So thoroughly have modern men fastened their attention upon the problems
of the immediate present, that one feels driven to justify oneself in
taking up an historical investigation of any subject presented in a
popular manner. And yet it takes little argument to show that what we
shall be depends in large measure on what we are; and that what we are
rests back on what we have been. In anything we try to think or feel or
do, we quickly reach a limit; and this limit is determined by the
original quality of our nervous system plus the training it has
received. For here is the curious fact about this instrument of thought
and feeling which at once takes it away from comparison with mechanical
instruments. Whatever it does, becomes a part of itself, and then helps
to determine what it will do the next time and how it will do it. With
the making easy of mental operations through repetition, and with the
formation of associations based on our choices, it may be truly said
that we become whatever we habitually think and feel and do.
Every choice we make is thus literally built into our character and
becomes a part of ourselves. After that, the old choice will help
determine the new, and we shall find ourselves being directed by all of
our past choices, and even by the choices of our ancestors. Since, then,
all our earlier selves are continued in us and make us what we are, we
are simply studying ourselves when we study the history of our
ancestors. If we would go forward, we must first look backward; for we
must rise on stepping-stones of our dead selves.
But history is not merely the story of the past. To relate that, would
take as long as it took to live it, and the result would be but
weariness of spirit. History, to be significant, must select the events
with which it will deal; it must arrange these in series that are in
accord with the constitution of things; and then it must use the
generalizations it reaches to interpret the present, and even to
forecast the future. It is obvious that this interpretation will depend
on the point of view held by the interpreter.
Hence we must ask in what fundamental beliefs this presentation rests.
These are, first, that life tends to move along certain lines that
constitute the law of human nature. Just as the infant tends first to
wriggle, then creep, then walk, then run and dance, so human nature
tends to move upward from savagery through primitive settled life to the
complex forms of larger settled units. In this progress, material or
economic forces play a large part; but ideas, originally born out of
circumstances, but sometimes borrowed from other people, sometimes
degenerate remnants of past utilities, also play a large part. The
progress we finally make is thus directed by this human tendency, by
material circumstances, and by ideas. Sometimes it keeps pretty closely
to what seems to us to be upward human growth; sometimes it stagnates;
sometimes it gives us perverted products; and sometimes it destroys
itself.
Thus it becomes necessary to trace the past experiences of woman that we
may see with what heritage she faces the future. She is all that she
has felt and thought and done. She started with at least half of the
destiny of the race in her keeping. Handicapped in size and agility, and
periodically weighted down by the burdens of maternity, she still
possessed charms and was mistress of pleasures which made her, for
savage man, the dearest possession next to food; and for civilized man,
the companion, joy and inspiration of his days.
Of woman's position in early savage times we know only what we can learn
from fragmentary prehistoric remains, from the structure of early
languages, from records of travelers and students among savages of more
recent times; or what can be inferred from human nature in general. Most
of this data is difficult to interpret, but it is probable that woman's
position was not much worse than man's. It is a bad beast that fouls its
own food or its own nest; and the female had always the protection of
the male's desire. If she could not entirely control her body, she could
still control her own expressions of affection and desire; and, without
these, mere possession lost much of its charm.
As keeper of the cave, cultivator of the soil, and guardian of the
child, woman, rather than her more foot-loose mate, probably became the
center of the earliest civilization. The jealousy of men formed tribal
rules for her protection; and to these, religion early gave its powerful
sanctions. Thus there came a day when the woman took her mate home to
her tribe and gave her children her own name. Even if the matriarchal
period was not so important as has sometimes been assumed, woman
certainly had large influence over tribal affairs in early savage life.
With the increase in population, and the consequent disappearance of
game, man was forced to turn his attention to the crude agriculture
which woman had begun to develop. The superior qualities which he had
acquired in war and the chase, enabled him slowly to improve on these
beginnings and to shape a body of custom which made settled society
possible. With man's leadership in the family the patriarchal form of
government developed, and man's power over woman was sanctioned by
custom and law. The woman was stolen, or bought; and while sexual
attraction did not play the continuous part which it plays in developed
society, it must have done much to protect women from abuse and neglect,
at least during the years of girlhood and child-bearing. It is at this
point that our historical records begin.
In the pages of Homer, or of the Old Testament, in Tacitus's "Germania,"
or in the writings of Livy, we find woman's position well defined. True,
she stands second to the man, but she is his assistant, not his slave.
