WOMAN'S WORK IN THE CHURCHSilena Moore Holman & David Lipscomb

With Introductions by Hans Rollman

PART 1: WOMAN'S WORK IN THE CHURCH

INTRODUCTIONJ. T. Hunsaker has a problem. The good brother from Dye, probably located in Missouri, doesn't know how to keep his congregation united. One elder feels so strongly that Paul's famous words in 1 Corinthians which instruct women to be silent in church apply even to the reading of Scripture during a mixed male and female Bible class, that he stays away from church over it. And, yet, brother Hunsaker is very uncomfortable with the elder's position. Not only does this restrictive view represent a novelty in Dye, but also his two fellow elders hold the contrary view and permit women to speak and read in Bible class. Hunsaker reasons, if the words of Paul were literally applied, might this not mean that women would not even be allowed to sing in public? What is he to do? To ask the women to be silent so that ecclesiastical peace and harmony can be re-established? In this situation the good brother seeks authoritative advice from the editor of the Gospel Advocate in Nashville, because the journal is widely read among church members. It's an anguished plea for immediate and detailed instruction.

Whether the reply Hunsaker receives from David Lipscomb is what he had expected is uncertain. There remains an air of indecisiveness throughout his answer. He is clear about one thing, that an elder who forsakes church assembly over any disputed matter is not fit to be an elder. But the question of the extent of women's involvement in church matters is by no means an easy one. Even for the seasoned editor, preacher, and teacher, "it is a difficult question to determine exactly the limit of the law forbidding women to teach or to usurp authority publicly." Lipscomb observes female involvement in the early church alongside instructions to silence and modesty. He argues that women should not teach and preach, neither should they be involved in administrative matters or public worship. This principle has for him absolute validity, although he is by no means as restrictive as the elder in Dye. In fact Lipscomb preserves a legitimate sphere for female activity in the church where a woman "may engage in those acts of service in the church assembly that she can do in a modest way, neither taking the lead, assuming authority or attracting public attention to herself."

To this twentieth-century observer it appears that Lipscomb narrows the historical record and range of female involvement in the early church a little too quickly. He also derives from the more strident gender subordination of the post- pauline Pastorals universal principles which are then used as the touchstone to interpret the restrictive passages of the pauline letters. In doing so, the more rigorous judgments are harmonized without any careful consideration of the specific contexts or with contrasting statements of the pauline corpus. And yet although Lipscomb claims hermeneutical certainty for the New Testament evidence, his answer remains curiously open-

ended in view of such "an absolute and universal rule." In the end he has to admit that "there are difficulties in drawing this line, and for one man," as the elder in Dye had, "to say I draw the line here, and if you do not come exactly to by [sic; my?] standard, I will withdraw from you—is to show himself a bigot and to declare his utter unfitness for ruling the church of God."

After the editor had spoken, it remained to be seen whether his scrutinizing of the biblical record provided a satisfactory answer. Probably to everyone's surprise, a woman, Silena Moore Holman of Fayetteville, Tennessee, raised her voice and addressed the issue from a "woman's standpoint." HANS ROLLMANN

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WOMAN'S WORK IN THE CHURCH (Lipscomb)by A. A. Hunsaker/David Lipscomb

(GOSPEL ADVOCATE, 14 March 1888, 6–7)

[[@Page:6]]Many things have come up between our brethren as differences which are causing deep gloom to the cause we all claim to love. That we are commanded to "speak the same things, be of the same mind and same judgment," we all admit, but yet with all these admonitions before us, we differ. Now, just to what extent we are to be a unit, is where the issue rests. I want to present you with a case in this congregation—Dye—and ask you to give us an answer through the Advocate as it is being read by many in this congregation. They have Lord's day worship every Lord's day, and they have a Bible class and it is conducted thus: The brethren and sisters are all in the class, they read and ask questions where there is anything they do not understand, and one of the elders claims that the sisters have no right to read, and to support this he quotes Paul, "I suffer not a woman to teach." "Let your women keep silent in the church" for it is a shame for a woman to speak." Now, this elder refuses to meet with the congregation—wont come out because they suffer the sisters to take part in this teaching.

I am at a loss to know just what to do in this case; for I never have before heard the right of the sisters engaging in the worship, or in reading in the Bible class, called in question. You will please tell us just what limit—if any limit—to put on the "I suffer not a woman to teach, for it is a shame for them to speak in the church. Let them keep silent." Now if we take this literally, with no exceptions, would it not prohibit women from singing in the worship? If not, why not? And then what is the duty of the elders toward the elder that refuses to come, because the sisters take part in this? Two of the elders think different from the one. For the sake of harmony should we ask the sisters to give up their part in it, and let the men read and the women listen? Answer immediately and oblige us. Give us a good long lesson on it.

T. J. HUNSAKER.

A question that presents itself, first to my mind, is, that a man who abandons the worship of God because [[@Page:7]] things do not work to suit him—is not fit for an elder. The prevalent idea, that a man is at liberty to forsake the assembly of the saints, and the worship of the church because things do not go to suit his idea—is contrary to the teaching of God's word and destructive of all church harmony. If all men do this we can never have a church. No church is conducted so as to suit the ideas of all. Indeed I never knew a church that was in all respects conducted to suit the ideas of any one. If men and women are to quit the service of the church, when this or that does not suit them, all church order and church work are gone.

The apostles dealt with churches with very great evils in them. The Corinthian church had a man living with his own father's wife. The church was sustaining him in it, until Paul commanded them to put him away from them. He did not intimate any emergency in which a man can withdraw from a church of Christ. A mistake in the application of a law of God does not unchristianize a church that makes the mistake. It is only a deliberate setting aside of the law or the adoption of a practice they know there is neither precept regarding or example authorizing, in the Scriptures. This is deliberate rejection of God as law-maker—this unchristianizes a church. Changes a church of God into a synagogue of Satan.

But the mistake of the application of a law cannot work this fatal result, else there is no church of God on earth. It is a difficult question to determine exactly the limit of the law forbidding women to teach or to usurp authority publicly. It is clear women must teach privately or be condemned. They must teach their children—they must teach their husbands who are more ignorant than they. They must do this not in an assuming, authoritative way—but in a modest deferential manner—just as a child may and must teach its parents. It is not only right for a woman to teach her own family, but others also. Priscilla united with Aquilla in teaching Apollos, an eloquent preacher, Philip the evangelist one of the seven, had four daughters who prophesied. They did not get up before promiscuous assembles, but they in the presence of men and women—their brethren and sisters, among them Paul, prophesied.

Then the Spirit 1 Cor. xi, tells the woman who prays, she must have her head covered—while this praying was not public prayer in the church assembly, it was clearly when some were present. She may not have spoken audibly, yet she prayed and those present saw she did it.

Then Acts xvi: 14, Paul went out of the city to the river bank where prayer was wont to be made, and spoke to the women, who were assembled there, and Lydia's heart was opened to receive the truth. The context clearly shows that women were here assembled apart from men for mutual prayer—God sent Paul to teach them. These show that women may assemble together for mutual prayer and edification. The examples show they could teach and prophesy with some men present. Now the point is, how far may this go—before they violate the law given to Timothy, and by Peter, "Let the women learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the men, but to be in silence. For Adam was first formed then Eve. And Adam was not in the transgression, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression." "Let your women keep silence in the churches, for it is not permitted unto them to speak. But they are commanded to be under obedience as saith the law. And if they will learn anything let them ask their husbands at home, for it is a shame for a woman to speak in the church." 1 Cor. xiv: 34. This seems to me, given as it is, an absolute and universal rule. We can

find nothing in the context or occasion that would modify it by temporary or local surroundings. The reason given is one of universal application. It must then have such a reference as not to conflict with the clear examples and teachings of the apostles in other places. We know of no limit, save this, it prohibits women assuming the position of public teacher or preacher, of assuming authority in the management of church affairs, of conducting the worship of the church. But she may in a modest quiet manner teach the gospel to her own family—in a quiet social way, in an assembling of the children and others for studying and learning the will of God, and may engage in those acts of service in the church assembly that she can do in a modest way, neither taking the lead, assuming authority or attracting public attention to herself. This is my judgment as to the line between the permissable and prohibited. But there are difficulties in drawing this line, and for one man to say I draw the line here, and if you do not come exactly to by standard, I will withdraw from you—is to show himself a bigot and to declare his utter unfitness for ruling the church of God. They are not to lord it over God's heritage, but they are to rule in love and by fidelity, in example and precept to the teachings of the Master[.] If the language is pressed literally on all occasions when brethren meet for worship, a woman can not sing or open her mouth or do anything else where brethren and sisters meet.

D. L. ________________________________________

PART 2: A PECULIAR PEOPLE (Holman)

INTRODUCTIONVery little is known about our good Sister Silena (1850–1915), the wife of Dr. T.P. Holman, an elder in Fayetteville, Lincoln County, Tennessee. As a child, she was forced to grow up fast, when the Civil War devastated her southern home and killed her father. As the oldest of 5 children she single-handedly supported her family as a teacher and saved enough money to buy back the family home they had lost. At age twenty-four she married and became the mother of eight children. Sister Silena's life-long devotion to serving the public was expressed especially in her activities in the Temperance movement. For 15 years she was the president of the Tennessee "Women's Christian Temperance Union." Under her leadership the state organization grew into a force of more than 4,000 members. As a person she did not want to justify her own existence through someone else. For that reason she also asked her friend T.B. Larimore to conduct the funeral, "'for I want no man to apologize for my work, and I know he will never do that.'"

In the following article in the Gospel Advocate, Sister Silena teaches without undue preaching and moralizing what David Lipscomb had left unsaid. It is a woman's voice about the involvement of women in the church. And in the process she exposes with fine irony the foibles of her male contemporaries, who are indeed "a peculiar people." Her contemporaries seem to know Paul's famous silencing dictum better than any other verse in scripture. And yet the stipulated inappropriateness of female teaching clashes directly with the observed reality in her own life, which knows of patent role reversals. Paul's dictum, she tells us with exegetical soundness, needs to be placed in a wider context. If torn out of context and one-sidedly emphasized, it leads to the absurd, a prescription for female church-goers to stay at home altogether. And then she simply confronts contemporary realities, such as the elder's attitude in

Dye, but also Lipscomb's lack of attention to the female contribution in the early church, with the biblical record itself. And the evidence of a much wider participation of women in the life of the early church convinces and convicts by contrast with the nineteenth-century neglect. Her irony in the conclusion, after presenting the impressive evidence, is an echo that continues to reverberate into our own century and is addressed with seriousness only now: "Verily, we have grown better than could have been expected, when we have grown too wise and too good to permit what the disciples permitted as a matter of course."

HANS ROLLMANN

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A Peculiar People (Holman)(GOSPEL ADVOCATE, 2 May 1888, 12)

BY MRS. T. P. HOLMAN.

[[@Page:12]]Somewhere in the Bible the Lord's people are called "a peculiar people." Certainly the Christian church to-day must be the "true church," for I sometimes think we have more "peculiar people" in that church than ever did get together in any of the "denominations."

These "peculiar people," to whom I refer like the one or two bad boys to be found in every school who cause the teacher more trouble than the entire school besides, usually contrive to cause more trouble in the church than all the membership besides. One brother, without a particle of foundation whatever in the Scriptures for such a delusion, takes up the idea that the Lord's supper should be celebrated but once a year, BECAUSE THE JEWS ATE THE PASSOVER BUT ONCE A YEAR. Such an idea is nowhere to be found in the Bible. The Savior said, "This do ye, as oft as you drink in remembrance of me." And it is indisputable that the early disciples met together on the first day of the week to break bread.

Another good brother objects to the use of lesson papers or question books in Sunday-school, threatening to withdraw from the church, if any thing but the New Testament is used in any of the classes.

The organ, long a bone of contention among the brethren, now threatens the entire church with disruption. And if the organ fails to do this, the missionary society stands ready to help accomplish this unholy end. Occasionally may be found a good brother whose CONSCIENCE will not permit him to allow the use of any but alcoholic wine for sacramental purposes, though not a person living making the slightest pretensions to scholarship but says the use of pure unfermented, non-alcoholic grape juice is in accord with the Scriptures. So, though the reformed drunkard is thus time and again tempted to relapse, and too often, alas, does relapse, going down to a drunkard's grave and a drunkard's terrible hereafter, this good brother's tender conscience must be respected, lest he withdraw from the church.

And last, but not all, nor least, comes the brother who has withdrawn from the church because the sisters are allowed to go to Sunday-school and take part in the reading of the Scriptures, teach and ask questions in the Sunday-school! I sometimes think the brothers and sisters know that passage from Paul, "Let your women keep silence in the churches," better than any other passage in the whole Bible, so often is it quoted to those women who like the women of the early church, desire only to "labor in the gospel, like those who labored with Paul in the gospel. Phil. iv: 3. But never before have I heard of the doctrine being carried to the extreme of objecting to women teaching in Sunday-school, or to their sitting in a class and asking questions.

The trouble with such people is that they base their ideas on some one passage of Scripture, when it is necessary in order to understand the teachings of the Word or take the Bible as a whole, and not in detached parts; always interpreting every passage of Scripture so as to harmonize with every other passage. In no other way is it possible to read the message of God to his children aright.

Brother Lipscomb answered this last brother in the ADVOCATE of March 14. But as I am a woman, and look at this question from a woman's standpoint, if he will permit, I too would like to say a few words on the subject.

For many years I have been striving to find out exactly what Paul means to teach in this passage. Detached from the balance of the Bible, it would certainly seem to teach that a woman should neither sing nor pray nor preach, nor open her mouth on any subject while at church, or to teach in Sunday-school or ask questions in the Bible class. Looking at the passage more clearly, we find that a literal interpretation of the verse would keep women at home altogether, NOT ALLOWING THEM TO GO TO CHURCH AT ALL, for it says if they will learn anything let them ask their husbands at home. Now, in these days, when two-thirds of the membership of the churches are women, we find that some women would be in a sore strait for information if they depended on their husbands. A gentleman once said to me while discussing this passage, "When I want to know any thing about the Bible I GO TO MY WIFE. She would have but a poor dependence, if she had to come to me for information." There are many passages in the Bible that we are compelled to interpret by the light of other passages, or by the general teaching of the Bible. Paul in 1 Cor. i: 17, says, "Christ sent me not to baptize, but to preach the gospel." The denominations quote that passage to show that baptism is not of so much importance, as we believe it to be. And yet interpreted in the light of the numerous other passages in the Bible on the subject of baptism, we are compelled to believe that, whatever be said, Paul had no intention of depreciating the importance of baptism.

So, although, the Bible says "children obey your parents," "wives obey your husbands," does any person living believe that passage is ALWAYS to be interpreted literally, or that children should obey their parents or wives their husbands, when commanded or asked to do any thing sinful? The general teaching of this [sic]. So to come to an understanding of what Paul meant to teach in the passage indicated, we must take into consideration the entire teaching of the New Testament [on] the subject. In one place Paul says in Christ there is neither bond nor free, NEITHER MALE NOR FEMALE. Does not that passage seem to indicate a perfect equality before the Lord[?]"

When Christ came into the world, woman was little better than a slave. "Under the old Roman law, the husband had the power of life and death over his wife. He was her sole tribunal, and she could invoke no law against him. As a mother she had no power over her children. Such a thing was not known as the rights of a woman's individual conscience." The general belief was that she had no soul." Christ came, and woman's emancipation began. Never a philosopher, or teacher or rabbi, or reformer on earth, had such a following of women as the Savior. And he had no word of rebuke for their love of, or work for him.

To a woman at the well of Samaria the Savior made the first disclosure of Himself as the Messiah. "I that speak unto thee, am He." And the woman of Samaria went through the streets of the town telling to others the glad tidings that she had received from the Savior's own lips. His most devoted disciples, while here on earth, were women. Men reviled and persecuted him, and crucified him, but no woman was found among his enemies. The wife of Pilate pleaded for his life. A mad crowd of Jews surged around the Roman Tribunal, howling like wild beasts for his blood and the cry ascended to heaven again and again, crucify him! crucify him!

But "a great company of women," followed him to the place of crucifixion weeping and lamenting him. Women were "last at the cross and first at the tomb" on the morning of the resurrection, and to a woman did our risen Lord first appear, while a woman received the first commission to tell the glad news of the resurrection.

Centuries before the Savior's birth the prophecy went forth, "In the last days saith God, I will pour out of my spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your DAUGHTERS shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions and your old men shall dream dreams, and on my servants and on my HANDMAIDENS I will pour out in those days of my spirit, and they shall prophesy." After the Savior's ascension we read Acts i: 14, that they all continued with one accord in prayer and supplication "with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus, and with his brethren." While there together "there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind that filled all the house where they were sitting," and one and all, men and women were then and there baptized with the Holy Ghost. And Peter explained that this was the fulfillment of the prophecy.

Philip the evangelist had four daughters who did prophesy. Acts xxi: 9. In 1 Cor. xiv: 3, Paul tells us what prophesying is. "He that prophesieth speaketh unto men to edification and exhortation, and comfort." So we find that Philip's four daughters did publicly expound the scriptures, and in the presence of some men at least, including Luke, and Paul himself. How many more were present, we have no means of knowing. Priscilla and Aquila instructed Apollo in the very things he was preaching about. And does our good brother notice that Priscilla's name comes first, as if she were the more important personage of the two? In Phil. iv: 3, Paul entreats help for those women who labored with him in the gospel. In Rom. xvi: 1 (ff) Paul commends Phoebe a servant of the church at Cenchrea, and many other women "who labor in the Lord." In 1 Cor. xi: 5 he speaks of women praying and prophesying ("speaking unto men to edification,") and quite as if it were a matter of course.

There are many other passages in Scripture bearing on the same line of thought, but I have no room for more. In the morn of the resurrection a woman was counted worthy to bear to the disciples the glad tidings of a risen Lord. But in the nineteenth century she is counted by some

brother unworthy to tell the same tidings to the little children in the Sunday-school. In those days Philip's daughters prophesied in the presence of Luke and of Paul. But the modern woman is deemed unworthy to read or even to ask questions about the Bible in the presence of a nineteenth century man. Priscilla was wise enough, and in no wise considered unworthy to instruct Apollo, one of the most learned and eloquent of the early teachers in the doctrine of the new religion. But the modern woman must not venture to express an opinion on any religious subject in the presence of the vast amount of dignity and learning and wisdom and goodness embodied in the presence of some of our brethren of the present day.

