10. Marriage and the Enlightenment
30. INFLUENCE OF SCIENCE
There was disagreement between the sciences and the church. Galileo in this seventeenth century was discovering amazing new relevant, and now entirely acceptable scientific ideas, but he was outlawed by the church, while many churchmen reasserted the old idea that a study of the sciences was associated with devil worship. It is interesting that the flat earth society is still with us today, though no longer supported by the church! It seems foolish now to see how the discovery of blood, and its ability to flow round the body, could diminish the spiritual understanding that the body was the Temple of God. Many godly, learned, thoughtful and scientific men were forced from the church and disinherited from the spiritual implications of the work that they did. Disfellowshipped and excommunicated from the influence of the church, they developed their own language and ethics were lost. The church once more lost credibility and the fires of the Inquisition that had persecuted people for their beliefs and sent them to war, died away. Knowledge and religion, public life and politics were pursued as a person’s own private business. The married women at home now had no serious moral case against husbands who carried on in adulterous situations and spent more and more time away from home. The church raved about hell fire, but that was in the future, and there was no help for the present. Harmony was no longer necessary in the home and there was no alignment between private virtue and public honour. Education, for women, was an expendable commodity in the marriage market of this new capitalistic age, money was not. The plays and stories of the time attest to the absolute necessity of marrying an heiress for marital harmony. The practice of endowing marrying daughters intensified and the dowry rate rose alarmingly. The number of single women seeking husbands outstripped the supply, and so many more ill matched marriages were made, and there were many more sad and lonely, ill qualified spinsters waiting patiently for their chance, and the populations became gender unbalanced.
By the middle of the eighteenth century, seventy per cent of the population of women in England remained single, and the moral and spiritual condition of marriage seemed to decline in proportion to the greater level of choice available. Not only did women's dependence grow within marriage, with the loss of the home industries, but her dependence on marriage grew as well.
At the end of the eighteenth century the compensations for virginity long abandoned by the church began to be preached by women themselves. There were 475,000 married women in London, and 70,000 prostitutes. Most men had a mistress as well as a wife, and with the permissiveness of the men, their wives were in danger of catching sexually transmitted diseases, for which there were only rare cures. They also died of childbirth, and many of their babies and children died as well. There were only 291 divorces granted in two hundred years to 1850 so that was hardly a solution to the unequally yoked. So society really became, once more, the province for men, and again, women had few prospects.
Of the single women (70% of the population) half of those remained virgins. The church did not preach the virtues of being virginal, they had long given up preaching that state as a refuge from abuse, but the women did. Mary Wortley Montague said at the time, "I will not say virginity is happier ...but it is undoubtedly safer than any marriage. In a lottery where there are, at the lowest computation, ten thousands blanks to a prize, it is the most prudent choice not to venture." To those who had little choice either way, abuse and neglect, illness and grief, loneliness and barrenness, the church preached endurance.
31. REVOLUTION
At the end of the eighteenth century the French Revolution burst on the scene, as a result of the successful American struggle for independence. Women expressed dissatisfaction with their economic, cultural, sexual and psychological roles and when the American Declaration of Independence declared rights for all, that included women as well. The women of France though struggled to be included in the equality that the men fought for, although the Russian Revolution which followed, 100 years later, acknowledged them.
There were Rational Dissenters at this time, or Unitarians, as they came to be known, who jettisoned original sin, eternal punishment, the Trinity and irrational guilt over sexual sin. This movement inspired women writers such as the Frenchwoman, Mary Wollstonecraft, to write a "Vindication of the Rights of Women" from a high moral and spiritual ground, for which she did escape the guillotine, only by expiring in childbirth first. The movement she founded was crushed, with its leaders guillotined and male superiority was restored under Code Napoleon. She had campaigned with prudent optimism against human misery, believing that men would be less vicious to women, if their circumstances improved, she believed that farming out children to wet nurses and single sex schools proved detrimental and often lethal to the welfare of children, she despised the wild oats sowing of men who postponed marriage and led to the exploitation of women. She wanted to see women educated not just for the playthings of men, nor to entertain the polite middle class society that idled away in drawing rooms all over the country, but as a human resource. Wollstonecraft placed high value on chastity, having experienced at first hand the sorrow and disappointment of those who were not.
However for all the objectors there was a torch lit that could not be extinguished, and there was a new openness to new possibilities, an unstoppable energy, and a new eagerness to get on with things. It was in this climate that our community was able to emerge. In the non cathedral towns of England, without the impinging shadow, that controlled their daily sustenance employment and living, men were now free and thought was free. It was a genie now, which could not be put back in a bottle, and marriage was not now controlled by the church but by the state.
In the middle of the nineteenth century the philosophers, like J. S. Mill, championed education for women and making no gender barriers at all, he challenged the whole system of marriage, that "where two are one, and that one is male", (the Christian culture), where men did not cherish the angels in their houses. He challenged the school system, that produced either male despots or slaves, and asked for employment opportunities for women, not only marriage, or prostitution.
This made a lot of good sense especially where the church had failed, in forbidding the study of theology to women, as "it made them unwomanly". The socialists liberated the divorce laws, because the church would not, or could not, speak out against abuse, and the clergy treated the arguments with scorn and suspicion. Considering Robert Owen wrote a seminal discussion paper, at this time, on "The Marriages of the Priesthood in the Old Immoral World", the hostility of the church was not surprising and its increasing irrelevance could only be expected. Can we learn some lessons from this time, to listen to the arguments, to learn about new ideas, to embrace them within the Christian heritage we have, not to pour scorn on those who ask for change?
The Owenites presented the thesis that character was socially constructed, not biologically determined and linked this theory to the church and politics and marital relations. He said that there were three sources of disunity and strife in the community, religion, private property and marriage. All encouraged selfishness and family chauvinism at the expense of those who were within. Women embraced these new societies, but they were only transient, as people differed on the amount of freedoms allowed, and the fact that they were plagued by economic difficulties.
Even at Oxford University, where women were at last accepted, in the late nineteenth century, there were cries of panic, that "overtaxing of their brains would lead to a deficiency of reproductive powers". And so, "inferior to us God made you, and our inferiors to the end of time, you shall remain", thundered Dean John Burgon from the New College chapel.
