Woman and the Republic Part 10

But to return to the Suffrage charge. "American men may quiet their consciences with the delusion that no such injustice exists in this country as in Eastern nations. Though, with the general improvement in our inst.i.tutions, woman's condition must inevitably have improved also, yet the same principle that degrades her in Turkey insults her here." American men _may_ quiet their consciences, while striving to enlighten them further. The answer to Mohammedanism is Turkey. The answer to Christianity is America. Ceremonial uncleanness is absolutely unlike religious and social orderliness in the distribution of duties. How came there to be "general improvement in our inst.i.tutions?" There has been no improvement in Turkey, in China, in India, or in j.a.pan, except such as is creeping back from the Christendom of which these Suffragists speak with a sneer.

Freedom and education have not been appreciably advanced by "woman's becoming a component part of the government" in any land. The lands where she has the most apparent governmental control are the ones that are least educated and least free among those of modern civilization.

The church is an ever-growing body, and its clergy hold widely differing beliefs. The Egyptian priesthood guarded the sacred mysteries and ruled the state. Through the utmost that natural religion can do for man, they had gleaned the secret of a Supreme Maker and Ruler of the universe.

Moses, who was "learned in all their wisdom," led the first exiles across the sea to find "freedom to wors.h.i.+p G.o.d," and, from that day to this, the ministers of religion have stood as public guard over the mysteries of faith and, in the beginnings of each civilization, have ruled the state.

Whenever they have forgotten the lesson that Moses taught, the lesson that Paul more clearly taught, that to G.o.d alone is any soul responsible, they have proved stumbling-blocks to progress. It is true that religious bigots, as Suffrage writers say, have "defended capital punishment, intemperance, slavery, polygamy, and the subjection of woman." But capital punishment is defended by many besides bigots. Intemperance finds not only its strongest but its most effective foes in the Christian ministry and the Christian church. Slavery in our country rent in twain several great religious bodies. James G. Birney says that "probably nine-tenths of the Abolitionists were church-members." With polygamy came woman's subjection and woman suffrage into our free States. And the bigots outside the Christian ministry and church must share the same condemnation with any who, professing freedom, have yet forgotten the injunction of the Bible and the Christ.

"She would invade the pulpit." Invasion seems a strange word to use in regard to woman's entrance upon one of the highest of human duties. A pulpitless teacher she is and always has been. Missionary women have taught mult.i.tudes of beings. The Salvation la.s.sie has no thought of invasion, or of self-exaltation, when she leads the service of a thousand souls; and I am not willing to believe that a single woman who has entered the regular ministry has any more. It is the spirit of Suffrage that looks upon woman's advance as an attack.

But times have changed, say Suffrage leaders. Mrs. Cornelia K. Hood, in her report of the King's County Suffrage work for 1895, says: "A circular letter was addressed to all the clergymen known to be friends, asking them that a sermon might be preached by them in favor of woman suffrage. This request met with a liberal response, and many able addresses were made on the Sunday morning set for that purpose." In her report of the Suffrage campaign in New York city in the winter of 1895-96, Dr. Jacobi says, speaking of the parlor meetings: "Several prominent clergymen joined us-- Mr. Rainsford, the Rev. Arthur Brooks, Mr. Percy Grant, Mr. Eaton, Mr.

Leighton Williams." In referring to the last regular meeting of the County Suffrage a.s.sociation held that winter in Cooper Union, she says: "The meeting was addressed by Samuel Gompers, President of the Federation of Labor, by Dr. Peters, an Episcopal clergyman, by Father Ducey, the Catholic priest, Dr. Saunders, a Baptist minister, and Henry George, the advocate of single tax." In her address before the Const.i.tutional Convention, she said: "The Church, which fifty years ago was a unit in denouncing the public work of woman--even for the slave--is now divided in its councils." The church never was a unit in denouncing the public work of woman, and much of her n.o.blest public work has been done under its auspices. The behavior of Suffrage women in slavery times caused scandal to church and state. The right of private judgment, claimed always by Protestant Christianity, has divided the clergy on all questions; and "a clergyman, a priest, and a minister" were as free to believe, and to speak what they believed, on suffrage, as were Samuel Gompers, who lately offended the Labor organization by inviting two anarchists to address it, and Henry George, whose single-tax theories have lately turned law and order upside down in Delaware.

