CHAPTER VII.

RENAISSANCE AND REVOLUTION

FROM the broad survey of the world during the Middle Age of the Christian era, which I have made in the last chapter, we pass to the modern phase of woman's evolution. The trite old proverb, that "the darkest hour is that before the dawn," is, in this application, a singular and literal truth. From the comparative elevation of ancient Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilisation, the cause of woman had sunk gradually, with occasional rebounds, to the lowest point it ever touched within the limits of civilisation. Half-a-dozen distinct civilisations lay over the world, cut off from each other by oceans that scorned their frail vessels, or by impassable deserts or mountain-chains; and in all of them the position of woman was one of great and unjust subordination.

At first glance it may seem that the facts are not consistent with the idea of a steady evolution of woman's position. It must be borne in mind, however, that I merely affirm a development of woman's political position in close relation to the development of culture, and then the situation offers little difficulty. The civilisations of North and South America, in which woman's position was relatively better than in Europe, were not suffered to develop fully their native resources. The civilisation of India was constricted in lethal bonds that arrested all growth of culture; nor would it be difficult to show that the position into which its women were forced was largely responsible for the degeneration. China, too, had made the mistake of stereotyping its moral and social standards, though these were much higher, and was content to maintain, instead of developing, its culture. Japan, fascinated by the high moral idealism of China, too readily contracted its formalism and conservatism.

The spirit of progress was to breathe its inspiration first over the surface of Europe, whence it would in time pass over the rest of the earth. From the end of the Middle Ages culture slowly ascended once more to its ancient height, and with its progress the position of woman steadily improved.

It is well known that the re-awakening of Europe was due to a revival of Greek culture; but it is not so often recognised that the inspiration came at two periods, in two different forms. The first period was when the light of the Arabian civilisation in Spain sent its reflection over the Pyrenees and impelled the theological schools of Europe to a broader activity. By the twelfth century there was a ferment of scholastic life in many parts of Europe; but it was a barren employment of the intelligence, isolated at once from inanimate nature and from the social and political life. Architecture and sculpture had been kept alive from Roman days, because the Church had use for them. Natural science was dead--had not outlived its infancy--and social or political science had no place under a theocracy.

Christian scholars were, therefore, greatly stimulated by the broader culture of the Arabs, which their more adventurous members went south to study or learned from the intermediate Jews; and Christian nobles, whose halls and persons still retained much of the coarseness and dirtiness of their ancestry, were quickened by the refined luxury of the Moors and the "Paynims." By the twelfth century Arabian Spain was deeply influencing Europe, and the advance in the thirteenth century plainly shows the great indebtedness to them. It is as obvious in Thomas Aquinas and Dante as it is in Pope Silvester or Roger Bacon. And there is no dispute that the progressive principles in Arabian civilisation were due to the Greek culture that had made its way to the new nation through Syria.

In this form, however, the revival of Greek culture had no direct influence on the position of woman, because it was associated with Mohammedanism. In his fine work, _Die Frauen des Orients_ (1904), Baron von Schweiger-Lerchenfeld shows that in the pre-Islamic period the Arabian women had a good deal of freedom and influence. What they have become under the influence of Islam is so well known that I need not describe their situation. It is one more calamity that women owe to the teaching of the Old Testament, which Mohammed absorbed. Under the Ommejad princes the women of the orient had, like the philosophers and the artists, a good deal of liberty, and their position in Spain approached this. But the more rigid ideal prevailed, and the Mohammedan woman sank lower than the Christian.

It is only indirectly, in its general stimulation of culture, that the first Greek revival aided the cause of woman. As a literature other than that of the theological schools now grew up in Europe, women found more pretext for cultivating letters. The few names of women who did thus depart from the prevailing ideal of ignorance and domestic inclusion must not, of course, mislead us. A few of the nobler women, like our Queen Matilda, could correspond in Latin; still fewer could, like the young Heloise, quote Lucan and boast a smattering of Greek. The cultivation of letters was still an almost exclusively clerical profession, and the chief object of it was to learn to copy tomes of theology. On the political side, moreover, the feudal system prevented even the dawn of an ambition in the women's minds. It was not until culture passed more generously into the hands of laymen, and the growth of free cities made a breach in the feudal system, that there could be even the possibility of any large change.

