In all social relations the Babylonian women had remarkable freedom. They could conduct business in their own right. Their power to dispose of property is proved by numerous contract tablets, and, at any rate in later periods, they were held to possess a full legal personality equal in all points with their husbands. In many contracts husband and wife are conjoined as debtors, creditors, and as together taking pledges. The wife, as in Egypt, is made a party to any action of the husband in which her dowry is involved. The wife could also act independently; women appear by themselves as creditors, and in some contracts we find a wife standing in that relation to her husband. In one case a woman acts as security for a man's debts to another woman. In a suit about a slave a woman, who was proved by witnesses to have made a wrongful claim, was compelled to pay a sum of money equivalent to the value of the slave. We find, too, a married woman joining with a man to sell a house. In another case, in which a mother and son had a sum of money owing to them, the debt was cancelled by giving a bill on the mother. The rich woman, by name Gugua, disposes her property among her children, but she reserves the right of taking it back into her own hands if she should so wish, and stipulates that it may not be mortgaged to any one without her consent.[250] There is another interesting deed[251] by which a father who, it is suggested, was a spendthrift, assigns the remnant of his property to his daughter under the stipulation "thou shalt measure to me, and as long as thou livest give me maintenance, food, ointment and clothing."
It would be easy to multiply such cases.[252] All these contract tablets have interest for us. The active participation of the Babylonian women in property transactions is the more instructive when we consider that in the development of commercial enterprise the Babylonians were in advance of all the rest of the world. One is tempted to suggest that the assistance of women may have brought an element into commerce beneficial to its growth. There is ample evidence to show the administrative and financial ability of women. This quality is noted by Lecky in the chapter on "Woman Questions" in his Democracy and Liberty. He says:
"How many fortunes wasted by negligence or extravagance have been restored by a long minority under female management?"
He notes, too, the financial ability of the French women.
"Where can we find in a large class a higher level of business habits and capacity than that which all competent observers have recognised in French women of the middle classes?"
The estimate of J.S. Mill on this question is too well known to call for quotation. We may recall also the superior ability in trade of the women of Burma. It is not necessary, however, to seek for proof of women's ability in finance. Against one woman who mismanages her income at least six men may be placed who mismanage theirs, not from any special extravagance, but from sheer male inability to adapt expenditure to income. A woman who has had any business training will discriminate better than a man between the essential and the non-essential in expenditure.
The civilisation of a people is necessarily determined to a large extent by the ideas of the relations of the sexes, and by the institutions and conventions that arise through such ideas. One of the most important and debatable of these questions is whether women are to be considered as citizens and independently responsible, or as beings differing in all their capacities from men, and, therefore, to be set in positions of at least material dependence to an individual man. It is the answer to this question we are seeking. The Babylonians decided for the civic equality of their women, and this decision must have affected all their actions from the larger matters of the State down to the smallest points of family conduct. The wisdom which, by giving a woman full control over her own property, recognised her right and responsibility to act for herself, was not, as we have seen, at once established. This recognition of the equality and fellowship between women and men as the finest working idea for the family relationship was only developed slowly through the long centuries of their civilisation.
III.—In Greece
"Of all things upon earth that breathe and grow
A herb most bruised is woman. We must pay
Our store of gold, hoarded for that one day
To buy us some man's love, and lo, they bring
A master of our flesh. There comes the sting
Of the whole shame, and then the jeopardy
For good or ill, what shall that master be?
Reject she cannot, and if she but stays
His suit, 'tis shame on all that woman's days.
So thrown amid new laws, new places, why,
'Tis magic she must have to prophesy.
Home never taught her that—how best to guide
Towards peace this thing that sleepeth at her side,
And she, who, labouring long, shall find some way
Whereby her lord may bear with her, nor fray
His yoke too fiercely, blessed is the breath
That woman draws! Else let her pray for death.
Her lord, if he be wearied of her face
Within doors, gets him forth; some merrier place
Will ease his heart; but she waits on, her whole
Vision enchained on a single soul.
And then, forsooth, 'tis they that face the call
Of war, while we sit sheltered, hid from all
Peril. False mocking. Sooner would I stand
Three times to face their battles, shield in hand,
Than bear our child."
—Euripides.
If we turn now from eastern civilisation to ancient Greece, the picture there presented to us is in many ways in sharp contrast to anything we have yet examined. The Greeks founded western civilisation, but their rapid advance in general culture was by no means accompanied by a corresponding improvement in the position of women. The fineness of their civilisation and their exquisite achievement in so many directions makes it the more necessary to remember this.