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Title: Woman in Political Evolution

Author: Joseph McCabe

Release date: January 19, 2021 [eBook #64340]

Language: English

Credits: David Thomas


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WOMAN IN POLITICAL EVOLUTION ***




 WOMAN IN POLITICAL
 EVOLUTION

 BY
 JOSEPH McCABE

 LONDON:
 WATTS & CO.,
 17, JOHNSON'S COURT, FLEET STREET, E.C.
 1909




 CONTENTS


 Chap.
 I. Is the Subordination of Woman the Price of Empire?
 II. Woman Before Civilisation
 III. Woman in Ancient Egypt and Assyria
 IV. Woman in Ancient Greece
 V. Woman in Ancient Rome
 VI. The Dark Age of Feminism
 VII. Renaissance and Revolution
 VIII. The Struggle in the Nineteenth Century
 IX. The Moral Base of Enfranchisement
 Footnotes




 WOMAN IN POLITICAL EVOLUTION



 CHAPTER I.

 IS THE SUBORDINATION OF WOMAN THE PRICE OF EMPIRE?


THE distinct 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 the _fora_ of Imperial Rome, and were heard again in the
_piasse_ of 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 our _chinoiserie d'idées_ with 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 CIVILISATION


FEMINIST writers 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's _Condition de
la femme_ (1903) and Westermarck's more optimistic _Position 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 the _men_ must 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 ASSYRIA


IT may 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 the _dominium eminens_ of 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 GREECE


IT is 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; but _her_
duty 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 the _gynecæum_, 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 the _bema_, 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 of _hetæræ_
and 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 the _hetæræ_, 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's
_Republic_. 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 ROME


THE history 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.

On the other hand, the old ideal of the family, the very incarnation
of woman's subjection, was falling into decay. Greek and Asiatic
courtesans were pouring in, and Roman fathers must have their
daughters educated, if a class of _hetæræ_ were not to hold the
position it had done at Athens and Corinth. Women found their value,
and stipulated for the retention of their dowries, if not for other
property. As their wealth grew, the lawyers entered their service,
and taught them how to evade the inconveniences of the law by
refusing the _confarreatio_ (the most solemn form) and only
entering on one of the looser forms of marriage. Divorce, which had
been unknown for centuries, became frequent; and some women entered
upon mock marriages, which withdrew them from a father's control
without substituting that of a husband.

And, about the year 190 B.C., the new spirit of the women broke out
in fiery eruption. During the war with Carthage a law had been
passed (215 B.C.) forbidding the women to wear heavy golden
ornaments or many-coloured robes, and restricting their use of
chariots. At the close of the war (195 B.C.) the women demanded the
repeal of this Oppian Law, as it had been passed to secure funds.
Cato, however, who was then Consul, and others resolved to retain
the law, and a struggle ensued that one could almost transfer from
the forum of ancient Rome to the Parliament Square of modern London.
Livy (_Ab urbe condita_, 1. xxxiv. c. i.-viii.) describes how, not
only crowds of men of opposing sides invaded the Capitol, but the
matrons themselves, "restrained neither by authority nor modesty
nor the control of their husbands," beset all the ways that led to
the Forum, and importunately demanded the votes of the legislators.
Reinforced by crowds of provincial women, they kept up a noisy
agitation during the debate in the Forum, and--strangest parallel of
all--"dared to approach the consuls, prætors, and other
magistrates," and at length forced their way into the houses of
the tribunes and won them to the cause! Conservative patricians
looked with alarm at this new species of "masculine women"
(_androgynæ_). Cato, who led the resistance, complained that he
had to bore his way with shame through a crowd of women to reach the
Forum. If the men did not wish to see themselves under the heel of
the women in a few years, he said--Livy gives his speech at
length--let them keep their wives in order at home and forbid them
to appear in public. But there were conscientious traitors to the
masculine cause, as there are to-day. Lucius Valerius replied to
Cato, and, intimidated by the armies of Amazons without, the
senators repealed the Oppian Law. Cato had to be content, some years
later, to impose a heavy tax on their property.[6]

This agitation, in the year 195 B.C., did not aim at securing direct
political power, but it well illustrates the futility of
anti-feminist predictions, as well as the law that feminism grows
with culture. From that time onward the women of Rome continued to
enlarge their liberty and their power. After a few decades the
Voconian law was passed, forbidding them to receive legacies; but it
was little observed, and the economic power of the wealthier women
increased. That many of them used their resources only to indulge a
taste for vicious or stupid luxury is merely to say that they did
what some rich men did, and are doing. We have just as many
instances recorded of wealthy and cultivated Roman ladies who
retained all the fine character of their ancestors. Those writers
who speak of good wives and good mothers as "the gold that
glitters on the muck-heap," as Dr. Reich does, seem to be ignorant
of the real character of some of their types.[7] That famous type of
motherhood, Cornelia, daughter of Scipio and mother of the Gracchi,
was one of the most learned women of her time, and was no less
interested in public affairs than in Greek culture. In her later
years her home was a centre of intellectual life, and her letters
are highly praised by the first critic of the Roman world. The
letters of Cicero refer to numbers of other Roman ladies of no less
culture than character and civic interest. The patriotism of Brutus
drew its strength, to no small extent, from the spirit of his
mother, wife, and sister.

By the beginning of the Christian era, when the Empire had displaced
the Republic, the position of woman had materially altered. The
despotism of the husband was a mere barbaric memory. From Augustus
they obtained full control of their dowry and protection against
avaricious husbands; and from Hadrian, later, they had the right to
make wills without consulting their husbands. Their accumulating
property gave them a good deal of indirect influence on civic and
political affairs. The philosopher Seneca acknowledged that he owed
his quæstorship to his aunt, and promotion through the influence of
women was quite common.

In the reign of Tiberius a senator made a spirited attack on their
interference in the public administration. The wives of generals and
governors, he complained, went down into the provinces with their
husbands, reviewed the troops with them, and meddled with the
government. The Senate ignored the complaint. Inscriptions have been
found in many Roman towns that tell with gratitude of women-patrons
of the municipality, women-donors of baths, arches, temples,
hospitals, and other treasured institutions.

The school-system of Rome now developed to a height which has only
been reached once more by education in the second half of the
nineteenth century, and of which many civilised nations still fall
far short. For the children of the free workers, of both sexes,
there was general and free elementary instruction in the later
Empire. Boys and girls sat together on the benches of the
_literator_ in the open porticoes, and the girls of the more
wealthy went on to the secondary schools of the _grammaticus_, as
their brothers did. Many women had slave-tutors teaching them Greek
letters and philosophy. The marble chambers of the rich, with their
rare birds nesting in the cedar roof, their silver furniture and
Greek vases, and all the treasures of Persia, did, indeed, often
echo with voluptuous music, and draw their heavy curtains upon
scenes such as unthinking wealth inspires in every age; but they
resounded, too, with feminine discussions of Greek philosophy and
poetry, and Roman politics, and they smiled on types of womanhood
that preserved all the character of the old Republic, with all the
interest in art and thought and life of the new Empire.

It is so commonly believed that this enlargement of the liberty and
power of the Roman women led to a general degradation of character
that I must linger for a moment on the point. The popular idea of an
entire corruption of Rome in the first century is quite discarded by
modern scholarship. The English reader will find the finest and
truest picture of that maligned age in Dr. Samuel Dill's _Roman
Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius_, in which the current
exaggeration is fully refuted.[8] The popular notion rests almost
entirely on the satires of Juvenal, a bohemian writer, anti-feminist
and anti-aristocratic, who hung on the fringe of society to catch
what dubious morsels he could of idle chatter and exaggerated
scandal. It would be more reasonable to take Father Vaughan's
strictures on the "smart set" as a full picture of English
society than to take Juvenal's less conscientious gossip about a
few wealthy women as a complete picture of Rome. A careful reader
will soon see that Juvenal lashes Roman women for their culture and
for innocent fads, as much as for vice. As Letourneau says:
"Neither the satires of the poets nor the objurgations of
moralists suffice to prove that the Roman woman was essentially
inferior to her male companion." The moralist he seems to have in
mind is Seneca; but Seneca expressly claimed that woman was the
mental and moral equal of man, and he lived in a circle of fine,
cultivated ladies. The morbidity of a few of the wealthier women--a
morbidity that has a parallel in every age of luxury and change, in
both sexes--does not characterise the sex; and, as to the larger
class of less wealthy women, Dr. Dill adds: "In his [Juvenal's]
own modest class female morality ... was probably as high as it ever
was, as high as the average morality of any age" (p. 76).

I do not need to dwell, therefore, on the few known cases of
slave-torture, on the one or two noble women slinking down to the
reeking _insulæ_ in the Subura, and the few other extraordinary
misdeeds that have puffed out the popular calumny. For the general
character of the age one need only recall London under the Stuarts,
or under the Georges. It was an age of great luxury (falling short,
however, of the same class in modern New York) and great laxity, and
the blame must be laid on the rigorous and tyrannical old idea of
marriage, as well as on the familiar causes. But the idea that this
condition of Roman society continued to the end of the Pagan Empire
is grotesquely untrue. Before the end of the first century, under
Stoic influence, the standard of character rose once more, Roman
society was purged, and in the last phase of the feminist movement
at Rome a general level of morality and philanthropy was reached
that will bear comparison with modern times. Both the historians of
the time, Tacitus and Suetonius, expressly describe the reform, and
every historian knows that Rome went on to a greater height (apart
from letters) than it had done before. Lecky, in particular, has
done justice to the way in which the Stoic doctrine of the
brotherhood of men found expression in the condemnation of slavery,
the imperial abolition of most of the old abuses, the care of the
aged and ailing, and a hundred works of justice and mercy.

In this remarkable fervour for social justice woman was bound to
find profit. The service done to her consisted mainly in providing
a sounder basis for the liberty and power which she had won, largely
by the equivocal aid of the growing laxity in regard to marriage.
The Stoics--philosophers, lawyers, and emperors--believed in the
equality of men and women. Antoninus Pius embodied in one of his
judgments the common Stoic sentiment that fidelity was equally
expected of husband and wife. The great Stoic jurist, Gaius,
severely criticised the older Roman law, that dealt unequally with
man and woman, and "scouted the popular apology for it in the
mental inferiority of the female sex," says Sir Henry Maine.[9]
Dion Chrysostom called for the legal suppression of prostitution.
Briefly, the Stoics, who controlled the legal and imperial courts
for more than a century, completed the work of putting woman on a
level of legal and social equality to man, and their world
included--as the letters and writings of Plutarch, Seneca, Tacitus,
and Pliny show--a large number of women of equal culture and
character.

Thus Rome had completely removed the sex-disability of its women
while it was still in the fulness of power, and as a direct
consequence of its later moral culture. That this emancipation did
not include the granting of political power can cause no surprise to
those who know the history of Rome. Since the fall of the Republic
the men themselves had no political power, and, therefore, the women
had no sex-disability on this side to agitate against. It is true
that the imperial purple was held exclusively by men, and the great
administrative offices were open to men alone. Against this
arrangement women may have protested; but we should hardly expect
such a protest until a more advanced stage of evolution; and, in
point of fact, the more ambitious women had a great deal of indirect
power. Even before the fall of the Republic we find notices of what
we should now call "women's clubs" (_senatus matronarum_),
and when power was concentrated in an hereditary monarchy the royal
women had immense influence over it. Women agitated in municipal
elections, as we saw, controlled small towns in the character of
municipal patrons, and influenced the choice of quæstors, prætors,
and tribunes. With this large measure of influence for the wealthier
women, and with the general admission of her equal mental capacity
to men, it was natural for woman to cease from agitation; the mass
of the women, who had not these opportunities, were in no worse
plight, politically, than their husbands. Until government by
popular representatives was once more adopted or demanded we can
hardly look for a further agitation. But the Roman Empire was now
beginning to decay, and the cause of woman was lost in the general
catastrophe.

