Although the law has opened wide the door for all women to engage in
business, it still discriminates in their favor in many particulars. No
woman can be arrested in a civil action, or held by an execution against
the body, except in cases in which it is shown that she has committed "a
wilful injury to person, character, or property," or has been guilty of
such an evasion of duty as is equivalent to a contempt of court. Thus a
woman engaged in business cannot be arrested in an action for a debt
fraudulently contracted.

All women judgment debtors, whether married or single, enjoy certain
exemptions from the sale of their property under execution, which, in the
case of men, extend only to a householder; that is, a man who has, and
provides for, a household or family.

Every married woman is the joint guardian of her children with her
husband, with equal powers, rights, and duties in regard to them with her
husband. It is only the survivor, be it father or mother, who possesses
the right to appoint a guardian by deed or by will. She has now equal
rights with the father over her children.

As matter of practice, the courts when called upon to award the custody of
minor children in cases of separation, determine the question with
reference solely to the interests of the child, with a strong leaning in
the mother's favor.

A husband's creditors have no claim upon the proceeds of a policy of
insurance upon his life for the benefit of his wife, unless the annual
premiums paid by him shall have exceeded five hundred dollars. The
proceeds of such a policy are exempt from execution for any debt owed by
the wife.

The statutes contain a large number of special provisions for the benefit
of female employees in factories and mercantile houses. In the city of New
York, if any man fails to pay the wages due a female employee up to fifty
dollars, not only is none of his property exempt from execution, but he is
liable to be imprisoned upon a body execution, and kept in close
confinement without the privilege of bail. A similar rule is applicable in
Brooklyn.

No woman can be called upon to perform military duty.

No woman can be required to serve upon any jury.

No woman can be called upon by the sheriff or any peace officer to assist
in quelling a disturbance or making an arrest.

CHAPTER VI.

WOMAN SUFFRAGE AND THE TRADES.

The fifth count in the Suffrage Declaration of Sentiments reads as
follows: "He has monopolized nearly all the profitable employments, and
from those she is permitted to follow she receives but scanty
remuneration."

The women who wrote that in 1848, in common with the majority of American
women, were presumably being well provided for in their own homes, by men
whose boast it was that their wives and daughters did not need or care to
seek employment elsewhere. It is true that at that time, because of this
supposed advantage, as married women they could not have engaged in
separate business that would involve the making of contracts or distinct
bargain and sale. To the world the husband was the wife's financial
manager. But at that time the wife could enter any of the employments as a
paid clerk or worker. This count seems more surprising in view of the fact
that, writing only three years later, to a Suffrage convention that met in
Akron, Ohio, Mrs. Stanton said: "The trades and professions are all open
to us; let us quietly enter and make ourselves, if not rich and famous, at
least independent and respectable." Two years later still, Colonel Thomas
W. Higginson wrote to another Suffrage convention that met in Akron, Ohio:
"We complain of the industrial disadvantages of women, and indicate at the
same time their capacities for a greater variety of pursuits. Why not
obtain a statement on as large a scale as possible, first of what women
are doing now, commercially and mechanically, throughout the Union, and
secondly, of the embarrassments which they meet, the inequality of their
wages, and all the other peculiarities of their position." This would have
been most valuable and interesting, and it would seem that something of
the kind should have preceded the sweeping accusation made in the
Declaration; but there appears in their "History" no evidence of its
having been done. In 1859 Caroline H. Ball said, in addressing a Suffrage
convention: "I honor women who act. That is the reason that I greet so
gladly girls like Harriet Hosmer, Louisa Landor, and Margaret Foley.
Whatever they do, or do not do, for Art, they do a great deal for the
cause of labor. I do not believe any one in this room has an idea of the
avenues that are open to women already." Then follows a list of the trades
then pursued by women in Great Britain. Of the United States she said: "Of
factory operatives in 1845 there were 55,828 men and 75,710 women. Women
are glue-makers, glove-makers, workers in gold and silver leaf, hair-
weavers, hat and cap-makers, hose-weavers, workers in India-rubber, paper-
hangers, physicians, picklers and preservers, saddlers and harness-makers,
shoe-makers, soda-room keepers, snuff and cigar-makers, stock and
suspender-makers, truss-makers, typers and stereotypers, umbrella-makers,
upholsterers, card-makers, photographers, house and sign-painters, fruit-
hawkers, button-makers, tobacco-packers, paper-box makers, embroiderers,
and fur-sewers." She added: "In New Haven seven women work with seventy
men in a clock factory (at half wages)." And in summing up she said: "The
great evils that lie at the foundation of depressed wages are that want of
respect for labor which prevents ladies from engaging in it, and that want
of respect for women which prevents men from valuing properly the work
they do. Make women equal with men before the law, and wages will adjust
themselves."

Women are equal with men legally and wages have not adjusted themselves,
and the law has had no control over the feelings and opinions of men and
women. Those who were large-minded enough to respect labor asked no
warrant from legislation, and those who were small-minded enough to
undervalue woman's work because it was woman's, do so still despite the
statutes, and would if women voted at every election. Men were equal with
each other before the law, but that did not compel the respect of foolish
men, nor did their wages adjust themselves to equality on that account. If
there were more men working in a trade in a given place than the demand
for their products required, the wage would fall, and so it must with
women. But reasons entered into the market value of woman's work that did
not enter into that of men. Mrs. Dall mentions but one trade in which the
wages were lower for women, and there they competed with men. Those seven
women working with the seventy men in New Haven were not expected to be
called upon to support a family by their earnings. If they were girls, in
the natural course of things they were expected to leave the work whenever
they were ready to marry. If one of them married one of the seventy men,
the firm of employers would lose her services entirely; but the man who
married her would be depended upon to work more steadily than before, and
he would also have more incentive to do better work in order to command
still higher wages. The long cry of Suffrage has not been able to bring
about "equal pay for equal work," even where legislation to that effect
has been introduced into Trades Unions and State laws. This has still
rested, and must rest, with the employer, and his action must be governed
by quality and demand and supply. The attempt to secure "equal wages"
among men has resulted in bringing down the wages of all to the point of
the poorer workers. The general laws of trade, like those of government,
are based on principles of universal equity, and however strenuously
temporary deviations may be pressed, they return at last to the natural
position. This is not saying that there is not great injustice toward
labor by capital, and toward capital by labor, but that the foundation
principles tend to govern the mutual relations, and forcing that is
contrary to these cannot be permanently successful. If the work of women
for any reason is unequal, the wages will be, and the mere fact that some
particular women work for some particular time the same number of hours,
and as well as do the men in the same establishments, does not do away
with the fact that women's work in general is not as steady as men's, and
is not expected to meet the same emergency of family support. No one can
believe more fully than I in equal wages for work that is really equal;
but it seems to me that private contract, and not public action, must
regulate the matter of special wage.

Government reports show that the average age of the working-girl in this
country is but twenty-two years, and that after twenty the number falls
off rapidly. Unskilled labor must forever take the place of that which is
withdrawn, which is another and most valid reason for lower wages. That
lower wages are the result of natural causes, and not of unnatural
feeling, is shown in many ways. Woman teachers at the West, where
teachers were needed, received as good pay as did men. In New York I heard
Superintendent Jasper, I think it was, say: "I am in favor of equal pay
for equal work, for the two sexes; but we cannot give it here. We can get
twice as many good women teachers as men teachers, and when we need men we
must pay at a higher rate." This does not extend to the highest grade of
teachers, superintendents, and professors in colleges, where men compete
with one another. There the compensation is the same for equal work. In
the highest forms of work women compete on equal terms. In literature
women are paid, for books or articles, the same prices that men receive.
In art this is true. It is the picture or statue or musical ability that
counts. Singers receive as much for the soprano as for the tenor voice.
Actresses are paid according to "drawing" power, and woman dancers and
acrobats, alas! command the highest price.

There is, among others, this fundamental difference between the business
life of men and women. For men who pursue occupations outside the home,
there are women to manage that home. For women who pursue occupations
outside the home, there are, not men, but other women, to manage the home.
The final domestic care of the world must come upon women. The final
attention to social life must come upon women. In behalf of the women who
are constrained, or who choose, to sacrifice their share in this part of
the world's necessary work, some other women must do double duty. That
this rule has seeming exceptions does not make it less the universal rule.

Nothing, not even "industrial emancipation," is gotten for nothing.

When the count cited above from the Suffrage indictment was written, the
factory system had been established in this country twenty-six years. From
the Revolution down to 1822, the women of the land had been busy in the
homes making the household and personal wear. Sixteen years after the
introduction of machinery into Lowell, Mass., 12,507 operatives were at
work there, the majority of whom were women, American women and girls. New
York State also had its mills. "Fanny Forester" (afterward Mrs. Judson)
worked in a mill near her home in that State. She went there, as did hosts
of New England girls, Lucy Larcom and Harriet Robinson among the number,
to relieve the home, but especially to gain the means of education, for
themselves and for their brothers and sisters. The towns afforded better
libraries, and there were evening classes that they could attend, things
not to be had in the farming districts. In 1850, in twenty-five States,
the factory census reported 32,295 men and 62,661 women workers. In 1860
there were 46,859 men and 75,169 women. Hosiery machinery at this time was
giving employment to three times as many women as men. But the emigrant,
and not the American man, had been the means of turning out the native
woman worker; it was the foreign-born woman who worked for "unequal pay."
In 1846, the sewing-machine had been invented. Previous to that time,
61,500 women were employed making boys' clothing by hand for the market,
which was twice the number of men so employed, while the woman tailor was
as familiar a figure as the dress-maker in every village, where she went
from house to house.

In 1861 came our Civil War, with its awful sacrifice of young men. With
that also came the heavy money loss, and consequent inability of many men,
even where life and limb had been spared, to support their families in the
homes. That great conflict, with its stern necessities, its lessons of
mutual helpfulness, its military discipline, which taught the value of
organization, did more than could ten thousand conventions, even had they
been working with knowledge and system, to instruct women in love for work
for others. It nerved them to labor for self-support and for the support
of those who were now dependent upon them' because the strong arm had
fallen and the willing heart had ceased to beat. Before the year 1861 had
closed, there were a million women in this country earning their daily
bread by honorable labor. As time went on, and the slaughter continued,
and the nation's debt piled up, and prices became almost fabulous, more
and more women asked through blinding tears, "What can I do?" Every trade
was thrown open to women, and the laws had placed the married woman where
she could compete on equal terms with her unmarried sister, even though
she still had the advantage of a husband's support.

