Endnotes
for section 2
[1]
“This
lovely character is drawn according to the usage of ancient times;
though the general principles are of universal application. It describes
not only the wife of a man of rank, but a wise, useful, and godly matron
in her domestic responsibilities. It is ‘a woman professing
godliness,’ adorned ‘with good works’ (I Tim.
2:10
);
a Mary no less than a Martha . . .
“Her
whole soul is in her work – girding
her loins with strength, and strengthening her arms – ready to do
any work befitting her sex and station. The land has also her due share
of attention. Ever careful for her husband’s interests, she considers
the value of a field; and,
if it be a good purchase, she buys
it, and plants the vineyard
for the best produce . . .
“We
now again observe her conduct as a mistress. And
here also her praise is not, that she spends her time in devotional
exercises (though these, as ‘a woman that feareth the Lord’ (Verse
30), she daily prizes); but that, according to the Scriptural canon,
‘she guides her house’ (I Tim. 5:14), watching carefully over her
charge, distributing both her meat and her work in due proportion, and
‘in due season.’ This is her responsibility. If ‘man goeth forth
to his work, and to his labour till the evening’ (Ps. 104:23), the
woman finds her work as ‘a keeper at home.’ (Tit. 2:5.) And
beautiful indeed is it to see, how by her industry, self-denial, and
heartiness she ‘buildeth her house.’ (Chap. 14:1.) She rises while it is yet night, not for the sake of being admired
and talked of, but to give meat to
her household. The delicacy also, with which she preserves her own
sphere, is remarkable. For while she provides food for the whole household, she giveth the
portion – that is – of work – not to the man-servants (these
with great propriety she leaves to her husband), but to
her maidens. Their clothing is also provided with every regard to
their comfort . . .
“But
never let the mistress contract her inspection within the sphere of a
mere housekeeper, with her whole time and mind employed in the external
routine of her household. While she exercises sound discipline and
maternal anxiety, her primary principle is a Christian conscience for
their highest interests; looking
well to their moral habits, their religious instruction, and
attendance on the means of grace; giving them time for secret prayer,
and reading the word of God, bringing them to the daily ordinance of
family worship; inculcating the careful observance of the Sabbath;
anxiously watching over their manners, habits, and connections. While we
would be careful not to over-work them, yet never let them eat the bread of idleness. If they have nothing to do for us, let
them work for God. In short – let us consider them, not as beasts of
burden, not as mere mercenaries; but as a solemn and responsible trust
for God and for eternity. Who can have the claim to a
virtuous woman, who does not feel this weight of family
responsibility?” (Charles Bridges on Prov.
31:13-27, A Commentary on
Proverbs, pp622-625).
[2]
This
biblical principle was incorporated into our common law: “Under
the principle of coverture the married woman became a non-person and for
all legal purposes her existence was suspended. Under the principle of
coverture the wife was under the protection and influence of the
husband. All her property passed to her husband. As divorce was
virtually impossible this was not as bad as it might at first appear as,
by law, the husband was required to provide his wife with the
necessities of life” (Stephen Marantelli, Jim Brennan, Roger Hawthorn,
Legal Studies for year 12, Edward Arnold, Australia, 1985, pp377,
378).
Compare
with Ebenezer Erskine (1680-1754), a renowned Scottish minister:
"You
know the wife is not sueable at law while clothed with a husband, he
answers for all. Just so when you close with Christ, the better Husband,
who is raised from the dead, you become dead to the law, Rom. 7.4. i.e.
you have no more concern with the law, and the debts you owe to it as a
covenant, either for obedience or punishment, than if they had never
been; insomuch that, with joy and triumph you may lift up your heads in
the presence of all your creditors or accusers, and say, ‘Who can lay
anything to my charge? for it is Christ that died for my offences, and
rose again for my justification and acquittance; I am under his
covering, I am with him in the bride-chamber, where law and justice have
no action against me’” (6th Sermon on Matt. 25:6, ‘The
Wise Virgins Going Forth to Meet the Bridegroom’, Works,
vol. 3, Free Presbyterian Publications, 2001, p237).
