Education: How Old The New

by James J. Walsh

CYCLES OF FEMININE EDUCATION AND INFLUENCE [Footnote 15]

[Footnote 15: The material for this was gathered for a lecture on the History of Education delivered for the Academy of the Sacred Heart, Kenwood, Albany, N. Y., and St. Joseph's College, Chestnut Hill, Philadelphia, Pa. Very nearly in its present form the address was delivered before the League for the Civic Education of Women, at the Colony Club, New York City, in the winter of 1910.]

Nothing is commoner than to suppose that what we are doing at the present day is an improvement over whatever they were doing at any time in the past in the same line. We were rather proud during the nineteenth century to talk of that century as the century of evolution. Evolutionary terms of all kinds found their way even into everyday speech and a very general impression was produced that we are in the midst of progress so rapid and unerring, that even from decade to decade it is possible to trace the wonderful advance that man is making. We look back on the early nineteenth century as quite hopelessly backward. They had no railroads, no street-car lines, no public street lighting, no modes of heating buildings that gave any comfort in the cold weather, no elevators, and when we compare our present comfortable condition with the discomforts of that not so distant period, we feel how much evolution has done for us, and inevitably [{200}] conclude that just as much progress as has been made in transportation and in comfort, has also been made in the things of the mind, and, above all, in education, so that, while the millennium is not yet here, it cannot surely be far off; and men are attaining at last, with giant strides, the great purpose that runs through the ages.

Probably in nothing is the assumption that we are doing something far beyond what was ever accomplished before, more emphatically expressed than in the ordinary opinions as to what is being done by and for women in our generation. We have come to think that at last in the course of evolution woman is beginning to come into something of her rights, she is at last getting her opportunity for the higher education and for professional education so far as she wants it, and as a consequence is securing that influence which, as the equal of man, she should have in the world. Now there is just one thing with regard to this very general impression which deserves to be called particularly to attention. This is not the first time in the world's history, nor the first by many times, that woman has had the opportunity for the higher education and has taken it very well. Neither is it the first time that she has insisted on having an influence in public affairs, but on the contrary, we can readily find a very curious series of cycles of feminine education and of the exercise of public influence by women, with intervals of almost negative phases in these matters that [{201}] are rather difficult to explain. Let us before trying to understand what the feministic movement means in our own time and, above all, before trying to sum up its ultimate significance for the race, study some of the corresponding movements in former times.

The most interesting phase of the woman movement in history is that which occurred at the time of the Renaissance. Because it is typical of the phases of the feministic movement at all times, and then, too, because it is closer to us and the records of it are more complete, it will be extremely interesting to follow out some of the details of it. It may be necessary for that to make a little excursion into the history of the period. During the early fifteenth century the Turks were bothering Constantinople so much, that Greek scholars, rendered uncomfortable at home, began making their way over into Italy rather frequently, bringing with them precious manuscripts and remains of old Greek art. Besides commerce aroused by the Crusades was making the intercourse between East and West much more intimate than it had been and, as a result, a taste for Greek letters and art was beginning to be felt in certain portions of Italy. When Constantinople fell, about the middle of the fifteenth century, the prestige of the old capital of the Greek empire was lost, and scholars abandoned it for Italy in large numbers. This is the time of the Renaissance. The rebirth that the word [{202}] signifies, is not a rebirth of art and architecture and literature into the modern world, as if there had been nothing before, for Gothic art and architecture and literature is quite as wonderful, if not more so, than anything that came after, and there are good authorities who insist that the Renaissance hurt, rather than helped, Europe. The Renaissance was a rebirth of Greek ideas and ideals in aesthetics into the European world, and while we may not agree with Sir Henry Maine that whatever lives and moves in the intellectual world is Greek in origin, there is no doubt that Greek can be the source of most wonderful incentive and such it proved to be during the fifteenth century.

Men and women began to study Greek and they paid much more attention as a consequence to the Latin classics modelled on the Greek, and so the New Learning, the so-called humanities, became the centre of intellectual interest. They were studied first in private schools, but before long a place for these new studies was demanded in the curriculum of the universities. The universities, however, were occupied with the so-called seven liberal arts, which were really scientific studies. There was geometry, astronomy, music, grammar, rhetoric, logic and metaphysics, with considerable ethics and political science, so that they resembled in many ways our modern universities as they have been transformed since the re-introduction of scientific studies into them. [{203}] The university faculties were content and conservative after the fashion of universities ever, and they quite naturally refused to entertain the notion of such a radical change as the introduction of classical studies into the curriculum. This is just exactly what the classical universities of the early nineteenth century did when they were asked by scientific enthusiasts to re-introduce scientific studies into the curriculum, which in the course of 800 years had come to be made up almost exclusively of classical studies. In this curious way does history repeat itself.

Unable to obtain a place for the studies in humanism in the universities, ruling princes and wealthy members of the nobility proceeded to found special schools for these subjects. In these schools without the traditions of the past, the women asked and obtained the privilege of studying. There had come a noteworthy change in intellectual interest, a novelty was introduced into education. Whenever that happens woman always asks and always obtains the privilege of the higher education. During the Renaissance period she proceeded to show her intellectual power. Many of the women of the Renaissance became distinguished for scholarship. Perhaps one thing should be noted with regard to that. Their reputation for scholarship was largely confined to their younger years. They were more precocious, or applied themselves better to their studies, and accordingly knew more of the classics [{204}] at twenty than their male relatives who had the same opportunities. Indeed we hear of them as brilliant scholars at sixteen and seventeen and eighteen. They took part in Latin plays that were brilliantly performed before the nobility, higher ecclesiastics, cardinals and even the Popes. They were brilliant in music, in the languages and in their taste for art. Later on in life we do not hear so much of them. They evidently were ready to leave the serious work of scholarship to the men and content themselves with being enlightened patrons of literature, beneficent advocates of the arts, liberal customers of the artistic geniuses of the time. Above all, we find no great original works from them. They are charming appreciators but not good inventors--at this time, of course.

While they do not occupy themselves with dry-as-dust scholarship, there is no doubt at all that much of the glory of the Renaissance, with its great revivals in art and letters, is due to the women of the time. It was they who insisted on the building of the town houses, finely decorated and with charming objects of art in them. It was for them that the artists of the time made many beautiful things. They were very often the patrons who enabled churches to obtain from artists the wonderful paintings of the time. The sculptors made for them many charming pieces of bric-a-brac. The artists laid out beautiful gardens that we are only just beginning to [{205}] appreciate again now that our taste for outdoor life is being properly cultivated. They bought the books that were issued by the Manutiuses at Venice. Isabella D'Este had a standing order that all the books issued from this great Venetian press should be sent to her. Books were costly treasures in these times. A single volume of one of these incunabula of printing so beautifully issued from Manutius's printing establishment was worth nearly one hundred dollars in our money.

The women designed their own dresses. They encouraged the miniature painting of the time and the illumination of books and occasionally took up these arts themselves. They fostered the development of textile industries, lacemaking and the various kinds of figured cloth, so that we have some of the most beautiful inventions in this kind at this time. Tapestry-making took on a new vigor and beauty because of their patronage. They wanted beautiful glass, and new periods of marvellous development of glass-tinting and making were ushered in. As can be readily understood these are the sort of things that men are not interested in, and whenever in the history of the race we find a period of development of this kind we can be sure that educated women are responsible for it. These women of the Renaissance decorated their homes beautifully, had them built substantially, with wonderful taste and, above all, had them set charmingly in the Italian [{206}] Renaissance gardens that are so deservedly admired.

While they were thus occupied with the beautiful things of life some of them wrote poetry that has lived (Lucrezia Tornabuoni dei Medici, Vittoria Colonna), some of them indulged in fiction (Marguerite of Navarre) that is still read, and a great epoch of fiction-writing responded to their interest as readers; some of them mixed in politics and proved their power, at times some of them acted as regents for their sons (Forli, D'Este), and succeeded magnificently, so that we have every phase of development of woman's power. There can be no doubt that at this period woman was afforded every opportunity for the development of her intellectual life, and that she took her opportunities with great success.

We have from this time probably the names of more distinguished women than from any other corresponding period in the world's history. There was a wonderful group of women at the Court of Giovanna of Naples in the first half of the fifteenth century, because Naples got her Renaissance impulses first, being closer by sea to Constantinople and having many Greek traditions from the old days when Southern Italy was Magna Graecia. Then there are a series of finely educated women connected with the Medici household at Florence. The mother of the great Lorenzo is the best known of them, and her poems show real literary power. The D'Este family is [{207}] better known generally, and then there were the Gonzagas, some of the women of the house of Forli, Vittoria Colonna, whose influence over art and artists shows her genius quite as well as does her writing, and many others. Everywhere women are on a footing with men as regards the intellectual life. Everywhere they direct conversations seriously with regard to literary and artistic subjects, and, indeed, it is they who, in what we would now call salons, serve to make intellectual subjects fashionable, and so concentrate attention on them and secure the patronage so necessary for artists and writers if they are to subsist while doing their work.

