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Page 7
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.
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