IIIWOMAN AND HOME
Someyears ago, in the course of the excavations which are being made with such success in Egypt, a papyrus was found which is now known among archæologists by the name ofThe Petition of Dionysia. This papyrus, which belongs to the second centuryA.D., contains on one side some books of theIliad, on the other a defence presented by a certain Dionysia to an Egyptian court, before which she was defending an action brought against her by her own father affecting her dowry and other questions of interest. To escape paying his daughter and her husband the sums which they demanded, the father had directed the husband to return him his daughter, and had dissolved the marriage. But the daughter, on her side, maintained in her defence that the father had forfeited his right to dissolve her marriage and to separate her from her husband, because her marriage was a “written†marriage—established, that is to say, by an act or document in writing. If it had been an “unwritten†marriage, Dionysia would not have contested herfather’s right in that case to dissolve it, for no motive whatever, merely because it so pleased him.
It would be difficult to imagine a document more strange than this, from the point of view of the ideas which prevail at the present day in European and American society. Matrimony is for us an act of so great social importance that the state alone—that is to say, the law, and the law courts—can recognise or dissolve it. To leave the destiny of a family at the mercy of the will of the father of one of the two parties, to recognise as his the right to destroy a family at any moment to suit his individual interest, without being accountable to anyone for so doing, would seem to us a monstrous thing. And yet this monstrous thing seemed to the whole of antiquity, with few restrictions and reservations, legitimate, reasonable, and wise. Differences in the organisation of the family existed in different countries and in different centuries; but they were but superficial, unessential differences. On one point, the whole world agreed: that matrimony should never be considered an act to be left to the will of the contracting parties, but a business transaction which the young people should leave to their fathers to arrange.
Matrimony, as it was in Rome, will serve to give a clear idea of the ancient world’s conception of the family. In Rome, fathers often betrothed their sons when they were still children. They made them marry when they were still quite young, the males before they were twenty, the girls at about sixteen; and they hadthe right to oblige them at any moment to divorce each other, without being forced to give any reason or explanation. A man might be an exemplary husband, might live with his wife in the most perfect bliss. If the son’s wife, for one reason or another, did not suit the fancy of his father, the son might be obliged any day to put her away. Amongst others to whom this happened was no less a person than Tiberius, at a time when he had already become one of the first figures in the Empire, and had commanded armies in battle. He had married a daughter of Agrippa, and loved her devotedly. The couple were considered in Rome a model of affection and faithfulness. But, at a certain moment, Augustus, who was the adoptive father of Tiberius, judged that for political motives another marriage might have suited Tiberius better; and he, accordingly, obliged Tiberius to divorce her. Tiberius was so much upset, that—as Suetonius tells us—every time he met his first wife in society, he burst into tears—he, who was one of the most formidable generals of his time; so that Augustus had to take measures to prevent their meeting each other. And yet Tiberius had to give way; for his father, in the eyes of the law and in accordance with the ideas current in his time, was absolute arbiter in these matters! Not even a man in the circumstances of Tiberius, who had already been consul, could think of rebelling against the paternal authority.
These few facts suffice to prove how often the ideas which to one epoch and to one civilisation seem themost natural, the most evident, and the most simple, are, on the contrary, complex and difficult ideas, at which mankind has arrived only after a long effort, and weary struggles. Is there anything which seems to us more reasonable than to leave to young people, who wish to found a family, ample liberty of judgment and of choice in the matter of the person with whom they will have to pass their lives? Fathers, it is true, often help their sons by giving advice. They readily place at the disposal of their children their own experience. But it is only in very rare instances that they maintain a struggleà outrance, to withhold their children from a marriage on which their hearts are set, or to force on them a repugnant alliance. We consider that the individual’s happiness may depend to some extent on his marriage. It is, therefore, just that everybody should have ample liberty of choice. If the law purported to restore to fathers the right to make or unmake their sons’ marriages, we are convinced that at the present day the vast majority of fathers would refuse to assume such a responsibility, and would consider such a power unjust, excessive, and tyrannical. There is not a father to-day who, however averse he may be to a marriage desired by his son or daughter, does not end by telling him or her, provided a little firmness is shown in resisting his arguments, that after all it is not he, but his son or daughter who has to take the husband or wife in question. Indeed, this inclination to pliability on the part of fathers towards their sons is increasingevery day. Every day sees a growing disinclination on the part of fathers to fetter, in a matter of such delicacy and of such importance to the personal happiness of the young, the freedom of the latter’s inclinations, the spontaneous rush of their feelings. Besides, what would be the use of having conquered liberty in so many other spheres, if it were withheld in this which, especially to the young, seems the most important of all: the liberty of yielding to the impulse of that passion which at a certain moment of life is the strongest of all, love?
