I opened a paper only ten minutes ago in which it was solemnly said, in the fine old style of such arguments, that there was a time when men regarded women as chattels. This is outside the serious possibilities of the human race. Men never could have regarded women as chattels. If a man tried to regard a woman as a chattel his life would not be worth living for twenty-four hours. You might as well say that there was a bad custom of using live tigers as arm-chairs; or that men had outgrown the habit of wearing dangerous snakes instead of watch-chains. It may or may not be the fact that men have sometimes found it necessary to define the non-political position of women by some legal form which called them chattels; just as they have thought it necessary in England to define the necessary authority of the State by the legal form of saying that the King could do no wrong. Whether this is so or not I do not know, and I do not care. But that any living man ever felt like that, that any living man ever felt as if a woman was a piece of furniture, with which he could do what he liked, is starkly incredible. And the whole tradition and the whole literature of mankind is solid against it. There is any amount of literature from the earliest time in praise of woman: calling her a mother, a protectress, a goddess. There is any amount of literature from the earliest time devoted to the abuse of woman, calling her a serpent, a snare, a devil, a consuming fire. But there is no ancient literature whatever, from the Ionians to the Ashantees, which denies her vitality and her power. The woman is always either the cause of a wicked war, like Helen, or she is the end of a great journey, like Penelope. In all the enormous love poetry of the world, it is practically impossible to find more than two or three poems written by a man to a woman which adopt that tone of de haut en bas, that tone as towards a pet animal, which we are now constantly assured has been the historic tone of men towards women. The poems are all on the other note; it is always “Why is the queen so cruel?” “Why is the goddess so cold?”
- The Illustrated London News, 6 April 1907.
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3 comments:
Excellent quote! I'll think I'll use it at my blog. Did you read that conversation with SB about women having the right to property ownership?
I'm glad to see you post again - is school still in session? How are college plans coming along?
I'm sorry to have taken so long in responding! The last day of school was Friday, but we have to go back next week to inventory and clean. I'm so glad to be finished!
I'm going to take the ACT in October, which will give me plenty of time to study higher maths this summer. That's my first college priority.
I heard that you all were thinking about moving...?
Well, of course we've been thinking about moving ever since we moved here since we never intended to settle here, but we are trying to step up the pace a bit. The goal is to whittle the possessions down to what will fit into one extra-large rental moving truck (which will take a miracle, so please pray!), and we've been working pretty hard towards that goal.
We finally had to hire a man to take care of some of the repairs around here because Mike just doesn't have time to get to everything. He's looking for jobs in the Springfield/Bolivar area - we're pretty sure that's where we'll be settling since it's pretty close to my family, has good homeschool laws, lowish land prices, fewer regulations in the counties away from the cities, and a CREC where we already have acquaintances.
However, we're not really noising it about on account of his job here. He's working on a project that he needs to get done some time this summer, and then he'll be free to go.
So it's still very unsure, but a little bit more sure than it was this time last year.
And we've joined a new church - we finally had to leave the ECUSA when they elected that woman as presiding bishop. If our priest at St. Paul's had been the least bit interested in contending for the truth we'd have gladly stayed. In spite of everything we really did love St. Paul's. But he's more of a "why can't we all just get along" kind of guy, and thinks women's ordination is a fine thing, so of course we couldn't stay once we actually had a woman head over us.
Holy Redeemer belongs to the Anglican Church of Virginia - very orthodox, though a little more high church than what we prefer, but nothing's perfect, eh? Reverend Gardener has sheep and goats and has been a wonderful help with a sick kid we've had - I think she would have died if he hadn't brought us some intravenous B-complex for her yesterday afternoon. And more importantly, he and his wife have five children who are all grown and are raising faithful children themselves.
:-)
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