These two processes went on throughout the fourteenth century. About 1350 appeared Boccaccio's _Decameron_, with its fairer promise of woman's position, and from that time the women of Italy show the remarkable degree of culture and liberty that we associate with the Renaissance. In Italy the Greek-Arabian culture had taken especial root, as every reader of Dante will surmise, and it was now fed by direct contact with the Greek world. The Latin and Greek classics were greatly treasured, philosophy speculated with remarkable freedom, and art soared higher and higher in its emancipation from monastic control. When, in 1453, the Turks captured Constantinople, and Greek scholars fled to Italy, the revival of Greek culture was completed, and the Renaissance of Europe accomplished.

The chief purpose of this essay dispenses me from ranging over the familiar ground of the women of the Renaissance.[11] The picture that Boccaccio gives of men and women cultivating letters on an equal footing was found in most of the Italian cities. At Venice, Rimini, Urbino, Mantua, Padua, Bologna, and the other great cities, women often formed intellectual centres, and vied with the men in production. Frau Braun tells of a woman-professor of theology at Bologna; of two female authorities on canon law, Novella d'Andrea and Maddalena Buonsignori; of an Isotta Nogarola who spoke before popes and emperors, and a Cassandra Fedele who taught at Padua. What the poetess Vittoria Colonna was to Michael Angelo the whole world knows.

It was fitting enough that the women of Italy, the successors of the older Roman women, should reopen the field of culture, but the inspiration was to pass into other lands before it would raise the general question of woman's position. Boccaccio was no feminist, but his study of the lives of illustrious men and women led to a practice of making encyclopædias of feminine biography, which was bound to suggest the question of woman's capacity. An Italian monk so far discarded the spirit of his order as to write two volumes (of 800 pages each) on distinguished women--170 in number--of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. A Roman cardinal and other prelates indulged the same genial humour. Ribera beat all the records with a comprehensive account of the careers of 845 distinguished women of all ages. The Renaissance ideal had quickly passed to Spain, where one reads of a Juliana Morelli of Barcelona speaking fourteen languages, and an Isabella of Cordova, of some distinction in theology.

It was, however, in the more northern lands that the new movement was to develop further. Italy and Spain were decaying. The Reformation would soon set them in antagonism to the bolder culture they had inspired in the north, and political despotism would stifle the growth of their spirit. They handed on the torch to Germany, France, and England, and slowly sank into the torpor of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

The women of Germany were the last to be stirred, and the stirring was soon arrested by the Reformation and the religious wars. One powerful work, however, was published in Germany in 1505--the Latin treatise of the great scholar Cornelius Agrippa, _De nobilitate et præcellentia feminini sexus_ ("Of the nobility and excellence of the female sex"). Agrippa maintained that the souls of men and women were equal, and that equal education should and could be given to women. The controversy that followed would, with a few changes of terms, entirely reflect the modern controversy about woman's capacity. But little progress was made, for the reasons I have given.

In France the Italian culture found a readier soil. Frau Braun describes the _Cité des Dames_ of Christine de Pisan (fifteenth century) as the first plea for woman's emancipation, but a reader of that curious work will find the plea very much qualified. It ranges over the whole field of distinguished women--the women of Italy, of the Bible, of antiquity--with admiration of their learning or virtue or power; but it adheres very closely to the prevailing religious ideas, and urges married women to see an advantage in their subjection to their husbands. Montaigne's adopted daughter, Mlle. de Gournay, was the real pioneer of the modern movement. She demanded the equality of the sexes in all things except military service. Another woman, Anna Dacier, made the first French translations of Plautus, Terence, and Aristophanes. Margaret of Navarre and--in a less degree--Margaret of Valois proved the capacity of their sex for literary production. Before Cardinal Richelieu founded the Academy for the perfecting of the French tongue the hotel of Mme. de Rambouillet was the chief centre of letters and culture in Paris; and Richelieu's own niece, Mme. de Combalet, had a literary salon in which Corneille and the best writers of the day met.

