Note Return to text — EDITORIAL NOTES.

Again, womanhood must refuse to heed the admonitions of Paul, which have for almost two thousand years been thundered from the pulpit, and persistently preached from the fireside as though they were oracles from heaven, rather than the natural expressions of a mind imbued with Grecian thought and ideals concerning womanhood. There is nothing surprising in Paul’s observations on the sphere of woman; they were the reflex of the conservative and prevailing thought among the civilizations with which he was familiar. But the world has outgrown this ancient conception, and it is worse than folly to attempt to fasten the corpse of the past to the living body of the present. The evolution of society, a growing sense of justice in man, and the exigencies of life are rapidly diminishing the old-time reverence for the Pauline theory of woman’s sphere. This is nowhere more significantly illustrated than in the expressed declaration of tens of thousands of pious, Christian women, and the active participation of a smaller number in public affairs, who would indignantly resent any intimation that they did not accept the plenary inspiration of the Bible.[16] The declarations of Paul, while in harmony with accepted ideas in his day, are absurd, and inapplicable to our age and generation, and as such are being discarded by enlightened public sentiment, as was the old theory of a flat earth finally given up after science fully exposed its falsity. Another duty of woman is to unitedly contend for the right of suffrage for those who wish to exercise it. There may have been a time when there was no pressing duty involved in this question, but that day has passed. Recent statistics show that there are in the United States to-day millions of women who earn a livelihood by their own individual exertions;[17] tens of thousands of these women are working for starvation wages, with the awful alternative ever before them “starve or sin.” This condition will remain until women have a voice in the government equal to man’s, and their numbers are so organized as to challenge the consideration of law-makers. The infamous “age of consent laws” which place the age of consent to her own ruin from seven to twelve years for girls could only be enacted in man-governed States. A noteworthy illustration of this is found in the fact that Wyoming, the only State where woman enjoys full franchise, has placed the age of consent at the legal age of majority, eighteen years, while Kansas, the State which more than any other approaches Wyoming in bestowing on women the rights of franchise, and where she exercises a greater influence in politics than any other American commonwealth save her younger sister, has also placed the age of consent at eighteen years. All the other States trail the banner of morality in the dust before the dictates of man’s bestiality.