Unargued I obey: so God ordains;
God is thy law, thou mine; to know no more
Is woman’s happiest knowledge, and her praise.’”
—(“Paradise Lost,” Book IV., 634.)
Concerning which words of Milton well may Mary Wollstonecraft observe, with a quiet sarcasm:—“If it be allowed that women were destined by Providence to acquire human virtues, and, by the exercise of their understandings, that stability of character which is the firmest ground to rest our future hopes upon, they must be permitted to turn to the fountain of light, and not forced to shape their course by the twinkling of a satellite.”—(“Vindication of the Rights of Woman,” Chap. II.)
Milton also discoursed learnedly, but self-interestedly, concerning divorce, claiming for the husband a privilege and option which he utterly denied to the wife:—“... the power and arbitrement of divorce from the master of the family, into whose hands God and the law of all nations had put it ... that right which God from the beginning had entrusted to the husband.”—(“The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce.”)
It was this same mediæval moralist who trained his daughters in the pronunciation of various languages, that they might minister to his comfort by reading to him in those tongues; while he carefully withheld from them any knowledge of the meaning of the words they were uttering. Could a greater insult or a more degrading office be inflicted on a cultured human intellect? Small wonder that his daughters were sufficiently “undutiful and unkind”—as Milton styled it—to leave him some years before his death. That the possessor of the same virile intellect which penned the “Areopagitica,” with its brave freedom, could tolerate and promulgate the servitude and degradation of one half of humanity indicates in him a mental darkness as gross and as pitiable as his physical blindness.
6, 7.—“... sanctimonious name
Of ‘woman’s duty’ ...”
“Hitherto the world has been governed by brute force only, which means that the stronger animal, man, has kept the weaker in subjection, allowing her to live only in so far as she ministered to his comforts; that he has not unnaturally made laws and fixed customs to suit his own pleasure and convenience, always at the expense of the woman; and, what is worse, that he has in all countries given a religious sanction to his vices, in order to bend the woman to his wishes.... I might also add that all cruel customs relating to woman have been imposed upon her under the guise of religion, and hence, though so injurious and baneful to herself, she is even slower to change them than the man. There is hardly any cruel wrong which has been inflicted in the course of ages by man upon his fellow-man that has not been justified by an appeal to religion.”—Mrs. Pechey Phipson, M.D. (“Address to the Hindoos of Bombay”).