Woman, Church & State

After discussion, the ministers present generally agreed that, because of motherhood, woman should be debarred from such official recognition.

The final ground of women’s exclusion as delegates to the General Conference, is most noticeable inasmuch as appeal was ultimately made to the State. Upon the seventh day’s session it was resolved to suspend the rules and continue the debate on the admission of women as lay-delegates. So anxious were men to speak that forty-one delegates at once sprung to their feet and claimed the floor. Judge Taylor, a lay delegate from the St. Louis conference, walking down the aisle with a number of law books under his arm, proceeded to argue the question on constitutional grounds, saying:

It would do much harm to admit women at the present time. There are bishops to be elected and other important matters to be voted on, and if women are admitted and allowed to vote, and it should subsequently be decided that women should not be entitled to seats, the acts of the present General Conference would be illegal and unconstitutional.

While claiming, personally, to favor women’s admission, he quoted law to sustain their rejection, and wished the question to be submitted to a vote of the church. The “vote of the church,” as shown by the adoption of Rev. F. B. Neely’s amendment, signifying the ministers present at annual conferences.567 The vote upon this amendment, which excluded women from seats in the General Conference, submitting their eligibility to the decision of ministers of the annual conferences, was adopted 237 to 198. It thus requires three-fourths vote of the members present and voting at the annual conferences, this vote to be ratified by a two-thirds vote of the General Conference in order to woman’s acceptance as lay delegate to such General Conference.568 Aside from the fact of an appeal to the civil law for the exclusion of woman, thus showing the close union of church and state, one other important point must be noticed. In the declaration that the church should be consulted in regard to such an important matter, that body was defined as the ministers of the annual conference, laymen not here ranking as part of the church. The lay delegates, unnarrowed by theological studies were, as a body, favorable to woman’s admission. Nor did they refrain from criticising the clergy, declaring that the episcopacy did not interpret the law of the church, this power resting in the General Conference. But one more favoring vote would have tied the question. Gen. Samuel H. Hurst, dairy and food commissioner of Ohio, the first layman to gain the floor, defended the right of women to admission. He alluded to the opponents of the women as “old fogies.” He criticized the bishop’s address.

The episcopacy does not interpret the law of the church, but the General Conference does. Woman does not come here as a strong-minded person demanding admittance, but she comes as representative of the lay conference. The word “laymen” was interpreted to mean all members of the church not represented in the ministry. That is the law, and if women are “laymen” they are entitled to admission.

The Southern Baptist Association, meeting in New Orleans in July of the same year, refused to admit women by a vote of 42 to 40. The church as of old, is still strenuous in its efforts to influence legislation. An amendment to the National Constitution is pressed by the National Reform Association, recognizing the sectarian idea of God; another placing marriage and divorce under control of the general government by uniform laws; while priestly views upon the political freedom of woman are thrust into the very faces of our law makers.569 The following portions of a sermon preached at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, Boston, February 21, 1886, by the Rev. Father J. P. Bodfish, were printed and distributed among the members of the Massachusetts Legislature that spring by the opponents of woman suffrage:570

Not that I would have woman step out of her sphere; the man is the natural protector, the father, the lawgiver, of his family; not would I counsel wives to usurp the places of their husbands at the polls. I believe this to be one of the errors of modern times, to try to unsex woman, and take her from the high place she occupies and drag her into the arena of public life. What has she to do there? We might as well try to drag down the angels to take part in the menial affairs of this world as to take woman from the high place she occupies in the family, where ’tis her privilege and duty to guide, to counsel and to instruct – to lead that family in the way of righteousness. It is but offering her a degradation; Almighty God never intended it. The charm, the influence of woman, is in that purity that comes from living in a sphere apart from us. God forbid that we should ever see the day that a man, a husband or a father, is to find his will opposed and thwarted at the polls by his daughter or his wife. Then farewell to that reverence which belongs to the character of woman.

She puts herself on an equal footing with man when she steps down from that place where every one regards her with reverence, and becomes unsexed by striving to make laws which she cannot enforce, and taking upon herself duties for which she is altogether unfitted.

