development of feminine education in the early university period was
at its height, that certain changes in the domestic economy of the
Bolognese are worthy of notice. Two kinds of prepared food became
popular, if they were not, indeed, both invented at this time. One of
them, bearing the classic name Bologna, is still with us, has spread
throughout the world, and is likely to continue to be an important
article of food for many centuries more. Another form of prepared food
was a sort of dessert called Bologna {221} pudding, prepared from
cereals, and which can still be purchased in Bologna, though
foreigners, as a rule, do not care much for it. These two articles of
food modified materially the preparation of food for meals at this
time. It was possible to buy both of these, as now, ready made, and so
the housewife was spared the bother and trouble and expenditure of
time required for this work. We have here one phase of the origin of
the delicatessen stores. This sort of change in domestic economy has
always been noted whenever women have gone out of the home for other
occupations and have become something less--or more--than the
housewives and mothers they were before. Such changes in the dietary,
however, in the direction of ready-made food are never popular with
men. One German historical writer has been unkind enough to say that
this is one of the reasons why the higher education gradually became
much less popular, or at least attracted less attention than before.
"Women want things for themselves, and if they are opposed insist on
getting them," is the way this cynic Teuton puts it. "If, after a
time, however, having got what they want, they find that the men do
not like them to have it, they gradually abandon it." According to him
Bologna and Bologna pudding saved the stooping over the kitchen range,
or whatever took its place in those days, and gave all classes of
women more opportunity for intellectual development or at least {222}
for occupation with things different from household duties, but after
a time the more or less resentful attitude of the men brought about a
change. However that may be is hard to say.
Another interesting feature of the history of these times connected in
some way with feminine education or, at least, with feminine
occupation with other things besides their households, was a great
devotion to a particular breed of pet dogs of which one hears much in
the accounts of the life at Bologna at this time. Here, once more, the
German cynic has had his say. He has suggested that, whenever women
became occupied with things outside their home, with a consequent
diminution in the number of children, they are almost sure to find an
outlet for their affections in devotion to dogs and other pets.
Apparently he would suggest that they literally go to the dogs. It is
very curious that just during this thirteenth century, when feminine
education at Bologna is at its height, one hears so much of these
pets. At other times in the world's history, when women have taken to
intellectual interests and especially when there has been a fall in
the birth-rate, this same attention to pet animals is worthy of study.
After the thirteenth century there seems to have been a reaction
against these pets. It is to be hoped that there is no connection
between this and the prepared foods spoken of, but the decline in the
popularity of pets and of woman's {223} occupation with intellectual
interests went hand in hand. For all of this I am indebted to German
authorities whose attitude towards feminine education may somewhat
prejudice them and, indeed, probably does so, but these things are
only mentioned as showing certain views that are held. The interesting
thing for us is that after a period of somewhat more than a century of
rather intense interest on the part of the women in nearly every phase
of the intellectual life, there is then a diminution of interest, so
that by the end of the fourteenth century women, even where feminine
intellectual life was vigorous, are occupied almost without exception
as they were before the university period, mainly with domestic
concerns.
While feminine education was so common in the ecclesiastically ruled
universities of Italy, the custom did not spread in Western Europe.
The reason is not far to seek. All of the western universities owe
their origins to Paris. Oxford was due to a withdrawal of English
students from Paris, Cambridge to a similar withdrawal from Oxford.
Many of the Scotch universities are grandchildren of Paris. All of the
French universities are direct descendants, except Montpellier. The
Spanish universities have a similar relation. The experience with
feminine education at Paris had been unfortunate. The Heloise and
Abelard incident came in a formative stage of the university. It
settled unfavorably the {224} whole question of feminine attendance at
universities for the west. It seems a small thing to have such a wide
and far-reaching influence, but it is very often on little things that
the success or failure of great social movements of any kind depends.
