WOMAN SUFFRAGE AND THE CHURCH.
The eighth count in the Suffrage indictment reads: "He allows her in
Church, as well as in State, but a subordinate position, claiming
Apostolic authority for her exclusion from the ministry, and, with some
exceptions, from any public participation in the affairs of the Church."
More than thirty years later than this, Mrs. Stanton, Miss Anthony, and
Mrs. Gage wrote in the preface to their "History of Woman Suffrage:"
"American men may quiet their consciences with the delusion that no such
injustice exists in this country as in Eastern nations. Though, with the
general improvement in our institutions, woman's condition must inevitably
have improved also, yet the same principle that degrades her in Turkey
insults her here. Custom forbids a woman there to enter a mosque, or call
the hour for prayers; here it forbids her a voice in Church councils or
State legislatures.... The Church, too, took alarm, knowing that with the
freedom and education acquired in becoming a component part of the
Government, woman would not only outgrow the power of the priesthood, and
religious superstitions, but would also invade the pulpit, interpret the
Bible anew from her own standpoint, and claim an equal voice in all
ecclesiastical councils. With fierce warnings and denunciations from the
pulpit, and false interpretations of Scripture, women have been
intimidated and misled, and their religious feelings have been played upon
for their more complete subjugation. While the general principles of the
Bible are in favor of the most enlarged freedom and equality of the race,
isolated texts have been used to block the wheels of progress in all
periods; thus bigots have defended capital punishment, intemperance,
slavery, polygamy, and the subjection of woman. The creeds of all nations
make obedience to man the corner-stone of her religious character.
Fortunately, however, more liberal minds are now giving us higher and
purer expositions of the Scriptures."
It is fifteen years since these statements were made, and we have now the
first instalment of "the Bible interpreted anew from her own standpoint,"
which presumably issues, in their view, from more liberal minds, and is
higher and purer than the old one. In the Introduction to that Suffrage
Woman's Bible (which is as yet only a commentary on the Pentateuch), Mrs.
Stanton says: "From the inauguration of the movement for woman's
emancipation the Bible has been used to hold her in her' divinely
appointed sphere' prescribed by the Old and New Testaments. The canon and
civil law, Church and State, priests and legislators, all political
parties and religious denominations, have alike taught that woman was made
after man, of man, and for man,--an inferior being, subject to man.
Creeds, codes, Scriptures, and statutes are all based on this idea. The
fashions, forms, ceremonies, and customs of society, church ordinances,
and discipline, all grow out of this idea.... So perverted is the
religious element in her nature, that with faith and works she is the
chief support of the Church and Clergy,--the very powers that make her
emancipation impossible."
I know that many believers in Suffrage are also believers in the Bible and
in denominational Christianity. Mrs. Helen Montgomery says, in the Woman's
edition of the Rochester "Post-Express," that one reason for her favorable
consideration of it is, that "Two-thirds of the membership of the
Christian church cannot express their conviction at the polls, since women
may not vote." "Much of the callousness of politicians to church opinion,"
she adds, "comes from the knowledge that that opinion is backed by few
votes." I also know that many of those who disbelieve in Suffrage may also
disbelieve in the Bible, the clergy, and the Church. I further recognize
the fact that the church and religion are not synonymous terms. I have no
attacks to make, and no special pleading to do. I am discussing the
question of Suffrage as I find it in the writing and the speech of its
proposers and its present conspicuous advocates. Each American woman has
this mighty problem before her, and she must settle it according to her
own conscience and best enlightenment.
Mrs. Stanton admits with shame that woman is one of the chief supporters
of the Church. Mrs. Montgomery says with delight that she forms two-thirds
of the Christian Church. Individual members of Suffrage organizations may
be in sympathy with Christianity, or against it; but the movement itself
cannot be on both sides of this question. What is its record? I will
endeavor to trace it, and will then, as best I may, attempt to say a few
words upon the general subject of the "subordination of woman."
In the course of the first clause of their accusation, the women say:
"Claiming Apostolic authority for her exclusion from the ministry." In
view of the fact that Paul frequently alludes to the teaching and
ministrations of women, it has come to be generally thought among
Christian scholars, I believe, that this injunction that they "keep
silence in the churches," referred to the propriety of their conduct in
the moral,--or rather the immoral,--atmosphere by which the Church at
Corinth was surrounded. This seems reasonable, because it may be observed
that, in writing to Timothy, who was in Macedonia, to Titus, who was in
Crete, and to the Church at Ephesus, while he repeats his general
injunctions of woman's submission to man, and especially to her husband,
he says nothing relative to her public work in the church. But if Paul had
been writing to the church in New England, in 1634, and in New York in
1774, his injunction to silence might well have been applied to the first
woman preachers to whom Americans were called upon to listen. When Anne
Hutchinson, in Boston, preached that "the power of the Holy Spirit
dwelleth perfectly in every believer, and the inward revelations of her
own spirit, and the conscious judgment of her own mind are of authority
paramount to any word of God," she shook the young colony to its
foundation, as no man had shaken it. The militia that had been ordered to
the Pequot war refused to march, because she had proclaimed their chaplain
to be "under a covenant of works, and not under a covenant of grace." Her
influence, and not her ballot, if she had one, threatened anarchy in the
state, and caused a schism in the church such as might have crushed out
the life from the infant body to which Paul was writing.
