The most important struggle in the history of the church is that of woman for liberty of thought and the right to give that thought to the world. As a spiritual force the church appealed to barbaric conception when it declared woman to have been made for man, first in sin and commanded to be under obedience. Holding as its chief tenet a belief in the inherent wickedness of woman, the originator of sin, as its sequence the sacrifice of a God becoming necessary, the church has treated her as alone under a “curse” for whose enforcement it declared itself the divine instrument. Woman’s degradation under it dating back to its earliest history, while the nineteenth century still shows religious despotism to have its stronghold in the theory of woman’s inferiority to man. The church has ever invoked the “old covenant” as authority, while it also asserts this covenant was done away with at the advent of the new dispensation. Paul, whose character as persecutor was not changed when he veered from Judaism to Christianity, gave to the church a lever long enough to reach down through eighteen centuries in opposition to woman’s equality with man. Through this lengthy period, his teaching has united the christian world in opposition to her right of private judgment and personal freedom.
Each great division of christianity alike proclaims the supreme sinfulness of woman in working for the elevation of her sex. In this work she has been left outside of religious sympathy, outside of political protection, yet in the interest of justice she claims the right to tear down the barriers of advancing civilization and to rend asunder all beliefs that men hold most sacred. Freedom for woman underlies all the great questions of the age. She must no longer be the scapegoat of humanity upon whose devoted head the sins of all people are made to rest. Woman’s increasing freedom within the last hundred years is not due to the church, but to the printing-press, to education, to free-thought and other forms of advancing civilization. The fashions of the christian world have changed but not its innermost belief. The power of the pulpit, built up by a claim of divine authority, with the priest as an immediate representative of God, has been reacting upon the priesthood itself, and now while vainly struggling for light this order finds itself bound by chains of its own creating. Today the priesthood is hampered by creeds and dogmas centuries old, yet so fully outside of practical life that the church has become the great materialistic force of the century; its ideas of a God, its teachings of a future life all falling within the realm of the physical senses; the incorporeal and spiritual are lost in the grossest forms of matter. Although a body professing to inculcate pure spiritual truths, the church teaches the grossest form of materialism. It asserts principles contradictory to natural laws; it presents chaos as the normal condition of the infinite; it bids people live under faith outside of evidence, and in thus doing is guilty of immeasurable evils to mankind. A bark without compass, it steers upon a sea of night no star illumining the darkness; the control and guidance by humanity of the psychic part of being, generally spoken of as “supernatural,” although the truest to nature, has become nearly lost through the materialization of spiritual truth by the church, the worst form of idolatry. Christianity was a stern reality to the men of the early and middle ages, who believing themselves to have been created nearer to God than woman also believed themselves to have lost earthly immortality through her. Permeated with this idea, it is not strange that men through many hundred years taught that woman was especially under control of the Evil One. The devil was an objective form to the clergy and people alike. Nor under such belief, is it strange that priests should warn their flocks from the pulpit against the wiles of woman, thus degrading her self-respect and teaching men to hold her in that contempt whose influence is felt today. The result of this teaching has been deplorable to humanity; men equally with women having sunk under this degradation of one-half of the race.
