Life and writings of Amelia BloomerBloomer, D. C. (Dexter C.)
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Life and writings of Amelia Bloomer
Bloomer, D. C. (Dexter C.)
Bloomer, Amelia Jenks, 1818-1894; Women's rights -- United States
“The pulpit was sacred ground, that no woman’s foot must profane.
One minister in Syracuse preached a sermon against us and had
it printed in pamphlet form. These he sent out by hundreds to
ministers of his church throughout the state for them to scatter
among the women of their congregations, hoping to head off this
new movement of women. Whether these determined opponents of other
days who meant to crush the women’s movement in the bud ever became
reconciled to the part she has since played in the world’s doings,
I don’t know. Some of them, and probably all, have passed to their
account where they have learned that God’s ways are not man’s ways.
I suppose that we cannot greatly blame them when we remember that,
up to that time, the world had been educated to believe woman an
inferior creation; that she had been placed by her Creator in an
inferior and subordinate position; and that St. Paul’s injunction
to the uneducated women of his day to keep silence in the churches
was intended for the women of all time, included public halls as
well as churches, and political, social, temperance and all other
subjects as well as the gospel of Christ, of which women were to
know nothing except what they learned from their husbands at home.
We find a very different state of things in these days, when the
clergy everywhere are ready to listen to women—nay, to welcome and
invite them to their desks; and even dismiss their own services
that the women may be heard. They must have learned a new gospel,
or a new interpretation of the old one. In those early days,
ministers before hearing us would refuse to open our meetings with
prayer—feeling, I suppose, that we had gotten too far out of our
sphere to be benefited by their prayers. Now, they hesitate not to
lend us all the aid in their power. There may be here and there one
who turns the cold shoulder, but the cause is too far advanced to
be affected by anything such can bring against it.”
IN ROCHESTER AGAIN—A CHANGE.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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