In 1774 appeared the next public woman preacher, Ann Lee. She proclaimed
that God was revealed a dual being, male and female, to the Jews; that
Jesus revealed to the world God as a Father; and that she,--Ann Lee,
"Mother Ann,"--was God's revelation of the Mother, "the bearing spirit of
the creation of God." She founded the sect of Shakers, whose main articles
of belief, besides the one above mentioned, were: community of goods; non-
resistance to force, even in self-defence; the sinfulness of all human
authority, and consequently the sinfulness of participation in any form of
government; absolute separation of the sexes, and consequently no marriage
institution. Her mission as "the Christ of the Second Appearing," began
with her announcement of God's, wrath upon all marriage, and the public
renunciation of her own. In New York, as in New England, her proclamations
against government and war tended directly to anarchy, and in the
momentous year 1776 she was for that reason imprisoned in Poughkeepsie,
whence she was released by Governor Clinton's pardon.
The next pulpitless preacher, in the succession we are considering,
appeared in this country in 1828. Her name was Frances Wright. She was a
person of totally different mind and methods from Anne Hutchinson and Ann
Lee. She was professedly an enemy of religion. Anne Hutchinson attacked
church and state in the name of Christian human perfection. Ann Lee
attacked church and state in the name of woman; she preached communism and
separation of the sexes in the name of Christ; she taught the abolition of
marriage. Frances Wright preached communism and sex license in the name of
irreligion. In opening the columns of the "Free Inquirer" to discussion,
in New York, in 1828, she said: "Religion is true--and in that case the
conviction of its truth should dictate every human word and govern every
sublunary action,--or it is a deception. If it is a deception, it is not
useless only, it is mischievous; it is mischievous by its idle terrors; it
is mischievous by its false morality; it is mischievous by its hypocrisy;
by its fanaticism; by its dogmatism; by its threats; by its hopes; by its
promises; and last, though not least, by its waste of public time and
public money." While deciding that it was a deception, she revealed the
evil results to which abandonment of all faith can lead a woman with a
clever brain and a fearless tongue. She constantly denounced religion as
the source of all injustice and bigotry and of the "enslavement of women."
The editors of the "Suffrage History" say: "As early as 1828 the standard
of the Christian party in politics was openly unfurled. Frances Wright had
long been aware of its insidious efforts, and its reliance upon women for
its support. Ignorant, superstitious, devout, woman's general lack of
education made her a fitting instrument for the work of thus undermining
the republic. Having deprived her of her just rights, the country was now
to find in woman its most dangerous foe. Frances Wright lectured that
winter in the large cities of the western and middle States, striving to
rouse the nation to the new danger which threatened it. The clergy at
once, became her most bitter opponents. The cry of 'infidel' was started
on every side, though her work was of vital importance to the country and
undertaken from the purest philanthropy."
It was high time that a Christian and a non-Christian party in politics
should unfurl a banner; for to the dauntless courage of the land from
which she came--Scotland--she added the polished manner of the country
from which came D'Arusmont, the husband from whom she was soon parted. To
the zeal of the Covenanter, the moral blackness of the infidel, and the
political creed of the Commune, she united the doctrine of Free Love. As
she set these forth with blandishments of speech and manner, the country
did indeed find in this woman a most dangerous foe. When "Fanny Wright
societies" sprang up in New York and the West, horror might well be felt
by lovers of the Republic.
Lucretia Mott was the next public preacher in this succession. Pure in
personal character, lofty in spirit, winning in address, she took for her
motto, "Truth for Authority, not Authority for Truth." As authority for
that truth, she took Elias Hicks.
Dr. Jacobi, in "Common Sense," says: "The abolitionists were declared to
have set aside the laws of God when they allowed women to speak in public:
and, by a pastoral letter, the Congregational churches of Massachusetts
were directed to defend themselves against heresy, by closing their doors
to the innovators. The Methodists denounced the Garrisonian societies as
no-government, no-Sabbath, no-church, no-Bible, no-marriage, women's
rights societies." Not the Methodists alone, but the Congregationalists,
the Presbyterians, the Episcopalians, the Baptists, the Unitarians, the
Universalists, and the Quakers so denounced that faction of them in which
culminated many of the doctrines of Anne Hutchinson, Ann Lee, Frances
Wright, and Lucretia Mott.
