The woman movement is demonstration of the power of thought beyond the power of muscle; it is evidence that the intangible forces of mind are superior to the external material powers of muscle, and sword, and bullet. It is reassuring to forecast that, spite of the present inefficacy, or but very limited success of woman’s protest against barbarous laws and usages, and the destructive errors and vices of the degree of civilization we have reached, the protest is a prophecy that the moral elevation of the race is to be the result of woman’s increased intelligence and equipment, and of her ascent to the full proportions of womanhood.
As a builder of material structures and enterprises, man is a superb success. The bridge, the triumphs of architecture, the steam engine, the almost intelligent machine are marvellous manifestations of inventive genius, and of the uses of muscle.
But the statistics of social progress in morals do not bear testimony to masculine superiority as builder of the higher humanity. A man has elaborated “The New Education,” but he allowed, without stint, that the moral elevation aimed at cannot be achieved except by the equal opportunity and co-operation of woman.
In the administration of affairs and the institution of government man is not a success. His first resort and last reliance is upon force. Harmony, and justice, and fraternity, and purity, and honesty cannot be brought into human society by fighting, nor evolved by the methods of force. Neither the ballot nor the bullet, the legislature nor the policeman, can make people honest or morally upright and sound.
The promotion of individual integrity, honesty, benevolence, and purity are the great requirements of humanity and of civilization. The infusion of the gentler, more persuasive influences and methods of feminine nature, and the higher quality and freedom of motherhood, are the only possible means of advancing the race to the altitude which the best specimens prefigure as the possibility of all.
The laws of Christendom and the usages of all civilizations are based upon the idea of the superiority and supremacy of masculine quality and of force. Upon the supposition that the husband is the bread winner and provider, he is virtually in law and actually in fact as effectually the owner of his wife and children as though he had bought them for a sum, as is still the custom among some primitive peoples on the planet.
In the Orient the idea that woman possesses a soul is rejected with contempt. But in the more spiritualized Occident where she is considered to be the possessor of a soul, she is by law, and oftentimes by usage, not allowed to be possessor of her body.
Christianity in its inception and in its primitive purity accomplished for woman the dignity of being possessor of a soul. She is still, even in the most degenerate churchianity, counted responsible as a soul, and accorded equal hope of redemption and of future equal standing in another stage of existence.
But this fact, too, has bred in woman rebellion against the estimate of her inferiority still held in the Church by many of the priestly order, and actualized in the majority of Protestant denominations, and universally in the Roman Catholic Church, by her exclusion from equal powers and opportunities in its administration and equal positions of honor and influence.
Having learned the alphabet woman has also learned to interpret Scripture, and having read the New Testament, she knows that her adorable Saviour left no theological system, creed, nor sanction of the supremacy and dominion of male over female.