History of Woman Suffrage, Volume I

by Unknown

A curious old black-letter volume published in London in 1632, entitled "The Lawes and Resolutions of Women's Rights," says, "the reason why women have no control in Parliament, why they make no laws, consent to none, abrogate none, is their Original Sin."

This doctrine of her original sin lies at the base of the religious and political disqualifications of woman. Christianity, through this doctrine, has been interpreted as sustaining man's rights alone. The offices held by her during the apostolic age, she has been gradually deprived of through ecclesiastical enactments. To Augustine, whose early life was spent in company with the most degraded of woman-kind, is Christianity indebted for the full development of the doctrine of Original Sin, which, although to be found in the religious systems of several ancient nations, was not a primitive one of the Christian Church.[181] Taught as one of the most sacred mysteries of religion, which to doubt or to question was to hazard eternal damnation, it at once exerted a most powerful and repressing influence upon woman, fastening upon her a bondage which the civilization of the nineteenth century has not been able to cast off.

To this doctrine of woman's created inferiority we can trace those irregularities which for many centuries filled the Church with shame, for practices more obscene than the orgies of Babylon or Corinth, and which dragged Christendom to a darkness blacker than the night of heathendom in pagan countries—a darkness upon which the most searching efforts of historians cast scarcely one ray of light—a darkness so profound that from the seventh to the eleventh century no individual thought can be traced. All was sunk in superstition; men were bound by Church dogmas, and looked only to aggrandizement through her. The priesthood, which alone possessed a knowledge of letters, prostituted their learning to the basest uses; the nobility spent their lives in warring upon each other; the peasantry were the sport and victim by turns of priest and noble, while woman was the prey of all; her person and her rights possessing no consideration only as they could be made to advance the interest or serve the pleasure of noble, husband, father, or priest—some man-god to whose lightest desire all her wishes were made to bend. The most pronounced doctrine of the Church during this period was, that through woman sin had been introduced into the world; that woman's whole tendency was toward evil, and that had it not been for the unfortunate oversight of her creation, man would be dwelling in the paradisical innocence and happiness of Eden blessed with immortality. The Church looking upon woman as under a curse, considered man as God's divinely appointed agent for its enforcement, and that the restrictions she suffered under Christianity were but parts of a just punishment for having caused the fall of man. Christian theology thus at once struck a blow at these old beliefs in woman's equality, broadly inculcating the doctrine that woman was created for man, was subordinate to him and under obedience to him. It bade woman stand aside from sacerdotal offices, forbidding her to speak in the church, commanding her to ask her husband at home for all she wished to know, at once repressing all tendency toward her freedom among those who adopted the new religion, and by various decretals taught her defilement through the physical peculiarities of her being. It placed the legality of marriage under priestly control, secured to husbands a right of divorce for causes not freeing the wife, and so far set its ban upon this relation as to hold single women above the wife and mother in holiness. After having forbidden woman the priestly office, it forbade her certain benefits to be derived therefrom, thus unjustly punishing her for an ineligibility of its own creation; offices in the Church, learning, and property rights, freedom of thought and action, all were held as improper for a being secondary to man, who came into the world, not as part of the great original plan, but as an afterthought of the Creator.

While it took many hundred years to totally exclude woman from the priesthood, the strict celibacy of the male clergy was during the same period the constant effort of the Church. At first its restrictions were confined to a single marriage with a woman who had never before entered that relation. A Council of a.d. 347, consisting of twenty-one bishops, forbade the ordination of those priests who had been twice married, or who had married a widow. A Council of a.d. 395, ruled that a bishop who had children after ordination, should be excluded from the major orders. The Council of a.d. 444, deposed Chelidonius, Bishop of Besancon, for having married a widow; while the Council of Orleans, a.d. 511, consisting of thirty-two bishops, decided that any monk who married should be expelled from the ecclesiastical order.

In the sixth century a Council was held at Macon (585), consisting of forty-three bishops with sees, sixteen bishops without sees, and fifteen envoys. At this Council the celebrated discussion took place of which it has often been said, the question was whether woman had a soul. It arose in this wise. A certain bishop insisted that woman should not be called "homo"; but the contrary was argued by others from the two facts that the Scriptures say that God created man, male and female, and that Jesus Christ, son of a woman, is called the son of man. Woman was, therefore, allowed to remain a human being in the eyes of the clergy, even though considered a very weak and bad one.