It would be a great mistake, however, to think for a moment that it was in Italy alone that such opportunities for higher education and intellectual influence were allowed to women. Just as the Renaissance movement itself spread throughout Europe affecting the education, the literature, the art, the architecture, the arts and crafts of the time and the nations, so did the feministic movement spread, and everywhere we find striking expressions of it. In France, for instance, the Renaissance can be traced very easily in letters and architecture, and was not much behind Italy in feminine education. Queen Anne of Bretagne organized the Court School of the time, and interest in literature became the fashion of the hour. Marguerite of Navarre is a woman of the Renaissance, and so is Renée of Anjou, while the name [{208}] of Louise La Cordière shows, for la cordière means the cord-wainer's daughter, that higher education for women was not confined to the nobility. Mary Queen of Scots, educated in France, whose letters and whose poetry with occasional excursions into Latin, show us how thoroughly educated she was,--it must not be forgotten that she was put into prison at twenty-four and never again got out,--is a typical woman of the French Renaissance. Sichel has told the story of these women of France very well, and those who want to know the details of the feministic movement of the time should turn to him.

In Spain, too, the Renaissance movement made itself felt in every department. Most of Spain's cathedrals were finished during the Renaissance time, and some of the work is the admiration of the world. Spain's literary Renaissance came a little later, but when it did it contributed at least two great names to the world literature--Cervantes and Calderon. The women of the nation were also affected, and Queen Isabella was a deeply intellectual woman of many interests. Spain contributed to the feministic movement probably the greatest name in the history of feminine intellectuality in St. Teresa. How much of sympathy there was with this great expression of feminine intelligence will be best appreciated from the fact that Spanish ecclesiastics talk of Teresa as their Spanish Doctor of the Church, and that in Rome there is amongst the statues [{209}] of the Doctors and the Fathers in the Church one woman figure, that of St. Teresa, with the title mater spiritualium--mother of spiritual things. Her books, profoundly admired by the Spaniards, Were the favorite reading for such extremely different minds as Fénelon and Bossuet, and have been the storehouse ever since for German mystics. They were beautifully translated by Crashaw into English, and have been the subject of great interest during the present feministic movement, especially since George Eliot's reference to her in the preface of "Middlemarch."

In England the Renaissance did not affect art much, nor architecture, though it did profoundly stir the men of letters, and the great Elizabethan period of English literature is really an expression of the Renaissance in England. Here almost more than anywhere else in Europe the women shared in the uplift and devotion to things intellectual that developed. Queen Mary was a well-educated woman, Queen Elizabeth read Greek as well as Latin easily, Lady Jane Grey preferred her lessons in Greek, under Roger Ascham, to going to balls and routs and hunting parties, and was a blue-stocking in the veriest sense of the term. It has been hinted that it was perhaps this that disturbed her feminine common sense and allowed her to be led so easily into the foolish conspiracy in which she lost her life. The losing of one's head in things deeply intellectual may sometimes mean the losing of it [{210}] more literally when crowns are at stake. There are many other names of noble women of this time that might be mentioned and that are well known for their intellectual development. That the movement did not confine itself to the higher nobility we can be sure, for when the better classes do ill they are imitated, but so also are they imitated when they do well. Besides, the story that we have of Margaret More and her friends shows that the middle classes were also stirred to interest in things intellectual.

The usual objection, when this story of the Renaissance and the feministic movement connected with it is told, if the narrator would urge that here was an earlier period of feminine education than ours, is that, after all, the education of this period was confined to only a few of the nobility. This is not true, and there are many reasons why it is not true. First, the upper classes are always imitated by the others, and if there was a fashion for education we can be sure that it spread. We have not the records of many educated women, but those that we have all make it clear that education was not confined to a few, and that those of the middle classes who wanted it could readily secure it. There were probably as many women to the population of Europe at that time enjoying the higher education as there are proportionately in America at the present time. Europe had but a small population altogether in the fifteenth century. There [{211}] were probably less than 4,000,000 of people in England at the end, even, of the sixteenth century. In Elizabeth's time when the census was taken, because of the Spanish Armada, these were the figures. There were not many more people in all Europe then than there are now in England. If out of these few, comparatively, we can pick out the group of distinguished women whom I have just spoken of, then there must have been a great many sharing in the privileges of the higher education. [Footnote 16]

[Footnote 16: What an interesting reflection on the notion of supposed progress is the fact pointed out by Ambassador Bryce in his address on Progress (Atlantic July, 1907), that while out of 40,000,000 of people there were so many genius men and women accomplishing work that the world will never willingly let die, we with a population ten times as great cannot show anything like as many. Most of the great names that are most familiar to the modern mind come in a single century,--the sixteenth. At the present time the western civilization then represented by 40,000,000 has near to 500,000,000 of people. We make no pretension at all, however, to the claim that we have more great men than they had. We should have ten times as many, but on the contrary we are quite willing to concede that we have very few compared to their number and almost none, if indeed there are any, who measure up to the high standards of achievement of that time more than four centuries ago. It is thoughts of this kind that show one how much we must correct the ordinarily accepted notions with regard to progress and inevitable development, and each generation improving on its predecessors and the like, that are so commonly diffused but that represent no reality in history at all.]

It is true that it was, as a rule, only the daughters of the nobility who received the opportunity for the higher education, or at least obtained it with facility. It must not be forgotten, however, just what the nobility of Italy, and, [{212}] indeed, of other countries also, represented. The conditions there are most typical and it is worth while studying them out. The Medici, for instance, of Florence, whose women folk were so well educated, were members of the gilds of the apothecaries, as their name indicates, who made a fortune on drugs and precious stones and beautiful stuffs from the East, and then became the bankers of Europe. Noblemen were created because of success in war, success in politics, success in diplomacy, but also because of success in commerce, and occasionally success in the arts. Not many educators and artists were among them any more than in our time, because they were not, as a rule, possessed of the fortune properly to keep up the dignity of a patent of nobility. The daughters of the nobility of Italy, however, were not very different, certainly their origin was very similar to that of the daughters of the wealthy men of America, who are, after all, the only ones who can take advantage of the higher education in our time. We must not forget that, compared to the whole population, the number of women securing the higher education is very limited.

To think that the Renaissance with this provision of ample opportunities for feminine education was the first epoch of this kind in the world's history would be to miss sadly a host of historical facts and their significance. Unfortunately history has been so written from the standpoint of [{213}] man and his interests, that this phase of history is not well known and probably less understood. History has been too much a mere accumulation of facts with regard to war, diplomacy and politics. While we have known much of heroes and battles, we have known little of education, of art, of artistic achievement of all kinds. We have known even less of popular movements. We have known almost nothing of the great uplift of the masses which created the magnificent arts and crafts of the Middle Ages, that we are just beginning to admire so much once more, and our admiration of them is the best measure of our own serious artistic development. Kings and warriors and kings' mistresses and ugly diplomacy and rotten politics, have occupied the centre of the stage in history. Surely we are coming to a time when other matters, the human things and not the animal instincts, will be the main subject of history; when fighting and sex and acquisitiveness and selfishness shall give place in history to mutual aid, uplift, unselfishness and thoughtfulness for others.

As soon as history is studied from the standpoint of the larger human interests and not that of political history, it is easy to find not only traces but detailed stories of feminine education at many times. Before the Renaissance the great phase of education had been that of the universities. The first of the universities was founded down at Salerno around a medical school, the [{214}] second that of Bologna around a law school and the third that of Paris with a school of philosophy and theology as a nucleus. This seems to be about the way that man's interests manifest themselves in an era of development. First, he is occupied mainly with his body and its needs; then his property and its rights, and finally, as he lifts himself up to higher things, his relations to his fellow-man and to his Creator come to be profound vital interests. Such, at least, is the story of the origin of the universities in the thirteenth century.

The surprise for us who are considering the story of feminine education and influence is what happened at Salerno. Here some twenty miles back from Naples, in a salubrious climate, not far from the Mediterranean, where old Greek traditions had maintained themselves, for Southern Italy was called Magna Graecia, where the intercourse with the Arabs and with the northern shores of Africa and with the Near East, brought the medical secrets of many climes to a focus, the first modern medical school came into existence. In the department of women's diseases women professors taught, wrote text-books and evidently were considered, in every sense of the word, co-ordinate professors in the university. We have the text-book of one of them, Trotula, who is hailed as the founder of the Salernitan School of Women Physicians, the word school being used in the same sense as when we talk of a school of [{215}] painting, and not at all in the sense of our modern women's medical schools. Trotula was the wife of the professor of medicine at the university, Plataerius I, and the mother of another professor at the university, Plataerius II, herself a professor like them.

There are many other names of women professors at the University of Salerno in this department. Women, however, were not alone allowed to practise this single phase of medicine, but we have licenses granted to women in Naples, of which at this time Salerno was the university, to practise both medicine and surgery. It seems to have been quite common, I should say, at least as common as in our own time for women to study and practise medicine, and their place in the university and the estimation in which their books were held, show us that all the difficulties in the way of professional education for women had been removed and that they were accepted by their masculine colleagues on a footing of absolute equality.

Probably the most interesting feature of this surprising and unexpected development of professional education for women is to be found in the conditions out of which Salerno developed. The school was originally a monastic school under the influence of the Benedictine monks from Monte Cassino not far away. The great Archbishop Alphanus I, who was the most prominent patron and who had been a professor there, was himself [{216}] a Benedictine monk. How intimately the relations of the monks to the school were maintained can be realized from the fact that when the greatest medical teacher and writer of Salerno, Constantine Africanus, wanted to have leisure to write his great works in medicine, he retired from his professorship to the monastery of Monte Cassino. His great friend Desiderius was the abbot there, and his influence was still very strong at Salerno. Desiderius afterwards became Pope, and continued his beneficent patronage of this Southern Italian university. In a word, it was in the midst of the most intimate ecclesiastical and monastic influence that this handing over of the department of women's diseases to women in a great teaching institution occurred. The wise old monks were thoroughly practical, and though eminently conservative, knew the needs of mankind very well, and worked out this solution of one series of problems.

