THOUGHTS FOR THE WOMEN OF THE TIMES.
BY ONE OF THEMSELVES.
The woman of the nineteenth century owes all the advantages of her social position to the Catholic Church.
The disadvantages of that position, which are more or less justly the causes of discontent and complaint, are the natural fruits of Protestantism.
For many centuries, the church maintained a severe conflict against influences, principalities, and powers, which must have baffled the efforts of any but a divine institution, to rescue woman from the depths of degradation into which the iniquities of heathenism had thrust her. It required the superhuman patience and energy of a system animated by divine charity and sustained by omnipotent power to prosecute the struggle successfully, and to place woman in the position for which she was designed by her Creator. So far as she has since preserved the high relations with her Maker, with the family, and with society which were achieved for her by that struggle, it has been by virtue of the same power that first effected her elevation.
The divided and antagonistic forces of Protestantism have been as adverse to the interests of woman as it was possible for disjointed elements, acting discordantly, to be. Fortunate has it been for her that the very discrepancies of its moral elements have operated in a great measure to neutralize its influence. Since the days when the first Reformers (?) pronounced the result of a solemn debate in their decision that the Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel might live with two wives conjointly without compromising his character as a good
Christian under the new religion, and those of England exulted in the action of Henry VIII. when he repudiated the saintly Catharine of Aragon—for twenty-five years his faithful and lawful wife—and took the wanton Anne Boleyn in her stead, the general tendency of Protestant influence has been to rob woman of the dignity with which the church had invested her, by loosening the obligations of the marriage bond and diminishing the sanctity of the conjugal relation. If it has not entirely succeeded in degrading her to be the mere victim of man’s capricious whims, it has done what it could. Want of harmonious action between its constituent parts has been the best protection Protestantism has afforded to woman against this result. The boasted “progress”—originating in the revolt against divine authority exercised through the church—so far as it affects the condition of woman, has been steadily in this direction, especially during the present century.
Women are conscious of this. They are aware that the ground upon which they stand is becoming, year by year, less and less firm, the guarantees of their rights more and more feeble and inoperative, while the chances of a conflict for gaining a more secure footing are strongly against them. But while they are keenly alive to these facts, the cause for their existence is an enigma they have not yet solved—its remedy, a contingency they have not reached even in conjecture.