The most stupendous system of organized robbery known has been that of the church towards woman, a robbery that has not only taken her self-respect but all rights of person; the fruits of her own industry; her opportunities of education; the exercise of her own judgment, her own conscience, her own will. The unfortunate peculiarity of the history of man, according to Buckle, is that although its separate parts have been examined with considerable ability, hardly any one has attempted to outline them into a whole and ascertain the way they are connected with each other. While this statement is virtually true as regards the general history of mankind, it is most particularly so in reference to the position of woman in its bearings upon race development. A thorough investigation of her connection with our present form of civilization, or even with that of the past, as compared with each other, or as influencing the whole, has never yet been authoritatively undertaken. This failure has not been so largely due to willful neglect as to incapacity upon the part of man to judge truly of this relation. Woman herself must judge of woman. The most remote feminine personality is not less incomprehensible to man than the woman of today; he now as little understands the finer qualities of her soul or her high intuitive reasoning faculties as in the past. Reason is divided into two parts, theoretical and practical; the former appertains to man; the latter, composed of those intuitive faculties which do not need a long process of ratiocination for their work, inhere in woman. Although the course of history has given many glimpses of her superiority, and the past few decades have shown in every land a new awakening of woman to a recognition of her own powers, man as man is still as obtuse as of yore. He is yet under the darkness of the Patriarchate, failing to recognize woman as a component part of humanity, whose power of development and influence upon civilization are at least the equal of his own. He yet fails to see in her a factor of life whose influence for good or for evil has ever been in direct ratio with her freedom. He does not yet discern her equal right with himself to impress her own opinions upon the world. He still interprets governments and religions as requiring from her an unquestioning obedience to laws she has no share in making, and that place her as an inferior in every relation of life. Ralph Waldo Emerson with keen insight into the fallibility of law-makers, declared that “good men must not obey the laws too well.” Woman is showing her innate wisdom in daring to question the infallibility of man, his laws, and his interpretation of her place in creation. She is not obeying “too well,” and yet man fails to analyze her motives in this defection. The church and the state have long done man’s thinking for him, the ideas of the few, whose aim is power, have been impressed upon the many; individualism is still characterized as the essence of evil; self-thought, self-control as heretical. The state condemns both as a crime against itself, the church as a sin against heaven. Both church and state claiming to be of divine origin have assumed divine right of man over woman; while church and state have thought for man, man has assumed the right to think for woman.
As man under fear of eternal damnation surrendered to the irresponsible power of church and state, so woman yielded to that power which closed every external avenue of knowledge to her under pretext of her sinfulness. One-tenth of the human race, within the period covered by modern civilization, has compelled the other nine-tenths to think their thoughts and live lives according to their commands. This has been the chief effort of governments and religion. The most formidable general evil under which woman has suffered during the Christian ages has been that of protection; a non-recognition of her ability to care for herself, rendering watchful guardianship over her a recognized part of man’s law; not alone to prevent her sinking into depths of vice but to also prevent her entire subversion of government and religion. Buckle and other writers have recognized the protective spirit as the greatest enemy to civilization, its influence causing the few to establish themselves as guardians of the many in all affairs of life. The American Revolution in proclaiming the rights of humanity struck a blow at the protective system. This system has ever based itself upon a declaration of the supreme rights of a God, and certain rights as pertaining to certain classes of men by virtue of authority from that God. The defense of such authority has ever been the chief business of church and state, and thus religions and governments have neither found time nor inclination to uphold the rights of humanity. Under the christian system, woman as the most rebellious against God in having eaten a forbidden fruit, has found herself condemned through the centuries to untold oppression in order that the rights of God might be maintained. Yet while constantly teaching that woman brought sin into the world, the church ever forgets its own corollary; that if she brought sin she also brought God into the world, thus throwing ineffable splendor over mankind. The whole theory regarding woman, under christianity, has been based upon the conception that she had no right to live for herself alone. Her duty to others has continuously been placed before her and her training has ever been that of self-sacrifice. Taught from the pulpit and legislative halls that she was created for another, that her position must always be secondary even to her children, her right to life, has been admitted only in so far as its reacting effect upon another could be predicated. That she was first created for herself, as an independent being to whom all the opportunities of the world should be open because of herself, has not entered the thought of the church; has not yet become one of the conceptions of law; is not yet the foundation of the family.