In an appeal to the women of New York, in 1860, signed by Elizabeth Cady
Stanton, Lydia Mott, Ernestine Rose, Martha C. Wright, and Susan B.
Anthony, we read: "The religion of our day teaches that, in the most
sacred relations of the race, the woman must ever be subject to the man;
that in the husband centres all power and learning; that the difference in
position between husband and wife is as vast as that between Christ and
the Church; and woman struggles to hold the noble impulses of her nature
in abeyance to opinions uttered by a Jewish teacher, which, alas! the mass
believe to be the will of God."
In 1895, among the names of those responsible for the Suffrage Woman's
Bible, we find three to which the title "Rev." is prefixed. The opening
commentary on the first verses of Genesis, where the creation of man is
described, says: "Instead of three male personages, as generally
represented, a Heavenly Father, Mother, and Son would seem more rational.
The first step in the elevation of woman to her true position, as an equal
factor in human progress, is the cultivation of the religious sentiment in
regard to her dignity and equality, the recognition by the rising
generation of an ideal Heavenly Mother, to whom their prayers should be
addressed, as well as to a Father." Here is Ann Lee's doctrine revived
with a mocking suggestion that savors more of Frances Wright than of its
poor, half-crazed author. The soul-sufficiency of Ann Hutchinson, the
spiritual anarchy of Lucretia Mott, the infidelity and the veiled
coarseness of Frances Wright, have all found fit setting in this
commentary on the Pentateuch. I know that Miss Anthony repudiates the
Suffrage Woman's Bible in the name of the Association of which she is
President. It certainly does not represent the faith or the culture or the
doctrines of many who belong to that body; but she cannot really repudiate
it for herself or for them. It was promised in the History of which she is
co-editor, it was foreshadowed in her circular quoted above, as well as in
innumerable speeches of hers in convention. Those Christian and
philanthropic bodies that have attached themselves to the Suffrage
movement have this book to account for and with. Whatever they may
personally decide to think or say of it, it is the consummate blossom of
the spirit of the Suffrage movement, and the names it bears upon its
title-page represent the varied classes that have worked for the political
enfranchisement of woman. By the world outside it will so be dealt with.
Few movements have been started, especially among women, that did not
professedly stand upon high moral and religious ground. Fourierism was
superhuman in its intention,--in this country, at least. Free-thinking
hopes to deliver the soul from the bondage of superstition in all
religion. Mormonism was founded as "the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-
Day Saints." Communism at Oneida was professedly built upon the doctrine
of human perfection in Christian love. The disaster to the soul is in
proportion to the amount of perversion of a living faith. Every movement
must be judged, not by what its advocates suppose themselves to believe,
but by that which time proves they do believe.
But to return to the Suffrage charge. "American men may quiet their
consciences with the delusion that no such injustice exists in this
country as in Eastern nations. Though, with the general improvement in our
institutions, woman's condition must inevitably have improved also, yet
the same principle that degrades her in Turkey insults her here." American
men _may_ quiet their consciences, while striving to enlighten them
further. The answer to Mohammedanism is Turkey. The answer to Christianity
is America. Ceremonial uncleanness is absolutely unlike religious and
social orderliness in the distribution of duties. How came there to be
"general improvement in our institutions?" There has been no improvement
in Turkey, in China, in India, or in Japan, except such as is creeping
back from the Christendom of which these Suffragists speak with a sneer.
Freedom and education have not been appreciably advanced by "woman's
becoming a component part of the government" in any land. The lands where
she has the most apparent governmental control are the ones that are least
educated and least free among those of modern civilization.
The church is an ever-growing body, and its clergy hold widely differing
beliefs. The Egyptian priesthood guarded the sacred mysteries and ruled
the state. Through the utmost that natural religion can do for man, they
had gleaned the secret of a Supreme Maker and Ruler of the universe.
Moses, who was "learned in all their wisdom," led the first exiles across
the sea to find "freedom to worship God," and, from that day to this, the
ministers of religion have stood as public guard over the mysteries of
faith and, in the beginnings of each civilization, have ruled the state.
