The Project Gutenberg EBook of Woman in Modern Society, by Earl Barnes This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org Title: Woman in Modern Society Author: Earl Barnes Release Date: April 23, 2005 [EBook #15691] Language: English Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WOMAN IN MODERN SOCIETY *** Produced by Audrey Longhurst, Melissa Er-Raqabi and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net. WOMAN IN MODERN SOCIETY BY EARL BARNES BY THE SAME AUTHOR: STUDIES IN EDUCATION (IN TWO VOLUMES) WHERE KNOWLEDGE FAILS WOMAN IN MODERN SOCIETY BY EARL BARNES AT ONE TIME PROFESSOR OF EUROPEAN HISTORY IN THE STATE UNIVERSITY OF INDIANA, AND LATER PROFESSOR OF EDUCATION IN LELAND STANFORD JUNIOR UNIVERSITY NEW YORK B.W. HUEBSCH COPYRIGHT, 1912 BY B.W. Huebsch PRINTED IN U.S.A. This volume is dedicated to a woman endowed by her ancestors with health and strength, reared by a wise mother, trained to earn her own living, and university bred, at one time an independent wage-earner and now equal partner in the business of a home, a social force in the life of her community, member of a woman's club, a suffragist, the devoted and intelligent mother of a group of fine children, and the center of a family which loves and reverences her and finds the deepest meaning of life in her presence. CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. What it Means to be a Woman 9 II. Woman's Heritage 31 III. Women in Education 57 IV. The Feminizing of Culture 85 V. The Economic Independence of Women 107 VI. Women in Industry 123 VII. The Meaning of Political Life 150 VIII. Woman's Relation to Political Life 173 IX. The Modern Family 207 X. Family Life as a Vocation 231 XI. Conclusion 251 WOMAN IN MODERN SOCIETY I What it Means to be a Woman If we go back to the earliest forms of life, where the unit is simply a minute mass of protoplasm surrounded by a cell wall, we find each of these divisions to be a complete individual. It can feed itself, that its life may go on to-day; it can fight or run away, that it may be here to fight to-morrow; and by a process of division it can create a new life so that its existence may continue across the generations. With such units it is quite conceivable that life might go on through all eternity, death following birth, were it not that protoplasm contains within itself a principle of change. Life and change are synonymous. And this change moves ever toward a complexity, which we call development, where cells unite in a larger life, and functions and organs are specialized. Thus there comes a time when the part split off carries with it power to eat and digest, to fight or run away, but only half the power of procreation. This half unit, this incomplete individual, is either male or female, and from this time on, the epic of life gathers around the search of these half-lives for their complements. The force that impels to this search, while at first valuable only for the perpetuation of the generations, gathers into itself modifying feeling and desires and, at a later period, ideas and ideals, which finally, when men and women appear, make it the greatest of all the shaping forces in life.[1] The fact that sexual selection does not play the part in organic evolution which Darwin assigned it does not affect this statement. See chapter on Sexual Selection in Yves Delagee and Marie Goldsmith, The Theories of Evolution, New York: Huebsch, 1912. Of course, in such a sweeping statement as this, one must include under sex hunger all the forces that drive men and women to seek each other's society, rather than that of their own sex. In this sense, it can be truly said that it gives a motive for our care of offspring, and for all our other most self-forgetful devotions, our finest altruisms, our most polished expressions in language, manners and dress. It justifies labor, ambition, and at times even self-effacement. It underlies nearly all the lyric expressions in art; furnishes almost the only theme for that delineation of modern life which we call the novel; and is a main support for music, painting, statuary and belles-lettres. It gives us the institution of the family, which is the parent of the state; it is closely allied to religion; and in our individual lives it lifts us to the heights of self-realization and happiness, or plunges us down to the depths of degradation and tragedy. While this sex hunger belongs equally to men and women, it has come to be associated with women, until we even speak of them as "the sex." Hence, when we are discussing women, we are generally discussing the sex interest common to both men and women, and this disturbs our point of view. The fact is that sex interest is a common possession, that the unit in human life, even more than among lower animals, is always a male and a female bound together by love. Just as a body can function in sleep or under the influence of a narcotic, for a time seemingly independent of the mind, so a man or a woman can live for a time in seeming independence of the opposite sex; but from any biological point of view, such a separate existence of male and female is only a transient effort. The half-life must find its mate or, after a few brief days, it dies, leaving its line extinct. For all the larger purposes of life, man is but a half-creature, and woman is equally a fragment. It is, of course, conceivable that these two halves of the biological unit might have been made, or might have developed, alike in everything except the sexual function. At least they might have been as much alike as men are alike. They might have been of the same size, possessed of the same strength, of the same figures and gestures, complexion and hair. Their voices might have been alike. They might have had the same kinds of nervous systems, with the same desires, feelings, ideas and tendencies. In the assertions and arguments born of intellectual, industrial, social and political readjustments, it is often assumed that this is the case. Differences are minimized or denied, and an attempt is made to resolve the world of men and women into a world of human beings capable of living together in mingled competitions and