Woman, Church & State

568

The final vote, excluding women from this conference and submitting the question of their eligibility to the annual conferences, stood: To exclude and submit, 237; against, 198 – making a majority of 39 only of the total vote, while the laymen were so evenly divided that the change of one vote would have tied them. If now the annual conference shall decree by a three-fourths vote of all the ministers present and voting, that women are eligible, and if four years hence the general conference by a two-thirds vote shall ratify that decree, the fair sisters will thereafter have free course in that body. Otherwise they will be tolerated only as mere lookers-on. From the fact, that many who voted to submit the matter to the annual conference did so, not because they wish the women to come in, but merely as the best method of getting rid of a troublesome question for the time being, it looks as though their chances of gaining admittance as delegates four years hence were little better, if any, than in the present instance. —Sunday Herald Syracuse, N.Y. May 13.

569

THE PRIESTHOODNow, too oft the priesthood waitAt the threshold of the state —Waiting for the beck and nodOf its power as law and God. —

From Whittier’s Curse of the Charter Breakers.

570

From “The Woman’s Journal.” Boston.

571

Headed by Mme. Astié de Valsayre.

572

When the temporal kingdom took possession of Italy, the rate of ignorance was 90 per cent. It has now been reduced to 45 per cent.

573

The “Boston Herald,” Aug. 17, 1886, heading an article upon these statutes, “Copper Colored Blue Laws.”

574

A husband is entitled to punish his wife when he sees fit. At first he is to use remonstrances; if these do not avail, he is to have recourse to more severe punishment. The confessor is at first bound not to pay much heed to women complaining of their husbands, because women are habitually inclined to lie.

575

The scene in the convocation was animated, the public at large favoring the women. The senior Proctor being slow in his figuring, one of the “Gods in the Gallery” becoming impatient for the announcement of the numbers, shouted “Call in one of the ladies to help you, sir.”

576

In Egypt, where women received the same education as men, very few children died – a fact noted in the absence of child mummies.

577

“Eve lived 940 years, giving birth to a boy and a girl every year. Eve lived ten years longer than Adam. They must give this first woman the best constitution in the world for while her husband lived 930 years and communicated to his sons for several generations the principle of so long a life (which is no less applicable to Eve than to him), he must have been of very vigorous constitution; turn the thing as you will it will always be an argument from the greater to the less to show that Eve’s body was better constituted than that of her husband.”

578

As the resurrection of a material body to dwell in a spiritual heaven.

579

When a quarter of the human race assume to tell me what I must do, I may be too much disheartened by the circumstance to see clearly the absurdity of this command. This is the condition of women, for whom I have the same compassion that I would have for a prisoner so long cramped in a narrow cage that he could not use his limbs. While many women are thinking their own thoughts there are others without so potent a brain, who have as yet, failed to see the absurdity of allowing others to think for them. For this condition of mental and moral blunders the church is responsible. —Ralph Waldo Emerson.

580

When reading was first taught women in America, said Dr. Clemence S. Lozier, it was opposed on the ground that she would forget her father’s or husband’s name should she learn to read and write. Geography met with like opposition on the ground of its tendency to make her dissatisfied with home and desirous to travel, while the records of history show that the first public examination of women in Geometry, 1829, raised a cry of disapproval over the whole country.

581

There are hard and ugly facts in this Christendom of ours, and its history includes the serfdom and nihilism of Russia, the drudgery of German women; the wrongs of the Irish peasant girl; the 20,000 little English girls sold each year to gratify the lusts of the aristocracy; all the horrors of the Inquisition; all the burnings of the witches; the slavery and polygamy of America and the thousand iniquities all around us; all these belong to the history of Christendom. —The Woman’s Tribune, Clara Colby, editor.

582

This case decided adversely to woman’s right of suffrage by the territorial Supreme Court, was appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States, through the efforts of Mr. A. S. Austin, a young and energetic attorney of Olympia, the state capital; the points raised by Mr. Austin were, First: that the Bloomer case is a collusive one between the original plaintiff and defendants, and is a fraud upon all friends of equal suffrage in the state. Second: that the decision of the Supreme Court of Washington Territory was erroneous in two respects, to wit: that the statute of the territory conferring suffrage was constitutional, and that women are citizens.

583

At a Democratic State Convention, Syracuse, N.Y.

584

This was the case at the Republican nominating convention, Chicago, 1880.

585

The liberty and civilization of the present are nothing else than the fragments of rights which the scaffold and stake have wrung from the strong hands of the usurpers. —Wendell Phillips.