"Interpret the Bible anew from her own standpoint." The volume in which a beginning has been made in this work is a thick pamphlet bearing a motto from Cousin on one cover, and the picture of a piano as an advertis.e.m.e.nt on the other. It is with a profound sense of sadness and disgust that any woman who honors G.o.d and loves her own s.e.x turns its pages. Behold the first dilemma in which the commentators find themselves involved. Mrs.

Stanton opens the comments on the Creation as follows: "In the great work of the creation, the crowning glory was realized when man and woman were evolved on the sixth day, the masculine and feminine forces in the image of G.o.d, that must have existed eternally, in all forms of matter and mind.... How then is it possible to make woman an afterthought?... All those theories based on the a.s.sumption that man was prior in the creation, have no foundation in Scripture. As to woman's subjection, on which both the canon and civil law delight to dwell, it is important to note that equal dominion is given to woman over every living thing, but not a word is said giving man dominion over woman. No lesson of woman's subjection can be fairly drawn from the first chapter of the Old Testament."

In commenting on the second account of the Creation, Ellen Battelle Dietrick says: "It is now generally conceded that some one (n.o.body pretends to know who) at some time (n.o.body pretends to know exactly when) copied two creation myths on the same leather roll, one immediately following the other. Modern theologians have, for convenience sake, ent.i.tled these two fables, respectively, the Elohistic and the Jahoistic stories. They differ not only in the point I have mentioned above, but in the order of the 'creative acts,' in regard to the mutual att.i.tude of man and woman, and in regard to human freedom from prohibitions imposed by deity. Now, it is manifest that both of these stories cannot be true; intelligent women who feel bound to give the preference to either, may decide according to their own judgment which is more worthy of an intelligent woman's acceptance. My own opinion is, that the second story was manipulated by some wily Jew, in an endeavor to give 'heavenly authority' for requiring a woman to obey the man she married." Lillie Devereux Blake takes still another horn of the dilemma. She says: "In the detailed description of creation we find a gradually ascending series.

'Creeping things,' 'great sea-monsters,' every bird of wing,' 'cattle and living things of the earth,' the 'fish of the sea and the birds of the heavens;' then man, and, last and crowning glory of the whole, woman. It cannot be maintained that woman was inferior to man, even if, as a.s.serted in chapter ii., she was created after him, without at once admitting that man is inferior to the creeping things because created after them."

These commentators, on the whole, agree that the first account of creation does not teach woman's subjection to man; that, although "some wily Jew"

inserted the second account in an endeavor to give "heavenly authority for requiring a woman to obey the man she married," he has been outwitted after all, for the ascending series of creation really teaches the same lesson as the first account, and from it woman's inferiority cannot be maintained. And yet it would seem that she must be an "afterthought" if she is to be superior.

Mrs. Stanton, in summing up the concensus of opinion on a matter which is not of the slightest importance to any of them, except that they feel an interest, for the cause of Suffrage, in endeavoring to release woman from the long bondage of superst.i.tion, says: "The first account dignifies woman as an important factor in the creation, equal in power and glory with man.

The second makes her a mere afterthought. The world in good running order without her, the only reason for her advent being the solitude of man.