Whenever they have forgotten the lesson that Moses taught, the lesson that
Paul more clearly taught, that to God alone is any soul responsible, they
have proved stumbling-blocks to progress. It is true that religious
bigots, as Suffrage writers say, have "defended capital punishment,
intemperance, slavery, polygamy, and the subjection of woman." But capital
punishment is defended by many besides bigots. Intemperance finds not only
its strongest but its most effective foes in the Christian ministry and
the Christian church. Slavery in our country rent in twain several great
religious bodies. James G. Birney says that "probably nine-tenths of the
Abolitionists were church-members." With polygamy came woman's subjection
and woman suffrage into our free States. And the bigots outside the
Christian ministry and church must share the same condemnation with any
who, professing freedom, have yet forgotten the injunction of the Bible
and the Christ.
"She would invade the pulpit." Invasion seems a strange word to use in
regard to woman's entrance upon one of the highest of human duties. A
pulpitless teacher she is and always has been. Missionary women have
taught multitudes of beings. The Salvation lassie has no thought of
invasion, or of self-exaltation, when she leads the service of a thousand
souls; and I am not willing to believe that a single woman who has entered
the regular ministry has any more. It is the spirit of Suffrage that looks
upon woman's advance as an attack.
But times have changed, say Suffrage leaders. Mrs. Cornelia K. Hood, in
her report of the King's County Suffrage work for 1895, says: "A circular
letter was addressed to all the clergymen known to be friends, asking them
that a sermon might be preached by them in favor of woman suffrage. This
request met with a liberal response, and many able addresses were made on
the Sunday morning set for that purpose." In her report of the Suffrage
campaign in New York city in the winter of 1895-96, Dr. Jacobi says,
speaking of the parlor meetings: "Several prominent clergymen joined us--
Mr. Rainsford, the Rev. Arthur Brooks, Mr. Percy Grant, Mr. Eaton, Mr.
Leighton Williams." In referring to the last regular meeting of the County
Suffrage Association held that winter in Cooper Union, she says: "The
meeting was addressed by Samuel Gompers, President of the Federation of
Labor, by Dr. Peters, an Episcopal clergyman, by Father Ducey, the
Catholic priest, Dr. Saunders, a Baptist minister, and Henry George, the
advocate of single tax." In her address before the Constitutional
Convention, she said: "The Church, which fifty years ago was a unit in
denouncing the public work of woman--even for the slave--is now divided in
its councils." The church never was a unit in denouncing the public work
of woman, and much of her noblest public work has been done under its
auspices. The behavior of Suffrage women in slavery times caused scandal
to church and state. The right of private judgment, claimed always by
Protestant Christianity, has divided the clergy on all questions; and "a
clergyman, a priest, and a minister" were as free to believe, and to speak
what they believed, on suffrage, as were Samuel Gompers, who lately
offended the Labor organization by inviting two anarchists to address it,
and Henry George, whose single-tax theories have lately turned law and
order upside down in Delaware.
"Interpret the Bible anew from her own standpoint." The volume in which a
beginning has been made in this work is a thick pamphlet bearing a motto
from Cousin on one cover, and the picture of a piano as an advertisement
on the other. It is with a profound sense of sadness and disgust that any
woman who honors God and loves her own sex turns its pages. Behold the
first dilemma in which the commentators find themselves involved. Mrs.
Stanton opens the comments on the Creation as follows: "In the great work
of the creation, the crowning glory was realized when man and woman were
evolved on the sixth day, the masculine and feminine forces in the image
of God, that must have existed eternally, in all forms of matter and
mind.... How then is it possible to make woman an afterthought?... All
those theories based on the assumption that man was prior in the creation,
have no foundation in Scripture. As to woman's subjection, on which both
the canon and civil law delight to dwell, it is important to note that
equal dominion is given to woman over every living thing, but not a word
is said giving man dominion over woman. No lesson of woman's subjection
can be fairly drawn from the first chapter of the Old Testament."
In commenting on the second account of the Creation, Ellen Battelle
Dietrick says: "It is now generally conceded that some one (nobody
pretends to know who) at some time (nobody pretends to know exactly when)
copied two creation myths on the same leather roll, one immediately
following the other. Modern theologians have, for convenience sake,
entitled these two fables, respectively, the Elohistic and the Jahoistic
stories. They differ not only in the point I have mentioned above, but in
the order of the 'creative acts,' in regard to the mutual attitude of man
and woman, and in regard to human freedom from prohibitions imposed by
deity. Now, it is manifest that both of these stories cannot be true;
intelligent women who feel bound to give the preference to either, may
decide according to their own judgment which is more worthy of an
intelligent woman's acceptance. My own opinion is, that the second story
was manipulated by some wily Jew, in an endeavor to give 'heavenly
authority' for requiring a woman to obey the man she married." Lillie
Devereux Blake takes still another horn of the dilemma. She says: "In the
detailed description of creation we find a gradually ascending series.
