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
Strange that we should forever turn back, as if the application of any
essential truth were finished. The child walks by faith. The childhood of
the world walked by faith, and left in the Bible the evidence of things
that are not seen but are eternal. The Suffrage movement has a quarrel
with the Bible because the Creator is there represented, for the reverence
of the race, under the guise of a Heavenly Father, and not a Heavenly
Mother, or rather, not as a human pair, equal in dignity and power. If the
first impulsion of love toward God had come into this world through the
mind of man, he would have represented the divine love that his soul
conceived under the guise of that being on earth whom he most loved. But
love was born with the "disabilities" of woman; it was evolved through
motherhood; and the same impulse that gave it, exalted, not itself, but
what it loved and trusted. "I have gotten a man from the Lord" said the
first recorded mother, who had learned to know the Lord through
motherhood; and the boy she bore was taught to look up with confidence to
the strength and protection of his father. She told him that the pity of
his father, which made him bring food and raiment, and which guarded his
home, was an image of the feeling that was felt for him by the divine
being. Could man have learned the lesson first, we can see that the story
would have been different, because man has named every beautiful and
gracious thing for woman. Virtue, temperance, truth, purity, love, faith,
hope, liberty, grace, beauty, charity, the inspirers of art and science,
of music and literature, of justice and of religion, all are feminine.
When man says: "Our Father which art in heaven," he prays as his mother
taught him. Through the self-abnegation that was unconscious of its
sacrifice, woman was to be the instrument for bringing human life up, on,
to the God who, being spirit, could act upon a clay-bound mind only
through the highest human thing that love could know. Men, as well as
women, have misunderstood and misinterpreted this. The love that "is not
puffed up," "doth not behave itself unseemly," cannot proclaim its own
virtue--to arrogate it is to lose it. But the secret of the Lord has been
with those who feared Him, and it has led the world aright in spite of
blunder and of sin.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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