Part 10 (2/2)
With Eastern nations the veil was the sign of retirement, of domestic life, and it was a.s.sumed by wives when they were in the street or in a public a.s.sembly. In heathen and barbarous countries it was also deemed a sign of woman's subjection and inferiority. The Hebrews were the first people to attain any truly spiritual conceptions, and they began to have a commensurately higher idea of the possibilities of woman's nature and work. When Christian women, in their new-found freedom, would have thrown aside the veil, just as Christian men, in their new-found reverence for G.o.d, would have repudiated the heathen wife, Paul said to them both that Christian liberty was individual,--it changed the character, not the s.e.x relations. In arranging for church discipline, he advised that men should uncover the head, and women should wear the veil. But he said, in reference to that veil, that ”woman should have _power_ on her head, because of the angels.” The angels are spoken of in the New Testament as veiling their faces in the very presence of the Creator. In that truer symbolism of Christianity, man was to uncover his head in token of reverence to G.o.d and acceptance of the responsibility of the guardians.h.i.+p of the earth. Woman was to cover her head in token of her acceptance of man's guardians.h.i.+p and of her dominion over his heart, to which she had revealed G.o.d's will.
Paul adds: ”For as the woman is of the man, so is the man also of the woman; but all things are of G.o.d.” This relation was one of the mysteries that Paul said he did not comprehend, nor could he, till the lessons he taught should work out their results, and might serve as commentary.
Life itself, as well as all that life could come to mean, depended upon woman's consenting. The word ”obey” in some marriage services seems, like what it really is, a survival. Obedience has brought its reward, and the consent of the heart is more than the consent of the lips. But if there is no consent of the heart to wifehood and motherhood, in time there will be no chivalry, no progress, no final emanc.i.p.ation for the race. Consenting is also commanding, and woman loses her life in order to find it in the fulfillment of her wish. It was consent to her own teaching. The chivalrous and tender-hearted Paul, who spoke of women with reverent affection, who adopted as his own the mother of Rufus, was repeating the lesson of every Jewish mother from Sarah to Deborah, and from Deborah to the women who were last at Christ's cross and first beside his tomb.
Deborah, who was the judge, prophetess and poet, but first of all ”a mother in Israel,” under whom her degenerate people had peace for forty years, rebuked Barak and said, to their humiliation: ”This day shall the Lord deliver Israel by the hand of a woman.” From this teaching Paul uttered his rebuke to the wayward church at Corinth: ”It is a shame for a man to cover his head, inasmuch as he is the image and glory of G.o.d; but the woman is the glory of the man.” And he added, in speaking of the wearing of the veil, ”For this cause ought the woman to have power”
”because of the angels.” In the Epistle to the Ephesians Paul admonishes the Church to be ”imitators of G.o.d, as beloved children, and walk in love, even as Christ also loved you, and gave himself for you, an offering and a sacrifice to G.o.d for a sweet-smelling savour.” Again, he says: ”Therefore, as the Church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in everything.” And as if to make doubly certain that no one should think that such submission implied bondage or inequality, he adds ”Husbands, love your wives even as Christ also loved the Church and _gave himself for it_.” Again, he says: ”So ought men to love their wives, as their own bodies.... Even as the Lord the Church,” adding with almost strained Oriental vehemence, ”for we are members of his body, of his flesh and of his bones. For this cause shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall be joined unto his wife, and they twain shall be one flesh.”
The comment most readily suggested is, that through this teaching the use of the veil has now no such significance. The uncovering of the head is a token of respect, largely to woman. The retention of the bonnet is not dreamed of in connection with woman's relation to man, nor does it suggest woman's power in the moral world. The obedience through which love ”constrained” a mind that had been bred to forms, was free. If anybody now holds that woman was intended to glorify G.o.d indirectly, through man, or to serve G.o.d by serving man, he makes an a.s.sumption long discredited, and not in accord with the spirit of Christ and of Paul. Man is as much the glory of woman as woman is the glory of man, and they reveal equally the glory of G.o.d.
