The Arena, Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891Various
General
The Arena, Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891
Various
American literature -- Periodicals
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.
The woman movement is setting the perception of mind feminine over
against the conceptions and speculations, the theological systems and
interpretations, of the mind masculine, in the realm of the religious
quality of human nature.
It is on this ground that a higher standpoint for human progress is to
be achieved. Woman is becoming the possessor of her brains and of an
equipment that will facilitate her use of them. When through
generations of experience she has fully learned her true position in
the order of the universe and of human unfoldment, a new created world
of humanity will blossom on this old earth.
Man is normally the builder in the material realm. It is his to press
the more tangible elements and forces into the service of man's
material and intellectual needs, and to master and subdue the earth.
It is woman's to become builder in the spiritual realm of the higher
nature. It is woman's first' to give bias to the brain cells and soul
impulses of ante-natal and post-natal infantile life. It is woman's,
the normal mother and teacher, to look, and feel, and speak into
impressible child life, the fine ennobling sentiments, the solid
truths of social relations, the sterling principles of rightness, and
honor, and honesty, and fraternal love.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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