_Resolved_, That as the duty of every individual is
self-development, the lessons of self-sacrifice and obedience
taught women by the Christian Church have been fatal, not only to
her own highest interests, but through her have also dwarfed and
degraded the race.
_Resolved_, That the fundamental principle of the Protestant
Reformation, the right of individual conscience and judgment in
the interpretation of Scripture, heretofore conceded to and
exercised by man alone, should now be claimed by woman, and that
in her most vital interests she should no longer trust authority,
but be guided by her own reason.
_Resolved_, That it is through the perversion of the religious
element in woman, cultivating the emotions at the expense of her
reason, playing upon her hopes and fears of the future, holding
this life, with all its high duties, forever in abeyance to that
which is to come, that she, and the children she has trained,
have been so completely subjugated by priestcraft and
superstition.
Professor Christlieb, a distinguished German clergyman who was in
attendance upon the Evangelical Alliance in New York, a few years
since, expressed severe condemnation of the marriage relation as he
saw it in this country. His criticism is a good exemplification of the
general religious view taken of woman's relation to man. After his
return to Germany, a young American student called, it is related,
upon the professor with a note of introduction, and was cordially
received by the German, who, while he praised this country, expressed
much solicitude about its future. On being asked his reasons, he
frankly expressed his opinion that "the Spirit of Christ" was not
here, and proceeded to illustrate his meaning. He seriously declared
that on more than one occasion he had heard an American woman say to
her husband, "Dear, will you bring me my shawl?" and the husband had
brought it! Worse than this, he had seen a husband, returning home at
evening, enter the parlor where his wife was sitting--perhaps in the
very best chair in the room--and the wife not only did not go and get
his slippers and dressing-gown, but she even remained seated, and left
him to find a chair as he could. In the view of this noted German
clergyman, the principles of the wife's equality with the husband, as
shown in the American home, is destructive of Christian
principles.[217]
Clerical action to-day, proves woman to hold the same place in the
eyes of the Church that she did during the dark ages. Woman is as
fully degraded, taking into consideration our civilization, as she
ever was. The form alone has changed. She is no longer burned at the
stake as a witch; she is no longer prostituted to feudal lords. The
age has outgrown a belief in the supernatural, and feudalism is dead;
yet the same principle which degraded her five hundred or a thousand
years since, still exists, even though its manifestation is not the
same. The feminine principle is still looked upon as secondary and
inferior,[218] though all the facts of nature and science prove it to
extend throughout creation.
It is through the Church idea of woman that the press of the world is
filled with scandals like the one that recently agitated the Romish
Church, in which the dead Cardinal Antonelli's name was bandied about
in courts of law. It is through Church interpretation of woman's
position that the suit of his putative daughter, the Countess
Lambertina, for his property, was decided against her on the ground
that she was "a sacrilegious child." The person who commits sacrilege
steals sacred things. "Sacrilegious" means violating sacred things. "A
sacrilegious child" is a child who "violated sacred things" by coming
into existence. Her father was holy; he did not violate holy things
when he violated and ruined a woman's life. He committed no sacrilege
in the eyes of the Church. His sin was nothing; but the unfortunate
result of his sin was a violation of holy things by the mere fact of
her coming into existence. What irony of all that is called holy!
It is because the Church has taught that woman was created solely for
man, that in tearing asunder a recent will in New York, it was proven
that the husband, indebted though he was to his wife for the beginning
of his vast fortune, incarcerated her while sane in a lunatic asylum,
because she objected to his practical polygamy by his introduction of
a mistress into the family.
Political despotism has now its strongest hold in the theory of
woman's created subordination. Woman has been legislated for as a
class, and not as a human being upon a basis of equality with man, but
as an inferior to whom a different code was applicable.
Our recent Secretary of State, William M. Evarts, when counsel in the
Beecher-Tilton trial, defined woman's legal and theological position
as that of subordination to man, declaring that notwithstanding
changing customs and the amenities of modern life, women were not
free, but were held in the hollow of man's hand, to be crushed at his
will.
Then Mr. Evarts read from various legal authorities instances and
opinions bearing upon the subjugation of weak wives by strong
husbands, the gist of them being that confessions of guilt
obtained by such husbands from such wives are not entitled to
great weight. He continued:
RECOGNIZING THE PRINCIPLES OF MARRIAGE.
