Kitabı oku: «The Arena. Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891», sayfa 6
THE WOMAN MOVEMENT
BY LUCINDA B. CHANDLER
The woman movement is a world-wide fact. An agitation which has gathered impetus and strength during more than forty years is a significant phenomenon in the realm of mind and of social progress.
Since, in 1848, the rebellion of Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, at the humiliating position accorded them as delegates to an international convention in London, England, led them to inaugurate the “woman’s rights” movement in this country, at Seneca Falls, New York, the growth of this “mustard seed” of truth has become a “great tree” whose branches overshadow continents, and the thought and active moral forces of nations “dwell in the branches thereof.”
If not from “Greenland’s icy mountains,” at least from the boundaries of the United States and British America to “India’s coral strand,” the onsweeping wave of woman’s elevation is steadily advancing.
Ramabai in India seeking the deliverance of the child widow, who has no earthly existence, nor any hope of one beyond mortal life except as a wife, and who, as a widow, is but an outcast, this woman missionary from the opposite side of the globe has clasped hands and is in heart-fellowship with her American sisters who are still seeking the enlargement of woman’s freedom and opportunities in this favored country.
It was a logical position that besieged the ballot as the first agency of deliverance in our land. The suffrage is, under our form of government and constitutional rights, the badge of equality.
Everywhere, in Church and State, woman was discriminated against, and the distinguishing disability imposed upon her by law and custom was her suppressed opinion and will in the administration of affairs.
In the church she might contribute her labor, carry forward enterprises to pay the minister’s salary, furnish the edifice, support social movements that would tend to increase membership, and sustain the religious services; but, were she a machine, minus brains, choice, or will, she could be no more completely a nonentity when the pastor was to be chosen, the amount of his salary fixed, or any matters of finance or administration decided upon.
The acceptance of her work for its support was the only recognition of her individuality, or her common share in the institution. She was cudgelled with Paul in the Church and with her inability to fight by the State.
Muscular force having been, and still widely held to be, the bulwark of civilization, and submission to the authority of man socially and ecclesiastically the measure of her religious excellence, at least of the excellence of the wifely portion of womanhood, woman has been a cipher at the left-hand side of the unit man in both civil and religious institutions.
But the evolution of brains, which is nature’s method of human development, has unsettled this standard of civilization and the relation of the sexes. The woman who thinks has come, and the struggle is no longer one of muscle, nor can it ever again become so.
The woman of the future can no more be remanded to the merely patient plodder in kitchen and nursery, with no horizon but the cook-stove and cradle illuminated by the weekly church service, than the lightning printing-press of to-day can be remanded to the clumsy instrument of a century ago, or the electric light to the tallow dip.
If the demand of woman for equal opportunity to win all the prizes of life, and to control her special function, involving the most serious and sacred responsibilities to the race, and the necessity of her own growth and advancement,—if this new demand is one that is not worthy the consent and co-operation of men and institutions, the mistake was fatal which permitted her to learn the alphabet.
This mistake, if mistake it was, has extended its mighty influence in widening circles through the past three centuries. Francois Saintonge, a young widow of France, toward the close of the sixteenth century, obtained the consent of her father to teach some girls to read if she would give her lessons at five o’clock in the morning. Without bed, bread, or fire, she and her five pupils stayed the first night in the house for which the only fifty pounds she possessed were paid. Simultaneously a young girl in Italy made an effort to set in motion the brain cells of the girls of her country by giving them a chance to learn the alphabet.
The heroic courage of women in striving to attain the weapons of intelligence affords evidence of the invincible proceeding of evolution inherent in the constitution of humanity.
The woman movement is demonstration of the power of thought beyond the power of muscle; it is evidence that the intangible forces of mind are superior to the external material powers of muscle, and sword, and bullet. It is reassuring to forecast that, spite of the present inefficacy, or but very limited success of woman’s protest against barbarous laws and usages, and the destructive errors and vices of the degree of civilization we have reached, the protest is a prophecy that the moral elevation of the race is to be the result of woman’s increased intelligence and equipment, and of her ascent to the full proportions of womanhood.
