Part 6 (1/2)
OBEY
After witnessing the marriage ceremony of the Episcopal Church, the other day, I walked down the aisle with the young rector who had officiated. It was natural to speak of the beauty of the Church service on an occasion like that; but, after doing this, I felt compelled to protest against the unrighteous pledge to obey. ”I hope,” I said, ”to live to see that word expunged from the Episcopal service, as it has been from that of the Methodists. The Roman Catholics, you know, have never had it.”
”Why do you object?” he asked. ”Is it because you know that they will not obey?”
”Because they ought not,” I said.
”Well,” said he, after a few moments' reflection, and looking up frankly, ”I do not think they ought!”
Here was a young clergyman of great earnestness and self-devotion, who included it among the sacred duties of his life to impose upon ignorant young girls a solemn obligation, which he yet thought they ought not to incur, and did not believe that they would keep. There could hardly be a better ill.u.s.tration of the confusion in the public mind, or the manner in which ”the subjection of woman” is being outgrown, or the subtile way in which this subjection has been interwoven with sacred ties, and baptized ”duty.”
The advocates of woman suffrage are constantly reproved for using the terms ”subjection,” ”oppression,” and ”slavery,” as applied to woman. They simply commit the same sin as that committed by the original abolitionists. They are ”as harsh as truth, as uncompromising as justice.” Of course they talk about oppression and emanc.i.p.ation. It is the word _obey_ that const.i.tutes the one, and shows the need of the other. Whoever is pledged to obey is technically and literally a slave, no matter how many roses surround the chains. All the more so if the slavery is self-imposed, and surrounded by all the prescriptions of religion. Make the marriage tie as close as church or state can make it; but let it be equal, impartial. That it may be so, the word _obey_ must be abandoned or made reciprocal. Where invariable obedience is promised, equality is gone.
That there may be no doubt about the meaning of this word in the marriage covenant, the usages of nations often add symbolic explanations. These are generally simple, and brutal enough to be understood. The Hebrew ceremony, when the bridegroom took off his slipper and struck the bride on the neck as she crossed his threshold, was unmistakable. As my black sergeant said, when a white prisoner questioned his authority, and he pointed to the _chevrons_ on his sleeve, ”Dat mean guv'ment.” All these forms mean simply government also. The ceremony of the slipper has now no recognition, except when people fling an old shoe after the bride, which is held by antiquarians to be the same observance. But it is all preserved and concentrated into a single word, when the bride promises to obey.
The deepest wretchedness that has ever been put into human language, or that has exceeded it, has grown out of that pledge. There is no misery on earth like that of a pure and refined woman who finds herself owned, body and soul, by a drunken, licentious, brutal man. The very fact that she is held to obedience by a spiritual tie makes it worse. Chattel slavery was not so bad; for, though the master might pervert religion for his own satisfaction, he could not impose upon the slave. Never yet did I see a negro slave who thought it a duty to obey his master; and therefore there was always some dream of release. But who has not heard of some delicate and refined woman, one day of whose torture was equivalent to years of that possible to an obtuse frame,--who had the door of escape ready at hand for years, and yet died a lingering death rather than pa.s.s through it; and this because she had promised to obey!
It is said of one of the most gifted women who ever trod American soil,-- she being of English birth,--that, before she obtained the divorce which separated her from her profligate husband, she once went for counsel to the wife of her pastor. She unrolled before her the long catalogue of merciless outrages to which she had been subject, endangering finally her health, her life, and that of her children born and to be born. When she turned at last for advice to her confessor, with the agonized inquiry, ”What is it my duty to do?”--”Do?” said the stern adviser: ”Lie down on the floor, and let your husband trample on you if he will. That is a woman's duty.”
The woman who gave this advice was not naturally inhuman nor heartless: she had simply been trained in the school of obedience. The Jesuit doctrine, that a priest should be as a corpse, _perinde ac cadaver_, in the hands of a superior priest, is not worse. Woman has no right to delegate, nor man to a.s.sume, a responsibility so awful. Just in proportion as it is consistently carried out, it trains men from boyhood into self-indulgent tyrants; and, while some women are transformed by it to saints, others are crushed into deceitful slaves. That this was the result of chattel slavery, this nation has at length learned. We learn more slowly the profounder and more subtile moral evil that follows from the unrighteous promise to obey.