In speaking of the proprieties of life, Paul said: ”Does not nature herself teach you?” ”If a man have long hair, it is a shame to him.” ”If a woman have long hair, it is a glory to her.” The badge of womanhood is a glory, and the ”short-haired women and long-haired men” of the early Suffrage movement transformed the symbols of dignity and honor into those of contempt and disgrace.
Canon law grew up during the Middle Ages, when came the great
”Death-grapple in the darkness, 'twixt old systems and the Word.”
The wondrous church that rose on the ruins of Roman militarism, and overthrew Norman feudalism, gave evidence, in its code, of the bitterness of the conflict and the rudeness of the time. The legal fiction that, in acknowledging the oneness of husband and wife, yet made the husband that one, was a perversion of Scripture.
It has been publicly said by Suffragists from the first, that the tenets of the Church of Rome, in which Canon law had its origin, were inimical to woman suffrage; and they have further said that those who canonize women and wors.h.i.+p the Virgin Mother, should naturally have been friendly to the Suffrage idea. I suppose no one will deny that the spirit of the Roman body is that of a state church. I have no more to say in criticism of it as a Christian denomination than I have of others; but that organization which has held temporal and spiritual power to be co-ordinate and interdependent in government, presents a political phase that has direct bearing on my theme, and I make my few comments as a historian. The Church that inculcates Mariolatry would have far more ignorant women to add to our body of voters than any other. It has done less for woman's education and general advancement than any other, but its claims are not therefore modest. The school elections in Staten Island last year gave an object- lesson in regard to its intention to use the suffrage. In Connecticut, the school election presented another evidence of the intense interest felt by the Catholic clergy in public-school matters. In California, in the late canva.s.s for woman suffrage, that Church a.s.sisted largely in carrying on the work to secure the amendment. While many of its individual members are among the n.o.blest friends that civil and religious freedom have in our country, this church, by its traditions, and by its latest p.r.o.nunciamentos, shows itself as a force that, for its own selfish reasons, may be reckoned on the side of woman suffrage in its conflict with woman's progress.
CHAPTER X.
WOMAN SUFFRAGE AND s.e.x.
The ninth count of the Suffrage Declaration says: ”He has created a false sentiment by giving to the world a different code of morals for men and women, by which moral delinquencies which exclude woman from society, are not only tolerated, but deemed of little account in men.” And the list of grievances is summed up as follows: ”Because women do feel themselves aggrieved, oppressed and fraudulently deprived of their most sacred rights, we insist that they have immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of the United States.”
The writers do not say whether the code of morals referred to is a code of law or an unwritten code of public sentiment. If they mean the former, their statement is not true; for whatever laws affect moral delinquencies visit their penalties equally upon men and women. If they mean public sentiment alone, the answer is, that both men and women are responsible for its creation. It is folly to deny that there is, in the nature of things, more excuse for men than for women. A mother realizes that her son has a natural temptation of which her daughter knows nothing. But this fact, while it accounts in part for the different standard, by no means exonerates man. One of the strangest anomalies of human experience exists in connection with this matter. Man reposes his deepest faith in the existence of goodness at its vital point, in the virtue of woman; and yet when he tramples upon that virtue he screens himself behind the excuse that her nature is as vulnerable as his own, while his temptation is greater. The main reason, as it seems to me, why women often appear more cruel to their fallen sisters than do men, lies in the fact that pure women abhor this vice as they abhor no other. Besides bestowing upon woman a loftier moral sense, her Creator has hedged about her virtue with a feeling of physical repulsion that is distinct from the moral question involved. The social life of the world is to a large extent in woman's hands. When she says to men ”You cannot bring your impurity into my home,”
”You must be the ones to guard our sons and daughters,” the reform will be begun in earnest. Woman's faith, and her abstract way of looking at moral questions, prevent her from fastening her thought, as men naturally do, on any special culprit, in her severe but vague sense of wrong in this matter. The Suffragists have taken fewer steps in the direction of removing the social plague-spot than in the direction of bringing about a system of easier divorce--a thing that strikes a blow directly against, instead of for, the virtue of their s.e.x. Social opinion is causing a change in some of the laws concerning social vice. Nearly every State legislature has raised the age of consent. So far as Suffrage a.s.sociations have a.s.sisted in this, it proves their ability and their good will; but much more is due to our educated physicians and philanthropists.
