Women Wage-Earners | Page 7

same manner as the formal seizing of lands. The passage from sexual service to manual service on the part of women was perfectly natural.... And thus we find that the women of most savage tribes perform the manual and servile labor of the camp."
"The basis of all oppression is economic dependence on the oppressor," is the word of a very keen thinker and worker in the German Reichstag to-day; and he adds: "This has been the condition of women in the past, and it still is so. Woman was the first human being that tasted bondage. Woman was a slave before the slave existed."
Science has demonstrated that in all rude races the size and weight of the brain differ far less according to sex than is the case in civilized nations. Physical strength is the same, with the advantage at times on the side of the woman, as in certain African tribes to-day, over which tribes this fact has given them the mastery. Primeval woman, all attainable evidence goes to show, started more nearly equal in the race, but became the inferior of man, when periods of child-bearing rendered her helpless and forced her to look to him for assistance, support, and protection.
When the struggle for existence was in its lowest and most brutal form, and man respected nothing but force, the disabled member of society, if man, was disposed of by stab or blow; if woman, and valuable as breeder of fresh fighters, simply reduced to slavery and passive obedience. Marriage in any modern sense was unknown. A large proportion of female infants were killed at birth. Battle, with its recurring periods of flight or victory, made it essential that every tribe should free itself from all impedimenta. It was easier to capture women by force than to bring them up from infancy, and thus the childhood of the world meant a state in which the child had little place, save as a small, fierce animal, whose development meant only a change from infancy and its helplessness to boyhood and its capacity for fight.
Out of this chaos of discordant elements, struggling unconsciously toward social form, emerged by slow degrees the tribe and the nation, the suggestions of institutions and laws and the first principles of the social state. Master and servant, employer and employed, became facts; and dim suspicions as to economic laws were penetrating the minds of the early thinkers. The earliest coherent thought on economic problems comes to us from the Greeks, among whom economic speculation had begun almost a thousand years before Christ. The problem of work and wages was even then forming,--the sharply accented difference between theirs and ours lying in the fact that for Greek and Roman and the earlier peoples in the Indies economic life was based upon slavery, accepted then as the foundation stone of the economic social system.
Up to the day when Greek thought on economic questions formulated, in Aristotle's "Politics" and "Economics," the first logical statement of principles, knowledge as to actual conditions for women is chiefly inferential. When a slave, she was like other slaves, regarded as soulless; and she still is, under Mohammedanism. As lawful wife she was physically restrained and repressed, and mentally far more so. A Greek matron was one degree higher than her servants; but her own sons were her masters, to whom she owed obedience. A striking illustration of this is given in the Odyssey. Telemachus, feeling that he has come to man's estate, invades the ranks of the suitors who had for years pressed about Penelope, and orders her to retire to her own apartments, which she does in silence. Yet she was honored above most, passive and prompt obedience being one of her chief charms.
Deep pondering brought about for Aristotle a view which verges toward breadth and understanding, but is perpetually vitiated by the fact that he regards woman as in no sense an individual existence. If all goes well and prosperously, women deserve no credit; if ill, they may gain renown through their husbands, the philosopher remarking: "Neither would Alcestis have gained such renown, nor Penelope have been deemed worthy of such praise, had they respectively lived with their husbands in prosperous circumstances; and it is the sufferings of Admetus and Ulysses which have given them everlasting fame."
This is Aristotle's view of women's share in the life they lived; yet gleams of something higher more than once came to him, and in the eighth chapter of the "Economics," he adds: "Justly to love her husband with reverence and respect, and to be loved in turn, is that which befits a wife of gentle birth, as to her intercourse with her own husband." Ulysses, in his address to Nausicaa, says:--
"There is no fairer thing Than when the lord and lady with one