Men, Women, and Gods; and Other Lectures

by Helen H. Gardener

"She may not make a deed."

"A man may administer moderate correction to his wife."

"These are the chief legal effects of marriage. Even the disabilities of the wife," Blackstone naively remarks, "are for the most part intended for her protection; so great a favorite is the female sex of the laws of England!"

I should think that if this latter point were not quite clear to a woman, "moderate correction" might convince her that she was quite an unreasonable favorite—beyond her most eager desires. Where the Pagan law recognized her as the equal of her husband, the Church discarded that law, and based the Canon Law upon an archaic invention.

Where Maine speaks of the later growth of Pagan law and of Christian influence upon it, he says: "But the chapter of law relating to married women was for the most part read by the light, not of Roman [or Pagan] but of Canon [or Church] Law, which in no one particular departs so widely from the [improved] spirit of the secular jurisprudence as in the view it takes of the relations created by marriage. This was in part inevitable, since no society which possesses any tincture of Christian institutions is likely to restore to married women the personal liberty conferred on them by the middle Roman law."

Women who support the clergy with one hand, and hold out the other for the ballot; who one day express indignation at the refusal to them of human recognition, and the next day intone the creeds, will have to learn that there is nothing which has so successfully stood, and still so powerfully stands, in the way of the individual liberty, human rights, and dignity of wives, as the Church which they support.

Blackstone says: "In times of popery a great variety of impediments to marriage were made, which impediments might, however, be bought off with money."

You could, for instance, buy a more distant relationship to your future wife for so much cash down to the Church. If your inamorata were your first cousin, you could remove her several degrees with five hundred dollars, and make her no relation at all for a little more. Such little sleight-of-hand performances are as nothing to a well-trained clergyman. Slip a check into one hand, and a request to marry your aunt into the other, let a clergyman shake them up in the coffers of the Church, and when one comes out gold, the other will appear as a blushing bride not even related to her own father, and not more than third cousin to herself.

Of the claim made by the early Christian Fathers, that it was because of the mental inferiority and incapacity of women that the more unjust and binding laws were enacted for them, thus doing all they could to create and intensify by law the incapacity which they asserted was imposed by God, Maine says: "But the proprietary disabilities of married females stand on quite a different basis from personal incapacity, and it is by the tendency of their doctrines to keep alive and consolidate the former, that the expositors of the Canon Law have deeply injured civilization."

He adds that there are many evidences of a struggle between secular principles in favor of justice for wives, and ecclesiastical principles against it, "but the Canon Law nearly everywhere prevailed. The systems which are least indulgent to married women are invariably those which have followed the Canon Law exclusively.... It enforced the complete legal subjection of wives."