There is something sublime in bringing order out of chaos; light out of darkness; giving each planet its place in the solar system; oceans and lands their limits,--wholly inconsistent with a petty surgical operation to find material for the mother of the race. It is in this allegory that all the enemies of woman rest their battering-rams, to prove her inferiority. Accepting the view that man was prior in the creation, some Scriptural writers say that, as the woman was of the man, therefore her position should be one of subjection. Grant it. Then, as the historical fact is reversed in our day, and the man is now of the woman, shall his place be one of subjection? The equal position declared in the first account must prove more satisfactory to both s.e.xes; created alike in the image of G.o.d--the heavenly Mother and Father. Thus, the Old Testament,' in the beginning,' proclaims the simultaneous creation of man and woman, the eternity and equality of s.e.x; and the New Testament echoes back through the centuries the individual sovereignty of woman growing out of this natural fact. Paul, in speaking of equality as the very soul and essence of Christianity, said, 'There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female; for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.' With this recognition of the feminine element in the G.o.dhead in the Old Testament, and this declaration of the equality of the s.e.xes in the New, we may well wonder at the contemptible status woman occupies in the Christian Church to-day."

So the woman who spurns the Bible as the book that is responsible for woman's degradation, who denies that it is the word of G.o.d, who pours out upon Paul the vials of her wrath, finds in them both her highest warrant for believing in the "equal position" of woman, "the perfect equality of the s.e.xes." When the wrath of woman thus praises G.o.d, the one who believes that through woman's status in the Bible and in the Christian Church this perfect equality is being worked out day by day need not take up controversial cudgels. Ribaldry in woman seems more gross than in man, and this is woman's ribaldry. It is profane to speak of the "feminine element in the G.o.dhead." G.o.d is a spirit. There is no more a feminine than a masculine element in the G.o.dhead. s.e.x belongs to mortal life and its conditions. It begins and ends with this earth. Christ has told us so: There will be in another world "no marrying, nor giving in marriage, but we all shall be as the angels in heaven." The equality of which Paul spoke as "the very soul and essence of Christianity" is the equality of the essence and soul of male and female humanity, and the oneness of the believer's soul with that of the Christ in whom his soul believes. The soul of humanity, as well as its body, is bound by s.e.x conditions as long as it draws the breath of this transitory life. Every thought and every act reveal the governing power of the s.e.x mould in which its form is cast for this world's uses. The use of this world is to give preparation for another and a better one; final spiritual triumph is the end to be attained. Humanity is now in the image of G.o.d only in the essential sense in which the full corn in the ear may be said to be wrapped up in its kernel, and it can unfold only according to the laws of its being. The first account of Creation sets forth, with the beautiful imagery of the Orient, the general and ultimate truth. The second account, with the same grand simplicity, foreshadows the method and the long, slow process by which this ultimate end is to be attained.

In continuing their comments, the editors say: "In chapter v., verse 23, Adam proclaims the eternal oneness of the happy pair, 'This is now bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh;' no hint of her subordination. How could men, admitting these words to be divine revelation, ever have preached the subjection of woman? Next comes the naming of the mother of the race. 'She shall be called woman,' in the ancient form of the word, 'womb-man.' She was man and more than man, because of her maternity. The a.s.sertion of the supremacy of the woman in the marriage relation is contained in chapter v., 24: 'Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother and cleave unto his wife.' Nothing is said of the heads.h.i.+p of man, but he is commanded to make her the head of the household, the home, a rule followed for centuries under the Matriarchate."

A rule that has been followed rudely through all centuries, and is followed to-day with far greater approach to perfect obedience. Maternity was to be G.o.d's method of working out the problem of changing the innocence of ignorant savagery to the holiness of enlightened civilization. To this end, the more delicate and complex organism of the womb-man must be cared for by the strength and steadiness that could find full play because that subtler task was not demanded of it.

In commenting on chapter iii., which contains the account of the Garden of Eden and the eating of the apple, they say: "As out of this allegory grow the doctrines of original sin, the fall of man and of woman the author of all our woes, and the curses on the serpent, the woman and the man, the Darwinian theory of the gradual growth of the race from a lower to a higher type of animal life is more hopeful and encouraging."

