Nothing is commoner than to suppose that what we are doing at the
present day is an improvement over whatever they were doing at any
time in the past in the same line. We were rather proud during the
nineteenth century to talk of that century as the century of
evolution. Evolutionary terms of all kinds found their way even into
everyday speech and a very general impression was produced that we are
in the midst of progress so rapid and unerring, that even from decade
to decade it is possible to trace the wonderful advance that man is
making. We look back on the early nineteenth century as quite
hopelessly backward. They had no railroads, no street-car lines, no
public street lighting, no modes of heating buildings that gave any
comfort in the cold weather, no elevators, and when we compare our
present comfortable condition with the discomforts of that not so
distant period, we feel how much evolution has done for us, and
inevitably {200} conclude that just as much progress as has been made
in transportation and in comfort, has also been made in the things of
the mind, and, above all, in education, so that, while the millennium
is not yet here, it cannot surely be far off; and men are attaining at
last, with giant strides, the great purpose that runs through the
ages.
Probably in nothing is the assumption that we are doing something far
beyond what was ever accomplished before, more emphatically expressed
than in the ordinary opinions as to what is being done by and for
women in our generation. We have come to think that at last in the
course of evolution woman is beginning to come into something of her
rights, she is at last getting her opportunity for the higher
education and for professional education so far as she wants it, and
as a consequence is securing that influence which, as the equal of
man, she should have in the world. Now there is just one thing with
regard to this very general impression which deserves to be called
particularly to attention. This is not the first time in the world's
history, nor the first by many times, that woman has had the
opportunity for the higher education and has taken it very well.
Neither is it the first time that she has insisted on having an
influence in public affairs, but on the contrary, we can readily find
a very curious series of cycles of feminine education and of the
exercise of public influence by women, with intervals of almost
negative phases in these matters that {201} are rather difficult to
explain. Let us before trying to understand what the feministic
movement means in our own time and, above all, before trying to sum up
its ultimate significance for the race, study some of the
corresponding movements in former times.
The most interesting phase of the woman movement in history is that
which occurred at the time of the Renaissance. Because it is typical
of the phases of the feministic movement at all times, and then, too,
because it is closer to us and the records of it are more complete, it
will be extremely interesting to follow out some of the details of it.
It may be necessary for that to make a little excursion into the
history of the period. During the early fifteenth century the Turks
were bothering Constantinople so much, that Greek scholars, rendered
uncomfortable at home, began making their way over into Italy rather
frequently, bringing with them precious manuscripts and remains of old
Greek art. Besides commerce aroused by the Crusades was making the
intercourse between East and West much more intimate than it had been
and, as a result, a taste for Greek letters and art was beginning to
be felt in certain portions of Italy. When Constantinople fell, about
the middle of the fifteenth century, the prestige of the old capital
of the Greek empire was lost, and scholars abandoned it for Italy in
large numbers. This is the time of the Renaissance. The rebirth that
the word {202} signifies, is not a rebirth of art and architecture and
literature into the modern world, as if there had been nothing before,
for Gothic art and architecture and literature is quite as wonderful,
if not more so, than anything that came after, and there are good
authorities who insist that the Renaissance hurt, rather than helped,
Europe. The Renaissance was a rebirth of Greek ideas and ideals in
aesthetics into the European world, and while we may not agree with
Sir Henry Maine that whatever lives and moves in the intellectual
world is Greek in origin, there is no doubt that Greek can be the
source of most wonderful incentive and such it proved to be during the
fifteenth century.
Men and women began to study Greek and they paid much more attention
as a consequence to the Latin classics modelled on the Greek, and so
the New Learning, the so-called humanities, became the centre of
intellectual interest. They were studied first in private schools, but
before long a place for these new studies was demanded in the
curriculum of the universities. The universities, however, were
occupied with the so-called seven liberal arts, which were really
scientific studies. There was geometry, astronomy, music, grammar,
rhetoric, logic and metaphysics, with considerable ethics and
political science, so that they resembled in many ways our modern
universities as they have been transformed since the re-introduction
of scientific studies into them. {203} The university faculties were
content and conservative after the fashion of universities ever, and
they quite naturally refused to entertain the notion of such a radical
change as the introduction of classical studies into the curriculum.
This is just exactly what the classical universities of the early
nineteenth century did when they were asked by scientific enthusiasts
to re-introduce scientific studies into the curriculum, which in the
course of 800 years had come to be made up almost exclusively of
classical studies. In this curious way does history repeat itself.
Unable to obtain a place for the studies in humanism in the
universities, ruling princes and wealthy members of the nobility
proceeded to found special schools for these subjects. In these
schools without the traditions of the past, the women asked and
obtained the privilege of studying. There had come a noteworthy change
in intellectual interest, a novelty was introduced into education.
Whenever that happens woman always asks and always obtains the
privilege of the higher education. During the Renaissance period she
proceeded to show her intellectual power. Many of the women of the
Renaissance became distinguished for scholarship. Perhaps one thing
should be noted with regard to that. Their reputation for scholarship
was largely confined to their younger years. They were more
precocious, or applied themselves better to their studies, and
accordingly knew more of the classics {204} at twenty than their male
relatives who had the same opportunities. Indeed we hear of them as
brilliant scholars at sixteen and seventeen and eighteen. They took
part in Latin plays that were brilliantly performed before the
nobility, higher ecclesiastics, cardinals and even the Popes. They
were brilliant in music, in the languages and in their taste for art.
Later on in life we do not hear so much of them. They evidently were
ready to leave the serious work of scholarship to the men and content
themselves with being enlightened patrons of literature, beneficent
advocates of the arts, liberal customers of the artistic geniuses of
the time. Above all, we find no great original works from them. They
are charming appreciators but not good inventors--at this time, of
course.
While they do not occupy themselves with dry-as-dust scholarship,
there is no doubt at all that much of the glory of the Renaissance,
with its great revivals in art and letters, is due to the women of the
time. It was they who insisted on the building of the town houses,
finely decorated and with charming objects of art in them. It was for
them that the artists of the time made many beautiful things. They
were very often the patrons who enabled churches to obtain from
artists the wonderful paintings of the time. The sculptors made for
them many charming pieces of bric-a-brac. The artists laid out
beautiful gardens that we are only just beginning to {205} appreciate
again now that our taste for outdoor life is being properly
cultivated. They bought the books that were issued by the Manutiuses
at Venice. Isabella D'Este had a standing order that all the books
issued from this great Venetian press should be sent to her. Books
were costly treasures in these times. A single volume of one of these
incunabula of printing so beautifully issued from Manutius's printing
establishment was worth nearly one hundred dollars in our money.
The women designed their own dresses. They encouraged the miniature
painting of the time and the illumination of books and occasionally
took up these arts themselves. They fostered the development of
textile industries, lacemaking and the various kinds of figured cloth,
so that we have some of the most beautiful inventions in this kind at
this time. Tapestry-making took on a new vigor and beauty because of
their patronage. They wanted beautiful glass, and new periods of
marvellous development of glass-tinting and making were ushered in. As
can be readily understood these are the sort of things that men are
not interested in, and whenever in the history of the race we find a
period of development of this kind we can be sure that educated women
are responsible for it. These women of the Renaissance decorated their
homes beautifully, had them built substantially, with wonderful taste
and, above all, had them set charmingly in the Italian {206}
Renaissance gardens that are so deservedly admired.
