WOMEN AND CHRISTIANITY 167 the husband was strongly developed. He might expose his infant children, chastise his wife, dispose of her person. He was her judge. In case of unfaithfulness he could put her to death. He acquired his wives by purchase. Polygamy was permitted and prevailed among the chiefs. The wife was subject to the three obediences, father, husband, son. Christianity. Though the conquered Romans were forced to accept the German practices, these were gradually changed by contact with Roman civilization, civil code, and Christianity. The status of the unmarried woman responded more quickly to such influences than did that of the married woman. Christianity taught humanity, sought to abolish the life and death authority of the husband over wife and children, discountenanced divorce and polygamy, required the mutual consent of both parties to a marriage, and held the immoral man to be as evil as the immoral woman. In this way it did much to better the condition of women. On the other hand it retarded their progress for centuries by teaching the propriety of woman's subjection to man. Christ himself never defined woman's place. He referred to women only with respect. Some of his followers however laid out a certain course of conduct for women which hindered their best chances for development. Peter admonished women, "Ye wives be in subjection to your own husbands; ... even as Sarah obeyed Abraham, calling him Lord." Paul exhorted aged women to teach young women, "To be discreet, chaste, keepers at home, good, obedient to their own husbands." According to him, man was the image and glory of God, but woman was the glory of man for man was not of woman but woman of man, neither was man created for woman but woman for man. Attitude of Later Centuries. These doctrines and the story of the Old Testament in which woman is pictured as the source of all evil conflicted with the irresistible feeling which man has for woman. This feeling is dictated by nature and triumphant over all laws. Outwardly men accepted the teachings, inwardly they revolted. The result was the development of a two-fold conception of womankind. On the one hand woman was subject to man, made for his pleasure. She was the cause of much of the evil in the world and alliance with her was a worldly institution to be avoided by God's chosen leaders. On the other hand woman was the embodiment of beauty, fragility, and virtue. These opposing attitudes can be traced through the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries and can be read in the writings of the great men of that period. Martin Luther, leader of the Protestant movement, said: "The woman's will, as God says, shall be subject to the man, and he shall be her master; that is, the woman shall not live according to her free will . . . and must neither begin nor complete anything without the man; where he is, there must she be, and bend before him as before her master, whom she shall fear, and to whom she shall be subject and obedient." Milton, the great English poet, said: "Whence true authority in men: though both To whom thus Eve with perfect beauty adorned:- God is thy law, thou mine: to know no more Is woman's happiest knowledge, and her praise.'" Rousseau, the French philosopher, said: "The education of the women should always be relative to the men. To please, to be useful to us, to make us love and esteem them, to educate us when young, to take care of us when grown up, to advise, to console us, to render our lives easy and agreeable: these are the duties of women at all times and what they should be taught in their infancy." The Old English Common Law. The old English common law ably supported these doctrines and compelled a reluctant or rebellious woman to obedience. Marriage was based on the idea that husband and wife were one person and that person the husband. The wife's personality was entirely submerged in his. She was under his cover or protection and had no legal personality of her own. As man and woman were regarded as one and the same person, neither could covenant with or make grants to the other. From this idea of "oneness" developed many of the rights, duties, and disabilities of the respective parties to a union. The husband was held responsible for his wife's necessaries and for any debts she might incur for them. A wife, injured in her person or property, could bring no suit for redress without her husband's WOMEN UNDER THE COMMON LAW 169 consent and in his name. If sued the husband must be her defendant. This held true of civil prosecutions only. For criminal offenses, the wife might be indicted and punished separately. The husband was permitted to give his wife moderate correction such as he might administer to his apprentices or children. By the language of the law, husband and wife were styled Baron and femme. If the Baron killed his femme he was subject to a penalty for murder. If a femme killed her Baron, it was regarded as an unthinkable atrocity far worse than ordinary murder. She was guilty not only of murder but of treason to her lord and was condemned to be drawn and burnt alive, the sentence of a female who killed a king. All women, no matter how learned, were denied benefit of the clergy. They might be sentenced to death or executed for the first offense in larceny, bigamy, manslaughter, etc., because their sex precluded their taking holy orders. A man who could read was presumed to belong to the clergy. For the same offenses he was merely condemned to a brand in the hand and imprisonment for a few months. If a man died intestate, his personal property was divided equally among his children. His real property went to his son, though he might be younger than any of the daughters. A woman's personal property became her husband's on marriage. He might even will it away at his death. He was likewise master of his wife's lands. This legal conception of woman, together with the position assigned her by the church, by custom and tradition, by education and