A great pother has lately been made by Suffrage workers in New York
because a bill was proposed prohibiting married women from teaching in the
public schools. This has been the unwritten law in many places for years.
The practice was adopted to offset the maintenance of married women.
Teachers should receive more pay, but so should poets and artists, and we
all hope the time will come when brain work will have more tangible market
value.

The sewing-machine had thrown women out of employment, as with it one
woman could do the work of many. The number of work-seekers was enlarged
by the influx, from the desolated South, of women whose entire living had
been swept away. This army of uneducated workers from all sections were
compelled not only to compete with men but with themselves as well. They
sought, and could seek, only the lighter employments. Suffragists had
their wish in regard to man's relinquishment of the "profitable
employments," but not in the way they intended. The women for whose sake
those profitable employments had been "monopolized" were now not only
allowed by law but compelled by circumstance to toil from sun to sun at
the best they could find to do; their frailer organizations were forced to
bear "the double curse of work and pain." A nobler army of martyrs never
turned their sorrows into blessings by the spirit in which they met them,
than the American women who put their shoulders to the wheels of business
that were moving in a hundred ways.

In 1843 a humble beginning at industrial education for girls had been made
by the Female Guardian Society. In 1854 Peter Cooper established the
Cooper Union with its generous facilities for women in industry and the
arts. The Young Women's Christian Association was founded in Normal,
Illinois, in 1872, and its work in the industrial branch spread, before
many years, to every city and town in the land. Men originated for women
the first "Woman's Protective Union." In twenty-five years it had reported
legal suits won for 12,000 women, and $41,000 collected. In 1869 the great
organization of the Knights of Labor was founded, and in its body of rules
was one "to secure for both sexes equal pay for equal work." Failure
proves that labor cannot, any more than paper, be coined into money by the
mere fiat of a government or an organization.

But the great impulse to industrial education came through the Centennial
Exposition held at Philadelphia in 1876. While the land was filled with
the hum of preparation, as their contribution to that indication of
peaceful progress, the Suffrage Associations were rolling up another
petition in which to set forth their wrongs. After General Hawley, manager
of the Exposition, had courteously refused to receive it in a public
meeting, it was "pressed upon the Nation's heart" by delegates who pushed
their way into Independence Hall. Outside that historic building, under
the broiling sun, with Matilda Joslyn Gage to hold an umbrella over her,
Miss Anthony read aloud a "Declaration of Independence" that re-echoed the
sentiments of their first Declaration. It began by saying: "While the
nation is buoyant with patriotism, and all hearts are attuned to praise,
it is with sorrow we come to strike the one discordant note"--a typical
and prophetic sentence.

From 1876 girls, as well as boys, received manual training in the public
schools, and when that proved impracticable, the way was found to open
industrial schools that should include classes for girls. Every State, and
almost every city and town of any size, had them. It was not long ere
multitudes of societies and organizations furnished means for women's
education in business and mechanic arts. The growth of the philanthropy of
self-help is one of the wonders of the past twenty-five years, and women,
without the ballot, have largely assisted in developing it.

John Graham Brooks, in a lecture delivered in New York in the winter of
1895-6, on "Some Economic Aspects of the Woman Question," said: "Woman who
used to do her work in the house now does it in the factory, and the same
work, doing her work under absolutely new and different conditions, a
change so great that it closes finally one argument that I hear again and
again by those opposed to woman suffrage--namely, that the place for woman
is in the home."

One condition under which she works that is not "absolutely new and
different" is that of sex. Whatever as a woman she could not do in the
home she cannot do abroad as a working-woman. She is in business as a
business woman, not as a business man. Economic equality in such things as
she can do is as unlike to a similarity in work which ignores sex
conditions as a business corporation is to the government under whose laws
it exists and by which its rights are defended. But even the external
conditions are not so changed as might at first appear. The statistical
proof of the youth of the majority of workers, the comparatively small
number out of the whole population who go into business, and the fact that
the domestic work for these very workers must be done by women, all show
this.

The United States Census of 1890 shows that not quite four million women
are "engaged in gainful occupations." Of these more than one and a half
million are in domestic service, and nearly half a million in professional
service, mainly as teachers. The most striking gain has been made in the
lighter forms of profitable labor--by stenographers, typewriters,
telegraph and telephone operators, cashiers, bookkeepers, etc. In 1870
there were 19,828 of these; in 1890, there were 228,421. The invention of
the type-writing machine appears to be the ballot that has mainly produced
this result. Carrol D. Wright says that in twenty cities examined in the
United States he found, among 17,000 working-women, that 15,887 were
single, 1,038 were widows, and 745 were married. This tells the same
story. The mass of these women, like the mass of men, are working, not for
public influence or station, but for the owning and holding of a home. The
latest effort in self-help for the working class is the wise one of
building them good homes. The best renting property has been found to be
that which gives privacy and those distinctions that mark the family.

The latest report of the New York Bureau of Statistics of Labor shows that
of 8,040 persons who registered for employment in New York city, 6,458
were men, and 1,582 were women. Of these, the foreign-born numbered 4,804,
of whom 3,674 were men and 1,140 were women. The native-born numbered
3,234, of whom 2,796 were men, and 442 were women. The list included every
trade and profession, from that of day laborer to that of clergyman, from
that of school teacher to that of domestic servant, and showed that in the
city where more women are employed than in any other place, the proportion
of women to men was less than one fifth, and of native American to
foreign-born women two fifths.

Mr. Brooks would favor suffrage because "in this new career there are
reasons for every whit of protection." He mentions, as proof of woman's
changed attitude as an industrial unit, that the Supreme Courts of
Illinois and California have decided against special legislation for
women. They did so on the ground that "they were now earning their
livelihood under men's conditions, and should not have special legislation
in business relations." If Mr. Brooks thinks that women wish the ballot to
restore the special legislation, he does not know the Suffrage demand for
equality. In England, when the laws were under discussion that forbid the
employment of women more than a certain number of hours, and of children
under certain ages, the Woman Suffrage leaders protested against the
former as an infringement of personal rights and the ability to make
contracts. But the special legislation for business women goes on,
because, after all, the State knows that they are business women, and not
business men, and the Suffrage quarrel in regard to privilege _versus_
right goes on also.

Before the Committee of the Constitutional Convention, Mrs. Ecob, of
Albany, said: "You speak of chivalry. We scorn the word! What has your
chivalry done for the weaker sex? Women are the unpaid laborers of the
world--outcasts in government." Mrs. Hood, of Brooklyn, on the same
occasion said: "Who dares insult our American manhood by declaring that
men will be less courteous to mother, wife, and sister, because they are
political equals? Woman's equality in the industrial world has to-day
produced a nobler, better chivalry than was ever conceived by the knights
of old."

These two Suffrage leaders will have to settle between themselves the
question which they have placed in dispute. It serves to point the moral
of dilemma that attends an attempted adjustment of unnatural claims.
Meantime government is caring for the weak, and chivalry is doing justice.
The Labor Law that went into effect in this State on September 1st
provided that children be classified so that those under fourteen years
should not be employed in mercantile pursuits. Children between the ages
of twelve and fourteen will be permitted to work in vacation, if they can
show that they have attended school through the year. The girls between
fourteen and twenty-one are not to be allowed to work more than ten hours
a day. Their employment before 7 A.M. and after 10 P.M. is forbidden.
Women and children are not allowed to work in basements, without permits
from the Health Board as to the condition of the basement. Seats are to be
provided for woman employees, forty-five minutes given them for luncheon,
and proper lunch and toilet rooms to be secured. Penalties, ranging from a
fine of $20 for the first offence to imprisonment, are prescribed for
violation of the law. In his last report, published in January 1897, the
New York Commissioner of Labor considers the low wages and petty wrongs of
working women and girls in New York City. He advises the formation of
unions among themselves for their better protection.

Mr. Brooks does not agree with those who claim that possession of the
ballot would raise wages. Mrs. Ames and Dr. Jacobi think it would only
raise them through the indirect influence of the greater respect in which
the worker would be held. This is safe ground again, because it is
debatable; but the domestic servants of those who hold the former opinion
might give them an object-lesson. Unfranchised as the servants are, they
have only to make a threat of leaving to secure better wages.

Harriette A. Keyser, who was the special Suffrage champion of the working-
woman before the Committee of the Constitutional Convention, gave not one
fact or figure to show that the working-woman, where she had the ballot,
had already been helped by it, or that it was likely to help her, or how
and why it might help her. Among the generalities she uttered was the
following; "But the greatest value of the working-woman, to my mind, is
that without her economic value this present demand for equal suffrage
could never be made. Indeed, the suffrage of the world is due to her. Do I
mean by this that every working-woman in the country sees her own value so
clearly that she demands enfranchisement? I could not say this with truth.
I make this statement irrespective of what any individual working-woman
may think. It is based upon what she is. As through the last half century
the contention for equal rights has continued, the working-woman has been
the great object-lesson. It was not from women of leisure, having all the
rights they want, that inspiration has been received. It has been caught
from the patient worker, healing the sick, writing the book, painting the
picture, teaching the children, tilling the soil, working in the factory,
serving in the household. Every stroke of these workers has been a protest
against a disfranchised individuality." Miss Keyser has mentioned most of
the classes in this country, for, so far as my experience goes, there is
no such thing as a leisure class, in the sense of an idle class, of women.
Women are almost universally industrious, and it is a mistake to suppose
that their early industry in the house was not as much appreciated and
counted in the general fund of work as their more public activity now. It
is well for Miss Keyser to make her estimate of the Suffrage value of the
working-woman one that shall have no reference to the expressed views of
the working-woman herself; because the working-woman seems almost
universally not only unconscious of but indifferent to her attitude as a
great object-lesson in favor of the ballot. But here is something new.
Suffragists have first claimed that there could be no working-woman unless
there was a ballot in woman's hand; then they claimed that, although there
was a working-woman despite the fact that she had not been enfranchised,
she was made by the agitation for the ballot; and now comes Miss Keyser to
say that, not only is the working-woman not due to the ballot, or to
ballot-seeking, but "the suffrage of the world is due to her," for
"without her economic value this present demand for equal suffrage could
never have been made!" Tar baby ain't sayin' nuthin'.