'Creeping things,' 'great sea-monsters,' every bird of wing,' 'cattle and
living things of the earth,' the 'fish of the sea and the birds of the
heavens;' then man, and, last and crowning glory of the whole, woman. It
cannot be maintained that woman was inferior to man, even if, as asserted
in chapter ii., she was created after him, without at once admitting that
man is inferior to the creeping things because created after them."
These commentators, on the whole, agree that the first account of creation
does not teach woman's subjection to man; that, although "some wily Jew"
inserted the second account in an endeavor to give "heavenly authority for
requiring a woman to obey the man she married," he has been outwitted
after all, for the ascending series of creation really teaches the same
lesson as the first account, and from it woman's inferiority cannot be
maintained. And yet it would seem that she must be an "afterthought" if
she is to be superior.
Mrs. Stanton, in summing up the concensus of opinion on a matter which is
not of the slightest importance to any of them, except that they feel an
interest, for the cause of Suffrage, in endeavoring to release woman from
the long bondage of superstition, says: "The first account dignifies woman
as an important factor in the creation, equal in power and glory with man.
The second makes her a mere afterthought. The world in good running order
without her, the only reason for her advent being the solitude of man.
There is something sublime in bringing order out of chaos; light out of
darkness; giving each planet its place in the solar system; oceans and
lands their limits,--wholly inconsistent with a petty surgical operation
to find material for the mother of the race. It is in this allegory that
all the enemies of woman rest their battering-rams, to prove her
inferiority. Accepting the view that man was prior in the creation, some
Scriptural writers say that, as the woman was of the man, therefore her
position should be one of subjection. Grant it. Then, as the historical
fact is reversed in our day, and the man is now of the woman, shall his
place be one of subjection? The equal position declared in the first
account must prove more satisfactory to both sexes; created alike in the
image of God--the heavenly Mother and Father. Thus, the Old Testament,' in
the beginning,' proclaims the simultaneous creation of man and woman, the
eternity and equality of sex; and the New Testament echoes back through
the centuries the individual sovereignty of woman growing out of this
natural fact. Paul, in speaking of equality as the very soul and essence
of Christianity, said, 'There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither
bond nor free, there is neither male nor female; for ye are all one in
Christ Jesus.' With this recognition of the feminine element in the
Godhead in the Old Testament, and this declaration of the equality of the
sexes in the New, we may well wonder at the contemptible status woman
occupies in the Christian Church to-day."
So the woman who spurns the Bible as the book that is responsible for
woman's degradation, who denies that it is the word of God, who pours out
upon Paul the vials of her wrath, finds in them both her highest warrant
for believing in the "equal position" of woman, "the perfect equality of
the sexes." When the wrath of woman thus praises God, the one who believes
that through woman's status in the Bible and in the Christian Church this
perfect equality is being worked out day by day need not take up
controversial cudgels. Ribaldry in woman seems more gross than in man, and
this is woman's ribaldry. It is profane to speak of the "feminine element
in the Godhead." God is a spirit. There is no more a feminine than a
masculine element in the Godhead. Sex belongs to mortal life and its
conditions. It begins and ends with this earth. Christ has told us so:
There will be in another world "no marrying, nor giving in marriage, but
we all shall be as the angels in heaven." The equality of which Paul spoke
as "the very soul and essence of Christianity" is the equality of the
essence and soul of male and female humanity, and the oneness of the
believer's soul with that of the Christ in whom his soul believes. The
soul of humanity, as well as its body, is bound by sex conditions as long
as it draws the breath of this transitory life. Every thought and every
act reveal the governing power of the sex mould in which its form is cast
for this world's uses. The use of this world is to give preparation for
another and a better one; final spiritual triumph is the end to be
attained. Humanity is now in the image of God only in the essential sense
in which the full corn in the ear may be said to be wrapped up in its
kernel, and it can unfold only according to the laws of its being. The
first account of Creation sets forth, with the beautiful imagery of the
Orient, the general and ultimate truth. The second account, with the same
grand simplicity, foreshadows the method and the long, slow process by
which this ultimate end is to be attained.
In continuing their comments, the editors say: "In chapter v., verse 23,
Adam proclaims the eternal oneness of the happy pair, 'This is now bone of
my bone and flesh of my flesh;' no hint of her subordination. How could
men, admitting these words to be divine revelation, ever have preached the
subjection of woman? Next comes the naming of the mother of the race. 'She
shall be called woman,' in the ancient form of the word, 'womb-man.' She
was man and more than man, because of her maternity. The assertion of the
supremacy of the woman in the marriage relation is contained in chapter
v., 24: 'Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother and cleave
unto his wife.' Nothing is said of the headship of man, but he is
commanded to make her the head of the household, the home, a rule followed
for centuries under the Matriarchate."
