Woman in Political Evolution

by Joseph McCabe

Letourneau (La condition de la femme) and Otto Henne am Rhyn (Das Frau in der Kulturgeschichte) have collected many indications that woman had a better position at the beginning of Greek civilisation. Polygamy was generally abolished at an early date, and the mother seems at first to have occupied the central place in the family, as in Egypt. An old legend, preserved in later writers, represented that the women had originally the right to vote in the Council, like the men, and that, because they outvoted the men and gave a feminine name to Athens, the jealous male god, Poseidon, intervened, and the vote was taken from them. From these and other obscure traces we may gather that woman was not so “subordinate” when Greece was climbing to power. Letourneau, who observes that early Greek patriotism should rather be called “matriotism,” gives the best suggestion of the way in which they lost influence. As private property and its value increased, the men shifted the line of inheritance from mother to father, and woman fell into economic dependence, with all its consequences. A clearer realisation of the father’s part in the children aided this. In time the mother is slighted as being merely the soil that passively nurtures the seed. The father is the creator.

I lay no stress on the abundance of female deities in the early Greek mythology. Westermarck points out that the presence of goddesses has not the significance that Reich and others ascribe to it, because we do not find woman’s position varying with the number or importance of female deities. That is so; though, perhaps, there was more correspondence between the two when the myths were originally framed. But it seems to me that, as divine families were always given human complexions, they were bound to have wife and daughter goddesses, whatever woman’s position in the tribe was.

Religion apart, then, there is sufficient evidence that the Greeks began their career with woman in a fair position, though with the political power, as everywhere, in the hands of the men. By the golden age women were not only rigidly excluded from public life, but were thrust to a lower social level, and treated bitterly and contemptuously in literature. This, it must be remembered, is mainly true of Athens. In the kingdom of Sparta women had ample freedom and great respect, and in the outlying parts of Greece their position was much better than at Athens. But the chief interest remains in the fact that at Athens, with its intense public life, its thorough democracy, its high mental and moral culture, the position of woman was one of subordination.

A recent French writer, G. Notor, has given us a fine work (La femme dans l’antiquité Grecque, 1901), in which he essays to vindicate the honour of Greece. He points out that, if the Ionians restricted and calumniated woman, the Dorians and Æolians treated her with much more consideration. He also reminds us, as is usual, of the fine types of womanhood portrayed in the Homeric poems and the comparatively good position they occupied. One must remember, however, that the Homeric poems depict the small class of the wives of chiefs and princes; and the glimpses we get of the lower women are not attractive. In any case, the Homeric portraits belong to the earlier and better phase, when an Andromache was assuredly respected. In regard to the Athenian woman, M. Notor can only correct the more exaggerated notions about her position. Miss Mason (Woman in the Golden Ages, 1901) writes that the lot of the Greek woman was “bare and cheerless, without even the sympathy that tempers the hardest fate.”

That is much too dark a picture of her condition. Of the two greatest writers of Greece, Aristotle wrote of woman in terms no harder than, and no different from, those of modern moralists like Ruskin or Frederic Harrison; while Plato has not an equal in modern Europe in his championship of her capacity and her rights.

As it was, her life was by no means “cheerless.” Until she approached the age of marriage (generally about her twentieth year) an Athenian girl had plenty of freedom and enjoyment. She was not, as in the colonies, educated with her brother at the public expense, nor did she enter the gymnastic schools, as in Sparta. But with the incessant cultivation of music and dance, and with the frequent spectacle of the great religious processions to the Acropolis and the temples, her life did not lack colour or gaiety. After marriage she was restricted to the gynecæum, or women’s quarters. One must not, however, imagine that this meant the grim dulness that inclusion in a modern house would suggest. The seclusion was not so rigid but that the women could visit each other; and when the long hours had passed in the beautiful sun-lit court, with its flowered terraces and marble fountains, or in chatting with her slaves or friends over her embroidery, the day would close with the music and dance of which the Greek woman was passionately fond. She had, too, the occasional distraction of witnessing the great religious solemnities, or of going to the theatre carved in the flank of the hill. Few large gatherings of Athenians, except the crowds that roared at the comedy or seethed round the bema, were not lit up by the presence of their beautiful ladies in their gay silk robes and golden sandals. And at longer intervals there broke on the monotony of their lives the greater thrill of a pilgrimage, or the journey to the Olympic games.