When the next great university, that of Bologna, was founded, it developed, as I have suggested, around a law school. Irnerius revived the study of the old Roman law, and his teaching of it attracted so much attention that students from all over Europe flocked to Bologna. Law is different from medicine in many respects. The right of women to study medicine will readily be granted, their place in a system of medical education is manifest. With regard to law, however, there can scarcely be grave question as to the [{217}] advisability of woman studying it unless economic conditions force her to it. This was particularly true at a time when woman could own no property and had no rights until she married. In spite of the many inherent improbabilities of this development, the law school was scarcely opened at Bologna before women became students in it. Probably Irnerius' daughter and some of her friends were the first students, but after a time others came and the facilities seem to have been quite open to them. As out of the law school the university gradually developed, opportunities for study in the other higher branches were accorded to women at Bologna. We have the story of their success in mathematics, in philosophy, in music and in astronomy.

According to a well-known and apparently well authenticated tradition, one distinguished woman student of Bologna, Maria Di Novella, achieved such success in mathematics about the middle of the thirteenth century that she was appointed professor of mathematics. Apparently the faculty of Bologna had no qualms of educational conscience nor betook themselves to such halfway measures as one of our modern faculties, which accords a certificate to a woman that she has passed better in the mathematical tripos than the Senior Wrangler, though they do not accord her the Senior Wranglership. The story goes on to say that Signorina Di Novella, knowing that she was pretty, and fearing that her [{218}] beauty would disturb the minds, at least, of her male students, arranged to lecture from behind a curtain. This would seem to indicate that the blue-stockings of the olden time could be as surpassingly modest as they were intelligent. I remember once telling this story before a convent audience. The dear old Mother Superior, who had known me for many years, ventured to ask me afterwards, "Did you say that she was young?" and I said yes, according to the tradition; "and handsome?" and I nodded the affirmative, "Well, then," she said, "I do not believe the rest of the story." But then, after all, what do dear old Mothers Superior know about the world or its ways, or about handsome young women or their ways, or about the significance of traditions which serve to show us that even pretty, intelligent women can be as modestly retiring and as ready to conceal their charms as they are to be charmingly courteous and careful of the feelings of others?

It was not alone in law and mathematics, however, that women were given opportunities for the higher education and even for professional work at the University of Bologna. In medicine, as well as in law, women reached distinction. The first great professor of anatomy of modern times is Mondino, whose text-book on dissection, published at the beginning of the fourteenth century, continued to be used in the medical schools for two centuries. One of his assistants was [{219}] Alessandra Giliani, one of the two university prosectors in anatomy. At the Surgeon General's Library in Washington, in one of the early printed editions of Mondino's work, the frontispiece shows a young woman making the dissection before him preparatory to his lecture. To her, according to an old Italian chronicle, we owe the invention of methods of varnishing and painting the tissues of cadavers so that they would resemble more their appearance in the living state, that they might be preserved for further use, thus avoiding to some extent the necessity for constant repetition of the deterrent work of dissection, even more deterrent at that time.

It is curiously interesting to find that another great improvement in the teaching of anatomy, invented in Italy nearly four centuries later, came also from a woman teaching at an Italian university, Madame Manzolini. The tradition connecting these two women is unbroken. There is not a century from the thirteenth to the eighteenth in which there were not distinguished women professors at the universities of Italy, and, therefore, also students in large numbers.

Just how many women students there were we do not know. It might seem to be a comparatively easy problem to find out just how many there were at any given time by looking up the registers of the universities. Once in Bologna itself I got hold of the old university registers, confident that now I would learn just what was [{220}] the proportion of women students at the university. I was utterly disappointed, however, Italian mothers had, so far as the settlement of this question is concerned, the unfortunate habit occasionally of giving boys' names to girls, and girls' names to boys. They called their children after favorite saints. A girl might well be called Antonio, for the feminine form was not in common use in earlier times. Many boys had for first name Maria. It used to be the custom in Venice for every child, no matter what its sex, to receive from the Church the two names Maria Giovanni, and then the parents might add what other names they pleased. The names of royalty, with their frequent use of mingled masculine and feminine names, show how much confusion can be worked to any scheme for the determination of the sex of students at the old universities by this, for us, unfortunate habit.

Curiously enough, it was during the thirteenth century when the development of feminine education in the early university period was at its height, that certain changes in the domestic economy of the Bolognese are worthy of notice. Two kinds of prepared food became popular, if they were not, indeed, both invented at this time. One of them, bearing the classic name Bologna, is still with us, has spread throughout the world, and is likely to continue to be an important article of food for many centuries more. Another form of prepared food was a sort of dessert called Bologna [{221}] pudding, prepared from cereals, and which can still be purchased in Bologna, though foreigners, as a rule, do not care much for it. These two articles of food modified materially the preparation of food for meals at this time. It was possible to buy both of these, as now, ready made, and so the housewife was spared the bother and trouble and expenditure of time required for this work. We have here one phase of the origin of the delicatessen stores. This sort of change in domestic economy has always been noted whenever women have gone out of the home for other occupations and have become something less--or more--than the housewives and mothers they were before. Such changes in the dietary, however, in the direction of ready-made food are never popular with men. One German historical writer has been unkind enough to say that this is one of the reasons why the higher education gradually became much less popular, or at least attracted less attention than before. "Women want things for themselves, and if they are opposed insist on getting them," is the way this cynic Teuton puts it. "If, after a time, however, having got what they want, they find that the men do not like them to have it, they gradually abandon it." According to him Bologna and Bologna pudding saved the stooping over the kitchen range, or whatever took its place in those days, and gave all classes of women more opportunity for intellectual development or at least [{222}] for occupation with things different from household duties, but after a time the more or less resentful attitude of the men brought about a change. However that may be is hard to say.

Another interesting feature of the history of these times connected in some way with feminine education or, at least, with feminine occupation with other things besides their households, was a great devotion to a particular breed of pet dogs of which one hears much in the accounts of the life at Bologna at this time. Here, once more, the German cynic has had his say. He has suggested that, whenever women became occupied with things outside their home, with a consequent diminution in the number of children, they are almost sure to find an outlet for their affections in devotion to dogs and other pets. Apparently he would suggest that they literally go to the dogs. It is very curious that just during this thirteenth century, when feminine education at Bologna is at its height, one hears so much of these pets. At other times in the world's history, when women have taken to intellectual interests and especially when there has been a fall in the birth-rate, this same attention to pet animals is worthy of study.

After the thirteenth century there seems to have been a reaction against these pets. It is to be hoped that there is no connection between this and the prepared foods spoken of, but the decline in the popularity of pets and of woman's [{223}] occupation with intellectual interests went hand in hand. For all of this I am indebted to German authorities whose attitude towards feminine education may somewhat prejudice them and, indeed, probably does so, but these things are only mentioned as showing certain views that are held. The interesting thing for us is that after a period of somewhat more than a century of rather intense interest on the part of the women in nearly every phase of the intellectual life, there is then a diminution of interest, so that by the end of the fourteenth century women, even where feminine intellectual life was vigorous, are occupied almost without exception as they were before the university period, mainly with domestic concerns.

While feminine education was so common in the ecclesiastically ruled universities of Italy, the custom did not spread in Western Europe. The reason is not far to seek. All of the western universities owe their origins to Paris. Oxford was due to a withdrawal of English students from Paris, Cambridge to a similar withdrawal from Oxford. Many of the Scotch universities are grandchildren of Paris. All of the French universities are direct descendants, except Montpellier. The Spanish universities have a similar relation. The experience with feminine education at Paris had been unfortunate. The Héloïse and Abélard incident came in a formative stage of the university. It settled unfavorably the [{224}] whole question of feminine attendance at universities for the west. It seems a small thing to have such a wide and far-reaching influence, but it is very often on little things that the success or failure of great social movements of any kind depends. We have practically no record of any relaxation of university regulations in this matter in the west. Perhaps the Teutonic character was opposed to it, perhaps the Teutonic women were less anxious for it, being more occupied with Church and children and their home, but there was none, and its absence is responsible for the feeling so common among us, that now for the first time in the world women are enjoying the opportunity for the higher education.

Even the university epoch, however, is not the first phase of opportunities for the education of woman in modern history. Far from it, indeed, we can find much more than traces of a feminist movement in other centuries before this, and, indeed, in many of them. When Charlemagne established schools for his people and invited Alcuin, the English monk, to develop educational institutions for his people, the first and most important school was that of the imperial palace where Alcuin himself taught. In this the women of Paris were given opportunities quite as well as the men; indeed, they seem to have taken a more vivid interest and their example seems to have been the highest incentive for many of the men to take up a work so foreign to their natures, [{225}] for as yet they had all the barbarous instincts of their Gothic ancestors, only slightly tamed and modified by two or three centuries of gradual uplift and religious training of character. There are letters from the women of the palace, and especially Charlemagne's daughter, to Alcuin, discussing phases of his teaching and suggesting problems and questions with regard to the matters which he had been making the subject of his instruction.