While they were thus occupied with the beautiful things of life some
of them wrote poetry that has lived (Lucrezia Tornabuoni dei Medici,
Vittoria Colonna), some of them indulged in fiction (Marguerite of
Navarre) that is still read, and a great epoch of fiction-writing
responded to their interest as readers; some of them mixed in politics
and proved their power, at times some of them acted as regents for
their sons (Forli, D'Este), and succeeded magnificently, so that we
have every phase of development of woman's power. There can be no
doubt that at this period woman was afforded every opportunity for the
development of her intellectual life, and that she took her
opportunities with great success.
We have from this time probably the names of more distinguished women
than from any other corresponding period in the world's history. There
was a wonderful group of women at the Court of Giovanna of Naples in
the first half of the fifteenth century, because Naples got her
Renaissance impulses first, being closer by sea to Constantinople and
having many Greek traditions from the old days when Southern Italy was
Magna Graecia. Then there are a series of finely educated women
connected with the Medici household at Florence. The mother of the
great Lorenzo is the best known of them, and her poems show real
literary power. The D'Este family is {207} better known generally, and
then there were the Gonzagas, some of the women of the house of Forli,
Vittoria Colonna, whose influence over art and artists shows her
genius quite as well as does her writing, and many others. Everywhere
women are on a footing with men as regards the intellectual life.
Everywhere they direct conversations seriously with regard to literary
and artistic subjects, and, indeed, it is they who, in what we would
now call salons, serve to make intellectual subjects fashionable, and
so concentrate attention on them and secure the patronage so necessary
for artists and writers if they are to subsist while doing their work.
It would be a great mistake, however, to think for a moment that it
was in Italy alone that such opportunities for higher education and
intellectual influence were allowed to women. Just as the Renaissance
movement itself spread throughout Europe affecting the education, the
literature, the art, the architecture, the arts and crafts of the time
and the nations, so did the feministic movement spread, and everywhere
we find striking expressions of it. In France, for instance, the
Renaissance can be traced very easily in letters and architecture, and
was not much behind Italy in feminine education. Queen Anne of
Bretagne organized the Court School of the time, and interest in
literature became the fashion of the hour. Marguerite of Navarre is a
woman of the Renaissance, and so is Renée of Anjou, while the name
{208} of Louise La Cordière shows, for la cordière means the
cord-wainer's daughter, that higher education for women was not
confined to the nobility. Mary Queen of Scots, educated in France,
whose letters and whose poetry with occasional excursions into Latin,
show us how thoroughly educated she was,--it must not be forgotten
that she was put into prison at twenty-four and never again got
out,--is a typical woman of the French Renaissance. Sichel has told
the story of these women of France very well, and those who want to
know the details of the feministic movement of the time should turn to
him.
In Spain, too, the Renaissance movement made itself felt in every
department. Most of Spain's cathedrals were finished during the
Renaissance time, and some of the work is the admiration of the world.
Spain's literary Renaissance came a little later, but when it did it
contributed at least two great names to the world
literature--Cervantes and Calderon. The women of the nation were also
affected, and Queen Isabella was a deeply intellectual woman of many
interests. Spain contributed to the feministic movement probably the
greatest name in the history of feminine intellectuality in St.
Teresa. How much of sympathy there was with this great expression of
feminine intelligence will be best appreciated from the fact that
Spanish ecclesiastics talk of Teresa as their Spanish Doctor of the
Church, and that in Rome there is amongst the statues {209} of the
Doctors and the Fathers in the Church one woman figure, that of St.
Teresa, with the title mater spiritualium--mother of spiritual
things. Her books, profoundly admired by the Spaniards, Were the
favorite reading for such extremely different minds as Fénelon and
Bossuet, and have been the storehouse ever since for German mystics.
They were beautifully translated by Crashaw into English, and have
been the subject of great interest during the present feministic
movement, especially since George Eliot's reference to her in the
preface of "Middlemarch."
In England the Renaissance did not affect art much, nor architecture,
though it did profoundly stir the men of letters, and the great
Elizabethan period of English literature is really an expression of
the Renaissance in England. Here almost more than anywhere else in
Europe the women shared in the uplift and devotion to things
intellectual that developed. Queen Mary was a well-educated woman,
Queen Elizabeth read Greek as well as Latin easily, Lady Jane Grey
preferred her lessons in Greek, under Roger Ascham, to going to balls
and routs and hunting parties, and was a blue-stocking in the veriest
sense of the term. It has been hinted that it was perhaps this that
disturbed her feminine common sense and allowed her to be led so
easily into the foolish conspiracy in which she lost her life. The
losing of one's head in things deeply intellectual may sometimes mean
the losing of it {210} more literally when crowns are at stake. There
are many other names of noble women of this time that might be
mentioned and that are well known for their intellectual development.
That the movement did not confine itself to the higher nobility we can
be sure, for when the better classes do ill they are imitated, but so
also are they imitated when they do well. Besides, the story that we
have of Margaret More and her friends shows that the middle classes
were also stirred to interest in things intellectual.
The usual objection, when this story of the Renaissance and the
feministic movement connected with it is told, if the narrator would
urge that here was an earlier period of feminine education than ours,
is that, after all, the education of this period was confined to only
a few of the nobility. This is not true, and there are many reasons
why it is not true. First, the upper classes are always imitated by
the others, and if there was a fashion for education we can be sure
that it spread. We have not the records of many educated women, but
those that we have all make it clear that education was not confined
to a few, and that those of the middle classes who wanted it could
readily secure it. There were probably as many women to the population
of Europe at that time enjoying the higher education as there are
proportionately in America at the present time. Europe had but a small
population altogether in the fifteenth century. There {211} were
probably less than 4,000,000 of people in England at the end, even, of
the sixteenth century. In Elizabeth's time when the census was taken,
because of the Spanish Armada, these were the figures. There were not
many more people in all Europe then than there are now in England. If
out of these few, comparatively, we can pick out the group of
distinguished women whom I have just spoken of, then there must have
been a great many sharing in the privileges of the higher education.
[Footnote 16]
It is true that it was, as a rule, only the daughters of the nobility
who received the opportunity for the higher education, or at least
obtained it with facility. It must not be forgotten, however, just
what the nobility of Italy, and, {212} indeed, of other countries
also, represented. The conditions there are most typical and it is
worth while studying them out. The Medici, for instance, of Florence,
whose women folk were so well educated, were members of the gilds of
the apothecaries, as their name indicates, who made a fortune on drugs
and precious stones and beautiful stuffs from the East, and then
became the bankers of Europe. Noblemen were created because of success
in war, success in politics, success in diplomacy, but also because of
success in commerce, and occasionally success in the arts. Not many
educators and artists were among them any more than in our time,
because they were not, as a rule, possessed of the fortune properly to
keep up the dignity of a patent of nobility. The daughters of the
nobility of Italy, however, were not very different, certainly their
origin was very similar to that of the daughters of the wealthy men of
America, who are, after all, the only ones who can take advantage of
the higher education in our time. We must not forget that, compared to
the whole population, the number of women securing the higher
education is very limited.