In speaking of decay as setting in immediately after the completion
of woman's emancipation I need hardly recall my protest against
connecting the two. The decay of the Roman Empire was due to causes
that are plainly set forth by modern historians like Boissier and
Schultze, and that have nothing whatever to do with the emancipation
of woman. No serious historian ever dreamed of such a notion until
the modern feminist movement arose. In point of fact, the
emancipation of woman was completed long before Rome passed the
height of its power. What the Stoics did was rather to find a
healthy moral basis for the liberty that had already been won. I
cannot go into the complex causes of the decay of the Empire in
Europe, but will only say that it is traced to political, economic,
and physical degeneration, with which the position of woman is
absolutely unconnected. To the very end Roman women retained their
culture, character, and influence; and the last glimpses we get (in
Symmachus and Macrobius) of Pagan Rome, before the Goths invade it,
leave with us a memory of a sober, cultivated, humane society,
unconscious that the wheels of fate are making so appalling a
revolution.

Thus, as I said in the beginning, the woman-movement of that older
empire broke up only because its civilisation was broken. Rome had
carried the cause of woman's emancipation to a great height, and,
had a fresh civilisation succeeded at once to the heritage, as
Greece succeeded Rome, the story would have been completed long ago.
Unhappily, Roman civilisation was replaced by a fresh barbarism, and
Europe fell with terrible rapidity into the swamp of the Middle
Ages. Women sank back all over Europe into a state of such
subordination that fourteen hundred years after the fall of Rome
there was not a civilisation in the world that would grant her the
least semblance of that legal and mental equality with man which she
had laboriously won nearly 2,000 years before. The cause of woman
passed into an abyss, from which it is only now emerging afresh. How
that came about, and why it lingered so long in the abyss, we have
now to see.




 CHAPTER VI.

 THE DARK AGE OF FEMINISM


THE millennium that lies between the year 500 and the year 1500 of
the Christian Era is known to all historians as the Middle Age, and
to very many as the Dark Age. Into the general correctness or
incorrectness of the latter title I need not inquire. In the story
of the evolution of woman that millennium must assuredly figure as
the Dark Age. All the prestige that woman had enjoyed in Egypt, all
the admissions she had wrung from the philosophers of Greece, all
the high ambitions she had realised in Rome, were sunk deep in
Lethe, and woman was again in a position of great subordination all
over the world. Among the nations that were slowly rising to
civilisation in the remote and unknown west, among the nations that
had already reached civilisation in the east and south of Asia, she
was subordinate; and in the centre of the world's stage, in
Europe, on which the main stream of cultural evolution had settled,
she occupied a lower position than ever. Her social position varied;
but her legal position was infamous, and her political position that
of a serf.

Without going so far as to say, with Mrs. Cady Stanton (_Woman's
Bible_), that "mankind touched the lowest depth of degradation," I
will be content for the moment to say that all that woman had won
in ancient Rome was entirely lost, and I will glance at the needful
qualifications later. The first point of interest is to determine
why the thread of woman's development was broken off for a thousand
years.

It will seem, at first glance, that I have assigned the cause in
saying that Roman civilisation gave way to barbarism. Goths and
Vandals trod underfoot the vast and wonderful polity that the Romans
had spread over Europe. Roman culture retired to the western empire,
to Asia, and, at the paralysing touch of Asia, fell into the rigid,
barren, stationary form that we recognise still in the Greek Church.
All Europe, west of Greece, was overrun by the barbarians who had
issued from the forests of Germany, as Rome grew feebler. Over
England, Gaul, Spain, Italy, and north Africa the light-haired,
blue-eyed giants poured, and wherever they passed the fabric of
Roman civilisation fell in ruins. Is not this explanation enough?

It is not, for these barbarians were of the class that treated woman
with deference, not of the class that would bring into civilisation
a fresh tradition of the ill treatment of their wives. It is useless
to suggest that Tacitus, the Roman historian who wrote an account of
their ways and ideals, exaggerated their deference to their women in
order to shame the Romans. His statement on the point agrees too
well with the earliest Teutonic and Scandinavian poetry, and with
what we know of Anglo-Saxon England; nor was Tacitus by any means a
feminist. There is no serious ground whatever for doubting his
statement that the "Germans" saw something sacred in woman, held
that the gods spoke more clearly through her, and took her counsel
on tribal issues. Yet when we find the various branches of the race
settling into fixed and organised polities on the ruins of Rome, we
find woman generally despised, excluded from political life, and
treated with the gravest injustice in legislation. The position of
woman in Europe--in England--less than a century ago dispenses us
from heaping up proofs.

It must be recognised at once that the extraordinary change in the
surroundings of these barbaric fathers of ours would lead of itself
to demoralisation. Buried for unknown centuries in the dense forests
that lay between the Baltic and the Danube, they had treasured and
submitted to the old traditions of their race, which favoured woman.
As time goes on they encounter orderly and deadly legions, superbly
armed, along the southern frontier of their region. In the early
centuries of the Christian era they learn more of this wonderful
race below the great river, with its impressive organisation, its
shining luxury, its fairy cities, its strange religion and ideals.
When the barrier falls they find themselves in a land whose mighty
achievements made their old traditions seem puny and childlike, as
their daubed huts or skin clothing. In that intoxication their
ideals would easily grow dim, and their feeling of power amid a
world of dwarfs would bode ill for woman. Thus, undoubtedly, we can
explain much of the disappearance of the old Teutonic chivalry and
virtue.

But it would be mere affectation to ignore the influence of their
change of religion, and I will briefly show how this affected the
position of woman. The greatest positive injustice that was done to
woman was in the sphere of law, and Sir Henry Maine has shown that
all the injustice done to woman in later European law was due to the
overruling of Roman and Teutonic law by the Canon Law of the Church.
The loss of social liberty and prestige can be clearly traced to the
same root. Under the influence of the Judaic spirit which was now
incorporated in Christianity, most of the early leaders of the
Church spoke of woman and marriage in terms that the duller wit and
coarser feeling of the following centuries only too literally
received.

I have already observed that modern science is disposed to seek the
origin of most of the Western civilisations in the ferment of tribes
that filled the south-western offshoot of Asia some thousands of
years before Christ, and that these tribes held very varying
attitudes in regard to their women. The Hebrews probably represent
one of these Semitic tribes in the north of the region between
Babylonia and Palestine. From the southern desert, or the
steppe-region leading to the desert, they invade Palestine,
assimilate its civilisation, and evolve into the monarchy with which
we are so familiar. It seems that the Hebrews came of one of those
Bedouin tribes that kept their women in close subjection, and the
later Judaic law preserved the tradition of the time when a boy
meant a new spear to the tribe, and a girl only a future breeder of
men. The wife was virtually the property of her husband, and could
not inherit. He could divorce her when he willed, and had a right to
her unconditional obedience. Few Hebrew women broke through this
rigid system of subordination and left their names in the growing
literature.

In the course of time the Hebrew sacred books, with a few additions,
became the absolute authority of life and conduct in Europe, and the
Judaic ideal came into collision with the later Roman ideal. I have
shown elsewhere that all the Christian leaders in the Latin
Empire--Tertullian, St. Cyprian, St. Augustine, St. Jerome, and St.
Ambrose--insisted sternly on the subjection of woman, denounced her
as the agent of humanity's downfall, and gave only too serious
ground for a revival of the old contempt for her. When these abler
leaders had passed away and the age of mediocrity set in, we find
bishops seriously doubting whether woman has a soul, refusing her
the sacrament on the same terms as men, and rejecting her testimony
in a court of justice. From the Gospels certainly no support can be
derived for this contemptuous attitude, but it was one of the points
of the Old Testament that had not been expressly repealed, and the
harsh and dominating language of St. Paul fully supported it. It
would be idle to question the extent of the influence that St. Paul
and the Old Testament and the great Fathers of the Church had on the
young nations that were now settling down in Europe. Professor Karl
Pearson has suggested that the northern tribes embraced Christianity
precisely because it taught the subjection of women. We must, at all
events, acknowledge that it displaced the old traditions with a
lamentable theory of woman's inferiority.

During the "age of iron" (fifth to tenth century), therefore, the
cause of woman was lost, and Europe entered upon the second phase of
the subordination of woman, from which it is only emerging to-day.
The life of the Middle Ages is so vast and varied a subject that
different writers will, according to their prepossessions, give the
most contradictory pictures of it. For most thoughtful women it will
be enough to reflect that the position won by the women of Rome was
obviously lost, or they would not again be laboriously assailing
the barriers raised about their lives fifteen centuries later; and
most of the recent women-writers--Mrs. Cady Stanton, Mrs. Gage,
Mdlle. Chauvin, etc.--are very emphatic on the point. But I will try
to sum up the changes in a few broad statements.

Socially, woman became once more absolutely subject to her husband.
In the new marriage ceremony she pledged herself to blind obedience
to his orders; and both Church and State gave him the power to flog
her when he thought fit, and for a long time gave him the power to
sell or dismiss her. In courts of justice she was put on a level
with the despised Jew or the ancient slave; though there were
courts--in Switzerland, for instance--that would generously accept
the testimony of two women as being equal to that of one man.
Prostitution and concubinage spread as they had never done before.
Clerical bodies and municipalities owned brothels in many places,
and not even Corinth or Athens at their worst had made so open a
parade of women of that class. The newly-wed wives of the serfs were
the property of the feudal lord for a few days. In the better class
the women could own no property, as a rule were closely confined to
the house, and were generally cut off completely from such culture
as there was. To political influence they had no pretension.
High-placed women won the irregular and dangerous power they have
done in all ages, but otherwise they were more effectually shut out
of public life than ever. Anglo-Saxon England offered a fine
exception in this respect. Women, whether abbesses or widows, could
rule their lands, and even succeed to hereditary administrative
offices. But the coming of the Normans reduced the English woman to
the general level of economic and political dependence.

All that can be set in relief against this dark picture is that
women might obtain power and culture as abbesses of the larger
convents, that at certain periods noble lay-women acquired learning,
and that until about the thirteenth century women entered largely
into the industries of the towns. But the number of women who stand
out in the chronicles before the Renaissance for either learning or
influence is extremely small, and serves only to deepen the general
gloom of their situation. A St. Bridget or St. Hildegard, a Matilda
or a Heloise, is but one figure advancing into the light out of
obscure millions of down-trodden women. And the great share of women
in the early medieval industries did not alter materially their
position of subordination. The independent woman had too many
dangers to face--the universal violence and license, the brutalities
of the ducking-stool and scold's bridle, the appalling fate of the
"witch"--to encourage rebellion against the received ideal.
Generally speaking, woman sank in the Middle Ages to a position
lower than she had ever before occupied in a civilised community.[10]

At some date in the remote future, when the story of woman's
disabilities is ended the world over, the historian will probably
regard that millennium as the darkest age for woman in the whole
long story. A curious hesitation seems to have come over the fates.
Up to this point the main stream of human development had flowed
steadily towards Europe. The dying civilisations of Asia and Africa
had made way for Greece, and Greece had turned the stream into
Italy, to be spread from there in fertile flood over half the soil
of Europe. Then civilisation almost disappeared in Europe, and for a
time it looked as though the line of development would be taken up
by some other race. Either unknown or very dimly known to Europe
there were civilisations growing far out on the frontiers of its
world that could very well outstrip it, as it floundered in the
morass of the Middle Ages; and we may glance shortly at the position
of woman in those distant races before we come to the awakening of
Europe.

In the as yet unknown continent of America, into which some branch
of the Mongolians had pushed before the northern land-bridge broke,
two races had, by the Middle Ages, reached the upper stages of
barbarism, and were climbing to civilisation. Since it is certain
that Mexico and Peru developed quite independently of Europe, and
probably independently of each other, their resemblance to medieval
Europe is remarkable. They were feudal monarchies, with very
powerful bodies of clergy, so that the general conditions were not
favourable to woman. Education in Mexico was advanced, but under
purely religious control, and vast numbers of the girls passed into
the celibate state in the innumerable nunneries, to teach and
embroider and capture little nuns in their turn. The girl who
married (at from eleven to eighteen years of age) did not choose her
partner, and passed from obedience to her father under the equal
authority of her husband. She was not treated harshly, and polygamy
was very exceptional. But the law imposed unequal punishment on her
for unfaithfulness, and she was the greater sufferer by that ghastly
evil of the Mexican religion--human sacrifice. In Peru the position
of woman was generally better. For the great mass of the population
there was little freedom, and the woman had few relative
disabilities. She worked in the fields with the men, under a
_régime_ of what one might call highly centralised feudalism, and
seems to have been respected in the home. All political power was
kept in the hands of the Incas, who had immense harems, and who
married their sisters even more frequently than had been done in
Egypt.

