Blackstone enumerates three "absolute rights of persons." First, "The
right of personal _security_, in the legal enjoyment of life,
limb, body, health, and reputation." Second, "The right of personal
liberty--free power of locomotion without legal restraint." Third, "The
right of private property--the free use and disposal of his own lawful
acquisitions."
None of these three primary and essential rights of persons were
conceded to women, and Church law did not rank her as a person deprived
of these rights, but held that she was _not a person at all_, but only a
function; therefore she possessed no rights of person in this world and
no hope of safety in the next.
As to the first of these "absolute rights of persons," any one of her
male relations, or her husband after she passed from one to the other,
had absolute power over her, even to the extent of bodily injury,*
bargain and sale of her person, and death. Nor did even this limit the
number of her masters. By both Church and Common Law the Lords temporal
(barons and other peers) and the Lords spiritual (Archbishops, Bishops,
and Abbots) possessed and exercised the right to dispose of her purity,
either for a money consideration or as a bribe or present as they saw
fit.**
* "Although England was christianized in the fourth century,
it was not until the tenth that a daughter had a right to
reject a husband selected for her by her father; and it was
not until the same century that a Christian wife of a
Christian husband acquired the right of eating at the table
with him. For many hundred years the law bound out to
servile labor all unmarried women between the ages of eleven
and forty."--M. J. Gage.
"Wives in England were bought from the fifth to the
eleventh century" [The dates are significant; let the Church
respond.]--Herbert Spencer.
"In England, as late as the seventeenth century, husbands of
decent station were not ashamed to beat their wives.
Gentlemen arranged parties of pleasure for the purpose of
seeing wretched women whipped at Bridewell. It was not until
1817 that the public whipping of women was abolished in
England."--Spencer.
** See Appendix E.
Thus was the forced degradation of woman made a source of revenue to
the Church, and a means of crushing her self-respect and destroying her
sense of personal responsibility as to her own acts in the matter of
chastity, the legitimate outcome of which is to be found in the vast
army of women who are named only to be reviled. _In them the Church can
look on her own work_. The fruit is the natural outcome of the training
woman received that taught and compelled her _always_ to submit to
the dictates of some man, no matter what her own judgment, modesty, or
desires might be. She was not supposed to have an opinion or to know
right from wrong; and from Paul's injunction, "If you want to know
anything ask your husband at home," down to the decisions of the last
General Conference of the Methodist Church, the teaching that woman must
subordinate her own sense of right and her own judgment to the dictates
of someone else--_any_ one else of the opposite sex--from first to last
has been as ingenious a method as could have been devised to fill the
world with libertines and their victims.* It is time for the followers
of St. Paul to nice the results of their own work.
* See Appendix F, 2.
Under the provisions of the law which held that all "persons" could
recover damages for injury--have legal redress for a wrong inflicted
upon them--woman again was held as _not a 'person._
If she were assaulted and beaten, or if she were subjected to the
greatest indignity that it is possible to inflict upon her, she had
no redress. She could not complain. The law gave her no protection
whatever. Her father or husband could, if he saw fit, bring suit to
recover damages for the loss of _her services as a servant and wholly
upon the ground that it was an injury to him and to his feelings_. She
was no more recognized as a "person" in the matter, nor was she more
highly considered than if she were an inmate of a zoological garden to
which some mischievous visitor had fed too many bonbons. The owner was
damaged because the brute might die or be injured in the sight of the
patrons, but aside from that view of the case no harm was done and no
account taken of so trivial a matter.
No matter what the injury she sustained, whether it crippled her
physically or blighted her mentally and made life to her the worst curse
that could be inflicted, she had no appeal. The wounded feelings of one
of her male relations received due consideration, and he could recover
the money-value he might set upon the injury to his lacerated mind. This
is still the letter and the practice of the law in many places, even in
America.
If she had no male relations, the injury did not count, and no "person"
being injured everything was lovely, and prayers went right on to the
God who, being no respecter of persons (provided they were free, white,
adult males), enjoyed the incense from altars whereon burning "witches"
writhed in agony and helpless young girls plead for mercy under
the loathed and loathsome touch of the "St." Augustines* and "St."
Pelayos,** whose praises are chanted and whose divine goodness is
recounted by Christendom to-day.
* "To Augustine, whose early life was spent in company with
the most degraded of womankind, is Christianity indebted for
the full development of the doctrine of Original sin."
--Gage.
"All or at least the greater part of the fathers of the
Greek Church before Augustine, denied any real original
sin."--Emerson. "The doctrine had a gradual growth, and was
fully developed by Augustine."
--Waite.
** "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 1180, was proved to have kept no less
than seventy mistresses. Henry III, Bishop of Liege, was
deposed in 1274 for having sixty-five illegitimate
children."
--Leeky, "Hist, of European Morals."
"This same bishop boasted, at a public banquet, that in
twenty-two months fourteen children had been born to him. A
license to the clergy to keep concubines was during several
centuries levied by princes."--Ibid.
"It was openly attested that 100,000 women in England alone
were made dissolute by the clergy."
--Draper, "Intellectual Development of Europe."
