THE 604TH ORDINARY MEETING, HELD IN COMMITTEE ROOM B, THE CENTRAL HALL, A. T. SCHOFIELD, ESQ., M.D., IN THE CHAIR. The Minutes of the previous Meeting were read, confirmed and signed, and the Secretary announced the election of Miss F. E. Newton, Miss Violet H. Thorold, and the Rev. W. L. Baxter, D.D., as Associates. THE INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY ON THE POSITION OF WOMEN. By CONSTANCE L. MAYNARD (First Principal of Westfield College, University of London). THIS is a wide subject. Let me speak first on that duality which runs through human nature, that curious cleft which cuts the race in two, that goes by the name of Sex. Physically the division is obvious and runs through the animal world below us (except among the lowest and brainless creatures such as coral and sponge), but in the world of mind the cleft also runs, and this is by no means so obvious, and needs careful study. The history of the individual runs parallel with the history of our race, and if we want to trace the story of that obscure being, Primitive Man, we may see it all writ small but very clearly in our nurseries of to-day. First, we see a time when physical wellbeing is the sole desire of life, and this we call the Age of Passivity. Then the perceptions and the will awake, and the supremacy-boy and girl alike-goes to brute force. This is the Age of Self-will, the first evidence of the spirit of man. babes awake to find they can, by effort, alter the world about them; there is no Reason as yet to guide their actions, and not enough Affection to suppress their violence, but the blind Will Our appears in outbursts, and the principle worked on is that of Might is Right." This is not wrong: it is nothing but uneven growth. It is the man-spirit claiming his inheritance, and obeying the first command ever given to the human race, Subdue the earth-have dominion." At about two years old our children scream and fight, and say No" and "I won't," and clutch a thing so tightly, they will tear it and hurt themselves rather than give way; but, a little later, skill and cunning begin to be mixed with force. Even as Primitive Man found it was easier to snare a wild animal than to encounter its strength face to face, so there comes in a spirit of invention among our babes which it is hardly fair to call lying. The child finds a better way of gaining its ends than by pitting its little strength against that of a grown person, and that is by some kind of artifice or deception. Up to about seven years old children may be considered as racial rather than individual characters, but after this the boy and the girl begin to differ a little, though in my opinion they should be treated alike for some years longer. The new development is the birth of sympathy within, and protective care of the weaker side, and the sense of compassion. This is the awakening of the Womanspirit, and in our grand old Narrative that will never be discredited we see how true it is that Eve is created a long while after Adam. Some children are most luminous examples of this development of character, and you may see a little boy who was a terror of screams and hitting out at two years old, and who at four did not know truth from falsehood, and would try cruelly to stamp upon the frogs in the garden, become a very Prince Pitiful by eight or nine. Eve is created, the balance is attained, and all goes well. Now turn from these bright instructive little pictures at our knee and glance at the whole world in its present position. All stages are simultaneous here. The lowest stage is brute force, where the woman, by her obvious muscular inferiority, becomes the drudge and the beast of burden. The early Moravian missionaries describe a feast among the Esquimaux: the men are sitting round the captured seal, cooking and eating for five or six hours at a time, and throwing the bones over their shoulders to a mixed crowd of women and dogs, there to be wrangled for with cries and blows. A little higher in the scale and you may see women counted as a great treasure, but woefully misused. Man reaches the very height of his ingenious tyranny, and then you may see established the dreary life of the Zenana, the bound feet of the Chinese, and the vapid, miserable existence of the Harem. To me this is worse than the savage stage. The woman no longer shares the hardships of the man, but has developed along a line exclusively her own-a mean and hateful line, where every germ of generous life is stifled. The one weapon left free is her tongue, and she becomes jealous, frivolous, petty, spiteful, without the least sense of justice, a creature it makes one blush to think of. And, alas, when debarred from cultivation and from her true scope, some beings of the same type are to be found in the civilised lands of to-day, and it seems that Eve, the Mother of all living, the summit of things created, is not even yet able to take her right place. Before going further, let us make it clear that we do not blame the masterful Man-spirit, although most of the wrong is due to his tyranny-not either in our babes nor in the world. You cannot steer a boat unless it has way on it; you cannot teach a horse his paces unless he will go; and you can make nothing of a human character unless it has boldness and adventure and skill, and a desire for conquest. Missionaries tell us that the cruel North American Indian and the crafty Chinese make far better and nobler converts than the inhabitants of some of the Pacific Islands, where people live like tropic birds in a cage, the bread-fruit always supplying food, and with no enemies. There is no need to fight with soil, or climate, or beast, or fellow-man, and life is idyllic idleness. Such tribes become hopeless. Better fight with the wrong thing than not fight at all. Remember the first command given to man, before he tastes of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, before