It would be easy to think that this incident of the Palace School did not mean very much and that its passing influence did not make itself felt widely nor for long. The state of education at this time must not be forgotten. Only the clergy, as a rule, had leisure for it. All the rest of the world were engaged either in the frequent wars or in a tireless struggle for subsistence as farmers, merchants and craftsmen. The nobility neglected education just as much as the upper classes always do, though there were certain fashions which gained a foothold and that seem to show that they had some interest. Many a nobleman of the mediaeval centuries, however, boasted that he could not sign his own name. He was rather proud of the fact that he had not lowered himself to mere book knowledge. There were large numbers of the clergy and the monks, however, and these were the scholars of the period.

There were also at this time large numbers of religious women, and these in their leisure hours [{226}] spent much time at educational matters and some of them accomplished lasting results. The mother of the family, the court dame, the wife of the nobleman, whose castle was much more the home of work than it has ever been at any time since, had but little leisure for the intellectual life. The nuns devoted themselves to beautiful handiwork, to the composition as well as the transcription of books and to the cultural interests generally.

It has always been true, as a rule, that the woman who accomplished anything in the intellectual life must be either a celibate, or at most, the mother of but a child or two. The mother of a large family, unless she is extremely exceptional, cannot be expected to be productive in the intellectual life. She has not the time for original work, and still less for the filing process necessary for appropriate expression. There are rare exceptions, but they only prove the rule. One of the two forms of production apparently women must give up to devote themselves to the other. The nuns in the Middle Ages, in the retirement of their convents, gave themselves much more than we are likely to think possible, to literary and scientific production. Within the past year I have published sketches of two distinguished women of the tenth and twelfth centuries whose books show us the intellectual interests of the women of this time. Only that women were having opportunities for mental development [{227}] these would not have been written, and as they were written for women, it is evident that those interests were quite widely diffused. One of these two authors comes in what is sometimes called the darkest of the Dark Ages, the tenth century; the other was born in the eleventh. They serve to show how much more intense than we are likely to think was the interest of the time in things intellectual. Without printing and without any proper means of publication, somehow these women succeeded in making literary monuments that have outlasted the wreck and ruin of time, and that have been of sufficient interest to mankind to be preserved among vicissitudes which seemed surely destined to destroy them.

One of the two ladies was Roswitha, or Hrotswitha, a nun of Gandersheim, in what is now Hanover, who in the tenth century wrote a series of comedies in imitation of Terence, probably not meant to be played but to be read. She says in the preface that the reason for writing them was that so many religious were reading the indecent literature of classical Rome, with the excuse that it was necessary for the cultivation of style or for the completion of their education, that she wanted and had striven to write something moral and Christian to replace the older writings. That preface of itself ought to be enough to show us that in the nunneries along the Rhine, of which we know that there were many, there must have been a much more [{228}] widespread and ardent interest in literature, and, above all, in classic literature, than we have had any idea of until recently. Hrotswitha, to give her her Saxon name, was only a young woman of twenty-five when she wrote the series of stories and plays thus prefaced, and while her style, of course, does not compare with the classics, worse Latin has often been written by people who were sure that they knew more about Latinity than any nun of the obscure tenth century could possibly have known.

The other woman writer of about this time was Hildegarde, the abbess of a monastery along the Rhine, born at the end of the eleventh century, who wrote a text-book of medicine, which was the most important document in the history of medicine in this century. The nuns were the nurses and the hospital attendants and in the country places, to a great extent, the physicians of this time. In the cities there were regular practitioners of medicine, but the infirmarian of a monastery cared for the ailing monks and the people on the monastery estates when ill, and often they were many in number, and the infirmarian of a convent did the same thing for the sisters and for at least the women folk among the people of the neighborhood. It was in order to gather together and preserve the medical traditions of the monasteries and convents that Hildegarde, who afterwards came to be known as St. Hildegarde, wrote her volume on medicine. It has been recently [{229}] issued in the collection of old writings called "Migne's Patrologia," and has drawn many praises from historical critics for the amount of information which it contains. These two, Hroswitha and Hildegarde, furnish abundant evidence of the intellectual life of the convents of this old time and more than hint at how much has been lost that might have helped us to a larger knowledge of them.

With this in mind it will be easier to understand a preceding phase of the history of feminine education in Europe. The first nation that was converted to Christianity in a body, so that Christian ideas and ideals had a chance for assertion and application in the life of the people, was Ireland. Christianity when introduced into Rome met with the determined opposition of old paganism. After the migration of nations and the coming down of the barbarians upon the Roman Empire, there was little opportunity for Christianity to assert itself until after these Teutonic peoples had been lifted out of their barbarism to a higher plane of civilization. In Ireland, however, not only did conversion to Christianity convert the whole people, but it came to a people who possessed already a high degree of civilization and culture, a literature that we have been learning to think more and more of in recent years, many arts, and the development of science, in the form of medicine at least, to a high degree. The law and music, the language and the literature of [{230}] the early Irish all show us a highly cultivated people. When Christianity came to them, then, education became its watchword. Schools were opened everywhere on the island. Ireland became The Island of Saints and of Scholars, and literally thousands of students flocked from England and the mainland to these Irish schools. The first and the greatest of these was that founded by St. Patrick himself at Armagh. During the century after his death there were probably at one time as many as 5,000 students at Armagh. Only next in importance to this great school of the Irish apostle was that of his great feminine co-worker, St. Brigid, who did for the women of Ireland what St. Patrick had been doing for the men. It is probable that there were 8,000 students at Kildare, Brigid's great school, at one time. It is curious to think that there should have been something like co-education 1,500 years ago, and, above all, in Ireland, but Kildare seems to have had a system not unlike that in vogue at many of our universities in the modern time. The male and female students were thoroughly segregated,--may I say this is not the last time in the world's history that segregation was the distinguishing trait of co-education,--but the teachers of the men at Kildare seem also to have lectured to the women. The men occupied an entirely subsidiary position, however; even the bishops of Kildare in Brigid's time were appointed on her recommendation. For centuries [{231}] afterwards the Abbess of Kildare, Brigid's successor, had the privilege of a commanding voice in the selection of the bishop. The school at Kildare was conducted mainly by and for women, though there were men in the neighboring monastery who taught both classes of pupils.

Perhaps the most interesting feature of the education of Kildare is that it was not concerned exclusively, nor even for the major part apparently, with book-learning. The book-learning of the Irish schools was celebrated. Down at Kildare, however, certain of the arts and crafts were cultivated with special success. Lace-making and the illumination of books were two of the favorite occupations of these students at Kildare in which marvellous success was achieved. The tradition of Irish lace-making which has maintained itself during all the centuries began, or at least, secured its first great prestige, in Brigid's time. Gerald the Welshman, sometimes spoken of as Giraldus Cambrensis, told of having seen during a journey in Ireland centuries after Brigid's time, but nearly a thousand years ago, a copy of the Scriptures that was wonderfully illuminated. He thought it the most beautiful book in the world. His description tallies very closely with that of the Book of Kells. Some have even ventured to suggest that he actually saw the Book of Kells at Kildare. This is extremely improbable, however, and the Book of Kells almost surely originated elsewhere. There [{232}] seems, however, to have been at Kildare some book nearly as beautiful as the Book of Kells, made there, and establishing peradventure the thoroughness of the artistic education given at Kildare at this time.

So much for feminine influence and education under Christianity. Most people are likely to know much more of the place of women in Greece and Rome than during Christian times. We are prone, however, to exaggerate the dependence of woman among both Latins and Greeks and to think that she had very few opportunities for intellectual development and almost none for expression of her personality and the exertion of her influence. Here, once more, as in many other phases of this subject we are, through ignorance, assuming conditions in the past that are quite unlike those which actually existed. Recently in the Atlantic Monthly, Mrs. Emily James Putnam, sometime the Dean of Barnard, in an article on "The Roman Lady," [Footnote 17] has completely undermined usual notions with regard to the position of the Roman woman. The Roman matrons had rights all their own, and succeeded in asserting themselves in many ways. There was never any seclusion of the women in Rome and the Roman matrona at all times enjoyed personal freedom, entertained her husband's guests, had a voice in his affairs, managed his house and came and went as she pleased. Mrs. Putnam suggests that "in [{233}] early days she shared the labors and the dangers of the insecure life of a weak people among hostile neighbors. It may not be fanciful to say that the liberty of the Roman woman of classical times was the inherited reward of the prowess of a pioneer ancestress, in the same way as the social freedom of the American woman to-day comes to her from the brave Colonial housemother, able to work and, when need was, to fight."

[Footnote 17: Atlantic Monthly, June, 1910.]

Indeed the more one studies social life in Rome the more clear does it become that conditions were very similar for women to what they are in this latest of the republics here in America. This will not be surprising if we but learn to realize that the circumstances of the development of Rome itself, the environment in which the women were placed resembled ours of the later time much more closely than we have had any idea of until recent years. The Italian historian, Ferrero, has read new lessons into Roman history for us by showing us the past in terms of the present.

The conditions that developed at Rome, as I have said, were very similar to those which developed in the modern American republic. Riches came, luxury arose. Eastern slaves came to do all the work in the household that could formerly be accomplished by the women, Greek hand-maidens particularly took every solicitude out of her hands, and then the Roman matron looked around for something to occupy herself with, and [{234}] it was not long before we have expressions from the men that would remind us of many things that have been said in the last generation or so. There is a well-known speech of Cato delivered in opposition to the repeal of the Oppian Law which forbade women to hold property, that is reported by Livy and sounds strangely modern. Mrs. Putnam talks of it very aptly, "as an expression of the ever recurrent uneasiness of the male in the presence of the insurgent female."

