Woman in Political Evolution

by Joseph McCabe

The causes of the early agitation were varied, and can only be noted in summary here. The eastern culture that was flowing into Italian life was corroding the bases of the old standards and traditions. The native religion, with its divine model of a Roman family, was losing its influence, and disquieting new goddesses were gaining favour. In the year 204 B.C. the cult of the mysterious “mother of the gods” (Cybele) was imported, and soon the processions of its frenzied and repulsive devotees were among the familiar sights of even country villages. From Egypt came the more sober cult of Isis, another mother-goddess; and, in spite of what we later learn of assignations in the temples of Isis, it had in it something of the cold and chaste beauty of the moon which it symbolised, and won some of the finest women of Rome. From Persia came other religions, one of which (the Manichean) offered special activity to women.

On the other hand, the old ideal of the family, the very incarnation of woman’s subjection, was falling into decay. Greek and Asiatic courtesans were pouring in, and Roman fathers must have their daughters educated, if a class of hetæræ were not to hold the position it had done at Athens and Corinth. Women found their value, and stipulated for the retention of their dowries, if not for other property. As their wealth grew, the lawyers entered their service, and taught them how to evade the inconveniences of the law by refusing the confarreatio (the most solemn form) and only entering on one of the looser forms of marriage. Divorce, which had been unknown for centuries, became frequent; and some women entered upon mock marriages, which withdrew them from a father’s control without substituting that of a husband.

And, about the year 190 B.C., the new spirit of the women broke out in fiery eruption. During the war with Carthage a law had been passed (215 B.C.) forbidding the women to wear heavy golden ornaments or many-coloured robes, and restricting their use of chariots. At the close of the war (195 B.C.) the women demanded the repeal of this Oppian Law, as it had been passed to secure funds. Cato, however, who was then Consul, and others resolved to retain the law, and a struggle ensued that one could almost transfer from the forum of ancient Rome to the Parliament Square of modern London. Livy (Ab urbe condita, 1. xxxiv. c. i.-viii.) describes how, not only crowds of men of opposing sides invaded the Capitol, but the matrons themselves, “restrained neither by authority nor modesty nor the control of their husbands,” beset all the ways that led to the Forum, and importunately demanded the votes of the legislators. Reinforced by crowds of provincial women, they kept up a noisy agitation during the debate in the Forum, and—strangest parallel of all—“dared to approach the consuls, prætors, and other magistrates,” and at length forced their way into the houses of the tribunes and won them to the cause! Conservative patricians looked with alarm at this new species of “masculine women” (androgynæ). Cato, who led the resistance, complained that he had to bore his way with shame through a crowd of women to reach the Forum. If the men did not wish to see themselves under the heel of the women in a few years, he said—Livy gives his speech at length—let them keep their wives in order at home and forbid them to appear in public. But there were conscientious traitors to the masculine cause, as there are to-day. Lucius Valerius replied to Cato, and, intimidated by the armies of Amazons without, the senators repealed the Oppian Law. Cato had to be content, some years later, to impose a heavy tax on their property.^[6]

This agitation, in the year 195 B.C., did not aim at securing direct political power, but it well illustrates the futility of anti-feminist predictions, as well as the law that feminism grows with culture. From that time onward the women of Rome continued to enlarge their liberty and their power. After a few decades the Voconian law was passed, forbidding them to receive legacies; but it was little observed, and the economic power of the wealthier women increased. That many of them used their resources only to indulge a taste for vicious or stupid luxury is merely to say that they did what some rich men did, and are doing. We have just as many instances recorded of wealthy and cultivated Roman ladies who retained all the fine character of their ancestors. Those writers who speak of good wives and good mothers as “the gold that glitters on the muck-heap,” as Dr. Reich does, seem to be ignorant of the real character of some of their types.^[7] That famous type of motherhood, Cornelia, daughter of Scipio and mother of the Gracchi, was one of the most learned women of her time, and was no less interested in public affairs than in Greek culture. In her later years her home was a centre of intellectual life, and her letters are highly praised by the first critic of the Roman world. The letters of Cicero refer to numbers of other Roman ladies of no less culture than character and civic interest. The patriotism of Brutus drew its strength, to no small extent, from the spirit of his mother, wife, and sister.

By the beginning of the Christian era, when the Empire had displaced the Republic, the position of woman had materially altered. The despotism of the husband was a mere barbaric memory. From Augustus they obtained full control of their dowry and protection against avaricious husbands; and from Hadrian, later, they had the right to make wills without consulting their husbands. Their accumulating property gave them a good deal of indirect influence on civic and political affairs. The philosopher Seneca acknowledged that he owed his quæstorship to his aunt, and promotion through the influence of women was quite common.

