It thus becomes necessary to leap over considerably more than a thousand years before we reach a stage of civilization in any degree approaching in height the final stage of Roman society. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, at first in France, then in England, we find once more the moral and legal movement tending towards the equalization of women with men. We find also a long series of pioneers of that movement foreshadowing its developments: Mary Astor, "Sophia, a Lady of Quality," Ségur, Mrs. Wheeler, and very notably Mary Wollstonecraft in _A Vindication of the Rights of Woman_, and John Stuart Mill in _The Subjection of Women_.[289] The main European stream of influences in this matter within historical times has involved, we can scarcely doubt when we take into consideration its complex phenomena as a whole, the maintenance of an inequality to the disadvantage of women. The fine legacy of Roman law to Europe was indeed favorable to women, but that legacy was dispersed and for the most part lost in the more predominating influence of tenacious Teutonic custom associated with the vigorously organized Christian Church. Notwithstanding that the facts do not all point in the same direction, and that there is consequently some difference of opinion, it seems evident that on the whole both Teutonic custom and Christian religion were unfavorable to the equality of women with men. Teutonic custom in this matter was determined by two decisive factors: (1) the existence of marriage by purchase which although, as Crawley has pointed out, it by no means necessarily involves the degradation of women, certainly tends to place them in an inferior position, and (2) pre-occupation with war which is always accompanied by a depreciation of peaceful and feminine occupations and an indifference to love. Christianity was at its origin favorable to women because it liberated and glorified the most essentially feminine emotions, but when it became an established and organized religion with definitely ascetic ideals, its whole emotional tone grew unfavorable to women. It had from the first excluded them from any priestly function. It now regarded them as the special representatives of the despised element of sex in life.[290] The eccentric Tertullian had once declared that woman was _janua Diaboli_; nearly seven hundred years later, even the gentle and philosophic Anselm wrote: _Femina fax est Satanæ_.[291] Thus among the Franks, with whom the practice of monogamy prevailed, a woman was never free; she could not buy or sell or inherit without the permission of those to whom she belonged. She passed into the possession of her husband by acquisition, and when he fixed the wedding day he gave her parents coins of small money as _arrha_, and the day after the wedding she received from him a present, the _morgengabe_. A widow belonged to her parents again (Bedollière, _Histoire de Moeurs des Français_, vol. i, p. 180). It is true that the Salic law ordained a pecuniary fine for touching a woman, even for squeezing her finger, but it is clear that the offence thus committed was an offence against property, and by no means against the sanctity of a woman's personality. The primitive German husband could sell his children, and sometimes his wife, even into slavery. In the eleventh century cases of wife-selling are still heard of, though no longer recognized by law.
The traditions of Christianity were more favorable to sexual equality than were Teutonic customs, but in becoming amalgamated with those customs they added their own special contribution as to woman's impurity. This spiritual inferiority of woman was significantly shown by the restrictions sometimes placed on women in church, and even in the right to enter a church; in some places they were compelled to remain in the narthex, even in non-monastic churches (see for these rules, Smith and Cheetham, _Dictionary of Christian Antiquities_, art. "Sexes, Separation of").
By attempting to desexualize the idea of man and to oversexualize the idea of woman, Christianity necessarily degraded the position of woman and the conception of womanhood. As Donaldson well remarks, in pointing this out (op. cit., p. 182), "I may define man as a male human being and woman as a female human being...What the early Christians did was to strike the 'male' out of the definition of man, and 'human being' out of the definition of woman." Religion generally appears to be a powerfully depressing influence on the position of woman notwithstanding the appeal which it makes to woman. Westermarck considers, indeed (_Origin and Development of the Moral Ideas_, vol. i, p. 669), that religion "has probably been the most persistent cause of the wife's subjection to her husband's rule."
