There are traces of separate property rights for woman, early among Aryan peoples. By the old laws of Wales, a wife became legal owner of part of her husband’s effects immediately upon marrying him, and had the sole disposal of this portion even during her husband’s life. Debt owed by a husband to a wife was as binding on him and his heirs and executors as a debt to any other person. After the English laws were introduced into Wales, innumerable disputes arose upon this ground. The Welsh woman being persistent in her determination to cling to her old rights, and for nearly two hundred years her will upon this subject was stronger than the will of English legislators, as proven by legal records. In other respects the ancient law of Wales favored woman. A husband’s fetid breath was held as good cause for divorce on part of the wife, who in such case took with her the whole of her property. While still living with her husband, the Welsh wife possessed the right to three kinds of property, cowyll, gowyn, and sarand, known as her three peculiars. Old Welsh law was unique in that it forbade both satisfaction and vengeance for the same wrong. Even if detecting his wife in adultery, for which he should chastise her, the husband was forbidden any satisfaction besides that. In case of an illegitimate birth the law provided that the man should wholly maintain the child, a species of justice not found under Christianity. The laws of “Howell the Good,” enacted at a later date under the supervision of the church favored the man at the woman’s expense. Under these laws if a husband and wife separated, the father took two-thirds of the children, the oldest and the youngest falling to his share, while the middle one fell to the mother. A woman was not admitted as surety, or as a witness in matters concerning a man. In the division of property the daughters received only one half the amount given to the sons.
Under the christian laws of England, by which the property of a married woman passed entirely into the control of her husband, the abduction of heiresses in that country was very common for many hundred years, no punishment following such a theft, although the most compulsory measures were used, even to forcibly bending the bride’s head in affirmative response during the marriage ceremony. She was a woman; the law furnished her no redress. It regarded her as the legal wife of her abductor, to whom she thereafter under this christian law, owed service and obedience. The sole right to her person, her property, her children then becoming legally invested in the robber husband. As noted in the opening chapter, the abduction of a woman, or even an immodest proposal to her, was punished in older un-christianized Scandinavia, by greater or lesser outlawry; rape being a capital crime, placing the culprit’s life in the hands of any man. He was outside the pale of law.
France under frequent changing names and forms of government, and with a broader general recognition each year of human rights, is yet very closely allied to the barbarism of the middle ages in its treatment of woman, and its conception of her natural rights. This was shown even during the revolution of 1787, of which Madame Roland and Charlotte Corday were such central heroic figures. Although this revolution established an equal succession between sons and daughters, yet it did not tolerate the proposition of Sieyes and Condorcet that woman should be endowed with the suffrage. One hundred years later, in 1887, a bill was introduced during the legislative session, to secure to woman the same political rights accorded man. This bill was lost; “Le Gaulois,” commenting upon it, declared that in whatever manner the question was discussed, it appeared grotesque and ridiculous. In the Legislative Assembly of 1851, M. Chapot, proposed the prohibition of the right of petition to women upon all subjects of a political nature. During the same session, Athenase Coquerel, the most distinguished member of a Protestant family of clergymen, presented a bill to the Chambers excluding women from political clubs. Woman’s testimony is not accepted in regard to civil acts. They cannot attest to a birth or a death, nor is their testimony admitted in the identification of persons. Neither can they become members of the family council, nor are they accepted as guardians of their own children. It is only since 1886 that their condition has been in any way ameliorated. The re-marriage of widows is forbidden under ten months after the husband’s death, and until within the last decade, divorces were of great rarity. The oppressed condition of woman in the marriage relation, was notably shown by the vast number of applications for release from the hated bond upon the passage of the new law; a number so great,—eleven thousand,—that two years scarcely sufficed to reach them all. No stronger argument against the evils of an indissoluble marriage is required, and as the greater number of applicants were women, it is farther evidence of woman’s degradation under christian marriage laws.
According to the famous Code Napoleon, accepted by France as her modern system of jurisprudence and declared (by man) to be nearly perfect in its provisions, every child born outside of wedlock is deemed to be fatherless unless such father of his own free will formally acknowledges his offspring. While fifty per cent of all children born in Paris are illegitimate, statistics prove that such acknowledgement takes place but once in fifty births. Thus forty-nine per cent of Parisian children under the Code Napoleon, theoretically come into the world without fathers—they are born fatherless. A still more heinous provision of this Code, forbids all research into paternity. The father of an illegitimate child—rendered illegitimate by church canons—is held as both morally and legally irresponsible for his fatherhood. Under this Code, upon the mother falls all the contumely associated with such birth, together with the care and expense of rearing the child. We cannot be surprised at the prevalence of infanticide, a crime resulting from such unjust legislation, and for which the church is directly responsible. In the whole history of French jurisprudence, not a single case can be found where the father of an illegitimate child has been compelled to acknowledge his offspring. Under French law, woman is a perpetual minor under the guardianship of her own, or that of her husband’s family. Only in case of the birth of an illegitimate child is she treated as a responsible being, and then only that discomfort and punishment may fall upon her. The same legal degradation of the unmarried mother, the same protection accorded the unmarried father, the same enticement of the law for man to assume a fatherhood freeing him from accountability, the same covert contempt of womanhood and of motherhood, also exists in Italy, its penal code forbidding all research into paternity. And this is not the legislation of the middle ages but of the nineteenth century.