"'If, Romans,' said he, 'every individual among us had made it a rule to maintain the prerogative and authority of a husband with respect to his own wife, we should have less trouble with the whole sex. It was not without painful emotions of shame that I just now made my way into the forum through a crowd of women. Had I not been restrained by respect for the modesty and dignity of some individuals among them, I should have said to them, "What sort of practice is this, of running out into public, besetting the streets, and addressing other women's husbands? Could not each have made the same request to her husband at home? Are your blandishments more seductive in public than in private, and with other women's husbands than your own?"

"'Our ancestors thought it not proper that women should transact any, even private business, without a director. We, it seems, suffer them now to interfere in the management of state [{235}] affairs. Will you give the reins to their untractable nature and their uncontrolled passions? This is the smallest of the injunctions laid on them by usage or the laws, all of which women bear with impatience; they long for liberty, or rather for license. What will they not attempt if they win this victory? The moment they have arrived at an equality with men, they will become your superiors.'"

The social conditions which developed at Rome are indeed so strangely like those with which we are now familiar as to be quite startling. As a mere man I should hesitate to suggest this, since it refers particularly to feminine affairs and domestic concerns, but since it has been betrayed by one of the sex perhaps I may venture to quote it. Once more I turn to Mrs. Putnam for an apt expression of the conditions. She says:

"The Greeks, who, to be sure, had nothing in their dwellings that was not beautiful, had still supposed the great works of art were for public places. With the Romans began the private collection of chefs-d'oeuvre in its most snobbish aspect. The parts played by the sexes in this enterprise sometimes showed the same division of labor that prevails very largely in a certain great nation of our own day that shall be nameless: the husband paid for the best art that money could buy, and the wife learned to talk about it and to entertain the artist. It is true that the Roman lady began also to improve her mind. She [{236}] studied Greek, and hired Greek masters to teach her history and philosophy. Ladies flocked to hear lectures on all sorts of subjects, originating the odd connection between scholarship and fashion which still persists."

This subject may be pursued with ever-increasing recognition of similarity between that time and our own. For instance, Mrs. Putnam says: "A woman of fashion, we are told, reckoned it among her ornaments if it were said of her that she was well read and a thinker, and that she wrote lyrics almost worthy of Sappho. She, too, must have her hired escort of teachers, and listen to them now and then, at table or while she was having her hair dressed,--at other times she was too busy. And often while the philosopher was discussing high ethical themes her maid would come in with a love-letter, and the argument must wait till it was answered.

"Nothing very important in the way of production resulted from all the lady's literary activity. The verses, if Sulpicia's they be, are the sole surviving evidence of creative effort among her kind; and, respectable as they are, they need not disturb Sappho's repose. It was indirectly that the Roman lady affected literature, since kinds began to be produced to her special taste; for it is hardly an accident that the vers de société should expand, and the novel originate, in periods when for the first time women were a large element in the reading public."

[{237}]

In our time it has been said, that one of the reasons why the young man does not marry is often that he is fearful of the superiority of the college-bred young woman. He knows that he himself has no more intelligence than is absolutely necessary for the proper conduct of life, and he fears that his "breaks" in grammar, in literature, in taste for art, in social things, may make him the laughing-stock of the educated woman. We would be reasonably sure, most of us, that at least this is the first time in the world's history that anything like this has happened. It is rather interesting, however, to read some of the reflections of the Roman satiric poets on the state of affairs that developed in Rome as a consequence of study and lectures and at least supposed scholarship becoming the fashion. "I hate the woman," says Juvenal, "who is always turning back to the grammatical rules of Palaemon and consulting them; the feminine antiquary who recalls verses unknown to me, and corrects the words of an unpolished friend which even a man would not observe. Let a husband be allowed to make a solecism in peace." I recommend the reading of Juvenal to the college young woman of the modern time, not only for its classic but for its social value.

Among the Greeks the position of women was quite different from what is usually supposed. It is only too often the custom to think that the Greek women, confined to a great degree to their [{238}] houses, sharing little in the public discussions, coming very slightly into public in any way, were more or less despised by the men and tolerated, but surely not much respected. The place of women in life at any time can be best judged from the position assigned them by the dramatic poets of any period. The larger the mind of the dramatic poet, the more of a genius he is, the more surely does his estimate expressed in literature represent life as he saw it. Ruskin pointed out that Shakespeare has no heroes and many heroines; that, while he has no men that stand in unmarred perfection of character, "there is scarcely a play that has not a perfect woman in it, steadfast in grave hope and errorless purpose; conceived in the highest heroic type of humanity." What is thus true of Shakespeare is just as true of the great dramatic poets of the Greeks. In practically all the extant plays of AEschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, women are the heroines. They are represented as nobler, braver, more capable of suffering, with a better appreciation of their ethical surroundings and the realities of life, than the men around them. As much as Antigone is superior to her quarrelsome brothers, as Alcestis rises above her selfish husband, as Tecmessa is superior to and would have saved Ajax if only he had permitted her, so everywhere do we find women occupying not a place of equality but a position of superiority.

These plays were written by men. Just as in [{239}] the case of Shakespeare they were written by men mainly to be witnessed by men, for while three-fourths of our audiences at theatres now are women, at least three-fourths of the audience in Shakespeare's time were men, and in the old Greek theatre the men largely exceeded the women in attendance. These were masculine pictures of the place of woman, painted not in empty compliment but with profoundest respect and deepest understanding. We honor these writers as the greatest in the history of literature because they saw life so clearly and so truly. Literature is only great when it mirrors life to the nail. What the Greek dramatists had done, Homer had done before them. His picture of the older Greek women shows us that they were on an absolute equality in their households with the men, that not only were they thoroughly respected and loved for themselves, but, to repeat Ruskin, they were looked up to as infallibly wise counsellors, as the best possible advisers to whom a man could go, provided they themselves were of high character and their hearts, as well as their intellects, were interested in the problems involved.

There are, of course, in all of the dramatists some wicked women. In the whole round of Shakespeare's characters there are only three wicked women who have degraded their womanhood among the principal figures. These are Lady Macbeth, Regan and Goneril. We have corresponding characters in the Greek dramatists. [{240}] Clytemnestra is the Lady Macbeth of Greek Tragedy. Euripides, the feminist as he has been called, has shown us, as feminists ever, more of the worst side of women than his greater predecessors AEschylus and Sophocles. He has exhibited the extent to which religious over-enthusiasm can carry women in the "Bacchae," and was the first to introduce the sex problem. In general it may be said, as Ruskin says of Shakespeare, that when a Greek dramatist pictures wicked women "they are at once felt to be frightful exceptions to the ordinary laws of life; fatal in their influence also in proportion to the power for good which they had abandoned." Indeed tragedy, as we see it in the great tragic poets, might be defined as the failure on the part of a good woman to save the men who are nearest and dearest to her from the faults into which their characters impel them. All the great dramatists, ancient and modern, represent women once more in Ruskin's words as "infallibly faithful and wise counsellors--incorruptibly just and pure examples--strong always to sanctify, even when they cannot save."

How little there is in any question of evolution having brought new influence or higher place to woman may be very well realized from this position of women among the old Greeks. Gladstone has called attention to it very forcibly in his "Essay on the Place of Ancient Greece in the Providential Order," when he says, "Outside [{241}] the pale of Christianity, it would be difficult to find a parallel in point of elevation to the Greek women of the heroic age." He has taken the place of woman as representing the criterion by which the civilization and the culture of a people at any time may be judged, though he does not at all think that one finds a constant upward tendency in history in this regard. He says:

"For when we are seeking to ascertain the measure of that conception which any given race has formed of our nature, there is, perhaps, no single test so effective, as the position which it assigns to woman. For as the law of force is the law of brute creation, so in proportion as he is under the yoke of that law does man approximate to the brute. And in proportion, on the other hand, as he has escaped from its dominion, is he ascending into the higher sphere of being and claiming relationship with Deity. But the emancipation and due ascendency of woman are not a mere fact, they are the emphatic assertion of a principle, and that principle is the dethronement of the law of force and the enthronement of other and higher laws in its place and its despite."

Of course, of the formal education of the women of Greece we know very little. We do know that they would not have been respected as they were, looked up to by their sons and their husbands, honored as the poets have shown them to be, put upon the stage as the heroines of the race, only that they had been intellectually as well as [{242}] morally the equals--nay, the superiors--of the men around them. We do not know much about the teaching of women before and during the classical period, but we can understand very well from what we know of them that they must have had good opportunities for education. Plato, of course, insists that women should be educated in every way exactly as the men. He mentions specifically gymnastics and horseback riding, and says that women should be trained in these as well as things intellectual, for they should have their bodies developed as well as their minds. His reason for demanding equal education is very interesting, because it is an anticipation of what is being said rather emphatically at the present time. He says: "If I am right nothing can be more foolish than our modern fashion of training men and women differently, whereby one-half of the power of the city is lost. For reflect if women are not to have the education of men some other must be found for them, and what other can we propose?" His idea evidently was that only one-half those who ought to be citizens were properly trained for civic duties if the education of women were neglected.

