Page:History of Woman Suffrage Volume 1.djvu/820

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History of Woman Suffrage.

of 1877, busied itself in preparing canons upon marriage and divorce, thus aiming to reach the finger of the Protestant Church down to a control of this most private family relation. The Diocesan Convention of South Carolina, in the spring of 1878, denied women the right to vote upon Church matters, although some churches in the diocese counted but five male members.

Not alone in her request for ordination has woman met with opposition, but in her effort for any separate church work. The formation of woman's foreign missionary societies was bitterly opposed by the different evangelical denominations, although they have raised more money than the male societies have ever been able to do—even helping them pay old debts—and have reached large classes of their own sex whom the male societies were powerless to touch. By thus supplementing men's work, they have made themselves acceptable.

Not only do councils, convocations, conferences, conventions, synods, and assemblies proclaim woman's inferiority, but Sunday-schools teach the same doctrine. A letter from a correspondent of The National Citizen and Ballot-Box (Syracuse, N. Y.), in August, 1880, said:

Our Sunday-schools here have just finished the lesson on the creation and fall of man, and those of us who are capable of feeling, felt keenly the thrusts at woman for her infidelity to God's laws, and her overpowering influence in dragging man from his exalted position in life into a bondage of sin and death, and that she is to be held responsible for all the accumulated sins of the ages. One man said that "had not Eve been lurking around where she had no business, the devil would never have tempted her." Another said, "Had it not been for woman, we might to-day be living in ease and splendor," and I listened to hear them say the fallen angel was a woman.

This same doctrine is taught in the public schools. The Republican, of Havre de Grace, Maryland, in its issue of August 6, 1880, gave the following report of a speech at that time:

Thus spoke Master Showell at the Berlin (Wicomico County) High-School commencement: "By woman was Eden lost and man cursed. If you trust her, give up all hopes of heaven. She can not love, because she is too selfish. She may have a fancy, but that is fleeting. Her smiles are deceit; her vows are traced in sand. She is a thread of candor with a web of wiles. Her charity is hypocrisy; she is deception every way—hair, teeth, complexion, heart, tongue, and all. Oh, I hate you, ye cold composition of art!"

Sermons are frequently preached in opposition to woman's demand