This institution of marriage, framed in our nature, built up in
our civilization, studied, contemplated, understood by the
jurisprudence of ages, is a solid and real institution, and for
its great benefits, and as a necessary part of them, it carries
not only the fact of the wife's subordination to the husband, but
of the merciful interpretation of that subordination[219] which
sensible, instructed men ever accord in practical life, and which
the judges pronounce from the bench, and the juries confirm by
their verdicts. Now, gentlemen, you may think that is our
advanced civilization, when so much of independence is assumed
for women, and such entire equality is accorded to them in
feeling and in sentiment by their husbands and by the world, that
the old rule of the common law interpreting this institution of
marriage, by which a wife was never held responsible to the law,
or subject to punishment for any crime committed in the presence
or under the influence of her husband, was one of those traits of
human nature belonging to ruder ages and to past times; but,
gentlemen, in our own Court of Appeals, and in the highest
tribunals of England, within the last few years, there is an
explicit recognition of these principles.
Mr. Evarts cited an English case in which a wife, who
participated in a robbery under the guidance of her husband, was
acquitted on the ground that she was irresponsible; and he added
an argument that the principle of law involved was correct. Then
he called attention to a recent case in this State, which he held
was a confirmation of the same sound theory.
The teachings of the Church that it was sinful for woman to use her
own reason, to think for herself, to question authority, thus
fettering her will, together with a false interpretation of Scripture,
have been the instruments to hold her, body and soul, in a slavery
whose depths of degradation can never be fathomed, whose indescribable
tortures can never be understood by man.
Not only has woman suffered in the Church, in society, under the laws,
and in the family by this theological degradation of her sex, but in
science and literature she has met a like fate. Hypatia, who succeeded
her father, Theon, in the government of the Alexandrian school, and
whose lectures were attended by the wisest men of Europe, Asia, and
Africa, was torn in pieces by a Christian mob afraid of her learning.
A monument erected to Catherine Sawbridge Macaulay, as "Patroness of
Liberty," was removed from the Church by order of its rector. Harriet
Martineau met the most strenuous opposition from bishops in her effort
to teach the poor; her day-schools and even her Sunday-schools were
broken up by clerical influence. Madam Pepe-Carpentier, founder of the
French system of primary instruction, of whom Froebel caught his
kindergarten idea, found her labors interrupted, and her life harassed
by clerical opposition.
Mary Somerville, the most eminent English mathematician of this
century, was publicly denounced in church by Dean Cockburn, of York;
and when George Eliot died a few weeks since, her lifeless remains
were refused interment in Westminster Abbey, where so many inferior
authors of the privileged sex lie buried; the grave even not covering
man's efforts toward the degradation of woman.
When Susannah Wesley dared to conduct religious services in her own
house, and to pray for the king, contrary to her husband's wishes, he
separated from her in consequence. The husband of Annie Besant left
her because she dared to investigate the Scriptures for herself, and
was sustained by the courts in taking from her the control of her
little daughter, simply because the mother thought best not to train
her in a special religious belief, but to allow her to wait until her
reason developed, that she might decide her religious views for
herself. A woman writing in the "Woman's Kingdom" department of The
_Chicago Inter-Ocean_, says:
The orthodox Church has been almost suicidal in its treatment of
women (and I write as one whose name still stands on the
membership list of the Presbyterian Church). Persons who have not
walked with wounded, lacerated hearts through the terrible
realities, can form no idea of the suffering occasioned young
women whose conscience summoned them to speak for temperance and
woman suffrage, by the persecutions encountered in the Church. We
have known clergymen come straight from the pulpit where they
have talked eloquently of "moral courage," of the heroism of
Martin Luther and Calvin and Wesley, and even of Garrison and
Harriet Beecher Stowe, to meet with a sneer some brave young
woman, who, with the same moral courage was proclaiming the truth
as revealed unto her. Our young women have been denied admittance
into theological schools; they have been compelled to go out into
the by-ways and hedges; they have been persecuted for
righteousness' sake. The Church has decreed that two-thirds of
its members shall be governed by the masculine one-third; but
despite this decision, woman will preach and the world will
listen.
