[Sidenote:  General attitude towards women at the present day]

The attitude of the Roman Catholic Church towards women’s rights at the present day is practically the same as it has been for eighteen centuries.  It still insists on the subjection of the woman to the man, and it is bitterly hostile to woman suffrage.  This position is so well illustrated by an article of the Rev. David Barry in the Roman Catholic paper, the Dublin Irish Ecclesiastical Review, that I cannot do better than quote some of it.  “It seems plain enough,” he says, “that allowing women the right of suffrage is incompatible with the high Catholic ideal of the unity of domestic life.  Even those who do not hold the high and rigid ideal of the unity of the family that the Catholic Church clings to must recognise some authority in the family, as in every other society.  Is this authority the conjoint privilege of husband and wife?  If so, which of them is to yield, if a difference of opinion arises?  Surely the most uncompromising suffragette must admit that the wife ought to give way in such a case.  That is to say, every one will admit that the wife’s domestic authority is subordinate to that of her husband.  But is she to be accorded an autonomy in outside affairs that is denied her in the home?  Her authority is subject to her husband’s in domestic matters—­her special sphere; is it to be considered co-ordinate with his in regulating the affairs of the State?  Furthermore, there is an argument that applies universally, even in the case of those women who are not subject to the care and protection of a husband, and even, I do not hesitate to say, where the matters to be decided on would come specially within their cognisance, and where their judgment would, therefore, be more reliable than that of men.  It is this, that in the noise and turmoil of party politics, or in the narrow, but rancorous arena of local factions, it must needs fare ill with what may be called the passive virtues of humility, patience, meekness, forbearance, and self-repression.  These are looked on by the Church as the special prerogative and endowment of the female soul ...  But these virtues would soon become sullied and tarnished in the dust and turmoil of a contested election; and their absence would soon be disagreeably in evidence in the character of women, who are, at the same time, almost constitutionally debarred from preeminence in the more robust virtues for which the soul of man is specially adapted.”

Cardinal Gibbons, in a letter to the National League for the Civic Education of Women—­an anti-suffrage organisation—­said that “woman suffrage, if realised, would be the death-blow of domestic life and happiness” (Nov. 2, 1909).

Rev. William Humphrey, S.J., in his Christian Marriage, chap. 16, remarks that woman is “the subordinate equal of man”—­whatever that means.

A few Roman Catholic prelates, like Cardinal Moran, have advocated equal suffrage, but they are in the minority.  The Pope has not yet definitely stated the position of the Church; individual Catholics are free to take any side they wish, as it is not a matter of faith; but the tendency of Roman Catholicism is against votes for women.