The Church held two entirely opposing views of marriage. Inasmuch as it taught that the fall came through marriage, this relation was regarded by many priests with holy horror as a continuance of the evil which first brought sin into the world. It was declared that God would have found some method of populating the world outside of marriage, and that condition was looked upon as one of peculiar temptation and trial. Another class taught its necessity, though in it woman was under complete subordination to man. These views can be traced to the early fathers; through clerical contempt of marriage, the conditions of celibacy and virginity were regarded as those of highest virtue. Jerome respected marriage as chiefly valuable in that it gave virgins to the Church, while Augustine, although he admitted the possibility of salvation to the married, yet spoke of a mother and daughter in heaven, the mother shining as a dim star, the daughter as one of the first magnitude.

In the "Apostolic Constitutions," held by the Episcopal Church as regulations established by the apostles themselves, and which are believed by many to be among the earliest Christian records, there are elaborate directions for the places of all who attend church, the unmarried being most honored. The virgins and widows and elder women stood, or sat first of all. The Emperor Honorius banished Jovinius for asserting the possibility of a man being saved who lived with his wife, even though he obeyed all the ordinances of the Church and lived a good life.

St. Chrysostom, whose prayer is repeated at every Sunday morning service of the Episcopal church, described woman as "a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic peril, a deadly fascination, and a painted ill." The doctrine of priestly celibacy which was early taught, though not thoroughly enforced until the eleventh century, and the general tenor of the Church against marriage, together with its teaching woman's greater sinfulness, were the great causes of undermining the morals of the Christian world for fifteen hundred years. With these doctrines was also taught the duty of woman to sacrifice herself in every way to man. The loss of chastity in a woman was held as a light sin in comparison to the degradation that marriage would bring upon the priesthood, and young girls ruined by some candidate or priest, considered themselves as doing God service by refusing a marriage that would cause the expulsion of their lovers from this order. With woman's so-called divine self-sacrifice, Heloise chose to remain Abelard's mistress rather than destroy his prospects of advancement in the Church.[182]

To the more strict enforcement of priestly celibacy, the barons were permitted to make slaves of the wives and children of married priests. While by common law children were held as following the condition of their fathers, under Church legislation they were held to follow the condition of their mothers. Serf mothers have thus borne serf children to free-born fathers, and slave mothers have borne slave children to their masters; while unmarried mothers still bear bastard children to unknown fathers, the Church thus throwing the taint of illegitimacy upon the innocent. The relations of man and woman to each other, the sinfulness of marriage, and the license of illicit relations employed most of the thought of the Church.[183] The duty of woman to obey, not only her husband, but all men by virtue of their sex, was sedulously inculcated. She was trained to hold her own desires and even her own thoughts in complete abeyance to those of man; father, husband, brother, son, priest, alike held themselves as her rightful masters, and every holy principle of her nature was subverted in this most degrading assumption. A great many important effects followed the full establishment of priestly celibacy. The doctrine of woman's inherent wickedness took new strength; a formal prohibition of the Scriptures to the laity was promulgated from Toulouse in the twelfth century; the canon law gained control of the civil law; the absolute sinfulness of divorce, which had been maintained in councils, yet allowed by the civil law, was established; the Inquisition arose; the persecution of woman for witchcraft took on a new phase, and a tendency to suicide was developed. The wives of priests rendered homeless, and with their children suddenly ranked among the vilest of the earth, were powerless and despairing, and not a few of them shortened their agony by death at their own hands. For all these crimes the Church was directly responsible.

Priestly celibacy did not cause priestly purity of life,[184] but looking upon themselves as especially sanctified and set apart by virtue of that celibacy, priests made their holy office the cover of the most degrading sensuality.[185] Methods were taken to debauch the minds of women as well as their bodies. As late as the seventeenth century it was taught that a priest could commit no sin. This was an old doctrine, but received new strength from the Illumines. It was said that "The devout, having offered up and annihilated their own selves, exist no longer but in God. Thenceforth they can do no wrong. The better part of them is so divine that it no longer knows what the other is doing." The doctrine of some Protestant sects, "Once in grace, always in grace," is of the same character. The very incarnation was used as a means of weakening woman's virtue. An enforcement of the duty of an utter surrender of the soul and the will was taught by the example of the Virgin, "who obeyed the angel Gabriel and conceived, without risk of evil, for impurity could not come of a spirit."[186] Another lesson, of which the present century has some glimpse, was "that sin could be killed by sin, as the better way of becoming innocent again." The result of this doctrine was seen in the mistresses of the priests, known as "The Hallowed Ones."