Ellen Dietrick
From Philosopedia
Dietrick, Ellen Battelle (1800s - 1895)
Dietrick served on Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Woman’s Bible committee, was a vice-president of the Kentucky Equal Rights Association in 1888, and in 1890 became president of the Boston Suffrage League.
She believed that without the vote women would never be able to achieve legal equality.
Dietrick's freethought is shown in “Cardinal Gibbon’s Ignorance” (Liberty, 20 April 1895), in which she wrote,
- The day has gone by when a monk can tear a Hypatia from the pursuit of philosophy and throw her to a rabble of insane monastics to be dragged to a violent death. . . . Man has made himself a law unto himself, publishing it in his pretended "heavenly" revelations, dogmas, and statutes. Woman is not constructing a law unto herself, and she is putting it forth, not on a pretendedly supernatural, but on a natural basis.
In Women in the Early Christian Ministry: A Reply to Bishop Doane, and Others (1897), she wrote,
- The human race is guided by its own ideas, and only by its ideas. If thought were left perfectly free from ban of legislative or ecclesiastical censor, the best thoughts would as naturally prevail over the worst as the best seeds of the forest naturally triumph over the worst seeds.
- Persistently leavening public opinion, in a grossly superstitious age, with the theological doctrine of popular preachers, that woman is a sex of superior wickedness and inferior mentality, could have but one general result throughout Christendom. Not only did it gradually create within women themselves a passion of self-depreciation, humility and a self-hatred which led thousands of them to slowly and persistently torture themselves until relieved by insanity or death, it planed within the minds of men a jealous hatred and superstitious horror of the natural powers of women, which ultimately culminated in a veritable crusade of ecclesiastics against womankind.
- The only method of restoring the natural equality of dignity between men and women, lies in the demolishment of that elaborate theological structure which maintains that woman is made for the possession of man in a sense in which man is not made for woman, and that celibacy, per se, is a state of superior purity. Nature and common sense (not metaphysical sense) demonstrate that there is no good reason why any man or any woman should take, claim, or wield "lordship" over another.
