* On the status of women there is much of interest in Mr.
Herbert Spencer's "Principles of Sociology," vol 1. Mr.
Spencer deals with the subject, in the main, from a
different point of view from the one taken in this article;
but that his position (in regard to the causes of woman's
advancement being due to the Church) is not wholly unlike my
own, will, I think, be readily seen. He places more stress
on the results of war than I have done (and in this the
corroborating evidence furnished by the Holy wars would
sustain the position of both), I having included this phase
of action under the term occupation, since I have dealt
almost wholly with nations more advanced and freer from the
fortunes of the Militant type than Mr. Spencer has done.
** See Appendix D.
*** See Appendix E.
WOMEN AS PERSONS.
Blackstone enumerates three "absolute rights of persons." First, "The right of personal security, in the legal enjoyment of life, limb, body, health, and reputation." Second, "The right of personal liberty—free power of locomotion without legal restraint." Third, "The right of private property—the free use and disposal of his own lawful acquisitions."
None of these three primary and essential rights of persons were conceded to women, and Church law did not rank her as a person deprived of these rights, but held that she was not a person at all, but only a function; therefore she possessed no rights of person in this world and no hope of safety in the next.
As to the first of these "absolute rights of persons," any one of her male relations, or her husband after she passed from one to the other, had absolute power over her, even to the extent of bodily injury,* bargain and sale of her person, and death. Nor did even this limit the number of her masters. By both Church and Common Law the Lords temporal (barons and other peers) and the Lords spiritual (Archbishops, Bishops, and Abbots) possessed and exercised the right to dispose of her purity, either for a money consideration or as a bribe or present as they saw fit.**
* "Although England was christianized in the fourth century,
it was not until the tenth that a daughter had a right to
reject a husband selected for her by her father; and it was
not until the same century that a Christian wife of a
Christian husband acquired the right of eating at the table
with him. For many hundred years the law bound out to
servile labor all unmarried women between the ages of eleven
and forty."—M. J. Gage.
"Wives in England were bought from the fifth to the
eleventh century" [The dates are significant; let the Church
respond.]—Herbert Spencer.
"In England, as late as the seventeenth century, husbands of
decent station were not ashamed to beat their wives.
Gentlemen arranged parties of pleasure for the purpose of
seeing wretched women whipped at Bridewell. It was not until
1817 that the public whipping of women was abolished in
England."—Spencer.
** See Appendix E.
Thus was the forced degradation of woman made a source of revenue to the Church, and a means of crushing her self-respect and destroying her sense of personal responsibility as to her own acts in the matter of chastity, the legitimate outcome of which is to be found in the vast army of women who are named only to be reviled. In them the Church can look on her own work. The fruit is the natural outcome of the training woman received that taught and compelled her always to submit to the dictates of some man, no matter what her own judgment, modesty, or desires might be. She was not supposed to have an opinion or to know right from wrong; and from Paul's injunction, "If you want to know anything ask your husband at home," down to the decisions of the last General Conference of the Methodist Church, the teaching that woman must subordinate her own sense of right and her own judgment to the dictates of someone else—any one else of the opposite sex—from first to last has been as ingenious a method as could have been devised to fill the world with libertines and their victims.* It is time for the followers of St. Paul to nice the results of their own work.
* See Appendix F, 2.
Under the provisions of the law which held that all "persons" could recover damages for injury—have legal redress for a wrong inflicted upon them—woman again was held as not a 'person.