But French disregard for the rights of woman, as already shown, far preceded the Code Napoleon; that system but legally emphasized the low estimate of the feminine we have traced through the Salic, Feudal, and Witchcraft periods. Louis VII referring to the number of girls born in his dominions, requested his subjects to pray unto God that he should accord them children of the better sex. Upon the birth of his first child, Margaret, who afterwards married Henry Courtmantel of England, his anger was so great that he would not look at her; he even refused to see his wife. He afterwards accorded an annual pension of three livres to the woman who first announced to him the birth of a son. Although five hundred years have passed since the graphic portrayal of woman’s condition, in the ballad of the Baron of Jauioz, we find the Breton farmer whose wife has given birth to a daughter, still saying, “my wife has had a miscarriage.” Question an ordinary French peasant in regard to his family and the father of girls alone, he will reply, “I have no children, sir, I have only daughters.”
During the feudal period parents gave themselves up to merry-making and rejoicing upon the marriage of the last of their daughters. Even yet, in some countries, the birth of a boy is announced by a servant wearing a white apron and carrying two bouquets in her hand; if a girl she carries but one; in some countries the father of a boy annually received the gift of two loads of wood from the state; but a single one if the child was a girl. Even in the United States we yet see this contempt of the feminine variously manifested, although the kindness and affection of girls to their parents, is usually more notable, than that of boys. Family regard is usually manifested in the descending, rather than the ascending line, yet Herbert Spencer declares that full civilization is dependent upon the respect and affection shown to parents. France is not the only christian land that invalidates a woman’s testimony, receiving the assertion of the woman with less authority than the denial of the man. In Scotland in case of an illegitimate birth, the accused man is allowed to clear himself upon oath, in opposition to that of the woman. Under Scottish law the child born outside of marriage was formerly compelled to do penance in church for the sins of his parents. Such has been the justice of christianity to women and children during the ages. These methods of christianity were in great contrast to those of heathendom. The early Anglo-Saxon (pagan) laws contained provisions for the punishment of assaults upon women. Crimes against her were punished by greater or less outlawry according to the attendant circumstances. Old Scandinavia possessed many laws for the protection of woman. It has sometimes been asserted that these laws were a dead letter, so many instances of loose connections are recorded in the Iceland Sagas. It is, however, a question of fact that these illegal relations, according to the same Sagas were much more frequent after the introduction of christianity than before. Roman law presumed that no woman went astray without the seduction and arts of the other sex, upon whom alone the punishment fell. Under old Saxon, Gothic and Scandinavian law, rape was punished by death. Under the Conqueror, its punishment was castration and loss of the eyes, which continued English law until after Bracton wrote in time of Henry III. A lighter punishment then superseded it, but the effects of this leniency was so evil the old penalty was restored. While forbidding woman control of her own property, common law, under one of those anomalous renderings which mark the constant injustice of Church and State towards woman, held twelve years as the age of female discretion or consent, rape after that age not being regarded as criminal.
Germany with sudden strides has coalesced from a number of independent principalities through the management of him of the iron hand, into a magnificent empire, based upon the destruction of human life. In this empire, where war underlies all, we find woman much more deeply degraded than during the old pagan days, when as chieftain and prophetess her voice was heeded even upon the battlefield. Now, while men are preparing to kill other men, the agriculture of the country and the lowest forms of mechanical labor fall into her hands. But it is not as responsible owner we thus find her; she cultivates the fields as a drudge, upon whom falls all the most severe portion of work. Equally in Germany as in other christian lands, is the wife looked upon as the servant of the husband, to whom she bears children that are his alone, and to whom greater deference is paid by the mother when a large number of little ones call him father. It has been the custom to reward a husband in proportion to the number of children borne him by his wife, and it is but a year since a Parisian journalist suggested that for each additional child borne by his wife, the husband should be allowed half a vote. In Germany as under the common law of England, the wife is subject to chastisement by her husband, its severity being left to his discretion. But the height of barbaric absurdity and wickedness is found in that provision of the Prussian common law which decrees that a husband can determine the length of time his wife must nurse her child. As might be expected, at his death the wife is not regarded capable of caring for the children, and must accept a guardian for them; the law going so far as to declare her under age similarly to that French law which makes woman a perpetual minor. It matters not if the family property all came through the wife, or was accumulated by her labor, she is still held as not of sufficient judgment for its control. In Prussia, woman is still forbidden to take part in political or other public meetings.
