The Laws of Chivalry refined the Upper Classes, inculcating Truth, Loyalty, Chastity, Courtesy, Liberality, Reverence for Women and Generosity to the Weak. But the real foundation of Privilege in Chivalric times was practically Strength, Courage and Success among men. Beauty, Grace and Honour among women. These qualities being temporary, were not synonymous with Justice. The position of Divinity is an unstable one, depending on the attitude of the worshippers. When Chivalry faded out of men’s hearts, women felt that the outer shell of custom meant little. It only set them on the shelf.
A tone of Chivalry affected the hearts of the traders and manufacturers of Chivalric Times, a tone healthier, because more founded on justice and equality. There was even then a confusion of ideas between return-value of labour abroad, and labour at home; but there was no confusion about the return-values of similar labour performed by men or by women. Women were equal in all social guilds, and trading women were equal in trading guilds.
The notion that partnership in toil could justify the assumption of the whole proceeds of the common labours to the use and will of one of the partners did not dawn on the simpler minds of our ancestors. It took centuries of mistranslations of the first principles of government to let this partial idea develop into its modern complexity. In Prynne’s “Fundamental Rights of English Freemen,” p. 3, art. 7, we read, “That it is the ancient and undoubted right of every freeman that he hath a full and absolute propriety in his goods and estate. And that no taxes, taillages, loans, benevolences, or other charge ought to be commanded, imposed, or levied by the King or his ministers, without common consent by Act of Parliament.” In order that husbands might have this absolute proprietary right over the whole of the common property, it was gradually extinguished among wives; and the second right for them naturally lapsed in consequence of the other. The absorption of a married woman’s property by her husband developed for her a massive code of legal restrictions, and a stern doctrine of civil disabilities. She was dissociated first from property, thence from privilege, finally she became property. This was but the natural outcome of the non-recognition of her Personal and Proprietary Rights. In any history, therefore, of British Freewomen, we must practically follow legal precedent, in assuming the non-existence of the feme couverte.
Through the different principles of inheritance, there have always been fewer heiresses than heirs; through the success of the various methods of protecting male professional and trade industries against female competition, there have always been fewer female owners of earned property; through the lower rate of women’s wages, and various causes tending to disable single women even in the retention of property, these owners represented smaller incomes than did men of their own class.
Representative Freewomen, therefore, have always been in a small minority. The dominance of a temporary majority sends a minority into the Opposition; in which exile it lays plans for future action, when in the see-saw of political change its turn comes to rise again. The majority has always to consider the minority in its calculations and actions. But a permanent majority, consciously or unconsciously, labours to oust a permanent minority from recognised and recognisable existence even as an Opposition. By always being able to overbear opinion, it makes the expression of opinion futile. Either it is concordant and unnecessary, or discordant and inoperative. The expression of either becomes a waste of time, and is soon denied. And thus women have been ousted by degrees from the building up of the superstructure of the English Constitution, in whose foundations they had been considered. The privilege of British Freewomen remained a recognised quantity for ages. Though that quantity became “small by degrees and beautifully less,” it was not finally annihilated till the heart of the nineteenth century.
The process of diminution was hastened in periods of spasmodic activity through association of principles that should have worked in the opposite direction, had the principles been understood and applied in their purity. No doctrine is more antagonistic to the spirit and teaching of Christ than that of the subjection of women, and yet, though the change from the Druidic religion to the worship of Odin affected them but slightly, the changes within the Christian Creed mark epochs in their gradual enthralment; as, for instance, the sixteenth century Reformation and the seventeenth century Revival On the Suppression of the Monasteries, Abbots and Abbesses were alike extinguished. But the power and privilege of the Abbot in the House of Peers as in the Church, survived in the Bishop. The extinction of the Abbess, without successor either in Church or State, took away finally the right of one class of representative women to sit in the Upper House. The suppression of the Social and Religious Guilds founded and supported by women in common with men, gave a seeming reason for later exclusion of Freewomen from trade guilds.
The loudest Puritan cry of the seventeenth century was, it is true, “No Bishop;” but the practical work Puritanism was really allowed to do in politics was to make the representation of women in the Lower House theoretically impossible.
