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Page 9
But ideas can only for a time overcome or divert the primitive human
hungers, and slowly Mary, Mother of Jesus, won first place among the
saints. Celibate recluses who feared to walk the streets for fear of
meeting a woman, and who spent the nights fighting down their noblest
passions, starving them, flagellating and rolling their naked bodies in
thorny rose hedges or in snow-drifts to silence demands for wife and
children, threw themselves in an ecstacy of adoration before an image of
the Virgin with the Baby in her arms. So Maryolatry came to bless the
world.
But even this blessing was not without alloy, for it gave us an ideal of
woman, superhuman, immaculate, bowing in frightened awe before the angel
with the lily, standing mute with crossed hands and downcast eyes before
her Divine Son. She represented, not the institution of the family, but
the institution of the Church. Even when she appeared in representations
of the Holy Family, Joseph, her husband, was not the father of her
child, but his servant.
Chivalry took up this conception, and shaped for us the fantastic lady
who stands back of much of modern romantic love. Robbed of her simple,
human, pagan passions, she became often an an�mic and unfruitful, if
angelic, creature. For the direct and passionate assurances of a
virtuous and noble love she substituted sighs and tears, languishing
looks and weary renunciations. This sterile hybrid, bred of human
passions and theological negations, must be finally banished from our
literature and from our minds before we can have a healthy eugenic
conscience among us.[20]
[20] R. DE MAULDE LA CLAVIERE, _The Woman of the Renaissance. A Study in
Feminism_, translated by George H. Ely. New York: C.P. Putnam's Sons,
1900.
The Protestant Revolution went far to restore the special functions of
women to respect. Belief in her individual soul, and in its need of
salvation through individual choice, was supplemented by the belief that
this choice must be guided by her individual judgment. Celibacy ceased
to be a sign of righteousness; and the best men and women married. But
beliefs cannot be directly destroyed by revolution; they can only be
disturbed and modified. The teachings of Paul, Augustine, Tertullian and
St. Jerome were still authoritative, and Calvin and Knox reaffirmed
many of them. The family was still subordinate to the Church; and
marriage still remained a sacrament, with theological significances,
rather than the simple union of a man and woman who loved each other.
The choice of a mate once made was final, because theological, and it
could be broken only with infinite pain and disgrace.
The great political upheaval, which we call the French Revolution,
carried in its fundamental teachings freedom and opportunity for men and
for women; but like the corresponding revolution in religion, it
required time to make adjustments, and so we have been content to live
for more than a hundred years in the midst of verbal affirmations which
we denied in all our institutional life.
In America, conditions have always been favorable for women to work out
their freedom. Among the immigrants who came to our shores before 1840
there were, of course, a few traders, adventurers and servants who hoped
to improve their financial conditions; but the leaders, and most of the
rank and file, came that they might be free to think their own thoughts
and live their own lives. If this selection of colonists, through
religious and political persecution, sometimes gave us bigots with one
idea, it also gave us people who knew that ideas can change. Along with
Cotton Mather it gave us Anne Hutchinson, Roger Williams and William
Penn.
Most of these who came in the early days belonged to extreme dissenting
sects believing in salvation through individual choice, based on
personal judgments. Preaching was exalted at the expense of ritual; and
by substituting new thinking for old habits in religion, the American
settlers made it less difficult for other adjustments to be made, even
in such a conservative matter as woman's position. It is through no
accident that Methodists, Friends, Unitarians and the Salvation Army
have been much more sympathetic to woman's progress than have the older
ritualistic faiths.
And these theological ideas had to be worked out under the material
conditions of the New World, which were also favorable to the
emancipation of women. Facing primitive conditions in the forest, it
became a habit to do new things in new ways. Woman's work and judgment
were indispensable; and these picked women showed themselves capable in
every direction. They did every kind of work; and when it came to
enduring privation or even to starving, they set an example for men.
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