Josephine Kirby Henry

“ The fact is the only prop of Christianity today is the subjection of women. The whole system is like unto an elegant chariot, caparisoned, cushioned and curtained, wherein sit the councils, synods, conferences, priests and laymen, who with wise looks and sanctimonious air, hold their conclaves, and interpret to the women the "Word of God." ”

“ Woman never knows what an exalted creature she is until the appeal is made for the collection, then her spiritual advisor gets off something after this fashion:
O, woman! woman, dearly beloved and tenderly esteemed woman, how much of our comfortable comfort do we owe to thy unselfish serving in the kitchen at home, and in the basement and scullery of the church. How many theological students rise up and call you blessed for your willingness to educate them to be your preachers. ”

“ All honor to the noble Vashti! She who defied destiny, who set customs and laws at naught, who refused to yield the sacred rights of her womanhood to a brutal husband, even though he was a king. Little is said in the pulpit about Vashti, while Esther, who was an intriguing, infamous woman, is canonized in pulpit platitudes, and in song and story.
Eve and Vashti were the founders of the "Woman's Rights" movement in this world.
These two Bible women are held up by the clergy as terrible examples of disobedient and ungodly women. ”

“ Woman is today quietly smiling at her masculine censors, the beings whose swaddling clothes she adjusts, and saying to herself "let them babble about a subject of which they know nothing. It amuses them, and does not affect women. These men are neither saints nor heroes, so we refuse to canonize them, and go on doing our own way just as the Bible women did."
The truth is, woman has never been obedient. Eve did not fear or obey either God, angels, or men. Eve is the greatest character in all history. Adam was the most obedient husband in the history of the race. ”

“ Bible women are not models for the women of today.
The thought that possesses me is this: What can women see in the Christian religion for themselves? I can see why some men might be Christians because they can secure place, power, profit and title, but what there is in it for women is more than I can divine. Then for men, there is a Bible promise of being made angels in heaven. ”

“ We do not wish to be understood as claiming that intellectual knees are always of the feminine gender, for we would not be so unjust to the vast army of bishops, priests and deacons who muzzle the women, and reserve an intimate acquaintance with the Deity for themselves. The real truth is women do not know what the Bible teaches for them. Only one eleventh of the Holy Book is devoted to them, and much of that is so obscene that no preacher would dare read it to his congregation. Bible women are a sorry lot. The Bible values woman chiefly for her anatomy and because she is a race preserver. ”

“ The hour is here now, when women are calling theologians to the bar of reason, and they will no longer believe the supernatural, miraculous fables of the Bible that put the brand of inferiority upon their sex. ”

“ Theology is nothing, if it is not dogmatic. So women have ever been taught that it is their "bounden duty" to be silent and obedient, and that the women of the Bible are shining examples of these so-called virtues. The dogmatism of the pulpit has outwardly succeeded in the subjection theory and the poetry of the pulpit has stimulated women to action and service, and fed their vanity, always with the paramount idea that "woman's sphere" was bounded by her duty to do only such things as shall suit man's interest, pleasure or convenience. ”

“ He even forgot God to obey woman. He partook of the free lunch furnished him by Eve and since that hour "free lunches have been demoralizing men and always will." When Adam and Eve were called to account for stealing the apple from the tree of knowledge the coward Adam skulked behind the woman and said: "The woman tempted me and I did eat." Let those who consider woman inferior to man not forget that Eve first discovered the tree of knowledge and had the courage to eat the forbidden fruit, while Adam had not enterprise nor courage enough to swallow it, for it stuck in his throat. ”

“ Women have done everything from getting up a swell dinner to scrubbing the floor of the "meetin house," from singing an oratorio to dancing the Kan-Kan for the church, all for the blessed privilege of being instructed to take Bible women as their example and "remain in silence and obedience," when Bible women did nothing of the sort. ”

