A NOBLEWOMAN OF THE 16TH CENTURY.
WOMEN DURING THE MIDDLE AGES.
From the accounts, given by Tertullian and other writers about the life of the early Christians, it appears that their conceptions in regard to women gave promise for a better future. But during the Middle Ages, which extend from the downfall of Rome to the discovery of America, Christianity unfortunately failed to realize these promises.
First of all the ancient Oriental prejudice against women again took hold of the minds of many Christian leaders. Instead of making themselves champions of women’s rights and interests, they curtailed women’s influence in order to subject them to the dominion of their husbands. In these efforts the “Christian Fathers” complied with those commands that Paul the Apostle had given in several of his epistles to the Corinthians, Philippians, and to Timothy. They read as follows:
“The head of every man is Christ, and the head of every woman is the man, and the head of Christ is God. For the man is not of the woman but the woman of the man. Neither was the man created for the woman but the woman for the man.”—
“Let your women keep silence in the churches, for it is not permitted unto them to speak but they are commanded to be under obedience. And if they would learn anything let them ask their husbands at home.”
“Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.”—
These narrow views destroyed the beneficial influence of woman in Christian lands and retarded her emancipation for more than eighteen hundred years. Approving of Paul’s commands, Ambrose, one of the eminent lights of the Church in the Fourth Century, said, to demonstrate the inferiority of woman: “Remember that God took a rib out of Adam’s body, not a part of his soul, to make her!” Another of these leaders made the name “Eve” synonymous with “deceiver,” accusing woman of having been the cause of men’s expulsion from Paradise. St. John Chrysostom wrote: “Woman is the source of evil, the author of sin, the gate of the tomb, the entrance to hell, the cause of all our misfortunes.” And St. John of Damascus told the world, that “woman is an evil animal, a hideous worm which makes its home in the heart of man.” Other teachers agreed with Paul that woman must veil her head because she is not, as is man, in God’s image!
In face of such vicious promulgations we must not be surprised that among the discussions of the early “Fathers” none was more important than that, “has woman a soul?” This question was argued in the Sixth Century at the Council of Macon. It is also recorded that a few of these pious leaders entertained the opinion that because of the great power and goodness of the Almighty “women may possibly be permitted to rise as men at the resurrection.” And the Council of Auxerre, held in the Sixth Century, decided that women should wear gloves before they touched the holy sacrament.
As at the same time ascetic thinkers impressed the minds of the Christians with an inordinate estimate of the virtue of celibacy, conceptions of matrimony also changed considerably. While marriage was not condemned, it was, however, regarded as an inferior state, and it was held, that persons who had not married, but remained pure, were nobler and more exalted beings than those who had married. With the advance of such ascetic ideas a large family came to be regarded almost as a disgrace, as a proof of lasciviousness.—