The
100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the [u]nited States
Constitution is upon us, and there has been plenty of chatter about this supposed
positive achievement for women’s rights.
Even those who call themselves conservatives have been
celebrating women’s suffrage.
But
the Southern view of this matter is just the opposite of that from the northern and the western
States, where women’s suffrage found its greatest support. Not only is women’s suffrage a loss for the
dignity of women, it has also opened the door for further civil rights
innovations (for the LGBTQ ‘community’ and for abortion) that have degraded
life within the union.
We
take as our Southern spokeswoman on this issue the formidable South Carolina
writer, Louisa McCord (1810-79), at once a poet, playwright, translator, and
essayist. She is not against the
improvement of the condition of women; she only asks that women, in so doing,
not seek to become something they are not - i.e., men - that they seek to
perfect themselves in the role given them by God to fulfil:
In womanhood is her
strength and her triumph. Class both as
woman, and the man again becomes inferior, inasmuch as he is incapable of
fulfilling her functions. A male woman
could as ill assume the place and duties of womanhood, as a female-man could
those of manhood. Each is strong in his
own nature. They are neither inferior,
nor superior, nor equal. They are
different. The air has its uses, and the
fire has its uses, but these are neither equal nor unequal—they are different.
. . .
In every error there is
its shadow of truth. Error is but truth turned
awry, or looked at through a wrong medium.
As the straightest rod will, in appearance, curve when one half of it is
placed under water, so God’s truths, leaning down to earth, are often distorted
to our view. Woman’s condition certainly
admits of improvement (but when have the strong forgotten to oppress the
weak?), but never can any amelioration result from the guidance of her prophets
in this present move. Here, as in all
other improvements, the good must be brought about by working with, not against—by
seconding, not opposing—Nature’s laws.
Woman, seeking as a woman, may raise her position; seeking as a man, we
repeat, she but degrades it. Everything
contrary to Nature is abhorrent to Nature, and the mental aberrations of woman,
which we are now discussing, excite at once pity and disgust, like those
revolting physical deformities which the eye turns from with involuntary
loathing, even while the hand of charity is extended to relieve them.
--‘Enfranchisement of
Woman’, Louisa S. McCord: Political and Social Essays, Richard Lounsbury
ed., Charlottesville, Vir., University Press of Virginia, 1995, pgs. 114, 108-9
Many women (we have
already said we will even grant an unfortunately large proportion of women) are
degraded, not because they have submitted themselves to the position which
nature assigns them, but because, like Mrs. Smith, they cannot be content with
the exercise of the duties and virtues called forth by that, and in that,
position. They forget the woman’s
duty-fulfilling ambition, to covet man’s fame-grasping ambition. Woman was made for duty, not for
fame; and so soon as she forgets this great law of her being, which
consigns her to a life of heroism if she will—but quiet, unobtrusive
heroism—she throws herself from her position, and thus, of necessity, degrades
herself. This mistaken hungering for the
forbidden fruit, this grasping at the notoriety belonging (if indeed it
properly belongs to any) by nature to man, is at the root of all her debasement.
. . .
It is this same misguided
love for notoriety which now misleads women to insist upon political rights, as
they word their demand—that is to say, admission to the struggle for political
distinction. And what is this that they
ask? What, but that like the
half-barbarous, half-heroic Spartan maid they may be permitted to strip
themselves to the strife, and wrestle in the public arena? Can civilized, Christianized woman covet such
a right? They pretend, or they mislead
themselves to the belief, that they are actuated by a pure desire to ennoble
the sex. Let them look honestly and
calmly to the bottom of the question, and they will see that it is but
notoriety, not elevation, which they seek.
In all derelictions from the right, the just, the holy, and the true,
woman is responsible for her own degradation, inasmuch as it entirely proceeds
from her own act, in casting herself out from her true position.
--'Woman and Her Needs’,
ibid., pgs. 131-2, 133-4
And
that ‘true position’ wherein women are elevated Mrs McCord describes beautifully
in other passages:
. . .
--
Holy Ælfred the Great, King of England,
South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð,
unworthy though we are!
Anathema to the Union!
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