Woman, Church & State / The Original Exposé of Male Collaboration Against the Female Sex

by Matilda Joslyn Gage

Decrees of various characters presenting woman as a being of different natural and spiritual rights from man, are constantly formulated by the churches. The Plenary Council of Baltimore, 1884, busied itself in the enactment of canons directly bearing upon marriage and divorce, re-affirming the sacramental character of marriage and declaring that marriages under civil rites should be resented by the whole Catholic world. This council was preceded by an encyclical from the Pope, laying out its plans by work yet leaving it within the power of the diocesan bishops to promulgate its canons according to their own wisdom. Consequently, not until three years later were those upon marriage published on the Pacific Coast, at which time the archbishop of San Francisco, the bishops of Monterey, Los Angeles and Grass Valley, addressed a pastoral letter to the Catholics of those regions, condemning civil marriage as a sin and sacrilege, illegal, and a “horrible concubinage.” It was farther stated that marriage unblessed by a priest, subjected the parties to excommunication. At the still later Catholic Congress, in honor of the hundredth anniversary of the Catholic Hierarchy in America, divorces were affirmed to be the plague of civilization, a discredit to the government, a degradation of the female sex, and a standing menace to the sanctity of the marriage bond. In noting these canons of the Plenary Council and the resolutions of the Catholic Congress, it should be borne in mind that the chief secret of the long-continued power of the Catholic church has been its hold upon marriage and the subordination of woman in this relation. To these celibate priests, nothing connected with woman is sacred. Celibacy and the sacramental nature of marriage are each of them based upon the theory of woman’s created inferiority and original sin. Priestly power over marriage, and the confessional, through which means it is able to wrest all family and state secrets to its own use, are powers that will not be peaceably relinquished. Their destruction will come through the growing intelligence of people, and the responsibility of political self-government. These will insure confidence in the validity of civil marriage and a belief in the personal rights of individuals. To woman, the education of political responsibility is most essential in order to free her from church bonds, and is therefore most energetically opposed by the church. In 1890, a number of Catholic ladies of Paris formed a union for the emancipation of woman from different kinds of social thraldom.[29] Their first attack was upon the priesthood, whom they declared the mortal adversary of woman’s advancement, affirming that every woman “who abets the abbés is an enemy of her sex.” This open rebellion of Catholic ladies against the power of the hierarchy, is a significant sign of woman’s advancing freedom.

All canons, decrees, resolutions and laws of the church, especially bearing upon the destinies of woman are promulgated without the hearing of her voice, either in confirmation or rejection. She is simply legislated for as a slave. Two of the later triennial conclaves of the Episcopal church of the United States, energetically debated the subject of divorce, not, however, arriving at sufficient unanimity of opinion for the enactment of a canon. When Mazzini, the Italian patriot, was in this country, 1852, he declared the destruction of the priesthood to be our only surety for continued freedom, saying:

They will be found as in Italy, the foes of mankind, and if the United States expects to retain even its political liberties, it must get rid of the priesthood as Italy intends to do.[30]

Frances Wright, that clear-seeing, liberty-loving, Scotch free-thought woman, noted the dangerous purpose and character of the Christian party in politics, even as early as 1829; and the present effort of this body, now organized as the “National Reform Association” with its adjunct “The American Sabbath Union,” officered by priests and influential members of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, and kindred bodies, is a perpetual menace to the civil and religious liberties of the United States. Its effort for an amendment to the Federal Constitution which shall recognize the United States as a Christian nation, is a determined endeavor toward the union of church and state; and its success in such attempt will be the immediate destruction of both civil and religious liberty. That such a party now openly exists, its intentions no secret, is evidence that the warnings of Italian patriot and the Scotch free thinker were not without assured foundation.

As a body, the church opposes education for woman, and all the liberalizing tendencies of the last thirty-five or forty years, which have opened new and varied industries to women and secured to wives some relief from their general serf condition. Bishop Littlejohn, of the Episcopal church, at the Triennial Conclave of bishops, 1883, preached as his “triennial charge” upon “The Church and the Family,” presenting the general church idea as to woman’s inferiority and subordination. He made authoritative use of the words “sanctities of home,” a phrase invented by the clergy as a method of holding woman in bondage; directed the church to “strictly impose her doctrines as to marriage and divorce, clash as they may with the spirit of the times and the laws of the state” (thus emulating the Catholic doctrines of the supremacy of the church). He declared that in any respect to change the relation established by God himself between husband and wife, was rank infidelity, no matter what specious disguise such change might assume, explicitly declaring the authority of the church over marriage, as against the authority of the state; protesting against omission of the word “obey” from the marriage service, and the control of the wife over her own earnings and expenditures, saying:

If it be outside the province of the states to treat marriage as more than a contract between a man and a woman, the church must make it understood, as it is not, that it is inside her province to treat it as a thing instituted of God. Practically, we have reached a point where the wife may cease to have property interests in common with her husband, may control absolutely her own means of living, and determine for herself the scale of expenditures that will suit her tastes or her caprices. The man is no longer the head of the household, the husband. It has been made an open question whether the man or his wife will fulfill that function, and “a community of interests, with the recognized authority of the husband to rule the wife, and the recognized duty of the wife to obey that authority, is no longer deemed expedient or necessary.” This rebellion against the old view of marriage is so strong that in many cases the word “obey” is omitted from the marriage service.

Even among Christianized Indians we find different laws governing man and woman. In 1886, the governor of Maine paid a visit to the governor of the Passamaquody Indians, at a time when a large council was in progress upon the St. Croix reservation. This council first assembled at the chapel, where the Revised Statutes—the whole basis of government of the Passamaquodies—are posted. These statutes having been approved by Bishop Healy, of Portland, are also looked upon as canons of the church.[31]

The statutes principally affecting women, are:

Third: No woman who is separated from her husband shall be admitted to the sacrament, or to any place in the church except the porch in summer and the back seat in winter, unless by the consent of the bishop.