Woman in Political Evolution
Date: 2021-01-19T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Women -- Suffrage; Women -- History

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Title: Woman in Political Evolution

Author: Joseph McCabe

Release date: January 19, 2021 [eBook #64340]
Most recently updated: October 18, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/64340

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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Table of Contents

- WOMAN IN POLITICAL EVOLUTION

- CONTENTS

- WOMAN IN POLITICAL EVOLUTION

- CHAPTER I. IS THE SUBORDINATION OF WOMAN THE PRICE OF EMPIRE?

- CHAPTER II. WOMAN BEFORE CIVILISATION

- CHAPTER III. WOMAN IN ANCIENT EGYPT AND ASSYRIA

- CHAPTER IV. WOMAN IN ANCIENT GREECE
- CHAPTER V. WOMAN IN ANCIENT ROME
- CHAPTER VI. THE DARK AGE OF FEMINISM
- CHAPTER VII. RENAISSANCE AND REVOLUTION

- CHAPTER VIII. THE STRUGGLE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

- CHAPTER IX. THE MORAL BASE OF ENFRANCHISEMENT

- FOOTNOTES
- TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES
- THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG™ LICENSE