It is sometimes said that the Christian tendency to place women in an inferior spiritual position went so far that a church council formally denied that women have souls. This foolish story has indeed been repeated in a parrot-like fashion by a number of writers. The source of the story is probably to be found in the fact, recorded by Gregory of Tours, in his history (lib. viii, cap. XX), that at the Council of Mâcon, in 585, a bishop was in doubt as to whether the term "man" included woman, but was convinced by the other members of the Council that it did. The same difficulty has presented itself to lawyers in more modern times, and has not always been resolved so favorably to woman as by the Christian Council of Mâcon.
The low estimate of women that prevailed even in the early Church is admitted by Christian scholars. "We cannot but notice," writes Meyrick (art. "Marriage," Smith and Cheetham, _Dictionary of Christian Antiquities_), "even in the greatest of the Christian fathers a lamentably low estimate of woman, and consequently of the marriage relationship. Even St. Augustine can see no justification for marriage, except in a grave desire deliberately adopted of having children; and in accordance with this view, all married intercourse, except for this single purpose, is harshly condemned. If marriage is sought after for the sake of children, it is justifiable; if entered into as a _remedium_ to avoid worse evils, it is pardonable; the idea of the mutual society, help, and comfort that the one ought to have of the other, both in prosperity and adversity, hardly existed, and could hardly yet exist."
From the woman's point of view, Lily Braun, in her important work on the woman question (_Die Frauenfrage_, 1901, pp. 28 et seq.) concludes that, in so far as Christianity was favorable to women, we must see that favorable influence in the placing of women on the same moral level as men, as illustrated in the saying of Jesus, "Let him who is without sin amongst you cast the first stone," implying that each sex owes the same fidelity. It reached, she adds, no further than this. "Christianity, which women accepted as a deliverance with so much enthusiasm, and died for as martyrs, has not fulfilled their hopes."
Even as regards the moral equality of the sexes in marriage, the position of Christian authorities was sometimes equivocal. One of the greatest of the Fathers, St. Basil, in the latter half of the fourth century, distinguished between adultery and fornication as committed by a married man; if with a married woman, it was adultery; if with an unmarried woman, it was merely fornication. In the former case, a wife should not receive her husband back; in the latter case, she should (art. "Adultery," Smith and Cheetham, _Dictionary of Christian Antiquities_). Such a decision, by attaching supreme importance to a distinction which could make no difference to the wife, involved a failure to recognize her moral personality. Many of the Fathers in the Western Church, however, like Jerome, Augustine, and Ambrose, could see no reason why the moral law should not be the same for the husband as for the wife, but as late Roman feeling both on the legal and popular side was already approximating to that view, the influence of Christianity was scarcely required to attain it. It ultimately received formal sanction in the Roman Canon Law, which decreed that adultery is equally committed by either conjugal party in two degrees: (1) _simplex_, of the married with the unmarried, and (2) _duplex_, of the married with the married.
It can scarcely be said, however, that Christianity succeeded in attaining the inclusion of this view of the moral equality of the sexes into actual practical morality. It was accepted in theory; it was not followed in practice. W.G. Sumner, discussing this question (_Folkways_, pp. 359-361), concludes: "Why are these views not in the _mores?_ Undoubtedly it is because they are dogmatic in form, invented or imposed by theological authority or philosophical speculation. They do not grow out of the experience of life, and cannot be verified by it. The reasons are in ultimate physiological facts, by virtue of which one is a woman and the other is a man." There is, however, more to be said on this point later.
It was probably, however, not so much the Church as Teutonic customs and the development of the feudal system, with the masculine and military ideals it fostered, that was chiefly decisive in fixing the inferior position of women in the mediæval world. Even the ideas of chivalry, which have often been supposed to be peculiarly favorable to women, so far as they affected women seem to have been of little practical significance.