Not only has woman recognized her own degradation, but the
largest-hearted men have also seen it. Thomas W. Higginson, in an
address at the anniversary of the Young Men's Christian Union, in New
York City, as long ago as 1858, in an address upon women in Christian
civilization, said:
No man can ever speak of the position of woman so mournfully as
she has done it for herself. Charlotte Bronté, Caroline Norton,
and indeed the majority of intellectual women, from the beginning
to the end of their lives, have touched us to sadness even in
mirth, and the mournful memoirs of Mrs. Siddons, looking back
upon years when she had been the chief intellectual joy of
English society, could only deduce the hope, "that there might be
some other world hereafter, where justice would be done to
woman."
The essayist, E. P. Whipple, in a recent speech before the Papyrus
Club of Boston, said of George Eliot:
The great masculine creators and delineators of human character,
Homer, Cervantes, Shakespeare, Göethe, Scott, and the rest, cheer
and invigorate us even in the vivid representation of our common
humanity in its meanest, most stupid, most criminal forms. Now
comes a woman endowed not only with their large discourse of
reason, their tolerant views of life, and their intimate
knowledge of the most obscure recesses of the human heart and
brain, but with a portion of that rich, imaginative humor which
softens the savageness of the serious side of life by a quick
perception of its ludicrous side, and the result of her survey of
life is, that she depresses the mind, while the men of genius
animate it, and that she saddens the heart, while they fill it
with hopefulness and joy. I do not intend to solve a problem so
complicated as this, but I would say, as some approach to an
explanation, that this remarkable woman was born under the wrath
and curse of what our modern philosophers call "heredity." She
inherited the results of man's dealings with woman during a
thousand generations of their life together.
Contempt for woman, the result of clerical teaching, is shown in
myriad forms. Wife-beating is still so common, even in America, that a
number of the States have of late introduced bills especially directed
to the punishment of the wife-beater. Great surprise is frequently
shown by these men when arrested. "Is she not my wife?" is cried in
tones proving the brutal husband had been trained to consider this
relationship a sufficient justification for any abuse.
In England, wives are still occasionally led to the market by a halter
around the neck to be sold by the husband to the highest bidder.[220]
George Borrow, in his singular narrative, "The Rommany Rye," says:
The sale of a wife with a halter around her neck is still a legal
transaction in England. The sale must be made in the cattle
market, as if she were a mare, "all women being considered as
mares by old English law, and indeed called 'mares' in certain
counties where genuine old English is still preserved."
It is the boast of America and Europe that woman holds a higher
position in the world of work under Christianity than under pagandom.
Heathen treatment of woman in this respect often points the moral and
adorns the tale of returned missionaries, who are apparently forgetful
that servile labor[221] of the severest and most degrading character
is performed by Christian women in highly Christian countries. In
Germany, where the Reformation had its first inception, woman carries
a hod of mortar up steep ladders to the top of the highest buildings;
or, with a coal basket strapped to her back, climbs three or four
flights of stairs, her husband remaining at the foot, pipe in mouth,
awaiting her return to load the hod or basket, that she may make
another ascent, the payment for her work going into the husband's
hands for his uncontrolled use. Or mayhap this German wife works in
the field harnessed by the side of a cow, while her husband-master
holds the plough and wields the whip. Or perhaps, harnessed with a
dog, she serves the morning's milk, or drags her husband home from
work at night.
In France women act as porters, carrying the heaviest burdens and
performing the most repulsive labors at the docks, while eating food
of so poor a quality that the lessening stature of the population
daily shows the result. In Holland and Prussia women drag barges on
the canal, and perform the most repulsive agricultural duties. On the
Alps[222] husbands borrow and lend their wives, one neighbor not
scrupling to ask the loan of another's wife to complete some farming
task, which loan is readily granted, with the understanding that the
favor is to be returned in kind. In England, scantily clothed women
work by the side of nude men in coal pits, and, harnessed to trucks,
perform the severe labor of dragging coal up inclined planes to the
mouth of the pit, a work testing every muscle and straining every
nerve, and so severe that the stoutest men shrink from it; while their
degradation in brick-yards and iron mines has commanded the attention
of philanthropists and legislators.[223]
A gentleman recently travelling in Ireland blushes for his sex when he
sees the employments of women, young and old. They are patient
drudges, staggering over the bogs with heavy creels of turf on their
backs, or climbing the slopes from the seashore, laden like beasts of
burden with the heavy sand-dripping seaweed, or undertaking long
journeys on foot into the market towns, bearing weighty hampers of
farm produce. In Montenegro, women form the beasts of burden in war,
and are counted among the "animals" belonging to the prince. In Italy,
that land which for centuries led the world in art, women work in
squalor and degradation under the shadow of St. Peter's and the
Vatican for four-pence a day; while in America, under the Christianity
of the nineteenth century, until within twenty years, she worked on
rice and cotton plantations waist-deep in water, or under a burning
sun performed the tasks demanded by a cruel master, at whose hands she
also suffered the same kind of moral degradation exacted of the serf
under feudalism. In some portions of Christendom the "service"[224] of
young girls to-day implies their sacrifice to the Moloch of man's
unrestrained passions.