Verily, we have grown better than could have been expected, when we have grown too wise and too good to permit what the disciples permitted as a matter of course.

Fayetteville, Tenn., March 17, 1888.

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PART 3: "Woman's Work in the Church" (Bunner Reponse)

INTRODUCTIONA good month after Silena Holman's article appeared in the GOSPEL ADVOCATE, A.A. Bunner replies and takes issue with what he considers to be wrong with Sister Silena's treatment. Bunner knows how to engage in polemics, by exploiting an innocent turn of phrase, the author's claimed "woman's standpoint," and insinuates that this viewpoint might yet turn out to lack scriptural warrant. While Bunner disagrees with the elder's narrow interpretation of the activities of women in the church, which had given rise to the original query in the GOSPEL ADVOCATE, he seriously questions the PUBLIC nature of female activities in the early church. Sister Holman is also accused of engaging in faulty hermeneutics when explaining a circumstance in one biblical book, such as the prophesying of Philip's four daughters in Acts, from an understanding of prophecy as a public act in Paul's first letter to the Corinthians. To highlight the alleged faulty logic of such exegesis, Bunner introduces an example of his own where two entirely unrelated passages are "yoked up" in order to explain each other. For him none of the examples cited by Silena Holman warrant any relativizing of Paul's famous dictum about the general silence of women in the church. HANS ROLLMANN

Woman's Work In the Church. (Bunner)by A. A. Bunner

(GOSPEL ADVOCATE, 20 June 1888, 5)

[[@Page:5]]Sister Holman in the ADVOCATE of May 2d under the caption "A peculiar people," looks, as she expresses it at the above question "from a woman's standpoint." Now if

she will bear with us a little we shall try and look at it from a scriptural standpoint. Our good sister says "I sometimes think the brothers and sisters know that passage from Paul, 'Let you women keep silence in the churches' better than any other passage in the whole Bible, so often is it quoted to those women who like the women of the early church desire only to labor in the gospel like those who labored with Paul in the gospel." Now I would be glad if our good sister would tell us if she when looking at this question "from a woman's standpoint" sees all or any of those women who labored with Paul in the gospel acting in the capacity of public proclaimers of the gospel of Christ. If she says that she does, then indeed will we be forced to conclude that looking at anything "from a woman's standpoint" is very far from looking at it from a scriptural standpoint. Indeed in looking at the question of woman's work in the church from a scriptural standpoint we find many ways in which women can labor in the gospel besides acting in the capacity of public proclaimers of the gospel. That brother was wrong who withdrew himself from the church because women were allowed to teach the children in the Sunday-school for I believe they have a right to teach the children the scriptures. I also believe they have a right in a quiet way to teach the men the way of life and salvation, but not publicly in the church for when the women get up publicly in the church of God to teach, then they disobey the apostolic injunction "Let your women keep silence in the churches for it is not permitted unto them to speak." 1 Cor. xiv: 34.

But right here I am, reminded by sister H., that Philip, the evangelist, had four daughters who did prophesy. Acts xxi: 9 and that Paul in 1 Cor. xiv: 3 tells us what prophesying is. "He that prophesieth speaketh unto men to edification and exhortation and comfort."

So you see our good sister yokes up 1 Cor. xiv: 3 with Acts xxi: 9 in order to prove that women have a right to act in the capacity of public teachers, but in doing so she did just what the man who yoked up the passage, "Judas went and hanged himself" with "Go thou and do likewise" in order to prove that it was right for a man to commit suicide and in proving his position in that sort of a way he made the scriptures contradict themselves, and if sister Holman proved by yoking up 1 Cor. xiv: 3 with Acts xxi: 9 that it is right for women to act as public teachers in the church of God then Paul is made to contradict his statement in the 34th verse of that very same 14th chapter of 1 Corinthians which reads "Let your women keep silence in the churches for it is not permitted unto them to speak, but let them be in subjection as also saith the law." Now if Philip's daughters could prophesy or speak unto men to edification and exhortation and comfort publicly in the churches of Christ and at the same time obey the injunction, "Let your women keep silence," etc., then I would like our sister to tell us just what they would have to do in order to disobey said injunction.

But further on our good sister H., tells us that Philip's daughters were public expounders of the scriptures for she says, "So we find that Philip's four daughters did publicly expound the scriptures."

Now if our good sister will not consider the question an impertinent one, I would love to ask her for my own special benefit to give us chapter and verse where she found that "Philip's four daughters did publicly expound the scriptures," and when she does then that will forever settle the question with me. So while I believe that Philip's four daughters did prophesy and to prophesy is to speak unto men to edification and exhortation and comfort," still I also believe

that Philip's daughters could and did exercise their gifts of prophecy without doing it publicly in the churches of Christ.

Now while I am willing to admit as true all that sister H., has said concerning our Savior's conversation with the woman at the well of Samaria and of the Holy Spirit being poured out on the servants and handmaidens in order that they might prophesy and of Priscilla and Aquila instructing the eloquent Apollos in the right way of the Lord and how Paul commended Phoebe a servant of the church at Cenchrea and of our Savior having a greater following of women than any philosopher or teacher or rabbi or reformer that ever appeared on this earth still that does not invalidate or set aside Paul's instructions, "Let your women keep silence in the churches."

A. A. BUNNER. ________________________________________

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PART 4: " Let Your Women Keep Silence." (Holman)

INTRODUCTIONIf Brother Bunner had hoped to conclude the discussion with his brief and somewhat flippant reply, he probably was surprised by the detailed answer he received from Sister Selina in the GOSPEL ADVOCATE's first August issue of 1888. Two points stand out to this reader: one, the refusal to accept the underlying argument in Bunner's irony, that the self-proclaimed woman's standpoint was anything but the scriptural one. It echoes the sister's determination to stand on her own feet and be taken seriously as a person. For similar reasons she probably also asked T.B. Larimore, the friend, to conduct her funeral, "for I want no man to apologize for my work, and I know he will never do that." The other point is that she recognizes and addresses squarely the hermeneutical problem: the difficulties in discerning the meaning of Paul's dictum about women's silence in light of the many passages that assert their vocal presence and activity in the church. For Silena Holman it is a topic for doubt, discussion, and differences of opinion that should not be silenced by a simplistic paternal fiat and arbitrary harmonization of Scripture. To demonstrate the complexity of the issue, she ends her article with a veritable barrage of questions directed at Bunner. They reveal how seriously our sister had wrestled with these issues and also that she was determined to look at the scriptural evidence from "every possible standpoint" before forming a final judgment. HANS ROLLMANN

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"Let Your Women Keep Silence."BY MRS. T. P. HOLMAN.

(GOSPEL ADVOCATE, 1 August 1888, 8)

[[@Page:8]]A few weeks since I wrote an article headed "A Peculiar People," for the ADVOCATE to show that according to the Bible, women might be allowed to teach in the Sunday school. I hadn't the remotest idea of trying to prove any thing else at that time, but it seems that I did, or else some one thought I did, for forthwith some big brother jumps on my poor little article with all his weight and utterly crushes me by challenging me to prove that women were public proclaimers of the gospel of Christ, or have the right to act in the capacity of public teachers, or do any sort of public work in the Church; though he agreed with me as to the propriety of women teaching in Sunday schools, the only thing I was trying to prove the right to do.

Bro. Bunner rather criticizes my assertion that I looked at the matter from a woman's standpoint, as if a woman's standpoint and a scriptural standpoint were quite two different things. Though I think the numerous scriptural quotations in my article ought to have been enough to convince him that while looking at the matter from a woman's standpoint I was also trying to look at it from a scriptural standpoint.

He speaks of my yoking together Acts xxi: 9 about Philip's four daughters prophesying and 1 Cor. xiv:3, which tells us what prophesying is, and likens it to the man trying to prove that it was right to commit suicide because the Bible says in one place "Judas went and hanged himself," and in another reference to an entirely different thing, "Go thou and do likewise." Now I appeal to the brethren throughout the state to know if the comparison is a fair one.

A brother in the pulpit quotes a passage commanding all men to have faith or to repent, and then quotes another to show what faith and repentance is, and he does not misquote or misapply scripture. Neither do I consider that I have misapplied scripture when in referring to women (or men) prophesying, I quote Paul, who, explaining to the brethren the difference between speaking in an unknown tongue and prophesying, says, "he that prophesieth speaketh unto men to edification to exhortation, and comfort." In the same chapter he farther says that, "he that prophesieth edifieth the church." I had not the remotest idea of trying to invalidate Paul's injunction that "women keep silence in the Churches" in my article. I only desired to group around the passage other teachings of the Bible on the same subject.

I do not know what Paul meant by his injunction. I have been trying for a long time to find exactly what he means. One of the best preachers in the Christian church, an old man a life long student of the Bible, once told me that he did not know exactly what Paul meant to teach there. I may have my opinions on the subject, and others may have different opinions. But after all, what do they amount to? About as much as a "Paedo-Baptists" opinion that Lydia must have had little children when she and her husband were baptized when trying to prove that infant baptism is right. Bro. Jesse Swell, one of the grandest preachers in the Christian church, once in a sermon I heard him preach, illustrated the absurdity of that infant baptism argument thus: "Now Lydia had no children. She had two sons. One was named James and one was named John. James was 18 years old, John was twenty. James followed so-and-so for a living, and John did such-and-such a thing for a living." Now I did not know quite as much about the Bible and things in general then, as I do now, and asked myself in big capitals where did he get his information? But he left us not long in doubt. "Now," said he, "you all want to know where I got my information, and I will tell

you. I guessed it. You guess she had little children and I guess she had grown children, and my authority is just as good as yours."

There would not be the slightest doubt as to Paul's meaning, if that was the only passage in the Bible on the work of women in the Church, for the language seems plain enough. But there are other passages showing that women were prominent workers in the early Church, and others still, seeming to teach differently from 1 Cor. xiv: 34, and it is these other passages taken in connection with the one under discussion that give rise to doubt as to the apostle's meaning.

Those who love the Bible seek to harmonize its teachings. Some would do it by stretching and trimming every passage in the Bible on the subject to fit Paul's injunction to the women to keep silence. Others try to so construe the apostle's meaning in this passage as to make it harmonize with his teachings in other places. And both I earnestly believe are only trying to get the truth.

But Bro. Bunner says I said "Philip's four daughters did publicly expound the Scriptures" and asks me to give the book, chapter and verse from which I obtained my information. Now Philip's four daughters did prophesy. Paul says that "he that prophesieth speaketh unto men to edification, to exhortation and comfort." 1 Cor. xiv: 3. Also in 1 Cor. xiv:4 he says "he that prophesieth edifieth the Church." And perhaps I drew a too hasty conclusion in deciding that in "edifying the Church" they expound the Scriptures to them. But if Bro. Bunner will open his Bible and find the verse which says "Philip's four daughters did prophesy privately," he will find in the verse following it, this passage: "Philip's four daughters did prophesy publicly also." There are other than Biblical reasons why many women should not be public proclaimers of the gospel of Christ. As for myself, I have neither the talent nor inclination to be a public speaker. My one poor little talent lies in another direction, and is, I think, fully consecrated to the service of the Lord. And I earnestly pray that he may so guide my pen that every word it writes may be to the glory of God. There are seven other reasons in a group, why I might not become a public preacher, and they are my seven children, the oldest just twelve. But if God in his infinite wisdom and goodness, should so guide the course of human events that the entire seven should become either public or private preachers of the gospel with heart, and soul, and purse, and life consecrated to his work, I could ask no greater blessing.

But the census shows us that there are many thousands of women, widows or unmarried women of mature ages, who never can have the blessings of home and husband and children. Should these have a talent for public or private speaking, and are earnest devoted Christians, who desire to go out in the high-ways and by- ways of the gospel of Christ to the lost and ruined of mankind and bring them into the fold, are they sinning against God in doing this work? Many think they are, others think they are not. Now Bro. Bunner, will you not answer a few questions for me? Will you tell me exactly what you think Paul meant by his injunction to the women to keep silence in the Church? Is it not a violation of this injunction for women to sing in the Church? If not, why not? They cannot sing and keep silence or without speaking the words they sing. Is it not a violation of the injunction when men and women together sing the words written by women? For thus it is women speaking through the voices of others; for a large portion of the songs sung in our churches are written by women? Should women pray in public? In 1 Cor. xi: 5 Paul says "every woman that prayeth or prophesieth with her head uncovered dishonoreth her head." Does Paul mean that when a woman prays by her bedside at home she must first cover her

head? "Let your women keep silence in the Church." What is meant by the word church? Does it mean the house, or the church members as an organized body of Christian people. The latter use of the word is quite common in the Bible, as "they added to the Church daily." "Feed the Church," etc., etc. If that is what he means, how would it violate the Scripture to speak to a mixed congregation of disciples and sinners who could in no wise be called "a church?" Would that injunction keep women from speaking in public on any other subject as on the subject of literature or science or temperance? You admit that women have the right in a quiet way to teach men the way of life and salvation. Suppose a dozen men and women were in my parlor and I talked to them of the gospel and exhorted them to obey it? Exactly how many would have to be added to the number to make my talk and exhortation a public instead of a private one? What does Paul mean in Gal. iii: 28, when he says "there is neither male nor female; for ye are all one in Christ." How do you explain the prophecy in Psalms lxviii: 11 (revision) which says "The Lord gave the word. The women that publish the tidings are a great host." Do you think it right for women to go to heathen countries as missionaries? I refer especially to those countries where it is impossible to reach women through men preachers on account of their secluded lives? Do you think it would be proper for women to hold a prayer meeting if no men were present? Might a woman talk of the gospel to a crowd of women only without violating Paul's injunction? In a neighborhood where there were few men and none belonging to the Church might a number, say a dozen or so of devoted women meet together, organize a church and worship God, without the assistance of a man, without violating Paul's injunction? I have recently read of such a church. Do they sin in so trying to worship God though they have no male member in their congregation? Do you think it was a mere accident with no meaning attached, that Christ appeared first to a woman after he had arisen, and that a woman received the first commission to tell the tidings of the resurrection? Now Bro. Bunner, please answer every one of these questions, for I assure you they are asked in no flippant manner. I am at present making a study of the "woman question," and I want to look at it from every possible standpoint. Indeed, it is my custom to study every side of any question that may come before me, in order that I may not mentally grow one-sided. When you are through with these, I may have a few more to propound.

Fayetteville, Tenn., June 25, 1888.

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The Scriptural Status of Woman. by Mrs. T. P. Holman

(GOSPEL ADVOCATE, 10 October 1888, 2–3)

“There can be no male and female; for ye are all one man in Christ Jesus.” Gal. iii: 28. R. V.

Dr. Adam Clark, commenting on this passage says: “Under the blessed spirit of Christianity, they (women) have equal rights, equal privileges, and equal blessings; and, let me add, they are equally useful.”

The difference in the status of women in the heathen world and in the Christian world is immense. Under the Hindoo religion, we find for instance, that their laws decree that for women

no sacramental right is performed with sacred texts, thus the law is settled, women, who are destitute of strength, and destitute of the knowledge of vedic texts (the sacred writings of the Hindoos), are as impure as falsehood itself; that is settled. She is forbidden to read the sacred scriptures, or even to pronounce a single syllable out of them. Some of the Hindoo proverbs teach that a woman (not some women) has the heart of a viper. That she is the chief gate to hell. That they are fetters to men. That they cannot be trusted. Not being allowed to receive any religious instruction and as there is not kind of education outside of religious instruction, women are debarred from all intellectual training whatever. In heathendom no possible misfortune is deemed equal to that of having been born of the female sex, because of the lowly status of womanhood. Socrates, one of the wisest and noblest of the Grecian philosophers, was accustomed to thank God daily that he “was born neither a woman nor a slave.” And even the Jews incorporated in their later ritual the utterance which is to this day used in some of their synagogues, “God, I thank thee that I was not born a woman.”

We of to-day, in this Christian land, are far removed from heathendom in many respects. But, in spite of ourselves, some of the prejudices of heathenism cling to us, and tinge our thoughts and actions in many ways. Heathen prejudice has debarred woman from legal rights, from intellectual culture, from religious instruction. Within the memory of many now living there were men in this country who refused to allow their daughters to learn to read and write. The first female college in this country celebrated its fiftieth anniversary a year or two since. And not so many decades ago, the Chamber of Deputies of France was exercised over a hot debate as to whether or not women should be allowed to learn the alphabet; and when the vote was taken it was decided that they should not.

Christ and the Christian religion has been woman's best friend. Slowly, surely, she has emerged from the darkness of heathenism into the full light of the perfect day of a Christian civilization. With the blessings of religious and intellectual culture, now freely bestowed, new vistas of thought and action open before woman, and with her strong emotional nature and loving heart, a few great souls among our women are pleading to be allowed to tell the story of the cross to the lost and ruined of mankind, that they may thus assist in the conversion of the world to Christianity.

While many say that women are not permitted to do any kind of public work in the gospel, and in this view are sustained by a large number of commentators, still the number of those who think that women should do public work in the gospel is growing larger and larger every day, and on this side may also be arrayed a large list of commentators, among them the learned Dr. Adam Clarke, who holds a high position in the exegetical world. Now let us turn to the other and unpopular side of the question of woman's public work for Christ. For I assure you that though unpopular, it has another side. In truth I find most questions have two sides, and the trouble with most people is that they can't be made to believe there is another than the side at which they are accustomed to look.

There are as many as three prophecies which are thought to relate to the prominence of women in the propagation of the religion of Christ. In the sixty-eighth psalm, of which Simon de Muis said “It may not improperly be termed the torture of critics, and the reproach of commentators,” in 11th verse, revised version, we read, “The Lord giveth the word. The women who publish the

tidings are a great host.” This is admitted to be prophetic, and is taught to refer to the large number of women engaged in publishing the gospel news.

