2.—“... _woman’s griefs with man of barbarous breed_.”
“In all barbarous societies the subjection of woman is more or less
severe; customs or coarse laws have regulated the savagery of the first
anarchic ages; they have doubtless set up a barrier against primitive
ferocity, they have interdicted certain absolutely terrible abuses of
force, but they have only replaced these by a servitude which is still
very heavy, is often iniquitous, and no longer permits to
legally-possessed women those escapes, or capriciously accorded
liberties, which were tolerated in savage life.”—Letourneau (“Evolution
of Marriage,” Chap. XIV.).
4.—“_Crippled and crushed by cruelty and toil_.”
Some of this crippling has been of set purpose, as well as the simple
result of brutal male recklessness. Instance the distortion of the feet
of high-born female children in China, the tradition concerning which is
that the practice was initiated and enjoined by an emperor of old, one
of whose wives had (literally) “run away” from him. A somewhat similar
precaution would seem to be indicated as a very probable source of the
persistent and almost universal incommodity and incumbrance of the dress
of woman as compared with that of man.
Dr. Thomas Inman, in his “Ancient Faiths Embodied in Ancient Names,”
Vol. I., p. 53, seems to indicate a different, yet closely allied,
origin and motive for the impeding form of woman’s clothing, the
subordinate status of woman being always the purpose in view.
_Id._... “Even supposing a woman to give no encouragement to her
admirers, many plots are always laid to carry her off. In the encounters
which result from these, she is almost certain to receive some violent
injury, for each of the combatants orders her to follow him, and, in the
event of her refusing, throws a spear at her. The early life of a young
woman at all celebrated for beauty is generally one continued series of
captivities to different masters, of ghastly wounds, of wandering in
strange families, of rapid flights, of bad treatment from other females
amongst whom she is brought, a stranger, by her captor; and rarely do
you see a form of unusual grace and elegance but it is marked and
scarred by the furrows of old wounds; and many a female thus wanders
several hundred miles from the home of her infancy, being carried off
successively to distant and more distant points.”—Sir George Grey
(“Travels in North-Western Australia,” 1841, Vol. II., p. 249; quoted in
M’Lennan on “Primitive Marriage,” p. 75).
5.—“... _her heart a gentle mien essayed_.”
“Woman seems to differ from man in mental disposition, chiefly in
greater tenderness and less selfishness, and this holds good even with
savages, as shown by a well-known passage in “Mungo Park’s Travels,” and
by statements made by other travellers. Woman, owing to her maternal
instincts, displays these qualities towards her infants in an eminent
degree; therefore it is likely that she should often extend them towards
her fellow creatures.”... “Mungo Park heard the negro women teaching
their young children to love the truth.”—Darwin (“The Descent of Man,”
Chaps. IX., III.).
6.—“_By deeper passion, holier impulse, swayed_.”
Mrs. Eliza W. Farnham well says:—“Woman has accepted her subordinate
lot, and lived in it with comparatively little moral harm, as the only
truly superior and noble being could have done. The masculine spirit,
enslaved and imprisoned, becomes diabolic or broken; the feminine, only
warped, weakened, or distorted, is ready, whenever the pressure upon it
is removed, to assume its true attitude.”—(“Woman and Her Era,” Part
IV.)
_Id._... Perhaps as appositely here, as elsewhere, may be recorded the
following:—“An American writer says: ‘While I lived among the Choctaw
Indians, I held a consultation with one of their chiefs respecting the
successive stages of their progress in the arts of civilised life, and,
among other things, he informed me that at their start they made a great
mistake, they only sent boys to school. Their boys came home intelligent
men, but they married uneducated and uncivilised wives, and the uniform
result was that the children were all like their mothers. The father
soon lost all his interest both in wife and children. And now,’ said he,
‘if we could educate but one class of our children, we should choose the
girls, for, when they become mothers, they educate their sons.’ This is
the point, and it is true.”—(_Manchester Examiner and Times_, Sept.,
1870.)
8.—“... _mother-love alone the infant oft preserved_.”
In Polynesia, “if a child was born, the husband was free to kill the
infant, which was done by applying a piece of wet stuff to the mouth and
nose, or to let it live; but, in the latter case, he generally kept the
wife for the whole of her life. If the union was sterile, or the
children put to death, the man had always the right to abandon the woman
when and how it seemed good to him.”—Letourneau (“Evolution of
Marriage,” p. 113).
_Id._... An Arab legend tells of a chief of Tamin, who became a constant
practitioner of infanticide in consequence of a wound given to his
pride ... and from that moment he interred alive all his daughters,
according to the ancient custom. But one day, during his absence, a
daughter was born to him, whom the mother secretly sent to a relative to
save her, and then declared to her husband that she had been delivered
of a still-born child.—(R. Smith, on “Kinship,” p. 282; quoted by
Letourneau, “Evolution of Marriage,” p. 83.)
