Chapter 9

* "Although England was christianized in the fourth century, it was not until the tenth that a daughter had a right to reject a husband selected for her by her father; and it was not until the same century that a Christian wife of a Christian husband acquired the right of eating at the table with him. For many hundred years the law bound out to servile labor all unmarried women between the ages of eleven and forty."--M. J. Gage.

"Wives in England were bought from the fifth to the eleventh century" [The dates are significant; let the Church respond.]--Herbert Spencer.

"In England, as late as the seventeenth century, husbands of decent station were not ashamed to beat their wives. Gentlemen arranged parties of pleasure for the purpose of seeing wretched women whipped at Bridewell. It was not until 1817 that the public whipping of women was abolished in England."--Spencer.

** See Appendix E.

Thus was the forced degradation of woman made a source of revenue to the Church, and a means of crushing her self-respect and destroying her sense of personal responsibility as to her own acts in the matter of chastity, the legitimate outcome of which is to be found in the vast army of women who are named only to be reviled. _In them the Church can look on her own work_. The fruit is the natural outcome of the training woman received that taught and compelled her _always_ to submit to the dictates of some man, no matter what her own judgment, modesty, or desires might be. She was not supposed to have an opinion or to know right from wrong; and from Paul's injunction, "If you want to know anything ask your husband at home," down to the decisions of the last General Conference of the Methodist Church, the teaching that woman must subordinate her own sense of right and her own judgment to the dictates of someone else--_any_ one else of the opposite sex--from first to last has been as ingenious a method as could have been devised to fill the world with libertines and their victims.* It is time for the followers of St. Paul to nice the results of their own work.

* See Appendix F, 2.

Under the provisions of the law which held that all "persons" could recover damages for injury--have legal redress for a wrong inflicted upon them--woman again was held as _not a 'person._

If she were assaulted and beaten, or if she were subjected to the greatest indignity that it is possible to inflict upon her, she had no redress. She could not complain. The law gave her no protection whatever. Her father or husband could, if he saw fit, bring suit to recover damages for the loss of _her services as a servant and wholly upon the ground that it was an injury to him and to his feelings_. She was no more recognized as a "person" in the matter, nor was she more highly considered than if she were an inmate of a zoological garden to which some mischievous visitor had fed too many bonbons. The owner was damaged because the brute might die or be injured in the sight of the patrons, but aside from that view of the case no harm was done and no account taken of so trivial a matter.

No matter what the injury she sustained, whether it crippled her physically or blighted her mentally and made life to her the worst curse that could be inflicted, she had no appeal. The wounded feelings of one of her male relations received due consideration, and he could recover the money-value he might set upon the injury to his lacerated mind. This is still the letter and the practice of the law in many places, even in America.

If she had no male relations, the injury did not count, and no "person" being injured everything was lovely, and prayers went right on to the God who, being no respecter of persons (provided they were free, white, adult males), enjoyed the incense from altars whereon burning "witches" writhed in agony and helpless young girls plead for mercy under the loathed and loathsome touch of the "St." Augustines* and "St." Pelayos,** whose praises are chanted and whose divine goodness is recounted by Christendom to-day.

* "To Augustine, whose early life was spent in company with the most degraded of womankind, is Christianity indebted for the full development of the doctrine of Original sin." --Gage.

"All or at least the greater part of the fathers of the Greek Church before Augustine, denied any real original sin."--Emerson. "The doctrine had a gradual growth, and was fully developed by Augustine." --Waite.

** "The abbot elect of St. Augustine, at Canterbury, in 1171, was found on investigation to have seventeen illegitimate children in a single village. An abbot of St. Pelayo in Spain, in 1180, was proved to have kept no less than seventy mistresses. Henry III, Bishop of Liege, was deposed in 1274 for having sixty-five illegitimate children." --Leeky, "Hist, of European Morals."

"This same bishop boasted, at a public banquet, that in twenty-two months fourteen children had been born to him. A license to the clergy to keep concubines was during several centuries levied by princes."--Ibid.

"It was openly attested that 100,000 women in England alone were made dissolute by the clergy." --Draper, "Intellectual Development of Europe."

Such was the "_elevation" and civilization offered by the Church to woman_. These are among her debts to the Church, and the men who fought and contended against the incorporation of such infamy into the common law were branded as infidels. It was said they denied their Lord. They were pronounced most dangerous, and the clergy held up their hands in holy horror and whispered that such men "as much as denied the Bible, blasphemed their God, and sold their souls to the Devil." And the women, poor dupes, believed it.

