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
make obedience to man the corner-stone of her religious character.
Fortunately, however, more liberal minds are now giving us higher and
purer expositions of the Scriptures."
It is fifteen years since these statements were made, and we have now the
first instalment of "the Bible interpreted anew from her own standpoint,"
which presumably issues, in their view, from more liberal minds, and is
higher and purer than the old one. In the Introduction to that Suffrage
Woman's Bible (which is as yet only a commentary on the Pentateuch), Mrs.
Stanton says: "From the inauguration of the movement for woman's
emancipation the Bible has been used to hold her in her' divinely
appointed sphere' prescribed by the Old and New Testaments. The canon and
civil law, Church and State, priests and legislators, all political
parties and religious denominations, have alike taught that woman was made
after man, of man, and for man,--an inferior being, subject to man.
Creeds, codes, Scriptures, and statutes are all based on this idea. The
fashions, forms, ceremonies, and customs of society, church ordinances,
and discipline, all grow out of this idea.... So perverted is the
religious element in her nature, that with faith and works she is the
chief support of the Church and Clergy,--the very powers that make her
emancipation impossible."
I know that many believers in Suffrage are also believers in the Bible and
in denominational Christianity. Mrs. Helen Montgomery says, in the Woman's
edition of the Rochester "Post-Express," that one reason for her favorable
consideration of it is, that "Two-thirds of the membership of the
Christian church cannot express their conviction at the polls, since women
may not vote." "Much of the callousness of politicians to church opinion,"
she adds, "comes from the knowledge that that opinion is backed by few
votes." I also know that many of those who disbelieve in Suffrage may also
disbelieve in the Bible, the clergy, and the Church. I further recognize
the fact that the church and religion are not synonymous terms. I have no
attacks to make, and no special pleading to do. I am discussing the
question of Suffrage as I find it in the writing and the speech of its
proposers and its present conspicuous advocates. Each American woman has
this mighty problem before her, and she must settle it according to her
own conscience and best enlightenment.
Mrs. Stanton admits with shame that woman is one of the chief supporters
of the Church. Mrs. Montgomery says with delight that she forms two-thirds
of the Christian Church. Individual members of Suffrage organizations may
be in sympathy with Christianity, or against it; but the movement itself
cannot be on both sides of this question. What is its record? I will
endeavor to trace it, and will then, as best I may, attempt to say a few
words upon the general subject of the "subordination of woman."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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