Decrees of various characters presenting woman as a being of different natural and spiritual rights from man, are constantly formulated by the churches. The Plenary Council of Baltimore, 1884, busied itself in the enactment of canons directly bearing upon marriage and divorce, re-affirming the sacramental character of marriage and declaring that marriages under civil rites should be resented by the whole Catholic world. This council was preceded by an encyclical from the Pope, laying out its plans by work yet leaving it within the power of the diocesan bishops to promulgate its canons according to their own wisdom. Consequently, not until three years later were those upon marriage published on the Pacific Coast, at which time the archbishop of San Francisco, the bishops of Monterey, Los Angeles and Grass Valley, addressed a pastoral letter to the Catholics of those regions, condemning civil marriage as a sin and sacrilege, illegal, and a “horrible concubinage.” It was farther stated that marriage unblessed by a priest, subjected the parties to excommunication. At the still later Catholic Congress, in honor of the hundredth anniversary of the Catholic Hierarchy in America, divorces were affirmed to be the plague of civilization, a discredit to the government, a degradation of the female sex, and a standing menace to the sanctity of the marriage bond. In noting these canons of the Plenary Council and the resolutions of the Catholic Congress, it should be borne in mind that the chief secret of the long-continued power of the Catholic church has been its hold upon marriage and the subordination of woman in this relation. To these celibate priests, nothing connected with woman is sacred. Celibacy and the sacramental nature of marriage are each of them based upon the theory of woman’s created inferiority and original sin. Priestly power over marriage, and the confessional, through which means it is able to wrest all family and state secrets to its own use, are powers that will not be peaceably relinquished. Their destruction will come through the growing intelligence of people, and the responsibility of political self-government. These will insure confidence in the validity of civil marriage and a belief in the personal rights of individuals. To woman, the education of political responsibility is most essential in order to free her from church bonds, and is therefore most energetically opposed by the church. In 1890, a number of Catholic ladies of Paris formed a union for the emancipation of woman from different kinds of social thraldom.571 Their first attack was upon the priesthood, whom they declared the mortal adversary of woman’s advancement, affirming that every woman “who abets the abbés is an enemy of her sex.” This open rebellion of Catholic ladies against the power of the hierarchy, is a significant sign of woman’s advancing freedom.

All canons, decrees, resolutions and laws of the church, especially bearing upon the destinies of woman are promulgated without the hearing of her voice, either in confirmation or rejection. She is simply legislated for as a slave. Two of the later triennial conclaves of the Episcopal church of the United States, energetically debated the subject of divorce, not, however, arriving at sufficient unanimity of opinion for the enactment of a canon. When Mazzini, the Italian patriot, was in this country, 1852, he declared the destruction of the priesthood to be our only surety for continued freedom, saying:

They will be found as in Italy, the foes of mankind, and if the United States expects to retain even its political liberties, it must get rid of the priesthood as Italy intends to do.572

Frances Wright, that clear-seeing, liberty-loving, Scotch free-thought woman, noted the dangerous purpose and character of the Christian party in politics, even as early as 1829; and the present effort of this body, now organized as the “National Reform Association” with its adjunct “The American Sabbath Union,” officered by priests and influential members of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, and kindred bodies, is a perpetual menace to the civil and religious liberties of the United States. Its effort for an amendment to the Federal Constitution which shall recognize the United States as a Christian nation, is a determined endeavor toward the union of church and state; and its success in such attempt will be the immediate destruction of both civil and religious liberty. That such a party now openly exists, its intentions no secret, is evidence that the warnings of Italian patriot and the Scotch free thinker were not without assured foundation.

As a body, the church opposes education for woman, and all the liberalizing tendencies of the last thirty-five or forty years, which have opened new and varied industries to women and secured to wives some relief from their general serf condition. Bishop Littlejohn, of the Episcopal church, at the Triennial Conclave of bishops, 1883, preached as his “triennial charge” upon “The Church and the Family,” presenting the general church idea as to woman’s inferiority and subordination. He made authoritative use of the words “sanctities of home,” a phrase invented by the clergy as a method of holding woman in bondage; directed the church to “strictly impose her doctrines as to marriage and divorce, clash as they may with the spirit of the times and the laws of the state” (thus emulating the Catholic doctrines of the supremacy of the church). He declared that in any respect to change the relation established by God himself between husband and wife, was rank infidelity, no matter what specious disguise such change might assume, explicitly declaring the authority of the church over marriage, as against the authority of the state; protesting against omission of the word “obey” from the marriage service, and the control of the wife over her own earnings and expenditures, saying:

If it be outside the province of the states to treat marriage as more than a contract between a man and a woman, the church must make it understood, as it is not, that it is inside her province to treat it as a thing instituted of God. Practically, we have reached a point where the wife may cease to have property interests in common with her husband, may control absolutely her own means of living, and determine for herself the scale of expenditures that will suit her tastes or her caprices. The man is no longer the head of the household, the husband. It has been made an open question whether the man or his wife will fulfill that function, and “a community of interests, with the recognized authority of the husband to rule the wife, and the recognized duty of the wife to obey that authority, is no longer deemed expedient or necessary.” This rebellion against the old view of marriage is so strong that in many cases the word “obey” is omitted from the marriage service.

