[12] Bücher, Industrial Evolution, p. 96.
CHAPTER II
The Status of Women in Early Historical Times
The world furnishes many examples of the rise and decline of civilizations before our era. Their art and literature often show social institutions comparing favorably with those of modern times. Almost without exception their decline can be traced to the invasion of people of less culture but greater warlike propensities. The institutions of these warlike peoples are the ones which survived, and upon which rest our modern institutions.
As we have seen the primitive society, militancy favors a greater differentiation of sex status and of work than industrialism. In the primarily industrial nations, men’s and women’s work often overlap, and although we can recognize a sex division of work, the line constantly shifts to the economic advantage of women. In a militant society, the women of the higher classes are often shown a deference unknown in the lower classes, but this deference is not shown them as a sex alone, but because of their relation to those who stand highest in the state. Where the women of the higher classes enjoy rights and privileges other than those reserved to them by the state, they are bestowed upon the individual alone, and not upon the sex in general. They have their basis in family ties making the family a unit in its economic interests, as well as in its social and political interests. No matter how conservative men may be in their attitude toward the political, social, and industrial equality of men and women, their prejudices do not weigh against family interests, or apply to the females of their own families.
Militant types of society have not recognized the political rights of women as women. But for all that their women have often played important roles in history by virtue of the power coming to them through some male relative who was more anxious to delegate his power to them than to see it pass to strangers, or to men of remoter blood relationship.
In the early, less militant societies we see that certain rights of women were recognized. In Egypt “the husband appears to have entered the house of his wives rather than the wives to have entered his, and this appearance of inferiority was so marked that the Greeks were deceived by it. They affirmed that the women were supreme in Egypt; the man at the time of marriage promised obedience to her, and entered into a contract not to raise any objection to her commands.”[13]
Hobhouse says, “It is very possible that the preservation of relics of mother-right was among the forces tending to the better condition of women in Egypt. These were augmented toward the close of the independent history of Egypt by the rise of free contract and the important part taken by women in the industrial and commercial life. In these relations and in social intercourse generally it is allowed on all hands that their position was remarkably free.”[14]
In Babylonia there were times when women held a position of independence and authority. “The wife could act apart from her husband, could enter into partnership, could trade with her money and conduct lawsuits in her own name.”
Sayce says further, “Women, as well as men, enjoyed the advantages of education. This evidence from the Babylonian contract-tablets, in which we find women appearing, as well as men, as plaintiffs or defendants in suits, as partners in commercial transactions, and as signing, when need arose, their names. There was none of that jealous exclusion of women in ancient Babylonia which characterizes the East of today, and it is probable that boys and girls pursued their studies at the same school.”[15]
Among the Greeks of the Homeric age, women held a position of respect and dignity but in the age of Pericles “little pains were taken with their education. Before their marriage, they managed their households and seldom left their dwellings.”[16]