Another prophecy is found in the fortieth chapter of Isaiah. Beginning at the third verse, (ff) we read “The voice of him that crieth in the wilderness, etc:” This is universally admitted to be a Messianic prophecy. John the Baptist himself quotes it in his preaching, heralding Christ. In the 9th verse we read in the unauthorized version, “O Zion that bringest good tidings, get thee up into the high mountain.” The revised version however makes Zion the recipient and not the publisher of the glad tidings, and it is there rendered thus, “Oh thou that bringest good tidings to Zion.” But the Hebrew participle there is in the feminine gender, which makes the bringer of the good tidings a female and the exhortation of the prophet to the woman sex, which fact is not brought out in either the authorized or revised versions of the holy scriptures. Rev. W. R. Brown in his book “Gunethics,” 46th page, following Dr. Adam Clark, translates Isa. xl: 9, thus: “O daughter that bringeth good tidings to Zion, get thee up into the high mountain! O daughter that tellest good tidings to Jerusalem, lift up thy voice with strength and say unto the cities of Judah, behold your God!”

Dr. Adam Clark, commenting on this says: “The office of announcing and celebrating such glad tidings are here spoken of belonged peculiarly to women. On occasion of any great public success, a signal victory, or any other joyful event, it was usual for women to gather together....to publish and celebrate the happy news.....So in this place, Jehovah having given the word by His prophet the joyful tidings of the restoration of Zion, and of God's returning to Jerusalem, the women are exhorted by the prophet to publish the joyful news with a loud voice from eminences whence they might best be heard all over the country; and the matter and burden of their song was to be, “Behold your God!”

The third prophecy to which I refer is found in Joel ii: 28, 29. “And it shall come to pass afterward that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions.” And also upon the servants and upon the handmaids in those days will I pour out my spirit.

This prophecy is quoted in Acts ii: 17, 18, by the apostle Peter who explains that the time of its fulfillment had come.

When the Savior was born into the world he found womanhood in almost as degraded a condition as were slaves. The Roman law, under which were the Jews at that time gave the husband the power of life and death over his wife. The woman had no control over her own children, The general belief was that woman had no soul. The Jews, apt in this, as in other things, to imitate their heathen neighbors, came to adopt much the same sentiments in regard to women. Says Dr. Adam Clark, “The Rabbins taught that a woman should know nothing but the use of her distaff.” The “sayings of Rabbi Eliezer are both worthy of remark and execration; they are these: “Let the words of the law be burned, rather than that they should be delivered to a woman.”

Almost from the Savior's first public appearance, he had a large following of women among his disciples. In the first year of his ministry, we read in Luke viii: 1, 2, 3, “And it came to pass afterward that he went throughout every city and village, preaching and showing the glad tidings

of the kingdom of God; and the twelve were with him, and certain women,” among whom were “Mary Magdalene....and Joanna the wife of Chuza, Herod's steward, and Susanna and many others, which ministered to him of their substance.” Think what love those fearless women must have borne their Savior, when they dared to oppose the customs of society and the traditions of their religion, “in following the greatest of Iconoclasts from city to village with a publicity and a persistence nothing less than outrageous to the conservatives of that day.” Our Savior honored a woman (at the well of Samaria) with the first disclosure of himself as the Messiah.

In Luke x: 38-42 we find our Savior in the home of the beloved family at Bethany. Mary one of the inmates, “Sat at Jesus' feet and heard his word.” Martha, her sister, appears to have been a woman tenacious of the existing conditions of society. Like a large number of people of the present day, she thought it was “a woman's place,” to attend only to domestic concerns and leave all other matters to men.

She was a careful and benevolent housekeeper, and on hospitable thoughts intent; and the thought that Mary was losing interest in domestic affairs, and concerning herself with matters fit only for men was very repugnant to her. In her impatience, she carried the matter to the Mater. “Dost thou not care that my sister has left me to serve alone? bid her therefore that she help me.” The Savior replied: “Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things: But one thing is needful: Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her.”

I have not time to follow up the group of women who waited on our Lord during his earthly ministry. After the mock trial, which condemned him to the death of the cross, “a large company of women” followed him to the place of crucifixion, weeping and lamenting him. When all was over, with sad hearts and loving hands they helped to embalm his body for the tomb; then left him, “pale but victorious, to sleep through the Sabbath.” When the Sabbath was passed a group of women who loved him best, started at early dawn to perform some loving office for the dead that the near approach of the Sabbath had rendered impossible for them to perform on the day of the crucifixion. To these faithful loving women did our Lord first show himself after the resurrection and it was they who received the first commission from the Savior's own lips to tell the glad news that the Lord was risen, death was conquered, and man redeemed!

I never could understand how a man could say that woman shall not tell the story of the cross, when she received her commission to do so from the Savior's own lips. True, those who do so, make a distinction between public and private teaching that a careful reading has convinced me is not found in the Bible. If Paul's injunction to Timothy, “I suffer not a woman to teach or usurp authority over a man,” prohibits a woman from telling the glad news of the gospel in public, it also prohibits her doing so in private.

Had there been five hundred or five thousand present when Mary rushed into the presence of the disciples with her joyful news, she would not have hesitated to proclaim, “He is risen! He is risen! I have seen the Lord!”

The women were present with the other disciples when our Lord appeared and convinced the most sceptical, opening their minds that they might better understand the scriptures, and said “Thus it is written and thus it behooved Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead on the third

day, and that repentance and remission of sins should be preached among all nations, beginning at Jerusalem. And ye are witnesses of these things.”

The women were present on the day of Pentecost at that mighty outpouring of the spirit and men and women alike were equally blessed with that wonderful ???? that enabled them to speak with tongues and to prophesy.

It certainly cannot be said that women did not speak in public on at least one occasion in the New Testament, where there were as many as one hundred and twenty persons present when they began, and a much larger number when they quit. In Acts ii: 4 we read, “And they were ALL filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues at the Spirit gave them utterance.” That the women were present on that occasion we will find by referring to Acts i: 14. “And these all continued with one accord in prayer and supplication with the women and Mary, the mother of Jesus, and with his brethren: That they all continued to speak for a while after the arrival of the crowd is evidenced from the fact that every man there “of every nation under heaven” heard them speak in his own tongue, and one man could only have spoken in eon language at a time. Then the others kept silent while Peter, as spokesman, stood up with the eleven apostles and preached that wonderful sermon that is the admiration of all ages. He told them that the time had come when the Lord had promised he would pour out his Spirit on all flesh; when the sons and the daughters should prophesy. And that this was the fulfillment of that prophecy.

After the death of Stephen, there arose a persecution at Jerusalem that scattered all the disciples (men and women) abroad except the apostles. Acts viii: 7. The conversions had been of both men and women. In Acts viii: 4 we read, “They that were scattered abroad went every where preaching the word.”

In the ninth chapter of Acts we find Saul getting authority that would allow him to bring both men and women who were of this religion bound to Jerusalem. If women were not allowed to speak of it except to their husbands at home, what possible harm (?) could they have done?

In the twenty-first chapter of Acts we read of Philip's “four daughters, virgins, which did prophesy.” In the eleventh chapter of first Corinthians we read Paul's directions that women should be veiled, that is have their heads covered when praying or prophesying. As these veils were only worn in public or in the presence of men this shows that the praying and prophesying spoken of was done in public or in the presence of men. Paul also explains 1 Cor. xiv: 3, 4, that prophesying is for the edification /3/ of the Church. So here we have both the permission and example of women doing public work in the Church for Christ.

Paul's letter to the Romans was written at Corinth and was sent by Phoebe to Rome. Thus one of the most important of the epistles was sent by a woman, and the taking it involved a sea voyage and a visit to a foreign country by a woman, when traveling was neither so common, nor nearly so safe as at present. Of this woman he writes: “I commend unto you, Phoebe, our sister which is a servant of the church which is at Cenchrea: that ye receive her in the Lord, as becometh saints, and that ye assist her in whatever business she hath need of you: for she hath been a succourer of many and of myself also.” So she not only took a long and dangerous voyage, taking with her

this important letter, but she was also entrusted with the performance of some important business, and Paul entreated the assistance of the Church for her in this business. The translation makes Phoebe a servant of the church. The revision renders it deaconess in the margin. The word translated servant here, is the Greek diakonos. This word is used thirty times in the New Testament and twenty times is translated minister which means, in many cases, at least, one who speaks or proclaims in public. “Ministers by whom ye believed.” 1 Cor. iii: 5. “Whereof, I was made a minister.” Eph. iii: 7. “I Paul am made a minister.” Col. i: 23. If thou put the brethren in remembrance of these things thou shalt be a good minister of Jesus Christ.” 1 Tim. iv: 6. “Tychicus, a beloved and faithful minister in the Lord.” Eph. vi: 2. “He hath counted me (Paul) faithful, putting me in the ministry (diakonian). 1 Tim. i: 12. The ministry (diakonian) which I have received of the Lord Jesus. Acts xx: 24. The word is translated deacon three times, and servant seven times. In regard to servants, it is used especially of servants at table. In Romans xvi: 12 he speaks of “Tryphena and Tryphosa who labor in the Lord,” and at Phil. iv: 3, we read of “those women who labored WITH ME in the gospel.” If he had said these men who labored with me no one would have thought of any thing else than that they were, like Paul, preachers of the gospel. But as it was only “those women,” why of course they did—they did—well we don't exactly know what they did, only we guess they din't preach any. But how they could labor with Paul without doing the same sort of labor he did is hard to be understood. The case of Phoebe, diakonos, servant, deaconess or minister, is not a solitary instance. In 1 Tim. third chapter, after telling the qualifications of deacons, he says in the eleventh verse “Even so must their wives be grave, not slanderous, sober, faithful in all things.” Now if you notice must, their and be in the authorized version are in italics, which shows, as all know, that those words were supplied, and were not found in the Greek. The revision puts it, “Likewise should women be,” etc. Meaning as a large number of commentators say women deacons or deaconesses. Of this passage Dr. Daniel Steele remarks: “Paul gave explicit directions respecting the ordination of women deacons in 1 Tim. iii: 11. There the translators have put a bushel over the deaconesses by using the word 'wives.' In his Biblico Theological Lexicon, Cremer, a German, a man of a nation strongly inclined to put woman down in a very low 'sphere,' is constrained to admit that 'this text is a passage which for preponderating reasons must be taken as referring to deaconesses.' Says Dean Alford: 'In this view, the ancients, are, as far as I know, unanimous.' A succession of first class exegetes, from Chrysostom to Philip Schaff, sustain this interpretation, among whom are Grotius, Mosheim, Michaelis, DeWette, Wisinger, Ellicott and Whedon.”

“In Mosheim's History of Christianity we read: "Justin Martyr (A.D. 150.) says: 'Both men and women were seen among them who had the extraordinary gifts of the Spirit of God, according as the prophet Joel had foretold, by which he endeavored to convince the Jews that the latter days were come.' Dodwell in dissertations on Irenaeus says, 'that the gifts of the spirit of prophecy were given to others besides the apostles, and that not only in the first and second, but in the third century, even to the time of Constantine, all sorts and ranks of men had these gifts; yea, and women too.' Eusebius speaks of Potumania Ammias, a prophetess, in Philadelphia, and others who were equally distinguished for their love and zeal in the cause of Christ. The Church had ever belonging to it from its very first rise a class of ministers composed of persons of either sex who were termed deacons or deaconesses.”

That women were recognized as ministers in the early Christian Church, appears also in a report of the younger Pliny to the Emperor Trajan, about A.D. 104 in which there is written, “However

I thought it necessary to apply the torture to some young women who were called ministers (ministrae.)” How women could have been ministers and deacons and have done no public work in the Church, or of what use the gifts of tongues and of prophecy would have been to them if they could not use these gifts except in private, is something that I cannot understand; and I think it would take a man (or woman) with a large measure of spiritual endowment to make it plain. In the Jewish economy only a certain class of men were priests to God. But in the Church of Christ, the entire membership is “made to be a kingdom, and priests unto God his Father.” Rev. i: 6; and so in the Christian religion men and women alike are entitled to the rights and duties of the priestly office.

Dear brothers and sisters in the Church of Christ; these thoughts are submitted to you in all humility. In all I have written, I have not desired to invalidate a single word written by the apostle Paul. I fully believe his letters are the work of inspiration. And though, in them, I find, as the apostle Peter says of them, (2 Pet. iii: 15, 16) “Some things hard to be understood,” I am willing to stand or fall with any command he has given. My only endeavor has been to reconcile Paul with Paul, and himself with other inspired writers.

I think Saint Paul one of the grandest characters known in the history of the world. He who suffered for his religion “in labors more abundant, in stripes above measure, in prisons more frequent, in deaths oft; .....in perils of water, in perils of robbers, in perils by his own countrymen, in perils by the heathen, in perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea, in perils among false brethren; in weariness and painfulness, in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness,” yet through it all “fought the good fight” and “kept the faith,” until the Lord should call him, I think, presents one of the grandest spectacles of unfaltering courage, and unflinching faith ever known in the history of humanity. The New Testament, after the resurrection, with Paul left out, would be but a meager document indeed. The recorded labors of all the other evangelists, almost seem to pale into insignificance, by the side of great work done by this greatest of all apostles, the apostle to the Gentiles; who yet could reckon himself as among the least of all disciples.

He who would strive to invalidate a single word written by any inspired writer in order to gratify or prop up some previously conceived notion would indeed be worthy of severest condemnation. But I pray thee, brethren, that however we may differ in our exegesis of the Scriptures, let us, in all charity, and brotherly kindness, at least give each other the credit of being sincere in our convictions, and conscientious in our interpretations.

Fayetteville, Tenn., Sept. 4, 1888.

(e-text: JoAnne Toews; HTML: Ernst Rollmann)

Woman's Station and Work (Lipscomb)by David Lipscomb

(GOSPEL ADVOCATE, 10 October 1888, 6–7)

[[@Page:6]]I think if we will read carefully and thoughtfully the article from sister Holman on woman's work in the church, we can find a pretty good reason why the Lord did not suffer a woman to teach and lead in his church. When she wants a thing so, her strong emotional nature and intense love will see and have it that way any how.

Our sister can't understand language like this: “Let the women learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach nor to usurp authority over the man but to be in silence. For Adam was first formed then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression. Notwithstanding she shall be saved in child bearing, if they continue in faith and charity and holiness.” That is too dark and mysterious. She cannot see that the Holy Spirit is telling, I suffered you to take the lead once; your strong emotional nature led you to violate God's word and to shipwreck a world, I cannot again trust you to lead. She cannot see that Paul is telling the woman must not become the teacher, ruler, leader over man, that she is to be in subjection, because Adam was first formed, given the preeminence. A reason of universal application, showing the truth based on it is universal in its bearing.

Her unfitness to lead and teach arises from her strong emotional nature causing her to be easily deceived and to be ready to run after anything or body that might strike her fancy against reason and facts. This is still strongly woman's characteristic, as the article of our sister plainly shows. Paul says, notwithstanding this characteristic that unfits woman for a leader and teacher of assemblies, if she will devote herself to bearing children, in faith and charity and holiness, as her true work, she shall be saved.

Then, too, this language is dark and mysterious. “Let your women (it means spiritually endowed women) keep silence in the churches, for it is not permitted a woman to speak; but they are commanded to be in obedience as saith also the law. And if they will learn anything let them ask their husbands at home; for it is a shame for a woman to speak in the church. What came the word of God out from you? or came it unto you only. If any man think himself to be a prophet or spiritual, let him acknowledge the things I write unto you are the commandments of the Lord.” Now Paul tells the church, “Let your women keep silence,” the reason given is, it is a shame for a woman to speak in the church, and then he refers to the fact that the law commanded the same thing, yet it is only a special case arising out of the condition of society at Corinth, or it just means women must not ask questions or dictate in church!! Asking questions or seeking information certainly does not involve ruling or dictating more than public teaching would. To ask a question is to become a learner not a dictator. And if they are not allowed to ask questions in public, much less could they assume the role of teacher. That bears much closer relation to ruling and dictating than asking questions does. He follows the idea up, they are to ask their husbands at home, the reason, It is a shame for the women to speak in the church. Then he asks, “What came the word of God out from you or came it unto you only?” There is diversity as to whether this refers to the church at Corinth or to the women. Whichever it may be, the question is propounded as a reproof to church or women, assuming to change the order of those from whom the word of God came, in permitting women to speak. If it refers to women it is a reproof for assuming to lead when God had not entrusted the word of God to her.

Then he adds, “If any man think himself to be a prophet or spiritual, let him acknowledge these things written by me (concerning these gifts) are the commandments of God.” Those who claim

to be spiritually endowed and would so claim power to teach the will of God are to be tested by a willingness to receive these as commandments of God and to be set aside. It seems to me the Holy Spirit could not have hedged this teaching that it should not be set aside more carefully. For one to call it in question was to advertise himself as not spiritual or a prophet.

“But is it not singular that these spiritually endowed women must ask their husbands at home to learn instead of relying on their own inspiration?” That question arises from a misapprehension of spiritual powers and their work. Spiritual powers did not reveal all truth to each one who possessed them. Paul and Barnabas were spiritually endowed men, but must needs go up to Jerusalem to consult the apostles. Paul consulted with the chief apostles privately lest he had run in vain. Even the apostles must consult one another and get all that had been revealed to each, before the full truth was known. It is not strange then that endowed women should desire to learn and be referred to their husbands.

But our sister says, There are a large number of women who have no husbands or homes, and they should teach. That is a strange reason, that those deprived of one chief source of learning should because of that deprivation be called on to teach. Paul settled the case about these. “The younger widows refuse: for when they have begun to wax wanton against Christ, they will marry; having damnation, because they have cast off their first faith. And withal they learn to be idle, wandering about from house to house; and not only idle, but tattlers also and busybodies, speaking things which they ought not. I will therefore that the younger women marry, bear children, guide the house, give none occasion to the adversary to speak reproachfully.” 1 Tim. v: 11–14. Here Paul so far differs from our sister as to tell these unmarried women they ought to marry, bear children, guide the house (train the children) and give no occasion to the adversary to speak reproachfully, as they do when they undertake to preach or make public speakers. This agrees with his promise, she shall be saved in child bearing, if she will quit trying to lead and teach and fulfill [sic] her own mission.

While our sister can no more see the teaching of God's word in these plain, carefully explained and guarded Scriptures than mother Eve could see death in the goodly fruit that pleased her, she can see as bright as the noonday sun, women must publicly preach. Why is this? Our sister struck it when she spoke of her “emotional nature, her intensely loving heart.” These blind her to facts, shut out reason and lead her headlong where her emotions prompt her and so unfit her for leadership. An emotional man is not fit for leadership. Her nature fits her for work, earnest, true, loving work, just as essential as the leading or teaching of public assemblies, and that for which her nature fits her, God assigns to her.