As a builder of material structures and enterprises, man is a superb success. The bridge, the triumphs of architecture, the steam engine, the almost intelligent machine are marvellous manifestations of inventive genius, and of the uses of muscle.
But the statistics of social progress in morals do not bear testimony to masculine superiority as builder of the higher humanity. A man has elaborated “The New Education,” but he allowed, without stint, that the moral elevation aimed at cannot be achieved except by the equal opportunity and co-operation of woman.
In the administration of affairs and the institution of government man is not a success. His first resort and last reliance is upon force. Harmony, and justice, and fraternity, and purity, and honesty cannot be brought into human society by fighting, nor evolved by the methods of force. Neither the ballot nor the bullet, the legislature nor the policeman, can make people honest or morally upright and sound.
The promotion of individual integrity, honesty, benevolence, and purity are the great requirements of humanity and of civilization. The infusion of the gentler, more persuasive influences and methods of feminine nature, and the higher quality and freedom of motherhood, are the only possible means of advancing the race to the altitude which the best specimens prefigure as the possibility of all.
The laws of Christendom and the usages of all civilizations are based upon the idea of the superiority and supremacy of masculine quality and of force. Upon the supposition that the husband is the bread winner and provider, he is virtually in law and actually in fact as effectually the owner of his wife and children as though he had bought them for a sum, as is still the custom among some primitive peoples on the planet.
In the Orient the idea that woman possesses a soul is rejected with contempt. But in the more spiritualized Occident where she is considered to be the possessor of a soul, she is by law, and oftentimes by usage, not allowed to be possessor of her body.
Christianity in its inception and in its primitive purity accomplished for woman the dignity of being possessor of a soul. She is still, even in the most degenerate churchianity, counted responsible as a soul, and accorded equal hope of redemption and of future equal standing in another stage of existence.
But this fact, too, has bred in woman rebellion against the estimate of her inferiority still held in the Church by many of the priestly order, and actualized in the majority of Protestant denominations, and universally in the Roman Catholic Church, by her exclusion from equal powers and opportunities in its administration and equal positions of honor and influence.
Having learned the alphabet woman has also learned to interpret Scripture, and having read the New Testament, she knows that her adorable Saviour left no theological system, creed, nor sanction of the supremacy and dominion of male over female.
The woman movement is setting the perception of mind feminine over against the conceptions and speculations, the theological systems and interpretations, of the mind masculine, in the realm of the religious quality of human nature.
It is on this ground that a higher standpoint for human progress is to be achieved. Woman is becoming the possessor of her brains and of an equipment that will facilitate her use of them. When through generations of experience she has fully learned her true position in the order of the universe and of human unfoldment, a new created world of humanity will blossom on this old earth.
Man is normally the builder in the material realm. It is his to press the more tangible elements and forces into the service of man’s material and intellectual needs, and to master and subdue the earth. It is woman’s to become builder in the spiritual realm of the higher nature. It is woman’s first’ to give bias to the brain cells and soul impulses of ante-natal and post-natal infantile life. It is woman’s, the normal mother and teacher, to look, and feel, and speak into impressible child life, the fine ennobling sentiments, the solid truths of social relations, the sterling principles of rightness, and honor, and honesty, and fraternal love.
This trained experience and exercise of motherhood is a precious wealth that the race needs to carry it on and up toward its perfectness.
All that was pronounced “good,” in man, in “the beginning” is innate in human nature. Social life and social relations are the life school in which this “good”-ness can be educed, strengthened, matured, in the individual.
Woman is not only the creative agency for building bodies, but the perfecting agency to build character, and to gestate and bring to birth the higher nature in humanity. Woman is man’s mother spiritually as well as physically. He is to be born into his spiritual life through the divine feminine, as he has been born into the physical life through the natural (or physical) feminine.
