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.