The Woman Socialist/Chapter 5
CHAPTER V
WOMAN'S SPHERE (continued)
“The feeling which makes husband and wife true companions … can grow up only in societies where the altruistic sentiment is so strong in the man as to make him recognise woman as his equal, and where she is not shut up as an exotic plant in a greenhouse, but is allowed to associate freely with men.” So says Westermarck in his “History of Human Marriage.” But the free woman of ancient Greece, beautiful, cultured Greece, knew nothing of this fine relationship. The Greek married women were shut up in their husbands’ houses, where they were visited by their intimate friends. Their seclusion was almost oriental. They appear to have been denied the opportunities of higher education, their whole lives being under the control of their male relations.
The best educated and most intelligent women of Greece were the courtesans, and the houses of the most famous of these were the resorts of the wisest and cleverest poets, philosophers, and writers which Greece has produced. It is generally accepted as an established fact that many women of that time chose the life of the prostitute as affording them the only opportunity of enjoying the culture they desired. By coming into close touch in this public way with the best minds of their time, they became acquainted with various subjects, acquiring a knowledge of history and a taste for art which no other life would have granted them. To quote one writer, Winwood Reade: “In Greece, a lady could only enter society by adopting a mode of life which, in England, usually facilitates her exit.”
The barbarians of the North found Rome seething in rottenness and sunk to a depth of degradation and corruption unparalleled in history either before or since. This is the period to which the warning finger is pointed when it is proposed to further enfranchise the women of the present. It is a most unjust comparison and prophecy. The rebellious Roman matron, no worse at least than her times, gained some liberty by casting aside the yoke of religious marriage, and for this reason lost her reputation for chastity. Indeed, of chastity at this time there was little, of unchaste women there were many; but it was a profligate age. It is a fact worthy of note that when, in days gone by, women have temporarily recovered their liberty, it seems to have been at the cost of their virtue, as in the case of the Roman women, domestic drudges before they became unmarried wives; and that when chastity has been restored, as Christianity restored it to the world, it has been as the result of taking away the liberty of the woman and putting her under the yoke of a husband.
It remains for Socialism to prove that woman can be both free and virtuous.
It is commonly claimed that the advance that the woman of the present has made upon the woman of the ante-Christian period is due to the civilising influence of Christianity. It is perfectly true that the entirely Christian principle of co-operation and brotherhood is to effect the complete salvation of woman in the time that is to come; but it is not true that the gospel of Christ as interpreted and practised by His followers has done everything that has been done to mitigate the truly awful bondage of women.
Chastity it did secure; but at the expense of wifehood and motherhood. Virginity it exalted, teaching that "marriage replenishes the earth but virginity replenishes heaven." St. Paul's teachings were of such a character that marriage became identified with lust and passion and sinfulness.
St. Chrysostom represented the attitude towards women of the early Christian Fathers when he wrote of them as “a necessary evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic peril, a deadly fascination, and a painted ill.”
The Protestant Reformation did some little to improve the lot of women; but its founder occupied a position towards the sex little, if any, better than the attitude of the Christian Fathers. Witch-burning waxed fast and furious under the blessing of Martin Luther, and sexual indulgence, within the marriage bonds, was condoned by him. That men might be saved from the consequences of their lustfulness, Luther advised very early marriages; but the sufferings of the wives were, apparently, not worthy of consideration.
No man could claim to be more religious-minded than the writer of the world’s greatest epic, "Paradise Lost"; yet he, writing after more than sixteen hundred years of the teaching and influence of Christianity, advocates one scale of morality for one sex and a different one for the other, putting into the hands of the man the power of divorce, “the right which God had, from the beginning, entrusted to the husband.” His well-known line, too, is only just beginning to have its well-merited contempt—
“He for God only, She for God in him.”
Nothing could have been more unchristian than that act of Milton’s, by which he taught his daughters to read in foreign tongues for his delectation without permitting them to understand a word that they spoke.
Even now the Church persists in her unholy differentiation of the sexes. A woman may not speak in the Church. She may not minister from the pulpit. She may not enter a church hatless, no matter how hot and uncomfortable her head may be. True, the Nonconformist bodies are gradually breaking away from these ridiculous traditions; but it is very gradually; and one has only to attend even their conferences, their church meetings, and their services, to note how unequally the sexes are treated in their opportunities for performance of the higher grades of church work.
Good men and true, and good women, in this nineteenth century, are very much in the position of Rousseau, infidel Rousseau, whose opinion was that "women are specially made to please men. All their education should be relative to men. To please them, to be useful to them, to make themselves honoured and loved by them, to bring them up when young, to take care of them when grown up, to counsel, to console them, to make their lives agreeable and pleasant; these in all ages have been the duties of women, and it is for these duties they should be educated from infancy. Being incapable of judging for themselves . . . they ought to accept the decision of their fathers and their husbands."
But the time is speedily coming when these ideas shall cease to exist. Then it will be realised that women, no less than men, have the right to a healthy, happy, human existence; that they have duties, not only to others, but duties to themselves; that anything that tends to dwarf and cripple them in body, mind, and spirit is wrong; that they have the right to choose in what way they will serve humanity; that—
Is shrivelled in a fruitless fire,
Or but subserves another's gain."