From the little knowledge we have of the position of woman in these
native American civilisations, it seems that they were passing
through a normal phase of development. The primitive tribes that
lived beyond their frontiers, and exist to-day, inform us of an
earlier stage, in which the woman was oppressed. On the other hand,
there are in the Spanish writers not obscure traces that the moral
sense of Mexico and Peru was advancing (especially in regard to
human sacrifices), and no doubt the problem of woman's position
would in time have emerged. But the Spanish troops, with their
superior weapons, quickly made an end of these interesting western
polities, and reduced nearly the whole continent to the condition of
a poor imitation of Spanish culture. I need only add that in the
more advanced of the Spanish-American republics to-day--Argentina,
Uruguay, Mexico, etc.--women have begun to take a keen and prominent
interest in the culture and public affairs of their country.

When we cross over to the far east of the medieval map of the world,
we find three civilisations that we must rank with the Europe of the
Middle Ages. Of India little need be said. There is hardly a country
in the world where woman is so drastically subordinated, and it is
fairly clear that the process of subjection has in this case
increased with the advance of the race. The comparatively good
position that woman holds in so many of the lower Asiatic tribes
suggests that at the beginning of Indian history she had the same
respect and influence. Our earliest positive knowledge is in the
Vedic poems, which suggest to us an "Aryan" race fighting their
way down from the hills to the north-west, and gradually occupying
the more fertile plains. A simple pastoral folk, with patriarchal
features, they divided the labour equitably between the sexes, and
apparently treated their women with respect. Monogamy seems to have
been the rule, and such later practices as the burning of widows
were quite unknown. With the settlement of the race woman's
position steadily sank. Whether it was that the practice of war
brought in subject-wives and polygamy, or that the rise of the
Brahmanic priesthood and the caste system altered the old ideal, we
certainly perceive a degeneration towards the later contempt of
woman. The advent of Buddha gave little help to woman. Though most
of the resources of his order came from women, he, like all monastic
leaders, if not all ascetics, made no effort to improve her position
in what ascetic literature calls "the world." And when the Brahmanic
religion finally prevailed she sank lower than ever, and, amid all
the glorious art of ancient India, the practices of polygamy,
child-marriage, seclusion, and suttee spread over the land. In this
there is no real reversal of the law we formulated. The highest
culture of India was purely artistic, and such culture never helps
woman. The conscience and intelligence of the nation were stifled in
the endless wrappings and cerements of a formal and unprogressive
religion.

The development of the other great Asiatic civilisation, the
Chinese, was in many ways remarkable. As in India, the drastic
subordination of the women does not seem to be merely a heritage
from a barbaric past, since the lower Mongolian tribes generally
show little tendency to it. Not only the Indo-Chinese tribes I
mentioned in an earlier chapter, but the more northern Mongolians,
grant their women much liberty and respect. Huc found the women of
Tartary very vigorous and independent; and another early traveller,
La Pérouse, found one of the most primitive of Mongolian tribes, in
the bay of Castries, with a remarkably good character and a very
generous and equable treatment of their women. Almost the only one
of the lower Mongolian peoples to treat their women harshly are the
Thibetans, and in their case the injustice is mainly confined to
Lhassa. In that city a woman cannot go out unless she smears her
face with a dark, gluey composition. There, however, the influence
of monks and priests clearly explains the anomaly.

From this primitive level of comparative equality the Chinese, as
they developed their civilisation, passed to a social order in which
woman held a very subordinate place. The symbolic representation of
capture is so common in Mongolian marriages that one cannot help
suspecting that an early capturing of wives may have led to
subordination; though one must remember that the symbol occurs in
tribes in which woman has great liberty and influence. Whatever the
causes may have been, we find woman in a position of abject
dependence as soon as literature throws any direct light on Chinese
civilisation. It seems to me that the oldest Chinese poetry in the
_King_ point to a less unjust _régime_; but we get our first
complete knowledge of the social order in the Confucian literature,
and there woman is almost, if not quite, as subject as she is
to-day. The girl was only too apt to be sold or exposed in infancy
by the poor--a practice on which the moralists always frowned, but
which the authorities allow even to-day; though there are now
generally public hospitals to receive exposed children. The Chinese
girl usually marries at about her twentieth year, and, as virginity
is essential (except among the poor), she is carefully guarded under
the parental roof. At marriage she passes under the power of a
husband, whom she must obey in all things. She brings no dowry,
inherits no property, and has no right of divorce. The law even
discriminates most unjustly between the sexes in its scale of
punishments. She has a very slight education--only a few women
having, by some domestic accident, figured in the literary
chronicles--and not the least knowledge of public affairs. We may
well regret that the great moralists of China did not denounce these
inequalities. Six centuries before Christ agnostic moralists like
Kung-fu-tse obtained a predominant influence in cultivated China,
and the ideals of the nation are still moulded by their teaching.
But Kung-fu-tse only commanded woman to obey, and his influence, so
beneficial to character generally in China, has done nothing for
woman. The progressive spirit died in China, and there has never
been since the further advance in culture that was needed to awaken
a rebellion of the subject women.

To the east of China, during our Middle Ages, lived a younger and
smaller civilisation that has made itself known throughout the
modern world. Japan is only partly Mongolian in origin; there seems
to be a strain of blood from the southern islands in the nation's
frame. It is, therefore, not surprising to find that the cause of
woman has run an entirely different course in Japan, and that the
later excessive subordination of women was due to Chinese influence.
It seems that the more primitive Asiatic feeling of respect for
woman was carried on into the early Japanese civilisation. She had
no more share in public life generally than elsewhere, but a
considerable number of the nobler or more cultivated women stand out
in the chronicles. The golden age of native Japanese civilisation
and letters corresponds with the worst age of Europe (about 800 to
1200 of the Christian era). The chief English writer on the subject,
Mr. Astor, tells us that during that period "a very large and
important part of the best literature Japan has produced was written
by women." There are also distinguished women-Mikados and feudal
princesses in the early story of Japan.

In the later Middle Ages Chinese culture began to play the
reactionary part (in regard to woman) in Japan that Greek culture
had done in Italy. The teaching of Kung-fu-tse and the great
humanitarian moralists was warmly welcomed by the educated Japanese,
and gradually became, as it still is, the sole religion of the
class. How finely it shaped the character of Japan on most
points--making its way down to nearly every class of the nation
through the Samurai--the whole world now knows; but, as I said, it
failed entirely to do justice to woman, and so led to the
comparatively few blemishes of Japanese life. Woman was to be
confined to the home, and that narrow and ill-advised ideal cast its
invariable shadow--a great growth of prostitution. Japan had its
_geishas_ as Greece had its _hetæræ_; and the situation was
worse in the sense that poor parents of good character made money
(from twenty to forty pounds) by sending their daughters to the
_joshiwara_ for a few years. On the other hand, of course, no shame
was attached to the profession, and the more gifted members
sometimes made distinguished marriages and were received at court.

With the recent opening of Japan to modern culture the Chinese ideal
is being discredited and the abuses it engendered are being
suppressed. Women are receiving ample and rational education; a man
is forbidden (since 1875) to sell his wife or daughter; the
_joshiwaras_ are being thrust out of sight; and the Western spirit
is slowly entering the minds of the women. Japan is plainly falling
under the action of the general law. With the growth of higher
culture the inequalities of the sexes are found to be artificial,
mischievous, and unjust, and the position of woman improves. The
main principles of the _bushido_ are not likely to be lost in the
growth of Japan, but they are now held in a living and progressive
sense. What Kung-fu-tse laid down as the duties of woman may or may
not have been right and expedient 2,500 years ago. To-day they have
an unmistakable aspect of masculine dictation and despotism.
However, it is the culture of the West that has opened the new era
in Japan and China and India, and we return to Europe to see how
woman fared in what proved, after all, to be the chief theatre of
the evolution of civilisation.




 CHAPTER VII.

 RENAISSANCE AND REVOLUTION


FROM the broad survey of the world during the Middle Age of the
Christian era, which I have made in the last chapter, we pass to the
modern phase of woman's evolution. The trite old proverb, that
"the darkest hour is that before the dawn," is, in this
application, a singular and literal truth. From the comparative
elevation of ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilisation, the
cause of woman had sunk gradually, with occasional rebounds, to the
lowest point it ever touched within the limits of civilisation.
Half-a-dozen distinct civilisations lay over the world, cut off from
each other by oceans that scorned their frail vessels, or by
impassable deserts or mountain-chains; and in all of them the
position of woman was one of great and unjust subordination.

At first glance it may seem that the facts are not consistent with
the idea of a steady evolution of woman's position. It must be
borne in mind, however, that I merely affirm a development of
woman's political position in close relation to the development of
culture, and then the situation offers little difficulty. The
civilisations of North and South America, in which woman's
position was relatively better than in Europe, were not suffered to
develop fully their native resources. The civilisation of India was
constricted in lethal bonds that arrested all growth of culture; nor
would it be difficult to show that the position into which its women
were forced was largely responsible for the degeneration. China,
too, had made the mistake of stereotyping its moral and social
standards, though these were much higher, and was content to
maintain, instead of developing, its culture. Japan, fascinated by
the high moral idealism of China, too readily contracted its
formalism and conservatism.

The spirit of progress was to breathe its inspiration first over the
surface of Europe, whence it would in time pass over the rest of the
earth. From the end of the Middle Ages culture slowly ascended once
more to its ancient height, and with its progress the position of
woman steadily improved.

It is well known that the re-awakening of Europe was due to a
revival of Greek culture; but it is not so often recognised that the
inspiration came at two periods, in two different forms. The first
period was when the light of the Arabian civilisation in Spain sent
its reflection over the Pyrenees and impelled the theological
schools of Europe to a broader activity. By the twelfth century
there was a ferment of scholastic life in many parts of Europe; but
it was a barren employment of the intelligence, isolated at once
from inanimate nature and from the social and political life.
Architecture and sculpture had been kept alive from Roman days,
because the Church had use for them. Natural science was dead--had
not outlived its infancy--and social or political science had no
place under a theocracy.

Christian scholars were, therefore, greatly stimulated by the
broader culture of the Arabs, which their more adventurous members
went south to study or learned from the intermediate Jews; and
Christian nobles, whose halls and persons still retained much of the
coarseness and dirtiness of their ancestry, were quickened by the
refined luxury of the Moors and the "Paynims." By the twelfth
century Arabian Spain was deeply influencing Europe, and the advance
in the thirteenth century plainly shows the great indebtedness to
them. It is as obvious in Thomas Aquinas and Dante as it is in Pope
Silvester or Roger Bacon. And there is no dispute that the
progressive principles in Arabian civilisation were due to the Greek
culture that had made its way to the new nation through Syria.

In this form, however, the revival of Greek culture had no direct
influence on the position of woman, because it was associated with
Mohammedanism. In his fine work, _Die Frauen des Orients_ (1904),
Baron von Schweiger-Lerchenfeld shows that in the pre-Islamic period
the Arabian women had a good deal of freedom and influence. What
they have become under the influence of Islam is so well known that
I need not describe their situation. It is one more calamity that
women owe to the teaching of the Old Testament, which Mohammed
absorbed. Under the Ommejad princes the women of the orient had,
like the philosophers and the artists, a good deal of liberty, and
their position in Spain approached this. But the more rigid ideal
prevailed, and the Mohammedan woman sank lower than the Christian.

It is only indirectly, in its general stimulation of culture, that
the first Greek revival aided the cause of woman. As a literature
other than that of the theological schools now grew up in Europe,
women found more pretext for cultivating letters. The few names of
women who did thus depart from the prevailing ideal of ignorance and
domestic inclusion must not, of course, mislead us. A few of the
nobler women, like our Queen Matilda, could correspond in Latin;
still fewer could, like the young Heloise, quote Lucan and boast a
smattering of Greek. The cultivation of letters was still an almost
exclusively clerical profession, and the chief object of it was to
learn to copy tomes of theology. On the political side, moreover,
the feudal system prevented even the dawn of an ambition in the
women's minds. It was not until culture passed more generously into
the hands of laymen, and the growth of free cities made a breach in
the feudal system, that there could be even the possibility of any
large change.