Even among Christianized Indians we find different laws governing man and woman. In 1886, the governor of Maine paid a visit to the governor of the Passamaquody Indians, at a time when a large council was in progress upon the St. Croix reservation. This council first assembled at the chapel, where the Revised Statutes – the whole basis of government of the Passamaquodies – are posted. These statutes having been approved by Bishop Healy, of Portland, are also looked upon as canons of the church.573

The statutes principally affecting women, are:

Third: No woman who is separated from her husband shall be admitted to the sacrament, or to any place in the church except the porch in summer and the back seat in winter, unless by the consent of the bishop.

Fourth: Any woman who admits men into her house by night shall be treated as a criminal and delivered to the courts.

Fifth: Any woman who is disobedient to her husband, any common scold or drunkard, shall not be permitted to enter the church, except by permission of the priest.

It will be noted that these statutes forbid the sacrament to the woman who is separated from her husband, not even permitting her an accustomed seat in church. She must remain in the porch during the summer and in a back seat during the winter, except “the bishop” otherwise permits. Also the woman not rendering obedience to her husband, is denied permission to enter the church except under priestly permit. The Christian theory of woman’s inferiority and subordination to man, is as fully endorsed by these statutes as in the mediaeval priestly instruction to husbands.574

No profession as constantly appeals to the lower nature as the priestly, the emotions rather than reason, are constantly invoked; ambition, love of power, hope of reward, fear of punishment, are the incentives presented and in no instance are such incentives more fully made use of than for purposes of sustaining the supremacy of man over woman. The teaching of the church cannot fail to impress woman with the feeling that if she expects education, or even opportunity of full entrance into business, she must not heed the admonitions of the priesthood, when, as by Dr. Dix, she is contemptuously forbidden to enter the professions on the ground that God designed these offices alone for man. When women sought university honors at Oxford, a few years since, many “incredibly foolish” letters, said London Truth, were written by its opponents who were chiefly clergymen. Canon Liddon’s influence was against the statute; the Dean of Norwich referred to it as “an attempt to defeat divine Providence and Holy Scripture.” Dr. Gouldbourne thought it would “unsex woman.”575

“There is no sin,” said Buddha, “but ignorance,” yet according to Rector Dix, Rev. S. W. Turnstall, Dr. Craven and the priesthood of the present day, in common with the earlier church, woman’s normal condition is that of ignorance, and education is the prerogative of man alone; and yet the dangers of ignorance have by no means been fathomed, although the latest investigations show the close relation between knowledge and life. That as intelligence is diffused, there is a corresponding increase of longevity, is proven; the most uneducated communities showing the greatest proportion of deaths. Ignorance and the death rate are parts of the same question; education and length of life are proportionately synonymous. Statistics gathered in England, Wales and Ireland a few years since showed the percentage of infantile deaths to be much greater in those portions where the mother could not read and write, than where the mother had sufficient education to read a newspaper and write her own name. In districts where there was no other appreciable difference except that of education, the mortality was the largest in the most ignorant districts.

In deprecating education for women, no organized body in the world has so clearly proven its own tyrannous ignorance as has the priesthood, and no body has shown itself so fully the enemy of mankind. Church teaching and centuries of repression acting through the laws of heredity have lessened woman’s physical size, depressed her mental action, subjugated her spirit, and crushed her belief in her right to herself and the proper training of her own children. The church, in its opposition to woman’s education through the ages, has literally killed off the inhabitants of the world with much greater rapidity than war, pestilence, or famine; more than one-half the children born into the world have soon died because of the tyranny and ignorance of the priesthood.576 The potential physical energy of mankind thus destroyed can in a measure be estimated, but no one can fathom the infinitely greater loss of mental and moral force brought about through condemnation of knowledge to woman; only by induction can it even be surmised. Lecky points out the loss to the world because so many of its purest characters donned the garb of monk or nun. That injury was immediately perceptible, but in the denial of education and freedom to woman more than ninety per cent of the moral and physical energy of the world has literally been suffocated, and owing to ignorance and lack of independent thought this loss is as yet scarcely recognized. So dense the pall of ignorance still overshadowing the world that even woman herself does not yet conjecture the injury that has been done her, or of what she and her children have been deprived. Nor has the world yet roused to a full consciousness of the mischief to mankind that has been perpetrated through the falsehood and ignorant presumption of those claiming control over its dearest rights and interests. Resistance to the wrong thus done the world has been less possible because perpetrated in the name of God and religion. It has caused tens of thousands of women to doubt their equality of right with man in education, to disbelieve they possess the same authority to interpret the Bible or present its doctrines as man; neither, having been deprived of education, do they believe themselves to be man’s political equal, or that they possess equal rights with him in the household. This degradation of woman’s moral nature is the most direful result of the teaching of the church in regard to her. A loss of faith in one’s own self, disbelief in one’s own right to the fullest cultivation of one’s own powers, proceeds from a debasement of the moral sentiments. Self-reliance, self-respect, self-confidence, are acquired through that cultivation of the intellectual faculties which has been denied to woman. Rev. Dr. Charles Little, of the Syracuse University, says: “In the report of a sermon of a distinguished theologian which appeared not long ago, this striking passage occurred: If I were to choose between Christianity as a life and Christianity as a dogma, I would choose Christianity as a dogma.” Judging from its treatment of woman and the many recent trials for heresy, dogma rather than life is the general spirit of the churches everywhere. It is dogma that has wrecked true religion; it is dogma that has crushed humanity; it is dogma that has created two codes of morals; that has inculcated the doctrine of original sin; that has degraded womanhood; that has represented divinity as possessing every evil attribute.