Morganatic or left-hand marriage still continues the custom in Germany. Under its provisions the wife does not take the husband’s rank, nor do the children inherit the father’s property, as they are not regarded as of full legitimacy. This form of marriage is recognized by the civil law of Germany, and is sustained by the church. The custom, at first confined to princes, gradually extended to the higher aristocracy, and as the moral perceptions of a nation bends itself to unison with civil law, the inferior gentry began to contract marriages of this kind. Under a morganatic union woman is still more debased than in the ordinary marriage relation. Aside from the ceremony, the wife is scarcely other than a concubine. The children of the morganatic marriage do not bear the father’s name, nor inherit from him, under the law of the state. Neither they nor the wife have more lasting claim upon him in these respects than had the concubines known as “the Honored Ones” upon the priestly destroyers of the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
Several notable instances of morganatic marriages have occurred within the present century. It is but a few years since the Grand Duke, Louis IV of Hesse-Darmstadt, son-in-law of Queen Victoria, made a morganatic marriage with Madame de Kalamine, whose lover he was long known to have been, and with whom he had previously lived outside of this relation, she having borne him several children. From the high position of the morganatic husband, and because of the previous relationship of the parties, this marriage became the talk of all Europe, and to some extent of the United States. Queen Victoria herself did not escape criticism, notwithstanding the prudery for which she is famed, because of her entertaining the Grand Duke at Windsor soon after this marriage unaccompanied by his wife, for the purpose, it was intimated, of placing him under the influence of Princess Beatrice. The very fact of such suggestion, whether true or not, as well as the fact that Queen Victoria, universally conceded a prude in reference to infractions of the moral law by those of her own sex, received the Grand Duke at her especial home of Windsor soon after his morganatic marriage, is a vivid commentary upon the two codes of morals extant in christendom and their influence even upon woman herself. Morganatic marriage degrades the wife of the right hand ceremony equally with her of the left hand, as it is a recognition by the law of a christian country today of man’s right to become a bigamist, provided he but gives his left hand instead of his right, to the bride during the marriage ceremony. It is a system of legalized concubinage under protestantism, which throws the shield of protection around man in illicit relations, and like all other forms of woman’s degradation, it reaches back for authority to that religious teaching which proclaims woman to have been created inferior and subordinate to man. Because of woman’s former superior position there, no country but Germany can as fully show the degradation of woman under Christianity. Not from pagan Greece can more vivid illustration of her moral degradation be shown, while pagan Rome shines clear and bright beside the Germanic races of today. While even left-handed marriages among the higher classes are encouraged and protected, yet among the lower orders in Germany the ordinary marriage is cumbered with so many restrictions, as to have become almost an impossibility, and no disgrace or loss of character falls upon the girl of this class who becomes a mother outside of legal prevision, but such motherhood upon the contrary is looked upon as the means of a higher position and greater wages as nurse. As amme in a rich or noble family she becomes a person of arrogance, part of the pomp and show of the house.
Despite these wrongs of the ages towards woman, of late so vividly presented, we still find both Church and State opposing a free discussion of the question. Within the last decade two northern European countries have strangely exhibited such hostility, the opposition coming upon ground of woman’s surpassing sinfulness.
But the most notable opposition has been against the works of two eminent literary men. “The Doll’s House” by Ibsen, the dramatic poet of Norway, attacking the irresponsible position of the wife under present marriage law, brought about the social ostracism of its author. Sweden’s supremely great thinker of the present century, August Strindberg, recently published a work entitled “Giftas” (to marry), which incidentally treated of the influence of religion upon this relation. The State authorities at once ordered its confiscation. Instead of a Papal Librorum Prohibitorum, it fell under the censure and prohibition of a Protestant State. But no more ready method for increasing its circulation could have been devised; so rapidly was the first edition of four thousand sold that only four hundred fell into the grasp of the censorious government. In order to escape the farther penalty of imprisonment that had been pronounced against him, the author was compelled to temporarily leave the country. But his work was not without effect upon the minds of his countrymen, and upon his return a few months later, a great demonstration in his honor took place. Strindberg defined the rights of woman as those which came to her by nature but of which, through a perverted social order she had been deprived. He declared that woman’s desire for deliverance was the same as man’s restless desire for deliverance. Let us, said he, therefore emancipate man from his prejudice and then woman will certainly be freed. To that end it is necessary to work together as friends not as enemies.
That a work of this moderate character, should fall under the ban of a protestant government, in the last half of the nineteenth century, should be confiscated and its author banished, is a striking proof of the degraded condition of woman in the marriage relation, and of the power still exerted for the continuance of this subjection. Opposition to discussion of this question in Sweden, is more strange in view of the excess of women in the population, as they outnumber the men some 40,000; while of single women over fifteen, there are 259,000. Despite the fact of this excess, impossible to provide for by marriage even were that condition one of equity and equality, all effort towards opening occupations to them, or the avenues of education, still meets with resistance from the church. The only opponent of Mr. Berner’s Bill, 1882, for permitting women to take the first two degrees in the University, those of Arts and Philosophy, was from a clergyman. The bill passed the Odelstling, one of the two Chambers of the Storthing, with only his dissentient voice. It received the unanimous vote of the other house, the Sagthing, April 21, becoming a law June 15 of that year.
