Woman, Church & State

These iniquities have taken place in christian lands256 and these nefarious outrages upon women have been enforced by the christian laws of both church and state. The degradation and unhappiness of the husband at the infringement of the lord’s spiritual and temporal upon his marital rights, has been depicted by many writers but history has been quite silent upon the despair and shame of the wife.257 No hope appeared for woman anywhere. The Church which should have been the great conserver of morals dragged her to the lowest depths through the vileness of its teachings and its priestly customs. The State which should have defended her civil rights followed the example of the church in crushing her to the earth. Christian laws were detrimental to woman in every relation of life.

The brilliant French author, Legouve,258 gives from among the popular songs of Brittany during the fourteenth century, a pathetic ballad, “The Baron of Jauioz,” which vividly depicts the condition of the peasant women of France at that date. In the power of the male members of her family over her, we also find an exact parallel in the condition of English women of the same era. The moral disease thus represented being due to the same religious teaching, the change of country and language but more fully serves to depict the condition of woman everywhere in christendom at this period.

BRETON BALLAD OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY. THE BARON OF JAUIOZIAs I was at the river washing,I heard the sighing of the bird of death.“Good little Jina, you do not know it, butyou are sold to the Baron of Jauioz.”Is this true, my mother, that I have heard?Is it true that I was sold to old Jauioz?“My poor little darling, I know nothing about it;ask your father.”“My nice good father, tell me now – is it truethat I am sold to Loys de Jauioz?”“My beloved child, I know nothing about it;ask your brother.”Lannik, my brother, tell me now – is it truethat I am sold to that lord there?“Yes you are sold to the Baron, and you must beoff at once. Your price is paid – fifty crowns of thewhite silver and as much of the yellow gold.”IIShe had not gone far from the hamletwhen she heard the ringing of the bells; whereatshe wept.“Adieu Saint Ann! Adieu, bells of my fatherland;Bells of my village church, adieu!”III“Take a seat and rest thee till the repast is ready.”The lord sat near the fire; his beard and hair allwhite, and his eyes like living coals.“Behold the young maiden whom I have desiredthis many a day!”“Come my child, let me show thee, crown by crown,how rich I am; come, count with me, my beauty,my gold and my silver.”“I should like better to be with my mothercounting the chips on the fire.”“Let us descend into the cellar andtaste of the wine that is sweet as honey.”“I should like better to taste the meadow streamWhereof my father’s horses drink.”“Come with me from shop to shop to buy thee aholiday cloak.”“I should better like a linsey petticoat,that my mother has woven for me.”“Ah, that my tongue had been blistered whenI was such a fool as to buy thee!Since nothing will comfort thee.”IV“Dear little birds as you fly, I pray youlisten to me,You are going to the village whither I cannot.You are merry but I am sad.”“Remember me to my playmates,To the good mother who brought me to light,And to the father who reared me; and tell mybrotherI forgive him.”VTwo or three months have passed and gonewhen as the family are sleeping,A sweet voice is heard at the door.“My father, my mother, for God’s love pray for me;your daughter lies on her bier.”

This ballad founded upon historic facts represents the social life of christendom during the fourteenth century. The authority of the son, the licentiousness of the lord, the powerlessness of the mother, the despair of the daughter, the indifference of society, are vividly depicted in this pathetic ballad. It shows the young girl regarded as a piece of merchandise, to be bought and sold at the whim of her masters who are the men of her own household and the lord of the manor. During the feudal period the power of the son was nearly absolute. For his own aggrandisement he did not hesitate to rob his sisters, or sell them into lechery.259 Hopelessly despairing in tone, this ballad gives us a clear picture of feudal times when chivalry was at its height, and the church had reached its ultimate of power. Woman’s attitude today is the echo of that despair. At this period the condition of a woman was not even tolerable unless she was an heiress, with fiefs in possession.260 Even then she was deprived of her property in case of loss of chastity, of which it was the constant aim to deprive her. Guardians, next of kin, and if none such existed, the church threw constant temptations in her way. Ruffians were hired, or reckless profligates induced to betray her under plea of love and sympathy, well paid by the next heir for their treachery.

