Papal Woman

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Title:     Papal Woman
Author: E. Lynn Linton [More Titles by Linton]

The wonderful instinct which has always guided the Papacy in distinguishing between forces that it may safely oppose and forces before which it must surrender, has just received a startling illustration in a scene reported to have taken place at the Vatican a few days ago. Rome may refuse all compromise with Italy, but even Rome shrinks from encountering the hostility of woman. The Brief of October last sounded, indeed, marvellously like a declaration of war; even in a Pope it argued no little resolution to denounce the "license of the female toilet," the "fantastic character of woman's head-dress," and the "scandalous indecency" of woman's attire. More worldly critics would hardly have ventured to describe a piquant chignon or a suggestive boddice as "a propaganda of the devil;" it will be long, at any rate, before censors of this class will meet with the reward of a deputation and a testimonial from the fair objects of their criticism.

St. Peter, however, we are adroitly reminded, after his miraculous delivery from prison by an angel, found an asylum among women; and, fresh from his troubles with the red-shirts of Monte Rotondo, the successor of St. Peter seems to have found himself wonderfully at home among the flounces that thronged the other day to his public audience at the Vatican. A hundred ladies--the presence amongst whom of a number of English Catholics gives us a national interest in the scene--came forward to express their gratitude for the censures of the Papal Briefs, and the adhesion of their sex to the orthodox doctrines of the toilet. The speech in which one of the fair deputation expressed the sentiments of her fellows has been unfortunately suppressed, but the letter of Pope Pius to the Bishop of Orleans explains the secret of this dramatic reconciliation, and the terms of the Concordat which has been arranged between Woman and the Papacy.

A common danger has driven the two Powers to this fresh alliance. If Garabaldi threatens the supremacy of the Holy See, the educational reforms of M. Duruy menace the domestic tyranny of woman. Woman sees herself in peril of deposition at home by the same spirit of democratic and intellectual equality which would drive the Pope from the Vatican. In presence of such a peril, mutual concession becomes easy, and the fair votaries pardon all references to their "propaganda of the devil" in consideration of a Papal assault on the "cynical writers who are desirous of attacking woman."

The motive of the Papacy, in opposing a system of education which emancipates woman from the intellectual control of the priesthood and plunges her into the midst of the doubts and questionings of sceptical man, is of course plain enough. We feel no particular surprise when the attendance of girls at the public classes of a Professor is denounced as tending to "despoil woman of her native modesty, to drag her before the public, to turn her from domestic life and duties, to puff her up with vain and false science." It is the adhesion of woman to this view of the case which puzzles us a little at first. We recall her aspirations after a higher training, and her bitter contempt for the unhappy censors who venture to remind her of certain primary truths respecting puddings and pies.

But the same problem meets us in other halls than those of the Vatican. Everywhere woman poses herself as a social martyr, as the victim of conventional bonds, as reduced to intellectual torpor by the refusal of intellectual facilities and intellectual distinctions, as excluded by sheer masculine tyranny from the larger sphere of thought and action which the world presents, as chained, like Prometheus, to the rock of home by necessity and force. It is only when some amiable enthusiast is taken in by all this admirable acting, and ventures to propose a plan for her deliverance, that one finds how wonderfully contented, after all, woman is with her bonds and her prison-house.

The philosopher who comes forward with his pet theory of the enfranchisement of woman, who recognizes the necessity for loosening the matrimonial tie, for securing to woman her property and its responsibilities, for levelling all educational differences and abolishing all social distinctions between the sexes, only finds himself snubbed for his pains. He is calmly assured that home is the sphere of woman, and the care of a family the first of woman's duties; the domestic martyr of yesterday proves from Proverbs and the Princess that marriage is the completion of woman, and that her office is but to wed the "noble music" of her feminine nature to the "noble words" of the nature of her spouse.

In a word, woman knows her own business a great deal better than her friends. She does not believe in the intellectual equality which she is always preaching about, and when M. Duruy offers it, a shriek of horror goes up from half the mothers of France. What she does believe is that, in seeking the educational Will-o'-the-Wisp, she may lose the solid pudding of domestic supremacy, and domestic supremacy is worth all the sciences in the world. Her position, as the Vatican suggests, is a religious, not an intellectual one, and her policy lies in an alliance with the priesthood, whose position is one with her own. So woman makes her submission to the Papacy, and the Pope snubs M. Duruy.

It is amusing to see how limited, after all, a man's power, the power even of the stoutest of men, is in his own house, and to watch the simple process by which woman establishes the limitation. It consists simply in asserting a specially religious character for her sex. She is never tired of telling us that the sentiments and sympathies of the feminine breast have a greater affinity for divine things than the rougher masculine nature; that her instincts are purer, more poetic, more refined; that her moral nature has a certain bloom upon it which contact with the world has brushed off from ours; that while we coarser creatures are driven to reason out our spiritual conclusions, she arrives at them by an intuitive process reserved for the angelic nature and her own.