Such was the "_elevation" and civilization offered by the Church to
woman_. These are among her debts to the Church, and the men who fought
and contended against the incorporation of such infamy into the common
law were branded as infidels. It was said they denied their Lord. They
were pronounced most dangerous, and the clergy held up their hands in
holy horror and whispered that such men "as much as denied the Bible,
blasphemed their God, and sold their souls to the Devil." And the women,
poor dupes, believed it.
One method the Church took to benefit woman and show its respect for her
was this: any married man was prohibited from being a priest. Women
were so unholy, so unclean, and so inferior, that to have one as a wife
degraded a man to such an extent that he was unfit to be a minister or
to touch holy things. The Catholic Church still prohibits either
party who is so unholy as to marry from profaning its pulpit'; but the
Protestant Churches divide up, giving women the disabilities and mon the
offices. The unselfishness of such a course is quite touching. It says
to women: "You support us and we will damn you; there is nothing mean or
niggardly about us."
As to Blackstone's second count--"the right to personal liberty"--I can
perhaps do no better than give a few bald facts.
Under Pagan rule the personal liberty of woman had become very
considerable, as well as her proprietary liberty; but Christianity began
her degradation at once.
Christianity was introduced into England in the fourth century, and the
_sale of women began in the fifth_; and it was not until the eleventh
that a girl could refuse to marry any suitor her father chose for
her. In a word, she always had a guardian; she had no personal liberty
whatever; she could neither buy nor own property as her brothers could;
she could not marry when and whom she preferred, live where she wished,
eat, drink, or wear what she liked, or refuse any of these provisions
when they were offered by her male relatives. If they decided that she
had too many back teeth they simply pulled them out, and she had nothing
to say on the subject. She could be sold outright by her father, or
leased or bound out as he preferred. She never got so old but that
her earnings belonged to him, and a mother never arrived at an age
sufficiently advanced to be entitled to the earnings of her children.
Sharswood says, "A father is entitled to the benefits of his children's
labor." "An infant [any one not of age] owes reverence and respect to
his mother; but she has no right to his services."*
* Blackstone. Sharswood.
This is upon the theory, doubtless, that starvation is wholesome for a
widowed mother, but that it does not agree with a father's digestion at
any time.
Sir Henry Maine in his "Ancient Law." says, that from the Pagan laws all
this inequality and oppressiveness of guardianship and restriction
of the personal liberty of women had disappeared, and he adds: "The
consequence was that the situation of the Roman female, whether married
or unmarried, became one of great personal and proprietary independence.
_But Christianity tended somewhat from the very first to narrow this
remarkable liberty...._ The great jurisconsult himself [Gaius] scouts
the popular Christian apology offered for it in the mental inferiority
of the female sex.... Led by their theory of Natural Law, the Roman
[Pagan] jurisconsults had evidently at this time assumed the equality of
the sexes as a principle of their code of equity."
Of the Christians, led by their theory of a revealed divine law which
treated women as inferior beings and useful only as prey, Lecky says
("European Morals," vol. 1, page 358): "But in the whole feudal
[Christian and chiefly Canon] legislation women were placed in a much
lower legal position than in the Pagan empire. The complete inferiority
of the sex was continually maintained by the law; and that generous
public opinion which in Pagan Rome had frequently revolted against the
injustice done to girls, in depriving them of the greater part of the
inheritance of their fathers, totally disappeared. _Wherever the canon
law has been the basis of legislation, we find laws of succession
sacrificing the Merest of daughters and of wives_, and a state of public
opinion which has been formed and regulated by these laws; nor was
any serious attempt made to abolish them _till the close of the last
century_. The French revolutionists, though rejecting the proposal of
Sieyes and Condorcet [both infidels] to accord political emancipation to
women, established at least an equal succession of sons and daughters,
and thus initiated a great reformation of both law and opinion which
sooner or later must traverse the world."
How soon or how late this will happen will depend very greatly upon the
amount of power retained by the Church. Pagans, Infidels, and Scientists
have fought for, and the Church has fought against, the dignity, honor,
and welfare of women for centuries; and because fear, organization,
wealth, selfishness, and power have been on the side of the Church, and
she has kept women too ignorant to understand the situation, she has
succeeded for many generations in retarding the progress and shutting
out the light that slowly came in despite of her.
"_No society which preserves any tincture of Christian institutions is
ever_ likely to restore to married women the personal liberty conferred
on them by the middle Roman law; but the proprietary disabilities of
married females stand on quite a different basis from their personal
incapacities, and it is by keeping alive and consolidating the former
that _the canon law has so deeply injured civilization_. There are
many vestiges of a _struggle between the secular and ecclesiastical
principles; but the canon law nearly everywhere prevailed._"*
* Maine's "Ancient Law," 158.
It has always been uphill work fighting the Church. So long as it had
sword and fagot at its command, and the will to use them; so long as it
pretended to have, and people believed that it had, power to mete out
damnation to its opposers; just so long were science, justice, and
thought fatally crippled.