To think that the Renaissance with this provision of ample
opportunities for feminine education was the first epoch of this kind
in the world's history would be to miss sadly a host of historical
facts and their significance. Unfortunately history has been so
written from the standpoint of {213} man and his interests, that this
phase of history is not well known and probably less understood.
History has been too much a mere accumulation of facts with regard to
war, diplomacy and politics. While we have known much of heroes and
battles, we have known little of education, of art, of artistic
achievement of all kinds. We have known even less of popular
movements. We have known almost nothing of the great uplift of the
masses which created the magnificent arts and crafts of the Middle
Ages, that we are just beginning to admire so much once more, and our
admiration of them is the best measure of our own serious artistic
development. Kings and warriors and kings' mistresses and ugly
diplomacy and rotten politics, have occupied the centre of the stage
in history. Surely we are coming to a time when other matters, the
human things and not the animal instincts, will be the main subject of
history; when fighting and sex and acquisitiveness and selfishness
shall give place in history to mutual aid, uplift, unselfishness and
thoughtfulness for others.
As soon as history is studied from the standpoint of the larger human
interests and not that of political history, it is easy to find not
only traces but detailed stories of feminine education at many times.
Before the Renaissance the great phase of education had been that of
the universities. The first of the universities was founded down at
Salerno around a medical school, the {214} second that of Bologna
around a law school and the third that of Paris with a school of
philosophy and theology as a nucleus. This seems to be about the way
that man's interests manifest themselves in an era of development.
First, he is occupied mainly with his body and its needs; then his
property and its rights, and finally, as he lifts himself up to higher
things, his relations to his fellow-man and to his Creator come to be
profound vital interests. Such, at least, is the story of the origin
of the universities in the thirteenth century.
The surprise for us who are considering the story of feminine
education and influence is what happened at Salerno. Here some twenty
miles back from Naples, in a salubrious climate, not far from the
Mediterranean, where old Greek traditions had maintained themselves,
for Southern Italy was called Magna Graecia, where the intercourse
with the Arabs and with the northern shores of Africa and with the
Near East, brought the medical secrets of many climes to a focus, the
first modern medical school came into existence. In the department of
women's diseases women professors taught, wrote text-books and
evidently were considered, in every sense of the word, co-ordinate
professors in the university. We have the text-book of one of them,
Trotula, who is hailed as the founder of the Salernitan School of
Women Physicians, the word school being used in the same sense as when
we talk of a school of {215} painting, and not at all in the sense of
our modern women's medical schools. Trotula was the wife of the
professor of medicine at the university, Plataerius I, and the mother
of another professor at the university, Plataerius II, herself a
professor like them.
There are many other names of women professors at the University of
Salerno in this department. Women, however, were not alone allowed to
practise this single phase of medicine, but we have licenses granted
to women in Naples, of which at this time Salerno was the university,
to practise both medicine and surgery. It seems to have been quite
common, I should say, at least as common as in our own time for women
to study and practise medicine, and their place in the university and
the estimation in which their books were held, show us that all the
difficulties in the way of professional education for women had been
removed and that they were accepted by their masculine colleagues on a
footing of absolute equality.
Probably the most interesting feature of this surprising and
unexpected development of professional education for women is to be
found in the conditions out of which Salerno developed. The school was
originally a monastic school under the influence of the Benedictine
monks from Monte Cassino not far away. The great Archbishop Alphanus
I, who was the most prominent patron and who had been a professor
there, was himself {216} a Benedictine monk. How intimately the
relations of the monks to the school were maintained can be realized
from the fact that when the greatest medical teacher and writer of
Salerno, Constantine Africanus, wanted to have leisure to write his
great works in medicine, he retired from his professorship to the
monastery of Monte Cassino. His great friend Desiderius was the abbot
there, and his influence was still very strong at Salerno. Desiderius
afterwards became Pope, and continued his beneficent patronage of this
Southern Italian university. In a word, it was in the midst of the
most intimate ecclesiastical and monastic influence that this handing
over of the department of women's diseases to women in a great
teaching institution occurred. The wise old monks were thoroughly
practical, and though eminently conservative, knew the needs of
mankind very well, and worked out this solution of one series of
problems.
When the next great university, that of Bologna, was founded, it
developed, as I have suggested, around a law school. Irnerius revived
the study of the old Roman law, and his teaching of it attracted so
much attention that students from all over Europe flocked to Bologna.
Law is different from medicine in many respects. The right of women to
study medicine will readily be granted, their place in a system of
medical education is manifest. With regard to law, however, there can
scarcely be grave question as to the {217} advisability of woman
studying it unless economic conditions force her to it. This was
particularly true at a time when woman could own no property and had
no rights until she married. In spite of the many inherent
improbabilities of this development, the law school was scarcely
opened at Bologna before women became students in it. Probably
Irnerius' daughter and some of her friends were the first students,
but after a time others came and the facilities seem to have been
quite open to them. As out of the law school the university gradually
developed, opportunities for study in the other higher branches were
accorded to women at Bologna. We have the story of their success in
mathematics, in philosophy, in music and in astronomy.
According to a well-known and apparently well authenticated tradition,
one distinguished woman student of Bologna, Maria Di Novella, achieved
such success in mathematics about the middle of the thirteenth century
that she was appointed professor of mathematics. Apparently the
faculty of Bologna had no qualms of educational conscience nor betook
themselves to such halfway measures as one of our modern faculties,
which accords a certificate to a woman that she has passed better in
the mathematical tripos than the Senior Wrangler, though they do not
accord her the Senior Wranglership. The story goes on to say that
Signorina Di Novella, knowing that she was pretty, and fearing that
her {218} beauty would disturb the minds, at least, of her male
students, arranged to lecture from behind a curtain. This would seem
to indicate that the blue-stockings of the olden time could be as
surpassingly modest as they were intelligent. I remember once telling
this story before a convent audience. The dear old Mother Superior,
who had known me for many years, ventured to ask me afterwards, "Did
you say that she was young?" and I said yes, according to the
tradition; "and handsome?" and I nodded the affirmative, "Well, then,"
she said, "I do not believe the rest of the story." But then, after
all, what do dear old Mothers Superior know about the world or its
ways, or about handsome young women or their ways, or about the
significance of traditions which serve to show us that even pretty,
intelligent women can be as modestly retiring and as ready to conceal
their charms as they are to be charmingly courteous and careful of the
feelings of others?
It was not alone in law and mathematics, however, that women were
given opportunities for the higher education and even for professional
work at the University of Bologna. In medicine, as well as in law,
women reached distinction. The first great professor of anatomy of
modern times is Mondino, whose text-book on dissection, published at
the beginning of the fourteenth century, continued to be used in the
medical schools for two centuries. One of his assistants was {219}
Alessandra Giliani, one of the two university prosectors in anatomy.
At the Surgeon General's Library in Washington, in one of the early
printed editions of Mondino's work, the frontispiece shows a young
woman making the dissection before him preparatory to his lecture. To
her, according to an old Italian chronicle, we owe the invention of
methods of varnishing and painting the tissues of cadavers so that
they would resemble more their appearance in the living state, that
they might be preserved for further use, thus avoiding to some extent
the necessity for constant repetition of the deterrent work of
dissection, even more deterrent at that time.
