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 inst.i.tutions 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 n.o.bler 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" mult.i.tudes 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 mult.i.tudes 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 circ.u.mstances 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 appet.i.te. I hold that the most legitimate outcome of such an education is to be found in the cla.s.s 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 a.s.sumed, _on the theory of Natural Law, the equality of the s.e.xes_, 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 const.i.tutions 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 pa.s.sages 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 G.o.d" 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 ill.u.s.trated 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 p.r.o.nounced "infidels, destroyers of the Bible, the home, and the dignity of women," aided by women whom the orthodox deride as "strong--minded, ill-balanced, coa.r.s.e, 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 a.s.sent 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 s.e.x 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 inst.i.tutions is likely to restore to married women the personal liberty conferred on them by the middle Roman law_."