These two processes went on throughout the fourteenth century. About
1350 appeared Boccaccio's _Decameron_, with its fairer promise of
woman's position, and from that time the women of Italy show the
remarkable degree of culture and liberty that we associate with the
Renaissance. In Italy the Greek-Arabian culture had taken especial
root, as every reader of Dante will surmise, and it was now fed by
direct contact with the Greek world. The Latin and Greek classics
were greatly treasured, philosophy speculated with remarkable
freedom, and art soared higher and higher in its emancipation from
monastic control. When, in 1453, the Turks captured Constantinople,
and Greek scholars fled to Italy, the revival of Greek culture was
completed, and the Renaissance of Europe accomplished.

The chief purpose of this essay dispenses me from ranging over the
familiar ground of the women of the Renaissance.[11] The picture
that Boccaccio gives of men and women cultivating letters on an
equal footing was found in most of the Italian cities. At Venice,
Rimini, Urbino, Mantua, Padua, Bologna, and the other great cities,
women often formed intellectual centres, and vied with the men in
production. Frau Braun tells of a woman-professor of theology at
Bologna; of two female authorities on canon law, Novella d'Andrea
and Maddalena Buonsignori; of an Isotta Nogarola who spoke before
popes and emperors, and a Cassandra Fedele who taught at Padua. What
the poetess Vittoria Colonna was to Michael Angelo the whole world
knows.

It was fitting enough that the women of Italy, the successors of the
older Roman women, should reopen the field of culture, but the
inspiration was to pass into other lands before it would raise the
general question of woman's position. Boccaccio was no feminist,
but his study of the lives of illustrious men and women led to a
practice of making encyclopædias of feminine biography, which was
bound to suggest the question of woman's capacity. An Italian monk
so far discarded the spirit of his order as to write two volumes (of
800 pages each) on distinguished women--170 in number--of the
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. A Roman cardinal and other
prelates indulged the same genial humour. Ribera beat all the
records with a comprehensive account of the careers of 845
distinguished women of all ages. The Renaissance ideal had quickly
passed to Spain, where one reads of a Juliana Morelli of Barcelona
speaking fourteen languages, and an Isabella of Cordova, of some
distinction in theology.

It was, however, in the more northern lands that the new movement
was to develop further. Italy and Spain were decaying. The
Reformation would soon set them in antagonism to the bolder culture
they had inspired in the north, and political despotism would stifle
the growth of their spirit. They handed on the torch to Germany,
France, and England, and slowly sank into the torpor of the
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

The women of Germany were the last to be stirred, and the stirring
was soon arrested by the Reformation and the religious wars. One
powerful work, however, was published in Germany in 1505--the Latin
treatise of the great scholar Cornelius Agrippa, _De nobilitate et
præcellentia feminini sexus_ ("Of the nobility and excellence of
the female sex"). Agrippa maintained that the souls of men and
women were equal, and that equal education should and could be given
to women. The controversy that followed would, with a few changes of
terms, entirely reflect the modern controversy about woman's
capacity. But little progress was made, for the reasons I have
given.

In France the Italian culture found a readier soil. Frau Braun
describes the _Cité des Dames_ of Christine de Pisan (fifteenth
century) as the first plea for woman's emancipation, but a reader
of that curious work will find the plea very much qualified. It
ranges over the whole field of distinguished women--the women of
Italy, of the Bible, of antiquity--with admiration of their learning
or virtue or power; but it adheres very closely to the prevailing
religious ideas, and urges married women to see an advantage in
their subjection to their husbands. Montaigne's adopted daughter,
Mlle. de Gournay, was the real pioneer of the modern movement. She
demanded the equality of the sexes in all things except military
service. Another woman, Anna Dacier, made the first French
translations of Plautus, Terence, and Aristophanes. Margaret of
Navarre and--in a less degree--Margaret of Valois proved the
capacity of their sex for literary production. Before Cardinal
Richelieu founded the Academy for the perfecting of the French
tongue the hotel of Mme. de Rambouillet was the chief centre of
letters and culture in Paris; and Richelieu's own niece, Mme. de
Combalet, had a literary salon in which Corneille and the best
writers of the day met.

England and Germany were at that time regarded as lingering at a
barbaric level from the point of view of Latin culture. Italian and
Spanish ladies very generally learned Latin, and the French aspirant
to letters acquired Spanish and Italian; but English was abandoned
to merchants and diplomatists. By the end of the seventeenth
century, however, the effect of the Renaissance was felt among the
women of England. In 1694 Mary Astell published, anonymously, _A
Serious Proposal to the Ladies for the Advancement of their True and
Greatest Interest_. She tells of the learned women of Italy and
France, and declares that woman's "incapacity" is "acquired, not
natural." "How can you be content to be like tulips in a garden?"
she disdainfully asks. Let women build a kind of lay convent, she
urges--a school of virtue and learning, a pious and proper imitation
of Oxford and Cambridge--and have their sex fully educated.

Mary Astell's appeal had little effect, though it was immediately
supported by no less powerful a writer than Defoe. It appears that
Defoe had already (in 1692 and 1693) written his _Essay upon
Projects_, and he published it in 1697. One of the score of
projects he put before the country was a plea for the higher
education of women. "I have often thought," he said, "that it
is one of the most parlous customs in the world that we deny the
advantages of learning to women. We reproach the sex every day with
folly and impertinence, while I am confident that, had they the
advantage of education equal to us, they would be guilty of less
than ourselves." In the meantime Defoe has apparently seen Mary
Astell's proposal, and he politely ridicules her idea of a
"nunnery." "Women are extravagantly desirous of going to heaven," he
says, "and will punish their pretty bodies to get thither; but
nothing else will do it, and even in that case it falls out
sometimes that nature will prevail." He is in favour of public
schools more like those in the country for youths. Women's
faculties are equal to men's, he insists; the only difference is
in education. But he hints that he will hear of no encroachment on
"man's sphere," and so condemns in advance any political ambition.
How little response there was to these appeals, and how the
education of English women remained at an almost medieval level
until little more than a generation ago, is sufficiently known.

Thus the fire of the Renaissance burnt itself out in Italy and Spain
within two or three centuries, and its inspiration led to little
direct result in France, and still less in England. The history of
French culture contains a number of names of brilliant women during
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but the records of English
literature are relieved by few feminine names until we reach the age
of Queen Victoria. But the educative movement started by the
Renaissance had great importance. It had provided a brilliant
disproof of the prevailing belief that woman was of a lower order of
intelligence than man. The position of men like Cornelius Agrippa
and Defoe was one of unanswerable common sense. Inequality of
culture between the sexes there assuredly was; but to ascribe this
to native inequality of resource, instead of to the glaring
inequality of education, was sheer folly. Grant woman the
opportunity of attaining culture, and then one may sensibly begin to
speculate on her capacity. And from every part of Christendom in
which the opportunity was granted there came a report of brilliant
and scholarly women. The extension of female education in our day
has completed that first breach in the medieval superstition of
woman's inferiority.

If the older notion of woman's incapacity on the speculative side
were thus proved to be unsound, it might very well be that the
corresponding belief in her practical capacity or political judgment
was equally unsound. It might turn out that, when the opportunity
for cultivating her political sense was offered, the result would be
the same as when opportunities of education were given. In this way
the cultural movement that issued from the Renaissance prepared the
way for the political struggle. But before this struggle could set
in two other profound and far-reaching changes were to take place.
The capability of exercising political power is one thing: the right
to exercise it another. Until the close of the eighteenth century
the second point was hardly raised. Then there opened a period of
economic and political change that made the raising of it
inevitable.

I will describe here the dawn of the new era in the last quarter of
the eighteenth century, and deal with the nineteenth in the next
chapter. By the beginning of the eighteenth century the cause of
woman had made a substantial advance in many respects. In Germany
the advance was almost purely cultural, though the names are not
wanting of women who wielded some political influence by the
indirect method of influencing rulers or statesmen. In England,
again, there were women of culture and women of influence, as all
know; but there was a singular retrogression in the political
position of women generally. Mrs. Stopes (_British Free Women_) has
so recently and fully discussed the change that I need do no more
than summarise it. For two reasons England had promised to be the
first theatre of the struggle for political enfranchisement. Not
only was it the first country of the modern era to set up
parliamentary representation, but it had been the latest of the
Teutonic races to retain the old ideal of respect for woman. The
Norman Conquest had greatly lowered the prestige of woman, but there
were still high offices (such as that of sheriff) that women could
inherit and fill. On the other hand, the Norman kings had been
forced to grant a permanent representation of the third estate (or
Commons) five hundred years before the French Revolution, and during
the great Civil War the power of the Commons had enormously
increased. The old Anglo-Saxon feeling persisted in the fact that
the privilege of electing the borough-representatives was not
confined to one sex.

The peculiarity of England's development is that in its case we seem
to have the only exception to the law I formulated--that the
position of woman improves with the growth of culture. From the
fourteenth to the seventeenth century culture enormously advanced,
and the position of woman steadily deteriorated. In the early
decades of the seventeenth century we find an Englishwoman, Anne
Clifford, struggling against the monarch for the hereditary right to
a high office. Women burgesses and landowners could still share the
election of parliamentary representatives; but at the beginning of
the seventeenth century this right was taken from them, and the
sex-disability was imposed. Sir Edward Coke, relying chiefly on St.
Paul's injunctions to women, successfully removed the last trace of
the old Teutonic ideal.

Here, at first sight, is an apparent exception to our alliance of
feminism and culture; but, in reality, we have a number of modifying
circumstances. The long lawlessness of the Middle Ages had made men
less and less disposed to see women in office or in public life. The
head, even of a manor, needed to be a soldier in those days. Women
often proved capable enough of inspiring and directing their
followers, but it is quite intelligible that there was a strong
tendency towards discouraging or preventing women from holding
office in such turbulent times. And with this tendency was joined
the even worse influence of the canon law of the Church. When we
find a great lawyer like Sir Edward Coke refusing the testimony of
women, on grounds of sex, we see at once how this fatal sentiment
had been gradually permeating the mind of England. It had put woman
in a deplorable legal position--or, rather, a position outside the
law--and it inevitably fostered the notion of woman's inferiority
and incapacity. Before the end of the eighteenth century we find
legal writers classing women with "infants, idiots, and lunatics" in
illustrating "natural incapacity." In this way the growth of culture
came to be, in England, associated with a deterioration in the
position of women; but the circumstance does not invalidate our law,
as the retrogression was plainly due to such extraneous causes as
the permeation of our life with the spirit and letter of the canon
law, as Sir Henry Maine has shown.

Under these reactionary influences the women of England seemed, in
the eighteenth century, to have entirely lost their birthright, and
fallen into line with the women of the world. The eighteenth century
is, indeed, a dramatic moment in the whole story of feminism. The
earlier power of English women was generally forgotten; the ambition
and struggle of women in older civilisations were quite unknown; the
fire of the Renaissance had sunk again, leaving only a few women
scattered over Europe with a zeal for culture. The world over woman
was subordinate and submissive. Then there broke out a series of
political eruptions that changed the face of the world, and awakened
a fresh ambition in women that would never again be stilled.

The first of these great disturbances was the Declaration of
Independence on the part of the American colonies. I have said that
certain fundamental changes took place during the nineteenth century
that made the raising of the feminist claim quite inevitable, and at
the same time made the refusal of the claim more illogical and
unjust than it had ever been before. The first and chief of these
changes was the democratisation of politics. The mass of the women
laboured under no political sex-disability in the eighteenth
century, because the mass of the men had no political power at all.
In England, under a corrupt and degenerate Parliamentary system, a
proportion of the men had a semblance of power; in other countries
the mass of the men had not even the shadow of it. France had not
summoned its States-General, in which the Third Estate had a nominal
representation, since 1614. The world was ruled by castes of priests
and nobles, and the higher and wealthier women often had the
satisfaction of ruling their rulers. When this system altered, when
political power began to spread over the middle class and working
men, the woman question would arise spontaneously and command
attention.

America inaugurated the change. The Declaration of Independence, in
1776, set up the first modern democracy--the Swiss Cantons were
essentially aristocratic until the nineteenth century--and prepared
the way for the suffrage controversy. From the very first moment the
women of America denounced the injustice of a male electorate. Mercy
Otis Warren had fostered the rebellion in her drawing-room, where
the leaders often met, and Abigail Smith Adams (wife of the first
President) was no less active. They and others demanded the
admission of women to the new constitution. While it was being
prepared, Mrs. Adams wrote to her husband that "if the position of
women was not thoroughly considered they would rebel, and not
consider themselves bound by laws that gave them no voice or
representation of their interests." The first assault failed, only
two States being willing to grant the justice of the plea. We will
return presently to the resumed agitation in America, but must
revert to Europe for the second exception, that was to stir the
lethargy of women by putting a specific sex-disability on them.

