Woman, Church & State

Germany with sudden strides has coalesced from a number of independent principalities through the management of him of the iron hand, into a magnificent empire, based upon the destruction of human life. In this empire, where war underlies all, we find woman much more deeply degraded than during the old pagan days, when as chieftain and prophetess her voice was heeded even upon the battlefield. Now, while men are preparing to kill other men, the agriculture of the country and the lowest forms of mechanical labor fall into her hands. But it is not as responsible owner we thus find her; she cultivates the fields as a drudge, upon whom falls all the most severe portion of work. Equally in Germany as in other christian lands, is the wife looked upon as the servant of the husband, to whom she bears children that are his alone, and to whom greater deference is paid by the mother when a large number of little ones call him father.505 It has been the custom to reward a husband in proportion to the number of children borne him by his wife, and it is but a year since a Parisian journalist suggested that for each additional child borne by his wife, the husband should be allowed half a vote. In Germany as under the common law of England, the wife is subject to chastisement by her husband, its severity being left to his discretion. But the height of barbaric absurdity and wickedness is found in that provision of the Prussian common law which decrees that a husband can determine the length of time his wife must nurse her child. As might be expected, at his death the wife is not regarded capable of caring for the children, and must accept a guardian for them; the law going so far as to declare her under age similarly to that French law which makes woman a perpetual minor. It matters not if the family property all came through the wife, or was accumulated by her labor, she is still held as not of sufficient judgment for its control. In Prussia, woman is still forbidden to take part in political or other public meetings.506

Morganatic or left-hand marriage still continues the custom in Germany. Under its provisions the wife does not take the husband’s rank, nor do the children inherit the father’s property, as they are not regarded as of full legitimacy. This form of marriage is recognized by the civil law of Germany, and is sustained by the church. The custom, at first confined to princes, gradually extended to the higher aristocracy, and as the moral perceptions of a nation bends itself to unison with civil law, the inferior gentry began to contract marriages of this kind. Under a morganatic union woman is still more debased than in the ordinary marriage relation. Aside from the ceremony, the wife is scarcely other than a concubine. The children of the morganatic marriage do not bear the father’s name, nor inherit from him, under the law of the state. Neither they nor the wife have more lasting claim upon him in these respects than had the concubines known as “the Honored Ones” upon the priestly destroyers of the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

Several notable instances of morganatic marriages have occurred within the present century. It is but a few years since the Grand Duke, Louis IV of Hesse-Darmstadt, son-in-law of Queen Victoria, made a morganatic marriage with Madame de Kalamine, whose lover he was long known to have been, and with whom he had previously lived outside of this relation, she having borne him several children. From the high position of the morganatic husband, and because of the previous relationship of the parties, this marriage became the talk of all Europe, and to some extent of the United States. Queen Victoria herself did not escape criticism, notwithstanding the prudery for which she is famed, because of her entertaining the Grand Duke at Windsor soon after this marriage unaccompanied by his wife,507 for the purpose, it was intimated, of placing him under the influence of Princess Beatrice. The very fact of such suggestion, whether true or not, as well as the fact that Queen Victoria, universally conceded a prude in reference to infractions of the moral law by those of her own sex, received the Grand Duke at her especial home of Windsor soon after his morganatic marriage, is a vivid commentary upon the two codes of morals extant in christendom and their influence even upon woman herself. Morganatic marriage degrades the wife of the right hand ceremony equally with her of the left hand, as it is a recognition by the law of a christian country today of man’s right to become a bigamist, provided he but gives his left hand instead of his right, to the bride during the marriage ceremony. It is a system of legalized concubinage under protestantism, which throws the shield of protection around man in illicit relations, and like all other forms of woman’s degradation, it reaches back for authority to that religious teaching which proclaims woman to have been created inferior and subordinate to man. Because of woman’s former superior position there, no country but Germany can as fully show the degradation of woman under Christianity. Not from pagan Greece can more vivid illustration of her moral degradation be shown, while pagan Rome shines clear and bright beside the Germanic races of today. While even left-handed marriages among the higher classes are encouraged and protected, yet among the lower orders in Germany the ordinary marriage is cumbered with so many restrictions, as to have become almost an impossibility, and no disgrace or loss of character falls upon the girl of this class who becomes a mother outside of legal prevision, but such motherhood upon the contrary is looked upon as the means of a higher position and greater wages as nurse. As amme in a rich or noble family she becomes a person of arrogance, part of the pomp and show of the house.508