She must be courted, and while marriage presents are exchanged, she is
not bought. In times of emergency, she steps to the front and
legislates, judges, or fights. It is possible in the pages of the Old
Testament to find women doing everything which men can do. Even where
the power is not nominally in her own hands, she often, as in the cases
of Penelope or Esther, rules by indirection. Her body and her offspring
are protected; and the Hebrew woman of the Proverbs shows us a
singularly free and secure industrial position.[16] Such was the
condition in primitive Judea, in early Greece, in republican Rome, or
among the Germans who invaded southern Europe in the third and fourth
centuries of our era.
[16] _Proverbs_ xxxi, 10.
Man's jealousy of his woman as a source of pleasure and honor to
himself, and to his family, must have always acted to limit woman's
freedom, even while it gave her protection and a secure position in
society. With the development of settled government in city states, like
Athens or early Rome, the necessity for defining citizenship made the
family increasingly a political institution. A man's offspring through
slave women, concubines, or "strangers" lived outside the citizen group,
and so were negligible; but the citizen woman's children were citizens,
and so she became a jealously guarded political institution. The
established family became the test of civic, military, and property
rights. The regulations limiting the freedom of girls and women were
jealously enforced, since mismating might open the treasures of
citizenship to any low born or foreign adventurer.[17]
[17] T.G. TUCKER, _Life in Ancient Athens_, Chapter VIII, Macmillan Co.,
1906.
In the ancient Orient, in Greece, Rome, and in later Europe, these
stages have been repeated again and again. Woman is first a slave,
stolen or bought, protected by sexual interest to which is later added
social custom and religious sanction. Early civilization centers around
the woman, so that she becomes in some degree the center of the
home-staying group. In primitive civilization man takes over woman's
most important activities; but she gains a fixed position, protected,
though still further enslaved, by political necessities.
But with the increase of wealth, whether in terms of money, slaves, or
trade, woman found herself subject to a fourth form of enslavement more
subtly dangerous than brute force, lust, or political and religious
institutionalism. This was the desire of man to protect her and make her
happy because he loved her. He put golden chains about her neck and
bracelets on her arms, clothed her in silks and satins, fed her with
dainty fare, gave her a retinue of attendants to spare her fatigue, and
put her in the safest rear rooms of the habitation. But it is foolish to
talk of conscious enslavement in this connection. Rich men and luxurious
civilizations have always enslaved women in the same way that rich,
fond, and foolish mothers have enslaved their children, by robbing them
of opportunity, by taking away that needful work and that vital
experience of real life which alone can develop the powers of the soul.
Thus in the Periclean age in Greece, in the Eastern Kingdoms established
by Alexander, in Imperial Rome, in the later Italian Renaissance, in
France under Louis XIV and Louis XV, in England under the Stuart kings,
and in many centers of our own contemporary world, women have given up
their legitimate heritage of work and independent thought for trinkets,
silks, and servants, and have quickly degenerated, like the children of
rich and foolish mothers, into luxury-loving parasites and
playthings.[18]
[18] OLIVE SCHREINER, _Woman and Labor_, Chapters on Parasitism. New
York: Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1911.
To maintain this luxurious setting for their mistresses, whether wives
or irregular concubines, men of the Occident have generally been driven
to ever fiercer struggle with their fellows. Thus a Pericles, at the
zenith of his powers, facing difficulties which strained and developed
all his forces, had for his legitimate wife a woman, bound hand and
foot by conventions and immured in her house in Athens. But a man is
only half a complete human being, and the other half cannot be furnished
by a weak and ignorant kept-woman, no matter how legal the bond. Hence
the forces always driving men to completeness and unity drove Pericles
away from his house and his legitimate children and his mere wife to
find the completion of his life.
In these cases, as elsewhere, demand creates supply, and there were to
be found everywhere in Athens able and cultivated foreign women, many of
whom had come over from the mainland of Asia Minor; and one of these,
Aspasia, became the mistress of Pericles and bore him children. She was
no adventuress of the street, but an educated and brilliant woman, in
whose home you might have met not only Pericles, but also Socrates,
Phidias, Anaxagoras, Sophocles and Euripides.
This is the stage that always follows the period of the luxury-loving
wife. It was so in Imperial Rome, in later Carthage, in Venice, and in
eighteenth-century France. But the normal human unit is the man and
woman who love each other, not these combinations of illegality, law,
lust, love and dishonor. Such a triangle of two women and a man rests
its base in shame, and its lines are lies, and its value is destruction.
