Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 1.djvu/386

366 falsehood, society has suborned the handmaids of progress, Religion and Science, to justify its wickedness; the one to prove inferiority from her organism, the other to add the weight of its anathema against any effort at equality.

But Nature vindicates herself against the first, by presenting De Staël, Margaret Fuller, and others; and to the cavilling bigot it may be said that whoever declared that "man is the head of the woman," if he designed to justify the present interpretation of that expression, has forfeited all claim to the apostleship of a religion whose highest merit it is to equalize the people by elevating the oppressed. But Paul taught no such doctrine.

The result of all this circumscription of woman has been to enfeeble and misdirect her faculties, to weaken the influence of her nature upon society and especially upon her offspring. Driven from the thousand avenues to wealth and position open to man, denied access to the best institutions of learning, permitted to acquire only superficial accomplishments, she is ushered into society at an age when her brothers are preparing to enter colleges and halls of learning from which she is excluded, and thus undeveloped and comparatively helpless, her instincts vitiated and no freedom for her affinities, she is turned adrift to encounter obstacles for which she is unprepared, and in the severe conflict to barter her honor for subsistence; or if she escape that horrible contingency, to exchange her beauty or her services for a matrimonial establishment, and thus prepare to perpetuate human degeneracy.

There are many exceptions to this statement, but the statement is the rule. From these unequal and discordant relations, and the feeble and restricted influence of the mother, spring generations of children who are born constitutionally defective in the feminine qualities of gentleness, purity, and love; and the utter rejection of that element in the societary arrangements under which they grow to manhood, aggravates their inherited tendencies, until whole nations of warriors founding governments of blood have filled the earth, and war and rapine have not only become the occupation and the pastime of man, but have grown into his religion and become incarnate in the Deities he worships.

It is thus that the seeds of violence and vice are sown with the germs of the generations, and they spring to a frightful harvest in each succeeding growth of the race. Millions of human beings issue into life, pre-ordained — not in the theological, but in the physiological sense — to violence and crime, and they go forth to make their calling and election sure. From these the world recruits its armies, renews its tyrants, refills its slave-pens and its brothels, populates its prisons, alms-houses, and asylums. It is in vain to hope for other results while woman, upon whom, as "mother of the living," depends the progress of man, is denied any other than a limited and indirect influence in the fabric of society.

We may abolish slavery, remove intemperance, banish war and licentiousness, but they will have frightful reproduction in the elemental discord of our natures; for that which is "in us will be revealed." Man indicates his condition by the institutions he creates; they are the issues of the life he lives at the time, the outward sign of his inward state.