Despite these wrongs of the ages towards woman, of late so vividly presented, we still find both Church and State opposing a free discussion of the question. Within the last decade two northern European countries have strangely exhibited such hostility, the opposition coming upon ground of woman’s surpassing sinfulness.509

But the most notable opposition has been against the works of two eminent literary men. “The Doll’s House”510 by Ibsen, the dramatic poet of Norway, attacking the irresponsible position of the wife under present marriage law, brought about the social ostracism of its author.511 Sweden’s supremely great thinker of the present century, August Strindberg, recently published a work entitled “Giftas” (to marry), which incidentally treated of the influence of religion upon this relation.512 The State authorities at once ordered its confiscation.513 Instead of a Papal Librorum Prohibitorum, it fell under the censure and prohibition of a Protestant State. But no more ready method for increasing its circulation could have been devised; so rapidly was the first edition of four thousand sold that only four hundred fell into the grasp of the censorious government. In order to escape the farther penalty of imprisonment that had been pronounced against him, the author was compelled to temporarily leave the country. But his work was not without effect upon the minds of his countrymen, and upon his return a few months later, a great demonstration in his honor took place. Strindberg defined the rights of woman as those which came to her by nature but of which, through a perverted social order she had been deprived. He declared that woman’s desire for deliverance was the same as man’s restless desire for deliverance. Let us, said he, therefore emancipate man from his prejudice and then woman will certainly be freed. To that end it is necessary to work together as friends not as enemies.

That a work of this moderate character, should fall under the ban of a protestant government, in the last half of the nineteenth century, should be confiscated and its author banished, is a striking proof of the degraded condition of woman in the marriage relation, and of the power still exerted for the continuance of this subjection. Opposition to discussion of this question in Sweden, is more strange in view of the excess of women in the population, as they outnumber the men some 40,000; while of single women over fifteen, there are 259,000. Despite the fact of this excess, impossible to provide for by marriage even were that condition one of equity and equality, all effort towards opening occupations to them, or the avenues of education, still meets with resistance from the church. The only opponent of Mr. Berner’s Bill, 1882, for permitting women to take the first two degrees in the University, those of Arts and Philosophy, was from a clergyman. The bill passed the Odelstling, one of the two Chambers of the Storthing, with only his dissentient voice.514 It received the unanimous vote of the other house, the Sagthing, April 21, becoming a law June 15 of that year.

Russia, which we are accustomed to regard as less than a half civilized country, gives evidence of an early civilization which in the field of morals reached a high place. Samokversof, a Russian author, has made a rich collection relating to pre-historic times, proving that as early as the first centuries of this era, the Slavonians lived in large societies, possessed fortified towns with treasurers of gold and silver, silk, embroidered tissues, iron weapons, ornaments of gold, silver, bronze and bone; while sickles, and the grasses of wheat, oats, and barley found in the graves of South Russia, show this people even to have been devoted to agriculture. The early history of Russia proves that women then held influential positions in the family, in the church, in the state; as was the case under the ancient common law of England, so woman among the ancient Slavs possessed the right of inheritance and the power of dividing such inheritance with her brothers. In the State we find woman’s wisdom at early date still continuing to shape the policy of the Russian empire; to the wise statesmanship of the Czarina Olga is the unchanging plan of that country for the ultimate possession of Constantinople due. Visiting the Patriarch of the East, during the tenth century, she at once perceived the vast importance of Constantinople to the power desiring universal domination; the possession of that city giving control of the Dardanelles, of Asia Minor, and Europe itself. Thenceforth she sought its annexation or seizure and her policy became that of the Russian nation, which for more than eight hundred years has made the ultimate possession of Constantinople the great object of its ambition. Nor has Olga’s statesmanship less influenced the entire European continent, the allied powers constantly struggling to defeat Russia’s aggressive plan, through maintenance of the “sick man” upon his throne.