It is not necessary that we take up the Scriptures which she has quoted and which her strong emotional nature has warped to teach what they do not teach the most remotely. Her first quotation, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female, ye are all one in Christ Jesus,” is tortured to mean there are no duties peculiar to one class and not to another. This we know is not true. The Holy Spirit made certain duties obligatory on freemen that were not on slaves, some on slaves that were not on freemen. Woman is continually allowed addressed in her own character with duties peculiar to herself and vice versa. As well say because a woman and man are one in marriage, they have the same functions to perform, the man must bear children and guide the house as well as the woman.

Her prophecies say nothing of public teaching. The church is frequently called the daughter of Zion and doubtless was the subject of the prophesy, but because it is feminine she finds women preachers. Her strong emotional nature making an idol of public preaching, finds, the Savior's telling Mary had chosen the better part, authority to lead assemblies in public addresses. She thinks the woman would have announced the resurrection to 10,000; doubtless, but the Master chose she should do it to one or two at a time and then that the men should proclaim it to the multitudes. We are seeking not what she would do, but what the Master wishes her to do.

She finds the women speaking in public at Pentecost. But only because the idol of her love demands she should see it. It is not in the Bible. The apostles are clearly recognized as the ministry, they supplied the vacancy of Judas by the election of Matthias, and Peter with the eleven spoke. None others were commissioned to speak at this time. She says there were deaconesses; deacon means one who serves, the connection must show whether the service was official or not. Women may have been official servants, yet not public speakers. Some elders even did not teach publicly, labor in word and doctrine. Our sister wonders why they were spiritually endowed if not to speak publicly. She answers it in another place when she says comparatively little of the teaching was done in public discourse, but in private and individual effort. Our sister gives a one-sided view of Dr. Clark's teaching. He said, “They have equal rights, equal privileges and equal blessings, and let me add they are equally useful.” And so say I. He did not say they had the same faculties, abilities, or work. I believe woman is equally useful with man. Have frequently said, were I going to a new place to introduce the gospel I would much prefer a good devoted Christian woman to help than a man. She can supplement my work in a way a man cannot. Her's is equally useful with mine but it is not the same. Dr. Clark says on 1st Timothy ii: 13, “For Adam was first formed, then Eve.” “And by this very act God designed that he should have the preeminence. God fitted man by the robust construction of his body, to live a public life, to contend with difficulties, and to be capable of great exertions. The structure of woman's body proves that she was never designed for those exertions required in public life.” Again, “God has not only rendered her unfit for it (ruling) but He has subjected her (expressly) to the government of the man.” Adam Clark did not believe women should become public teachers. Her ideas of the condition of women among the Jews while having nothing to do with the question are greatly fanciful. Smith's Bible dictionary as also Strong and McClintock's say, “Instead of being immured in a harem, or appearing in public with the face covered, the wives and maidens of ancient times mingled freely and openly with the other sex in the duties and amenities of ordinary life. Rebecca traveled on a camel with her face unveiled, until she came into the presence of her affianced (Gen. xxiv: 64). Jacob saluted Rachel with a kiss in the presence of the shepherds. Each of these maidens was engaged in active employment, because [[@Page:7]] the former in fetching water from the well, the latter in tending the flock. Sarah wore no veil in Egypt, and yet this formed no ground for supposing her married.” Again, with regard to the use of the veil, “It is important to observe that it was by no means so general in ancient as in modern times.” “Generally speaking women, both married, and unmarried, appeared in public with their faces exposed, both among the Jews (Gen. xii: 14; xxiv: 16; xxix: 10; 1 Sam'l i: 12,) and among the Egyptians and Assyrians, as proved by the invariable absence of the veil on the sculpture and paintings of these people.” “Much of the scrupulousness in respect to the use of the veil dates from the promulgation of the Koran, which forbade women appearing unveiled except in the presence of their nearest relatives.” So it is all a figment about this veiling and modesty of women being a relic of paganism. It is ordained of God and stamped

in the true woman's nature. The covering for the head was a token of her submission and as such was proper when she worshipped. Not one of her examples from the Bible, nor from Church history finds women leading in public address. She went with Paul and labored with him and taught Apollos, but never once does she find her addressing multitudes.

But I just as earnestly believe that women should work in the gospel as any one can. I am anxious that she should do it, only that she should do it as a woman not as a man. The Bible encourages her to work in the gospel. It nowhere either in the law or the gospel encourages her to teach or lead in public assemblies. I believe God knew what was best for her, for the human family and where she would do most effective service. It was not in public speaking. There is not an example of her doing this in the New Testament. She was not sent to preach in the public use of that word as was man. The early church used her under the guidance of the Spirit, but never as the teacher of public assemblies. The churches that most effectively use women to-day do not permit her to teach public assemblies. The Roman church and the Episcopal are examples. The churches that permit her to preach are those that have made least growth and are most loose in faith—the Congregational. The Methodist are beginning to tolerate it. The communities where this is most popular are not more religious than others, but they are growing infidel. New England three hundred years ago zealously religious is now sceptical. The marriage relation is lightly esteemed. Marriage is loose, divorce easy, child-bearing avoided. This must be the natural result of women in public affairs, a woman with a thirst for the publicity and applause of the rostrum, wont bear children and guide the house, foeticide is said to be common where this sentiment prevails. So that New England is becoming Romish in its faith because puritan women wont bear children and the Romish do. The puritan stock is said to be decreasing all over the country from the same cause. On the other hand, where woman has married, borne children, guided the house, given no occasion to the adversary to speak reproachfully as she does when she enters public life, the people are the most religious. When the Bible and experience both condemn it why should Christian women desire it? The southern people are more religious than the northern—a much greater proportion are church members.

Then wherefore should women desire to preach publicly? Alexander wept because he had no more worlds to conquer. But he had conquered the one before him before he wept for another. Woman, or some women, only a few I am glad to say, are hunting for new fields of action, weeping for new worlds to conquer. But have they conquered the one committed to them? To bear and raise children is a work given to her by God—to raise them in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. Has she finished and completed this work that she so longs to step over and supplant man and conquer his world for him? The place at which above all others the Christian religion fails, is in that work committed especially to women, the raising and training of children for the Lord. The gambling rooms, the whisky shops, the whore-houses, theatres, the schools of crime and sin and shame, the penitentiaries and prisons, are all manned and filled with the children of Christian mothers. The leaders of infidelity, the rogues and murderers of every shade and degree were brought up by Christian mothers, but not in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. Gross, glaring, perfidious failure in the family is the curse and the weakness of the church. This is the place at which it fails most fearfully and disastrously. Were the children borne by Christian mothers all trained and saved to the Lord, the conversion of the world would be easy and speedy. Woman is not alone to blame for this failing. But home is her realm, her children her subjects. Until she trains them to be loyal and true to her religion and her God, it is

simply shameful folly as well as treason to herself, her children, her race, and her God, to seek to occupy man's field of labor. They cannot swap functions, nature or work. Man cannot bear children, no more can he guide the house. That's woman's duty. Really the public preaching is much better done than the home training, the private work. There is no call yet for women to weep for other worlds to conquer, her world is not conquered. She can lighten the public preacher's work. She can labor most effectually with man in the gospel, by bearing children and guiding the house for God. When this is done the world, the whole world will be quickly converted to God. She can help and labor with every preacher in the gospel, when so far as her duties to her family will permit, she modestly and quietly appeals to men and women to be Christians.

My dear sisters, God has committed to you a work surpassed in importance and second in sacredness to no other work in the world - that of bearing and training immortals for his home. Here your strong emotional nature and intense love may find their true field for useful and loving work without danger of misleading. No other can occupy this field save you. It is an unnatural, unwomanly, ungodly ambition that would prompt women to leave this for any other work in the world. Do this well, you become then true helpmeets and co-workers with man in the gospel. It complements and supplements his as his does this. One cannot do both—the twain shall be one, and the twain work makes the true perfect work of the one body in Christ. Your work is the foundation of man's. It is of the two really the more necessary and important.

D. L.

A Protestby Mrs. T. P. Holman

(GOSPEL ADVOCATE, 17 November 1892)

I have just read the article on “Woman and her Work” in Gospel Advocate of October 13, and confess that I am moved to enter a most emphatic protest against some of the assertions contained therein.

They are something after this style: that men have ceased to attend church, the growing infidelity in the country, loose marriage, easy divorce laws, the indisposition of women to bear children, with all the attendant social impurity, the threatened extinction of a great race, the spread of Roman Catholicism, all these evils are brought about, or owe their existence to the fact that women sometimes preach or speak in public, or take pat in the public affairs of the country!

Poor woman! It would seem that she would have her hands full to bear the burden of and render an account for her own sins. But, if in addition, she has to render an account for all the sins men commit, she would as well give up the fight at once, for then is there no hope for her here or in the world to come.

I am not at this place discussing the right of women to speak in public, or take part in the public affairs of the country whenever, or wherever she is :“the best man that can be found for the

place.” Advocate readers know where I stand on that subject, for I have not changed. But what I do protest against is, that when men fail to attend to their church duties, or sin in other respects, they should hide behind a womans skirt and say you are to blame because I have not done right.

The statistics given, in the article referred to on another page, of so large a number of families who do not attend church, and the much larger proportion of women than of men who do attend in some counties in Maine, could, I am sure, be duplicated in some counties in more than one Southern state. A gentleman who has canvassed our state selling Bibles, says, that he never saw a town in which so many heads of families were out of the church, as in our town of Fayettville. And in all the churches I ever attended in my life, more women than men belong to the church, and more women than men attended the church. But how the women who belong to the church, or attend the church, or any other women, are to blame because men do not belong to the church, or do not attend church, is something that passes my comprehension. Admitting that it is wrong for women to speak in public, and because they do this, men fail in their duties, men and not women would still be accountable for all mans sins of omission and commission. The Bible teaches that man is the head of the woman. And as such he should do what he could to help her, keep her in right paths. But should she stray, in spite of his best endeavors, he is under none the less obligation to keep his own walk and conversation under divine guidance. And when he fails to do so, he cannot get rid of the responsibility by saying, you did wrong first and therefore you are to blame because I did wrong.

One would conclude from reading the article that in the Northern and Western states, most, if not all the churches are headed by women, and that women take the lead in that section in public affairs in general, leaving men in the background. Whereas, I do not suppose there are one hundred churches out of the fifty or hundred thousand in the United States, who have women pastors, and the proportion of women to men, who take part in public affairs, is very small, even in the North and West.

The assumption that men will never attend associations of any kind manned by women, is wholly gratuitous. And our national W.C.T.U. conventions managed wholly by women and visitors outside of the women delegates there are quite as large audiences of men as women, who attend the mass-meetings of the conventions. The same is true of our state conventions, as I can safely testify, having attended them in many parts of the state. And the audiences are always as largely composed of men as of women.

He says, New England is becoming infidel because of this publicity of women. What of Infidel France. A hundred years ago when such a thing as “womans rights” was unheard of? The taking part in the public affairs of the country has as little to do with the infidelity of New England today as it had with the infidelity of France a hundred years ago. Easy divorce laws is another crime he lays at womans doors. Yet statistics show a hundred cases, I think I could safely say a thousand, of divorces sought because of drunkenness, adultery, and general bad treatment, where one is brought about by the desire of women to lead in public affairs.

Another evil brought about by this desire of women to take part in the public affairs of the country, he says, is the indisposition of women to bear children. Now I know personally of

twenty women who do not believe in “womans rights,” who will not bear children or are indisposed to bear children because of their love of fashionable life, and their love of selfish ease and pleasure, where I know of one who believes in “womans rights,” in any shape, and refuses to bear children. And I am willing to leave it to any unprejudiced person in the land to say if this proportion does not hold good from Maine to California, and from the lakes to the gulf.

But all the sin of refusing to bear children does not rest on womans shoulders by any means. I know of one woman who sought a divorce from her husband because he had stood over her with a pistol, threatening to shoot her if she did not take drugs to bring about a miscarriage.

One of our county papers with a big circulation came out some years ago with an announcement that the girls who married the young men of a certain club in town would have no children. The papers are full of coarse jokes and caricatures about the young benedict walking the floor at midnight in scant raiment, trying to hush to sleep a squalling brat, and other like discouragements to his assuming the duties of paternity. The fashionable man of the day is quite as much opposed to having the care and expense of a family as is his fashionable wife. And the desire of women to lead in public has nothing to do with either.

But when I come to the assertion that the desire of women to lead in public has anything whatever to do with the prevalent social impurity of the day, I am dumb. The statement is so utterly unfounded and preposterous that I can find no words with which to refute it.

It is said that marriage is becoming less common than formerly. Perhaps because women are learning to be self-supporting and do not so often now as formerly, marry “for a living.” Perhaps because more men refuse to be burdened with the care and expense of a family. But how the taking part in public affairs by women has anything to do with this, or with any consequent social impurity would be hard to say.

I have always repudiated the idea that women possessed all the goodness in the world. But I am equally indisposed to have them shoulder the responsibility for all the bad.

He assumes that all these evil things are more prevalent in the Northern and Western states than in the Southern states. That in these same states more women take part in public affairs than in Southern states. Therefore these evils exist because women take part in public affairs. But where is his proof? Because both occur in the same locality? Let us see. There is much more infidelity and failure of men to attend church and loose marriages and easy divorce laws, and indisposition of women to bear children in the Northern and Western states, than in the Southern. In these states the proportion of well educated people is much larger than in the South. Therefore all these evils exist because people have been well educated. I submit to any logician that my logic is as good as his.

It would be more charitable and much nearer the truth I should think to say that women everywhere have seen the Lords work not done because there are not enough laborers in the field and in their desire for the advancement of his kingdom, have gone out to labor with their

own hands, than to say that the work is not done because women have undertaken to do a part of it.

(e-text: JoAnne Toews; HTML: Ernst Rollmann)

Untitled Response to T. P. HolmanAuthor Unknown—Photocopy of the end of the article appears to be missing

(GOSPEL ADVOCATE, 17 November 1892)

It is rather difficult to discuss with one who relies on personal knowledge of private and secret facts to upset well authenticated public statistics. Well authenticated and public data, published by leading New England statisticians, are my authority for the statements concerning the indisposition to bear children and the decrease of the puritan race. The reports of all the churches of and of the United States census show that the proportion of church members to the population in the South is much larger than in the North, five or six times greater. We have published these heretofore. Our sister thinks her town of Fayetteville furnishes as small proportion as the North. I do not know personally. But I have heard it has a fair proportion of strong minded women, who run conventions, make public speeches, teach churches how to worship. She persists, too, it has of women who do not wish to bear children, and men who do not wish to sustain them. She represents a bad state of morals and religion in Fayetteville. I think she must shade the picture too deeply. But, in this case, her private knowledge furnishes an example in the South of just what I said existed greatly in the North; and I said, too, that, as the same influences spread South, the same results follow. Her women friends do not refuse to bear children because they wish to enter public life, but because they love fashionable life. When an evil is once started it will be used for any end it will serve.

I take it, she means that only a few women in the North have attained notoriety in leading in churches. The masses of the churches North are now managed by women. They frequently use the pastor through whom to work. The same condition is rapidly working its way South. The only reason I object to it is, it is unscriptural, and I am sure will soon work the same irreligious condition among the men here that so greatly exists there.

(e-text: JoAnne Toews; HTML: Ernst Rollmann)

________________________________________

Part 5: “Women's Scriptural Status Again”

Women’s Scriptural Status Againby Mrs. T. P. Holman

(GOSPEL ADVOCATE, 21 November 1888)

At odd moments during the present year Bro. Bunner and I have been sparing a little over the scriptural status of woman. But in the Advocate of October 10th Bro. Lipscomb takes up the cudgel in Bro. Bunners place and lays on the blows with an unsparing hand. Now while it does seem rather bad that two big brothers must fight one little sister, still, I am grateful for the implied compliment, and feel encouraged to continue.

Seriously though, this article would not have been written had not my position in some respects been misunderstood. For I am perfectly willing for my argument to remain beside Bro. Lipscombs, and stand or fall on its merits.

In the first place, I wish to say that nothing is more plainly taught in the scriptures, than that the man is the head of the woman, and should take the lead, most especially in the family relation. While it is too often true that women are compelled to assume, if not the nominal, at least the real headship, both in business matters, where through the incompetency or dissipated habits of the husbands, they are compelled to support the family, and in religious matters when their husbands are irreligious or indifferent, still, I have always maintained that such a state of affairs is both unscriptural and unnatural. In nothing I have written have I intended to convey the impression that I thought women should “usurp authority over man.” And I am truly sorry anyone should imagine that I did. But I believe that a learned Christian woman may expound the scriptures and urge obedience to them, to one hundred men and women at one time, as well as to one hundred, one at a time, and do much good, and no more violate a scriptural command in the one instance than the others, and that too without assuming to lead or abolish mans “headship” more in one case than the other. Brother Lipscomb emphasizes again and again the duty of women to marry and bring up children. Now if Paul in Timothy wills that women should marry and bring up children, in the seventh chapter of first Corinthians he gives them full permission to remain unmarried if they wish. In truth he rather commends such a course, for in the thirty-fourth verse he says, “The unmarried woman careth for the things of the Lord that she may be holy both in body and spirit; but she that is married careth for the things of the world, how she may please her husband.”

Now if a woman is married and has children, she owes them every possible care, and such a womans place is at home. No possible good that she might do elsewhere in religious or charitable work would be able to compensate for neglect of home duties. I would be glad to hear that doctrine thundered from every pulpit in the land, until fashionable women and bad women of every grade, and would-be good women are made to believe that their childrens immortal souls will be demanded of them at the last day, and no possible excuse will suffice for their neglect. Women should never marry until they have made up their minds to bear children. And I agree most heartily with Bro. Lipscomb in what he has said of the 19th century-womens distaste to motherhood. A sin by no means confined to New England, as he seems to think, but which is cropping up all over this country. And I can assure him most positively that while I have seen dozens of instances of it, not one was attributable to a desire for public life. I believe with Grace Greenwood that “for one woman whom the pursuits of literature, the ambition of authorship, and the love of fame, have rendered unfit for home life, a thousand have been made undomestic by poor social striving, the follies of fashion, and the intoxicating distinction which mere personal beauty confers.”