coöperations, regardless of sex, except where the reproductive process is considered. But this view is superficial; born of argument it breaks down when confronted by any body of significant facts. Again, it has happened that in the long struggle of developing civilization, sometimes one and sometimes the other sex has gained what has seemed an advantage over the other, just as in the development of any man's individual life, his brain may gain a seeming advantage over his stomach, so that it has more than its fair share of nourishment and activity. Arguing from such a case, we might declare the brain superior to the stomach in power, health and function; but in the long accounting, all such temporary superiorities are wiped out. So with men and women, seeming advantages for either are gained only at the expense of the common life; and in the last analysis, each finds his individual value only in the common life of the unit. Let us try then to see what the special characteristics of women are, ignoring as far as possible the accidental variations of individuals, and the temporary advantages or disadvantages due to economic or ideational forces, and all assertions of what would be if things were not as they are. While the whole matter of sex differences is in a state of unsettlement, it seems very certain that males are more active and more variable than females. This superabundant vitality appears in the males of the higher animals in secondary sex characteristics, such as more abundant and unnecessary hair and feathers, tusks, spurs, antlers, wattles, brilliant colors and scent pouches. It also appears in mating calls, songs, and general carriage of the body. Correspondingly, the female is smaller, duller colored, and less immediately attractive than the male. [1] All the studies that have been made on men and women, also confirm our ordinary observation that men are taller, heavier, stronger and more active than women, and this holds true in all stages of civilization, wherever tests have been made. In strength, rapidity of movement, and rate of fatigue Miss Thompson's studies[2] show that men have a very decided advantage over women. Thus in strength tests, the men in Yale have double the power of women in Oberlin;[3] while our college athletic records place men far ahead of women in all events requiring strength and endurance. Helen B. Thompson, Psychological Norms in Men and Women, p. 167. University of Chicago Press, 1903. Thomas, Sex and Society, p. 21. University of Chicago Press, 1907. The differences in structure between men and women are such as to correspond with the functional differences just stated. A woman's bones are smaller in proportion to her size, than are those of a man. The body is longer, the hips broader, and the abdomen more prominent. Relatively to the length of the body, the arms, legs, feet and hands are shorter than in men, the lower leg and arm are shorter in proportion to the upper leg and arm. Man has the long levers and the active frame. One has only to look at two good statues of a man and a woman to realize the greater strength and activity of the man. Woman, as she actually appears in modern society, is also less subject to variation than man;[4] she is much less liable to be a genius or an idiot than her brother.[5] She offers greater resistance to disease, endures pain and want more stoically, and lives longer; so that while more boys than girls are born in all parts of the world, where statistics are kept, in mature years women always outnumber men. Karl Pearson denies this. See The Chances of Death, Vol. I, p. 256. London, 1897. C.W. Saleeby, in Woman and Womanhood, p. 54, New York, Mitchell Kennerley, 1911, maintains that woman is biologically more variable than man, and that woman's less variable activity is due to her training. All these statements are summed up by saying that not only in women, but in most female animals of the higher orders, life is more anabolic than in males. They tend to more static conditions; they collect, organize, conserve; they are patient and stable; they move about less; they more easily lay on adipose tissue. Compared with the female, the male animal is katabolic; he is active, impulsive, destructive, skilful, creative, intense, spasmodic, violent. Such a generalization as this must not be pushed too far in its applications to our daily life; but as a statement of basal differences it seems justified by ordinary observation as well as by scientific tests.[6] Patrick Geddes and Arthur Thompson, in The Evolution of Sex, D. Appleton & Co., 1889, first advanced this position. Meantime, it is probably true that the female, as mother of the race, is more important biologically than the male, since she both furnishes germ plasm and nourishes the newly conceived life. The latest studies, along lines laid down by Mendel, seem to indicate that the female brings to the new creation both male and female attributes, while the male brings only male qualities. Thus when either sex sinks into insignificance, as sometimes happens in lower forms of life, it is generally the male which exists merely for purposes of reproduction.[7] C.W. Saleeby, Woman and Womanhood, Chapter V. New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1911. The differences in the nervous systems of men and women are now fairly established on the quantitative side. Marshall has shown that if we compare brain weight with the stature in the two sexes there is a slight preponderance of cerebrum in males; but if the other parts of the brain are taken into consideration, the sexes are equal.[8] Havelock Ellis has carefully gathered the results of many investigators and declares that woman's brain is slightly superior to man's in proportion to her size.