“ We hear in sermons only of the meekness of Moses the faith of Abraham, the patience of Job, the strength of Samson, the wisdom of Solomon, the godliness of David, and so on through the chapters, but the clergy should proclaim the whole gospel of God as they are commanded to do by sermonizing on all the other peculiarities and propensities of Bible men and women who are held up as models for the human race.
It is taught that woman brought sin into the world and is at the bottom of all wrong doing in the world. ”

“ This estimate of woman permeates all Jewish and Christian canons. Today to bear a son is considered more honorable and desirable than to bear a daughter, yet our civilization swarms with sons who are worthless, or dissipated, or dishonest, or who wreck the fortunes and happiness of the family while daughters are as a rule, the comfort and mainstay of parents in their declining years. ”

“ Let Christian women and men of today be up to such tricks as are recorded of Abraham, Sarah, Jacob, Rebecca, Leah, Noah, Lot and his daughters, David, Solomon and their lady friends, Samson, Delilah, Sisera, Jael, Abimelech, Naomi, Ruth, Esther, Martha, all the Marys and even St. Paul, the premier saint of the Christian calendar, and they would not only be ostracized by society, but many of them would find themselves behind prison bars.
When woman reasons more and believes less, then, and not till then, will her charter to liberty be signed. ”

“ Perhaps the example of the holy men and women in the Holy Bible accounts for the epidemic of brutality and moral leprosy in Christendom. There is no use having a guide book unless you are guided by it. Bible Christians have no warrant for respecting womanhood, either as maid or mother, and the claim that woman owes all she possesses of personal purity, domestic happiness, and social consideration to the Bible is false and absurd. There is not a single Bible character, either woman or man, that is a perfect model for the women and men of today to copy after. ”

“ The Bible promises nothing but subjection in this life for women, and no mention is made that there will be any female seraphs in the angel throng. Holy writ gives men alone a passport through the pearly gates of the Heavenly city. The Bible says explicitly "it is not good for man to be alone," yet the church today is a female institution. All men in heaven, and all women in the church on earth. Strange, ain't it? The average woman makes a fetich of the Bible, and a God of her preacher, but she does not understand either one of them. The preacher interprets the Bible for women. ”

“ O, woman! pure, noble, holy, superlatively fine, and exquisitely superior woman, your bounden duty is to give generously of your labor and lucre, that we men of God may carry on our work amidst the heathen at home, and the pagans abroad. Set to work dear sisters as we men direct. ”

“ There were grand and noble women and men in the Pagan world, ten centuries before the laws of Moses or Christ were promulgated.
If women will lay aside their religious bigotry, they will discover that our boasted Christian civilization literally puts into practice, the crimes, the Bible records against their sex, and how well it is being done, the press attests, as never in the history of the world were such atrocious crimes committed against maidens, wives, pregnant, insane, and aged women. ”

“ For the man is not of woman, but the woman of the man; neither was the man created for the woman but the woman for the man."
Of course we can all see that woman is a perfectly unnecessary creature, and man could get along very well without her. St. Paul says as much, but he rather qualifies this statement when he says "We are fools for Christ's sake."
Women of the old time and the new time have been, and are an enigmatical element. Statistics record that 91 per cent of all criminals in Christendom belong to the sex to which the "sons of God" belong. ”

“ All honor to Eve and Vashti! They did not live in vain.
Hannah is immortalized because she "made a little coat for her son Samuel." There are millions of women today not only making coats for their little sons, but furnishing the goods and making whole suits for worthless husbands and grown sons.
Dorcas made clothes for the poor. Millions of women today are making clothes for the poor and the rich at such starvation prices that they are forced to sell their virtue for bread. ”

“ As the world is swarming with miserable women, who are robbed of their human rights, bearing children against their will, who are filling our reform schools, poor houses, and prisons, the "elevation" for women and the "sacred halo" for children not having arrived yet after being on the way for 2,000 years, has so far proved to be a mere pipe-dream of this cleric. ”

