Women of the Romance Countries | Page 3

of consuls, but by the number of her husbands." Juvenal reports a Roman freedman as saying to his wife: "Leave the house at once and forever! You blow your nose too frequently. I desire a wife with a dry nose." When Christianity appeared, then, the marriage tie was held in slight consideration, and it was only after many centuries and by slow degrees that its sanctity was recognized, and its rights respected. While, under the Roman law, both men and women had been able to get a divorce with the same ease, the feudal idea, which gave all power into the hands of the men, made divorce an easy thing for the men alone, but this was hardly an improvement, as the marriage relation still lacked stability.
It must not be supposed that all the medi?val ideas respecting marriage and divorce and the condition of women in general, which have just been explained, had to do with any except those who belonged in some way to the privileged classes, for such was not the case. At that time, the great mass of the people in Europe--men and women--were ignorant to the last degree, possessing little if any sense of delicacy or refinement, and were utterly uncouth. For the most part, they lived in miserable hovels, were clothed in a most meagre and scanty way, and were little better than those beasts of burden which are compelled to do their master's bidding. Among these people, rights depended quite largely upon physical strength, and women were generally misused. To the lord of the manor it was a matter of little importance whether or not the serfs upon his domain were married in due form or not; marriage as a sacrament had little to do with these hewers of wood and drawers of water, and they were allowed to follow their own impulses quite generally, so far as their relations with each other were concerned. The loose moral practices of the time among the more enlightened could be but a bad example for the benighted people of the soil; consequently, throughout all classes of society there was a degree of corruption and immorality which is hardly conceivable to-day.
So far as education was concerned, there were but a few who could enjoy its blessings, and these were, for the most part, men. Women, in their inferior and unimportant position, rarely desired an education, and more rarely received one. Of course, there were conspicuous exceptions to this rule; here and there, a woman working under unusually favorable circumstances was really able to become a learned person. Such cases were extremely rare, however, for the true position of woman in society was far from being understood. Schools for women were unknown; indeed, there were few schools of any kind, and it was only in the monasteries that men were supposed to know how to read and write. Even kings and queens were often without these polite accomplishments, and the right of the sword had not yet been questioned. Then, it must be taken into consideration that current ideas regarding education in Italy in this early time were quite different from what they are to-day. As there were no books, book learning was impossible, and the old and yellowed parchments stored away in the libraries of the monasteries were certainly not calculated to arouse much public enthusiasm. Education at this time was merely some sort of preparation for the general duties of life, and the nature of this preparation depended upon a number of circumstances.
To make the broadest and most general classification possible, the women of that time might be divided into ladies of high degree and women of the people. The former were naturally fitted by their training to take their part in the spectacle of feudal life with proper dignity; more than that, they were often skilled in all the arts of the housewife, and many times they showed themselves the careful stewards of their husbands' fortunes. The women of the people, on the other hand, were not shown any special consideration on account of their sex, and were quite generally expected to work in the fields with the men. Their homes were so unworthy of the name that they required little care or thought, and their food was so coarse that little time was given to its preparation. Simple-minded, credulous, superstitious in the extreme, with absolutely no intellectual uplift of any kind, and nothing but the sordid drudgery of life with which to fill the slow-passing hours, it is no wonder that the great mass of both the men and the women of this time were hopelessly swallowed up in a many-colored sea of ignorance, from which, with the march of the centuries, they have been making slow efforts to rise. So the lady sat