The appeal of Montaigne's daughter had raised no echo in the France
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The women of the
nobility had ample power of the familiar, irregular kind, and the
women of the people were no poorer than their husbands in political
rights. Then Rousseau set up the ideal of the Rights of Man, and
France moved towards the great Revolution. The influence of the
philosophers in preparing the Revolution has been exaggerated, and
in point of fact most of them were decidedly anti-feminist. Voltaire
and Montesquieu slighted their demands and capacities. Rousseau
contrived to reconcile a doctrine of the equality of human beings
with the old-fashioned ideal of woman's place. But they, at least,
stimulated thought and encouraged education in women, and women
learned to correct their logic. Then came the news of the struggle
in America, and the feeling against England made it extraordinarily
popular. Ladies wore "American Independence hats," and discussed
deep constitutional questions during the recently imported function
of tea. Nobles volunteered for service, and brought back stirring
stories of democracy.

The American episode had nearly lost interest when the Revolution
broke out. There can be no doubt that it was not without permanent
influence, but the more demonstrative zeal had been manifested by
the upper class, and the form that democracy now took in their own
country very quickly extinguished it. Of the first French Revolution
in itself I need say little. The later and less picturesque
Revolutions were more permanently effective. Freeman has observed,
however, that the face of Europe was changed for ever by the first
Revolution, and it is well taken as the pyrotechnic inauguration of
the modern era.

Little direct encouragement was given to women by the
revolutionaries. A few men like Sieyès and Condorcet, who had
founded a Lyceum for women in 1786, recognised that women were human
beings when they spoke of "the Rights of Man." The majority, led
by Mirabeau, and afterwards by Danton, refused to listen to the
appeal of women like Mme. Condorcet; even revolutionary women like
Mme. Roland agreed with them. Hence the share that women took in the
Revolution cannot occupy a place of any prominence in such a study
as this. Their campaign for the recognition of their rights came to
naught. They showered petitions on the National Assembly, founded
political clubs all over the country, and published a journal,
_L'Observateur féminin_. But the Jacobins were inexorable, and
they guillotined the most fiery of their speakers, Olympe de Gouges
(reputed daughter of Louis XIV.), for her fearless opposition. And,
eventually, the three great waves washed over the work of the
Revolution and obliterated its traces. The Directory suppressed
Jacobinism, Napoleon superseded Directorism, and Metternich and
Wellington annihilated Napoleonism. A group of statesmen, sitting
round a table in the Foreign Office at Vienna, set up again the
broken model of aristocratic Europe, and democracy was
unceremoniously buried.

But political evolution had set definitively in the direction of
democracy, and in another generation it would rise again. With this
development, which of itself sufficed to lay bare the foundations of
political power and press forward the woman question, was associated
an industrial development that made an equally fatal breach in the
old order. How these and other far-reaching changes have
irresistibly forced on us the feminist controversy of our time will
be shown in the next chapter.




 CHAPTER VIII.

 THE STRUGGLE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY


IN ancient Greece there was a certain symbolic ceremony of a very
picturesque character in connection with one of the great festivals.
A lighted torch was to be conveyed to a distant altar, and a series
of horsemen had to discharge the ceremony. Along the line of frantic
riders, from the exhausted hand of one horseman to the fresh grasp
of the next, the fiery symbol was handed, until the last of the
procession placed it in triumph on the destined altar.

Our story of the evolution of woman's position recalls this old
ceremony. For nearly three thousand years, at least, the torch has
passed from rider to rider, and the altar is in sight. The struggle
of the later Egyptian women re-appears in Greece, crosses the sea to
Italy, is raised again in the revival of ancient culture, passes on
to France, when the Italian States decay, and reaches at length the
vigorous hands of England, Germany, and the United States. In one
respect, however, the parallel fails. It is true that the cause has
moved onward through the ages, but there have been years, even
centuries, when the torch was almost, if not quite, extinct. There
have been times when the distant altar seemed to be forgotten, and
women sank back into uncomplaining subjection. Such a period was the
appalling stretch between the fifth and the twelfth centuries,
between the murder of Hypatia and the living death of Heloise. The
eighteenth century, compared with the promise of its predecessors,
is another such period, in most countries. The first quarter of the
nineteenth century is another, and the last. Then the torch flames
out again, and, for reasons I will give presently, can never more be
extinguished until it is laid on the altar.

After the fall of Napoleon in 1815 Europe closed the mouth of the
pit, as it thought, and dreamed soft dreams of continued despotism.
The Holy Alliance had a sharp ear for murmurs of rebellion against
any received ideal, and enforced submission everywhere at the point
of the bayonet. It would be futile for women to chafe at their bonds
in that world. Happily, the world was wider than the sphere of the
Bourbons, the Hapsburgs, and the Pope. England contemplated their
"white terror" with instinctive resentment; though England had
shuddered at Jacobinism, and in the main was more disposed than
before for coercion and subjection. But the United States maintained
its theoretic scorn of despotism, and little British colonies which
dotted the blue southern ocean promised the same spirit of
independence.

It was in the United States that the modern struggle for the
enfranchisement of nations began. The appeals of Mercy Warren and
Abigail Adams were almost forgotten, and the masculine ideal was
firmly incorporated in the American constitution, when a young
Scotchwoman, Frances Wright, used the comparative freedom of the
country to start a brilliant and fiery campaign for the rights of
women. How she was presently joined by the talented Polish Jewess,
Ernestine Rose, and the devoted Quaker women, Abby Kelly and the
Sisters Grimke; how the democratic Americans jeered and howled at
them, and the clergy branded them, and the little company grew
larger and larger--all this may be read in Mrs. Cady Stanton's
_History_. By 1837 the great American poet, Whittier, took up arms
for them against their clerical opponents. They had proved their
capacity for public life by their share in the anti-slavery
campaign. They did not take the view of Carlyle.

In the meantime the second Revolution had taken place in France, and
the second democratic wave passed over Europe. Its chief expression
was the passing of the great Reform Bill in England in 1832. With
singular logic the men who had prepared forests of pikes to
withstand Wellington, the men who had met in gatherings of 200,000
to sing "Hail, dawn of liberty," and threaten to march on London,
now turned on their less militant women and expressly excluded them
from political life. James Mill had laid it down in 1825 (_Essay on
Government_) that women's interests were bound up with men's, and
so Radicals could justly exclude them from the franchise. In their
resentment of the notion that a superior class should dictate to
them how they were to be represented, the men of England had sacked
cathedrals, challenged the troops, and trampled on the portrait of
the king; then they turned about and dictated to the women, who
would not do these things, how _they_ were to be represented. The
Reform Bill made the electorate exclusively male for the first time
in the history of England; and the Reformed Parliament went on, in
1835, to exclude women from the enfranchising clauses of the
Municipal Corporations' Act.

I have already described the influences that had for centuries been
undermining the older English ideal, but this open violation of it,
at the very time when streams of oratory were flowing all over
England on liberty and the value of representation, naturally led to
a reaction. The agitation for the Reform Bill had itself re-awakened
in women the desire of sharing in public life, and the injustice
shown by the reformers would not allay it. There were not wanting
gospels for the new cause. Mary Wollstonecraft had published a
_Vindication of the Rights of Women_ in the height of the French
Revolution (1792), and a political writer who had great influence
with Liberals, William Godwin, had supported her. William Thompson
had issued a spirited reply to James Mill in 1825. Robert Owen, who
had immense influence in England by 1840, adopted the same view.
Women also joined in the Corn Law Agitation, and some of its chief
leaders acknowledged that they proved their capacity for public
life. Cobden and Villiers favoured their claim. W. J. Fox, one of
the most brilliant of the Free Traders, minister of South Place
Chapel (London), warmly espoused their cause. About 1850 pamphlets
and magazine articles began to appear, advocating the
enfranchisement of women.[12]

By the middle of the century there was a strong feeling in England
and the United States for the enfranchisement of women. The number
of agitators was very small, but the life of the world was now
developing rapidly, and the new tendencies were putting an entirely
new complexion on the question of woman's position in the State.
It will be convenient to note these tendencies here--warning the
reader that they increase in later decades--in order to understand
the real logical strength of the modern movement.

The struggle is, in essence, a conflict of two ideals--the new ideal
and the old belief, not so much that "woman's place is the home,"
but that she shall have no interest beyond it. How far men have a
right to dictate their position to women, or how far one group of
women have the faintest pretension to dictate to another group, I
need not waste time in inquiring. I chance to be one of those males
who have never discovered the slenderest moral or rational base for
the assumed right to tell women what is best for them, and force
them to do it. But I need not linger over this, as the old ideal was
framed in harmony with a world that has passed away for ever, and it
is as odd and discordant as any other medieval survival in our
world.

I admitted that when political life, or the practice of settling
social or corporate issues, first arose it was quite natural that it
should fall exclusively into the hands of the men. The social
decisions usually concerned migration, or war, or some other
extra-domal matter, in the execution of which woman was, from the
nature of things, much less interested than man. I need not run over
the intermediate stages of political life, and will merely point out
a few of the ways in which the old division of home-work and
State-work broke down in the nineteenth century. The industrial
development made the first great breach in the old standard. The
early political system was obviously founded on the early division
of labour. Woman worked in and about the home, owing to the natural
tie of the children, and man worked further afield. The factory
system entirely discarded this old division, and encouraged women to
leave their homes and work by the side of men. Long before the
middle of the nineteenth century tens of thousands of women were
performing the same work as men, as far from the home as men. Then
workshops, shops, and offices took fresh groups of women away from
the home; and journalism and other professions further extended the
process. In 1851 there was not a woman photographer or book-binder
in England, and there were only 1,742 shop-girls. In 1861 there were
130 women in the photographic trade, 308 in book-binding (1,755 in
1871), and 7,000 in shops. To what proportions the extra-domal
employment has reached I need not describe. One-fourth of the women
and girls of England now have other than domestic employment. More
than a million married women are so employed.

With this enormous and increasing employment of women in view it is
impossible to continue to talk of woman's place being the home,
and quite ridiculous to make that threadbare phrase a ground for the
limitation of woman's interests. To refuse them a right that only
the most desperate stretch of imagination could represent as taking
women "out of the home," and at the same time to acquiesce in an
industrial development that effectively takes millions of them out
of it, is a quaint aberration of reasoning. It would be more
sensible to recognise that the phrase, "woman's place is the home,"
belonged to an older civilisation. Assuredly, it is a strange phrase
to use to-day as an argument against the suffrage. The old division
of labour has broken down. The old political division that was built
on it must follow.

Side by side with this economic development there was proceeding a
political evolution that no less thoroughly undermined the old
ideal. In the first place, the base of political power grew broader
and broader throughout the century. In 1848 the middle-class revolt,
that had succeeded in England in 1832, broke out over most of the
Continent, and triumphed. Though there was a reaction in some
countries, the basis of political life was generally and permanently
broadened, and millions of professional men and higher workers won a
share in the control of the affairs of their country. Towards 1870
(speaking generally) a fresh and larger class clamoured for
enfranchisement, and secured it. And as the century went on ever
fresh demands were made, and the enfranchised few found no principle
on which they could decently resist. In most of the countries of
Europe the overwhelming majority of the adult and literate males
have the vote.

This development of political life puts the modern demand of the
women in a position entirely new and incalculably stronger than it
ever had before. Only in ancient Athens was there a somewhat similar
situation, and in that case decay followed too quickly upon full
bloom to allow the natural consequence. In most other cases the
women had no specific political disability. Their husbands and
brothers had, as a rule, no more political right than they. A
woman-franchise movement was inconceivable in any earlier
period--apart from Athens, where it was evidently preparing--and it
was just as inevitable in modern times. When you extend the control
of national affairs to tens of millions of men--the Socialists alone
count between seven and eight million votes on the Continent--you
disfranchise as many tens of millions of women. You impose the
sex-disability in its most offensive and least defensible form.

