[Footnote 1:  Story’s Treatise on the Law of Contracts not under Seal, sec. 84, p. 89.]

OBEY

After witnessing the marriage ceremony of the Episcopal Church, the other day, I walked down the aisle with the young rector who had officiated.  It was natural to speak of the beauty of the Church service on an occasion like that; but, after doing this, I felt compelled to protest against the unrighteous pledge to obey.  “I hope,” I said, “to live to see that word expunged from the Episcopal service, as it has been from that of the Methodists.  The Roman Catholics, you know, have never had it.”

“Why do you object?” he asked.  “Is it because you know that they will not obey?”

“Because they ought not,” I said.

“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.