In his great work on chivalry Gautier brings forward much evidence to show that the feudal spirit, like the military spirit always and everywhere, on the whole involved at bottom a disdain for women, even though it occasionally idealized them. "Go into your painted and gilded rooms," we read in _Renaus de Montauban_, "sit in the shade, make yourselves comfortable, drink, eat, work tapestry, dye silk, but remember that you must not occupy yourselves with our affairs. Our business is to strike with the steel sword. Silence!" And if the woman insists she is struck on the face till the blood comes. The husband had a legal right to beat his wife, not only for adultery, but even for contradicting him. Women were not, however, entirely without power, and in a thirteenth century collection of _Coutumes_, it is set down that a husband must only beat his wife reasonably, _resnablement_. (As regards the husband's right to chastise his wife, see also Hobhouse, _Morals in Evolution_, vol. i, p. 234. In England it was not until the reign of Charles II, from which so many modern movements date, that the husband was deprived of this legal right.)
In the eyes of a feudal knight, it may be added, the beauty of a horse competed, often successfully, with the beauty of a woman. In _Girbers de Metz_, two knights, Garin and his cousin Girbert, ride by a window at which sits a beautiful girl with the face of a rose and the white flesh of a lily. "Look, cousin Girbert, look! By Saint Mary, a beautiful woman!" "Ah," Girbert replies, "a beautiful beast is my horse!" "I have never seen anything so charming as that young girl with her fresh color and her dark eyes," says Garin. "I know no steed to compare with mine," retorts Girbert. When the men were thus absorbed in the things that pertain to war, it is not surprising that amorous advances were left to young girls to make. "In all the _chansons de geste_," Gautier remarks, "it is the young girls who make the advances, often with effrontery," though, he adds, wives are represented as more virtuous (L. Gautier, _La Chevalerie_, pp. 236-8, 348-50).
In England Pollock and Maitland (_History of English Law_, vol. ii, p. 437) do not believe that a life-long tutela of women ever existed as among other Teutonic peoples. "From the Conquest onwards," Hobhouse states (op. cit., vol. i, p. 224), "the unmarried English woman, on attaining her majority, becomes fully equipped with all legal and civil rights, as much a legal personality as the Babylonian woman had been three thousand years before." But the developed English law more than made up for any privileges thus accorded to the unmarried by the inconsistent manner in which it swathed up the wife in endless folds of irresponsibility, except when she committed the supreme offence of injuring her lord and master. The English wife, as Hobhouse continues (loc. cit.) was, if not her husband's slave, at any rate his liege subject; if she killed him it was "petty treason," the revolt of a subject against a sovereign in a miniature kingdom, and a more serious offence than murder. Murder she could not commit in his presence, for her personality was merged in him; he was responsible for most of her crimes and offences (it was that fact which gave him the right to chastise her), and he could not even enter into a contract with her, for that would be entering into a contract with himself. "The very being and legal existence of a woman is suspended during marriage," said Blackstone, "or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of her husband, under whose wing, protection and cover she performs everything. So great a favorite," he added, "is the female sex of the laws of England." "The strength of woman," says Hobhouse, interpreting the sense of the English law, "was her weakness. She conquered by yielding. Her gentleness had to be guarded from the turmoil of the world, her fragrance to be kept sweet and fresh, away from the dust and the smoke of battle. Hence her need of a champion and guardian."
In France the wife of the mediæval and Renaissance periods occupied much the same position in her husband's house. He was her absolute master and lord, the head and soul of "the feminine and feeble creature" who owed to him "perfect love and obedience." She was his chief servant, the eldest of his children, his wife and subject; she signed herself "your humble obedient daughter and friend," when she wrote to him. The historian, De Maulde la Clavière, who has brought together evidence on this point in his _Femmes de la Renaissance_, remarks that even though the husband enjoyed this lofty and superior position in marriage, it was still generally he, and not the wife, who complained of the hardships of marriage.
