Morganatic or left-hand marriage still continues the custom in Germany. Under its provisions the wife does not take the husband’s rank, nor do the children inherit the father’s property, as they are not regarded as of full legitimacy. This form of marriage is recognized by the civil law of Germany, and is sustained by the church. The custom, at first confined to princes, gradually extended to the higher aristocracy, and as the moral perceptions of a nation bends itself to unison with civil law, the inferior gentry began to contract marriages of this kind. Under a morganatic union woman is still more debased than in the ordinary marriage relation. Aside from the ceremony, the wife is scarcely other than a concubine. The children of the morganatic marriage do not bear the father’s name, nor inherit from him, under the law of the state. Neither they nor the wife have more lasting claim upon him in these respects than had the concubines known as “the Honored Ones” upon the priestly destroyers of the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
Several notable instances of morganatic marriages have occurred within the present century. It is but a few years since the Grand Duke, Louis IV of Hesse-Darmstadt, son-in-law of Queen Victoria, made a morganatic marriage with Madame de Kalamine, whose lover he was long known to have been, and with whom he had previously lived outside of this relation, she having borne him several children. From the high position of the morganatic husband, and because of the previous relationship of the parties, this marriage became the talk of all Europe, and to some extent of the United States. Queen Victoria herself did not escape criticism, notwithstanding the prudery for which she is famed, because of her entertaining the Grand Duke at Windsor soon after this marriage unaccompanied by his wife,[100] for the purpose, it was intimated, of placing him under the influence of Princess Beatrice. The very fact of such suggestion, whether true or not, as well as the fact that Queen Victoria, universally conceded a prude in reference to infractions of the moral law by those of her own sex, received the Grand Duke at her especial home of Windsor soon after his morganatic marriage, is a vivid commentary upon the two codes of morals extant in christendom and their influence even upon woman herself. Morganatic marriage degrades the wife of the right hand ceremony equally with her of the left hand, as it is a recognition by the law of a christian country today of man’s right to become a bigamist, provided he but gives his left hand instead of his right, to the bride during the marriage ceremony. It is a system of legalized concubinage under protestantism, which throws the shield of protection around man in illicit relations, and like all other forms of woman’s degradation, it reaches back for authority to that religious teaching which proclaims woman to have been created inferior and subordinate to man. Because of woman’s former superior position there, no country but Germany can as fully show the degradation of woman under Christianity. Not from pagan Greece can more vivid illustration of her moral degradation be shown, while pagan Rome shines clear and bright beside the Germanic races of today. While even left-handed marriages among the higher classes are encouraged and protected, yet among the lower orders in Germany the ordinary marriage is cumbered with so many restrictions, as to have become almost an impossibility, and no disgrace or loss of character falls upon the girl of this class who becomes a mother outside of legal prevision, but such motherhood upon the contrary is looked upon as the means of a higher position and greater wages as nurse. As amme in a rich or noble family she becomes a person of arrogance, part of the pomp and show of the house.[101]
Despite these wrongs of the ages towards woman, of late so vividly presented, we still find both Church and State opposing a free discussion of the question. Within the last decade two northern European countries have strangely exhibited such hostility, the opposition coming upon ground of woman’s surpassing sinfulness.[102]
But the most notable opposition has been against the works of two eminent literary men. “The Doll’s House”[103] by Ibsen, the dramatic poet of Norway, attacking the irresponsible position of the wife under present marriage law, brought about the social ostracism of its author.[104] Sweden’s supremely great thinker of the present century, August Strindberg, recently published a work entitled “Giftas” (to marry), which incidentally treated of the influence of religion upon this relation.[105] The State authorities at once ordered its confiscation.[106] Instead of a Papal Librorum Prohibitorum, it fell under the censure and prohibition of a Protestant State. But no more ready method for increasing its circulation could have been devised; so rapidly was the first edition of four thousand sold that only four hundred fell into the grasp of the censorious government. In order to escape the farther penalty of imprisonment that had been pronounced against him, the author was compelled to temporarily leave the country. But his work was not without effect upon the minds of his countrymen, and upon his return a few months later, a great demonstration in his honor took place. Strindberg defined the rights of woman as those which came to her by nature but of which, through a perverted social order she had been deprived. He declared that woman’s desire for deliverance was the same as man’s restless desire for deliverance. Let us, said he, therefore emancipate man from his prejudice and then woman will certainly be freed. To that end it is necessary to work together as friends not as enemies.
That a work of this moderate character, should fall under the ban of a protestant government, in the last half of the nineteenth century, should be confiscated and its author banished, is a striking proof of the degraded condition of woman in the marriage relation, and of the power still exerted for the continuance of this subjection. Opposition to discussion of this question in Sweden, is more strange in view of the excess of women in the population, as they outnumber the men some 40,000; while of single women over fifteen, there are 259,000. Despite the fact of this excess, impossible to provide for by marriage even were that condition one of equity and equality, all effort towards opening occupations to them, or the avenues of education, still meets with resistance from the church. The only opponent of Mr. Berner’s Bill, 1882, for permitting women to take the first two degrees in the University, those of Arts and Philosophy, was from a clergyman. The bill passed the Odelstling, one of the two Chambers of the Storthing, with only his dissentient voice.[107] It received the unanimous vote of the other house, the Sagthing, April 21, becoming a law June 15 of that year.