Augustine, in his work, "The City of God," taunts Rome with having
caused her own downfall. He speaks of her slaves, miserable men, put
to labors only fit for the beasts of the field, degraded below them;
their condition had brought Rome to its own destruction. If such
wrongs contributed to the overthrow of Rome, what can we not predict
of the Christian civilization which, in the twentieth century of its
existence, degrades its Christian women to labors fit only for the
beasts of the field; harnessing them with dogs to do the most menial
labors; which drags them below even this, holding their womanhood up
to sale, putting both Church and State sanction upon their moral
death; which, in some places, as in the city of Berlin, so far
recognizes the sale of women's bodies for the vilest purposes as part
of the Christian religion, that license for this life is refused until
they have partaken of the Sacrament; and which demands of the "10,000
licensed women of the town" of the city of Hamburg, certificates
showing that they regularly attend church and also partake of the
sacrament?
A civilization which even there has not reached its lowest depths, but
which has created in England, as a result of its highest Christian
civilization, a class of women under the protection of the State,
known as "Queen's women," or "Government women," with direct purpose
of more fully protecting man in his departure from the moral law, and
which makes woman the hopeless slave of man's lowest nature; a system
not confined to England, but already in practice in France, in Italy,
in Switzerland, in Germany, and nearly every country in Europe. A
system of morality which declares "the necessity" of woman's
degradation, and which annually sends its tens of thousands down to a
death from which society grants no resurrection.
In a letter to the National Woman's Suffrage Convention, held at St.
Louis, May, 1879, upon this condition of Licensed Vice, from Josephine
E. Butler, Hon. Secretary of the Federation and the Ladies' National
Association for the Protection of Women; a society which has its
branches over Europe, and has for years been actively at work against
this last most hideous form of slavery for women, Mrs. Butler says:
England holds a peculiar position in regard to the question. She
was the last to adopt this system of slavery, and she adopted it
in that thorough manner which characterizes the actions of the
Anglo-Saxon race. In no other country has prostitution been
regulated by law. It has been understood by the Latin races, even
when morally enervated, that the law could not without risk of
losing its majesty and force sanction illegality and violate
justice. In England alone the regulations are law.
This legalization of vice, which is the endorsement of the
"necessity" of impurity for man and the institution of the
slavery of woman, is the most open denial which modern times have
seen of the principle of the sacredness of the individual human
being. An English high-class journal dared to demand that women
who are unchaste shall henceforth be dealt with "not as human
beings, but as foul sewers," or some such "material nuisance"
without souls, without rights, and without responsibility. When
the leaders of public opinion in a country have arrived at such a
point of combined skepticism and despotism as to recommend such a
manner of dealing with human beings, there is no crime which that
country may not presently legalize, there is no organization of
murder, no conspiracy of abominable things that it may not, and
in due time will not--have been found to embrace in its guilty
methods. Were it possible to secure the absolute physical health
of a whole province or an entire continent by the destruction of
one, only one poor and sinful woman, woe to that nation which
should dare, by that single act of destruction, to purchase this
advantage to the many! It will do it at its peril. God will take
account of the deed not in eternity only, but in time, it may be
in the next or even in the present generation.
The fact of governments lending their official aid to the
demoralization of woman by the registration system, shows an utter
debasement of law. This system is directly opposed to the fundamental
principle of right, that of holding the accused innocent until proven
guilty, which until now has been recognized as a part of modern law.
Under the registration or license system, all women within the radius
of its action are under suspicion; all women are held as morally
guilty until they prove themselves innocent. Where this law is in
force, all women are under an irresponsible police surveillance,
liable to accusation, arrest, examination, imprisonment, and the
entrance of their names upon the list of the lewd women of a town.