But woman is learning for herself that not self-sacrifice, but self-development, is her first duty in life; and this, not primarily for the sake of others but that she may become fully herself; a perfectly rounded being from every point of view; her duty to others being a secondary consideration arising from those relations in life where she finds herself placed at birth, or those which later she voluntarily assumes. But these duties are not different in point of obligation, no more imperative upon her, than are similar duties upon man. The political doctrine of the sovereignty of the individual, although but partially recognized even in the United States, has been most efficacious in destroying that protective spirit which has so greatly interfered with the progress of humanity. This spirit yet retains its greatest influence in the family, where it places a boundary between husband and wife. Of all circumstances biasing the judgment and restricting the sympathies, none have shown themselves more powerful than physical differences, whether of race, color or sex. When those differences are not alone believed to be a mark of inferiority, but to have been especially created for the pleasure and peculiar service of another, the elements of irresponsible tyranny upon one side, and irremediable slavery upon the other, are already organized. If in addition, that inferior is regarded as under an especial curse for extraordinary sin, as the church has ever inculcated in reference to women; and when as in the case of woman and man an entire separation of interests, hopes, feelings and passions is impossible, we have reached the extreme of injustice and misery under the protective system. Consequently no other form of “protection” has possessed so many elements of absolute injustice as that of man over woman. Swedenborg taught, and experience declares, that morality cannot exist except under conditions of freedom. Hence we find much that has been called morality is the effect of dependence and lessened self-respect, and has really been immorality and degradation. While in every age, the virtues of self-sacrifice have been pointed to as evidence of the highest morality, we find those women in whom it has been most apparent, have been those doing least justice where justice first belongs—to themselves. Justice as the foundation of the highest law, is a primal requirement of the individual to the self. It is none the less a serious impeachment of the religious-moral idea, that the doctrine of protection and the duty of woman’s self-sacrifice, were taught under the theory of divine authority. No faith was more profound, none could be more logical if resting on a true foundation, than the church theory regarding woman. Life assumed a sterner reality to men who believed themselves in point of purity and priority nearer their Creator than woman. Thereafter, she was to be protected from herself, the church and man cheerfully assuming this duty. Under the protective spirit it is not so very long since men sold themselves and their families to some other man in power, either lay or religious, under promise of protection, binding themselves to obey the mandates of such lord evermore. The church protected and directed the thought of the world. To think for one’s self is not even now the tendency of mankind; the few who dare, do so at great peril. It will require another hundred years of personal and political freedom for men to appreciate what liberty really is—for them to possess confidence in their own judgment upon religious questions—for the man of humble station to fully believe in himself and in his own opinions when opposed to the authority of church or state.
Women of the present century whose struggle for equal opportunity of education with men; for a chance to enter the liberal professions; for a fair share of the world of work; for equal pay in that work; for all demands of equality which make the present a noted age in the world’s history, have met their greatest opposition from this protective spirit. No less than during the darkest period of its history does the church still maintain the theory that education and public life are not fitting for woman—indelicate for herself and injurious to the community. During the Christian ages, the church has not alone shown cruelty and contempt for woman, but has exhibited an impious and insolent disregard of her most common rights of humanity. It has robbed her of responsibility, putting man in place of God. It has forbidden her the offices of the church and at times an entrance within its doors. It has denied her independent thought, declaring her a secondary creation for man’s use to whom alone it has made her responsible. It has anathematized her sex, teaching her to feel shame for the very fact of her being. It has not been content with proclaiming a curse upon her creative attributes, but has thrust the sorrows and expiations of man’s “curse” upon her, and in doing these things the church has wrought her own ruin. A religious revolution of the most radical kind, has even now assumed such proportions as to nearly destroy the basic creeds of various sects, and undermine the whole fabric of christendom. It everywhere exists although neither the world nor the church seem to realize the magnitude of its proportions. As a legitimate result of two opposing forces, a crisis in the life of the church is at hand; nay, even upon it. While we see it making organized effort for extension of power and entire control of the state, we also find great increase of radical thought, and development of individual conscience and individual judgment. With thought no longer bound by fear of everlasting punishment, mankind will cease to believe unproved assertions, simply because made by a class of men under assumed authority from God. Reason will be used, mankind will seek for truth come whence it may, lead where it will, and with our own Lucretia Mott, will accept “truth for authority and not authority for truth.”