It is curiously interesting to find that another great improvement in
the teaching of anatomy, invented in Italy nearly four centuries
later, came also from a woman teaching at an Italian university,
Madame Manzolini. The tradition connecting these two women is
unbroken. There is not a century from the thirteenth to the eighteenth
in which there were not distinguished women professors at the
universities of Italy, and, therefore, also students in large numbers.
Just how many women students there were we do not know. It might seem
to be a comparatively easy problem to find out just how many there
were at any given time by looking up the registers of the
universities. Once in Bologna itself I got hold of the old university
registers, confident that now I would learn just what was {220} the
proportion of women students at the university. I was utterly
disappointed, however, Italian mothers had, so far as the settlement
of this question is concerned, the unfortunate habit occasionally of
giving boys' names to girls, and girls' names to boys. They called
their children after favorite saints. A girl might well be called
Antonio, for the feminine form was not in common use in earlier times.
Many boys had for first name Maria. It used to be the custom in Venice
for every child, no matter what its sex, to receive from the Church
the two names Maria Giovanni, and then the parents might add what
other names they pleased. The names of royalty, with their frequent
use of mingled masculine and feminine names, show how much confusion
can be worked to any scheme for the determination of the sex of
students at the old universities by this, for us, unfortunate habit.
Curiously enough, it was during the thirteenth century when the
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 Héloïse and
Abélard 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."
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 société should expand, and the novel originate, in
periods when for the first time women were a large element in the
reading public."
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.
Among the Greeks the position of women was quite different from what
is usually supposed. It is only too often the custom to think that the
Greek women, confined to a great degree to their {238} houses, sharing
little in the public discussions, coming very slightly into public in
any way, were more or less despised by the men and tolerated, but
surely not much respected. The place of women in life at any time can
be best judged from the position assigned them by the dramatic poets
of any period. The larger the mind of the dramatic poet, the more of a
genius he is, the more surely does his estimate expressed in
literature represent life as he saw it. Ruskin pointed out that
Shakespeare has no heroes and many heroines; that, while he has no men
that stand in unmarred perfection of character, "there is scarcely a
play that has not a perfect woman in it, steadfast in grave hope and
errorless purpose; conceived in the highest heroic type of humanity."
What is thus true of Shakespeare is just as true of the great dramatic
poets of the Greeks. In practically all the extant plays of AEschylus,
Sophocles and Euripides, women are the heroines. They are represented
as nobler, braver, more capable of suffering, with a better
appreciation of their ethical surroundings and the realities of life,
than the men around them. As much as Antigone is superior to her
quarrelsome brothers, as Alcestis rises above her selfish husband, as
Tecmessa is superior to and would have saved Ajax if only he had
permitted her, so everywhere do we find women occupying not a place of
equality but a position of superiority.
These plays were written by men. Just as in {239} the case of
Shakespeare they were written by men mainly to be witnessed by men,
for while three-fourths of our audiences at theatres now are women, at
least three-fourths of the audience in Shakespeare's time were men,
and in the old Greek theatre the men largely exceeded the women in
attendance. These were masculine pictures of the place of woman,
painted not in empty compliment but with profoundest respect and
deepest understanding. We honor these writers as the greatest in the
history of literature because they saw life so clearly and so truly.
Literature is only great when it mirrors life to the nail. What the
Greek dramatists had done, Homer had done before them. His picture of
the older Greek women shows us that they were on an absolute equality
in their households with the men, that not only were they thoroughly
respected and loved for themselves, but, to repeat Ruskin, they were
looked up to as infallibly wise counsellors, as the best possible
advisers to whom a man could go, provided they themselves were of high
character and their hearts, as well as their intellects, were
interested in the problems involved.
There are, of course, in all of the dramatists some wicked women. In
the whole round of Shakespeare's characters there are only three
wicked women who have degraded their womanhood among the principal
figures. These are Lady Macbeth, Regan and Goneril. We have
corresponding characters in the Greek dramatists. {240} Clytemnestra
is the Lady Macbeth of Greek Tragedy. Euripides, the feminist as he
has been called, has shown us, as feminists ever, more of the worst
side of women than his greater predecessors AEschylus and Sophocles.
He has exhibited the extent to which religious over-enthusiasm can
carry women in the "Bacchae," and was the first to introduce the sex
problem. In general it may be said, as Ruskin says of Shakespeare,
that when a Greek dramatist pictures wicked women "they are at once
felt to be frightful exceptions to the ordinary laws of life; fatal in
their influence also in proportion to the power for good which they
had abandoned." Indeed tragedy, as we see it in the great tragic
poets, might be defined as the failure on the part of a good woman to
save the men who are nearest and dearest to her from the faults into
which their characters impel them. All the great dramatists, ancient
and modern, represent women once more in Ruskin's words as "infallibly
faithful and wise counsellors--incorruptibly just and pure
examples--strong always to sanctify, even when they cannot save."
How little there is in any question of evolution having brought new
influence or higher place to woman may be very well realized from this
position of women among the old Greeks. Gladstone has called attention
to it very forcibly in his "Essay on the Place of Ancient Greece in
the Providential Order," when he says, "Outside {241} the pale of
Christianity, it would be difficult to find a parallel in point of
elevation to the Greek women of the heroic age." He has taken the
place of woman as representing the criterion by which the civilization
and the culture of a people at any time may be judged, though he does
not at all think that one finds a constant upward tendency in history
in this regard. He says:
"For when we are seeking to ascertain the measure of that conception
which any given race has formed of our nature, there is, perhaps, no
single test so effective, as the position which it assigns to woman.
For as the law of force is the law of brute creation, so in
proportion as he is under the yoke of that law does man approximate
to the brute. And in proportion, on the other hand, as he has
escaped from its dominion, is he ascending into the higher sphere of
being and claiming relationship with Deity. But the emancipation and
due ascendency of woman are not a mere fact, they are the emphatic
assertion of a principle, and that principle is the dethronement of
the law of force and the enthronement of other and higher laws in
its place and its despite."
Of course, of the formal education of the women of Greece we know very
little. We do know that they would not have been respected as they
were, looked up to by their sons and their husbands, honored as the
poets have shown them to be, put upon the stage as the heroines of the
race, only that they had been intellectually as well as {242} morally
the equals--nay, the superiors--of the men around them. We do not know
much about the teaching of women before and during the classical
period, but we can understand very well from what we know of them that
they must have had good opportunities for education. Plato, of course,
insists that women should be educated in every way exactly as the men.
He mentions specifically gymnastics and horseback riding, and says
that women should be trained in these as well as things intellectual,
for they should have their bodies developed as well as their minds.
His reason for demanding equal education is very interesting, because
it is an anticipation of what is being said rather emphatically at the
present time. He says: "If I am right nothing can be more foolish than
our modern fashion of training men and women differently, whereby
one-half of the power of the city is lost. For reflect if women are
not to have the education of men some other must be found for them,
and what other can we propose?" His idea evidently was that only
one-half those who ought to be citizens were properly trained for
civic duties if the education of women were neglected.
It is extremely interesting in the light of this to read some of
Aristophanes' plays. Three of them, "Lysistrata," the
"Thesmophoriazusae," which has a simpler name "The Women's Festival,"
for it referred to the great feast of Thesmophoria in honor of Ceres
and Proserpine, and {243} the "Ecclesiazusae." This last title may be
rendered a little freely "The Female Parliament," for in it women
secure, by a little fraud, the right to vote and vote themselves into
office as the main portion of the plot of the play. All three of these
plays refer particularly to the question of women's rights, and though
"The Women's Festival" was written as a satire on Euripides it is
evident that only this subject was about as prominently before the
people of Athens as the question of votes for women is in our time,
Aristophanes would not have written these satiric comedies. The
subjects of his plays are always the very latest actuality in Athens.