Russia, which we are accustomed to regard as less than a half civilized country, gives evidence of an early civilization which in the field of morals reached a high place. Samokversof, a Russian author, has made a rich collection relating to pre-historic times, proving that as early as the first centuries of this era, the Slavonians lived in large societies, possessed fortified towns with treasurers of gold and silver, silk, embroidered tissues, iron weapons, ornaments of gold, silver, bronze and bone; while sickles, and the grasses of wheat, oats, and barley found in the graves of South Russia, show this people even to have been devoted to agriculture. The early history of Russia proves that women then held influential positions in the family, in the church, in the state; as was the case under the ancient common law of England, so woman among the ancient Slavs possessed the right of inheritance and the power of dividing such inheritance with her brothers. In the State we find woman’s wisdom at early date still continuing to shape the policy of the Russian empire; to the wise statesmanship of the Czarina Olga is the unchanging plan of that country for the ultimate possession of Constantinople due. Visiting the Patriarch of the East, during the tenth century, she at once perceived the vast importance of Constantinople to the power desiring universal domination; the possession of that city giving control of the Dardanelles, of Asia Minor, and Europe itself. Thenceforth she sought its annexation or seizure and her policy became that of the Russian nation, which for more than eight hundred years has made the ultimate possession of Constantinople the great object of its ambition. Nor has Olga’s statesmanship less influenced the entire European continent, the allied powers constantly struggling to defeat Russia’s aggressive plan, through maintenance of the “sick man” upon his throne.
From the advent of christianity, forced upon the Slav peoples a thousand years since by Vladimir, their baptism taking place by tens of thousands as driven into the rivers and streams mid-deep, priests upon the banks recited the baptism formula, a change was noticeable. As soon as the thorough establishment of the Byzantine church in Russia, which took no inconsiderable period, it being brought about by force rather than free will, its priests, like those of the Western Church, directed their principal efforts towards control of the marriage relation, and, through that, of the family. Nor are we to regard this as strange inasmuch as every form of christianity regards woman as an inferior being, the creator of original sin, rendering the sacrifice of a God necessary in order to re-establish the equilibrium overthrown by her. Edmond Noble, in tracing the cause of the present social upheaval in that empire, says:
Scarcely had the priests of the Greek Church begun their teaching of the new faith when change began to unsettle the position of woman and burden her relationship to the family with a sense of inferiority ... her status falling with the natural extension of the ecclesiastical policy. The Russian woman at last became the slave of her Christian husband; as much his chattel as if she had been purchased at market or captured in war.
An examination of history proves that in Christian Russia as in Christian England the husband could release himself from the marriage bond by killing his wife, over whom under christian law he had power of life and death. Her children, as today in Christian England and America, are not under her control; she is to bear children but not to educate them, for, as under Catholic and Protestant Christianity, women are looked upon as a lower order of beings, of an unclean nature. The assertion of Agathes the Sophist that he detected the smell of her whose hands had milked the cow, is more than paralleled under Greek Christianity, woman not even being allowed to kill a fowl under assertion that should she so do the meat would become poisonous. Wife beating enjoined as a religious duty became so common, says Noble, that love was measured by it, “The more whippings the more love.” “The Domstroii,” a household guide, compiled by a dignitary of the Greek Church in time of Ivan the Terrible, counseled use of the rod to keep wives, children, and servants in subjection. By it husbands were given almost unlimited power over wives, who were not even permitted to attend church without the husband’s consent. The prominent ideas regarding woman under Byzantine Christianity have been her uncleanliness, her sinfulness and the small value of her life. She is regarded as a being of lower order than man, and as looked upon in a different light by God.
Where marriage is wholly or partly under church control, its very form degrades woman, her promise of obedience not yet having passed away. In the old Covenanter period of Scotland the records give a still more debased form, in which the man as head was declared united to an ignoble part, represented by the woman. But in modern times, both in Catholic and Protestant countries a more decent veil is thrown over this sacrifice of woman than in the Greek Church, where the wife is sometimes delivered to the husband under this formula, “Here wolf, take thy lamb!” and the bridegroom is presented with a whip by his bride giving her a few blows as part of the ceremony, and bidding her draw off his boots as a sign of her subjection to him. With such an entrance ceremony it may well be surmised that the marriage relation permits the most revolting tyranny. And this condition can be directly traced to the period since Christianity was adopted under Vladimir, a thousand years since, as the religion of that nation. The old Slavs recognized the equality of woman in household, political, and religious matters, and not until Byzantine Christianity became incorporated with, and a part of, the civil polity of its rulers, did Russia present such a picture of domestic degradation as it shows today. The chastisement of wives is directly taught as part of the husband’s domestic duty. Until recently, the wife who killed her husband while he was thus punishing her, was buried alive, her head only being left above ground. Many lingered for days before death reached them.