In knocking at the door of political rights, woman is severing the last link between church and state; the church must lose that power it has wielded with changing force since the days of Constantine, ever to the injury of freedom and the world. The immeasurable injustice of woman, and her sufferings under christianity, her intellectual, moral and spiritual servitude, will never be understood until life with its sorrows shall be opened to our vision in a sphere more defined than the present one. The superstitions of the church, the miseries of woman, her woes, tortures, burnings, rackings and all the brutalities she has endured in the church, the state, the family, under the sanction of christianity, would be incredible had we not the most undeniable evidence of their existence, not alone in the past but as shown by the teachings, laws and customs of the present time. “She has suffered under a theology which extended its rule not only to her civil and political relations, but to her most significant domestic and personal concerns, regulating the commerce of husband and wife, of parent and child, of master and servant, even prescribing her diet and dress, her education and her industries.” Edmund Noble speaks in like manner of the ancient Russians under the tyrannical provisions of the Greek church, saying, “clearly, such a system of theocratic supervision and direction as this, is compatible only with the lowest possible spiritual condition of the subject, or the lowest possible conception of God.” Possessing no proof of its existence, the church has ever fostered unintelligent belief. To doubt her “unverified” assertion has even been declared an unpardonable sin. The supreme effort of the church, being maintenance of power, it is but recently that woman has been allowed to read history for herself, or having read it, dared to draw her own conclusion from its premises. Ignorance and falsehood created a sentiment in accord with themselves, crushing all her aspirations. In the family, man still decides the rights and duties of the wife, as of old. As legislator and judge, he still makes and executes class laws. In the church, he yet arrogates to himself the interpretation of the bible; still claims to be an exponent of the Divine will, that grandest lesson of the reformation, the right of private interpretation of the scriptures, not yet having been conceded to woman. The premises upon which the church is based being radically false, and this, most especially in everything related to woman. Trained from infancy by the church to a belief in woman’s inferiority and incapacity for self-government, men of the highest station have not hesitated to organize societies in opposition to her just demands. As early as 1875, an anti-woman’s franchise association was formed in London, under the name of “Association for Protecting the Franchise from the Encroachment of Women;” Hon. Mr. Bouverie, a leading opponent of Woman Suffrage in the House of Commons, being its chairman. Among the promoters of the movement were Sir Henry James, formerly attorney-general (for the Crown), Hon. Mr. Claflin and Mr. Leathers, correspondent of the New York Tribune.
Since this period, a number of women distinguished as “the wives of” have petitioned legislative bodies for protection against freedom for themselves, and all others of their sex, in asking that legislatures shall not recognize woman’s self-governing right. The deepest depth of degradation is reached when the slave not only declares against his own freedom, but strives to tighten the bonds of fellow slaves; and the most cruel wrong resulting from such slavery is the destruction of self-respect in the enslaved, as shown by the course of these women petitioners. The protective theory reached its lowest depth for woman by an attack upon her already vested rights of the ballot, in the former territory, now State of Washington, on the Pacific coast, in case of Nevada M. Bloomer (a woman) against John Wood and others, to have the women of that territory deprived of their already existing right of suffrage. In line with the general opposition to the enfranchisement of woman, men of even the most liberal tendencies declare that her political freedom will be used to sustain the church, apparently forgetting that man alone has placed the church in power and that man alone holds it in power. And proof of man’s complicity is even greater than this. Despite what is said of the larger church membership of women, the most noted modern evangelist, Moody, recently declared that he “found men tenfold, aye, an hundred-fold” more receptive of his preaching than women. While speaking in Farwell Hall, Chicago, 1886, he said, “For fifteen years I have preached to women in the afternoon and very often as near as I could, have preached the same sermon to men at night, and in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred have had five times more result in preaching to men than to women.” This pseudo-argument, as to woman’s susceptibility to church teaching, brought up by the enemies of her freedom, possesses no more real value than the pseudo-political argument sometimes presented in opposition to woman’s admission into active politics; that is, her emotional temperament. To one who has been present at four great presidential nominating conventions and several large state conventions, knowledge upon this point is practical. When one has seen a cordon of police enforced by the mayor upon the platform, protecting the officers of such convention, while its members, standing upon seats, stamped, shouted, gesticulated, threatened with revolvers, acting more like uncaged wild beasts than like men, when one has witnessed the wildest enthusiasm at the mention of a name, the waving of flags, of hats, of handkerchiefs, the shaking of umbrellas, chairs, canes, with violent stamping, amid a hubbub of indistinguishable voices, all shouting; screaming so loud that people for blocks away are roused from slumber in affright of a fire, or the approach of an ungovernable mob, such objections to woman’s freedom as her “emotions” fall to their lowest value.