It is extremely interesting in the light of this to read some of Aristophanes' plays. Three of them, "Lysistrata," the "Thesmophoriazusae," which has a simpler name "The Women's Festival," for it referred to the great feast of Thesmophoria in honor of Ceres and Proserpine, and [{243}] the "Ecclesiazusae." This last title may be rendered a little freely "The Female Parliament," for in it women secure, by a little fraud, the right to vote and vote themselves into office as the main portion of the plot of the play. All three of these plays refer particularly to the question of women's rights, and though "The Women's Festival" was written as a satire on Euripides it is evident that only this subject was about as prominently before the people of Athens as the question of votes for women is in our time, Aristophanes would not have written these satiric comedies. The subjects of his plays are always the very latest actuality in Athens. Socrates was satirized in "The Clouds" within a few months of his death. "The War" was written while Athens was actually engaged in it, and "The Peace" was written within a few months after the signing of the treaty.

Votes for women must actually have been on the very centre of the carpet when Aristophanes wrote his "Ecclesiazusae" or "Feminine Parliament." Lest it should be thought that I intrude myself in any way in trying to boil down for you the old satiric comedy, or that I am modernizing Aristophanes in order to adapt the ideas of this play more fully to conditions that are around us at the present time, I shall read to you the excellent condensation of it made by the Rev. W. Lucas Collins, M.A., in his "Aristophanes," in the series of "Ancient Classics for English [{244}] Readers," that scholarly introduction to the classic authors of which Mr. Collins is the editor. He says:

"The women have determined, under the leadership of a clever lady named Praxagora, to reform the constitution of Athens. For this purpose they will dress like men--beards included--and occupy the seats in the Pnyx, so as to be able to command a majority of votes in the next public assembly, the parliament of Athens. Praxagora is strongly of opinion with the modern Mrs. Poyser, that on the point of speaking, at all events, the women have great natural advantages over the men; that 'when they have anything to say they can mostly find words to say it in.' They hold a midnight meeting for the purpose of rehearsing their intended speeches and getting accustomed to their new clothes. Two or three of the most ambitious orators unfortunately break down at the very outset, much to their leader's disgust, by addressing the assembly as 'ladies' and swearing female oaths and using many other unparliamentary expressions quite unbefitting their masculine attire. Praxagora herself, however, makes a speech which is very generally admired. She complains of the mismanagement hitherto of public affairs, and asserts that the only hope of salvation for the state is to put the government into the hands of the women; arguing, like Lysistrata in the comedy of that name, that those who have so long managed the domestic establishment [{245}] successfully are best fitted to undertake the same duties on a larger scale. The women, too, are shown by their advocate to be highly conservative, and, therefore, safe guardians of the public interests:

"They roast and boil after the good old fashion,
They keep the holidays that were kept of old.
They make their cheesecakes by the old receipts.
They keep a private bottle like their mothers.
They plague their husbands--as they always did."

Even in the management of a campaign, they will be found more prudent and more competent than the men:

"Being mothers, they'll be chary of the blood
Of their own sons, our soldiers; being mothers,
They will take care their children do not starve
When they're on service; and, for ways and means,
Trust us, there's nothing cleverer than a woman:
And as for diplomacy, they'll be hard indeed
To cheat--they know too many tricks themselves."

Her speech is unanimously applauded; she is elected lady-president on the spot, by public acclamation, and the chorus of ladies march off towards the Pnyx to secure their places like the old gentlemen in 'The Wasps' ready for the daybreak.

"In the next scene, two of the husbands enter in great perplexity, one wrapped in his wife's dressing gown, and the other with only his under-garment [{246}] on and without his shoes. They both want to go to the assembly but cannot find their clothes. While they are wondering what in the world their wives can have done with them, and what is become of the ladies themselves, a third neighbor, Chremes, comes in. He has been to the assembly; but even he was too late to get the threepence which was allowed out of the public treasury to all who took their seat in good time, and which all Athenian citizens, if we may trust their satirist, were so ludicrously eager to secure. The place was quite full already, and of strange faces, too. And a handsome fair-faced youth (Praxagora in disguise, we are to understand) had got up, and amid the loud cheers of those unknown voters had proposed and carried a resolution, that the government of the state should be placed in the hands of a committee of ladies,--an experiment which had found favor also with others, chiefly because it was 'the only change which had not as yet been tried at Athens.' His two neighbors are somewhat confounded at his news, but congratulate themselves on the fact that the wives will now, at all events, have to see to the maintenance of the children, and that 'the gods sometimes bring good out of evil.'
"The women return, and get home as quickly as they can to change their costume so that the trick by which the passing of this new decree has been secured may not be detected. Praxagora succeeds in persuading her husband that she had [{247}] been sent for in a hurry to attend a sick neighbor, and only borrowed his coat to put on 'because the night was so cold' and his strong shoes and staff, in order that any evil-disposed person might take her for a man as she tramped along, and so not interfere with her. She at first affects not to have heard of the reform which has been just carried, but when her husband explains it, declares it will make Athens a paradise. Then she confesses to him that she has herself been chosen, in full assembly, 'Generalissima of the state.' She puts the question, however, just as we have all seen it put by a modern actress,--'will this house agree to it?' And if Praxagora was at all attractively got up, we may be sure it was carried by acclamation in the affirmative. Then, in the first place, there shall be no more poverty; there shall be community of goods, and so there shall be no law suits, and no gambling and no informers. (They promised more even than our suffragettes--if possible.) Moreover, there shall be community of wives,--and all the ugly wives shall have the first choice of husbands. So she goes off to her public duties, to see that these resolutions are carried out forthwith; the good citizen begging leave to follow close at her side, so that all who see him may say, 'What a fine fellow is our Generalissima's husband!'
"The scene changes to another street in Athens, where the citizens are bringing out all their property, to be carried into the market-place [{248}] and inventoried for the common stock. Citizen 'A' dances with delight as he marshals his dilapidated chattels into a mock procession--from the meal sieve, which he kisses, it looks so pretty with its powdered hair, to the iron pot which looks as black 'as if Lysimachus' (some well-known fop of the day, possibly present among the audience) 'had been boiling his hair dye in it.' This patriot, at least, has not much to lose, and hopes he may have something to gain, under these female communists.
"But his neighbor, who is better off, is in no such hurry. The Athenians, as he remarks, are always making new laws and abrogating them; what has been passed to-day very likely will be repealed to-morrow. Besides it is a good old national habit to take, not to give. He will wait a while before he gives in an inventory of his possessions. (One might think of an income tax law in the United States in the twentieth century.)
"But at this point comes the city-beadle (an appointment now held, of course, by a lady) with a summons to a banquet provided for all citizens out of the public funds: and amongst the items in the bill of fare is one dish whose name is composed of seventy-seven syllables--which Aristophanes gives us, but which the reader shall be spared. (It has been boiled down by the American schoolboy to just 'hash.') Citizen 'B' at once delivers it as his opinion that 'every [{249}] man of proper feeling should support the constitution to the utmost of his ability,' and hurries to take his place at the feast. There are some difficulties caused, very naturally by the new communistic regulations as to providing for the old and ugly women, but with these we need not deal. The piece ends with an invitation, issued by direction of Praxagora through her lady-chamberlain, to the public generally, spectators included, to join the national banquet which is to inaugurate the new order of things."

In a previous comedy Aristophanes had told of another interference of women in the political life of Athens that contains so many reminders of the modern time, and shows so definitely how old the new is, that it deserves a place here. Above all, the desertions from the cause of the women when they find that their political duties interfere with their home duties, and that they have to sacrifice many of the joys of life even though they are duties that may at times seem irksome enough,--children, household work, etc.,--for these newer obligations with which they have so little sympathy, is especially interesting. Once more I prefer to take the Rev. Mr. Collins' summary of the play in order that it may be clear that Aristophanes' meaning is not being stretched for the purpose of making points with regard to present-day conditions. After all, Mr. Collins' little book was written very nearly thirty years ago, when very little of the present feministic [{250}] movement, at least in the form in which we are now familiar with it, had asserted itself.