The Christian doctrine is more hopeful and encouraging still. It reveals the growth of the race from a low type of animal life to the perfect life of the soul.

We do not need to go back to the garden where our first parents dwelt, to look for the substantiation of the eternal truth of this whole wondrous story. Amid the landscape of the civilization of the n.o.blest country that the world possesses, we have the drama repeated. In the work of Anne Hutchinson, Ann Lee, Frances Wright, Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Stanton, Susan Anthony, Ellen Dietrick, Lillie Blake, and their fellow- commentators, we have re-enacted the Temptress and the Fall. Woman first aspired. She stretched forth her eager hand to seize the good, and in so doing s.n.a.t.c.hed the evil that grew beside it. The woman in Eden had not learned what maternity taught her later--that she could point the path, but could not lead in entering it. Wherever woman has forgotten this hard- won but glorious lesson, she has been the most dangerous of guides. The conscience, that intellect of the soul, woke first in woman. By her obedience to its voice, the faith that worketh by love had its perfected work, and the promise that was given to her was fulfilled in the birth of Christ. A Creation story without a gospel is chaos without gravitation, primal darkness without the sun. Forward to divinity in human form woman was able, through obedience, to point mankind. Backward to divinity in human form she points again, until humanity itself shall become divine. If she loses the final vision, or subst.i.tutes her own, she can neither point nor guide. No wonder woman has been a mystery to the church. No wonder a witch was not allowed to live, while a wizard might; she was more dangerous. No wonder Paul was perplexed by the woman question. No wonder monks fled to the desert. Christ has spoken the final words of woman, "Thy faith hath saved thee." From the anguish of His cross he said: "Woman, behold thy son!" "Behold thy mother," and the beloved disciple "took her to his own home from that hour."

In the Suffrage appeal of 1860, the writers said: "The difference between husband and wife is as vast as the difference between Christ and his Church." Christ himself says that the difference between him and his Church is that of degree, not of kind, and that the resemblance is that of essential oneness. He says: "I am the vine, ye are the branches." Could union be more completely pictured? The fruit-bearing branch cannot say to the strength-giving vine, "I have no need of thee." The vine cannot say, "I have no need of thee." Man in his imperious folly has pictured the relations.h.i.+p as that of oak and vine which have no organic union; but, despite imperiousness and folly, both men and women, through mutual obedience to G.o.d, have thus far worked out, and are still working out, the n.o.bler destiny for both.

In summing up their opinion of the Pentateuch, the editors of the Suffrage Woman's Bible say: "This utter contempt for all the decencies of life, and all the natural personal rights of women, as set forth in these pages, should destroy, in the minds of women at least, all authority to superhuman origin, and stamp the Pentateuch at least as emanating from the most obscene minds of a barbarous age." So low can woman fall in ignorance and shameless audacity when the faith that works by love is lost. As the spirit of the Commandments comes to prevail, the decencies of life and the natural personal rights of woman become more secure. Here again Christ has spoken the ultimate word. He says: "Ye have heard by them of old time'

Thou shalt not commit adultery,' but I say unto you whosoever looketh on a woman to l.u.s.t after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart." This is the standard of chast.i.ty to which mankind must come. When the Hebrew mother in living faith cast the bread of her own life's being upon the Nile, she was to find it after many days in the great law-giver of her people. The Commandments received through him were the foreshadowing of those greater oracles in which Christ summed up the whole duty of man. The individual liberty which Moses was the first to proclaim to a whole people, in the Pentateuch, Christ, his anti-type, proclaimed to a whole world, and on his proclamation rests to-day the freedom of woman and of the American Republic. The Bread of Life, again cast on the troubled waters of this world, by woman's faith, through Mary the Virgin Mother, is returning after many days.