I believe a good woman will not neglect her children under any possible circumstances, and a bad one does not need an excuse to do so.

He speaks as if “a thirst for the publicity and applause of the rostrum,” were the guiding motive of those women who desire to preach the gospel. Is that the motive actuating men who preach the gospel? If not, then it were but charity to assume a better motive for women. Bro. Lipscomb accuses me of having given a one-sided view of Dr. Adam Clarkes teaching. To prove that I have not, I will quote a part of his comment on 1st Cor., xiv: 34, “let your women keep silence,” etc.

“But this by no means intimates that when a women received any particular influence from God, to enable her to teach, that she was not to obey that influence, on the contrary she was to obey it, and the apostle lays down directions in chapter eleven for regulating her personal appearance when thus employed. All the apostle opposes here is their questioning to find fault, etc., in the Christian church, as the Jewish men were permitted to do in their synagogues.”

He says it is not in the Bible that women spoke in public on the day of Pentecost. In Acts I: 14 we find that the women were with the apostles waiting for the spirit. In Bro. Creels little booklet, “Shall the sisters pray and speak in public.” on page 6 he says, “Our leading scholars, such men as Alexander Campbell, Moses E. Lard, Robert Milligau, and as far as I know, all the leading scholars, among the different denominations, say the entire one hundred and twenty disciples were baptized with the Holy Spirit.”

In Acts ii: 4 we read “And they were all filled with the Holy Ghost, and began to speak with other tongues as the spirit gave them utterance.” Peter then arose and explained to the assembled multitude that the time had come as prophesied in Joel when the spirit of the Lord should be poured out on all flesh; when men, and women should prophesy, etc., and this was a fulfilment of that prophesy. Now, perhaps the inspired writer did not mean ALL, when he said all. But then how does Bro. Lipscomb know that? He must have guessed it. For I am sure the Bible does not say so.

I beg Bro. Lipscombs pardon, but I certainly did not say that women who had no husbands or homes should teach, because tens of thousands of such women are unfit for teaching in every possible way. I only meant that when such a woman had a special talent for teaching, with a strong desire to proclaim the gospel, having no home duties to prevent, and being an earnest, conscientious, good woman, I believed and still believe there is no scriptural reason to prevent. He kindly accuses me of idolatry, of warping and torturing the scriptures, and of being blind. As to my idol (women preaching the gospel) I assure him that I have no idol that I know of, and that least of all. I have said before, and here repeat that I have neither talent, inclination nor opportunity, for any kind of public work. Every instinct of my nature clings to my home, my husband and my children. I abhor the very idea of a public life of either myself or my husband, for which I, at least, am totally unfitted. But that is no reason why I should object to other men and women who have a talent for public work, and a desire to engage in it, doing so.

He thinks it very strange that I cannot understand so plain language as “Let your women keep silence,” etc. Now I am ready to admit, that the language is as clear as the noonday sun. It is only those dozen or so other passages that seem to teach differently that have mystified me.

He has reiterated again and again the unfitness of woman to lead. The Bible nowhere intimates that the mind of woman is inferior to that of man (and it is the mind that makes the leader) or that it is because of womans inferiority or unfitness that man is to take the lead. In all partnership business there is a senior partner. In the marriage relation, the Lord, for good and sufficient reasons, has seen fit to say that the man shall be the head of the family, and no woman should marry a man who is her inferior, or who is incapable of taking the lead. But that women are unfit to lead in the family is disproved by everybodys observation every day of the world. No one who has ever seen a weak inefficient or worthless man, supported by a stirring energetic woman, who, in addition, has to bring up a family, and guide her household, will say that a woman is unfit to lead in the family, though it is rather an imposition for her to have it to do. Again, some of the best work that has been given to the world by man, owes its perfection to the guidance and inspiration of some woman. As to her unfitness to lead in public matters, history and even the Bible itself disproves that. The Holy Spirit does not say that after woman “shipwrecked the world” He could not trust the leadership to her any more, because the Lord did after that trust the leadership to a woman.

In Judges ii: 16 we read that “The Lord raised up judges which delivered them (Israel) out of the hands of those that spoiled them.” Among these judges was one Deborah, the wife of Lapidoth, who even led them to battle, Barak, refusing to go unless she went too. Under her leadership &8220;The land of the children of Israel prospered and prevailed against Jabin the king of Canaan, until they had destroyed him.” Judges xi: 24. The song of Deborah after the battle is one of the finest pieces of literature extant. And so wise was her reign that “Israel had rest forty years.” Judges v: 31.

In history which is full of examples of great women who led, the reign of Elizabeth shines like a ray of light in a dark place, and no country could be more prosperous than England at present under Victoria. In our own day in the great battle of the temperance hosts against the realm of king Alcohol, Frances E. Willard President of the National Women Christian Temperance Union, with the genius of a Napoleon, has led two hundred thousand women to battle with a success unattained as yet by any other department of the temperance army.

In science, in the art, in education, in literature, in journalism, in the professions, in finance, in business of every kind, woman has come to the front and proven her ability to cope with man, in anything she may undertake. Indeed it is impossible that it should be otherwise under the great law of heredity than that, mentally, woman should be mans equal in every possible respect.

But the unkindest cut of all is this, that because of the failure of Christian mothers to do their duty, “The gambling rooms, the whiskey shops, the whore house, theatres, the schools of crime and sin and shame, the penitentiaries and prisons are all manned and filled with sons of Christian Mothers.” Christian mothers know this is the end of their sons better than any one else; and this knowledge has sent thousands of mothers to premature graves. It is these houses of sin and shame, licensed and legalized and permitted to exist by the fathers in the land, that has tempted and led astray the sons of Christian mothers and landed them in the prisons and penitentiaries. Had Christian Mothers had a say so in the matter, no licensed saloon or other school of crime would stand with brazen front to entice their sons to ruin and eternal death. Tis this great wrong to woman that has cut into her heart like a great festering cancerous sore for ages; until in her

great agony she was compelled to cry out, and beg the men and fathers to remove these stumbling blocks, that her effort to bring up her sons aright might not be in vain. This is what has brought woman into the temperance fight, where she will remain until no legalized saloon or other school of crime remains in the land.

I would like to say before closing that in bringing up the case of Mary of Bethany, whom the Saviour had said had chosen the better part, I only desired to show that at least under some circumstances, a woman might take interest in other than domestic affairs, and did not see in that instance authority for women to lead in public assemblies, as Brother L. intimates. I do not believe that in the early days of Christianity, there were nearly so many women engaged in the active work of the Gospel, as men. Nor in the nature of things is it possible that there will ever be so many. Neither do I believe that the Bible makes any distinction between public and private teaching, or preaching. If it is wrong to tell the story of the cross to one hundred men, it is wrong to repeat it to one. Outside of the Apostles, there are very few examples in the Bible of what we would call public preaching even by men. It simply says, they went every where teaching, but how, whether publicly or privately is not explained. I spoke of this more at length in an article answering Brother Bunner, preceding the one published, but which the editors failed to find room for in Advocate. While, I was sorry not to get all the argument before the people, and some of the best points I made were in that article, still I know that the articles have been long enough to try any editors patience. I would also like to say that if the silence of Scripture as to womans public work, admitting that it is silent, is reason sufficient to oppose it, then no woman should be allowed to sing in church, or partake of the Lords supper as there is not the faintest allusion in the Bible as to her having ever done either.

Fayetteville, Tenn. Oct. 15, 1888

(e-text: JoAnne Toews; HTML: Ernst Rollmann)

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Women in the Church (Lipscomb)by David Lipscomb

(GOSPEL ADVOCATE, 21 November 1888)

Please read sister Holman's article above before reading this.

We think our sister should not excite or encourage a desire in other women that is so repugnant to her own womanly instincts and feelings.

We have nowhere said that woman was inferior to man in talent or position. We have said she has not the same talent, taste, combination of faculties, moral, social or physical. Hence is not adapted to the same work.

Hers is a more quiet, less public work, but the quiet, less showy work is the more important work in all departments of life. Training children at home has more to do with the moral and of

religious life and character of the children and the world than public preaching. If the world is only to receive the benefit of a good home training from Christian mothers, or to hear public preaching, we say by all means let it have the home training of Christian mothers. Because this is absolutely necessary to the child, the mother is doubtless prohibited by God from all public work because it would interfere with this her special work and the important work for the world. The most sacred trust committed to mortals is the training of children for immortality. This God committed to women, and cut her off from all other works that would distract her from this work. Certainly this is not saying woman is inferior to man or has been assigned an inferior position. Still she is not suited for the work which has been assigned to man. If each follows the work for which God fitted them and to which he has called them they exactly complement each other and it takes both and the work of both to carry out the work of the Lord. There need be no question of inferiority or superiority. Men and women in the same community stand about equal in regard for morality and virtue. Man is much what woman makes him, woman is much what man demands she must be.

Our sister thinks that if woman voted, there would be no licensed saloons, nor gambling houses, nor whore houses, nor places tempting men and women to sin. She seems to think these evils all exist because wicked man votes to license them. Well, my dear sister, man is what his mother makes him. The great and good men are always conceded to be the work of their mothers. The bad men are just as much the work of their hands. Then the whore house, and the gambling houses are not licensed. Strong laws to suppress them have been enacted. The license of the saloon does not encourage drinking. The license was intended as a restriction and discouragement of the use of intoxicants. In the natural state, every man made, sold and drank as much whiskey as he pleased. There was no license then. The trouble was mothers and fathers raised their boys to so love and drink whisky, it became such a crying evil, men and women concluded the good of the community demanded that restrictions should be thrown around the manufacture and sale, to check its use. They forbid anyone making or selling it without paying a tax and securing a license, which license contained restrictions intended to guard and discourage the use of it. It may be that the time has come when a still greater prohibition can be laid on it, but when a man or woman lays the love and custom of drink to the license they do not know what they talk about.

Woman has done much to cultivate the love of drink in her children. She has done and is now doing much to discourage the use of it, but her effective work is done at home, in teaching her children the evil of it and instilling into them principles of morality and religious integrity. Without this strength of moral principle all the laws in the world will not check intemperance or sin of any kind. She finds other motives than the love of public life hindering women from child-bearing. Most certainly, yet it had its origin in the same homes, grew in the same soil with her love for the rostrum. The idea of its being not wrong once admitted many occasions for committing the crime is found. Here are statistics furnished by Mr. Talmage:

According to the statistics of Prof. Dikes in one year in moral New Hampshire there were 241 divorces; in temperate Maine, 478 divorces; in good old Massachusetts, 600 divorces, and in New England of “steady habits,” 2,113. In one county in Illinois 830 divorce suits were begun in one year, and in many places it seems as if a new arrangement had been made of the commandments, and instead of ten there were only nine, the seventh commandment having been

left out. When you see how many husbands and wives are parted by law, and know of so many who would like to dissolve conjugal partnership, do you not come to the conclusion that Satan is engaged in mighty industries.

Woman and men are about equals in morality. It is probable God overrules Miss Willards course to bring some good out of it to humanity. He does most usually overrule mans rebellion, to bring good out of it to man. Man would be in a deplorable condition if he did not. But I have no more doubt that her course as a whole is hurtful to humanity and dishonouring to God.

Paul said an unmarried woman could devote her time to God with more undivided consecration than the married one. He said this could be done in the then crisis of a persecution, “the present distress,” 1 Cor. vii 26 resting upon them, just as a woe was pronounced on those who were with child and who gave suck when certain terrible days where to come on them. Nor do I understand that Paul intended to declare that every woman should marry. But those who love to make themselves conspicuous, officious, seek publicity and are forward in seeking to lead in the church. These are certainly commanded to marry, guide the house and give no occasion to speak evil of the cause. A woman may devote herself to the work of the church today and never make a public speech. Thousands do. Our sister seems to have the idea that no service can be done for God except by public harangue. The same hurtful idea hinders men from trying to do personal service to God, unless they can make public harangues.

Dr. Clark said “The structure of womans body plainly proves that she was never designed for those exertions required in public life.” “God has not only rendered her unfit for it, but he has subjected her (expressly) to the government of men.”

That is plain. If he anywhere says she ought to engage in the public ministries he contradicts himself. But he does use an expression that may be so construed, and our sister construes the plain by the doubtful as she does Pauls language.

Did the Holy Spirit say woman had “wrecked a world” when leading and so he could not trust her again to lead? Not in so many words. But God speaking through Paul, giving a reason why she should not speak and lead in the assemblies says, “Adam was not deceived, but woman being deceived was in the transgression.” The transgression in which she led turned the world over to the devil and wrecked it.

But he tells her “she shall be saved,” notwithstanding that fatal misstep in turning the world over to the devil, “in child-bearing, if they will continue in faith and charity and holiness with sobriety.”

While I think it clearly a mistake that we can find no example of women singing or partaking of the Lords supper, I only add if it were true, and then coupled with a declaration of Holy Writ, “I suffer not a woman to sing or to partake of the bread and wine,” I would say woman ought not to sing or partake of the Lords Supper.

But all did speak on the day of Pentecost! Well if our sister will look back into the first chapter she will see the all did not include the women. In verse 14th, “These all (apostles) continued

with one accord in prayer and supplication, with the women and Mary the mother of Jesus and his brethren,” showing that these all were the apostles, and the women and the mother of Jesus and his brethren are in addition to these all. Then Peter in speaking of what these all must do recognized only, “men and brethren.” When the day of Pentecost was come fully, these all were in one accord in one place. These same all were filled with the Holly Ghost and began to speak with other tongues as the spirit gave them utterance. Now it is not certain a single woman was present, if so they were in addition to the all mentioned. Then again when the public preaching began only Peter with the eleven taught the public assembly. This last is positive and there is not the shadow of ground for saying a woman spoke on this occasion, nor can I with a number of commentators at hand, find one that so construes it. There is no doubt women received spiritual gifts during the apostolic age, but not the least evidence that these led her to speak in public.

The Holy Spirit said, “It is a shame for women to speak in the church.” It says that Priscilla and Aquilla did teach Apollos the way of the Lord more perfectly. But our sister believes if it is right for a woman to teach one it is right for her to teach a hundred and there is no difference between public teaching and private. In this persistence she thoroughly vindicates her womanly nature. She wants it so—and it is so, and that is the end of it. But now if our sisters will train their own children to be true Christians, true and faithful to God, the conversion of the world will be speedily accomplished without women entering public life.

(e-text: JoAnne Toews; HTML: Ernst Rollmann)

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Woman's Work (1892)by David Lipscomb

(GOSPEL ADVOCATE, 1 December 1892)

Selena Moore Holman’s QuestionBro. Lipscomb: Can you not tell us through the Advocate just what work you think, according to the Bible, woman may be permitted to do for the church as such? Once in a while you admit that there is work for women to do, but just what it is you never tell us. Of course we understand about home duties and raising children, and all that, of which I one of your strong minded women, certainly do my share. But what may we do for the church as such, besides?Fayetteville, Tenn., Nov. 18, 1892.

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Liscomb’s ResponseThe question is by sister Holman, and, as asked, betrays one of the strongest, yet most common, widespread and most difficult to be uprooted, errors concerning church work, to wit, that it is all done in public and by public speaking.

There was very little set speaking and speeches in the days of Christ or the apostles. They talked to those they met—one or a hundred—concerning the things of the kingdom. A very small part of the work was done by public speaking. Whatever is done by a Christian under divine direction is church work.

“The church is the body of Christ; ye are members in particular.”

Christ dwells in the body and works through the members, as the soul dwells in the body and works through the hands, feet, eyes, ears, etc. What the hand does the body does; so, too, of all the members.

Paul (1 Tim. ii: 9), after telling the men what they should do, says: “In like manner also, that women adorn themselves in modest apparel, with shamefacedness and sobriety; not with braided hair or gold or costly array. But (which becometh women professing godliness) with good works. But let the women learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence; for Adam was first formed, then Eve, and Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression, notwithstanding she shall be saved in childbearing, if they continue in faith and charity and holiness with sobriety.” Following both these negative and positive requirements is church work, because the work of Christ, and must be observed by women if they be faithful members of the church.

Chap. iii: 11: “Even so must their wives be grave, not slanderers, sober, faithful in all things.”

In chap. v: 10, Paul gives the works a widow must have done to entitle her to the support of the church: “Well reported of, for good works; if she have brought up children, if she have lodged strangers, if she have washed the saints feet, if she have relieved the afflicted, if she have diligently followed every good work . . . I will that the younger women marry, bear children, guide the house, give none occasion to the adversary to speak reproachfully.”

That is church work. The church has no more important work than bearing children and training them for service to God. Women must do that work.

He tells Titus to teach sound doctrine. That doctrine, as it refers to women, is, ii: 3: “The aged women likewise, that they be in behavior as becometh holiness, not false accusers, not given to much wine, teachers of good things, that they may teach the young women to be sober, to love their husbands, to love their children, to be discreet, keepers at home, good, obedient to their own husbands, that the word of God be not blasphemed.”

That is church work—the old women to teach the young women good things, to be sober, to love their husbands, their children; to be discreet, chaste, good housekeepers, obedient to their husbands. A Chris- (There appears to be a sentence or two missing at this point --- where one column ends and the next begins) house well—when she properly loves her husband, her children. The word of God is blasphemed when a woman does not keep house well; when she fails to love and honor her husband; when she fails to love her children and guide the house.

Peter says: “Likewise, ye wives be in subjection to your own husbands; that if they obey not the word, they may also without the word be won by the conversation (behavior) of the wives while they behold your chaste conversation coupled with fear.”

He gives the adornment they are to practice. All this is church work performed by women as members of that church, as members of the body of Christ. I am not quoting these passages because they admonish obedience to husbands, but all the passages on woman work contain this caution.

In these general admonitions that might be multiplied, it is stated that women must guide the house and relieve the afflicted. This imposes on her the necessity of teaching her children the way of the Lord, of visiting the sick, and in these ministrations it is her duty to teach the word of God. Then women are to engage in all the prayers of the church—she is not to lead in prayer.

Paul asks: “Is it comely that a woman pray unto God with her head uncovered?” showing plainly how she should appear before God when she prays; how she should approach God. It applies as much to her approach to God in the closet as in the public assembly. It has no bearing whatever on the question as to whether she should lead in prayer or not. Every Christian should bear a part in the public prayer, as well as the leader. There is no sense in any one bowing or making a pretense of prayer if only the leader prays.

