The _Bombay Guardian_ calls attention to an extraordinary book which is
being circulated (early in 1891) broadcast, as a prize-book in the
Government Girls’ School in the Bombay Presidency. The following
quotations are given as specimens of the teachings set forth in the
book:—
“If the husband of a virtuous woman be ugly, of good or bad disposition,
diseased, fiendish, irascible, or a drunkard, old, stupid, dumb, blind,
deaf, hot-tempered, poor, extremely covetous, a slanderer, cowardly,
perfidious, and immoral, nevertheless she ought to worship him as God,
with mind, speech, and person.
“The wife who gives an angry answer to her husband will become a village
pariah dog; she will also become a jackal, and live in an uninhabited
desert.
“The woman who eats sweetmeats without sharing them with her husband
will become a hen-owl, living in a hollow tree.—(Conf. Note VI., 8.)
“The woman who walks alone without her husband will become a
filth-eating village sow.
“The woman who speaks disrespectfully to her husband will be dumb in the
next incarnation.
“The woman who hates her husband’s relations will become from birth to
birth a musk-rat, living in filth.
“She who is always jealous of her husband’s concubine will be childless
in the next incarnation.”
To illustrate the blessed result of a wife’s subserviency, a story is
told of “the great reward that came to the wife of an ill-tempered,
diseased, and wicked Brahmin, who served her husband with a slavish
obedience, and even went the length of carrying him on her own shoulders
to visit his mistress.”
So quotes the _Woman’s Journal_ of Boston, Mass., and says in comment
thereon:—“The British Government in India has bound itself not to
interfere with the religion of the natives, but it certainly ought not
to inculcate in Government schools the worst doctrines of heathenism.”
Yet, again, are these Hindoo, or Japanese, or Chinese doctrines simply
the precepts of “heathenism” alone? Buckle quotes for us the following
passage from the Nonconformist “Fergusson on the Epistles,” 1656, p.
242:—“There is not any husband to whom this honour of submission is not
due. No personal infirmity, frowardness of nature, no, not even on the
point of religion, doth deprive him of it.”
Much the same teaching is continued a century later in the noted Dr.
Gregory’s “A Father’s Legacy to his Daughters”; and again, hideously
true is the picture which Mill has to draw, in 1869:—“Above all, a
female slave has (in Christian countries) an admitted right, and is
considered under a moral obligation to refuse to her master the last
familiarity. Not so the wife; however brutal a tyrant she may
unfortunately be chained to, though she may know that he hates her,
though it may be his daily pleasure to torture her, and though she may
feel it impossible not to loathe him, he can claim from her and enforce
the lowest degradation of a human being, that of being made the
instrument of an animal function contrary to her inclinations.... No
amount of ill-usage, without adultery superadded, will in England free a
wife from her tormentor.”—(“The Subjection of Women,” pp. 57, 59.)
As to how far public feeling, if not law, has amended some of these
conditions, see Note XXXVI., 6. Meanwhile, as an evidence of what is the
“orthodox” opinion and sentiment at this present day, it may be noted
that Cardinal Manning wrote in the _Dublin Review_, July, 1891:—“A woman
enters for life into a sacred contract with a man before God at the
altar to fulfil to him the duties of wife, mother, and head of his home.
Is it lawful for her, even with his consent, to make afterwards a second
contract for so many shillings a week with a millowner whereby she
becomes unable to provide her husband’s food, train up her children, or
do the duties of her home? It is no question of the lawfulness of
gaining a few more shillings for the expenses of a family, but of the
lawfulness of breaking a prior contract, the most solemn between man and
woman. No arguments of expediency can be admitted. It is an obligation
of conscience to which all things must give way. The duties of home must
first be done” (by the woman) “then other questions may be entertained.”
Are not these English injunctions to womanly and wifely slavery as
trenchant and merciless as any ascribed to so-called “heathenism”? And
is it not the fuller truth that the spirit of the male teaching against
woman is the same all the world over, and no mere matter of creed—which
is nevertheless made the convenient vehicle for such teaching; and that,
in brief, the precepts of womanly and wifely servitude are blind,
brutal, and universal?
See also Note XXXIV., 8.