And yet no idea would have appeared more absurd and scandalous to the men of the ancient world, the contemporaries of Pericles and Cæsar. The difference is so radical and profound that it must arise from important reasons. In fact, whoever compares ancient with modern times easily recognises that the rights of sentiment and the principles of liberty have been able to triumph in modern society only by virtue of a complete transformation in social customs and ordinances, which has stripped the family in our times of much of its social importance. To-day the family is purely and simply a form of social life in common. Man and woman cannot live solitary lives. A powerful instinct impels them towards each other. Even when the instinct is not felt, or is spent, the man needs to live in the company of other human beings, to have round him a circle of persons with whom he may find himself in relations of the closest intimacy. To-day the family performs this profoundly human office—this office andpractically no other. Nowadays, man and woman study, work, take part in government, compete for the conquest of wealth and power, and exercise an influence on society—engage in all these activities quite outside the family.
But it was not so in ancient times. The family was then an independent economic organisation, in which the woman had a predominant part. She wove and spun, providing every member of the family with clothes. She made bread, she dried the fruits for the winter, she seized the right moment for laying in the necessary supplies of provisions—a most important task, in times in which commerce was much less developed than it is now. In poor or moderately wealthy families, the women wove and performed similar tasks with their own hands. Rich women learned to do these tasks as children, but later contented themselves with superintending their performance by women slaves or freedwomen. But, especially in the rich families, the woman could contribute a great deal to the prosperity or the ruin of the house, according as she was or was not active in the performance of her work, zealous in her surveillance, energetic and shrewd in giving her orders, moderate in her expenditure. Even to-day the woman can contribute a great deal, in the wealthy classes, to the prosperity of the family. But for this she requires only one negative virtue, for all that this virtue is not too common or easily acquired: to know how to confine her expenses within reasonable limits,and not to be too ready to gratify her whims. In ancient times, on the contrary, if a woman was to be useful to her family she needed as well a positive virtue: to know how to produce much and well. This explains how we come to know that certain emperors’ wives, Livia for instance, directed the weaving operations in their homes personally and with great zeal, and that Augustus was particular not to wear any togas but those woven in his house under the eyes of his wife. The Emperor and his wife by their example meant to recall to all the Roman women the duty of attending with zeal and alacrity to their domestic duties.
The ancient family, especially among the upper classes, was also a school. The ancient world had few institutions of public education; and private instruction did not reach a high level of development, except in the closing years of the Empire. Though Rome was the greatest military power in the world, the family took the place of military schools, which were then non-existent. The officers, who all belonged to the nobility, were prepared in the family. The father was the first military instructor of his sons, and on him fell the duty of making good soldiers of them. This, indeed, was one of the reasons why the aristocracy became indispensable to the Roman Empire; because it alone could prepare the officers and generals in the family.
In short, the ancient family was a sort of political society. Its members were bound to support and help each other in difficult and dangerous contingencies, to amuch greater extent than they are nowadays. In political struggles, for instance, they were all of one colour. It was the most difficult and unheard of thing, if indeed not impossible, for a son or a son-in-law to attach himself to a different political party from that of his father or his father-in-law. If a member of the family was implicated in a lawsuit, or financially embarrassed, the family was bound to help him much more energetically, and at much greater risk, than in our day. We see this phenomenon most clearly in Roman history. After the aristocracy split into two opposing parties,—the conservative and the popular, to borrow modern expressions,—a man’s position in one or the other party was determined, almost always, by his birth. He belonged to one party or the other, according as his own family belonged to one or the other. Take Cæsar, for example. Why was Cæsar always a member of the democratic party, and bound to follow its vicissitudes, to the extent of becoming its leader and occasioning a civil war, overturning the ancient government, and establishing a dictatorship which, reviving as it did the saddest memories of Sulla’s reaction, could not fail to be odious to the majority, and which was the cause of Cæsar’s death? It was not the result of any special inclination or ambition of his own. Several times he tried to cross over to the other party, which had much more power and authority; or at any rate, to reach an understanding with it. But his effort was of no avail. He wasthe nephew of Marius, the most celebrated among the leaders of the popular party, and the one whom the other party most detested. The first impulse towards the whole of the great dictator’s extraordinary career was given by this relationship; he had in the end to bring about a second revolution, because his uncle had already caused one.
It is easy then to understand for what reason, in times in which the family performed so many social offices and was the pivot of so many interests, marriage was not considered as an act to be left to the full discretion of the young and to their love, and why the fathers were conceded the right to decide for themselves in such matters. A marriage involved grave political, economic, and moral responsibilities for the members of both clans. Therefore the young people were required to sacrifice to the common interests of their clan some part of their personal inclinations. In compensation, they had the advantage, in case of danger and of need, of being able to count on the family much more than they can nowadays; the family arrogated to itself, it is true, certain rights in connection with their choice, but in return did not abandon them to their fate in the hour of need.
