The deepest wretchedness that has ever been put into human language, or that has exceeded it, has grown out of that pledge.  There is no misery on earth like that of a pure and refined woman who finds herself owned, body and soul, by a drunken, licentious, brutal man.  The very fact that she is held to obedience by a spiritual tie makes it worse.  Chattel slavery was not so bad; for, though the master might pervert religion for his own satisfaction, he could not impose upon the slave.  Never yet did I see a negro slave who thought it a duty to obey his master; and therefore there was always some dream of release.  But who has not heard of some delicate and refined woman, one day of whose torture was equivalent to years of that possible to an obtuse frame,—­who had the door of escape ready at hand for years, and yet died a lingering death rather than pass through it; and this because she had promised to obey!

It is said of one of the most gifted women who ever trod American soil,—­ she being of English birth,—­that, before she obtained the divorce which separated her from her profligate husband, she once went for counsel to the wife of her pastor.  She unrolled before her the long catalogue of merciless outrages to which she had been subject, endangering finally her health, her life, and that of her children born and to be born.  When she turned at last for advice to her confessor, with the agonized inquiry, “What is it my duty to do?”—­“Do?” said the stern adviser:  “Lie down on the floor, and let your husband trample on you if he will.  That is a woman’s duty.”

The woman who gave this advice was not naturally inhuman nor heartless:  she had simply been trained in the school of obedience.  The Jesuit doctrine, that a priest should be as a corpse, perinde ac cadaver, in the hands of a superior priest, is not worse.  Woman has no right to delegate, nor man to assume, a responsibility so awful.  Just in proportion as it is consistently carried out, it trains men from boyhood into self-indulgent tyrants; and, while some women are transformed by it to saints, others are crushed into deceitful slaves.  That this was the result of chattel slavery, this nation has at length learned.  We learn more slowly the profounder and more subtile moral evil that follows from the unrighteous promise to obey.

WOMAN IN THE CHRYSALIS

When the bride receives the ring upon her finger, and utters—­if she utters it—­the promise to obey, she sees a poetic beauty in the rite.  Turning of her own free will from her maiden liberty, she voluntarily takes the yoke of service upon her.  This is her view; but is this the historic fact in regard to marriage?  Not at all.  The pledge of obedience—­the whole theory of inequality in marriage—­is simply what is left to us of a former state of society, in which every woman, old or young, must obey somebody.  The state of tutelage, implied in such a marriage, is merely what is left of the old theory of the “Perpetual Tutelage of Women,” under the Roman law.