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.

I have already observed that modern science is disposed to seek the origin of most of the Western civilisations in the ferment of tribes that filled the south-western offshoot of Asia some thousands of years before Christ, and that these tribes held very varying attitudes in regard to their women. The Hebrews probably represent one of these Semitic tribes in the north of the region between Babylonia and Palestine. From the southern desert, or the steppe-region leading to the desert, they invade Palestine, assimilate its civilisation, and evolve into the monarchy with which we are so familiar. It seems that the Hebrews came of one of those Bedouin tribes that kept their women in close subjection, and the later Judaic law preserved the tradition of the time when a boy meant a new spear to the tribe, and a girl only a future breeder of men. The wife was virtually the property of her husband, and could not inherit. He could divorce her when he willed, and had a right to her unconditional obedience. Few Hebrew women broke through this rigid system of subordination and left their names in the growing literature.

In the course of time the Hebrew sacred books, with a few additions, became the absolute authority of life and conduct in Europe, and the Judaic ideal came into collision with the later Roman ideal. I have shown elsewhere that all the Christian leaders in the Latin Empire--Tertullian, St. Cyprian, St. Augustine, St. Jerome, and St. Ambrose--insisted sternly on the subjection of woman, denounced her as the agent of humanity's downfall, and gave only too serious ground for a revival of the old contempt for her. When these abler leaders had passed away and the age of mediocrity set in, we find bishops seriously doubting whether woman has a soul, refusing her the sacrament on the same terms as men, and rejecting her testimony in a court of justice. From the Gospels certainly no support can be derived for this contemptuous attitude, but it was one of the points of the Old Testament that had not been expressly repealed, and the harsh and dominating language of St. Paul fully supported it. It would be idle to question the extent of the influence that St. Paul and the Old Testament and the great Fathers of the Church had on the young nations that were now settling down in Europe. Professor Karl Pearson has suggested that the northern tribes embraced Christianity precisely because it taught the subjection of women. We must, at all events, acknowledge that it displaced the old traditions with a lamentable theory of woman's inferiority.

During the "age of iron" (fifth to tenth century), therefore, the cause of woman was lost, and Europe entered upon the second phase of the subordination of woman, from which it is only emerging to-day. The life of the Middle Ages is so vast and varied a subject that different writers will, according to their prepossessions, give the most contradictory pictures of it. For most thoughtful women it will be enough to reflect that the position won by the women of Rome was obviously lost, or they would not again be laboriously assailing the barriers raised about their lives fifteen centuries later; and most of the recent women-writers--Mrs. Cady Stanton, Mrs. Gage, Mdlle. Chauvin, etc.--are very emphatic on the point. But I will try to sum up the changes in a few broad statements.

Socially, woman became once more absolutely subject to her husband. In the new marriage ceremony she pledged herself to blind obedience to his orders; and both Church and State gave him the power to flog her when he thought fit, and for a long time gave him the power to sell or dismiss her. In courts of justice she was put on a level with the despised Jew or the ancient slave; though there were courts--in Switzerland, for instance--that would generously accept the testimony of two women as being equal to that of one man. Prostitution and concubinage spread as they had never done before. Clerical bodies and municipalities owned brothels in many places, and not even Corinth or Athens at their worst had made so open a parade of women of that class. The newly-wed wives of the serfs were the property of the feudal lord for a few days. In the better class the women could own no property, as a rule were closely confined to the house, and were generally cut off completely from such culture as there was. To political influence they had no pretension. High-placed women won the irregular and dangerous power they have done in all ages, but otherwise they were more effectually shut out of public life than ever. Anglo-Saxon England offered a fine exception in this respect. Women, whether abbesses or widows, could rule their lands, and even succeed to hereditary administrative offices. But the coming of the Normans reduced the English woman to the general level of economic and political dependence.

All that can be set in relief against this dark picture is that women might obtain power and culture as abbesses of the larger convents, that at certain periods noble lay-women acquired learning, and that until about the thirteenth century women entered largely into the industries of the towns. But the number of women who stand out in the chronicles before the Renaissance for either learning or influence is extremely small, and serves only to deepen the general gloom of their situation. A St. Bridget or St. Hildegard, a Matilda or a Heloise, is but one figure advancing into the light out of obscure millions of down-trodden women. And the great share of women in the early medieval industries did not alter materially their position of subordination. The independent woman had too many dangers to face--the universal violence and license, the brutalities of the ducking-stool and scold's bridle, the appalling fate of the "witch"--to encourage rebellion against the received ideal. Generally speaking, woman sank in the Middle Ages to a position lower than she had ever before occupied in a civilised community.[10]

At some date in the remote future, when the story of woman's disabilities is ended the world over, the historian will probably regard that millennium as the darkest age for woman in the whole long story. A curious hesitation seems to have come over the fates. Up to this point the main stream of human development had flowed steadily towards Europe. The dying civilisations of Asia and Africa had made way for Greece, and Greece had turned the stream into Italy, to be spread from there in fertile flood over half the soil of Europe. Then civilisation almost disappeared in Europe, and for a time it looked as though the line of development would be taken up by some other race. Either unknown or very dimly known to Europe there were civilisations growing far out on the frontiers of its world that could very well outstrip it, as it floundered in the morass of the Middle Ages; and we may glance shortly at the position of woman in those distant races before we come to the awakening of Europe.