Strange that we should forever turn back, as if the application of any essential truth were finished. The child walks by faith. The childhood of the world walked by faith, and left in the Bible the evidence of things that are not seen but are eternal. The Suffrage movement has a quarrel with the Bible because the Creator is there represented, for the reverence of the race, under the guise of a Heavenly Father, and not a Heavenly Mother, or rather, not as a human pair, equal in dignity and power. If the first impulsion of love toward G.o.d had come into this world through the mind of man, he would have represented the divine love that his soul conceived under the guise of that being on earth whom he most loved. But love was born with the "disabilities" of woman; it was evolved through motherhood; and the same impulse that gave it, exalted, not itself, but what it loved and trusted. "I have gotten a man from the Lord" said the first recorded mother, who had learned to know the Lord through motherhood; and the boy she bore was taught to look up with confidence to the strength and protection of his father. She told him that the pity of his father, which made him bring food and raiment, and which guarded his home, was an image of the feeling that was felt for him by the divine being. Could man have learned the lesson first, we can see that the story would have been different, because man has named every beautiful and gracious thing for woman. Virtue, temperance, truth, purity, love, faith, hope, liberty, grace, beauty, charity, the inspirers of art and science, of music and literature, of justice and of religion, all are feminine.

When man says: "Our Father which art in heaven," he prays as his mother taught him. Through the self-abnegation that was unconscious of its sacrifice, woman was to be the instrument for bringing human life up, on, to the G.o.d who, being spirit, could act upon a clay-bound mind only through the highest human thing that love could know. Men, as well as women, have misunderstood and misinterpreted this. The love that "is not puffed up," "doth not behave itself unseemly," cannot proclaim its own virtue--to arrogate it is to lose it. But the secret of the Lord has been with those who feared Him, and it has led the world aright in spite of blunder and of sin.

If man, in his ignorant conceit, has fancied that this was the subjection of woman, it has been a part of his mother's lesson to correct that impression. If woman, in her folly, has allowed herself to make the same mistake, that, too, is working out its cure through the love that so arranged human nature that "a man should leave father and mother and cleave unto his wife, and they twain should be one flesh," and that "_her desire_ should be to her husband" in those matters wherein the mutual interest required that he should bear sway. If there is a minister of religion who holds to the perverted notion that, because woman ate the original apple in disobedience to G.o.d's command, she was the bringer of original sin into the world, and for that was and is punished by arbitrary subjection to the authority of man, that minister does not deserve the support of women. The fact that he would have few listeners, and fewer followers, if women were not the bringers and the maintainers of religious faith is sufficient proof against such an exposition of scripture. As a matter of fact, while the dogmatism of belief, like the dogmatism of unbelief, has made a.s.sertions that have dishonored both divine and human nature, the practical working of formulated faiths of all names has been to approach the standard laid down in the Old and the New Testament. The model of being set by Christ is that of a little child. "Except ye become as little children, ye shall in no wise enter the kingdom of heaven." The natural characteristics of the child are faith, and hope, and love--the virtues that abide. When the virile apostle to the Gentiles "put away childish things," he kept these childlike qualities. If woman first attains them in perfection, she is superior; if man, he is superior. In the race toward the final goal, to be equal in accomplishment it is needful to be equal in obedience. The keynote of Paul's preaching was obedience--the obedience of all human beings to G.o.d in Christ, the obedience of all men and women to lawful civil authority for the sake of Christ and the promotion of his kingdom,--the obedience of men to one another in the churchly offices, for the sake of that "decency" that he loved and enjoined--the obedience of the equal wife to the husband who was the external representative of family life.