Socrates was satirized in "The Clouds" within a few months of his
death. "The War" was written while Athens was actually engaged in it,
and "The Peace" was written within a few months after the signing of
the treaty.
Votes for women must actually have been on the very centre of the
carpet when Aristophanes wrote his "Ecclesiazusae" or "Feminine
Parliament." Lest it should be thought that I intrude myself in any
way in trying to boil down for you the old satiric comedy, or that I
am modernizing Aristophanes in order to adapt the ideas of this play
more fully to conditions that are around us at the present time, I
shall read to you the excellent condensation of it made by the Rev. W.
Lucas Collins, M.A., in his "Aristophanes," in the series of "Ancient
Classics for English {244} Readers," that scholarly introduction to
the classic authors of which Mr. Collins is the editor. He says:
"The women have determined, under the leadership of a clever lady
named Praxagora, to reform the constitution of Athens. For this
purpose they will dress like men--beards included--and occupy the
seats in the Pnyx, so as to be able to command a majority of votes
in the next public assembly, the parliament of Athens. Praxagora is
strongly of opinion with the modern Mrs. Poyser, that on the point
of speaking, at all events, the women have great natural advantages
over the men; that 'when they have anything to say they can mostly
find words to say it in.' They hold a midnight meeting for the
purpose of rehearsing their intended speeches and getting accustomed
to their new clothes. Two or three of the most ambitious orators
unfortunately break down at the very outset, much to their leader's
disgust, by addressing the assembly as 'ladies' and swearing female
oaths and using many other unparliamentary expressions quite
unbefitting their masculine attire. Praxagora herself, however,
makes a speech which is very generally admired. She complains of the
mismanagement hitherto of public affairs, and asserts that the only
hope of salvation for the state is to put the government into the
hands of the women; arguing, like Lysistrata in the comedy of that
name, that those who have so long managed the domestic establishment
{245} successfully are best fitted to undertake the same duties on a
larger scale. The women, too, are shown by their advocate to be
highly conservative, and, therefore, safe guardians of the public
interests:
"They roast and boil after the good old fashion,
They keep the holidays that were kept of old.
They make their cheesecakes by the old receipts.
They keep a private bottle like their mothers.
They plague their husbands--as they always did."
Even in the management of a campaign, they will be found more prudent
and more competent than the men:
"Being mothers, they'll be chary of the blood
Of their own sons, our soldiers; being mothers,
They will take care their children do not starve
When they're on service; and, for ways and means,
Trust us, there's nothing cleverer than a woman:
And as for diplomacy, they'll be hard indeed
To cheat--they know too many tricks themselves."
Her speech is unanimously applauded; she is elected lady-president on
the spot, by public acclamation, and the chorus of ladies march off
towards the Pnyx to secure their places like the old gentlemen in 'The
Wasps' ready for the daybreak.
"In the next scene, two of the husbands enter in great perplexity,
one wrapped in his wife's dressing gown, and the other with only his
under-garment {246} on and without his shoes. They both want to go
to the assembly but cannot find their clothes. While they are
wondering what in the world their wives can have done with them, and
what is become of the ladies themselves, a third neighbor, Chremes,
comes in. He has been to the assembly; but even he was too late to
get the threepence which was allowed out of the public treasury to
all who took their seat in good time, and which all Athenian
citizens, if we may trust their satirist, were so ludicrously eager
to secure. The place was quite full already, and of strange faces,
too. And a handsome fair-faced youth (Praxagora in disguise, we are
to understand) had got up, and amid the loud cheers of those unknown
voters had proposed and carried a resolution, that the government of
the state should be placed in the hands of a committee of
ladies,--an experiment which had found favor also with others,
chiefly because it was 'the only change which had not as yet been
tried at Athens.' His two neighbors are somewhat confounded at his
news, but congratulate themselves on the fact that the wives will
now, at all events, have to see to the maintenance of the children,
and that 'the gods sometimes bring good out of evil.'
"The women return, and get home as quickly as they can to change
their costume so that the trick by which the passing of this new
decree has been secured may not be detected. Praxagora succeeds in
persuading her husband that she had {247} been sent for in a hurry
to attend a sick neighbor, and only borrowed his coat to put on
'because the night was so cold' and his strong shoes and staff, in
order that any evil-disposed person might take her for a man as she
tramped along, and so not interfere with her. She at first affects
not to have heard of the reform which has been just carried, but
when her husband explains it, declares it will make Athens a
paradise. Then she confesses to him that she has herself been
chosen, in full assembly, 'Generalissima of the state.' She puts the
question, however, just as we have all seen it put by a modern
actress,--'will this house agree to it?' And if Praxagora was at all
attractively got up, we may be sure it was carried by acclamation in
the affirmative. Then, in the first place, there shall be no more
poverty; there shall be community of goods, and so there shall be no
law suits, and no gambling and no informers. (They promised more
even than our suffragettes--if possible.) Moreover, there shall be
community of wives,--and all the ugly wives shall have the first
choice of husbands. So she goes off to her public duties, to see
that these resolutions are carried out forthwith; the good citizen
begging leave to follow close at her side, so that all who see him
may say, 'What a fine fellow is our Generalissima's husband!'
"The scene changes to another street in Athens, where the citizens
are bringing out all their property, to be carried into the
market-place {248} and inventoried for the common stock. Citizen 'A'
dances with delight as he marshals his dilapidated chattels into a
mock procession--from the meal sieve, which he kisses, it looks so
pretty with its powdered hair, to the iron pot which looks as black
'as if Lysimachus' (some well-known fop of the day, possibly present
among the audience) 'had been boiling his hair dye in it.' This
patriot, at least, has not much to lose, and hopes he may have
something to gain, under these female communists.
"But his neighbor, who is better off, is in no such hurry. The
Athenians, as he remarks, are always making new laws and abrogating
them; what has been passed to-day very likely will be repealed
to-morrow. Besides it is a good old national habit to take, not to
give. He will wait a while before he gives in an inventory of his
possessions. (One might think of an income tax law in the United
States in the twentieth century.)
"But at this point comes the city-beadle (an appointment now held,
of course, by a lady) with a summons to a banquet provided for all
citizens out of the public funds: and amongst the items in the bill
of fare is one dish whose name is composed of seventy-seven
syllables--which Aristophanes gives us, but which the reader shall
be spared. (It has been boiled down by the American schoolboy to
just 'hash.') Citizen 'B' at once delivers it as his opinion that
'every {249} man of proper feeling should support the constitution
to the utmost of his ability,' and hurries to take his place at the
feast. There are some difficulties caused, very naturally by the new
communistic regulations as to providing for the old and ugly women,
but with these we need not deal. The piece ends with an invitation,
issued by direction of Praxagora through her lady-chamberlain, to
the public generally, spectators included, to join the national
banquet which is to inaugurate the new order of things."
