On the other hand, the old ideal of the family, the very incarnation of woman’s subjection, was falling into decay. Greek and Asiatic courtesans were pouring in, and Roman fathers must have their daughters educated, if a class ofhetæræwere not to hold the position it had done at Athens and Corinth. Women found their value, and stipulated for the retention of their dowries, if not for other property. As their wealth grew, the lawyers entered their service, and taught them how to evade the inconveniences of the law by refusing theconfarreatio(the most solemn form) and only entering on one of the looser forms of marriage. Divorce, which had been unknown for centuries, became frequent; and some women entered upon mock marriages, which withdrew them from a father’s control without substituting that of a husband.And, about the year 190 B.C., the new spirit of the women broke out in fiery eruption. During the war with Carthage a law had been passed (215 B.C.) forbidding the women to wear heavy golden ornaments or many-coloured robes, and restricting their use of chariots. At the close of the war (195 B.C.) the women demanded the repeal of this Oppian Law, as it had been passed to secure funds. Cato, however, who was then Consul, and others resolved to retain the law, and a struggle ensued that one could almost transfer from the forum of ancient Rome to the Parliament Square of modern London. Livy (Ab urbe condita, 1. xxxiv. c. i.-viii.) describes how, not only crowds of men of opposing sides invaded the Capitol, but the matrons themselves, “restrained neither by authority nor modesty nor the control of their husbands,” beset all the ways that led to the Forum, and importunately demanded the votes of the legislators. Reinforced by crowds of provincial women, they kept up a noisy agitation during the debate in the Forum, and—strangest parallel of all—“dared to approach the consuls, prætors, and other magistrates,” and at length forced their way into the houses of the tribunes and won them to the cause! Conservative patricians looked with alarm at this new species of “masculine women” (androgynæ). Cato, who led the resistance, complained that he had to bore his way with shame through a crowd of women to reach the Forum. If the men did not wish to see themselves under the heel of the women in a few years, he said—Livy gives his speech at length—let them keep their wives in order at home and forbid them to appear in public. But there were conscientious traitors to the masculine cause, as there are to-day. Lucius Valerius replied to Cato, and, intimidated by the armies of Amazons without, the senators repealed the Oppian Law. Cato had to be content, some years later, to impose a heavy tax on their property.[6]This agitation, in the year 195 B.C., did not aim at securing direct political power, but it well illustrates the futility of anti-feminist predictions, as well as the law that feminism grows with culture. From that time onward the women of Rome continued to enlarge their liberty and their power. After a few decades the Voconian law was passed, forbidding them to receive legacies; but it was little observed, and the economic power of the wealthier women increased. That many of them used their resources only to indulge a taste for vicious or stupid luxury is merely to say that they did what some rich men did, and are doing. We have just as many instances recorded of wealthy and cultivated Roman ladies who retained all the fine character of their ancestors. Those writers who speak of good wives and good mothers as “the gold that glitters on the muck-heap,” as Dr. Reich does, seem to be ignorant of the real character of some of their types.[7]That famous type of motherhood, Cornelia, daughter of Scipio and mother of the Gracchi, was one of the most learned women of her time, and was no less interested in public affairs than in Greek culture. In her later years her home was a centre of intellectual life, and her letters are highly praised by the first critic of the Roman world. The letters of Cicero refer to numbers of other Roman ladies of no less culture than character and civic interest. The patriotism of Brutus drew its strength, to no small extent, from the spirit of his mother, wife, and sister.By the beginning of the Christian era, when the Empire had displaced the Republic, the position of woman had materially altered. The despotism of the husband was a mere barbaric memory. From Augustus they obtained full control of their dowry and protection against avaricious husbands; and from Hadrian, later, they had the right to make wills without consulting their husbands. Their accumulating property gave them a good deal of indirect influence on civic and political affairs. The philosopher Seneca acknowledged that he owed his quæstorship to his aunt, and promotion through the influence of women was quite common.In the reign of Tiberius a senator made a spirited attack on their interference in the public administration. The wives of generals and governors, he complained, went down into the provinces with their husbands, reviewed the troops with them, and meddled with the government. The Senate ignored the complaint. Inscriptions have been found in many Roman towns that tell with gratitude of women-patrons of the municipality, women-donors of baths, arches, temples, hospitals, and other treasured institutions.The school-system of Rome now developed to a height which has only been reached once more by education in the second half of the nineteenth century, and of which many civilised nations still fall far short. For the children of the free workers, of both sexes, there was general and free elementary instruction in the later Empire. Boys and girls sat together on the benches of theliteratorin the open porticoes, and the girls of the more wealthy went on to the secondary schools of thegrammaticus, as their brothers did. Many women had slave-tutors teaching them Greek letters and philosophy. The marble chambers of the rich, with their rare birds nesting in the cedar roof, their silver furniture and Greek vases, and all the treasures of Persia, did, indeed, often echo with voluptuous music, and draw their heavy curtains upon scenes such as unthinking wealth inspires in every age; but they resounded, too, with feminine discussions of Greek philosophy and poetry, and Roman politics, and they smiled on types of womanhood that preserved all the character of the old Republic, with all the interest in art and thought and life of the new Empire.It is so commonly believed that this enlargement of the liberty and power of the Roman women led to a general degradation of character that I must linger for a moment on the point. The popular idea of an entire corruption of Rome in the first century is quite discarded by modern scholarship. The English reader will find the finest and truest picture of that maligned age in Dr. Samuel Dill’sRoman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius, in which the current exaggeration is fully refuted.[8]The popular notion rests almost entirely on the satires of Juvenal, a bohemian writer, anti-feminist and anti-aristocratic, who hung on the fringe of society to catch what dubious morsels he could of idle chatter and exaggerated scandal. It would be more reasonable to take Father Vaughan’s strictures on the “smart set” as a full picture of English society than to take Juvenal’s less conscientious gossip about a few wealthy women as a complete picture of Rome. A careful reader will soon see that Juvenal lashes Roman women for their culture and for innocent fads, as much as for vice. As Letourneau says: “Neither the satires of the poets nor the objurgations of moralists suffice to prove that the Roman woman was essentially inferior to her male companion.” The moralist he seems to have in mind is Seneca; but Seneca expressly claimed that woman was the mental and moral equal of man, and he lived in a circle of fine, cultivated ladies. The morbidity of a few of the wealthier women—a morbidity that has a parallel in every age of luxury and change, in both sexes—does not characterise the sex; and, as to the larger class of less wealthy women, Dr. Dill adds: “In his [Juvenal’s] own modest class female morality ... was probably as high as it ever was, as high as the average morality of any age” (p. 76).I do not need to dwell, therefore, on the few known cases of slave-torture, on the one or two noble women slinking down to the reekinginsulæin the Subura, and the few other extraordinary misdeeds that have puffed out the popular calumny. For the general character of the age one need only recall London under the Stuarts, or under the Georges. It was an age of great luxury (falling short, however, of the same class in modern New York) and great laxity, and the blame must be laid on the rigorous and tyrannical old idea of marriage, as well as on the familiar causes. But the idea that this condition of Roman society continued to the end of the Pagan Empire is grotesquely untrue. Before the end of the first century, under Stoic influence, the standard of character rose once more, Roman society was purged, and in the last phase of the feminist movement at Rome a general level of morality and philanthropy was reached that will bear comparison with modern times. Both the historians of the time, Tacitus and Suetonius, expressly describe the reform, and every historian knows that Rome went on to a greater height (apart from letters) than it had done before. Lecky, in particular, has done justice to the way in which the Stoic doctrine of the brotherhood of men found expression in the condemnation of slavery, the imperial abolition of most of the old abuses, the care of the aged and ailing, and a hundred works of justice and mercy.In this remarkable fervour for social justice woman was bound to find profit. The service done to her consisted mainly in providing a sounder basis for the liberty and power which she had won, largely by the equivocal aid of the growing laxity in regard to marriage. The Stoics—philosophers, lawyers, and emperors—believed in the equality of men and women. Antoninus Pius embodied in one of his judgments the common Stoic sentiment that fidelity was equally expected of husband and wife. The great Stoic jurist, Gaius, severely criticised the older Roman law, that dealt unequally with man and woman, and “scouted the popular apology for it in the mental inferiority of the female sex,” says Sir Henry Maine.[9]Dion Chrysostom called for the legal suppression of prostitution. Briefly, the Stoics, who controlled the legal and imperial courts for more than a century, completed the work of putting woman on a level of legal and social equality to man, and their world included—as the letters and writings of Plutarch, Seneca, Tacitus, and Pliny show—a large number of women of equal culture and character.Thus Rome had completely removed the sex-disability of its women while it was still in the fulness of power, and as a direct consequence of its later moral culture. That this emancipation did not include the granting of political power can cause no surprise to those who know the history of Rome. Since the fall of the Republic the men themselves had no political power, and, therefore, the women had no sex-disability on this side to agitate against. It is true that the imperial purple was held exclusively by men, and the great administrative offices were open to men alone. Against this arrangement women may have protested; but we should hardly expect such a protest until a more advanced stage of evolution; and, in point of fact, the more ambitious women had a great deal of indirect power. Even before the fall of the Republic we find notices of what we should now call “women’s clubs” (senatus matronarum), and when power was concentrated in an hereditary monarchy the royal women had immense influence over it. Women agitated in municipal elections, as we saw, controlled small towns in the character of municipal patrons, and influenced the choice of quæstors, prætors, and tribunes. With this large measure of influence for the wealthier women, and with the general admission of her equal mental capacity to men, it was natural for woman to cease from agitation; the mass of the women, who had not these opportunities, were in no worse plight, politically, than their husbands. Until government by popular representatives was once more adopted or demanded we can hardly look for a further agitation. But the Roman Empire was now beginning to decay, and the cause of woman was lost in the general catastrophe.In speaking of decay as setting in immediately after the completion of woman’s emancipation I need hardly recall my protest against connecting the two. The decay of the Roman Empire was due to causes that are plainly set forth by modern historians like Boissier and Schultze, and that have nothing whatever to do with the emancipation of woman. No serious historian ever dreamed of such a notion until the modern feminist movement arose. In point of fact, the emancipation of woman was completed long before Rome passed the height of its power. What the Stoics did was rather to find a healthy moral basis for the liberty that had already been won. I cannot go into the complex causes of the decay of the Empire in Europe, but will only say that it is traced to political, economic, and physical degeneration, with which the position of woman is absolutely unconnected. To the very end Roman women retained their culture, character, and influence; and the last glimpses we get (in Symmachus and Macrobius) of Pagan Rome, before the Goths invade it, leave with us a memory of a sober, cultivated, humane society, unconscious that the wheels of fate are making so appalling a revolution.Thus, as I said in the beginning, the woman-movement of that older empire broke up only because its civilisation was broken. Rome had carried the cause of woman’s emancipation to a great height, and, had a fresh civilisation succeeded at once to the heritage, as Greece succeeded Rome, the story would have been completed long ago. Unhappily, Roman civilisation was replaced by a fresh barbarism, and Europe fell with terrible rapidity into the swamp of the Middle Ages. Women sank back all over Europe into a state of such subordination that fourteen hundred years after the fall of Rome there was not a civilisation in the world that would grant her the least semblance of that legal and mental equality with man which she had laboriously won nearly 2,000 years before. The cause of woman passed into an abyss, from which it is only now emerging afresh. How that came about, and why it lingered so long in the abyss, we have now to see.CHAPTER VI.THE DARK AGE OF FEMINISMThemillennium that lies between the year 500 and the year 1500 of the Christian Era is known to all historians as the Middle Age, and to very many as the Dark Age. Into the general correctness or incorrectness of the latter title I need not inquire. In the story of the evolution of woman that millennium must assuredly figure as the Dark Age. All the prestige that woman had enjoyed in Egypt, all the admissions she had wrung from the philosophers of Greece, all the high ambitions she had realised in Rome, were sunk deep in Lethe, and woman was again in a position of great subordination all over the world. Among the nations that were slowly rising to civilisation in the remote and unknown west, among the nations that had already reached civilisation in the east and south of Asia, she was subordinate; and in the centre of the world’s stage, in Europe, on which the main stream of cultural evolution had settled, she occupied a lower position than ever. Her social position varied; but her legal position was infamous, and her political position that of a serf.Without going so far as to say, with Mrs. Cady Stanton (Woman’s Bible), that “mankind touched the lowest depth of degradation,” I will be content for the moment to say that all that woman had won in ancient Rome was entirely lost, and I will glance at the needful qualifications later. The first point of interest is to determine why the thread of woman’s development was broken off for a thousand years.It will seem, at first glance, that I have assigned the cause in saying that Roman civilisation gave way to barbarism. Goths and Vandals trod underfoot the vast and wonderful polity that the Romans had spread over Europe. Roman culture retired to the western empire, to Asia, and, at the paralysing touch of Asia, fell into the rigid, barren, stationary form that we recognise still in the Greek Church. All Europe, west of Greece, was overrun by the barbarians who had issued from the forests of Germany, as Rome grew feebler. Over England, Gaul, Spain, Italy, and north Africa the light-haired, blue-eyed giants poured, and wherever they passed the fabric of Roman civilisation fell in ruins. Is not this explanation enough?It is not, for these barbarians were of the class that treated woman with deference, not of the class that would bring into civilisation a fresh tradition of the ill treatment of their wives. It is useless to suggest that Tacitus, the Roman historian who wrote an account of their ways and ideals, exaggerated their deference to their women in order to shame the Romans. His statement on the point agrees too well with the earliest Teutonic and Scandinavian poetry, and with what we know of Anglo-Saxon England; nor was Tacitus by any means a feminist. There is no serious ground whatever for doubting his statement that the “Germans” saw something sacred in woman, held that the gods spoke more clearly through her, and took her counsel on tribal issues. Yet when we find the various branches of the race settling into fixed and organised polities on the ruins of Rome, we find woman generally despised, excluded from political life, and treated with the gravest injustice in legislation. The position of woman in Europe—in England—less than a century ago dispenses us from heaping up proofs.It must be recognised at once that the extraordinary change in the surroundings of these barbaric fathers of ours would lead of itself to demoralisation. Buried for unknown centuries in the dense forests that lay between the Baltic and the Danube, they had treasured and submitted to the old traditions of their race, which favoured woman. As time goes on they encounter orderly and deadly legions, superbly armed, along the southern frontier of their region. In the early centuries of the Christian era they learn more of this wonderful race below the great river, with its impressive organisation, its shining luxury, its fairy cities, its strange religion and ideals. When the barrier falls they find themselves in a land whose mighty achievements made their old traditions seem puny and childlike, as their daubed huts or skin clothing. In that intoxication their ideals would easily grow dim, and their feeling of power amid a world of dwarfs would bode ill for woman. Thus, undoubtedly, we can explain much of the disappearance of the old Teutonic chivalry and virtue.But it would be mere affectation to ignore the influence of their change of religion, and