With Eastern nations the veil was the sign of retirement, of domestic life, and it was a.s.sumed by wives when they were in the street or in a public a.s.sembly. In heathen and barbarous countries it was also deemed a sign of woman's subjection and inferiority. The Hebrews were the first people to attain any truly spiritual conceptions, and they began to have a commensurately higher idea of the possibilities of woman's nature and work. When Christian women, in their new-found freedom, would have thrown aside the veil, just as Christian men, in their new-found reverence for G.o.d, would have repudiated the heathen wife, Paul said to them both that Christian liberty was individual,--it changed the character, not the s.e.x relations. In arranging for church discipline, he advised that men should uncover the head, and women should wear the veil. But he said, in reference to that veil, that "woman should have _power_ on her head, because of the angels." The angels are spoken of in the New Testament as veiling their faces in the very presence of the Creator. In that truer symbolism of Christianity, man was to uncover his head in token of reverence to G.o.d and acceptance of the responsibility of the guardians.h.i.+p of the earth. Woman was to cover her head in token of her acceptance of man's guardians.h.i.+p and of her dominion over his heart, to which she had revealed G.o.d's will.

Paul adds: "For as the woman is of the man, so is the man also of the woman; but all things are of G.o.d." This relation was one of the mysteries that Paul said he did not comprehend, nor could he, till the lessons he taught should work out their results, and might serve as commentary.

Life itself, as well as all that life could come to mean, depended upon woman's consenting. The word "obey" in some marriage services seems, like what it really is, a survival. Obedience has brought its reward, and the consent of the heart is more than the consent of the lips. But if there is no consent of the heart to wifehood and motherhood, in time there will be no chivalry, no progress, no final emanc.i.p.ation for the race. Consenting is also commanding, and woman loses her life in order to find it in the fulfillment of her wish. It was consent to her own teaching. The chivalrous and tender-hearted Paul, who spoke of women with reverent affection, who adopted as his own the mother of Rufus, was repeating the lesson of every Jewish mother from Sarah to Deborah, and from Deborah to the women who were last at Christ's cross and first beside his tomb.

Deborah, who was the judge, prophetess and poet, but first of all "a mother in Israel," under whom her degenerate people had peace for forty years, rebuked Barak and said, to their humiliation: "This day shall the Lord deliver Israel by the hand of a woman." From this teaching Paul uttered his rebuke to the wayward church at Corinth: "It is a shame for a man to cover his head, inasmuch as he is the image and glory of G.o.d; but the woman is the glory of the man." And he added, in speaking of the wearing of the veil, "For this cause ought the woman to have power"

"because of the angels." In the Epistle to the Ephesians Paul admonishes the Church to be "imitators of G.o.d, as beloved children, and walk in love, even as Christ also loved you, and gave himself for you, an offering and a sacrifice to G.o.d for a sweet-smelling savour." Again, he says: "Therefore, as the Church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in everything." And as if to make doubly certain that no one should think that such submission implied bondage or inequality, he adds "Husbands, love your wives even as Christ also loved the Church and _gave himself for it_." Again, he says: "So ought men to love their wives, as their own bodies.... Even as the Lord the Church," adding with almost strained Oriental vehemence, "for we are members of his body, of his flesh and of his bones. For this cause shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall be joined unto his wife, and they twain shall be one flesh."

The comment most readily suggested is, that through this teaching the use of the veil has now no such significance. The uncovering of the head is a token of respect, largely to woman. The retention of the bonnet is not dreamed of in connection with woman's relation to man, nor does it suggest woman's power in the moral world. The obedience through which love "constrained" a mind that had been bred to forms, was free. If anybody now holds that woman was intended to glorify G.o.d indirectly, through man, or to serve G.o.d by serving man, he makes an a.s.sumption long discredited, and not in accord with the spirit of Christ and of Paul. Man is as much the glory of woman as woman is the glory of man, and they reveal equally the glory of G.o.d.

In speaking of the proprieties of life, Paul said: "Does not nature herself teach you?" "If a man have long hair, it is a shame to him." "If a woman have long hair, it is a glory to her." The badge of womanhood is a glory, and the "short-haired women and long-haired men" of the early Suffrage movement transformed the symbols of dignity and honor into those of contempt and disgrace.

Canon law grew up during the Middle Ages, when came the great

"Death-grapple in the darkness, 'twixt old systems and the Word."