[9] But these quantitative differences are now felt to have comparatively little significance; and of the relative qualities of the brain substance in the two sexes we know nothing positively. In fact, if we give a scientist a section of brain substance he cannot tell whether it is the brain of a man or a woman. Marshall, Journal of Anatomy and Physiology, July, 1892. Havelock Ellis, Man and Woman, p. 97, Contemporary Science Series. It is very probable that the average woman's mind is capable of much the same activity as the average man's mind, given the same heredity and the same training. They are both alike capable of remarkable feats of imitation, and an ordinarily [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] intelligent man could probably learn to wear woman's clothes, and walk as she generally walks, so as to deceive even a jury of women, if there were a motive to justify the effort. Women also can perform, and they do perform, most of the feats of men. At the same time it is desirable to note present differences in modes of thinking and feeling, for while they may have been produced by environment and ideals, and may hence give way to education, they must be reckoned with in making the next steps. In the chapter on education we shall discuss certain academic peculiarities of women's minds, but here we are interested in seeing what fundamental differences characterize the thinking of the sexes. Women seem more subject to emotional states than men;[10] and this general observation agrees with the fact that the basal ganglia of the brain are more developed in women than in men, and these parts of the brain seem most intimately concerned with emotional activity. Whether emotion follows acts or leads to acts remains a disputed question, but certainly emotion gives charm and significance to life and distinguishes modes of thinking. Particularly in the dramatic art, this quality of mind gives women special excellence. The fact that she more often appeals to emotion than to reason, as cause for action, in no way marks her as inferior to man, but simply as different. As Ellen Key says: "There is nothing more futile than to try to prove the inferiority of woman to man, unless it be to try to prove her equality."[11] Helen Bradford Thompson, Psychological Norms in Men and Women, p. 171, University of Chicago Press, 1903. Ellen Key, Love and Ethics, p. 52. New York: Huebsch, 1911. Most women think in particulars as compared with men. The individual circumstance seems to them very important; and it is hard for them to get away from the concrete. On the other hand, a man's thinking is more impersonal and general; and he is more easily drawn into abstractions. It is true that woman's domestic life would naturally develop this quality but we are not now concerned with the question of origins. Most women find it easy to live from day to day; the man is more given to systematizing and planning. Thus in offices, men are more efficient as heads of departments, while women handle details admirably. In public life we have recently seen thousands of women eager to depose a United States Senator, accused of polygamy, without regard to the bearing of the concrete act on constitutional guarantees. Women have done little with abstract studies like metaphysics; they have done much with the novel, where ideas are presented in the concrete and particular. This habit of dealing with particulars, and disinclination for abstraction, leads easily to habitual action. It is easy for women to stock up their lower nerve centers with reflex actions. This, of course, goes along with the general anabolic characteristics of the sex. Hence women are the conservers of traditions; rules of conducting social intercourse appeal to them; and they are the final supporters of theological dogmas.[12] Women naturally uphold caste, and Daughters of the Revolution and Colonial Dames flourish on the scantiest foundations of ancestral excellence. Man, on the other hand, is more radical and creative. He has perfected most of our inventions; he has painted our great pictures; carved our great statues; he has written music, while women have interpreted it. Helen B. Thompson, Psychological Norms in Men and Women, p. 171, University of Chicago Press, 1903. Along with these fixed qualities of action, women have a tendency to indirection when they advance. We say they have diplomacy, tact and coquetry, while man is more direct and bald in his methods. Of course, one easily understands how these qualities may have arisen, since "fraud is the force of weak natures," and woman has always been driven to supplement her weakness with tact, from the days of Jael and Delilah down to the present day adventuress. These qualities of mind naturally drive women to literary interests which are concrete, personal and emotional. Men turn more easily than women to the abstract generalizations of science. Of course, there are marked exceptions to these general statements, in both sexes. Madame Curie, who was recently a candidate for the honors of the French Academy, and who, in 1911, was given the Nobel prize for her distinguished services to chemistry, is but one of many women who are famous to-day in the world of science. Still the private life of these women, as in the case of Sónya Kovalévsky, seems to bear out our general conclusion. Men, on the other hand, as milliners and editors of ladies' journals, show marked skill in catering to women's tastes; but on the whole the differences indicated seem important and widely diffused. Another profound difference between men and women is the woman's greater tendency to periodicity in all her functions and adjustments to life.[13] In all normal societies the life of the man is fairly regular and constant from birth to [10] [11] [12] old age. He moves along lines mainly predetermined by his heredity and his environment, his habits and his work. Even puberty is less disturbing in its effect upon a boy than upon a girl; and often by eighteen we can anticipate the life of a young man with great accuracy. The one element in his life hardest to forecast is the effect of his love-affairs. See chapter on Periodicity in G. Stanley Hall's Adolescence, Vol. I, p. 472. With a woman, it is quite different. As a girl, the period of puberty produces profound changes; and after that, for more than thirty years she passes through periodical exaltations and depressions that must play a large part in determining her health, happiness and efficiency. In the forties, comes another great change which affects her life to a degree strangely ignored by those who have dealt with her possibilities in the past.