A rule that has been followed rudely through all centuries, and is
followed to-day with far greater approach to perfect obedience. Maternity
was to be God's method of working out the problem of changing the
innocence of ignorant savagery to the holiness of enlightened
civilization. To this end, the more delicate and complex organism of the
womb-man must be cared for by the strength and steadiness that could find
full play because that subtler task was not demanded of it.
In commenting on chapter iii., which contains the account of the Garden of
Eden and the eating of the apple, they say: "As out of this allegory grow
the doctrines of original sin, the fall of man and of woman the author of
all our woes, and the curses on the serpent, the woman and the man, the
Darwinian theory of the gradual growth of the race from a lower to a
higher type of animal life is more hopeful and encouraging."
The Christian doctrine is more hopeful and encouraging still. It reveals
the growth of the race from a low type of animal life to the perfect life
of the soul.
We do not need to go back to the garden where our first parents dwelt, to
look for the substantiation of the eternal truth of this whole wondrous
story. Amid the landscape of the civilization of the noblest country that
the world possesses, we have the drama repeated. In the work of Anne
Hutchinson, Ann Lee, Frances Wright, Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Stanton,
Susan Anthony, Ellen Dietrick, Lillie Blake, and their fellow-
commentators, we have re-enacted the Temptress and the Fall. Woman first
aspired. She stretched forth her eager hand to seize the good, and in so
doing snatched the evil that grew beside it. The woman in Eden had not
learned what maternity taught her later--that she could point the path,
but could not lead in entering it. Wherever woman has forgotten this hard-
won but glorious lesson, she has been the most dangerous of guides. The
conscience, that intellect of the soul, woke first in woman. By her
obedience to its voice, the faith that worketh by love had its perfected
work, and the promise that was given to her was fulfilled in the birth of
Christ. A Creation story without a gospel is chaos without gravitation,
primal darkness without the sun. Forward to divinity in human form woman
was able, through obedience, to point mankind. Backward to divinity in
human form she points again, until humanity itself shall become divine. If
she loses the final vision, or substitutes her own, she can neither point
nor guide. No wonder woman has been a mystery to the church. No wonder a
witch was not allowed to live, while a wizard might; she was more
dangerous. No wonder Paul was perplexed by the woman question. No wonder
monks fled to the desert. Christ has spoken the final words of woman, "Thy
faith hath saved thee." From the anguish of His cross he said: "Woman,
behold thy son!" "Behold thy mother," and the beloved disciple "took her
to his own home from that hour."
In the Suffrage appeal of 1860, the writers said: "The difference between
husband and wife is as vast as the difference between Christ and his
Church." Christ himself says that the difference between him and his
Church is that of degree, not of kind, and that the resemblance is that of
essential oneness. He says: "I am the vine, ye are the branches." Could
union be more completely pictured? The fruit-bearing branch cannot say to
the strength-giving vine, "I have no need of thee." The vine cannot say,
"I have no need of thee." Man in his imperious folly has pictured the
relationship as that of oak and vine which have no organic union; but,
despite imperiousness and folly, both men and women, through mutual
obedience to God, have thus far worked out, and are still working out, the
nobler destiny for both.
In summing up their opinion of the Pentateuch, the editors of the Suffrage
Woman's Bible say: "This utter contempt for all the decencies of life, and
all the natural personal rights of women, as set forth in these pages,
should destroy, in the minds of women at least, all authority to
superhuman origin, and stamp the Pentateuch at least as emanating from the
most obscene minds of a barbarous age." So low can woman fall in ignorance
and shameless audacity when the faith that works by love is lost. As the
spirit of the Commandments comes to prevail, the decencies of life and the
natural personal rights of woman become more secure. Here again Christ has
spoken the ultimate word. He says: "Ye have heard by them of old time'
Thou shalt not commit adultery,' but I say unto you whosoever looketh on a
woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his
heart." This is the standard of chastity to which mankind must come. When
the Hebrew mother in living faith cast the bread of her own life's being
upon the Nile, she was to find it after many days in the great law-giver
of her people. The Commandments received through him were the
foreshadowing of those greater oracles in which Christ summed up the whole
duty of man. The individual liberty which Moses was the first to proclaim
to a whole people, in the Pentateuch, Christ, his anti-type, proclaimed to
a whole world, and on his proclamation rests to-day the freedom of woman
and of the American Republic. The Bread of Life, again cast on the
troubled waters of this world, by woman's faith, through Mary the Virgin
Mother, is returning after many days.
