In dealing with this point the humor of the situation is too plain to
require comment, and I need only cite a few facts in order to place the
beautiful little fiction where it belongs.*
* See Appendix T.
As to general education it is well known that the Church has fought
investigation and persecuted science. From the third century to Bruno,
and from Bruno to Darwin and Tyndall there is an unbroken chain of
evidence as to her position in these matters and her opposition to the
diffusion of knowledge. When, however, it became impossible for her to
resist the demand of the people for education; when she could no longer
retard liberty and prevent the recognition of individual rights; then
she modestly demanded the right to do the teaching herself and to
control its extent and scope.*
With a brain stultified by faith** she proposed to regulate
investigations in which the habit of faith would necessarily prove fatal
to the discovery of truth.*** She proposed to teach nothing but the dead
languages and theology, and to confine knowledge to these fields, and
she succeeded for many generations in so doing. Every time she found a
man who had discovered something, or who had a theory he was trying to
test by some little scientific investigations, she cried "heretic" and
suppressed that man. She stuck to the dead languages, and the only
thing she is not afraid of to-day is something dead. Any other kind of
knowledge is a dangerous acquaintance for her to make. ****
If you meet a clergyman to-day who has devoted his time to the dead
languages you need not be afraid that he is a heretic; but if he is
studying the sciences, arts, literature, and history of the living world
in earnest you can get your fagot ready. His orthodoxy is a dead doxy.
It is only a question of time and bravery when he will swear off.*****
* See Appendix G, 1-4.
** See Appendix U.
*** See Clifford's "Scientific Basis of Morals," p. 25
**** See Morley's "Diderot," p. 190.
***** See Ibid, p. 126.
In the Church schools and "universities" to-day it is quite pathetic
to hear the professors wrestle with geology and Genesis, and cut
their astronomy to fit Joshua. If in one of these institutions for the
petrifaction of the human mind there is a teacher who is either not
nimble enough to escape the conclusions of a bright pupil or too honest
to try, he is at once found to be "incompetent as an instructor," and is
dropped from the faculty. I know one case where it took twenty years to
discover that a professor was not able to teach geology--and it took a
heresy-hunter with a Bible to do it then.
But it is the claim of the Church in regard to the education of women
with which I have to do here.
Women in Greece and Rome under Pagan rule had become learned and
influential to an unparalleled degree.*
The early Fathers of the Church found women thirsty for knowledge and
eager for opportunities to learn. They thereupon set about making it
disreputable for a woman to know anything,** and in order to clinch
their prohibition the Church asserted that woman was unable to learn,
had not the mental capacity,*** was created without mental power and for
purely physical purposes.
* See Lecky, Milman, Diderot, Morley, Christian, and others.
** "In the fourth century we find that holy men in council
gravely argued the question, and that too with abundant
confidence in their ability and power to decide the whole
matter: 'Ought women to be called human beings?' A wise
and pious father in the Church, after deliberating solemnly
and long on the vexed question of women, finally concluded:
'The female sex is not a fault in itself, but a fact in
nature for which women themselves are not to blame;' but he
graciously cherished the opinion that women will be
permitted to rise as men, at the resurrection. A few
centuries later the masculine mind underwent great agitation
over the question: 'Would it be consistent with the duties
and uses of women for them to learn the alphabet?' And in
America, after Bridget Gaffort had donated the first plot of
ground for a public school, girls were still denied the
advantages of such schools. The questions--'Shall women be
allowed to enter colleges?' and 'Shall they be admitted
into the professions?' have been as hotly contested as has
been the question of their humanity."
--Gamble.
*** "There existed at the same time in this celebrated city a
class of women, the glory of whose intellectual brilliancy
still survives; and when Alcibiades drew around him the
first philosophers and statesmen of Greece, 'it was a virtue
to applaud Aspasia;' of whom it has been said that she
lectured publicly on rhetoric and philosophy with such
ability that Socrates and Alcibiades gathered wisdom from
her lips, and so marked was her genius for statesmanship
that Pericles afterward married her and allowed her to
govern Athens, then at the height of its glory and power.