[14] Karin Michaëlis, The Dangerous Age, John Lane Co., 1911, is said to have sold 80,000 in six weeks when it first appeared in Berlin. The Bride of the Mistletoe, by James Lane Allen (Macmillan), deals with the same period. But the great element of uncertainty, always fronting the girl and young woman, is marriage. Marriage for her generally means abandonment of old working interests, and a substitution of new; it brings her geographical change; new acquaintances and friendships; and the steady adjustment of her personal life to the man she has married in its relation to industry, religion, society and the arts. If children come to her, they must inevitably retire her from public life, for a time, with the danger of losing connections which comes to all who temporarily drop out of the race. A boy, industrious, observant, with some power of administration, studies mining engineering, moves to a mining center and expresses his individual and social powers along the lines of his work until he is sixty. The women who impinge against his life may deflect him from the mines in California to those in Australia, or from the actual work of superintendence to an office; or from an interest in Browning to Tennyson; or from Methodism to Christian Science. The girl with industrious and observant interests studies stenography and type-writing, moves to the vicinity of offices, but is then caught up in the life of a farmer-husband who shifts her center of activity to a farm in Idaho where she must devote herself to entirely different activities, form new associations, think in new terms, respond to new emotions, and adjust herself to her farmer-husband's personality. When, after twenty-five years, she has reared a family of children, and when improved circumstances enable them to move up to the county seat, she confronts many of the conditions for which she originally prepared herself, but with farm habits, diminishing adaptability and diminishing power of appealing to her husband. His powers are still comparatively unimpaired, and as a dealer in farm produce or farm machinery his interests undergo slight change. In general, it may be said that a woman's life falls into three great periods of twenty-five years each. The first twenty-five years of childhood and girlhood is a time of getting ready for the puzzling combination of her personal needs as a human being, her needs as a self-supporting social unit, and her probabilities of matrimony. The second twenty-five years, the domestic period of her life, is a time of adjustments as wife and mother, which may instead prove to be a period of barren waiting, or a time of professional and industrial self-direction and self-support. The third twenty-five years is a time of mature and ripened powers, of lessened romantic interests, and if the preceding period has been devoted to husband and children, it is often a time of social detachment, of weakened individual initiative, of old-fashioned knowledge, of inefficiency, of premature retirement and old age. On the moral side, as Professor Thomas has so admirably pointed out,[15] women have evolved a morality of the person and of the family, while men have evolved a morality of the group and of property. Since men have had a monopoly of property and of law-making they have shaped laws mainly for the protection of property, and in a secondary degree for the protection of the person. Under these laws a man who beats another nearly to death is less severely punished than one who signs the wrong name to a check for five dollars. Man's katabolic nature and his greater freedom have given him almost a monopoly of crime under these laws which he has made. Offences against the coming generation, against health, social efficiency and good taste have until recently been left to the tribunal of public opinion as expressed in social usage; and here, as we have seen, women are generally the judges and executioners. In this, her own field of moral judgment, woman is idealistic and uncompromising. If one of her sisters falls from virtue she will often pursue her unmercifully. If a man, on the other hand, commits a burglary or forgery her sympathy and mercy may make her a very lenient judge. William I. Thomas, Sex and Society, p. 149. University of Chicago Press, 1907. Ellen Key, in Love and Marriage, G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1911, traces the same lines of growth. In æsthetics, the differences follow the same general law. Women express beauty in themselves; jewels are for their ornament; and rooms are furnished as a setting for themselves. The lives of millions of workers go to the adornment of women. In painting they sometimes excel, but a Madame Le Brun does her best work when she paints herself and her [13] [14] [15] child, and when Angelica Kauffmann would paint a vestal virgin, she drapes a veil over her own head and transfers her features to the canvas. Sculpture and architecture are too impersonal and abstract to attract much attention from women at present. Even a sculptor like Mrs. Bessie Potter Vonnoh finds her truest theme in statuettes of mothers with their children about them. During the past few years psychologists have paid great attention to secondary sex characteristics of the mind, and doubtless many qualities of the thought and feeling of men and women owe their origin to the same source as brilliant plumage, antlers, combs and wattles. Thus the shy, retiring, reticent, self-effacing, languishing, adoring excesses of maidenhood and the peculiar psychological manifestations of the late forties must probably be understood from this point of view. So, also, must the bold, swaggering, assertive, compelling bearing of youth be interpreted. The shy or modish, dandified, lackadaisical cane-carrying youth is naturally disliked as a sexual perversion. Women alone, whether individually or in groups, tend to develop certain hard, dry, arid qualities of mind and heart, or they become emotional and unbalanced. Losing a sense of large significances, they become overcareful, saving, sometimes penurious, while in matters of feeling they lavish sentiment and