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In short, the ancient marriage, organised though it was on lines which appear to us tyrannical, presented certain advantages which, if considered carefully, will be seen to compensate, at least in part, for the restrictedliberty of choice. In the great transformation of civilisation of which the modern marriage is the product, men have, it is true, gained, on the one hand, greater liberty, but have lost, on the other, certain advantages which, in the ancient world, were guaranteed to them by the closer and more vigorous solidarity of the family. Women, on the contrary, have gained much more in the passage from the ancient to the modern world, because in exchange for what they have gained, they have lost practically nothing. The organisation of the modern family is distinguished from that of the ancient especially by the much greater concessions it makes to the woman. Feminists complain loudly of the present condition of woman. It is certain, however, at least to anyone with any knowledge of the history of the past, that at no epoch have women been so little oppressed by men and at no epoch have they enjoyed so many advantages as at present.
In fact, if in the ancient marriage so little liberty of choice was reserved to the man, it is easy to understand that not a ghost of it was conceded to the woman. The man had in addition one advantage. Constrained to submit to the will of the father as long as the latter was alive, he became, when the father died, absolute master of his wife, because he could then repudiate her and marry another, how and when he chose. The almost unfettered liberty of divorce, without any motive, or for the most futile motives, might well be some compensation to the man for the subjection in which thefather, while alive, kept him. For the woman, there was no compensation at all. As long as her father lived, she had to obey the man to whom her father gave her. When the father was no more, she still remained in the power of her husband, who could not only repudiate her without any motive, but even marry her to another. In the history of Rome, especially, the men used and abused this privilege in a way, which to us seems sometimes ridiculous, sometimes revolting, and always extravagant. Especially in the last century of the republic, when the struggles between the parties became intense, the most eminent statesmen adopted the habit of consolidating their alliances with marriages. Therefore, we see every political vicissitude of importance shrouded in a curious web of divorces and marriages. Now one great man hands his wife over to another, now he marries the other’s daughter, now gives him his sister to wife. The poor women wander from one house to the other, change husbands from one year to another, with the same facility with which, nowadays, a traveller changes his inn. For all these marriages lasted only as long as the political combination on account of which they were entered into. When the combination was dissolved, divorce broke up all or most of these families, and the husbands set themselves to contract new marriages. It was so easy for the husband to get a divorce. He needed only to write his wife a letter announcing his intention!
Life, then, was bound to be not over-agreeable inCæsar’s time for an affectionate, delicate, virtuous woman who desired the quiet joys of family life. When we contemplate from afar the historical grandeur and the glory of ancient Rome, we ought not to forget the multitude of hapless women which Rome was forced to sacrifice—a precious holocaust indeed—to her fortune and power. How many women’s broken hearts, how many women’s shattered lives went to make up the foundations of Roman grandeur! Nevertheless, even the greatest evils are never without some small admixture of good; and that sorrowful plight of woman in ancient times, especially of the Roman woman, was offset by one advantage of which liberty has robbed the woman of to-day. That is, that in ancient times, a woman, whether fair or plain, clever or foolish, attractive or insipid, was certain to be married, and that too while she was still young. The husband could not choose her; but she was sure of finding him, and that without undue delay.
In fact, nowhere in the ancient world do we find any striking traces of a feminine celibacy like that which existed later under the influence of Christianity in the convents, or like that which is to-day again coming into prominence for social and economic reasons, without any religious impress or need of monastic vows, especially in the great industrial countries. It seems that women of the upper and middle classes, if they were not positively deformed and physically unsuited for matrimony, all married. Furthermore, inasmuch as marriages,especially among the upper classes, were arranged from political and social motives, no account was taken of the beauty of the bride, but of her social position, her family, and so on. Historians always tell us how many wives the numerous prominent figures in Roman history married, and to what families they belonged. But it is rare for them to tell us whether they were beautiful or ugly, intelligent or stupid, pleasing or unpleasing; these details seemed to them of but trifling importance. One of the few exceptions to this rule is Livia, the last wife of Augustus. All the writers vie in celebrating her rare beauty (to which the statues also bear witness), her wisdom, intelligence, and virtue. But Livia seems really to have been a miracle; for it is a fact that, having married Augustus in her earliest youth, she succeeded in living with him all her life.