From all these incontrovertible facts in church and state, we see that both religion and government are essentially masculine in their present forms and development. All the evils that have resulted from dignifying one sex and degrading the other may be traced to one central error, a belief in a trinity of masculine gods, in one from which the feminine element is wholly eliminated; and yet in the scriptural account of the simultaneous creation of man and woman, the text plainly recognizes the feminine as well as the masculine element in the God-head, and declares the equality of the sexes in goodness, wisdom and power. Genesis i, 26-27.

And God said, Let us make man in our own image, after our likeness, and so God created man in his own image; in the image of God created He him, male and female created He them, and gave them dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

In nothing has the ignorance and weakness of the church been more fully shown than in its controversies in regard to the creation. From time of the “Fathers” to the present hour, despite its assertion and its dogmas, the church has ever been engaged in discussions upon the Garden of Eden, the serpent, woman, man, and God as connected in one inseparable relation. Amid all the evils attributed to woman, her loss of Paradise, introduction of sin into the world and the consequent degradation of mankind, yet Eve, and through her, all women have found occasional defenders. A book printed in Amsterdam, 1700, in a series of eleven reasons, threw the greater culpability upon Adam, saying:

First: The serpent tempted her before she thought of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and suffered herself to be persuaded that not well understood his meaning.

Second: That believing that God had not given such prohibition she eat the fruit.

Third: Sinning through ignorance she committed a less heinous crime than Adam.

Fourth: That Eve did not necessarily mean the penalty of eternal death, for God’s decree only imported that man should die if he sinned against his conscience.

Fifth: That God might have inflicted death on Eve without injustice, yet he resolved, so great is his mercy toward his works, to let her live, in (that) she had not sinned maliciously.

Sixth: That being exempted from the punishment contained in God’s decree, she might retain all the prerogatives of her sex except those that were not incidental with the infirmities to which God condemned her.

Seventh: That she retained in particulars the prerogative of bringing forth children who had a right to eternal happiness on condition of obeying the new Adam.

Eighth: That as mankind was to proceed from Adam and Eve, Adam was preserved alive only because his preservation was necessary for the procreation of children.

Ninth: That it was by accident therefore, that the sentence of death was not executed on him, but that otherwise he was more (justly) punished than his wife.

Tenth: That she was not driven out from Paradise as he was, but was only obliged to leave it to find out Adam in the earth; and that it was with full privilege of returning thither again.

Eleventh: That the children of Adam and Eve were subject to eternal damnation, not as proceeding from Eve, but as proceeding from Adam.

In 1580, but three hundred years since, an inquiry set on foot as to the language of Paradise, resulted in the statement that God spoke Danish; Adam, Swedish; and the serpent, French. Eve doubtless was conceded to have spoken all three languages, as she conversed with God, with Adam, and with the serpent. Hieronymus, a Father of the Church, credited Eve with possessing a much finer constitution than Adam, and in that respect as superior to him.577 Thus, during the ages, the church through its “Fathers” and its priests has devoted itself to a discussion of the most trivial questions concerning woman, as well as to the formation of most oppressive canons against her, and although as shown she has found an occasional defender, and even claimants for her superiority upon certain points, yet such discussions have had no effect upon the general view in which the church has presented her, as one accursed of God and man.