We have practically no record of any relaxation of university
regulations in this matter in the west. Perhaps the Teutonic character
was opposed to it, perhaps the Teutonic women were less anxious for
it, being more occupied with Church and children and their home, but
there was none, and its absence is responsible for the feeling so
common among us, that now for the first time in the world women are
enjoying the opportunity for the higher education.
Even the university epoch, however, is not the first phase of
opportunities for the education of woman in modern history. Far from
it, indeed, we can find much more than traces of a feminist movement
in other centuries before this, and, indeed, in many of them. When
Charlemagne established schools for his people and invited Alcuin, the
English monk, to develop educational institutions for his people, the
first and most important school was that of the imperial palace where
Alcuin himself taught. In this the women of Paris were given
opportunities quite as well as the men; indeed, they seem to have
taken a more vivid interest and their example seems to have been the
highest incentive for many of the men to take up a work so foreign to
their natures, {225} for as yet they had all the barbarous instincts
of their Gothic ancestors, only slightly tamed and modified by two or
three centuries of gradual uplift and religious training of character.
There are letters from the women of the palace, and especially
Charlemagne's daughter, to Alcuin, discussing phases of his teaching
and suggesting problems and questions with regard to the matters which
he had been making the subject of his instruction.
It would be easy to think that this incident of the Palace School did
not mean very much and that its passing influence did not make itself
felt widely nor for long. The state of education at this time must not
be forgotten. Only the clergy, as a rule, had leisure for it. All the
rest of the world were engaged either in the frequent wars or in a
tireless struggle for subsistence as farmers, merchants and craftsmen.
The nobility neglected education just as much as the upper classes
always do, though there were certain fashions which gained a foothold
and that seem to show that they had some interest. Many a nobleman of
the mediaeval centuries, however, boasted that he could not sign his
own name. He was rather proud of the fact that he had not lowered
himself to mere book knowledge. There were large numbers of the clergy
and the monks, however, and these were the scholars of the period.
There were also at this time large numbers of religious women, and
these in their leisure hours {226} spent much time at educational
matters and some of them accomplished lasting results. The mother of
the family, the court dame, the wife of the nobleman, whose castle was
much more the home of work than it has ever been at any time since,
had but little leisure for the intellectual life. The nuns devoted
themselves to beautiful handiwork, to the composition as well as the
transcription of books and to the cultural interests generally.
It has always been true, as a rule, that the woman who accomplished
anything in the intellectual life must be either a celibate, or at
most, the mother of but a child or two. The mother of a large family,
unless she is extremely exceptional, cannot be expected to be
productive in the intellectual life. She has not the time for original
work, and still less for the filing process necessary for appropriate
expression. There are rare exceptions, but they only prove the rule.
One of the two forms of production apparently women must give up to
devote themselves to the other. The nuns in the Middle Ages, in the
retirement of their convents, gave themselves much more than we are
likely to think possible, to literary and scientific production.
Within the past year I have published sketches of two distinguished
women of the tenth and twelfth centuries whose books show us the
intellectual interests of the women of this time. Only that women were
having opportunities for mental development {227} these would not have
been written, and as they were written for women, it is evident that
those interests were quite widely diffused. One of these two authors
comes in what is sometimes called the darkest of the Dark Ages, the
tenth century; the other was born in the eleventh. They serve to show
how much more intense than we are likely to think was the interest of
the time in things intellectual. Without printing and without any
proper means of publication, somehow these women succeeded in making
literary monuments that have outlasted the wreck and ruin of time, and
that have been of sufficient interest to mankind to be preserved among
vicissitudes which seemed surely destined to destroy them.
