Amelia Gere Mason.

August, 1901.

CONTENTS

PAGE
[Preface] [vii]
[Introduction] [xiii]
[Woman in Greek Poetry] [1]
[Sappho and the First Woman’s Club] [25]
[Glimpses of the Spartan Woman] [51]
[The Athenian Woman, Aspasia, and the First Salon] [69]
[Revolt of the Roman Women] [105]
[The “New Woman” of Old Rome] [137]
[Some Famous Women of Imperial Rome] [167]
[Marcella, Paula, and the First Convent] [205]
[The Learned Women of the Renaissance] [241]
[The Literary Courts and Platonic Love] [291]
[Salon and Woman’s Club] [353]

INTRODUCTION

It has been quite gravely asserted of late that “woman has just discovered her intellect.” As a result of this we are told with great earnestness that the nineteenth century belonged to her by virtue of conquest, and that she is entering upon a new era of power and intelligence which is to usher in the millennium.

On the other hand, we are assured with equal persistency that the divine order of things is being upset: that women are spoiled by over-education; that the time-honored privileges of men are ruthlessly invaded and their mental vigor endangered; that morals are suffering; that all the good old ideals are in process of destruction; and that we have the dismal prospect of being ruled, to our sorrow, by a race of Minervas who neglect their families, if they have any, and insist upon running things in their own way, to the ruin of social order—all of which has been said periodically since the beginning of the world.

With these serious questions I do not attempt to deal any further than to picture, to the best of my ability in a limited space, the position of women in the great ages of the past, and the personality, aspirations, and achievements of a few of their most famous representatives, so far as this is possible after the lapse of centuries. From a multiplicity of facts which point their own moral, each one of us may draw his or her special lessons.