In the as yet unknown continent of America, into which some branch of the Mongolians had pushed before the northern land-bridge broke, two races had, by the Middle Ages, reached the upper stages of barbarism, and were climbing to civilisation. Since it is certain that Mexico and Peru developed quite independently of Europe, and probably independently of each other, their resemblance to medieval Europe is remarkable. They were feudal monarchies, with very powerful bodies of clergy, so that the general conditions were not favourable to woman. Education in Mexico was advanced, but under purely religious control, and vast numbers of the girls passed into the celibate state in the innumerable nunneries, to teach and embroider and capture little nuns in their turn. The girl who married (at from eleven to eighteen years of age) did not choose her partner, and passed from obedience to her father under the equal authority of her husband. She was not treated harshly, and polygamy was very exceptional. But the law imposed unequal punishment on her for unfaithfulness, and she was the greater sufferer by that ghastly evil of the Mexican religion--human sacrifice. In Peru the position of woman was generally better. For the great mass of the population there was little freedom, and the woman had few relative disabilities. She worked in the fields with the men, under a _régime_ of what one might call highly centralised feudalism, and seems to have been respected in the home. All political power was kept in the hands of the Incas, who had immense harems, and who married their sisters even more frequently than had been done in Egypt.

From the little knowledge we have of the position of woman in these native American civilisations, it seems that they were passing through a normal phase of development. The primitive tribes that lived beyond their frontiers, and exist to-day, inform us of an earlier stage, in which the woman was oppressed. On the other hand, there are in the Spanish writers not obscure traces that the moral sense of Mexico and Peru was advancing (especially in regard to human sacrifices), and no doubt the problem of woman's position would in time have emerged. But the Spanish troops, with their superior weapons, quickly made an end of these interesting western polities, and reduced nearly the whole continent to the condition of a poor imitation of Spanish culture. I need only add that in the more advanced of the Spanish-American republics to-day--Argentina, Uruguay, Mexico, etc.--women have begun to take a keen and prominent interest in the culture and public affairs of their country.

When we cross over to the far east of the medieval map of the world, we find three civilisations that we must rank with the Europe of the Middle Ages. Of India little need be said. There is hardly a country in the world where woman is so drastically subordinated, and it is fairly clear that the process of subjection has in this case increased with the advance of the race. The comparatively good position that woman holds in so many of the lower Asiatic tribes suggests that at the beginning of Indian history she had the same respect and influence. Our earliest positive knowledge is in the Vedic poems, which suggest to us an "Aryan" race fighting their way down from the hills to the north-west, and gradually occupying the more fertile plains. A simple pastoral folk, with patriarchal features, they divided the labour equitably between the sexes, and apparently treated their women with respect. Monogamy seems to have been the rule, and such later practices as the burning of widows were quite unknown. With the settlement of the race woman's position steadily sank. Whether it was that the practice of war brought in subject-wives and polygamy, or that the rise of the Brahmanic priesthood and the caste system altered the old ideal, we certainly perceive a degeneration towards the later contempt of woman. The advent of Buddha gave little help to woman. Though most of the resources of his order came from women, he, like all monastic leaders, if not all ascetics, made no effort to improve her position in what ascetic literature calls "the world." And when the Brahmanic religion finally prevailed she sank lower than ever, and, amid all the glorious art of ancient India, the practices of polygamy, child-marriage, seclusion, and suttee spread over the land. In this there is no real reversal of the law we formulated. The highest culture of India was purely artistic, and such culture never helps woman. The conscience and intelligence of the nation were stifled in the endless wrappings and cerements of a formal and unprogressive religion.

The development of the other great Asiatic civilisation, the Chinese, was in many ways remarkable. As in India, the drastic subordination of the women does not seem to be merely a heritage from a barbaric past, since the lower Mongolian tribes generally show little tendency to it. Not only the Indo-Chinese tribes I mentioned in an earlier chapter, but the more northern Mongolians, grant their women much liberty and respect. Huc found the women of Tartary very vigorous and independent; and another early traveller, La Pérouse, found one of the most primitive of Mongolian tribes, in the bay of Castries, with a remarkably good character and a very generous and equable treatment of their women. Almost the only one of the lower Mongolian peoples to treat their women harshly are the Thibetans, and in their case the injustice is mainly confined to Lhassa. In that city a woman cannot go out unless she smears her face with a dark, gluey composition. There, however, the influence of monks and priests clearly explains the anomaly.