So virile republican Rome swept over decadent Greece and made it into
the Roman province of Achaia; later the chaste Germans swarmed over the
decadent Roman Empire and then slowly rebuilt modern Europe; the ascetic
Puritans destroyed the Stuarts; while the French Revolution was the
deluge that swept away Louis XVI and put the virtuous, if commonplace,
bourgeoisie in power.
So far we have dealt with the position of women as though it depended
alone on human hungers, passions and environment; but while these are
the driving forces of life, they are very subject to the repressing and
diverting power of ideas, working in an environment of economic
conditions. These ideas may themselves date back to earlier passions and
economic conditions, but they often survive the time which created them,
and then they enter into life and conduct as seemingly independent
forces. These ideas played a large part, even in the ancient world.
The Jews organized their religious and political practices about a
patriarchal Deity ruling a patriarchal state; and their tradition
handicapped all women with the sin of Eve, the sin of seeking knowledge.
The Greeks, on the other hand, gave woman a splendid place in the
hierarchy of the gods, and idealized not only her beauty in Aphrodite
but her chaste aloofness in Artemis, her physical strength in the
Amazons, and her wisdom in Athena and Hera. They covered the Acropolis
with matchless monuments in honor of Athena, patron goddess of their
fair city, and celebrated splendid pageants on her anniversaries. So,
too, republican Rome, while it gathered its civic life about patriarchal
ideas in which the father was supreme, gave women positions of high
honor in its religion, whether as deities or as servitors of the gods.
In the Niebelungenlied, the Germans bodied forth their splendid
conceptions of female beauty, strength and passion in such figures as
Brunhilda. These ideas must have done much to offset the physical
weakness and functional handicaps of women in the ancient world.
The Christian ideas, which have dominated us now for nearly two
thousand years, are generally considered to have been favorable to
women. In their insistence on the value of the human soul, and on
democratic equality, they have doubtless helped to raise the status of
women along with that of all human beings. But, as between man and
woman, Christianity has given every possible advantage to men, and has
added needlessly to the natural burdens of women.[19]
[19] JAMES DONALDSON, _Woman: Her Position and Influence in Ancient
Greece and Rome and Among the Early Christians_, Longmans, Green, and
Co., 1907.
From Judaism, Christianity borrowed Eve, with her eternally operative
sin, and thus placed all women under a perpetual load of suspicion and
guilt. The Founder of the new faith never assumed the responsibilities
of a family, and he included no woman among his disciples. Example, even
negative example, is often more powerful than precept. Paul, the most
learned of the disciples, in his writings, and as an organizer of the
Church, emphasized the older Jewish position. In the new organization,
women filled only lesser places, while the men settled all points of
dogma, directing and mainly conducting the services of worship. Meantime
each woman's soul remained her own, to be saved only by her individual
actions; therein lay her hope for the future, both on earth and in
heaven.
But it was those later developments of belief and practice that gathered
around Christian asceticism which placed woman and her special functions
under a cloud of suspicion from which she is not even yet entirely
freed. Celibacy became exalted; virginity was a positive virtue;
chastity, instead of a healthful antecedent to parenthood, became an end
in itself; and monasteries and convents multiplied throughout
Christendom. Something of shame and guilt gathered around conception and
birth, as representing a lower standard of life, even when sanctified by
the ceremonies of the Church. From the second century to the sixth, the
ablest of the Church Fathers, Greek and Latin alike, formulated
statements in which woman became the chief ally of the devil in dragging
men down to perdition. We still hear ancestral reverberations of these
teachings in all our discussions of woman's place in civilization.
But ideas can only for a time overcome or divert the primitive human
hungers, and slowly Mary, Mother of Jesus, won first place among the
saints. Celibate recluses who feared to walk the streets for fear of
meeting a woman, and who spent the nights fighting down their noblest
passions, starving them, flagellating and rolling their naked bodies in
thorny rose hedges or in snow-drifts to silence demands for wife and
children, threw themselves in an ecstacy of adoration before an image of
the Virgin with the Baby in her arms. So Maryolatry came to bless the
world.
But even this blessing was not without alloy, for it gave us an ideal of
woman, superhuman, immaculate, bowing in frightened awe before the angel
with the lily, standing mute with crossed hands and downcast eyes before
her Divine Son. She represented, not the institution of the family, but
the institution of the Church. Even when she appeared in representations
of the Holy Family, Joseph, her husband, was not the father of her
child, but his servant.