Dr. Jacobi, in "Common Sense," says: "Whatever may be the personal
privileges of their lot, whatever the legal protection accorded to their
earnings, the public status of such a class remains strictly that of
aliens. At the present moment this vast and constantly growing army of
women industrials constitutes an alien class. The privation for that class
of political right to defend its interests is only masked, but not
compensated, by its numerous inter-relations with those who have rights."
So they are conceded to have personal privileges, and legal protection for
earnings. The alienism is then purely political, and works no hardship but
what Suffragists conceive to be in the mental attitude of the worker.

Foreign capitalists who own land or plant in the United States are
unfranchised. We have large numbers of men working in trades and
professions who never have been naturalized, but we do not dream that all
these constitute an alien class of industrials. No distinction is made in
business opportunity between the voter and non-voter. Neither is any
social distinction made regarding worker or employer on account of the
relations of either to the ballot. Market value is not measured by
suffrage, except in dishonorable transactions, and the women "with ballots
in their hands" are not the Government's preferred creditors. The men in
the District of Columbia are not conscious of lower wages and industrial
ostracism. Again, Dr. Jacobi says: "The share of women in political rights
and life--imperfect and deferred during the predominance of militarism--
has become natural, has become inevitable, with the advent of
industrialism, in which they so largely share."

Industrialism has no more power to change the basis of government than the
abolition movement had when certain advocates of it shouted that it was
"sinful to vote or hold office, because the government was founded upon
physical force and maintained itself by muskets." Industrialism is
bringing into this country some of the gravest problems it has ever met.
The sympathy of the people is on the side of labor that uses honorable
means; but Cleveland and Leadville are among the places that suggest
afresh the fact that industrialism must be kept in order for its own sake,
for the sake of general peace, and for the sake of its increasing ranks of
"alien" women who look to it for "every whit of protection," save that
which their own self-respect and that of public opinion can win them.

Again, Dr. Jacobi says: "Notwithstanding the repression of women's civil
rights, and their absolute exclusion from even the dream of a political
sphere, the women of France engage more freely than anywhere else in
business and industry." There is a moral here deeper than can be read at a
glance. The first thought suggested is, that industrial success for woman
is not in the least dependent upon the vote. The second is, that
industrial progress does not command the vote. The third is, that American
freedom has worked in the opposite direction from French unstable
republicanism. And the fourth is, that industrious France stands appalled
at the lack of increase of its population. There are many forces that sap
its national life, but perhaps the most conspicuous is the socialistic and
anarchistic tendency of its labor organizations. The woman-suffrage idea
was first openly proclaimed during the French Revolution. In 1851 the
annual Suffrage Convention in this country was called by Paulina Wright
Davis, to meet in Worcester, Mass. Ernestine Rose read to the convention
two letters addressed to that body through her, written by Jeanne Deroine
and Pauline Roland, from a Paris prison. During the revolutionary
movements of 1848, these women had played conspicuous roles. One of them
had attempted to nominate the mayor in her native city, the other to be a
candidate for the Legislative Assembly. They wrote: "Sisters of America!
Your socialist sisters of France are united with you in the vindication of
the right of woman to civil and political equality. We have, moreover, the
profound conviction that only by the power of association based on
solidarity--by the union of the working-classes of both sexes in organized
labor, can be acquired, completely and pacifically, the civil and
political equality of woman, and the social right for all."

I know the feud, and the grounds for it, between socialism and anarchy.
But both are enemies of the social order, and both are favorers of woman
suffrage. How "pacifically" the labor movement that originated in France
in 1848, and spread throughout Europe, was likely to proceed, we may judge
by its constant outbreaks kindred to the recent bomb-throwing in Paris. In
the German Working-man's Union, Hasenclever, for many years the leading
socialist in the German Reichstag, said: "The Woman Question would be
taken by the developed, or, more correctly speaking, the communistic
state, under its own control, for in this state" (which was to consist of
men and women with equal vote) "when the community bears the obligation of
maintaining the children, and no private capital exists, the woman need no
longer be chained to one man. The bond between the sexes will be merely a
moral one, and if the characters do not harmonize could be dissolved." The
"Social Democrat" of Copenhagen has for mottoes: "All men and women over
twenty-one should vote." "There should be institutions for the proper
bringing up of children." All the communistic and anarchistic labor
organizations in Germany, France, Switzerland, Denmark, and England
proclaim woman suffrage as a prime factor, and the disruption of the
family as its corollary.

There are many who remember the visit to this country of the socialist,
Dr. Aveling, and his (so-called) wife, the daughter of Karl Marx. His
legal wife had been left in England. Miss Marx said, in reply to the
question of a Chicago lady, that love was the only recognized marriage in
Socialism, consequently no bonds of any kind would be required. Divorces
would be impossible; for when love ceased, separation would naturally
ensue.

At a meeting of the Woman's Council held in Washington, in 1888, Mrs.
Stanton said: "I have often said to men of the present day that the next
generation of women will not stand arguing with you as patiently as we
have for half a century. The organizations of labor all over the country
are holding out their hands to women. The time is not far distant when, if
men do not do justice to women, the women will strike hands with labor,
with socialists, with anarchists, and you will have the scenes of the
Revolution of France acted over again in this republic."

Mrs. Stanton Blatch, daughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, in her lecture in
this country two years ago on "The Economic Emancipation of Woman," said
that she rejoiced in every co-operative working-woman's dwelling, because
it was a blow aimed at the isolated home, and she has just repeated in New
York her proposition for the institutional care of children. Alice Hyneman
Rhine, in her article on "Woman's Work in America," says of socialistic
labor, "It aims to benefit woman by recognizing her as a perfect equal of
man, politically and socially; by fixing woman's means of support by the
state so as to render her independent of man." "Freedom," a radical
socialistic newspaper published in Chicago, where Emma Goldman and her ilk
have revealed the true inwardness of such movements, recommends as the
first step "equal rights for all, without distinction of race or sex," and
the abolition of "class rule." Our most radical socialistic Labor National
Convention in New York, this year, had four woman delegates.

The Knights of Labor who first put "equal pay for equal work" into their
platform, appeared in their late convention, under the lead of Sovereign,
who declared that Gov. Altgeld "was one of the finest types of American
manhood to-day." They seem to be drifting toward that phase of Socialism
to which Alice Hyneman Rhine referred. There are no greater tyrants than
some of the Labor organizations, and one evidence of this is the fact that
they prevent the colored man from doing any work outside of a few of the
least noble occupations.

With such edged tools as these are our American women playing when they
demand, in the name of democracy, in the name of the family, in the name
of the working-woman, that the word "sex" shall be inserted in the United
States Constitution, and the word "male" be stricken from every State
constitution that now contains it.

CHAPTER VII.

WOMAN SUFFRAGE AND THE PROFESSIONS.

The sixth count in the Declaration of Sentiments reads: "He closes against
her all the avenues to wealth and distinction which he considers most
honorable to himself. As a teacher of theology, medicine, or law, she is
not known."

That statement contains another evidence of the untruthfulness of a half
truth. First, it is an unwarrantable assumption, of which no proof is
offered, that man had closed against woman any avenue to wealth and
distinction, or that he felt toward woman the selfish and monopolizing
spirit implied in such accusation. Second, but three of the avenues, all
of which he was said to have closed against her, are mentioned. Whatever
may be the truth about those three, the no less honorable, although less
arduous, avenues to wealth and distinction were as open to her as to him.
As educator, author, artist, in painting, music, and sculpture, she could
freely attain to the same coveted end. The Suffragists did not decry man's
"monopoly" of the honorable and profitable but severe professions of civil
engineering, seamanship, mining engineering, lighthouse keeping and
inspecting, signal service, military and naval duty, and the like. These,
and the drudgery of the world's business and commerce, man was welcome to
keep.

But, most of all, this Suffrage indictment contains, as do all the rest,
another tacit untruth when it assumes that woman's work has not in the
past been as honorable to herself and as profitable to the world as has
that of man. By setting up a false standard for achievement, and
attempting to make everything conform to it, the Suffrage movement has
done incalculable harm. It is not progressing to push into an unwonted
place merely because it is unwonted, and because you can push in. It is
progress to enter it in response both to an inward and an outward need.

When the first Suffrage convention had adopted the Declaration of
Sentiments, Lucretia Mott offered a resolution, which was also adopted,
declaring that "the speedy success of our cause depends upon the zealous
and untiring efforts of men and women for the overthrow of the monopoly of
the pulpit, and for the securing to woman an equal participation with men
in the various trades, professions, and commerce."

The most remarkable thing about this resolution is, that it was
promulgated by a woman who was at that very time a gifted and eloquent
preacher, so that to her, who cared for it so highly, man had not closed
that avenue to wealth and distinction. As she had a husband to support her
and her children, she was much more free to attain those desirable ends
than most of the ministers who were preaching for humanity's sake and the
gospel's, at salaries ranging from five hundred to two thousand dollars a
year, and who had families to support out of their slender pittance. If
any woman was in a position to "overthrow the monopoly of the pulpit,"
surely she was. Stately and beautiful of mien, fervent in spirit, eloquent
in language, one who had learned the Hebrew and Greek that she might read
the Scriptures in the original tongues, what did she lack? Not only was no
pulpit of another faith than hers ever opened to her, but more than half
those of her own form of worship were closed against hearing the inner
voice as interpreted by her. In that schism that rent the Society of
Friends as no other religious body has ever been rent, she threw in her
fortunes, or led others to throw in their fortunes (for she had been
preaching nine years when the division occurred), with that portion that
placed the "inner light" above all Scripture. When the Friends came from
the London meeting to testify against the teachings of the schismatics,
they besought Lucretia Mott to return to the faith of her childhood, but
she resisted from conviction that she was right. Elias Hicks, her leader,
had instigated the members of his congregation to refuse to pay their
taxes to the Government during and following the war of 1812, on the
ground that they represented an encroachment of the secular power on
Christian liberty, and were used to support war, which was sin. Lucretia
Mott preached that "no Christian can consistently uphold a government
based on the sword, or relying on that as an ultimate resort." The country
has always suffered from this doctrine. The Tory Quakers of the Revolution
called publicly upon Friends "to withstand and refuse to submit" "to
instructions and ordinances" not warranted by "that happy Constitution
under which we have long enjoyed tranquillity and peace." Thomas Paine,
whose parents were Friends, in "The Crisis," says: "The common phrase of
these people is, 'Our principles are peace.' To which it may be replied,
'and your practices are the reverse.'" Another striking instance of this
disagreement between principle and practice is seen in Lucretia Mott's
behavior. From the platform where she demanded the ballot for woman, she
proclaimed that all voting was sinful. That bodies of people who so held
should continue to enjoy the Government's protection of themselves and
their property, through the sacrifices made by those who carried on
government by giving willingly their money and their strength, is a proof
of our wonderful freedom.

