Women Wage-Earners | Page 8

soul One home possess."
Aristotle, charmed at the picture, dilates on this "mutual concord of husband and wife, ... not the mere agreement upon servile matters, but that which is justly and harmoniously based on intellect and prudence."[2]
Side by side with this picture of a state known to a few only among the noblest, must be placed the lament of "Iphigenia in Tauris":
"The condition of women is worse than that of all human beings. If man is favored by fortune, he becomes a ruler, and wins fame on the battlefield; and if the gods have ordained him his fortune, he is the first to die a fair death among his people. But the joys of woman are narrowly compassed: she is given unasked, in marriage, by others, often to strangers; and when she is dragged away by the victor through the smoking ruins, there is none to rescue her."
Thucydides, who had already expressed the opinion quoted by many a modern Philistine,--"The wife who deserves the highest praise is she of whom one hears neither good nor evil outside her own house,"--anticipates a later verdict, in words that might have been the foundation of Iphigenia's lament:--
"Woman is more evil than the storm-tossed waves, than the heat of fire, than the fall of the wild cataract! If it was a god who created woman, wherever he may be, let him know that he is the unhappy author of the greatest ills."
This was a summary of the Greek view as a whole. Sparta trained her girls and boys alike in childhood; but the theories of Lycurgus, admirable at some points, were brutal and short-sighted at others, and Sparta demonstrated that the extinction of all desire for beauty or ease or culture brings with it as disastrous results as its extreme opposite.
It is Athens that sums up the highest product of Greek thought, and that represents a civilization which from the purely intellectual side has had no successor. Yet even here was almost absolute obtuseness and indifference, on the part of the aristocracy, to the intolerable bondage of the masses. "The people," as spoken of by their historians and philosophers, mean simply a middle class, the humblest member of which owned at least one slave. The slaves themselves, the real "masses," had no political or social existence more than the horses with which they were sent to the river to drink. In any scheme of political economy Aristotle's words, in the first book of the "Politics," were the keynote: "The science of the master reduces itself to knowing how to make use of the slave. He is the master, not because he is the owner of the man, but because he knows how to make use of his property."
In fact, according to this chivalrous philosopher, the man was the head of the family in three distinct capacities; for he says: "Now a freeman governs his slave in the manner the male governs the female, and in another manner the father governs his child; and these have the different parts of the soul within them, but in a different manner. Thus a slave can have no deliberative faculty; a woman but a weak one, a child an imperfect one."
That liberty could be their right appears to have been not even suspected. Yet out from these dumb masses of humanity, regarded less than brutes, toiling naked under summer sun or in winter cold, chained in mines, men and women alike, and when the whim came, massacred in troops, sounded at intervals a voice demanding the liberty denied. It was quickly stifled. The record is there for all to read; stifled again and again, from Drimakos the Chian slave to Spartacus at Rome, yet each protest from this unknown army of martyrs was one step onward toward the emancipation to come. In each revolution, however small, two parties confronted each other,--the people who wished to live by the labor of others, the people who wished to live by their own labor,--the former denying in word and deed the claim of the latter.
Such conditions, as we proved in our own experience of slavery, benumb spiritual perception and make clear vision impossible; and it is plain that if the mass of workers had neither political nor social place, woman, the slave of the slave, had even less. Her wage had never been fixed. That she had right to one had entered no imagination. To the end of Greek civilization a wage remained the right of free labor only. The slave, save by special permit of the master, had right only to bare subsistence; and though men and women toiled side by side, in mine or field or quarry, there was, even with the abolition of slavery, small betterment of the condition of women. The degradation of labor was so complete,