Ivan Panim, a Russian exile, while a student at Harvard College, 1881, made the following statement at a Convention of the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Society:
A short time ago the wife of a well-to-do peasant came to the justice of one of the district courts in Russia and demanded protection from the cruelty of her husband. She proved conclusively by the aid of competent witnesses that he had bound her naked to a stake during the cold weather on the street, and asked the passers-by to strike her; and whenever they refused he struck her himself. He fastened her moreover to the ground, put many stones and weights on her and broke one of her arms. The court declared the husband “not guilty.” “It cannot afford,” it said, “to teach woman to disobey the commands of her husband.”
Mr. Panim declared this to be by no means an extreme or isolated case, and that few became known to the public through the courts or the press. While the above incident illustrates the cruelty of the state towards woman under the Greek form of christianity, others with equal pertinence proved the cruelty of the church.
A peasant in the village of Zelovia Baltic, having reason to doubt the fidelity of his spouse, deliberately harnessed her to a cart in company with a mare—a species of double harness for which the lady was doubtless unprepared when she took the nuptial vow—He then got into the cart in company with a friend, and drove the ill-assorted team some sixteen versts (nearly eleven English miles,) without sparing the whip-cord. When he returned from his excursion he sheared the unlucky woman’s head, tarred and feathered her and turned her out of doors. She naturally sought refuge and consolation from her parish priest; but he sent her back to her lord and master, prescribing further flaggellations. An appeal to justice by the poor woman and her relatives, resulted in a non-suit, and recourse to a higher court will probably terminate in the same manner.
Popular Russian songs allude to woman’s wrongs in the marriage relation. The wife of a son living with his father, is looked upon as an additional animal to be urged to the utmost exertion. She is treated almost like a slave and with less consideration than a horse or cow. Lady Varney, gives the chorus of a song in the “Lament of a Young Russian Bride,” which portrays the father-in-law’s part.
CHORUS
“Thumping, scolding, never lets his daughter sleep,”
“Up you slattern! up you sloven sluggish slut!”
The wife also entreats her husband for mercy.
“Oh husband, only for good cause beat thou thy wife, Not for little things.” “Far away is my father dear, and farther still my mother.”
While demanding marital fidelity from wives, Russian husbands do not bind themselves to the same purity; and aside from wife-beating, the husband’s infidelities form the general subject of songs. Peter the Great, head of the Greek Church, not only beat his Empress Catherine, but while demanding marital fidelity from her, was notorious for his liaisons with women of low rank. Women were not counted in the census of Russia until the reign of this monarch. So many “souls” no woman named. So long continued has been this treatment of woman, that the poet Nekrasof says:
Ages have rolled away, the whole face of the earth has brightened; only the somber lot of the Mowguk’s wife God forgets to change.
Man’s opinion of woman is shown in the proverb, “A hen is not a bird, neither is a woman a human being.” Nekrasof makes one of his village heroines say: “God has forgotten the nook where he hid the keys of woman’s emancipation,” which woman’s despair has changed to the proverb “God remembers everything but the Slavonian woman; he has forgotten where he hid the keys of her emancipation.” The system of indulgence is as marked in the Greek as in the Catholic Church, but under slightly different aspects. The worship of saints is an important part of the Byzantine religion. There are two saints, to whom if a person prays as he goes out to commit a crime, however heinous, he takes his pardon with him. The present condition of Russian affairs is ascribed by Edmond Noble, to a long felt revolt in the minds of the people, against the social, political and religious system of that country. While the peasant implicitly obeys the czar, regarding his position as divine and all his commands as just, there is an element that recalls the former period of freedom, with intensity of desire for its re-establishment. To this class, permeated as it must be with the spirit of the age, the efforts for constitutional change, and what the world knows as Nihilism, are attributable. It is in reality a mighty protest against that christianity which in destroying political freedom, instituted a monstrous spiritual and material tyranny in its place. Nihilism is not wholly nor even chiefly a form of political change; it has a depth and a power much beyond mere social or governmental change; it looks to an entire overthrow of that religious system which permeates and underlies all moral and political tyranny in Russia.
Class legislation of extreme character is still constantly met in all christian lands. The English Bill of 1887, for extending Parliamentary Franchise to woman, as shown, having as its last clause, “Provided that nothing in this Act contained shall enable women under coverture to be registered or to vote at such elections.” In this Bill, the State recognized the marital subordination of woman, held by law as under her husband’s control not possessing freedom of thought, judgment, or action upon questions of vital importance to herself. Walter Besant declares:
That it is only by searching and poking among unknown pamphlets and forgotten books that one finds out the actual depth of the English savagery of the last century ... that for drunkenness, brutality and ignorance the Englishmen of the baser kind, reached the lowest depth ever reached by civilized men ... a drunkard, a brawler, a torturer of dumb beasts, a wife-beater, a profligate.
