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COMPARATIVE STATUS

It is a fact that in some Christian countries the actual status of woman is higher than it is to-day in any other country; but it is also true that her comparative status is often lower.²¹

If we compare the actual status of woman in Russia or Spain (the two most intensely Christian countries to-day) with that of the Chinese or Hindoo woman, the showing may be somewhat in favor of the former; but on the other hand, her comparative position (when taken with that of the men of her country) does not gain but loses by the contrast.

"How immeasurably would his faith in the elevating tendency of his religion have been increased, could he have looked with prophetic eye into the distant ages of the future, and beheld the enlightened and Christianized nations of the nineteenth century adopting the remains of Grecian architecture, sculpture, painting, oratory, music, and literature as their models!

"Pagan Rome, too, once mistress of the world and arbitress of nations – the home of philosophers and sages – the land in which the title, 'I am a Roman citizen,' was the proudest that a mortal could wear – Rome, by the above Christian argument, should have ascribed all her honor, praise, and glory to her mythology.

"The Turk and the Saracen, likewise, have had their day of power and renown. Bagdad was the seat of science and learning at a time when the nations of Europe were sunk in darkness and superstition. The Turk and Saracen should have pointed to the Koran as the source of their refinement.

"Thus we see that the Christian argument we are noticing, if it proves anything, proves too much. If the nations of Christendom are indebted to the Bible for their enlightenment, likewise were the Egyptians indebted to their cat and crocodile and onion worship, the Greeks and Romans to their mythology, and the Turks and Saracens to their Koran."

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 constitution 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 Constitution of the United States, and that she is losing her grip on the Supreme Bench!²²

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.²³

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 damning, that I need add no word of mine to such passages as I can give from it, in the accompanying appendix to this work.²⁴

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 passed from one to the other, had absolute power over her, even to the extent of bodily injury,²⁵ 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.²⁶

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 chastity, 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 sex – from first to last has been as ingenious a method as could have been devised to fill the world with libertines and their victims.²⁷ It is time for the followers of St. Paul to nice the results of their own work.

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 assaulted 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 God 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." Augustines²⁸ and "St." Pelayos,²⁹ whose praises are chanted and whose divine goodness is recounted by Christendom to-day.

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 pronounced 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 God, 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 damn you; there is nothing mean or niggardly 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 entitled to the earnings of her children.

Sharswood says, "A father is entitled 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."³⁰

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 sex… Led by their theory of Natural Law, the Roman [Pagan] jurisconsults had evidently at this time assumed the equality of the sexes 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 sex 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 emancipation 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 retarding the progress and shutting out the light that slowly came in despite of her.

"No society which preserves any tincture of Christian institutions 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."³¹

It has always been uphill work fighting the Church. So long as it had sword and fagot at its command, and the will to use them; so long as it pretended to have, and people believed that it had, power to mete out damnation to its opposers; just so long were science, justice, and thought fatally crippled.

But when Voltaire, Diderot, Condorcet and the great encyclopedist circle of France got their hands on the throat of the Church, and dipped their pens in the fire of eloquence, wit, ridicule, reason, and justice, then, and not till then, began to dawn a day of honor toward women, of humanity and justice and truth. They drew back the curtain, the world saw, the cloud lifted, and life began on a new plane. Under Pagan rule woman had begun, as we have seen, to receive recognition apart from sex. She was a human being. A general law of "persons" applied to and shielded her. But from the first the Christian Church refused to consider her apart from her capacity for reproduction; and this one ground of consideration it pronounced a curse, a crime, and a shame to her. Her only claim to recognition at all was a curse. She was not a person, she was only a function.³²

Man it pronounced a person first, with rights, privileges, and protection as such. Incidentally he might also be a husband, a father, or a son. His welfare, duties, and rights as a person, as a human being, were apart from and superior to those that were special and incidental. He received consideration always as a person. He might be dealt with as husband or father.

But ignoring all her mental life and denying that she had any, and ignoring all her physical possibilities, ambitions, desires, and capabilities as a person, the Church narrowed woman's life and restricted her energies into a compass where its power over her became absolute and her subjection certain. Nor has the loss been wholly to woman, for any influence which cripples the mother's capacity of endowment takes cruel revenge on the race.³³

From this outlook the debt of civilization to the Church is heavy indeed. Is it a debt of gratitude?

Under this head there is space for but one point farther, out of the great store at hand.

The clergy were licensed to commit crime. They got up a neat little scheme called "benefit of clergy" by which they were secure from the punishment meted out to other criminals. The relief offered did sometimes reach other men, but as learning was largely confined to the clergy they were the chief beneficiaries, as the name implies and as was the intent of the law. Any man who could read was allowed "benefit of clergy;" in other words, his punishment was lightened or entirely omitted. But a woman, though she were a perfect mine of wisdom and could read in any number of languages, could receive no such benefit, because she could not take holy orders. They first enacted that she should not take orders, and then they denied to her the relief which only that ability could give. So great a favorite was woman with the Church!

The ordinary male criminal received the ordinary punishment, the clergy received none; and in order that the requisite gross amount of suffering for crime should be inflicted on somebody, the clergy enacted that woman should receive their share vicariously in addition to her own, and then to this they added such interest as would make the twenty-per-cent-a-month men of Wall street ashamed of their stupid financiering.

Thus the Church arrogated to itself the exclusive right to commit crime with impunity, and also claimed and exercised the right to prevent women from learning to read. If she still persisted it could then punish her doubly, because she had no right to learn.

For offenses for which ordinary men were hanged, women were burned alive, and priests were glorified. For larceny a man was branded in the hand or imprisoned for a few months; while for a first offence of the kind a woman was kindly permitted to be hanged or beheaded without benefit of clergy; and the clergy went scot free.³⁴ The Church did then as it does now, it claimed all the benefits of citizenship and paid none of the penalties and bore none of the burdens.³⁵

The Church did then just as it does now, in principle, in setting up certain great benefits which only priests might hope to obtain, and then enacting that certain persons were forever ineligible to the priesthood; and the same or quite as good reasons were given for denying women such relief from the penalties of the law as was freely extended to men, as are given to-day for refusing her the liberty, emoluments, and benefits that are freely accorded to the most imbecile little theological student who is educated by the needle of a sister and supported by money wrung from the fears of shop or factory girls, to whom he paints the terrors of hell, and freely threatens the same to those who disobey him. Salvation comes high, but no preacher ever gets so poor that he cannot distribute hell free of charge to the multitude without the least diminution of his stock-in-trade.

I should think that an orthodox pulpit would be about the last place a self-respecting woman would wish to fill; but I am glad, since there are some who do so wish, that the issue has again been forced upon the Church, and that in 1884, true to her history, she was again compelled to acknowledge herself a respecter of persons, a degrader of women, and a clog to progress and individual liberty, equality, and conscience.

I am glad that women have recently forced the Methodist and Presbyterian Churches to declare their principles of class preference and partial legislation. I am glad that in 1884 these Churches were compelled to say in effect to women, so that the world could hear: "You are not and you never can be our equals. We are holy. You are unclean. We will hold you back and down to the ancient level we made for you just as long as the life is in us; and if you ever receive recognition as a human being, it must be at the hands of those who defy the Church and hate creeds that are not big enough to go all round. Our creeds are only large enough to give each sex half. But we won't be stingy, we only want our share. You are entirely welcome to all the degradation here and all the damnation hereafter; and any man who attempts to deprive you of these blessings is a heretic and a sinner. Let us pray."