“Why?” he asked. “Is it because you know that they will not obey, whatever their promise?”
“Well,” said he, after a few moments’ reflection, and looking up frankly, “I do not think they ought!”
Here was a young clergyman of great earnestness and self-devotion, who included it among the sacred duties of his life to impose upon ignorant young girls a solemn obligation, which he yet thought they ought not to incur, and did not believe that they would keep. There could hardly be a better illustration of the confusion in the public mind, or the manner in which “the subjection of woman” is being outgrown, or the subtile way in which this subjection has been interwoven with sacred ties, and baptized “duty.”
The advocates of woman suffrage are constantly reproved for using the terms “subjection,” “oppression,” and “slavery,” as applied to woman. They simply commit the same sin as that committed by the original abolitionists. They are “as harsh as truth, as uncompromising as justice.” Of course they talk about oppression and emancipation. It is the word _obey_ that constitutes the one, and shows the need of the other. Whoever is pledged to obey is technically and literally a slave, no matter how many roses surround the chains. All the more so if the slavery is self-imposed, and surrounded by all the prescriptions of religion. Make the marriage-tie as close as Church or State can make it; but let it be equal, impartial. That it may be so, the word _obey_ must be abandoned or made reciprocal. Where invariable obedience is promised, equality is gone.
That there may be no doubt about the meaning of this word in the marriage-covenant, the usages of nations often add symbolic explanations. These are generally simple and brutal enough to be understood. The Hebrew ceremony, when the bridegroom took off his slipper and struck the bride on the neck as she crossed his threshold, was unmistakable. As my black sergeant said, when a white prisoner questioned his authority, and he pointed to the _chevrons_ on his sleeve, “Dat mean guv’ment.” All these forms mean simply government also. The ceremony of the slipper has now no recognition, except when people fling an old shoe after the bride, which is held by antiquarians to be the same observance. But it is all preserved and concentrated into a single word, when the bride promises to obey.