“ No Eve, no race; no eating of the apple, no edge. According to the Bible if the daughters of men were "fair to look upon" they were acceptable to the "sons of God." There is not a hint that virtue, industry, intelligence or domesticity were shining qualities of Bible women.
The first compliment on record is that of Abraham when he said to Sarah: "Behold now, I know that thou art a fair woman to look upon," and thus has Abraham's art of flattery descended to his posterity making falsifiers of men and coquettes of women. ”

“ How well you have filled your womanly sphere as teachers to Indians where your scalps were in danger, or Feejees who relish quartered missionary as much as we do saddle rocks with liquid trimmings. Yes, dear sisters, you have done well building up congregations to which we men of God can preach. ”

“ I ought to understand them because my grandmother, mother, and all my female relations were women, and I am a woman myself, but I don't. For the most part women are good hearted creatures, but they fail in judgment when you strike them on religion. The true Christian woman believes in the infallibility of her preacher. He defines her sphere and duty and she proceeds to walk therein. Her sphere is silence and subjection, and her duty is to devise catch penny devices to bring in the shekels and lay them on the altar of the Lord. ”

“ The cry from the pulpit is "cling to the religion learned from your mother's knee." We are glad that the clergy make an open confession that the intellect of the orthodox mother is located in her knee; for the impossible Bible stories taught to children give no evidence that the brain power is called into action. ”

“ The world today is full of good housekeepers and entertaining women. The pulpit cry of the centuries has been "giving to the church is lending to the Lord." Housekeepers and society women have been held in line by the Martha and Mary" sermon. Many a woman has roasted her self over a hot stove, cooking for church suppers or to entertain her preacher. Many a woman has tramped the streets gathering donations for her church or wrest led with church fairs, grab bags nd church lotteries until every bone in her body ached and her vitality and shoes were worn out. ”

“ If children are "conceived in sin and shapen in iniquity" there should be a law passed prohibiting any one being born once, thus making it impossible to be "born again." The clergy are so busy keeping the women in harness that they ignore other commands of the Bible. Celibacy is as positive a command as any that Paul gives. ”

“ If the Bible says what it means, and means what it says, the woman of ordinary mentality will discover that in the part of the Holy Book which is devoted to her sex, she will find horrors, terrors and obscenities that she had never dreamed of which her clerical teachers had never told her of, and that much of the teaching from the pulpit regarding women is not true. ”

“ If a delegation of Bible women could attend a Woman's Club in the United States today the Bible women would resolve that they had been born too soon, and the club women would pass a resolution that for the good of the human race the Bible women should not have been born at all. ”

“ Yet, after 1900 years of preaching the doctrine of silence and obedience to women, the example of all other Bible women is a dead letter and the example of Eve and Vashti is being followed by more women today than all the characters in scripture, and the fact is admitted that woman was never so elevated as she is today. ”

“ A woman who bore five sons after she was dead, discounts all the exploits of warriors, patriarchs, prophets, priests and kings recorded in the Holy Bible. Another Bible miracle that has been overlooked is recorded in the 4th chapter of 2nd Kings, where "Elisha made a dead boy sneeze seven times." The old woman laden with Abrahamic faith said she would rather believe the Bible, than the truth any day, and she has plenty of company of the female persuasion. ”

“ The law of God given to Moses in the 12th chapter of Leviticus, clearly pronounces a woman who becomes a mother to be unclean and impure. If she had borne a son she was not allowed to touch any hallowed thing, or enter the sanctuary for three and thirty days, but if she had borne a daughter she was doubly impure, and was unhallowed and barred out of the temple for sixty-six days. ”

“ The Bible says that "there was a woman whose name was Bathsheba—and as King David was walking on the roof of his palace he saw Bathsheba taking a bath and fell in love with her. It always seemed a queer proceeding to me for a man to take a walk on the roof of his house, and a woman to take a bath in public. There were some queer proceedings in Bible days. David is the only man on record who ever fell in love with a woman while she was taking her bath, and Bath-she-ba was quite an appropriate name for her. ”