Women Wage-Earners | Page 9

even for the freeman, that the most pronounced aversion to taking a wage ruled among the entire educated class. Plato abhorred a sophist who would work for wages. A gift was legitimate, but pay ignoble; and the stigma of asking for and taking pay rested upon all labor. The abolition of slavery made small difference, for the taint had sunk in too deeply to be eradicated. A curse rested upon all labor; and even now, after four thousand years of vacillating progress and retrogression, it lingers still.
The ancients were, in the nature of things, all fighters. Even when slavery for both the Aryan and Semitic races ended, two orders still faced each other: aristocracy on the one side, claiming the fruits of labor; the freeman on the other, rebelling against injustice, and forming secret unions for his own protection,--the beginning of the co-operative principle in action.
Thus much for the Greek. Turn now to the second great civilization, the Roman. During the first centuries after the founding of Rome the Roman woman had no rights whatever, her condition being as abject as that of the Grecian. With the growth of riches and of power in the State, more social but still no legal freedom was accorded. The elder Cato complained of the allowing of more liberty, and urged that every father of a family should keep his wife in the proper state of servility; but in spite of this remonstrance, a movement for the better had begun. Under the Empire, woman acquired the right of inheritance, but she herself remained a minor, and could dispose of nothing without the consent of her guardian. Sir Henry Maine[3] calls attention to the institution known to the oldest Roman law as the "Perpetual Tutelage of Women," under which a female, though relieved from her parent's authority by his decease, continues subject through life. Various schemes were devised to enable her to defeat ancient rules; and by their theory of "Natural Law," the jurisconsults had evidently assumed the equality of the sexes as a principle of their code of equity.
Few more significant words or words more teeming with importance on the actual economic condition of women have ever been written than those of the great jurist whose name counts as almost final authority. "Ancient law," he writes, "subordinates the woman to her blood relations, while a prime phenomenon of modern jurisprudence has been her subordination to her husband." Under the modified laws as to marriage, he goes on to state, there came a time "when the situation of the Roman female, unmarried or married, became one of great personal and proprietary independence; for the tendency of the later law, as already hinted, was to reduce the power of the guardian to a nullity, while the form of marriage in fashion conferred on the husband no compensating superiority."
These were the final conditions for the Roman, whose power, sapped by long excesses, was even then trembling to its fall. Already the barbarians threatened them, and at various points had penetrated the Empire, showing to the amazed Romans morals absolutely opposed to their own. The German races contented themselves with one wife; and Tacitus wrote of them: "Their marriages are very strict. No one laughs at vice, nor is immorality regarded as a sign of good breeding. The young men marry late,--they marry equal in years and in health, and the strength of the parent is transmitted to the children."
This has a rosier aspect than facts warrant. For the Germans, as for other barbarians of that epoch, the patriarchal family was the social order, and the head of the family the lord of the community. Wives, daughters, and daughters-in-law were excluded from leadership, though in spite of this there is record of a woman as being occasionally at the head of a tribe,--a circumstance chronicled by Tacitus with much disgust.
While from the West this gigantic wave of powerful but uncultured life was flowing in, from the East had come another. Early Christianity had already established itself, and its ascetic teachings made another element in the contradictions of the time. Up to this date slavery had been the foundation of society, and any amelioration in the condition of women had applied only to the patrician class. The Carpenter of Nazareth set his seal upon the sacredness of labor, and taught first not only the rights but the immeasurable value of even the weakest human soul. Women were ardent converts to the new gospel. Hoping with all the wretched for redemption and deliverance from present evils, they became eager and devoted adherents. Their missionary zeal was a powerful agent in the early days of Christianity. "In the first enthusiasm of the Christian movement," says Principal Donaldson, in his notable article on "Women among the Early Christians," in the "Fortnightly Review,"