In a previous comedy Aristophanes had told of another interference of
women in the political life of Athens that contains so many reminders
of the modern time, and shows so definitely how old the new is, that
it deserves a place here. Above all, the desertions from the cause of
the women when they find that their political duties interfere with
their home duties, and that they have to sacrifice many of the joys of
life even though they are duties that may at times seem irksome
enough,--children, household work, etc.,--for these newer obligations
with which they have so little sympathy, is especially interesting.
Once more I prefer to take the Rev. Mr. Collins' summary of the play
in order that it may be clear that Aristophanes' meaning is not being
stretched for the purpose of making points with regard to present-day
conditions. After all, Mr. Collins' little book was written very
nearly thirty years ago, when very little of the present feministic
{250} movement, at least in the form in which we are now familiar with
it, had asserted itself.
"They determine, under the leading of the clever Lysistrata, wife to
one of the magistrates, to take the question (of the ending of the
war) into their own hands. They resolve upon a voluntary separation
from their husbands--a practical divorce a mensa et thoro--until
peace with Sparta shall be proclaimed. It is resolved that a body of
the elder matrons shall seize the Acropolis and make themselves
masters of the public treasury. These form one of the two choruses
in the play, the other being composed of the old men of Athens. The
latter proceed (with a good deal of comic difficulty, owing to the
steepness of the ascent and their shortness of breath) to attack the
Acropolis, armed with torches and fagots and pans of charcoal, with
which they hope to smoke out the occupants. But the women have
provided themselves with buckets of water, which they empty on the
heads of their assailants, who soon retire discomfited to call the
police. But the police are, in their turn, repulsed by these
resolute insurgents, whom they do not exactly know how to deal with.
At last a member of the public committee comes forward to parley,
and a dialogue takes place between him and Lysistrata. 'Why,' he
asks, 'have they thus taken possession of the citadel?' 'They have
resolved henceforth to manage the public revenues themselves,' is
the {251} reply, 'and not allow them to be applied to carrying on
this ruinous war.' 'That is no business for women,' argues the
magistrate. 'Why not?' says Lysistrata; 'the wives have long had the
management of the private purses of the husbands, to the great
advantage of both.' In short, the women have made up their minds to
have their voice no longer ignored, as hitherto, in questions of
peace and war. Their remonstrances have always been met with the
taunt that 'war is the business of men;' and to any question they
have ventured to ask their husbands on such points, the answer has
always been the old cry--old as the days of Homer--'Go spin, you
jade, go spin!' But they will put up with it no longer. As they have
always had wit enough to clear the tangled threads in their work, so
they have no doubt of settling all these difficulties and
complications in international disputes, if it is left to them. But
what concern, her opponent asks, can women have with war, who
contribute nothing to its dangers and hardships? 'Contribute,
indeed!' says the lady; 'we contribute the sons who carry it on.'
And she throws down to her adversary her hood, her basket and her
spindle, and bids him 'go home and card wool,'--it is all such old
men are fit for; henceforth the proverb (of the men's making) shall
be reversed,--'War shall be the care of the women.' The magistrate
retires not having got the best of it, very naturally, in an
encounter of words; and the chorus of elders raise the cry--{252}
well known as a popular partisan cry at Athens, and sure to call
forth a hearty laugh in such juxtaposition--that the women are
designing to 'set up a tyranny!'
"But poor Lysistrata soon has her troubles. Her unworthy recruits
are fast deserting her. They are going off to their husbands in the
most sneaky manner--creeping out through the little hole under the
citadel which led to the celebrated cave of Pan, and letting
themselves down from the walls by ropes at the risk of breaking
their necks. Those who are caught all have excellent excuses. One
has some fleeces of fine Milesian wool at home which must be seen
to,--she is sure the moths are eating them. Another has urgent
occasion for the doctor; a third cannot sleep alone for fear of the
owls--of which, as every one knows, there were really a great many
at Athens. The husbands, too, are getting uncomfortable without
their housekeepers; there is no one to cook their victuals; and one
poor soul comes and humbly entreats his wife at least to come home
and wash and dress the baby.
"It is becoming plain that either the war or the wives' resolution
will soon give way, when there arrives an embassy from Sparta. They
cannot stand this general strike of the wives. They are agreed
already with their enemies, the Athenians, on one point--as to the
women--that the old Greek comedian's proverb, which we have borrowed
and translated freely, is true,--
"There is no living with 'em--or without 'em."
"They are come to offer terms of peace. When two parties are already
of one mind, as Lysistrata observes, they are not long in coming to
an understanding. A treaty is made on the spot, with remarkably few
preliminaries."
Whenever we have sufficient remains to illustrate the life of any
period of history with reasonable completeness, we find women
occupying a much more important place than is usually conceded to
them. The trouble is that we assume that we know something about the
past, because we have somewhere obtained a vague notion of it and then
we fill in details in accordance with that preconceived notion. The
general rule, unfortunately, is to make as little of the past as
possible and to consider that, of course, they must have been very
different from us, and surely far behind us in everything. The more
one really knows of history, however, the less does one think this. We
must not let our complacent self-satisfaction with our own generation
disturb our proper appreciation of past generations, however. An
English writer said not very long ago, and now that we have reviewed
various periods in the history of feminine influence and of education,
I think that you will recognize the justice of what he said, "It is
too much the easy custom of the present self-admiring day--not a bit
more self-satisfied, after all, than each day has been in its {254}
turn--to hold the women of the past as something little better than
dolls for their attainments, a little dearer than slaves for their
position and despicably content therein." Nothing could well be less
true than this.
What is apt to strike us, however, after a review of the phases of
feminine education and influence such as I have sketched, is that
there are undoubtedly times during which very little is heard of
feminine influence and almost nothing at all of feminine education.
There are periods on the other hand when these subjects are the very
centre of human interest. This interest waxes to a certain climax and
then apparently wanes. What is the reason for these waxings and
wanings? Is there anything that we know about them that will help us
to account for them? If women have once achieved a certain position
and have once secured certain privileges in the matter of education,
it might reasonably be expected that, barring some great cataclysm or
political upheaval, that completely disrupted society, they would not
abandon these hard-won rights and precious privileges, and so we
should not have to be going through the storm and stress of another
period of discussion, controversy, opposition with regard to woman's
rights. How is it that rights once attained--and never unless after a
struggle, for no matter how civilized a period or how cultured a
people, they do not grant rights to any class unless forced to do so--
that these rights have afterwards been lost, or at least greatly
diminished and partly forgotten?
In this we come upon one of the mysteries of history and of the life
of man. How is it that men secure certain knowledge and then forget
it--literally forget all about it--how is it that men make
discoveries and then lose sight of them so that they have to be made
over again; how is it that men even make useful inventions of all
kinds and these are lost sight of and the invention has to be made
over again in succeeding generations? How is it that the Suez Canal
was opened at least once before our time and then allowed to fill up
with sand, and we had to do the work all over again two generations
ago? How is it that America was discovered at least twice, probably
oftener, before Columbus' time, and yet his was a real discovery? We
actually have Papal documents addressed to bishops in Greenland from
Popes in the thirteenth century, mentioning missions on the mainland
of America. There are traditions that seem to point beyond all doubt
to the fact that the Irish monks were here in America in the eighth
and ninth centuries. Those traditions come from three or four
different sources. There was a reverence for the cross among the
Indians in certain parts of the country. A tradition of white-robed
priests who came from over the sea. The Norse name for America was
Irland it Mikla, Ireland the Great, {256} that is, the island of the
Irish, much larger than Ireland itself and lying beyond it in the
seas.