"They determine, under the leading of the clever Lysistrata, wife to one of the magistrates, to take the question (of the ending of the war) into their own hands. They resolve upon a voluntary separation from their husbands--a practical divorce a mensa et thoro--until peace with Sparta shall be proclaimed. It is resolved that a body of the elder matrons shall seize the Acropolis and make themselves masters of the public treasury. These form one of the two choruses in the play, the other being composed of the old men of Athens. The latter proceed (with a good deal of comic difficulty, owing to the steepness of the ascent and their shortness of breath) to attack the Acropolis, armed with torches and fagots and pans of charcoal, with which they hope to smoke out the occupants. But the women have provided themselves with buckets of water, which they empty on the heads of their assailants, who soon retire discomfited to call the police. But the police are, in their turn, repulsed by these resolute insurgents, whom they do not exactly know how to deal with. At last a member of the public committee comes forward to parley, and a dialogue takes place between him and Lysistrata. 'Why,' he asks, 'have they thus taken possession of the citadel?' 'They have resolved henceforth to manage the public revenues themselves,' is the [{251}] reply, 'and not allow them to be applied to carrying on this ruinous war.' 'That is no business for women,' argues the magistrate. 'Why not?' says Lysistrata; 'the wives have long had the management of the private purses of the husbands, to the great advantage of both.' In short, the women have made up their minds to have their voice no longer ignored, as hitherto, in questions of peace and war. Their remonstrances have always been met with the taunt that 'war is the business of men;' and to any question they have ventured to ask their husbands on such points, the answer has always been the old cry--old as the days of Homer--'Go spin, you jade, go spin!' But they will put up with it no longer. As they have always had wit enough to clear the tangled threads in their work, so they have no doubt of settling all these difficulties and complications in international disputes, if it is left to them. But what concern, her opponent asks, can women have with war, who contribute nothing to its dangers and hardships? 'Contribute, indeed!' says the lady; 'we contribute the sons who carry it on.' And she throws down to her adversary her hood, her basket and her spindle, and bids him 'go home and card wool,'--it is all such old men are fit for; henceforth the proverb (of the men's making) shall be reversed,--'War shall be the care of the women.' The magistrate retires not having got the best of it, very naturally, in an encounter of words; and the chorus of elders raise the cry--[{252}] well known as a popular partisan cry at Athens, and sure to call forth a hearty laugh in such juxtaposition--that the women are designing to 'set up a tyranny!'
"But poor Lysistrata soon has her troubles. Her unworthy recruits are fast deserting her. They are going off to their husbands in the most sneaky manner--creeping out through the little hole under the citadel which led to the celebrated cave of Pan, and letting themselves down from the walls by ropes at the risk of breaking their necks. Those who are caught all have excellent excuses. One has some fleeces of fine Milesian wool at home which must be seen to,--she is sure the moths are eating them. Another has urgent occasion for the doctor; a third cannot sleep alone for fear of the owls--of which, as every one knows, there were really a great many at Athens. The husbands, too, are getting uncomfortable without their housekeepers; there is no one to cook their victuals; and one poor soul comes and humbly entreats his wife at least to come home and wash and dress the baby.
"It is becoming plain that either the war or the wives' resolution will soon give way, when there arrives an embassy from Sparta. They cannot stand this general strike of the wives. They are agreed already with their enemies, the Athenians, on one point--as to the women--that the old Greek comedian's proverb, which we have borrowed and translated freely, is true,--
"There is no living with 'em--or without 'em."

[{253}]

"They are come to offer terms of peace. When two parties are already of one mind, as Lysistrata observes, they are not long in coming to an understanding. A treaty is made on the spot, with remarkably few preliminaries."

Whenever we have sufficient remains to illustrate the life of any period of history with reasonable completeness, we find women occupying a much more important place than is usually conceded to them. The trouble is that we assume that we know something about the past, because we have somewhere obtained a vague notion of it and then we fill in details in accordance with that preconceived notion. The general rule, unfortunately, is to make as little of the past as possible and to consider that, of course, they must have been very different from us, and surely far behind us in everything. The more one really knows of history, however, the less does one think this. We must not let our complacent self-satisfaction with our own generation disturb our proper appreciation of past generations, however. An English writer said not very long ago, and now that we have reviewed various periods in the history of feminine influence and of education, I think that you will recognize the justice of what he said, "It is too much the easy custom of the present self-admiring day--not a bit more self-satisfied, after all, than each day has been in its [{254}] turn--to hold the women of the past as something little better than dolls for their attainments, a little dearer than slaves for their position and despicably content therein." Nothing could well be less true than this.

What is apt to strike us, however, after a review of the phases of feminine education and influence such as I have sketched, is that there are undoubtedly times during which very little is heard of feminine influence and almost nothing at all of feminine education. There are periods on the other hand when these subjects are the very centre of human interest. This interest waxes to a certain climax and then apparently wanes. What is the reason for these waxings and wanings? Is there anything that we know about them that will help us to account for them? If women have once achieved a certain position and have once secured certain privileges in the matter of education, it might reasonably be expected that, barring some great cataclysm or political upheaval, that completely disrupted society, they would not abandon these hard-won rights and precious privileges, and so we should not have to be going through the storm and stress of another period of discussion, controversy, opposition with regard to woman's rights. How is it that rights once attained--and never unless after a struggle, for no matter how civilized a period or how cultured a people, they do not grant rights to any class unless forced to do so-- that these rights have afterwards been lost, or at least greatly diminished and partly forgotten?

[{255}]

In this we come upon one of the mysteries of history and of the life of man. How is it that men secure certain knowledge and then forget it--literally forget all about it--how is it that men make discoveries and then lose sight of them so that they have to be made over again; how is it that men even make useful inventions of all kinds and these are lost sight of and the invention has to be made over again in succeeding generations? How is it that the Suez Canal was opened at least once before our time and then allowed to fill up with sand, and we had to do the work all over again two generations ago? How is it that America was discovered at least twice, probably oftener, before Columbus' time, and yet his was a real discovery? We actually have Papal documents addressed to bishops in Greenland from Popes in the thirteenth century, mentioning missions on the mainland of America. There are traditions that seem to point beyond all doubt to the fact that the Irish monks were here in America in the eighth and ninth centuries. Those traditions come from three or four different sources. There was a reverence for the cross among the Indians in certain parts of the country. A tradition of white-robed priests who came from over the sea. The Norse name for America was Irland it Mikla, Ireland the Great, [{256}] that is, the island of the Irish, much larger than Ireland itself and lying beyond it in the seas.

How is it, indeed, that there are many discoveries and rediscoveries of the same principle in science? Heron's engine at Alexandria was an anticipation of the turbine principle in the application of steam. When we dug up surgical instruments at Pompeii we were surprised to find that they had the form of many instruments that we thought we had invented in our time. In glass-making, in iron-working, in all the arts and crafts precious secrets are discovered, then lost, then rediscovered, and this may even happen several times. We find no sign of a continuous progress, but recurring phases that represent ups and downs in man's interest in certain things and his achievements corresponding to the intensity of his interest. Such a thing as a regular progressive advance one finds nowhere in history. Nations do not maintain their power after they have achieved it. Just as soon as the struggle to maintain themselves is over, internal troubles of various kinds set disintegrating factors at work and it is not long before decadence can be noted and then the disappearance of the people or at least of its national prominence becomes inevitable. We shall not be surprised to find ups and downs in the history of feminine influence and education, for this is the rule of history. We have only been laboring under the false notion that definite progress was the rule because of [{257}] over-absorption in the evolution theory--but it is not.

There seems to be in this matter a certain check upon the occupation of woman with interests external to her household that would tempt her to occupy herself much with duties extraneous to the family life. After all, one thing is perfectly clear. Only women can be mothers. We have not succeeded even in getting the slightest possible hint of any method of continuing the race except by the ordinary process of maternity. Whatever of direct evolution the advocates of the theory of evolution have suggested as coming in humanity so that it may be the subject of observation, has been due in their minds to the lengthening of the period during which the young of the race are cared for. As we go up in the scale of life from the lowest to the highest, infancy-- meaning by that the period during which the offspring is cared for by the parents--lengthens. In the very small beings there is none. As we ascend in the scale we find traces of parental care. Then comes occupation of the parents with their offspring from a few hours up to a day or two, and then finally months and years, until in the human race infancy has been gradually prolonged to twenty years. This is Herbert Spencer's observation and it is interesting and suggestive. A mother then especially, though also a father, must care for children, not alone for months before and after birth, but for a score of years.

[{258}]

Occupation with other things, though necessary, detracts from this care of children, and if exaggerated leads to the celibate condition or that approaching it, the limitation of families within narrow bounds. The mother of but two or three children may occupy herself with other things and, indeed, has to find other occupation of mind. At certain periods in the world's history a certain number of these women accumulate and the tendency to celibacy or to very limited maternity makes itself felt, and then this class of people usually fails to propagate enough of the species like themselves to take their places in the world. It is a matter of common comment at the present moment that if the women's colleges were to depend on the progeny of their graduates to fill the classes in succeeding years, the numbers at the schools not only would not increase but would constantly tend to decrease. Of course this same thing is true of the descendants of the male graduates of many of our Eastern universities, and I believe that attention has been particularly called to it with regard to our three oldest universities. Such are the risks of life and the fatalities incident to disease, even with our present improved hygienic conditions, that anything less than five or six children in a family will not prove sufficient eventually to replace the parents in their activities. When to small families is added the number of celibates consequent upon absorption in self-improvement, then the failure of the [{259}] cultured classes even to replace themselves becomes very manifest, and hence our dwindling native populations, if we take that word to mean the families that have been in the country for more than two generations.

Nature does not confide conditions in humanity entirely to man, however. This would be to leave mankind subject to certain whims and fashions and the caprices of times and people. There are many biological checks which maintain mankind in a certain equilibrium. A typical example of it is the regulation of the number of each sex born. In general the proportion of the sexes to one another maintains a ratio very near that of equality under ordinary natural conditions. This obtains in spite of the fact that man is so much more subject to accidents than woman, so much more likely to catch and succumb to disease and so much more likely to wear himself out prematurely as the result of his labors. The death-rate among women at all ages is lower than that of men, yet a constant, definite equilibrium of the sexes is maintained with accurate nicety. There is evidently some check existing in nature itself that prevents any disturbance of this fixed ratio.

Not only is nature able to maintain this, but in cases where, because of some serious disturbance of natural conditions, a decided inequality of the ratio occurs by accident, nature is able to restore conditions to the previous normal, without our being quite able to understand just how this is [{260}] accomplished. We do not know how sex is determined. There have been many explanations offered, but all of them have proved inadequate and most of them quite nugatory. In spite of our lack of knowledge there have been times in history when a striking manifestation of nature's power has occurred. For instance, after the Thirty Years' War in Germany the ratio between the sexes had been so much disturbed that, according to some historians, there were probably nearly twice as many women as men in existence in the Germanic countries. The men had been cut off by the war itself, by famines consequent upon it, by extreme and unusual efforts to support their families and by epidemic diseases in camps and campaigns. The disproportion was so great that a relaxation of the marriage laws was permitted for a time in certain of the countries and men were allowed to have two wives.