It is to this end that evolution is in every direction placing woman to-day in the foreground and quickening her to make new demands upon the resources of intelligence and moral power.
Having furnished to the child the “three R’s,” manual training, industrial habits, and quickening the higher sentiments with a solid foundation of principles of right conduct and pure habits, are more important to the advancement of the human race than literary researches, languages, or higher mathematics. To know the physiological and psychological processes of embryotic growth, and the possible influences of motherhood over the coming child, and how to neutralize poor heredity, would achieve more for race elevation than the combined wisdom of schools and pulpits minus these.
There would be no need of laws for the suppression of vicious literature, were all mothers faithful and capable of pre-empting the plastic mind and imagination of childhood by intelligent explanations and true statements concerning the origin of life, and the vital purities and sanctities that can save every child from demoralization and debauchery. The boy who has been blest with a wise conscientious motherhood is not the boy to dwell in secret on lascivious thoughts and vile communications, nor will he be led away by vicious associations.
The true place of woman in the order of all things, is a link between the material and spiritual, especially in her creative function.
Woman is more intuitive. She sees, seizes upon, grasps, where man toils to question, investigate, prove, demonstrate. She is touched by the secret springs of life, and vibrates in response, like the Æolian harp.
“When men are as good as their obituaries, and when women are as good as men think they are, the recording angel in heaven can take his long needed vacation.”
The woman movement indicates that women ought to have an opportunity to become “as good as men think they are.” It is impossible that men shall hold a higher ideal of woman than it is possible for woman to become. But first she must be free. Free to think, act, live, study, experiment, exercise judgment, assume and be held to responsibilities. She does not need man’s protection except that he shall protect her from himself, i. e., protect her from the invasion and intrusion of his wishes, opinion, and will, his dictation and demand.
Equality before the law is a right principle and therefore should obtain, especially under our Constitution. But what woman needs is personal freedom to be the most womanly woman.
Under legal disability, marital subjection, and ecclesiastically assigned inferiority, woman has been bred to servility in mind and morals. She does not need training in the tricks of caucus and wire-pulling politics, but she does need freedom and choice of action that will give her the powers of her own mind and nature in full possession, as a woman.
She does not need that men shall instruct her what a woman ought to be, but she needs to be let alone to find out for herself this precious and important knowledge.
It is not an incident or an accident that the agitation of woman’s advancement and the agitation of industrial reform are simultaneous movements. The priority of woman’s demand for equal rights before the law in this country, has placed woman in literature, on the platform, in the press, and even in the political field of action, in the position of co-worker with man to achieve the highest outcome and greatest blessing of civilization, the right of every person to an opportunity to achieve subsistence, and the right of every worker to the full reward of his labor.
Already in Kaweah Colony in California, woman is an equal participator in the administration of affairs. She has equal opportunity to achieve subsistence and equal pay for her labor.
The star of equity, justice, and fraternity, is shining in the west. When the fraternal order of society is established, woman as mother will be, in her training and her conception of her high office, and in the position and advantage provided for her, exalted as the artist of humanity.
She will be so furnished mentally, and so provided for materially, that she can furnish to her babes what no textbooks, or Scripture, or statutes can convey to them. The mother who can recite to her children the songs of the American poets, the character of Dickens, and Eliot, and Scott, who can portray the noble characters of Lincoln and Lucretia Mott, who is able to devote the time required to entertain her children, will become the most effective moral educator.
The woman of the good time coming will not hold lightly the moral education of labor, for she will learn that many solid virtues are carved into the beautiful character by the blessed exercise that manual industry and regular duties alone can furnish.
But she will have leisure also to cultivate the finer sentiments, and paint for the admiration of her babes the grand ideals of noble manhood and womanhood.
Two problems belong to the woman question in the not remote future.
First, the industrial and financial independence of woman.
