Lux Lucet

The Monstrous Regiment of Women, title page.

Ratified in 1920, the 19th Amendment to the Constitution guaranteed women the right to vote in the United States. The text of the Amendment reads in part, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.”

Prior to the adoption of this Amendment, women had limited access to the ballot box. Some states permitted women to vote, as did some municipalities. But with the 19th Amendment, women were guaranteed the same voting rights as men. And if women had the same voting rights as men, on what basis could anyone deny them the right to hold office, up to and including the presidency?

This very point was raised during the debate over woman suffrage in Great Britain. During the parliamentary debate on the 1906 Resolution on the Enfranchisement of Women, several points were put forth by those opposed to women voting. Among the reasons for opposing female suffrage was the following:

Because the acquirement of the Parliamentary vote would logically involve admission to Parliament itself, and to all Government offices. It is scarcely possible to imagine a woman being Minister for War, and yet the principles of the Suffragettes involve that an many similar absurdities.

But what was scarcely imaginable in 1906 has in 2016 become a self-evident truth. To deny it is to run the risk of being declared a heretic in the church of progressive liberalism and, at least metaphorically speaking, being burned at the stake.

But if this be heresy, let us make the most of it. It is the contention of this writer that those opposed to woman suffrage were in the right, and the suffragists in the wrong. My case rests on the evidence of the Scriptures. And while the conclusions drawn from Scripture on the matter are, in and of themselves, decisive, the practical experience of the last 96 years can be called upon to support this contention as well.

Scriptural Evidence Against Woman Suffrage

In what many today consider a controversial New Testament passage, the Apostle Paul enjoined the church at Corinth, “Let your women keep silent in the churches, for they are not permitted to speak; but they are to be submissive, as the law also says. And if they want to learn something, let them ask their own husbands at home; for it is shameful for women to speak in church” (1 Corinthians 14:34).

In another place, Paul writes thus to Timothy, “Let a woman learn in silence with all submission. And I do not permit a woman to teach or exercise authority over a man, but to be in silence. For Adam was formed first, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived, fell into transgression (1 Timothy 2:11-14).

In his essay Paul on Woman Speaking in Church, B.B. Warfield concluded from these passages,

(1) That the prohibition of speaking in church to women is precise, absolute, and all-inclusive. They are to keep silent in the churches – and that means in all the public meetings for worship; they are not even to ask questions; (2) that this prohibition is given especial point precisely for the two matters of teaching and ruling covering specifically the functions of preaching and ruling elders; (3) that the grounds on which the prohibition is put are universal and turn on the difference in sex, and particularly on the relative places given to the sexes in creation and in the fundamental history of the race.

To this essay John Robbins appended the following comment, “If women are forbidden to speak in church meetings, as the Bible says, then they cannot vote either, let alone hold office. The contemporary debate over the ordination of women could arise only because the prior question of the silence of women in church was answered in an anti-Christian fashion.”

And because both civil government and church government are ordained by God, what holds true in the one logically follows in the other. Commenting on the same passages as did Warfield, John Knox pointed out,

The Apostle takes power from all women to speak in the assembly. Ergo, he permits no woman to rule above man. The former part is evident, whereupon does the conclusion of necessity follow. For he that takes from woman the least part of authority, dominion, or rule will not permit unto her that which is greatest. But greater it is to reign above realms and nations, to publish and make laws, and to command men of all estates, and finally to appoint judges and ministers, than to speak in the congregation (The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women).

If it is improper for women to speak and hold office in the church, it is likewise improper for them to speak – that is, vote and hold office – in civil government.

John Calvin is another reformer who understood the Bible’s prohibition on women in government. In his commentary on 1 Corinthians 14, he stated,

Wherever even natural propriety has been maintained, women have in all ages been excluded from the public management of affairs. It is the dictate of common sense, that female government is improper and unseemly.

And if female government is unseemly, so too is female suffrage. But what in earlier ages was common sense even among people who did not know God, is today in the “Christian” West embraced as a positive good.

The Failure of Practical Arguments

While in the 16th century Knox manfully argued from the Scriptures against women holding civil power, those opposed to woman suffrage in the 19th and early 20th centuries mustered only practical reasons to oppose woman suffrage and by implication the rule of women. The fact that opponents of woman suffrage offered a weak defense of male headship in government underscores the theological decline that had taken place in the 350 years from the time Knox to the late 19th and early 20th centuries when the debate over woman suffrage ran hot.

Not that there is anything inherently wrong with practical reasons. They can be used very effectively as ad hominem arguments. But they can never form the basis of a competent defense of Christian political theory. The Scriptures alone can do this.

For example, a pamphlet issued by the National Association OPPOSED to Woman Suffrage gave the following reasons to vote no on woman suffrage,

• Because 90% of the women either do not want it, or do not care.
  
• Because it means competition of women with men instead of co-operation.
  
• Because 80% of the women eligible to vote are married and can only double or annual their husband’s votes.
  
• Because it can be of no benefit commensurate with the additional expense involved.
  
• Because in some States more voting women than voting men will place the Government under petticoat rule.
  
• Because it is unwise to risk the good we already have for the evil which may occur.
  

Worth noting is that I found pamphlet quoted above in an article from the Atlantic the titled ‘Vote No on Women’s Suffrage’: Bizarre Reasons For Not Letting Women Vote. Eleanor Barkhorn, the author of the article dated November 6, 2012, simply cannot fathom the thought that any reasonable person might object to giving women the vote. But the concerns that strike the progressives at the Atlantic as “bizarre”, appear to at least one reader as not unreasonable.

The statement that suffrage, “means competition with men instead of co-operation,” is particularly on target. In the 1960s following the rise of second wave feminism in the wake of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, it became common to speak of the “war between the sexes,” as indeed feminist philosophy put women and men into conflict with one another in the home, the church, the workplace and the government.

Describing feminism as “popular, militant and anti-Christian,” John Robbins added that the women’s movement brought with it the, “attendant evils [of] child abuse, promiscuity, adultery, homosexuality, abortion and divorce (Scripture Twisting in the Seminaries Part I: Feminism, xi), which evils are the effects of the war between men and women brought about by the feminists and their ungodly philosophy.

Conclusion

The 19th Amendment to the Constitution not only explicitly guaranteed women the right to vote, but implicitly guaranteed that someday the US would have a woman Commander-in-Chief of the army, a state of affairs that even atheist Ayn Rand correctly concluded was “unspeakable.” Those who argued against woman suffrage in Great Britain in 1906 Parliamentary likewise understood this point and considered it an “absurdity.” But what was seen as absurd in the more Christian year of 1906, now is accepted by nearly everyone, Christians included, as a self-evident, unalloyed blessing.

Such a sea change in received opinion has come about as a result of the West’s fatal decision to reject Christ and embrace secular philosophy. And so thorough has been the West’s rejection of Christ that even many of the elect have been deceived into accepting at least some of the secularists’ program, one aspect of which involves the advancement of women to positions of leadership in the civil government. And even many of those who are not deceived fail to base their arguments, as did Knox, on Scripture, but rather turn to practical arguments to make their case.

To be continued…