Chapter 10

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."

AS WIVES.

We are told that women owe honorable marriage to Christianity;* that the more beautiful and tender relations of husband and wife find their root there; that Christianity protects and elevates the mother as no other law or religion ever has. Let us see.

* See Appendix I, 1-2.

On this subject I find in Maine's "Ancient Law" these facts:

"Although women had been objects of barter and sale, according to barbaric usages, between their male relatives, the later Roman [Pagan] law having assumed, _on the theory of Natural Law, the equality of the sexes_, control of the _person_ of women was quite obsolete when Christianity was born. Her situation had become one of great personal liberty and proprietary independence, even when married, and the arbitrary power over her of her male relations, or her guardian, was reduced to a nullity, while the form of _marriage conferred on the husband no superiority_."

Thus as a daughter and as a wife had she grown to be honored and recognized as an equal under Pagan rule.

"_But Christianity tended from the first to narrow this remarkable liberty...._ The latest Roman [Pagan] law, _so far as touched by the constitutions of the Christian emperors, bears marks of reaction against these great liberal doctrines._" --Maine.

And again began the sale of women. Christianity held her as unclean and in all respects inferior; and "during the era which begins modern history the women of dominant races are seen everywhere under various forms of archaic guardianship, and _the husband pays a money price to her male relations for her_. The prevalent state of _religious_ sentiment may explain why it is that _modern_ jurisprudence has absorbed among its rudiments _much more than usual of those rules_ [archaic] _concerning the position of women which belong peculiarly to an imperfect civilization._" --Ibid.

Thus it will be seen that from the first, and extending down to the present, the Church did all she could to cast woman back into the night of the race from which in a great measure she had been rescued through the ages when Natural Law and not "revelation" was the guide of man. The laws which the Church found liberal and just toward women it discarded, and it searched back in the ages of night for such as it saw fit to re-enact for her. Of this Maine says: "The husband now draws to himself the power which formerly belonged to his wife's male relatives, the only difference being that he no longer pays anything for the privilege."

As Christians grew economical wives came cheaper than formerly, and it became a dogma that wives were not worth much anyhow, and then, too, it enabled persons of limited means to have more of them. Of a somewhat later date Maine says: "_At this point heavy disabilities begin to be imposed upon wives_."

That was to make marriage honorable and attractive, no doubt, and, says Maine: "_It was very long before the subordination entailed on women by marriage was sensibly diminished." And what diminution it received came from men who fought against Church law_.*

*See Lecky, Maine, Lea, Milman, Christian, Blackstone, Morley, and others for ample proof of this fact

It was only the crumbs of liberty, honor, and justice extorted by men who fought the Church on behalf of wives, that lightened their most oppressive burdens. It was true then, and it is true to-day, that women owe what justice and freedom and power they possess to the fact that the best and clearest-headed men are more honorable than our religion, and that they have invited Moses and St. Paul to take a back seat Moses has complied, and St. Paul is half-way down the aisle.

Some of the clergy now explain that although Paul may have written certain things inimical to women, he did not _mean_ them, so it is all right. Such passages as 1 Cor. xi. 3-9; xiv. 34-35; and Eph. v. 22-24, are now explained to be intended in a purely Pickwickian sense; and a Rev. Mr. Boyd, of St. Louis, has even gone so far as to produce the doughty apostle before a woman-suffrage society, as on their side of that argument. This second conversion of St. Paul impresses one as even more remarkable than his first. It took an "angel of God" to show him the error of his ways in Ephesus, but one little Baptist preacher did it this time--all by himself. Truly St. Paul is getting easier to deal with than he used to be.

But to resume, Maine, in tracing the amalgamation of the later Roman (Pagan) law with the archaic laws of a lower civilization (the result of which was Christian law), shows that the Church, while it chose the Roman laws, which had arrived at so high a state, for others, _retained for women, and particularly for wives, the least favorable_ of the Roman, eked out with the archaic _Patria Potestas_ and the more degrading provisions of the earlier civilizations. Maine reluctantly says that the jurisconsults of the day contended for better laws for wives, but that the Church prevailed in most instances, and established the more oppressive ones.

With certain of these laws--the worst ones--I cannot deal here for obvious reasons; but a few of them I may be permitted to give without offence to the modesty of any one.

Blackstone says: "By marriage the husband and wife are one person in law; that is, the very being or legal _existence of the woman is suspended_ during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband. The husband becomes her _baron or lord_--she his _servant_. Upon this principle of the union of person in husband and wife depend almost all the legal rights, duties, and disabilities they acquire by marriage."

That is to say the husband acquires all the rights, and the wife all the disabilities; and the Church wishing to be fair has made the latter as many as possible.

"And therefore," continues Blackstone, "it is also generally true, that all compacts made between husband and wife, _when single, are voided by the intermarriage_." The working of this principle has been so often illustrated as to render comment unnecessary. A wife retains no rights which her husband is bound to respect, no matter how solemn the compact before marriage, nor what her belief in its strength might have been.

Fortunately for women, happily for wives, men are more decent than their religion; and the law of custom and public opinion has largely outgrown this enactment of the Church, made when she had the power to thus degrade women and brutalize men.

"If the wife be injured in _her person or her property she can bring no action for redress_ without her husband's concurrence _and in his name_," and on the basis of loss of _her services_ to him _as a servant. "But in criminal prosecutions, it is true, the wife may be indicted and punished separately_." *

* Blackstone.