[3]
The
era of the entrenchment of liberal doctrine in the churches was the time
in which many women began to leave the guidance and protection of
fathers and husbands, to undervalue the domestic sphere and consequently
to discard chaste behaviour and dress. The following extracts concern
the progress of feminism in America and are drawn from a work which supports that
philosophy:
“By
the 1850s schoolteaching became a major woman’s vocation, with women
teachers in the majority in most large cities. The employment of female
teachers served to enlarge the work opportunities open to educated women
. . . While woman’s work outside the home remained limited, family
size was shrinking . . . in the 1830s surgical abortions became common.
Abortionists advertised their services in large cities, and middle-class
and elite women asked their doctors to perform abortions. One sign of
the upswing in abortions was the increase in legislation against it . .
. by 1860, twenty states had outlawed it. Only three of those twenty
punished the mother, however, and the laws were rarely enforced . . .
smaller families and fewer births changed the position and living
conditions of women . . . The beginnings of public education in the
1830s and the policy of grouping school children by age tended to
reinforce this trend . . . At the same time, working women were
pioneering new roles for women beyond the home. Many found teaching a
rewarding profession and preferred it to marriage and domesticity. Mill
girls forged new roles for women, as did the women who assembled at
Seneca
Falls,
New
York,
in 1848. Modeling their protest on the Declaration of Independence, they
called for political, social, and economic equality for women”
(pp278-280).
“Unlike
the First Great Awakening [in Britain and
America, c. 1720-1750],
when converts were evenly divided by sex, more women than men –
particularly young women – answered the call of Christianity during
the Second Great Awakening [in America, c.
1795-1835] .
. . Young women’s roles changed dramatically at the same time, as
cloth production began to move from the household to the factory”
(pp203, 204).
“When
[Charles G.] Finney led daytime prayer meetings in
Rochester,
New
York,
for instance, pious middle-class women visited families while the men
were away at work . . . The organized prayer groups and female
missionary societies that preceded and accompanied the Second Great
Awakening were soon surpassed by greater organized reform and religious
activity. Thus revival prompted and legitimised woman’s public role,
providing a path of certainty and stability amidst a rapidly changing
economy and society” (p327).
“In
1800 there were no public schools outside New England; by 1860 every
state had some public education . . . Massachusetts established a
minimum school year of six months, increased the number of high schools,
formalized the training of teachers, and emphasized secular subjects and
applied skills rather than religious training. In the process, teaching
became a woman’s profession . . . Many traditionalists, including New
England Congregationalists, fought to maintain the old ties between
education and religion . . . A more controversial reform movement was
the rise of American feminism in the 1840s. Ironically, it was women’s
traditional image as pious and spiritual that brought them into the
public sphere” (p331).
From
1865 (after the Civil War):
“As a result of these changes southerners adopted new values. Women,
sheltered in the patriarchal antebellum society, gained substantial new
responsibilities. The wives and mothers of soldiers became heads of
households and undertook what had previously been considered men’s
work . . . In the cities, white women, who had been virtually excluded
from the labor force, found a limited number of new, respectable, jobs.
Clerks had always been males, but now the war changed that, too.
‘Government girls’ staffed the Confederate bureaucracy, and female
schoolteachers became a familiar sight for the first time” (pp388,
389).
“Northern
women, like their southern counterparts, took on new roles . . . The
professionalization of medicine since the Revolution had created a
medical system dominated by men; thus dedicated and able female nurses
had to fight both military regulations and professional hostility to win
the chance to make their contribution . . . Even Clara Barton, the most
famous female nurse, was ousted from her post during the winter of
1863” (p397).
“As
machines and assembly-line production reduced the need for skilled
workers, employers cut wage costs by hiring more women and children.
Between 1880 and 1900, the numbers of employed women grew from 2.6
million to 8.6 million, and their employment patterns underwent major
changes. First, the proportion of working women engaged in domestic and
personal service jobs (maids, cooks, laundresses), traditionally the
most common form of female employment, dropped dramatically as jobs
opened up in other economic sectors . . . By 1920 nearly half of all
clerical workers were women; only 4 percent had been women in 1880”
(pp495, 496).
“Moreover,
men feared that entry of women would transform many jobs from all-male
to all-female ones, just as clerical jobs were changing. Male workers,
accustomed to sex-segregation in employment, could not recognize or
accept the possibility of men and women working side by side” (p503).
“In
the rural society that the
United
States
was in the nineteenth century, women and children worked at tasks that
were important to the family’s daily existence – cooking, cleaning,
planting, and harvesting. Their jobs were often hard to define, and they
seldom appeared in employment figures because they earned no wages”
(p539).