In Rom. xvi: 1 he commends unto them: “Phoebe, who is a servant of the church which is at Cenchrea.” This shows that she devoted herself to the service of the church. This service was in looking after the needy and sick of their own numbers, then of the world. The theory now is, that the public teachers should do this work. In the apostolic days it was said, “It is not meet that we should leave the word of God to serve tables.” Men who are teaching the word of God should not be hindered in this work to serve tables. Men were appointed to distribute to these families, but there is always work of looking after the sick and needy men, women and children, that women can do much better than men. Phoebe did this work. In doing this she taught the word of God to all who came into contact with her.

The next verse adds: “Greet Priscilla and Aquilla, my helpers in Christ Jesus.” One way they helped was when they found a young man, “mighty and eloquent in the scriptures,” knowing only a part of the counsel of God, “they took him unto them and expounded unto him the way of the Lord more perfectly.” Acts xvii: 26. Priscilla did this in taking him unto them and privately teaching him. They also helped Paul by giving him a home and employment when he needed it.

Paul says in Phil. iv: 3: “Help these women who labored with me in the gospel.” This shows women did work with Paul in spreading the gospel, and the record shows, I think, that his missionary company generally embraced a number of godly women who could reach their own sex and teach them the word of truth. Acts xxi: 8. They found daughters of Philip the evangelist, who were inspired, and prophesied; but all was done modestly and in private. Acts xvi: 13. Paul went out to where prayer was wont to be made, and spake to the women that resorted thither.

As I take it, this teaches that women met together by themselves and instructed each other and worshipped together. Paul teaches the same order in reference to women was continued under

Christ that prevailed under the law. Other scriptures and examples might be found, but these suffice to show that women must teach their own children; must . . . (Sentence[s] missing) quiet ministrations, teach them the word of truth. She may teach men in private; she may teach her sisters, one by one, or together. The scriptures give full authority to the Christian women to teach those misguided women, who refuse to bear children. It can be more effectively done in private, by tender, personal admonition. She can teach her servants, employees and others about her house. She can teach her neighbors in private, the most effective teaching ever done. She can gather her neighbors children together, if they will come, and teach them. It is no violation of these restraints thrown around woman for her to take a class of children, or old persons, and quietly, in the Bible school, teach them. There is privacy in publicity. When all sing there is no publicity attached to one singing. When one sings alone, there is publicity. So, for a woman to teach a class in a meeting house, when all others are teaching around, is not publicity. It would be wrong for her to get up as the only teacher of all who attend. This would be inviting publicity.

There is no trouble in finding labor. The field is wide enough. It is large enough to satisfy all demands, save what President Loos calls “a prurient desire to assail Pauls teaching as narrow.”

I have known men, and women, too, who devoted their whole time to teaching the Bible from house to house that never made public speeches. They are successful laborers for God. There is ample room around Fayetteville for the full home talent and energies of all the sisters without once violating Pauls order, and their services are greatly needed there, as everywhere. There is not an ungodly home; there is not an ill-kept house, a badly cooked meal; there is not a discordant home, a family of children untrained in the nurture and admonition of the Lord; there is not a wayward girl threatened with ruin, or a boy that looks on the wine; there is not a negro hut nor a princely mansion where the people are not religious, that is not an inviting field pleading for missionary labor on the part of the faithful Christian woman, where all of her gentle ministrations, her “tender, tearful, heartfelt talks” may not be freely made to the salvation of men and women and the honor and glory of God. The magnitude of the field, the multiplicity of the openings at our own doors, that plead for her ministrations, are oppressive, and, without earnest trust in God, would be discouraging. The field at your doors, my dear sisters, is white for the harvest, but the laborers in this vineyard are few. Why is it?

David Lipscomb

(e-text: JoAnne Toews; HTML: Ernst Rollmann)

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Part 6: The “New Woman” (1896)

The “New Woman”by Mrs. T. P. Holman

(GOSPEL ADVOCATE, 9 July 1896, 438)

Is there a New Woman; and if so, What Causes Led to Her Creation?

For almost a year past it has been borne in upon me, as our Quaker friends would say, to tell the Advocate readers what I think of the new woman; but the days of a busy life have passed so rapidly, and have been so full of other duties, that only now have I seemed to find the time.

The comic papers are full of the monstrosity called the "new woman;" the newspaper paragraphers find her at present their chief "stock in trade;" ministers and religious papers and conservative people generally build figures of straw, which they label the "new woman," and deride them and cuff them and vehemently warn all good women to beware of them; and altogether so much stuff of this sort meets our eyes, when we find a few moments' time to read the papers, that the average woman becomes bewildered and frightened, and would fain fly from the monstrosity, only she can't tell where to find it; for no one ever meets it in real life. Many a time, when a particularly disagreeable specimen of some newspaper writer's too vivid imagination is impaled and held up to view, I have tossed the paper impatiently aside, ready to say, with one of Dickens' characters in reference to the immortal Sairy Gamp's mythical friend, Mis' Harris: “There hain't no sich person.”

But, after all, one is compelled to admit that the woman of to-day differs in many respects from the woman of the past centuries, and even from the woman of one hundred or of fifty years ago; and while the comic papers and newspaper paragraphers have failed to discover her—or, if they have done so, they have distorted her features beyond all recognition—yet there is a "new woman," in one sense of the word; and she is not only coming, but is come.

In the first place, in the proper consideration of this question, it will be necessary to consider something of what woman was in the remote and immediate past before we can know in what respect the nineteenth century woman differs from her sufficiently to be called the "new woman." It will be well to consider also why or from what cause the change was brought about. Then we will try to find out what the new woman is and what she will do for the world.

The position of woman in the past ages has been a very low one. As far back as A.D. 578 the priesthood, by a decree of the Council of Auxerre, forbade women (on account of their innate impurity) to receive the Eucharist (communion bread) in their naked hands; and by the same council they were forbidden to sing in the churches on account of “their inherent wickedness.”

“Six years afterwards, A.D. 585, a solemn ecclesiastical council was held at Macon for the purpose of determining whether or not woman had a soul. The subject was long and hotly discussed, but the council adjourned and left the matter in doubt.” At that time the world was sinking into an era of such

profound mental and moral darkness that it is characterized by historians as the "dark ages," a darkness so profound that “neither science nor literature flourished, and history itself died.” Emerging from this age, history begins again, in the twelfth century, but tells of little but of the field of combat and the realm of brute force, when men were fighting continuously, and when women, from the exigencies of the time, were necessarily confined to the cloister or the equally secluded castle, “defended and imprisoned behind bar and battlement, moat and drawbridge.” In those days books were few, and only reproduced by the slow and laborious process of copying with the pen. Few people outside of the priesthood could either read or write. People had little beyond the barest necessaries of life. If women knew little outside of a very narrow round of household duties, men knew little but the sword and spear and battle-ax. This condition obtained largely up into the sixteenth century. The printing press, invented about the middle of the fifteenth century, making books of more easy access, opened up the mysteries of learning to the common people; and they soon began to avail themselves of the advantage thus opened up to them. But then, as now, men were unwilling to see their women change in any respect; and while themselves eagerly grasping for the advantages afforded them in the new learning that so broadened their own outlook in every respect, they yet stretched out their hands to bar the entrance of women into the fields of learning. The first public step taken along this line, so far as I know, was when the question was brought up in the Chamber of Deputies, in France (I am uncertain as to the date), as to whether or not women should be allowed to learn the alphabet; and after a long and hard-fought debate, the question was brought to a vote, and it was decided that she should not.

Notwithstanding that august decree, a few women not only learned the alphabet, but also to read and to write. But for many, many long years few souls were brave enough to venture beyond that, and for those few no special provisions were made to enable them to gather even these few crumbs from the table of knowledge. “The years dragged their slow length along into centuries; and the means for man's education rose from the high school into college, university, school of medicine, law, and theology; but nobody dreamed of educating the other half of the human family, and woe betide the misguided mortal who should voice such an unheard-of audacity!”

In the annals of education we read of a young girl who used to sit on the steps of a Boston schoolhouse for boys to catch such scraps of education as might escape through the chinks of the closed doors when the boys were reciting. After a while, so the story goes, “she plucked up courage and knocked for entrance at the awe-inspiring door; and she must have been a persistent young person, for she knocked one hundred and forty-five years before the rusty hinges creaked, and by slow and painful degrees the door swung open.” Her first petition, which was not granted, was that girls be admitted to the public school buildings to be taught reading and writing for three hours a day during vacation, and at such

times as the boys did not need the buildings. “The Boston public schools were founded in 1644 for boys only. In 1789 girls were first admitted to the reading and writing schools for a part of the year; in 1818 primary schools for both sexes were opened; in 1828 girls were admitted to all grades below the high school; in 1855 the Girls' High Normal School was established, and in 1868 the Girls' Latin High School was opened.” That was the history of the public schools of that State. The first private seminary in this country was a Quaker school at Bethlehem, Pa., established in 1749. In 1819 Mrs. Emma Willard, one of the foremost educators of her day, petitioned her State Legislature for an endowment for a female seminary, disclaiming all thought, however, of “college-bred females,” for whom she seemed to have an abhorrence. I think that the first college in this country to admit women was Oberlin, established in 1833. Then comes very early in the list the Mary Sharp, of Winchester, established about 1850. Others still followed in rapid succession, until, as the Commissioner of Education tells us, “while in 1855 there were not a half dozen of the higher schools open to women, to-day there are not half a dozen worthy of the name whose doors are closed to them.”

But the path of the woman who made the fight for the higher education of woman was not one of roses by any means. Step by step she had to fight for every inch of ground that she won. The term “new woman” had not then been coined; but the "educated female" was as bitterly derided and ridiculed and caricatured as is the “new woman” to-day. Objections of every sort were urged against her higher education. She was, they said, mentally incapacitated to receive an education. Besides, her body was so frail that she was physically unable to endure the strain and labor necessary to acquire an education. Yet, they said, admitting that she was mentally and physically able to acquire a higher education, “such acquirements would impair feminine grace, dull feminine sensibilities, and destroy domestic tastes, thereby unfitting women for the conjugal and maternal relations in which Heaven had appointed that they should find their chief happiness.” These people, defending what they called the “natural womanhood,” as against the educated womanhood, went on to argue that “the tenderness, affection, and chivalrous regard with which women had inspired men had been the chief agencies in softening man's rough nature, and that educated women would fail to inspire men with these sentiments.”

We can afford to laugh now at these predictions or assertions of women's mental incapacity when we think of Phillipa Fawcett and her four hundred marks above the “mercifully nameless” senior wrangler of the time-honored University of Cambridge; of Helen Reed, who won the Sargent prize at Harvard University; or of Mademoiselle Belasco, who took first honors in the celebrated Paris Law School. We can smile at that long-ago talk of her physical frailty when we consider the superior physical health of the woman of to-day, with all her education, over that of her sisters of a generation ago; and where is the educated man of to-day who would seek among those who may have preserved their

“natural womanhood” by not cultivating their minds for a wife? Echo answers: “Where?” The educated man wants an educated wife now and always, and no other will he have; and he doesn't believe that education has impaired her feminine grace or lovable qualities in the slightest degree.

When we look over the pages of history, we find that neither the men nor the women of one generation are just the same as the men or women of the preceding generation. In this very nature of things, considering the progress of the ages from century to century, it is impossible that it should be otherwise. “New occasions bring new duties.” New thoughts, new occupations, new surroundings, new aspirations, new duties that make the new civilization, as certainly make the new man or the new woman as one age gives way to another, or as the barbarism of the past age gives way to the civilization of the present.

Perhaps in no period of the world's history have both men and women made such rapid strides along all lines of progress as in the past generation. Discoveries and advances everywhere along the lines of physical and scientific research and every possible field of human endeavor, the introduction of machinery of every kind, with steam and electricity for motive power to help accelerate the speed of this fast-moving generation, all combine to move both men and women farther from the generation just preceding them than was ever before known in the history of the world. Nobody seems surprised or hurt that the men of this generation are not just the same in their thoughts, feelings, and aspirations as their slow-moving fathers of a generation ago; but a large part of the world seems to be immeasurably astonished and grieved because, in all the vim and go of the present generation, with its quick rush of mental life and large physical activities, so entirely unknown to our grandmothers, they are not just the same women that their grandmothers were in every respect. In the nature of things, I ask: How could they be? Is it not unreasonable to expect that they should be?

The woman of to-day, even if she had been forced to remain uneducated, would not have been just the same as the women of the past; for her surroundings would have forced upon her so different a life that she could not have remained the same. But, with the higher education with which most women are now endowed, with their broader mental grasp, and the larger possibilities this opens up in their lives, undreamed of in the lives of their grandmothers, it is as impossible for them to be just the same women that their grandmothers were as it is that their husbands or brothers should themselves go back to the days when their grandfathers went to mill on horseback, with half a bushel of meal in one end of the sack and a stone to balance it in the other, and be just the same quiet, steady, slowgoing, yet maybe thoroughly good men that their grandfathers were.

So we see, after all, that there is a new woman; that her surroundings had much to do in making her so, her higher education more. It only remains to tell what

she is and what she is not and what is her use in the world; and if my friends will have the patience to follow me, I will endeavor to tell that in another article.

MRS. T. P. HOLMAN.Fayetteville, Tenn.

(Untitled Response By DL)It gives a body the blues to read Sister Holman's article on man. Man was such a monster to hold the woman down in ignorance and darkness through the long, weary centuries, when she was so earnestly seeking an opportunity to learn. She seems to think men are innate enemies and oppressors of womankind. Her account of those centuries of effort on the part of man to suppress the aspirations of woman for education is as gross a caricature of facts as is the description of the “new woman” which she so strongly deprecates. That terrible struggle is all in our sister's imagination. The men were as anxious to have the women educated as the women were to be educated. There was no conflict between the sexes, one struggling for education, the other to keep her from it. Women ridiculed the educated female as much as men did.

One would suppose from her account that it was a rare thing for a woman to know how to read and write in the last century. The truth is, educational advantages were few to all, and none sought a higher education, save those intending to follow the learned professions; /439?/ and as only men followed these, schools for higher education were provided only for men. Outside of those who proposed to follow the professions the girls and boys fared alike as to education. Sister Holman's grandmother, raised in the last century, if I do not mistake her maternity, was a well educated woman, as well educated as her grandfather. My grandmothers, raised back in the middle of the last century, were as well educated as were my grandfathers, although one of these was a schoolteacher. And many women back in the preceding century were well educated. But in the struggle to clear up their lands, build homes, and gain a living they could not have the facilities for education that now exist.

But I do not see the justice or good of representing that there was a bitter conflict between the men and women on the question of woman's education or any other question. The two sexes have never had contests. The contests now over the rights of woman is not between the men and the women. A larger proportion of men than women desire the women to vote and become public speakers. Paul says: “So ought men to love their own wives as their own bodies. He that loveth his wife loveth himself.” That is the better spirit to cultivate.

D.L.

(e-text: JoAnne Toews; HTML: Ernst Rollmann)

The New Woman. No. 2.

by Silena Holman(GOSPEL ADVOCATE, 16 July 1896, 452–3)

What She Is Not, and Something of What She Is and Will Be.

If by the “new woman” it were meant that the average woman of our country were, as some writer, quoted in the Advocate, says, “thirsting for men's prerogatives as husbands and heads of families;” if, as a rule, and not as an exception, she would grow to abhor wifehood and motherhood and so neglect the little ones God has given her and the home, which is the stay of our nation; if it should make of her the nameless unsexed being that the vivid imaginations of various prophets of evil have conjured up, certainly no calamity that could afflict God's green earth could be so great or so destructive to the happiness of the human race.

But as solemnly as I believe anything do I believe that never before in the history of the world did so few women regret that they were not born men as at the present time. In the past a woman had no choice in the matter of a “career,” for the only one for her was that of wife and mother. Failing to become a wife, society had no use and no place for her. Her life was accounted a failure. She was ridiculed and scorned until her life was a misery and her tempter soured, and “as sour as an old maid” became a proverbial saying. Mothers always wanted their children to be boys, because “boys have so much better chance in life.” Girls regretted that they were not boys, because then there would be some place in the world for them, at least until they were married. My father was killed in the war, and my mother left with a house full of girls, the oldest, myself, just fourteen, and a baby boy; and all the neighbors regretted it for her and condoled with my mother for having such a big crowd of girls on her hands and no boys, and “boys could have been of so much use to her.” No misfortune on earth could befall a man, as the world considered it, equal to having a house full of girls born to him. I knew a man and woman whose married estate had brought to them ten girls and no son; and well do I remember the looks of pity cast on the man by sympathetic neighbors because of so great a calamity. Girls were trained to believe that their lives were a failure if they did not marry. They should marry well if possible, but they must be sure to marry. Girls were taught to cultivate their physical attractions with a view to making “a good catch,” until “as vain as a woman” became another proverbial saying; and many an unhappy marriage has resulted from a girl's fear that it was her last or only chance, and many children thus brought up in the world had better never been born. Does any woman wonder that the women of those days wished they had been born men, not because of an abhorrence of wifehood and motherhood, but because if they failed in that there was no hope in life for them or that mothers always wished their girls had been born boys?

I think that one of the most hopeful signs of the times is that an unmarried woman's chances in life are now such that the “new woman” will not have to “marry for a living,” a thing which is so degrading in thought or fact that no true woman could look on it but with horror; but she will marry because she has found her king, and love has made her a willing captive.

It does not signify that a girl wants to be a man because she rides a bicycle or sometimes wears a collar and cravat shaped like a man's. She wears that style of dress because she thinks it becoming to her, and she likes it. Strange—isn't it?—that men should place such stress on a little matter of the arrangement of dress and say such vile things of a woman because of it. I have no patience with anything of the sort. I know the girls who dress that way are as sweet and lovely

and pure and womanly as any of God's creatures, girls that would indignantly deny that they were “woman's rights women” even in a small degree.