One of the two ladies was Roswitha, or Hrotswitha, a nun of
Gandersheim, in what is now Hanover, who in the tenth century wrote a
series of comedies in imitation of Terence, probably not meant to be
played but to be read. She says in the preface that the reason for
writing them was that so many religious were reading the indecent
literature of classical Rome, with the excuse that it was necessary
for the cultivation of style or for the completion of their education,
that she wanted and had striven to write something moral and Christian
to replace the older writings. That preface of itself ought to be
enough to show us that in the nunneries along the Rhine, of which we
know that there were many, there must have been a much more {228}
widespread and ardent interest in literature, and, above all, in
classic literature, than we have had any idea of until recently.
Hrotswitha, to give her her Saxon name, was only a young woman of
twenty-five when she wrote the series of stories and plays thus
prefaced, and while her style, of course, does not compare with the
classics, worse Latin has often been written by people who were sure
that they knew more about Latinity than any nun of the obscure tenth
century could possibly have known.
The other woman writer of about this time was Hildegarde, the abbess
of a monastery along the Rhine, born at the end of the eleventh
century, who wrote a text-book of medicine, which was the most
important document in the history of medicine in this century. The
nuns were the nurses and the hospital attendants and in the country
places, to a great extent, the physicians of this time. In the cities
there were regular practitioners of medicine, but the infirmarian of a
monastery cared for the ailing monks and the people on the monastery
estates when ill, and often they were many in number, and the
infirmarian of a convent did the same thing for the sisters and for at
least the women folk among the people of the neighborhood. It was in
order to gather together and preserve the medical traditions of the
monasteries and convents that Hildegarde, who afterwards came to be
known as St. Hildegarde, wrote her volume on medicine. It has been
recently {229} issued in the collection of old writings called
"Migne's Patrologia," and has drawn many praises from historical
critics for the amount of information which it contains. These two,
Hroswitha and Hildegarde, furnish abundant evidence of the
intellectual life of the convents of this old time and more than hint
at how much has been lost that might have helped us to a larger
knowledge of them.
With this in mind it will be easier to understand a preceding phase of
the history of feminine education in Europe. The first nation that was
converted to Christianity in a body, so that Christian ideas and
ideals had a chance for assertion and application in the life of the
people, was Ireland. Christianity when introduced into Rome met with
the determined opposition of old paganism. After the migration of
nations and the coming down of the barbarians upon the Roman Empire,
there was little opportunity for Christianity to assert itself until
after these Teutonic peoples had been lifted out of their barbarism to
a higher plane of civilization. In Ireland, however, not only did
conversion to Christianity convert the whole people, but it came to a
people who possessed already a high degree of civilization and
culture, a literature that we have been learning to think more and
more of in recent years, many arts, and the development of science, in
the form of medicine at least, to a high degree. The law and music,
the language and the literature of {230} the early Irish all show us a
highly cultivated people. When Christianity came to them, then,
education became its watchword. Schools were opened everywhere on the
island. Ireland became The Island of Saints and of Scholars, and
literally thousands of students flocked from England and the mainland
to these Irish schools. The first and the greatest of these was that
founded by St. Patrick himself at Armagh. During the century after his
death there were probably at one time as many as 5,000 students at
Armagh. Only next in importance to this great school of the Irish
apostle was that of his great feminine co-worker, St. Brigid, who did
for the women of Ireland what St. Patrick had been doing for the men.
It is probable that there were 8,000 students at Kildare, Brigid's
great school, at one time. It is curious to think that there should
have been something like co-education 1,500 years ago, and, above all,
in Ireland, but Kildare seems to have had a system not unlike that in
vogue at many of our universities in the modern time. The male and
female students were thoroughly segregated,--may I say this is not the
last time in the world's history that segregation was the
distinguishing trait of co-education,--but the teachers of the men at
Kildare seem also to have lectured to the women. The men occupied an
entirely subsidiary position, however; even the bishops of Kildare in
Brigid's time were appointed on her recommendation. For centuries
{231} afterwards the Abbess of Kildare, Brigid's successor, had the
privilege of a commanding voice in the selection of the bishop. The
school at Kildare was conducted mainly by and for women, though there
were men in the neighboring monastery who taught both classes of
pupils.