In Church and in State, man has exhibited the wildest passions, the most ungovernable frenzy—has shown himself less controlled by reason than possible for woman under the most adverse circumstances. Judaism, and its offspring, Christianity, show the results of the Patriarchate in some of its most degenerate forms; industrial servitude, educational restrictions, legal thraldom, political slavery, false religious teachings, are but a portion of the evils existing under its most enlightened forms, and equally with the more pronounced polygamy and infanticide they show a total perversion of moral ideas. Woman dearly pays for the rights she has secured. Labor opposes, in less pay for the same work; literature, at first welcoming her only through the cook book, next compelled her to conceal her sex under a male pseudonym, in order that her writings might be received with the same respect as those of man; art has given her similar experiences, and while today admitting her to the same advantage of study with man, yet compels her to pay twice the price for the same instructions.
The careful student of history will discover that christianity has been of very little value in advancing civilization, but has done a great deal toward retarding it. “Civilization, a recognition of the rights of others at every point of contact,” has been carried forward by means of rebellion against church teaching and church authority. The experience of science is familiar to all, even school children quoting Galileo and Dr. Faust. What are called reformations in religion, the work of Huss, of Luther, of the Waldenses, the Huguenots, are equally familiar instances to the youngest student, of rebellion against the church. These and a myriad of others known to the historian, have all been brought about by refusal to accept the authority of the church as final. The Peasant War, in France, the struggles of Wat Tyler and of Hampden in England, the French and the American revolutions looking toward equality of rights; and a thousand minor forms of political progress have all been opposed by the church as rebellions against its teachings, yet all have been marked steps in civilization. The church and civilization are antipodal; one means authority, the other freedom; one means conservatism, the other progress; one means the rights of God as interpreted by the priesthood, the other the rights of humanity as interpreted by humanity. Civilization advances by free-thought, free speech, free men. The uprising of the women of all peoples in assertion of their common humanity with man, is exemplification of that fact recognized in the Declaration of Independence, that while patient endurance of wrongs to which persons are accustomed, always long borne rather than by change perhaps to meet evils they know not of, shows its absolutely certain ultimate effect, no matter how long delayed, in rebellion. A time comes in the history of souls, as of nations, when forbearance ceases to be a virtue, and self-respecting life is only to be retained through defiance of and rebellion against, existing customs. The soul must assert its own supremacy or die. It is not one woman, or the women of one nation that have thus suddenly shown desire to rule themselves—to act for themselves alone. A strange identity of thought pervades all parts of the world—India, China, Japan, Russia and all of Europe, North and South America, the vast continents of the southern seas and the isles thereof, and even barbaric Africa, all evince proof of the wide psychic under-current which seething through women’s souls, is overthrowing the civilizations built upon the force principles of the patriarchate, and will soon reinstate the reign of truth and justice. During those long ages of priestly intolerance, of domestic and governmental tyranny, in which woman seemed to accept the authority of the priest as that of God, there still existed a consciousness hardly perceptible to herself, that she was an independent being to whom by virtue of her humanity all opportunities in life belonged. From century to century mothers transmitted this scarcely developed perception to daughters, until suddenly within the past fifty years, these dominant ideas woke to thought, and the women of all nations began to proclaim their same right to self-control as that claimed by man.
It is impossible to write of the church without noticing its connection with the great systems of the world, during its course of life. The history of christendom is the history of the myriad institutions which have arisen through its teachings, or that have been sustained by its approval. The world has not grown wise under it, except with a wisdom that is leading the purest humanitarian thought in a direction contrary to its footsteps. Slavery and prostitution, persecutions for heresy, the inquisition with its six hundred modes of torture, the destruction of learning, the oppression of science, the systematized betrayal of confiding innocence, the recognized and unrecognized polygamy of man, the denial to woman of a right to herself, her thought, her wages, her children, to a share in the government which rules her; to an equal part in religious institutions, all these and a myriad more, are parts of what is known as christian civilization. Nor has the church ever been the leader in great reforms. During the anti-slavery conflict, the American Church was known as “the bulwark of American slavery.” Its course continues the same in every great contest with wrong. A memorial history of the American Episcopal church, an extensive work in two volumes of seven hundred pages each, published within the past few years, devotes but seven pages to “the Attitude of the Church during the Civil War,” and the general refusal of the church to take part in the great struggle for national life, is referred to with complacent satisfaction. Penitentiaries and prisons, asylums and reformatories, all institutions of a repressive character which the church prides herself as having built up, are no less evil than the convents, monasteries and religious orders belonging to it. They have all risen through perversion of nature. Crimes and criminals are built up and born because of the great wrong first done to mothers; they are the offspring of church and state. Science now declares crime to be a disease, but it has not yet discovered the primal cause of this disease. It is an inheritance from centuries of legalized crime against woman, of which the church in its teachings is prime factor.