Although Sir William Blackstone in his Commentaries said that he discovered no traces of marquette in England, a reminiscence of that custom is to be found in the “fine” or “permit” known in that country as Redemption of Blood, and designated as Merchetum Sanguinis, by Fleta.261 This was a customary payment made by a tenant to his lord for license to give his daughter in marriage. Such redemption was considered a special mark of tenure in villeinage.262 It was not exacted from a free man, which is corroborative proof of its origin in the Jus Primae Noctis, of the feudal lord. Of the free man this fine was not permissible, because of the privilege of free blood. Raepsaet, M. Hoffman, Dr. Karl Schmidt, and other authors writing in the interest of the church and finding it impossible to deny the existence of some power over the bride, have questioned its character, declaring it not to be feudal, but a spiritual authority, to guard the bride by enforcing a penitence of marital abstinence of one to three days after the nuptials. It is not to be doubted that under the peculiar teachings of the church in regard to the uncleanliness of marriage, such continence was a certain period part of church law.263 Nevertheless this does not invalidate the fact that a widespread contrary custom existed in feudal times and at a still later period. The present usages of society point back to an age when right to the peasant’s bride was enforced by the lord. A reminiscence264 of this period is to be found in charivari and the buying off of a party of this character with refreshments from the house, or with money for the purchase of cigars and liquor. Such occurrences constantly fall within our knowledge, personally or through the press.265 The very fact of such persecution of the bridal pair is a symbol of that custom under which the retainers of the feudal lord jeered and flouted the bridegroom, throwing him into foul water,266 and other most unseemly practices. To others outside of the charivari party this practice still affords amusement, few persons inclining to interfere or prohibit such pastimes. Society no longer as sharply defined as in the feudal period, yet has preserved in this practice a symbol of the times when even the highborn dames in the castle equally as degraded as its lord, amused themselves while the bride was in the company of the lord by ridiculing and torturing the husband who in anxiety for his wife ventured too near the castle. The present nearly universal custom of a wedding journey must be referred in its origin to the same period, arising from an inherited tendency in the bride and groom to escape the jeers and ill treatment that in past ages invariably accompanied entrance into the married state.

In some European countries redemption was demanded from all women, not alone the daughters of villeins and serfs, but also of those of noble birth who were freed by payment of a ransom in silver known as the “Maiden Rents.” Lands were even held under Maiden Redemption.267 In Scotland this ransom became known as “Marquette”; Margaret wife of Malcolm Canmore, generally spoken of for her goodness as Saint Margaret,268 exercising her royal influence in 1057 against this degradation of her sex. Numberless seditions having arisen from this claim upon the bride, the king more willingly established a release upon the payment of a piece of silver, a demi-marc, called marquette (whence the name), and a certain number of cows. The piece of silver went to the king, the cows to the queen, and from that period cuissage was known as the droit de marquette. But this nefarious custom possessed such strength, appealing directly to man’s basest passions, his love of power, his profligacy – the human beast within him – that it continued in existence nearly seven hundred years after the royal edict in Scotland against its practice.269 This vile power extended over all ranks of women; the king holding it over the daughters of the grand seigneur, the suzerain over the daughters of his vassals; the seigneur over the daughters of his serfs, even the judge or bailie enforcing this right upon all women who passed upon his road.270

The Church has ever been the bulwark of this base claim. Holding the powers of penance and of excommunication, such custom could neither have originated nor been sustained without the sanction of the church.271 At this date the privileges of the lower clergy were extraordinary. Even in England they were not amenable to the common law; they ruled the laity with iron hand, but the laity possessed no power over the priesthood.272 All appointments were in priestly hands, the union of church and state complete.

