It is a significant fact that of all the Christian countries, in those where the Church stands highest and has most power women rank lowest and have fewest rights accorded them, whether of personal liberty or proprietary interest. In the countries named above, and in other countries where the Church still has a strong grip upon the throat of the State, woman"s position is degraded indeed; while in the three so-called Christian countries where the Church has _least_ power, where law is not wholly or in so large part canonical, woman"s position is more free, more independent, and less degraded, when compared with the position of the men of those countries.
That tells the whole story. If it were to the Church or to her religion that she owed her advancement, it would be in the most strictly Christian countries that her elevation and advantages would be greatest.
Under the canon law her status would be higher than under the common law. On the contrary, however, it is under the least religious, freest, and most purely secular forms of government that she has attained most full recognition and secured the greatest advancement.
Compare the position of woman in Christian Spain with her position in Infidel France. Compare her condition in Russia, with the flag of the Church and the seal of the Cross for her protection, with that of her sister under the stars and stripes of America, with a const.i.tution written by the infidels Jefferson and Paine.
Compare them and decide whether it is to the Church and the Cross, with their wars and persecutions, or to Liberty and Scepticism that women owe their loyal love and their earnest support. Compare them and determine then whether it is to Christianity or to Science that she should fly for protection, and where it is that she will be most certain of justice.
Compare them and answer whether it is to the Fathers of the Church or to the Founders of Republics that women should be most grateful. Compare them, and be thankful, oh women of America, that the Church never had her hand on the throat of the Const.i.tution of the United States, and that she is losing her grip on the Supreme Bench! *
In our pride of race we forget that it is less than three hundred short years since Christianity by both legal and spiritual power enforced the most degrading and vile conditions upon woman, compelling her to live solely by the sale of her virtue.**
Only within the past three hundred years of growing scepticism and loss of power by the Church has either purity or dignity become possible for women; and it is well for us to remember that for over 1500 years of Christianity, when the Church had almost absolute power, it never dreamed of elevating woman, or recognizing her as other than an inferior being created solely to minister to the lowest nature of man, and possessing neither a right to her own person nor a voice in her own defence.
I wish that every woman who upholds the Church to-day might read the array of facts on this subject so ably presented by Matilda Joslyn Gage in her work on "Woman, Church, and State," a digest of which is printed in the last chapter of vol. 1. of the "History of Woman Suffrage," of which she is one of the editors. It is so ably written, and the facts collected are so d.a.m.ning, that I need add no word of mine to such pa.s.sages as I can give from it, in the accompanying appendix to this work. ***
* On the status of women there is much of interest in Mr.
Herbert Spencer"s "Principles of Sociology," vol 1. Mr.
Spencer deals with the subject, in the main, from a different point of view from the one taken in this article; but that his position (in regard to the causes of woman"s advancement being due to the Church) is not wholly unlike my own, will, I think, be readily seen. He places more stress on the results of war than I have done (and in this the corroborating evidence furnished by the Holy wars would sustain the position of both), I having included this phase of action under the term occupation, since I have dealt almost wholly with nations more advanced and freer from the fortunes of the Militant type than Mr. Spencer has done.
** See Appendix D.
*** See Appendix E.
WOMEN AS PERSONS.
Blackstone enumerates three "absolute rights of persons." First, "The right of personal _security_, in the legal enjoyment of life, limb, body, health, and reputation." Second, "The right of personal liberty--free power of locomotion without legal restraint." Third, "The right of private property--the free use and disposal of his own lawful acquisitions."
None of these three primary and essential rights of persons were conceded to women, and Church law did not rank her as a person deprived of these rights, but held that she was _not a person at all_, but only a function; therefore she possessed no rights of person in this world and no hope of safety in the next.
As to the first of these "absolute rights of persons," any one of her male relations, or her husband after she pa.s.sed from one to the other, had absolute power over her, even to the extent of bodily injury,*
bargain and sale of her person, and death. Nor did even this limit the number of her masters. By both Church and Common Law the Lords temporal (barons and other peers) and the Lords spiritual (Archbishops, Bishops, and Abbots) possessed and exercised the right to dispose of her purity, either for a money consideration or as a bribe or present as they saw fit.**
* "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 chast.i.ty, 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 s.e.x--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 a.s.saulted 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 G.o.d 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 p.r.o.nounced 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 G.o.d, 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 d.a.m.n you; there is nothing mean or n.i.g.g.ardly 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 ent.i.tled to the earnings of her children.
Sharswood says, "A father is ent.i.tled 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 s.e.x.... Led by their theory of Natural Law, the Roman [Pagan] jurisconsults had evidently at this time a.s.sumed the equality of the s.e.xes 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 s.e.x 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 emanc.i.p.ation 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 r.e.t.a.r.ding the progress and shutting out the light that slowly came in despite of her.
"_No society which preserves any tincture of Christian inst.i.tutions 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._"*