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

Mrs. Stanton, in summing up the concensus of opinion on a matter which is not of the slightest importance to any of them, except that they feel an interest, for the cause of Suffrage, in endeavoring to release woman from the long bondage of superstition, says: "The first account dignifies woman as an important factor in the creation, equal in power and glory with man. The second makes her a mere afterthought. The world in good running order without her, the only reason for her advent being the solitude of man. There is something sublime in bringing order out of chaos; light out of darkness; giving each planet its place in the solar system; oceans and lands their limits,—wholly inconsistent with a petty surgical operation to find material for the mother of the race. It is in this allegory that all the enemies of woman rest their battering-rams, to prove her inferiority. Accepting the view that man was prior in the creation, some Scriptural writers say that, as the woman was of the man, therefore her position should be one of subjection. Grant it. Then, as the historical fact is reversed in our day, and the man is now of the woman, shall his place be one of subjection? The equal position declared in the first account must prove more satisfactory to both sexes; created alike in the image of God—the heavenly Mother and Father. Thus, the Old Testament,' in the beginning,' proclaims the simultaneous creation of man and woman, the eternity and equality of sex; and the New Testament echoes back through the centuries the individual sovereignty of woman growing out of this natural fact. Paul, in speaking of equality as the very soul and essence of Christianity, said, 'There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female; for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.' With this recognition of the feminine element in the Godhead in the Old Testament, and this declaration of the equality of the sexes in the New, we may well wonder at the contemptible status woman occupies in the Christian Church to-day."

So the woman who spurns the Bible as the book that is responsible for woman's degradation, who denies that it is the word of God, who pours out upon Paul the vials of her wrath, finds in them both her highest warrant for believing in the "equal position" of woman, "the perfect equality of the sexes." When the wrath of woman thus praises God, the one who believes that through woman's status in the Bible and in the Christian Church this perfect equality is being worked out day by day need not take up controversial cudgels. Ribaldry in woman seems more gross than in man, and this is woman's ribaldry. It is profane to speak of the "feminine element in the Godhead." God is a spirit. There is no more a feminine than a masculine element in the Godhead. Sex belongs to mortal life and its conditions. It begins and ends with this earth. Christ has told us so: There will be in another world "no marrying, nor giving in marriage, but we all shall be as the angels in heaven." The equality of which Paul spoke as "the very soul and essence of Christianity" is the equality of the essence and soul of male and female humanity, and the oneness of the believer's soul with that of the Christ in whom his soul believes. The soul of humanity, as well as its body, is bound by sex conditions as long as it draws the breath of this transitory life. Every thought and every act reveal the governing power of the sex mould in which its form is cast for this world's uses. The use of this world is to give preparation for another and a better one; final spiritual triumph is the end to be attained. Humanity is now in the image of God only in the essential sense in which the full corn in the ear may be said to be wrapped up in its kernel, and it can unfold only according to the laws of its being. The first account of Creation sets forth, with the beautiful imagery of the Orient, the general and ultimate truth. The second account, with the same grand simplicity, foreshadows the method and the long, slow process by which this ultimate end is to be attained.

In continuing their comments, the editors say: "In chapter v., verse 23, Adam proclaims the eternal oneness of the happy pair, 'This is now bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh;' no hint of her subordination. How could men, admitting these words to be divine revelation, ever have preached the subjection of woman? Next comes the naming of the mother of the race. 'She shall be called woman,' in the ancient form of the word, 'womb-man.' She was man and more than man, because of her maternity. The assertion of the supremacy of the woman in the marriage relation is contained in chapter v., 24: 'Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother and cleave unto his wife.' Nothing is said of the headship of man, but he is commanded to make her the head of the household, the home, a rule followed for centuries under the Matriarchate."

A rule that has been followed rudely through all centuries, and is followed to-day with far greater approach to perfect obedience. Maternity was to be God's method of working out the problem of changing the innocence of ignorant savagery to the holiness of enlightened civilization. To this end, the more delicate and complex organism of the womb-man must be cared for by the strength and steadiness that could find full play because that subtler task was not demanded of it.

In commenting on chapter iii., which contains the account of the Garden of Eden and the eating of the apple, they say: "As out of this allegory grow the doctrines of original sin, the fall of man and of woman the author of all our woes, and the curses on the serpent, the woman and the man, the Darwinian theory of the gradual growth of the race from a lower to a higher type of animal life is more hopeful and encouraging."

The Christian doctrine is more hopeful and encouraging still. It reveals the growth of the race from a low type of animal life to the perfect life of the soul.

