The additional reasons presented by Rev. Mr. Crummel against woman’s right of divorce, even for the infidelity of the husband, are “The hidden mystery of generation, the wondrous secret of propagated life committed to the trust of woman.” In thus referring to those laws of nature whose conditions are not yet fully understood, Rev. Mr. Crummel presented the strongest reasons why the mother and not the father should be regarded as the true head of the family. This “hidden mystery of generation, this wondrous secret of propagated life, committed to the trust of woman, “most forcibly demonstrates that she should be the one in whose power is placed the opportunity for escape from an adulterous husband, thus enabling her to keep her body a holy temple for its divine-human uses, over which as priestess she alone should possess control. The assertion of Rev. Alexander Crummel, that an adulterous husband cannot do the same wrong to the wife that the wife does to the husband under similar circumstances, is absolutely false. By reason of certain “physiological mysteries,” to which he refers, but to which he also shows absolute ignorance, the wrong done woman by reason of her potential motherhood is infinitely greater to her than similar infidelity upon her part can possibly be to the husband. And not to her alone but to the children whom she may bring to life. His attempted justification of the husband’s adultery upon the plea that “when a man begets bastard children, he does so beyond the boundary of the home,” and so cannot “foist spurious children upon the household and kindred—that the family is kept together,” are most sophistical and fallacious methods of reasoning, entirely inimical to truth and purity. Of an absolutely selfish and libidinous character, they have been used by profligates in the church and in the state as pleas for a license that has no regard to the rights of woman, or the duties of fatherhood, and are not only essentially immoral in themselves, but are equally destructive of personal and social purity.
The individual and not the family is the social unit; the rights of individuals are foremost. Immorality of man everywhere presents a more serious and destructive aspect than that of woman. Aside from the unmarried mother whom society does not recognize as longer a part of it, is the irreparable wrong done to those innocent human beings whom Rev. Mr. Crummel designates as “spurious children;” whom the Catholics call “sacrilegious” when the father is shown to be a priest, and upon whom society at large terms “illegitimate.” Closely connected with injury to the innocent child itself, thrust into being without provision for its future needs, is the detriment to society which thus finds itself compelled to assume the duties belonging to the bastard’s father. Such children, for whom neither home nor fatherly care awaits, are allowed by him to grow up neglected street waifs, uneducated, untrained, uncared for, filling alms-houses, reformatories, and prisons of the land, perhaps to die upon the gallows. The responsibility of such fathers is not a subject of church teaching; it is simply passed carelessly by, regardless of the unspeakable wrongs connected with it. If, as the Rev. Mr. Turnstall asserts, the Bible is not for woman, if his position is true, or if that of the Jews who claim that the Ten Commandments were given to man alone, is true, it is to man alone that adultery is forbidden. Luther asserted that the Ten Commandments applied to neither Gentiles nor Christians, but only to the Jews. It was to man alone that Christ spoke against adultery saying: “Whosoever looketh upon a woman to lust after her hath already committed adultery with her, in his heart.” To man, Christ also said: “Owing to the hardness of their hearts, Moses permitted a man to put away his wife, but it was not so from the beginning.” Man, and not woman, is commanded to leave father and mother; man is to cleave unto his wife, not woman unto her husband. It was the men of Corinth whom Paul addressed concerning lewdness, “Such fornication was never known among the heathen as that a man should take his father’s wife.”[22]
One of the most remarkable facts connected with church teaching, is the lightness with which such positive declarations of Christ as to the relations of husband and wife are cast aside, or his teaching entirely reversed, in order that man may receive license for an immorality forbidden to woman.
It must be noted that the chief reason given by the church for assuming woman’s greater guilt in committing adultery is not based upon the greater immorality of the act, per se, but the injury to property rights, succession, etc. It must also be noted that the great objection of the church to divorce on part of woman lies in the fact that the wife thus escapes from a condition of bondage to one of comparative freedom. In securing a divorce she repudiates the husband’s “headship,” she thus subverts his authority; by this act she places herself upon an equality of moral and property rights with man, and the church not admitting such equality between man and woman, is hostile to divorce upon her part. Every new security gained by woman for the protection of her civil rights in or out of the family, is a direct blow at the church theory of her inferiority and subordination. Her full freedom is to be looked for through her increased legal and political rights and not through the church.
