Bible -- Commentaries; Bible -- Feminist criticism; Women in the Bible
The nations under Bible influence are the only drunken nations on the
earth. The W. C. T. U. will certainly not claim that drunkenness
elevates woman; indeed, its great work for our sex is a splendid
protest against this idea. Throughout Christendom millions of wretched
women wait in suspense and in terror for the return of drunken
husbands, while in heathendom a drunkard's wife cannot be found unless
a heathen husband is being Christianized by Christian whiskey. The
Chinese women have their feet compressed, but, unlike Christian women,
they do not need their feet to give broom drills or skirt dances for
the "benefit of their church." The child-wives of India need to be
rescued and protected, but no more than many adult wives in Bible lands
need protection from drunken and brutal husbands. The heathen wife
seeks death on her husband's funeral pyre, but the Christian wife is
often sent to death by a bullet in her brain, or a knife in her heart.
It is said that "woman's ballot is unknown except where the Gospel of
Christ has mellowed the hearts of men until they became willing to do
women justice." justice through the ballot has been accorded only to
the women of Wyoming, Colorado, Idaho, Utah, and far away New Zealand.
In these States the people are honest, industrious and law-abiding; but
the "influence of the Gospel of Christ," according to religious
statistics, is so small it would take a search-warrant to find it,
while Utah is full of Mormons and New Zealand is a convict dumping
ground for Christian nations. Is this the extent of justice to women
after the "influence of the Gospel of Christ has mellowed the hearts of
men" for nineteen hundred years?
The fact is that woman has been elevated in spite of Bible influence.
Every effort that woman has made to secure education has been
challenged by popes, bishops, priests, moderators, conferences and
college presidents, yet against all these protests she has battered
down the doors of Christian colleges and is now studying the Bible of
Science in conjunction with the Bible of the Christian religion. With
increasing knowledge woman is founding her faith on reason and
demonstrated truth, instead of taking it second-hand from priest,
parson or presbyter.
Remove from Bible lands the busy brains and hands which have guided
the plow and the locomotive, driven the machinery of the mine, the
foundry, the factory, the home, the mental and the physical labor which
have brought material prosperity, broadened the mind, subdued the
brutal instincts, and humanized the race--remove all these and leave
but the Bible and its influence, and where, let me, ask, would woman be
to-day? Where, indeed, would man be? A crouching and cowering slave to
the Bible doctrine of the Divine right of kings, living as the brutes
of the field, as he did when Bible Christianity was at the zenith of
its power. Wherever in Christian lands man has been a slave, woman has
been the slave of a slave.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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