It is not necessary to search “unknown pamphlets and forgotten books,” in order to find out the depths of English or other christian savagery of the present century. Every newspaper report, every court decision, every Act of Parliament or Legislature, every decree of king, or czar, or other potentate; every canon, decree or decision of the church, proclaims the ignorance, brutality and savagery of Christendom. Nor is it among men of the baser kind with their infliction of corporal punishment upon wives, but in the subtler and more refined methods of torture made use of by men of the highest position, that we most truly find out the depths of the savagery of the nineteenth century. Profligacy among men of the highest position never flourished more luxuriantly than at the present time; drunkenness has by no means passed away; wife-beating is still a common amusement; the law still fails to extend a protecting arm around those most needing its defence; the church yet fails to recognize a common humanity in all classes of people. Old traditional customs of thought and action still prevail, and the men of a hundred years hence will look upon the present time with the same criticising astonishment that the historian of today looks upon the last century. Savagery instead of civilization is still the predominant power in christendom. In comparison with the treatment many wives receive in christian lands, that of women among the American Indians, or the most savage races of the old world, is far more humane than shown in England, America and other christian lands, where even maternity does not free woman from the coarsest brutality upon the part of husbands, nor the illness incident upon bringing a new being into the world, from writs of “contempt,” even though the death of mother or babe result. In 1890, the Press of New York City reported the case of Mrs. R. Bassman, who was summoned to appear before the Surrogate Court, for a funeral debt. Being in confinement she was unable to appear. Thereupon an order for her arrest for Contempt of Court was issued, and while still unrecovered from her illness, she was arrested and incarcerated in Ludlow Street jail. Her newly born babe deprived of its mother’s care sickened and died; and this is part of Christian civilization for woman, in nearly the two thousandth year of its existence.
Booth’s “Darkest England” relates a somewhat parallel case, parallel in so far as it shows the enslaved condition of the English wife under present christian laws.
A woman who lived just opposite had been cruelly kicked and cursed by her husband, who had finally bolted the door against her, and she had turned to Barbie, as the only hope, Barbie took her in with her rough and ready kindness, got her to bed and was both nurse and doctor for the poor woman till her child was born and laid in the mother’s arms. Not daring to be absent longer she got up as best she could and crawled on hands and knees down the little steep steps, across the street, and back to her own door; ... it might have cost the woman her life to be absent from her home more than a couple of hours.
That brutal men exist everywhere, that women and children are in all lands abused, that prize-fighting with its concomitants of broken jaws, noses, heads, takes place in christian lands, are undeniable facts, usually although in defiance of law and subjecting their perpetrators to punishment. But the peculiarity of the cases noted and of ten thousand others, is that they are done under the authority of the law, to a being whom the law seems not bound to protect. No husbands in the world are more brutal than lower-class Englishmen into whose hands the wife is given by law, and he protected by the law in his ill-usage of her. It is Christian law of which complaint is made; it is the effect of Christian civilization, in its treatment of woman, to which attention is called. “Darkest England” furnishes still fuller statements of woman’s degraded condition in that country. In the opening pages of that work it is said:
Hard it is, no doubt, to read in Stanley’s pages of the slave-traders coldly arranging for the surprise of a village, the capture of the inhabitants, the massacre of those who resist, and the violation of all the women; but the stony streets of London, if they could but speak, would tell of tragedies as awful, of ruin as complete, of ravishments as horrible, as if we were in Central Africa; only the ghostly devastation is covered, corpse-like, with the artificialities of modern civilization.
The lot of a negress in the Equatorial Forest is not, perhaps, a very happy one but is it so much worse than that of many a pretty orphan girl’s in our christian capital? We talk about the brutalities of the dark ages and we profess to shudder as we read in the books of the shameful exactions of the rights of feudal superiors. And yet here, beneath our very eyes, in our theaters, in our restaurants, and in many other places unspeakable, it be enough but to name it, the same hideous abuse flourishes unchecked. A young penniless girl, if she be pretty, is often hunted from pillar to post by her employers, confronted always by the alternative—starve or sin. Darkest England, like Darkest Africa, reeks with malaria.
It should be impressed upon the mind that difference between “Darkest Africa,” and “Darkest England,” lies in the two facts, that one is the darkness of ignorance and savage races who are in the very night of barbarism; while the other is the moral darkness of christian civilization, in the very center of Christendom, after 2,000 years of church teaching and priestly influence. A few years since, in Massachusetts, an action for cruelty on part of a husband came before a court, the charge being that he came home one night in February, when the thermometer was ten degrees below zero, and turned his wife and little child, with his wife’s mother of eighty, out of the house. While the wife was giving testimony, the judge interrupted, saying:
The husband had a right to do so, there was a quarrel between the husband and wife, and he had a legal right to turn her out and take possession of the house, that was not cruelty.
From the newspapers of April, 1886, we learn that:
At Salem, W. Va., Thomas True drove his wife out of doors and swore he would kill any one who would give her shelter. Robert Miller took her into his house, and was killed by True.
The system of marriage recognized by the church has ever been that of ownership and power by the husband and father, over the wife and children, and during the Middle Ages the ban of the church fell with equal force upon the woman, who for any cause left her husband, as upon the witch. The two were under the same ban as the excommunicated, denounced as one whom all others must shun, whom no one must succor or harbor, and with whom it was unlawful to hold any species of intercourse.