Upon this frightful infraction of justice, we have the sentiments of
Sheldon Amos, Professor of Jurisprudence in the Law College of London
University. In "The Science of Law," he says, in reference to this
very wrong:
The loss of liberty to the extent to which it exists, implies a
degradation of the State, and, if persisted in, can only lead to
its dissolution. No person or class of persons must be under the
cringing fear of having imputed to them offences of which they
are innocent, and of being taken into custody in consequence of
such imputation. They must not be liable to be detained in
custody without so much as a _prima facie_ case being made out,
such as in the opinion of a responsible judicial officer leaves a
presumption of guilt. They must not be liable to be detained for
an indefinite time without having the question of their guilt or
innocence investigated by the best attainable methods. When the
fact comes to be inquired into, the best attainable methods of
eliciting the truth must be used. In default of any one of these
securities, _public liberty_ must be said to be proportionately
at a very low ebb.
Great effort has been made to introduce this system into the United
States, and a National Board of Health, created by Congress in 1879,
is carefully watched in its action, lest its irresponsible powers lead
to its encroachment upon the liberties and personal rights of woman. A
resolution adopted March 2, 1881, at a meeting of the New York
Committee appointed to thwart the effort to license vice in this
country, shows the need of its watchful care.
_Resolved_, That this committee has learned with much regret and
apprehension of the action of the American Public Health
Association, at its late annual meeting in New Orleans, in
adopting a sensational report commending European governmental
regulation of prostitution, and looking to the introduction in
this country, with modifications, through the medium of State
legislative enactments and municipal ordinances, of a kindred
immoral system of State-regulated social vice.
From all these startling facts in Church and State we see that our
government and religion are alike essentially masculine in their
origin and development. All the evils that have resulted from
dignifying one sex and degrading the other may be traced to this
central error: a belief in a trinity of masculine Gods in One, from
which the feminine element is wholly eliminated.[225] 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 own likeness_.... 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."
While woman's subordination is taught as a Scriptural doctrine, the
most devout and learned biblical scholars of the present day admit
that the Bible has suffered many interpolations in the course of the
centuries. Some of these have doubtless occurred through efforts to
render certain passages clearer, while others have been forged with
direct intention to deceive. Disraeli says that the early English
editions contain 6,000 errors, which were constantly introduced, and
passages interpolated for sectarian purposes, or to sustain new
creeds. Sometimes, indeed, they were added for the purpose of
destroying all Scriptural authority by the suppression of texts. _The
Church Union_ says of the present translation, that there are more
than 7,000 variations from the received Hebrew text, and more than
150,000 from the received Greek text.
These 7,000 variations in the Old Testament and 150,000 in the New
Testament, are very significant facts. The oldest manuscripts of the
New Testament are the Alexandrine Codex, known since the commencement
of the seventeenth century, and believed to date back to the middle of
the fifth century, the Sinaitic, and the Vatican Codices, each
believed to have been executed about the middle of the fourth century.
The Sinaitic Codex was discovered by Professor Tischendorf, a German
scholar, at a monastery upon Mt. Sinai, in fragments, and at different
periods from 1848 to 1859, a period of eleven years elapsing from his
discovery of the first fragment until he secured the last one. The
Vatican Codex has been in the Vatican library since its foundation,
but it has been inaccessible to scholars until very recently. It is
not known from whence it came or by whom executed, but is deemed the
oldest and most authentic copy of the Bible extant. As these oldest
codices only date to the middle of the fourth century, we have no
record of the New Testament, in its present form, for the first three
hundred and fifty years of this era.
A commission of eminent scholars has been engaged for the past eleven
years upon a revision of the Bible. The New Testament portion is now
about ready for the public, but so great and so many are its
diversities from the old version, that it is prophesied the orthodox
church will be torn by disputes between adherents of the old and the
new, while those anxious for the truth, touch where it may, will be
honestly in doubt if either one is to be implicitly trusted. Various
comments and inquiries in regard to this revision have already
appeared in the press.[226] The oldest codices do not contain many
texts we have learned to look upon as especially holy. Portions of the
Sermon on the Mount are not in these old manuscripts, a proof of their
interpolation to serve the purpose of some one at a later date. In the
same way additions have been made to the Lord's Prayer. Neither of
these manuscripts contain the story of the woman taken in adultery, as
narrated John viii. 1-11, so often quoted as proof of the divine mercy
of Jesus. A letter upon this so long accepted story, from the eminent
scholar, Howard Crosby, D.D., LL.D., a member of the revisory
commission, will be read with interest:
MRS. M. J. GAGE:
DEAR MADAME:--The passage in John viii. 1-11, is _not_ in the
Alexandrian, nor is it in the Sinaitic, Vatican, and Ephraim
Codices. It is found in twelve uncials (though marked _doubtful_
in five of these) and in over 300 cursives.