Elizabeth Fry and most of the English Friends would not mention the name
of Mrs. Mott. Mrs. Stanton once asked her what she would have done after
the Hicksite faction had been voted out of meeting at the World's
Conventicle of Friends in London, if the spirit had moved her to speak
when the chairman and members had moved that she be silent, and she
answered, "Where the spirit of God is, there is liberty." This is the
liberty of anarchy, and it had its due weight in the Suffrage movement.
Mrs. Stanton, in the course of a eulogy pronounced at Mrs. Mott's funeral,
said: "The 'vagaries' of the Anti-slavery struggle, in which Lucretia Mott
took a leading part, have been coined into law; and the 'wild fantasies'
of the Abolitionists are now the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth
amendments to the National Constitution.... The 'infidel' Hicksite
principles that shocked Christendom are now the cornerstones of the
liberal religious movement in this country." The vagaries of the Anti-
slavery struggle are exactly those that were _not_ coined into law. The
wild fantasies of the Abolitionists were rejected by those whose sober
judgment and steady courage made possible the last constitutional
amendments. And no truer is it that the "infidel" Hicksite principles are
the corner-stones of any genuine movement of Christian liberality. While
the Friends mourn that infidelity and Roman Catholicism have made inroads
upon their progress in some places, they have steadily advanced in the
other direction from that pointed out by Lucretia Mott. Their educated and
paid ministry, their First-day schools, their missions, home and foreign,
their music, and simple but set forms, their reports to London of
"conversion and profession of faith," and their rapid growth where these
things have taken place, all indicate the truth of this. The large meeting
at Swartmore College, in the summer of 1896, is another evidence.

The proportion of woman preachers to the different denominations is as
follows: The Hicksite-Quakers (as against the orthodox) have the most. So
have the German Methodists (United Brethren) as against the orthodox
Methodists. The Free-Will Baptists, as against the orthodox Baptists,
ordain more woman preachers. The Universalist preceded the Unitarian
church in so doing. The Presbyterian and Congregational churches, as a
body, have taken no steps in that direction. In the Congregational
denomination any separate body of worshippers can ordain whom it sees fit.
The Roman Catholic and Episcopal churches have orders which band women as
religious workers and remove them more or less from the ordinary life of
the world, but they have taken no steps toward ordaining women for the
ministry.

We may note that the denominations that have been foremost in building
colleges for woman, and in promoting her general advancement in
professions and trades, as well as in social and philanthropic matters,
are the ones whose pulpits she has not entered. They are also those by
which she is most cordially welcomed to speak on all Christian and
philanthropic themes. Where her influence is most broadly felt, she has
not been taken out of the ordinary life that she was meant to share and to
sway. It was from the great denominations that she first crossed the
threshold of home to carry home love and principle to foreign countries.
In missions she has served in every conceivable form of public
benevolence, side by side with man. Real reforms work from within. If the
time comes when the other branches of the Christian Church feel as do a
few at present, that the exercise of the ministerial office is consistent
and appropriate for woman, one that compels no sacrifice of the life and
work that are, and must be, peculiarly her own, the ballot will not be
needed to place her or to keep her in their pulpits. Whatever may be
thought of the profession of the ministry for woman, it must certainly be
acknowledged that it is the one farthest removed from political thought
and action. If any class of women should be glad to be exempted from the
vote, it is the woman preachers.

In her book, "Common Sense," Dr. Jacobi says: "The profession of medicine
was thrown open to women when, in 1849, the year following the Revolution,
and the passage of the Married Woman's Property Rights Bill, New York
State for the first time, at Geneva, conferred a medical diploma on a
woman, Elizabeth Blackwell. She was, or rather she became, the sister-in-
law of Lucy Stone; and the work of these two women, the one in medicine,
the other for equal suffrage, constituted the two necessary halves of one
idea."

In 1848, when the first Suffrage convention was held, twelve women were
studying medicine in different parts of the country. Dr. Elizabeth
Blackwell was studying that year in Geneva, and when members of the
convention wrote to congratulate her, she said, in the course of her
reply: "Much has been said of the oppression that woman suffers; man is
reproached with being unjust, tyrannical, jealous. I do not so read human
life." Dr. Blackwell estimates that within ten years of that time three
hundred women had been graduated in medicine. In an address delivered in
1889 before the London Medical School for women in London, Dr. Blackwell
said: "I believe that the department of medicine in which the great and
beneficent influence of women may be specially exerted is that of the
family physician. Not as specialists, but as the trusted guides and wise
counsellors in all that concerns the physical welfare of the family, they
will find their most congenial field of labor." All this was the exact
opposite of the spirit that prevailed in the Association with which Lucy
Stone was identified. She declaimed against man's injustice; and when it
was proposed, after the civil war had taught the power of organization, to
have a constitution and by-laws for the Suffrage movement, Lucy Stone said
that she had felt the "thumb-screws and the soul-screws," and did not wish
to be placed under them again. "Our duty is merely agitation." After a
stormy quarrel, she left to form a new association in New England.
Elizabeth Blackwell's name is conspicuous for its absence from Suffrage
annals. In the letter referred to she wrote: "The exclusion and constraint
woman suffers is not the result of purposed injury or premeditated insult.
It has arisen naturally, without violence, because woman has desired
nothing more, has not felt the soul too large for the body. But when
woman, with matured strength, with steady purpose, presents her lofty
claim, all barriers will give way, and man will welcome, with a thrill of
joy, the new birth of his sister spirit."

The way in which barriers have fallen, and have been removed by men, in
order that woman may enter the noble profession of medicine, is one of the
strange stories of this half century. The Civil War, which taught us so
much, helped greatly in this. There were some genuine obstacles in the way
of woman's education in medicine, and that they were genuine is proved by
the fact that, as rapidly as arrangements can be made so that woman can
have thorough training by and with her own sex, this is being done. This
trend is in opposition to Suffrage action. Dr. Clemence Lozier, who was so
long at the head of the Suffrage association in New York City, was the
most persistent urger of mixed clinics, and marched in to them at
Bellevue, at the head of her classes, defying the delicate instincts of
both men and women.

The struggle of the "new" school, which was really as old as Hippocrates,
who said four hundred years before Christ that some remedies acted by the
rule of "contraries," and some by the rule of "similarity," was long and
hard compared with that of the entrance of woman upon the practice of
medicine, although the latter involved sex questions and the former only
forms, and professional prejudice did not die with woman's adoption of it.

Dr. Jacobi says: "We are perfectly well aware that industrial and
professional competition are entirely different matters from popular
sovereignty. But when we find the same instincts aroused, the same
opposition excited, the same arguments advanced, and the same
determination manifested, by trades unions, to exclude women from trades,
by learned societies to exclude them from professions, by universities to
exclude them from learning, and by voters to exclude them from the polls,
we cannot avoid asking whether the difference in the cases is not balanced
by the identity in the mental attitude of the opponents." The best trades
unions have admitted women to their protective and wage associations, or,
better still, have helped them to form their own; the worst trades unions,
the socialistic and anarchistic, have claimed for them the right to vote.
The learned societies are admitting them professionally as fast as they
make themselves worthy. The men who hold out against their admission to
men's universities are precisely the class of men who have been most
active in assisting to found for them equal colleges of their own, and
they are also the men who are most strenuous against their admission to
the polls. In medicine, while co-education is deemed better than
ignorance, the tendency is to separate the sexes in study as fast as
facilities can be made equal. The opponents of woman's progress and those
of woman suffrage are of opposite classes, and their mental attitudes are
entirely different. How much harm the struggle for "popular sovereignty"
for women has done in hindering the progress of industrial and
professional competition, can be judged somewhat by the success of the
latter and the failure of the former in the highest fields. It is a
significant fact that women do not avail themselves of opportunities open
to them in the professions to the extent that it has been claimed they
would. The medical examination advertised in January, 1896, by the New
York State Civil Service Commission for woman candidates, failed for lack
of applicants, although the salaries of women in the State hospitals range
from $1,000 to $1,500 a year.

The entrance of woman upon the legal profession raised constitutional
questions as to the enactment of law; and so here, as in the matter of the
school suffrage, we see how carefully republicanism guarded the post at
which must stand the sentinels of liberty. If it might involve law-
enforcement, woman could not practise law or vote on the school question;
but the Supreme Court of the United States decided that "the practising of
any profession violates no law of the Federal Constitution."

The study of law must prove of great benefit to woman, though here again
it has already been shown that it is possible that the greatest practical
advantage she will derive from entrance into this noble profession will be
from acquiring knowledge of her country's laws, and how to take care of
her own property. Widows and unmarried women have almost invariably placed
their moneyed interests in the hands of a man, when it would have been
better for all concerned that they should have spent some patient thought
on the details of their own affairs. The first woman who was admitted to
the bar in this State (New York) was a teacher in the Albany Normal
College, and she still remains there, and the women's classes for legal
study in New York City have been largely composed of those who had no
intention of claiming admittance to the bar. That women can and do enter
all these professions with credit to themselves, and that they thus
enhance the feeling of pride in their sex, which is a strong impulse with
women, is matter for profound congratulation, and is evidence that the
animus of the Suffrage movement is not that which stirs society.

CHAPTER VIII.

