Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 1.djvu/385

Rh is worked out physiologically upon the whole nature of man, reaching every tissue of his body and every faculty of his mind.

It is a law of God, well understood, that whenever and wherever any community forcibly depresses any class of its people below the genera: level, it not only injures and degrades that class, but is itself injured, degraded, and deranged in exact proportion to the wrong it perpetrates. Whenever we crowd any portion of our fellow-beings into an abyss of ignorance and servitude, we are drawn irresistibly, by their weight, to the brink of the same gulf.

If this be the inevitable result of the oppression of an individual, or a class, how much more forcibly must it apply when one-half the world, the "mothers of the living," are made subject to systematic deprivation of rights and tyrannous restriction in the exercise of high and noble faculties.

I do not propose to detail the disabilities under which woman suffers. They have been ably depicted by women in this meeting. But I wish to indicate the breadth and basis of this reform, for the consideration of those people who suppose it to be a fractional and transient movement.

Whatever suffering or degradation woman is subjected to, by the depression of the whole sex below the level of society, reacts with frightful force upon man; who is thus compelled to compensate for the cruel and mistaken policy, which, in all time, has denied to her equal opportunities of education and development, closed to her those avenues to profit and progress open to him, ignored her in the Church and State as feeble and inferior, rejected her counsels, and derided her authority in the creation of those institutions of society to which not only she, but her children are to be subject; although, if there be any induction more striking than another it is this, that a child, who is the offspring of the physical union of man and woman, can only be truly educated and nurtured by institutions springing from the unity of mental and moral elements in the father and mother.

This universal ignoring of the feminine element pervades not only the politics, but the religion of every country on earth. Men worship, as their supreme God, only an embodiment of the masculine element — "Power," whether in Jove or Jehovah; and ever in the Christian Trinity or Unity, the same masculine ideal is maintained. Jesus did, indeed, recognize the feminine element in His emphatic declaration that "God is Love," but His professed followers have "not so learned Him," for they not only declare God to be a triune masculinity, but they have driven woman from the pulpit, and would dispute with her the place at the cross and the sepulchre.

The religions of antiquity permitted woman to be a priestess at the expense of wifehood and maternity, but our Christian Protestantism denies to her the mission of minister, even with that penalty. It is true the Catholic Church does recognize women among its divinities. and it might be a curious and instructive inquiry, how far that Church owes its perpetuity, despite its gigantic crimes and crushing despotism, to the recognition of "Mary the mother of God." In its effort to perpetuate the servitude of woman, as in other attempts to defend oppression and