Yours very truly,
HOWARD CROSBY.
116 East 19th, N. Y., _March 14, '81_.
The world still asks, What is Truth? A work has recently been
published entitled, "The Christian Religion to A.D. 200." It is the
fruit of several-years' study of a period upon which the Church has
but little record. It finds no evidence of the existence of the New
Testament in its present form during that time; neither does it find
evidence that the Gospels in their present form date from the lives of
their professed authors. All Biblical scholars acknowledge that the
world possesses no record or tradition of the original manuscripts of
the New Testament, and that to attempt to reestablish the old text is
hopeless. No reference by writers to any part of the New Testament as
authoritative is found earlier than the third century (A.D. 202). The
first collection, or canon, of the New Testament was prepared by the
Synod or Council of Laodicea in the fourth century (A.D. 360). It
entirely omitted the Book of Revelation from the list of sacred works.
This book has met a similar fate from many sources, not being printed
in the Syriac Testament as late as 1562.
Amid this vast discrepancy in regard to the truth of the Scriptures
themselves; with no Hebrew manuscript older than the twelfth century;
with no Greek one older than the fourth; with the acknowledgment by
scholars of 7,000 errors in the Old Testament, and 150,000 in the New;
with assurance that these interpolations and changes have been made by
men in the interest of creeds, we may well believe that the portions
of the Bible quoted against woman's equality are but interpolations of
an unscrupulous priesthood, for the purpose of holding her in
subjection to man.
Amid this conflict of authority over texts of Scripture we have been
taught to believe divinely inspired, destroying our faith in doctrines
heretofore declared essential to salvation, how can we be sure that
the forthcoming version of the Bible from the masculine revisers of
our day will be more trustworthy than those which have been accepted
as of Divine origin in the past?
This chapter is condensed from the writer's forthcoming work,
"WOMAN, CHURCH, AND STATE."
FOOTNOTES:
[178] Maine (Gaius) says of the position of woman under Roman law
before the introduction of Christianity: "The juriconsulists had
evidently at this time assumed the equality of the sexes as a
principle of the code of equity. The situation of the Roman woman,
whether married or single, became one of great personal and property
independence ... but Christianity tended somewhat, from the very
first, to narrow this remarkable liberty. The prevailing state of
religious sentiment may explain why modern jurisprudence has adopted
these rules concerning the position of woman which belong peculiarly
to an imperfect civilization.... No society which preserves any
tincture of Christian institutions, is likely to restore to married
women the personal liberty conferred on them by middle Roman law.
Canon law has deeply injured civilization."
[179] Canon law is the whole body of Church decrees enacted by
councils, bulls, decretals, etc., and is recognized as a system of
laws primarily established by the Christian Church, and enforced by
ecclesiastical authority. It took cognizance first merely of what were
considered spiritual duties, but ultimately extended itself to
temporal rights. It was collected and embodied in the ninth century,
since which period numerous additions have been made.
[180] The women claimed the right to baptize their own sex. But the
bishops and presbyters did not care to be released from the pleasant
duty of baptizing the female converts.--_Hist. of Christian Religion
from A.D. to 200_, _p. 23, Waite_. The Constitution of the Church of
Alexandria, which is thought to have been established about the year
200, required the applicant for baptism to be divested of clothing,
and after the ordinance had been administered, to be anointed with
oil.--_Ibid._, _p. 384-5_. The converts were first exorcised of the
evil spirits that were supposed to inhabit them; then, after
undressing and being baptized, they were anointed with oil.--_Bunsen's
Christianity of Mankind_, _Vol. VII._, _p. 386-393_; _3d Vol.
Analecta_.
[181] All, or at least the greater part of the fathers of the Greek
Church before Augustine, denied any real, original sin.--"Augustinism
and Pelagianism," p. 43, Emerson's Translations (Waite). The doctrine
had a gradual growth, and was fully developed by Augustine, A.D.
420.--_Hist. Christian Religion to A.D. 200 (Waite)_, _p. 382_.
