Marital Equality Quotes
There was a movement to pay married women who were housewives to compensate them for the time they spend in, if nothing else, educating and bringing up male children who were educated. It was they who transmitted the values and many experts agree have more to do with a child’s education than the schools do. So this important and critical societal task was not remunerated as were all others. At the time, even many of the feminists held the view that society would be better off if women were homemakers and brought up the children. However, without any pay (and at the time few or no rights to a husbands earnings of assets) she was bound to be a second class citizen. That idea of housewife compensation obtained almost no support, and the only way for women to gain some kind of position and equality was to work outside the home—the condition that became the norm about 30 years after this was written.
This relatively radical viewpoint regarding equal rights for women was expressed by Roosevelt as his Senior thesis at Harvard in 1880. In those days, the kind of scrutiny of everything a candidate ever wrote or said that is characteristic of modern politics, did not exist. It is very doubtful that if the Republican Party officials had ever known that he had espoused these views—even as a young student, that he ever would have risen so high in the party, much less get nominated at the Vice Presidential candidate which was his entree to the Presidency. When in office however, there is no record of him reviving his youthful proposal that women who marry retain their maiden names.
In 1877 Wasburn was dropped from the List of Ministers by the Unitarian Church. He had become quite atheistic.
The case was a protest against the 1921 law which gave equal rights to women of Wisconsin. See {587976}.
This is the passage of the Bible that causes many fundamentalist Christians to believe that wives should obey and be subservient to their husbands. Other Christians believe that this as archaic as stoning adulterers or executing children who are not obedient to their fathers. Ironically, this is one area where many fundamentalist Christians and fundamentalist Muslims are in agreement.
