Woman in Modern Society | Page 9

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 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]
[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