Nor is this the only aspect of political evolution that exhibits the
cant phrase about woman's place as a medieval survival. So long as
political life was mainly concerned with issues, like trade or war,
that fell in the men's sphere of work, the primitive division of
political responsibility remained more or less plausible. It is no
longer even plausible. National defence is, and must be, a primary
concern of politics; but in England at least this concerns women
just as much as men. The vast majority of our men do not share in
the work. A select body undertakes it, and the other men have just
as much, and no more, interest in controlling them than women have.
Trade, commerce, and industry are still main objects of political
concern; but women are included in vast numbers in the industrial
world. And the new and broader conception of the task of an
administration has completed the annihilation of the old ideal.
Social reform--questions of housing, temperance, pensions,
etc.--obviously concern women as much as men, and are in no sense
whatever masculine issues; while the recent extension of legislation
to the home and the child has made it quite futile to talk of the
woman's home as her sphere, in the sense that she must have no
interest in the public life beyond it. Once she really was mistress
in the home; now, happily, the law has invaded every corner of it.
It controls the birth of her children, controls their infancy in a
score of ways, controls their beds and fires and food, controls
their punishment, their recreation, their education, and their early
employment. This is a colossal change in the objective of political
life, and it necessarily involves a surrender of the older idea of
enfranchisement.

Finally, we have in yet another way enfeebled the old idea of
woman's sphere. No one seems yet to have reflected that, while the
Churches have been the most serious opponents of feminism, they have
done more than any to give woman an interest outside the home. But
Church affairs and missionary enterprise and charity bazaars were
quickly succeeded or supplemented by other interests. As late as
1840 Londoners forbade a group of devoted American women from
speaking at the Anti-Slavery Convention on the express ground that
woman's place was the home. It seems centuries remote from our day
of women's clubs, literary societies, golf, and the hundreds of
organisations in which women are on equal terms with men. But the
last and most ironic departure from the old ideal was when the great
political bodies formed feminine annexes to their organisations, and
pressed women into active service in the electoral campaign. The
psychology of the Conservative or Liberal who approves of the
Primrose League or the Women's Liberal Federation, and the
employment of women at elections, yet, when these ladies ask for the
vote, murmurs that their place is the home, is a thing too turbid or
too insincere for analysis. One could, at least, understand a man
urging still the old phrase who would press for the exclusion of
women from our industries and professions, from all political
organisations, permanent or temporary, from all clubs, bazaars,
entertainments, and educative societies; but such a man would be
deemed little short of insane. Yet the right to cast a vote once in
five years, and to maintain a sufficient interest in politics to do
so reasonably, would lay no more strain on a woman's domestic
energy than any single one of these admitted activities.

At all events, these four radical changes that have occurred in the
nineteenth century have given an entirely new complexion to the
demand of women. The extension of the franchise to the general male
population has laid a specific sex-disability on woman: the
extension of the sphere of legislation has completely eliminated
whatever trace of justice there was in the primitive political
division; the economic evolution of woman has made her a sharer in
the nation's life, apart from the home, and involves a share in
the control of that life; and the deliberate encouragement of her to
occupy herself with public life has made the old phrase ring
somewhat hollow and insincere. These are the causes of the modern
suffrage movement. We have educated woman and developed her
personality. It is too late to tell her to remain a child in all but
maternal duties. We have ourselves destroyed the rigid partition
that once divided the life of the home from the life of the State,
and it is ludicrous to ask woman to imagine that it still exists.
The present revolt of woman is not the mere effect of a sudden
concession of education. Its roots run deep into the most
characteristic elements of modern life. It cannot possibly be
eradicated, but must grow on to its fulness.

It is in this spirit that we must approach the political evolution
of woman in the last half-century if we are to understand it aright.
It has advanced more rapidly in that half-century than in all
preceding time, and the reason is that human life itself has evolved
more rapidly and remarkably. It is not so much that women are
assailing an old social ideal. The old ideal is dead, and they
demand a live, just, and rational adjustment of their position to
the new conditions.

It would be quite useless to attempt a review of the struggle that
has been conducted in the last half-century, and I must be content
to summarise the steps of progress in England and record the
victories already gained abroad. The story is equally long and
eventful in the United States, but cannot be told here. Frances
Wright (later Mme. D'Arusmont), Ernestine Rose, Abby Kelly, and
the other pioneers, fought a stern missionary fight in the first
half of the century. When England refused a hearing to their finest
anti-slavery workers in 1840 the resentment of that piece of
medieval folly led to the holding of the first Women's Suffrage
Convention in the States, and the cause has gradually gained in
public feeling. The assertion of Mrs. Humphry Ward that it has
recently lost ground is astounding. She might have read, in the
current number of the _Englishwoman's Year Book_, that within the
last few years about five hundred men's organisations have
declared in favour of women suffrage, and that this number includes
such powerful bodies as the American Federation of Labour and the
United Mine Workers. Indeed, her statement was quickly followed by
the announcement in the Press that the women of New York were
preparing a fresh and far more active campaign, and that another of
the States (Oregon) is re-considering the question of granting it.

As is known, four States in the Union have granted the suffrage to
their women. In 1869 Wyoming admitted women to vote on the same
terms as men. The predictions of the Conservatives were so far
falsified that in 1893 the State Legislature forwarded to the
Legislatures of the other States in the Union an official resolution
to the effect that the change had "wrought no harm, and done great
good in many ways," and added: "As the result of experience we
urge every civilised community on earth to enfranchise its women
without delay." Wyoming has a remarkable record of social
improvement, and the Legislature acknowledges great aid in this from
the women. Divorce is far less frequent than in other States, so
that the predicted disruption of domestic peace seems not to have
followed. Nor have women tired of the vote they won, for to-day,
after forty years' possession, ninety per cent. of them vote.

Colorado granted woman franchise in 1893, and it has since had a
fine record of social legislation. Judge Lindsey declared in 1906:
"No one would dare to propose its repeal; and, if left to the men
of the State, any proposition to revoke the right bestowed upon
women would be overwhelmingly defeated. Many good laws have been
obtained in Colorado which would not have been secured but for the
power and influence of women."

The evident success of the reform stimulated neighbouring States
(who should be the most competent judges), and in 1896 Idaho and
Utah adopted it. Their leading public men speak in the same terms of
the effect, and a healthy stimulus has been given to social
legislation. In 1906 the same proposal was submitted to the male
electors of Oregon, and it was only lost by ten thousand votes. The
loss was easily accounted for by the violent opposition of the
saloon-keepers in the State. Ex-President Roosevelt has repeatedly
advocated the reform in his own State, and the movement is steadily
gaining ground in the other States.[13]

In England the movement has advanced far beyond the dreams of the
women of half a century ago. Miss Blackburn gives an ample chronicle
of the progress made since 1850, but I have (in writing the
biography of George Jacob Holyoake) been able to see a good deal of
correspondence of the period that throws light on the early group.
Holyoake, a faithful disciple of the great Owen, had endeavoured for
many years to stir women to revolt. As early as 1847 he had drawn up
a programme (published in the _Free Press_), according to which
they were to found a journal, hold meetings with women speakers, and
agitate for legal and political justice. Ten years later, when he
was in close relation with Miss Harriet Martineau, Miss Bessie R.
Parkes (later Mrs. Belloc), Miss Barbara L. Smith (Mrs. Bodichon),
Mrs. Stansfeld, Mrs. Crawford, and many other advanced women, they
founded the _Woman's Journal_, and began to increase. In the same
year the rights of women figured prominently for the first time in
an election-manifesto--that issued by Mr. Holyoake in his abortive
campaign at Tower Hamlets. He had also issued as a pamphlet Mrs. J.
S. Mill's article, "Are Women fit for Politics?" Mill himself
lent his powerful advocacy to the cause, and in 1869 issued his
famous _Subjection of Women_.

The growing feeling was now stimulated by the agitation over the
second Reform Bill in 1866-7, and strong parties were formed in
Manchester and London. Disraeli himself assented to the principle,
and within a fortnight a petition obtained 1,499 signatures. A great
public meeting was held in Manchester (where Miss Lydia Belcher had
been then working for two or three years) in 1868, and was addressed
by Dr. Pankhurst and other well-known public men. Mr. Jacob Bright
was another staunch supporter in the North. At London, in the
following year, a very striking meeting was addressed by Professor
Fawcett, Charles Kingsley, John Morley, Lord Houghton, Charles
Dilke, P. A. Taylor, James Stansfeld, and Professor Masson. Mrs.
Fawcett and Viscountess Amberley were now associated with the
movement, and Professor Francis Newman and Mr. J. Chamberlain were
quoted in favour of it.

In 1869 the first victory was won, when the municipal franchise was
restored to women; and in the following year the School Boards were
set up, and--apart from the metropolis--women could vote for and
serve on them. With such prominent and eloquent supporters, the
women movement now made rapid progress, and it was decided to open
the long, historic siege of Westminster. The first Bill to be
presented had the support of a petition of 134,000 women, and passed
the first reading. But Gladstone was hostile, and it was rejected on
second reading by 220 votes to 94. It would be impossible here to
follow the long and spirited struggle in detail, and I must refer
the reader to Miss Blackburn's chronicle. From 1875 to 1879 a Bill
was presented annually, and never failed to secure more than a
hundred votes. John Bright, unhappily, thundered against it with all
his eloquence, and in 1878 and 1879 the opponents made the most
unsparing efforts to win the members. Even in 1879, however, the
Bill had 103 supporters and 217 opponents. In 1883 a resolution in
favour was supported by 114 members against 130. In 1884 an
amendment to the Reform Bill was lost by 136 votes (271 to 135), but
it was well known that scores of Liberal members merely voted
against it owing to the threats of Mr. Gladstone. At the General
Election of 1886 there were 343 friends of women suffrage returned
to the House, and a fresh attempt was made in 1892. On the side of
the supporters were now Mr. Balfour and Sir G. Wyndham, while Mr.
Asquith began his career of hostility, and Mr. Gladstone threw his
influence against it. The voting showed 152 friends to 179
opponents. The General Election of 1892 reduced the friends of the
cause to 229, but the number rose to 232 in 1895, 274 in 1900, and
to the extraordinary number of 420 in the present Parliament, which
passed the second reading of Mr. Stanger's Bill by a majority of
179.

No one who reflects seriously on the growth of the demand for woman
suffrage since G. J. Holyoake quixotically expressed it in his
manifesto of 1857 can hesitate in forecasting the future. In half a
century the movement has expanded from a small group of a score of
women writers to a body that can force 420 Members of Parliament to
promise their support, can fill Hyde Park with half a million
demonstrators, and can hold thousands of meetings throughout the
country in the course of the year. No agitation, with anything like
the same resources, ever made such advance in the course of thirty
or forty years. Possibly two other organisations show a more
imposing record--the early Free Trade movement and the modern Tariff
Reform movement. But both these had enormous financial resources,
dealt with a material issue, and had the organisation of existing
great political parties to draw upon. The spirit of the age has
borne women on as it advanced, and the future is assured. It is
hardly too much to say that only the prejudice of _one_ man
prevents the granting of the demand to-day in England.

It will be in entire harmony with its early history and its finer
traditions if England is the first great power to grant woman
franchise, as it promises to be. Meantime, instances are multiplying
in which smaller communities admit their women to political life
with a happy success. In 1881 the miniature State of the Isle of Man
granted a restricted franchise to women in the elections for the
House of Keys. In Canada the question has been agitated since 1883,
when Sir J. A. Macdonald inserted a clause enfranchising women in
the Electoral Bill which he submitted to the Dominion Parliament.
But the large Roman Catholic population of French Canadians blocks
the way for the present in the Dominion.

In Australia and New Zealand the more independent and progressive
spirit of the colonists needed little pressure to realise that men
who resent the despotic dictation of other men have no title to
dictate despotically to their women. New Zealand very early caught
the echo of the struggle in England. In 1878 an Electoral Bill,
enfranchising women ratepayers, was put through the House of
Representatives by the Government, but failed--not exactly on the
woman issue--to pass the Legislative Council. The women organised in
1886, and saw their Bill in 1891 carried by a majority of thirty-two
to seven in the lower House, but lost by two votes in the Council.
In 1893 it passed both Houses, and of the 109,000 enfranchised women
no less than 90,000 voted at the next general election.

