The True Woman: A Series of Discourses, to Which Is Added Woman vs. BallotFulton, Justin D. (Justin Dewey)
Religion
The True Woman: A Series of Discourses, to Which Is Added Woman vs. Ballot
Fulton, Justin D. (Justin Dewey)
Husband and wife; Women -- Religious aspects -- Christianity; Women -- Suffrage
The necessity of recalling attention to the portraiture of woman as
God made her, is the more apparent, when we remember that those who
ask the ballot for woman practically ignore the teachings of the Bible
and the right of God to rule, and claim by word, as well as by deed,
that they have outgrown the wisdom of the past, and have entered upon
a stage of progress in advance of old time precedents. We believe in
the rule of God, and in the wisdom of God, and claim that Omniscience
is not dependent either upon a morning newspaper, or upon the crude
conjectures of a godless Infidelity, for wisdom or light in adjusting
means to an end, or in assigning to woman her proper sphere.
Again. We are impelled to seek wisdom from God, because we seek for
it in vain elsewhere. As to how the ballot is to help woman, even its
advocates give us no light. Whether it is proposed to lighten by its
aid the penalties, and do away with the ruin of the fall, we are left
in doubt.
If we give to woman the ballot, shall the equality which woman lost,
when she ate of the forbidden fruit, be restored, and shall she be
made again the equal of man? Shall the sorrow in child-bearing be
removed? Can housework, or the duties of motherhood, and wifehood, and
sisterhood, be met and discharged by the use of the ballot?
These are questions which deserve to be answered. It is patent to
every one that this attempt to secure the ballot for woman is a revolt
against the position and sphere assigned to woman by God himself. It
is a revolt against the holiest duties enjoined upon woman. It is
an attempt to reorganize society upon a new basis; to change the
relations of men and women; to secure the millennium by a vote, and by
majorities to do away with the rule of God. The Bible declares that
the headship of the house devolves on man. Man is lawgiver. Woman is
not slave: she is helpmeet; the sharer of man's joys and sorrows; the
light of his home, if there be any light in his home; the solace of
his life, if his life have solace; the mother of his children, if
children there be. Now, as then, woman, in her natural state, before
she makes the attempt to unsex herself, and render herself a monster,
finds it in her nature to look to man as lawmaker, and expects to
submit to his rule in the home. We do not say that all women submit
cheerfully to this rule, for there are some who do not. But when this
is the case, from the nature of things, happiness takes its flight,
the marriage-bed is defiled, woman becomes an outlaw in her heart, and
the two bound together by a chain rather than by the silken cord of
love, are candidates for a peaceable divorce or a continuous battle.
The advocates of the ballot for woman hope through its aid to secure
an overthrow of this rule, or escape from this so-called bondage. They
demand a change in public sentiment regarding the sphere woman is to
fill, securing to her an equality before the law, in representation,
in privileges, and in wages.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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