England and Germany were at that time regarded as lingering at a barbaric level from the point of view of Latin culture. Italian and Spanish ladies very generally learned Latin, and the French aspirant to letters acquired Spanish and Italian; but English was abandoned to merchants and diplomatists. By the end of the seventeenth century, however, the effect of the Renaissance was felt among the women of England. In 1694 Mary Astell published, anonymously, _A Serious Proposal to the Ladies for the Advancement of their True and Greatest Interest_. She tells of the learned women of Italy and France, and declares that woman's "incapacity" is "acquired, not natural." "How can you be content to be like tulips in a garden?" she disdainfully asks. Let women build a kind of lay convent, she urges--a school of virtue and learning, a pious and proper imitation of Oxford and Cambridge--and have their sex fully educated.

Mary Astell's appeal had little effect, though it was immediately supported by no less powerful a writer than Defoe. It appears that Defoe had already (in 1692 and 1693) written his _Essay upon Projects_, and he published it in 1697. One of the score of projects he put before the country was a plea for the higher education of women. "I have often thought," he said, "that it is one of the most parlous customs in the world that we deny the advantages of learning to women. We reproach the sex every day with folly and impertinence, while I am confident that, had they the advantage of education equal to us, they would be guilty of less than ourselves." In the meantime Defoe has apparently seen Mary Astell's proposal, and he politely ridicules her idea of a "nunnery." "Women are extravagantly desirous of going to heaven," he says, "and will punish their pretty bodies to get thither; but nothing else will do it, and even in that case it falls out sometimes that nature will prevail." He is in favour of public schools more like those in the country for youths. Women's faculties are equal to men's, he insists; the only difference is in education. But he hints that he will hear of no encroachment on "man's sphere," and so condemns in advance any political ambition. How little response there was to these appeals, and how the education of English women remained at an almost medieval level until little more than a generation ago, is sufficiently known.

Thus the fire of the Renaissance burnt itself out in Italy and Spain within two or three centuries, and its inspiration led to little direct result in France, and still less in England. The history of French culture contains a number of names of brilliant women during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but the records of English literature are relieved by few feminine names until we reach the age of Queen Victoria. But the educative movement started by the Renaissance had great importance. It had provided a brilliant disproof of the prevailing belief that woman was of a lower order of intelligence than man. The position of men like Cornelius Agrippa and Defoe was one of unanswerable common sense. Inequality of culture between the sexes there assuredly was; but to ascribe this to native inequality of resource, instead of to the glaring inequality of education, was sheer folly. Grant woman the opportunity of attaining culture, and then one may sensibly begin to speculate on her capacity. And from every part of Christendom in which the opportunity was granted there came a report of brilliant and scholarly women. The extension of female education in our day has completed that first breach in the medieval superstition of woman's inferiority.

If the older notion of woman's incapacity on the speculative side were thus proved to be unsound, it might very well be that the corresponding belief in her practical capacity or political judgment was equally unsound. It might turn out that, when the opportunity for cultivating her political sense was offered, the result would be the same as when opportunities of education were given. In this way the cultural movement that issued from the Renaissance prepared the way for the political struggle. But before this struggle could set in two other profound and far-reaching changes were to take place. The capability of exercising political power is one thing: the right to exercise it another. Until the close of the eighteenth century the second point was hardly raised. Then there opened a period of economic and political change that made the raising of it inevitable.