Russia, which we are accustomed to regard as less than a half civilized country, gives evidence of an early civilization which in the field of morals reached a high place. Samokversof, a Russian author, has made a rich collection relating to pre-historic times, proving that as early as the first centuries of this era, the Slavonians lived in large societies, possessed fortified towns with treasurers of gold and silver, silk, embroidered tissues, iron weapons, ornaments of gold, silver, bronze and bone; while sickles, and the grasses of wheat, oats, and barley found in the graves of South Russia, show this people even to have been devoted to agriculture. The early history of Russia proves that women then held influential positions in the family, in the church, in the state; as was the case under the ancient common law of England, so woman among the ancient Slavs possessed the right of inheritance and the power of dividing such inheritance with her brothers. In the State we find woman’s wisdom at early date still continuing to shape the policy of the Russian empire; to the wise statesmanship of the Czarina Olga is the unchanging plan of that country for the ultimate possession of Constantinople due. Visiting the Patriarch of the East, during the tenth century, she at once perceived the vast importance of Constantinople to the power desiring universal domination; the possession of that city giving control of the Dardanelles, of Asia Minor, and Europe itself. Thenceforth she sought its annexation or seizure and her policy became that of the Russian nation, which for more than eight hundred years has made the ultimate possession of Constantinople the great object of its ambition. Nor has Olga’s statesmanship less influenced the entire European continent, the allied powers constantly struggling to defeat Russia’s aggressive plan, through maintenance of the “sick man” upon his throne.
From the advent of christianity, forced upon the Slav peoples a thousand years since by Vladimir, their baptism taking place by tens of thousands as driven into the rivers and streams mid-deep, priests upon the banks recited the baptism formula, a change was noticeable. As soon as the thorough establishment of the Byzantine church in Russia, which took no inconsiderable period, it being brought about by force rather than free will, its priests, like those of the Western Church, directed their principal efforts towards control of the marriage relation, and, through that, of the family. Nor are we to regard this as strange inasmuch as every form of christianity regards woman as an inferior being, the creator of original sin, rendering the sacrifice of a God necessary in order to re-establish the equilibrium overthrown by her.[108] Edmond Noble, in tracing the cause of the present social upheaval in that empire, says:[109]
Scarcely had the priests of the Greek Church begun their teaching of the new faith when change began to unsettle the position of woman and burden her relationship to the family with a sense of inferiority ... her status falling with the natural extension of the ecclesiastical policy. The Russian woman at last became the slave of her Christian husband; as much his chattel as if she had been purchased at market or captured in war.
An examination of history proves that in Christian Russia as in Christian England the husband could release himself from the marriage bond by killing his wife, over whom under christian law he had power of life and death. Her children, as today in Christian England and America, are not under her control; she is to bear children but not to educate them, for, as under Catholic and Protestant Christianity, women are looked upon as a lower order of beings, of an unclean nature. The assertion of Agathes the Sophist that he detected the smell of her whose hands had milked the cow, is more than paralleled under Greek Christianity, woman not even being allowed to kill a fowl under assertion that should she so do the meat would become poisonous. Wife beating enjoined as a religious duty became so common, says Noble, that love was measured by it, “The more whippings the more love.” “The Domstroii,” a household guide, compiled by a dignitary of the Greek Church in time of Ivan the Terrible, counseled use of the rod to keep wives, children, and servants in subjection. By it husbands were given almost unlimited power over wives, who were not even permitted to attend church without the husband’s consent. The prominent ideas regarding woman under Byzantine Christianity have been her uncleanliness, her sinfulness and the small value of her life.[110] She is regarded as a being of lower order than man, and as looked upon in a different light by God.
Where marriage is wholly or partly under church control, its very form degrades woman, her promise of obedience not yet having passed away. In the old Covenanter period of Scotland the records give a still more debased form, in which the man as head was declared united to an ignoble part, represented by the woman. But in modern times, both in Catholic and Protestant countries a more decent veil is thrown over this sacrifice of woman than in the Greek Church, where the wife is sometimes delivered to the husband under this formula, “Here wolf, take thy lamb!” and the bridegroom is presented with a whip by his bride giving her a few blows as part of the ceremony, and bidding her draw off his boots as a sign of her subjection to him. With such an entrance ceremony it may well be surmised that the marriage relation permits the most revolting tyranny. And this condition can be directly traced to the period since Christianity was adopted under Vladimir, a thousand years since, as the religion of that nation. The old Slavs recognized the equality of woman in household, political, and religious matters, and not until Byzantine Christianity became incorporated with, and a part of, the civil polity of its rulers, did Russia present such a picture of domestic degradation as it shows today. The chastisement of wives is directly taught as part of the husband’s domestic duty. Until recently, the wife who killed her husband while he was thus punishing her, was buried alive, her head only being left above ground. Many lingered for days before death reached them.