From the advent of christianity, forced upon the Slav peoples a thousand years since by Vladimir, their baptism taking place by tens of thousands as driven into the rivers and streams mid-deep, priests upon the banks recited the baptism formula, a change was noticeable. As soon as the thorough establishment of the Byzantine church in Russia, which took no inconsiderable period, it being brought about by force rather than free will, its priests, like those of the Western Church, directed their principal efforts towards control of the marriage relation, and, through that, of the family. Nor are we to regard this as strange inasmuch as every form of christianity regards woman as an inferior being, the creator of original sin, rendering the sacrifice of a God necessary in order to re-establish the equilibrium overthrown by her.515 Edmond Noble, in tracing the cause of the present social upheaval in that empire, says:516

Scarcely had the priests of the Greek Church begun their teaching of the new faith when change began to unsettle the position of woman and burden her relationship to the family with a sense of inferiority … her status falling with the natural extension of the ecclesiastical policy. The Russian woman at last became the slave of her Christian husband; as much his chattel as if she had been purchased at market or captured in war.

An examination of history proves that in Christian Russia as in Christian England the husband could release himself from the marriage bond by killing his wife, over whom under christian law he had power of life and death. Her children, as today in Christian England and America, are not under her control; she is to bear children but not to educate them, for, as under Catholic and Protestant Christianity, women are looked upon as a lower order of beings, of an unclean nature. The assertion of Agathes the Sophist that he detected the smell of her whose hands had milked the cow, is more than paralleled under Greek Christianity, woman not even being allowed to kill a fowl under assertion that should she so do the meat would become poisonous. Wife beating enjoined as a religious duty became so common, says Noble, that love was measured by it, “The more whippings the more love.” “The Domstroii,” a household guide, compiled by a dignitary of the Greek Church in time of Ivan the Terrible, counseled use of the rod to keep wives, children, and servants in subjection. By it husbands were given almost unlimited power over wives, who were not even permitted to attend church without the husband’s consent. The prominent ideas regarding woman under Byzantine Christianity have been her uncleanliness, her sinfulness and the small value of her life.517 She is regarded as a being of lower order than man, and as looked upon in a different light by God.

Where marriage is wholly or partly under church control, its very form degrades woman, her promise of obedience not yet having passed away. In the old Covenanter period of Scotland the records give a still more debased form, in which the man as head was declared united to an ignoble part, represented by the woman. But in modern times, both in Catholic and Protestant countries a more decent veil is thrown over this sacrifice of woman than in the Greek Church, where the wife is sometimes delivered to the husband under this formula, “Here wolf, take thy lamb!” and the bridegroom is presented with a whip by his bride giving her a few blows as part of the ceremony, and bidding her draw off his boots as a sign of her subjection to him. With such an entrance ceremony it may well be surmised that the marriage relation permits the most revolting tyranny. And this condition can be directly traced to the period since Christianity was adopted under Vladimir, a thousand years since, as the religion of that nation. The old Slavs recognized the equality of woman in household, political, and religious matters, and not until Byzantine Christianity became incorporated with, and a part of, the civil polity of its rulers, did Russia present such a picture of domestic degradation as it shows today. The chastisement of wives is directly taught as part of the husband’s domestic duty. Until recently, the wife who killed her husband while he was thus punishing her, was buried alive, her head only being left above ground. Many lingered for days before death reached them.