How is it, indeed, that there are many discoveries and rediscoveries
of the same principle in science? Heron's engine at Alexandria was an
anticipation of the turbine principle in the application of steam.
When we dug up surgical instruments at Pompeii we were surprised to
find that they had the form of many instruments that we thought we had
invented in our time. In glass-making, in iron-working, in all the
arts and crafts precious secrets are discovered, then lost, then
rediscovered, and this may even happen several times. We find no sign
of a continuous progress, but recurring phases that represent ups and
downs in man's interest in certain things and his achievements
corresponding to the intensity of his interest. Such a thing as a
regular progressive advance one finds nowhere in history. Nations do
not maintain their power after they have achieved it. Just as soon as
the struggle to maintain themselves is over, internal troubles of
various kinds set disintegrating factors at work and it is not long
before decadence can be noted and then the disappearance of the people
or at least of its national prominence becomes inevitable. We shall
not be surprised to find ups and downs in the history of feminine
influence and education, for this is the rule of history. We have only
been laboring under the false notion that definite progress was the
rule because of {257} over-absorption in the evolution theory--but it
is not.
There seems to be in this matter a certain check upon the occupation
of woman with interests external to her household that would tempt her
to occupy herself much with duties extraneous to the family life.
After all, one thing is perfectly clear. Only women can be mothers. We
have not succeeded even in getting the slightest possible hint of any
method of continuing the race except by the ordinary process of
maternity. Whatever of direct evolution the advocates of the theory of
evolution have suggested as coming in humanity so that it may be the
subject of observation, has been due in their minds to the lengthening
of the period during which the young of the race are cared for. As we
go up in the scale of life from the lowest to the highest, infancy--
meaning by that the period during which the offspring is cared for by
the parents--lengthens. In the very small beings there is none. As we
ascend in the scale we find traces of parental care. Then comes
occupation of the parents with their offspring from a few hours up to
a day or two, and then finally months and years, until in the human
race infancy has been gradually prolonged to twenty years. This is
Herbert Spencer's observation and it is interesting and suggestive. A
mother then especially, though also a father, must care for children,
not alone for months before and after birth, but for a score of years.
Occupation with other things, though necessary, detracts from this
care of children, and if exaggerated leads to the celibate condition
or that approaching it, the limitation of families within narrow
bounds. The mother of but two or three children may occupy herself
with other things and, indeed, has to find other occupation of mind.
At certain periods in the world's history a certain number of these
women accumulate and the tendency to celibacy or to very limited
maternity makes itself felt, and then this class of people usually
fails to propagate enough of the species like themselves to take their
places in the world. It is a matter of common comment at the present
moment that if the women's colleges were to depend on the progeny of
their graduates to fill the classes in succeeding years, the numbers
at the schools not only would not increase but would constantly tend
to decrease. Of course this same thing is true of the descendants of
the male graduates of many of our Eastern universities, and I believe
that attention has been particularly called to it with regard to our
three oldest universities. Such are the risks of life and the
fatalities incident to disease, even with our present improved
hygienic conditions, that anything less than five or six children in a
family will not prove sufficient eventually to replace the parents in
their activities. When to small families is added the number of
celibates consequent upon absorption in self-improvement, then the
failure of the {259} cultured classes even to replace themselves
becomes very manifest, and hence our dwindling native populations, if
we take that word to mean the families that have been in the country
for more than two generations.
Nature does not confide conditions in humanity entirely to man,
however. This would be to leave mankind subject to certain whims and
fashions and the caprices of times and people. There are many
biological checks which maintain mankind in a certain equilibrium. A
typical example of it is the regulation of the number of each sex
born. In general the proportion of the sexes to one another maintains
a ratio very near that of equality under ordinary natural conditions.
This obtains in spite of the fact that man is so much more subject to
accidents than woman, so much more likely to catch and succumb to
disease and so much more likely to wear himself out prematurely as the
result of his labors. The death-rate among women at all ages is lower
than that of men, yet a constant, definite equilibrium of the sexes is
maintained with accurate nicety. There is evidently some check
existing in nature itself that prevents any disturbance of this fixed
ratio.
Not only is nature able to maintain this, but in cases where, because
of some serious disturbance of natural conditions, a decided
inequality of the ratio occurs by accident, nature is able to restore
conditions to the previous normal, without our being quite able to
understand just how this is {260} accomplished. We do not know how sex
is determined. There have been many explanations offered, but all of
them have proved inadequate and most of them quite nugatory. In spite
of our lack of knowledge there have been times in history when a
striking manifestation of nature's power has occurred. For instance,
after the Thirty Years' War in Germany the ratio between the sexes had
been so much disturbed that, according to some historians, there were
probably nearly twice as many women as men in existence in the
Germanic countries. The men had been cut off by the war itself, by
famines consequent upon it, by extreme and unusual efforts to support
their families and by epidemic diseases in camps and campaigns. The
disproportion was so great that a relaxation of the marriage laws was
permitted for a time in certain of the countries and men were allowed
to have two wives.
Under these conditions nature at once began to reassert herself, the
number of male births was greatly increased and the disproportion
between the sexes immediately began to lessen. At the end of scarcely
more than three generations the normal equilibrium of the sexes was
restored and there was about an equal number of men and women again.
Here we have the effect of one of these curiously interesting
biological checks upon man's foolish quarrelsomeness which might
result in a too great disproportion of the sexes.
We shall not be surprised, then, if we find other {261} such
biological checks and compensations exerting themselves. In recent
years Sir Francis Galton, the cousin of Darwin, who is recognized as
the best living authority in statistical biology, and Professor Karl
Pearson, who has done more than any one else to bring out many curious
and interesting but very important biological laws by the study of
statistics, have insisted in their studies of the effect of the law of
primogeniture, that when there are small families, the children are
more likely to be nervous, oftener have an inclination to mental
disease and have less resistive vitality against disease in general
than the average child of the larger families. There is a small but
significant advantage in vitality that accrues to later children of a
family. This is so contrary to the frequently expressed opinion that
only the children of small families can be brought up properly to
resist disease and have such advantages in their education and
nutrition as to be of better health, that I should hesitate to quote
it, only that it has behind it the authority of such distinguished
scientists as Galton and Pearson. They are both conservative
Englishmen, they have no theory of their own that they are supporting,
they have no axe to grind in things social and political for the
launching of the new theory, they are only making observations on the
facts presented and the data that have been collected.
Here is another striking example of a check on certain tendencies in
humanity that apparently {262} nature does not approve of, or to avoid
personifying a process, we had better say are not according to
nature's laws. The small family does not perpetuate itself. It has
certain natural disadvantages that work against it. It gradually
disappears and the races of larger families maintain themselves. We
need not have had recourse to Galton's and Pearson's principle in this
matter, for we see the results of the small family in present-day
history. France is decreasing in population. Our own Puritan families
are dying out. American families generally of more than three
generations are not perpetuating themselves. The teeming fertility of
the poor immigrants who come to us is, with immigration itself,
supplying our increase in population. Our nation is, as a result,
gradually becoming something very different from what our forefathers
anticipated.