I will describe here the dawn of the new era in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, and deal with the nineteenth in the next chapter. By the beginning of the eighteenth century the cause of woman had made a substantial advance in many respects. In Germany the advance was almost purely cultural, though the names are not wanting of women who wielded some political influence by the indirect method of influencing rulers or statesmen. In England, again, there were women of culture and women of influence, as all know; but there was a singular retrogression in the political position of women generally. Mrs. Stopes (_British Free Women_) has so recently and fully discussed the change that I need do no more than summarise it. For two reasons England had promised to be the first theatre of the struggle for political enfranchisement. Not only was it the first country of the modern era to set up parliamentary representation, but it had been the latest of the Teutonic races to retain the old ideal of respect for woman. The Norman Conquest had greatly lowered the prestige of woman, but there were still high offices (such as that of sheriff) that women could inherit and fill. On the other hand, the Norman kings had been forced to grant a permanent representation of the third estate (or Commons) five hundred years before the French Revolution, and during the great Civil War the power of the Commons had enormously increased. The old Anglo-Saxon feeling persisted in the fact that the privilege of electing the borough-representatives was not confined to one sex.

The peculiarity of England's development is that in its case we seem to have the only exception to the law I formulated--that the position of woman improves with the growth of culture. From the fourteenth to the seventeenth century culture enormously advanced, and the position of woman steadily deteriorated. In the early decades of the seventeenth century we find an Englishwoman, Anne Clifford, struggling against the monarch for the hereditary right to a high office. Women burgesses and landowners could still share the election of parliamentary representatives; but at the beginning of the seventeenth century this right was taken from them, and the sex-disability was imposed. Sir Edward Coke, relying chiefly on St. Paul's injunctions to women, successfully removed the last trace of the old Teutonic ideal.

Here, at first sight, is an apparent exception to our alliance of feminism and culture; but, in reality, we have a number of modifying circumstances. The long lawlessness of the Middle Ages had made men less and less disposed to see women in office or in public life. The head, even of a manor, needed to be a soldier in those days. Women often proved capable enough of inspiring and directing their followers, but it is quite intelligible that there was a strong tendency towards discouraging or preventing women from holding office in such turbulent times. And with this tendency was joined the even worse influence of the canon law of the Church. When we find a great lawyer like Sir Edward Coke refusing the testimony of women, on grounds of sex, we see at once how this fatal sentiment had been gradually permeating the mind of England. It had put woman in a deplorable legal position--or, rather, a position outside the law--and it inevitably fostered the notion of woman's inferiority and incapacity. Before the end of the eighteenth century we find legal writers classing women with "infants, idiots, and lunatics" in illustrating "natural incapacity." In this way the growth of culture came to be, in England, associated with a deterioration in the position of women; but the circumstance does not invalidate our law, as the retrogression was plainly due to such extraneous causes as the permeation of our life with the spirit and letter of the canon law, as Sir Henry Maine has shown.

Under these reactionary influences the women of England seemed, in the eighteenth century, to have entirely lost their birthright, and fallen into line with the women of the world. The eighteenth century is, indeed, a dramatic moment in the whole story of feminism. The earlier power of English women was generally forgotten; the ambition and struggle of women in older civilisations were quite unknown; the fire of the Renaissance had sunk again, leaving only a few women scattered over Europe with a zeal for culture. The world over woman was subordinate and submissive. Then there broke out a series of political eruptions that changed the face of the world, and awakened a fresh ambition in women that would never again be stilled.

The first of these great disturbances was the Declaration of Independence on the part of the American colonies. I have said that certain fundamental changes took place during the nineteenth century that made the raising of the feminist claim quite inevitable, and at the same time made the refusal of the claim more illogical and unjust than it had ever been before. The first and chief of these changes was the democratisation of politics. The mass of the women laboured under no political sex-disability in the eighteenth century, because the mass of the men had no political power at all. In England, under a corrupt and degenerate Parliamentary system, a proportion of the men had a semblance of power; in other countries the mass of the men had not even the shadow of it. France had not summoned its States-General, in which the Third Estate had a nominal representation, since 1614. The world was ruled by castes of priests and nobles, and the higher and wealthier women often had the satisfaction of ruling their rulers. When this system altered, when political power began to spread over the middle class and working men, the woman question would arise spontaneously and command attention.

