34G

THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.

Civil life in a wide continent has to adopt the methods of the matriarchal system, though they are despised by patriarchs. They are based on conference, councils, arbitration, and not commands from one. A patriarch did not confer with his people. He ruled and directed by his sovereign will and his wish. He claimed to be directed by his god, or his angel, or his high priest. Women were directed by their collected reason as to what was right. Their instincts were their authority; so they established the council as authority. Because they were not strong when isolated, they invented habitations that protected them from wild beasts and from lawless persons of their own and other tribes. Their method was the motto of one of the states of our republic:, “ United we stand, divided we fall.” It was this uniting of the mothers to secure ben­efit to their families that began the method of councils and that introduced treaties for peace. Women, not being as strong in body as men, and with the care of their young, could not take risks of starvation or fight with enemies single-handed; so, from their disability in physical strength and animal courage, they developed the defense that comes from thought and invention. For this reason the matriarchal power is older than the patriarchal. The mothers united in council and acted together. When they, from their grain fields, controlled the food supply and the sale of their baskets, trinkets and religious vestments, then they were a power; for that one is master who supplies the food and raiment. Walled cities, large armies broke the matriarchal reign and established empires.

Let us turn back four hundred years: Constantinople was taken in 1453 by Moham­medans. In 1480 Columbus was starting for Portugal. Ferdinand and Isabella were in their prime, thirty years of age. Sir Thomas More, Margaret (daughter of Maxi­milian), and the great Mary of Burgundy, were born this year. Sister ITadewych, a nun of Brabant, was collecting songs for the people in their own tongue, thus establishing a unity of the Dutch language. Anna Bljins, the first to write with grace and elegance that language, was writing for the good of people who could not read Latin.

From this time the matriarchal stream of thought and ideas have gradually eroded the walls and pillars of patriarchal power.

In 1480 the Continent of America was at peace, not yet found by the covetous, wrangling, fighting, stealing, persecuting Europeans. The women here on this conti­nent had their harvest festivals, gathering their corn and potatoes, weaving baskets and making pottery, worshiping what helped them in life in their temples with rev­erence to sun moon and stars: their help and yet their mystery. They had learned that they were connected in some way in guiding and blessing their every-day life with light and growth. It was from their religious island that a woman held high the sacred torch of their worship that greeted Columbus in that dark night of despair with his frail boats on the unknown ocean. The incident is preserved by art in the woman’s seal of the World’s Columbian Exposition. It was the intuitive apprecia­tion and generosity of women that gave Columbus the ability to do his work. The accumulated charts and geographical knowledge, and the fortune and estate of his wife in Porto Santo, and wisdom of her mother, were his opportunity and inspiration. The granddaughter of the great Queen Philippa of England was the mother and inspirer of Henry II. of Portugal, who gave Perestrello, the father of Columbus’ wife, his knowledge and his estate. The great women of that time are a study of them­selves. I leave them and go back a century before, to 1380, when closed the lives of two great women whose history remains to teach and inspire us today—Philippa of Hainault and St. Catherine of Sienna.

Marcus Aurelius commends the precept of Themistocles to have before the mind some of the many men of antiquity who illustrated by their lives the greatness possi­ble to men. It is equally a benefit for women. Too long we have been kept on his­tory written and illustrated by men’s lives; now we want to know the spinners of the fiber of individual character; the knitters who have formed the social life; the weav­ers who have held together by principles and laws the passions of people, so that the strength of each should be the salvation of the whole. The lives of the women in each age will reveal the evolution of the growth of civil life, though men’s lives may