Ivan Panim, a Russian exile, while a student at Harvard College, 1881, made the following statement at a Convention of the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Society:

A short time ago the wife of a well-to-do peasant came to the justice of one of the district courts in Russia and demanded protection from the cruelty of her husband. She proved conclusively by the aid of competent witnesses that he had bound her naked to a stake during the cold weather on the street, and asked the passers-by to strike her; and whenever they refused he struck her himself. He fastened her moreover to the ground, put many stones and weights on her and broke one of her arms. The court declared the husband “not guilty.” “It cannot afford,” it said, “to teach woman to disobey the commands of her husband.”

Mr. Panim declared this to be by no means an extreme or isolated case, and that few became known to the public through the courts or the press. While the above incident illustrates the cruelty of the state towards woman under the Greek form of christianity, others with equal pertinence proved the cruelty of the church.

A peasant in the village of Zelovia Baltic, having reason to doubt the fidelity of his spouse, deliberately harnessed her to a cart in company with a mare – a species of double harness for which the lady was doubtless unprepared when she took the nuptial vow – He then got into the cart in company with a friend, and drove the ill-assorted team some sixteen versts (nearly eleven English miles,) without sparing the whip-cord. When he returned from his excursion he sheared the unlucky woman’s head, tarred and feathered her and turned her out of doors. She naturally sought refuge and consolation from her parish priest; but he sent her back to her lord and master, prescribing further flaggellations. An appeal to justice by the poor woman and her relatives, resulted in a non-suit, and recourse to a higher court will probably terminate in the same manner.

Popular Russian songs allude to woman’s wrongs in the marriage relation. The wife of a son living with his father, is looked upon as an additional animal to be urged to the utmost exertion. She is treated almost like a slave and with less consideration than a horse or cow. Lady Varney,518 gives the chorus of a song in the “Lament of a Young Russian Bride,” which portrays the father-in-law’s part.

CHORUS“Thumping, scolding, never lets his daughter sleep,”“Up you slattern! up you sloven sluggish slut!”

The wife also entreats her husband for mercy.

“Oh husband, only for good cause beat thou thy wife,Not for little things.”“Far away is my father dear, and farther still my mother.”

While demanding marital fidelity from wives, Russian husbands do not bind themselves to the same purity; and aside from wife-beating, the husband’s infidelities form the general subject of songs. Peter the Great, head of the Greek Church, not only beat his Empress Catherine, but while demanding marital fidelity from her, was notorious for his liaisons with women of low rank.519 Women were not counted in the census of Russia until the reign of this monarch. So many “souls” no woman named. So long continued has been this treatment of woman, that the poet Nekrasof says:

Ages have rolled away, the whole face of the earth has brightened; only the somber lot of the Mowguk’s wife God forgets to change.

Man’s opinion of woman is shown in the proverb, “A hen is not a bird, neither is a woman a human being.” Nekrasof makes one of his village heroines say: “God has forgotten the nook where he hid the keys of woman’s emancipation,” which woman’s despair has changed to the proverb “God remembers everything but the Slavonian woman; he has forgotten where he hid the keys of her emancipation.” The system of indulgence is as marked in the Greek as in the Catholic Church, but under slightly different aspects. The worship of saints is an important part of the Byzantine religion. There are two saints, to whom if a person prays as he goes out to commit a crime, however heinous, he takes his pardon with him.520 The present condition of Russian affairs is ascribed by Edmond Noble, to a long felt revolt in the minds of the people, against the social, political and religious system of that country. While the peasant implicitly obeys the czar, regarding his position as divine and all his commands as just, there is an element that recalls the former period of freedom, with intensity of desire for its re-establishment. To this class, permeated as it must be with the spirit of the age, the efforts for constitutional change, and what the world knows as Nihilism, are attributable. It is in reality a mighty protest against that christianity which in destroying political freedom, instituted a monstrous spiritual and material tyranny in its place. Nihilism is not wholly nor even chiefly a form of political change; it has a depth and a power much beyond mere social or governmental change; it looks to an entire overthrow of that religious system which permeates and underlies all moral and political tyranny in Russia.