America inaugurated the change. The Declaration of Independence, in 1776, set up the first modern democracy--the Swiss Cantons were essentially aristocratic until the nineteenth century--and prepared the way for the suffrage controversy. From the very first moment the women of America denounced the injustice of a male electorate. Mercy Otis Warren had fostered the rebellion in her drawing-room, where the leaders often met, and Abigail Smith Adams (wife of the first President) was no less active. They and others demanded the admission of women to the new constitution. While it was being prepared, Mrs. Adams wrote to her husband that "if the position of women was not thoroughly considered they would rebel, and not consider themselves bound by laws that gave them no voice or representation of their interests." The first assault failed, only two States being willing to grant the justice of the plea. We will return presently to the resumed agitation in America, but must revert to Europe for the second exception, that was to stir the lethargy of women by putting a specific sex-disability on them.

The appeal of Montaigne's daughter had raised no echo in the France of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The women of the nobility had ample power of the familiar, irregular kind, and the women of the people were no poorer than their husbands in political rights. Then Rousseau set up the ideal of the Rights of Man, and France moved towards the great Revolution. The influence of the philosophers in preparing the Revolution has been exaggerated, and in point of fact most of them were decidedly anti-feminist. Voltaire and Montesquieu slighted their demands and capacities. Rousseau contrived to reconcile a doctrine of the equality of human beings with the old-fashioned ideal of woman's place. But they, at least, stimulated thought and encouraged education in women, and women learned to correct their logic. Then came the news of the struggle in America, and the feeling against England made it extraordinarily popular. Ladies wore "American Independence hats," and discussed deep constitutional questions during the recently imported function of tea. Nobles volunteered for service, and brought back stirring stories of democracy.

The American episode had nearly lost interest when the Revolution broke out. There can be no doubt that it was not without permanent influence, but the more demonstrative zeal had been manifested by the upper class, and the form that democracy now took in their own country very quickly extinguished it. Of the first French Revolution in itself I need say little. The later and less picturesque Revolutions were more permanently effective. Freeman has observed, however, that the face of Europe was changed for ever by the first Revolution, and it is well taken as the pyrotechnic inauguration of the modern era.

Little direct encouragement was given to women by the revolutionaries. A few men like Sieyès and Condorcet, who had founded a Lyceum for women in 1786, recognised that women were human beings when they spoke of "the Rights of Man." The majority, led by Mirabeau, and afterwards by Danton, refused to listen to the appeal of women like Mme. Condorcet; even revolutionary women like Mme. Roland agreed with them. Hence the share that women took in the Revolution cannot occupy a place of any prominence in such a study as this. Their campaign for the recognition of their rights came to naught. They showered petitions on the National Assembly, founded political clubs all over the country, and published a journal, _L'Observateur féminin_. But the Jacobins were inexorable, and they guillotined the most fiery of their speakers, Olympe de Gouges (reputed daughter of Louis XIV.), for her fearless opposition. And, eventually, the three great waves washed over the work of the Revolution and obliterated its traces. The Directory suppressed Jacobinism, Napoleon superseded Directorism, and Metternich and Wellington annihilated Napoleonism. A group of statesmen, sitting round a table in the Foreign Office at Vienna, set up again the broken model of aristocratic Europe, and democracy was unceremoniously buried.

But political evolution had set definitively in the direction of democracy, and in another generation it would rise again. With this development, which of itself sufficed to lay bare the foundations of political power and press forward the woman question, was associated an industrial development that made an equally fatal breach in the old order. How these and other far-reaching changes have irresistibly forced on us the feminist controversy of our time will be shown in the next chapter.