When the untenableness of muscular or mental power, as a ground for holding women in an inferior position, becomes obvious, the next support man conceives for his exclusive appropriation of authority, is the belief that he is exclusively the representative and vicegerent of God on earth; that woman is placed in subordination to him by the direct command of God. In the Hindu law we read, "The husband of a woman is her deity;" and in the Ramayana, "A husband is the god of his consort." The New Testament says, "Man is the head of the woman, but the head of the man is God;" "Man is the glory of God, but woman is the glory of man. For the man is not of the woman, but the woman of the man." The Apostle likewise declares, "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." This position of the Apostle was based on the Hebrew account of the creation of the first woman from the rib of the first man, and of the sentence of God upon her in consequence of her sin in eating the apple: "Thou shalt be subject to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee." Few persons have a conception of the extent to which this representation has moulded the opinions and feelings of the Christian world. The origin of the view is obvious: the desire of the stronger for homage, and the willingness of the weaker to reflect that desire in their conduct. Is it a sound view? or is it a fallacy and a superstition? or is it a mixture of truth and error?
For those who believe in the infallibility of every word of Scripture, the subject is taken out of the province of natural reason, conscience, and expediency; and there is nothing to be said. They hold by the current tradition as the explicit will of God. But, at the present day, there is an increasing proportion of persons who look on the Hebrew narrative of the origin and earliest experience of our race in the garden of Eden, as a legend, similar to kindred narratives in other literatures. They are led, by teachings of philosophy and science which they cannot resist, to the conclusion, that the Almighty did not produce the human species by an arbitrary and wholly exceptional interposition; but created them just as he did the other species--through a law of development. It seems to them incredible, that man and woman were made separately, in succession, the latter exclusively for the former. They are obliged to suppose that man and woman were created simultaneously--the differentiation of sex having gone on in the lower types for incomputable ages, causing humanity to appear in its earliest rise as male and female. So, instead of saying, "The man was not made for the woman, but the woman for the man," they would affirm, "The man and the woman were equally made for each other, to advance hand in hand to perfection." Those who assume this scientific point of view, will see that the question of the rights of woman, and her true relation to man, is to be decided purely by a philosophical mastery of the expediency and inexpediency, the essential right and wrong, in the facts of the case. The question of the eligibility of woman to public life and political prerogatives has nothing to do with her comparative personal weakness; nothing to do with any supposed rule, given in an ancient revelation; nothing to do with any supposition that man was the first to be created and the second to sin, woman the second to be created and the first to sin. Did priority of creation confer authority to govern, then man should obey the lower animals; for they were made before he was. Even Apostolic logic sometimes limps. The question can be understood only by a correct perception of the will of God, as indicated in the nature and destiny of progressive humanity composed of male and female.