In the case of punishment the Church was entirely willing to give the devil his due. It had no ambition to deprive women of any indictments and punishments that were to be had. In this case, although the husband and wife were one, she was that one. Where privileges or property-rights were to be considered, he was the "one." Such grand reversible doctrines were always on tap with the clergy, and their barrel was always full. Truly, wives do owe much to the Church.

Some of the provisions of these laws have, of late years, been modified by the efforts of men who were pronounced "infidels, destroyers of the Bible, the home, and the dignity of women," aided by women whom the orthodox deride as "strong--minded, ill-balanced, coarse, impious," etc., etc., _ad infinitum, ad nauseam_. A strong mind, whether in man or woman, has always been to the clergy as a red rag to a bull.

"A woman may make a will, _with the assent of her husband_, by way of appointment of her _personal_ property. _She cannot even with his consent devise lands_.... Although our law in general considers a man and wife as one person, yet there are _some instances where she is considered separately as his inferior_," and for that trip only.

As I remarked before when it comes to penalties she is welcome to the whole lot.

"She may not make a deed."

"A man may administer moderate correction to his wife."

"These are the chief legal effects of marriage. Even the disabilities of the wife," Blackstone naively remarks, "are for the most part _intended for her protection; so great a favorite is the female sex of the laws of England!_"

I should think that if this latter point were not quite clear to a woman, "moderate correction" might convince her that she was quite an unreasonable favorite--beyond her most eager desires. Where the Pagan law recognized her as the equal of her husband, the Church discarded that law, and based the Canon Law upon an archaic invention.

Where Maine speaks of the later growth of Pagan law and of Christian influence upon it, he says: "But the chapter of law relating to married women was for the most part read by the light, not of Roman [or Pagan] but of Canon [or Church] Law, _which in no one particular departs so widely from the [improved] spirit of the secular jurisprudence as in the view it takes of the relations created by marriage_. This was in part inevitable, _since no society which possesses any tincture of Christian institutions is likely to restore to married women the personal liberty conferred on them by the middle Roman law_."

Women who support the clergy with one hand, and hold out the other for the ballot; who one day express indignation at the refusal to them of human recognition, and the next day intone the creeds, will have to learn that there is nothing which has so successfully stood, and still so powerfully stands, in the way of the individual liberty, human rights, and dignity of wives, as the Church which they support.

Blackstone says: "In times of popery a great _variety_ of impediments to marriage were made, which impediments might, however, be _bought off with money_."

You could, for instance, buy a more distant relationship to your future wife for so much cash down to the Church. If your inamorata were your first cousin, you could remove her several degrees with five hundred dollars, and make her no relation at all for a little more. Such little sleight-of-hand performances are as nothing to a well-trained clergyman. Slip a check into one hand, and a request to marry your aunt into the other, let a clergyman shake them up in the coffers of the Church, and when one comes out gold, the other will appear as a blushing bride not even related to her own father, and not more than third cousin to herself.

Of the claim made by the early Christian Fathers, that it was because of the mental inferiority and incapacity of women that the more unjust and binding laws were enacted for them, thus doing all they could to create and intensify by law the incapacity which they asserted was imposed by God, Maine says: "But the proprietary disabilities of married females _stand on quite a different basis from personal incapacity_, and it is by the tendency of their doctrines to keep alive and consolidate the former, that the expositors of the _Canon Law have deeply injured civilization_."

He adds that there are many evidences of a struggle between _secular principles in favor of justice for wives_, and _ecclesiastical principles against it_, "but the Canon Law nearly everywhere prevailed. The systems which are _least indulgent_ to married women are invariably those which have followed the _Canon Law exclusively_.... It enforced the complete legal subjection of wives."

Lecky says: "Fierce invectives against the sex form a conspicuous and grotesque portion of the writings of the Fathers. Woman was represented as the door of hell, as the mother of all human ills. She should be ashamed at the very thought that she is a woman.... Women were even forbidden, in the sixth century, on account of their impurity, to receive the Eucharist into their naked hands. Their essentially subordinate position was continually maintained. This teaching in part determined the principles of legislation concerning the sex.* The Pagan laws during the empire had been continually _repealing the old disabilities_ of women, and the legislative movement in their favor continued with unabated force from Constantine to Justinian, and appeared also in some of the early laws of the barbarians. _But in the whole feudal [Christian] legislation women were placed in a much lower legal position than in the Pagan empire_."

* See Appendix J.

And he adds that the French revolutionists (the infidel party) established better laws for women, "and initiated a great reformation of both law and opinion, _which sooner or later must traverse the world_." And these reformations, being in Christendom, will be calmly claimed in the future, as in the present, as due to the beneficent influence of the Church. The Church always belongs to the conservative party, but after a good thing is established in despite of her, she says: "Just see what I have done! 'See what a good boy am I!"'

Not many years ago a few great-souled men who were "heretics" got a glimpse of a principle which has electrified the world. They said that individual liberty is a universal right; they maintained that humanity is a unit, with interests and aims indivisible, and that liberty to use to the utmost advantage all natural abilities cannot be denied one-half of the race without crippling both. A few even went so far as to suggest that the assumption of the inferiority of women, and the imposition of disabilities upon them, under the claim of divine authority, is the greatest crime in the great calendar of crime for which the Church has yet to render a reckoning to humanity.

To one who reads the history of Canon Law, it is not strange that Christian Judges still decide that women are "incompetent to practice law," and that they should not be allowed to study it. A woman well versed in the history of ancient and modern law might easily be an uncomfortable advocate for such a judge to face. He would probably feel the need of an umbrella.