"Not one but has the sex so strong within her,
She differs nothing from the rest. Step-mothers
All hate their step-daughters, and every wife
Studies alike to contradict her husband,
The same perverseness running through them all."
The acute reader, on turning to the play of the "Mother-in-law," from which these lines are taken, will not be surprised to learn that the women in the comedy are in the right, and the men grossly in fault.
A Scene of Conjugal Life. (Daumier, Paris, 1846.)
The literature of the Middle Ages tells the same story. The popular tales of that period exhibit women as equally seductive and malevolent, silly, vain, not to be trusted, enchanting to the lover, a torment to the husband. Caricatures of women and their extravagances in costume and behavior occur in manuscripts as far back as A.D. 1150, and those extravagances may serve to console men of the present time by their enormity. Many specimens could be given, but they are generally too formless or extravagant to be interesting. There are also many rude pictures from those centuries which aimed to satirize the more active foibles of the sex. One of these exhibits a wife belaboring her husband with a broom, another pounding hers with a ladle, another with a more terrible instrument, her withering tongue, and another with the surest weapon in all the female armory—tears. In the Rouen Cathedral there are a pair of carvings, one representing a fierce struggle between husband and wife for the possession of a garment the wearing of which is supposed to be a sign of mastery, and the other exhibiting the victorious wife in the act of putting that garment on. On the portal of a church at Ploërmel, in France, there is a well-cut representation of a young girl leading an elderly man by the nose. More violent contests are frequently portrayed, and even fierce battles with bellows and pokers, stirring incidents in the "eternal war between man and woman."
The gentle German priest who wrote the moral ditties of the "Ship of Fools" ought not to have known much of the tribulations of husbands; but in his poem on the "Wrath and great Lewdnes of Wymen," he becomes a kind of frantic Caudle, and lays about him with remarkable vigor. He calls upon the "Kinge most glorious of heaven and erth" to deliver mankind from the venomous and cruel tongues of froward women. One chiding woman, he observes, "maketh greater yell than a hundred magpies in one cage;" and let her husband do what he will, he can not quiet her till "she hath chid her fill." No beast on earth is so capable of furious hate—not the bear, nor the wolf, nor the lion, nor the lioness; no, nor the cruel tigress robbed of her whelps, rushing wildly about, tearing and gnawing stock and tree.
"A wrathfull woman is yet more mad than she.
Cruell Medea doth us example shewe
Of woman's furour, great wrath and cruelty;
Which her owne children dyd all to pecis hewe."
This poet, usually so moderate and mild in his satire of human folly, is transported with rage in contemplating the faults of women, and holds them up to the abhorrence of his readers. A woman, he remarks, can wallow in wicked delights, and then, giving her mouth a hurried wipe, come forward with tranquil mind and an air of child-like innocence, sweetly protesting that she has done nothing wrong. The most virulent woman-hater that was ever jilted or rejected could not go beyond the bachelor priest who penned this infuriate diatribe upon the sex.