It is because the Church has taught that woman was created solely for man, that in tearing asunder a recent will in New York, it was proven that the husband, indebted though he was to his wife for the beginning of his vast fortune, incarcerated her while sane in a lunatic asylum, because she objected to his practical polygamy by his introduction of a mistress into the family.
Political despotism has now its strongest hold in the theory of woman's created subordination. Woman has been legislated for as a class, and not as a human being upon a basis of equality with man, but as an inferior to whom a different code was applicable.
Our recent Secretary of State, William M. Evarts, when counsel in the Beecher-Tilton trial, defined woman's legal and theological position as that of subordination to man, declaring that notwithstanding changing customs and the amenities of modern life, women were not free, but were held in the hollow of man's hand, to be crushed at his will.
Then Mr. Evarts read from various legal authorities instances and opinions bearing upon the subjugation of weak wives by strong husbands, the gist of them being that confessions of guilt obtained by such husbands from such wives are not entitled to great weight. He continued:
RECOGNIZING THE PRINCIPLES OF MARRIAGE.
This institution of marriage, framed in our nature, built up in our civilization, studied, contemplated, understood by the jurisprudence of ages, is a solid and real institution, and for its great benefits, and as a necessary part of them, it carries not only the fact of the wife's subordination to the husband, but of the merciful interpretation of that subordination[219] which sensible, instructed men ever accord in practical life, and which the judges pronounce from the bench, and the juries confirm by their verdicts. Now, gentlemen, you may think that is our advanced civilization, when so much of independence is assumed for women, and such entire equality is accorded to them in feeling and in sentiment by their husbands and by the world, that the old rule of the common law interpreting this institution of marriage, by which a wife was never held responsible to the law, or subject to punishment for any crime committed in the presence or under the influence of her husband, was one of those traits of human nature belonging to ruder ages and to past times; but, gentlemen, in our own Court of Appeals, and in the highest tribunals of England, within the last few years, there is an explicit recognition of these principles.
Mr. Evarts cited an English case in which a wife, who participated in a robbery under the guidance of her husband, was acquitted on the ground that she was irresponsible; and he added an argument that the principle of law involved was correct. Then he called attention to a recent case in this State, which he held was a confirmation of the same sound theory.
The teachings of the Church that it was sinful for woman to use her own reason, to think for herself, to question authority, thus fettering her will, together with a false interpretation of Scripture, have been the instruments to hold her, body and soul, in a slavery whose depths of degradation can never be fathomed, whose indescribable tortures can never be understood by man.
Not only has woman suffered in the Church, in society, under the laws, and in the family by this theological degradation of her sex, but in science and literature she has met a like fate. Hypatia, who succeeded her father, Theon, in the government of the Alexandrian school, and whose lectures were attended by the wisest men of Europe, Asia, and Africa, was torn in pieces by a Christian mob afraid of her learning.
A monument erected to Catherine Sawbridge Macaulay, as "Patroness of Liberty," was removed from the Church by order of its rector. Harriet Martineau met the most strenuous opposition from bishops in her effort to teach the poor; her day-schools and even her Sunday-schools were broken up by clerical influence. Madam Pepe-Carpentier, founder of the French system of primary instruction, of whom Froebel caught his kindergarten idea, found her labors interrupted, and her life harassed by clerical opposition.
Mary Somerville, the most eminent English mathematician of this century, was publicly denounced in church by Dean Cockburn, of York; and when George Eliot died a few weeks since, her lifeless remains were refused interment in Westminster Abbey, where so many inferior authors of the privileged sex lie buried; the grave even not covering man's efforts toward the degradation of woman.
When Susannah Wesley dared to conduct religious services in her own house, and to pray for the king, contrary to her husband's wishes, he separated from her in consequence. The husband of Annie Besant left her because she dared to investigate the Scriptures for herself, and was sustained by the courts in taking from her the control of her little daughter, simply because the mother thought best not to train her in a special religious belief, but to allow her to wait until her reason developed, that she might decide her religious views for herself. A woman writing in the "Woman's Kingdom" department of The Chicago Inter-Ocean, says:
The orthodox Church has been almost suicidal in its treatment of women (and I write as one whose name still stands on the membership list of the Presbyterian Church). Persons who have not walked with wounded, lacerated hearts through the terrible realities, can form no idea of the suffering occasioned young women whose conscience summoned them to speak for temperance and woman suffrage, by the persecutions encountered in the Church. We have known clergymen come straight from the pulpit where they have talked eloquently of "moral courage," of the heroism of Martin Luther and Calvin and Wesley, and even of Garrison and Harriet Beecher Stowe, to meet with a sneer some brave young woman, who, with the same moral courage was proclaiming the truth as revealed unto her. Our young women have been denied admittance into theological schools; they have been compelled to go out into the by-ways and hedges; they have been persecuted for righteousness' sake. The Church has decreed that two-thirds of its members shall be governed by the masculine one-third; but despite this decision, woman will preach and the world will listen.