Law and custom assumed that a woman should be more or less under the protection of a man, and even the ideals of fine womanhood which arose in this society, during feudal and later times, were necessarily tinged by the same conception. It involved the inequality of women as compared with men, but under the social conditions of a feudal society such inequality was to woman's advantage. Masculine force was the determining factor in life and it was necessary that every woman should have a portion of this force on her side. This sound and reasonable idea naturally tended to persist even after the growth of civilization rendered force a much less decisive factor in social life. In England in Queen Elizabeth's time no woman must be masterless, although the feminine subjects of Queen Elizabeth had in their sovereign the object lesson of a woman who could play a very brilliant and effective part in life and yet remain absolutely masterless. Still later, in the eighteenth century, even so fine a moralist as Shaftesbury, in his _Characteristics_, refers to lovers of married women as invaders of property. If such conceptions still ruled even in the best minds, it is not surprising that in the same century, even in the following century, they were carried out into practice by less educated people who frankly bought and sold women.
Schrader, in his _Reallexicon_ (art. "Brautkauf"), points out that, originally, the purchase of a wife was the purchase of her person, and not merely of the right of protecting her. The original conception probably persisted long in Great Britain on account of its remoteness from the centres of civilization. In the eleventh century Gregory VII desired Lanfranc to stop the sale of wives in Scotland and elsewhere in the island of the English (Pike, _History of Crime in England_, vol. i, p. 99). The practice never quite died out, however, in remote country districts.
Such transactions have taken place even in London. Thus in the _Annual Register_ for 1767 (p. 99) we read: "About three weeks ago a bricklayer's laborer at Marylebone sold a woman, whom he had cohabited with for several years, to a fellow-workman for a quarter guinea and a gallon of beer. The workman went off with the purchase, and she has since had the good fortune to have a legacy of £200, and some plate, left her by a deceased uncle in Devonshire. The parties were married last Friday."
The Rev. J. Edward Vaux (_Church Folk-lore_, second edition, p. 146) narrates two authentic cases in which women had been bought by their husbands in open market in the nineteenth century. In one case the wife, with her own full consent, was brought to market with a halter round her neck, sold for half a crown, and led to her new home, twelve miles off by the new husband who had purchased her; in the other case a publican bought another man's wife for a two-gallon jar of gin.
It is the same conception of woman as property which, even to the present, has caused the retention in many legal codes of clauses rendering a man liable to pay pecuniary damages to a woman, previously a virgin, whom he has intercourse with and subsequently forsakes (Natalie Fuchs, "Die Jungfernschaft im Recht und Sitte," _Sexual-Probleme_, Feb., 1908). The woman is "dishonored" by sexual intercourse, depreciated in her market value, exactly as a new garment becomes "second-hand," even if it has but once been worn. A man, on the other hand, would disdain the idea that his personal value could be diminished by any number of acts of sexual intercourse.
This fact has even led some to advocate the "abolition of physical virginity." Thus the German authoress of _Una Poenitentium_ (1907), considering that the protection of a woman is by no means so well secured by a little piece of membrane as by the presence of a true and watchful soul inside, advocates the operation of removal of the hymen in childhood. It is undoubtedly true that the undue importance attached to the hymen has led to a false conception of feminine "honor," and to an unwholesome conception of feminine purity.
Custom and law are slowly changing in harmony with changed social conditions which no longer demand the subjection of women either in their own interests or in the interests of the community. Concomitantly with these changes a different ideal of womanly personality is developing. It is true that the ancient ideal of the lordship of the husband over the wife is still more or less consciously affirmed around us. The husband frequently dictates to the wife what avocations she may not pursue, what places she may not visit, what people she may not know, what books she may not read. He assumes to control her, even in personal matters having no direct concern with himself, by virtue of the old masculine prerogative of force which placed a woman under the hand, as the ancient patriarchal legists termed it, of a man. It is, however, becoming more and more widely recognized that such a part is not suited to the modern man. The modern man, as Rosa Mayreder has pointed out in a thoughtful essay,[292] is no longer equipped to play this domineering part in relation to his wife. The "noble savage," leading a wild life on mountain and in forest, hunting dangerous beasts and scalping enemies when necessary, may occasionally bring his club gently and effectively on to the head of his wife, even, it may be, with grateful appreciation on her part.[293] But the modern man, who for the most part spends his days tamely at a desk, who has been trained to endure silently the insults and humiliations which superior officials or patronizing clients may inflict upon him, this typical modern man is no longer able to assume effectually the part of the "noble savage" when he returns to his home. He is indeed so unfitted for the part that his wife resents his attempts to play it. He is gradually recognizing this, even apart from any consciousness of the general trend of civilization. The modern man of ideas recognizes that, as a matter of principle, his wife is entitled to equality with himself; the modern man of the world feels that it would be both ridiculous and inconvenient not to accord his wife much the same kind of freedom which he himself possesses. And, moreover, while the modern man has to some extent acquired feminine qualities, the modern woman has to a corresponding extent acquired masculine qualities.