Under these conditions nature at once began to reassert herself, the number of male births was greatly increased and the disproportion between the sexes immediately began to lessen. At the end of scarcely more than three generations the normal equilibrium of the sexes was restored and there was about an equal number of men and women again. Here we have the effect of one of these curiously interesting biological checks upon man's foolish quarrelsomeness which might result in a too great disproportion of the sexes.

We shall not be surprised, then, if we find other [{261}] such biological checks and compensations exerting themselves. In recent years Sir Francis Galton, the cousin of Darwin, who is recognized as the best living authority in statistical biology, and Professor Karl Pearson, who has done more than any one else to bring out many curious and interesting but very important biological laws by the study of statistics, have insisted in their studies of the effect of the law of primogeniture, that when there are small families, the children are more likely to be nervous, oftener have an inclination to mental disease and have less resistive vitality against disease in general than the average child of the larger families. There is a small but significant advantage in vitality that accrues to later children of a family. This is so contrary to the frequently expressed opinion that only the children of small families can be brought up properly to resist disease and have such advantages in their education and nutrition as to be of better health, that I should hesitate to quote it, only that it has behind it the authority of such distinguished scientists as Galton and Pearson. They are both conservative Englishmen, they have no theory of their own that they are supporting, they have no axe to grind in things social and political for the launching of the new theory, they are only making observations on the facts presented and the data that have been collected.

Here is another striking example of a check on certain tendencies in humanity that apparently [{262}] nature does not approve of, or to avoid personifying a process, we had better say are not according to nature's laws. The small family does not perpetuate itself. It has certain natural disadvantages that work against it. It gradually disappears and the races of larger families maintain themselves. We need not have had recourse to Galton's and Pearson's principle in this matter, for we see the results of the small family in present-day history. France is decreasing in population. Our own Puritan families are dying out. American families generally of more than three generations are not perpetuating themselves. The teeming fertility of the poor immigrants who come to us is, with immigration itself, supplying our increase in population. Our nation is, as a result, gradually becoming something very different from what our forefathers anticipated.

What has apparently happened, then, in the history of feminine education and influence is that, whenever women became occupied with such modes of education, or the cultivation of phases of feminine influence that took them out of their houses, away from family life and far from the hearthstone, the particular classes of women who thus became interested did not propagate themselves, or propagated themselves to such a limited degree that, after a time, their kind disappeared to a great extent. The domestic woman with tendencies to care much more for her maternal duties than for any extra-domiciliary successes [{263}] propagated herself, raised her children with her ideals, cultivated domesticity and consciously or unconsciously fostered the mother idea as the main feature of woman's life and her principal source not only of occupation, but of joy in the living, of consolation and of genuine accomplishment. The tendency, as can readily be seen in our own time, of the other class of woman is largely to foster, often unconsciously, but of course often consciously also, the opposite notions. She talks of the slavery of child-raising, the limitations of the home woman, the drudgery of domestic life, forgetting that life is work and that the only happiness in life is to have work that you want to do, whatever it may be, but all this talk has its inevitable effect upon all but the born mother woman, and the result is the fad for public occupation instead of domestic life.

It is easy to see what the result of the opposite opinion is. Every tendency of the intellectual woman so-called is to repress such natural instincts as lead to the propagation of the race and the continuance of her kind. Of course it will be said that intellectual women are quite willing to have one or two children. First, this is not true for a great many of them. Secondly, for those who have one or two children losses by death and failure to marry in the second generation, because of conscious or unconscious discouragements and the exaggeration of ideas with regard to the danger of maternity, lead often to a complete [{264}] suppression of the family in the second or third generation.

Apparently the rule of history is that there are four or five generations of women interested in intellectual things particularly, who follow one another in these periods of special feminine education and exertion of influence outside of the home. Then there comes a distinct decadence of the feminist movement, because of the gradual diminution in number of women who are interested in such things, and then, while there are always certain women who develop great intellectual abilities which require a larger stage than the home for their display, and while there are always some who find an intellectual career or rather make it, very little is heard of feminism and women's claims. They are satisfied to rule their husbands, to raise their children, to be saints to their sons and elder sisters to their daughters, and the feminine world has its simple joys and not much fuss about rights.

It may seem far-fetched thus to appeal to a biological check or a great underlying natural law in a matter of this kind, but in recent years biology has so often been appealed to to justify unsocial conditions that its true application needs to be pointed out. We have heard, for instance, much of the struggle for life and the competition that is supposed to be inevitable in nature, while all the time it has apparently been forgotten that there is no struggle for life within the species [{265}] except when there is some disturbance of the ordinary order of nature, as in times of famine, or when a mother is foraging for her children. On the contrary, mutual aid is the rule within the species and there is no animal small or large, from the ant to the elephant, that does not help its kind and has not certain wonderful instincts for helpfulness, the origin of which we do not know, but which are founded in nature itself. Man justifies inhumanity to man by the supposed struggle for life, while all the time nature teaches us the opposite law.

Nature's way is that of elimination. Her interest is the race. She cares very little for the individual and guards only her great purpose of securing the propagation of the race. Apparently such intense preoccupation with the intellectual life as provides opportunity for serious education, for literary work and for the exertion of diffuse influence in a community, does not make for the propagation of the race or its proper preservation. We can see this easily in the world around us, in the limited progeny of those who live the intellectual or selfish life to the exclusion of racial interests. This is opposed to nature's purpose and she proceeds to eliminate those who stand in her way. This is not done by any cataclysmic process but by a law of nature. Those involved in the influence disturbing to her purpose eliminate themselves. This is as true for indulgence in toxic substances that produce certain personal [{266}] momentary good feelings, as for the more deliberate avoidance of certain of nature's burdens which brings about a certain negative pleasure at least by lessening the amount of pain that has to be borne and trouble to be endured. To these pains and troubles nature has attached some of the best of the compensations of life. The domestic joys are properly man's highest source of unalloyed pleasure without remorse.

Our review of the phases of feminine education and influence would seem to show that there has occurred a series of cycles about three centuries apart in the history of the race, during which women become very much occupied with things external to their household. Such cycles are represented by our own period, that of the Renaissance in the sixteenth century, that of the university period in the thirteenth century, and then that at Charlemagne's court earlier, though the barbaric conditions following the migration of nations probably did not allow a natural expression of the tendencies at this time. Earlier in history, in the first century before Christ and just after and in the fourth century before Christ in Greece, there had been, as we have pointed out, such cycles. During the intervening centuries there is a negative phase in the movement, so that feminism, under which is understood woman's expression of herself outside of her home and the exertion of her influence apart from her family and immediate friends, is very little in [{267}] evidence. During these times the domestic woman reasserts herself. During the positive phases of the movement she continues to have her children, the feminists do not, or at least not to the same extent. They and their kind are gradually eliminated, at least to a great degree, and so the negative phase comes on.

This is not an argument and is not meant as such. It is meant to be a scientific reading of the meaning of certain phases of the history of the race as they can be studied. I would be the last in the world to think that I could influence present-day activities by any such indications of a great law in the history of the race that takes three centuries from phase to phase. After all, who cares for a law that does not affect our generation, but at most the third and fourth succeeding generations, and the manifestation of whose phenomena can only be recognized in three-century periods?

What I have tried to do is to point out just what are the cycles of feminine influence and education in the world's history, and then to work out the reasons why, quite contrary to what might be expected, these phases have not continued, but are interrupted by periods of utter decadence of feminine influence or interest in public life and education. Perhaps in our time we are going to change all that. That is the feeling that we are prone to have. Others may have made progress and forgotten about it, or [{268}] may have made mistakes and been eliminated for them, but we are so consciously active in our affairs that we cannot think of ourselves as likely to suffer the fate of our predecessors. There is much of that feeling abroad in the present day, there has always been much of that feeling abroad in every other day, for each succeeding generation in its turn is perfectly sure that what it is doing means more than ever before, though it can see very clearly the mistakes made by its predecessors. It is somewhat like our feeling towards other persons and their accomplishments in life as compared to our own. Most of us are quite sure that whatever we are doing is quite significant, though we can see plainly that what most of our friends are doing, or are trying to do, is altogether trivial and insignificant.

In recent years we have come to realize more and more how much history needs to be studied in the light of biology. The decadence of Greece was probably due, to a great extent, to the bringing back by Alexander's conquering soldiers of malaria from the Orient, and thus the vanquished proved the ruin of their conquerors. The great plagues of the olden time which sometimes carried away nearly one-half the human race in a single visitation, were due to insect pests of various kinds, which all unknown to men conveyed the disease and diffused it widely. It will not be easy always to read the lessons of biology in history aright. Whether I have done so for you [{269}] or not, in this matter of the history of feminism, I cannot tell. The story, however, has been interesting to work out, and I do not think that its conclusions have ever been presented to the public in quite this form before. They are now presented not with the idea that they should be accepted as absolute, but for the criticism and consideration of those who are most vitally interested and who want to know all that can be known about the conditions surrounding woman's influence in the world and her place for good in the history of the race.

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