As to the “bicycle girl,” I think that bicycling may be carried to excess, like most other things; but I think its invention will prove a blessing to the human race. Many a poor woman has spent days and days over the sewing machine putting unnecessary tucks and ruffles in little garments, or has spent weeks in making a few yards of crocheted or knitted trimming or other fancy embroidery or crazy quilts, breaking their backs, weakening their eyes, and ruining their health, when they were literally dying for fresh air and exercise; and a spin on the bicycle is one of the most exhilarating forms of exercise. Why shouldn't they have it if they like it and want it? It is no more masculine or unwomanly to ride the bicycle than it is to ride horseback, and a woman no more need sit astride or wear bloomers in the one case than in the other. It is only the novelty of the thing that has excited the animosity of the critics. In the meantime many a poor woman, especially in the cities, will find exercise and fresh air and health in this way who would get it in no other way.

“But the 'new woman' is crowding into the professions and various sorts of business now, and crowding the men out,” say the critics. Now that is pitiful—isn't it?—that woman has to eat and clothe herself and live some way, as well as man; and that, after ages of wishing for it, at last a woman may support herself, and not be a dependent on some unwilling male relative, with all the inconveniences and disagreeable concomitants of such a position. One of the most pitiful wails I have seen on the subject was quoted in the Advocate of Dec. 5, in which the writer bewailed the coming of the new woman and the going of the old man; and on this crowding of women into the businesses and professions he lays the cause of the tramp evil and the want of employment by so many men, and the shoulders of the poor /45(6)3?/ women who have to work for a living must bear it.

My, friends, the point of view from which we consider matters has much to do, after all, with the manner in which we form our conclusions. Has it not?

Now, I came to my conclusions as to the right of woman to make a living for herself in this way: My mother, as I have just said, was left a widow with a house full of girls, when I, the eldest, was just fourteen. We had to live somehow. There were no boys among us, except a nursing babe. My father had lost his all in the war, as did so many people who fought on the losing side. Something had to be done, for we had no male relative to shoulder the burden of our support, and we had to do it ourselves. I had gone to school all my life, and had a moderately good education for a girl of my age. So, young as I was, I gathered a few of the neighbors' children around me and began to teach them. At first they paid me just what they could for this; for they, too, were poor. I was so fortunate as to give satisfaction, and was soon able to get a better situation. So, though I was a girl, I was able to help my mother. I gave her everything I made except barely enough to clothe me in the simplest way. By that means I was able to help her educate my younger brothers and sisters and provide them with the necessaries, if not with many of the comforts, of life. Our little home was sold, and, with the assistance of a widowed grandmother, who intrusted me with such part of her estate as she intended to give us at her death, I bought it, paying three-fourths of the money myself, in order that we might all have a home we could call

our own. What could we have done if there had been no “career” open to me but a place in somebody's kitchen, which would not more than have enabled me to support myself?

I hope my friends will excuse this little bit of personal history; but, considering this, do they wonder that, when I see a poor girl trying to get something to do to support herself and, perhaps, others, I always want to see her succeed? And I rejoice that there are other ways for her to do this than in the schoolroom, sewing room, or kitchen. The last two afford such a meager support, though any sort of labor should be honorable; and very few, or at least not all people, make good teachers; and if they did, there would not be nearly enough room for them all in this capacity.

So I consider it a cause of rejoicing that so many occupations are open to women. If a woman prefers an unmarried life and financial independence, she has Paul's permission to remain unmarried—and who could furnish higher authority?—though I believe that the happiest and best life for a woman is to be happily married with children of her own growing up around her; and there is no cause for alarm on this score. It is the nature of man and woman to want to live together, and no condition of society is going to subvert this instinct. I wonder that any one could think so for a moment.

So the new woman does not wish she was a man (far from it), but rejoices that the day has gone by when she need to have done so. She is proud that she is a woman. Mothers no longer dread to hear the announcement, “It is a girl;” for the world gives a woman a chance now as well as a man. I do not mean to say that in the evolution of the new woman there have not been many things to deplore. There are coarse, rough, unwomanly women now, and there always have been. There are perhaps, besides, some evils abroad in the world brought about by this evolution, caused by the reaction from one state to another. That was inevitable, and always follows in the wake of revolutions or evolutions of any kind; but time will correct such as these.

There is one thing I notice about the critics of the “new woman,” and that is that they take the worst specimens of this age and compare them with the best of a former age. There were as grand women in the past age as the world will ever know; but there was also the shrew, the coarse, masculine woman, the untidy housekeeper, whose husband haunted the village “grocery,” the gossip who tattled with her neighbors across the back yard fence while her children roamed neglected abroad. It is unjust to select the worst specimens of this age to compare with the best specimens of a former age. That we have women of equally undesirable character to-day is not to be wondered at, considering human nature as it is, and not as we would like to have it; but I maintain that the average trend of our womanhood is upward in all that is best and most desirable in the human race.

So we find that the “new woman,” though she has not yet reached her fullest development, will retain all the best and most desirable qualities of the old, adding to them such as will add to her value, not only in the eyes of the world, but in the eyes of the “new man”—her husband.

She is alert, wide awake, and well able to take care of herself and help to take care of others when necessary. The days of the “clinging vine woman” are gone forever. In her stead the husband will find walking by his side the bright, wide-awake companion, able to share his

sorrows as well as his joys, and one who, when necessary, will be able to help carry the burden that is bearing him down—a helpmeet in the best possible sense of the term.

She fully realizes that nothing on the wide earth is such a “drawback” to a woman as bad health, or to her husband as a sickly wide. So both for her own sake and for her husband's she studies the laws of health and learns how to keep herself well. She intends to marry some day—ninety-nine one-hundredths of the women do—but she does not intend to marry until the right person comes along; and, that she may not be necessarily hurried in the matter and so make a bad choice, she goes to work to find some means of making a living for herself while waiting for that blessed day to arrive. If, in God's providence, the day does not come, she does not consider her life a failure, but goes to work trying to make herself useful to her race and to the world, and she does it.

She stores her mind with culture along many different lines of thought as her time, purse, and inclination permit. She knows what is going on in the world around her, knowing fully as much of current history as of past history; and why shouldn't she, even if her critics do say that it is politics, and a woman has no business with politics? To have an intelligent interest in what is going on around us is certainly as laudable a matter as to know what took place a hundred or a thousand years ago; and such a woman, as compared with one who only knew past history, would certainly be the more companionable of the two. Such a woman married makes the best possible wife. She takes an intelligent interest in all matters that are of interest to her husband, and so comes to be an appreciated companion to him. She does not wear out his mind and temper by constantly dwelling on the small worries of everyday life, for her views are broadened, and she does not spend her own time dwelling on them.

Her children are not ushered into the world uncared for and unwelcome little creatures, but her study of prenatal life and influence has enabled her to give them the best possible heritage that her own imperfect organization is capable of, and they arrive in due possession of “a child's first and most sacred right, the right to be rightly born.” After they have come she does not go to work, in the haphazard way of our ancestors, to bring them up only by blind instinct, as was their custom. She goes to work in an intelligent way to study their needs and keep them in proper health of mind and body. She often joins with other mothers to meet weekly or monthly to study together as to what is best for their children, profiting by each other's failures and successes, and learning together what is best for their dear ones. As her child grows, all the best there is in her is devoted to his proper bringing up. She interests herself in what interests her child, studying with him, more than ever desirous to keep herself informed for her child's sake, that he may not outgrow her. What would more certainly keep a boy at home and away from evil companions than to have such an intelligent companion for a mother instead of a fretful, complaining woman, whose talk never wandered beyond the dish the servant broke, the chicken that died yesterday, or the last gossip about her neighbor? Boys so brought up find few attractions at the saloon or place of evil resort.

The “new woman” believes that a man should keep himself as pure as a woman should. She teaches her sons the same blessed doctrine; and she would no more marry a man whom she knew to be unchaste and impure than she would have her sons marry such a woman.

Will the new woman vote? I am afraid she will. The signs of the times seem to point that way. Twenty States give woman school suffrage; one, municipal; and three States, full suffrage; and, whether for good or evil, the experiment is going to be tried. But this I know: A woman will no more lose her womanliness or purity or goodness because she has the privilege of expressing her opinion at the ballot box (as the prophets of evil had predicted that she would) than she did in being allowed to receive a higher education. Woman's nature could not be so subverted and changed by that or anything else.

That the horrible newspaper caricatures of the new woman in no way resemble her you may know by a moment's consideration. You never see her at home; and if you travel all over the world, you will never find her, for she does not exist in the world. Are not most of the women of your acquaintance good women? Now, could any one for a moment allow himself to think it possible that such women could ever become the horrible creature of the newspaper paragrapher's imagination? It is as impossible as that the world should turn round and move the other way. We sometimes have the evolution of one type into another closely related, but never its complete change into something its exact opposite.

Sometimes I think that after all we should not be surprised that men are always opposing a change in the women they love. They love us so well as they have always known us that perhaps they think we cannot be changed for the better, and, if a change is made, it must necessarily be for the worse. However flattering such a thing might be, it certainly has its inconveniences at times; for women have in them the elements of progression as well as men, and, in spite of all, they will progress with the ages as men do. So it will go on until the end of time. As men advance women will advance in spite of any effort to keep them in the old grooves; and men from age to age will go on loving their women folks, whatever the tide of progress makes of them, just the same; and just as womankind will always love their men, always thinking they are best just as they find them, and that any change would be for the worse. God made them that way, and no law of man or condition of society can ever make it otherwise.

(e-text: JoAnne Toews; HTML: Ernst Rollmann)

Other Articles on Women’s Issues in Gospel Advocate by SMH

Wanted—Mothers (1880)by Silena M. Holman

(GOSPEL ADVOCATE, 1 April 1880)

Not long since I read somewhere of an incident in a Texas court something like this: A witness being sworn in an El Paso court, gave her occupation as that of “wife and mother,” at which “the court smiled.” The writer goes on to say that perhaps if the woman had replied that she was a public lecturer on the rights of downtrodden women, an advocate of bloomer dress reform, or even a concert hall singer, the court would not have smiled, with much stuff of the same sort, all of which set me thinking.

The first thought was an inquiry. Is it possible that in our broad land, as especially in our sunny south, among our lovely southern women, the occupation of women as public lecturers, as advocates of bloomer dress, and the like, were so common as to excite no comment, while the occupation of “wife and mother” is so “old-fashioned and out of date,” as the writer said as to cause a smile to ripple over the face of the modern man when he chances to meet up with one who is a wife and mother?

Then I began to cast about among my friends and acquaintances and the people I had seen, and about whom I knew, and among them all—tens of thousands of them—are wives and mothers and only a very few of them are public lecturers and the rest of it, and many of these are also wives and mothers. So it could not have been because the “occupation of wife and mother” is “so old-fashioned and out of date” that “the court smiled.” Perhaps it was because the woman called it an “occupation.”

Then my thoughts scattered off in another direction, as they have a way of doing, and I thought that among the tens of thousands of mothers in our land, how many of them were the right sort of mothers—mothers in the best sense of that best of all good words, mothers who make this their life business, their occupation, mothers who equip themselves for this occupation, this life business, “this only royal profession of womanhood,” by any sort of preparation or education or knowledge such as the humblest professional man would seek to acquire before entering the meanest profession of them all?

And, knowing how few do this, how few women have any sort of educational or preparatory equipment for this royal profession, I have come to the conclusion that the crying want of the age is mothers—mothers who are wide awake, mothers who know what the best interest of their children require, and who are willing to sacrifice everything necessary that these best interests may be subserved.

In other times, when life was of a more primitive nature, and men had few interests outside of providing food, clothing, and shelter of the simplest kind for the body, perhaps little more was necessary than the natural instinct implanted in every mothers heart, whether animal or human, to defend and provide for her offspring until they were old enough to do this for themselves.

But in these days of our complex civilization, when life demands so much from everyone, outside of these first simple requirements the mother is poorly equipped indeed who depends only on her motherly instincts for guidance in her efforts to prepare her child for the battle of life, and his effort to secure for himself the best there is in this world and the world to come.

Herbert Spencer passes this scathing criticism on the educational system of our day: “If by some strange chance, not a vestige of us descended to the remote future save a pile of our schoolbooks or some college examination papers, we may imagine how puzzled an antiquarian of the period would be on finding in them no indication that the learners were ever likely to be parents. This must have been the curriculum for their celibates, we may fancy him concluding. I perceive here an elaborate preparation for many things—especially for reading the books of extinct nations and coexisting nations, from which indeed it seems clear that these people had very little worth reading in their own tongue—but I find no reference whatever to the bringing up of children.

They could not have been so absurd as to omit all training for the gravest of responsibilities. Evidently then, this was the school course of one of their monastic orders. ”

Lide Meriwether says: “The training of mothers will be the chief corner stone of a higher, purer, nobler, civilization than the world has ever seen.” With all my heart I agree with her. Mothers sin in the bringing up of their children, not willfully but ignorantlly. If they only could realize, if they only knew, what terrible results would inevitably follow this indulgence or that failure to properly discipline them, or the neglect to properly cultivate every faculty of the childs mind and character that would lead to a better development, and to check or uproot every tendency that would result in evil, they would unwaveringly pursue the right course. Surely there is not a mother but wishes all that is best for her child. She will sacrifice herself for her child in every possible way—her rest, her comfort, her very life if need be, asking, expecting no reward but her childs love; still surrendering everything willingly gladly, even though that reward be not forthcoming, if she may but add to her childs real or imaginary comfort in the least.

Think what an immense power for good in this world this wonderful force of a mothers self-devotion, self-sacrifice, self-immolation would be if directed along proper channels, by an intelligent understanding of what her child really needs, both for the best development of the best forces of his life and character and for the suppression of evil tendencies. How it would assist in the building up of a manhood and a womanhood that would help to make the world a better place in which to live! They dont know, and the world wants mothers who do know; for

A partnership with God is motherhood.

What strength, what purity, what self-control.

What love, what wisdom, should belong to her

Who helps God fashion an immortal soul !

There is nothing on earth so important as that mothers should absolutely know what course to pursue with their children all through their prenatal lives, as well as along every step of their earthly lives, from the hour the child first opens his eyes to the light of day until her control is lost in the light of a perfectly developed, fully matured manhood or womanhood.

Thousands of mothers go wrong from the very beginning. They havent an idea of their duties and responsibilities during the prenatal life of their children. They start with an unnatural dislike to having children at all, and their hearts are filled with anger and hatred and such murderous feelings that it often leads to prenatal murder. Many, while not going so far, still allow these feelings to predominate in their hearts at this all important period, and their children are born into the world—into what a heritage! Does any one having the least idea of the influence of the mother over the prenatal life of her child, wonder why there are so many murderous monstrosities cropping out from among those supposed to be well nurtured people? Knowing what I know of many womens dislike to bearing children, I sometimes wonder that there are not more. So the child is often ushered into the world, most unwelcome at the beginning; but mothers love soon comes to her assistance, and the child, so unwelcome at first, comes to be

worth more to her than the value of a thousand worlds. What would she not do to promote the well-being of her child?

But a large number of mothers are ignorant of the first principles of the childs requirements. Instead of allowing the child to rest undisturbed between proper intervals of feeding, it is nursed and fondled and rocked and shaken and jumped until its body and nerves are racked with pain. It is fed every time in manifests a desire for attention of any sort, if that is half a dozen times an hour, until its stomach and bowels are disordered and the childs life is endangered. Surviving this, as it grows older it is indulged, petted, and noticed until the child is miserable, without it, even for a moment. Children are encouraged into precociousness mentally, and grow up with a self-consciousness and a desire for abnormal excitement that is a detriment to them all the days of their lives. They are sent to school and taught the usual branches and accomplishments, but few things that go to real character building or to fitting them to the business of their lives, and are launched into the world with as little idea of the duties and responsibilities of life as had their mothers before them.

O that we had mothers who were capable of properly molding the wax of their little childrens lives and habits when it is most susceptible to impressions! Some one has said: “Beat not your knuckles against the granite of mature character, when you can mold the clay of a three year olds life and habit.”

Press, pulpit, and platform tell us in season and out, that “the only royal profession for woman is motherhood.” I believe that with all my heart; but where in all our broad land are the means of equipping the young women who enter the matrimonial field for the practice of this royal profession? I believe that the best talent in the scientific world, the best thought of the centuries, the best experience of the ages, should be at the command of those who would follow this profession.

I believe women should study to know how she may exert the right sort of influence over the prenatal life of her child—how to feed it and care for it, that she may keep it in the best possible health; how to train its moral and mental nature, that her child may grow up into the heritage of a well-balanced life.

If I were a woman (as I am), I would study these questions with all my heart (as I have done all my life). If I were a man, whatever qualities I might consider requisite for a wife, I should choose for the mother of my children a woman who was wide awake, intelligent, healthy, industrious and well balanced from every point of view.

I believe that when the “new woman” (not the “new woman” of the newspaper paragrapheds imagination, but a “new woman” as she is and will be) comes into her kingdom, wide-awake, alert, thoughtful, up to date, she will not depreciate, but so magnify and glorify the profession of motherhood that there will be an evolution of the present type of mankind into a higher race of beings. I believe that the crying want of the age is mothers, the right sort of mothers—mothers who are devoted and earnest and religious and intelligent and wide-awake and up to date and well informed; mothers who understand and appreciate the sacredness and responsibilities of motherhood; mothers who believe that a childs first and most sacred right is the right to be

rightly born, and who welcome their children into the world with wide-open arms and tender, expectant, loving hearts; mothers who place their duties to their children above any other earthly duty, and who go about the performance of these duties in an intelligent, understanding way; mothers who, though they may be compelled at times to follow other avocations, yet believe that motherhood is the best of them all, that “the only royal profession of woman is motherhood.”

May God give us more such mothers!

(e-text: JoAnne Toews; HTML: Ernst Rollmann)

THE FAMILY INCOME (1894)by Mrs. T. P. Holman

(GOSPEL ADVOCATE, 15 March 1894, 6–7)

I sometimes think that in the family life there is no other thing—I had almost said, no other dozen things—that causes so much friction as that of administering the domestic finances.

Though a woman may have the ability to earn a handsome income by the work of her own hands, yet during this period of bearing and rearing her children, it is almost impossible for her to do this without neglecting her duties as a mother. Consequently it is usually the husband and father that must“make a living” for the family, and through whose hands must first pass the money that provides his own with food and clothing. And the magician who will invent some method of transmuting this income into its equivalent of food and clothing and house-furnishings without friction will have earned the gratitude of women for all ages to come.