Strange that we should forever turn back, as if the application of any
essential truth were finished. The child walks by faith. The childhood of
the world walked by faith, and left in the Bible the evidence of things
that are not seen but are eternal. The Suffrage movement has a quarrel
with the Bible because the Creator is there represented, for the reverence
of the race, under the guise of a Heavenly Father, and not a Heavenly
Mother, or rather, not as a human pair, equal in dignity and power. If the
first impulsion of love toward God had come into this world through the
mind of man, he would have represented the divine love that his soul
conceived under the guise of that being on earth whom he most loved. But
love was born with the "disabilities" of woman; it was evolved through
motherhood; and the same impulse that gave it, exalted, not itself, but
what it loved and trusted. "I have gotten a man from the Lord" said the
first recorded mother, who had learned to know the Lord through
motherhood; and the boy she bore was taught to look up with confidence to
the strength and protection of his father. She told him that the pity of
his father, which made him bring food and raiment, and which guarded his
home, was an image of the feeling that was felt for him by the divine
being. Could man have learned the lesson first, we can see that the story
would have been different, because man has named every beautiful and
gracious thing for woman. Virtue, temperance, truth, purity, love, faith,
hope, liberty, grace, beauty, charity, the inspirers of art and science,
of music and literature, of justice and of religion, all are feminine.
When man says: "Our Father which art in heaven," he prays as his mother
taught him. Through the self-abnegation that was unconscious of its
sacrifice, woman was to be the instrument for bringing human life up, on,
to the God who, being spirit, could act upon a clay-bound mind only
through the highest human thing that love could know. Men, as well as
women, have misunderstood and misinterpreted this. The love that "is not
puffed up," "doth not behave itself unseemly," cannot proclaim its own
virtue--to arrogate it is to lose it. But the secret of the Lord has been
with those who feared Him, and it has led the world aright in spite of
blunder and of sin.
If man, in his ignorant conceit, has fancied that this was the subjection
of woman, it has been a part of his mother's lesson to correct that
impression. If woman, in her folly, has allowed herself to make the same
mistake, that, too, is working out its cure through the love that so
arranged human nature that "a man should leave father and mother and
cleave unto his wife, and they twain should be one flesh," and that "_her
desire_ should be to her husband" in those matters wherein the mutual
interest required that he should bear sway. If there is a minister of
religion who holds to the perverted notion that, because woman ate the
original apple in disobedience to God's command, she was the bringer of
original sin into the world, and for that was and is punished by arbitrary
subjection to the authority of man, that minister does not deserve the
support of women. The fact that he would have few listeners, and fewer
followers, if women were not the bringers and the maintainers of religious
faith is sufficient proof against such an exposition of scripture. As a
matter of fact, while the dogmatism of belief, like the dogmatism of
unbelief, has made assertions that have dishonored both divine and human
nature, the practical working of formulated faiths of all names has been
to approach the standard laid down in the Old and the New Testament. The
model of being set by Christ is that of a little child. "Except ye become
as little children, ye shall in no wise enter the kingdom of heaven." The
natural characteristics of the child are faith, and hope, and love--the
virtues that abide. When the virile apostle to the Gentiles "put away
childish things," he kept these childlike qualities. If woman first
attains them in perfection, she is superior; if man, he is superior. In
the race toward the final goal, to be equal in accomplishment it is
needful to be equal in obedience. The keynote of Paul's preaching was
obedience--the obedience of all human beings to God in Christ, the
obedience of all men and women to lawful civil authority for the sake of
Christ and the promotion of his kingdom,--the obedience of men to one
another in the churchly offices, for the sake of that "decency" that he
loved and enjoined--the obedience of the equal wife to the husband who was
the external representative of family life.
With Eastern nations the veil was the sign of retirement, of domestic
life, and it was assumed by wives when they were in the street or in a
public assembly. In heathen and barbarous countries it was also deemed a
sign of woman's subjection and inferiority. The Hebrews were the first
people to attain any truly spiritual conceptions, and they began to have a
commensurately higher idea of the possibilities of woman's nature and
work. When Christian women, in their new-found freedom, would have thrown
aside the veil, just as Christian men, in their new-found reverence for
God, would have repudiated the heathen wife, Paul said to them both that
Christian liberty was individual,--it changed the character, not the sex
relations. In arranging for church discipline, he advised that men should
uncover the head, and women should wear the veil. But he said, in
reference to that veil, that "woman should have _power_ on her head,
because of the angels." The angels are spoken of in the New Testament as
veiling their faces in the very presence of the Creator. In that truer
symbolism of Christianity, man was to uncover his head in token of
reverence to God and acceptance of the responsibility of the guardianship
of the earth. Woman was to cover her head in token of her acceptance of
man's guardianship and of her dominion over his heart, to which she had
revealed God's will.
Paul adds: "For as the woman is of the man, so is the man also of the
woman; but all things are of God." This relation was one of the mysteries
that Paul said he did not comprehend, nor could he, till the lessons he
taught should work out their results, and might serve as commentary.