the Conscience is born within, before there is any recognised distinction between Right and Wrong. It runs, "Replenish the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over every living thing." It was a tremendous task set him by his Creator, and on the whole he has bravely and diligently answered it: he has subdued, not merely the animals taming some and exterminating others—but he has subjugated the vast impersonal forces of Nature, air for the sails of ships and mills, fire, water, and their powerful child, steam; even lightning is brought down and tamed into electricity, giving us light and voice and tramlines. There are scores of other inventions which combine to make life more comfortable and more effective, and I pray you to remember that man has made these conquests unaided and alone, and that woman has D given no help at all. She seems to have no power of invention. Weapons of war do not interest her, but, mark you, she did not invent the weaving loom or the sewing machine, which touch her own life so closely; and if we turn to the most congenial themes, we find her seldom among the composers of music and writers of poetry. That part of her brain seems to be left out, and hardly one thing, from the safety-pin of the Celtic barrows to the fountain-pen of to-day, owes its existence to her. Where, then, is her supremacy? Where is the region where she leads? It is outside the world of matter altogether, and is in the world of the heart and the soul, showing itself in protection, patience, hope and love. Her sovereignty has its dim dawn in the instinctive care of the babe, which is a sacrifice of the ease and pleasure of the stronger life for the service of the weaker life. This God-given instinct is clearly seen in the character of all the higher animals as well in the world of the dog, the cat, the sheep, the horse and the rabbit, and the rest of our friends, paternity is morally non-existent, and the whole burden falls on the mother. We may sum it up by saying that the Manprinciple fights for his own present life, to make it stronger, wider, happier; while the Woman-principle fights for the life of another, for something blind, weak, helpless, that does not. know its own interests. She works for the future rather than for the present, and in the long period of protective compassion. true love is at last born within her, love that "beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things," love that "never faileth." This love at first is very narrow, being limited to her own child, and that only for the years of dependence, as we may see in the savage mother; but, by the good hand of our God over us, it expands and ramifies to every outpost and corner of life. From this one ancestral love springs all the sweetness of communal society where the strong stand back for the weak, and all kinds of loyalty and patriotism, and all sympathy with sickness, suffering and poverty, and, at last, all world-wide philanthropy. When the Woman spirit, the Mother-spirit, is firmly fixed, it is, as time goes on, inherited by the sons as well as by the daughters, and you have that noble being-the sympathetic, generous, bencficent man. At last Eve is fully created within, for the Man-spirit is conscious that there is a superior force in the world to that of mere muscular strength or of cunning inventions the force of gentleness, sweetness and affection; and both his great gifts-force and skill-bow down at her feet and become the willing, grateful and laborious servants of her one superiority-love. Man creates toy after toy and glories in them, but there is a side of his nature that is not satisfied even by aeroplanes and wireless telegraphy, and then he comes to the Woman to help him toward the ideal, and to supply the wants of the starving heart of loneliness which lives on amid the fair circle of creation. Might of all crude and obvious kinds yields to the Right of altruism, with its two great executives-Justice and Love. Might is a means, but Right is an end. I have been a long while in reaching the course of history in this subject, which is, I understand, the theme allotted to me; but as the lines of the Nursery and of Geographical distribution run closely parallel to those of Historical development, I hope the time given to them has not been wasted. When the light of History dawns in written records and carvings, we find certain nations already in possession of the world. There are Nineveh and Babylon, dreadful old tyrannies of brute force; there is Phenicia, the nation of commerce, and Egypt, the land of buildings and agriculture, where the huge works of the drainage of the Delta of the Nile can be traced back to 4000 B.C. Then springs up Greece, beautiful Greece, the mother of art and of thought; and later again Rome, the executive of the world; and, running through them all like a thread of gold, the story of Israel, the one channel of true religion. There are many more lesser nations, but, like Assyria, they are all military, spreading destruction around them. Of their inner life, of their women, we know nothing, as they thought nothing was worth recording but battles and thefts. The Manspirit is seen at its crudest and worst, and as all merely military nations are doomed by the hand of God to perish, so we have nothing but mounds of ruin, and their life is gone from us for ever. The first two nations of which we know the domestic life, are quiet and constructive Egypt and Phenicia the mother of barter and commerce. Now commerce is good and is highly civilising, for it brings in its train shipbuilding, navigation, coinage and even (so they tell us) the construction of the alphabet, and the general improvement of life, lifting it above the barren existence of the savage. Phenicia had ports and colonies all round the Mediterranean, and was likely to be the agent of much good, but one black blot ruined everything, and that was |