Part 6 (1/2)

OBEY

After witnessing the e 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 coe 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 fewup frankly, ”I do not think they ought!”

Here was a young clergyreat earnestness and self-devotion, who included it anorant young girls a soleht not to incur, and did not believe that they would keep There could hardly be a better illustration of the confusion in the public mind, or the rown, or the subtile way in which this subjection has been interwoven with sacred ties, and baptized ”duty”

The advocates of wo the terms ”subjection,” ”oppression,” and ”slavery,” as applied to woman They siinal abolitionists They are ”as harsh as truth, as unco as justice” Of course they talk about oppression and emancipation It is the word _obey_ that constitutes 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-iion Make the e 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 proone

That there e covenant, the usages of nations often add syenerally sih to be understood The Hebrew cereroom took off his slipper and struck the bride on the neck as she crossed his threshold, was uneant said, when a white prisoner questioned his authority, and he pointed to the _chevrons_ on his sleeve, ”Dat overnnition, 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 hurown 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 h the ion for his own satisfaction, he could not iro 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 pass through it; and this because she had proifted wolish birth,--that, before she obtained the divorce which separated her froate husband, she once went for counsel to the wife of her pastor She unrolled before her the long catalogue offinally 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 woave 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 Woate, nor man to assume, a responsibility so awful Just in proportion as it is consistently carried out, it trains ent 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 hteous promise to obey

WOMAN IN THE CHRYSALIS

When the bride receives the ring upon her finger, and utters--if she utters it--the pro 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 e of obedience--the whole theory of inequality in e--is simply what is left to us of a for, e, ie, 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 faether by paternal power _(patria potestas)_ If the father died, his powers passed to the son or grandson, as the possible head of a new family; but these powers could never pass to a woe, , she was still subject through life to her nearest uardians She was under perpetual guardianshi+p, both as to person and property No years, no experience, couldbut 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 notthe wife's legal guardian If the woorously held under so 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 sonized 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 ish 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 wohter of her husband” All she had became his, and after his death she was retained in the saht appoint

Afterwards, to soften this rigid bond, the wo temporarily deposited by her fauardians over her; and thus, between the two tyrannies, she won a sort of independence Then came Christianity, and swept away theall upon the husband

Hence our legislation bears the nized as an equal and half as a slave

It is necessary to remember, therefore, that all the relation of subjection in e is merely the residue of an unnatural systerown It would have seemed to an ancient Ro, 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 a us, on the contrary, both these theories of obedience seem barbarous, and the one is ard the history of the Theory of Tutelage If we could believe that a chrysalis is always a chrysalis, and a butterfly always a butterfly, we could easily leave each to its appropriate sphere; but e see the chrysalis open, and the butterfly come half out of it, we know that sooner or later it e implies the chrysalis Woman is the butterfly Sooner or later she will be wholly out