In the reign of Tiberius a senator made a spirited attack on their interference in the public administration. The wives of generals and governors, he complained, went down into the provinces with their husbands, reviewed the troops with them, and meddled with the government. The Senate ignored the complaint. Inscriptions have been found in many Roman towns that tell with gratitude of women-patrons of the municipality, women-donors of baths, arches, temples, hospitals, and other treasured institutions.

The school-system of Rome now developed to a height which has only been reached once more by education in the second half of the nineteenth century, and of which many civilised nations still fall far short. For the children of the free workers, of both sexes, there was general and free elementary instruction in the later Empire. Boys and girls sat together on the benches of the literator in the open porticoes, and the girls of the more wealthy went on to the secondary schools of the grammaticus, as their brothers did. Many women had slave-tutors teaching them Greek letters and philosophy. The marble chambers of the rich, with their rare birds nesting in the cedar roof, their silver furniture and Greek vases, and all the treasures of Persia, did, indeed, often echo with voluptuous music, and draw their heavy curtains upon scenes such as unthinking wealth inspires in every age; but they resounded, too, with feminine discussions of Greek philosophy and poetry, and Roman politics, and they smiled on types of womanhood that preserved all the character of the old Republic, with all the interest in art and thought and life of the new Empire.

It is so commonly believed that this enlargement of the liberty and power of the Roman women led to a general degradation of character that I must linger for a moment on the point. The popular idea of an entire corruption of Rome in the first century is quite discarded by modern scholarship. The English reader will find the finest and truest picture of that maligned age in Dr. Samuel Dill’s Roman Society from Nero to Marcus Aurelius, in which the current exaggeration is fully refuted.^[8] The popular notion rests almost entirely on the satires of Juvenal, a bohemian writer, anti-feminist and anti-aristocratic, who hung on the fringe of society to catch what dubious morsels he could of idle chatter and exaggerated scandal. It would be more reasonable to take Father Vaughan’s strictures on the “smart set” as a full picture of English society than to take Juvenal’s less conscientious gossip about a few wealthy women as a complete picture of Rome. A careful reader will soon see that Juvenal lashes Roman women for their culture and for innocent fads, as much as for vice. As Letourneau says: “Neither the satires of the poets nor the objurgations of moralists suffice to prove that the Roman woman was essentially inferior to her male companion.” The moralist he seems to have in mind is Seneca; but Seneca expressly claimed that woman was the mental and moral equal of man, and he lived in a circle of fine, cultivated ladies. The morbidity of a few of the wealthier women—a morbidity that has a parallel in every age of luxury and change, in both sexes—does not characterise the sex; and, as to the larger class of less wealthy women, Dr. Dill adds: “In his [Juvenal’s] own modest class female morality ... was probably as high as it ever was, as high as the average morality of any age” (p. 76).

I do not need to dwell, therefore, on the few known cases of slave-torture, on the one or two noble women slinking down to the reeking insulæ in the Subura, and the few other extraordinary misdeeds that have puffed out the popular calumny. For the general character of the age one need only recall London under the Stuarts, or under the Georges. It was an age of great luxury (falling short, however, of the same class in modern New York) and great laxity, and the blame must be laid on the rigorous and tyrannical old idea of marriage, as well as on the familiar causes. But the idea that this condition of Roman society continued to the end of the Pagan Empire is grotesquely untrue. Before the end of the first century, under Stoic influence, the standard of character rose once more, Roman society was purged, and in the last phase of the feminist movement at Rome a general level of morality and philanthropy was reached that will bear comparison with modern times. Both the historians of the time, Tacitus and Suetonius, expressly describe the reform, and every historian knows that Rome went on to a greater height (apart from letters) than it had done before. Lecky, in particular, has done justice to the way in which the Stoic doctrine of the brotherhood of men found expression in the condemnation of slavery, the imperial abolition of most of the old abuses, the care of the aged and ailing, and a hundred works of justice and mercy.

In this remarkable fervour for social justice woman was bound to find profit. The service done to her consisted mainly in providing a sounder basis for the liberty and power which she had won, largely by the equivocal aid of the growing laxity in regard to marriage. The Stoics—philosophers, lawyers, and emperors—believed in the equality of men and women. Antoninus Pius embodied in one of his judgments the common Stoic sentiment that fidelity was equally expected of husband and wife. The great Stoic jurist, Gaius, severely criticised the older Roman law, that dealt unequally with man and woman, and “scouted the popular apology for it in the mental inferiority of the female sex,” says Sir Henry Maine.^[9] Dion Chrysostom called for the legal suppression of prostitution. Briefly, the Stoics, who controlled the legal and imperial courts for more than a century, completed the work of putting woman on a level of legal and social equality to man, and their world included—as the letters and writings of Plutarch, Seneca, Tacitus, and Pliny show—a large number of women of equal culture and character.