[182] Milman says that Heloise sacrificed herself on account of the
impediments the Church threw in the way of the married clergy's career
of advancement. As his wife she would close the ascending ladder of
ecclesiastical honors, priory, abbacy, bishopric, metropolitane,
cardinalade, and even that which was above and beyond all.--"_Latin
Christianity_."
[183] The Christian Church was swamped by hysteria from the third to
the sixteenth century.--_Rev. Charles Kingsley's Life and Letters_.
[184] In 1874 an Old Catholic priest of Switzerland, about to follow
Père Hyacinth's example in abandoning celibacy, announced his
betrothal in the following manner: "I marry because I wish to remain
an honorable man. In the seventeenth century it was a proverbial
expression, 'As corrupt as a priest,' and this might be said to-day. I
marry, therefore, because I wish to get out of the Ultramontane
slough."--_Galignani's Messenger_, _September 19, 1874_.
[185] The abbot elect of St. Augustine, at Canterbury, in 1171 was
found, on investigation, to have seventeen illegitimate children in a
single village. An abbot of St. Pelayo in Spain in 1130 was proved to
have kept no less than seventy mistresses. Henry 3d, Bishop of
Liege, was deposed in 1274 for having sixty-five illegitimate
children.--_Lecky_, "_Hist. of European Morals_," _p. 350_. This same
bishop boasted in a public banquet, that in twenty-two months,
fourteen children had been born to him. A tax called "Cullagium,"
which was, in fact, a license to clergymen to keep concubines, was
during several centuries systematically levied by princes.--_Ibid_,
_Vol. 2_, _p. 349_. It was openly attested that 100,000 women in
England were made dissolute by the clergy.--_Draper's "Intellectua.
Development of Europe_," _p. 498_.
[186] "_Le Sorcerie_," p. 259, _Michelet_.
[187] _Died in 1880_.
[188] In the dominion of the Count de Foix the lord had right once in
his lifetime to take, without payment, a certain quantity of goods
from the stores of each tenant.--"_Histoire Universelle_," _Cesar
Cantu_.
[189] In days to come people will be slow to believe that the law
among Christian nations went beyond anything decreed concerning the
olden slavery; that it wrote down as an actual right the most grievous
outrage that could ever wound man's heart. The Lord Spiritual had this
right no less than the Lord Temporal. The parson being a lord,
expressly claimed the first fruits of the bride, but was willing to
sell his rights to the husband. The Courts of Berne openly maintain
that this right grew up naturally.--"_La Sorcerie_," _Michelet_, p.
62.
[190] Margaret was canonized in 1351, and made the patron saint of
Scotland in 1673. Several of the Scotch feudalry, despite royal
protestation, kept up the infamous practice till a late date. One of
the Earls of Crawford, a truculent and lustful anarch, popularly known
and dreaded as "Earl Brant," in the sixteenth century, was probably
among the last who openly claimed leg-right (the literal translation
of _droit de jambage_).--_Sketches of Feudalism_.
[191] At the beginning of the Christian era, Corinth possessed a
thousand women who were devoted to the service of its idol, the
Corinthian Venus. "To Corinthianize" came to express the utmost
lewdness, but Cornith, as sunken as she was in sensual pleasure, was
not under the pale of Christianity. She was a heathen city, outside of
that light which, coming into the world, is held to enlighten every
man that accepts it.
[192] Les Cuisiniers et les marmitons de l'arehevêques de Vienne
avaient imposé un tribut sur les mariages; on croit que certains
feuditaires extgeaient un droit obscène de leur vassaux qui se
marienient, quel fut transformé ensuite en droit de _cuissage_
consistant, de la part du seigneur, à mettre une jambe nue dans le lit
des nouveaux époux. Dans d'autres pays l'homme ne pouvait couche avec
sa femme les trois premières nuits sans le consentement de l'evêque ou
du seigneur du feif.--_Cesar Cantu_, "_Histoire Universelle_," _Vol.
IX._, p. 202-3.
[193] _Le Michelet_, "_Le Sorcerie_," _p. 151_.
[194] The very word _femina_ (woman) means one wanting in faith; for
_fe_ means faith, and _minus_, less.--_Witch Hammer_. This work was
printed in 18mo, an unusually small size for that period, for the
convenience of carrying it in the pocket, where its assertions, they
could not be called arguments, could be always within reach,
especially for those traveling witch inquisitors, who proceeded from
country to country, like Sprenger himself, to denounce witches. This
work bore the sanction of the Pope, and was followed, even in
Protestant countries, until the eighteenth century. It based its
theories upon the Bible, and devoted thirty-three pages to a proof
that women were especially addicted to sorcery.
