Women and Politics

Women and Politics, by Charles
Kingsley

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Title: Women and Politics
Author: Charles Kingsley

Release Date: January 23, 2007 [eBook #20433]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WOMEN
AND POLITICS***

Transcribed from the 1869 London National Society edition by David
Price, email [email protected]

WOMEN AND POLITICS.
BY THE REV. CANON KINGSLEY.
REPRINTED FROM 'MACMILLAN'S MAGAZINE.'
Published by the London National Society for Women's Suffrage.
LONDON: PRINTED BY SPOTTISWOODE & CO., NEW-STREET
SQUARE, FARRINGDON STREET AND 80 PARLIAMENT
STREET, WESTMINSTER 1869.

WOMEN AND POLITICS. {3}
Somewhat more than 300 years ago, John Knox, who did more than
any man to mould the thoughts of his nation--and indeed of our English
Puritans likewise--was writing a little book on the 'Regiment of
Women,' in which he proved woman, on account of her natural
inferiority to man, unfit to rule.
And but the other day, Mr. John Stuart Mill, who has done more than
any man to mould the thought of the rising generation of Englishmen,
has written a little book, in the exactly opposite sense, on the
'Subjection of Women,' in which he proves woman, on account of her
natural equality with man, to be fit to rule.
Truly 'the whirligig of Time brings round its revenges.' To this point
the reason of civilised nations has come, or at least is coming fast, after
some fifteen hundred years of unreason, and of a literature of unreason,
which discoursed gravely and learnedly of nuns and witches, hysteria
and madness, persecution and torture, and, like a madman in his dreams,
built up by irrefragable logic a whole inverted pyramid of seeming
truth upon a single false premiss. To this it has come, after long
centuries in which woman was regarded by celibate theologians as the
'noxious animal,' the temptress, the source of earthly misery, which

derived--at least in one case--'femina' from 'fe' faith, and 'minus' less,
because women had less faith than men; which represented them as of
more violent and unbridled animal passions; which explained learnedly
why they were more tempted than men to heresy and witchcraft, and
more subject (those especially who had beautiful hair) to the attacks of
demons; and, in a word, regarded them as a necessary evil, to be
tolerated, despised, repressed, and if possible shut up in nunneries.
Of this literature of celibate unreason, those who have no time to read
for themselves the pages of Sprenger, Meier, or Delrio the Jesuit, may
find notices enough in Michelet, and in both Mr. Lecky's excellent
works. They may find enough of it, and to spare also, in Burton's
'Anatomy of Melancholy.' He, like Knox, and many another scholar of
the 16th and of the first half of the 17th century, was unable to free his
brain altogether from the idola specus which haunted the cell of the
bookworm. The poor student, knowing nothing of women, save from
books or from contact with the most debased, repeated, with the
pruriency of a boy, the falsehoods about women which, armed with the
authority of learned doctors, had grown reverend and incontestable
with age; and even after the Reformation more than one witch-mania
proved that the corrupt tree had vitality enough left to bring forth evil
fruit.
But the axe had been laid to the root thereof. The later witch
prosecutions were not to be compared for extent and atrocity to the
mediaeval ones; and first, as it would seem, in France, and gradually in
other European countries, the old contempt of women was being
replaced by admiration and trust. Such examples as that of Marguerite
d'Angouleme did much, especially in the South of France, where
science, as well as the Bible, was opening men's eyes more and more to
nature and to fact. Good little Rondelet, or any of his pupils, would
have as soon thought of burning a woman for a witch as they would
have of immuring her in a nunnery.
In Scotland, John Knox's book came, happily for the nation, too late.
The woes of Mary Stuart called out for her a feeling of chivalry which
has done much, even to the present day, to elevate the Scotch character.

Meanwhile, the same influences which raised the position of women
among the Reformed in France raised it likewise in Scotland; and there
is no country on earth in which wives and mothers have been more
honoured, and more justly honoured, for two centuries and more. In
England, the