“In
1930 over 10.5 million women were in the work force, composing 22 per
cent of all workers. Despite these statistics, most Americans believed
that women should not work outside the home, that they should strive
instead to be good wives and mothers, and that women who worked were
doing so for “pin money” to buy frivolous things. Moreover, the
depression invigorated the longstanding charge that women in the labor
force necessarily displaced male breadwinners. One
Chicago
civic group protested that women ‘are holding jobs that rightfully
belong to the God-intended providers of the household.’ Married women
workers received the most criticism; some states even passed laws
forbidding the hiring of married women for civil service positions”
(p. 717).
“Well
over 6 million women entered the labor force during the war years,
increasing the number of working women 57 percent in less than five
years. Two million took clerical jobs; another 2.5 million worked in
manufacturing . . . There was a change in attitude toward heavy labor
for women. Up to the early months of the war employers had insisted that
women were not suited for industrial jobs. If women were allowed to work
in factories they would begin to wear overalls instead of dresses; their
muscles would bulge; they might even drink whiskey and swear like men.
As labor shortages began to threaten the war effort, employers did an
about-face” (pp804, 805).
“In
the 1970s . . . increasing numbers of women were committing themselves
to the struggle for equality with men. In 1974 Congress passed the Equal
Credit Opportunity Act, which enabled women to get bank loans and obtain
cards on the same terms as men . . . To take advantage of new
opportunities, many women delayed having children until they were in
their thirties and had established themselves in their careers. Still,
women continued to encounter barriers in their quest for equality. One
of the most formidable was the antifeminist, or ‘profamily,’
movement, which contended that men should lead and women should follow,
particularly within the family. The backlash against feminism became an
increasingly powerful force in the 1970s. In defense of the family –
especially the patriarchal, or father-led, family – antifeminists
campaigned against the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), the gay rights
movement, and abortion on demand” (p988). [Mary
Beth Norton, David M. Katzman, Paul D. Escott, Howard P. Chudacoff,
Thomas G. Paterson, William M. Tuttle, Jr., A
People and a Nation - A History of the United States, Houghton
Miffin Company, 1986].
Similar
changes occurred in the other Western countries, including
Australia:
“There
were also major changes in the sex composition of the workforce. In 1857
women made up less than a quarter of Melbourne’s
employees, with two-thirds working as domestics and the rest in
manufacturing. By 1901 female employment opportunities had widened and
almost a third of the city’s workers were women. Forty out of every
hundred working women remained in personal service, but often now
outside the home as a hairdresser rather than in it as a maid . . . In
the half century after 1871 two in every five
Melbourne
women between the ages of fifteen and sixty years earned wages. Mostly
they were single, with perhaps only one married woman in ten going out
to work” (pp167, 168).
“In
1954 only one married woman in eight worked for wages but by 1970 one in
three did so; furthermore over half the women in Melbourne aged between
fifteen and sixty were in paid employment” (p225).
[Tony
Dingle, The Victorians Settling, Fairfax,
Syme & Weldon Associates 1984].
[4]
The
late 19th century replacement of biblically-based education
in schools by secular (atheistic) philosophies coincided with the
large-scale introduction of women as public teachers of children. The
blasphemous Woman’s Bible (Elizabeth Cady Stanton & “Revising
Committee”) says of the inspired apostle: “Could Paul have looked
down to the nineteenth century with clairvoyant vision . . . he might,
perhaps, have been less anxious about the apparel and the manners of his
converts . . . Or, could he have had a vision of the public school
system of this Republic, and witnessed the fact that a large proportion
of the teachers are women, it is possible that he might have hesitated
to utter so tyrannical an edict: ‘But I permit not a woman to
teach’” (‘Epistles to Timothy – Further comments by Lucinda B.
Chandler’, The Woman’s Bible,
1898, p163). Compare such sentiments with the historic Protestant
teaching: “According to
St. Paul, women must be
learners, and are not allowed to be public teachers in the church: for
teaching is an office of authority; whereas she is not to usurp
authority over the man, but is to be in silence. But, notwithstanding
this prohibition, good women may and ought to teach their children at
home the principles of true religion” (Matthew Henry
on I Tim.
2:11, 12,
Commentary, vol. 6,
p1196).