What has apparently happened, then, in the history of feminine
education and influence is that, whenever women became occupied with
such modes of education, or the cultivation of phases of feminine
influence that took them out of their houses, away from family life
and far from the hearthstone, the particular classes of women who thus
became interested did not propagate themselves, or propagated
themselves to such a limited degree that, after a time, their kind
disappeared to a great extent. The domestic woman with tendencies to
care much more for her maternal duties than for any extra-domiciliary
successes {263} propagated herself, raised her children with her
ideals, cultivated domesticity and consciously or unconsciously
fostered the mother idea as the main feature of woman's life and her
principal source not only of occupation, but of joy in the living, of
consolation and of genuine accomplishment. The tendency, as can
readily be seen in our own time, of the other class of woman is
largely to foster, often unconsciously, but of course often
consciously also, the opposite notions. She talks of the slavery of
child-raising, the limitations of the home woman, the drudgery of
domestic life, forgetting that life is work and that the only
happiness in life is to have work that you want to do, whatever it may
be, but all this talk has its inevitable effect upon all but the born
mother woman, and the result is the fad for public occupation instead
of domestic life.
It is easy to see what the result of the opposite opinion is. Every
tendency of the intellectual woman so-called is to repress such
natural instincts as lead to the propagation of the race and the
continuance of her kind. Of course it will be said that intellectual
women are quite willing to have one or two children. First, this is
not true for a great many of them. Secondly, for those who have one or
two children losses by death and failure to marry in the second
generation, because of conscious or unconscious discouragements and
the exaggeration of ideas with regard to the danger of maternity, lead
often to a complete {264} suppression of the family in the second or
third generation.
Apparently the rule of history is that there are four or five
generations of women interested in intellectual things particularly,
who follow one another in these periods of special feminine education
and exertion of influence outside of the home. Then there comes a
distinct decadence of the feminist movement, because of the gradual
diminution in number of women who are interested in such things, and
then, while there are always certain women who develop great
intellectual abilities which require a larger stage than the home for
their display, and while there are always some who find an
intellectual career or rather make it, very little is heard of
feminism and women's claims. They are satisfied to rule their
husbands, to raise their children, to be saints to their sons and
elder sisters to their daughters, and the feminine world has its
simple joys and not much fuss about rights.
It may seem far-fetched thus to appeal to a biological check or a
great underlying natural law in a matter of this kind, but in recent
years biology has so often been appealed to to justify unsocial
conditions that its true application needs to be pointed out. We have
heard, for instance, much of the struggle for life and the competition
that is supposed to be inevitable in nature, while all the time it has
apparently been forgotten that there is no struggle for life within
the species {265} except when there is some disturbance of the
ordinary order of nature, as in times of famine, or when a mother is
foraging for her children. On the contrary, mutual aid is the rule
within the species and there is no animal small or large, from the ant
to the elephant, that does not help its kind and has not certain
wonderful instincts for helpfulness, the origin of which we do not
know, but which are founded in nature itself. Man justifies inhumanity
to man by the supposed struggle for life, while all the time nature
teaches us the opposite law.
Nature's way is that of elimination. Her interest is the race. She
cares very little for the individual and guards only her great purpose
of securing the propagation of the race. Apparently such intense
preoccupation with the intellectual life as provides opportunity for
serious education, for literary work and for the exertion of diffuse
influence in a community, does not make for the propagation of the
race or its proper preservation. We can see this easily in the world
around us, in the limited progeny of those who live the intellectual
or selfish life to the exclusion of racial interests. This is opposed
to nature's purpose and she proceeds to eliminate those who stand in
her way. This is not done by any cataclysmic process but by a law of
nature. Those involved in the influence disturbing to her purpose
eliminate themselves. This is as true for indulgence in toxic
substances that produce certain personal {266} momentary good
feelings, as for the more deliberate avoidance of certain of nature's
burdens which brings about a certain negative pleasure at least by
lessening the amount of pain that has to be borne and trouble to be
endured. To these pains and troubles nature has attached some of the
best of the compensations of life. The domestic joys are properly
man's highest source of unalloyed pleasure without remorse.
Our review of the phases of feminine education and influence would
seem to show that there has occurred a series of cycles about three
centuries apart in the history of the race, during which women become
very much occupied with things external to their household. Such
cycles are represented by our own period, that of the Renaissance in
the sixteenth century, that of the university period in the thirteenth
century, and then that at Charlemagne's court earlier, though the
barbaric conditions following the migration of nations probably did
not allow a natural expression of the tendencies at this time. Earlier
in history, in the first century before Christ and just after and in
the fourth century before Christ in Greece, there had been, as we have
pointed out, such cycles. During the intervening centuries there is a
negative phase in the movement, so that feminism, under which is
understood woman's expression of herself outside of her home and the
exertion of her influence apart from her family and immediate friends,
is very little in {267} evidence. During these times the domestic
woman reasserts herself. During the positive phases of the movement
she continues to have her children, the feminists do not, or at least
not to the same extent. They and their kind are gradually eliminated,
at least to a great degree, and so the negative phase comes on.
This is not an argument and is not meant as such. It is meant to be a
scientific reading of the meaning of certain phases of the history of
the race as they can be studied. I would be the last in the world to
think that I could influence present-day activities by any such
indications of a great law in the history of the race that takes three
centuries from phase to phase. After all, who cares for a law that
does not affect our generation, but at most the third and fourth
succeeding generations, and the manifestation of whose phenomena can
only be recognized in three-century periods?
What I have tried to do is to point out just what are the cycles of
feminine influence and education in the world's history, and then to
work out the reasons why, quite contrary to what might be expected,
these phases have not continued, but are interrupted by periods of
utter decadence of feminine influence or interest in public life and
education. Perhaps in our time we are going to change all that. That
is the feeling that we are prone to have. Others may have made
progress and forgotten about it, or {268} may have made mistakes and
been eliminated for them, but we are so consciously active in our
affairs that we cannot think of ourselves as likely to suffer the fate
of our predecessors. There is much of that feeling abroad in the
present day, there has always been much of that feeling abroad in
every other day, for each succeeding generation in its turn is
perfectly sure that what it is doing means more than ever before,
though it can see very clearly the mistakes made by its predecessors.
It is somewhat like our feeling towards other persons and their
accomplishments in life as compared to our own. Most of us are quite
sure that whatever we are doing is quite significant, though we can
see plainly that what most of our friends are doing, or are trying to
do, is altogether trivial and insignificant.
In recent years we have come to realize more and more how much history
needs to be studied in the light of biology. The decadence of Greece
was probably due, to a great extent, to the bringing back by
Alexander's conquering soldiers of malaria from the Orient, and thus
the vanquished proved the ruin of their conquerors. The great plagues
of the olden time which sometimes carried away nearly one-half the
human race in a single visitation, were due to insect pests of various
kinds, which all unknown to men conveyed the disease and diffused it
widely. It will not be easy always to read the lessons of biology in
history aright. Whether I have done so for you {269} or not, in this
matter of the history of feminism, I cannot tell. The story, however,
has been interesting to work out, and I do not think that its
conclusions have ever been presented to the public in quite this form
before. They are now presented not with the idea that they should be
accepted as absolute, but for the criticism and consideration of those
who are most vitally interested and who want to know all that can be
known about the conditions surrounding woman's influence in the world
and her place for good in the history of the race.