Chapter XI: New Englandism 433 (7)

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."

[Footnote 17: _Atlantic Monthly,_ June, 1910.]

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 societe_ should expand, and the novel originate, in periods when for the first time women were a large element in the reading public."

{237}

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."

{253}

"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?

{255}

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.

{258}

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.