Woman in Modern Society | Page 8

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]
[17] T.G. TUCKER, Life in Ancient Athens,
Chapter VIII
, Macmillan Co., 1906.
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]
[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