Woman will gain nothing by a compromising attitude toward the church, by attempt to excuse its great wrong toward her sex, or by palliation of its motives. On the contrary, a stern reference to facts, keeping the face of the world turned toward its past teachings, its present attitude, is her duty. Wrongs of omission equal in magnitude those of commission.
Advance for woman is too well established, woman has had too much experience, has borne too much ridicule, misrepresentation and abuse to now hesitate in an attack upon the stronghold of her oppression—the church. She possesses too full knowledge of its subtle touch upon civil law to dare leave it alone; it has become one of woman’s first duties, one of her greatest responsibilities, to call public attention to its false doctrines and false teachings in regard to the origin, condition and subjection of woman. She has engaged in too many battles, weathered too many storms to longer hesitate in exposure of its stupendous crimes toward one-half of humanity. Let those who fear, hide themselves, if they will, until the storm is past. Let those who dare, defiantly rejoice that they are called upon to bear still more, in order that woman may be free. A brighter day is to come for the world, a day when the intuitions of woman’s soul shall be accepted as part of humanity’s spiritual wealth; when force shall step backward, and love, in reality, rule the teachings of religion; and may woman be strong in the ability and courage necessary to bring about this millennial time. The world is full of signs of the near approach of this period; as never before is there an arousing sense of something deeper, holier in religion than the christian church has given. The world has seemingly awaited the advent of heroic souls who once again should dare all things for the truth. The woman who possesses love for her sex, for the world, for truth, justice and right, will not hesitate to place herself upon record as opposed to falsehood, no matter under what guise of age or holiness it appears. A generation has passed since the great struggle began, but not until within ten years has woman dared attack upon the veriest stronghold of her oppression, the Church. The state, agent and slave of the church, has so long united with it in suppression of woman’s intelligence, has so long preached of power to man alone, that it has created an inherited tendency, an inborn line of thought toward repression. Bent in this line before his birth, man still unwittingly thinks of woman as not quite his equal, and it requires a new creation of mind to change his thought. A second generation has arisen, in whom some slight inherited tendencies toward recognition of a woman’s right to herself are seen. In the next generation this line of inherited thought will have become stronger, both Church and State more fully recognizing woman’s inherent right to share in all the opportunities of life; but at what cost to all who have taken part in the great struggle.
Has woman no wrongs to avenge upon the church? As I look backward through history I see the church everywhere stepping upon advancing civilization, hurling woman from the plane of “natural rights” where the fact of her humanity had placed her, and through itself, and its control over the state, in the doctrine of “revealed rights” everywhere teaching an inferiority of sex; a created subordination of woman to man; making her very existence a sin; holding her accountable to a diverse code of morals from man; declaring her possessed of fewer rights in church and in state; her very entrance into heaven made dependent upon some man to come as mediator between her and the Saviour it has preached, thus crushing her personal, intellectual and spiritual freedom. Looking forward, I see evidence of a conflict more severe than any yet fought by reformation or science; a conflict that will shake the foundations of religious belief, tear into fragments and scatter to the winds the old dogmas upon which all forms of christianity are based. It will not be the conflict of man with man upon rites and systems; it will not be the conflict of science upon church theories regarding creation and eternity; it will not be the light of biology illuminating the hypothesis of the resurrection of the body; but it will be the rebellion of one half of the church against those theological dogmas upon which the very existence of the church is based. In no other country has the conflict between natural and revealed rights been as pronounced as in the United States; and in this country where the conflict first began, we shall see its full and final development. During the ages, no rebellion has been of like importance with that of Woman against the tyranny of Church and State; none has had its far reaching effects. We note its beginning; its progress will overthrow every existing form of these institutions; its end will be a regenerated world.
