Women and Progress.

 By Lady Cook, nee Tennessee Claflin.

To many there might not at first blush appear to be any necessary connection between women and progress, yet a slight study of the past is sufficient to show that the position of one is a sure measure of that of the other. The moral and political status of any country has always depended upon the position held by woman there. The nearer she is to the condition of a slave, the more generally degraded is the whole nation; thus the degree of her freedom is significant of a country's worth and durability. No people and no scheme of progress ever succeeded and became lasting which did not include the advancement of woman equally with man.

The oldest and best known nation of antiquity was Egypt. In her day she was the most polished and most civilized of all peoples. Her learning, her science, her military and political abilities, her handicrafts and mechanical appliances amaze the student of to-day. He rubs his eyes and asks, " Was this really an ancient or a modern country, this land of nineteenth century conveniences, this home of established government hoary with antiquity and of institutions venerable with age,this preceptress and mother of art and learning throughout the whole of the known world ? The answer is simple: She was the first to recognise the equality of the sexes. Her marriage contracts prove that an Egyptian wife then was in many respects in a better position than a wife in most European countries now. The medical profession was mostly practised by women, and thus we find that the mortality of mothers, of infants, and children, was surprisingly small. In that charming little story, " The Doctors of Hopland," by Dr. Conan Doyle, we have a case where a gifted and skilful lady practitioner quite annihilated those common prejudices against female doctors, even when entertained by a sore male competitor, one Dr. Ripley, a country surgeon of the old school. The fiction that amuses and surprises the novel-reading English of this tail-end of the nineteenth century was a common matter of every-day fact in Egypt more than four thousand years ago. Women also occupied conspicuous positions in the State Church. As priestesses they officiated in all its ceremonies and were most frequently the vehicles of the divine oracles. They contributed largely to the founding of national literature, and even in Plato's day the sacred books of Isis were considered to be about ten thousand years old. A Greek sage, when in Egypt, having boasted of the divine descent of the mushroom royalty of his country, the high priest rebuked him by exhibiting the statues of 300 of his predecessors in that office in one long unbroken line, all high priests, and all the sons of men. What other state in the world ever surpassed this for good government—that is, a government most suitable to its people —or for steady durability ? But there, in that remote day, the wife was almost as free as the husband and had similar social rights. Contrary to all modern usages of the east, she could dine in public with him, and facetious painters occasionally depicted her in various stages of intoxication. While monogamy was the rule, polygamy, though exceptional, was also lawful, and the double system seems to have worked well. The reformation of Mahomet excluded women from its system, denied them education and civil rights, shut them out from its churches and its immortal Paradise, and ranked them with the lower animals. The result was a rapid and fatal degradation of the race, and national impoverishment both mentally and materially. The descendants of a wealthy, learned, and high-spirited people, the most distinguished in ancient history, became the ignorant and feeble fellaheen of Egypt, than whom, under Turkish rule, no more miserable class ever existed.

In Greece the doctrine of the natural equality of the sexes was indulged in only by a few philosophers, particularly by Plato. Education and free intercourse of women were left to courtesans. Toil and seclusion and abundant ignorance formed the condition of the mothers and sisters of the citizens.

With all her masculine vigor and glory Greece fell, gradually atrophied, because one half of her had been, of set purpose, intellectually and politically paralysed. Not long ago the wife of a wealthy Greek peasant sought protection against the cruelty of her husband. He had bound her almost naked to a stake in the street in cold weather, and urged the passers-by to strike her, chastising them when they refused. The court exonerated the husband on the ground of the wife's insubordination. "We cannot afford," it said, " to teach a woman to disobey the commands of her husband."

And Rome, proud Rome, began nobly, but ended in degradation. In her early days her women could boast of numerous privileges of which they were afterwards deprived. As their liberties became narrowed social depravity increased. The nobility of her matrons and the purity of her daughters became things of the past. Female ignorance became a virtue, and every accomplishment in art or learning was regarded as fit only for women of loose morals. Music, dancing, singing, reading were all interdicted. Under Christianized Rome and the institution of Canon Law, the position of women not in Rome only but throughout all Christendom was still more degraded. All pretense to equal rights was swept away. The Church held and taught that woman was created to serve man and to submit to his desires. Even to-day the English law, in the spirit of the Canon Law, holds that a wife is the servant of her husband.