This was the normal tenure of life for the wife of the well-to-do Athenian. The wives of the poor went, of course, freely about their shopping, and as time went on even the wealthier women took more part in public entertainments. That the tragedians Sophocles and Euripides (of unhappy matrimonial experience) spoke bitterly of them, and that the comic poets Aristophanes and Menander satirised them, is quite true; but the common inference, that they express a contempt for women more offensive or more widespread at Athens than in recent England, is quite wrong. Their gibes and strictures really show that the conscience of Athens was pricked at the injustice and irrationality of its system, that a feminist movement was felt, and that conservatives were struggling against it with their customary exaggeration, and humorists making trade of it, as they do to-day.

This movement for reform began as soon as the material struggle for establishment was over, and the culture of Athens opened its splendour. Long before the age of Pericles and Pheidias the women of Athens were stirred with a breath of ambition from the eastern isles. The women of Æolia had, as I said, more freedom and education; and Athenians might have reflected, when they made their strictures on woman’s intelligence, that where, among their own kin, the artificial restriction was not imposed women quickly proved their capacity for art and letters. Of the voluminous work of Sappho we have scant remnants, but those resplendent fragments are enough to justify her title as one of the greatest lyric poets of all time. Athenians seem to have evaded the moral by loading her memory with calumnies about her life and death, which many modern writers are unwilling to accept. In her time Sappho had about her a number of able, but less brilliant, women writers, and pupils came from all parts of the Greek world to feel the glow of the new-lit fire. There are reasons for thinking that Sappho went beyond literary ambition, and was exiled for interfering in some political trouble. However, the stifling atmosphere of Persia came over the eastern Greek world, and the fire dwindled and died.

The Lesbian movement must have been felt in Athens, and other changes were now helping to show the absurdity of the system of restriction. One of these was the rise of the class of hetæræ and the freedom with which even great Athenians consorted with the higher members of the class. The ideal of the men of Athens, to marry wives solely for the purpose of rearing families and to confine themselves to males for comradeship, soon sank in the mud. Among the evils it brought about was the encouragement of prostitution on a large scale; and from the class was evolved a more select group, of very beautiful or very cultivated women, with whom even statesmen and philosophers were intimate. While wives and daughters found what pleasure they could in the home, the men flocked to the houses of courtesans to discuss the subjects their less educated wives could not discuss, or sought the perfumed chambers where the wine and flute and dance made the blood run swifter. The injustice and absurdity of such a social division cannot long have escaped the wit of Athens. Aspasia, the most famous of the hetæræ, was a standing rebuke to the Greek ideal of woman, and it is not improbable that it was her attacks on it that led the Athenians to put her on trial.

It is therefore not surprising that, as culture grew, the partition began to give way. From the time when Greek thinkers turned from natural to moral philosophy we find them slighting the current ideal. Most of the leaders of the schools freely included women among their pupils and prominent disciples. Pythagoras, the austere and mystic early thinker, had a high regard for Perictione, and his wife maintained the school after his death. Socrates showed the same regard for Diotima and other ladies, and Crates encouraged his wife Hipparchia to think. Epicurus—who was not the hedonist so many imagine, but a sober, almost ascetic, teacher—opened his quiet garden in the vicinity of Athens, and offered his modest cakes and water, to men and women alike. No doubt, we must see in all this only an admission of woman’s equal capacity for culture and demand for social equality; but the satires of Aristophanes show that there was also a strong claim for political equality, and some of the great writers expressly consider it.