Ernestine Rose Quotes
Again, I shall be told that the law presumes the husband to be kind, affectionate, and ready to provide for and protect his wife. But what right, I ask, has the law to presume at all on the subject?
Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, et al. History of Woman Suffrage. Vol. 1, Fowler and Wells, 1881, p. 240.
This is a particularly interesting passage of the Koran. On the one hand it provides the religious justification for the sexist dominance of the male in a marriage. However, at the same time, it gave wives rights at a time when few cultures and religions did--such as the right to own and inherit property. Women in the Western world did not obtain some of these rights until the last hundred years. So historically, Islam was somewhat ahead of Christianity when Muhammed lived, but while most Western interpretations of gender role and rights have changed and advanced, a small minority of Islam has been reformist and modern so Islam has gone from a leader in modern gender relations to an obstacle to equality and fairness by not changing and reforming.
That is easy for the man to do. At the time, this Indian view was little different than that prevailing amongst religious Christian whites.
In many countries, wives must have the permission of their husbands to have any major medical procedure. In some she cannot leave the home, travel, or make a contract without the permission of the husbands. Each year, in the third world, many women die in from not being able to have medical care because they were not allowed to leave the village to go to a hospital or clinic in an emergency, until the husband could be found to grant permission. Under American and most law of developed countries, either spouse had the unilateral right to have any medical procedure and neither is required to inform or obtain the permission of the other.
The decree prevents a married woman from obtaining a passport without her husbands written approval. The reference to criminals is because the Egyptian Constitution and the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights provides the right of any Egyptian to travel or leave the country except for criminals who have been properly adjudicated.
Ernestine Louise Rose was an atheist feminist, individualist feminist, and abolitionist. She was one of the major intellectual forces behind the women's rights movement in nineteenth-century America.