WOMAN IN THE CHRYSALIS
When the bride receives the ring upon her finger, and utters--if she utters it--the promise to obey, she sees a poetic beauty in the rite. Turning of her own free will from her maiden liberty, she voluntarily takes the yoke of service upon her. This is her view; but is this the historic fact in regard to marriage? Not at all. The pledge of obedience--the whole theory of inequality in marriage--is simply what is left to us of a former state of society, in which every woman, old or young, must obey somebody. The state of tutelage, implied in such a marriage, is merely what is left of the old theory of the ”Perpetual Tutelage of Women,” under the Roman law.
Roman law, from which our civil law is derived, has its foundation evidently in patriarchal tradition. It recognized at first the family only, and that family was held together by paternal power _(patria potestas)_. If the father died, his powers pa.s.sed to the son or grandson, as the possible head of a new family; but these powers could never pa.s.s to a woman, and every woman, of whatever age, must be under somebody's legal control. Her father dying, she was still subject through life to her nearest male relations, or to her father's nominees, as her guardians. She was under perpetual guardians.h.i.+p, both as to person and property. No years, no experience, could make her anything but a child before the law.
In Oriental countries the system was still more complete. ”A man,” says the Gentoo Code of Laws, ”must keep his wife so much in subjection that she by no means be mistress of her own action. If the wife have her own free will, notwithstanding she be of a superior caste, she will behave amiss.” But this authority, which still exists in India, is not merely conjugal. The husband exerts it simply as being the wife's legal guardian. If the woman be unmarried or a widow, she must be as rigorously held under some other guardians.h.i.+p. It is no uncommon thing for a woman in India to be the ward of her own son. Lucretia Mott or Florence Nightingale would there be in personal subjection to somebody. Any man of legal age would be recognized as a fit custodian for them, but there must be a man.
With some variation of details at different periods, the same system prevailed essentially at Rome, down to the time when Rome became Christian.
Those who wish for particulars will find them in an admirable chapter (the fifth) of Maine's ”Ancient Law.” At one time the husband was held to possess the _patria potestas_, or paternal power, in its full force. By law ”the woman pa.s.sed _in manum viri_, that is, she became the daughter of her husband.” All she had became his, and after his death she was retained in the same strict tutelage by any guardians his will might appoint.
Afterwards, to soften this rigid bond, the woman was regarded in law as being temporarily deposited by her family with her husband; the family appointed guardians over her; and thus, between the two tyrannies, she won a sort of independence. Then came Christianity, and swept away the merely parental authority for married women, concentrating all upon the husband.
Hence our legislation bears the mark of a double origin, and woman is half recognized as an equal and half as a slave.
It is necessary to remember, therefore, that all the relation of subjection in marriage is merely the residue of an unnatural system, of which all else is long since outgrown. It would have seemed to an ancient Roman a matter of course that a woman should, all her life long, obey the guardians set over her person. It still seems to many people a matter of course that she should obey her husband. To others among us, on the contrary, both these theories of obedience seem barbarous, and the one is merely a relic of the other.
We cannot disregard the history of the Theory of Tutelage. If we could believe that a chrysalis is always a chrysalis, and a b.u.t.terfly always a b.u.t.terfly, we could easily leave each to its appropriate sphere; but when we see the chrysalis open, and the b.u.t.terfly come half out of it, we know that sooner or later it must spread wings, and fly. The theory of tutelage implies the chrysalis. Woman is the b.u.t.terfly. Sooner or later she will be wholly out.
TWO AND TWO
A young man of very good brains was telling me, the other day, his dreams of his future wife. Rattling on, more in joke than in earnest, he said, ”She must be perfectly ignorant, and a bigot: she must know nothing, and believe everything. I should wish to have her from the adjoining room call to me, 'My dear, what do two and two make?'”