sympathy on unimportant pets and movements. Men, when alone, become selfish, coarse, and reckless; their judgments become extravagant and their pursuits remorseless. Thus it is certainly true that men and women supplement each other in the subjective as in the objective life. Man creates, woman conserves; man composes, woman interprets; man generalizes, woman particularizes; man seeks beauty, woman embodies beauty; man thinks more than he feels, woman feels more than she thinks. For new spiritual birth, as for physical birth, men and women must supplement each other. To be a woman then, is to be for twenty-five years a girl and then a young woman, capable of feeding and protecting herself, possessed of preparing and conserving powers superior to her brothers. After that, for twenty-five years, she is a human being primarily devoted to romanticism, finding her largest fulfilment only in wifehood and motherhood, direct or vicarious; in the last twenty-five years, she should be a wise woman, of ripe experience, carrying over her gathered training and powers to the service of the group. All this time she is, like the man, an incomplete creature, realizing her greatest power and her greatest service only when working in loving association with the man of her choice. II Woman's Heritage So thoroughly have modern men fastened their attention upon the problems of the immediate present, that one feels driven to justify oneself in taking up an historical investigation of any subject presented in a popular manner. And yet it takes little argument to show that what we shall be depends in large measure on what we are; and that what we are rests back on what we have been. In anything we try to think or feel or do, we quickly reach a limit; and this limit is determined by the original quality of our nervous system plus the training it has received. For here is the curious fact about this instrument of thought and feeling which at once takes it away from comparison with mechanical instruments. Whatever it does, becomes a part of itself, and then helps to determine what it will do the next time and how it will do it. With the making easy of mental operations through repetition, and with the formation of associations based on our choices, it may be truly said that we become whatever we habitually think and feel and do. Every choice we make is thus literally built into our character and becomes a part of ourselves. After that, the old choice will help determine the new, and we shall find ourselves being directed by all of our past choices, and even by the choices of our ancestors. Since, then, all our earlier selves are continued in us and make us what we are, we are simply studying ourselves when we study the history of our ancestors. If we would go forward, we must first look backward; for we must rise on stepping-stones of our dead selves. But history is not merely the story of the past. To relate that, would take as long as it took to live it, and the result would be but weariness of spirit. History, to be significant, must select the events with which it will deal; it must arrange these in series that are in accord with the constitution of things; and then it must use the generalizations it reaches to interpret the present, and even to forecast the future. It is obvious that this interpretation will depend on the point of view held by the interpreter. Hence we must ask in what fundamental beliefs this presentation rests. These are, first, that life tends to move along certain lines that constitute the law of human nature. Just as the infant tends first to wriggle, then creep, then walk, then run and dance, so human nature tends to move upward from savagery through primitive settled life to the complex forms of larger settled units. In this progress, material or economic forces play a large part; but ideas, originally born out of circumstances, but sometimes borrowed from other people, sometimes degenerate remnants of past utilities, also play a large part. The progress we finally make is thus directed by this human tendency, by material circumstances, and by ideas. Sometimes it keeps pretty closely to what seems to us to be upward human growth; sometimes it stagnates; sometimes it gives us perverted products; and sometimes it destroys itself. Thus it becomes necessary to trace the past experiences of woman that we may see with what heritage she faces the future. She is all that she has felt and thought and done. She started with at least half of the destiny of the race in her keeping. Handicapped in size and agility, and periodically weighted down by the burdens of maternity, she still possessed charms and was mistress of pleasures which made her, for savage man, the dearest possession next to food; and for civilized man, the companion, joy and inspiration of his days. Of woman's position in early savage times we know only what we can learn from fragmentary prehistoric remains, from the structure of early languages, from records of travelers and students among savages of more recent times; or what can be inferred from human nature in general. Most of this data is difficult to interpret, but it is probable that woman's position was not much worse than man's. It is a bad beast that fouls its own food or its own nest; and the female had always the protection of the male's desire. If she could not entirely control her body, she could still control her own expressions of affection and desire; and, without these, mere possession lost much of its charm. As keeper of the cave, cultivator of the soil, and guardian of the child, woman, rather than her more foot-loose mate, probably became the center of the earliest civilization. The jealousy of men formed tribal rules for her protection; and to these, religion early gave its powerful sanctions. Thus there came a day when the woman took her mate home to her tribe and gave her children her own name. Even if the matriarchal period was not so important as has sometimes been assumed, woman certainly had large influence over tribal affairs in early savage life. With the increase in population, and the consequent disappearance of game, man was forced to turn his attention to