WOMAN SUFFRAGE AND EDUCATION.

The seventh count in the Suffrage indictment declared: "He has denied her
facilities for obtaining a thorough education, all colleges being closed
against her."

Among the resolutions passed in the first Suffrage convention was one
demanding: "Equal rights in the universities," and the first petition
presented by Suffrage advocates contained a clause asking that entrance to
men's colleges be obtained for women by legal enactment. We note that this
is far from being a demand for education for women equal to that given to
men in the universities. Men have founded colleges for women, men and
women have worked together in securing for woman every facility and
opportunity for education of the highest grade; but the "barrier of sex"
is not broken down in education. But few of the older colleges for men
admit women, and those few, so far as I have learned from conversation
with members of their faculties, speak of the arrangement as an
experiment, and give the need for economy, combined with a desire to
assist women, as a reason for making that experiment. Meantime the
knocking at men's literary portals by Suffrage advocates has gone on as
vigorously as if women could obtain education in no other way.

In the first Suffrage convention ever held in Massachusetts these two
resolutions were adopted: "That political rights acknowledge no sex, and
therefore the word 'male' should be stricken from every State
constitution;" and "That every effort to educate woman, until you accord
to her her rights, and arouse her conscience by the weight of her
responsibilities, is futile, and a waste of labor."

The State in which these sentiments were uttered abounded in fine schools
for girls, among which were Mount Holyoke and Wheaton seminaries.

A rapid survey of some of the educational conditions that led to the state
of things existing when Suffrage associations were formed, will be in
place. Learning seemed incompatible with worship early in the Christian
era. The faith that worked by love was "to the Jews a stumbling-block, and
to the Greeks foolishness." That great battle between the felt and the
comprehended, which in this era we have named the conflict between science
and religion, was decided in the mind of the apostle to the Gentiles when
he wrote: "We know in part, and we prophesy in part; when that which is
perfect is come, that which is in part shall be done away." He recalled
the accusation, "Thou art beside thyself, much learning hath made thee
mad," and he hastened to assure the unlettered fishermen and the simple
and devout women who were followers of Christ, that "all knowledge" was
naught if they had not love; that even faith was vain if it led to the
rejection of the diviner wisdom that a little child could understand.

The great learning of Augustine and the Fathers brought into the Church
pagan speculations of God and morality, as well as pagan knowledge in art,
science, and literature. The Church became corrupted, and a great outcry
was made against the learning itself, which was falsely supposed to be the
cause of the degeneration of faith. Symonds says that during the Dark Ages
that followed upon this first battle between faith and sight, the meaning
of Latin words derived from the Greek was lost; that Homer and Virgil were
believed to be contemporaries, and "Orestes Tragedia" was supposed to be
the name of an author. Milman says that "at the Council of Florence in
1438, the Pope of Rome and the Patriarch of Constantinople, being
ignorant, the one of Greek, and the other of Latin, discoursed through an
interpreter." It was near the time of the Reformation that a German monk
announced in his convent that "a new language, called Greek, had been
invented, and a book had been written in it, called the New Testament."
"Beware of it," he added, "It is full of daggers and poison."

But the tradition of the love that book revealed had crept into the heart
of the world, and now awoke. Through what struggles the "spirit of all
truth" promised by Christ was leading, and would lead the world, the
history of civilization can tell. Women shared in some degree the outward
benefits of the Revival of Learning. They became in not a few instances
Doctors of Law and professors of the great universities that sprang up, as
well as teachers, transcribers, and illuminators in the great nunneries. I
could give a long and honorable list of names of woman writers and
artists, in many lands, from Mediaeval to modern times; and one of the
interesting things revealed by such a record would be the number who were
working with, or were directly inspired and helped by, a father or a
brother. The Court contained some women who, like Lady Jane Grey, upheld
the model of purity while acquiring the learning that naturally
accompanied wealth. But elegant letters had again become the associate of
moral and religious corruption in the courts, and the "ignorance of
preaching" arose to combat it, in Cromwell, the Roundheads, the
Dissenters, the Covenanters.

Yet sound learning was not to die that Christian truth might live. Of the
band of Pilgrims and Puritans that came first to our shores, about one in
thirty was college-bred. While subordinating book-knowledge to piety,
they had learned scarcely less the dangers of ignorance. Their first
college was founded because of "the dread of having an illiterate ministry
to the churches when our ministers shall lie in dust." Charles Francis
Adams says, in regard to the establishment of Harvard College: "The
records of Harvard University show that, of all the presiding officers
during the century and a half of colonial days, but two were laymen, and
not ministers of the prevailing denomination." He further says that "of
all who in early times availed themselves of such advantages as this
institution could offer, nearly half the number did so for the sake of
devoting themselves to the gospel. The prevailing notion of the purpose of
education was attended with one remarkable consequence--the cultivation of
the female mind was regarded with utter indifference."

It was attended with still another remarkable consequence, the effect of
which is felt up to this hour. Only men who were fitted for a profession
were given a college education. It is well within my memory when it began
to be seriously said: "A college education is good for a boy, whether he
intends to follow a profession or not; it will make him a better business
man, or even a better farmer." The country girl is now, as a rule, better
educated than her brother. It also happened in those earlier days, that
the artist and the musician were expected to attain knowledge by
intuition, save in technical branches.

The minister was, almost of necessity, like a magistrate in these semi-
religious colonies. The fact of the breaking up into various sects, which
we sometimes incline to look upon with regret as defeating Christian
unity, really saved the essentials of that unity by preventing the
clerical magistrate from establishing a church resting upon state
authority. It was obligatory that the civil rulers should be learned, even
at the expense of those who carried on the business and the home.

During the first two hundred years of our existence it would have been
almost absurd to expect that women would be extensively educated outside
the home. The country was poor, and struggling with new conditions, and
great financial crises swept over it. There were wars and rumors of wars.
Until after 1812-15 American independence was not an assured fact.
Whatever may be said of the present, woman's place in America then was in
the home, and nobly did she fill that place. That she had not been wholly
uninstructed in even elegant learning, is evidenced by the share she took
in literature and in the discussion of religious and public matters, and
in such personal records as that of Elder Faunce, who eulogized Alice
Southworth Bradford for "her exertions in promoting the literary
improvement and the deportment of the rising generation." Dame schools
were early established for girls, and here were often found the sons of
the farmer and the mechanic. These were established in Massachusetts in
1635. Late in 1700, girls were admitted through the summer to "Latin
schools" where boys were taught in winter, and in 1789 women began to be
associated with men as teachers. In 1771 Connecticut founded a system of
free schools in which boys and girls were taught. In 1794 the Moravians
founded a school for girls at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Here were educated
the sisters of Peter Cooper, the mother of President Arthur, and many
women who became exponents of culture.

New England began before this to have fine private schools for girls, but
no great step was taken until Miss Hart (afterward Mrs. Willard) had
become so successful with her academy teaching in her native town of
Berlin, Connecticut, and in Hartford, that three States simultaneously
invited her to establish schools within their borders. She went to
Massachusetts, but afterward, at the solicitation of Governor Clinton, of
New York, she removed her school to Troy, in 1821. It was a new departure,
and there was ignorant prejudice to overcome. Governor Clinton, in an
appeal to the legislature for aid, said: "I trust you will not be deterred
by commonplace ridicule from extending your munificence to this
meritorious institution." They were not deterred. An act was passed for
the incorporation of the proposed institute, and another which gave to
female academies a share of the literary fund. The citizens of Troy
contributed liberally, and the success of an effort in woman's high
education was assured.

As early as 1697 the Penn Charter School was founded, and it has lived
until to-day. Provision was made "at the cost of the people called
Quakers," for "all children and servants, male and female, the rich to be
instructed at reasonable rates, the poor to be maintained and schooled for
nothing." They also provided for "instruction for both sexes in reading,
writing, work, languages, arts and sciences." The boys and girls have been
taught separately, the girls' school being much behind the boys', neither
Latin nor other ancient language forming a part of their curriculum.
Friends are just beginning to discuss giving higher education to girls.
This is a fact especially significant in our discussion, because it has
always been claimed that the Quaker doctrine that "souls have no sex" led
them to place woman on an "equality" with man before other sects had
thought of allowing that they were equals. Lucretia Mott, Susan Anthony,
Abby Kelley, and a great body of the women who adopted the resolution that
set forth the uselessness of educating woman until she could vote, and who
clamored for her entrance to men's institutions, were all of this sect
that has kept its women generally far behind in the acquisition of
knowledge.

In 1845 Mrs. Willard was invited to address the Teachers' Convention that
met in Syracuse. She prepared a paper in which she set forth the idea
that, "women, now sufficiently educated, should be employed and furnished
by the men as committees, charged with the minute cares and supervision of
the public schools," but declined the honor tendered her of delivering it
in person. Sixty gentlemen from the convention visited her at the hotel,
and, at their earnest request, she read the essay, which met with their
emphatic approval of the plan she proposed. The employment of women in the
common schools, and the system of normal schools, were projected by her.

A Teachers' Convention was held in Rochester in 1852. Miss Anthony, though
a teacher, was not in attendance upon it, but she records that she went in
and listened for a few hours to a discussion of the causes that led to
their profession being held in less esteem than those of the doctor,
lawyer, and minister. In her judgment, the kernel of the matter was not
alluded to, so she arose and said: "Mr. President." She records that "at
length President Davies stepped to the front and said in a tremulous,
mocking tone," "What will the lady have?" "I wish, sir," she said, "to
speak to the question." "What is the pleasure of the convention?" asked
Mr. Davies. A gentleman moved that she be heard; another seconded the
motion; whereupon, she records, "a discussion, pro and con, followed,
lasting full half an hour, when a vote was taken of the men only, and
permission was granted by a small majority." She adds that it was lucky
for her that the thousand women crowding that hall could not vote on the
question, for they would have given a solid "No." The president then
announced "The lady can speak." "It seems to me, gentlemen," said she,
"that none of you quite comprehend the cause of the disrespect of which
you complain. Do you not see that, so long as society says a woman is
incompetent to be a lawyer, minister, or doctor, but has ample ability to
be a teacher, every man of you who chooses this profession tacitly
acknowledges that he has no more brains than a woman? Would you exalt your
profession, exalt those who labor with you. Would you make it more
lucrative, increase the salaries of the women engaged in the noble work of
educating our future Presidents, Senators, and Congressmen."

