Men, Women, and Gods; and Other LecturesGardener, Helen H. (Helen Hamilton)
Religion
Men, Women, and Gods; and Other Lectures
Gardener, Helen H. (Helen Hamilton)
Free thought
Thus was the forced degradation of woman made a source of revenue to
the Church, and a means of crushing her self-respect and destroying her
sense of personal responsibility as to her own acts in the matter of
chastity, the legitimate outcome of which is to be found in the vast
army of women who are named only to be reviled. _In them the Church can
look on her own work_. The fruit is the natural outcome of the training
woman received that taught and compelled her _always_ to submit to
the dictates of some man, no matter what her own judgment, modesty, or
desires might be. She was not supposed to have an opinion or to know
right from wrong; and from Paul's injunction, "If you want to know
anything ask your husband at home," down to the decisions of the last
General Conference of the Methodist Church, the teaching that woman must
subordinate her own sense of right and her own judgment to the dictates
of someone else--_any_ one else of the opposite sex--from first to last
has been as ingenious a method as could have been devised to fill the
world with libertines and their victims.* It is time for the followers
of St. Paul to nice the results of their own work.
* See Appendix F, 2.
Under the provisions of the law which held that all "persons" could
recover damages for injury--have legal redress for a wrong inflicted
upon them--woman again was held as _not a 'person._
If she were assaulted and beaten, or if she were subjected to the
greatest indignity that it is possible to inflict upon her, she had
no redress. She could not complain. The law gave her no protection
whatever. Her father or husband could, if he saw fit, bring suit to
recover damages for the loss of _her services as a servant and wholly
upon the ground that it was an injury to him and to his feelings_. She
was no more recognized as a "person" in the matter, nor was she more
highly considered than if she were an inmate of a zoological garden to
which some mischievous visitor had fed too many bonbons. The owner was
damaged because the brute might die or be injured in the sight of the
patrons, but aside from that view of the case no harm was done and no
account taken of so trivial a matter.
No matter what the injury she sustained, whether it crippled her
physically or blighted her mentally and made life to her the worst curse
that could be inflicted, she had no appeal. The wounded feelings of one
of her male relations received due consideration, and he could recover
the money-value he might set upon the injury to his lacerated mind. This
is still the letter and the practice of the law in many places, even in
America.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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