The Complete History of Women's Suffrage – All 6 Volumes in One Edition (Illustrated Edition). Elizabeth Cady Stanton
denies woman's right of free speech. The priesthood, from Paul down, say gravely: "It is not permitted for woman to speak in the churches." Some denominations have gravely debated whether she should be allowed in the service, or chants, to respond Amen!
The whole arrangement of Nature in her beautiful and wise manifestations to us evinces that the Divine order is for the sexes to mingle their different and peculiar characteristics in every relation of life. In Jesus the masculine and feminine elements of humanity were blended harmoniously. These different characteristics in His own person were distinctly and plainly seen. The masculine, when He fixed His eye in stern rebuke, and made the hypocrite and the Pharisee tremble; and the feminine gleamed often through His tears of affection and pity, and shone ever a glorious halo of patience and love around Him in the midst of suffering the most wasting and intense. The Church, as His Representative, should also exhibit these peculiarities in as full and glorious harmony.
Yet very few of the sects allow woman to assume the responsibility as religious teacher. However great she may feel the duty to be upon her, and however well qualified she may be, all ecclesiastical authorities, with one accord, begin to make excuses whenever a woman presents herself to be properly authorized, according to the popular usage of that Church, to preach the Gospel to a people, one-half of whom are her own sex.
Again, woman is denied a representation in all Ecclesiastical Assemblies.
The male portion of the Church assemble in delegation from the different bodies with which they are connected to legislate in behalf of the churches, but woman has no representation in these councils. Her opinion of what is best to promote the interests of religion is not respected; her right to representation being denied, her claim to just recognition is solemnly mocked. The Church places its hands on woman's lips, and says to her, "You shall not speak; you shall not be represented; you are not eligible to office because you are a woman!" Is not this crucifying with a strange presumption the soul of Christ?—treating with contempt the purity of the Christian character?—trampling upon Human Rights? And yet woman patiently bears this contumely and scorn. The poor young men that she often educates by toil early and late, labor, arduous and half paid, teach her, when properly prepared, that this absurd tyranny is supported by the word of God!
Woman may speak when the thoughtless crowd the halls of fashion, with no aim but amusement, in the theatre, opera, or concert hall; she may meet with ministers in revivals, camp meetings, and sociables, and reply with smile and bow to the hollow compliments addressed to her vanity, but she must keep silence in the churches and all religious meetings; if there are only six persons present woman may not ask God's blessing to rest there, nor presume, should one man be present, to give utterance to her religious aspiration.
Every class of society, and especially each sex, need religious teachers of their own class and sex with themselves, having the same experience, the same hopes, aims, and relations. Human minds are so constituted as to need not merely intellectual instruction, but the strength imparted by an earnest sympathy born of a like experience. In order rightly to appreciate the wants of others, we must know and realize the trials of their situation, the struggles they may encounter, the burthens, the toils, the temptations that beset their different relations. These should be apprehended to some extent, and the more the better by the person qualified to speak to the spiritual wants of all. Each relation, therefore, needs its teacher—its peculiar ministry. No one can demonstrate by college lore the weight of a mother's responsibility.
No man—not even the kindest father—can fully apprehend the wearisome cares and anxious solicitude for children of her who bore them. The tremblings of a mother's soul none save a mother can feel. Man may prepare sound and logical discourses; he may clearly define a mother's duty; he may talk eloquently about her responsibility; he may urge upon her strong motives to faithfulness in the discharge of her maternal duties; he may tell her what her children should be in all life's varied aspects. She hears the good instruction and advice with more or less of the feeling, "You cannot know of what you are talking."....
The Church needs a varied ministry. Not alone is the power of mind needed, but the zeal and the inspiration of the inner life; the unction of love and faith and courage produced by a struggle amid life's realities. Not the dreamer, but the toiler can best affect the lives of others through their hearts. In this ministry the sexes must blend harmoniously their ministrations to others from their own lives and experiences. This must be the Divine order. Reason teaches it to the calm observer. Our souls respond to this truth from their deepest chambers.
... Doom woman no longer to banishment from the hallowed ground of Church and State. She has too long been but as the Pariah of the desert. Welcome her ministrations reverently to her human nature, kindly to her present weakness, encouragingly to her hopes; receive her counsels with respect and confidence, so far as they are worthy, and be assured that a better day will begin to dawn. The birth of a new spiritual life will be given in this new marriage, and melody as from the harps of angels will be breathed from the circles of earth.
Paulina Wright Davis: ... We commence life where our fathers left it. We have their mistakes and their achievements. We attempt to walk in the paths they trod, and wear the garments left by them; but they are all too short and narrow for us; they deform and cramp our energies; for they demand the Procrustean process to conform the enlarged natures of the present to the past. While the human soul, like the infinite in wisdom and love, is ever governed by the eternal law of progress, creeds and codes are always changing. All things founded in immutable truth grow only the stronger by every trial.
... The sacred traditions of both Jew and Gentile agree in ascribing to woman a primary agency in the introduction of human evils. In the Greek Mythology, she is indeed not the first offender; but she is the bearer of the box that contained all the crimes and diseases which have punished our world for the abuse of liberty. It is worthy of remark that Pandora, who is the Eve of the Grecian system, being like her Hebrew correspondent, created for special purposes, was the joint work of all the gods. Venus gave her beauty, Minerva wisdom, Apollo the art of music, Mercury eloquence, and the rest the perfection and completeness of all her divine accomplishments. Her name signifies gifts from all.
"A combination and a form Indeed
Where every god did seem to set his seal,
To give the world assurance of a paragon."
Prometheus made the first man of clay and animated him with fire stolen from Heaven. Jupiter is represented as attaching the terrible consequences of a rational and responsible vitality, thus conferred upon a creation of earth, by sending this wonderfully gifted Pandora into the world loaded with all the evils which it was fated to endure. It was her destiny to be the occasion of the fall, the instrument of doom; but her fortunes are linked to the resurrection and life, as well as the suffering and death of the race. Among the gifts of Pandora which had otherwise been fatal, she brought hope which lay concealed after all the others had flown abroad on their missions of mischief. In our Sacred Story this point in the parable has a clear explanation: "The seed of the woman shall bruise the serpent's head." If she brought death into the world, she brought forth a Son who "taketh away the sins of the world.".... These myths, whether received as simple facts, or poetic fiction, whose oracles always reveal the deepest signification of facts, alike indicate the eminent agency of woman in the fall and rising again of the human image of the divine upon earth.
... From the marriage hour woman is presented only in a series of dissolving views. First. She stands beside her husband radiant in girlish beauty. She worships. One side of the lesson is well learned, that of entire dependence. Not once has she dreamed that there must be mutual dependence and separate fountains of reciprocal life.... In the next scene the child wife appears withering away from life as from the heart she is not large or noble enough to fill—pining in the darkness of her home-life, made only the deeper by her inactivity, ignorance, and despair.... In another view she has passed the season of despair, and appears as the heartless votary of fashion, a flirt, or that most to be dreaded, most to be despised being, a married coquette; at once seductive, heartless, and basely unprincipled; or as beauty of person has faded away, she may be found turning from these lighter styles of toys to a quiet kind of hand-maiden piety and philanthropy.
... Marriage