I will briefly show how this affected the position of woman. The greatest positive injustice that was done to woman was in the sphere of law, and Sir Henry Maine has shown that all the injustice done to woman in later European law was due to the overruling of Roman and Teutonic law by the Canon Law of the Church. The loss of social liberty and prestige can be clearly traced to the same root. Under the influence of the Judaic spirit which was now incorporated in Christianity, most of the early leaders of the Church spoke of woman and marriage in terms that the duller wit and coarser feeling of the following centuries only too literally received.I have already observed that modern science is disposed to seek the origin of most of the Western civilisations in the ferment of tribes that filled the south-western offshoot of Asia some thousands of years before Christ, and that these tribes held very varying attitudes in regard to their women. The Hebrews probably represent one of these Semitic tribes in the north of the region between Babylonia and Palestine. From the southern desert, or the steppe-region leading to the desert, they invade Palestine, assimilate its civilisation, and evolve into the monarchy with which we are so familiar. It seems that the Hebrews came of one of those Bedouin tribes that kept their women in close subjection, and the later Judaic law preserved the tradition of the time when a boy meant a new spear to the tribe, and a girl only a future breeder of men. The wife was virtually the property of her husband, and could not inherit. He could divorce her when he willed, and had a right to her unconditional obedience. Few Hebrew women broke through this rigid system of subordination and left their names in the growing literature.In the course of time the Hebrew sacred books, with a few additions, became the absolute authority of life and conduct in Europe, and the Judaic ideal came into collision with the later Roman ideal. I have shown elsewhere that all the Christian leaders in the Latin Empire—Tertullian, St. Cyprian, St. Augustine, St. Jerome, and St. Ambrose—insisted sternly on the subjection of woman, denounced her as the agent of humanity’s downfall, and gave only too serious ground for a revival of the old contempt for her. When these abler leaders had passed away and the age of mediocrity set in, we find bishops seriously doubting whether woman has a soul, refusing her the sacrament on the same terms as men, and rejecting her testimony in a court of justice. From the Gospels certainly no support can be derived for this contemptuous attitude, but it was one of the points of the Old Testament that had not been expressly repealed, and the harsh and dominating language of St. Paul fully supported it. It would be idle to question the extent of the influence that St. Paul and the Old Testament and the great Fathers of the Church had on the young nations that were now settling down in Europe. Professor Karl Pearson has suggested that the northern tribes embraced Christianity precisely because it taught the subjection of women. We must, at all events, acknowledge that it displaced the old traditions with a lamentable theory of woman’s inferiority.During the “age of iron” (fifth to tenth century), therefore, the cause of woman was lost, and Europe entered upon the second phase of the subordination of woman, from which it is only emerging to-day. The life of the Middle Ages is so vast and varied a subject that different writers will, according to their prepossessions, give the most contradictory pictures of it. For most thoughtful women it will be enough to reflect that the position won by the women of Rome was obviously lost, or they would not again be laboriously assailing the barriers raised about their lives fifteen centuries later; and most of the recent women-writers—Mrs. Cady Stanton, Mrs. Gage, Mdlle. Chauvin, etc.—are very emphatic on the point. But I will try to sum up the changes in a few broad statements.Socially, woman became once more absolutely subject to her husband. In the new marriage ceremony she pledged herself to blind obedience to his orders; and both Church and State gave him the power to flog her when he thought fit, and for a long time gave him the power to sell or dismiss her. In courts of justice she was put on a level with the despised Jew or the ancient slave; though there were courts—in Switzerland, for instance—that would generously accept the testimony of two women as being equal to that of one man. Prostitution and concubinage spread as they had never done before. Clerical bodies and municipalities owned brothels in many places, and not even Corinth or Athens at their worst had made so open a parade of women of that class. The newly-wed wives of the serfs were the property of the feudal lord for a few days. In the better class the women could own no property, as a rule were closely confined to the house, and were generally cut off completely from such culture as there was. To political influence they had no pretension. High-placed women won the irregular and dangerous power they have done in all ages, but otherwise they were more effectually shut out of public life than ever. Anglo-Saxon England offered a fine exception in this respect. Women, whether abbesses or widows, could rule their lands, and even succeed to hereditary administrative offices. But the coming of the Normans reduced the English woman to the general level of economic and political dependence.All that can be set in relief against this dark picture is that women might obtain power and culture as abbesses of the larger convents, that at certain periods noble lay-women acquired learning, and that until about the thirteenth century women entered largely into the industries of the towns. But the number of women who stand out in the chronicles before the Renaissance for either learning or influence is extremely small, and serves only to deepen the general gloom of their situation. A St. Bridget or St. Hildegard, a Matilda or a Heloise, is but one figure advancing into the light out of obscure millions of down-trodden women. And the great share of women in the early medieval industries did not alter materially their position of subordination. The independent woman had too many dangers to face—the universal violence and license, the brutalities of the ducking-stool and scold’s bridle, the appalling fate of the “witch”—to encourage rebellion against the received ideal. Generally speaking, woman sank in the Middle Ages to a position lower than she had ever before occupied in a civilised community.[10]At some date in the remote future, when the story of woman’s disabilities is ended the world over, the historian will probably regard that millennium as the darkest age for woman in the whole long story. A curious hesitation seems to have come over the fates. Up to this point the main stream of human development had flowed steadily towards Europe. The dying civilisations of Asia and Africa had made way for Greece, and Greece had turned the stream into Italy, to be spread from there in fertile flood over half the soil of Europe. Then civilisation almost disappeared in Europe, and for a time it looked as though the line of development would be taken up by some other race. Either unknown or very dimly known to Europe there were civilisations growing far out on the frontiers of its world that could very well outstrip it, as it floundered in the morass of the Middle Ages; and we may glance shortly at the position of woman in those distant races before we come to the awakening of Europe.In the as yet unknown continent of America, into which some branch of the Mongolians had pushed before the northern land-bridge broke, two races had, by the Middle Ages, reached the upper stages of barbarism, and were climbing to civilisation. Since it is certain that Mexico and Peru developed quite independently of Europe, and probably independently of each other, their resemblance to medieval Europe is remarkable. They were feudal monarchies, with very powerful bodies of clergy, so that the general conditions were not favourable to woman. Education in Mexico was advanced, but under purely religious control, and vast numbers of the girls passed into the celibate state in the innumerable nunneries, to teach and embroider and capture little nuns in their turn. The girl who married (at from eleven to eighteen years of age) did not choose her partner, and passed from obedience to her father under the equal authority of her husband. She was not treated harshly, and polygamy was very exceptional. But the law imposed unequal punishment on her for unfaithfulness, and she was the greater sufferer by that ghastly evil of the Mexican religion—human sacrifice. In Peru the position of woman was generally better. For the great mass of the population there was little freedom, and the woman had few relative disabilities. She worked in the fields with the men, under arégimeof what one might call highly centralised feudalism, and seems to have been respected in the home. All political power was kept in the hands of the Incas, who had immense harems, and who married their sisters even more frequently than had been done in Egypt.From the little knowledge we have of the position of woman in these native American civilisations, it seems that they were passing through a normal phase of development. The primitive tribes that lived beyond their frontiers, and exist to-day, inform us of an earlier stage, in which the woman was oppressed. On the other hand, there are in the Spanish writers not obscure traces that the moral sense of Mexico and Peru was advancing (especially in regard to human sacrifices), and no doubt the problem of woman’s position would in time have emerged. But the Spanish troops, with their superior weapons, quickly made an end of these interesting western polities, and reduced nearly the whole continent to the condition of a poor imitation of Spanish culture. I need only add that in the more advanced of the Spanish-American republics to-day—Argentina, Uruguay, Mexico, etc.—women have begun to take a keen and prominent interest in the culture and public affairs of their country.When we cross over to the far east of the medieval map of the world, we find three civilisations that we must rank with the Europe of the Middle Ages. Of India little need be said. There is hardly a country in the world where woman is so drastically subordinated, and it is fairly clear that the process of subjection has in this case increased with the advance of the race. The comparatively good position that woman holds in so many of the lower Asiatic tribes suggests that at the beginning of Indian history she had the same respect and influence. Our earliest positive knowledge is in the Vedic poems, which suggest to us an “Aryan” race fighting their way down from the hills to the north-west, and gradually occupying the more fertile plains. A simple pastoral folk, with patriarchal features, they divided the labour equitably between the sexes, and apparently treated their women with respect. Monogamy seems to have been the rule, and such later practices as the burning of widows were quite unknown. With the settlement of the race woman’s position steadily sank. Whether it was that the practice of war brought in subject-wives and polygamy, or that the rise of the Brahmanic priesthood and the caste system altered the old ideal, we certainly perceive a degeneration towards the later contempt of woman. The advent of Buddha gave little help to woman. Though most of the resources of his order came from women, he, like all monastic leaders, if not all ascetics, made no effort to improve her position in what ascetic literature calls “the world.” And when the Brahmanic religion finally prevailed she sank lower than ever, and, amid all the glorious art of ancient India, the practices of polygamy, child-marriage, seclusion, and suttee spread over the land. In this there is no real reversal of the law we formulated. The highest culture of India was purely artistic, and such culture never helps woman. The conscience and intelligence of the nation were stifled in the endless wrappings and cerements of a formal and unprogressive religion.The development of the other great Asiatic civilisation, the Chinese, was in many ways remarkable. As in India, the drastic subordination of the women does not seem to be merely a heritage from a barbaric past, since the lower Mongolian tribes generally show little tendency to it. Not only the Indo-Chinese tribes I mentioned in an earlier chapter, but the more northern Mongolians, grant their women much liberty and respect. Huc found the women of Tartary very vigorous and independent; and another early traveller, La Pérouse, found one of the most primitive of Mongolian tribes, in the bay of Castries, with a remarkably good character and a very generous and equable treatment of their women. Almost the only one of the lower Mongolian peoples to treat their women harshly are the Thibetans, and in their case the injustice is mainly confined to Lhassa. In that city a woman cannot go out unless she smears her face with a dark, gluey composition. There, however, the influence of monks and priests clearly explains the anomaly.From this primitive level of comparative equality the Chinese, as they developed their civilisation, passed to a social order in which woman held a very subordinate place. The symbolic representation of capture is so common in Mongolian marriages that one cannot help suspecting that an early capturing of wives may have led to subordination; though one must remember that the symbol occurs in tribes in which woman has great liberty and influence. Whatever the causes may have been, we find woman in a position of abject dependence as soon as literature throws any direct light on Chinese civilisation. It seems to me that the oldest Chinese poetry in theKingpoint to a less unjustrégime; but we get our first complete knowledge of the social order in the Confucian literature, and there woman is almost, if not quite, as subject as she is to-day. The girl was only too apt to be sold or exposed in infancy by the poor—a practice on which the moralists always frowned, but which the authorities allow even to-day; though there are now generally public hospitals to receive exposed children. The Chinese girl usually marries at about her twentieth year, and, as virginity is essential (except among the poor), she is carefully guarded under the parental roof. At marriage she passes under the power of a husband, whom she must obey in all things. She brings no dowry, inherits no property, and has no right of divorce. The law even discriminates most unjustly between the sexes in its scale of punishments. She has a very slight education—only a few women having, by some domestic accident, figured in the literary chronicles—and not the least knowledge of public affairs. We may well regret that the great moralists of China did not denounce these inequalities. Six centuries before Christ agnostic moralists like Kung-fu-tse obtained a predominant influence in cultivated China, and the ideals of the nation are still moulded by their teaching. But Kung-fu-tse only commanded woman to obey, and his influence, so beneficial to character generally in China, has done nothing for woman. The progressive spirit died in China, and there has never been since the further advance in culture that was needed to awaken a rebellion of the subject women.To the east of China, during our Middle Ages, lived a younger and smaller civilisation that has made itself known throughout the modern world. Japan is only partly Mongolian in origin; there seems to be a strain of blood from the southern islands in the nation’s frame. It is, therefore, not surprising to find that the cause of woman has run an entirely different course in Japan, and that the later excessive subordination of women was due to Chinese influence. It seems that the more primitive Asiatic feeling of respect for woman was carried on into the early Japanese civilisation. She had no more share in public life generally than elsewhere, but a considerable number of the nobler or more cultivated women stand out in the chronicles. The golden age of native Japanese civilisation and letters corresponds with the worst age of Europe (about 800 to 1200 of the Christian era). The chief English writer on the subject, Mr. Astor, tells us that during that period “a very large and important part of the best literature Japan has produced was written by women.” There are also distinguished women-Mikados and feudal princesses in the early story of Japan.In the later Middle Ages Chinese culture began to play the reactionary part (in regard to woman) in Japan that Greek culture had done in Italy. The teaching of Kung-fu-tse and the great humanitarian moralists was warmly welcomed by the educated Japanese, and gradually became, as it still is, the sole religion of the class. How finely it shaped the character of Japan on most points—making its way down to nearly every class of the nation through the Samurai—the whole world now knows; but, as I said, it failed entirely to do justice to woman, and so led to the comparatively few blemishes of Japanese life. Woman was to be confined to the home, and that narrow and ill-advised ideal cast its invariable shadow—a great growth of prostitution. Japan had itsgeishasas Greece had itshetæræ; and the situation was worse in the sense that poor parents of good character made money (from twenty to forty pounds) by sending their daughters to thejoshiwarafor a few years. On the other hand, of course, no shame was attached to the profession, and the more gifted members sometimes made distinguished marriages and were received at court.With the recent opening of Japan to modern culture the Chinese ideal is being discredited and the abuses it engendered are being suppressed. Women are receiving ample and rational education; a man is forbidden (since 1875) to sell his wife or daughter; thejoshiwarasare being thrust out of sight; and the Western spirit is slowly entering the minds of the women. Japan is plainly falling under the action of the general law. With the growth of higher culture the inequalities of the sexes are found to be artificial, mischievous, and unjust, and the position of woman improves. The main principles of thebushidoare not likely to be lost in the growth of Japan, but they are now held in a living and progressive sense. What Kung-fu-tse laid down as the duties of woman may or may not have been right and expedient 2,500 years ago. To-day they have an unmistakable aspect of masculine dictation and despotism. However, it is the culture of the West that has opened the new era in Japan and China and India, and we return to Europe to see how woman fared in what proved, after all, to be the chief theatre of the evolution of civilisation.CHAPTER VII.RENAISSANCE AND REVOLUTIONFromthe broad survey of the world during the Middle Age of the Christian era, which I have made in the last chapter, we pass to the modern phase of woman’s evolution. The trite old proverb, that “the darkest hour is that before the dawn,” is, in this application, a singular and literal truth. From the comparative elevation of ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilisation, the cause of woman had sunk gradually, with occasional rebounds, to the lowest point it ever touched within the limits of civilisation. Half-a-dozen distinct civilisations lay over the world, cut off from each other by oceans that scorned their frail vessels, or by impassable deserts or mountain-chains; and in all of them the position of woman was one of great and unjust subordination.At first glance it may seem that the facts are not consistent with the idea of a steady evolution of woman’s position. It must be borne in mind, however, that I merely affirm a development of woman’s political position in close relation to the development of culture, and then the situation offers little difficulty. The civilisations of North and South America, in which woman’s position was relatively better than in Europe, were not suffered to develop fully their native resources. The civilisation of India was constricted in lethal bonds that arrested all growth of culture; nor would it be difficult to show that the position into which its women were forced was largely responsible for the degeneration. China, too, had made the mistake of stereotyping its moral and social standards, though these were much higher, and was content to maintain, instead of developing, its culture. Japan, fascinated by the high moral idealism of China, too readily contracted its formalism and conservatism.The spirit of progress was to breathe its inspiration first over the surface of Europe, whence it would in time pass over the rest of the earth. From the end of the Middle Ages culture slowly ascended once more to its ancient height, and with its progress the position of woman steadily improved.It is well known that the re-awakening of Europe was due to a revival of Greek culture; but it is not so often recognised that the inspiration came at two periods, in two different forms. The first period was when the light of the Arabian civilisation in Spain sent its reflection over the Pyrenees and impelled the theological schools of Europe to a broader activity. By the twelfth century there was a ferment of scholastic life in many parts of Europe; but it was a barren employment of the intelligence, isolated at once from inanimate nature and from the social and political life. Architecture and sculpture had been kept alive from Roman days, because the Church had use for them. Natural science was dead—had not outlived its infancy—and social or political science had no place under a theocracy.Christian scholars were, therefore, greatly stimulated by the broader culture of the Arabs, which their more adventurous members went south to study or learned from the intermediate Jews; and Christian nobles, whose halls and persons still retained much of the coarseness and dirtiness of their ancestry, were quickened by the refined luxury of the Moors and the “Paynims.” By the twelfth century Arabian Spain was deeply influencing Europe, and the advance in the thirteenth century plainly shows the great indebtedness to them. It is as obvious in Thomas Aquinas and Dante as it is in Pope Silvester or Roger Bacon. And there is no dispute that the progressive principles in Arabian civilisation were due to the Greek culture that had made its way to the new nation through Syria.In this form, however, the revival of Greek culture had no direct influence on the position of woman, because it was associated with Mohammedanism. In his fine work,Die Frauen des Orients(1904), Baron von Schweiger-Lerchenfeld shows that in the pre-Islamic period the Arabian women had a good deal of freedom and influence. What they have become under the influence of Islam is so well known that I need not describe their situation. It is one more calamity that women owe to the teaching of the Old Testament, which Mohammed absorbed. Under the Ommejad princes the women of the orient had, like the philosophers and the artists, a good deal of liberty, and their position in Spain approached this. But the more rigid ideal prevailed, and the Mohammedan woman sank lower than the Christian.It is only indirectly, in its general stimulation of culture, that the first Greek revival aided the cause of woman. As a literature other than that of the theological schools now grew up in Europe, women found more pretext for cultivating letters. The few names of women who did thus depart from the prevailing ideal of ignorance and domestic inclusion must not, of course, mislead us. A few of the nobler women, like our Queen Matilda, could correspond in Latin; still fewer could, like the young Heloise, quote Lucan and boast a smattering of Greek. The cultivation of letters was still an almost exclusively clerical profession, and the chief object of it was to learn to copy tomes of theology. On the political side, moreover, the feudal system prevented even the dawn of an ambition in the women’s minds. It was not until culture passed more generously into the hands of laymen, and the growth of free cities made a breach in the feudal system, that there could be even the possibility of any large change.These two processes went on throughout the fourteenth century. About 1350 appeared Boccaccio’sDecameron, with its fairer promise of woman’s position, and from that time the women of Italy show the remarkable degree of culture and liberty that we associate with the Renaissance. In Italy the Greek-Arabian culture had taken especial root, as every reader of Dante will surmise, and it was now fed by direct contact with the Greek world. The Latin and Greek classics were greatly treasured, philosophy speculated with remarkable freedom, and art soared higher and higher in its emancipation from monastic control. When, in 1453, the Turks captured Constantinople, and Greek scholars fled to Italy, the revival of Greek culture was completed, and the Renaissance of Europe accomplished.The chief purpose of this essay dispenses me from ranging over the familiar ground of the women of the Renaissance.[11]The picture that Boccaccio gives of men and women cultivating letters on an equal footing was found in most of the Italian cities. At Venice, Rimini, Urbino, Mantua, Padua, Bologna, and the other great cities, women often formed intellectual centres, and vied with the men in production. Frau Braun tells of a woman-professor of theology at Bologna; of two female authorities on canon law, Novella d’Andrea and Maddalena Buonsignori; of an Isotta Nogarola who spoke before popes and emperors, and a Cassandra Fedele who taught at Padua. What the poetess Vittoria Colonna was to Michael Angelo the whole world knows.It was fitting enough that the women of Italy, the successors of the older Roman women, should reopen the field of culture, but the inspiration was to pass into other lands before it would raise the general question of woman’s position. Boccaccio was no feminist, but his study of the lives of illustrious men and women led to a practice of making encyclopædias of feminine biography, which was bound to suggest the question of woman’s capacity. An Italian monk so far discarded the spirit of his order as to write two volumes (of 800 pages each) on distinguished women—170 in number—of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. A Roman cardinal and other prelates indulged the same genial humour. Ribera beat all the records with a comprehensive account of the careers of 845 distinguished women of all ages. The Renaissance ideal had quickly passed to Spain, where one reads of a Juliana Morelli of Barcelona speaking fourteen languages, and an Isabella of Cordova, of some distinction in theology.It was, however, in the more northern lands that the new movement was to develop further. Italy and Spain were decaying. The Reformation would soon set them in antagonism to the bolder culture they had inspired in the north, and political despotism would stifle the growth of their spirit. They handed on the torch to Germany, France, and England, and slowly sank into the torpor of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.The women of Germany were the last to be stirred, and the stirring was soon arrested by the Reformation and the religious wars. One powerful work, however, was published in Germany in 1505—the Latin treatise of the great scholar Cornelius Agrippa,De nobilitate et præcellentia feminini sexus(“Of the nobility and excellence of the female sex”). Agrippa maintained that the souls of men and women were equal, and that equal education should and could be given to women. The controversy that followed would, with a few changes of terms, entirely reflect the modern controversy about woman’s capacity. But little progress was made, for the reasons I have given.In France the Italian culture found a readier soil. Frau Braun describes theCité des Damesof Christine de Pisan (fifteenth century) as the first plea for woman’s emancipation, but a reader of that curious work will find the plea very much qualified. It ranges over the whole field of distinguished women—the women of Italy, of the Bible, of antiquity—with admiration of their learning or virtue or power; but it adheres very closely to the prevailing religious ideas, and urges married women to see an advantage in their subjection to their husbands. Montaigne’s adopted daughter, Mlle. de Gournay, was the real pioneer of the modern movement. She demanded the equality of the sexes in all things except military service. Another woman, Anna Dacier, made the first French translations of Plautus, Terence, and Aristophanes. Margaret of Navarre and—in a less degree—Margaret of Valois proved the capacity of their sex for literary production. Before Cardinal Richelieu founded the Academy for the perfecting of the French tongue the hotel of Mme. de Rambouillet was the chief centre of letters and culture in Paris; and Richelieu’s own niece, Mme. de Combalet, had a literary salon in which Corneille and the best writers of the day met.England and Germany were at that time regarded as lingering at a barbaric level from the point of view of Latin culture. Italian and Spanish ladies very generally learned Latin, and the French aspirant to letters acquired Spanish and Italian; but English was abandoned to merchants and diplomatists. By the end of the seventeenth century, however, the effect of the Renaissance was felt among the women of England. In 1694 Mary Astell published, anonymously,A Serious Proposal to the Ladies for the Advancement of their True and Greatest Interest. She tells of the learned women of Italy and France, and declares that woman’s “incapacity” is “acquired, not natural.” “How can you be content to be like tulips in a garden?” she disdainfully asks. Let women build a kind of lay convent, she urges—a school of virtue and learning, a pious and proper imitation of Oxford and Cambridge—and have their sex fully educated.Mary Astell’s appeal had little effect, though it was immediately supported by no less powerful a writer than Defoe. It appears that Defoe had already (in 1692 and 1693) written hisEssay upon Projects, and he published it in 1697. One of the score of projects he put before the country was a plea for the higher education of women. “I have often thought,” he said, “that it is one of the most parlous customs in the world that we deny the advantages of learning to women. We reproach the sex every day with folly and impertinence, while I am confident that, had they the advantage of education equal to us, they would be guilty of less than ourselves.” In the meantime Defoe has apparently seen Mary Astell’s proposal, and he politely ridicules her idea of a “nunnery.” “Women are extravagantly desirous of going to heaven,” he says, “and will punish their pretty bodies to get thither; but nothing else will do it, and even in that case it falls out sometimes that nature will prevail.” He is in favour of public schools more like those in the country for youths. Women’s faculties are equal to men’s, he insists; the only difference is in education. But he hints that he will hear of no encroachment on “man’s sphere,” and so condemns in advance any political ambition. How little response there was to these appeals, and how the education of English women remained at an almost medieval level until little more than a generation ago, is sufficiently known.Thus the fire of the Renaissance burnt itself out in Italy and Spain within two or three centuries, and its inspiration led to little direct result in France, and still less in England. The history of French culture contains a number of names of brilliant women during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but the records of English literature are relieved by few feminine names until we reach the age of Queen Victoria. But the educative movement started by the Renaissance had great importance. It had provided a brilliant disproof of the prevailing belief that woman was of a lower order of intelligence than man. The position of men like Cornelius Agrippa and Defoe was one of unanswerable common sense. Inequality of culture between the sexes there assuredly was; but to ascribe this to native inequality of resource, instead of to the glaring inequality of education, was sheer folly. Grant woman the opportunity of attaining culture, and then one may sensibly begin to speculate on her capacity. And from every part of Christendom in which the opportunity was granted there came a report of brilliant and scholarly women. The extension of female education in our day has completed that first breach in the medieval superstition of woman’s inferiority.If the older notion of woman’s incapacity on the speculative side were thus proved to be unsound, it might very well be that the corresponding belief in her practical capacity or political judgment was equally unsound. It might turn out that, when the opportunity for cultivating her political sense was offered, the result would be the same as when opportunities of education were given. In this way the cultural movement that issued from the Renaissance prepared the way for the political struggle. But before this struggle could set in two other profound and far-reaching changes were to take place. The capability of exercising political power is one thing: the right to exercise it another. Until the close of the eighteenth century the second point was hardly raised. Then there opened a period of economic and political change that made the raising of it inevitable.I will describe here the dawn of the new era in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, and deal with the nineteenth in the next chapter. By the beginning of the eighteenth century the cause of woman had made a substantial advance in many respects. In Germany the advance was almost purely cultural, though the names are not wanting of women who wielded some political influence by the indirect method of influencing rulers or statesmen. In England, again, there were women of culture and women of influence, as all know; but there was a singular retrogression in the political position of women generally. Mrs. Stopes (British Free Women) has so recently and fully discussed the change that I need do no more than summarise it. For two reasons England had promised to be the first theatre of the struggle for political enfranchisement. Not only was it the first country of the modern era to set up parliamentary representation, but it had been the latest of the Teutonic races to retain the old ideal of respect for woman. The Norman Conquest had greatly lowered the prestige of woman, but there were still high offices (such as that of sheriff) that women could inherit and fill. On the other hand, the Norman kings had been forced to grant a permanent representation of the third estate (or Commons) five hundred years before the French Revolution, and during the great Civil War the power of the Commons had enormously increased. The old Anglo-Saxon feeling persisted in the fact that the privilege of electing the borough-representatives was not confined to one sex.The peculiarity of England’s development is that in its case we seem to have the only exception to the law I formulated—that the position of woman improves with the growth of culture. From the fourteenth to the seventeenth century culture enormously advanced, and the position of woman steadily deteriorated. In the early decades of the seventeenth century we find an Englishwoman, Anne Clifford, struggling against the monarch for the hereditary right to a high office. Women burgesses and landowners could still share the election of parliamentary representatives; but at the beginning of the seventeenth century this right was taken from them, and the sex-disability was imposed. Sir Edward Coke, relying chiefly on St. Paul’s injunctions to women, successfully removed the last trace of the old Teutonic ideal.Here, at first sight, is an apparent exception to our alliance of feminism and culture; but, in reality, we have a number of modifying circumstances. The long lawlessness of the Middle Ages had made men less and less disposed to see women in office or in public life. The head, even of a manor, needed to be a soldier in those days. Women often proved capable enough of inspiring and directing their followers, but it is quite intelligible that there was a strong tendency towards discouraging or preventing women from holding office in such turbulent times. And with this tendency was joined the even worse influence of the canon law of the Church. When we find a great lawyer like Sir Edward Coke refusing the testimony of women, on grounds of sex, we see at once how this fatal sentiment had been gradually permeating the mind of England. It had put woman in a deplorable legal position—or, rather, a position outside the law—and it inevitably fostered the notion of woman’s inferiority and incapacity. Before the end of the eighteenth century we find legal writers classing women with “infants, idiots, and lunatics” in illustrating “natural incapacity.” In this way the growth of culture came to be, in England, associated with a deterioration in the position of women; but the circumstance does not invalidate our law, as the retrogression was plainly due to such extraneous causes as the permeation of our life with the spirit and letter of the canon law, as Sir Henry Maine has shown.Under these reactionary influences the women of England seemed, in the eighteenth century, to have entirely lost their birthright, and fallen into line with the women of the world. The eighteenth century is, indeed, a dramatic moment in the whole story of feminism. The earlier power of English women was generally forgotten; the ambition and struggle of women in older civilisations were quite unknown; the fire of the Renaissance had sunk again, leaving only a few women scattered over Europe with a zeal for culture. The world over woman was subordinate and submissive. Then there broke out a series of political eruptions that changed the face of the world, and awakened a fresh ambition in women that would never again be stilled.The first of these great disturbances was the Declaration of Independence on the part of the American colonies. I have said that certain fundamental changes took place during the nineteenth century that made the raising of the feminist claim quite inevitable, and at the same time made the refusal of the claim more illogical and unjust than it had ever been before. The first and chief of these changes was the democratisation of politics. The mass of the women laboured under no political sex-disability in the eighteenth century, because the mass of the men had no political power at all. In England, under a corrupt and degenerate Parliamentary system, a proportion of the men had a semblance of power; in other countries the mass of the men had not even the shadow of it. France had not summoned its States-General, in which the Third Estate had a nominal representation, since 1614. The world was ruled by castes of priests and nobles, and the higher and wealthier women often had the satisfaction of ruling their rulers. When this system altered, when political power began to spread over the middle class and working men, the woman question would arise spontaneously and command attention.America inaugurated the change. The Declaration of Independence, in 1776, set up the first modern democracy—the Swiss Cantons were essentially aristocratic until the nineteenth century—and prepared the way for the suffrage controversy. From the very first moment the women of America denounced the injustice of a male electorate. Mercy Otis Warren had fostered the rebellion in her drawing-room, where the leaders often met, and Abigail Smith Adams (wife of the first President) was no less active. They and others demanded the admission of women to the new constitution. While it was being prepared, Mrs. Adams wrote to her husband that “if the position of women was not thoroughly considered they would rebel, and not consider themselves bound by laws that gave them no voice or representation of their interests.” The first assault failed, only two States being willing to grant the justice of the plea. We will return presently to the resumed agitation in America, but must revert to Europe for the second exception, that was to stir the lethargy of women by putting a specific sex-disability on them.The appeal of Montaigne’s daughter had raised no echo in the France of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The women of the nobility had ample power of the familiar, irregular kind, and the women of the people were no poorer than their husbands in political rights. Then Rousseau set up the ideal of the Rights of Man, and France moved towards the great Revolution. The influence of the philosophers in preparing the Revolution has been exaggerated, and in point of fact most of them were decidedly anti-feminist. Voltaire and Montesquieu slighted their demands and capacities. Rousseau contrived to reconcile a doctrine of the equality of human beings with the old-fashioned ideal of woman’s place. But they, at least, stimulated thought and encouraged education in women, and women learned to correct their logic. Then came the news of the struggle in America, and the feeling against England made it extraordinarily popular. Ladies wore “American Independence hats,” and discussed deep constitutional questions during the recently imported function of tea. Nobles volunteered for service, and brought back stirring stories of democracy.The American episode had nearly lost interest when the Revolution broke out. There can be no doubt that it was not without permanent influence, but the more demonstrative zeal had been manifested by the upper class, and the form that democracy now took in their own country very quickly extinguished it. Of the first French Revolution in itself I need say little. The later and less picturesque Revolutions were more permanently effective. Freeman has observed, however, that the face of Europe was changed for ever by the first Revolution, and it is well taken as the pyrotechnic inauguration of the modern era.Little direct encouragement was given to women by the revolutionaries. A few men like Sieyès and Condorcet, who had founded a Lyceum for women in 1786, recognised that women were human beings when they spoke of “the Rights of Man.” The majority, led by Mirabeau, and afterwards by Danton, refused to listen to the appeal of women like Mme. Condorcet; even revolutionary women like Mme. Roland agreed with them. Hence the share that women took in the Revolution cannot occupy a place of any prominence in such a study as this. Their campaign for the recognition of their rights came to naught. They showered petitions on the National Assembly, founded political clubs all over the country, and published a journal,L’Observateur féminin. But the Jacobins were inexorable, and they guillotined the most fiery of their speakers, Olympe de Gouges (reputed daughter of Louis XIV.), for her fearless opposition. And, eventually, the three great waves washed over the work of the Revolution and obliterated its traces. The Directory suppressed Jacobinism, Napoleon superseded Directorism, and Metternich and Wellington annihilated Napoleonism. A group of statesmen, sitting round a table in the Foreign Office at Vienna, set up again the broken model of aristocratic Europe, and democracy was unceremoniously buried.But political evolution had set definitively in the direction of democracy, and in another generation it would rise again. With this development, which of itself sufficed to lay bare the foundations of political power and press forward the woman question, was associated an industrial development that made an equally fatal breach in the old order. How these and other far-reaching changes have irresistibly forced on us the feminist controversy of our time will be shown in the next chapter.CHAPTER VIII.THE STRUGGLE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURYInancient Greece there was a certain symbolic ceremony of a very picturesque character in connection with one of the great festivals. A lighted torch was to be conveyed to a distant altar, and a series of horsemen had to discharge the ceremony. Along the line of frantic riders, from the exhausted hand of one horseman to the fresh grasp of the next, the fiery symbol was handed, until the last of the procession placed it in triumph on the destined altar.Our story of the evolution of woman’s position recalls this old ceremony. For nearly three thousand years, at least, the torch has passed from rider to rider, and the altar is in sight. The struggle of the later Egyptian women re-appears in Greece, crosses the sea to Italy, is raised again in the revival of ancient culture, passes on to France, when the Italian States decay, and reaches at length the vigorous hands of England, Germany, and the United States. In one respect, however, the parallel fails. It is true that the cause has moved onward through the ages, but there have been years, even centuries, when the torch was almost, if not quite, extinct. There have been times when the distant altar seemed to be forgotten, and women sank back into uncomplaining subjection. Such a period was the appalling stretch between the fifth and the twelfth centuries, between the murder of Hypatia and the living death of Heloise. The eighteenth century, compared with the promise of its predecessors, is another such period, in most countries. The first quarter of the nineteenth century is another, and the last. Then the torch flames out again, and, for reasons I will give presently, can never more be extinguished until it is laid on the altar.After the fall of Napoleon in 1815 Europe closed the mouth of the pit, as it thought, and dreamed soft dreams of continued despotism. The Holy Alliance had a sharp ear for murmurs of rebellion against any received ideal, and enforced submission everywhere at the point of the bayonet. It would be futile for women to chafe at their bonds in that world. Happily, the world was wider than the sphere of the Bourbons, the Hapsburgs, and the Pope. England contemplated their “white terror” with instinctive resentment; though England had shuddered at Jacobinism, and in the main was more disposed than before for coercion and subjection. But the United States maintained its theoretic scorn of despotism, and little British colonies which dotted the blue southern ocean promised the same spirit of independence.It was in the United States that the modern struggle for the enfranchisement of nations began. The appeals of Mercy Warren and Abigail Adams were almost forgotten, and the masculine ideal was firmly incorporated in the American constitution, when a young Scotchwoman, Frances Wright, used the comparative freedom of the country to start a brilliant and fiery campaign for the rights of women. How she was presently joined by the talented Polish Jewess, Ernestine Rose, and the devoted Quaker women, Abby Kelly and the Sisters Grimke; how the democratic Americans jeered and howled at them, and the clergy branded them, and the little company grew larger and larger—all this may be read in Mrs. Cady Stanton’sHistory. By 1837 the great American poet, Whittier, took up arms for them against their clerical opponents. They had proved their capacity for public life by their share in the anti-slavery campaign. They did not take the view of Carlyle.In the meantime the second Revolution had taken place in France, and the second democratic wave passed over Europe. Its chief expression was the passing of the great Reform Bill in England in 1832. With singular logic the men who had prepared forests of pikes to withstand Wellington, the men who had met in gatherings of 200,000 to sing “Hail, dawn of liberty,” and threaten to march on London, now turned on their less militant women and expressly excluded them from political life. James Mill had laid it down in 1825 (Essay on Government) that women’s interests were bound up with men’s, and so Radicals could justly exclude them from the franchise. In their resentment of the notion that a superior class should dictate to them how they were to be represented, the men of England had sacked cathedrals, challenged the troops, and trampled on the portrait of the king; then they turned about and dictated to the women, who would not do these things, howtheywere to be represented. The Reform Bill made the electorate exclusively male for the first time in the history of England; and the Reformed Parliament went on, in 1835, to exclude women from the enfranchising clauses of the Municipal Corporations’ Act.I have already described the influences that had for centuries been undermining the older English ideal, but this open violation of it, at the very time when streams of oratory were flowing all over England on liberty and the value of representation, naturally led to a reaction. The agitation for the Reform Bill had itself re-awakened in women the desire of sharing in public life, and the injustice shown by the reformers would not allay it. There were not wanting gospels for the new cause. Mary Wollstonecraft had published aVindication of the Rights of Womenin the height of the French Revolution (1792), and a political writer who had great influence with Liberals, William Godwin, had supported her. William Thompson had issued a spirited reply to James Mill in 1825. Robert Owen, who had immense influence in England by 1840, adopted the same view. Women also joined in the Corn Law Agitation, and some of its chief leaders acknowledged that they proved their capacity for public life. Cobden and Villiers favoured their claim. W. J. Fox, one of the most brilliant of the Free Traders, minister of South Place Chapel (London), warmly espoused their cause. About 1850 pamphlets and magazine articles began to appear, advocating the enfranchisement of women.[12]By the middle of the century there was a strong feeling in England and the United States for the enfranchisement of women. The number of agitators was very small, but the life of the world was now developing rapidly, and the new tendencies were putting an entirely new complexion on the question of woman’s position in the State. It will be convenient to note these tendencies here—warning the reader that they increase in later decades—in order to understand the real logical strength of the modern movement.The struggle is, in essence, a conflict of two ideals—the new ideal and the old belief, not so much that “woman’s place is the home,” but that she shall have no interest beyond it. How far men have a right to dictate their position to women, or how far one group of women have the faintest pretension to dictate to another group, I need not waste time in inquiring. I chance to be one of those males who have never discovered the slenderest moral or rational base for the assumed right to tell women what is best for them, and force them to do it. But I need not linger over this, as the old ideal was framed in harmony with a world that has passed away for ever, and it is as odd and discordant as any other medieval survival in our world.I admitted that when political life, or the practice of settling social or corporate issues, first arose it was quite natural that it should fall exclusively into the hands of the men. The social decisions usually concerned migration, or war, or some other extra-domal matter, in the execution of which woman was, from the nature of things, much less interested than man. I need not run over the intermediate stages of political life, and will merely point out a few of the ways in which the old division of home-work and State-work broke down in the nineteenth century. The industrial development made the first great breach in the old standard. The early political system was obviously founded on the early division of labour. Woman worked in and about the home, owing to the natural tie of the children, and man worked further afield. The factory system entirely discarded this old division, and encouraged women to leave their homes and work by the side of men. Long before the middle of the nineteenth century tens of thousands of women were performing the same work as men, as far from the home as men. Then workshops, shops, and offices took fresh groups of women away from the home; and journalism and other professions further extended the process. In 1851 there was not a woman photographer or book-binder in England, and there were only 1,742 shop-girls. In 1861 there were 130 women in the photographic trade, 308 in book-binding (1,755 in 1871), and 7,000 in shops. To what proportions the extra-domal employment has reached I need not describe. One-fourth of the women and girls of England now have other than domestic employment. More than a million married women are so employed.With this enormous and increasing employment of women in view it is impossible to continue to talk of woman’s place being the home, and quite ridiculous to make that threadbare phrase a ground for the limitation of woman’s interests. To refuse them a right that only the most desperate stretch of imagination could represent as taking women “out of the home,” and at the same time to acquiesce in an industrial development that effectively takes millions of them out of it, is a quaint aberration of reasoning. It would be more sensible to recognise that the phrase, “woman’s place is the home,” belonged to an older civilisation. Assuredly, it is a strange phrase to use to-day as an argument against the suffrage. The old division of labour has broken down. The old political division that was built on it must follow.Side by side with this economic development there was proceeding a political evolution that no less thoroughly undermined the old ideal. In the first place, the base of political power grew broader and broader throughout the century. In 1848 the middle-class revolt, that had succeeded in England in 1832, broke out over most of the Continent, and triumphed. Though there was a reaction in some countries, the basis of political life was generally and permanently broadened, and millions of professional men and higher workers won a share in the control of the affairs of their country. Towards 1870 (speaking generally) a fresh and larger class clamoured for enfranchisement, and secured it. And as the century went on ever fresh demands were made, and the enfranchised few found no principle on which they could decently resist. In most of the countries of Europe the overwhelming majority of the adult and literate males have the vote.This development of political life puts the modern demand of the women in a position entirely new and incalculably stronger than it ever had before. Only in ancient Athens was there a somewhat similar situation, and in that case decay followed too quickly upon full bloom to allow the natural consequence. In most other cases the women had no specific political disability. Their husbands and brothers had, as a rule, no more political right than they. A woman-franchise movement was inconceivable in any earlier period—apart from Athens, where it was evidently preparing—and it was just as inevitable in modern times. When you extend the control of national affairs to tens of millions of men—the Socialists alone count between seven and eight million votes on the Continent—you disfranchise as many tens of millions of women. You impose the sex-disability in its most offensive and least defensible form.Nor is this the only aspect of political evolution that exhibits the cant phrase about woman’s place as a medieval survival. So long as political life was mainly concerned with issues, like trade or war, that fell in the men’s sphere of work, the primitive division of political responsibility remained more or less plausible. It is no longer even plausible. National defence is, and must be, a primary concern of politics; but in England at least this concerns women just as much as men. The vast majority of our men do not share in the work. A select body undertakes it, and the other men have just as much, and no more, interest in controlling them than women have. Trade, commerce, and industry are still main objects of political concern; but women are included in vast numbers in the industrial world. And the new and broader conception of the task of an administration has completed the annihilation of the old ideal. Social reform—questions of housing, temperance, pensions, etc.—obviously concern women as much as men, and are in no sense whatever masculine issues; while the recent extension of legislation to the home and the child has made it quite futile to talk of the woman’s home as her sphere, in the sense that she must have no interest in the public life beyond it. Once she really was mistress in the home; now, happily, the law has invaded every corner of it. It controls the birth of her children, controls their infancy in a score of ways, controls their beds and fires and food, controls their punishment, their recreation, their education, and their early employment. This is a colossal change in the objective of political life, and it necessarily involves a surrender of the older idea of enfranchisement.
On the other hand, the old ideal of the family, the very incarnation of woman’s subjection, was falling into decay. Greek and Asiatic courtesans were pouring in, and Roman fathers must have their daughters educated, if a class ofhetæræwere not to hold the position it had done at Athens and Corinth. Women found their value, and stipulated for the retention of their dowries, if not for other property. As their wealth grew, the lawyers entered their service, and taught them how to evade the inconveniences of the law by refusing theconfarreatio(the most solemn form) and only entering on one of the looser forms of marriage. Divorce, which had been unknown for centuries, became frequent; and some women entered upon mock marriages, which withdrew them from a father’s control without substituting that of a husband.
And, about the year 190 B.C., the new spirit of the women broke out in fiery eruption. During the war with Carthage a law had been passed (215 B.C.) forbidding the women to wear heavy golden ornaments or many-coloured robes, and restricting their use of chariots. At the close of the war (195 B.C.) the women demanded the repeal of this Oppian Law, as it had been passed to secure funds. Cato, however, who was then Consul, and others resolved to retain the law, and a struggle ensued that one could almost transfer from the forum of ancient Rome to the Parliament Square of modern London. Livy (Ab urbe condita, 1. xxxiv. c. i.-viii.) describes how, not only crowds of men of opposing sides invaded the Capitol, but the matrons themselves, “restrained neither by authority nor modesty nor the control of their husbands,” beset all the ways that led to the Forum, and importunately demanded the votes of the legislators. Reinforced by crowds of provincial women, they kept up a noisy agitation during the debate in the Forum, and—strangest parallel of all—“dared to approach the consuls, prætors, and other magistrates,” and at length forced their way into the houses of the tribunes and won them to the cause! Conservative patricians looked with alarm at this new species of “masculine women” (androgynæ). Cato, who led the resistance, complained that he had to bore his way with shame through a crowd of women to reach the Forum. If the men did not wish to see themselves under the heel of the women in a few years, he said—Livy gives his speech at length—let them keep their wives in order at home and forbid them to appear in public. But there were conscientious traitors to the masculine cause, as there are to-day. Lucius Valerius replied to Cato, and, intimidated by the armies of Amazons without, the senators repealed the Oppian Law. Cato had to be content, some years later, to impose a heavy tax on their property.[6]
This agitation, in the year 195 B.C., did not aim at securing direct political power, but it well illustrates the futility of anti-feminist predictions, as well as the law that feminism grows with culture. From that time onward the women of Rome continued to enlarge their liberty and their power. After a few decades the Voconian law was passed, forbidding them to receive legacies; but it was little observed, and the economic power of the wealthier women increased. That many of them used their resources only to indulge a taste for vicious or stupid luxury is merely to say that they did what some rich men did, and are doing. We have just as many instances recorded of wealthy and cultivated Roman ladies who retained all the fine character of their ancestors. Those writers who speak of good wives and good mothers as “the gold that glitters on the muck-heap,” as Dr. Reich does, seem to be ignorant of the real character of some of their types.[7]That famous type of motherhood, Cornelia, daughter of Scipio and mother of the Gracchi, was one of the most learned women of her time, and was no less interested in public affairs than in Greek culture. In her later years her home was a centre of intellectual life, and her letters are highly praised by the first critic of the Roman world. The letters of Cicero refer to numbers of other Roman ladies of no less culture than character and civic interest. The patriotism of Brutus drew its strength, to no small extent, from the spirit of his mother, wife, and sister.
By the beginning of the Christian era, when the Empire had displaced the Republic, the position of woman had materially altered. The despotism of the husband was a mere barbaric memory. From Augustus they obtained full control of their dowry and protection against avaricious husbands; and from Hadrian, later, they had the right to make wills without consulting their husbands. Their accumulating property gave them a good deal of indirect influence on civic and political affairs. The philosopher Seneca acknowledged that he owed his quæstorship to his aunt, and promotion through the influence of women was quite common.
In the reign of Tiberius a senator made a spirited attack on their interference in the public administration. The wives of generals and governors, he complained, went down into the provinces with their husbands, reviewed the troops with them, and meddled with the government. The Senate ignored the complaint. Inscriptions have been found in many Roman towns that tell with gratitude of women-patrons of the municipality, women-donors of baths, arches, temples, hospitals, and other treasured institutions.
The school-system of Rome now developed to a height which has only been reached once more by education in the second half of the nineteenth century, and of which many civilised nations still fall far short. For the children of the free workers, of both sexes, there was general and free elementary instruction in the later Empire. Boys and girls sat together on the benches of theliteratorin the open porticoes, and the girls of the more wealthy went on to the secondary schools of thegrammaticus, as their brothers did. Many women had slave-tutors teaching them Greek letters and philosophy. The marble chambers of the rich, with their rare birds nesting in the cedar roof, their silver furniture and Greek vases, and all the treasures of Persia, did, indeed, often echo with voluptuous music, and draw their heavy curtains upon scenes such as unthinking wealth inspires in every age; but they resounded, too, with feminine discussions of Greek philosophy and poetry, and Roman politics, and they smiled on types of womanhood that preserved all the character of the old Republic, with all the interest in art and thought and life of the new Empire.
It is so commonly believed that this enlargement of the liberty and power of the Roman women led to a general degradation of character that I must linger for a moment on the point. The popular idea of an entire corruption of Rome in the first century is quite discarded by modern scholarship. The English reader will find the finest and truest picture of that maligned age in Dr. Samuel Dill’sRoman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius, in which the current exaggeration is fully refuted.[8]The popular notion rests almost entirely on the satires of Juvenal, a bohemian writer, anti-feminist and anti-aristocratic, who hung on the fringe of society to catch what dubious morsels he could of idle chatter and exaggerated scandal. It would be more reasonable to take Father Vaughan’s strictures on the “smart set” as a full picture of English society than to take Juvenal’s less conscientious gossip about a few wealthy women as a complete picture of Rome. A careful reader will soon see that Juvenal lashes Roman women for their culture and for innocent fads, as much as for vice. As Letourneau says: “Neither the satires of the poets nor the objurgations of moralists suffice to prove that the Roman woman was essentially inferior to her male companion.” The moralist he seems to have in mind is Seneca; but Seneca expressly claimed that woman was the mental and moral equal of man, and he lived in a circle of fine, cultivated ladies. The morbidity of a few of the wealthier women—a morbidity that has a parallel in every age of luxury and change, in both sexes—does not characterise the sex; and, as to the larger class of less wealthy women, Dr. Dill adds: “In his [Juvenal’s] own modest class female morality ... was probably as high as it ever was, as high as the average morality of any age” (p. 76).
I do not need to dwell, therefore, on the few known cases of slave-torture, on the one or two noble women slinking down to the reekinginsulæin the Subura, and the few other extraordinary misdeeds that have puffed out the popular calumny. For the general character of the age one need only recall London under the Stuarts, or under the Georges. It was an age of great luxury (falling short, however, of the same class in modern New York) and great laxity, and the blame must be laid on the rigorous and tyrannical old idea of marriage, as well as on the familiar causes. But the idea that this condition of Roman society continued to the end of the Pagan Empire is grotesquely untrue. Before the end of the first century, under Stoic influence, the standard of character rose once more, Roman society was purged, and in the last phase of the feminist movement at Rome a general level of morality and philanthropy was reached that will bear comparison with modern times. Both the historians of the time, Tacitus and Suetonius, expressly describe the reform, and every historian knows that Rome went on to a greater height (apart from letters) than it had done before. Lecky, in particular, has done justice to the way in which the Stoic doctrine of the brotherhood of men found expression in the condemnation of slavery, the imperial abolition of most of the old abuses, the care of the aged and ailing, and a hundred works of justice and mercy.
In this remarkable fervour for social justice woman was bound to find profit. The service done to her consisted mainly in providing a sounder basis for the liberty and power which she had won, largely by the equivocal aid of the growing laxity in regard to marriage. The Stoics—philosophers, lawyers, and emperors—believed in the equality of men and women. Antoninus Pius embodied in one of his judgments the common Stoic sentiment that fidelity was equally expected of husband and wife. The great Stoic jurist, Gaius, severely criticised the older Roman law, that dealt unequally with man and woman, and “scouted the popular apology for it in the mental inferiority of the female sex,” says Sir Henry Maine.[9]Dion Chrysostom called for the legal suppression of prostitution. Briefly, the Stoics, who controlled the legal and imperial courts for more than a century, completed the work of putting woman on a level of legal and social equality to man, and their world included—as the letters and writings of Plutarch, Seneca, Tacitus, and Pliny show—a large number of women of equal culture and character.
Thus Rome had completely removed the sex-disability of its women while it was still in the fulness of power, and as a direct consequence of its later moral culture. That this emancipation did not include the granting of political power can cause no surprise to those who know the history of Rome. Since the fall of the Republic the men themselves had no political power, and, therefore, the women had no sex-disability on this side to agitate against. It is true that the imperial purple was held exclusively by men, and the great administrative offices were open to men alone. Against this arrangement women may have protested; but we should hardly expect such a protest until a more advanced stage of evolution; and, in point of fact, the more ambitious women had a great deal of indirect power. Even before the fall of the Republic we find notices of what we should now call “women’s clubs” (senatus matronarum), and when power was concentrated in an hereditary monarchy the royal women had immense influence over it. Women agitated in municipal elections, as we saw, controlled small towns in the character of municipal patrons, and influenced the choice of quæstors, prætors, and tribunes. With this large measure of influence for the wealthier women, and with the general admission of her equal mental capacity to men, it was natural for woman to cease from agitation; the mass of the women, who had not these opportunities, were in no worse plight, politically, than their husbands. Until government by popular representatives was once more adopted or demanded we can hardly look for a further agitation. But the Roman Empire was now beginning to decay, and the cause of woman was lost in the general catastrophe.
In speaking of decay as setting in immediately after the completion of woman’s emancipation I need hardly recall my protest against connecting the two. The decay of the Roman Empire was due to causes that are plainly set forth by modern historians like Boissier and Schultze, and that have nothing whatever to do with the emancipation of woman. No serious historian ever dreamed of such a notion until the modern feminist movement arose. In point of fact, the emancipation of woman was completed long before Rome passed the height of its power. What the Stoics did was rather to find a healthy moral basis for the liberty that had already been won. I cannot go into the complex causes of the decay of the Empire in Europe, but will only say that it is traced to political, economic, and physical degeneration, with which the position of woman is absolutely unconnected. To the very end Roman women retained their culture, character, and influence; and the last glimpses we get (in Symmachus and Macrobius) of Pagan Rome, before the Goths invade it, leave with us a memory of a sober, cultivated, humane society, unconscious that the wheels of fate are making so appalling a revolution.
Thus, as I said in the beginning, the woman-movement of that older empire broke up only because its civilisation was broken. Rome had carried the cause of woman’s emancipation to a great height, and, had a fresh civilisation succeeded at once to the heritage, as Greece succeeded Rome, the story would have been completed long ago. Unhappily, Roman civilisation was replaced by a fresh barbarism, and Europe fell with terrible rapidity into the swamp of the Middle Ages. Women sank back all over Europe into a state of such subordination that fourteen hundred years after the fall of Rome there was not a civilisation in the world that would grant her the least semblance of that legal and mental equality with man which she had laboriously won nearly 2,000 years before. The cause of woman passed into an abyss, from which it is only now emerging afresh. How that came about, and why it lingered so long in the abyss, we have now to see.
Themillennium that lies between the year 500 and the year 1500 of the Christian Era is known to all historians as the Middle Age, and to very many as the Dark Age. Into the general correctness or incorrectness of the latter title I need not inquire. In the story of the evolution of woman that millennium must assuredly figure as the Dark Age. All the prestige that woman had enjoyed in Egypt, all the admissions she had wrung from the philosophers of Greece, all the high ambitions she had realised in Rome, were sunk deep in Lethe, and woman was again in a position of great subordination all over the world. Among the nations that were slowly rising to civilisation in the remote and unknown west, among the nations that had already reached civilisation in the east and south of Asia, she was subordinate; and in the centre of the world’s stage, in Europe, on which the main stream of cultural evolution had settled, she occupied a lower position than ever. Her social position varied; but her legal position was infamous, and her political position that of a serf.
Without going so far as to say, with Mrs. Cady Stanton (Woman’s Bible), that “mankind touched the lowest depth of degradation,” I will be content for the moment to say that all that woman had won in ancient Rome was entirely lost, and I will glance at the needful qualifications later. The first point of interest is to determine why the thread of woman’s development was broken off for a thousand years.
It will seem, at first glance, that I have assigned the cause in saying that Roman civilisation gave way to barbarism. Goths and Vandals trod underfoot the vast and wonderful polity that the Romans had spread over Europe. Roman culture retired to the western empire, to Asia, and, at the paralysing touch of Asia, fell into the rigid, barren, stationary form that we recognise still in the Greek Church. All Europe, west of Greece, was overrun by the barbarians who had issued from the forests of Germany, as Rome grew feebler. Over England, Gaul, Spain, Italy, and north Africa the light-haired, blue-eyed giants poured, and wherever they passed the fabric of Roman civilisation fell in ruins. Is not this explanation enough?
It is not, for these barbarians were of the class that treated woman with deference, not of the class that would bring into civilisation a fresh tradition of the ill treatment of their wives. It is useless to suggest that Tacitus, the Roman historian who wrote an account of their ways and ideals, exaggerated their deference to their women in order to shame the Romans. His statement on the point agrees too well with the earliest Teutonic and Scandinavian poetry, and with what we know of Anglo-Saxon England; nor was Tacitus by any means a feminist. There is no serious ground whatever for doubting his statement that the “Germans” saw something sacred in woman, held that the gods spoke more clearly through her, and took her counsel on tribal issues. Yet when we find the various branches of the race settling into fixed and organised polities on the ruins of Rome, we find woman generally despised, excluded from political life, and treated with the gravest injustice in legislation. The position of woman in Europe—in England—less than a century ago dispenses us from heaping up proofs.
It must be recognised at once that the extraordinary change in the surroundings of these barbaric fathers of ours would lead of itself to demoralisation. Buried for unknown centuries in the dense forests that lay between the Baltic and the Danube, they had treasured and submitted to the old traditions of their race, which favoured woman. As time goes on they encounter orderly and deadly legions, superbly armed, along the southern frontier of their region. In the early centuries of the Christian era they learn more of this wonderful race below the great river, with its impressive organisation, its shining luxury, its fairy cities, its strange religion and ideals. When the barrier falls they find themselves in a land whose mighty achievements made their old traditions seem puny and childlike, as their daubed huts or skin clothing. In that intoxication their ideals would easily grow dim, and their feeling of power amid a world of dwarfs would bode ill for woman. Thus, undoubtedly, we can explain much of the disappearance of the old Teutonic chivalry and virtue.
But it would be mere affectation to ignore the influence of their change of religion, and I will briefly show how this affected the position of woman. The greatest positive injustice that was done to woman was in the sphere of law, and Sir Henry Maine has shown that all the injustice done to woman in later European law was due to the overruling of Roman and Teutonic law by the Canon Law of the Church. The loss of social liberty and prestige can be clearly traced to the same root. Under the influence of the Judaic spirit which was now incorporated in Christianity, most of the early leaders of the Church spoke of woman and marriage in terms that the duller wit and coarser feeling of the following centuries only too literally received.
I have already observed that modern science is disposed to seek the origin of most of the Western civilisations in the ferment of tribes that filled the south-western offshoot of Asia some thousands of years before Christ, and that these tribes held very varying attitudes in regard to their women. The Hebrews probably represent one of these Semitic tribes in the north of the region between Babylonia and Palestine. From the southern desert, or the steppe-region leading to the desert, they invade Palestine, assimilate its civilisation, and evolve into the monarchy with which we are so familiar. It seems that the Hebrews came of one of those Bedouin tribes that kept their women in close subjection, and the later Judaic law preserved the tradition of the time when a boy meant a new spear to the tribe, and a girl only a future breeder of men. The wife was virtually the property of her husband, and could not inherit. He could divorce her when he willed, and had a right to her unconditional obedience. Few Hebrew women broke through this rigid system of subordination and left their names in the growing literature.
In the course of time the Hebrew sacred books, with a few additions, became the absolute authority of life and conduct in Europe, and the Judaic ideal came into collision with the later Roman ideal. I have shown elsewhere that all the Christian leaders in the Latin Empire—Tertullian, St. Cyprian, St. Augustine, St. Jerome, and St. Ambrose—insisted sternly on the subjection of woman, denounced her as the agent of humanity’s downfall, and gave only too serious ground for a revival of the old contempt for her. When these abler leaders had passed away and the age of mediocrity set in, we find bishops seriously doubting whether woman has a soul, refusing her the sacrament on the same terms as men, and rejecting her testimony in a court of justice. From the Gospels certainly no support can be derived for this contemptuous attitude, but it was one of the points of the Old Testament that had not been expressly repealed, and the harsh and dominating language of St. Paul fully supported it. It would be idle to question the extent of the influence that St. Paul and the Old Testament and the great Fathers of the Church had on the young nations that were now settling down in Europe. Professor Karl Pearson has suggested that the northern tribes embraced Christianity precisely because it taught the subjection of women. We must, at all events, acknowledge that it displaced the old traditions with a lamentable theory of woman’s inferiority.
During the “age of iron” (fifth to tenth century), therefore, the cause of woman was lost, and Europe entered upon the second phase of the subordination of woman, from which it is only emerging to-day. The life of the Middle Ages is so vast and varied a subject that different writers will, according to their prepossessions, give the most contradictory pictures of it. For most thoughtful women it will be enough to reflect that the position won by the women of Rome was obviously lost, or they would not again be laboriously assailing the barriers raised about their lives fifteen centuries later; and most of the recent women-writers—Mrs. Cady Stanton, Mrs. Gage, Mdlle. Chauvin, etc.—are very emphatic on the point. But I will try to sum up the changes in a few broad statements.
Socially, woman became once more absolutely subject to her husband. In the new marriage ceremony she pledged herself to blind obedience to his orders; and both Church and State gave him the power to flog her when he thought fit, and for a long time gave him the power to sell or dismiss her. In courts of justice she was put on a level with the despised Jew or the ancient slave; though there were courts—in Switzerland, for instance—that would generously accept the testimony of two women as being equal to that of one man. Prostitution and concubinage spread as they had never done before. Clerical bodies and municipalities owned brothels in many places, and not even Corinth or Athens at their worst had made so open a parade of women of that class. The newly-wed wives of the serfs were the property of the feudal lord for a few days. In the better class the women could own no property, as a rule were closely confined to the house, and were generally cut off completely from such culture as there was. To political influence they had no pretension. High-placed women won the irregular and dangerous power they have done in all ages, but otherwise they were more effectually shut out of public life than ever. Anglo-Saxon England offered a fine exception in this respect. Women, whether abbesses or widows, could rule their lands, and even succeed to hereditary administrative offices. But the coming of the Normans reduced the English woman to the general level of economic and political dependence.
All that can be set in relief against this dark picture is that women might obtain power and culture as abbesses of the larger convents, that at certain periods noble lay-women acquired learning, and that until about the thirteenth century women entered largely into the industries of the towns. But the number of women who stand out in the chronicles before the Renaissance for either learning or influence is extremely small, and serves only to deepen the general gloom of their situation. A St. Bridget or St. Hildegard, a Matilda or a Heloise, is but one figure advancing into the light out of obscure millions of down-trodden women. And the great share of women in the early medieval industries did not alter materially their position of subordination. The independent woman had too many dangers to face—the universal violence and license, the brutalities of the ducking-stool and scold’s bridle, the appalling fate of the “witch”—to encourage rebellion against the received ideal. Generally speaking, woman sank in the Middle Ages to a position lower than she had ever before occupied in a civilised community.[10]
At some date in the remote future, when the story of woman’s disabilities is ended the world over, the historian will probably regard that millennium as the darkest age for woman in the whole long story. A curious hesitation seems to have come over the fates. Up to this point the main stream of human development had flowed steadily towards Europe. The dying civilisations of Asia and Africa had made way for Greece, and Greece had turned the stream into Italy, to be spread from there in fertile flood over half the soil of Europe. Then civilisation almost disappeared in Europe, and for a time it looked as though the line of development would be taken up by some other race. Either unknown or very dimly known to Europe there were civilisations growing far out on the frontiers of its world that could very well outstrip it, as it floundered in the morass of the Middle Ages; and we may glance shortly at the position of woman in those distant races before we come to the awakening of Europe.
In the as yet unknown continent of America, into which some branch of the Mongolians had pushed before the northern land-bridge broke, two races had, by the Middle Ages, reached the upper stages of barbarism, and were climbing to civilisation. Since it is certain that Mexico and Peru developed quite independently of Europe, and probably independently of each other, their resemblance to medieval Europe is remarkable. They were feudal monarchies, with very powerful bodies of clergy, so that the general conditions were not favourable to woman. Education in Mexico was advanced, but under purely religious control, and vast numbers of the girls passed into the celibate state in the innumerable nunneries, to teach and embroider and capture little nuns in their turn. The girl who married (at from eleven to eighteen years of age) did not choose her partner, and passed from obedience to her father under the equal authority of her husband. She was not treated harshly, and polygamy was very exceptional. But the law imposed unequal punishment on her for unfaithfulness, and she was the greater sufferer by that ghastly evil of the Mexican religion—human sacrifice. In Peru the position of woman was generally better. For the great mass of the population there was little freedom, and the woman had few relative disabilities. She worked in the fields with the men, under arégimeof what one might call highly centralised feudalism, and seems to have been respected in the home. All political power was kept in the hands of the Incas, who had immense harems, and who married their sisters even more frequently than had been done in Egypt.
From the little knowledge we have of the position of woman in these native American civilisations, it seems that they were passing through a normal phase of development. The primitive tribes that lived beyond their frontiers, and exist to-day, inform us of an earlier stage, in which the woman was oppressed. On the other hand, there are in the Spanish writers not obscure traces that the moral sense of Mexico and Peru was advancing (especially in regard to human sacrifices), and no doubt the problem of woman’s position would in time have emerged. But the Spanish troops, with their superior weapons, quickly made an end of these interesting western polities, and reduced nearly the whole continent to the condition of a poor imitation of Spanish culture. I need only add that in the more advanced of the Spanish-American republics to-day—Argentina, Uruguay, Mexico, etc.—women have begun to take a keen and prominent interest in the culture and public affairs of their country.
When we cross over to the far east of the medieval map of the world, we find three civilisations that we must rank with the Europe of the Middle Ages. Of India little need be said. There is hardly a country in the world where woman is so drastically subordinated, and it is fairly clear that the process of subjection has in this case increased with the advance of the race. The comparatively good position that woman holds in so many of the lower Asiatic tribes suggests that at the beginning of Indian history she had the same respect and influence. Our earliest positive knowledge is in the Vedic poems, which suggest to us an “Aryan” race fighting their way down from the hills to the north-west, and gradually occupying the more fertile plains. A simple pastoral folk, with patriarchal features, they divided the labour equitably between the sexes, and apparently treated their women with respect. Monogamy seems to have been the rule, and such later practices as the burning of widows were quite unknown. With the settlement of the race woman’s position steadily sank. Whether it was that the practice of war brought in subject-wives and polygamy, or that the rise of the Brahmanic priesthood and the caste system altered the old ideal, we certainly perceive a degeneration towards the later contempt of woman. The advent of Buddha gave little help to woman. Though most of the resources of his order came from women, he, like all monastic leaders, if not all ascetics, made no effort to improve her position in what ascetic literature calls “the world.” And when the Brahmanic religion finally prevailed she sank lower than ever, and, amid all the glorious art of ancient India, the practices of polygamy, child-marriage, seclusion, and suttee spread over the land. In this there is no real reversal of the law we formulated. The highest culture of India was purely artistic, and such culture never helps woman. The conscience and intelligence of the nation were stifled in the endless wrappings and cerements of a formal and unprogressive religion.
The development of the other great Asiatic civilisation, the Chinese, was in many ways remarkable. As in India, the drastic subordination of the women does not seem to be merely a heritage from a barbaric past, since the lower Mongolian tribes generally show little tendency to it. Not only the Indo-Chinese tribes I mentioned in an earlier chapter, but the more northern Mongolians, grant their women much liberty and respect. Huc found the women of Tartary very vigorous and independent; and another early traveller, La Pérouse, found one of the most primitive of Mongolian tribes, in the bay of Castries, with a remarkably good character and a very generous and equable treatment of their women. Almost the only one of the lower Mongolian peoples to treat their women harshly are the Thibetans, and in their case the injustice is mainly confined to Lhassa. In that city a woman cannot go out unless she smears her face with a dark, gluey composition. There, however, the influence of monks and priests clearly explains the anomaly.
From this primitive level of comparative equality the Chinese, as they developed their civilisation, passed to a social order in which woman held a very subordinate place. The symbolic representation of capture is so common in Mongolian marriages that one cannot help suspecting that an early capturing of wives may have led to subordination; though one must remember that the symbol occurs in tribes in which woman has great liberty and influence. Whatever the causes may have been, we find woman in a position of abject dependence as soon as literature throws any direct light on Chinese civilisation. It seems to me that the oldest Chinese poetry in theKingpoint to a less unjustrégime; but we get our first complete knowledge of the social order in the Confucian literature, and there woman is almost, if not quite, as subject as she is to-day. The girl was only too apt to be sold or exposed in infancy by the poor—a practice on which the moralists always frowned, but which the authorities allow even to-day; though there are now generally public hospitals to receive exposed children. The Chinese girl usually marries at about her twentieth year, and, as virginity is essential (except among the poor), she is carefully guarded under the parental roof. At marriage she passes under the power of a husband, whom she must obey in all things. She brings no dowry, inherits no property, and has no right of divorce. The law even discriminates most unjustly between the sexes in its scale of punishments. She has a very slight education—only a few women having, by some domestic accident, figured in the literary chronicles—and not the least knowledge of public affairs. We may well regret that the great moralists of China did not denounce these inequalities. Six centuries before Christ agnostic moralists like Kung-fu-tse obtained a predominant influence in cultivated China, and the ideals of the nation are still moulded by their teaching. But Kung-fu-tse only commanded woman to obey, and his influence, so beneficial to character generally in China, has done nothing for woman. The progressive spirit died in China, and there has never been since the further advance in culture that was needed to awaken a rebellion of the subject women.
To the east of China, during our Middle Ages, lived a younger and smaller civilisation that has made itself known throughout the modern world. Japan is only partly Mongolian in origin; there seems to be a strain of blood from the southern islands in the nation’s frame. It is, therefore, not surprising to find that the cause of woman has run an entirely different course in Japan, and that the later excessive subordination of women was due to Chinese influence. It seems that the more primitive Asiatic feeling of respect for woman was carried on into the early Japanese civilisation. She had no more share in public life generally than elsewhere, but a considerable number of the nobler or more cultivated women stand out in the chronicles. The golden age of native Japanese civilisation and letters corresponds with the worst age of Europe (about 800 to 1200 of the Christian era). The chief English writer on the subject, Mr. Astor, tells us that during that period “a very large and important part of the best literature Japan has produced was written by women.” There are also distinguished women-Mikados and feudal princesses in the early story of Japan.
In the later Middle Ages Chinese culture began to play the reactionary part (in regard to woman) in Japan that Greek culture had done in Italy. The teaching of Kung-fu-tse and the great humanitarian moralists was warmly welcomed by the educated Japanese, and gradually became, as it still is, the sole religion of the class. How finely it shaped the character of Japan on most points—making its way down to nearly every class of the nation through the Samurai—the whole world now knows; but, as I said, it failed entirely to do justice to woman, and so led to the comparatively few blemishes of Japanese life. Woman was to be confined to the home, and that narrow and ill-advised ideal cast its invariable shadow—a great growth of prostitution. Japan had itsgeishasas Greece had itshetæræ; and the situation was worse in the sense that poor parents of good character made money (from twenty to forty pounds) by sending their daughters to thejoshiwarafor a few years. On the other hand, of course, no shame was attached to the profession, and the more gifted members sometimes made distinguished marriages and were received at court.
With the recent opening of Japan to modern culture the Chinese ideal is being discredited and the abuses it engendered are being suppressed. Women are receiving ample and rational education; a man is forbidden (since 1875) to sell his wife or daughter; thejoshiwarasare being thrust out of sight; and the Western spirit is slowly entering the minds of the women. Japan is plainly falling under the action of the general law. With the growth of higher culture the inequalities of the sexes are found to be artificial, mischievous, and unjust, and the position of woman improves. The main principles of thebushidoare not likely to be lost in the growth of Japan, but they are now held in a living and progressive sense. What Kung-fu-tse laid down as the duties of woman may or may not have been right and expedient 2,500 years ago. To-day they have an unmistakable aspect of masculine dictation and despotism. However, it is the culture of the West that has opened the new era in Japan and China and India, and we return to Europe to see how woman fared in what proved, after all, to be the chief theatre of the evolution of civilisation.
Fromthe broad survey of the world during the Middle Age of the Christian era, which I have made in the last chapter, we pass to the modern phase of woman’s evolution. The trite old proverb, that “the darkest hour is that before the dawn,” is, in this application, a singular and literal truth. From the comparative elevation of ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilisation, the cause of woman had sunk gradually, with occasional rebounds, to the lowest point it ever touched within the limits of civilisation. Half-a-dozen distinct civilisations lay over the world, cut off from each other by oceans that scorned their frail vessels, or by impassable deserts or mountain-chains; and in all of them the position of woman was one of great and unjust subordination.
At first glance it may seem that the facts are not consistent with the idea of a steady evolution of woman’s position. It must be borne in mind, however, that I merely affirm a development of woman’s political position in close relation to the development of culture, and then the situation offers little difficulty. The civilisations of North and South America, in which woman’s position was relatively better than in Europe, were not suffered to develop fully their native resources. The civilisation of India was constricted in lethal bonds that arrested all growth of culture; nor would it be difficult to show that the position into which its women were forced was largely responsible for the degeneration. China, too, had made the mistake of stereotyping its moral and social standards, though these were much higher, and was content to maintain, instead of developing, its culture. Japan, fascinated by the high moral idealism of China, too readily contracted its formalism and conservatism.
The spirit of progress was to breathe its inspiration first over the surface of Europe, whence it would in time pass over the rest of the earth. From the end of the Middle Ages culture slowly ascended once more to its ancient height, and with its progress the position of woman steadily improved.
It is well known that the re-awakening of Europe was due to a revival of Greek culture; but it is not so often recognised that the inspiration came at two periods, in two different forms. The first period was when the light of the Arabian civilisation in Spain sent its reflection over the Pyrenees and impelled the theological schools of Europe to a broader activity. By the twelfth century there was a ferment of scholastic life in many parts of Europe; but it was a barren employment of the intelligence, isolated at once from inanimate nature and from the social and political life. Architecture and sculpture had been kept alive from Roman days, because the Church had use for them. Natural science was dead—had not outlived its infancy—and social or political science had no place under a theocracy.
Christian scholars were, therefore, greatly stimulated by the broader culture of the Arabs, which their more adventurous members went south to study or learned from the intermediate Jews; and Christian nobles, whose halls and persons still retained much of the coarseness and dirtiness of their ancestry, were quickened by the refined luxury of the Moors and the “Paynims.” By the twelfth century Arabian Spain was deeply influencing Europe, and the advance in the thirteenth century plainly shows the great indebtedness to them. It is as obvious in Thomas Aquinas and Dante as it is in Pope Silvester or Roger Bacon. And there is no dispute that the progressive principles in Arabian civilisation were due to the Greek culture that had made its way to the new nation through Syria.
In this form, however, the revival of Greek culture had no direct influence on the position of woman, because it was associated with Mohammedanism. In his fine work,Die Frauen des Orients(1904), Baron von Schweiger-Lerchenfeld shows that in the pre-Islamic period the Arabian women had a good deal of freedom and influence. What they have become under the influence of Islam is so well known that I need not describe their situation. It is one more calamity that women owe to the teaching of the Old Testament, which Mohammed absorbed. Under the Ommejad princes the women of the orient had, like the philosophers and the artists, a good deal of liberty, and their position in Spain approached this. But the more rigid ideal prevailed, and the Mohammedan woman sank lower than the Christian.
It is only indirectly, in its general stimulation of culture, that the first Greek revival aided the cause of woman. As a literature other than that of the theological schools now grew up in Europe, women found more pretext for cultivating letters. The few names of women who did thus depart from the prevailing ideal of ignorance and domestic inclusion must not, of course, mislead us. A few of the nobler women, like our Queen Matilda, could correspond in Latin; still fewer could, like the young Heloise, quote Lucan and boast a smattering of Greek. The cultivation of letters was still an almost exclusively clerical profession, and the chief object of it was to learn to copy tomes of theology. On the political side, moreover, the feudal system prevented even the dawn of an ambition in the women’s minds. It was not until culture passed more generously into the hands of laymen, and the growth of free cities made a breach in the feudal system, that there could be even the possibility of any large change.
These two processes went on throughout the fourteenth century. About 1350 appeared Boccaccio’sDecameron, with its fairer promise of woman’s position, and from that time the women of Italy show the remarkable degree of culture and liberty that we associate with the Renaissance. In Italy the Greek-Arabian culture had taken especial root, as every reader of Dante will surmise, and it was now fed by direct contact with the Greek world. The Latin and Greek classics were greatly treasured, philosophy speculated with remarkable freedom, and art soared higher and higher in its emancipation from monastic control. When, in 1453, the Turks captured Constantinople, and Greek scholars fled to Italy, the revival of Greek culture was completed, and the Renaissance of Europe accomplished.
The chief purpose of this essay dispenses me from ranging over the familiar ground of the women of the Renaissance.[11]The picture that Boccaccio gives of men and women cultivating letters on an equal footing was found in most of the Italian cities. At Venice, Rimini, Urbino, Mantua, Padua, Bologna, and the other great cities, women often formed intellectual centres, and vied with the men in production. Frau Braun tells of a woman-professor of theology at Bologna; of two female authorities on canon law, Novella d’Andrea and Maddalena Buonsignori; of an Isotta Nogarola who spoke before popes and emperors, and a Cassandra Fedele who taught at Padua. What the poetess Vittoria Colonna was to Michael Angelo the whole world knows.
It was fitting enough that the women of Italy, the successors of the older Roman women, should reopen the field of culture, but the inspiration was to pass into other lands before it would raise the general question of woman’s position. Boccaccio was no feminist, but his study of the lives of illustrious men and women led to a practice of making encyclopædias of feminine biography, which was bound to suggest the question of woman’s capacity. An Italian monk so far discarded the spirit of his order as to write two volumes (of 800 pages each) on distinguished women—170 in number—of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. A Roman cardinal and other prelates indulged the same genial humour. Ribera beat all the records with a comprehensive account of the careers of 845 distinguished women of all ages. The Renaissance ideal had quickly passed to Spain, where one reads of a Juliana Morelli of Barcelona speaking fourteen languages, and an Isabella of Cordova, of some distinction in theology.
It was, however, in the more northern lands that the new movement was to develop further. Italy and Spain were decaying. The Reformation would soon set them in antagonism to the bolder culture they had inspired in the north, and political despotism would stifle the growth of their spirit. They handed on the torch to Germany, France, and England, and slowly sank into the torpor of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
The women of Germany were the last to be stirred, and the stirring was soon arrested by the Reformation and the religious wars. One powerful work, however, was published in Germany in 1505—the Latin treatise of the great scholar Cornelius Agrippa,De nobilitate et præcellentia feminini sexus(“Of the nobility and excellence of the female sex”). Agrippa maintained that the souls of men and women were equal, and that equal education should and could be given to women. The controversy that followed would, with a few changes of terms, entirely reflect the modern controversy about woman’s capacity. But little progress was made, for the reasons I have given.
In France the Italian culture found a readier soil. Frau Braun describes theCité des Damesof Christine de Pisan (fifteenth century) as the first plea for woman’s emancipation, but a reader of that curious work will find the plea very much qualified. It ranges over the whole field of distinguished women—the women of Italy, of the Bible, of antiquity—with admiration of their learning or virtue or power; but it adheres very closely to the prevailing religious ideas, and urges married women to see an advantage in their subjection to their husbands. Montaigne’s adopted daughter, Mlle. de Gournay, was the real pioneer of the modern movement. She demanded the equality of the sexes in all things except military service. Another woman, Anna Dacier, made the first French translations of Plautus, Terence, and Aristophanes. Margaret of Navarre and—in a less degree—Margaret of Valois proved the capacity of their sex for literary production. Before Cardinal Richelieu founded the Academy for the perfecting of the French tongue the hotel of Mme. de Rambouillet was the chief centre of letters and culture in Paris; and Richelieu’s own niece, Mme. de Combalet, had a literary salon in which Corneille and the best writers of the day met.
England and Germany were at that time regarded as lingering at a barbaric level from the point of view of Latin culture. Italian and Spanish ladies very generally learned Latin, and the French aspirant to letters acquired Spanish and Italian; but English was abandoned to merchants and diplomatists. By the end of the seventeenth century, however, the effect of the Renaissance was felt among the women of England. In 1694 Mary Astell published, anonymously,A Serious Proposal to the Ladies for the Advancement of their True and Greatest Interest. She tells of the learned women of Italy and France, and declares that woman’s “incapacity” is “acquired, not natural.” “How can you be content to be like tulips in a garden?” she disdainfully asks. Let women build a kind of lay convent, she urges—a school of virtue and learning, a pious and proper imitation of Oxford and Cambridge—and have their sex fully educated.
Mary Astell’s appeal had little effect, though it was immediately supported by no less powerful a writer than Defoe. It appears that Defoe had already (in 1692 and 1693) written hisEssay upon Projects, and he published it in 1697. One of the score of projects he put before the country was a plea for the higher education of women. “I have often thought,” he said, “that it is one of the most parlous customs in the world that we deny the advantages of learning to women. We reproach the sex every day with folly and impertinence, while I am confident that, had they the advantage of education equal to us, they would be guilty of less than ourselves.” In the meantime Defoe has apparently seen Mary Astell’s proposal, and he politely ridicules her idea of a “nunnery.” “Women are extravagantly desirous of going to heaven,” he says, “and will punish their pretty bodies to get thither; but nothing else will do it, and even in that case it falls out sometimes that nature will prevail.” He is in favour of public schools more like those in the country for youths. Women’s faculties are equal to men’s, he insists; the only difference is in education. But he hints that he will hear of no encroachment on “man’s sphere,” and so condemns in advance any political ambition. How little response there was to these appeals, and how the education of English women remained at an almost medieval level until little more than a generation ago, is sufficiently known.
Thus the fire of the Renaissance burnt itself out in Italy and Spain within two or three centuries, and its inspiration led to little direct result in France, and still less in England. The history of French culture contains a number of names of brilliant women during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but the records of English literature are relieved by few feminine names until we reach the age of Queen Victoria. But the educative movement started by the Renaissance had great importance. It had provided a brilliant disproof of the prevailing belief that woman was of a lower order of intelligence than man. The position of men like Cornelius Agrippa and Defoe was one of unanswerable common sense. Inequality of culture between the sexes there assuredly was; but to ascribe this to native inequality of resource, instead of to the glaring inequality of education, was sheer folly. Grant woman the opportunity of attaining culture, and then one may sensibly begin to speculate on her capacity. And from every part of Christendom in which the opportunity was granted there came a report of brilliant and scholarly women. The extension of female education in our day has completed that first breach in the medieval superstition of woman’s inferiority.
If the older notion of woman’s incapacity on the speculative side were thus proved to be unsound, it might very well be that the corresponding belief in her practical capacity or political judgment was equally unsound. It might turn out that, when the opportunity for cultivating her political sense was offered, the result would be the same as when opportunities of education were given. In this way the cultural movement that issued from the Renaissance prepared the way for the political struggle. But before this struggle could set in two other profound and far-reaching changes were to take place. The capability of exercising political power is one thing: the right to exercise it another. Until the close of the eighteenth century the second point was hardly raised. Then there opened a period of economic and political change that made the raising of it inevitable.
I will describe here the dawn of the new era in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, and deal with the nineteenth in the next chapter. By the beginning of the eighteenth century the cause of woman had made a substantial advance in many respects. In Germany the advance was almost purely cultural, though the names are not wanting of women who wielded some political influence by the indirect method of influencing rulers or statesmen. In England, again, there were women of culture and women of influence, as all know; but there was a singular retrogression in the political position of women generally. Mrs. Stopes (British Free Women) has so recently and fully discussed the change that I need do no more than summarise it. For two reasons England had promised to be the first theatre of the struggle for political enfranchisement. Not only was it the first country of the modern era to set up parliamentary representation, but it had been the latest of the Teutonic races to retain the old ideal of respect for woman. The Norman Conquest had greatly lowered the prestige of woman, but there were still high offices (such as that of sheriff) that women could inherit and fill. On the other hand, the Norman kings had been forced to grant a permanent representation of the third estate (or Commons) five hundred years before the French Revolution, and during the great Civil War the power of the Commons had enormously increased. The old Anglo-Saxon feeling persisted in the fact that the privilege of electing the borough-representatives was not confined to one sex.
The peculiarity of England’s development is that in its case we seem to have the only exception to the law I formulated—that the position of woman improves with the growth of culture. From the fourteenth to the seventeenth century culture enormously advanced, and the position of woman steadily deteriorated. In the early decades of the seventeenth century we find an Englishwoman, Anne Clifford, struggling against the monarch for the hereditary right to a high office. Women burgesses and landowners could still share the election of parliamentary representatives; but at the beginning of the seventeenth century this right was taken from them, and the sex-disability was imposed. Sir Edward Coke, relying chiefly on St. Paul’s injunctions to women, successfully removed the last trace of the old Teutonic ideal.
Here, at first sight, is an apparent exception to our alliance of feminism and culture; but, in reality, we have a number of modifying circumstances. The long lawlessness of the Middle Ages had made men less and less disposed to see women in office or in public life. The head, even of a manor, needed to be a soldier in those days. Women often proved capable enough of inspiring and directing their followers, but it is quite intelligible that there was a strong tendency towards discouraging or preventing women from holding office in such turbulent times. And with this tendency was joined the even worse influence of the canon law of the Church. When we find a great lawyer like Sir Edward Coke refusing the testimony of women, on grounds of sex, we see at once how this fatal sentiment had been gradually permeating the mind of England. It had put woman in a deplorable legal position—or, rather, a position outside the law—and it inevitably fostered the notion of woman’s inferiority and incapacity. Before the end of the eighteenth century we find legal writers classing women with “infants, idiots, and lunatics” in illustrating “natural incapacity.” In this way the growth of culture came to be, in England, associated with a deterioration in the position of women; but the circumstance does not invalidate our law, as the retrogression was plainly due to such extraneous causes as the permeation of our life with the spirit and letter of the canon law, as Sir Henry Maine has shown.
Under these reactionary influences the women of England seemed, in the eighteenth century, to have entirely lost their birthright, and fallen into line with the women of the world. The eighteenth century is, indeed, a dramatic moment in the whole story of feminism. The earlier power of English women was generally forgotten; the ambition and struggle of women in older civilisations were quite unknown; the fire of the Renaissance had sunk again, leaving only a few women scattered over Europe with a zeal for culture. The world over woman was subordinate and submissive. Then there broke out a series of political eruptions that changed the face of the world, and awakened a fresh ambition in women that would never again be stilled.
The first of these great disturbances was the Declaration of Independence on the part of the American colonies. I have said that certain fundamental changes took place during the nineteenth century that made the raising of the feminist claim quite inevitable, and at the same time made the refusal of the claim more illogical and unjust than it had ever been before. The first and chief of these changes was the democratisation of politics. The mass of the women laboured under no political sex-disability in the eighteenth century, because the mass of the men had no political power at all. In England, under a corrupt and degenerate Parliamentary system, a proportion of the men had a semblance of power; in other countries the mass of the men had not even the shadow of it. France had not summoned its States-General, in which the Third Estate had a nominal representation, since 1614. The world was ruled by castes of priests and nobles, and the higher and wealthier women often had the satisfaction of ruling their rulers. When this system altered, when political power began to spread over the middle class and working men, the woman question would arise spontaneously and command attention.
America inaugurated the change. The Declaration of Independence, in 1776, set up the first modern democracy—the Swiss Cantons were essentially aristocratic until the nineteenth century—and prepared the way for the suffrage controversy. From the very first moment the women of America denounced the injustice of a male electorate. Mercy Otis Warren had fostered the rebellion in her drawing-room, where the leaders often met, and Abigail Smith Adams (wife of the first President) was no less active. They and others demanded the admission of women to the new constitution. While it was being prepared, Mrs. Adams wrote to her husband that “if the position of women was not thoroughly considered they would rebel, and not consider themselves bound by laws that gave them no voice or representation of their interests.” The first assault failed, only two States being willing to grant the justice of the plea. We will return presently to the resumed agitation in America, but must revert to Europe for the second exception, that was to stir the lethargy of women by putting a specific sex-disability on them.
The appeal of Montaigne’s daughter had raised no echo in the France of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The women of the nobility had ample power of the familiar, irregular kind, and the women of the people were no poorer than their husbands in political rights. Then Rousseau set up the ideal of the Rights of Man, and France moved towards the great Revolution. The influence of the philosophers in preparing the Revolution has been exaggerated, and in point of fact most of them were decidedly anti-feminist. Voltaire and Montesquieu slighted their demands and capacities. Rousseau contrived to reconcile a doctrine of the equality of human beings with the old-fashioned ideal of woman’s place. But they, at least, stimulated thought and encouraged education in women, and women learned to correct their logic. Then came the news of the struggle in America, and the feeling against England made it extraordinarily popular. Ladies wore “American Independence hats,” and discussed deep constitutional questions during the recently imported function of tea. Nobles volunteered for service, and brought back stirring stories of democracy.
The American episode had nearly lost interest when the Revolution broke out. There can be no doubt that it was not without permanent influence, but the more demonstrative zeal had been manifested by the upper class, and the form that democracy now took in their own country very quickly extinguished it. Of the first French Revolution in itself I need say little. The later and less picturesque Revolutions were more permanently effective. Freeman has observed, however, that the face of Europe was changed for ever by the first Revolution, and it is well taken as the pyrotechnic inauguration of the modern era.
Little direct encouragement was given to women by the revolutionaries. A few men like Sieyès and Condorcet, who had founded a Lyceum for women in 1786, recognised that women were human beings when they spoke of “the Rights of Man.” The majority, led by Mirabeau, and afterwards by Danton, refused to listen to the appeal of women like Mme. Condorcet; even revolutionary women like Mme. Roland agreed with them. Hence the share that women took in the Revolution cannot occupy a place of any prominence in such a study as this. Their campaign for the recognition of their rights came to naught. They showered petitions on the National Assembly, founded political clubs all over the country, and published a journal,L’Observateur féminin. But the Jacobins were inexorable, and they guillotined the most fiery of their speakers, Olympe de Gouges (reputed daughter of Louis XIV.), for her fearless opposition. And, eventually, the three great waves washed over the work of the Revolution and obliterated its traces. The Directory suppressed Jacobinism, Napoleon superseded Directorism, and Metternich and Wellington annihilated Napoleonism. A group of statesmen, sitting round a table in the Foreign Office at Vienna, set up again the broken model of aristocratic Europe, and democracy was unceremoniously buried.
But political evolution had set definitively in the direction of democracy, and in another generation it would rise again. With this development, which of itself sufficed to lay bare the foundations of political power and press forward the woman question, was associated an industrial development that made an equally fatal breach in the old order. How these and other far-reaching changes have irresistibly forced on us the feminist controversy of our time will be shown in the next chapter.
Inancient Greece there was a certain symbolic ceremony of a very picturesque character in connection with one of the great festivals. A lighted torch was to be conveyed to a distant altar, and a series of horsemen had to discharge the ceremony. Along the line of frantic riders, from the exhausted hand of one horseman to the fresh grasp of the next, the fiery symbol was handed, until the last of the procession placed it in triumph on the destined altar.
Our story of the evolution of woman’s position recalls this old ceremony. For nearly three thousand years, at least, the torch has passed from rider to rider, and the altar is in sight. The struggle of the later Egyptian women re-appears in Greece, crosses the sea to Italy, is raised again in the revival of ancient culture, passes on to France, when the Italian States decay, and reaches at length the vigorous hands of England, Germany, and the United States. In one respect, however, the parallel fails. It is true that the cause has moved onward through the ages, but there have been years, even centuries, when the torch was almost, if not quite, extinct. There have been times when the distant altar seemed to be forgotten, and women sank back into uncomplaining subjection. Such a period was the appalling stretch between the fifth and the twelfth centuries, between the murder of Hypatia and the living death of Heloise. The eighteenth century, compared with the promise of its predecessors, is another such period, in most countries. The first quarter of the nineteenth century is another, and the last. Then the torch flames out again, and, for reasons I will give presently, can never more be extinguished until it is laid on the altar.
After the fall of Napoleon in 1815 Europe closed the mouth of the pit, as it thought, and dreamed soft dreams of continued despotism. The Holy Alliance had a sharp ear for murmurs of rebellion against any received ideal, and enforced submission everywhere at the point of the bayonet. It would be futile for women to chafe at their bonds in that world. Happily, the world was wider than the sphere of the Bourbons, the Hapsburgs, and the Pope. England contemplated their “white terror” with instinctive resentment; though England had shuddered at Jacobinism, and in the main was more disposed than before for coercion and subjection. But the United States maintained its theoretic scorn of despotism, and little British colonies which dotted the blue southern ocean promised the same spirit of independence.
It was in the United States that the modern struggle for the enfranchisement of nations began. The appeals of Mercy Warren and Abigail Adams were almost forgotten, and the masculine ideal was firmly incorporated in the American constitution, when a young Scotchwoman, Frances Wright, used the comparative freedom of the country to start a brilliant and fiery campaign for the rights of women. How she was presently joined by the talented Polish Jewess, Ernestine Rose, and the devoted Quaker women, Abby Kelly and the Sisters Grimke; how the democratic Americans jeered and howled at them, and the clergy branded them, and the little company grew larger and larger—all this may be read in Mrs. Cady Stanton’sHistory. By 1837 the great American poet, Whittier, took up arms for them against their clerical opponents. They had proved their capacity for public life by their share in the anti-slavery campaign. They did not take the view of Carlyle.
In the meantime the second Revolution had taken place in France, and the second democratic wave passed over Europe. Its chief expression was the passing of the great Reform Bill in England in 1832. With singular logic the men who had prepared forests of pikes to withstand Wellington, the men who had met in gatherings of 200,000 to sing “Hail, dawn of liberty,” and threaten to march on London, now turned on their less militant women and expressly excluded them from political life. James Mill had laid it down in 1825 (Essay on Government) that women’s interests were bound up with men’s, and so Radicals could justly exclude them from the franchise. In their resentment of the notion that a superior class should dictate to them how they were to be represented, the men of England had sacked cathedrals, challenged the troops, and trampled on the portrait of the king; then they turned about and dictated to the women, who would not do these things, howtheywere to be represented. The Reform Bill made the electorate exclusively male for the first time in the history of England; and the Reformed Parliament went on, in 1835, to exclude women from the enfranchising clauses of the Municipal Corporations’ Act.
I have already described the influences that had for centuries been undermining the older English ideal, but this open violation of it, at the very time when streams of oratory were flowing all over England on liberty and the value of representation, naturally led to a reaction. The agitation for the Reform Bill had itself re-awakened in women the desire of sharing in public life, and the injustice shown by the reformers would not allay it. There were not wanting gospels for the new cause. Mary Wollstonecraft had published aVindication of the Rights of Womenin the height of the French Revolution (1792), and a political writer who had great influence with Liberals, William Godwin, had supported her. William Thompson had issued a spirited reply to James Mill in 1825. Robert Owen, who had immense influence in England by 1840, adopted the same view. Women also joined in the Corn Law Agitation, and some of its chief leaders acknowledged that they proved their capacity for public life. Cobden and Villiers favoured their claim. W. J. Fox, one of the most brilliant of the Free Traders, minister of South Place Chapel (London), warmly espoused their cause. About 1850 pamphlets and magazine articles began to appear, advocating the enfranchisement of women.[12]
By the middle of the century there was a strong feeling in England and the United States for the enfranchisement of women. The number of agitators was very small, but the life of the world was now developing rapidly, and the new tendencies were putting an entirely new complexion on the question of woman’s position in the State. It will be convenient to note these tendencies here—warning the reader that they increase in later decades—in order to understand the real logical strength of the modern movement.
The struggle is, in essence, a conflict of two ideals—the new ideal and the old belief, not so much that “woman’s place is the home,” but that she shall have no interest beyond it. How far men have a right to dictate their position to women, or how far one group of women have the faintest pretension to dictate to another group, I need not waste time in inquiring. I chance to be one of those males who have never discovered the slenderest moral or rational base for the assumed right to tell women what is best for them, and force them to do it. But I need not linger over this, as the old ideal was framed in harmony with a world that has passed away for ever, and it is as odd and discordant as any other medieval survival in our world.
I admitted that when political life, or the practice of settling social or corporate issues, first arose it was quite natural that it should fall exclusively into the hands of the men. The social decisions usually concerned migration, or war, or some other extra-domal matter, in the execution of which woman was, from the nature of things, much less interested than man. I need not run over the intermediate stages of political life, and will merely point out a few of the ways in which the old division of home-work and State-work broke down in the nineteenth century. The industrial development made the first great breach in the old standard. The early political system was obviously founded on the early division of labour. Woman worked in and about the home, owing to the natural tie of the children, and man worked further afield. The factory system entirely discarded this old division, and encouraged women to leave their homes and work by the side of men. Long before the middle of the nineteenth century tens of thousands of women were performing the same work as men, as far from the home as men. Then workshops, shops, and offices took fresh groups of women away from the home; and journalism and other professions further extended the process. In 1851 there was not a woman photographer or book-binder in England, and there were only 1,742 shop-girls. In 1861 there were 130 women in the photographic trade, 308 in book-binding (1,755 in 1871), and 7,000 in shops. To what proportions the extra-domal employment has reached I need not describe. One-fourth of the women and girls of England now have other than domestic employment. More than a million married women are so employed.
With this enormous and increasing employment of women in view it is impossible to continue to talk of woman’s place being the home, and quite ridiculous to make that threadbare phrase a ground for the limitation of woman’s interests. To refuse them a right that only the most desperate stretch of imagination could represent as taking women “out of the home,” and at the same time to acquiesce in an industrial development that effectively takes millions of them out of it, is a quaint aberration of reasoning. It would be more sensible to recognise that the phrase, “woman’s place is the home,” belonged to an older civilisation. Assuredly, it is a strange phrase to use to-day as an argument against the suffrage. The old division of labour has broken down. The old political division that was built on it must follow.
Side by side with this economic development there was proceeding a political evolution that no less thoroughly undermined the old ideal. In the first place, the base of political power grew broader and broader throughout the century. In 1848 the middle-class revolt, that had succeeded in England in 1832, broke out over most of the Continent, and triumphed. Though there was a reaction in some countries, the basis of political life was generally and permanently broadened, and millions of professional men and higher workers won a share in the control of the affairs of their country. Towards 1870 (speaking generally) a fresh and larger class clamoured for enfranchisement, and secured it. And as the century went on ever fresh demands were made, and the enfranchised few found no principle on which they could decently resist. In most of the countries of Europe the overwhelming majority of the adult and literate males have the vote.
This development of political life puts the modern demand of the women in a position entirely new and incalculably stronger than it ever had before. Only in ancient Athens was there a somewhat similar situation, and in that case decay followed too quickly upon full bloom to allow the natural consequence. In most other cases the women had no specific political disability. Their husbands and brothers had, as a rule, no more political right than they. A woman-franchise movement was inconceivable in any earlier period—apart from Athens, where it was evidently preparing—and it was just as inevitable in modern times. When you extend the control of national affairs to tens of millions of men—the Socialists alone count between seven and eight million votes on the Continent—you disfranchise as many tens of millions of women. You impose the sex-disability in its most offensive and least defensible form.
Nor is this the only aspect of political evolution that exhibits the cant phrase about woman’s place as a medieval survival. So long as political life was mainly concerned with issues, like trade or war, that fell in the men’s sphere of work, the primitive division of political responsibility remained more or less plausible. It is no longer even plausible. National defence is, and must be, a primary concern of politics; but in England at least this concerns women just as much as men. The vast majority of our men do not share in the work. A select body undertakes it, and the other men have just as much, and no more, interest in controlling them than women have. Trade, commerce, and industry are still main objects of political concern; but women are included in vast numbers in the industrial world. And the new and broader conception of the task of an administration has completed the annihilation of the old ideal. Social reform—questions of housing, temperance, pensions, etc.—obviously concern women as much as men, and are in no sense whatever masculine issues; while the recent extension of legislation to the home and the child has made it quite futile to talk of the woman’s home as her sphere, in the sense that she must have no interest in the public life beyond it. Once she really was mistress in the home; now, happily, the law has invaded every corner of it. It controls the birth of her children, controls their infancy in a score of ways, controls their beds and fires and food, controls their punishment, their recreation, their education, and their early employment. This is a colossal change in the objective of political life, and it necessarily involves a surrender of the older idea of enfranchisement.