The wondrous church that rose on the ruins of Roman militarism, and overthrew Norman feudalism, gave evidence, in its code, of the bitterness of the conflict and the rudeness of the time. The legal fiction that, in acknowledging the oneness of husband and wife, yet made the husband that one, was a perversion of Scripture.

It has been publicly said by Suffragists from the first, that the tenets of the Church of Rome, in which Canon law had its origin, were inimical to woman suffrage; and they have further said that those who canonize women and wors.h.i.+p the Virgin Mother, should naturally have been friendly to the Suffrage idea. I suppose no one will deny that the spirit of the Roman body is that of a state church. I have no more to say in criticism of it as a Christian denomination than I have of others; but that organization which has held temporal and spiritual power to be co-ordinate and interdependent in government, presents a political phase that has direct bearing on my theme, and I make my few comments as a historian. The Church that inculcates Mariolatry would have far more ignorant women to add to our body of voters than any other. It has done less for woman's education and general advancement than any other, but its claims are not therefore modest. The school elections in Staten Island last year gave an object- lesson in regard to its intention to use the suffrage. In Connecticut, the school election presented another evidence of the intense interest felt by the Catholic clergy in public-school matters. In California, in the late canva.s.s for woman suffrage, that Church a.s.sisted largely in carrying on the work to secure the amendment. While many of its individual members are among the n.o.blest friends that civil and religious freedom have in our country, this church, by its traditions, and by its latest p.r.o.nunciamentos, shows itself as a force that, for its own selfish reasons, may be reckoned on the side of woman suffrage in its conflict with woman's progress.

CHAPTER X.

WOMAN SUFFRAGE AND s.e.x.

The ninth count of the Suffrage Declaration says: "He has created a false sentiment by giving to the world a different code of morals for men and women, by which moral delinquencies which exclude woman from society, are not only tolerated, but deemed of little account in men." And the list of grievances is summed up as follows: "Because women do feel themselves aggrieved, oppressed and fraudulently deprived of their most sacred rights, we insist that they have immediate admission to all the rights and privileges which belong to them as citizens of the United States."

The writers do not say whether the code of morals referred to is a code of law or an unwritten code of public sentiment. If they mean the former, their statement is not true; for whatever laws affect moral delinquencies visit their penalties equally upon men and women. If they mean public sentiment alone, the answer is, that both men and women are responsible for its creation. It is folly to deny that there is, in the nature of things, more excuse for men than for women. A mother realizes that her son has a natural temptation of which her daughter knows nothing. But this fact, while it accounts in part for the different standard, by no means exonerates man. One of the strangest anomalies of human experience exists in connection with this matter. Man reposes his deepest faith in the existence of goodness at its vital point, in the virtue of woman; and yet when he tramples upon that virtue he screens himself behind the excuse that her nature is as vulnerable as his own, while his temptation is greater. The main reason, as it seems to me, why women often appear more cruel to their fallen sisters than do men, lies in the fact that pure women abhor this vice as they abhor no other. Besides bestowing upon woman a loftier moral sense, her Creator has hedged about her virtue with a feeling of physical repulsion that is distinct from the moral question involved. The social life of the world is to a large extent in woman's hands. When she says to men "You cannot bring your impurity into my home,"

"You must be the ones to guard our sons and daughters," the reform will be begun in earnest. Woman's faith, and her abstract way of looking at moral questions, prevent her from fastening her thought, as men naturally do, on any special culprit, in her severe but vague sense of wrong in this matter. The Suffragists have taken fewer steps in the direction of removing the social plague-spot than in the direction of bringing about a system of easier divorce--a thing that strikes a blow directly against, instead of for, the virtue of their s.e.x. Social opinion is causing a change in some of the laws concerning social vice. Nearly every State legislature has raised the age of consent. So far as Suffrage a.s.sociations have a.s.sisted in this, it proves their ability and their good will; but much more is due to our educated physicians and philanthropists.

