“Hetairai, famous at once for their beauty and intellect such as Phryne, Laïs of Corinth, Gnathæna, and Aspasia, were objects of universal admiration among the most distinguished Greeks. They were admitted to their assemblies and banquets, while the ‘honest’ women of Greece were, without exception, confined to the house.... A considerable number of women preferred the greater freedom which they enjoyed as Hetairai to marriage, and carried on the trade of prostitution as a means of livelihood. In unrestrained intercourse with men, the more intelligent of the Hetairai, who were doubtless often of good birth, acquired a far greater degree of versatility and culture than that possessed by the majority of married women, living in a state of enforced ignorance and bondage. This invested the Hetairai with a greater charm for the men, in addition to the arts which they employed in the special exercise of their profession. This explains the fact that many of them enjoyed the esteem of some of the most distinguished and eminent men of Greece, to whom they stood in a relationship of influential intimacy, a position held by no legitimate wife. The names of these Hetairai are famous to the present day, while one enquires in vain after the names of the legitimate wives.”—August Bebel (“Woman,” Chap. I.).
7.—“... wealth, or ... fame.”
E.g., Phryne, who offered to rebuild the wall of Thebes; and Laïs, commemorated in the adage, “Non cuivis hominum contingit adire Corinthum.” And as to even modern “fame,” a writer so merciless concerning her own sex as Mrs. Lynn Linton can yet say, “Agnes Sorel, like Aspasia, was one of the rare instances in history where failure in chastity did not include moral degradation nor unpatriotic self-consideration.”—(Nineteenth Century, July, 1891, p. 84.)
8.—“... the tinge of shame.”
Why indeed should shame have attached specially to those women, more highly cultured and better treated than wives; and whose sole impeachment could be that they rejected the still lower serfdom of wedded bondage?
XIII.
2.—“To him who fixed the gages of the fight.”
“If we could imagine a Bossuet or a Fénélon figuring among the followers of Ninon de Lenclos, and publicly giving her counsel on the subject of her professional duties, and the means of securing adorers, this would be hardly less strange than the relation which really existed between Socrates and the courtesan Theodota.”—Lecky (“History of European Morals,” Vol. II., p. 280).
8.—“The waste of woman worth ...”
Since these words were written, a letter from Mrs. Mona Caird has been published by the “Women’s Emancipation Union,” in which is said:—“So far from giving safety and balance to the ‘natural forces,’ these time-honoured restrictions, springing from a narrow theory which took its rise in a pre-scientific age, are fraught with the gravest dangers, creating a perpetual struggle and unrest, filling society with the perturbations and morbid developments of powers that ought to be spending themselves freely and healthfully on their natural objects. Anyone who has looked a little below the surface of women’s lives can testify to the general unrest and nervous exhaustion or malaise among them, although each would probably refer her suffering to some cause peculiar to herself and her circumstances, never dreaming that she was the victim of an evil that gnaws at the very heart of society, making of almost every woman the heroine of a silent tragedy. I think few keen observers will deny that it is almost always the women of placid temperament, with very little sensibility, who are happy and contented; those of more highly wrought nervous systems and imaginative faculty, who are nevertheless capable of far greater joy than their calmer sisters, in nine cases out of ten are secretly intensely miserable. And the cause of this is not eternal and unalterable. The nervously organised being is not created to be miserable; but when intense vital energy is thwarted and misdirected—so long as the energy lasts—there must be intense suffering.... It is only when resignation sets in, when the ruling order convinces at last and tires out the rebel nerves and the keen intelligence, that we know that the living forces are defeated, and that death has come to quiet the suffering. All this is waste of human force, and far worse than waste.”