God himself seemed to have forsaken woman, and the peasantry lost all belief in the justice of earth or heaven. The customs of feudalism which were akin to the customs of power wherever existing throughout christendom did more to create what the church terms “infidelity” than all the reason of the philosophers. No human being is so degraded as not to possess an innate sense of justice; a wrong is as keenly felt by the most humble and ignorant as by the educated and refined, its effect more lasting because of the impossibility of redress. The power of the seigneur was nearly equal to that of the king himself. Manorial courts entirely local aided the seigneur in the enforcement of his traditional privileges273 at the expense of the villeins. The crown possessed no jurisdiction over these courts. The lord held the right to make laws, render justice, lay imposts, declare war, coin money, dispose of the goods and lives of his subjects, and other prerogatives still more closely touching their personal rights, especially of the women living in his dominion.274

To persons not conversant with the history of feudalism and the church it will seem impossible that such foulness could ever have been part of christian civilization. That the vices they have been taught to consider the outgrowth of paganism, and as the worst heathendom could have existed in Christian Europe upheld many hundred years by both church and state will strike most people with incredulity. Such however is the truth; we are compelled to admit well attested facts of history, however severe a blow they strike our preconceived beliefs.

The seigneural tenure of the feudal period was a law of Christian Europe more dishonorable than the worship of Astarte at Babylon.275 In order to fully comprehend the vileness of marquette, we must remember that it did not originate in a pagan country, many thousand years since; that it was not a heathen custom transplanted to Europe with many others adopted by the church,276 but that it arose in christian countries a thousand years after the origin of that religion, continuing in existence until within the last century.

The attempt made by some modern authors to deny that the claim of the feudal lord to the person of his female serf upon her marriage ever existed, on the ground that statutes sustaining such a right have not been discovered, is extremely weak.277 The authority of a custom or “unwritten law” is still almost absolute. A second objection that such customs are unchristian has been answered. The third plea in opposition, namely that those so outraged, so oppressed, left no record of resistance is false. Aside from the fact that education was everywhere limited, no peasant and but few of the nobility knowing how to read or write, and within the church learning very rare, we have indisputable evidence of strong character in the revolt of serfs at different periods, through which concessions were gained; the final refusal of the serfs to marry, and in the travesty upon religion known as the “Black Mass.”

We can not measure the serf’s power of resistance by the same standard as our own. The degradation of man with but a few exceptions was as great as that of woman. Civilly and educationally the peasant man was on a par with the peasant woman. No more than she had he a voice in making the laws; the serf was virtually a slave under the absolute dominion of his lord. No power existed for him higher than that of his feudal superior. It is nearly impossible to realize the hopeless degraded condition of the peasant serf of the middle ages. It has had no parallel in the present century, except in the slavery of the southern states. Free action, free speech, free thought was impossible. But our respect for humanity is increased when we know that these vassals, although under the life and death power of their lords, did not tamely submit to the indignities enforced upon their wives and daughters.

It must also be remembered that the historians of that period were generally priests by whom the fact of such usage or custom would pass unmentioned, especially as the church taught that woman was created to meet the special demands of man. Other important historical facts have been as lightly touched upon, or passed over entirely. The deification of Julius Caesar while Emperor of Rome, is scarcely referred to in the more familiar literary sources of Roman history. And yet his worship was almost universal in the provinces, where he was adored as a god. The records of this worship are only to be found in scattered monuments and inscriptions but recently brought to light, and deciphered within the last few years. Through these it is proven that there was an organized worship of this emperor, and an order of consecrated priests devoted to him.278 Higgins refers to this deification of Caesar.279 It is not alone proof of the low condition of morality at this period, but also of the universal disbelief in woman’s authority over, or right to herself, that so few writers upon feudal subjects have treated of the libidinous powers of the lord over his female serfs. Even those presenting the evils of feudalism in other respects, have merely expressed a mild surprise that christian people should have admitted that right of the lord over his feminine vassals. The various names under which this right was known as jus primae noctis,280 droit de seigneur,281 droit de jambage,282 droit de cuissage,283 droit d’ afforage,284 droit de marquette,285 and many other terms too indelicate for repetition, indicating this right of the lord over all the women in his domain, is still another incontestable proof of the universality of the custom.

