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168. 29 November 1900: ECS to the Editor, New York Sun
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^ 367 ship in the federation, paid dues, and received an official welcome that lasted only until southern whites realized at the annual meeting that the club’s members were African Americans.As if to lessen the insult of taking away the club’s membership, its delegate,Josephine Ruffin,was told she could stay at the meeting representing a white organization.She refused.(New York Tribune,26 November 1900; New York Evening Post, 1 December 1900; H. F. Kletzing and W. H. Crogman, Progress of a Race: Or, The Remarkable Advancement of the Afro-American, From the Bondage of Slavery, Ignorance and Poverty to the Freedom of Citizenship, Intelligence, Affluence , Honor and Trust [Atlanta,Ga.,1903],219–23; Blair, Clubwoman as Feminist, 145–46n; Joan Marie Johnson, Southern Ladies, New Women: Race, Region, and Clubwomen in South Carolina, 1890–1930 [Gainesville, Fla., 2004], 107–21.) 3. ECS refers to the Civil Rights Act of 1875, one of the great achievements of Reconstruction. However, here as elsewhere in her late work she fails to acknowledge its fate: key provisions of the act were struck down by the Supreme Court of the United States in the Civil Rights Cases (1883). 4. Beatrice Portinari (1266–1290), a Florentine noblewoman who inspired the Italian poet Dante (1265–1321), guides him through Paradise in his Divine Comedy . ECS often described a popular engraving based on the painting Dante and Beatrice by Ary Sheffer, an early nineteenth-century French painter. It illustrates a scene in the “Paradiso,” canto 1, lines 46–54. (John Denison Champlin, Jr., ed., Cyclopedia of Painters and Paintings [New York, 1885], 1:371, 4:124–26; Papers, 3:450–51.) ••••••••• 168 • ECS to the Editor, New York SUN New York, Nov. 29 [1900]. To the Editor of The Sun—Sir: Ever and anon public thought is aroused on the question of prostitution: now, by a terrible tragedy like the one just enacted in Paterson, 1 again, by some unusual, open manifestation of vice in the streets of our cities, now the Philippines or South Africa, one of the terrible adjuncts of war. But though an aroused public sentiment can repress the evils for a time in one locality,they reappear at once with renewed energy in many others. Occasionally church officials make their protests, but no one seems to understand the hidden cause of all these outrages; they are all trying to lop off the branches, but no one goes to the root of the deadly upas tree, the wholesale degradation of the mothers of the race. The authorities of the Episcopal Church are just now fully aroused to action: 2 the first step to be taken is for it to teach woman a higher respect 28 november 1900 368 & for herself,and the rising generation a more profound reverence for her.So long as we assign to her an inferior position in the scale of being,emphasize the fables of her creation as an afterthought, the guilty factor in the fall of man, cursed of God in her maternity, a marplot in the life of a Solomon or a Samson, unfit to stand in the “Holy of Holies,” in cathedrals, or to take a seat as delegate in a Synod, General Assembly or Conference, or to be ordained to preach the gospel or administer the sacraments—so long will her degradation continue! When the Episcopal Church, in the great gathering at Washington two years ago, held a meeting for the discussion of a national law for divorce, though 1,500 women belonging to the same church held an auxiliary meeting there at the same time,the Bishops discussed the questions of marriage and divorce with closed doors,not one woman being permitted to be present though equally interested in these social questions. 3 The moral effect of that act degraded woman in the estimation of every man, young and old, connected with the Episcopal Church. When in their marriage service, they make it the duty of woman to obey and be given away by some man, they make her the inferior and subject of the man she marries; when they read from the pulpit these passages of Scripture: “Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak, but they are commanded to be under obedience,” as also saith the law; “If they will learn anything let them ask their husbands at home for it is a shame for women to speak in the church”; “Wives...