Fifteen or sixteen years was considered the suitable age for a bride. Sometimes girls were married when they were barely fourteen, while nowadays it is rare for a girl to marry before she is twenty, and the majority marry between the ages of twenty and thirty. Furthermore, in many states of the ancient world the legal age for matrimony, both for the woman and the man, was much lower than it is to-day in European and American legal codes. This is not surprising. In all times and in all places in which matrimony is considered not as a personal matter of sentiment, but as a social act which must be regulated and directed by the parents, the object is to marry off the young people asquickly as possible. Often they are actually betrothed when they are still children, and share each other’s games of running and jumping. This was a fairly common practice in ancient Rome amongst the nobility, as it is a thriving custom in the China of to-day. Nor is it difficult to understand the reason for this procedure, which, considered by itself, seems to us extravagant and senseless. Love in all times and in all places is a most intractable passion. It is, therefore, more easy in such matters, for the elders to impose their wills and cold-blooded arrangements, on girls of fourteen or fifteen and boys of seventeen or eighteen, than on women or men of twenty-five. Naturally such precocious marriages, contracted between young people who had not yet had a taste of the world, were not free from dangers and serious inconveniences. But these dangers and inconveniences appeared to contemporary eyes less great than those which would have arisen, if the young had been left to follow the dictates of their own feelings.
In conclusion, another advantage which the ancient marriage, with all its many hardships and its want of sympathy, assured to the woman was what one might call the legal protection of virtue. Nowhere was this protection greater and stronger than in ancient Rome. In Rome, the legitimacy of a marriage did not depend, as it does now in Europe and America, on the fulfilment of certain formalities before a priest or a magistrate, but on the moral situation of the woman. Aningenuaet honestawoman, to use the expression then current, meaning a free-born woman of irreproachable habits, could live with a man only in the capacity of his legitimate wife. No formality in the presence of any magistrate was required. The fact of living with a man and beingingenua et honestasufficed to assure to a woman and her own children all the rights appertaining to a wife and to legitimate offspring. On the other hand, a woman who had lived a dissolute life, had engaged in certain employments considered, and justly considered, disgraceful for a woman, or who had been convicted of adultery, could never become a legitimate wife or enjoy the privileges and rights of a legitimate wife. There was no ceremony before a priest or magistrate which could make a legitimate wife of her. She was by law aconcubina, and in that capacity for a long time had no rights. Only in the course of time could she hope to get the rights, much restricted and of little importance as they were, which the law gradually conceded to theconcubina.
To transport this ancient conception of matrimony into modern society would doubtless not be possible, because it contradicts the great democratic principle of the equality of all before the law, on which our social organisation rests. But considered by itself this ancient conception of matrimony is without a doubt more lofty and more noble, and in particular more favourable to the woman, than the modern one. For it did not reduce the status of legitimate wife to what is practicallya formality, but made it the exclusive privilege of the virtuous woman, and therefore assured the virtuous woman of a kind of privileged legal position, protecting her effectively against the intrigues and seductions of the attractive and gay women who, in the modern régime, are usually the more dangerous to the peace and happiness of the virtuous women, the less austere are their habits. In ancient Rome, the law guaranteed the virtuous woman that at least no one of these women should be able to rob her of the post of honour which she occupied in the family.
The comparison of the ancient marriage with the modern marriage once more proves to us, then, how complex are human affairs, and how difficult it is to pass an absolute and definitive judgment upon them. Certainly, at first sight, the condition of the woman in the ancient family seems to us a horrible one, resembling that of a slave. We wonder how nations that had risen to a lofty level of social, intellectual, and moral development could have tolerated it. But when we consider the matter more attentively, we find that even this condition, wretched though it was in certain respects, was not without certain advantages, which may perhaps explain to us why women put up with it for so many centuries. The liberty which the woman of the present day enjoys has countless advantages; but it has made matrimony for her a struggle, in which, if some triumph, others are worsted, and those who triumph are not always the most virtuous and the most wise.Also, in this order of things, liberty is an excellent thing, especially for the fortunate and the brave; but the fortunate and the brave, where marriages and love are concerned, are not always those who possess the qualities which conduce most effectively to the progress of the world and the improvement of the human species. Modern liberty has set a high price on beauty and intelligence in woman, which is all to the good; but it has also made coquetry, frivolity, and vapidity into qualities which are useful for the conquest of man, who is not always a reasonable being and is even less reasonable than usual when he is in love—which isnotall to the good. For there is no doubt that between twenty and thirty years of age a man is much more sensitive to the attractions of a frivolous and seductive girl than to those of a serious and sensible woman.
All human things, then, have their advantages and their disadvantages, and that perhaps is why the world never tires of its experiments in diverse directions and on every topic. Absolute perfection is unattainable—a fact which should make us careful not to boast too loudly of the times in which we live, nor to be too ready to disparage what preceding generations have done.