That’s all, gentlemen. You and I will go. There will be other witnesses and days of testimony. But isn’t this enough? What would you yourselves do if your church and your state handed you over body and soul, like this, to any other human being to have and to hold and to exercise this power and dominion over you? I don’t believe you’d ever stop at all to parade and respectfully to petition about it. I think you’d be mobbing and rioting and bombing right away. And if they had arrested you and put you in Holloway Jail, you’d have raised the roof and torn down the whole social structure!
Well, in England women broke windows. In Germany, as I have said, they broke more. “Your statutes have limited the liberties of the woman who marries. Then you shall never limit us,” was the gauntlet thrown down to society by the extremists. They were university women, some of them with doctor of philosophy degrees, who scathingly refused the ring and faced free love instead. They were quite frank about it—and quite fearless. I have talked with them there in Berlin. They looked at me as clear eyed, when they told me of what they had done, as any women who have walked ringed and veiled down a church aisle into legal wedlock. Well, they seemed to think it was the only way, to act directly instead of to agitate.
And they got out the book of the church ritual that they had repudiated. And they turned to a paragraph and said to me, Read. And I read: “The woman’s will, as God says, shall be subject to the man and he shall be her master: that is, the woman shall not live according to her free will ... and must neither begin nor complete anything without the man. Where he is, there must she be and bend before him as her master, whom she shall fear and to whom she shall be subject and obedient.”
So I write it here, gentlemen, for you to see. And again, I submit, What would you do if they had said it that way to you? Be fair. Could any ring have held you?
It was natural, I think, that revolt should be most bitter in England and in Germany, the two countries where women were driven to the verge of desperation. A Frenchman may hold the reins of his authority so gaily that a woman with skill evades them. And the dear American man will pass them right over to you if you’re a woman of any judgment and finesse at all. But in those lands where a wife must not only promise to obey, but also they made her, the eruption was due. Action and reaction are equal in the old law of physics, and you can pretty accurately measure the rebound by that. It was because the ring hurt worse in Germany than anywhere else in the world, that they just tore it off. But the marriage strike that was started in Germany wasn’t staying there.
In nearby Sweden, a woman who is a very prominent lawyer and a man who is a university professor, decided to do with an announcement in a newspaper instead of a ceremony in a church—and the lady remains a lawyer. It was the only way that she could. The law of that land places the woman, on the day that she marries, under her husband’s guardianship, and pronounces her incompetent thereafter to act as an attorney in court! The newspaper announcement as it is now used in Scandinavia is called the “conscience marriage.”
There were also Anglo-Saxon women who had rebelled. In London, an Oxford graduate who had done with window breaking told me quite candidly that she was living what she called the “unorthodox life.” And there were others in her particular London suburb. In New York City, even, there are women who have preferred the “free union.”
You see how near it was to being wrecked, this an institution more revered by society than all of the cathedrals and art galleries. Only this war, probably, could have averted the disaster. Now this new woman, with her wage envelope and her vote, has become articulate. She can speak as one who can pay the rent, about how “we” shall live.
Oh, it’s not either Hampstead or Long Island. Never mind for a while whether the lace curtains will be long enough or shall the floors be done over. Yesterday her domain was the home. To-day it’s the wide, wide world to be set to order. For the first time she’s facing her destiny, with the right to decide more than the parlour carpet or her satin slippers or even her sociological principles.
How “we” shall live and love together, is the question for consultation. And there is statute and dogma and custom and convention and tradition to be done over. These have been handed down until they are many of them past all usefulness. Some of them are moth-eaten and quite outworn. None of them, please note this, gentlemen, none of them is of her selection. Just think of that. There’s not a code in the world that was formulated by a woman. The creeds that have come from Rome and Wittenberg and Westminster were not even submitted for woman’s inspection. And marriage was made for her by law courts and church councils to which she was not even asked. There was not so much as a by-your-leave to the lady, in the matter of her most intimate personal concern. Oh, isn’t this clearly where the reconstruction of civilisation shall commence?