Chivalry took up this conception, and shaped for us the fantastic lady
who stands back of much of modern romantic love. Robbed of her simple,
human, pagan passions, she became often an anæmic and unfruitful, if
angelic, creature. For the direct and passionate assurances of a
virtuous and noble love she substituted sighs and tears, languishing
looks and weary renunciations. This sterile hybrid, bred of human
passions and theological negations, must be finally banished from our
literature and from our minds before we can have a healthy eugenic
conscience among us.[20]
[20] R. DE MAULDE LA CLAVIERE, _The Woman of the Renaissance. A Study in
Feminism_, translated by George H. Ely. New York: C.P. Putnam's Sons,
1900.
The Protestant Revolution went far to restore the special functions of
women to respect. Belief in her individual soul, and in its need of
salvation through individual choice, was supplemented by the belief that
this choice must be guided by her individual judgment. Celibacy ceased
to be a sign of righteousness; and the best men and women married. But
beliefs cannot be directly destroyed by revolution; they can only be
disturbed and modified. The teachings of Paul, Augustine, Tertullian and
St. Jerome were still authoritative, and Calvin and Knox reaffirmed
many of them. The family was still subordinate to the Church; and
marriage still remained a sacrament, with theological significances,
rather than the simple union of a man and woman who loved each other.
The choice of a mate once made was final, because theological, and it
could be broken only with infinite pain and disgrace.
The great political upheaval, which we call the French Revolution,
carried in its fundamental teachings freedom and opportunity for men and
for women; but like the corresponding revolution in religion, it
required time to make adjustments, and so we have been content to live
for more than a hundred years in the midst of verbal affirmations which
we denied in all our institutional life.
In America, conditions have always been favorable for women to work out
their freedom. Among the immigrants who came to our shores before 1840
there were, of course, a few traders, adventurers and servants who hoped
to improve their financial conditions; but the leaders, and most of the
rank and file, came that they might be free to think their own thoughts
and live their own lives. If this selection of colonists, through
religious and political persecution, sometimes gave us bigots with one
idea, it also gave us people who knew that ideas can change. Along with
Cotton Mather it gave us Anne Hutchinson, Roger Williams and William
Penn.
Most of these who came in the early days belonged to extreme dissenting
sects believing in salvation through individual choice, based on
personal judgments. Preaching was exalted at the expense of ritual; and
by substituting new thinking for old habits in religion, the American
settlers made it less difficult for other adjustments to be made, even
in such a conservative matter as woman's position. It is through no
accident that Methodists, Friends, Unitarians and the Salvation Army
have been much more sympathetic to woman's progress than have the older
ritualistic faiths.
And these theological ideas had to be worked out under the material
conditions of the New World, which were also favorable to the
emancipation of women. Facing primitive conditions in the forest, it
became a habit to do new things in new ways. Woman's work and judgment
were indispensable; and these picked women showed themselves capable in
every direction. They did every kind of work; and when it came to
enduring privation or even to starving, they set an example for men.
But while every new movement in ideas always carries with it other
radical ideas, the practical difficulties of mental, social and legal
adjustment always prevent the full and harmonious development of all
that is involved in any new point of view. In the American colonies the
need for new adjustments in religion, government and practical living
made it inevitable that any very important change in woman's position
should linger. In fact, the student of colonial records finds many
traces of ultra conservatism in the treatment of women, though the
forces had been liberated which must inevitably open the way for her
through the New World of America into a new world of the spirit.
And before the quickening influence of the new life had time to become
commonplace, the struggle with England began. The Revolutionary period
was a time of intense political education for every one. War and
sacrifice glorified the new ideas; and even the children and women could
not escape their influence. Why then did not the American Revolution
pass on to full freedom and opportunity for women? For the same reason
that it did not forever abolish slavery in America. The vested interests
involved were so many, and the changes so momentous and difficult, that
only the most imperative needs could receive attention.
But this does not mean that the interest in a larger life for women was
not active or that women were making no advance in self-direction. There
is evidence that women like Abigail Adams realized the abstract
injustice of their position, and the fact that as early as 1794, Mary
Wollstonecraft's "Vindication of the Rights of Woman" was republished in
Philadelphia shows that her ideas must have had some currency in
America.
After the Revolution, the intimate, stimulating influence of Europe,
which the earlier colonists had enjoyed, was for a time almost entirely
lost. The new States became extremely provincial; and minds untouched by
the larger world always tend to conservatism. Noah Webster, in "A
Letter to Young Ladies," published in Boston, in 1790, declared that
they "must be content to be women; to be mild, social and sentimental."