Brief and summary as the preceding discussion has necessarily been, it will have served to bring us face to face with the central fact in the sexual morality which the growth of civilization has at the present day rendered inevitable: personal responsibility. "The responsible human being, man or woman, is the centre of modern ethics as of modern law;" that is the conclusion reached by Hobhouse in his discussion of the evolution of human morality.[294] The movement which is taking place among us to liberate sexual relationships from an excessive bondage to fixed and arbitrary regulations would have been impossible and mischievous but for the concomitant growth of a sense of personal responsibility in the members of the community. It could not indeed have subsisted for a single year without degenerating into license and disorder. Freedom in sexual relations involves mutual trust and that can only rest on a basis of personal responsibility. Where there can be no reliance on personal responsibility there can be no freedom. In most fields of moral action this sense of personal responsibility is acquired at a fairly early stage of social progress. Sexual morality is the last field of morality to be brought within the sphere of personal responsibility. The community imposes the most varied, complicated, and artificial codes of sexual morality on its members, especially its feminine members, and, naturally enough, it is always very suspicious of their ability to observe these codes, and is careful to allow them, so far as possible, no personal responsibility in the matter. But a training in restraint, when carried through a long series of generations, is the best preparation for freedom. The law laid on the earlier generations, as old theology stated the matter, has been the schoolmaster to bring the later generations to Christ; or, as new science expresses exactly the same idea, the later generations have become immunized and have finally acquired a certain degree of protection against the virus which would have destroyed the earlier generations.
The process by which a people acquires the sense of personal responsibility is slow, and perhaps it cannot be adequately acquired at all by races lacking a high grade of nervous organization. This is especially the case as regards sexual morality, and has often been illustrated on the contact of a higher with a lower civilization. It has constantly happened that missionaries--entirely against their own wishes, it need not be said--by overthrowing the strict moral system they have found established, and by substituting the freedom of European customs among people entirely unprepared for such freedom, have exerted the most disastrous effects on morality. This has been the case among the formerly well-organized and highly moral Baganda of Central Africa, as recorded in an official report by Colonel Lambkin (_British Medical Journal_, Oct. 3, 1908).
As regards Polynesia, also, R.L. Stevenson, in his interesting book, _In the South Seas_ (Ch. V), pointed out that, while before the coming of the whites the Polynesians were, on the whole, chaste, and the young carefully watched, now it is far otherwise.
Even in Fiji, where, according to Lord Stanmore--who was High Commissioner of the Pacific, and an independent critic--missionary effort has been "wonderfully successful," where all own at least nominal allegiance to Christianity, which has much modified life and character, yet chastity has suffered. This was shown by a Royal Commission on the condition of the native races in Fiji. Mr. Fitchett, commenting on this report (Australasian _Review of Reviews_, Oct., 1897) remarks: "Not a few witnesses examined by the commission declare that the moral advance in Fiji is of a curiously patchy type. The abolition of polygamy, for example, they say, has not told at every point in favor of women. The woman is the toiler in Fiji; and when the support of the husband was distributed over four wives, the burden on each wife was less than it is now, when it has to be carried by one. In heathen times female chastity was guarded by the club; a faithless wife, an unmarried mother, was summarily put to death. Christianity has abolished club-law, and purely moral restraints, or the terror of the penalties of the next world, do not, to the limited imagination of the Fijian, quite take its place. So the standard of Fijian chastity is distressingly low."
