Woman and the Republic / A Survey of the Woman-Suffrage Movement in the United States and a Discussion of the Claims and Arguments of Its Foremost Advocates

by Helen Kendrick Johnson

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.