It seems at first thought as if there were no direct connection between voting and social questions of s.e.x; but I am following the lead of my Suffrage texts. Others who attempt the discussion are led to the same themes. Dr. Jacobi, in her book, says: "The problem is, to show why, in a representative system based on the double principle that all the intelligence in the state shall be enlisted for its welfare, and all the weakness in the state represented for its own defence, women, being often intelligent, and often weak, and always persons in the community, should not also be represented." In replying to the anti-suffrage arguments of Prof. Goldwin Smith, she says: "Do s.e.x relations depend upon acts of Parliament or const.i.tutional amendments? Can women marry a ballot, or embrace the franchise, otherwise than by a questionable figure of speech?

Must adultery and infanticide necessarily be favored by the decisions of female jurors? Is divorce legislation, as arranged by the exclusive wisdom of men, now so satisfactory that women--who must perforce be involved in every case--should always modestly refrain from attempting amendment? This entire cla.s.s of considerations, however irrelevant to the issue, may be grouped together and considered together, because, to a large cla.s.s of minds--the rudest, quite as much as those of Mr. Smith's cultivation--they are the considerations that do come to the front whenever equal rights are suggested." She adds that the reason they come to the front is, "that men, accustomed to think of men as possessing s.e.x attributes and other things besides, are accustomed to think of women as having s.e.x and nothing else."

Is there a ruder mind anywhere than one that could not only think but write a sentiment so revolting and so false? And yet the statement admits that, whatever the reason, the s.e.x issue does underlie the whole Suffrage question.

In their "History," the leaders not only set forth all the specific charges in their Declaration of Sentiments, but of this "rebellion such as the world has never seen" they say: "Men saw that with political equality for woman, she could no longer be kept in social subjection. The fear of a social revolution thus complicated the discussion."

In the Introduction to the Suffrage Woman's Bible, the commentators say: "How can woman's position be changed from that of a subordinate to an equal, without opposition?--without the broadest discussion of all the questions involved in her present degradation? For so far-reaching and momentous a reform as her complete independence, an entire revolution in all existing inst.i.tutions is inevitable."

Dr. Jacobi says: "To-day, when all men rule, and diffused self-government has abolished the old divisions between the governing cla.s.ses and the governed, only one cla.s.s remains over whom all men can exercise sovereignty--namely, the women. Hence a shuddering dread runs through society at the proposal to also abolish this last refuge of facile domination."

Here, then, all these Suffragists present a problem far more momentous than appears when it is proposed "to show why, in a representative system based on the double principle that all the intelligence in the state shall be enlisted for its welfare, and all the weakness in the state represented for its defence, women, being often intelligent, and often weak, and always persons, should not also be represented." It is the s.e.x battle that has been waged from the beginning. In the Suffrage Woman's Bible Mrs.

Stanton says: "The correction of this [the misinterpretation of the Bible as concerns woman] will restore her, and deprive her enemy, man, of a reason for his oppression and a weapon of attack." Disguise it as they may, to themselves and to others, the Suffrage idea is compelled to claim that man is woman's enemy, that the ballot is the engine of his power, and that therefore she must vote. The reason that "these considerations come to the front whenever equal rights is mentioned" is because the women of that movement brought them there, and keep them there, and because no one can seriously consider the matter without seeing that they belong there.

In discussing them, Dr. Jacobi says: "What is imagined, claimed, and very seriously demanded, is, that women be recognized as human beings, with a range of faculties and activities co-extensive with that of men, whatever may be the difference in the powers within that range."

In another place she admits that "women are really recognized as individuals, the same as men," and the fact that they are so recognized is made the basis of an argument for their voting. Suppose men demanded that they be given a "range of faculties and activities co-extensive with that of women, whatever may be the difference in the powers within that range,"

if they demanded it "seriously" they would probably become laughing- stocks.