Three years later the "Letters to a Young Lady," by the Reverend John
Bennett, were republished in Philadelphia, after going through several
London editions. He placed the qualities to be cultivated in this order:
"A genteel person, a simple nature, sensibility, cheerfulness, delicacy,
softness, affability, good manners, regular habits, skill in fancy work,
and a fund of hidden genteel learning." Through the first half of the
nineteenth century these ideals struggled along parallel with the new
ideas that were everywhere springing up from the colonial forest
experiences of the last two generations.
As conservers of morals and as leaders in higher ideals of life, the
advanced women of America came early face to face with two outgrown
abuses. One of these was human slavery and the other was intemperance.
In attacking these abuses, women had to break with all the traditions
that defined their position.
The wealthy and intelligent Englishwoman, Frances Wright, who came to
this country in 1818 to attack slavery, found herself doubly opposed
because she was a woman speaking in public. Had not St. Paul declared:
"It is a shame for women to speak in the church"? Lucretia Mott, born in
the Society of Friends in Nantucket, had escaped the full force of this
injunction, but even she found, when she attacked slavery in public,
that she had invaded a world sacred to men, and she was sternly warned
back. Miss Susan B. Anthony also began her public life as a teacher and
a temperance reformer. It was only when she found herself helpless, in
presence of the prejudices against her sex, that she turned her
attention to freeing women from all purely sex limitation in public
life.
When the Civil War broke out, the women were ready to do their part. It
is quite possible that the names of Clara Barton and Dorothea Dix may be
remembered when Grant and Sherman are forgotten. With the establishing
of new human values the historian of the future may consider the saving
of life and the preventing of misery as more worthy of lasting record
than even military genius. These women and their millions of helpers
had not the resources of organized government at their disposal; but,
instead, they had oftentimes to work against the jealousy of those in
authority. At the close of the war, the Sanitary Commission comprised
seven thousand aid societies scattered over the country, and it had
raised over fifteen millions of dollars. Those women who remained at
home, in the absence of fathers and sons for four years, faced all the
problems of practical life. Who can estimate the value of training in
coöperative work and organization which the Civil War gave to the
American women?
In the Civil War, women directly served men; but in the great industrial
reorganization which came afterward they served mainly women and
children. Here the victories have been won in the press, in the
legislative halls, and in courts of law. Working with men, or alone,
they have perfected organization, agitated, raised money, printed
appeals, and carried cases through the courts, until factories and
stores have been made safer, excessive working hours have been cut down,
young children have been exempted from labor, many sweat-shops have
been closed, and women workers have begun to be organized to care for
their own needs. Much has been done; more remains to be done; but the
training of the women has gone steadily forward.
These, then, are the forces which have pushed women forward in America:
European political and religious persecution, the forest necessities of
colonial life, the American Revolution, the struggle with slavery and
intemperance, the Civil War, the industrial struggle and the need to
protect women and children from capitalistic exploitation. Possibly
women have now reached a point in their development where they can turn
to public service and to a full realization of their powers and
responsibilities without the goading necessity of a great wrong. If not,
there are sufficient wrongs still calling to lead them for many years.
Intemperance is not yet banished; the negro is not yet freed from the
effects of his slavery; working women and children are not yet fairly
protected; disease reaps needlessly large harvests; Lazarus still begs
at the table of Dives; our public education leaves much to be desired;
criminals are badly handled; millions of European refugees come marching
into our land needing guidance. Meantime, millions of women are content,
because themselves comfortable, and there are some even willing to aid
the powers of obstruction.
In these later years, marvelous changes have taken place all over the
world. Even in China, official attempts are now being made to leave
women free to walk by abolishing the bandaging of infants' feet. In
Turkey, women are going out from the harem to participate in public
life. In Germany, they are escaping from the exclusive service of the
home. In England, they are repeating the cries of the men of 1776 and of
1789: "All men and women are born free and equal." "No taxation without
representation." "One person, one vote." In Finland, Australia, New
Zealand, Norway and Sweden, women have all the essential civic and
political rights of men.
But, as in all human progress, first the ideas of a few leaders change;
they shape legislation; and the new organization slowly makes over the
practices and then the deep-seated mental and moral habits, which
constitute popular prejudices. These old unreasoning feelings still
largely dominate us, blinding us to the facts of life and blocking each
new advance by which women might pass into the world of free choice and
adjustment of their lives as co-workers with men. In the next chapters
we must study these present-day conditions in detail.