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
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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
"Interpret the Bible anew from her own standpoint." The volume in which a
beginning has been made in this work is a thick pamphlet bearing a motto
from Cousin on one cover, and the picture of a piano as an advertisement
on the other. It is with a profound sense of sadness and disgust that any
woman who honors God and loves her own sex turns its pages. Behold the
first dilemma in which the commentators find themselves involved. Mrs.
Stanton opens the comments on the Creation as follows: "In the great work
of the creation, the crowning glory was realized when man and woman were
evolved on the sixth day, the masculine and feminine forces in the image
of God, that must have existed eternally, in all forms of matter and
mind.... How then is it possible to make woman an afterthought?... All
those theories based on the assumption that man was prior in the creation,
have no foundation in Scripture. As to woman's subjection, on which both
the canon and civil law delight to dwell, it is important to note that
equal dominion is given to woman over every living thing, but not a word
is said giving man dominion over woman. No lesson of woman's subjection
can be fairly drawn from the first chapter of the Old Testament."
In commenting on the second account of the Creation, Ellen Battelle
Dietrick says: "It is now generally conceded that some one (nobody
pretends to know who) at some time (nobody pretends to know exactly when)
copied two creation myths on the same leather roll, one immediately
following the other. Modern theologians have, for convenience sake,
entitled these two fables, respectively, the Elohistic and the Jahoistic
stories. They differ not only in the point I have mentioned above, but in
the order of the 'creative acts,' in regard to the mutual attitude of man
and woman, and in regard to human freedom from prohibitions imposed by
deity. Now, it is manifest that both of these stories cannot be true;
intelligent women who feel bound to give the preference to either, may
decide according to their own judgment which is more worthy of an
intelligent woman's acceptance. My own opinion is, that the second story
was manipulated by some wily Jew, in an endeavor to give 'heavenly
authority' for requiring a woman to obey the man she married." Lillie
Devereux Blake takes still another horn of the dilemma. She says: "In the
detailed description of creation we find a gradually ascending series.
'Creeping things,' 'great sea-monsters,' every bird of wing,' 'cattle and
living things of the earth,' the 'fish of the sea and the birds of the
heavens;' then man, and, last and crowning glory of the whole, woman. It
cannot be maintained that woman was inferior to man, even if, as asserted
in chapter ii., she was created after him, without at once admitting that
man is inferior to the creeping things because created after them."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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