The Mosaic teaching as to sacredness of “first fruits,” under Judaism, dedicated to the Lord of Heaven, doubtless was in part the origin of the claim of the feudal lord. The law of primogeniture, or precedence of the first born son as the beginning of “his father’s strength” is also a translation from Judaism into the customs of many nations, but nowhere under the law of primogeniture at the present day does even a first born daughter receive as high consideration as a first born son. This is especially noticeable in royal families. It is not therefore singular that men who took the literal sense of the bible in science, who believed that the world had been created in six days, this work having so greatly fatigued the Lord Almighty as to make rest of the seventh day necessary for him, should under example of that lord, claim the first fruits in all their possessions. No Christians of the present day, except the Mormons, so fully base their lives upon the teachings of the bible as the Catholics of the middle ages. If we accord divine authority to this book, accepting the literal word as infallible and sacred, we must admit that both Church and State were at this period in unison with its teachings, and even during the nineteenth century have not freed themselves from the stigma of sustaining woman’s degradation; the theory of the feudal ages remains the same, although the practice is somewhat different. Legal bigamy or polygamy, non-marital unions, are common in every large city of christendom. Government license has created a class in many European countries devoted to the most degraded lives under government sanction, protection, and control; in England known as “Queen’s Women,” “Government Women.” Thus the State places itself before the world as a trafficker in women’s bodies for the vilest purposes. The culmination of nearly two thousand years of christian teaching is the legalization of vice for women and the creation of a new crime. Previous to the enactment of this law the rules of modern jurisprudence held an accused person as innocent until proven guilty. Under this legalization of vice all women within a certain radius of recruiting, or other army stations, are “suspects,” looked upon as immoral, and liable to arrest, examination, and registration upon government books as government women. It required seventeen years of arduous work to repeal this law in England. This legalization of prostitution in the nineteenth century by the State is its open approval of that doctrine of the Church that woman was created for man. It is an acknowledgment by men that vice is an inherent quality of their natures. It is in accord with man’s repeated assertion that only through means of a class of women pursuing immorality as a business, is any woman safe from violence.

In a letter to the National Woman Suffrage Convention at St. Louis, May, 1879, Mrs. Josephine E. Butler, Honorable Secretary of the Federation and of the Ladies National Association for the Protection of Women, wrote:

England holds a peculiar position in regard to the question. She was the last to adopt this system of slavery, and she adopted it in that thorough manner which characterizes the actions of the Anglo-Saxon race. In no other country has prostitution been registered by law. It has been understood by the Latin race, even when morally enervated, that the law could not without risk of losing its majesty and force sanction illegality and violate justice. In England alone the regulations are law.

This legalization of vice, which is the endorsement of the “necessity” of impurity of man and the institution of the slavery of woman, is the most open denial which modern times have seen of the principle of the sacredness of the individual human being. An English high-class journal dared to demand that women who are unchaste shall henceforth be dealt with “not as human beings, but as foul sewers,” or some such “material nuisance” without souls, without rights, and without responsibility. When the leaders of public opinion in a country have arrived at such a point of combined skepticism and despotism as to recommend such a manner of dealing with human beings, there is no crime which that country may not presently legalize, there is no organization of murder, no conspiracy of abominable things that it may not, and in due time will not – have been found to embrace in its guilty methods. Were it possible to secure the absolute physical health of a whole province or an entire continent by the destruction of one, only one poor and sinful woman, woe to that nation which should dare, by that single act of destruction, to purchase this advantage to the many! It will do it at its peril. God will take account of the deed not in eternity only, but in time, it may be in the next or even in the present generation.

Although a long and active work through seventeen years eventually brought about the repeal of this law in England, it still continues in the British colonies, being forced upon the people in opposition to their own action. After the Cape Parliament of the Colony of Good Hope had repealed the law, Sir Bartle Frere re-introduced it by means of an edict.286 When in London, 1882, Sir John Pope Hennessey, Governor and Commander in Chief of British China, was waited upon by an influential deputation of members of parliament and others to whom he made known the practical workings of governmental regulation of prostitution introduced by England into that colony. He did not hesitate to characterize it as a system of slavery for the registered women and girls. He also declared that they detested the life they are thus compelled to enter having both a dread and an abhorrence of foreigners, especially foreign sailors and soldiers. He said such Chinese girls are the real slaves of Hong Kong.