One method the Church took to benefit woman and show its respect for her was this: any married man was prohibited from being a priest. Women were so unholy, so unclean, and so inferior, that to have one as a wife degraded a man to such an extent that he was unfit to be a minister or to touch holy things. The Catholic Church still prohibits either party who is so unholy as to marry from profaning its pulpit'; but the Protestant Churches divide up, giving women the disabilities and mon the offices. The unselfishness of such a course is quite touching. It says to women: "You support us and we will damn you; there is nothing mean or niggardly about us."

As to Blackstone's second count--"the right to personal liberty"--I can perhaps do no better than give a few bald facts.

Under Pagan rule the personal liberty of woman had become very considerable, as well as her proprietary liberty; but Christianity began her degradation at once.

Christianity was introduced into England in the fourth century, and the _sale of women began in the fifth_; and it was not until the eleventh that a girl could refuse to marry any suitor her father chose for her. In a word, she always had a guardian; she had no personal liberty whatever; she could neither buy nor own property as her brothers could; she could not marry when and whom she preferred, live where she wished, eat, drink, or wear what she liked, or refuse any of these provisions when they were offered by her male relatives. If they decided that she had too many back teeth they simply pulled them out, and she had nothing to say on the subject. She could be sold outright by her father, or leased or bound out as he preferred. She never got so old but that her earnings belonged to him, and a mother never arrived at an age sufficiently advanced to be entitled to the earnings of her children.

Sharswood says, "A father is entitled to the benefits of his children's labor." "An infant [any one not of age] owes reverence and respect to his mother; but she has no right to his services."*

* Blackstone. Sharswood.

This is upon the theory, doubtless, that starvation is wholesome for a widowed mother, but that it does not agree with a father's digestion at any time.

Sir Henry Maine in his "Ancient Law." says, that from the Pagan laws all this inequality and oppressiveness of guardianship and restriction of the personal liberty of women had disappeared, and he adds: "The consequence was that the situation of the Roman female, whether married or unmarried, became one of great personal and proprietary independence. _But Christianity tended somewhat from the very first to narrow this remarkable liberty...._ The great jurisconsult himself [Gaius] scouts the popular Christian apology offered for it in the mental inferiority of the female sex.... Led by their theory of Natural Law, the Roman [Pagan] jurisconsults had evidently at this time assumed the equality of the sexes as a principle of their code of equity."

Of the Christians, led by their theory of a revealed divine law which treated women as inferior beings and useful only as prey, Lecky says ("European Morals," vol. 1, page 358): "But in the whole feudal [Christian and chiefly Canon] legislation women were placed in a much lower legal position than in the Pagan empire. The complete inferiority of the sex was continually maintained by the law; and that generous public opinion which in Pagan Rome had frequently revolted against the injustice done to girls, in depriving them of the greater part of the inheritance of their fathers, totally disappeared. _Wherever the canon law has been the basis of legislation, we find laws of succession sacrificing the Merest of daughters and of wives_, and a state of public opinion which has been formed and regulated by these laws; nor was any serious attempt made to abolish them _till the close of the last century_. The French revolutionists, though rejecting the proposal of Sieyes and Condorcet [both infidels] to accord political emancipation to women, established at least an equal succession of sons and daughters, and thus initiated a great reformation of both law and opinion which sooner or later must traverse the world."

How soon or how late this will happen will depend very greatly upon the amount of power retained by the Church. Pagans, Infidels, and Scientists have fought for, and the Church has fought against, the dignity, honor, and welfare of women for centuries; and because fear, organization, wealth, selfishness, and power have been on the side of the Church, and she has kept women too ignorant to understand the situation, she has succeeded for many generations in retarding the progress and shutting out the light that slowly came in despite of her.

"_No society which preserves any tincture of Christian institutions is ever_ likely to restore to married women the personal liberty conferred on them by the middle Roman law; but the proprietary disabilities of married females stand on quite a different basis from their personal incapacities, and it is by keeping alive and consolidating the former that _the canon law has so deeply injured civilization_. There are many vestiges of a _struggle between the secular and ecclesiastical principles; but the canon law nearly everywhere prevailed._"*

* Maine's "Ancient Law," 158.

It has always been uphill work fighting the Church. So long as it had sword and fagot at its command, and the will to use them; so long as it pretended to have, and people believed that it had, power to mete out damnation to its opposers; just so long were science, justice, and thought fatally crippled.

But when Voltaire, Diderot, Condorcet and the great encyclopedist circle of France got their hands on the throat of the Church, and dipped their pens in the fire of eloquence, wit, ridicule, reason, and justice, then, and not till then, began to dawn a day of honor toward women, of humanity and justice and truth. They drew back the curtain, the world saw, the cloud lifted, and life began on a new plane. Under Pagan rule woman had begun, as we have seen, to receive recognition apart from sex. She was a human being. A general law of "persons" applied to and shielded her. But from the first the Christian Church refused to consider her apart from her capacity for reproduction; and this one ground of consideration it pronounced a curse, a crime, and a shame to her. Her only claim to recognition at all was a curse. She was not a person, she was only a function.*

* See Lea's "Sacerdotal Celibacy."