Numerous examples might be cited in which Athenian women
rendered material aid to the state."
--Gamble.
It was maintained that her "sphere" was clearly defined, and that it
was purely and solely an animal one; and worst of all it was stoutly
asserted that her greatest crime had always been a desire for wisdom,
and that it was this desire which brought the penalty of labor and death
into this world.*
With such a belief it is hardly strange that the education of girls was
looked upon as a crime; and with such a record it is almost incredible
effrontery that enables the Church to-day to claim credit for the
education of women,** If she were to educate every woman living, free
of charge, in every branch of known knowledge, she could not repay woman
for what she has deprived her of in the past, or efface the indignity
she has already offered.***
* See Morley's "Diderot," p. 76; Lea's "Sacerdotal
Celibacy;" Lecky's "European Morals."
** See Appendix H, 1 to 4.
*** Lecky, "European Morals," p. 310.
A prominent clergyman of the Church of England, who was recently much
honored in this country, lately said, in a sermon to women: "There are
those who think a woman can be taught logic. This is a mistake. Men are
logical, women are not." He was too modest to give his proofs. It seemed
to me strange that he did not mention the doctrines of the trinity and
vicarious atonement, or a few of the miracles, as the result of logic in
the masculine mind. And I could not help thinking at the time that a man
whose mental furniture was chiefly composed of the thirty-nine articles
and the Westminster Catechism would naturally be a profound authority on
logic. An orthodox preacher talking about logic is a sight to arouse the
compassion of a demon. Next to the natural sciences, logic can give the
Church the colic quicker than any other kind of a green apple. And so it
is not strange that the clergy should be afraid that it would disagree
with the more delicate constitution of a woman. They always did maintain
that any diet that was a trifle too heavy for them couldn't be digested
by anybody else; and they would be perfectly right in their supposition
if intellectual dyspepsia or softening of the brain were contagious.
The "sphere" of no other creature is wholly determined and bounded by
_one physical_ characteristic or capacity. To every other creature is
conceded without question the right to use more than one talent.
But the Fathers decided in holy and solemn council that it would be
"unbecoming" for a woman to learn the alphabet, and that she could have
no possible use for such information. They said that she would be a
better mother without distracting her dear little brain with the
a, b, c's, and that therefore she should not learn them. They also
decided that she who was so far lost to modesty as to become acquainted
with the multiplication table "was an unfit associate for our wives and
mothers." There was something wrong with such a woman. She was either a
"witch" or else she was "married to the devil."
That is the way the Church encouraged education for women. This
was done, the holy Fathers said, to "protect women from the awful
temptations of life to which the Lord in his infinite wisdom had
subjected man." They had too much respect for their wives and mothers to
permit them to come in contact with the wickedness of long division
or cube root, and they hoped while life lasted that no man would be
so negligent of duty as to allow his sister to soil her pure mind with
conic sections.
Well, in time there were a few women brave enough, and a few men
honorable and moral enough, to set aside the letter of this prohibition;
but much of its spirit still blossoms in all its splendor in Columbia,
Harvard, Yale, and various other institutions of learning, where women
are either not permitted to enter at all or are required to learn and
accomplish unaided that which it takes a large faculty of instructors
and every known or obtainable educational device (together with future
business stimulus) to enable the young men to do the same thing!
The Fathers said, in effect, "It was through woman wanting to know
something that sin came into this world; therefore let her hereafter
want to know nothing." They taught that a desire for knowledge on the
part of woman was the greatest crime ever committed on this earth, and
that it so enraged God that he punished it by death and by every curse
known to man. When it was pointed out that animals had lived and _died_
on this earth long before man could have lived, they said that God
knew Adam was going to live and Eve was going to sin, so he _made death
retroactive_ because Adam would represent all animals when he should be
created!
