Thus Rome had completely removed the sex-disability of its women while it was still in the fulness of power, and as a direct consequence of its later moral culture. That this emancipation did not include the granting of political power can cause no surprise to those who know the history of Rome. Since the fall of the Republic the men themselves had no political power, and, therefore, the women had no sex-disability on this side to agitate against. It is true that the imperial purple was held exclusively by men, and the great administrative offices were open to men alone. Against this arrangement women may have protested; but we should hardly expect such a protest until a more advanced stage of evolution; and, in point of fact, the more ambitious women had a great deal of indirect power. Even before the fall of the Republic we find notices of what we should now call “women’s clubs” (senatus matronarum), and when power was concentrated in an hereditary monarchy the royal women had immense influence over it. Women agitated in municipal elections, as we saw, controlled small towns in the character of municipal patrons, and influenced the choice of quæstors, prætors, and tribunes. With this large measure of influence for the wealthier women, and with the general admission of her equal mental capacity to men, it was natural for woman to cease from agitation; the mass of the women, who had not these opportunities, were in no worse plight, politically, than their husbands. Until government by popular representatives was once more adopted or demanded we can hardly look for a further agitation. But the Roman Empire was now beginning to decay, and the cause of woman was lost in the general catastrophe.

In speaking of decay as setting in immediately after the completion of woman’s emancipation I need hardly recall my protest against connecting the two. The decay of the Roman Empire was due to causes that are plainly set forth by modern historians like Boissier and Schultze, and that have nothing whatever to do with the emancipation of woman. No serious historian ever dreamed of such a notion until the modern feminist movement arose. In point of fact, the emancipation of woman was completed long before Rome passed the height of its power. What the Stoics did was rather to find a healthy moral basis for the liberty that had already been won. I cannot go into the complex causes of the decay of the Empire in Europe, but will only say that it is traced to political, economic, and physical degeneration, with which the position of woman is absolutely unconnected. To the very end Roman women retained their culture, character, and influence; and the last glimpses we get (in Symmachus and Macrobius) of Pagan Rome, before the Goths invade it, leave with us a memory of a sober, cultivated, humane society, unconscious that the wheels of fate are making so appalling a revolution.

Thus, as I said in the beginning, the woman-movement of that older empire broke up only because its civilisation was broken. Rome had carried the cause of woman’s emancipation to a great height, and, had a fresh civilisation succeeded at once to the heritage, as Greece succeeded Rome, the story would have been completed long ago. Unhappily, Roman civilisation was replaced by a fresh barbarism, and Europe fell with terrible rapidity into the swamp of the Middle Ages. Women sank back all over Europe into a state of such subordination that fourteen hundred years after the fall of Rome there was not a civilisation in the world that would grant her the least semblance of that legal and mental equality with man which she had laboriously won nearly 2,000 years before. The cause of woman passed into an abyss, from which it is only now emerging afresh. How that came about, and why it lingered so long in the abyss, we have now to see.

CHAPTER VI.
THE DARK AGE OF FEMINISM

The millennium that lies between the year 500 and the year 1500 of the Christian Era is known to all historians as the Middle Age, and to very many as the Dark Age. Into the general correctness or incorrectness of the latter title I need not inquire. In the story of the evolution of woman that millennium must assuredly figure as the Dark Age. All the prestige that woman had enjoyed in Egypt, all the admissions she had wrung from the philosophers of Greece, all the high ambitions she had realised in Rome, were sunk deep in Lethe, and woman was again in a position of great subordination all over the world. Among the nations that were slowly rising to civilisation in the remote and unknown west, among the nations that had already reached civilisation in the east and south of Asia, she was subordinate; and in the centre of the world’s stage, in Europe, on which the main stream of cultural evolution had settled, she occupied a lower position than ever. Her social position varied; but her legal position was infamous, and her political position that of a serf.

Without going so far as to say, with Mrs. Cady Stanton (Woman’s Bible), that “mankind touched the lowest depth of degradation,” I will be content for the moment to say that all that woman had won in ancient Rome was entirely lost, and I will glance at the needful qualifications later. The first point of interest is to determine why the thread of woman’s development was broken off for a thousand years.

It will seem, at first glance, that I have assigned the cause in saying that Roman civilisation gave way to barbarism. Goths and Vandals trod underfoot the vast and wonderful polity that the Romans had spread over Europe. Roman culture retired to the western empire, to Asia, and, at the paralysing touch of Asia, fell into the rigid, barren, stationary form that we recognise still in the Greek Church. All Europe, west of Greece, was overrun by the barbarians who had issued from the forests of Germany, as Rome grew feebler. Over England, Gaul, Spain, Italy, and north Africa the light-haired, blue-eyed giants poured, and wherever they passed the fabric of Roman civilisation fell in ruins. Is not this explanation enough?

It is not, for these barbarians were of the class that treated woman with deference, not of the class that would bring into civilisation a fresh tradition of the ill treatment of their wives. It is useless to suggest that Tacitus, the Roman historian who wrote an account of their ways and ideals, exaggerated their deference to their women in order to shame the Romans. His statement on the point agrees too well with the earliest Teutonic and Scandinavian poetry, and with what we know of Anglo-Saxon England; nor was Tacitus by any means a feminist. There is no serious ground whatever for doubting his statement that the “Germans” saw something sacred in woman, held that the gods spoke more clearly through her, and took her counsel on tribal issues. Yet when we find the various branches of the race settling into fixed and organised polities on the ruins of Rome, we find woman generally despised, excluded from political life, and treated with the gravest injustice in legislation. The position of woman in Europe—in England—less than a century ago dispenses us from heaping up proofs.

It must be recognised at once that the extraordinary change in the surroundings of these barbaric fathers of ours would lead of itself to demoralisation. Buried for unknown centuries in the dense forests that lay between the Baltic and the Danube, they had treasured and submitted to the old traditions of their race, which favoured woman. As time goes on they encounter orderly and deadly legions, superbly armed, along the southern frontier of their region. In the early centuries of the Christian era they learn more of this wonderful race below the great river, with its impressive organisation, its shining luxury, its fairy cities, its strange religion and ideals. When the barrier falls they find themselves in a land whose mighty achievements made their old traditions seem puny and childlike, as their daubed huts or skin clothing. In that intoxication their ideals would easily grow dim, and their feeling of power amid a world of dwarfs would bode ill for woman. Thus, undoubtedly, we can explain much of the disappearance of the old Teutonic chivalry and virtue.

But it would be mere affectation to ignore the influence of their change of religion, and I will briefly show how this affected the position of woman. The greatest positive injustice that was done to woman was in the sphere of law, and Sir Henry Maine has shown that all the injustice done to woman in later European law was due to the overruling of Roman and Teutonic law by the Canon Law of the Church. The loss of social liberty and prestige can be clearly traced to the same root. Under the influence of the Judaic spirit which was now incorporated in Christianity, most of the early leaders of the Church spoke of woman and marriage in terms that the duller wit and coarser feeling of the following centuries only too literally received.