Man it pronounced a person first, with rights, privileges, and protection as such. Incidentally he might also be a husband, a father, or a son. His welfare, duties, and rights as a person, as a human being, were apart from and superior to those that were special and incidental. He received consideration always as a person. He _might_ be dealt with as husband or father.

But ignoring all her mental life and denying that she had any, and ignoring all her physical possibilities, ambitions, desires, and capabilities as a person, the Church narrowed woman's life and restricted her energies into a compass where its power over her became absolute and her subjection certain. Nor has the loss been wholly to woman, for any influence which cripples the mother's capacity of endowment takes cruel revenge on the race.*

* "It is not impossible but that a more correct understanding of the laws of life and heredity may establish the fact that because of the subjection of woman, the entire race has been mentally dwarfed and physically weakened." --Gamble.

From this outlook the debt of civilization to the Church is heavy indeed. Is it a debt of gratitude?

Under this head there is space for but one point farther, out of the great store at hand.

The clergy were licensed to commit crime. They got up a neat little scheme called "benefit of clergy" by which they were secure from the punishment meted out to other criminals. The relief offered did sometimes reach other men, but as learning was largely confined to the clergy they were the chief beneficiaries, as the name implies and as was the intent of the law. Any man who could read was allowed "benefit of clergy;" in other words, his punishment was lightened or entirely omitted. But a woman, though she were a perfect mine of wisdom and could read in any number of languages, could receive no such benefit, _because she could not take holy orders_. They first enacted that she should not take orders, and then they denied to her the relief which only that ability could give. So great a favorite was woman with the Church!

The ordinary male criminal received the ordinary punishment, the clergy received none; and in order that the requisite gross amount of suffering for crime should be inflicted on somebody, the clergy enacted that woman should receive _their_ share vicariously in addition to her own, and then to this they added such interest as would make the twenty-per-cent-a-month men of Wall street ashamed of their stupid financiering.

Thus the Church arrogated to itself the exclusive right to commit crime with impunity, and also claimed and exercised the right to prevent women from learning to read. If she still persisted it could then punish her doubly, _because she had no right to learn_.

For offenses for which ordinary men were hanged, women were burned alive, and priests were glorified. For larceny a man was branded in the hand or imprisoned for a few months; while _for a first offence_ of the kind a woman was kindly permitted to be hanged or beheaded _without benefit of clergy_; and the clergy went scot free.* The Church did then as it does now, it claimed all the benefits of citizenship and paid none of the penalties and bore none of the burdens.**

* Blackstone. Christian.

** It still claims exemption from taxation, thus throwing its burden on others; and it also claims immunity from the very gambling laws which it so rigidly enforces against other institutions.

The Church did then just as it does now, in principle, in setting up certain great benefits which _only priests might hope to obtain, and then enacting that certain persons were forever ineligible to the priesthood_; and the same or quite as good reasons were given for denying women such relief from the penalties of the law as was freely extended to men, as are given to-day for refusing her the liberty, emoluments, and benefits that are freely accorded to the most imbecile little theological student who is educated by the needle of a sister and supported by money wrung from the fears of shop or factory girls, to whom he paints the terrors of hell, and freely threatens the same to those who disobey him. Salvation comes high, but no preacher ever gets so poor that he cannot distribute hell free of charge to the multitude without the least diminution of his stock-in-trade.

I should think that an orthodox pulpit would be about the last place a self-respecting woman would wish to fill; but I am glad, since there are some who do so wish, that the issue has again been forced upon the Church, and that in 1884, true to her history, she was again compelled to acknowledge herself a respecter of persons, a degrader of women, and a clog to progress and individual liberty, equality, and conscience.

I am glad that women have recently forced the Methodist and Presbyterian Churches to declare their principles of class preference and partial legislation. I am glad that in 1884 these Churches were compelled to say in effect to women, so that the world could hear: "You are not and you never can be our equals. We are holy. You are unclean. We will hold you back and down to the ancient level we made for you just as long as the life is in us; and if you ever receive recognition as a human being, it must be at the hands of those who defy the Church and hate creeds that are not big enough to go all round. Our creeds are only large enough to give each sex half. But we won't be stingy, we only want our share. You are entirely welcome to all the degradation here and all the damnation hereafter; and any man who attempts to deprive you of these blessings is a heretic and a sinner. Let us pray."

EDUCATION.

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.*