1, 2.—“... _fearing that the slave herself might guess
The knavery of her forced enchainedness_.”
“Here I believe is the clue to the feeling of those men who have a real
antipathy to the equal freedom of women. I believe they are afraid, not
lest women should be unwilling to marry ... but lest they should insist
that marriage should be on equal conditions; but all women of spirit and
capacity should prefer doing almost anything else, not in their own eyes
degrading, rather than marry, when marrying is giving themselves a
master, and a master too of all their earthly possessions. And truly, if
this consequence were necessarily incident to marriage, I think that the
apprehension would be very well founded.”—J S. Mill (“The Subjection of
Women,” p. 51).
See also Note XL., 4.
5.—“... _dogmas_ ...”
These dogmas which, under the guise of religion, were imposed on the
acceptance of womanhood, may be aptly summarised and epitomised in the
following lines from one of the hierarchs of the system:—
“To whom thus Eve, with perfect beauty adorn’d:
‘My author and disposer, what thou bidd’st
Unargued I obey: so God ordains;
God is thy law, thou mine; to know no more
Is woman’s happiest knowledge, and her praise.’”
—(“Paradise Lost,” Book IV., 634.)
Concerning which words of Milton well may Mary Wollstonecraft observe,
with a quiet sarcasm:—“If it be allowed that women were destined by
Providence to acquire human virtues, and, by the exercise of their
understandings, that stability of character which is the firmest ground
to rest our future hopes upon, they must be permitted to turn to the
fountain of light, and not forced to shape their course by the twinkling
of a satellite.”—(“Vindication of the Rights of Woman,” Chap. II.)
Milton also discoursed learnedly, but self-interestedly, concerning
divorce, claiming for the husband a privilege and option which he
utterly denied to the wife:—“... the power and arbitrement of divorce
from the master of the family, into whose hands God and the law of all
nations had put it ... that right which God from the beginning had
entrusted to the husband.”—(“The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce.”)
It was this same mediæval moralist who trained his daughters in the
pronunciation of various languages, that they might minister to his
comfort by reading to him in those tongues; while he carefully withheld
from them any knowledge of the meaning of the words they were uttering.
Could a greater insult or a more degrading office be inflicted on a
cultured human intellect? Small wonder that his daughters were
sufficiently “undutiful and unkind”—as Milton styled it—to leave him
some years before his death. That the possessor of the same virile
intellect which penned the “Areopagitica,” with its brave freedom, could
tolerate and promulgate the servitude and degradation of one half of
humanity indicates in him a mental darkness as gross and as pitiable as
his physical blindness.
6, 7.—“... _sanctimonious name
Of ‘woman’s duty’_ ...”
“Hitherto the world has been governed by brute force only, which means
that the stronger animal, man, has kept the weaker in subjection,
allowing her to live only in so far as she ministered to his comforts;
that he has not unnaturally made laws and fixed customs to suit his own
pleasure and convenience, always at the expense of the woman; and, what
is worse, that he has in all countries given a religious sanction to his
vices, in order to bend the woman to his wishes.... I might also add
that all cruel customs relating to woman have been imposed upon her
under the guise of religion, and hence, though so injurious and baneful
to herself, she is even slower to change them than the man. There is
hardly any cruel wrong which has been inflicted in the course of ages by
man upon his fellow-man that has not been justified by an appeal to
religion.”—Mrs. Pechey Phipson, M.D. (“Address to the Hindoos of
Bombay”).
_Id._... “There is nothing which men so easily learn as this
self-worship: all privileged persons, and all privileged classes, have
had it.... Philosophy and religion, instead of keeping it in check, are
generally suborned to defend it.”—J. S. Mill (“The Subjection of Women,”
p. 77).
_Id._... A. Dumas fils speaks of “les femmes, ces éternelles mineures
des religions et des codes;” and of “les arguments à l’aide desquels
l’Eglise veut mettre les femmes de son côté”; and shows as the effect
that “Il y a des femmes honnêtes, esclaves du devoir, pieuses. Leur
religion leur a enseigné le sacrifice. Non seulement elles ne se
plaignent pas des épreuves à traverser mais elles les appellent pour
mériter encore plus la récompense promise, et elles les bénissent quand
elles viennent. Tout arrive, pour elles, par la volonté de Dieu, et tout
est comme il doit être dans cette vallée des larmes, chemin de
l’éternité bienheureuse.... D’ailleurs elles ne lisent ni les journaux,
ni les livres où il est question de ces choses-là; cette lecture leur
est interdite. Si, par hasard, elles avaient connaissance de pareilles
idées, ... elles en rougiraient, elles en souffriraient pour leur sexe,
et elles prieraient pour celles qui se laissent aller à propager de si
dangereuses erreurs et à donner de si déplorables exemples.... Mais, pas
plus que le bonheur, la ruse, l’ignorance, la misère et la servitude, la
foi aveugle, l’extase, et l’immobilité volontaire de l’esprit ne sont
des arguments sans réplique.”—(“Les Femmes qui Tuent,” &c., pp. 10, 91,
103.)
The evil which Dumas points out is common to all religions, of whatever
race or make; the hall-mark of every creed, from Confucianism to
Comtism, has been the subjection of woman, under the affectation of
advocating her highest interests. The pious compound has usually been
altered to meet the growing intellectual requirements of common-sense
and justice and humanity, and hence the precepts of religion as to
feminine conduct have by no means always lain in such lines as the
multitude in our modern Western civilisation still enjoins on women. No
more than the whole and universal attitude of religion, ancient or
modern, as regards woman, is exposed or expressed in the following
recapitulation of present or historic facts:—“It is not the chastity of
women, as we understand it, but her subjection, that Japanese morality
requires. The woman is a thing possessed, and her immorality consists
simply in disposing freely of herself.
