Sifting Through the Sands of Time from the Courier Archives

100 Years Ago 2 June 18, 1909

New Woman a Freak Says Bishop Doane

One Who Strives For Man's Work "a Horrible Misshapen Monster," He Declares—Sees Suffragists' Doom—Their "Quiet Appeal Will Be Drowned by Howling-Dervish Suffragettes"—Talks to Girl Graduates Albany, NY—Bishop William Croswell Doane, in his address to the graduating class of St. Agnes' School, bitterly attacked the new woman in her efforts to do man's work, and denounced the woman suffrage campaign as a "hysterical clamor employed in the pursuit of this chimera."

"Your womanhood is your especial gift of grace and honor equal to, but different from, the glory of manhood," he said to the young women students. "Nothing but mischief and misery and confusion worse confounded can come from the attempt to make the two the same. The masculine woman, the effeminate man, like bearded women or a long haired man, is a lusu naturae, a monstrum horrendum informe. So first, you are to keep and guard as a sacred trust your womanhood, your femineness.

"In the stress and strain, in the crush and pressure of our modern life, woman has elbowed herself into certain kinds of work in which she resembles and rivals man. How much humanity, how much society, has gained by it, if employed women are to make unemployed men, it is difficult if not impossible to say. And yet I believe things will right themselves in time. But this deep line of distinctive difference remains unchanged.

"I believe myself that the vocation of a trained nurse is as honorable and as valuable as the calling of a physician, and to my old-fashioned notion is more suitable and more becoming. In spite of the fair figure and quick cleverness of Shakespeare's Portia, I think the place for the women pleading is with Mrs. Ballington Boot in the cells and corridors of jails rather than in the courtroom before a jury and a judge. And I am absolutely sure that the admission or intrusion of women into the ministry is not only against the teachings of Scripture and the tradition of centuries but is the spoiling of their great power and teaching and influencing in the schools and classes a few at a time those whom the very closeness and quietness and privacy influence and effect.

"Deep in the very roots of nature and the character the cleavage of this difference lies. Guard it and humor it as the choice and special gift to you of power, as the intimation and indication to you of the lines by which to shape your lives. Truly as the boy is father of the man, so truly the girl is mother of the woman. And I have hope and confidence to think that some such shaping and settling as your womanhood has taken on her will make and mold your womanhood when you get out into the world.

"I cannot count it necessary and perhaps it is not wise for me to caution you against the loudly shrieked call to give women the right to vote and to be voted for. I am disposed to think that the quiet and decent appeal of a few of the so-called suffragists will be so drowned in the sort of howling dervish performance of the so-called Suffragettes that they will fail of any effect. At any rate, the argument should be addressed rather to legislators than to you, except so far as one is justified in saying here to you that your womanhood will gain nothing by suffrage, and is losing every day in its dignity and true influence by the hysterical clamor which is employed in pursuit of this chimera."