|
Main
- books.jibble.org
My Books
- IRC Hacks
Misc. Articles
- Meaning of Jibble
- M4 Su Doku
- Computer Scrapbooking
- Setting up Java
- Bootable Java
- Cookies in Java
- Dynamic Graphs
- Social Shakespeare
External Links
- Paul Mutton
- Jibble Photo Gallery
- Jibble Forums
- Google Landmarks
- Jibble Shop
- Free Books
- Intershot Ltd
|
books.jibble.org
Previous Page
| Next Page
Page 8
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.
Previous Page
| Next Page
|
|