the crude agriculture which woman had begun to develop. The superior qualities which he had acquired in war and the chase, enabled him slowly to improve on these beginnings and to shape a body of custom which made settled society possible. With man's leadership in the family the patriarchal form of government developed, and man's power over woman was sanctioned by custom and law. The woman was stolen, or bought; and while sexual attraction did not play the continuous part which it plays in developed society, it must have done much to protect women from abuse and neglect, at least during the years of girlhood and child-bearing. It is at this point that our historical records begin. In the pages of Homer, or of the Old Testament, in Tacitus's "Germania," or in the writings of Livy, we find woman's position well defined. True, she stands second to the man, but she is his assistant, not his slave. She must be courted, and while marriage presents are exchanged, she is not bought. In times of emergency, she steps to the front and legislates, judges, or fights. It is possible in the pages of the Old Testament to find women doing everything which men can do. Even where the power is not nominally in her own hands, she often, as in the cases of Penelope or Esther, rules by indirection. Her body and her offspring are protected; and the Hebrew woman of the Proverbs shows us a singularly free and secure industrial position.[16] Such was the condition in primitive Judea, in early Greece, in republican Rome, or among the Germans who invaded southern Europe in the third and fourth centuries of our era. Proverbs xxxi, 10. Man's jealousy of his woman as a source of pleasure and honor to himself, and to his family, must have always acted to limit woman's freedom, even while it gave her protection and a secure position in society. With the development of settled government in city states, like Athens or early Rome, the necessity for defining citizenship made the family increasingly a political institution. A man's offspring through slave women, concubines, or "strangers" lived outside the citizen group, and so were negligible; but the citizen woman's children were citizens, and so she became a jealously guarded political institution. The established family became the test of civic, military, and property rights. The regulations limiting the freedom of girls and women were jealously enforced, since mismating might open the treasures of citizenship to any low born or foreign adventurer.[17] T.G. Tucker, Life in Ancient Athens, Chapter VIII, Macmillan Co., 1906. [16] [17] In the ancient Orient, in Greece, Rome, and in later Europe, these stages have been repeated again and again. Woman is first a slave, stolen or bought, protected by sexual interest to which is later added social custom and religious sanction. Early civilization centers around the woman, so that she becomes in some degree the center of the home- staying group. In primitive civilization man takes over woman's most important activities; but she gains a fixed position, protected, though still further enslaved, by political necessities. But with the increase of wealth, whether in terms of money, slaves, or trade, woman found herself subject to a fourth form of enslavement more subtly dangerous than brute force, lust, or political and religious institutionalism. This was the desire of man to protect her and make her happy because he loved her. He put golden chains about her neck and bracelets on her arms, clothed her in silks and satins, fed her with dainty fare, gave her a retinue of attendants to spare her fatigue, and put her in the safest rear rooms of the habitation. But it is foolish to talk of conscious enslavement in this connection. Rich men and luxurious civilizations have always enslaved women in the same way that rich, fond, and foolish mothers have enslaved their children, by robbing them of opportunity, by taking away that needful work and that vital experience of real life which alone can develop the powers of the soul. Thus in the Periclean age in Greece, in the Eastern Kingdoms established by Alexander, in Imperial Rome, in the later Italian Renaissance, in France under Louis XIV and Louis XV, in England under the Stuart kings, and in many centers of our own contemporary world, women have given up their legitimate heritage of work and independent thought for trinkets, silks, and servants, and have quickly degenerated, like the children of rich and foolish mothers, into luxury- loving parasites and playthings.[18] Olive Schreiner, Woman and Labor, Chapters on Parasitism. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1911. To maintain this luxurious setting for their mistresses, whether wives or irregular concubines, men of the Occident have generally been driven to ever fiercer struggle with their fellows. Thus a Pericles, at the zenith of his powers, facing difficulties which strained and developed all his forces, had for his legitimate wife a woman, bound hand and foot by conventions and immured in her house in Athens. But a man is only half a complete human being, and the other half cannot be furnished by a weak and ignorant kept-woman, no matter how legal the bond. Hence the forces always driving men to completeness and unity drove Pericles away from his house and his legitimate children and his mere wife to find the completion of his life. In these cases, as elsewhere, demand creates supply, and there were to be found everywhere in Athens able and cultivated foreign women, many of whom had come over from the mainland of Asia Minor; and one of these, Aspasia, became the mistress of Pericles and bore him children. She was no adventuress of the street, but an educated and brilliant woman, in whose home you might have met not only Pericles, but also Socrates, Phidias, Anaxagoras, Sophocles and Euripides. This is the stage that always follows the period of the luxury-loving wife. It was so in Imperial Rome, in later Carthage, in Venice, and in eighteenth-century France. But the normal human unit is the man and woman who love each other, not these combinations of illegality, law, lust, love and dishonor. Such a triangle of two women and a