During the same year of the remarkable sermon by Rev. Alexander Crummel, 1881, Rev. S. W. Dilke read a paper before the Social Science Association at Saratoga, entitled “Lax Divorce Legislation.” He showed the same disregard for the rights of the individual, when the individual was a wife, as his brother clergymen, saying: “Our lax divorce system treats the wrongs of the wife chiefly as those of a mere individual.” He was assiduous in his regard for the protection of the womanly nature, recognizing sex, “her sex” as “a profound fact in nature,” but why the sex of woman should be a more “profound fact” than the sex of man, he did not show. That woman now claims a recognition of her individuality as a being possessed of personal rights, is the basis of present attack upon divorce by the church; nor is the state more ready to admit her individual representation and personal rights of self-government. In March, 1887, Rev. E. B. Hurlbert preached a sermon in the First Baptist church of San Francisco on “The Relation of Husband and Wife,” afterward published, in which he said:
The principal objection to the Episcopal marriage service raised by the self-willed woman of the period is that it requires her to obey her husband. But this objection is leveled equally against the requirement of the word of God, and, furthermore, the additional promise to honor and love him can only be kept in the spirit of obedience. This obligation is founded upon the fact that he is her husband, and if she cannot reverence him for what he is in himself, still she must reverence him for the position which he holds. And, again, she must render this submissive reverence to her husband’s headship as unto the Lord, as is fit in the Lord. She reverences him not simply as a man, but as her own husband, behind whom stands the Lord himself. It is the Lord who has made him husband, and the honor with which she regards him, though himself personally not deserving it, is in reality an honoring of the Lord. Many a Christian woman, actuated by this motive, has been most tenderly submissive, dutiful and patient, as towards the most unreasonable and despotic of husbands—inspired by the remembrance that it was a service rendered unto Christ. Let the wife, then, reverence her husband for what he is in himself, for his loving and noble qualities; but if these qualities do not belong to him, then let her reverence him for the sake of his office—simply because he is her husband—and in either event let her reverence him, because in doing so she is honoring the Lord and Savior.
It is but a short time since the pastor of the Swedenborgian church, Washington, D.C., as reported by one of his flock, expressed to that body his opinion that the church had better remain unrepresented rather than have women represent it, and this, although nine-tenths of his congregation are women. It is, however, pleasing to state that the committee for that purpose elected an equal number of women with men; the efforts of the pastor against woman, securing but seven votes. The Unitarian and Universalist churches which ordain women to preach and administer the ordinances, still make these women pastors feel that the innovation is not a universally acceptable one. In a lengthy pastoral letter issued by the Episcopal convention held in Chicago a few years since, it was asserted that the claim of the wife to an equal right with her husband to the control of her person, her property and her earnings was “disparaging the Christian law of the household.” The Methodist church still refuses to place woman upon an equality with man, either in the ministry or in lay representation, a few years since taking from them their previous license to preach, and this despite the fact that Mrs. Van Cott, a woman evangelist, did such severe work during a period of fourteen years, as to seriously injure her health, and so successful were her ministrations that she brought more converts to the church than a dozen of its most influential bishops during the same time. To such bitter lengths has opposition to woman’s ordination been carried in that church that Rev. Mr. Buckley, editor of The Christian Advocate,[23] when debating the subject, declared that he would oppose the admission of the mother of our Lord into the ministry, the debate taking on most unseemly form.[24] Miss Oliver who had long been pastor of the Willoughby Street church, in Brooklyn, appealed to the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, at its session in Cincinnati, May, 1880, for full installment and ordination, saying:
“I am sorry to trouble our dear mother church with any perplexing question, but it presses me also, and the church and myself must decide something. I am so thoroughly convinced that the Lord has laid commands upon me in this direction that it becomes with me really a question of my own soul’s salvation.” She then gave the reasons that induce her to believe that she is called to pastoral work, and concluded: “I have made almost every conceivable sacrifice to do what I believe to be God’s will. Brought up in a conservative circle in New York City, that held it a disgrace for a woman to work, surrounded with the comforts and advantages of ample means, and trained in the Episcopal church, I gave up home, friends and support, went counter to prejudices that had become second nature to me, worked several years to constant exhaustion, and suffered cold, hunger and loneliness; the things hardest for me to bear were laid upon me. For two months my own mother would not speak to me. When I entered the house she turned and walked away, and when I sat at the table she did not recognize me. I have passed through tortures to which the flames of martyrdom would be nothing, for they would end in a day; and through all this time and today I could turn off to positions of comparative ease and profit. I ask you, fathers and brethren, tell me what would you do in my place? Tell me what would you wish the church to do toward you, were you in my place? Please only apply the golden rule, and vote in conference accordingly.”
In answer to this powerful and noble appeal and in reply to all women seeking the ministry of that church, the General Conference passed this resolution:
Resolved: That women have already all the rights and privileges in the Methodist church, that are good for them, and that it is not expedient to make any change in the books of discipline that would open the doors for their ordination to the ministry.