Several thoughts arise in regard to this scene, which was so strongly in
contrast with the conduct of Mrs. Willard or any of the great educators.
Miss Anthony gave no reason for her belief that the entrance of woman upon
the other professions would raise either the status or the wages of those
engaged in the teacher's profession, and as a matter of fact they have not
done so. It was not the society that cast scorn at woman's "lack of
brains" which assisted to remove the natural prejudice against her
assuming duties that had been deemed unsuited to her physique and her
necessary work.

Meantime, one year before the Rochester meeting was held, the first
college for women had been chartered at Auburn, New York, under the name
of "Auburn Female University." In 1853 it was transferred to Elmira, and
it was formally opened in 1855. It was placed under the care of the
Congregational Church, but its charter required that it should have
representative trustees from five other denominations. Its course of study
for the degree of A. B. was essentially the same that was then pursued in
the men's colleges of the State. It was expected to rely upon endowment,
which put woman's education upon a new and more secure footing.

Suffrage leaders lose no opportunity to represent the Church as an enemy
to woman's advancement. Nothing can be further from the truth; and in
striking evidence stand the colleges, which, while unsectarian in spirit
and in method, have been established and cared for by special religious
denominations. Dr. Jacobi, in her book "Common Sense," takes up the tale
and says: "The Mount Holyoke Seminary, the immediate successor of that at
Troy, was opened in 1837 by Miss Lyon, in spite of the opposition of the
clergy." Many besides the clergy were opposed to the plan for which Miss
Lyon was endeavoring to raise money. Her idea that the entire domestic
work of the establishment could be done by pupils and teachers, was
thought unwise and hopeless. In that noble school, where thousands of
women have been educated, a great number have become missionaries. When a
Suffrage convention in session in Worcester wrote to Miss Lyon, asking her
to interest herself in the wrongs of her sex, she answered, "I cannot
leave my work." Neither was Vassar College founded from any impulse or
suggestion of Suffrage agitators, but in a spirit exactly the opposite.
The real impetus to its founding came from Milo Parker Jewett, who was
born in Vermont in 1808, and was graduated at Dartmouth College and at
Andover Theological Seminary. He was active in the formation of the
common-school system of Ohio, and in 1839 he founded The Judson Female
Institute in Marion, Alabama. He established a seminary for girls in
Poughkeepsie in 1855. He had studied law, and became the friend and legal
adviser of Matthew Vassar, who, being unmarried, was casting about for a
method of disposing of his fortune. He suggested to Mr. Vassar an endowed
college for women, and visited the universities and libraries of Europe
with a plan of organization in mind. Mr. Vassar gladly accepted this great
enlargement upon an idea that had lain dormant in his own mind, and Vassar
College was founded, Dr. Jewett becoming its first president in 1862.

I may claim to have been beside the cradle of Vassar College; for when Dr.
Jewett resigned the presidency in 1864, my father named the successor who
was appointed, Dr. John H. Raymond, his life-long friend. Dr. Raymond came
to Rochester to discuss a plan of work, and, knowing my father's interest,
I was on tiptoe to hear about the new college. At my earnest solicitation,
he and Dr. Raymond and Prest. Anderson permitted me to be present at their
discussions. I learned to comprehend the value of womanliness to the world
by the estimate that those noble educators put upon it. It was evident
that they were arranging for those for whose minds they felt respect. They
made no foolish remarks about the superiority, inferiority, or equality of
the sexes, and had no contempt to throw upon the old education of tutor,
and library, and young ladies' seminary. They did not sneer at the "female
mind," but they did talk of the feminine mind as of something as distinct
in its essence from the masculine mind as the feminine form is distinct in
its outlines. To "preserve womanliness" was a task they felt they must
fulfil, or the women for whose good they labored would one day call them
to account. The dictum so frequently in the mouths of Suffrage leaders,
"There is no sex in brain," would have been abhorrent to them. In their
view, there was as much sex in brain as in hand; and the education that
did not, through cultivation, emphasize that fact, would be a lower and
not a higher product. They laid that intellectual corner-stone in love,
and in the faith that the same womanly spirit which, when there was not
college education enough to go round, had said, "Give it to the boys,
because their work must be public," would find, through the glad return
the boys were making, a way to teach the world still higher lessons of
womanly character and influence. Since that time, college after college
has arisen without a dream on the part of the founders, faculties, or
students that "every effort to educate woman, until you accord to her the
right to vote, is futile and a waste of labor," and it may well be that
the women educated in these colleges will decide that, because political
rights do acknowledge sex, therefore the word "male" should not be
stricken from any State constitution.

Before the committee of the New York State Constitutional Convention in
1894, Mr. Edward Lauterbach, who was arguing in favor of woman suffrage,
said: "It was only after the establishment of the Willard School at Troy,
only after its noble founder, believing that women and men were formed in
the same mould, successfully tried the experiment of educating women in
the higher branches, that steps for higher education became generally
taken." If Mr. Lauterbach imagines that Mrs. Willard was in the most
distant way an advocate of woman's doing the same work as man in the same
way, he is unfamiliar with her life and work. Mrs. Willard, in setting
forth her ideal of woman's education, said "Education should be adapted to
female character and duties. To do this would raise the character of
man.... Why may not housewifery be reduced to a system as well as the
other arts? If women were properly fitted for instruction, they would be
likely to teach children better than the other sex; they could afford to
do it cheaper; and men might be at liberty to add to the wealth of the
nation by any of the thousand occupations from which women are necessarily
debarred." Old-fashioned wisdom, but choicely good. Mr. Lauterbach further
said: "What wonder that, being so fully equipped in every mental
attribute, in every intellectual qualification, they will be able not only
to cast a vote but to take practical part in the administration of the
government?"

A female Solon would be a woman still, and in a democracy the intellectual
is not the only qualification needed. This certainly was the belief of
Mrs. Willard, and in 1868, when the Suffrage leaders were holding a
convention in Washington, and were urging that Congress should pass a
sixteenth amendment admitting women to suffrage, Almira Lincoln Phelps,
sister of Mrs. Willard, herself an educator and an author of text-books,
wrote to Isabella Beecher Hooker: "Hoping you will receive kindly what I
am about to write, I will proceed without apologies. I have confidence in
your nobleness of soul, and that you know enough of me to believe in my
devotion to the best interests of woman. I can scarcely realize that you
are giving your name and influence to a cause which, with some good, but,
as I think, misguided women, numbers among its advocates others with loose
morals.... If we could with propriety petition the Almighty to change the
condition of the sexes, and let men take a turn in bearing children and in
suffering the physical ailments peculiar to women, which render them unfit
for certain positions and business, why, in this case, if we really wish
to be men, and thought God would change the established order, we might
make our petition; but why ask Congress to make us men? Circumstances drew
me from the quiet domestic life while I was yet young, but success in
labors which involved publicity, and which may have been of advantage to
society, was never considered as an equivalent to my own heart for such a
loss of retirement. In the name of my sainted sister, Emma Willard, and of
my friend Lydia Sigourney, and, I think I might say, in the name of the
women of the past generation who have been prominent as writers and
educators (the exception may be made of Mary Wollstonecraft, Frances
Wright, and a few licentious French writers) in our own country and in
Europe, let me urge the high-souled and honorable of our sex to turn their
energies into that channel which will enable them to act for the true
interests of their sex."

In a woman's club, last winter, a New York teacher, Miss Helen Dawes
Brown, a graduate of Vassar College, founder of the Woman's University
Club and also one of the founders of Barnard College, in a speech said in
part: "The young girl who doesn't dance, who doesn't play games, who can't
skate and can't row, is a girl to be pitied. She is losing a large part of
what Chesterfield calls the 'joy and titivation of youth.' If our young
girl has learned to be good, teach her not to disregard the externals of
goodness. Let our girls, in college and out, learn to be agreeable. A
girl's education should, first of all, be directed to fitting her for the
things of home. We talk of woman as if the only domestic relations were
those of wife and mother. Let us not forget that she is also a
granddaughter, a daughter, a sister, an aunt. I should like to see her
made her best in all these characters, before she undertakes public
duties. The best organization in the world is the home. Whatever in the
education of girls draws them away from that, is an injury to
civilization."

At the close of an article in the "Outlook," written by Elizabeth Fisher
Read, of Smith College, she said, speaking of their last adaptation of
athletics: "From the beginning, the policy of Smith College has been, not
to duplicate the means of development offered in men's colleges, but to
provide courses and methods of study that should do for women what the
men's courses did for them. Emphasis has been put, not on the resemblances
between men and women, but rather on the differences. The effort has not
been to turn out new women, capable of doing anything man can do, from
walking thirty miles to solving the problems of higher mathematics.
Instead of this, the college has tried to develop its students along
natural womanly lines, not along the lines that would naturally be
followed in training men."

This sounds strangely like Mrs. Willard, who would be the first to rejoice
in the new education and in the old spirit that it can develop. Of course
Suffrage claims to have the same end in view. Every college woman must
decide for herself where she will stand on the question. So far, there
never has been any open affiliation between the colleges and the Suffrage
movement. We wait to hear a final verdict.

A contributor to the Suffrage department of the Woman's Edition of the
Rochester "Post-Express," March 26, 1896, said: "Will Rochester give to
its daughters the same advantages as to its sons, or will it say to the
girls who have no money to leave home and seek in Smith and Wellesley the
culture they cannot procure here: 'You cannot be thoroughly educated; you
have no money; you can have no education; sit and spin; bake and brew--but
don't bother about higher education,' or will the University of Rochester
recognize the one splendid opportunity that awaits it, the one last chance
to take its proper place and become all that the highest American
standards demand for a University?"

The time has not yet fully come when these same sentimentalists shall say
to the faculty and trustees of Vassar, Wellesley and Smith: "Will you not
give to the boys of Poughkeepsie, Northhampton, and Wellesley the same
advantages as to the girls? Or will you say to them: 'You cannot be
thoroughly educated; you have no money; you can have no education; work in
the shop or on the farm, but don't bother about higher education.'" This
is Suffrage logic, and there is no more reason why the educational
institutions in which men study from the age of eighteen to twenty-two
should be invaded by women of that age, than why women's institutions
should be invaded by men. Yet this would be the destruction of our women's
colleges. When Miss Anthony headed a delegation that went bodily to force
co-education on Rochester University, she was told that classes open to
women had been connected with the college for years.