In most of the other colonies the victory has come with even less
struggle. South Australia debated and carried a resolution in favour
as early as 1885, though there was practically no demand on the part
of the women. As a two-thirds majority was needed, the women began
to educate and agitate, and the franchise was secured in 1894. In
New South Wales the question was brought forward by Sir H. Parkes in
his Electoral Bill of 1890, and a powerful organisation of women
took up the demand in the colony. By 1901 the measure passed the
House of Assembly by a large majority (fifty-one to seven), but was
rejected by a small majority (twenty-six to twenty-one) in the
Legislative Council. In the following year it passed into law. West
Australia passed the reform almost without a struggle. The Women's
Franchise League of that colony was formed in the spring of 1899,
and the suffrage was obtained the same year. In Victoria, during a
ten years' brisk agitation, a measure has passed the lower House
six times with increased majorities, but is blocked by the
Legislative Council. Tasmania granted the franchise to women in
1903, and Queensland in 1905. Finally, the franchise for the Federal
Parliament of Australia was granted to women, after a very brief
struggle, in 1902.[14]

To these victories won by the principle in the English-speaking
world must be added the granting of the municipal franchise in
Denmark, the enfranchisement of tax-paying women in Norway, and the
concession of the right, not only to vote, but to sit in the Diet,
in Finland. At the first election under the new Finnish constitution
nineteen women were returned to the Diet, and the number increased
to twenty-five in the following year (1908). Their colleagues
willingly testify to the advantage of their presence in passing the
beneficent series of Bills that the Tsar prevents them from carrying
into law.

These are the triumphs of a single generation against one of the
deepest-rooted prejudices of social life. One thinks instinctively
of some iron-bound coast, where the wavelets ripple feebly to the
foot of the beetling cliffs, and where even the fiercest storms
fling their waters impotently on the adamantine front. And one day
there occurs a convulsion of the crust, the culmination of a slow
alteration of level, and the storms begin to tear wide breaches in
the enfeebled barrier. From that day the confining rock is doomed.
There has been an alteration of level in the social, industrial, and
political life of the world. Large breaches have been torn in the
ring of prejudice that confined the life of women. Here it has been
the granting of municipal franchise or the power to serve as Poor
Law Guardians; there it has been the right to vote for the national
Parliament; at one place the right to sit in Parliament. The
confining bonds are doomed. The political evolution of woman is
running in a channel that it had never reached before in the history
of the world, and all the abortive rushes of earlier ages have no
moral for the present time. The only question now is, how long can
the reef of prejudice survive? Nay, we are not talking of
unconscious stone, but human hearts and minds, and the real question
is: Which great nation will win the honour of recognising first that
the age of despotism is over and the position of woman in the
commonwealth radically changed?




 CHAPTER IX.

 THE MORAL BASE OF ENFRANCHISEMENT


THE general sketch I have just completed, of the evolution of
woman's political position from the earliest and dimmest human
communities to the twentieth century, has vindicated the law which
I set out to prove. This essay is in no sense a chronicle of
women's agitations, women's disabilities, and women's victories. It
is a simple effort to discover a principle, and only sufficient
details have been included for its purpose. They have made it clear
that, in the first place, the subordination of woman springs from a
barbaric institution, is always challenged (both by men and women)
when a nation reaches a high stage of culture, and is continuously
modified as the mental and moral cultivation of the community grows.
Since it is inconceivable that civilisation should perish or
retrograde again, in the new world of our time, it follows that the
present feminist movement cannot sink back into submission, but will
continue with the spread of culture, until woman's position is
adjusted on principles of general equity and reason.

This position is further strengthened by the reflection, which I
have vindicated, that changes have taken place in the structure of
modern life which have of themselves destroyed the old partition
between man's sphere and woman's sphere. Parliaments, in their
embryonic form, grow out of the informal discussions among the men
of a tribe about matters that they alone were competent and
naturally designed to carry out. The broad scope of a modern
Parliament is so remote from this narrow institution that the old
reason for excluding women has utterly disappeared. But I have said
enough of the four social revolutions of the nineteenth century that
make up this change. In principle they are fully recognised, and the
reader must therefore not be surprised at the relative scantiness
and incompleteness of the details given in the last chapter. They
suffice to show that it is now an unthinking repetition of an
outworn phrase to say that woman's place is the home _only_.

In concluding, I would glance for a moment at a few subsidiary
aspects of the question, which may throw further light on the
general position of this essay. The first point is an examination of
the just and rational basis of enfranchisement, as political
moralists have determined it. The various extensions of the
franchise during the nineteenth century have been wrung from the
reluctant holders of power by force, or the threat of force. We
flatter ourselves, not quite unreasonably, that the age of violence
has given place to an age of justice, and it is therefore extremely
advisable to determine precisely why _anybody_ has a vote--in other
words, what is the moral basis of enfranchisement--and then test the
claim of women on the principle we may detect.

For this purpose I briefly examine the conclusions of a few of the
most distinguished political moralists. We must, naturally, confine
ourselves to a democratic age, so that in effect we can only consult
writers of ancient Athens or modern England. From these, however, I
do not make a purposive selection, but will consider those whose
authority is most regarded.

Plato and Aristotle are the two political writers, as they are the
two outstanding philosophers, of ancient Greece. We have already
seen something of the political ideas of Plato, and know how
thoroughly he resisted the theory of woman's inferiority. Beyond
this sturdy defence of woman's capacity, however, Plato helps us
little in the search for the moral base of political power. In his
_Gorgias_ he expresses great disdain of the actual Athenian
democracy, and insists on the superiority of the aristocratic ideal.
The wiser are to rule the community, and such rulers were by no
means always chosen by the democracy of Athens. In the _Republic_,
from which I have previously quoted, Plato goes on to sketch his
ideal political system. The rulers and administrators are to be a
special and hereditary caste, with distinct education, beside the
classes of workers and of soldiers. Within their limits there will
be election for the higher offices, and women are to be put on a
level of absolute equality with men in the political body. Thus
Plato is emphatic in his protest against any sex limitation of
political power, but it must be admitted that he misses or ignores
the most difficult point in the problem--how the workers are to be
reconciled to a permanent exclusion from politics--and his Utopian
commonwealth has never been taken seriously.

Aristotle, a realist and a critic of Plato, brings us at once to the
practical problem. He, too, disdains the boisterous democracy of
Athens, with its shallow mob and their frothy orators, and believes
democracy would always have the same weaknesses. Oligarchy and
despotism are equally unsound. Kingship is an admirable political
form, but the uncertainties of kings make it impracticable.
Aristocracy is the ideal constitution. A few leisured and cultivated
landowners, supported by the work of slaves, would be the best body
to entrust with the choice of rulers. But Aristotle sees that
democratic Greece will never admit that system, and he proposes a
compromise. Excluding the poorest, on the ground of incompetency, he
would have the magistrates elected by the vote of the majority of
the men in the free cities; and he would grant an increased power to
property-holders, for the defence of their possessions. We have seen
that Aristotle would exclude women from political life, apparently
on the ground of incompetency. In this the contrast to Plato is
merely superficial. Plato did not proclaim the actual competency of
women for public life, but shrewdly attributed their present
weakness to the complete lack of education and experience--a point
that Aristotle quite fails to meet. However, it is enough that he
definitively assigns competency as the moral basis of
enfranchisement.

I might close the inquiry at once by saying that no subsequent
political moralist has brought us much further than Aristotle, but
will glance at one or two interesting variations of the thesis in
modern writers. In the time of Aristotle the shadow of Macedonia lay
full on Athens, and, indeed, the whole of Greece was degenerating.
Nor is it needful to glance at the literature of Rome, which
produced no great thinker. The same problem of democracy and
enfranchisement arose in Rome, but it was pushed aside by the
founding of the Empire, and there is no serious discussion left for
us to consider. In the Italian republics of the thirteenth century
it arose again; but the republics were blotted out by empires or
converted into principalities, and all political theorising was
silenced by the general acceptance in Europe of the "divine right
of kings." The successive Revolutions in France, and that gradual
rise of class after class to claim a share in the political life,
which I described in the last chapter, reopened the whole question.
In the chaos of constitutions that were formed in different parts of
Europe we see only grudging concessions to demands that had a show
of force behind them. It was again incumbent on political moralists
to seek a rational and just principle on which to determine the
limits of enfranchisement, and I will briefly notice the chief
efforts that have been made in this country to discover such a
principle.

Mr. Walter Bagehot made the most ingenious attempt to formulate a
principle that should at once limit the franchise, yet retain the
sacred characters of logic and justice. Nearly all English writers
start from the supposed natural "rights of man"--the principle
of Rousseau and the Revolutionists, which was still urged by
advanced politicians. To this Bagehot replies that, if there is any
such thing as an inherent right of man, it is at least limited by
the fact that he has no right to injure his fellow-men. The
limitation, in theory, is perfectly just. On that principle even the
most advanced Radical disfranchises criminals and lunatics and
illiterates, and requires a certain age in voters. It at once forces
Mr. Bagehot to fall back on competency alone as the moral basis of
enfranchisement. All shall vote who can do so competently: the
incompetent shall not vote, as it would mean injustice to their
fellows. Mr. Bagehot draws up the principle: "A man has a right to
so much political power as he can exercise without impeding any
other who would more fitly exercise political power." The curious
wording of the principle is, of course, due to a desire to prevent
the mass of the workers or middle class from swamping the vote of
the wealthy. But as it is only on the ground of their presumed
greater culture and competence that Mr. Bagehot tampers with his
franchise to favour the wealthy, and as the general growth of
education has materially altered the situation, I need not go into
the details of his electoral scheme. His principle of
enfranchisement is competency alone.

When we turn to another political moralist of a very different
school, Professor Sidgwick, we have, at first sight, an entirely
novel attempt to reach a principle. Professor Sidgwick, as a sound
utilitarian, rejects the transcendental idea of the inherent rights
of man, and puts the utility of social life as the first principle.
He then urges that the laws will have a better chance of being
observed if they have the active consent of all who are subject to
them--in other words, if the citizens have elected the law-makers.
Thus he gets a general franchise, which he proceeds to limit. He at
once admits that only mental or moral inferiority is a ground of
exclusion from the franchise, and so neither sex nor poverty can be
a legitimate bar. But when he comes to formulate his principle we
get the astonishing declaration that "every sane, _self-supporting_
adult" should have a vote. The words I have italicised are put in,
quite wantonly, to exclude married women from the franchise. But I
need not discuss here the somewhat frivolous grounds on which
Sidgwick would exclude wives, nor stay to point out how many highly
cultivated males would be deprived of the vote by his arbitrary
phrase. It suffices for my purpose that he takes competency alone as
the just basis of enfranchisement.

Sidgwick somewhere suggests that the poorer citizens should be
allowed to prove their competency by a public examination. This idea
was elaborated by Mr. Holyoake, who advocated biennial examinations
in economics and constitutional history, at which candidates for the
vote, of either sex, should prove their capacity. The idea was
seriously expounded in the House of Lords, and much discussed at one
time. Apart from the question of practicability, however, it would
have the peculiar disadvantage of annihilating the electorate. Its
principle of competency was generally accepted.

Lastly, I may notice the political theorising of Professor Ritchie.
In this there is no fantastic casuistry, but a plain restatement of
the principle laid down by Aristotle and accepted, as a rule,
without the aid of philosophy. The difficulty is practical, not
theoretical. The work of government is to be discharged by experts,
and the experts are to be elected, on a broad franchise, by an
educated democracy. The principle is again competency, and we need
not stay to criticise the vagueness of the "broad franchise."

There is thus a very positive agreement among political theorists on
the principle by which we should determine which members of the
State should have the vote. However they approach the problem, and
whatever be their general theory, they agree that, when the
political power is electoral, incompetence alone should exclude from
a share in the election. There is no question in any of them of
taxation as a basis of representation, no question of property as
such forming a qualification. Until recent times the possession of
property gave some presumption of education. In the days when the
workers were almost all densely illiterate, when education was
almost confined to the leisured and professional classes, it was
quite natural to assume that the paying of taxes gave a general
presumption of leisure, culture, or capacity. It, therefore, became
the "basis of representation," but only in the sense that it was
a rough test of competency or education. In the course of time
unthinking people came to imagine that taxation carries with it a
moral right to the franchise, and thought they could settle in that
simple way who should or should not have a vote. I have shown that
no political moralist will sanction the idea for a moment, and in
point of fact English electoral law has departed from it in two
ways: by excluding tax-paying women on the one hand, and by setting
up a lodger vote on the other. The general spread of education has
wholly altered the situation by giving competence and training to
the non-propertied class.