“As regards prostitution, Brahmanic India is scarcely more scrupulous
than Japan, and there again we find religious prostitution practised in
the temples, analogous to that which in ancient Greece was practised at
Cyprus, Corinth, Miletus, Tenedos, Lesbos, Abydos, &c. (Lecky, ‘History
of European Morals,’ Vol. I., p. 103). According to the legend, the
Buddha himself, Sakyamouni, when visiting the famous Indian town of
Vasali, was received there by the great mistress of the courtesans.
(Mrs. Spier, ‘Life in Ancient India,’ p. 28).”—Letourneau (“The
Evolution of Marriage,” Chap. X.).
The enforcement, or commendation, or acceptance of the practice of
prostitution, with its profanation of the dignity and individuality of
woman, and its utter carelessness and disregard for either her physical
or intellectual well-being, is indubitable evidence of the man-made
(_i.e._, male) origin of such a scheme of religion or ethics or
economics. For, as Mrs. Eliza W. Farnham truly remarks:—“If a doubt yet
remains on the mind of any reader that I have stated truly the part of
the masculine as cause in this terrible phenomenon, let it be considered
how man has always introduced prostitution in every country that he has
visited, and every island of the sea. Does anyone believe, for example,
that if the voyages of discovery and trade had been made by women
instead of men, to the islands of the Pacific, this scourge would have
been left as the testimony of their visit, so that, in a few
generations, the populations native there would have fallen a literal
sacrifice to their sensuality, as they are actually falling to man’s at
this day? There is no comment needed on the illustration, I am sure. The
common sense of every reader will furnish the best comment and answer
the question correctly.”—(“Woman and Her Era,” Vol. II., p. 299.)
_Id._... Lastly, but most convincingly, as to the wilful and intentional
degradation and subjugation of woman by the teaching and rites of
religion, let it be noted that, among the Jews, the very fact of being a
woman is made a disgrace; and woman, the mother of the human race, is
insulted accordingly. In the morning synagogue service of prayer,
directly after unitedly blessing “Adonai,” for bestowing on the
barn-door fowl the power to distinguish between night and day, and for
not having created the worshippers present heathens or slaves, each
member of the male portion of the congregation thanks the same Adonai
“that Thou hast not fashioned me as a woman,” while each member of the
segregated female portion of the company is instructed to submissively
give thanks “that Thou hast fashioned me after Thine own pleasure.” The
male thanks for not being heathens seem, under the circumstances,
conspicuously premature.—(See “Ohel Jakob,” _i.e._, “Jacob’s Temple,”
the “Daily Prayer of the Israelites,” Fraenkel’s ed., Berlin.)
That the spirit of this Mosaic or Hebrew sexual teaching, with its
incongruous assertions and inferences, has communicated itself deeply to
Christianity, may be observed from such passages as 1 Tim. ii. 13, 14; 1
Cor. vii., 9; Eph. v. 24; Col. iii. 18; 1 Pet. iii. 1, 5; and many
others.
_Id._... Buckle quotes from “Fergusson on the Epistles,” 1656, p.
242:—“The great and main duty which a wife, as a wife, ought to learn,
and so learn as to practice it, is to be subject to her own husband.”
(See also Note XVII., 8.) And Buckle further cites, from “Fox’s
Journal,” “After the middle of the seventeenth century the Quakers set
up ‘women’s’ meetings, to the disgust of many, and (query, because) in
the teeth of St. Paul’s opinion.”—(“Miscellaneous and Posthumous Works,”
Vol. I., pp. 375, 384.)
_Id._... As already said, the “sanctimonious” claim of “woman’s duty”
runs through all religions. Here, for instance, is what is reported in a
leader of the _Manchester Guardian_ of August 15th, 1892:—
“In this country no one would place suicide in the ranks of the
virtues. Here it is a crime, but in China under certain circumstances
it is regarded as an act of heroism and devotion worthy of sympathy
and of national recognition. Thus the Governor of Shansi forwarded to
the Emperor of China a memorial setting forth the virtues as daughter
and wife of a lady in that province. She was of good family, both her
father and grandfather having been officials in the district. At the
age of ten she showed her love for her mother in a peculiarly Chinese
fashion. One of the Celestial beliefs is that medicine acquires
efficacy by having mingled with it some human flesh, and the little
girl cut some from her own body to be used for the purpose of curing
an illness which threatened her mother’s life. In 1890 she was married
to an ‘expectant magistrate,’ whose expectations were realised by his
appointment last autumn to a judicial post. What she had, as a good
daughter, done for her mother, she, as a good wife, did also for her
husband, who fell ill; but her remedy was inefficacious, and he died.
She was now in a position which, according to the Chinese code of
ethics, has no responsibilities for a woman. Without parents, husband,
or children to demand her affectionate care, she decided to commit
suicide, and apparently not only communicated her intentions to those
around her, but had their sympathy and support in her decision. We are
told that, “only waiting till she had completed the arrangements for
her husband’s interment, she swallowed gold and powder of lead. She
handed her _trousseau_ to her relations to defray her funeral
expenses, and made presents to the younger members of the family and
the servants, after which, draped in her state robes, she sat waiting
her end. The poison began to work, and soon all was over.” The story
of a distracted wife seeking refuge in death from the sorrows of
widowhood might doubtless be told of any country in Europe, but the
sequel is possible only in China. The Governor of Shansi, struck with
the courage of the lady in what he evidently regards as a very proper
though somewhat unusual exhibition of conjugal affection, asks in his
memorial that the virtuous life and death of the lady may be duly
commemorated. The prayer of the memorial has been granted by the
Emperor and a memorial arch is to be erected in honour of the
suicide.”
8.—“... _this reasoned day_ ...”
See Note XVII., 8.