Perhaps the most interesting feature of the education of Kildare is
that it was not concerned exclusively, nor even for the major part
apparently, with book-learning. The book-learning of the Irish schools
was celebrated. Down at Kildare, however, certain of the arts and
crafts were cultivated with special success. Lace-making and the
illumination of books were two of the favorite occupations of these
students at Kildare in which marvellous success was achieved. The
tradition of Irish lace-making which has maintained itself during all
the centuries began, or at least, secured its first great prestige, in
Brigid's time. Gerald the Welshman, sometimes spoken of as Giraldus
Cambrensis, told of having seen during a journey in Ireland centuries
after Brigid's time, but nearly a thousand years ago, a copy of the
Scriptures that was wonderfully illuminated. He thought it the most
beautiful book in the world. His description tallies very closely with
that of the Book of Kells. Some have even ventured to suggest that he
actually saw the Book of Kells at Kildare. This is extremely
improbable, however, and the Book of Kells almost surely originated
elsewhere. There {232} seems, however, to have been at Kildare some
book nearly as beautiful as the Book of Kells, made there, and
establishing peradventure the thoroughness of the artistic education
given at Kildare at this time.
So much for feminine influence and education under Christianity. Most
people are likely to know much more of the place of women in Greece
and Rome than during Christian times. We are prone, however, to
exaggerate the dependence of woman among both Latins and Greeks and to
think that she had very few opportunities for intellectual development
and almost none for expression of her personality and the exertion of
her influence. Here, once more, as in many other phases of this
subject we are, through ignorance, assuming conditions in the past
that are quite unlike those which actually existed. Recently in the
_Atlantic Monthly,_ Mrs. Emily James Putnam, sometime the Dean of
Barnard, in an article on "The Roman Lady," [Footnote 17] has
completely undermined usual notions with regard to the position of the
Roman woman. The Roman matrons had rights all their own, and succeeded
in asserting themselves in many ways. There was never any seclusion of
the women in Rome and the Roman _matrona_ at all times enjoyed
personal freedom, entertained her husband's guests, had a voice in his
affairs, managed his house and came and went as she pleased. Mrs.
Putnam suggests that "in {233} early days she shared the labors and
the dangers of the insecure life of a weak people among hostile
neighbors. It may not be fanciful to say that the liberty of the Roman
woman of classical times was the inherited reward of the prowess of a
pioneer ancestress, in the same way as the social freedom of the
American woman to-day comes to her from the brave Colonial
housemother, able to work and, when need was, to fight."
[Footnote 17: _Atlantic Monthly,_ June, 1910.]
Indeed the more one studies social life in Rome the more clear does it
become that conditions were very similar for women to what they are in
this latest of the republics here in America. This will not be
surprising if we but learn to realize that the circumstances of the
development of Rome itself, the environment in which the women were
placed resembled ours of the later time much more closely than we have
had any idea of until recent years. The Italian historian, Ferrero,
has read new lessons into Roman history for us by showing us the past
in terms of the present.
The conditions that developed at Rome, as I have said, were very
similar to those which developed in the modern American republic.
Riches came, luxury arose. Eastern slaves came to do all the work in
the household that could formerly be accomplished by the women, Greek
hand-maidens particularly took every solicitude out of her hands, and
then the Roman matron looked around for something to occupy herself
with, and {234} it was not long before we have expressions from the
men that would remind us of many things that have been said in the
last generation or so. There is a well-known speech of Cato delivered
in opposition to the repeal of the Oppian Law which forbade women to
hold property, that is reported by Livy and sounds strangely modern.
Mrs. Putnam talks of it very aptly, "as an expression of the ever
recurrent uneasiness of the male in the presence of the insurgent
female."