_Id._... Charles Darwin writes of Tierra del Fuego:—“The husband is to
the wife a brutal master to a laborious slave. Was a more horrid deed
ever perpetrated than that witnessed on the west coast by Byron, who saw
a wretched mother pick up her bleeding, dying infant-boy, whom her
husband had mercilessly dashed on the stones for dropping a basket of
sea-eggs!”—(“Voyage of the _Beagle_,” Chap. X.)
_Id._... Mrs. Reichardt tells of a certain Moslem, of high standing in
the society of Damascus, who “married a young girl of ten, and, after
she had born him two sons, he drove her almost mad with such cruelty and
unkindness that she escaped, and went back to her father. Her husband
sent for her to return, and, as she was hidden out of his sight, he
wrung the necks of both his sons, and sent their bodies to his wife to
show her what he had in store for her. The young mother, not yet twenty,
died in a few days.”—(See _Nineteenth Century_, June, 1891.)
_Id._... It will not be forgotten that, in more than one of the older
civilisations, the father had the power of life and death over the
members of the family, even past adult age.
And, to come to quite recent times, and this our England, Mrs.
Wolstenholme Elmy, to whose unflagging energy, during some fifteen years
of labour, was mainly attributable (as the Parliamentary sponsors of the
measures know) the amelioration in the English law concerning wives and
mothers, embodied in the Married Women’s Property Acts of 1870 and 1882,
together with the later and beneficent Guardianship of Infants Act,
1886, relates, in her record of the history of this latter Act:—
“It will be remembered that so recently as 1883, a young lady
petitioned that she might be allowed to spend her summer holidays with
her own mother, from whom she was separated for no fault of her own or
of her mother’s, but in virtue of the supreme legal rights of her
father. The Court refused her petition, natural and proper as it seems
to everyone of human feelings; and the words of the Master of the
Rolls in giving judgment, on the 24th of July, 1883, are more
significant and instructive as to the actual state of the law than the
words of any non-professional writer can be:—‘The law of England
_recognises the rights of the father_, not as the guardian, but
_because he is the father of his children_.... _The rights of the
father are recognised because he is the father_; his duties as a
father are recognised because they are natural duties. The natural
duties of a father are to treat his children with the utmost
affection, and with infinite tenderness.... The law recognises these
duties, from which if a father breaks he breaks from everything which
nature calls upon him to do; and, although the law may not be able to
insist upon their performance, it is because the law recognises them,
and knows that in almost every case the natural feelings of a father
will prevail. The law trusts that the father will perform his natural
duties, and does not, and, indeed, cannot, inquire how they have been
performed.... I am not prepared to say whether _when the child is a
ward of Court, and the conduct of the father is such as to exhaust all
patience—such, for instance, as cruelty, or pitiless spitefulness
carried to a great extent—the Court might not interfere. But such
interference will be exercised_ ONLY IN THE UTMOST NEED, AND IN MOST
EXTREME CASES. It is impossible to lay down the rule of the Court more
clearly than has been done by Vice-Chancellor Bacon in the recent case
of “_Re._ Plowley” (47 “L.T.,” N.S., 283). In saying that this Court,
“whatever be its authority or jurisdiction, _has no authority to
interfere with the sacred right of a father over his own children_,”
the learned Vice-Chancellor has summed up all that I intended to say.
_The rights of a father are sacred rights, because his duties are
sacred._...’
“These sacred rights of the father were, it will be observed, in the
eyes of the law so _exclusive_ and paramount as to justify and demand
the refusal to a young girl, at the most critical period of early
womanhood, of the solace of a few weeks’ intercourse with a blameless
and beloved mother; and this although the gratification of the
daughter’s wish would have involved no denial to the father of the
solace of his daughter’s company, since she was not actually, but only
_legally_, in his custody, not having seen him for more than a year.
“It will be seen from this that the father alone has the absolute
legal right to deal with his child or children, to the extent of
separating them, at his own sole pleasure, from their mother, and of
giving them into the care and custody of any person whom he may think
fit. The mother has, as such, no legal status, no choice, voice, lot,
or part in the matter.”—Mrs. Wolstenholme Elmy (“The Infants’ Act,
1886,” p. 2).
It is consolatory to learn that a palliation of some part of the above
unjust conditions has been achieved; yet how often has our presumedly
happy land witnessed scenes of child misery and helpless mother-love, to
which was denied even the poor consolation, so pathetically depicted by
Mrs. Browning, in a scene which, as Moir truly says, “weighs on the
heart like a nightmare”;—
“Do you hear the children weeping, oh! my brothers!
Ere the sorrow comes with years?
They are leaning their young heads against their mothers,
And _that_ cannot stop their tears.”