She must have this to acquire the dignity and moral strength of self-support, and that wifehood and motherhood shall be assumed by her solely according to the dictates of her heart, and the sanction of her best judgment. Second, the financial independence of motherhood, without a bread-winning occupation, that her time, energies, and talents may be devoted to the careful training and moral and religious education of her children.
The opportunities for single women to achieve subsistence in the realm of intellectual and sedentary occupations especially, are increasing. But co-operative housekeeping of some kind is the only hope for mothers to be saved from overwork and worry, and to have leisure for the proper training and entertaining of their children.
The provision in Kaweah Colony for the maintenance and education of orphan children, or of children whose parents are disabled by sickness or calamity, is another feature that is commendable in its wisdom and justice.
The paternal and maternal community of voluntary co-operators is the brightest dream of human association we can imagine.
If woman is to become the wise, sensible, self-helpful, cultured mother, with proper opportunity to exercise maternal function for the highest good of the future child, and without being herself dragged into a spiritless machine, we must have her fortified, not only by a “higher education,” but a better home environment.
The woman question involves and forecasts a higher social order, industrial evolution, economic adjustment, moral advancement, and the adoption of the “New Education,” which will develop and cultivate in harmony all the powers and talents belonging to the threefold nature of humanity.
NEW TESTAMENT SYMBOLISMS
BY PROF. S. P. WAIT
Although the many doctrines built up about the personality of Jesus attribute to him in some peculiar sense the relation of sonship with God, he does not so say of himself, but by every word and work declares a common spiritual fatherhood and human brotherhood. When Nicodemus testified to his superior power, Jesus did not trace its origin to a special interposition of Providence in his birth or life, but he made of general application the law that governed his conception by the emphatic assertion that all men must realize themselves as begotten and born from above before they can understand the forces of the unseen universe within and without. He affirmed the kingdom of God and of heaven to be latent in the life of man, and promised no peace for the soul here or hereafter until its innate capabilities for wisdom, love, and power for good are developed and exercised. His precepts and example would be foolishness and a stumbling-block, his character an unattainable ideal, were it other than the first fruit ripened on the tree of life, the promise of a perfected race.
We only apprehend its vital value, as we can trace in our own experience and that of others, the growth and fruition of that seed-principle of Truth around which the New Testament story has been crystallized. This re-conception of the Christ is, like the first one, essentially of the soul and intrinsically immaculate. It then matters little when or by whom the Gospels and Epistles were originally written; for the book as a whole is lifted forever above the level of legend and myth, on the one hand, and that of a merely historical narrative on the other, because the persons and events mentioned and described represent laws and principles permanent in operation, and reveal faculties whose reality and value we are daily called upon to demonstrate. We can, when we so will it, verify, each in his own subjective consciousness, all that the wondrous story of nineteen centuries ago relates as having taken place in the outward objective world of form and phenomena. For unto every “excellent Theophilus,” every lover of the good and true, the gospel of the Christ is, through the conscience, reconveyed, even as delivered by those who from the first have been its messengers.
The faith of Abraham and law of Moses, the line of patriarch, priest, and prophet, that linked the life of Jesus with that of primitive man, we find repictured in the working of those evolutionary forces that constitute each one of us an epitome of the past, a miniature of society. As children of earth we give due credit to each factor in heredity and environment that makes us what we are as we pass through planes of physical, intellectual, and moral development. But a still higher kingdom of consciousness is at hand, which forces us to feel that as brethren of the Son of Man we are also sons of God.