Class legislation of extreme character is still constantly met in all christian lands. The English Bill of 1887, for extending Parliamentary Franchise to woman, as shown, having as its last clause, “Provided that nothing in this Act contained shall enable women under coverture to be registered or to vote at such elections.” In this Bill, the State recognized the marital subordination of woman, held by law as under her husband’s control not possessing freedom of thought, judgment, or action upon questions of vital importance to herself. Walter Besant declares:

That it is only by searching and poking among unknown pamphlets and forgotten books that one finds out the actual depth of the English savagery of the last century … that for drunkenness, brutality and ignorance the Englishmen of the baser kind, reached the lowest depth ever reached by civilized men … a drunkard, a brawler, a torturer of dumb beasts, a wife-beater, a profligate.

It is not necessary to search “unknown pamphlets and forgotten books,” in order to find out the depths of English or other christian savagery of the present century. Every newspaper report, every court decision, every Act of Parliament or Legislature, every decree of king, or czar, or other potentate; every canon, decree or decision of the church, proclaims the ignorance, brutality and savagery of Christendom. Nor is it among men of the baser kind with their infliction of corporal punishment upon wives, but in the subtler and more refined methods of torture made use of by men of the highest position, that we most truly find out the depths of the savagery of the nineteenth century. Profligacy among men of the highest position never flourished more luxuriantly than at the present time; drunkenness has by no means passed away; wife-beating is still a common amusement; the law still fails to extend a protecting arm around those most needing its defence; the church yet fails to recognize a common humanity in all classes of people. Old traditional customs of thought and action still prevail, and the men of a hundred years hence will look upon the present time with the same criticising astonishment that the historian of today looks upon the last century. Savagery instead of civilization is still the predominant power in christendom. In comparison with the treatment many wives receive in christian lands, that of women among the American Indians, or the most savage races of the old world, is far more humane than shown in England, America and other christian lands, where even maternity does not free woman from the coarsest brutality upon the part of husbands, nor the illness incident upon bringing a new being into the world, from writs of “contempt,” even though the death of mother or babe result. In 1890, the Press of New York City reported the case of Mrs. R. Bassman, who was summoned to appear before the Surrogate Court, for a funeral debt. Being in confinement she was unable to appear. Thereupon an order for her arrest for Contempt of Court was issued, and while still unrecovered from her illness, she was arrested and incarcerated in Ludlow Street jail. Her newly born babe deprived of its mother’s care sickened and died; and this is part of Christian civilization for woman, in nearly the two thousandth year of its existence.

Booth’s “Darkest England”521 relates a somewhat parallel case, parallel in so far as it shows the enslaved condition of the English wife under present christian laws.

A woman who lived just opposite had been cruelly kicked and cursed by her husband, who had finally bolted the door against her, and she had turned to Barbie, as the only hope, Barbie took her in with her rough and ready kindness, got her to bed and was both nurse and doctor for the poor woman till her child was born and laid in the mother’s arms. Not daring to be absent longer she got up as best she could and crawled on hands and knees down the little steep steps, across the street, and back to her own door; … it might have cost the woman her life to be absent from her home more than a couple of hours.

That brutal men exist everywhere, that women and children are in all lands abused, that prize-fighting with its concomitants of broken jaws, noses, heads, takes place in christian lands, are undeniable facts, usually although in defiance of law and subjecting their perpetrators to punishment. But the peculiarity of the cases noted and of ten thousand others, is that they are done under the authority of the law, to a being whom the law seems not bound to protect. No husbands in the world are more brutal than lower-class Englishmen into whose hands the wife is given by law, and he protected by the law in his ill-usage of her. It is Christian law of which complaint is made; it is the effect of Christian civilization, in its treatment of woman, to which attention is called. “Darkest England” furnishes still fuller statements of woman’s degraded condition in that country. In the opening pages of that work it is said: