WOMAN IN POLITICALEVOLUTIONBYJOSEPH McCABELONDON:WATTS & CO.,17, JOHNSON’S COURT, FLEET STREET, E.C.1909CONTENTSChap.I.Is the Subordination of Woman the Price of Empire?II.Woman Before CivilisationIII.Woman in Ancient Egypt and AssyriaIV.Woman in Ancient GreeceV.Woman in Ancient RomeVI.The Dark Age of FeminismVII.Renaissance and RevolutionVIII.The Struggle in the Nineteenth CenturyIX.The Moral Base of EnfranchisementFootnotesWOMAN IN POLITICAL EVOLUTIONCHAPTER I.IS THE SUBORDINATION OF WOMAN THE PRICE OF EMPIRE?Thedistinct aim which emboldened the author to add one more essay to the large class of works that deal with woman’s position throughout the ages was twofold. It seemed, in the first place, that there was a lack of connecting principle in the series of detached sketches that usually make up a work of the kind; that a continuous, panoramic view of human history would reveal such a principle, and one of very great importance for the proper appreciation of the present woman-movement. It has been possible to trace the action of a consistent law through all the historic spasms of feminist agitation, and to show that that law has reached a stage of final and irresistible pressure in our time. The underlying principles of the present movement are too rarely noticed, and a clear enunciation of them may contribute a little to the proper understanding of the struggle.The second aim was to meet a serious concern that is expressed by thoughtful observers, when they note that the woman-movement is one of a score of agitations that ruffle the whole surface, and even stir the depths, of modern life. We have passed through a century of revolutions, yet we seem as far as ever from the peace that each one had promised to bring. Nations that had slept undisturbed through the political storms that shook Europe during three generations are now waking to revolt; classes that had witnessed the upheavals of the nineteenth century with dull indifference or shrinking apprehension now take up the world-cry of change with the energy of pioneers. The routine of daily life is distracted with the flash of a dozen new ideals. Placidity has fallen from the rank of virtues. What is the meaning of it all? What is likely to be the issue?Those who read history shake their heads in concern. They say that they are familiar with the symptoms, and can recognise the malady. Through such spluttering of energy and iridescence of dreams every great nation passed as it neared the end. Such scenes were witnessed, and just such cries were heard, in the marble porticoes of Greece when its glorious life began to sink. The same cries rang through theforaof Imperial Rome, and were heard again in thepiasseof medieval Italy, when the long-drawn shadows fell on their exhausted citizens. Do not nations run the cycle of birth and lusty manhood and decay, like individuals? And is not this restlessness the familiar token that the heart is slowing down and the frame failing to control the worn and hypersensitive nerves? Do not the fevered dreams, the ceaseless irritation, the rebellion of parts that had served so well in silence, warn us that the dissolution, of which we have read so often, is setting in? Can we do other than knit the frame close in its old fabric, repress the impatient elements, and close our eyes resolutely to the disordered dreams?In this light many regard the agitation for a revision of woman’s place in the social order. “The subordination of woman is invariably one of the prices of Empire,” says Dr. Emil Reich, who has lately set out to correct ourchinoiserie d’idéeswith the breadth of his historical lore. The British or the German Empire grew to its height when—if we can forget Elizabeth—woman tended the cradle and the home, while man wrought its industries, shaped its policy, and bore its defence. With the same sharing of labour among their men and women all earlier empires had grown to power, and it was only in the years of decay that woman impatiently clamoured for an enlargement of her sphere. This agitation, they conclude, is the mere play of distempered nerves in an enfeebled system. It must be cured by a sermon on self-sacrifice, a return to virility, a stern refusal of the demand in the interest of the race. They who listen to it cannot have scanned the memorial pages in which history has written the fate of even greater empires than ours.I propose to show that this conservative attitude is inspired by an entirely false reading of history. True it is that the recent course of woman’s development recalls a drama that has been played on the planet’s stage time after time. In the first act we have the “womanly woman,” absorbed in the cradle and the distaff, clothed in quiet matronly virtues, content to hear news of the great world without from her stronger mate. In the second act new and disturbing types come on, women impatient of child-bearing, women that chafe at the barriers and cry for freedom and justice, women that would go out with man into the battle of life. The third act—the act in which men begin to listen—has so constantly ended in tragedy that many confidently look for the same issue now, if we dally with the demands of the women as those others did. It is a plausible anxiety, yet it arises solely from a superficial and perverse reading of history.In the first place, this assumption that nations run through a life-curve like individuals needs serious qualification. There is no inner law that nations shall be born and die, like the men and women who compose them. To the student of science or history a law is but a description of the way in which things have invariably acted, and will presumably act again in the same circumstances. But the circumstances in this case are the same no longer. The conditions of national existence are radically different from what they were when the procession of great empires passed over the stage of the world. Then, almost invariably, the situation was that one virile race entrenched itself in a strong capital and flung out its frontiers on every side, while smaller races watched on the bracing hills all round for the softness of muscle that city-life and parasitic habits would bring. Nerve and brain mattered far less in those days of heavy arms and armour. When you shortened your spear and lightened your shield, the vigorous barbarian knew that his hour had come; the frontier-walls crumbled under his pressure, and he took over the heritage of civilisation. That situation has passed away for ever. There is not one world-power to-day, with a chafing surge of barbarians beating on its shores, but a dozen great nations, and a new thing in the world that we call the balance of power. Softness of muscle is of less account, as a regiment of city clerks can annihilate an army of barbarians. Victory goes to intelligence and nerve. A nation may die still, but assuredly there is no inner law demanding that it must. That impressive march across the stage of Babylon, Assyria, Egypt, Persia, Ethiopia, Greece, Rome, and Venice gives no precedent for our time.Further, even if a modern nation die, the cry of its women will not perish with it, as in those older days. I do not for a moment forget that the balance may be disturbed, and the flood of war devastate a modern kingdom, at any time; or that, if the lips of our guns were sealed and the red rain stopped for ever, commercial rivalry might bring a flagging race to ruin. That is quite possible; but the truth is that every one of these rival nations has the same agitation in its midst. No nation whose women have not yet stirred at the cry of reform has the remotest chance of rising to power. The cry is strong in Japan to-day, and will be heard in China to-morrow. It has loud and eloquent utterance in Russia, Italy, and Spain, and it will assuredly pass on to a renovated Turkey and Persia. Whatever powers rise or fall, civilisation cannot die again, and it is civilisation that faces the demand for change to-day. The cry died away on the lips of the women of Greece and Rome and medieval Italy because their civilisation perished, and a power rose on its ruins that had not yet reached the same height of culture. That, assuredly, will never happen again.If this is so—and, apart from a few yellow-peril fanatics, I know of no serious observer who doubts it—the comparison of the modern woman-movement with those of former times must lead to a very different conclusion from that of our superficial historical critics. England, or the greatness of England, may die, but this agitation is not a symptom, good or bad, of England’s life alone. It is not a special feature of the life of Germany, or the United States, or any nation. It is a general feature of civilisation, and civilisation will never again evade the settlement of its moral problems by dying. Culture will go on, and the demand grows with culture. We cannot possibly see a third act to the drama as it was played on the earlier stage of history. There will be no fall of the curtain now on an unsolved problem.The fallacy of those, like Dr. Reich, who read the story otherwise is the familiar historical mistake of regarding things as connected because they chanced to occur at the same time. We may allow that men were stronger at the time when women were subject; but it is a poor fallacy to forget that the men then had a fresh heritage of strength from barbaric days, as yet untouched by luxury, and to assign their triumph in any measure to the silence of their women. We may grant that the rebellion of the women generally came when the nation was nearing decay; but, again, it is a poor fallacy to erect this coincidence into a principle. The truth is that the revolt of the women in earlier civilisations coincided with two things—with a high state of culture and with a beginning of decay; and an unprejudiced study of the agitation in any era will show plainly that it was due to the former, and merely coincided with the latter. It sprang from the culture, the social conscience, the strength—not the weakness—of a nation. It was an ironic feature of the older world that high and general culture and the triumph of justice over ancient conventions were only reached when death was approaching. The new order promises a totally different development, because all nations of power are at the same stage of culture. And in our own day the movement is due quite unmistakably to the renascence of culture and the advance of moral principle.Civilisation has now to face the problem candidly, and settle it. The agitation is no bubble rising out of the effervescence of the time, to burst, like a score of others that shone in the sun for a moment, and give place to new. It is an essential element in the evolution of culture. No nation ever reached the point of culture that we have reached but its women rose with a moral challenge of the justice of their position. Every nation had inherited from its barbaric ancestry the practice of excluding women from the corporate life, and there was good ground to demand a reconsideration of the practice when the sense of social justice developed. To regard the demand of our women as due to a temporary fit of nerves is to ignore one of the most salient features of the course of human history. Wherever civilisation grew out of barbarism the demand arose; it died away only because a fresh barbarism broke the thread of civilisation. As that thread will never more be broken, the demand will increase with our culture, and it can afford to smile at these fallacious lessons or warnings from a widely different past. When, in addition, we consider the development of political life itself, when we see that it concerns itself increasingly with the affairs of women in a way that it never did before, we are forced to admit that the demand for a reconsideration of woman’s position has a solid base in the actual evolution of life.I propose, therefore, to run rapidly over the known phases of human development, and show how the attitude of women has varied in proportion to the growth of enlightenment and moral feeling. We will catch what glimpse we can of the first human pair that wandered over a strange earth in the faintest dawn of humanity. We will learn, from races that have lingered in primitive ways for untold ages, how, as the family grew into the race (or the rough social group into the clan),[1]the issues of the corporate life were naturally appropriated by the men. We will see how, as savagery rises to barbarism, as the social life grows larger and more varied, the warriors and their chief keep control of it, save where some exceptional circumstance disposes them to take account of the woman’s will. We shall find the woman still patient and laborious in the early years of civilisation, and will note how, as the corporate life begins to look to other things than the mere defence of the State, as social construction is studied, the woman, awakened by the light of culture that breaks through the narrow windows of her home, comes forth to claim her share in the control of that larger national life, with which she must prosper or suffer no less than the man. We shall see how the division of labour handed down from the barbaric ages breaks down, how the law comes to invade every corner of the little territory in which she had held sway, how she demands that her knowledge and feeling be consulted in the framing of such laws, and how she builds up a larger ideal of womanhood that will add dignity and worth to maternity by a recognition of her essential humanity.CHAPTER II.WOMAN BEFORE CIVILISATIONFeministwriters in the second half of the nineteenth century were often seduced by an interesting theory that all, or nearly all, nations in the simplest stage of political structure were ruled by their women. A learned Swiss jurist, Dr. Bachofen, thought he had discovered very generally among the tribes that linger at the threshold of civilisation a practice of tracing descent through the mother only, and concluded that this pointed to an earlier phase in which the mothers ruled the community. This theory of the matriarchate was, somewhat unfortunately, enlisted in the campaign for a revision of woman’s position. I say unfortunately because, if it were true that the rule of the women belonged almost wholly to a simpler and barbaric age, and was abandoned when tribes rose to civilisation, a demand for a return to the older order would not be free from ambiguity. A Nordau or a Carpenter may gird as he pleases at civilisation. Essentially it is a correction of the errors of infancy.It is, therefore, not to be deplored that modern ethnographers emphatically reject the theory of the matriarchate. “No sociologist nowadays believes Bachofen’s theory,” says Professor Westermarck. An occasional feminist writer still builds on the theory, but I find Westermarck’s statement in regard to the authorities justified.[2]It is quite true that in “a very considerable number of tribes” we find the habit of giving the mother’s name to the child, and tracing through her whatever inheritance there be of rank or property. But there are serious objections to seeing in these practices a lingering trace of a former matriarchal rule. In at least an equal number of cases more complete research has found the opposite practice of tracing kinship through the father. In many of the tribes, where the female line is observed, the man rules even the home. In all cases where the female line is followed it is just as natural, at least, to trace the practice to a primitive promiscuity and uncertainty of paternity as to feminine domination. That, indeed, is the inference of the great majority of modern ethnographers. Westermarck dissents from them on this point of promiscuity (and, within limits that I will indicate, I agree with him); but he just as firmly rejects the matriarchate. It is surely possible that in the childhood of the race the man’s share in the creation of children was unknown, and the child was the child of its mother.The evolution of woman has run on different lines than those suggested by Bachofen, and it is by no means easy to retrace them. The earliest phase, indeed, we have no hope of restoring with confidence. No authority now doubts that there have been human or semi-human beings on this planet for some hundreds of thousands of years, and that for the greater part of the time—that is to say, until near the end of the Old Stone Age—they were below the level of the existing savage. For my present purpose it matters little that we can only dimly perceive the outline of these early men and women in the thick mist of a remote past. With what evidence there is I happen to be well acquainted, but I will not enlarge on it. Those primitive humans certainly had no social or political structure, and so do not concern us. How the first social groups arose it is not agreed; but from the scattering of the early traces of men and from the habits of the larger apes I conclude (as Westermarck does) that the primitive humans wandered along the broad river-banks in family groups, and that larger communities arose later by the fusion or expansion of families. Probably enough there was a great deal of promiscuity when these communities were formed, and monandry would need to be developed afresh. Where there was this community of wives the practice of tracing descent through the mother would be inevitable. In any case, the origin of children would be a profound mystery to such lowly beings, and for ages the man’s fatherhood would be unknown.In the course of time (the New Stone Age) a higher race appears. It has more skilfully-made implements, rudimentary agriculture, weaving, and pottery, and tamed cattle. In these more advanced groups there was certainly some measure of social organisation, and it would be interesting to know if the control of it was to any extent divided between the sexes.To learn something of this phase of human development we turn to study the life of the lower races. Far away from the centres of civilisation, in the dense forests of Africa, in the remote islands of the Pacific, in the grim wastes of the Arctic, or in the extreme tips of the continents, we find survivors of the earlier phases of human development. The Australian was cut off from the stimulating contact of higher races a hundred thousand years ago or more. The Fuegians and the Veddahs, the Bushmans and some of the Central Africans, linger at about the same level. The Esquimaux have, in their deserts of ice, stereotyped the next chapter (the New Stone Age) in the story of humanity. Round the frontiers of old civilisations, like India and China, and in remote islands, we find other remnants of the infancy of the race. What can we learn from these fragments of prehistoric humanity about the lot of woman before civilisation began? Is there any general and consistent practice from which we may gather the story of woman’s evolution?It seems to me, after a careful survey of the voluminous details, that we may make this general statement: Wherever there is an approach to a social or political system, the control of it is in the hands of the men. They may in cases, where we may suspect special circumstances, consult their women on social issues (of trade, or migration, or war), but they are the rulers, and in most cases they take no account whatever of the women’s views. The woman quite commonly rules in the hut, but she is rarely represented in the council, and very rarely attains tribal power. The man generally hunts and fights (sometimes tills the fields and makes the clothes): the woman generally does all the work in or about the home, which is the greater part of the family’s work. In very many cases she is treated respectfully, and is quite equal to her husband in the home—it is not at all true that the lower races always, or nearly always, treat their women as cattle—but the fact remains that she is very rarely equal to him outside the home, in dealing with tribal issues.If, then, we are to see survivals of primitive customs in the ways of our lowest savages, it seems that this was the very general course of development in early times. Travellers differ so much in competence or in prejudice that one still finds important divergences in different ethnographic writers—the reader who would go more closely into it should compare Letourneau’sCondition de la femme(1903) and Westermarck’s more optimisticPosition of Woman in Early Civilisation(1904)—but the above is a fair summary of the accredited facts. It is, however, necessary to remark that we must not too readily regard the ways of savages as unchanged survivals from the infancy of humanity. Even where their material life remains at the level of the Old Stone Age, their customs may have been greatly modified, under the influence, for instance, of superstitious feelings. With that caution we may glance at the position of woman in existing tribes of savages, especially at the lowest grade, such as the Australian natives, the Fuegians, certain tribes of Central Africa, the Bushmans, and the wild Veddahs of Ceylon.The conflicting statements that are made in regard to the position of woman among the native Australians (of whom only some 20,000 now survive, with greatly altered habits) point to the fact that it differed very considerably in different tribes. It is, however, clear that she was everywhere the great worker of the clan, and nowhere admitted to the tribal councils. Her task it was to make the rude screen of bark that stood for the primitive house, to weave the baskets and the cords, and cook the food. Whether she was the common property of the clan, whether there were group-marriages and promiscuity, even the latest authorities differ. But in the vast majority of cases her lot was pitiable. Initiated to married life with brutal usage, evading child-bearing by such crude means as she had, working far more than the men, and never consulted in tribal affairs, she seems fairly entitled to the name of slave, which Westermarck would refuse her. If there were tribes in which the husband could not kill or cast her off without the sanction of the tribe, it was only a transfer of power from one man to a group of men. If there were tribes in which she had gentler treatment, and might rise to the height of bullying her husband, the general rule was that she bore most of the burden, and waited humbly like a dog for the remains of her husband’s meal.In Papua, New Guinea, and New Caledonia we seem to have a somewhat more advanced branch of the same primitive stock; but the position of woman does not improve. Here and there we find regions where the brutality has been modified; but, on the whole, the advance towards civilisation has imposed more work on her, and, by removing the comparative protection of the clan, made the husband more despotic than ever. Among the Fuegians and Veddahs, lingering in southern islands at the very lowest level of culture, her lot is less intolerable. They are monogamous, and have no tribal organisation whatever, so that the sexes come nearer equality. The Veddah girl puts her band round the waist of her lover, and the two then rear their family in isolation. The Yahgan girl (the most primitive of the Fuegians) chooses her mate and shares with him the scant and savage existence. There are no social issues for him to appropriate, and the comparative physical equality is her safeguard.Africa contains an enormous diversity of tribes, and the position of woman varies considerably in them. On the whole, it is true that the simpler the life, the nearer the sexes are to equality; but all generalisation is precarious. Letourneau says that for most of the blacks she is “a lower animal,” and the phrase cannot be greatly qualified. It is quite true that a Hottentot husband dare not take a drink of sour milk in his own house without his wife’s permission, under penalty of a fine, and he is often scolded by her; but it is the Hottentots who buy girls of ten or twelve to add to their harem, and expose them to death when they are prematurely worn. The less advanced Bushman treats his wife with more respect. The Monbuttu woman rules the home and practically owns its furniture. The Kaffir dare not touch his wife’s property, and in some tribes he even admits a woman (the chief’s mother) to the council. Among other tribes of East Central Africa, and among the Berbers and Bedouins of the north, she has fair respect and often influence. There is one happy region in which she may divorce him if he fails to sew her clothes. In Ashantee the king’s sisters could marry (and virtually enslave) whom they willed. In Dahomey the regiment of female warriors was the nerve of the army, and not far behind the males in consumption of alcohol; but they were not allowed to marry.Africa is a medley of tribes at different points on the upward march, but we may trace a consistency in the various customs. We must not say that women are treated as cattle because they bear all the burdens on the march. The men have to be free to hunt and to fight. Nor must we see a gleam of justice in tribes where the male tills the field and tends the cattle. He has a superstition that they would wither and die at the touch of women. Broadly speaking, the division of labour remains the same; and, what is more to our purpose, the moment tribal organisation arises, and social issues are to be treated, the man appropriates the power. If in one or two cases he admits a woman to his councils, it is a distinct and rare concession.When we turn to the lower races of Asia we find a result that surprises us in view of Hindoo and Chinese practice. In Polynesia women have a remarkable degree of independence. They may (in Hawaii and the Sandwich Islands) inherit feudal dignity and rule large districts with the same authority and respect as men. Not many years ago a Polynesian princess advertised in a Parisian journal for a cultivated European husband. In the Malay Archipelago the woman is practically equal to the man, and has influence on communal decisions. On the continent of Asia, too, her position is generally good. Among the Indo-Chinese races generally she has a power and respect that the later civilisations seem to have taken from her. The Shans of Burmah allow her to turn her husband away for drunkenness or other misconduct, and retain his property. Among the hill-tribes about India we find her in a good position. The Kondhs expect fidelity from the husband, but not from the wife. She is treated with great respect, has a good deal of influence on tribal affairs, and may leave her husband almost when she pleases. Among the Savaras she has the same liberty, and the simple Todas and the Bheels have a respect for their wives. Even among the isolated and backward tribes of the north (the Chukchis, Kamchadales, etc.) the women are well treated.It is curious to reflect that, precisely in the continent where civilisation is most stringent in its demand for the subjection of women, the lower races, which are presumed to indicate the earlier phase, are more liberal than in any other part of the world. But I will glance at the last group of lower races before entering upon explanations. The American group is pretty certainly an offshoot from the early Asiatics, and we may be surprised that the position of woman among the Indians is usually described as very low. In point of fact, there seems to be some exaggeration, and the situation is by no means uniform. Among the Seneca Indians the woman ruled the home to such a degree that she would order a lazy husband to roll up his blanket and depart. The Iroquois and Cherokees and others left the decision on an issue of peace or war to the women; but it should be added that the Indian woman was as fierce and vindictive as her husband, and would submit a captive to the most fiendish tortures. The Nootkas consulted their wives on trade matters, the Omahas gave them an equal social standing with men, and the Flatheads and other tribes treated them with some respect. Among the South American Indians the woman’s position was generally bad, and in many cases atrocious; indeed, Letourneau affirms that her tribal influence even in the north was more nominal than real, as the men concealed the more important issues.Among the Esquimaux, finally, her position is generally fair. Polygamy and polyandry are practised, and there is no marriage ceremony. But the men generally consult their wives in regard to bargains, and in many tribes allow her to rule the home. Among the eastern Esquimaux the women often disdain marriage and support themselves.From this general survey we may draw a few inferences in regard to the evolution of woman’s position. We must not look for a uniform development in all parts of the human race. Different circumstances would put a different economic and personal value on women, and this would necessarily affect the behaviour of the men. We seem, however, quite safe in tracing the general development. Where tribes approach nearest to the primitive family, and there is no communal organisation, the man and woman are nearest equality. Her maternal office naturally defines her sphere. The care of children keeps her in or near the home, and the industries that arise in or about it (agriculture, weaving, etc.) fall to her. The man, like the male animal, must wander afield to forage, hunt, and fight.In the course of time the family expands into the clan and tribe. The division of labour continues in regard to the home, but there are now interests of the community as such to be considered, and on these the welfare of all may depend. It is generally true that this elementary political life fell naturally to the men. The issues were predominantly questions of war or migration, and they came within the men’s sphere of work. And when the republican council gives way to the rule of chief or prince, the government remains essentially masculine. The ruler must be, above all, a warrior. Here and there the women may force or cajole their way into the council, or receive the flattery of consultation; but the work to be discussed is predominantly men’s work. Where a woman develops the ferocity of the man, as among the Red Indians and (to some extent) the Ethiopians, or where war is all but unknown (as among the Esquimaux), it is natural for her to be consulted. Where she is entrusted with the agriculture, as an occupation about the home, she may have influence as co-producer; though this is not a general rule. But the cases in which she shares the primitive political power as a right are insignificant in number, and in the vast majority of tribes she has no influence on it. Her exclusion implies no conscious despotism or injustice. It is merely that the enterprises to come before the tribal council are almost entirely enterprises that themenmust carry out; and the formal councils have grown insensibly out of informal consultations about their work among the men, in which she would naturally have no part.Hence it is that when nations come into the light of history we generally find the political power in the hands of the men, and the women subject to laws they have not made and authority they have not chosen. Religion—a male priesthood—lends its sanction to the ancient usage, and the very remoteness and obscurity of its origin invest it with authority. Men learn to enjoy the monopoly of power, and use their strength to maintain it. The primitive equality of the sexes disappears. If for ages men select the more submissive mates and discard the more self-assertive, the character of woman will be slowly modified, and the sexes will diverge more and more. And thus, as Chinese, Hindoos, Greeks, Romans, Celts, and Teutons advance into the light of history, we find the familiar types of the gentle, industrious, submissive wife and the aggressive, adventurous, masterful husband. The woman may be respected, may even be consulted, but the home is her realm and the state her husband’s.CHAPTER III.WOMAN IN ANCIENT EGYPT AND ASSYRIAItmay seem strange that, if this has been the general course of development, the first civilised nation to which we turn does not bear the features that it would lead us to expect. Egypt, the first and most enduring of civilisations, has a proud page in the calendar of womanhood. In no other nation, until quite recent times, has woman enjoyed so much power and prestige. Indeed, the development of woman’s position in Egypt is in some respects the reverse of what we shall find to be the general rule. There seems to have been no heritage of subjection from a barbaric past, but from the first we discover woman in a position of honour and influence. Through the long ages of Egypt’s power she retains that position, and she finally loses it at the very stage of incipient decay at which the women of other civilisations are beginning to obtain it.We need not pause to point the moral for those who think that “the subordination of women is invariably one of the prices of empire”; but we may recall our warning that there has been no uniformity in the separate national lines of human development. At the lowest levels of culture men and women are physically, mentally, and morally equal. There are, however, differences that contain the germ of the future divergence. The tie of the children makes the woman, like the female animal in her shorter motherhood, economically dependent on the male. As he grows in wisdom or astuteness, he will perceive and abuse it. Moreover, though sex functions as such lay little disability on the woman at that level of culture, the difference of their work has led to a difference in the nature of their powers. The man, accustomed to hunt and fight, works in spasms of energy, and can exert his stored force with greater effect on occasion. The woman works continuously and less violently. It may be added, too, that she has inherited an instinct of passivity in love: the male an instinct of active search and conquest—an instinct curiously embodied in the ovum and the sperm-cell.In all this we have a clear promise of the later development; and when the political structure evolves in the way I have indicated, and the control quite naturally falls to the men, the real wonder is that there were ever any approaches to a matriarchate at all. But many circumstances may influence the natural course of development; and it is sometimes forgotten that these circumstances may have passed away long before the race or tribe comes to our knowledge. Yet the effect on woman’s position may remain, in people so tenacious of traditions. I have described many such circumstances, and need add here only the possibility of a distinctly moral or humane development on the point of the treatment of woman in some tribes. There are plenty of instances of the development among lowly tribes of one or other virtue (say veracity among the Khonds, or pacificness among the Esquimaux) above the European level.We are, therefore, quite prepared to find exceptions to the general rule that, as races civilise and pass into the light of history, woman will be found subordinate. At the same time, we must, for the purpose of this inquiry, bear clearly in mind the distinction between power and respect in the home, or in social life generally, and influence in the political administration. Even in works that profess to deal with woman’s political development this is not always done. Possibly, if we bear that distinction in mind, we may find it necessary to modify a prevailing impression in regard to ancient Egypt.The golden age of the women of Egypt comes comparatively late (about 1500 B.C.) in the history of that remarkable nation; but all the records tend to show that her position was one of relative ease and dignity from the beginning of the dynastic race. Between 8000 and 5000 B.C. we find broken traces of a long struggle for the Nile delta between tribes (apparently) from the African east and the Asiatic west. About 5000 B.C. a powerful, civilised race enters the arena, conquers the land, and founds the Egyptian people that we know so well. Where they came from is still a matter of conjecture, but there is good reason to believe that they brought their early civilisation from some part of southern Arabia. We must suppose that they came from one of those tribes, still plentiful enough in the north of Africa and the south of Asia, in which women held a good position. Even to-day we find tribes side by side in the African desert (such as the Tuaregs and the Bedouins) who hold a radically different attitude towards their women. This must have been the case with the great variety of tribes that were found in the region of Persia, Syria, and Arabia thousands of years before Christ. From one tribe came the Jews, whose attitude to woman has had so baneful an influence on her history. From another came the ancestors of the Egyptians of the historic period.From the moment when the remains become sufficient to afford a full picture of Egyptian life we find the position of woman good.[3]It has, however, been described so often that a slight summary will suffice here. “The Egyptian woman of the lower and middle class,” says Maspéro, “was more respected and independent than any other woman in the world.” In no class of the community was there a trace of the dominating tendency of the male, and the resultant family life seems to have been of the happiest. In the poorer class the girl ran nude with her brothers until the age of puberty, and then put on the light and close linen smock from the breasts to the ankles. About fifteen she married, and began to rear the large family and live the busy day of her class. Her husband had heavy tasks to perform, under feudal pressure, and she and the children had often to help him to escape the bastinado by sharing his labour. In the little brick or mud hut, with its few stools and mats and utensils, she was mistress. Polygamy was allowed, but her husband was too poor to afford a second wife. She aged early under that merciless sun, but had the affection of husband and respect of children to the end. The children were her children, and took her name; and on the great religious festivals she would grease her hair, and don her sandals and bracelets and better robe, to catch the rare hour of joy like her partner in life—possibly enough, her own brother.When we rise to the easier class we find that woman has even greater independence. For the greater part of Egyptian history there was no private ownership of property for the mass of the people. The king, nobles, and priests had thedominium eminensof the land, and only such things as jewels and furniture could be held privately. But such inheritance as there was passed through the mother, and she had so high a position in the home that Egyptologists speak of the husband as “a privileged guest.” In theory her husband was polygamous, or could bring in concubines; but she made her stipulations before marriage, and suffered little in that respect. She had her own house and her own slaves, and complete liberty to go about and receive visitors, in her robes of finest linen. In the country she and the children accompanied the husband when he went out to hunt or fish. And if a young woman aspired to something more than domestic work, she might become one of the many women assistants in the cult of the great female goddesses of her country.People of the twentieth century, with no historical knowledge, are apt to wonder that so much is made of this, and fancy it is only a bright picture in contrast to the Greek or Roman civilisations. In point of fact, it is only in recent years that an English woman has had an equal social liberty; even now she has not so high a prestige in the home, and certainly not the same position in regard to inheritance and property. But our chief concern is with woman’s political development, and we must see how she stood in this respect in ancient Egypt.As the political system of Egypt was an absolute and sacred autocracy, there was no political power whatever for the middle and lower classes, and so woman had in this no disadvantage as compared with man. Above the whole of the people were the castes of priests and feudal nobles, and high above these the monarch. Before him, as “son of the Sun,” even the greatest nobles bowed in theatrical awe, and shielded their eyes from his burning rays. And here we find that, as I predicted, Egypt is by no means an exception to the general law, that, as nations come into the light of history, the control of the corporate life is always in the hands of the men. It is not without meaning that Egyptian statues of couples make the woman smaller than the man, or standing behind the man. They had nothing like the so common conception of her as an inferior being; but they did assuredly hold that she was unfitted for the three supreme things in their system—the priesthood, the army, and royalty.The priestly caste she could merely penetrate as special minister of certain goddesses; she never wielded its power. In the order of nobles she had more opportunity. She could govern the feudal province in the husband’s absence, and even after his death; but it remains true that this is only a vicarious and exceptional assumption of man’s office. And this is to be said, with little alteration, of the royal power. The queen was with the king when he drove in his flowing linen robes and red-striped head-dress to the temple, and when he sat in the gallery to receive his subjects; but she was at a lower level, or behind him, and she had no voice in the council of nobles that he sometimes summoned. She could rule in his place if he went on a long journey, and she could even remain on the throne, and rule alone, when he died. A few women have left their names as rulers. The daughter of Amenhotep, especially, is always noted as a powerful and useful ruler of Egypt for fifteen years. It is not so often noted that she had herself depicted on the monuments as a man, and that her legal position was probably that of regent. Royalty was, in Egyptian eyes, a man’s office. There was not the least pretence of equality in succeeding to it.The brightness of woman’s social position in Egypt must not, therefore, blind us to the fact that she was normally excluded from higher power, and rarely reached any share of it. However, as this power was confined to one man, with tributary power among a few other men, no one can draw any moral for our democratic age. Let us rather see how woman lost her position of equality in the people at large.Before the Egyptian woman sank to a position of inferiority she seems, for some centuries, to have risen higher than ever. At about the beginning of the sixteenth century B.C. the rigid frame of Egyptian civilisation began to relax. Amenhotep instituted private ownership of landed property and the use of legal contracts. One consequence was that the middle class began to amass wealth and win power from the priests and nobles; another consequence was that women also used their privileged position to acquire wealth. As time goes on the marriage-contracts show a painfully commercial spirit. The woman not only stipulates that there shall be no rival, but she fixes the fines for her husband’s misdeeds and obtains more and more of his property.As the general character and power of the nation were now rapidly deteriorating—the rigidity of the old system proving incapable of adaptation to the changed conditions—we can easily see what this would lead to. The land was torn with political dissension; avarice, vice, and sensuality displaced the sobriety of the older people. The kings slunk in their harems, and for a century or more the priests ruled, even marrying the princesses. Woman was still in her privileged position, but the decay went on, with flashes of revival, until 650 B.C. Ethiopians and Assyrians had overrun the land, but a powerful ruler arose in 650. Among other improvements he developed the commerce of Egypt, and this led to the beginning of woman’s downfall.To the north of Egypt, across the Mediterranean, a race had grown to civilisation that had a very different tradition in regard to the treatment of its women. The Greek held his wife in subjection, and when his commercial affairs brought him into Egypt he could not but express his astonishment at the way in which men were ruled by their weaker wives. By this time, the contracts show, women were pressing too far with their marriage-stipulations and their property. One writer makes the last grievance of the men consist in the fact that they had to borrow money from their wives at exorbitant interest. At all events, the decay of Egypt set in once more after 530 B.C., and the Greek ideas grew more familiar. The fine old Egyptian ideal of equality took long to die, but at last a Greek ruler came to the throne and made an end of it. He passed a law that no woman could part with property except by the consent of her husband, and substituted the father for the mother in inheritance. She sank slowly into a condition of economic dependence; and the downtrodden slave of the fellah of modern Egypt, or the veiled and imprisoned wife of the merchant, are no less eloquent ruins of the old civilisation than are the pyramids of Gizeh.* * * * * *When we turn to the second great civilisation, whose history we can trace to nearly 5,000 years before Christ, we find that neither was the rise so high, nor the fall so low. Somewhere before 4500 B.C. we get our first glimpse of the pioneers of civilisation on the Babylonian plain. A strange people, with language and ways more akin to Chinese or Turks than to the surrounding Semites, descends into the valley, and founds the cities that went before Babylon and Nineveh. It is useless to inquire into the position of woman among these Sumerians or Akkadians. By 4500 B.C. the Semites from the Syrian highlands (some say from Arabia) mingle with them, and a mixed civilisation rises. Many authorities think the older race had the maternal type of family, and that the Semites modified the woman’s position.However that may be, woman enjoyed an independence in ancient Assyria only second to that of the Egyptian and Ethiopian women. The wife of the worker had the same busy round of labour, the same freedom to roam the streets unveiled for her purchases of fish and vegetables. In the law-courts men and women were, as in Egypt, on a perfectly equal footing. The recently discovered Hammurabi Code (dating back to more than 2000 B.C.) contains many remarkable provisions, in the most striking moral contrast to the Hebrew code. There are whole pages regulating the relations of men and women with a general sense of justice that has no parallel in legislation until the most recent times—if even now.There was not, however, the perfect social equality of Egypt, and as we pass to the higher classes we get indications of male domination. The woman of the lower-middle class had an excellent position. While her few slaves attended to the work in the rooms that opened on the central court, she chatted from the flat roof with her neighbour on the adjoining roof, and she moved freely about in the heavy embroidered garments that the Assyrians wore. She had brought a dowry to her husband, and kept control of it or increased it, with perfect freedom to trade. In the imperishable clay tablets that still recall the business-world of Babylon and Nineveh we find married women very commonly interested in trade or industry. The wealthier women, with large dowries, should, on the face of the matter, have great independence, but it seems that some restraint was imposed on them. They spent most of their time in the elaborate luxury of their houses, and, if they ventured out, it was only with the accompaniment of a troop of slaves and eunuchs. Ladies of higher rank were even more restricted, and the queens never went out.We find, then, in ancient Mesopotamia that woman generally had no sex disabilities. In some clauses relating to divorce and unfaithfulness we find the inevitable advantage of the male, but in practice the woman had little to complain of. As in Egypt, the political system was a sacred and absolute monarchy, so that neither men nor women had any control, or any idea of aspiring to it. Queens could occupy the throne. Semiramis is probably a mythic personage; but a Babylonian princess, Sammuramat, ruled at Nineveh (whose king she had married) about 800 B.C. with great success. Once more, however, this was exceptional and vicarious. Political power was in the hands of men—the king and his council of nobles; and over all the community again were the castes of warriors and priests, though the latter body could be penetrated by women to some extent, owing to the immense popularity of the goddess Ishtar.[4]To sum up, therefore, in regard to Egypt and Assyria, we must say that they were civilisations in which no one can with propriety talk of the “subordination of women”; yet they were two of the most powerful, and certainly two of the most enduring, empires the world has ever seen. We may take Maspéro’s statement that in Assyria “woman was equal, or nearly equal, to man”; in Egypt she was even nearer to perfect equality. There was no struggle of the sexes in Assyria; and the remarkably good legal position, commercial activity, and general independence of the women “in no way affected the womanly character of their duties,” as Dr. Reich is forced to admit. Assyria did not mount to greatness by the subordination of woman, nor did it lose its greatness by, or during, any revolt of its women. Egypt, also, grew to greatness without any shade of subordination of woman; and, although in this case the curtain falls on a discontented and embittered womankind, it was because the men positively robbed them of their 5,000-year-old rights. If there were any logic in the fallacy of the anti-feminist historians, we should have to say in this case that the equality of woman was the price of Egypt’s empire, and the destruction of that equality the cause of its downfall; but we may leave fallacies to those with a poorer case.Egypt and Assyria were exceptional in that they did not live long enough to hear and consider the cry of democracy. The power remained to the end in the hands of a heaven-sent king. They fall into line with my general statement that in all early civilisations the power is in the hands of men. But as they never passed the stage of absolute monarchy, and no struggle in the least resembling the modern contest ever set in, we must go on to later empires for the second phase of woman’s political evolution.CHAPTER IV.WOMAN IN ANCIENT GREECEItis not necessary, and it would be much more difficult, to make a minute inquiry into the other civilisations that sprang up, before the Christian era, in that remarkable tract of Asia that lies between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. Their lesser power and shorter life have left them in the shade of the greatness of Egypt and Assyria. One only of them was destined, in an indirect way, to have a momentous influence on woman’s position in civilisation; but it will be convenient to notice the Jews when their ideas are embodied in Christianity and begin to mould Europe. There was a striking lack of uniformity in the various tribes that were struggling upward in that western offshoot of Asia. The Phenicians are (somewhat precariously) linked with the Egyptians, but do not seem to have granted their women anything like the same independence. The Sumerians (or oldest Babylonians) are connected with the Mongols, yet gave woman an excellent position. The Jews were Semites, like the later Babylonians, yet began an ominous tradition of contempt for woman.Only one of these West-Asiatic civilisations is known to us with any fulness; but this also was monarchical, and neither men nor women (save the privileged few) had any political power. Ancient Persia was the fourth world-power to issue from the chaos of tribes and build on the ruins of its predecessors. If we trust the Greek writers, the position of woman in Persia varied very considerably. It is suggested that she was oppressed in the western parts, where the religion of Zoroaster had less influence, and respected in the eastern. The poorer women had the liberty that their poverty generally entails, but the women of the wealthier had enclosed chambers and guarding eunuchs. The monarchs and princes had large harems, and their women at times won the irregular and blood-stained power that the system often gives them. The Persian sacred book, the Avesta, contains the best feeling of the country. A man must have the woman’s consent to marriage, must respect her after marriage, and must only in an exceptional case take a second wife; butherduty is to obey, and she is treated with the usual unfairness in regard to divorce and misconduct.The short sway of Persia, however, soon fell before invaders from Europe, who bring us to the interesting story of woman’s position in Greece. Here we at once enter an atmosphere much nearer to our own than that of the older civilisations, and the tendency to see parallels and to draw morals becomes very strong. With the general statement that woman was emphatically subordinated to man in the chief centre of Greek civilisation, at Athens, and that there arose in time a contest of feminists and anti-feminists to which we may liken our familiar struggle, all are now familiar. But we must trace the evolution of woman’s position with some care, if we are to understand it aright.Letourneau (La condition de la femme) and Otto Henne am Rhyn (Das Frau in der Kulturgeschichte) have collected many indications that woman had a better position at the beginning of Greek civilisation. Polygamy was generally abolished at an early date, and the mother seems at first to have occupied the central place in the family, as in Egypt. An old legend, preserved in later writers, represented that the women had originally the right to vote in the Council, like the men, and that, because they outvoted the men and gave a feminine name to Athens, the jealous male god, Poseidon, intervened, and the vote was taken from them. From these and other obscure traces we may gather that woman was not so “subordinate” when Greece was climbing to power. Letourneau, who observes that early Greek patriotism should rather be called “matriotism,” gives the best suggestion of the way in which they lost influence. As private property and its value increased, the men shifted the line of inheritance from mother to father, and woman fell into economic dependence, with all its consequences. A clearer realisation of the father’s part in the children aided this. In time the mother is slighted as being merely the soil that passively nurtures the seed. The father is the creator.I lay no stress on the abundance of female deities in the early Greek mythology. Westermarck points out that the presence of goddesses has not the significance that Reich and others ascribe to it, because we do not find woman’s position varying with the number or importance of female deities. That is so; though, perhaps, there was more correspondence between the two when the myths were originally framed. But it seems to me that, as divine families were always given human complexions, they were bound to have wife and daughter goddesses, whatever woman’s position in the tribe was.Religion apart, then, there is sufficient evidence that the Greeks began their career with woman in a fair position, though with the political power, as everywhere, in the hands of the men. By the golden age women were not only rigidly excluded from public life, but were thrust to a lower social level, and treated bitterly and contemptuously in literature. This, it must be remembered, is mainly true of Athens. In the kingdom of Sparta women had ample freedom and great respect, and in the outlying parts of Greece their position was much better than at Athens. But the chief interest remains in the fact that at Athens, with its intense public life, its thorough democracy, its high mental and moral culture, the position of woman was one of subordination.A recent French writer, G. Notor, has given us a fine work (La femme dans l’antiquité Grecque, 1901), in which he essays to vindicate the honour of Greece. He points out that, if the Ionians restricted and calumniated woman, the Dorians and Æolians treated her with much more consideration. He also reminds us, as is usual, of the fine types of womanhood portrayed in the Homeric poems and the comparatively good position they occupied. One must remember, however, that the Homeric poems depict the small class of the wives of chiefs and princes; and the glimpses we get of the lower women are not attractive. In any case, the Homeric portraits belong to the earlier and better phase, when an Andromache was assuredly respected. In regard to the Athenian woman, M. Notor can only correct the more exaggerated notions about her position. Miss Mason (Woman in the Golden Ages, 1901) writes that the lot of the Greek woman was “bare and cheerless, without even the sympathy that tempers the hardest fate.”That is much too dark a picture of her condition. Of the two greatest writers of Greece, Aristotle wrote of woman in terms no harder than, and no different from, those of modern moralists like Ruskin or Frederic Harrison; while Plato has not an equal in modern Europe in his championship of her capacity and her rights.As it was, her life was by no means “cheerless.” Until she approached the age of marriage (generally about her twentieth year) an Athenian girl had plenty of freedom and enjoyment. She was not, as in the colonies, educated with her brother at the public expense, nor did she enter the gymnastic schools, as in Sparta. But with the incessant cultivation of music and dance, and with the frequent spectacle of the great religious processions to the Acropolis and the temples, her life did not lack colour or gaiety. After marriage she was restricted to thegynecæum, or women’s quarters. One must not, however, imagine that this meant the grim dulness that inclusion in a modern house would suggest. The seclusion was not so rigid but that the women could visit each other; and when the long hours had passed in the beautiful sun-lit court, with its flowered terraces and marble fountains, or in chatting with her slaves or friends over her embroidery, the day would close with the music and dance of which the Greek woman was passionately fond. She had, too, the occasional distraction of witnessing the great religious solemnities, or of going to the theatre carved in the flank of the hill. Few large gatherings of Athenians, except the crowds that roared at the comedy or seethed round thebema, were not lit up by the presence of their beautiful ladies in their gay silk robes and golden sandals. And at longer intervals there broke on the monotony of their lives the greater thrill of a pilgrimage, or the journey to the Olympic games.This was the normal tenure of life for the wife of the well-to-do Athenian. The wives of the poor went, of course, freely about their shopping, and as time went on even the wealthier women took more part in public entertainments. That the tragedians Sophocles and Euripides (of unhappy matrimonial experience) spoke bitterly of them, and that the comic poets Aristophanes and Menander satirised them, is quite true; but the common inference, that they express a contempt for women more offensive or more widespread at Athens than in recent England, is quite wrong. Their gibes and strictures really show that the conscience of Athens was pricked at the injustice and irrationality of its system, that a feminist movement was felt, and that conservatives were struggling against it with their customary exaggeration, and humorists making trade of it, as they do to-day.This movement for reform began as soon as the material struggle for establishment was over, and the culture of Athens opened its splendour. Long before the age of Pericles and Pheidias the women of Athens were stirred with a breath of ambition from the eastern isles. The women of Æolia had, as I said, more freedom and education; and Athenians might have reflected, when they made their strictures on woman’s intelligence, that where, among their own kin, the artificial restriction was not imposed women quickly proved their capacity for art and letters. Of the voluminous work of Sappho we have scant remnants, but those resplendent fragments are enough to justify her title as one of the greatest lyric poets of all time. Athenians seem to have evaded the moral by loading her memory with calumnies about her life and death, which many modern writers are unwilling to accept. In her time Sappho had about her a number of able, but less brilliant, women writers, and pupils came from all parts of the Greek world to feel the glow of the new-lit fire. There are reasons for thinking that Sappho went beyond literary ambition, and was exiled for interfering in some political trouble. However, the stifling atmosphere of Persia came over the eastern Greek world, and the fire dwindled and died.The Lesbian movement must have been felt in Athens, and other changes were now helping to show the absurdity of the system of restriction. One of these was the rise of the class ofhetæræand the freedom with which even great Athenians consorted with the higher members of the class. The ideal of the men of Athens, to marry wives solely for the purpose of rearing families and to confine themselves to males for comradeship, soon sank in the mud. Among the evils it brought about was the encouragement of prostitution on a large scale; and from the class was evolved a more select group, of very beautiful or very cultivated women, with whom even statesmen and philosophers were intimate. While wives and daughters found what pleasure they could in the home, the men flocked to the houses of courtesans to discuss the subjects their less educated wives could not discuss, or sought the perfumed chambers where the wine and flute and dance made the blood run swifter. The injustice and absurdity of such a social division cannot long have escaped the wit of Athens. Aspasia, the most famous of thehetæræ, was a standing rebuke to the Greek ideal of woman, and it is not improbable that it was her attacks on it that led the Athenians to put her on trial.It is therefore not surprising that, as culture grew, the partition began to give way. From the time when Greek thinkers turned from natural to moral philosophy we find them slighting the current ideal. Most of the leaders of the schools freely included women among their pupils and prominent disciples. Pythagoras, the austere and mystic early thinker, had a high regard for Perictione, and his wife maintained the school after his death. Socrates showed the same regard for Diotima and other ladies, and Crates encouraged his wife Hipparchia to think. Epicurus—who was not the hedonist so many imagine, but a sober, almost ascetic, teacher—opened his quiet garden in the vicinity of Athens, and offered his modest cakes and water, to men and women alike. No doubt, we must see in all this only an admission of woman’s equal capacity for culture and demand for social equality; but the satires of Aristophanes show that there was also a strong claim for political equality, and some of the great writers expressly consider it.Xenophon and Aristotle were politely conservative. Their words are sometimes quoted as illustrations of the Athenian disdain for women; but there is no contempt whatever in their reference to the obvious fact that the Greek woman, restricted in education and interests for centuries, was less competent for public life than her husband. Indeed, Aristotle would have deprived most of the husbands of their vote, if it could have been done. It is something that he granted woman a title to respect and fidelity; that is as much as Carlyle, or Comte, or Ruskin, or even Harrison, has done.But Plato, the greatest of all the Greeks, redeems the culture of his race. He saw plainly—what we might have expected the more scientific Aristotle to see—that woman’s frailer power of reasoning was simply due to her education. He insisted on the inherent equality of the sexes. Professor Westermarck quotes Plato as saying that “the female sex is inferior to the male,” and represents him as an opponent. But, in putting this phrase into the mouth of Socrates, Plato is merely leading up to the satirical conclusion that we ought, therefore, to impose our laws on men only, and not on women, and he presently adds: “The same education which makes a man a good guardian [governor] will make a woman a good guardian, for their original nature is the same.”[5]There are differences between men and women, but he says that these differences no more affect the capacity for public work than the question whether a cobbler is bald or hairy affects his fitness for mending sandals. He will not even reserve military duties to men, so solid is his conviction of woman’s capacity. In a word, one of the greatest thinkers of Greece, and most treasured writers in all literature, is the most advanced feminist that ever existed.What the influence of such an advocate might have been, had Greece lived, we may well surmise, but decay had already set in. The heavy hand of the conqueror fell on the enfeebled frame of Athens, and the great spirit slowly sank. One of its latest thinkers and moralists was Epicurus, who preached no subordination of woman; but he bade both men and women turn from such political life as was left in Athens to the joy of friendship and culture. The last of the moralists, Plutarch (in the first century of the Christian era), held the complete moral and mental equality of the sexes. The time had gone by, however, to press for a solution of the problem of woman’s position. We find, indeed, a queen Olympias of Macedonia in 317 B.C., and a queen Agiatis of Sparta in 241 B.C., as we find the famous Cleopatra at Alexandria afterwards. They have little significance. Greece was dead. Its culture passed over, in diminished lustre, to Alexandria, and it is not a little interesting to find it ending there (in the fifth century) in the production of Hypatia—not the frail and credulous maiden whom Charles Kingsley has thought fit to offer us, but the aged, learned, powerful Hypatia of historical reality, the most respected and influential person in the civic as well as the intellectual life of Alexandria.In the meantime the struggle and the task of settlement had passed to another world-power. Rome had subdued and succeeded Greece; and, much as that practical nation resented the Greek subtlety and restlessness, it was destined to carry the evolution of woman’s position a long step further, before it in turn sank into the spacious tomb of old empires.Greece had run the normal course that I have traced for the earlier powers. In its pre-civilised stage its men and women seem to have stood on a common level, with the military rulers over all. As it advances from the gloom into the lit territory of history, we find that the men have asserted a crude supremacy in private as well as public life. In this Greece differed from Egypt and Assyria, and a proportionately keener struggle set in. We find many traces of that struggle from the moment when Greece reaches its height of culture; and the intense pre-occupation with moral problems, which begins with Socrates, culminates in the extraordinary feminism of Plato’sRepublic. The movement increases as culture rises. But decay has set in, from a variety of causes, and the problems of civilisation are cast on other shoulders. I do not suppose that even the most determined of anti-feminists will venture to connect the decay of Athens with the stirring of its women. The causes have been too often and too clearly traced. The cry of the Athenian feminists dies away because the frame of the superb city is palsied and beset. Another vigorous race fills the stage of the world, and we pass over to Italy for the next phase in the development of woman’s position.CHAPTER V.WOMAN IN ANCIENT ROMEThehistory of woman’s position in ancient Rome is one of the most interesting chapters in the entire story of her development. It affords the most conspicuous illustration of the law we have formulated—that nations generally come into the light of history with their women in subjection, and that the women rebel as conscience and culture prevail over tradition. There was a special reason why the subordination of woman soon fell under discussion at Rome. The culture of Greece had culminated in the establishment of a number of philosophical schools, which speculated on moral problems with complete freedom from the restraints that always hamper such speculation in religious bodies. One of the finest of these schools of morality, the Stoic system, was adopted by cultivated Romans, and eventually by the Emperors, and thus questions of social justice received earnest attention. The position of woman (as well as that of the slave, the child, and the feeble) secured in this way a consideration to which we can only find a parallel in quite recent times. How the promising development was broken off, and women had to wait 1,500 years for a re-consideration of their claims, we shall see presently.When the first uncertain light of history falls on the promontory of Italy, and on the vigorous nation that was building up one of the most powerful empires the world has ever seen, the women are subordinate, but not so harshly treated as at a later date. Letourneau finds a number of indications that the earlier Roman family was maternal in form (i.e., the children took the name of, and inherited through, the mother); but this does not imply anything like a matriarchate. Indeed, a curious marriage-rite that long survived at Rome, in which the husband parted the bride’s hair with the point of a spear, and the story of the rape of the Sabines, suggest an early practice of capturing wives—a practice that leads naturally to subordination.However that may be, when the Romans come at length within our clear knowledge, the woman is in a position of great subordination. The state-organisation is slight, and the father rules his house with a terrible despotism. From the absolute control of a father a young woman passes to the almost absolute control of her husband. The only difference is that he cannot sell her, as he may the slave or the child, and cannot pass judgment on her except in the presence of her male relatives. It seems, however, that, as Mommsen says, a public opinion had already grown that controlled this theoretic autocracy of the husband and father. The husband could and did dismiss her at his will, while she had no right of divorce; but the woman who was reconciled to the conditions was treated with respect and affection, received guests, went to the circus with her husband, and never suffered the seclusion of her Greek cousin. She could also bear witness or plead, when the courts of justice developed. A few instances of brutal treatment are preserved in the chronicles, but these were quite exceptional.This first phase of woman’s development in historical Rome lasted until about 200 B.C. I need not dwell on the familiar and splendid types of womanhood that stand out in the chronicles before that time. It is well known that character was finely developed in the early Romans. About the beginning of the second century before Christ, at the close of the long struggle with Carthage, the second phase in the development of the women (and of the race generally) set in. It is to be remembered that the Republic was still a comparatively small power. The great age of conquest, that would carry the eagles over the known earth, was to come long afterwards, and therefore, in the case of Rome, it is sheer historical untruth to represent the power as beginning to decay when the women began to assert themselves. Two hundred years before Christ conservative Romans greeted the woman-movement with all the dismal prophecies with which many greet it in our own time. Yet it was not until three centuries later that Rome reached the height of its power.The causes of the early agitation were varied, and can only be noted in summary here. The eastern culture that was flowing into Italian life was corroding the bases of the old standards and traditions. The native religion, with its divine model of a Roman family, was losing its influence, and disquieting new goddesses were gaining favour. In the year 204 B.C. the cult of the mysterious “mother of the gods” (Cybele) was imported, and soon the processions of its frenzied and repulsive devotees were among the familiar sights of even country villages. From Egypt came the more sober cult of Isis, another mother-goddess; and, in spite of what we later learn of assignations in the temples of Isis, it had in it something of the cold and chaste beauty of the moon which it symbolised, and won some of the finest women of Rome. From Persia came other religions, one of which (the Manichean) offered special activity to women.
WOMAN IN POLITICALEVOLUTIONBYJOSEPH McCABELONDON:WATTS & CO.,17, JOHNSON’S COURT, FLEET STREET, E.C.1909
Chap.I.Is the Subordination of Woman the Price of Empire?II.Woman Before CivilisationIII.Woman in Ancient Egypt and AssyriaIV.Woman in Ancient GreeceV.Woman in Ancient RomeVI.The Dark Age of FeminismVII.Renaissance and RevolutionVIII.The Struggle in the Nineteenth CenturyIX.The Moral Base of EnfranchisementFootnotes
Chap.I.Is the Subordination of Woman the Price of Empire?II.Woman Before CivilisationIII.Woman in Ancient Egypt and AssyriaIV.Woman in Ancient GreeceV.Woman in Ancient RomeVI.The Dark Age of FeminismVII.Renaissance and RevolutionVIII.The Struggle in the Nineteenth CenturyIX.The Moral Base of EnfranchisementFootnotes
Thedistinct aim which emboldened the author to add one more essay to the large class of works that deal with woman’s position throughout the ages was twofold. It seemed, in the first place, that there was a lack of connecting principle in the series of detached sketches that usually make up a work of the kind; that a continuous, panoramic view of human history would reveal such a principle, and one of very great importance for the proper appreciation of the present woman-movement. It has been possible to trace the action of a consistent law through all the historic spasms of feminist agitation, and to show that that law has reached a stage of final and irresistible pressure in our time. The underlying principles of the present movement are too rarely noticed, and a clear enunciation of them may contribute a little to the proper understanding of the struggle.
The second aim was to meet a serious concern that is expressed by thoughtful observers, when they note that the woman-movement is one of a score of agitations that ruffle the whole surface, and even stir the depths, of modern life. We have passed through a century of revolutions, yet we seem as far as ever from the peace that each one had promised to bring. Nations that had slept undisturbed through the political storms that shook Europe during three generations are now waking to revolt; classes that had witnessed the upheavals of the nineteenth century with dull indifference or shrinking apprehension now take up the world-cry of change with the energy of pioneers. The routine of daily life is distracted with the flash of a dozen new ideals. Placidity has fallen from the rank of virtues. What is the meaning of it all? What is likely to be the issue?
Those who read history shake their heads in concern. They say that they are familiar with the symptoms, and can recognise the malady. Through such spluttering of energy and iridescence of dreams every great nation passed as it neared the end. Such scenes were witnessed, and just such cries were heard, in the marble porticoes of Greece when its glorious life began to sink. The same cries rang through theforaof Imperial Rome, and were heard again in thepiasseof medieval Italy, when the long-drawn shadows fell on their exhausted citizens. Do not nations run the cycle of birth and lusty manhood and decay, like individuals? And is not this restlessness the familiar token that the heart is slowing down and the frame failing to control the worn and hypersensitive nerves? Do not the fevered dreams, the ceaseless irritation, the rebellion of parts that had served so well in silence, warn us that the dissolution, of which we have read so often, is setting in? Can we do other than knit the frame close in its old fabric, repress the impatient elements, and close our eyes resolutely to the disordered dreams?
In this light many regard the agitation for a revision of woman’s place in the social order. “The subordination of woman is invariably one of the prices of Empire,” says Dr. Emil Reich, who has lately set out to correct ourchinoiserie d’idéeswith the breadth of his historical lore. The British or the German Empire grew to its height when—if we can forget Elizabeth—woman tended the cradle and the home, while man wrought its industries, shaped its policy, and bore its defence. With the same sharing of labour among their men and women all earlier empires had grown to power, and it was only in the years of decay that woman impatiently clamoured for an enlargement of her sphere. This agitation, they conclude, is the mere play of distempered nerves in an enfeebled system. It must be cured by a sermon on self-sacrifice, a return to virility, a stern refusal of the demand in the interest of the race. They who listen to it cannot have scanned the memorial pages in which history has written the fate of even greater empires than ours.
I propose to show that this conservative attitude is inspired by an entirely false reading of history. True it is that the recent course of woman’s development recalls a drama that has been played on the planet’s stage time after time. In the first act we have the “womanly woman,” absorbed in the cradle and the distaff, clothed in quiet matronly virtues, content to hear news of the great world without from her stronger mate. In the second act new and disturbing types come on, women impatient of child-bearing, women that chafe at the barriers and cry for freedom and justice, women that would go out with man into the battle of life. The third act—the act in which men begin to listen—has so constantly ended in tragedy that many confidently look for the same issue now, if we dally with the demands of the women as those others did. It is a plausible anxiety, yet it arises solely from a superficial and perverse reading of history.
In the first place, this assumption that nations run through a life-curve like individuals needs serious qualification. There is no inner law that nations shall be born and die, like the men and women who compose them. To the student of science or history a law is but a description of the way in which things have invariably acted, and will presumably act again in the same circumstances. But the circumstances in this case are the same no longer. The conditions of national existence are radically different from what they were when the procession of great empires passed over the stage of the world. Then, almost invariably, the situation was that one virile race entrenched itself in a strong capital and flung out its frontiers on every side, while smaller races watched on the bracing hills all round for the softness of muscle that city-life and parasitic habits would bring. Nerve and brain mattered far less in those days of heavy arms and armour. When you shortened your spear and lightened your shield, the vigorous barbarian knew that his hour had come; the frontier-walls crumbled under his pressure, and he took over the heritage of civilisation. That situation has passed away for ever. There is not one world-power to-day, with a chafing surge of barbarians beating on its shores, but a dozen great nations, and a new thing in the world that we call the balance of power. Softness of muscle is of less account, as a regiment of city clerks can annihilate an army of barbarians. Victory goes to intelligence and nerve. A nation may die still, but assuredly there is no inner law demanding that it must. That impressive march across the stage of Babylon, Assyria, Egypt, Persia, Ethiopia, Greece, Rome, and Venice gives no precedent for our time.
Further, even if a modern nation die, the cry of its women will not perish with it, as in those older days. I do not for a moment forget that the balance may be disturbed, and the flood of war devastate a modern kingdom, at any time; or that, if the lips of our guns were sealed and the red rain stopped for ever, commercial rivalry might bring a flagging race to ruin. That is quite possible; but the truth is that every one of these rival nations has the same agitation in its midst. No nation whose women have not yet stirred at the cry of reform has the remotest chance of rising to power. The cry is strong in Japan to-day, and will be heard in China to-morrow. It has loud and eloquent utterance in Russia, Italy, and Spain, and it will assuredly pass on to a renovated Turkey and Persia. Whatever powers rise or fall, civilisation cannot die again, and it is civilisation that faces the demand for change to-day. The cry died away on the lips of the women of Greece and Rome and medieval Italy because their civilisation perished, and a power rose on its ruins that had not yet reached the same height of culture. That, assuredly, will never happen again.
If this is so—and, apart from a few yellow-peril fanatics, I know of no serious observer who doubts it—the comparison of the modern woman-movement with those of former times must lead to a very different conclusion from that of our superficial historical critics. England, or the greatness of England, may die, but this agitation is not a symptom, good or bad, of England’s life alone. It is not a special feature of the life of Germany, or the United States, or any nation. It is a general feature of civilisation, and civilisation will never again evade the settlement of its moral problems by dying. Culture will go on, and the demand grows with culture. We cannot possibly see a third act to the drama as it was played on the earlier stage of history. There will be no fall of the curtain now on an unsolved problem.
The fallacy of those, like Dr. Reich, who read the story otherwise is the familiar historical mistake of regarding things as connected because they chanced to occur at the same time. We may allow that men were stronger at the time when women were subject; but it is a poor fallacy to forget that the men then had a fresh heritage of strength from barbaric days, as yet untouched by luxury, and to assign their triumph in any measure to the silence of their women. We may grant that the rebellion of the women generally came when the nation was nearing decay; but, again, it is a poor fallacy to erect this coincidence into a principle. The truth is that the revolt of the women in earlier civilisations coincided with two things—with a high state of culture and with a beginning of decay; and an unprejudiced study of the agitation in any era will show plainly that it was due to the former, and merely coincided with the latter. It sprang from the culture, the social conscience, the strength—not the weakness—of a nation. It was an ironic feature of the older world that high and general culture and the triumph of justice over ancient conventions were only reached when death was approaching. The new order promises a totally different development, because all nations of power are at the same stage of culture. And in our own day the movement is due quite unmistakably to the renascence of culture and the advance of moral principle.
Civilisation has now to face the problem candidly, and settle it. The agitation is no bubble rising out of the effervescence of the time, to burst, like a score of others that shone in the sun for a moment, and give place to new. It is an essential element in the evolution of culture. No nation ever reached the point of culture that we have reached but its women rose with a moral challenge of the justice of their position. Every nation had inherited from its barbaric ancestry the practice of excluding women from the corporate life, and there was good ground to demand a reconsideration of the practice when the sense of social justice developed. To regard the demand of our women as due to a temporary fit of nerves is to ignore one of the most salient features of the course of human history. Wherever civilisation grew out of barbarism the demand arose; it died away only because a fresh barbarism broke the thread of civilisation. As that thread will never more be broken, the demand will increase with our culture, and it can afford to smile at these fallacious lessons or warnings from a widely different past. When, in addition, we consider the development of political life itself, when we see that it concerns itself increasingly with the affairs of women in a way that it never did before, we are forced to admit that the demand for a reconsideration of woman’s position has a solid base in the actual evolution of life.
I propose, therefore, to run rapidly over the known phases of human development, and show how the attitude of women has varied in proportion to the growth of enlightenment and moral feeling. We will catch what glimpse we can of the first human pair that wandered over a strange earth in the faintest dawn of humanity. We will learn, from races that have lingered in primitive ways for untold ages, how, as the family grew into the race (or the rough social group into the clan),[1]the issues of the corporate life were naturally appropriated by the men. We will see how, as savagery rises to barbarism, as the social life grows larger and more varied, the warriors and their chief keep control of it, save where some exceptional circumstance disposes them to take account of the woman’s will. We shall find the woman still patient and laborious in the early years of civilisation, and will note how, as the corporate life begins to look to other things than the mere defence of the State, as social construction is studied, the woman, awakened by the light of culture that breaks through the narrow windows of her home, comes forth to claim her share in the control of that larger national life, with which she must prosper or suffer no less than the man. We shall see how the division of labour handed down from the barbaric ages breaks down, how the law comes to invade every corner of the little territory in which she had held sway, how she demands that her knowledge and feeling be consulted in the framing of such laws, and how she builds up a larger ideal of womanhood that will add dignity and worth to maternity by a recognition of her essential humanity.
Feministwriters in the second half of the nineteenth century were often seduced by an interesting theory that all, or nearly all, nations in the simplest stage of political structure were ruled by their women. A learned Swiss jurist, Dr. Bachofen, thought he had discovered very generally among the tribes that linger at the threshold of civilisation a practice of tracing descent through the mother only, and concluded that this pointed to an earlier phase in which the mothers ruled the community. This theory of the matriarchate was, somewhat unfortunately, enlisted in the campaign for a revision of woman’s position. I say unfortunately because, if it were true that the rule of the women belonged almost wholly to a simpler and barbaric age, and was abandoned when tribes rose to civilisation, a demand for a return to the older order would not be free from ambiguity. A Nordau or a Carpenter may gird as he pleases at civilisation. Essentially it is a correction of the errors of infancy.
It is, therefore, not to be deplored that modern ethnographers emphatically reject the theory of the matriarchate. “No sociologist nowadays believes Bachofen’s theory,” says Professor Westermarck. An occasional feminist writer still builds on the theory, but I find Westermarck’s statement in regard to the authorities justified.[2]It is quite true that in “a very considerable number of tribes” we find the habit of giving the mother’s name to the child, and tracing through her whatever inheritance there be of rank or property. But there are serious objections to seeing in these practices a lingering trace of a former matriarchal rule. In at least an equal number of cases more complete research has found the opposite practice of tracing kinship through the father. In many of the tribes, where the female line is observed, the man rules even the home. In all cases where the female line is followed it is just as natural, at least, to trace the practice to a primitive promiscuity and uncertainty of paternity as to feminine domination. That, indeed, is the inference of the great majority of modern ethnographers. Westermarck dissents from them on this point of promiscuity (and, within limits that I will indicate, I agree with him); but he just as firmly rejects the matriarchate. It is surely possible that in the childhood of the race the man’s share in the creation of children was unknown, and the child was the child of its mother.
The evolution of woman has run on different lines than those suggested by Bachofen, and it is by no means easy to retrace them. The earliest phase, indeed, we have no hope of restoring with confidence. No authority now doubts that there have been human or semi-human beings on this planet for some hundreds of thousands of years, and that for the greater part of the time—that is to say, until near the end of the Old Stone Age—they were below the level of the existing savage. For my present purpose it matters little that we can only dimly perceive the outline of these early men and women in the thick mist of a remote past. With what evidence there is I happen to be well acquainted, but I will not enlarge on it. Those primitive humans certainly had no social or political structure, and so do not concern us. How the first social groups arose it is not agreed; but from the scattering of the early traces of men and from the habits of the larger apes I conclude (as Westermarck does) that the primitive humans wandered along the broad river-banks in family groups, and that larger communities arose later by the fusion or expansion of families. Probably enough there was a great deal of promiscuity when these communities were formed, and monandry would need to be developed afresh. Where there was this community of wives the practice of tracing descent through the mother would be inevitable. In any case, the origin of children would be a profound mystery to such lowly beings, and for ages the man’s fatherhood would be unknown.
In the course of time (the New Stone Age) a higher race appears. It has more skilfully-made implements, rudimentary agriculture, weaving, and pottery, and tamed cattle. In these more advanced groups there was certainly some measure of social organisation, and it would be interesting to know if the control of it was to any extent divided between the sexes.
To learn something of this phase of human development we turn to study the life of the lower races. Far away from the centres of civilisation, in the dense forests of Africa, in the remote islands of the Pacific, in the grim wastes of the Arctic, or in the extreme tips of the continents, we find survivors of the earlier phases of human development. The Australian was cut off from the stimulating contact of higher races a hundred thousand years ago or more. The Fuegians and the Veddahs, the Bushmans and some of the Central Africans, linger at about the same level. The Esquimaux have, in their deserts of ice, stereotyped the next chapter (the New Stone Age) in the story of humanity. Round the frontiers of old civilisations, like India and China, and in remote islands, we find other remnants of the infancy of the race. What can we learn from these fragments of prehistoric humanity about the lot of woman before civilisation began? Is there any general and consistent practice from which we may gather the story of woman’s evolution?
It seems to me, after a careful survey of the voluminous details, that we may make this general statement: Wherever there is an approach to a social or political system, the control of it is in the hands of the men. They may in cases, where we may suspect special circumstances, consult their women on social issues (of trade, or migration, or war), but they are the rulers, and in most cases they take no account whatever of the women’s views. The woman quite commonly rules in the hut, but she is rarely represented in the council, and very rarely attains tribal power. The man generally hunts and fights (sometimes tills the fields and makes the clothes): the woman generally does all the work in or about the home, which is the greater part of the family’s work. In very many cases she is treated respectfully, and is quite equal to her husband in the home—it is not at all true that the lower races always, or nearly always, treat their women as cattle—but the fact remains that she is very rarely equal to him outside the home, in dealing with tribal issues.
If, then, we are to see survivals of primitive customs in the ways of our lowest savages, it seems that this was the very general course of development in early times. Travellers differ so much in competence or in prejudice that one still finds important divergences in different ethnographic writers—the reader who would go more closely into it should compare Letourneau’sCondition de la femme(1903) and Westermarck’s more optimisticPosition of Woman in Early Civilisation(1904)—but the above is a fair summary of the accredited facts. It is, however, necessary to remark that we must not too readily regard the ways of savages as unchanged survivals from the infancy of humanity. Even where their material life remains at the level of the Old Stone Age, their customs may have been greatly modified, under the influence, for instance, of superstitious feelings. With that caution we may glance at the position of woman in existing tribes of savages, especially at the lowest grade, such as the Australian natives, the Fuegians, certain tribes of Central Africa, the Bushmans, and the wild Veddahs of Ceylon.
The conflicting statements that are made in regard to the position of woman among the native Australians (of whom only some 20,000 now survive, with greatly altered habits) point to the fact that it differed very considerably in different tribes. It is, however, clear that she was everywhere the great worker of the clan, and nowhere admitted to the tribal councils. Her task it was to make the rude screen of bark that stood for the primitive house, to weave the baskets and the cords, and cook the food. Whether she was the common property of the clan, whether there were group-marriages and promiscuity, even the latest authorities differ. But in the vast majority of cases her lot was pitiable. Initiated to married life with brutal usage, evading child-bearing by such crude means as she had, working far more than the men, and never consulted in tribal affairs, she seems fairly entitled to the name of slave, which Westermarck would refuse her. If there were tribes in which the husband could not kill or cast her off without the sanction of the tribe, it was only a transfer of power from one man to a group of men. If there were tribes in which she had gentler treatment, and might rise to the height of bullying her husband, the general rule was that she bore most of the burden, and waited humbly like a dog for the remains of her husband’s meal.
In Papua, New Guinea, and New Caledonia we seem to have a somewhat more advanced branch of the same primitive stock; but the position of woman does not improve. Here and there we find regions where the brutality has been modified; but, on the whole, the advance towards civilisation has imposed more work on her, and, by removing the comparative protection of the clan, made the husband more despotic than ever. Among the Fuegians and Veddahs, lingering in southern islands at the very lowest level of culture, her lot is less intolerable. They are monogamous, and have no tribal organisation whatever, so that the sexes come nearer equality. The Veddah girl puts her band round the waist of her lover, and the two then rear their family in isolation. The Yahgan girl (the most primitive of the Fuegians) chooses her mate and shares with him the scant and savage existence. There are no social issues for him to appropriate, and the comparative physical equality is her safeguard.
Africa contains an enormous diversity of tribes, and the position of woman varies considerably in them. On the whole, it is true that the simpler the life, the nearer the sexes are to equality; but all generalisation is precarious. Letourneau says that for most of the blacks she is “a lower animal,” and the phrase cannot be greatly qualified. It is quite true that a Hottentot husband dare not take a drink of sour milk in his own house without his wife’s permission, under penalty of a fine, and he is often scolded by her; but it is the Hottentots who buy girls of ten or twelve to add to their harem, and expose them to death when they are prematurely worn. The less advanced Bushman treats his wife with more respect. The Monbuttu woman rules the home and practically owns its furniture. The Kaffir dare not touch his wife’s property, and in some tribes he even admits a woman (the chief’s mother) to the council. Among other tribes of East Central Africa, and among the Berbers and Bedouins of the north, she has fair respect and often influence. There is one happy region in which she may divorce him if he fails to sew her clothes. In Ashantee the king’s sisters could marry (and virtually enslave) whom they willed. In Dahomey the regiment of female warriors was the nerve of the army, and not far behind the males in consumption of alcohol; but they were not allowed to marry.
Africa is a medley of tribes at different points on the upward march, but we may trace a consistency in the various customs. We must not say that women are treated as cattle because they bear all the burdens on the march. The men have to be free to hunt and to fight. Nor must we see a gleam of justice in tribes where the male tills the field and tends the cattle. He has a superstition that they would wither and die at the touch of women. Broadly speaking, the division of labour remains the same; and, what is more to our purpose, the moment tribal organisation arises, and social issues are to be treated, the man appropriates the power. If in one or two cases he admits a woman to his councils, it is a distinct and rare concession.
When we turn to the lower races of Asia we find a result that surprises us in view of Hindoo and Chinese practice. In Polynesia women have a remarkable degree of independence. They may (in Hawaii and the Sandwich Islands) inherit feudal dignity and rule large districts with the same authority and respect as men. Not many years ago a Polynesian princess advertised in a Parisian journal for a cultivated European husband. In the Malay Archipelago the woman is practically equal to the man, and has influence on communal decisions. On the continent of Asia, too, her position is generally good. Among the Indo-Chinese races generally she has a power and respect that the later civilisations seem to have taken from her. The Shans of Burmah allow her to turn her husband away for drunkenness or other misconduct, and retain his property. Among the hill-tribes about India we find her in a good position. The Kondhs expect fidelity from the husband, but not from the wife. She is treated with great respect, has a good deal of influence on tribal affairs, and may leave her husband almost when she pleases. Among the Savaras she has the same liberty, and the simple Todas and the Bheels have a respect for their wives. Even among the isolated and backward tribes of the north (the Chukchis, Kamchadales, etc.) the women are well treated.
It is curious to reflect that, precisely in the continent where civilisation is most stringent in its demand for the subjection of women, the lower races, which are presumed to indicate the earlier phase, are more liberal than in any other part of the world. But I will glance at the last group of lower races before entering upon explanations. The American group is pretty certainly an offshoot from the early Asiatics, and we may be surprised that the position of woman among the Indians is usually described as very low. In point of fact, there seems to be some exaggeration, and the situation is by no means uniform. Among the Seneca Indians the woman ruled the home to such a degree that she would order a lazy husband to roll up his blanket and depart. The Iroquois and Cherokees and others left the decision on an issue of peace or war to the women; but it should be added that the Indian woman was as fierce and vindictive as her husband, and would submit a captive to the most fiendish tortures. The Nootkas consulted their wives on trade matters, the Omahas gave them an equal social standing with men, and the Flatheads and other tribes treated them with some respect. Among the South American Indians the woman’s position was generally bad, and in many cases atrocious; indeed, Letourneau affirms that her tribal influence even in the north was more nominal than real, as the men concealed the more important issues.
Among the Esquimaux, finally, her position is generally fair. Polygamy and polyandry are practised, and there is no marriage ceremony. But the men generally consult their wives in regard to bargains, and in many tribes allow her to rule the home. Among the eastern Esquimaux the women often disdain marriage and support themselves.
From this general survey we may draw a few inferences in regard to the evolution of woman’s position. We must not look for a uniform development in all parts of the human race. Different circumstances would put a different economic and personal value on women, and this would necessarily affect the behaviour of the men. We seem, however, quite safe in tracing the general development. Where tribes approach nearest to the primitive family, and there is no communal organisation, the man and woman are nearest equality. Her maternal office naturally defines her sphere. The care of children keeps her in or near the home, and the industries that arise in or about it (agriculture, weaving, etc.) fall to her. The man, like the male animal, must wander afield to forage, hunt, and fight.
In the course of time the family expands into the clan and tribe. The division of labour continues in regard to the home, but there are now interests of the community as such to be considered, and on these the welfare of all may depend. It is generally true that this elementary political life fell naturally to the men. The issues were predominantly questions of war or migration, and they came within the men’s sphere of work. And when the republican council gives way to the rule of chief or prince, the government remains essentially masculine. The ruler must be, above all, a warrior. Here and there the women may force or cajole their way into the council, or receive the flattery of consultation; but the work to be discussed is predominantly men’s work. Where a woman develops the ferocity of the man, as among the Red Indians and (to some extent) the Ethiopians, or where war is all but unknown (as among the Esquimaux), it is natural for her to be consulted. Where she is entrusted with the agriculture, as an occupation about the home, she may have influence as co-producer; though this is not a general rule. But the cases in which she shares the primitive political power as a right are insignificant in number, and in the vast majority of tribes she has no influence on it. Her exclusion implies no conscious despotism or injustice. It is merely that the enterprises to come before the tribal council are almost entirely enterprises that themenmust carry out; and the formal councils have grown insensibly out of informal consultations about their work among the men, in which she would naturally have no part.
Hence it is that when nations come into the light of history we generally find the political power in the hands of the men, and the women subject to laws they have not made and authority they have not chosen. Religion—a male priesthood—lends its sanction to the ancient usage, and the very remoteness and obscurity of its origin invest it with authority. Men learn to enjoy the monopoly of power, and use their strength to maintain it. The primitive equality of the sexes disappears. If for ages men select the more submissive mates and discard the more self-assertive, the character of woman will be slowly modified, and the sexes will diverge more and more. And thus, as Chinese, Hindoos, Greeks, Romans, Celts, and Teutons advance into the light of history, we find the familiar types of the gentle, industrious, submissive wife and the aggressive, adventurous, masterful husband. The woman may be respected, may even be consulted, but the home is her realm and the state her husband’s.
Itmay seem strange that, if this has been the general course of development, the first civilised nation to which we turn does not bear the features that it would lead us to expect. Egypt, the first and most enduring of civilisations, has a proud page in the calendar of womanhood. In no other nation, until quite recent times, has woman enjoyed so much power and prestige. Indeed, the development of woman’s position in Egypt is in some respects the reverse of what we shall find to be the general rule. There seems to have been no heritage of subjection from a barbaric past, but from the first we discover woman in a position of honour and influence. Through the long ages of Egypt’s power she retains that position, and she finally loses it at the very stage of incipient decay at which the women of other civilisations are beginning to obtain it.
We need not pause to point the moral for those who think that “the subordination of women is invariably one of the prices of empire”; but we may recall our warning that there has been no uniformity in the separate national lines of human development. At the lowest levels of culture men and women are physically, mentally, and morally equal. There are, however, differences that contain the germ of the future divergence. The tie of the children makes the woman, like the female animal in her shorter motherhood, economically dependent on the male. As he grows in wisdom or astuteness, he will perceive and abuse it. Moreover, though sex functions as such lay little disability on the woman at that level of culture, the difference of their work has led to a difference in the nature of their powers. The man, accustomed to hunt and fight, works in spasms of energy, and can exert his stored force with greater effect on occasion. The woman works continuously and less violently. It may be added, too, that she has inherited an instinct of passivity in love: the male an instinct of active search and conquest—an instinct curiously embodied in the ovum and the sperm-cell.
In all this we have a clear promise of the later development; and when the political structure evolves in the way I have indicated, and the control quite naturally falls to the men, the real wonder is that there were ever any approaches to a matriarchate at all. But many circumstances may influence the natural course of development; and it is sometimes forgotten that these circumstances may have passed away long before the race or tribe comes to our knowledge. Yet the effect on woman’s position may remain, in people so tenacious of traditions. I have described many such circumstances, and need add here only the possibility of a distinctly moral or humane development on the point of the treatment of woman in some tribes. There are plenty of instances of the development among lowly tribes of one or other virtue (say veracity among the Khonds, or pacificness among the Esquimaux) above the European level.
We are, therefore, quite prepared to find exceptions to the general rule that, as races civilise and pass into the light of history, woman will be found subordinate. At the same time, we must, for the purpose of this inquiry, bear clearly in mind the distinction between power and respect in the home, or in social life generally, and influence in the political administration. Even in works that profess to deal with woman’s political development this is not always done. Possibly, if we bear that distinction in mind, we may find it necessary to modify a prevailing impression in regard to ancient Egypt.
The golden age of the women of Egypt comes comparatively late (about 1500 B.C.) in the history of that remarkable nation; but all the records tend to show that her position was one of relative ease and dignity from the beginning of the dynastic race. Between 8000 and 5000 B.C. we find broken traces of a long struggle for the Nile delta between tribes (apparently) from the African east and the Asiatic west. About 5000 B.C. a powerful, civilised race enters the arena, conquers the land, and founds the Egyptian people that we know so well. Where they came from is still a matter of conjecture, but there is good reason to believe that they brought their early civilisation from some part of southern Arabia. We must suppose that they came from one of those tribes, still plentiful enough in the north of Africa and the south of Asia, in which women held a good position. Even to-day we find tribes side by side in the African desert (such as the Tuaregs and the Bedouins) who hold a radically different attitude towards their women. This must have been the case with the great variety of tribes that were found in the region of Persia, Syria, and Arabia thousands of years before Christ. From one tribe came the Jews, whose attitude to woman has had so baneful an influence on her history. From another came the ancestors of the Egyptians of the historic period.
From the moment when the remains become sufficient to afford a full picture of Egyptian life we find the position of woman good.[3]It has, however, been described so often that a slight summary will suffice here. “The Egyptian woman of the lower and middle class,” says Maspéro, “was more respected and independent than any other woman in the world.” In no class of the community was there a trace of the dominating tendency of the male, and the resultant family life seems to have been of the happiest. In the poorer class the girl ran nude with her brothers until the age of puberty, and then put on the light and close linen smock from the breasts to the ankles. About fifteen she married, and began to rear the large family and live the busy day of her class. Her husband had heavy tasks to perform, under feudal pressure, and she and the children had often to help him to escape the bastinado by sharing his labour. In the little brick or mud hut, with its few stools and mats and utensils, she was mistress. Polygamy was allowed, but her husband was too poor to afford a second wife. She aged early under that merciless sun, but had the affection of husband and respect of children to the end. The children were her children, and took her name; and on the great religious festivals she would grease her hair, and don her sandals and bracelets and better robe, to catch the rare hour of joy like her partner in life—possibly enough, her own brother.
When we rise to the easier class we find that woman has even greater independence. For the greater part of Egyptian history there was no private ownership of property for the mass of the people. The king, nobles, and priests had thedominium eminensof the land, and only such things as jewels and furniture could be held privately. But such inheritance as there was passed through the mother, and she had so high a position in the home that Egyptologists speak of the husband as “a privileged guest.” In theory her husband was polygamous, or could bring in concubines; but she made her stipulations before marriage, and suffered little in that respect. She had her own house and her own slaves, and complete liberty to go about and receive visitors, in her robes of finest linen. In the country she and the children accompanied the husband when he went out to hunt or fish. And if a young woman aspired to something more than domestic work, she might become one of the many women assistants in the cult of the great female goddesses of her country.
People of the twentieth century, with no historical knowledge, are apt to wonder that so much is made of this, and fancy it is only a bright picture in contrast to the Greek or Roman civilisations. In point of fact, it is only in recent years that an English woman has had an equal social liberty; even now she has not so high a prestige in the home, and certainly not the same position in regard to inheritance and property. But our chief concern is with woman’s political development, and we must see how she stood in this respect in ancient Egypt.
As the political system of Egypt was an absolute and sacred autocracy, there was no political power whatever for the middle and lower classes, and so woman had in this no disadvantage as compared with man. Above the whole of the people were the castes of priests and feudal nobles, and high above these the monarch. Before him, as “son of the Sun,” even the greatest nobles bowed in theatrical awe, and shielded their eyes from his burning rays. And here we find that, as I predicted, Egypt is by no means an exception to the general law, that, as nations come into the light of history, the control of the corporate life is always in the hands of the men. It is not without meaning that Egyptian statues of couples make the woman smaller than the man, or standing behind the man. They had nothing like the so common conception of her as an inferior being; but they did assuredly hold that she was unfitted for the three supreme things in their system—the priesthood, the army, and royalty.
The priestly caste she could merely penetrate as special minister of certain goddesses; she never wielded its power. In the order of nobles she had more opportunity. She could govern the feudal province in the husband’s absence, and even after his death; but it remains true that this is only a vicarious and exceptional assumption of man’s office. And this is to be said, with little alteration, of the royal power. The queen was with the king when he drove in his flowing linen robes and red-striped head-dress to the temple, and when he sat in the gallery to receive his subjects; but she was at a lower level, or behind him, and she had no voice in the council of nobles that he sometimes summoned. She could rule in his place if he went on a long journey, and she could even remain on the throne, and rule alone, when he died. A few women have left their names as rulers. The daughter of Amenhotep, especially, is always noted as a powerful and useful ruler of Egypt for fifteen years. It is not so often noted that she had herself depicted on the monuments as a man, and that her legal position was probably that of regent. Royalty was, in Egyptian eyes, a man’s office. There was not the least pretence of equality in succeeding to it.
The brightness of woman’s social position in Egypt must not, therefore, blind us to the fact that she was normally excluded from higher power, and rarely reached any share of it. However, as this power was confined to one man, with tributary power among a few other men, no one can draw any moral for our democratic age. Let us rather see how woman lost her position of equality in the people at large.
Before the Egyptian woman sank to a position of inferiority she seems, for some centuries, to have risen higher than ever. At about the beginning of the sixteenth century B.C. the rigid frame of Egyptian civilisation began to relax. Amenhotep instituted private ownership of landed property and the use of legal contracts. One consequence was that the middle class began to amass wealth and win power from the priests and nobles; another consequence was that women also used their privileged position to acquire wealth. As time goes on the marriage-contracts show a painfully commercial spirit. The woman not only stipulates that there shall be no rival, but she fixes the fines for her husband’s misdeeds and obtains more and more of his property.
As the general character and power of the nation were now rapidly deteriorating—the rigidity of the old system proving incapable of adaptation to the changed conditions—we can easily see what this would lead to. The land was torn with political dissension; avarice, vice, and sensuality displaced the sobriety of the older people. The kings slunk in their harems, and for a century or more the priests ruled, even marrying the princesses. Woman was still in her privileged position, but the decay went on, with flashes of revival, until 650 B.C. Ethiopians and Assyrians had overrun the land, but a powerful ruler arose in 650. Among other improvements he developed the commerce of Egypt, and this led to the beginning of woman’s downfall.
To the north of Egypt, across the Mediterranean, a race had grown to civilisation that had a very different tradition in regard to the treatment of its women. The Greek held his wife in subjection, and when his commercial affairs brought him into Egypt he could not but express his astonishment at the way in which men were ruled by their weaker wives. By this time, the contracts show, women were pressing too far with their marriage-stipulations and their property. One writer makes the last grievance of the men consist in the fact that they had to borrow money from their wives at exorbitant interest. At all events, the decay of Egypt set in once more after 530 B.C., and the Greek ideas grew more familiar. The fine old Egyptian ideal of equality took long to die, but at last a Greek ruler came to the throne and made an end of it. He passed a law that no woman could part with property except by the consent of her husband, and substituted the father for the mother in inheritance. She sank slowly into a condition of economic dependence; and the downtrodden slave of the fellah of modern Egypt, or the veiled and imprisoned wife of the merchant, are no less eloquent ruins of the old civilisation than are the pyramids of Gizeh.
* * * * * *
When we turn to the second great civilisation, whose history we can trace to nearly 5,000 years before Christ, we find that neither was the rise so high, nor the fall so low. Somewhere before 4500 B.C. we get our first glimpse of the pioneers of civilisation on the Babylonian plain. A strange people, with language and ways more akin to Chinese or Turks than to the surrounding Semites, descends into the valley, and founds the cities that went before Babylon and Nineveh. It is useless to inquire into the position of woman among these Sumerians or Akkadians. By 4500 B.C. the Semites from the Syrian highlands (some say from Arabia) mingle with them, and a mixed civilisation rises. Many authorities think the older race had the maternal type of family, and that the Semites modified the woman’s position.
However that may be, woman enjoyed an independence in ancient Assyria only second to that of the Egyptian and Ethiopian women. The wife of the worker had the same busy round of labour, the same freedom to roam the streets unveiled for her purchases of fish and vegetables. In the law-courts men and women were, as in Egypt, on a perfectly equal footing. The recently discovered Hammurabi Code (dating back to more than 2000 B.C.) contains many remarkable provisions, in the most striking moral contrast to the Hebrew code. There are whole pages regulating the relations of men and women with a general sense of justice that has no parallel in legislation until the most recent times—if even now.
There was not, however, the perfect social equality of Egypt, and as we pass to the higher classes we get indications of male domination. The woman of the lower-middle class had an excellent position. While her few slaves attended to the work in the rooms that opened on the central court, she chatted from the flat roof with her neighbour on the adjoining roof, and she moved freely about in the heavy embroidered garments that the Assyrians wore. She had brought a dowry to her husband, and kept control of it or increased it, with perfect freedom to trade. In the imperishable clay tablets that still recall the business-world of Babylon and Nineveh we find married women very commonly interested in trade or industry. The wealthier women, with large dowries, should, on the face of the matter, have great independence, but it seems that some restraint was imposed on them. They spent most of their time in the elaborate luxury of their houses, and, if they ventured out, it was only with the accompaniment of a troop of slaves and eunuchs. Ladies of higher rank were even more restricted, and the queens never went out.
We find, then, in ancient Mesopotamia that woman generally had no sex disabilities. In some clauses relating to divorce and unfaithfulness we find the inevitable advantage of the male, but in practice the woman had little to complain of. As in Egypt, the political system was a sacred and absolute monarchy, so that neither men nor women had any control, or any idea of aspiring to it. Queens could occupy the throne. Semiramis is probably a mythic personage; but a Babylonian princess, Sammuramat, ruled at Nineveh (whose king she had married) about 800 B.C. with great success. Once more, however, this was exceptional and vicarious. Political power was in the hands of men—the king and his council of nobles; and over all the community again were the castes of warriors and priests, though the latter body could be penetrated by women to some extent, owing to the immense popularity of the goddess Ishtar.[4]
To sum up, therefore, in regard to Egypt and Assyria, we must say that they were civilisations in which no one can with propriety talk of the “subordination of women”; yet they were two of the most powerful, and certainly two of the most enduring, empires the world has ever seen. We may take Maspéro’s statement that in Assyria “woman was equal, or nearly equal, to man”; in Egypt she was even nearer to perfect equality. There was no struggle of the sexes in Assyria; and the remarkably good legal position, commercial activity, and general independence of the women “in no way affected the womanly character of their duties,” as Dr. Reich is forced to admit. Assyria did not mount to greatness by the subordination of woman, nor did it lose its greatness by, or during, any revolt of its women. Egypt, also, grew to greatness without any shade of subordination of woman; and, although in this case the curtain falls on a discontented and embittered womankind, it was because the men positively robbed them of their 5,000-year-old rights. If there were any logic in the fallacy of the anti-feminist historians, we should have to say in this case that the equality of woman was the price of Egypt’s empire, and the destruction of that equality the cause of its downfall; but we may leave fallacies to those with a poorer case.
Egypt and Assyria were exceptional in that they did not live long enough to hear and consider the cry of democracy. The power remained to the end in the hands of a heaven-sent king. They fall into line with my general statement that in all early civilisations the power is in the hands of men. But as they never passed the stage of absolute monarchy, and no struggle in the least resembling the modern contest ever set in, we must go on to later empires for the second phase of woman’s political evolution.
Itis not necessary, and it would be much more difficult, to make a minute inquiry into the other civilisations that sprang up, before the Christian era, in that remarkable tract of Asia that lies between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. Their lesser power and shorter life have left them in the shade of the greatness of Egypt and Assyria. One only of them was destined, in an indirect way, to have a momentous influence on woman’s position in civilisation; but it will be convenient to notice the Jews when their ideas are embodied in Christianity and begin to mould Europe. There was a striking lack of uniformity in the various tribes that were struggling upward in that western offshoot of Asia. The Phenicians are (somewhat precariously) linked with the Egyptians, but do not seem to have granted their women anything like the same independence. The Sumerians (or oldest Babylonians) are connected with the Mongols, yet gave woman an excellent position. The Jews were Semites, like the later Babylonians, yet began an ominous tradition of contempt for woman.
Only one of these West-Asiatic civilisations is known to us with any fulness; but this also was monarchical, and neither men nor women (save the privileged few) had any political power. Ancient Persia was the fourth world-power to issue from the chaos of tribes and build on the ruins of its predecessors. If we trust the Greek writers, the position of woman in Persia varied very considerably. It is suggested that she was oppressed in the western parts, where the religion of Zoroaster had less influence, and respected in the eastern. The poorer women had the liberty that their poverty generally entails, but the women of the wealthier had enclosed chambers and guarding eunuchs. The monarchs and princes had large harems, and their women at times won the irregular and blood-stained power that the system often gives them. The Persian sacred book, the Avesta, contains the best feeling of the country. A man must have the woman’s consent to marriage, must respect her after marriage, and must only in an exceptional case take a second wife; butherduty is to obey, and she is treated with the usual unfairness in regard to divorce and misconduct.
The short sway of Persia, however, soon fell before invaders from Europe, who bring us to the interesting story of woman’s position in Greece. Here we at once enter an atmosphere much nearer to our own than that of the older civilisations, and the tendency to see parallels and to draw morals becomes very strong. With the general statement that woman was emphatically subordinated to man in the chief centre of Greek civilisation, at Athens, and that there arose in time a contest of feminists and anti-feminists to which we may liken our familiar struggle, all are now familiar. But we must trace the evolution of woman’s position with some care, if we are to understand it aright.
Letourneau (La condition de la femme) and Otto Henne am Rhyn (Das Frau in der Kulturgeschichte) have collected many indications that woman had a better position at the beginning of Greek civilisation. Polygamy was generally abolished at an early date, and the mother seems at first to have occupied the central place in the family, as in Egypt. An old legend, preserved in later writers, represented that the women had originally the right to vote in the Council, like the men, and that, because they outvoted the men and gave a feminine name to Athens, the jealous male god, Poseidon, intervened, and the vote was taken from them. From these and other obscure traces we may gather that woman was not so “subordinate” when Greece was climbing to power. Letourneau, who observes that early Greek patriotism should rather be called “matriotism,” gives the best suggestion of the way in which they lost influence. As private property and its value increased, the men shifted the line of inheritance from mother to father, and woman fell into economic dependence, with all its consequences. A clearer realisation of the father’s part in the children aided this. In time the mother is slighted as being merely the soil that passively nurtures the seed. The father is the creator.
I lay no stress on the abundance of female deities in the early Greek mythology. Westermarck points out that the presence of goddesses has not the significance that Reich and others ascribe to it, because we do not find woman’s position varying with the number or importance of female deities. That is so; though, perhaps, there was more correspondence between the two when the myths were originally framed. But it seems to me that, as divine families were always given human complexions, they were bound to have wife and daughter goddesses, whatever woman’s position in the tribe was.
Religion apart, then, there is sufficient evidence that the Greeks began their career with woman in a fair position, though with the political power, as everywhere, in the hands of the men. By the golden age women were not only rigidly excluded from public life, but were thrust to a lower social level, and treated bitterly and contemptuously in literature. This, it must be remembered, is mainly true of Athens. In the kingdom of Sparta women had ample freedom and great respect, and in the outlying parts of Greece their position was much better than at Athens. But the chief interest remains in the fact that at Athens, with its intense public life, its thorough democracy, its high mental and moral culture, the position of woman was one of subordination.
A recent French writer, G. Notor, has given us a fine work (La femme dans l’antiquité Grecque, 1901), in which he essays to vindicate the honour of Greece. He points out that, if the Ionians restricted and calumniated woman, the Dorians and Æolians treated her with much more consideration. He also reminds us, as is usual, of the fine types of womanhood portrayed in the Homeric poems and the comparatively good position they occupied. One must remember, however, that the Homeric poems depict the small class of the wives of chiefs and princes; and the glimpses we get of the lower women are not attractive. In any case, the Homeric portraits belong to the earlier and better phase, when an Andromache was assuredly respected. In regard to the Athenian woman, M. Notor can only correct the more exaggerated notions about her position. Miss Mason (Woman in the Golden Ages, 1901) writes that the lot of the Greek woman was “bare and cheerless, without even the sympathy that tempers the hardest fate.”
That is much too dark a picture of her condition. Of the two greatest writers of Greece, Aristotle wrote of woman in terms no harder than, and no different from, those of modern moralists like Ruskin or Frederic Harrison; while Plato has not an equal in modern Europe in his championship of her capacity and her rights.
As it was, her life was by no means “cheerless.” Until she approached the age of marriage (generally about her twentieth year) an Athenian girl had plenty of freedom and enjoyment. She was not, as in the colonies, educated with her brother at the public expense, nor did she enter the gymnastic schools, as in Sparta. But with the incessant cultivation of music and dance, and with the frequent spectacle of the great religious processions to the Acropolis and the temples, her life did not lack colour or gaiety. After marriage she was restricted to thegynecæum, or women’s quarters. One must not, however, imagine that this meant the grim dulness that inclusion in a modern house would suggest. The seclusion was not so rigid but that the women could visit each other; and when the long hours had passed in the beautiful sun-lit court, with its flowered terraces and marble fountains, or in chatting with her slaves or friends over her embroidery, the day would close with the music and dance of which the Greek woman was passionately fond. She had, too, the occasional distraction of witnessing the great religious solemnities, or of going to the theatre carved in the flank of the hill. Few large gatherings of Athenians, except the crowds that roared at the comedy or seethed round thebema, were not lit up by the presence of their beautiful ladies in their gay silk robes and golden sandals. And at longer intervals there broke on the monotony of their lives the greater thrill of a pilgrimage, or the journey to the Olympic games.
This was the normal tenure of life for the wife of the well-to-do Athenian. The wives of the poor went, of course, freely about their shopping, and as time went on even the wealthier women took more part in public entertainments. That the tragedians Sophocles and Euripides (of unhappy matrimonial experience) spoke bitterly of them, and that the comic poets Aristophanes and Menander satirised them, is quite true; but the common inference, that they express a contempt for women more offensive or more widespread at Athens than in recent England, is quite wrong. Their gibes and strictures really show that the conscience of Athens was pricked at the injustice and irrationality of its system, that a feminist movement was felt, and that conservatives were struggling against it with their customary exaggeration, and humorists making trade of it, as they do to-day.
This movement for reform began as soon as the material struggle for establishment was over, and the culture of Athens opened its splendour. Long before the age of Pericles and Pheidias the women of Athens were stirred with a breath of ambition from the eastern isles. The women of Æolia had, as I said, more freedom and education; and Athenians might have reflected, when they made their strictures on woman’s intelligence, that where, among their own kin, the artificial restriction was not imposed women quickly proved their capacity for art and letters. Of the voluminous work of Sappho we have scant remnants, but those resplendent fragments are enough to justify her title as one of the greatest lyric poets of all time. Athenians seem to have evaded the moral by loading her memory with calumnies about her life and death, which many modern writers are unwilling to accept. In her time Sappho had about her a number of able, but less brilliant, women writers, and pupils came from all parts of the Greek world to feel the glow of the new-lit fire. There are reasons for thinking that Sappho went beyond literary ambition, and was exiled for interfering in some political trouble. However, the stifling atmosphere of Persia came over the eastern Greek world, and the fire dwindled and died.
The Lesbian movement must have been felt in Athens, and other changes were now helping to show the absurdity of the system of restriction. One of these was the rise of the class ofhetæræand the freedom with which even great Athenians consorted with the higher members of the class. The ideal of the men of Athens, to marry wives solely for the purpose of rearing families and to confine themselves to males for comradeship, soon sank in the mud. Among the evils it brought about was the encouragement of prostitution on a large scale; and from the class was evolved a more select group, of very beautiful or very cultivated women, with whom even statesmen and philosophers were intimate. While wives and daughters found what pleasure they could in the home, the men flocked to the houses of courtesans to discuss the subjects their less educated wives could not discuss, or sought the perfumed chambers where the wine and flute and dance made the blood run swifter. The injustice and absurdity of such a social division cannot long have escaped the wit of Athens. Aspasia, the most famous of thehetæræ, was a standing rebuke to the Greek ideal of woman, and it is not improbable that it was her attacks on it that led the Athenians to put her on trial.
It is therefore not surprising that, as culture grew, the partition began to give way. From the time when Greek thinkers turned from natural to moral philosophy we find them slighting the current ideal. Most of the leaders of the schools freely included women among their pupils and prominent disciples. Pythagoras, the austere and mystic early thinker, had a high regard for Perictione, and his wife maintained the school after his death. Socrates showed the same regard for Diotima and other ladies, and Crates encouraged his wife Hipparchia to think. Epicurus—who was not the hedonist so many imagine, but a sober, almost ascetic, teacher—opened his quiet garden in the vicinity of Athens, and offered his modest cakes and water, to men and women alike. No doubt, we must see in all this only an admission of woman’s equal capacity for culture and demand for social equality; but the satires of Aristophanes show that there was also a strong claim for political equality, and some of the great writers expressly consider it.
Xenophon and Aristotle were politely conservative. Their words are sometimes quoted as illustrations of the Athenian disdain for women; but there is no contempt whatever in their reference to the obvious fact that the Greek woman, restricted in education and interests for centuries, was less competent for public life than her husband. Indeed, Aristotle would have deprived most of the husbands of their vote, if it could have been done. It is something that he granted woman a title to respect and fidelity; that is as much as Carlyle, or Comte, or Ruskin, or even Harrison, has done.
But Plato, the greatest of all the Greeks, redeems the culture of his race. He saw plainly—what we might have expected the more scientific Aristotle to see—that woman’s frailer power of reasoning was simply due to her education. He insisted on the inherent equality of the sexes. Professor Westermarck quotes Plato as saying that “the female sex is inferior to the male,” and represents him as an opponent. But, in putting this phrase into the mouth of Socrates, Plato is merely leading up to the satirical conclusion that we ought, therefore, to impose our laws on men only, and not on women, and he presently adds: “The same education which makes a man a good guardian [governor] will make a woman a good guardian, for their original nature is the same.”[5]There are differences between men and women, but he says that these differences no more affect the capacity for public work than the question whether a cobbler is bald or hairy affects his fitness for mending sandals. He will not even reserve military duties to men, so solid is his conviction of woman’s capacity. In a word, one of the greatest thinkers of Greece, and most treasured writers in all literature, is the most advanced feminist that ever existed.
What the influence of such an advocate might have been, had Greece lived, we may well surmise, but decay had already set in. The heavy hand of the conqueror fell on the enfeebled frame of Athens, and the great spirit slowly sank. One of its latest thinkers and moralists was Epicurus, who preached no subordination of woman; but he bade both men and women turn from such political life as was left in Athens to the joy of friendship and culture. The last of the moralists, Plutarch (in the first century of the Christian era), held the complete moral and mental equality of the sexes. The time had gone by, however, to press for a solution of the problem of woman’s position. We find, indeed, a queen Olympias of Macedonia in 317 B.C., and a queen Agiatis of Sparta in 241 B.C., as we find the famous Cleopatra at Alexandria afterwards. They have little significance. Greece was dead. Its culture passed over, in diminished lustre, to Alexandria, and it is not a little interesting to find it ending there (in the fifth century) in the production of Hypatia—not the frail and credulous maiden whom Charles Kingsley has thought fit to offer us, but the aged, learned, powerful Hypatia of historical reality, the most respected and influential person in the civic as well as the intellectual life of Alexandria.
In the meantime the struggle and the task of settlement had passed to another world-power. Rome had subdued and succeeded Greece; and, much as that practical nation resented the Greek subtlety and restlessness, it was destined to carry the evolution of woman’s position a long step further, before it in turn sank into the spacious tomb of old empires.
Greece had run the normal course that I have traced for the earlier powers. In its pre-civilised stage its men and women seem to have stood on a common level, with the military rulers over all. As it advances from the gloom into the lit territory of history, we find that the men have asserted a crude supremacy in private as well as public life. In this Greece differed from Egypt and Assyria, and a proportionately keener struggle set in. We find many traces of that struggle from the moment when Greece reaches its height of culture; and the intense pre-occupation with moral problems, which begins with Socrates, culminates in the extraordinary feminism of Plato’sRepublic. The movement increases as culture rises. But decay has set in, from a variety of causes, and the problems of civilisation are cast on other shoulders. I do not suppose that even the most determined of anti-feminists will venture to connect the decay of Athens with the stirring of its women. The causes have been too often and too clearly traced. The cry of the Athenian feminists dies away because the frame of the superb city is palsied and beset. Another vigorous race fills the stage of the world, and we pass over to Italy for the next phase in the development of woman’s position.
Thehistory of woman’s position in ancient Rome is one of the most interesting chapters in the entire story of her development. It affords the most conspicuous illustration of the law we have formulated—that nations generally come into the light of history with their women in subjection, and that the women rebel as conscience and culture prevail over tradition. There was a special reason why the subordination of woman soon fell under discussion at Rome. The culture of Greece had culminated in the establishment of a number of philosophical schools, which speculated on moral problems with complete freedom from the restraints that always hamper such speculation in religious bodies. One of the finest of these schools of morality, the Stoic system, was adopted by cultivated Romans, and eventually by the Emperors, and thus questions of social justice received earnest attention. The position of woman (as well as that of the slave, the child, and the feeble) secured in this way a consideration to which we can only find a parallel in quite recent times. How the promising development was broken off, and women had to wait 1,500 years for a re-consideration of their claims, we shall see presently.
When the first uncertain light of history falls on the promontory of Italy, and on the vigorous nation that was building up one of the most powerful empires the world has ever seen, the women are subordinate, but not so harshly treated as at a later date. Letourneau finds a number of indications that the earlier Roman family was maternal in form (i.e., the children took the name of, and inherited through, the mother); but this does not imply anything like a matriarchate. Indeed, a curious marriage-rite that long survived at Rome, in which the husband parted the bride’s hair with the point of a spear, and the story of the rape of the Sabines, suggest an early practice of capturing wives—a practice that leads naturally to subordination.
However that may be, when the Romans come at length within our clear knowledge, the woman is in a position of great subordination. The state-organisation is slight, and the father rules his house with a terrible despotism. From the absolute control of a father a young woman passes to the almost absolute control of her husband. The only difference is that he cannot sell her, as he may the slave or the child, and cannot pass judgment on her except in the presence of her male relatives. It seems, however, that, as Mommsen says, a public opinion had already grown that controlled this theoretic autocracy of the husband and father. The husband could and did dismiss her at his will, while she had no right of divorce; but the woman who was reconciled to the conditions was treated with respect and affection, received guests, went to the circus with her husband, and never suffered the seclusion of her Greek cousin. She could also bear witness or plead, when the courts of justice developed. A few instances of brutal treatment are preserved in the chronicles, but these were quite exceptional.
This first phase of woman’s development in historical Rome lasted until about 200 B.C. I need not dwell on the familiar and splendid types of womanhood that stand out in the chronicles before that time. It is well known that character was finely developed in the early Romans. About the beginning of the second century before Christ, at the close of the long struggle with Carthage, the second phase in the development of the women (and of the race generally) set in. It is to be remembered that the Republic was still a comparatively small power. The great age of conquest, that would carry the eagles over the known earth, was to come long afterwards, and therefore, in the case of Rome, it is sheer historical untruth to represent the power as beginning to decay when the women began to assert themselves. Two hundred years before Christ conservative Romans greeted the woman-movement with all the dismal prophecies with which many greet it in our own time. Yet it was not until three centuries later that Rome reached the height of its power.
The causes of the early agitation were varied, and can only be noted in summary here. The eastern culture that was flowing into Italian life was corroding the bases of the old standards and traditions. The native religion, with its divine model of a Roman family, was losing its influence, and disquieting new goddesses were gaining favour. In the year 204 B.C. the cult of the mysterious “mother of the gods” (Cybele) was imported, and soon the processions of its frenzied and repulsive devotees were among the familiar sights of even country villages. From Egypt came the more sober cult of Isis, another mother-goddess; and, in spite of what we later learn of assignations in the temples of Isis, it had in it something of the cold and chaste beauty of the moon which it symbolised, and won some of the finest women of Rome. From Persia came other religions, one of which (the Manichean) offered special activity to women.