In every wilderness of human life that stands instead of the oncoming paradise, a voice of preparation loudly calls. It is the self-same cry which of old the Baptist first sent forth, and which the Nazarene with emphasis took up. This watchword, Repent ye, repent ye! means, as metanoia always meant, newness and rightness of thought, and consequently a thorough and abiding betterment of motive, character, disposition and habit, in every department and relation of individual and social human life. To effect this transformation from ignorance to knowledge, from selfishness to its opposite, is eternally the mission of that principle of truth personified as Jesus. We recognize its saving power only as it is set up within us as a rule of thought and action. When we pattern after it, we then realize all sin to be just what the Hebrew chattah and the Greek amartia indicate, i. e., a missing of the mark, a lack of conformity to type, the type being man finished in his creation, harmoniously developed, physically, intellectually, morally, spiritually. And we learn that sins are not forgiven by the setting aside of any law, or the amelioration of the consequences of the violation of law, knowingly, or unknowingly; but by the ordination in the nature of things of those agencies that tend, even though it be through the penalty of pain, to bring us to the knowledge of, and obedience to, every law written in the body and mind of man and governing his environment seen or unseen. Sin is incompletion, immaturity, unwholeness, ignorance, as well as the violation of some understood and accepted moral code. As the green fruit on the tree is forgiven for its unripeness by the baptism of sunlight, moisture, and all other forces needed to mature it, so man forgives and is forgiven by the impartation of strength where weakness is in body or in mind, by the diffusion of science to take the place of superstition, and by every other sure though slow, as we count time, redemptive evolutionary trend. The only sin unpardonable in this æon or the next is non-receptivity to the spirit that in every age impels to righteousness. So long as man keeps his eyes closed, he cannot be forgiven for being in a state of darkness. But it is an utterly unthinkable as well as unscriptural idea that there be any so perverse as to refuse throughout an endless time, to look upon the glory of a world of light and color, when by opening the windows of the soul they can exchange their trouble and unrest for peace that will not pass away.
As for the babe of Bethlehem there was no other birthplace than a manger, so when the universal Christ is cradled in our souls, its resting place is in the midst of a well-nurtured animalism. The Herod of a ruling selfishness seeks to obliterate the loftier ideal. But while he summons all his strength to prevent the embodiment of the new thought, there are other faculties that perceive the star of promise and follow it as a harbinger of truth.
The years of Jesus’ life of which we have no record, save the one instance of his questioning and answering the wise ones in the temple, represent the time of preparation, discipline, study, culture, contemplation, necessary to fit us to give to others the benefit of our experience and attainment. For no one can lift another to a higher round of the ladder of life than that upon which he stands himself.
The immersion in the Jordan shows a willingness to conform to existing customs, when no principle is sacrificed thereby and a point of contact with the masses can thus be established, so that the truth symbolized by the rite of baptism can be shown forth through the action of those formative, purifying, spiritual forces that sustain to the psychical realm the same relation that water bears to the physical world.
The temptation of Jesus is typical of the time of testing that comes to every one who takes a step in advance of the age in which he lives. The principle of resistance called Satan confronts such an one at the very outset of his mission, and seemingly insuperable obstacles arise as foes to his progress. But he who first meets and masters all inward opposition, through knowledge of the law and allegiance thereto, can conquer every outward phase of hybrid beast and human, whose selfish pride and cruel greed have been well imaged as a devil with cloven foot and fiendish face.
The Sermon on the Mount is a statement of spiritual axioms. It lays before us the law of love for the neighbor, as the very instinct of self-preservation. Not to do for others as we would be done by, is to fail to furnish food, raiment, and shelter for our own souls. Physical and intellectual man gains worldly strength and honor as he takes to himself and retains riches and knowledge regardless of the rights of others. In contradistinction to this, the spiritual man gets treasure and wisdom imperishable, as he serves his fellow men, and freely gives of whatsoever he may have, of which his neighbor stands in need.
The beatitudes, with which the speech begins, such as man never spake before, tell, in a symbolism that is self-evidently true, the way by which alone, real happiness is won. We are blessed or cursed of God, through the working of His laws immutable, according as our relation to those laws is one of knowledge and obedience, or of ignorance and perversity. As, in the Hebrew tongue the words we render, “to curse,” and “to bless,” run back to the same root idea, so in point of fact, the very suffering which, sooner or later, comes to us when we are out of touch with the divine order of love to God and love to man, is the means appointed to bring us to that harmony which all must gain.