The kind of education best suited to the idea of Suffrage is a training in
political history and present political issues; but the women who have
talked loudly and vaguely of the right of suffrage for years have been the
last to present such knowledge. I have read their "History," attended
their conventions, glanced at their magazines, but never have come upon
the discussion of a single public issue. I think those most familiar with
it will bear me out if I make the statement that their principal
periodical, "The Woman's Journal," edited by Mary A. Livermore, Julia Ward
Howe, Mr. Blackwell, and Alice Stone Blackwell, has not contained any
presentations of questions of public policy in the past ten years.

Those whose names are signed to the Suffrage Woman's Bible, and who are
therefore responsible for that disgraceful effusion, have little right to
claim to be intelligent instructors of their sex. With an ignorance that
is monumental, Frances Ellen Burr glories in the fact that "the Revising
Committee refer to a woman's translation of the Bible as their ultimate
authority for the Greek, Latin, and Hebrew text," and they add that "Julia
Smith, this distinguished scholar," is the only person, man or woman, who
ever made a translation of the Bible without help. They say: "Wycliff made
a translation from the Vulgate assisted by Nicholas of Hereford. He was
not sufficiently familiar with Hebrew and Greek to translate from those
tongues. Coverdale's translation was not done alone. Tyndale, in his
translation, had the assistance of Frye, of William Roye, and also of
Miles Coverdale. Julia Smith translated the whole Bible absolutely alone,
without consultation with any one"! Again they say, "King James appointed
fifty-four men of learning to translate the Bible. Seven of them died, and
forty-seven carried the work on. Compare this corps of workers with one
little woman performing the Herculean task without one suggestion or word
of advice from mortal man "! Yes, compare it! Uncultured Julia Smith,
stirred by the Millerite prophecies, did the best she could to enlighten
her own mind, and should be honored for so doing; but what is to be said
of the women who in this day, in cool print, are willing to show that they
have no comprehension of her grotesque errors or of the difficulties that
beset a real scholar in his noble task? Protest at woman's educational
deprivation comes with ill-grace from those who have thus revealed their
own lack of knowledge of the oldest literature in the world, the model of
poetry and prose, the guardian of the purity of our English speech.

Educated women desire that woman should do all that strength and time
allow in the care of the public schools. The school suffrage ought to be a
boon for them. But it does not, so far, look as if women could make it so.
The figures of the school vote of women in Connecticut, for three years,
occasion serious question whether the use of the ballot is the way in
which woman is to effect anything. In Staten Island, ignorance in women
voted out education, and a tremendous effort had to be made to vote it in
again. The number of men who voted at the last general election in
Connecticut was about 164,000. The women outnumber the men, but the
following table represents the school vote in the State of Emma Willard.
It certainly does not represent the amount of interest taken in education,
nor in the common schools:

  COUNTIES.   1893. 1894. 1895.

  Hartford.   1293  1186   689
  New Haven.   973   949   570
  New London.  364   873   185
  Fairneld.    273   198   126
  Windham      176   182   148
  Litchfield   159    85    50
  Middlesex     60   136   101
  Tolland      372   137    37

This gives the results from all but three or four towns in the State.
Aside from any other considerations, the uncertainty attending the vote of
an element whose first call is elsewhere than at the polls, is a menace to
the welfare of the schools as well as of republican institutions.

One of the grievances of the Suffrage leaders lay in the fact that the
literary women of the country would express no sympathy with their
efforts. Poets and authors in general were denounced. Gail Hamilton, who
had the good of woman in her heart, who was better informed on public
affairs than perhaps any woman in the United States, and whose trenchant
pen cut deep and spared not, always reprobated the cause. Mrs. Stowe stood
aloof, and so did Catherine Beecher, though urged to the contrary course
by Henry Ward Beecher and Isabella Beecher Hooker. In a letter to Mrs.
Cutler, Catherine Beecher said: "I am not opposed to women's speaking in
public to any who are willing to hear, nor am I opposed to women's
preaching, sanctioned as it is by a prophetic apostle--as one of the
millennial results. Nor am I opposed to a woman's earning her own
independence in any lawful calling, and wish many more were open to her
which are now closed. Nor am I opposed to the organization and agitation
of women, as women, to set forth the wrongs suffered by great multitudes
of our sex, which are multiform and most humiliating. Nor am I opposed to
women's undertaking to govern boys and men--they always have, and they
always will. Nor am I opposed to the claim that women have equal rights
with men. I rather claim that they have the sacred superior rights that
God and good men accord to the weak and defenceless, by which they have
the easiest work, the most safe and comfortable places, and the largest
share of all the most agreeable and desirable enjoyments of this life. My
main objection to the Woman-Suffrage organization is this, that a wrong
mode is employed to gain a right object. The right object sought is, to
remedy the wrongs and relieve the sufferings of great multitudes of our
sex; the wrong mode is that which aims to enforce by law, instead of by
love. It is one which assumes that man is the author and abettor of all
these wrongs, and that he must be restrained and regulated by
constitutions and laws, as the chief and most trustworthy methods. I hold
that the fault is as much, or more, with women than with men, inasmuch as
we have all the power we need to remedy the wrongs complained of, and yet
we do not use it for that end. It is my deep conviction that all
reasonable and conscientious men of our age, and especially of our
country, are not only willing but anxious to provide for the good of our
sex. They will gladly bestow all that is just, reasonable, and kind,
whenever we unite in asking in the proper spirit and manner. In the half a
century since I began to work for the education and relief of my sex, I
have succeeded so largely by first convincing intelligent and benevolent
women that what I aimed at was right and desirable, and then securing
their influence with their fathers, brothers, and husbands, and always
with success. Why not take the shorter course, and ask to have the men do
for us what we might do for ourselves if we had the ballot? Now if women
are all made voters, it will be their duty to vote, and also to qualify
themselves for that duty. But already women have more than they can do
well in all that appropriately belongs to them, and, to add the civil and
political duties of men, would be deemed a measure of injustice and
oppression by those who are opposed."

Miss Beecher, like Mrs. Willard and Mrs. Phelps, made text-books for the
use of her own seminaries, and her Arithmetic, and Mental and Moral
Philosophy, and Applied Theology, were among the educational forces of her
day. It is one of the significant signs of the times that science and
education, as well as philanthropy, are occupying themselves just now with
childhood and motherhood and housewifery. Mrs. Willard's high ideal of
womanliness is beginning to be set forth by the electric light of modern
thought.

CHAPTER IX.

WOMAN SUFFRAGE AND THE CHURCH.

The eighth count in the Suffrage indictment reads: "He allows her in
Church, as well as in State, but a subordinate position, claiming
Apostolic authority for her exclusion from the ministry, and, with some
exceptions, from any public participation in the affairs of the Church."

More than thirty years later than this, Mrs. Stanton, Miss Anthony, and
Mrs. Gage wrote in the preface to their "History of Woman Suffrage:"
"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 institutions, woman's condition must inevitably
have improved also, yet the same principle that degrades her in Turkey
insults her here. Custom forbids a woman there to enter a mosque, or call
the hour for prayers; here it forbids her a voice in Church councils or
State legislatures.... The Church, too, took alarm, knowing that with the
freedom and education acquired in becoming a component part of the
Government, woman would not only outgrow the power of the priesthood, and
religious superstitions, but would also invade the pulpit, interpret the
Bible anew from her own standpoint, and claim an equal voice in all
ecclesiastical councils. With fierce warnings and denunciations from the
pulpit, and false interpretations of Scripture, women have been
intimidated and misled, and their religious feelings have been played upon
for their more complete subjugation. While the general principles of the
Bible are in favor of the most enlarged freedom and equality of the race,
isolated texts have been used to block the wheels of progress in all
periods; thus bigots have defended capital punishment, intemperance,
slavery, polygamy, and the subjection of woman. The creeds of all nations
make obedience to man the corner-stone of her religious character.
Fortunately, however, more liberal minds are now giving us higher and
purer expositions of the Scriptures."

It is fifteen years since these statements were made, and we have now the
first instalment of "the Bible interpreted anew from her own standpoint,"
which presumably issues, in their view, from more liberal minds, and is
higher and purer than the old one. In the Introduction to that Suffrage
Woman's Bible (which is as yet only a commentary on the Pentateuch), Mrs.
Stanton says: "From the inauguration of the movement for woman's
emancipation the Bible has been used to hold her in her' divinely
appointed sphere' prescribed by the Old and New Testaments. The canon and
civil law, Church and State, priests and legislators, all political
parties and religious denominations, have alike taught that woman was made
after man, of man, and for man,--an inferior being, subject to man.
Creeds, codes, Scriptures, and statutes are all based on this idea. The
fashions, forms, ceremonies, and customs of society, church ordinances,
and discipline, all grow out of this idea.... So perverted is the
religious element in her nature, that with faith and works she is the
chief support of the Church and Clergy,--the very powers that make her
emancipation impossible."

I know that many believers in Suffrage are also believers in the Bible and
in denominational Christianity. Mrs. Helen Montgomery says, in the Woman's
edition of the Rochester "Post-Express," that one reason for her favorable
consideration of it is, that "Two-thirds of the membership of the
Christian church cannot express their conviction at the polls, since women
may not vote." "Much of the callousness of politicians to church opinion,"
she adds, "comes from the knowledge that that opinion is backed by few
votes." I also know that many of those who disbelieve in Suffrage may also
disbelieve in the Bible, the clergy, and the Church. I further recognize
the fact that the church and religion are not synonymous terms. I have no
attacks to make, and no special pleading to do. I am discussing the
question of Suffrage as I find it in the writing and the speech of its
proposers and its present conspicuous advocates. Each American woman has
this mighty problem before her, and she must settle it according to her
own conscience and best enlightenment.

