The cruel persecutions in all ages, some of which are instanced by Dr. Jacobi, and which sympathetic emotions were unable to prevent, were due to the acceptance of false premises or to illogical reasoning from sound premises, and hence prove not the weakness of reason, per se, as against emotion, but the strength of reason even when faulty in origin and process and directed to anti-social ends. In other words, beliefs not founded in fact and reasoning which was erroneous in premise or method or both perverted the normally kindly emotions of men and women or served as the tools of their cruel and vindictive creeds.
When we speak of the inequitable treatment of women having its root in "primitive
emotions", might it not be judicious to ask how primitive those emotions are supposed to be
and whether the blame is not less to be laid at the door of primitive emotions than at the
door of primitive reasoning, which was theological reasoning? Did not the matriarchate
antedate the patriarchate, and so may we not claim that, if emotion was the active factor in
the about face, the more primitive emotions were not so unfavorable to woman as were the
later? Or, was it a change in feeling or a change in the mental outlook, primarily, the shift of
the theological direction of worship, that chiefly was responsible for the later degradation of
women? When Earth was the Mother, sex was cleanly worshipped and woman seems to have
been equal with man or paramount to him.
But when the Sun took the place of chief god and
the male Christ successively ascended the throne in this or that land, the old order changed
to the new and women descended in the scale of importance. Only in the Church of Rome
does there linger an element of the old régime in the form of the Virgin, still worshipped as
the mother of the male god. By so much only is Rome nearer to the period of the
matriarchate than is Wittenberg or Geneva.
The failure of the attack of the Greek and Roman writers and of the Christian Fathers
upon the double standard, does not, as Dr. Jacobi thinks it should, "astonish those who put
their faith (partly) in preaching". For two reasons: First, it has not been, at bottom, a fight
between logic and emotion but between two forms of logic. On the one side were the
teachings of a more primitive theology, impressed almost indelibly on the race in one of the
most plastic stages of its existence and drilled into the children of the later ages in the most
receptive period of their individual lives.
On the other side were the secular teachings, the
appeals for human justice, made by a few exceptional men. Precisely so in the special domain
of religion the comparatively few Free thinkers have had, and now have, to fight with the
weapons of a better reasoning against all the inculcations of thousands of years, the
parent taught, church taught, State taught reiterated casuistries and dogmas that each
generation has had and still has to learn.
Second, the proponents of the single standard have been handicapped from the beginning
of the race by the needless burden they took upon themselves. They essayed the impossible
task of bringing all men into and holding them in the narrow groove of monogamy. They tried
to bring all men down to the level of abnegation and dwarfing to which all women had been
condemned, by men and by women.
The very opposite course is the one indicated to every
thoughtful student of human nature who is sufficiently emancipated from the thraldom of
ancient theology to search for facts without bias and to face them without flinching. The
advocates of a certain theory of sexual relations have had, and have, so little faith in the
soundness of their theory, so little faith in the strength of any system founded upon it, so little
faith in its ability to win out over all rivals in the arena of a fair test, that they have done all
they could, and still do all they can, to prevent the free evolution of the family, by penalizing
all divergent theories and practices, at the same time admitting that prostitution and venereal
diseases are gigantic evils with which they struggle hopelessly.