Woman and the Republic: A Survey of the Woman-Suffrage Movement in the United States and a Discussion of the Claims and Arguments of Its Foremost AdvocatesJohnson, Helen Kendrick
History
Woman and the Republic: A Survey of the Woman-Suffrage Movement in the United States and a Discussion of the Claims and Arguments of Its Foremost Advocates
Johnson, Helen Kendrick
Women -- Legal status, laws, etc. -- United States; Women -- Suffrage -- United States
Elizabeth Fry and most of the English Friends would not mention the name
of Mrs. Mott. Mrs. Stanton once asked her what she would have done after
the Hicksite faction had been voted out of meeting at the World's
Conventicle of Friends in London, if the spirit had moved her to speak
when the chairman and members had moved that she be silent, and she
answered, "Where the spirit of God is, there is liberty." This is the
liberty of anarchy, and it had its due weight in the Suffrage movement.
Mrs. Stanton, in the course of a eulogy pronounced at Mrs. Mott's funeral,
said: "The 'vagaries' of the Anti-slavery struggle, in which Lucretia Mott
took a leading part, have been coined into law; and the 'wild fantasies'
of the Abolitionists are now the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth
amendments to the National Constitution.... The 'infidel' Hicksite
principles that shocked Christendom are now the cornerstones of the
liberal religious movement in this country." The vagaries of the Anti-
slavery struggle are exactly those that were _not_ coined into law. The
wild fantasies of the Abolitionists were rejected by those whose sober
judgment and steady courage made possible the last constitutional
amendments. And no truer is it that the "infidel" Hicksite principles are
the corner-stones of any genuine movement of Christian liberality. While
the Friends mourn that infidelity and Roman Catholicism have made inroads
upon their progress in some places, they have steadily advanced in the
other direction from that pointed out by Lucretia Mott. Their educated and
paid ministry, their First-day schools, their missions, home and foreign,
their music, and simple but set forms, their reports to London of
"conversion and profession of faith," and their rapid growth where these
things have taken place, all indicate the truth of this. The large meeting
at Swartmore College, in the summer of 1896, is another evidence.
The proportion of woman preachers to the different denominations is as
follows: The Hicksite-Quakers (as against the orthodox) have the most. So
have the German Methodists (United Brethren) as against the orthodox
Methodists. The Free-Will Baptists, as against the orthodox Baptists,
ordain more woman preachers. The Universalist preceded the Unitarian
church in so doing. The Presbyterian and Congregational churches, as a
body, have taken no steps in that direction. In the Congregational
denomination any separate body of worshippers can ordain whom it sees fit.
The Roman Catholic and Episcopal churches have orders which band women as
religious workers and remove them more or less from the ordinary life of
the world, but they have taken no steps toward ordaining women for the
ministry.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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