Official Christianity described the most innocent relations of the sexes as naturally corrupt.

Nature was subordinated to a depraved theology. Kingsley says, " The Christian Church was swamped by hysteria from the third to the sixteenth century." The Reformation left woman little better than before. Luther gave as his opinion and that of six other great reformers that polygamy was nowhere condemned by the Bible. As to education, "No gown or garment," he said, "worse became a woman than that she should be wise.

That popular clergyman, the Rev. Knox Little, in his "Sermon to Women," 1880, says, " There is no crime that a man can commit which justifies his wife in leaving him. It is her duty to subject herself to him always, and no crime that he can commit justifies her lack of obedience. If he be a bad and wicked man she may gently remonstrate with him, but refuse him never!"

It is not to Christianity, but to science, not to our preachers, but to our thinkers, that the race owes its progression, and that the bonds of women are being loosened. No great English woman has ever appeared but some dignitary of the church has attempted to smother her or her schemes of reform. Mary Somerville was publicly denounced by Dean Cockburn of York ; and as late as April 24th, 1884, Dean Burgon wrote in a Liberal paper, "The Daily News," against the proposed admission of women to examinations for honors at Oxford University. He described it as "a moral revolution disastrous to a woman's best interests." He went on to give the purpose of creation, how she was designed to be " the complement of man's being," "his chiefest earthly joy," " but all this will be brought to an end if you teach her to try to be (what she can never become) man's equal, much less man's superior. Henceforth she will have to be kept down," and so on according to the old formula. Do these good gentlemen really believe that their christian offices require them to oppose, tooth and nail, every attempt towards woman's advancement ? We suppose they do. An American song goes :—

" There was a man who had a clock,

 His name was Mathew Mears,

He wound it reg'lar every night

For four and twenty years,

And when this precious time-piece proved

 An eight-day clock to be,

A madder man than Mathew Mears

 You wouldn't wish to see."

So when the end comes and woman's cause prevails, will they not feel like Mr. Mears, that they have been mistaken in their timepiece and have been engaged in supererogatory efforts to wind up the public clock ? Let us turn from such puling specimens of manhood who would keep women in perpetual servitude, to one of our great thinkers and giants in progress, the late Professor Huxley. In his " Lay Sermons"  he says: "What is the first step towards a better state of things ?" We reply, " emancipate girls. Recognise the fact that they share the senses, perceptions, feelings, reasoning powers, and emotions of boys, and that the mind of the average girl is less different from that of the average boy than the mind of one boy is from that of another. . . . . Let those women who feel inclined to do so descend into the arena of life; let them, if they so please, become merchants, barristers, politicans. Let them have a fair field."

The last sentence contains the whole secret of social progress : " Let them have a fair field!" How otherwise can the male half of the community endure in freedom and preserve the integrity of their manhood ? " Man ! be it yours to help them on to good!" And although Jeremy Bentham laid it down that " No Government ever yielded a right unless bullied into it," heaven forbid that the same be said of our brothers and husbands. Let them yield in good time and give the woman's cause a fair field, for her cause is not hers only, but man's also. Whatever uplifts her will elevate him. Her increase of usefulness will stimulate him. As was remarked by a powerful writer: " Society is raised by every new right that women gain."

Let us have a fair field ! This is all we ask, and we will be content with nothing less. The finger of evolution, which touches everything, is laid tenderly upon women. They have on their side all the elements of progress, and its spirit stirs within them. They are fighting not for themselves alone, but for the future of humanity. Let them have a fair field !

Bowral Free Press and Berrima District Intelligencer (NSW : 1884 - 1901), Saturday 8 May 1897

http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article112450381