From this primitive level of comparative equality the Chinese, as they developed their civilisation, passed to a social order in which woman held a very subordinate place. The symbolic representation of capture is so common in Mongolian marriages that one cannot help suspecting that an early capturing of wives may have led to subordination; though one must remember that the symbol occurs in tribes in which woman has great liberty and influence. Whatever the causes may have been, we find woman in a position of abject dependence as soon as literature throws any direct light on Chinese civilisation. It seems to me that the oldest Chinese poetry in the _King_ point to a less unjust _régime_; but we get our first complete knowledge of the social order in the Confucian literature, and there woman is almost, if not quite, as subject as she is to-day. The girl was only too apt to be sold or exposed in infancy by the poor--a practice on which the moralists always frowned, but which the authorities allow even to-day; though there are now generally public hospitals to receive exposed children. The Chinese girl usually marries at about her twentieth year, and, as virginity is essential (except among the poor), she is carefully guarded under the parental roof. At marriage she passes under the power of a husband, whom she must obey in all things. She brings no dowry, inherits no property, and has no right of divorce. The law even discriminates most unjustly between the sexes in its scale of punishments. She has a very slight education--only a few women having, by some domestic accident, figured in the literary chronicles--and not the least knowledge of public affairs. We may well regret that the great moralists of China did not denounce these inequalities. Six centuries before Christ agnostic moralists like Kung-fu-tse obtained a predominant influence in cultivated China, and the ideals of the nation are still moulded by their teaching. But Kung-fu-tse only commanded woman to obey, and his influence, so beneficial to character generally in China, has done nothing for woman. The progressive spirit died in China, and there has never been since the further advance in culture that was needed to awaken a rebellion of the subject women.

To the east of China, during our Middle Ages, lived a younger and smaller civilisation that has made itself known throughout the modern world. Japan is only partly Mongolian in origin; there seems to be a strain of blood from the southern islands in the nation's frame. It is, therefore, not surprising to find that the cause of woman has run an entirely different course in Japan, and that the later excessive subordination of women was due to Chinese influence. It seems that the more primitive Asiatic feeling of respect for woman was carried on into the early Japanese civilisation. She had no more share in public life generally than elsewhere, but a considerable number of the nobler or more cultivated women stand out in the chronicles. The golden age of native Japanese civilisation and letters corresponds with the worst age of Europe (about 800 to 1200 of the Christian era). The chief English writer on the subject, Mr. Astor, tells us that during that period "a very large and important part of the best literature Japan has produced was written by women." There are also distinguished women-Mikados and feudal princesses in the early story of Japan.

In the later Middle Ages Chinese culture began to play the reactionary part (in regard to woman) in Japan that Greek culture had done in Italy. The teaching of Kung-fu-tse and the great humanitarian moralists was warmly welcomed by the educated Japanese, and gradually became, as it still is, the sole religion of the class. How finely it shaped the character of Japan on most points--making its way down to nearly every class of the nation through the Samurai--the whole world now knows; but, as I said, it failed entirely to do justice to woman, and so led to the comparatively few blemishes of Japanese life. Woman was to be confined to the home, and that narrow and ill-advised ideal cast its invariable shadow--a great growth of prostitution. Japan had its _geishas_ as Greece had its _hetæræ_; and the situation was worse in the sense that poor parents of good character made money (from twenty to forty pounds) by sending their daughters to the _joshiwara_ for a few years. On the other hand, of course, no shame was attached to the profession, and the more gifted members sometimes made distinguished marriages and were received at court.

With the recent opening of Japan to modern culture the Chinese ideal is being discredited and the abuses it engendered are being suppressed. Women are receiving ample and rational education; a man is forbidden (since 1875) to sell his wife or daughter; the _joshiwaras_ are being thrust out of sight; and the Western spirit is slowly entering the minds of the women. Japan is plainly falling under the action of the general law. With the growth of higher culture the inequalities of the sexes are found to be artificial, mischievous, and unjust, and the position of woman improves. The main principles of the _bushido_ are not likely to be lost in the growth of Japan, but they are now held in a living and progressive sense. What Kung-fu-tse laid down as the duties of woman may or may not have been right and expedient 2,500 years ago. To-day they have an unmistakable aspect of masculine dictation and despotism. However, it is the culture of the West that has opened the new era in Japan and China and India, and we return to Europe to see how woman fared in what proved, after all, to be the chief theatre of the evolution of civilisation.