The “boycott” is not an invention of the present century, but was in use many hundred years since against a recalcitrant wife, under sanction of both church and state. The advertisements of absconding wives seen at the present day, whom the husband sets forth as having left his bed and board and whom all persons are thereafter forbidden to trust upon his account, are but a reminiscence of the wife-boycott of former years, when all persons, were forbidden to “harbor her” under penalty unless it could be proven that her life was in danger without such aid. The husband was held to possess vested rights in the wife, not only as against herself, but as against the world, and it is not half a decade since the notice below, appeared in a Kansas paper, accompanied by the cut of a fleeing woman.
A $50 CAPTURE.
A woman who ran away from her husband at Lawrence some time ago, was found at Fort Leavenworth yesterday by a Lawrence detective and taken back to her home. The officer received a reward of $50 for her capture.—Leavenworth Standard, Kas., Dec. 21, 1886.
This advertisement and others of a similar character to be seen in the daily and weekly press of the country, are undeniable proofs of the low condition under the law, of woman in the marriage relation, and read very much like the notices in regard to absconding slaves a few years since. Kansas was one of the very first states which recognized the right of a married mother to her own child, that provision having been incorporated in its constitution at early date as an enticement for bringing women emigrants into that state, at a period when the anti-slavery and pro-slavery contests within its borders had made it bloody ground. Although the married woman’s property law and the spirit of free thought has rendered such action less frequent than formerly, it is less than forty years, as before noted, since the New York Court of Common Pleas rendered a judgment of $10,000 in favor of a husband against the relatives of his wife, who at her own request “harbored and sheltered” her. The Christian principle of man’s ownership of woman, for many hundred years under English law, rendered the party giving shelter to a fleeing wife liable to the husband in money damages, upon the ground of having aided a runaway servant to the master’s injury. Under but one circumstance was such shelter admissible. In case the wife was in danger of perishing, she could be harbored until morning, when she must be returned to her master by the person who had thus temporarily taken care of his perishable property. In England as late as 1876, the case of a Mrs. Cochrane, who had lived apart from her husband for years, and showing another phase of property law in the wife, came up before Judge Coleridge. Her character was not at all impeached, but she indulged in amusements which her husband considered reprehensible, and through stratagem she was brought to his lodgings and there kept a prisoner. A writ of habeas corpus being sued out, the husband was compelled to bring her before the court of the Queen’s Bench. The decision of the judge rendered in favor of the husband’s right of forcible detention, was declared by him to be upon ground that English law virtually considered the wife as being under the guardianship of the husband, not a person in her own right, and this distinctly upon the ground of her perpetual infancy; she must be restored to her husband. As late as 1886, the Personal Rights Journal of England called attention to the suit of a clergyman for the “restitution of conjugal rights” and custody of child. The wife not being able to live in agreement with the husband, had taken her child and left him. A decree for such restitution having been pronounced by court, the husband Rev. Joseph Wallis, advertised for his absconding wife, Caroline Wallis, offering one hundred pounds reward for such information as should lead to her discovery.
£100 REWARD.
Whereas, A Decree was pronounced in the Probate, Divorce, and Admiralty Division of the High Court of Justice, on the 5th day of June, 1886, in the suit of Samuel Joseph Wallis versus Caroline Wallis, for restitution of conjugal rights, and for custody of the child, May Wallis, to the petitioner, the said Samuel Joseph Wallis. And Whereas it has been ascertained that the said Caroline Wallis has lately been seen at Whitstable and the Neighborhood,
NOTICE IS HEREBY GIVEN,
That the above Reward will be paid to any Person or Persons who shall give such information as will lead to the discovery of the whereabouts of the said Caroline Wallis, and the recovery by the said S. J. Wallis of the custody of the said Child.
Information to be sent to me, Richard Howe Brightman, of Sheerness, Kent, Solicitor to the said Samuel Joseph Wallis.
This brutal advertisement in the dying hours of the nineteenth century had the effect of rousing public attention to woman’s enslaved condition in the marital relation, and a rapid growth of public sentiment in recognition of a wife’s individual and distinct personality, took place between 1886 and 1890, a period of four years. During the latter year another English husband, one Jackson, forcibly abducted his wife who lived apart from him, holding her prisoner with gun and bayonet, threatening her friends with death—as was his legal right in case of her attempted rescue. When this was known, hundreds of letters poured into the press, upholding the right of a wife to the control of her own person, and writ of habeas corpus compelled her production in court. Under the pressure of a public sentiment he found it wise to conciliate, the judge decided in favor of her right to live away from her husband, who was also restrained from farther molesting her. The Supreme Court of Georgia recently rendered a decision in regard to the rights of husbands as related to the wife’s rights of property, in which the church theory of her subordination was maintained.
The wife has been much advanced by the general tenor of legislation of late years in respect to her property. She has acquired a pretty independent position as to title, control and disposition, but this relates to her own property, not to his. The law has not yet raised her to the station of superintendent of her husband’s contracts and probably never will. In taking a wife a man does not put himself under an overseer. He is not a subordinate in his own family but the head of it. A subjugated husband is a less energetic member of society than one who keeps his true place, yet knows how to temper authority with affection.
