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Page 3
During the same period, indirectly, and by means of juridical evasions,
this independence was also won by unmarried women, who, according to
ancient laws, ought to have remained all their lives under a guardian,
either selected by the father in his will or appointed by the law in
default of such selection. To get around this difficulty, the fertile
and subtle imagination of the jurists invented first the _tutor
optivus_, permitting the father, instead of naming his daughter's
guardian in his will, to leave her free to choose one general guardian
or several, according to the business in hand, or even to change that
official as many times as she wished.
To give the woman means to change her legitimate guardian at pleasure,
if her father had provided none by will, there was invented the _tutor
cessicius_, thereby allowing the transmission of a legal guardianship.
However, though all restrictions imposed upon the liberty of the
unmarried woman by the institution of tutelage disappeared, one
limitation continued in force--she could not make a will. Yet even
this was provided for, either by fictitious marriage or by the
invention of the _tutor fiduciarius_. The woman, without contracting
matrimony, gave herself by _coemptio_ (purchase) into the _manus_ of a
person of her trust, on the agreement that the _coemptionator_ would
free her: he became her guardian in the eyes of the law.
[Illustration: A Roman marriage custom. The picture shows the bride
entering her new home in the arms of the bridegroom.]
There was, then, at the close of the republic little disparity in legal
condition between the man and the woman. As is natural, to this almost
complete legal equality there was united an analogous moral and social
equality. The Romans never had the idea that between the _mundus
muliebris_ (woman's world) and that of men they must raise walls, dig
ditches, put up barricades, either material or moral. They never
willed, for example, to divide women from men by placing between them
the ditch of ignorance. To be sure, the Roman dames of high society
were for a long time little instructed, but this was because, moreover,
the men distrusted Greek culture. When literature, science, and
Hellenic philosophy were admitted into the great Roman families as
desired and welcome guests, neither the authority, nor the egoism, nor
yet the prejudices of the men, sought to deprive women of the joy, the
comfort, the light, that might come to them from these new studies. We
know that many ladies in the last two centuries of the republic not
only learned to dance and to sing,--common feminine studies,
these,--but even learned Greek, loved literature, and dabbled in
philosophy, reading its books or meeting with the famous philosophers
of the Orient.
Moreover, in the home the woman was mistress, at the side of and on
equality with her husband. The passage I have quoted from Nepos proves
that she was not segregated, like the Greek woman: she received and
enjoyed the friends of her husband, was present with them at festivals
and banquets in the houses of families with whom she had friendly
relations, although at such banquets she might not, like the man,
recline, but must, for the sake of greater modesty, sit at table. In
short, she was not, like the Greek woman, shut up at home, a veritable
prisoner.
She might go out freely; this she did generally in a litter. She was
never excluded from theaters, even though the Roman government tried as
best it could for a long period to temper in its people the passion for
spectacular entertainments. She could frequent public places and have
recourse directly to the magistrates. We have record of the assembling
and of demonstrations made by the richest women of Rome in the Forum
and other public places, to obtain laws and other provisions from the
magistrates, like that famous demonstration of women that Livy
describes as having occurred in the year 195 B.C., to secure the
abolition of the Oppian Law against luxury.
What more? We have good reason for holding that already under the
republic there existed at Rome a kind of woman's club, which called
itself _conventus matronarum_ and gathered together the dames of the
great families. Finally, it is certain that many times in critical
moments the government turned directly and officially to the great
ladies of Rome for help to overcome the dangers that menaced public
affairs, by collecting money, or imploring with solemn religious
ceremonies the favor of the gods.
One understands then, how at all times there were at Rome women much
interested in public affairs. The fortunes of the powerful families,
their glory, their dominance, their wealth, depended on the
vicissitudes of politics and of war. The heads of these families were
all statesmen, diplomats, warriors; the more intelligent and cultivated
the wife, and the fonder she was of her husband, the intenser the
absorption with which she must have followed the fortunes of politics,
domestic and foreign; for with these were bound up many family
interests, and often even the life of her husband.
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