Similar tendencies to those which affected the industrial position of women can be traced in the professions also, showing that, important as was the influence of capitalistic organisation in the history of women’s evolution, other powerful factors were working in the same direction.
Three professions were closed to women in the seventeenth century, Arms, the Church and the Law.
The Law.—It must be remembered that the mass of the “common people” were little affected by “the law” before the seventeenth century. “Common law” was the law of the nobles,[[547]] while farming people and artizans alike were chiefly regulated in their dealings with each other by customs depending for interpretation and sanction upon a public opinion which represented women as well as men. Therefore the changes which during the seventeenth century were abrogating customs in favour of common law, did in effect eliminate women from what was equivalent to a share in the custody and interpretation of law, which henceforward remained exclusively in the hands of men. The result of the elimination of the feminine influence is plainly shown in a succession of laws, which, in order to secure complete liberty to individual men, destroyed the collective idea of the family, and deprived married women and children of the property rights which customs had hitherto secured to them. From this time also the administration of the law becomes increasingly perfunctory in enforcing the fulfilment of men’s responsibilities to their wives and children.
Church.—According to modern ideas, religion pertains more to women than to men, but this conception is new, dating from the scientific era.
Science has solved so many of the problems which in former days threatened the existence of mankind, that the “man in the street” instinctively relegates religion to the region in which visible beauty, poetry and music are still permitted to linger; to the ornamental sphere in short, whither the Victorian gentleman also banished his wife and daughters. This attitude forms a singular contrast to the ideas which prevailed in the Middle Ages, when men believed that supernatural assistance was their sole protection against the “pestilence that walketh in darkness” or from “the arrow that flieth by day.” Religion was then held to be such an awful power that there were men who even questioned whether women could, properly speaking, be considered religious at all. Even in the seventeenth century the practice of religion and the holding of correct ideas concerning it were deemed to be essential for the maintenance of human existence, and no suggestion was then made that religious observances could be adequately performed by women alone.
Ideas as to the respective appropriateness of religious power to men and women have differed widely; some races have reserved the priesthood for men, while others have recognised a special power enduing women; in the history of others again no uniform tendency is shown, but the two influences can be traced acting and reacting upon each other.
This has been the case with the Christian religion, which has combined the wide-spread worship of the Mother and Child with a passionate splitting of hairs by celibate priests in dogmatic controversies concerning intellectual abstractions. The worship of the Mother and Child had been extirpated in England before the beginning of the seventeenth century; pictures of this subject were denounced because they showed the Divine Son under the domination of a woman. One writer accuses the Jesuits of representing Christ always “as a sucking child in his mothers armes”—“nay, that is nothing they make him an underling to a woman,” alleging that “the Jesuits assert (1) no man, but a woman did helpe God in the work of our Redemption, (2) that God made Mary partaker and fellow with him of his divine Majesty and power, (3) that God hath divided his Kingdom with Mary, keeping Justice to himselfe, and yielding mercy to her.” He complains that “She is always set forth as a woman and a mother, and he as a child and infant, either in her armes, or in her hand, that so the common people might have occasion to imagine that looke, what power of overruling and commanding the mother hath over her little child, the same hath she over her son Jesus ... the mother is compared to the son, not as being a child or a man, but as the saviour and mediator, and the paps of a woman equalled with the wounds of our Lord, and her milke with his blood.... But for her the holy scriptures speake no more of her, but as of a creature, a woman ... saved by Faith in her Saviour Jesus Christ ... and yet now after 1600 yeares she must still be a commanding mother and must show her authority over him ... she must be saluted as a lady, a Queen, a goddesse and he as a child.”[[548]]
The ridicule with which Peter Heylin treated the worship of the Virgin Mary in France seems to have been pointed more at the notion of honouring motherhood, rather than at the distinction given to her as a woman, for he wrote “if they will worship her as a Nurse with her Child in her arms, or at her breast, let them array her in such apparel as might beseem a Carpenter’s Wife, such as she might be supposed to have worn before the world had taken notice that she was the Mother of her Saviour. If they must needs have her in her state of glory as at Amiens; or of honour (being now publikely acknowledged to be the blessedness among Women) as at Paris: let them disburden her of her Child. To clap them thus both together, is a folly equally worthy of scorn & laughter.”[[549]]
The reform which had swept away the worship of divine motherhood had also abolished the enforced celibacy of the priesthood; but the priest’s wife was given no position in the Church, and a tendency may be noted towards the secularisation of all women’s functions. Convents and nunneries were abolished, and no institutions which might specially assist women in the performance of their spiritual, educational or charitable duties were established in their place. There was, in fact, a deep jealousy of any influence which might disturb the authority and control which the individual husband exercised over his wife, and probably the seventeenth century Englishman was beginning to realise that nothing would be so subversive to this authority as the association of women together for religious purposes. If a recognised position was given to women in the Church, their lives must inevitably receive an orientation which would not necessarily be identical with their husband’s, thus creating a danger of conflicting loyalties. Naturally, therefore, women were excluded from any office, but it would be a mistake to suppose that their subordination to their husbands in religious matters was rigidly enforced throughout this period. Certainly in the first half of the century their freedom of thought in religion was usually taken for granted, and possibly amongst the Baptists, certainly amongst the Quakers, full spiritual equality was accorded to them. Women were universally admitted to the sacraments, and therefore recognised as being, in some sort, members of the Church, but this was consistent with the view of their position to which Milton’s well known lines in “Paradise Lost” give perfect expression, the ideal which, in all subsequent social and political changes, was destined to determine women’s position in Church and State:—
“Whence true authoritie in men, though both