“Between a woman’s yes and no there isn’t room for the point of a needle.”
“If you are too happy, take a wife.”
When we read that “Montaigne is of that number, who, through false gallantry, would keep woman in a state of ignorance, on the pretext that instruction would mar her natural charms;” and that the same author recommends poetry to women, because it is “a wanton, crafty art, disguised, all for pleasure, all for show, just as they are”; we recall with a smile John Stuart Mill’s sarcastic reference to the time, “Some generations ago, when satires on women were in vogue, and men thought it a clever thing to insult women for being what men made them.”
CHRISTIANITY AND LOVE
Christianity claims to be pre-eminently the religion of love, in the widest sense of that term, including, especially, religious veneration of a personal Deity and love of one’s enemy. It has been asserted by Mrs. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and others that Christianity has done little or nothing in aid of woman’s elevation; and it cannot be denied that much good would have resulted if more emphasis had been placed by the Apostles on certain phases of the domestic relations. That Romantic Love is not alluded to in the New Testament need not cause any surprise, for that sentiment cannot have existed in those days when Courtship and Individual Choice were unknown. But there are passages in St. Paul’s writings which were probably the seeds from which grew the mediæval contempt for marriage and women. And although marriage is now zealously guarded by the Church, Love of the romantic sort is no doubt looked upon even to-day by many an austere clergyman as a harmless youthful epidemic—a sort of emotional measles—rather than as a new æsthetico-moral sentiment destined to become the strongest of all agencies working for the improvement of the personal appearance, social condition, and happiness of mankind.
On the other hand, even agnostics must admit on reflection that Christianity contained elements which, despite the vicious fanaticism of many of its early teachers, slowly helped to ameliorate woman’s lot. In the first place, Protestantism, as embodied in Luther, performed an invaluable service by restoring and enforcing universal respect for the marriage-tie. He set a good example by not only defying the degrading custom of obligatory celibacy, but by marrying a most sensible woman—a nun who had escaped with eight others from a convent at Nimtsch.
Mariolatry, or the cult of the Virgin Mary, is the second avenue through which Christianity influenced the development of the tender emotions. The halo of sanctity which it spread at the same time over virginity and motherhood has been of incalculable value in raising woman in the estimation of the masses.
A third way in which Christianity influenced woman’s position is suggested by the following remarks of Mr. Lecky, who has done valuable service to philosophy, in showing how emotions as well as ideas change with time: “In antiquity,” he says, “the virtues that were most admired were almost exclusively those which were distinctively masculine. Courage, self-assertion, magnanimity, and, above all, patriotism, were the leading features of the ideal type; and chastity, modesty, and charity, the gentler and the domestic virtues, which are especially feminine, were greatly undervalued. With the single exception of conjugal fidelity, none of the virtues that were highly prized were virtues distinctively or pre-eminently feminine.” Now the “religion of love,” by especially insisting on these “feminine virtues,” became a powerful agent in undermining the coarse mediæval spirit with its masculine, military “virtues,” alias barbarisms.
CHIVALRY—MILITANT AND COMIC
In the howling wilderness of mediæval masculine brutality and feminine degradation there was one sunny oasis in which the flowers of Love were allowed to grow undisturbed for a few generations,—until military ambition trod them again underfoot. This brief episode of gentler manners is known as the period of Chivalry.