Life itself, as well as all that life could come to mean, depended upon
woman's consenting. The word "obey" in some marriage services seems, like
what it really is, a survival. Obedience has brought its reward, and the
consent of the heart is more than the consent of the lips. But if there is
no consent of the heart to wifehood and motherhood, in time there will be
no chivalry, no progress, no final emancipation for the race. Consenting
is also commanding, and woman loses her life in order to find it in the
fulfillment of her wish. It was consent to her own teaching. The
chivalrous and tender-hearted Paul, who spoke of women with reverent
affection, who adopted as his own the mother of Rufus, was repeating the
lesson of every Jewish mother from Sarah to Deborah, and from Deborah to
the women who were last at Christ's cross and first beside his tomb.
Deborah, who was the judge, prophetess and poet, but first of all "a
mother in Israel," under whom her degenerate people had peace for forty
years, rebuked Barak and said, to their humiliation: "This day shall the
Lord deliver Israel by the hand of a woman." From this teaching Paul
uttered his rebuke to the wayward church at Corinth: "It is a shame for a
man to cover his head, inasmuch as he is the image and glory of God; but
the woman is the glory of the man." And he added, in speaking of the
wearing of the veil, "For this cause ought the woman to have power"
"because of the angels." In the Epistle to the Ephesians Paul admonishes
the Church to be "imitators of God, as beloved children, and walk in love,
even as Christ also loved you, and gave himself for you, an offering and a
sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling savour." Again, he says: "Therefore,
as the Church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own
husbands in everything." And as if to make doubly certain that no one
should think that such submission implied bondage or inequality, he adds
"Husbands, love your wives even as Christ also loved the Church and _gave
himself for it_." Again, he says: "So ought men to love their wives, as
their own bodies.... Even as the Lord the Church," adding with almost
strained Oriental vehemence, "for we are members of his body, of his flesh
and of his bones. For this cause shall a man leave his father and his
mother, and shall be joined unto his wife, and they twain shall be one
flesh."
The comment most readily suggested is, that through this teaching the use
of the veil has now no such significance. The uncovering of the head is a
token of respect, largely to woman. The retention of the bonnet is not
dreamed of in connection with woman's relation to man, nor does it suggest
woman's power in the moral world. The obedience through which love
"constrained" a mind that had been bred to forms, was free. If anybody now
holds that woman was intended to glorify God indirectly, through man, or
to serve God by serving man, he makes an assumption long discredited, and
not in accord with the spirit of Christ and of Paul. Man is as much the
glory of woman as woman is the glory of man, and they reveal equally the
glory of God.
In speaking of the proprieties of life, Paul said: "Does not nature
herself teach you?" "If a man have long hair, it is a shame to him." "If a
woman have long hair, it is a glory to her." The badge of womanhood is a
glory, and the "short-haired women and long-haired men" of the early
Suffrage movement transformed the symbols of dignity and honor into those
of contempt and disgrace.
Canon law grew up during the Middle Ages, when came the great
"Death-grapple in the darkness, 'twixt old systems and the Word."
The wondrous church that rose on the ruins of Roman militarism, and
overthrew Norman feudalism, gave evidence, in its code, of the bitterness
of the conflict and the rudeness of the time. The legal fiction that, in
acknowledging the oneness of husband and wife, yet made the husband that
one, was a perversion of Scripture.
It has been publicly said by Suffragists from the first, that the tenets
of the Church of Rome, in which Canon law had its origin, were inimical to
woman suffrage; and they have further said that those who canonize women
and worship the Virgin Mother, should naturally have been friendly to the
Suffrage idea. I suppose no one will deny that the spirit of the Roman
body is that of a state church. I have no more to say in criticism of it
as a Christian denomination than I have of others; but that organization
which has held temporal and spiritual power to be co-ordinate and
interdependent in government, presents a political phase that has direct
bearing on my theme, and I make my few comments as a historian. The Church
that inculcates Mariolatry would have far more ignorant women to add to
our body of voters than any other. It has done less for woman's education
and general advancement than any other, but its claims are not therefore
modest. The school elections in Staten Island last year gave an object-
lesson in regard to its intention to use the suffrage. In Connecticut, the
school election presented another evidence of the intense interest felt by
the Catholic clergy in public-school matters. In California, in the late
canvass for woman suffrage, that Church assisted largely in carrying on
the work to secure the amendment. While many of its individual members are
among the noblest friends that civil and religious freedom have in our
country, this church, by its traditions, and by its latest
pronunciamentos, shows itself as a force that, for its own selfish
reasons, may be reckoned on the side of woman suffrage in its conflict
with woman's progress.