Woman, Church, and State
789
of holy things by the mere fact of her coming into existence. What irony of all that is called holy!
It is because the Church has taught that woman was created solely for man, that in tearing asunder a recent will in New York, it was proven that the husband, indebted though he was to his wife for the beginning of his vast fortune, incarcerated her while sane in a lunatic asylum, because she objected to his practical polygamy by his introduction of a mistress into the family.
Political despotism has now its strongest hold in the theory of woman's created subordination. Woman has been legislated for as a class, and not as a human being upon a basis of equality with man, but as an inferior to whom a different code was applicable.
Our recent Secretary of State, William M. Evarts, when counsel in the Beecher-Tilton trial, defined woman's legal and theological position as that of subordination to man, declaring that notwithstanding changing customs and the amenities of modern life, women were not free, but were held in the hollow of man's hand, to be crushed at his will.
Then Mr. Evarts read from various legal authorities instances and opinions bearing upon the subjugation of weak wives by strong husbands, the gist of them being that confessions of guilt obtained by such husbands from such wives are not entitled to great weight. He continued:
RECOGNIZING THE PRINCIPLES OF MARRIAGE.
This institution of marriage, framed in our nature, built up in our civilization, studied, contemplated, understood by the jurisprudence of ages, is a solid and real institution, and for its great benefits, and as a necessary part of them, it carries not only the fact of the wife's subordination to the husband, but of the merciful interpretation of that subordination
[1] which sensible, instructed men ever accord in practical life, and which the judges pronounce from the bench, and the juries confirm by their verdicts. Now, gentlemen, you may think that is our advanced civilization, when so much of independence is assumed for women, and such entire equality is accorded to them in feeling and in sentiment by their husbands and by the world, that the old rule of the common law interpreting this institution of marriage, by which a wife was never held responsible to the law, or subject to punishment for any crime committed in the presence or under the influence of her husband, was one of those traits of human nature belonging to ruder ages and to past times; but, gentlemen, in our own Court of Appeals, and in the highest tribunals of England,
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- ↑ The legal subordination of one sex to another is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement; it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality, admitting no powers or privileges on the one side or disability on the other.—Subjection of Woman, John Stuart Mill.