And on the whole man accepts the claim. He is bribed perhaps into allowing it by his own desire to have something at home better and purer than himself. It is a startling thing perhaps to say, but in ninety-nine homes out of a hundred real humility of heart is to be found in the husband, not in the wife. The husband has very little belief in his own religion, in his unworldliness and spirituality; but he has an immense belief in the spirituality and the devotion of the being who fronts him over the breakfast-table. He does not profess to understand the character of her piety, her lore of sermons, the severity with which she visits the household after family prayers, or the extreme interest with which she peruses the geographical chapters of the Book of Joshua. But his incapacity to understand it is mixed with a certain awe. He never ventures to disturb, by "shadowed hint" of his own thoughts about the matter, the "simple views" of his spouse. He adroitly diverts the conversation of his dinner-table when it drifts near to the fatal pigeons of Colenso.

Sometimes he bends to a little gentle deceit, and wins a smile of approval by turning up at an early Litany, or by bringing home the newest photograph of a colonial metropolitan. In one way or another he practically acknowledges, like King Cnut, that there is a bound to his empire. Over bonnet bills and butchers' bills he may exercise a certain nominal control. It is possible that years of struggle might enable him to alter by half an inch the length of his wife's skirt, if fashion had not shortened it in the interval. But over the whole domain of moral and religious thought and action he is absolutely powerless. Woman meets him, if he attempts any interference, as Christian martyrs have always met their persecutors, with outstretched neck and on her knees. She prays for his return to better thoughts, and the whole household knows she is praying for him. She listens to all his remonstrances, professes obedience on every point but the one he wants, and keeps her finger all the time on the particular page of Thomas à Kempis at which the remonstrance found her. Before such an adversary, there is no shame in a defeat.

It is not that on all points of moral or religious life woman professes herself above criticism; to the criticisms of her religious teachers, for instance, we have seen her singularly obsequious. Woman and the priesthood in fact understand one another perfectly, and a tacit convention forces woman to submit to censures so long as those censures are reserved for one topic alone. To religion woman makes the sacrifice of her dress. It is not that she seriously intends to make the slightest amendments, or to withdraw before the exhortations of her spiritual guide into poke bonnets and print muslins. It is a sufficient mark of self-sacrifice if she listens patiently to a diatribe against butterfly bonnets, trains, or crinolines, or even thanks her pastor for describing evening costume as a "propaganda of the devil." The very minuteness, in fact, of censures such as these, is a flattering proof of the spiritual importance of even the most trivial details in the life of woman.

When Father Ignatius informed mankind that the angels bent down from heaven to weep over the flirtations of Rotten Row, the smallest child on her pony felt her ride, and her chatter over her palings, invested with certain celestial importance. Criticisms, too, so strictly reserved for the outside of the platter, are an immense compliment to the inside, and it is something to listen to half an hour of spiritual reproof, and to be able to pass oneself triumphantly as a "Fair Soul" after all. There is nothing revolutionary in a mere border-skirmish, which leaves the field of woman's sway not an inch the narrower. It is another matter when M. Duruy calls on Hermione to come down from her pedestal of worship, and in the long run to abdicate. For equality of education would, of course, even if it did nothing else, make mince-meat of the spiritual pretensions of woman. It would be impossible to preserve a domestic Papacy with a more than papal weakness for dogmatism and infallibility, if woman is to come down into school and share the common training of men.

If women are to be educated precisely as men are educated, they will share the reasonings, the scepticisms, the critical doubts of men. There will be no refuge for praying sisters in that world of "simple views" from which they come forth at present furnished with a social and domestic decalogue whose sacredness it is impious to doubt or to dispute. In other words, the power which woman now exercises will simply crumble to dust. Whether she might gain a power higher and more beneficial to the world and to herself, is a matter which we are not now discussing. What is perfectly certain is that such a power would not be the power she exercises now. The moral censorship of woman over woman, for example, would at once pass away. It rests on the belief that women have higher moral faculties than other beings, and that their treason to this higher form of moral humanity which is exhibited in womanhood is a treason of deeper dye than an offence against morality itself.

An erring sister sins against something greater than goodness--she sins against the theory of woman, against the faith that woman is a creature who soars high above the weaknesses of man and the common nature of man. Long ages of self-assertion have penetrated woman with the conviction of her worth; she is the object of her own especial worship, and the sharp stinging justice she deals out to social offenders is not merely a proof of the spiritual nature of her rule, but the vindication of her self-idolatry. Again, she would forfeit the peculiar influence which she is every day exerting in a greater degree on the course of religion and the Church. The hypothesis of a superior spiritual nature in woman lies at the root, for instance, of the great modern institution of sisterhoods, and of the peculiar relation which is slowly attaching his Paula and his Eustochium to every Jerome of our day.

But the main loss of power would lie in the family itself. It would be no longer possible to front the political dogmatist of the hearth-rug with a social and religious dogmatism as brusque and unreasonable as his own. The balance of power which woman has slowly built up in home would be roughly disturbed, and new forms of social and domestic life would emerge from the chaos of such a revolution. From sweeping changes of this sort the very temper of woman, her innate conservatism, her want of originative power, turns her away. It is more comfortable to bask in the glow of Papal sunshine, to figure in Allocutions from the Vatican as "the pure and shining light of the house, the glory of her husband, the education of her family, a bond of peace, an emblem of piety;" and to let Monsieur Duruy and his insidious Professors alone.

[The end]
E. Lynn Linton's essay: Papal Woman

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