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THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.
No polygamist ever rose above a contempt for woman. Every libertine has it. You are safe in estimating a man’s character by his valuation of your sex.
In these old days, and for long generations after, no woman’s consent to her own marriage was asked. Look at the story of Leah and Rachel. Leah is forced upon Jacob as an extra animal might be, and accepted in the same manner. A woman was only valued for the children she produced. We have a graphic picture of the agony and despair of Rachel, because she knew if she were childless she must descend to a lower social level than her unloved sister.
All the progress of civilization has been retarded through unfairness to women. No person, people or race that is discriminated against ever attains the highest possible development. If woman, through her servitude, ignorance and subordination did not help to raise man, she yet had power to often drag him down to her own low standard. She was a clog in his advancement, and he knew it. All literature is full of the biting scorn for the poor creature who was content to take the role he gave her. No man respects the woman that willingly accepts a slavish subordination. No man ever did respect her, and when he enacted such brutalities as that a husband might chastise his wife with a stick of a certain thickness, or appropriate her fortune or her earnings, she was his slave and not his equal.
Time, and a certain enlightenment, have made him ashamed of these old savageries. In later years he has dropped the tone of the tyrant and taken up that of the hypocrite. He now pretends that he allows her no voice in the making of her own laws, and keeps her in childish subjection for her own good. Fancy any man allowing another man to openly defraud him of all real liberty under any such flimsy pretence. The theory would be blown to the winds, and men would rise in revolution against it. Yet this is what many men expect women not only to accept—they have forced them to do that—but also to believe.
Man likes a willing slave, and so for all the ages he has taken care to have her taught that her highest happiness lies in belonging to him. His needs, his comforts, his pleasures, his surroundings, his ambitions, his hopes and joys are her chief concern. He has taken good care to teach her that her prize in life is the chance of ministering unto him. He has implanted in her mind that her greatest good fortune is to be chosen by him. He has heaped ridicule through the ages on every woman that escaped him. He has taught girls to look on a woman’s single life as a waste of herself because he was excluded from it. The highest aim of a woman is to be a wife and mother. He never allowed that the highest aim of a man is to be a husband and a father. Yet all that is high, sacred and beautiful in wifehood and motherhood was meant by a just Lord to be equally high, sacred and beautiful in husbandhood and fatherhood. He has, moreover, denied her any other means of earning her bread. For long centuries he gave her matrimony or starvation to choose between; often she discovered this to be a choice between evils.
There have always been in all ages small minorities of men who have opposed the degradation of women. True religion has always opposed it. The Divine Commandments were not given to a woman. They were given to Moses to be kept by men. In Christianity you find no doctrine that makes one color of a sin for a woman and another for a man. On the contrary their sins are equal, and must be expiated the same way. “ With us,” cries the great St. Jerome, “ what is commanded of woman is commanded of man.” The laws of Christ and the laws of emperors are not the same. The old law stoned a woman to death for betraying her husband; or it condemned her to be expelled with a whip from under the conjugal roof and chased naked through the town, or exposed on a pillar in the public square. On all sides curses and blows were flung at her by men, who called her sin a “ fault” only when it was committed by themselves.
Among such laws appeared the Master, and, lo! the unfortunate is dragged before him. His answer tore the veil from hypocrisy, and was the first wedge in breaking the heavy chains of woman’s bondage.