But when Voltaire, Diderot, Condorcet and the great encyclopedist circle
of France got their hands on the throat of the Church, and dipped their
pens in the fire of eloquence, wit, ridicule, reason, and justice,
then, and not till then, began to dawn a day of honor toward women, of
humanity and justice and truth. They drew back the curtain, the world
saw, the cloud lifted, and life began on a new plane. Under Pagan rule
woman had begun, as we have seen, to receive recognition apart from
sex. She was a human being. A general law of "persons" applied to
and shielded her. But from the first the Christian Church refused to
consider her apart from her capacity for reproduction; and this one
ground of consideration it pronounced a curse, a crime, and a shame to
her. Her only claim to recognition at all was a curse. She was not a
person, she was only a function.*
* See Lea's "Sacerdotal Celibacy."
Man it pronounced a person first, with rights, privileges, and
protection as such. Incidentally he might also be a husband, a father,
or a son. His welfare, duties, and rights as a person, as a human being,
were apart from and superior to those that were special and incidental.
He received consideration always as a person. He _might_ be dealt with
as husband or father.
But ignoring all her mental life and denying that she had any, and
ignoring all her physical possibilities, ambitions, desires, and
capabilities as a person, the Church narrowed woman's life and
restricted her energies into a compass where its power over her became
absolute and her subjection certain. Nor has the loss been wholly
to woman, for any influence which cripples the mother's capacity of
endowment takes cruel revenge on the race.*
* "It is not impossible but that a more correct
understanding of the laws of life and heredity may establish
the fact that because of the subjection of woman, the entire
race has been mentally dwarfed and physically weakened."
--Gamble.
From this outlook the debt of civilization to the Church is heavy
indeed. Is it a debt of gratitude?
Under this head there is space for but one point farther, out of the
great store at hand.
The clergy were licensed to commit crime. They got up a neat little
scheme called "benefit of clergy" by which they were secure from
the punishment meted out to other criminals. The relief offered did
sometimes reach other men, but as learning was largely confined to the
clergy they were the chief beneficiaries, as the name implies and as was
the intent of the law. Any man who could read was allowed "benefit
of clergy;" in other words, his punishment was lightened or entirely
omitted. But a woman, though she were a perfect mine of wisdom and could
read in any number of languages, could receive no such benefit, _because
she could not take holy orders_. They first enacted that she should
not take orders, and then they denied to her the relief which only that
ability could give. So great a favorite was woman with the Church!
The ordinary male criminal received the ordinary punishment, the clergy
received none; and in order that the requisite gross amount of suffering
for crime should be inflicted on somebody, the clergy enacted that woman
should receive _their_ share vicariously in addition to her own,
and then to this they added such interest as would make the
twenty-per-cent-a-month men of Wall street ashamed of their stupid
financiering.
Thus the Church arrogated to itself the exclusive right to commit crime
with impunity, and also claimed and exercised the right to prevent women
from learning to read. If she still persisted it could then punish her
doubly, _because she had no right to learn_.
For offenses for which ordinary men were hanged, women were burned
alive, and priests were glorified. For larceny a man was branded in the
hand or imprisoned for a few months; while _for a first offence_ of
the kind a woman was kindly permitted to be hanged or beheaded _without
benefit of clergy_; and the clergy went scot free.* The Church did then
as it does now, it claimed all the benefits of citizenship and paid none
of the penalties and bore none of the burdens.**
* Blackstone. Christian.
** It still claims exemption from taxation, thus throwing
its burden on others; and it also claims immunity from the
very gambling laws which it so rigidly enforces against
other institutions.
The Church did then just as it does now, in principle, in setting up
certain great benefits which _only priests might hope to obtain, and
then enacting that certain persons were forever ineligible to the
priesthood_; and the same or quite as good reasons were given for
denying women such relief from the penalties of the law as was freely
extended to men, as are given to-day for refusing her the liberty,
emoluments, and benefits that are freely accorded to the most imbecile
little theological student who is educated by the needle of a sister
and supported by money wrung from the fears of shop or factory girls,
to whom he paints the terrors of hell, and freely threatens the same to
those who disobey him. Salvation comes high, but no preacher ever gets
so poor that he cannot distribute hell free of charge to the multitude
without the least diminution of his stock-in-trade.
I should think that an orthodox pulpit would be about the last place a
self-respecting woman would wish to fill; but I am glad, since there
are some who do so wish, that the issue has again been forced upon the
Church, and that in 1884, true to her history, she was again compelled
to acknowledge herself a respecter of persons, a degrader of women, and
a clog to progress and individual liberty, equality, and conscience.
I am glad that women have recently forced the Methodist and Presbyterian
Churches to declare their principles of class preference and partial
legislation. I am glad that in 1884 these Churches were compelled to say
in effect to women, so that the world could hear: "You are not and you
never can be our equals. We are holy. You are unclean. We will hold you
back and down to the ancient level we made for you just as long as the
life is in us; and if you ever receive recognition as a human being, it
must be at the hands of those who defy the Church and hate creeds that
are not big enough to go all round. Our creeds are only large enough to
give each sex half. But we won't be stingy, we only want our share. You
are entirely welcome to all the degradation here and all the damnation
hereafter; and any man who attempts to deprive you of these blessings is
a heretic and a sinner. Let us pray."