We do not need to go back to the garden where our first parents dwelt, to look for the substantiation of the eternal truth of this whole wondrous story. Amid the landscape of the civilization of the noblest country that the world possesses, we have the drama repeated. In the work of Anne Hutchinson, Ann Lee, Frances Wright, Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Stanton, Susan Anthony, Ellen Dietrick, Lillie Blake, and their fellow- commentators, we have re-enacted the Temptress and the Fall. Woman first aspired. She stretched forth her eager hand to seize the good, and in so doing snatched the evil that grew beside it. The woman in Eden had not learned what maternity taught her later—that she could point the path, but could not lead in entering it. Wherever woman has forgotten this hard- won but glorious lesson, she has been the most dangerous of guides. The conscience, that intellect of the soul, woke first in woman. By her obedience to its voice, the faith that worketh by love had its perfected work, and the promise that was given to her was fulfilled in the birth of Christ. A Creation story without a gospel is chaos without gravitation, primal darkness without the sun. Forward to divinity in human form woman was able, through obedience, to point mankind. Backward to divinity in human form she points again, until humanity itself shall become divine. If she loses the final vision, or substitutes her own, she can neither point nor guide. No wonder woman has been a mystery to the church. No wonder a witch was not allowed to live, while a wizard might; she was more dangerous. No wonder Paul was perplexed by the woman question. No wonder monks fled to the desert. Christ has spoken the final words of woman, "Thy faith hath saved thee." From the anguish of His cross he said: "Woman, behold thy son!" "Behold thy mother," and the beloved disciple "took her to his own home from that hour."

In the Suffrage appeal of 1860, the writers said: "The difference between husband and wife is as vast as the difference between Christ and his Church." Christ himself says that the difference between him and his Church is that of degree, not of kind, and that the resemblance is that of essential oneness. He says: "I am the vine, ye are the branches." Could union be more completely pictured? The fruit-bearing branch cannot say to the strength-giving vine, "I have no need of thee." The vine cannot say, "I have no need of thee." Man in his imperious folly has pictured the relationship as that of oak and vine which have no organic union; but, despite imperiousness and folly, both men and women, through mutual obedience to God, have thus far worked out, and are still working out, the nobler destiny for both.

In summing up their opinion of the Pentateuch, the editors of the Suffrage Woman's Bible say: "This utter contempt for all the decencies of life, and all the natural personal rights of women, as set forth in these pages, should destroy, in the minds of women at least, all authority to superhuman origin, and stamp the Pentateuch at least as emanating from the most obscene minds of a barbarous age." So low can woman fall in ignorance and shameless audacity when the faith that works by love is lost. As the spirit of the Commandments comes to prevail, the decencies of life and the natural personal rights of woman become more secure. Here again Christ has spoken the ultimate word. He says: "Ye have heard by them of old time' Thou shalt not commit adultery,' but I say unto you whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart." This is the standard of chastity to which mankind must come. When the Hebrew mother in living faith cast the bread of her own life's being upon the Nile, she was to find it after many days in the great law-giver of her people. The Commandments received through him were the foreshadowing of those greater oracles in which Christ summed up the whole duty of man. The individual liberty which Moses was the first to proclaim to a whole people, in the Pentateuch, Christ, his anti-type, proclaimed to a whole world, and on his proclamation rests to-day the freedom of woman and of the American Republic. The Bread of Life, again cast on the troubled waters of this world, by woman's faith, through Mary the Virgin Mother, is returning after many days.

Strange that we should forever turn back, as if the application of any essential truth were finished. The child walks by faith. The childhood of the world walked by faith, and left in the Bible the evidence of things that are not seen but are eternal. The Suffrage movement has a quarrel with the Bible because the Creator is there represented, for the reverence of the race, under the guise of a Heavenly Father, and not a Heavenly Mother, or rather, not as a human pair, equal in dignity and power. If the first impulsion of love toward God had come into this world through the mind of man, he would have represented the divine love that his soul conceived under the guise of that being on earth whom he most loved. But love was born with the "disabilities" of woman; it was evolved through motherhood; and the same impulse that gave it, exalted, not itself, but what it loved and trusted. "I have gotten a man from the Lord" said the first recorded mother, who had learned to know the Lord through motherhood; and the boy she bore was taught to look up with confidence to the strength and protection of his father. She told him that the pity of his father, which made him bring food and raiment, and which guarded his home, was an image of the feeling that was felt for him by the divine being. Could man have learned the lesson first, we can see that the story would have been different, because man has named every beautiful and gracious thing for woman. Virtue, temperance, truth, purity, love, faith, hope, liberty, grace, beauty, charity, the inspirers of art and science, of music and literature, of justice and of religion, all are feminine. When man says: "Our Father which art in heaven," he prays as his mother taught him. Through the self-abnegation that was unconscious of its sacrifice, woman was to be the instrument for bringing human life up, on, to the God who, being spirit, could act upon a clay-bound mind only through the highest human thing that love could know. Men, as well as women, have misunderstood and misinterpreted this. The love that "is not puffed up," "doth not behave itself unseemly," cannot proclaim its own virtue—to arrogate it is to lose it. But the secret of the Lord has been with those who feared Him, and it has led the world aright in spite of blunder and of sin.