"'If, Romans,' said he, 'every individual among us had made it a rule
to maintain the prerogative and authority of a husband with respect to
his own wife, we should have less trouble with the whole sex. It was
not without painful emotions of shame that I just now made my way into
the forum through a crowd of women. Had I not been restrained by
respect for the modesty and dignity of some individuals among them, I
should have said to them, "What sort of practice is this, of running
out into public, besetting the streets, and addressing other women's
husbands? Could not each have made the same request to her husband at
home? Are your blandishments more seductive in public than in private,
and with other women's husbands than your own?"
"'Our ancestors thought it not proper that women should transact any,
even private business, without a director. We, it seems, suffer them
now to interfere in the management of state {235} affairs. Will you
give the reins to their untractable nature and their uncontrolled
passions? This is the smallest of the injunctions laid on them by
usage or the laws, all of which women bear with impatience; they long
for liberty, or rather for license. What will they not attempt if they
win this victory? The moment they have arrived at an equality with
men, they will become your superiors.'"
The social conditions which developed at Rome are indeed so strangely
like those with which we are now familiar as to be quite startling. As
a mere man I should hesitate to suggest this, since it refers
particularly to feminine affairs and domestic concerns, but since it
has been betrayed by one of the sex perhaps I may venture to quote it.
Once more I turn to Mrs. Putnam for an apt expression of the
conditions. She says:
"The Greeks, who, to be sure, had nothing in their dwellings that
was not beautiful, had still supposed the great works of art were
for public places. With the Romans began the private collection of
chefs-d'oeuvre in its most snobbish aspect. The parts played by the
sexes in this enterprise sometimes showed the same division of labor
that prevails very largely in a certain great nation of our own day
that shall be nameless: the husband paid for the best art that money
could buy, and the wife learned to talk about it and to entertain
the artist. It is true that the Roman lady began also to improve her
mind. She {236} studied Greek, and hired Greek masters to teach her
history and philosophy. Ladies flocked to hear lectures on all sorts
of subjects, originating the odd connection between scholarship and
fashion which still persists."
This subject may be pursued with ever-increasing recognition of
similarity between that time and our own. For instance, Mrs. Putnam
says: "A woman of fashion, we are told, reckoned it among her
ornaments if it were said of her that she was well read and a thinker,
and that she wrote lyrics almost worthy of Sappho. She, too, must have
her hired escort of teachers, and listen to them now and then, at
table or while she was having her hair dressed,--at other times she
was too busy. And often while the philosopher was discussing high
ethical themes her maid would come in with a love-letter, and the
argument must wait till it was answered.
"Nothing very important in the way of production resulted from all the
lady's literary activity. The verses, if Sulpicia's they be, are the
sole surviving evidence of creative effort among her kind; and,
respectable as they are, they need not disturb Sappho's repose. It was
indirectly that the Roman lady affected literature, since kinds began
to be produced to her special taste; for it is hardly an accident that
the _vers de societe_ should expand, and the novel originate, in
periods when for the first time women were a large element in the
reading public."
{237}
In our time it has been said, that one of the reasons why the young
man does not marry is often that he is fearful of the superiority of
the college-bred young woman. He knows that he himself has no more
intelligence than is absolutely necessary for the proper conduct of
life, and he fears that his "breaks" in grammar, in literature, in
taste for art, in social things, may make him the laughing-stock of
the educated woman. We would be reasonably sure, most of us, that at
least this is the first time in the world's history that anything like
this has happened. It is rather interesting, however, to read some of
the reflections of the Roman satiric poets on the state of affairs
that developed in Rome as a consequence of study and lectures and at
least supposed scholarship becoming the fashion. "I hate the woman,"
says Juvenal, "who is always turning back to the grammatical rules of
Palaemon and consulting them; the feminine antiquary who recalls
verses unknown to me, and corrects the words of an unpolished friend
which even a man would not observe. Let a husband be allowed to make a
solecism in peace." I recommend the reading of Juvenal to the college
young woman of the modern time, not only for its classic but for its
social value.