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
So the woman who spurns the Bible as the book that is responsible for
woman's degradation, who denies that it is the word of God, who pours out
upon Paul the vials of her wrath, finds in them both her highest warrant
for believing in the "equal position" of woman, "the perfect equality of
the sexes." When the wrath of woman thus praises God, the one who believes
that through woman's status in the Bible and in the Christian Church this
perfect equality is being worked out day by day need not take up
controversial cudgels. Ribaldry in woman seems more gross than in man, and
this is woman's ribaldry. It is profane to speak of the "feminine element
in the Godhead." God is a spirit. There is no more a feminine than a
masculine element in the Godhead. Sex belongs to mortal life and its
conditions. It begins and ends with this earth. Christ has told us so:
There will be in another world "no marrying, nor giving in marriage, but
we all shall be as the angels in heaven." The equality of which Paul spoke
as "the very soul and essence of Christianity" is the equality of the
essence and soul of male and female humanity, and the oneness of the
believer's soul with that of the Christ in whom his soul believes. The
soul of humanity, as well as its body, is bound by sex conditions as long
as it draws the breath of this transitory life. Every thought and every
act reveal the governing power of the sex mould in which its form is cast
for this world's uses. The use of this world is to give preparation for
another and a better one; final spiritual triumph is the end to be
attained. Humanity is now in the image of God only in the essential sense
in which the full corn in the ear may be said to be wrapped up in its
kernel, and it can unfold only according to the laws of its being. The
first account of Creation sets forth, with the beautiful imagery of the
Orient, the general and ultimate truth. The second account, with the same
grand simplicity, foreshadows the method and the long, slow process by
which this ultimate end is to be attained.
In continuing their comments, the editors say: "In chapter v., verse 23,
Adam proclaims the eternal oneness of the happy pair, 'This is now bone of
my bone and flesh of my flesh;' no hint of her subordination. How could
men, admitting these words to be divine revelation, ever have preached the
subjection of woman? Next comes the naming of the mother of the race. 'She
shall be called woman,' in the ancient form of the word, 'womb-man.' She
was man and more than man, because of her maternity. The assertion of the
supremacy of the woman in the marriage relation is contained in chapter
v., 24: 'Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother and cleave
unto his wife.' Nothing is said of the headship of man, but he is
commanded to make her the head of the household, the home, a rule followed
for centuries under the Matriarchate."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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