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
Life itself, as well as all that life could come to mean, depended upon
woman's consenting. The word "obey" in some marriage services seems, like
what it really is, a survival. Obedience has brought its reward, and the
consent of the heart is more than the consent of the lips. But if there is
no consent of the heart to wifehood and motherhood, in time there will be
no chivalry, no progress, no final emancipation for the race. Consenting
is also commanding, and woman loses her life in order to find it in the
fulfillment of her wish. It was consent to her own teaching. The
chivalrous and tender-hearted Paul, who spoke of women with reverent
affection, who adopted as his own the mother of Rufus, was repeating the
lesson of every Jewish mother from Sarah to Deborah, and from Deborah to
the women who were last at Christ's cross and first beside his tomb.
Deborah, who was the judge, prophetess and poet, but first of all "a
mother in Israel," under whom her degenerate people had peace for forty
years, rebuked Barak and said, to their humiliation: "This day shall the
Lord deliver Israel by the hand of a woman." From this teaching Paul
uttered his rebuke to the wayward church at Corinth: "It is a shame for a
man to cover his head, inasmuch as he is the image and glory of God; but
the woman is the glory of the man." And he added, in speaking of the
wearing of the veil, "For this cause ought the woman to have power"
"because of the angels." In the Epistle to the Ephesians Paul admonishes
the Church to be "imitators of God, as beloved children, and walk in love,
even as Christ also loved you, and gave himself for you, an offering and a
sacrifice to God for a sweet-smelling savour." Again, he says: "Therefore,
as the Church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own
husbands in everything." And as if to make doubly certain that no one
should think that such submission implied bondage or inequality, he adds
"Husbands, love your wives even as Christ also loved the Church and _gave
himself for it_." Again, he says: "So ought men to love their wives, as
their own bodies.... Even as the Lord the Church," adding with almost
strained Oriental vehemence, "for we are members of his body, of his flesh
and of his bones. For this cause shall a man leave his father and his
mother, and shall be joined unto his wife, and they twain shall be one
flesh."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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