ideals, bound her in shackles hard to break. The average woman, raised in ignorance, accepted her fate with little question. Both her physical and mental development were stunted. She never attained the knowledge necessary to a well-rounded existence. Many of life's greatest experiences were denied her. She lived in a dream world, secluded from hardship if wealthy, forced to servitude if poor, and in either case entirely dependent on the goodwill and affection of another person. WOMEN IN THE UNITED STATES Colonial Women. The concept of woman's position, the customs and traditions of the old world concerning her "place," the old English common law with certain changes and reforms which had been instigated in England from time to time were introduced into the new world by the colonists. Colonial women married young, often at an age which would seem to the twentieth century mere childhood. Large families, hard work, and sex restric tions combined to keep them in "woman's place." Their sphere was narrowly limited and woe to the woman who ventured from it. In 1638 Anne Hutchinson was tried, convicted of sedition and heresy, and banished from the colony because she instructed the women of the neighborhood in religious precepts according to her own interpretation. Two offenses were encompassed in her act. She had presumed to question the teachings of the men in authority and to advance new ideas concerning religion. She had disobeyed the instruction of St. Paul who said: "But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence." President Eliot has described the life of the colonial dames and his picture is not enviable. "Generations of them cooked, carried water, washed and made clothes, bore children in lonely peril, and tried to bring them up safely through all sorts of physical exposure without medical or surgical help, lived themselves in terror of savages, in terror of the wilderness, and under the burden of a sad and cruel creed, and sank at last into nameless graves, without any vision of the grateful days when millions of their descendants should rise up and call them blessed." Just how many "millions of their descendants" possess such gratitude to-day is questionable. We hear much of the colonial fathers but of the colonial mothers. The same general attitude concerning the stern duty of women, the necessity of their sacrifice for the sake of husband, of children, and of home is still in evidence. Mankind has not yet faced the inevitable that children, home, wife, and husband demand equal sacrifices of both sexes. One sex cannot decline to halve the burden with the other. Neither sex is justified in choosing the path which suits its selfish interest. Neither has a right to impose a certain kind of existence on the other. Women were active in the struggle for independence. Their spirit was as dauntless as the men's. Inspired by the great ideal of liberty, they were not entirely unmindful of the incongruity of their own position. Abigail Adams writing her husband, March, 1776, when he was sitting with the Continental Congress, said: “I long to hear you have declared an independency, and, by the way, in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies and be more favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of husbands. Remember all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention are not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion THE DECLARATION OF SENTIMENTS 171 and will not hold ourselves bound to obey any laws in which we have no voice or representation." This plea went unheeded. The Declaration of Independence was for men only. No attempt was made to include the women whose need was so pressing. The war for independence in which women bore the necessary but inconspicuous part played by women in all wars brought them no freedom. The Constitution, the first stable instrument of government for the new nation, contained no clause drawing women into the vital life of the nation or changing their status to make the new government a democracy of all the people. Women in the New Nation. The legal and political status of women in the new democracy was more completely subordinate to men than that of men had ever been to the crown in the colonial days of British control. But the nineteenth century was at hand. It was destined to see the greatest social movement of the ages. This movement was born from the agitation of a few exceptional women. It gained impetus until it became a vast progressive march of a sex hitherto stunted and oppressed. The early pioneers of the movement blazed a trail of progress against almost overwhelming odds. Mary Wollstonecraft in England pleaded for greater opportunities for women. Frances Wright, a young Scotchwoman, lectured in the United States on woman's rights and other social questions in the face of ridicule and criticism. The Grimke sisters of South Carolina and Abby Kelly labored for anti-slavery and incidentally compelled the acknowledgement of the right of women to speak from public platforms. Opposition to any change in the condition of women was so strong that only the bravest dared raise the issue in their own defense. Women found movements against slavery, temperance, and other evils more acceptable to more people than any struggle in their own behalf. It is not strange that many liberal women began their reform activities as emancipationists or abolitionists. When their attempts brought them hard against the solid sex barrier of disapproval at woman's public participation in any cause, they gained the necessary spirit of revolt and courage to fight for themselves and other women. Declaration of Sentiments. When women interested in the Negro cause sought an equal position with men in the American Anti-Slavery Society that supposedly liberal body pledged to secure freedom for the Negro was horrified at the idea of equality for females in even such a venture as this. The party divided on the issue. One faction opposed the women. The other, led |