The political thinkers we consulted were really more concerned with
the limitation of the franchise than with its extension. This serves
my purpose well enough, but I should like to draw up a positive
principle of enfranchisement in harmony with their conclusions. I
venture to formulate it thus: All those who share in the life of the
State, are subject to its laws, and gain or suffer by its prosperity
or adversity, are entitled to a share in the control of its policy,
unless they are disabled by a moral or intellectual inferiority that
would make their power a standing prejudice to the community's
welfare. This is a positive statement of the basis of
enfranchisement that accords entirely with all that has been written
about it from Aristotle to Ritchie. On that principle we have to
determine, with equity and reason, whether or no there is injustice
in the political subordination of one sex to the other.

It is a remarkable thing that the only writer in our literature who
has scientifically studied the psychological differences between man
and woman concluded that woman's gifts were as high as, if not
higher than, man's in relation to political work. Mr. Havelock
Ellis (_Man and Woman_) quotes an older writer who had studied the
matter from the historical and empirical point of view, and had
concluded that "women are probably more fitted for politics than
men." He then adds, on the ground of his own reading of history and
his study of sex characters:--


  Among all races and in all parts of the world women have ruled
  brilliantly and with perfect control over even the most fierce and
  turbulent hordes. Among many primitive races also all the diplomatic
  relations with foreign tribes are in the hands of women, and they
  have sometimes decided on peace or war. The game of politics seems
  to develop very feminine qualities in those who play it, and it may
  be paying no excessive compliment to women to admit the justice of
  old Burdach's remarks. Whenever their education has been
  sufficiently sound and broad to enable them to free themselves from
  fads and sentimentalities, women probably possess in at least as
  high a degree as men the power of dealing with the practical
  questions of politics.


Nor is the opinion so uncommon as one would imagine. I was myself
astonished, on pleading with an experienced political worker for
leniency in judging women's present political competence (on
account of their lack of experience), to receive the reply: "But
women are better to deal with than men, and grasp the issues more
quickly"! This was said by a Conservative magistrate after twenty
years' close experience of political work in a large town.

However that may be, I have merely to meet the objection that women
are so incompetent that their participation in politics would
endanger the welfare of the State. To meet the point I do not need
to range the records of history, nor to dwell on the significant
contrast of England under her three Queens and her dozens of Kings.
The reply is simple. Precisely the same objection was raised to the
extension of the franchise in 1832 and in 1868, and it was just as
plausible. Men who had been excluded from the slightest influence on
political affairs from all time had no incentive whatever to study
them. No sooner were their minds quickened by a suffrage agitation,
and their responsibility aroused by the concession of the vote, than
they entered keenly upon political themes and developed a normal
political judgment. There is not the slightest ground to assume that
the present political apathy of the mass of women has any other
cause, and will not disappear when they are invited or permitted to
exercise their dormant powers. It is not judgment, but the material
of judgment--knowledge--that women lack. This knowledge of political
issues they not only had no incentive or motive to acquire, but
public opinion positively discouraged them from acquiring. Wherever
the vote has been given the competence has been proved at once. A
century ago men were just as convinced that woman was incompetent to
work in the score of industries and professions in which she works
with success to-day.

The case is, therefore, that while those who urge the incompetence
of woman have not a shred of evidence to rely upon--beyond the
ridiculous and futile practice of referring us to some woman or
group of women they have met--those who believe in her competence
have an immense and increasing body of experience, besides the plain
probabilities of the situation. We have opened a hundred doors to
women, and have discovered a hundred aptitudes that men had not
suspected. Communities amounting in the aggregate to eleven or
twelve million souls have admitted women to the parliamentary
franchise, and the result has been admirable. Larger countries,
including England, have admitted women to a share in other branches
of public life (local government), and no evils have been reported.
To say that our women are not competent to take the further step of
choosing once in five or seven years which party should be returned
to power, which of two candidates they prefer as their
representative, is either a piece of wanton cynicism or an insincere
cloak for an obstinate prejudice. And for those who view with
complacency the enlisting of thousands of women in the service of
political parties, and their active employment in electoral battles,
the position is intolerable.

The suggestion of Plato, of the Stoics, of medieval thinkers like
Agrippa, and of so many more recent observers, that the chief mental
difference between the sexes is a difference in education and
experience, has been borne out by the whole experience of the latter
half of the nineteenth century. The medieval world regarded the Jew
with infantine wonder, and its theologians speculated learnedly on
his aloofness, his distrust, his narrow capacities, and so forth.
Luther broke in on their sophistry with the sensible remark that if
you treat a man as a dog he may be forced to act as one. The freedom
we have given to the Jew has brought out his essential humanity and
capacity. We may apply the parable to the position of woman. She has
been treated, politically, as a child. The moment we begin to
abandon that treatment we find the maturity of her power.

 * * * * * *

When, in 1866 and 1867, Lord Elcho, Lord Sherbrooke, and the
"Adullamite" Whigs made public reflections on the political
capacity of the hundreds of thousands of working men whom Gladstone
proposed to enfranchise, and Disraeli did enfranchise, the working
men retorted with a violence and disorder that one may regard as not
unnatural. To-day the sons of these enfranchised workers make less
polite reflections on the capacity of women, and are shocked at the
"hysteria" that sometimes ensues. For my part, I have felt it
unpleasant to have to discuss the question whether the prospective
women electors of Britain are mentally inferior to the male
electors. My apology must be that not only have I found the belief
of their inferiority to lie at the root of most of the prejudices
against the movement, but that, if their competence be granted, the
argument is over. Hundreds of thousands of obviously competent women
demand the vote to-day. No matter how many more thousands may not,
we maintain an offensive medieval injustice when we continue to
refuse it to those who do.

But a last word may be devoted to those women and men who think the
granting of the vote would injure woman, and, indirectly, the
community. It is, unfortunately, very difficult to grasp the precise
fear that finds expression in this objection. The frequent statement
that woman's "refined" and "angelic" nature should not be "dragged
into politics" is usually a piece of insincere flippancy both as
regards woman and politics. At the most, if political life were so
corrupt, one would think the introduction of "angels" would greatly
benefit it. But it is difficult to see, however prone one may be to
pessimism, that the reading of a political journal every day, an
occasional attendance at a political meeting, or membership of a
political club, would greatly sully woman's high nature. The moment
you reflect what the exercise of the vote really involves in the
concrete, a great many rhetorical balloons collapse.

The same point holds in regard to the objection that admission to
the franchise will distract woman from her domestic duties. It has
even been gravely suggested that it might affect maternity. It is
very difficult to treat such statements seriously. Vast numbers of
women do not marry, vast numbers have no children, or only one or
two, and a large number relegate the work to servants. But what
makes it really difficult to meet the point seriously is: (1) The
ridiculously slender amount of work the exercise of the vote will
put on women; (2) the light-heartedness with which women were
employed by political parties before they asked for the vote; and
(3) the enormous amount of interest, distraction, and employment
outside the home that we already willingly grant our women. The
higher education of women is undoubtedly affecting maternity.[15]
Does anyone propose to abolish it? The rush of life among the
wealthy is even more exacting. The middle class, and even the
working women, have corresponding distractions. Beside these the
exercise of the suffrage is a sheer trifle, in relation to strain on
the system.

Of the apprehended discord in families, which influenced even
Professor Sidgwick, one can only say that the proposal to perpetuate
a monstrous and offensive injustice on the ground of an imaginary
evil of that character is astounding. I do not happen to know any
such families, in a fairly extensive acquaintance, but I should
fancy that they will not wait for politics to spread discord in
them. The apprehension seems to be based on a very cynical estimate
of the relations of married folk, or in the notion that they have
always agreed on religion, on dress, on local affairs, or in their
estimates of people. But as one half of the opponents of the
enfranchisement of wives plead that the wife would be sure to vote
as her husband does, and therefore needs no separate representation,
while the other half of our opponents declare the opposite and
apprehend widespread discord, one may leave them to reconcile their
contradictory experiences.

High above all these trivial and inflated fancies one fact is clear.
The admission of women to public life would give them a wider
horizon and more balanced judgment. Men are growing more feminine in
every century. A medieval man would gaze with astonishment at the
growth of feminine qualities in the modern world--sympathy with
suffering, refinement, even tenderness. Women are growing more
masculine on the intellectual side. There is no such thing as a
fixed and immutable type of organism. The sexes are approaching,
after æons of separation, and the tendency is good. Politics is not
a game--or should not be--but a concentration of the best
intelligence and feeling of the nation upon the gravest issues of
national life. Through every serious Parliament of the world some
breath has passed of the new spirit, the determination to uplift the
race, assuage suffering, mitigate poverty, and do battle with old
evils. No finer thing can happen to woman than that she be enlisted,
actively and responsibly, in that great crusade.

 [The End]




 FOOTNOTES


 [1]
 For reasons which I give later, I follow Westermarck, against most
 sociologists, in thinking that the family expanded into the clan,
 rather than that the family emerged out of the clan. The uncertainty
 does not affect my argument.

 [2]
 Frau Lily Braun's _Die Frauenfrage_ (1901) avoids the pitfall, but
 Eliza B. Gamble's _Evolution of Woman_ (1894) stumbles at it. Dr.
 Moscatelli (_La Conditione Della Donna Nelle Società Primitive_,
 1886) seems to have been one of the last authorities to hold the
 theory.

 [3]
 Many writers believe that it was the outcome of polyandry among the
 earlier ancestors. So Maspéro and others.

 [4]
 I do not enlarge upon what is called "sacred prostitution" in the
 temples, as there is ample proof that this was not regarded as an
 onerous imposition on woman. It probably had its roots in some
 ancient superstition. The normal life of Babylon and Nineveh
 compares favourably enough even with modern times.

 [5]
 _Republic_, Book V. Nearly the whole book is taken up with the most
 advanced claims for woman.

 [6]
 Cato is so often the villain of the chapter in works of this kind
 that I am tempted to quote a saying of his: "The man who beats his
 wife and children lays impious hands on that which is most sacred,"
 and he "would deem it higher praise to be a good husband than a
 good senator" (Plutarch, c. xx.). I know, of course, how Cato
 obliged Hortensius; but we are not aware that Mme. Cato objected to
 the eugenic arrangement.

 [7]
 Dr. Reich also speaks of the "Voltairean atheism" of advanced women.
 Voltaire was not only an ardent _theist_, but wrote world-known
 works on the point.

 [8]
 But admirers of Dr. Reich as an historian need not go beyond their
 favourite author. I know no defence of the Romans of the early
 Empire so ardent and so flattering as that made by Dr. Reich in his
 _History of Civilisation_ (p. 371). But this was written before he
 took up the cause of the anti-feminists.

 [9]
 _Ancient Law_, p. 154. This section of Sir Henry's fine study
 should be read by every feminist.

 [10]
 I leave chivalry and the early romanticism out of account
 deliberately. The whole movement was a cult of pretty faces and
 rounded limbs, leading to general laxity of morals. It essentially
 implied the subordination of woman in all but beauty and dress.

 [11]
 The best summary survey, in chronological order, is in Lily Braun's
 _Die Frauenfrage_ (1901). More detailed and partial pictures are
 excellently given in A. G. Mason's _Women in the Golden Ages_
 (1901).

 [12]
 I take this and a few other details from Miss Helen Blackburn's
 _Women's Suffrage_ (1902), to which I must send the reader for a
 full account of the struggle in England. See, also, E. A. Pratt's
 _Pioneer Women in Victoria's Reign_.

 [13]
 For further details about Wyoming, Colorado, Idaho, and Utah see
 Mrs. Borrmann Wells's _America and Woman Suffrage_ (price 1d.).

 [14]
 For further details in regard to Australia (to the year 1901) see
 Helen Blackburn's _Women's Suffrage_ and Mrs. Martel's _Women's
 Vote in Australia_.

 [15]
 This may very well be only temporary. Woman's energy has so long
 been absorbed in maternal and domestic work that a great diversion
 of it is bound at first to affect the older function. In time the
 organism may adapt itself to both functions. It would not concern
 many of us if it did not, but in any case it must be clearly
 understood that so slight an additional occupation as having a vote
 cannot for a moment be expected to have a like effect.




 TRANSCRIBER'S NOTES


Alterations to the text:

[Chapter II] Change _Hawai_ to _Hawaii_.

[Chapter VII] Change "start a brilliant and fiery _compaign_ for..."
to _campaign_.

Relabel and relocate footnotes to the end of the book. Add footnotes
to the TOC.

 [End of Text]



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