Feudal legislation combined with clerical contempt and criminal persecution in lowering woman’s position. There were numerous and stringent enactments which “rendered it impossible for women to succeed to any considerable amount of property, and which almost reduced them to the alternative of marriage or a nunnery. The complete inferiority of the sex was continually maintained by the law; and that generous public opinion which in Rome had frequently revolted against the injustice done to girls, in depriving them of the greater part of the inheritance of their fathers, totally disappeared.” Beaumanoir says that “Every husband may beat his wife if she refuses to obey his orders, or if she speaks ill of him or tells an untruth, provided he does so with moderation.” Early German law permitted the father, and subsequently the husband, to sell, punish, or even kill the wife; and in England wife-beating has not yet died out.
“If, in the times of St. Louis,” says Legouvé, “a young vassal of some royal fief was sought in marriage, it was necessary for her father to get his seigneur’s permission for her marriage; the seigneur asked the king’s consent to his permission, and not till after all these agreements (father, seigneur, king) was she consulted regarding this contract which affected her whole life.” How beautifully such a law must have fostered the sentiment of Love which depends on Individual Preference and Special Sympathy!
Such laws no doubt were simply echoes of clerical teachings. “The girl,” says St. Ambrose of Rebecca, whom he holds up herein as an example, “is not consulted about her espousals, for she awaits the judgment of her parents; inasmuch as a girl’s modesty will not allow her to choose a husband” (!). Irish “bulls” appear to have crept even into ecclesiastic enactments, for we read in Smith’s Dictionary of Christian Antiquities that “An Irish council in the time of St. Patrick, about the year 450 lays it down that the will of the girl is to be inquired of the father, and that the girl is to do what her father chooses, inasmuch as man is the head of the woman.” “Even widows,” we read further, “under the age of twenty-five were forbidden by a law of Valentinian and Gratian to marry without their parents’ consent; and St. Ambrose desires young widows to leave the choice of their second husbands to their parents.”
Compayré states in his History of Pedagogy that in the seventeenth century “woman was still regarded as the inferior of man, in the lower classes as a drudge, in the higher as an ornament. In her case intellectual culture was regarded as either useless or dangerous; and the education that was given her was to fit her for a life of devotion or a life of seclusion from society.”
Still more, of course, was this the case in the times of St. Jerome, who in his letter to Læta on the education of her daughter Paula, tells her that the girl must never eat in public, or eat meat. “Never let Paula listen to musical instruments.” Even her affections must be suppressed—all except the devotional sentiments. She must not be “in the gatherings and in the company of her kindred; let her be found only in retirement.” “Do not allow Paula to feel more affection for one of her companions than for others.” And this ascetic moralist even recommends uncleanliness as a virtue: “I entirely forbid a young girl to bathe;” which may be matched with the following, also cited from Compayré: “The first preceptors of Gargantua said that it sufficed to comb one’s hair with the four fingers and the thumb; and that whoever combed, washed, and cleansed himself otherwise was losing his time in this world.”
In such a rough atmosphere of masculine ignorance, fanaticism, and cruelty the feminine virtues of sympathy, tenderness, grace, and sweetness could not have flourished very luxuriantly. Consequently there is doubtless more than a grain of truth in mediæval proverbs about women, cynical and brutal as some of them are. Here are a few specimens:—
“Women and horses must be beaten.”
“Women and money are the cause of all evil in the world.”
“Women only keep those secrets which they don’t know.”
“Trust no woman, and were she dead.”