The lowest things are often seen to signify the things most high. A parable, paraballo, is that which “throws before” us such concrete imagery as best serves to foreshadow and to fit the mind to understand a certain abstract principle. As we become disciples, “learners” of the Truth, we find it speaks to us only through such emblems as enable us to reason from the things we do already know to those concerning which we wish to be informed. The words of Jesus went forth full-freighted with vitality. They were truly spirit and life, because charged with a virtue that can only come from a soul in submission to the law by his lips enunciated. Hence we see why, in the mystical language with which the Gospel of St. John begins, he is called the Logos, Reason or Word of God, from God and one with God, because he reveals the divine thought concerning man, inherently perfect from the first, but requiring time and space for its outworking. That human individuality may be maintained, man is uplifted only over the fulcrum of his own will. This volitional power is the ray in us of that Creative Energy whose name Jehovah signifies, I will be what I will to be. Thus, then, oneness with God is not sameness with God, nor the absorption of human personality in the Infinite Being. It is simply a state to be reached in our progressive creation where we will come to a knowledge of the laws of life, and will consciously co-operate with those divine decrees governing the origin, nature, and destiny of the soul. To illustrate the possibility of such achievement and exemplify the way of its attainment, was the mission of the Christ. But it has been so much easier to idolatrously worship his person than to embody his principles, that ceremonials and doctrines have been substituted for the life he lived. This is a sufficient reason for the manifestly unsaved condition that the so-called Christian world still exhibits in all manner of bigotry and disease, social unrest and iniquity.
The name Jesus signifies “that which makes whole.” So we find the one who bore it, true to his title, healing the bodies of men and giving to their souls a cure for sorrow. Yet, even he was made to feel that of himself he could do nothing, so keenly was he conscious of the fact that every self-denying sympathetic soul becomes a mediator, through whom the reconstructive forces of the universe make their impress felt upon the race. He speaks of prayer and faith, as mental states to be entered into and maintained, if we would be and do the best we can. His injunctions in reference to prayer correspond well with the meaning of the Greek verb euchomai which we render “to pray,” and which signifies to put forth effort rightly, i. e., along the lines of laws understood. He said that true prayer is not the repetition of any words, nor the asking for that which we may think it best that we should have. For the spiritual man knows that his labor for others insures of himself the results that are best. So the discourse of Jesus in this connection defines prayer, in its highest sense, as an inward, not an outward attitude; a state of mental receptivity to the guidance of truth and desire for the good of others, always to be observed, not the mere utterance of terms of petition or praise. He tells us to withdraw into the soul’s most secret place, where God already sits enthroned, and there commune with Him.
Before in spirit and with understanding we can in thought, and word, and deed, articulate Our Father! we must pass back in review through all the cycles that have rolled around, since this old earth of ours first turned in space. We then behold the most attenuate form of matter of which we can conceive, as a condensation of creative energy, yet but a matrix fitted for the reception of a planet seed or soul. We recognize a divine involution as the antecedent and causation of all so-called natural evolution. We see each link in the chain of being, from least to greatest, from the simplest to the most complex; grass, herb, and tree, fish, reptile, bird, and beast, as multiple yet orderly expressions of the immanence and permanence of the fatherhood of God. We view the creation of man as His highest handiwork, in which the seed of human life, bearing latent within it every high attribute and potency possessed by its celestial source, is placed or planted in a prepared material environment. We look back through the ages upon the travail of this our soul, and are satisfied as we see it gradually rising to the mastery and reformation of the physical form and animal soul, in which and with which it has been tabernacled to gain a necessary experience. From savagery to civilization, through planes of physical, intellectual, and moral consciousness we pass, borne upward by the overshadowing power of God to realize the omnipresence of its fatherhood. From this right starting-point there follows of necessity a conception of that vital fraternity of man which makes us members of one body, and which precludes the possibility of the gaining of a lasting good by any individual part thereof without a benefit to all.