I think good women have suffered more injustice from the hands of otherwise good husbands and fathers in this one matter than in almost anything else. In a great many families money is doled out in little bits and with angry growls, that makes a woman with any self-respect almost wish she were dead rather than have to endure what she must endure in order to obtain money for necessary expenses. I do not know why it is so, but that it is so too many broken-spirited women can testify, that many man cannot part with a dime without an angry protest. One good woman whose husband was a minister, and worth thousands of dollars, told me that she dreaded to ask her husband even for money to buy a spool of thread or a paper of needles, such a storm did it raise every time she mentioned money to him. It is pitiful to think how some women have to study, and plan, and manage, in order to extract from an unwilling husband the money for necessary and unavoidable family expenses. No general planning a great campaign bestows more thoughtful consideration to the subject than does many a poor woman in considering how she may approach her husband and secure from him money to clothe her children. I know more than one woman who, considering that she has an equal right to the family income with her husband, as she has, will habitually go through his pockets, like a thief, after he is asleep, and take out such small change as she thinks he will not miss, in order that she may have money for her small expenses, without having to ask him for it.

The husband and wife are one. This is the divine order. And this should be true in every relation of their lives, their business interest not excepted. But, objects one, there may be a difference of

opinion as to how much money is necessary for family expenses, and how is this difference to be adjusted? If the man has a sensible wife—and many men have who think they have not—he should go over with her, item by item, the list of necessary expenses. They should decide how much money can be spared for these, and how much, if any, can be spared for other comforts or luxuries not in the line of actual necessities, and this money should be as conscientiously turned over for the purpose without growl or protest, as any other action in life is performed. If a man is so unfortunate as to have married a baby, or an imbecile, who cannot be made to understand in a sensible way just what a mans income is, and how much of it can be spared for expenses, which must be kept within certain limits, why, then, he is greatly to be pitied to be sure. But if he allows such an one to spend his money at all, he should at least allow her to do so in peace, and not raise a storm every time he gives her a dime to buy a paper of pins or a yard of calico.

I believe there are few women who could not understand fully her husbands business relations if he would take the trouble to explain, and who would not gladly consider with him the matter of necessary expenses, item by item, and agree to keep within the bounds of a certain amount laid aside for the purpose of meeting these expenses, if he would but treat her as a rational being, and consult with her in regard to these matters. But few men treat their wives as rational beings. They imagine if they had money when they wanted it, they would spend it in reckless extravagance, and soon bankrupt their husbands. That some women are recklessly extravagant is as true as that some men are recklessly extravagant. But I believe that, on the whole women who know what their income is, and are responsible for it, are more careful of expenses, and more saving than men. I have known men, who all their lives had treated their wives as irresponsible beings in money matters, to die and leave their wives to manage their own finances, who were fully as careful not to spend money unnecessarily as ever their husbands could have been. And this is the rule with widows and unmarried women who mange their own income, and not the exception. I cannot understand why this lack of faith in their wives that seems to possess most men. What right has a man to marry a woman in whom he has not confidence enough to explain to her their financial condition, or to whom he cannot give money for necessary expenses without angry charges of unnecessary extravagance? There is nothing that has given such “backbone”to the womans rights movement as the injustice women have been compelled to endure from their husbands along this very line. A mans wife should be his companion, and not his slave or plaything. And I believe that in the new life that is opening to both men and women, men will seek their wives with a view to their fitness for companions in every possible sense of the word; that a new standard of wifeship is being raised that will result in good to all the world. When the time shall come that men will treat their wives as rational beings, will consult with their wives as to all their business interests, and the family expenses, just as sensibly as they consult with their business partners as to their interests, and the expenses necessary to carry on their business, and with no more angry protest in the one case than the other, then will the family relation assume newer and better conditions, and both man and wife be happier than before.

Now let no one assume, as has been done before, when I undertook to show up some of the failings and weaknesses of the sterner sex, that Sister Holmans lines have fallen in hard places, and that in my own family or neighborhood only are to be found the troubles of which I complain. I have lived in many neighborhoods, and in many different families, and associated intimately with many others, and I can assure the Advocate readers most earnestly that these evils are not confined to the immediate neighborhood in which I reside. In the papers I read—

and their name is legion—I often come across a wail of grief from some suffering soul whose life has been one long martyrdom for this very cause. I think men cannot understand how women with any self-respect can be made to suffer because of their husbands unwillingness to part with money, even for necessary expenses, without angry protest. Let him put himself in his wifes place for a while. Let him imagine her doling out money to him bit by bit, angrily complaining every time he should need a little to buy himself a new hat or pair of shoes, a cravat, or pair of gloves, or any other articles of wearing apparel, or to secure for himself some personal comfort. How would he like it? I can assure my readers most solemnly that he would like it not at all. Neither do women like to be treated that way.

Sometimes men freely furnish money for necessary household expenses, but allow their wives not one cent for individual pocket money, though well able to do so. For instance, she may desire to subscribe for papers or magazines in which she is specially interested, buy a new book occasionally, give a little for charity, church, or other philanthropic work, or may need pocket money for other matters, but can do nothing for lack of means. This is cruel and unjust, especially when we consider that these men never hesitate to spend money themselves in just the same way, or any other way they please. When men learn to carry the Golden Rule into the treatment of their wives, then will the world have taken a long step toward the millennium.

All men do not treat their wives so unjustly. There are many grand men who would no more treat their wives in the way complained of than they would commit any other disreputable act. But, for the happiness of womankind, their number is all too few. “May their tribe increase.”

(e-text: JoAnne Toews; HTML: Ernst Rollmann)

The Proper Education of Our Daughters (1894)by Mrs. T. P. Holman

(GOSPEL ADVOCATE, 13 April 1894)

I have often been struck with the inefficiency of our educational system as applied to both boys and girls, so utterly does it fail to prepare them or train them properly for the sterner duties of life. This is especially true of girls, and I would fain call the attention of parents to the matter, hoping that some day sufficient interest may be aroused to bring about a radical change for the better. Girls are sent to school from the time they are little tots until they are full-fledged young ladies. At school their time is so fully occupied with the ordinary school curriculum of reading, writing, arithmetic, grammar, geography, history, mathematics, the sciences, half a dozen foreign languages, music, art, etc., etc., that there hardly seems time to add anything to the list, however important it may seem. But, even though girls must learn these things, there are still other things of equal importance to their happiness and success in life. Perhaps all will admit this, but the school life is already so crowded with studies that teachers protest against the introduction of new courses. And mothers keep their daughters so continuously in school that even if they desired to give them the necessary training at home, and were in every way competent to do so, yet it seems difficult to find just the right time to do it. How or when girls should receive this instruction—whether by lengthening the school course, or lopping off some of the branches now taught and substituting the necessary branches instead—whether it shall be done in the regular

schools or in special schools instituted for the purpose either during or after the regular course is finished—are matters that the future must determine. But that it must and will be done in some way many things seem to indicate.

Do not misunderstand me. I do not wish to depreciate the value of the branches now taught in school. I am an earnest advocate of the higher education of woman. I think her education should only be limited by her desire to learn, her capacity to receive instruction, and her financial ability to command such instruction as she may need. But, at the same time, if she cannot find time for the branches now taught in the school and the more practical branches necessary to her domestic happiness and her success in life, it would be far better to omit some of the branches now taught and substitute for them these others so much needed. As it is, the average girl is launched into life with a tolerably familiar acquaintance with the three rs—reading, riting, and rithmetic—a smattering of a few dozen other things, while utterly ignorant of all housekeeping accomplishments, unable to make herself a decent dress, unacquainted with her own nature and its requirements, ignorant of every principle of the laws of health, with little idea of her duties to her husband if she should have one, absolutely without an idea as to how to properly train children, should she ever be so blessed as to have children of her own, and with no knowledge or training whatever to enable her to earn a living for herself, should it be necessary for her to do so.

Without any instruction or training along any of these lines, which constitutes the very life of a large majority of our women, they are expected to stumble in some unaccountable way into successful wives, mothers, and housekeepers, and to be fully able to support themselves and their children, should it ever be necessary for them to do so. The wonder is that so many should succeed so well as they do. And when we come to think of the utter lack of any training along these lines, it is not surprising that the failures are so sadly numerous.

All girls should be taught the principles of careful, economical housekeeping. I think it must be the hope of every woman to some day have a home of her own to take care of and love. But few have any training to fit them to make this home just what it should be in every respect.

All girls should be taught to cook, not in the careless, slipshod way known in most American homes, but scientifically. They should be taught what articles are best for food, and how this food should be prepared so as to be not only palatable, but most easily assimilated.

They should be taught to sew. It is surprising to know how many girls who, with plenty of time on their hands, and not very well able to hire their sewing done, yet are compelled to hire every dress made, or else, if unable to hire it done, are compelled to wear an ill-fitting, badly-made garment.

They should be taught that their bodies are the temples of the Holy Ghost, and as such they should bring them to their best development in every way—that good health is the greatest earthly blessing, and tight corsets are the greatest enemy to good health. So great is my abhorrence of a small waist in women, knowing as I do how nature must be deformed to secure it, that I sometimes feel as if I would like to lead a crusade against it. I think people who are studying the question of dress reform should receive the support and encouragement of all good

people, instead of the ridicule and condemnation that is now so often meted out to them by many good people.

If girls were properly trained as to the importance of good health, and how to attain and preserve it by attention to proper dress, food, exercise, and fresh air, it is certain that an improved race would take the place of the present nervous, irritable, high-strung generation. And why should not a careful drill in these things be had in school along with —or, if needs be, instead of—the teaching of geology, astronomy, and such like? Along with these things all girls should be trained in the care and nursing of the sick, with at least some knowledge of medicine. But instead girls are taught anatomy and physiology, with little or no training as to the care of the body in sickness and in health. I would not abolish the study of these from the schools, but instead I would teach along with them the laws and requirements of the body in sickness and in health.

Then our girls should be taught their duties to their husbands, their duties to themselves as married women, and how best to train the children that may some day be intrusted to their care. Why not? Do girls make the better mothers by entering into this holy estate with no knowledge of its requirements but an instinct that may be perverted by the false teachings or the pernicious views of a fashionable life? Do women make the better mothers that, instead of being taught that motherhood is the most sacred of all relations and one most to be desire, they are taught by the false ideas now prevailing in the world to abhor it so intensely that they are in a constant state of rebellion throughout the entire prenatal life of their child? Are they better mothers for not knowing that this rebellious state, which sometimes engenders even murderous feelings in the womans heart, can but result in a deterioration of her offspring? Ah me! If prospective mothers could but be taught the principles of health and heredity, if they could but be taught the laws of mental and physical life for themselves and for their child during its prenatal existence as well as afterwards, if they could but know that no blessing the Lord could send us would be so great as that of a little child all our own, surely the world would be better than it is.

Sometimes when I read of those moral monstrosities who seem to live but to commit terrible crimes, and to know of the hate and murderous feelings in the hearts of many mothers in bearing children, I can but connect the one with the other, as cause and effect. A false delicacy should not prevent girls being taught things that may affect the happiness of their future life and that of generations unborn. The girl could have no better teaching than of good mothers. But where the mother herself is not sufficiently informed, there are many good women to whom such teaching might safely be intrusted.

Girls, to make ideal mothers, should be developed mentally, physically, morally, and socially to their highest possible capacity. “A high degree of intellectual capacity and a broad mental grasp is more important in those who have the training and molding of small children than if the children were older. The younger the mind the less able it is to guide itself, intelligently, and therefore the more important is it that the guide be both wise and well informed . . . She must understand the proportions of things and wherein they touch each other, and the bearing and trend of mental and physical phenomena. She must furnish self-poise to the nervous child, and stimulus to the phlegmatic one. She must be able to read signs and interpret indications in the mental and moral, as well as in the physical being of those within her care . . . More than this, she must be not only able to detect, but have the wisdom to guide, to stimulate, to restrain, and to

develop the plastic creature in her keeping. If she had the wisdom of the fabled gods, and the self-poise of Milo, she would not be too well equipped for educating—to do the best for the race in her keeping.”

Then, is it possible for girls to be too well educated? And are the points I emphasize of minor importance?

Last, but not of least importance, the girls should be taught some business or profession by which they would be able to maintain themselves independently during their unmarried life, or should it be necessary for them to continue to do so after marriage, or if left a widow. I believe girls often make unsuitable marriages because they feel they are in the way of younger brothers and sisters at home, or are dependent upon other relatives, and marry without proper consideration, because they feel that they will be more independent to be “supported” by a husband than any other. It is unnatural that a girl should “marry for a living.” And when our girls are able to maintain themselves independently, they will be far less likely to make such a mercenary marriage. But even if such a consideration should be deemed insufficient to induce us to make our girls self-sustaining, the uncertainties of life, which may leave them maids, wives, or widows, compelled to support themselves, and perhaps others, demand of us that we do not leave them thus rudderless on the great ocean of life; but that the rather, we put into their hands the means of guiding themselves safely away from the bars and quicksands of poverty and dependence. When these things in relation to the proper training of our daughters receive due consideration, the world will be better and the millennium nearer.

(e-text: JoAnne Toews; HTML: Ernst Rollmann)

BROTHER LARIMORE'S TRIBUTE TO MRS. SILENA MOORE HOLMAN.

(GOSPEL ADVOCATE, 14 October 1915, 1027–8)(Reprint from the Nashville Tennessean.)

Following a beautiful prayer of gratitude that Mrs. Holman had been permitted to live and work in our world, Elder Larimore talked from the text: “She hath wrought a good work....She hath done what she could.” He said in part:

“It is difficult for me to understand my own emotions upon this solemn and important occasion. We are here to perform a sad service. Our Savior, in Mark 14: 6–8, said to his disciples of the woman who loved him and showed it by her services to him: 'She hath wrought a good work....She hath done what she could.' That is the sum and substance of all I may with propriety say to-day. When I apply these sentences to our dearly beloved and wonderful sister who has finished her earthly career, I say only what the tens of thousands who have loved her know to be true, as true of her as of the woman of our Savior's example. While I am seven years her senior, I have been practically her lifelong friend; and she was my valued, true, and faithful friend.

“I saw her for the last time in this life August 26—three weeks and three days ago. I was conducting a series of meetings at Lewisburg. She was excessively busy, as she always was, but she came to Lewisburg to see me, and we were the guests of Mrs. Collins. We talked freely of things of mutual interest. Mrs. Collins and I were principally listeners because we loved to hear her talk and because what she said was practical, important, and exceedingly helpful. She was then optimistic, bright, and hopeful, not only because of past triumphs for her cause, but for future prospects. She seemed as if she would take wings and fly away. She alluded modestly to her life and cheerfully to death, even to the sad events culminating to-day. She told Mrs. Collins she desired me to make the talk at her funeral, impressed it upon Mrs. Collins, paused, and said: 'I want Brother Larimore to do it; for I want no man to apologize for my work, and I know he will never do that.' There was no dark shadow, no tinge of doom, but that tide of thought swept over her though she spoke with cheer and even laughter. She then seemed able to continue her wonderful work many years. Why should any one apologize for her work? As well apologize for the fragrance of beauty and songs of the birds, for the light of the moon, for the glittering of the stars, for the shining of the sun, /1028/ for the purity of sweet infancy, and almost for the perfection of heaven itself.”

In referring to her early life, Elder Larimore said:“She was a worker almost from the cradle to the casket. In her eleventh year came the home-wrecking, heart-breaking war that devastated our sunny Southland. She was thus deprived of the protection and companionship of her brave father, who was called away to defend his fireside, his family, and the country he loved. It took him not only for a short time from all that he held dearest, but the same grim war ended his life. Before Mrs. Holman was fifteen the war closed, leaving the South a land of widows and orphans, and little else but sorrow, honor, glory, and graves. She was the oldest of five children, and she managed by diligent exercise of her wonderful intelligence to become qualified to teach and take care of the family. The old family home had slipped away, but she earned and saved two thousand dollars to buy back the home they loved, but had lost. She passed through that terrible period of war as a mere child. We who wore the gray and followed the waning fortunes of the Lost Cause sometimes thought our lot hard, but it was blissful compared with what the women and children at home had to endure; hence they should certainly not be honored less than the veterans of the cause they loved.

“She continued this honorable and industrious life, and at the age of twenty-four became the wife of Dr. T. P. Holman, the husband who is to-day lonely and broken-hearted because of her departure.”

In speaking of her great life work, Elder Larimore continued:“Thirty-five or forty years ago she became interested in temperance, an interest which soon became the mainspring of her life. She took hold of this work with renewed vigor when the State Woman's Christian Temperance Union numbered less than two hundred, a membership which during her fifteen years' presidency increased to four thousand or more. To her belongs more honor for this work than to any one else, living or dead. It was never her desire to meddle with politics. The elimination of evil was the object of her life, and along that line she achieved success that lasted and grew as long as she lived.

“Her work as a child, as a daughter, as a sister, as a teacher, her loyalty and fidelity as wife and mother, all justify my text. Her seven sons and one daughter are proof positive that their father and mother faithfully discharged their parental duty, bringing them up in the 'nurture and admonition of the Lord.' Mrs. Holman became a Christian in early childhood, and her faith never wavered. She was a Christian more than fifty years. When she was told a few days ago that the end was approaching, she was not disturbed or moved from her calm composure, her perfect resignation, and the sweet assurance to her loved ones that all was well with her soul. She loved her work, her sisters in the work, her loved ones at home, the church of Christ, and the brotherhood of man. She met death without dread, saying, just before she lapsed into unconsciousness: 'I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith; henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous judge, shall give me at that day.”

“In all her work, she was never known to employ harsh means. Not a newspaper in Tennessee, I have been told, ever refused to print any of her manuscripts. In her last conversation with me she spoke of men who had been bitter foes of her work, speaking not unkindly, but in the spirit of charity, and I want to commend that spirit to all who are here. Her last communication to the press was a letter in regard to the present senatorial campaign in Tennessee, in which she urged the candidates to treat each other as gentlemen in kindness of spirit, saying nothing which one would not like to have said of himself. If her advice, based on the Golden Rule principle, should be adopted, it would revolutionize politics.

“In her death, her family, her friends, her coworkers, the church of Christ, and the brotherhood of man have sustained a great loss. 'She hath wrought a good work. She hath done what she could.'”