man rests its base in shame, and its lines are lies, and its value is destruction. So virile republican Rome swept over decadent Greece and made it into the Roman province of Achaia; later the chaste Germans swarmed over the decadent Roman Empire and then slowly rebuilt modern Europe; the ascetic Puritans destroyed the Stuarts; while the French Revolution was the deluge that swept away Louis XVI and put the virtuous, if commonplace, bourgeoisie in power. So far we have dealt with the position of women as though it depended alone on human hungers, passions and environment; but while these are the driving forces of life, they are very subject to the repressing and diverting power of ideas, working in an environment of economic conditions. These ideas may themselves date back to earlier passions and economic conditions, but they often survive the time which created them, and then they enter into life and conduct as seemingly independent forces. These ideas played a large part, even in the ancient world. The Jews organized their religious and political practices about a patriarchal Deity ruling a patriarchal state; and their tradition handicapped all women with the sin of Eve, the sin of seeking knowledge. The Greeks, on the other hand, gave woman a splendid place in the hierarchy of the gods, and idealized not only her beauty in Aphrodite but her chaste aloofness in Artemis, her physical strength in the Amazons, and her wisdom in Athena and Hera. They covered the Acropolis with matchless monuments in honor of Athena, patron goddess of their fair city, and celebrated splendid pageants on her anniversaries. So, too, republican Rome, while it gathered its civic life about patriarchal ideas in which [18] the father was supreme, gave women positions of high honor in its religion, whether as deities or as servitors of the gods. In the Niebelungenlied, the Germans bodied forth their splendid conceptions of female beauty, strength and passion in such figures as Brunhilda. These ideas must have done much to offset the physical weakness and functional handicaps of women in the ancient world. The Christian ideas, which have dominated us now for nearly two thousand years, are generally considered to have been favorable to women. In their insistence on the value of the human soul, and on democratic equality, they have doubtless helped to raise the status of women along with that of all human beings. But, as between man and woman, Christianity has given every possible advantage to men, and has added needlessly to the natural burdens of women.[19] James Donaldson, Woman: Her Position and Influence in Ancient Greece and Rome and Among the Early Christians, Longmans, Green, and Co., 1907. From Judaism, Christianity borrowed Eve, with her eternally operative sin, and thus placed all women under a perpetual load of suspicion and guilt. The Founder of the new faith never assumed the responsibilities of a family, and he included no woman among his disciples. Example, even negative example, is often more powerful than precept. Paul, the most learned of the disciples, in his writings, and as an organizer of the Church, emphasized the older Jewish position. In the new organization, women filled only lesser places, while the men settled all points of dogma, directing and mainly conducting the services of worship. Meantime each woman's soul remained her own, to be saved only by her individual actions; therein lay her hope for the future, both on earth and in heaven. But it was those later developments of belief and practice that gathered around Christian asceticism which placed woman and her special functions under a cloud of suspicion from which she is not even yet entirely freed. Celibacy became exalted; virginity was a positive virtue; chastity, instead of a healthful antecedent to parenthood, became an end in itself; and monasteries and convents multiplied throughout Christendom. Something of shame and guilt gathered around conception and birth, as representing a lower standard of life, even when sanctified by the ceremonies of the Church. From the second century to the sixth, the ablest of the Church Fathers, Greek and Latin alike, formulated statements in which woman became the chief ally of the devil in dragging men down to perdition. We still hear ancestral reverberations of these teachings in all our discussions of woman's place in civilization. But ideas can only for a time overcome or divert the primitive human hungers, and slowly Mary, Mother of Jesus, won first place among the saints. Celibate recluses who feared to walk the streets for fear of meeting a woman, and who spent the nights fighting down their noblest passions, starving them, flagellating and rolling their naked bodies in thorny rose hedges or in snow-drifts to silence demands for wife and children, threw themselves in an ecstacy of adoration before an image of the Virgin with the Baby in her arms. So Maryolatry came to bless the world. But even this blessing was not without alloy, for it gave us an ideal of woman, superhuman, immaculate, bowing in frightened awe before the angel with the lily, standing mute with crossed hands and downcast eyes before her Divine Son. She represented, not the institution of the family, but the institution of the Church. Even when she appeared in representations of the Holy Family, Joseph, her husband, was not the father of her child, but his servant. Chivalry took up this conception, and shaped for us the fantastic lady who stands back of much of modern romantic love. Robbed of her simple, human, pagan passions, she became often an anæmic and unfruitful, if angelic, creature. For the direct and passionate assurances of a virtuous and noble love she substituted sighs and tears, languishing looks and weary renunciations. This sterile hybrid, bred of human passions and theological negations, must be finally banished from our literature and from our minds before we can have a healthy eugenic conscience among us.