Woman, Church & State. Gage Matilda Joslyn

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СКАЧАТЬ in one breath assailed by the most opprobrious names,239 and in the next he was congratulated upon the honor to be done him in that perchance his oldest child would be the son of a baron.240 So great finally became the reproach and infamy connected with the droit de cuissage, as this right was generally called in France,241 and so recalcitrant became the peasants over its nefarious exactions, that ultimately both lords spiritual and lords temporal fearing for their own safety, commenced to lessen their demands.242 This custom had its origin at the time the great body of the people were slaves bound either to the person or land of some lord. At this period personal rights no more existed for the lower classes than for the blacks of our own country during the time of slavery. Under feudalism, the property, family ties, and even the lives of the serfs were under control of the suzerain. It was a system of slavery without the name; the right of the lord to all first fruits was universally admitted;243 the best in possession of the serf, by feudal custom belonged to the lord. The feudal period was especially notable for the wrongs of women. War, the pastime of nobles and kings, brought an immense number of men into enforced idleness. Its rapine and carnage were regarded as occupations superior to the tillage of the soil or the arts of peace. Large numbers of men, retainers of every kind, hung about the castle dependent upon its lord, obedient to his commands.244 At an age when books were few and reading an accomplishment of still greater rarity, these men, apart from their families, or totally unbound by marriage, were in readiness for the grossest amusement. At an age when human life was valueless, and suffering of every kind was disregarded, we can readily surmise the fate likely to overtake unprotected peasant women. They were constantly ridiculed and insulted; deeds of violence were common and passed unreproved. For a woman of this class to be self-respecting was to become a target for the vilest abuse. Morality was scoffed at; to drag the wives and daughters of villeins and serfs into the mire of lechery was deemed a proper retribution for their attempted pure lives; they possessed no rights of person or morality against the feudal lord and his wild retainers. All christian Europe was plunged into the grossest morality.245 A mistress was looked upon as a necessary part of a monarch’s state.246 Popes, cardinals, and priests of lesser degrees, down to the present century, still continued the unsavory reputation of their predecessors;247 “nephews,” “nieces,” and “sacrilegious” children are yet supported by the revenues of the Church, or left to poverty, starvation and crime. It was long the custom of christian municipalities to welcome visiting kings by deputations of naked women,248 and as late as the eighteenth century, a mistress whose support was drawn from the revenues of the kingdom, was recognized as part of the pageantry of the kingdom.

      The heads of the Greek and Protestant Churches, no less than of the Catholic, appear before the world as men of scandalous lives. The history of the popes is familiar to all students. No less is that of the English Eighth Henry, the real father of the Reformation, in England, and founder of the Anglican Church, whose adulteries and murders make him a historic Blue Beard. The heads of the Greek Church figure in a double sense as fathers of their people. The renowned Peter the Great amused himself by numberless liaisons, filling Russia with descendants whose inherited tendencies are those of discontent and turmoil. When he visited the Court of Prussia, 1717, he was accompanied by his czarina, son, daughter, and four hundred ladies in waiting, women of low condition, each of whom carried an elegantly dressed infant upon her arms. If asked in regard to the paternity of the child they invariably replied “my lord has done me the honor to make me its mother.”249

      In no country has a temporal monarch under guise of a spiritual ruler been more revered than in Russia. Even amidst nihilism a belief that the czar can do no wrong is the prevailing conviction among the Slavic peoples. This is both a great cause of, and a result of Russian degradation. If we except the proportionately few liberal thinkers, that conviction is as strong as it was in the time of Ivan the Terrible. In no civilized or half-civilized nation is ignorance as dense as among the peasantry of that vast empire embracing one-sixth of the habitable globe. Nor to the czar alone was such disregard of woman’s right of person confined. The system of serfdom which existed until within the last half of the present century, was a system of feudalism in its oppression of women, although if possible even more gross. The sale of young peasant girls regularly took place, and the blood of the nobility of that country runs in the veins of its most degraded and ignorant population.250 Although Italy the seat of the papal power is noted for the ignorance, squalor, and superstition of its people, we no less find such a condition of affairs existing in Russia. Amid the starvation of its people, accompanied by “hunger-typhus,” that form of disease which in the Irish famine of 1848 was known as “ship-fever,” the peasants will not accept aid from Count Tolstoi, whom they have been taught to regard as Anti-Christ, fearing that by so doing they will condemn themselves to eternal torment.251 While the peasantry are thus suffering wrongs of every nature, the priesthood and churches are as thriving as before.

      Having shown the results of power in the hands of a controlling class, upon women of low degree in both the Catholic and Greek divisions of christendom, we have but to look at our own country to find like condition under Protestantism. The state of the slave women of the South was that of serfs of the body under feudalism, or of the serf peasant women of Russia. Nor is other proof of this statement required than the hue of this race, no longer spoken of as the blacks, but as colored people. Let the condition of woman as to her rights of person, under the three great divisions of Christianity, be answer to all who without examination of history, or the customs of ancient and modern times, and with eyes closed to these most patent facts, so falsely assert that woman has been elevated by christianity, and is now holding a position never before in the world accorded her. But what has already been shown of her degradation under christian teachings and laws is but a small portion of the wrongs woman has suffered during the christian centuries.

      Under theory of the divine rights of man, society has everywhere been permeated with disregard for woman’s rights of person. Monarchs not posing as spiritual heads of their people have yet equally made use of their place and power for woman’s degradation, and an indefinite fatherhood outside of marriage. Augustus of Saxony, King of Poland, is chiefly renowned in history as the father of three hundred illegitimate children.252 Of Charles II not alone King of England, but also head of the Anglican Church, one of his subjects declared him to be the father of many of his people in the literal as well as in the spiritual sense. Four English dukes of the present day trace their lineage to this monarch, who left no legitimate descendants.253

      H.R.H. the present heir-apparent to the English throne bears an equally unsavory record.254 To him and his aristocratic companions in guilt is due the support and protection of England’s notorious and infamous purchase and sale, outrage, and exploitation of helpless young girls. An English clergyman writing the New York Sun, at the time of the disclosures made by the Pall Mall Gazette, declared he had in his possession a list of the names of the royal princes, dukes, nobles, and leading men who had been the principal patrons and supporters of the “gilded hells” devoted to the ruin of the merest children, girls from the ages of nine to thirteen.255 The reputation of the male members of the Hanoverian dynasty has ever been bad. Trace as you will the path of either ecclesiastical or temporal rulers claiming authority by “divine right,” and you will find the way marked with the remains of women and children whose life has been wrecked by man under plea of created superiority. While Italy within the last forty years has escaped from the temporal control of the pope, its kings have no less copied СКАЧАТЬ