And to-day, if she offers her opinion and her logic for what they are worth, the clergy preach doleful sermons about her losing her beautiful home character, about her innocence being gone, about their idea of her glorious exaltation as wife and mother being destroyed. Then they grow florid and exclaim that "man is after all subject to her, that he is born for the rugged path and she for the couch of flowers!"*
* "A pertinacious adversary, pushed to extremities, may say
that husbands indeed are willing to be reasonable, and to
make fair concessions to their partners without being
compelled to it, but that wives are not; that if allowed any
rights of their own, they will acknowledge no rights at all
in any one else, and never will yield in anything, unless
they can be compelled, by the man's mere authority, to yield
in everything. This would have been said by many persons
some generations ago, when satires on women were in vogue,
and men thought it a clever thing to insult women for being
what men made them. But it will be said by no one now who
is worth replying to. It is not the doctrine of the present
day that women are less susceptible of good feeling and
consideration for those with whom they are united by the
strongest ties, than men are. On the contrary, we are
perpetually told that women are better than men by those who
are totally opposed to treating them as if they were as
good; so that the saying has passed into a piece of tiresome
cant, intended to put a complimentary face upon an injury."
—John Stuart Mill.
You recognize it all, I see. You seem to have heard it somewhere before. I recall one occasion when I heard it from a country clergyman, who knew so much about heaven and hell that he hardly had time to know enough about this world to enable him to keep out of the fire unless he was tied to a chair. It was in the summer of 1876, and I remember the conversation began by his asking a lady in the room about the Centennial display, from which she had just returned. He asked her if she would advise him to take his daughter. She said she thought it would be a very nice thing for the girl, and she added, "It will be good for you. You will see so much that is new and wonderful. It will be of use to you in your work, I am sure." He said, "Well, I don't know about that. There won't be anything much that is new to me. I've seen it all. I was in Philadelphia in 1840." Then he gave us quite a talk on "woman's sphere." He could tell you in five minutes just what it was; and the amount of information that man possessed about the next world was simply astonishing. He knew pretty nearly everything. I think he could tell you, within a fraction or two, just how much material it took to make wings for John the Baptist, and whether Paul sings bass or tenor. His presbytery says he is a most remarkable theologian—and I don't doubt it. According to the law of compensation, however, what he does not know about this world would make a very comprehensive encyclopedia.
But seriously, did it ever occur to you to ask any of these divine oracles why, if all these recent compliments are true about the superior beauty and virtue and truth and power resting with women—why it is that they always desire as heirs sons rather than daughters? You would think their whole desire would be for girls, and that, like Oliver Twist, their chief regret would be that they hadn't "more." But the Bible (and the clergy, until quite recently) pronounces it twice as great a crime to be the mother of a girl as to be the mother of a boy. A crime to be the mother of a little child—a double crime if the child should be a girl.*
* See Appendix K.
It is often urged that women are better off under the Christian than under any other religion; that our Bible is more just to her than other Bibles are. For the time we will grant this, and respectfully inquire—what does it prove? If it proves anything it is this—that all "divine revelations" are an indignity to women, and that they had better stick to nature. Nature may be exacting, but she is not partial. If it proves anything, it is that all religions have been made by men for men and through men. I do not contend for the superiority of other Bibles, I simply protest against the wrong in ours. One wrong cannot excuse another. That murder is worse than arson does not make a hero of the rascal who fires our homes. If Allah were more cruel than Jehovah, that would be no palliation of the awful crimes of the Old Testament. That slaves have better clothes than savages cannot make noble traffic in human blood. A choice of evils is often necessary, but it does not make either of them a good. But there is no book which tells of a more infamous monster than the Old Testament, with its Jehovah of murder and cruelty and revenge, unless it be the New Testament, which arms its God with hell, and extends his outrages throughout all eternity!
WHY WOMEN SUPPORT IT.
Another argument is that if orthodox Christianity were not good for women they would not support and cling to it; if it did not comfort them they would discard it. In reply to that I need only recall to you the fact that it is the same in all religions. Women have ever been the stanchest defenders of the faith, the most bitter haters of an infidel, the most certain that their form of faith is the only truth.* Yet I do not hear this fact advanced to prove the divinity of the Koran or the book of Mormon. If it is a valid argument in the one case it is valid in the others. The trouble with it is it proves too much. It takes in the whole field. It does not leave a weed, from the first incantation of the first aborigine to the last shout of the last convert to Mormonism, out of its range; and it does, and always has done, just as good service for any one of the other religions as it does for ours. It is a free-for-all, go-as-you-please argument; but it is the sort of chaff they feed theological students on—and they sift it over for women. It is pretty light diet when it gets to them—but it is filling.
* See Appendix G.