[20] R. de Maulde la Claviere, The Woman of the Renaissance. A Study in Feminism, translated by George H. Ely. New York: C.P. Putnam's Sons, 1900. The Protestant Revolution went far to restore the special functions of women to respect. Belief in her individual soul, and in its need of salvation through individual choice, was supplemented by the belief that this choice must be guided by her individual judgment. Celibacy ceased to be a sign of righteousness; and the best men and women married. But beliefs cannot be directly destroyed by revolution; they can only be disturbed and modified. The teachings of Paul, Augustine, Tertullian and St. Jerome were still authoritative, and Calvin and Knox reaffirmed many of them. The family was still subordinate to the Church; and marriage still remained a sacrament, with theological significances, rather than the simple union of a man and woman who loved each other. The choice of a mate once made was final, because theological, and it could be broken only with infinite pain and disgrace. [19] [20] The great political upheaval, which we call the French Revolution, carried in its fundamental teachings freedom and opportunity for men and for women; but like the corresponding revolution in religion, it required time to make adjustments, and so we have been content to live for more than a hundred years in the midst of verbal affirmations which we denied in all our institutional life. In America, conditions have always been favorable for women to work out their freedom. Among the immigrants who came to our shores before 1840 there were, of course, a few traders, adventurers and servants who hoped to improve their financial conditions; but the leaders, and most of the rank and file, came that they might be free to think their own thoughts and live their own lives. If this selection of colonists, through religious and political persecution, sometimes gave us bigots with one idea, it also gave us people who knew that ideas can change. Along with Cotton Mather it gave us Anne Hutchinson, Roger Williams and William Penn. Most of these who came in the early days belonged to extreme dissenting sects believing in salvation through individual choice, based on personal judgments. Preaching was exalted at the expense of ritual; and by substituting new thinking for old habits in religion, the American settlers made it less difficult for other adjustments to be made, even in such a conservative matter as woman's position. It is through no accident that Methodists, Friends, Unitarians and the Salvation Army have been much more sympathetic to woman's progress than have the older ritualistic faiths. And these theological ideas had to be worked out under the material conditions of the New World, which were also favorable to the emancipation of women. Facing primitive conditions in the forest, it became a habit to do new things in new ways. Woman's work and judgment were indispensable; and these picked women showed themselves capable in every direction. They did every kind of work; and when it came to enduring privation or even to starving, they set an example for men. But while every new movement in ideas always carries with it other radical ideas, the practical difficulties of mental, social and legal adjustment always prevent the full and harmonious development of all that is involved in any new point of view. In the American colonies the need for new adjustments in religion, government and practical living made it inevitable that any very important change in woman's position should linger. In fact, the student of colonial records finds many traces of ultra conservatism in the treatment of women, though the forces had been liberated which must inevitably open the way for her through the New World of America into a new world of the spirit. And before the quickening influence of the new life had time to become commonplace, the struggle with England began. The Revolutionary period was a time of intense political education for every one. War and sacrifice glorified the new ideas; and even the children and women could not escape their influence. Why then did not the American Revolution pass on to full freedom and opportunity for women? For the same reason that it did not forever abolish slavery in America. The vested interests involved were so many, and the changes so momentous and difficult, that only the most imperative needs could receive attention. But this does not mean that the interest in a larger life for women was not active or that women were making no advance in self-direction. There is evidence that women like Abigail Adams realized the abstract injustice of their position, and the fact that as early as 1794, Mary Wollstonecraft's "Vindication of the Rights of Woman" was republished in Philadelphia shows that her ideas must have had some currency in America. After the Revolution, the intimate, stimulating influence of Europe, which the earlier colonists had enjoyed, was for a time almost entirely lost. The new States became extremely provincial; and minds untouched by the larger world always tend to conservatism. Noah Webster, in "A Letter to Young Ladies," published in Boston, in 1790, declared that they "must be content to be women; to be mild, social and sentimental." Three years later the "Letters to a Young Lady," by the Reverend John Bennett, were republished in Philadelphia, after going through several London editions. He placed the qualities to be cultivated in this order: "A genteel person, a simple nature, sensibility, cheerfulness, delicacy, softness, affability, good manners, regular habits, skill in fancy work, and a fund of hidden genteel learning." Through the first half of the nineteenth century these ideals struggled along parallel with the new ideas that were everywhere springing up from the colonial forest experiences of the last two generations. As conservers of morals and as leaders in higher ideals of life, the advanced women of America came early face to face with two outgrown abuses. One of these was human slavery and the other was intemperance. In attacking these abuses, women had to break with all the traditions that defined their position. The wealthy and intelligent Englishwoman, Frances Wright, who came to this country in 1818 to attack slavery, found herself doubly opposed because she was a woman speaking in public. Had not St. Paul declared: "It is a sh...