Now to that statement I adhere. I give it to you on the full authority of the Governor of the colony. I have been five years looking at the operation of this law in Hong Kong, and that is the result to which I have arrived that, under the flag of England there is slavery there, but it is slavery created and protected by these ordinances.

The relation of Christianity to this treatment of Chinese women, and the contempt with which this religion is regarded by these heathen, is most fully shown by Sir John’s conversation with the leading Chinese merchant of Canton, as given by himself, upon the material progress of the colony. To this merchant Sir Pope said: “Your people are making a large fortune here. Why not send down your second son to enter the house of the Chinese merchant and learn the business there?” The merchant replied, “I can not for this reason; Hong Kong is a sink of iniquity.” Sir Pope Hennessey answered. “This is a Christian colony; we have been here now for forty years, we are supposed to be doing the best we can to spread civilization and christianity.” The Chinaman repeated: “It is a sink of iniquity in my mind. As Chinamen we think of domestic and family life – we reverence such things – but how do I see the poor Chinese treated in this colony?” And he related stories of the abuses to which his countrywomen were subjected.

In repeating this conversation to Her Majesty’s government, Sir Pope Hennessey declared the words that the merchant of Canton who called Hong Kong a “sink of iniquity” have a wide application, because the British colony at Hong Kong is geographically a part of a great Empire, an empire where you have missionaries of various churches. “I have been asked to explain the curious and distressing fact that christianity is declining in China. I think it is declining mainly on account of the treaties we have forced upon the Chinese; but I will frankly tell you, it is declining also because they see these girls registered in such houses for ‘Europeans’ and made practically slaves under our flag.”287

Nor are the Cape of Good Hope, and China, the sole foreign countries in which this system of the legalized moral degradation of women has been carried by England, nearly one hundred places in India showing the same vice under license from the British Government, even to bearing the same name.288 Nor have innumerable petitions and protests from native and foreign ladies, from zenana workers, from missionaries, and even from all ranks of the resident English civil service for immediate repeal of this vilest of all laws, been of the least effect. So thoroughly imbued are English legislators with contempt for womanhood, as not only to maintain these outrageous laws but also to cause fear in the minds of those women who for twenty years wrought for the repeal of these acts in Great Britain and Ireland, of their again being introduced under more insidious and dangerous form.289 A memorial signed by a number of native born and English ladies was presented to the Viceroy praying that the age of protection for young girls be raised. While in India a man’s dog, horse, elephant, and even the plants of his garden are under the protection of English law, his daughter of ten years is outside this protection.290 The penal code punishes with imprisonment or a fine, or both, the man who injures an animal valued at ten rupees; if the animal be worth fifty rupees his imprisonment may be for five years, while for dishonestly coaxing his neighbor’s dog to follow him, the punishment is three years imprisonment, or a fine or both; while the man who induces “consent” from a girl-child of ten years escapes all punishment.

In deference to the bitter opposition these acts created, it was declared that legalized prostitution was abolished in British India, June 5th, 1888. A statement was made in the House of Commons that the contagious disease acts had been suspended in Bombay. But an investigation of these statements by the English Social Purity Society, proved them false, the Sentinel, its organ, stating, June 1890, that upon inquiry it was found that the licensing of prostitution systematically prevails in British India, and is always attended with results most disastrous to health of body as well as morals of the community. The most extraordinary course is taken towards the accomplishment of their ends, by the advocates of legalizing vice. In 1888 having failed to secure an act of the legislature of the state of New York, in its favor, a society to this end was formed in the city of New York, incorporated as a “Voluntary Association”; borrowing the name used in England at the time its women were most degraded by the state.291 This society grants certificates to women presenting themselves for examination. And thus step by step under many forms more extended than even under feudal law, is woman’s moral degradation made the effort of christian civilization of today.