It seems at first thought as if there were no direct connection between voting and social questions of s.e.x; but I am following the lead of my Suffrage texts. Others who attempt the discussion are led to the same themes. Dr. Jacobi, in her book, says: ”The problem is, to show why, in a representative system based on the double principle that all the intelligence in the state shall be enlisted for its welfare, and all the weakness in the state represented for its own defence, women, being often intelligent, and often weak, and always persons in the community, should not also be represented.” In replying to the anti-suffrage arguments of Prof. Goldwin Smith, she says: ”Do s.e.x relations depend upon acts of Parliament or const.i.tutional amendments? Can women marry a ballot, or embrace the franchise, otherwise than by a questionable figure of speech?
Must adultery and infanticide necessarily be favored by the decisions of female jurors? Is divorce legislation, as arranged by the exclusive wisdom of men, now so satisfactory that women--who must perforce be involved in every case--should always modestly refrain from attempting amendment? This entire cla.s.s of considerations, however irrelevant to the issue, may be grouped together and considered together, because, to a large cla.s.s of minds--the rudest, quite as much as those of Mr. Smith's cultivation--they are the considerations that do come to the front whenever equal rights are suggested.” She adds that the reason they come to the front is, ”that men, accustomed to think of men as possessing s.e.x attributes and other things besides, are accustomed to think of women as having s.e.x and nothing else.”
Is there a ruder mind anywhere than one that could not only think but write a sentiment so revolting and so false? And yet the statement admits that, whatever the reason, the s.e.x issue does underlie the whole Suffrage question.
In their ”History,” the leaders not only set forth all the specific charges in their Declaration of Sentiments, but of this ”rebellion such as the world has never seen” they say: ”Men saw that with political equality for woman, she could no longer be kept in social subjection. The fear of a social revolution thus complicated the discussion.”
In the Introduction to the Suffrage Woman's Bible, the commentators say: ”How can woman's position be changed from that of a subordinate to an equal, without opposition?--without the broadest discussion of all the questions involved in her present degradation? For so far-reaching and momentous a reform as her complete independence, an entire revolution in all existing inst.i.tutions is inevitable.”
Dr. Jacobi says: ”To-day, when all men rule, and diffused self-government has abolished the old divisions between the governing cla.s.ses and the governed, only one cla.s.s remains over whom all men can exercise sovereignty--namely, the women. Hence a shuddering dread runs through society at the proposal to also abolish this last refuge of facile domination.”
Here, then, all these Suffragists present a problem far more momentous than appears when it is proposed ”to show why, in a representative system based on the double principle that all the intelligence in the state shall be enlisted for its welfare, and all the weakness in the state represented for its defence, women, being often intelligent, and often weak, and always persons, should not also be represented.” It is the s.e.x battle that has been waged from the beginning. In the Suffrage Woman's Bible Mrs.
Stanton says: ”The correction of this [the misinterpretation of the Bible as concerns woman] will restore her, and deprive her enemy, man, of a reason for his oppression and a weapon of attack.” Disguise it as they may, to themselves and to others, the Suffrage idea is compelled to claim that man is woman's enemy, that the ballot is the engine of his power, and that therefore she must vote. The reason that ”these considerations come to the front whenever equal rights is mentioned” is because the women of that movement brought them there, and keep them there, and because no one can seriously consider the matter without seeing that they belong there.
In discussing them, Dr. Jacobi says: ”What is imagined, claimed, and very seriously demanded, is, that women be recognized as human beings, with a range of faculties and activities co-extensive with that of men, whatever may be the difference in the powers within that range.”
In another place she admits that ”women are really recognized as individuals, the same as men,” and the fact that they are so recognized is made the basis of an argument for their voting. Suppose men demanded that they be given a ”range of faculties and activities co-extensive with that of women, whatever may be the difference in the powers within that range,”
if they demanded it ”seriously” they would probably become laughing- stocks.
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