As antagonistic to the doctrine of the subjection of women are the Principles of Liberty. How can men become truly free that ignore, for others, the liberties founded on the same reasonings by which they enfranchised themselves? Yet every great era in the Evolution of so-called Popular Liberty has been marked by contemporary restrictions of Feminine Freedom. Hence, in the seventeenth century, when hereditary serfdom was finally abolished, and when slavery, by purchase, became impossible in Britain, we first find the doctrine promulgated that tended to disfranchise women. When outbursts of fervid eloquence on “Liberty” were preparing the nation to lay out its millions in enfranchising even its colonial slaves, in 1832, the disfranchisement of women was effected by the use of a single statutory word. When, on the 29th of June, 1867, William Lloyd Garrison, the champion of Negro Emancipation, was receiving an ovation at St. James’ Hall, men were discussing in St. Stephen’s whether to give women political existence or not. Though the single excluding word was erased from the statute book, the House and the Courts of Law next year determined that its spirit lingered there. When a new extension of the Suffrage took place in 1884, the claims of women were again disallowed. The new rights of men emphasised more strongly the old wrongs of women. A lowered qualification for the Franchise protected property, not only inherited or earned, but that which was only in the process of earning. This privilege of prospective property increased the opportunities of earning enormously. But only when its possession was vested in a man. Women’s possession of property, more difficult to acquire through laws of nature, custom, inheritance, marriage, and the protection of male industries, was further rendered less stable by their exclusion from the faintest voice in determining laws, taxation, and home and foreign policy. The progress of education has enriched public ideas, has altered the Content of public Conscience, has facilitated public discussion of facts and theories. The relations of representation to taxation are assailed. New bases of privilege are being proposed. There are those who hold that Property is no sound foundation on which to build a Constitution. Some would put in its place the notion of Justice, which others name the right of the Individual. But those who accept this are divided into two great classes, the first considering Justice in its own nature, and treating Individuals as the indivisible units to which Justice is to be applied, units not to be segregated by any test into groups receiving Justice or no Justice. The second class also considers Justice applicable to all individuals, but adds a rider, that, in their opinion, individuals can be only masculine. Something in the construction of their minds permits them to harmonise, to their own satisfaction, two discordant ideas. Masculinity seems to them a natural basis of privilege—a solid foundation of Justice.
Others hold the older doctrines in a modified form, believing that individuality without qualification of individuals cannot provide a stable basis. If the idle and improvident, by mere force of numbers, are to dominate the industrious and the provident, the ends of justice would be defeated. By property or industry tests those are included who have interests to preserve. Those who help to support the State should have a voice in determining its action. No one is excluded from Enfranchisement thereby. A very moderate degree of industry or success will make it possible to any one to attain the franchise. A worthy incentive to labour is a moral good. Amidst these thinkers there are also two classes: those who consider that the rights of women in themselves, and in the property they inherit or acquire, are as important as those of men, and should be made as stable; and those that, by combining two principles of Enfranchisement, make a logical cross division, importing the totally unconnected dividing principle of sex into the consideration of the rights of property. What is simply unjust, when individuals are selected on the basis of sex, becomes both illogical and unjust when questions of sex are imposed on those of property. Sex is an inseparable accident, and when accepted as the Basis of Justice, closes the question; property is a separable accident, and must be considered upon different lines. The various objections to any simple, logical, homogeneous, and just arrangement of the Bases of Privilege, while depending on the doctrine of sex, are worked out by two sub-sections of thinkers upon different lines. One section says boldly, “when persons qualified by property are also qualified by masculinity, we grant them privilege.” The other section analyses the attributes of masculinity, and apply each as a separate test to the person qualified by property. “The physical force argument is the foundation of government, most men are stronger than most women, therefore no women must interfere in government.” Women would “require an improved understanding to vote for a member of Parliament.” “Women cannot understand mathematics, nor master the classics,” and when they proved they could, the principle was sent back further into statements that “their brains were not heavy enough,” “their moral force not strong enough.” “Women have not written Shakespeare, composed Beethoven, painted Raphael, built St. Peter’s.” The understanding of proportional representation, and the far-reaching economic results of bi-metallism, have been seriously proposed as tests for women. But have the whole series, or any one of them, ever been applied to the mere male electors of the realm? When pressed hard on this point, these objectors, in their confusion, fall back upon precedent and on authority to prove that to be legal which they cannot prove to be just or reasonable. It is no argument in favour of anything that it has been, or else reformation would be impossible. But when the sole argument against its being is that it has not been, the consideration of Legality and of Precedent becomes a necessity to the advocates of Justice. Many mistakes have been taken for facts, many fallacious arguments based upon erroneous premises. A Review of the History of Women that have hitherto ever exercised any privilege is necessary for generalisations to be based thereon. For by this process we may unite the followers of Legality and Precedent with the worshippers of Justice and Equality, and the union of the two forces, like those of the sun and moon upon the sea, may raise the high “tide in the affairs of women that leads on to fortune.”
The Review is encouraging in two aspects. In the light of the modern doctrine of Heredity, we see that our far-away ancestors held opinions to which we may hope that our successors may yet revert; and from Ancient History we find that a recognition of the existence of women in the State, far from being novel or revolutionary, would only be the fulfilling of the fundamental principles of the English Constitution.