During the famous Beecher trial, Hon. Wm. M. Evarts defined woman’s legal position as one of subordination to man, declaring “that notwithstanding changing customs and the amenities of modern life, women were not free, but were held in the hollow of man’s hand, to be crushed at his will.” In exemplification of this statement he referred to a recent decision of the New York Court of Appeals, and to the highest tribunals of England. He gave his own sanction to these principles of law, all of which owe their foundation to church teaching regarding woman, enforced by the peculiar forms of marriage ceremony it has instituted.
The church everywhere strenuously opposes civil marriage. The Plenary Council of 1884, and the celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the Catholic hierarchy in the United States, each making church marriage a prominent part of their discussions. Different parts of Europe and of South America have recently been shaken by church action in regard to it. Prussia, Belgium, Italy, France, have fallen under the odium of the church in consequence of the civil laws declaring marriage valid without the aid of the church. The celebrated M. Godin, founder of the cooperative Familistere, at Guise, was married in 1886 under civil form, to a lady member of the French League for the Rights of Women, and thus announced the marriage to their friends:
M. Godin, manufacturer, founder of Familistere, and Madame Marie Godin, nee Moret, his secretary and co-laborer in the work of the Familistere, and in the propagation of social reform, have the honor of announcing to you the purely civil marriage which they contracted at Guise, the 14th day of July, 1886, that they might manifest to all their union, and the common purpose of all the efforts of their lives.
Civil marriage, where the church is supreme, is followed by excommunication and odious insults. In 1885 a remarkable instance of this kind occurred in the city of Concepcion, Chili. A young couple were married with consent of their parents, according to the civil law. Their social and political prominence made the occasion conspicuous, as it was the first wedding among the aristocracy in that country, dispensing with the aid of a priest. The church paper edited by a Jesuit priest thus commented:
The “Libertad” calls this “a happy union,” but it should remember that “happy unions” of this sort have hitherto existed only in the animal kingdom.
The bride, groom, and all their families suffered excommunication from the church. But it is not alone the Catholic church which desires to retain its hold upon marriage. Less than two years since certain clergymen of the Anglican church agreed to officiate at marriage without a fee, for the purpose of retaining control of this relation; and so strong has been the influence of the church during the ages, that few people look upon a ceremony under the civil law with the same respect as one performed by a priest, even of a Protestant denomination. The control of marriage by the church while throwing wealth into its own coffers, has ever had a prejudicial effect upon morals, as impediments to marriage of whatever character increase immorality. In the city of Concepcion referred to, of 200,000 inhabitants, there are two thousand children of unknown parentage. In 1884, statistics showed sixty-two per cent of the children to be illegitimate. The parents of those little ones were mostly known, being persons too poor to pay the cost of a church marriage, twenty-five dollars, its price, being quite beyond the means of the humbler classes. The Liberal party, in establishing civil marriage as legitimate, authorized any magistrate to perform the ceremony, and furnish a certificate for twenty-five cents. This assault upon the ancient prerogative of the church depriving priests of the largest source of their revenue, at once made a religious-political issue of the question, the church taking strenuous action against all connected with framing the law, and its repeal became the prominent political issue, to aid which all the faithful were called. Using its old weapons, the church through the Archbishop issued an edict excommunicating the president of the republic, the members of his cabinet and the members of congress who voted for the statute; directing that a similar penalty should fall upon every communicant who obeyed it and neglected to recognize the church as the only authority competent to solemnize the marriage rite.
A correspondent of the New York Sun, in Chili, wrote:
This brought matters to a crisis. On the one hand, the State declared all marriages not under the civil law illegal, and their issue illegitimate, refusing to recognize rites performed by the priests. On the other, those who obey the law are excommunicated from the church, and their cohabitation forbidden by the highest ecclesiastical authority. Thus matrimony is practically forbidden, and those who choose to enter it have their choice between arrest and excommunication. A young member of Congress, a man of gifts and influence, who stands as one of the leaders of the Liberal party, and who voted and argued for civil marriage, is engaged to the daughter of a wealthy merchant with proud lineage and aristocratic connections. He is willing to accept the civil authority, which he helped to create, and she and her father are also willing, but her mother is a devout church woman and cannot regard marriage as sacred without the blessing of a priest. She favors the alliance, but insists that the Church shall be recognized. The bishop declines to permit the ceremony unless the young man shall go to the confessional and retract his political record, with a vow to hereafter remain steadfast to the church. This he refuses to do. The couple will go to Europe or the States and there have the ceremony performed.
This action of the Chilian republic in substituting a civil for a religious ceremony in marriage and declaring the latter to be illegal, is a most important step in civilization, of which freedom for woman is such an essential factor; and its results in that country must be left in woman’s every relation of life, promoting self-respect, self-reliance and security in place of the degradation, self-distrust and fear to which its church has so long condemned her.