All this was thought and done and taught in order to agree with the
silly story of the "fall of man in the Garden of Eden," which every one
acquainted with the simple rudiments of science or the history of the
races knows to be a childish legend of an undeveloped people. Instead of
a "fall" from perfect beginnings, there has been and is a constant rise
in the moral as well as in the mental and physical conditions of man.
The type is higher, the race nobler and nearer perfection than it ever
was before; and the stories of our Bible are the same as those of
all other Bibles, simply the effort of ignorant or imaginative men
to account for the origin and destiny of things of which they had no
accurate knowledge.*
* One of the simplest and most interesting explanations of
this latter point will be found in "The Childhood of
Religions," by Edward Clodd, F.R.A.S., where the Christian
reader may be surprised to find that the "ten-commandment"
idea (with a number of them which apply to general morals,
as "Thou shalt not kill," etc.) is not confined to our
Bible, but is found also in the Buddhist Bible in the same
form; that the "golden rule" was given by Confucius 500
years before Christ; and that Christianity, when taken as it
should be with the other great religions and examined in the
same way, presents no problem, no claim, and no proofs which
are not found in equal strength in one or more of the other
forms of faith. In the matters of morality, miracles, and
power to attract and "comfort" multitudes of people, it
ranks neither first nor last. It is simply one of several,
and in no essential matter is it different from them.
St. Paul said, "If they [women] will learn _anything_, let them ask
their husbands at home;" and the colossal ignorance of most women would
seem to indicate that they have obeyed the command to the letter. But
fortunately for women the civilization of freedom has outgrown St.
Paul as it has the dictates of the Church, and one by one the doors of
information, _and hence the doors to honest labor_, have been opened,
and the possibility of living with dignity and honor has replaced the
forced degradation of the days when the power of the Church enabled it
to reduce women to the animal existence it so long forced upon her.
So long as the Church allowed woman but one avenue of support, so long
did it force her to use that single means of livelihood. So long as it
made her believe that she could bring to this world nothing of value but
her capacity to minister to the lower animal wants of man, so long did
it force upon her that single alternative--or starvation.
So long as it is able to make multitudes of women believe themselves of
value for but one purpose, just that long will it continue to insure the
degradation of many of those women who are helpless, or weak, or loving,
or ignorant of the motives of those in whose power they are. So long
as it teaches woman that she can repay her debt to the world in but one
way, so long will it promote commerce in vice and revenue in shame.
Every man is taught that he can repay his debt to this world in many
ways. He has open to him many avenues of happiness, many paths to
honorable employment. If he fails in one there is still hope. If he
misses supreme happiness in marriage he has still left ambition, labor,
study, fame; if the one failure overtakes him, no matter how sad, he
still can turn aside and find, if not joy, at least occupation and rest.
But the Church has always taught woman that there is but one "sphere,"
one hope, one occupation, one life for her. If she fails in that, what
wonder that with broken hope comes broken virtue or despair? Every woman
who has fallen or lost her way has been previously taught by the Church
that she had and has but one resource; that there is open to her in life
but one path; that whether that path be legally crooked or straight,
she was created for but one purpose; that _man is to decide for her what
that purpose is; and that she must under no circumstances set her own
judgment up against his_.
The legitimate fruits of such an education are too horribly apparent
to need explanation. Every fallen woman is a perpetual monument to the
infamy of a religion and a social custom that narrow her life to the
possibilities of but one function, and provide her no escape--a system
that trains her to depend wholly on one physical characteristic of her
being, and to neglect all else.
That system teaches her that her mind is to be of but slight use to her;
that her hands may not learn the cunning of a trade nor her brain
the bearings of a profession; that mentally she is nothing; and that
physically she is worse than nothing only in so far as she may minister
to one appetite. I hold that the most legitimate outcome of such an
education is to be found in the class that makes merchandise of all that
woman is taught that she possesses that is of worth to herself or to
this world. No system could be more perfectly devised to accomplish this
purpose.*
* See Lea's "Sacerdotal Celibacy."