Mrs. Stanton admits with shame that woman is one of the chief supporters
of the Church. Mrs. Montgomery says with delight that she forms two-thirds
of the Christian Church. Individual members of Suffrage organizations may
be in sympathy with Christianity, or against it; but the movement itself
cannot be on both sides of this question. What is its record? I will
endeavor to trace it, and will then, as best I may, attempt to say a few
words upon the general subject of the "subordination of woman."

In the course of the first clause of their accusation, the women say:
"Claiming Apostolic authority for her exclusion from the ministry." In
view of the fact that Paul frequently alludes to the teaching and
ministrations of women, it has come to be generally thought among
Christian scholars, I believe, that this injunction that they "keep
silence in the churches," referred to the propriety of their conduct in
the moral,--or rather the immoral,--atmosphere by which the Church at
Corinth was surrounded. This seems reasonable, because it may be observed
that, in writing to Timothy, who was in Macedonia, to Titus, who was in
Crete, and to the Church at Ephesus, while he repeats his general
injunctions of woman's submission to man, and especially to her husband,
he says nothing relative to her public work in the church. But if Paul had
been writing to the church in New England, in 1634, and in New York in
1774, his injunction to silence might well have been applied to the first
woman preachers to whom Americans were called upon to listen. When Anne
Hutchinson, in Boston, preached that "the power of the Holy Spirit
dwelleth perfectly in every believer, and the inward revelations of her
own spirit, and the conscious judgment of her own mind are of authority
paramount to any word of God," she shook the young colony to its
foundation, as no man had shaken it. The militia that had been ordered to
the Pequot war refused to march, because she had proclaimed their chaplain
to be "under a covenant of works, and not under a covenant of grace." Her
influence, and not her ballot, if she had one, threatened anarchy in the
state, and caused a schism in the church such as might have crushed out
the life from the infant body to which Paul was writing.

In 1774 appeared the next public woman preacher, Ann Lee. She proclaimed
that God was revealed a dual being, male and female, to the Jews; that
Jesus revealed to the world God as a Father; and that she,--Ann Lee,
"Mother Ann,"--was God's revelation of the Mother, "the bearing spirit of
the creation of God." She founded the sect of Shakers, whose main articles
of belief, besides the one above mentioned, were: community of goods; non-
resistance to force, even in self-defence; the sinfulness of all human
authority, and consequently the sinfulness of participation in any form of
government; absolute separation of the sexes, and consequently no marriage
institution. Her mission as "the Christ of the Second Appearing," began
with her announcement of God's, wrath upon all marriage, and the public
renunciation of her own. In New York, as in New England, her proclamations
against government and war tended directly to anarchy, and in the
momentous year 1776 she was for that reason imprisoned in Poughkeepsie,
whence she was released by Governor Clinton's pardon.

The next pulpitless preacher, in the succession we are considering,
appeared in this country in 1828. Her name was Frances Wright. She was a
person of totally different mind and methods from Anne Hutchinson and Ann
Lee. She was professedly an enemy of religion. Anne Hutchinson attacked
church and state in the name of Christian human perfection. Ann Lee
attacked church and state in the name of woman; she preached communism and
separation of the sexes in the name of Christ; she taught the abolition of
marriage. Frances Wright preached communism and sex license in the name of
irreligion. In opening the columns of the "Free Inquirer" to discussion,
in New York, in 1828, she said: "Religion is true--and in that case the
conviction of its truth should dictate every human word and govern every
sublunary action,--or it is a deception. If it is a deception, it is not
useless only, it is mischievous; it is mischievous by its idle terrors; it
is mischievous by its false morality; it is mischievous by its hypocrisy;
by its fanaticism; by its dogmatism; by its threats; by its hopes; by its
promises; and last, though not least, by its waste of public time and
public money." While deciding that it was a deception, she revealed the
evil results to which abandonment of all faith can lead a woman with a
clever brain and a fearless tongue. She constantly denounced religion as
the source of all injustice and bigotry and of the "enslavement of women."

The editors of the "Suffrage History" say: "As early as 1828 the standard
of the Christian party in politics was openly unfurled. Frances Wright had
long been aware of its insidious efforts, and its reliance upon women for
its support. Ignorant, superstitious, devout, woman's general lack of
education made her a fitting instrument for the work of thus undermining
the republic. Having deprived her of her just rights, the country was now
to find in woman its most dangerous foe. Frances Wright lectured that
winter in the large cities of the western and middle States, striving to
rouse the nation to the new danger which threatened it. The clergy at
once, became her most bitter opponents. The cry of 'infidel' was started
on every side, though her work was of vital importance to the country and
undertaken from the purest philanthropy."

It was high time that a Christian and a non-Christian party in politics
should unfurl a banner; for to the dauntless courage of the land from
which she came--Scotland--she added the polished manner of the country
from which came D'Arusmont, the husband from whom she was soon parted. To
the zeal of the Covenanter, the moral blackness of the infidel, and the
political creed of the Commune, she united the doctrine of Free Love. As
she set these forth with blandishments of speech and manner, the country
did indeed find in this woman a most dangerous foe. When "Fanny Wright
societies" sprang up in New York and the West, horror might well be felt
by lovers of the Republic.

Lucretia Mott was the next public preacher in this succession. Pure in
personal character, lofty in spirit, winning in address, she took for her
motto, "Truth for Authority, not Authority for Truth." As authority for
that truth, she took Elias Hicks.

Dr. Jacobi, in "Common Sense," says: "The abolitionists were declared to
have set aside the laws of God when they allowed women to speak in public:
and, by a pastoral letter, the Congregational churches of Massachusetts
were directed to defend themselves against heresy, by closing their doors
to the innovators. The Methodists denounced the Garrisonian societies as
no-government, no-Sabbath, no-church, no-Bible, no-marriage, women's
rights societies." Not the Methodists alone, but the Congregationalists,
the Presbyterians, the Episcopalians, the Baptists, the Unitarians, the
Universalists, and the Quakers so denounced that faction of them in which
culminated many of the doctrines of Anne Hutchinson, Ann Lee, Frances
Wright, and Lucretia Mott.

In an appeal to the women of New York, in 1860, signed by Elizabeth Cady
Stanton, Lydia Mott, Ernestine Rose, Martha C. Wright, and Susan B.
Anthony, we read: "The religion of our day teaches that, in the most
sacred relations of the race, the woman must ever be subject to the man;
that in the husband centres all power and learning; that the difference in
position between husband and wife is as vast as that between Christ and
the Church; and woman struggles to hold the noble impulses of her nature
in abeyance to opinions uttered by a Jewish teacher, which, alas! the mass
believe to be the will of God."

In 1895, among the names of those responsible for the Suffrage Woman's
Bible, we find three to which the title "Rev." is prefixed. The opening
commentary on the first verses of Genesis, where the creation of man is
described, says: "Instead of three male personages, as generally
represented, a Heavenly Father, Mother, and Son would seem more rational.
The first step in the elevation of woman to her true position, as an equal
factor in human progress, is the cultivation of the religious sentiment in
regard to her dignity and equality, the recognition by the rising
generation of an ideal Heavenly Mother, to whom their prayers should be
addressed, as well as to a Father." Here is Ann Lee's doctrine revived
with a mocking suggestion that savors more of Frances Wright than of its
poor, half-crazed author. The soul-sufficiency of Ann Hutchinson, the
spiritual anarchy of Lucretia Mott, the infidelity and the veiled
coarseness of Frances Wright, have all found fit setting in this
commentary on the Pentateuch. I know that Miss Anthony repudiates the
Suffrage Woman's Bible in the name of the Association of which she is
President. It certainly does not represent the faith or the culture or the
doctrines of many who belong to that body; but she cannot really repudiate
it for herself or for them. It was promised in the History of which she is
co-editor, it was foreshadowed in her circular quoted above, as well as in
innumerable speeches of hers in convention. Those Christian and
philanthropic bodies that have attached themselves to the Suffrage
movement have this book to account for and with. Whatever they may
personally decide to think or say of it, it is the consummate blossom of
the spirit of the Suffrage movement, and the names it bears upon its
title-page represent the varied classes that have worked for the political
enfranchisement of woman. By the world outside it will so be dealt with.

Few movements have been started, especially among women, that did not
professedly stand upon high moral and religious ground. Fourierism was
superhuman in its intention,--in this country, at least. Free-thinking
hopes to deliver the soul from the bondage of superstition in all
religion. Mormonism was founded as "the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-
Day Saints." Communism at Oneida was professedly built upon the doctrine
of human perfection in Christian love. The disaster to the soul is in
proportion to the amount of perversion of a living faith. Every movement
must be judged, not by what its advocates suppose themselves to believe,
but by that which time proves they do believe.

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
institutions, 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 institutions?" There has been no improvement
in Turkey, in China, in India, or in Japan, 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 worship God," 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 God 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 multitudes of beings. The Salvation lassie 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 Association 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 Constitutional
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 noblest 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 advertisement
on the other. It is with a profound sense of sadness and disgust that any
woman who honors God and loves her own sex 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 God, 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 assumption 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 (nobody
pretends to know who) at some time (nobody 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,
entitled 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 attitude 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 asserted
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 superstition, 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 sexes; created alike in the
image of God--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 sex; 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
Godhead in the Old Testament, and this declaration of the equality of the
sexes 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 God, 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 sexes." When the wrath of woman thus praises God, 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 Godhead." God is a spirit. There is no more a feminine than a
masculine element in the Godhead. Sex 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 sex conditions as long
as it draws the breath of this transitory life. Every thought and every
act reveal the governing power of the sex 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 God 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 assertion 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 headship 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 God'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 noblest 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 snatched 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 substitutes 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
relationship as that of oak and vine which have no organic union; but,
despite imperiousness and folly, both men and women, through mutual
obedience to God, have thus far worked out, and are still working out, the
nobler 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 lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his
heart." This is the standard of chastity 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 God 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 God 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 God'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 assertions 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 God 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 assumed by wives when they were in the street or in a
public assembly. 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
God, would have repudiated the heathen wife, Paul said to them both that
Christian liberty was individual,--it changed the character, not the sex
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 God and acceptance of the responsibility of the guardianship
of the earth. Woman was to cover her head in token of her acceptance of
man's guardianship and of her dominion over his heart, to which she had
revealed God'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 God." 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 emancipation 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 God; 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