[195] It was observed they (devils) had a peculiar attachment to women
with beautiful hair, and it was an old Catholic belief that St. Paul
alluded to this in that somewhat obscure passage in which he exhorts
women to cover their heads because of the angels.--SPRANGLER.
[196] One of the most powerful incentives to confession was
systematically to deprive the suspected witch of her natural sleep....
Iron collars, or witches' bridles, are still preserved in various
parts of Scotland, which had been used for such iniquitous purposes.
These instruments were so constructed that by means of a loop which
passed over the head, a piece of iron having four points or prongs,
was forcibly thrust into the mouth, two of these being directed to the
tongue and palate, the others pointing outward to each cheek. This
infernal machine was secured by a padlock. At the back of the collar
was fixed a ring, by which to attach the witch to a staple in the wall
of her cell. Thus equipped, and day and night waked and watched by
some skillful person appointed by her inquisitors, the unhappy
creature, after a few days of such discipline, maddened by the misery
of her forlorn and helpless state, would be rendered fit for
confessing anything, in order to be rid of the dregs of her wretched
life. At intervals fresh examinations took place, and they were
repeated from time to time until her "_contumacy_," as it was termed,
was subdued. The clergy and Kirk Sessions appear to have been the
unwearied instruments of "purging the land of witchcraft," and _to
them, in the first instance, all the complaints and informations were
made_.--_Pitcairn_, Vol. I., Part 2, p. 50.
[197] The following is an account of the material used, and the
expenses attending the execution of two witches in Scotland:
For 10 loads of coal to burn the witches..............£3 06 8
" a tar barrel....................................... 0 14 0
" towes.............................................. 0 06 0
" hurdles to be jumps for them....................... 3 10 0
" making of them.................................... 0 08 0
" one to go to Tinmouth for the lord to sit upon
the assize as judge ............................... 0 06 0
" the executioner for his pains...................... 8 14 0
" his expenses there................................. 0 16 4
_--Lectures on Witchcraft in Salem, Charles W. Upham._
[198] See an account of the tortures and death of Alison Balfour, in
which not only she, but her husband and her young children were also
grievously tortured in order to wring confession from the wife and
mother. This poor woman bore everything applied to herself, nor did
the sufferings of her husband and son compel a confession of guilt.
Not until her little daughter of seven or eight years was put to the
torture in her presence did the constancy of the mother give way. To
spare the innocent child, the equally innocent mother confessed she
was a witch. After enduring all the agonies applied to herself, and
all she was made to bear in the persons of her innocent family, she
was still made to undergo the frightful suffering of death at the
stake. She was one of those who died calling upon God for that mercy
she could not find at the hands of Christian men.
[199] No marriage could take place after 12 M., which is even now the
rule of the established Church of England.
[200] Science of Law.
[201] Gerard say the doctrines of the Canon Law most favorable to the
power of the clergy, are founded on ignorance, or supported by fraud
and forgery.
[202] Whoever wishes to gain insight into that great institution,
Canon Law, can do so most effectively by studying Common Law, in
regard to woman.--BLACKSTONE..
I have arrived at conclusions which I keep to myself as yet, and only
utter as Greek [Greek: phônanta, sunetotsi], the principle of which is
that there will never be a good world for woman till the last monk,
and therewith the last remnant of the monastic idea of, and
legislation for, woman, _i.e._, the Canon Law, is civilized off the
face of the earth. Meanwhile all the most pure and high-minded women
in England and in Europe, have been brought up under the shadow of the
Canon Law, and have accepted it with the usual divine self-sacrifice,
as their destiny by law of God and nature, and consider their own
womanhood outraged when it, their tyrant, is meddled with.--_Charles
Kingsley_, _Life and Letters. Letter to John Stuart Mill, of June 17,
1849_.
[203] Wives in England were bought from the fifth to the eleventh
century (_Descriptive Sociology_, _Herbert Spencer_). By an ancient
law of India, a father was forbidden to sell his daughter in marriage.
_Keshub Chunder Sen_, who recently spent a few years in England,
objected, after his return home, to the introduction of English
customs in regard to woman into India, on account of their degradation
of the female sex.