It must always be remembered that when the highly organized primitive system of mixed spiritual and physical restraints is removed, chastity becomes more delicately and unstably poised. The controlling power of personal responsibility, valuable and essential as it is, cannot permanently and unremittingly restrain the volcanic forces of the passion of love even in high civilizations. "No perfection of moral constitution in a woman," Hinlon has well said, "no power of will, no wish and resolution to be 'good,' no force of religion or control of custom, can secure what is called the virtue of woman. The emotion of absolute devotion with which some man may inspire her will sweep them all away. Society, in choosing to erect itself on that basis, chooses inevitable disorder, and so long as it continues to choose it will continue to have that result."
It is necessary to insist for a while on this personal responsibility in matters of sexual morality, in the form in which it is making itself felt among us, and to search out its implications. The most important of these is undoubtedly economic independence. That is indeed so important that moral responsibility in any fine sense can scarcely be said to have any existence in its absence. Moral responsibility and economic independence are indeed really identical; they are but two sides of the same social fact. The responsible person is the person who is able to answer for his actions and, if need be, to pay for them. The economically dependent person can accept a criminal responsibility; he can, with an empty purse, go to prison or to death. But in the ordinary sphere of everyday morality that large penalty is not required of him; if he goes against the wishes of his family or his friends or his parish, they may turn their backs on him but they cannot usually demand against him the last penalties of the law. He can exert his own personal responsibility, he can freely choose to go his own way and to maintain himself in it before his fellowmen on one condition, that he is able to pay for it. His personal responsibility has little or no meaning except in so far as it is also economic independence.
In civilized societies as they attain maturity, the women tend to acquire a greater and greater degree alike of moral responsibility and economic independence. Any freedom and seeming equality of women, even when it actually assumes the air of superiority, which is not so based, is unreal. It is only on sufferance; it is the freedom accorded to the child, because it asks for it so prettily or may scream if it is refused. This is merely parasitism.[295] The basis of economic independence ensures a more real freedom. Even in societies which by law and custom hold women in strict subordination, the woman who happens to be placed in possession of property enjoys a high degree alike of independence and of responsibility.[296] The growth of a high civilization seems indeed to be so closely identified with the economic freedom and independence of women that it is difficult to say which is cause and which effect. Herodotus, in his fascinating account of Egypt, a land which he regarded as admirable beyond all other lands, noted with surprise that, totally unlike the fashion of Greece, women left the men at home to the management of the loom and went to market to transact the business of commerce.[297] It is the economic factor in social life which secures the moral responsibility of women and which chiefly determines the position of the wife in relation to her husband.[298] In this respect in its late stages civilization returns to the same point it had occupied at the beginning, when, as has already been noted, we find greater equality with men and at the same time greater economic independence.[299] In all the leading modern civilized countries, for a century past, custom and law have combined to give an ever greater economic independence to women. In some respects England took the lead by inaugurating the great industrial movement which slowly swept women into its ranks,[300] and made inevitable the legal changes which, by 1882, insured to a married woman the possession of her own earnings. The same movement, with its same consequences, is going on elsewhere. In the United States, just as in England, there is a vast army of five million women, rapidly increasing, who earn their own living, and their position in relation to men workers is even better than in England. In France from twenty-five to seventy-five per cent. of the workers in most of the chief industries--the liberal professions, commerce, agriculture, factory industries--are women, and in some of the very largest, such as home industries and textile industries, more women are employed than men. In Japan, it is said, three-fifths of the factory workers are women, and all the textile industries are in the hands of women.[301] This movement is the outward expression of the modern conception of personal rights, personal moral worth, and personal responsibility, which, as Hobhouse has remarked, has compelled women to take their lives into their own hands, and has at the same time rendered the ancient marriage laws an anachronism, and the ancient ideals of