So that even in this year 1892, within eight years of the Twentieth Christian century, we find the largest proportion of the United States still giving to the husband custody of the wife’s person; the exclusive control of the children of the marriage; of the wife’s personal and real estate; the absolute right to her labor and all products of her industry. In no state does the law recognize the legal existence of the wife, unless she relinquishes her own name, upon marriage, taking that of her husband, thus sinking her identity in his; the old femme covert,—or covered woman,—idea of the law books under state and church. That woman is an individual with the right to her own separate existence, has not yet permeated the thought of church, state or society. A letter to the American press from Rev. Robert Laird Collyer, while re-visiting his native country a few years since, gives the unbiased views of a native-born English clergyman, as to woman’s position in that land of christian civilization, the husband being represented as king of the household, the wife as his dutiful subject. The letter was headed:
MARRIAGE CUSTOMS IN ENGLAND
The Man King of the House, the Woman His Dutiful Subject.
The man is the king of the English household, and the wife is only the prime minister. There is no confusion or overlapping of authority. The will of the husband is law. He has not only the place of honor but of ease. The arrangements of the house, the company entertained, and the service employed, all have respect to his wishes and to his convenience. The wife conducts the affairs of state for the king. She has her household and, more than likely, her personal allowance, and she renders a strict account of stewardship either weekly or monthly.
The wife’s personal expenditures are less, much less than the husband’s. In many instances he will spend more on his dress as a man than she does as a woman, for the rule is, the Englishman is the best-dressed man and the English woman is the worst dressed in the civilized world.
“The will of the husband is law,” the wife possessing no freedom, but renders “a strict account of her stewardship, either weekly or monthly.” Kicks, blows, wounds inflicted upon the wife under the countenance of the civil law; the will of the husband as undisputed law; her person, her property, her children under his sole control; what is the condition of the wife in England today but one of degraded slavery? That every woman does not endure all these wrongs is simply because she has a lenient master. Like Adolph under St. Clair, in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, she has freedom because a good master allows her to take it; under a bad master she suffers as Adolph when falling into the hands of Legree. Personal rights are the basis of all other rights; personal slavery is the root of all other wrongs. Neither freedom of the intellect or conscience can exist without freedom of person. Thus civilization has not yet existed, that which has borne the name having been but the thought of the few; the civilization of the present is not enlightened, it belongs to the barbarous ages; authority and not justice is the rule. To the present time the lenient sentence imposed upon the English husband who beats his wife is such as to invite a repetition of the offense; knocking a wife down, beating and bruising her with a poker are rights secured to the husband under present English law.
A man named Hefferon, at Rotherham, finding his wife had gone to some place of which he disapproved, knocked her down and beat her violently with a poker. She bled from both ears, her throat was scratched, and she was badly bruised on her back and arms. Mr. Justice Day practically told the jury to acquit. He said the case ought not to have come before them, and he suggested that the prisoner had been merely exercising that control over his wife which was still sanctioned by the law of England.[43] The jury acquitted promptly, as directed.[44]
To such extent is this abuse of woman under law as to have called forth a vigorous article in the Westminister Review,[45] under head of “The Law in Relation to Woman.”
There is another cruel injustice to woman, which is so notorious as to have become a mere truism. It is referred to almost daily, yet familiarity has bred such contempt, that it goes on unchecked and unabated. We refer to the monstrously lenient sentences passed upon husbands who assault and beat their wives. In one of our criminals courts recently, two men and a woman were sentenced to six years penal servitude for stealing a watch by force, while a man who assaulted and grievously wounded his wife and mother-in-law with a reaping hook, got eighteen months’ imprisonment. An instance occurred the other day in a small municipal court. A man pleaded guilty to assaulting and kicking his wife and another woman with effusion of blood and injury to their persons. He was fined a pound for each female. Shortly after two men were convicted of injuring public seats belonging to the municipality, by knocking them about, etc., they were fined two pounds each. Clearly, therefore, in the eyes of this magistrate a municipal seat is worth exactly twice the value of a woman. Parallel sentences to these may be seen almost daily in the newspapers in any part of the United Kingdom. In the police courts, wife-beaters often get off with a few days imprisonment, sometimes with an admonition. If it be argued that theft is such a common offense that it is necessary that it should be punished with greater severity than cruelty, we rejoice that the argument applies quite as forcibly to wife-beating, which, unfortunately is as common an offence as can be found among a certain class of society.[46]
The comparison here shown between the penalty of criminally assaulting and wounding women, not alone the man’s wife but also her aged mother, most forcibly shows the entire disregard of Christian England in the last half of the nineteenth century, for the personal rights of all women. No proof is needed other than such decisions; nor is the United States far in advance. Within ten months from the formation of the “Protective Agency for Women and Children,” organized in Chicago, April 1886, it had investigated nearly one hundred complaints. Although in a majority of these cases the agency was successful in securing redress, it yet found there was not legal remedy where the husband and father failed to provide for his family; and that in cases of crimes against women, its efforts were crippled by the disposition of police justices to regard such crimes as venial offenses, either dismissing such cases upon frivolous pretexts or imposing light sentences. Nothing could more clearly demonstrate women’s degraded condition in the nineteenth century of christian civilization, than the almost universal demand for laws securing better protection to women and children. These two classes, unrecognized by church or state, are still largely without that pale of protection man has reared for himself. January 23, 1886, the Inter Ocean, gave more than six columns to an account of the dreadful crimes committed against women and children in Chicago alone, within the short period of the preceding four months. It also showed the ease with which criminals of that class escaped punishment, not alone from laxity of protective legislation for their victims but still more from the tendency of magistrates to ignore crimes perpetrated by men against women; this condition being the natural result of the teaching of the church in regard to woman. In the city of Boston, 1884, the Chief of Police, testified that there were at least fifteen cases of brutal wife-beating in that city every week, and this is but one type of the injuries perpetrated upon women for which the teachings of christianity are directly responsible. So common this crime and so ineffective all efforts to stop it, that the State of Delaware has re-established the long abolished whipping-post, for offenders of this character, thus acknowledging christian civilization to be a failure, and resorting to the retributive punishment common among barbarians. But the remedy for crimes against women, and for the indifference of magistrates, does not lie in the punishment of the offenders, but in different sentiments in regard to woman in both church and state. Their teachings are the real foundations of the evil. Within the past ten years, the judge of an English Court decided that the flogging of a wife in the presence of her son did not constitute cruelty, sustaining his decision by reference to Blackstone and other learned christian jurists. It was during that same year (1884) that the chief of the Boston police testified to the many cases of brutal wife beating in that “Athens of America,” every week. So common this form of assault that a bill was introduced in the Massachusetts lower House for the punishment of wife beaters, by a public whipping of not less than ten or more than thirty lashes.[47] For those refractory wives of mediaeval christian England, whom whippings failed to subdue, other punishments were invented; such as the “Ducking Stool,” the “Scold’s Bridle,” etc.[48] The Scold’s Bridle, also known as the Witches Bridle and the Brank, was an extremely painful method of torture, although not as absolutely dangerous to life as the Ducking Stool, yet fastened in the mouth, its sharp edges pressing down upon the tongue, if the “Brawling Woman” attempted to speak her tongue was cut and the torture great.[49] An American clergyman describing in a public lecture an “ancient machine” seen by him in christian England, “for curing a scolding wife,” accompanied his description by the very clerical intimation that it could now be made by an ordinary blacksmith. Two curved plates of bronze conformed to the shape of the head, were delicately hinged and provided with hooks to place in the corners of the mouth. When adjusted, the machine was buckled back of the head.[50]