Woman under socialism Part 3

To me it falls to give my judgment last.

Here openly I give it for Orestes.

No mother bore me. To the masculine side For all save marriage my whole heart is given,-- In all and everything the father's child.

So little care I for a woman's death, That slew her lord, the guardian of her home.

Now though the votes be even, Orestes wins.

The new right won. Marriage with the father as head, had overpowered the gyneocracy.

Another legend represents the downfall of the mother-right in Athens this way: "Under the reign of Kekrops, a double miracle happened. There broke forth simultaneously out of the earth an oil-tree, and at another place water. The frightened king sent to Delphi to interrogate the Oracle upon the meaning of these happenings. The answer was: 'The oil-tree stands for Minerva, the water for Neptune; it is now with the citizens after which of the two deities they wish to name their city.'

Kekrops called together the a.s.sembly of the people in which men and women enjoyed the right of suffrage. The men voted for Neptune, the women for Minerva; and as the women had a majority of one, Minerva won.

Thereupon Neptune was angered and he caused the sea to wash over the territory of the Athenians. In order to soothe the wrath of the G.o.d, the Athenians placed a threefold punishment upon their women:--_they were to forfeit the suffrage, children were no longer to carry their mother's name, and they themselves were no longer to be called Athenian women_."[9]

As in Athens, the transition from the mother to the father-right was everywhere achieved so soon as a certain height was reached in social development. Woman is crowded into the house; she is isolated; she is a.s.signed special quarters--the gynekonitis--, in which she lives; she is even excluded from intercourse with the male visitors of the house.

That, in fact, was the princ.i.p.al object of her isolation.

This change finds its expression as early as the Odyssey. Telemachus forbids Penelope's, his mother's, presence among the suitors. He, the son, orders his mother:

But come now, go to thy bower, and deal with such things as ye can; With the sock and the loom be busy, and thine handmaids order and teach, That they speed the work and the wearing; but for men is the word and the speech; For all, but for me the chiefest, for here am I the might and the power.

Such was the doctrine already common in Greece at that time. It went even further. Woman, even if a widow, stands so completely under the rule of the nearest male relative, that she no longer has even the choice of a husband. The suitors, tired of long waiting, due to the cunning of Penelope, address themselves to Telemachus through the mouth of Antinous, saying:

But for thee, do we the suitors this answer to thee show, That thou in thy soul may'st know it, and that all the folk may know, _Send thou thy mother away, and bid her a wedding to gain_ _With whomso her father willeth, of whomso her heart may be fain_.

It is at an end with the freedom of woman. If she leaves the house, she must veil herself not to awaken the desires of another man. In the Orient, where, due to the warm climate, s.e.xual pa.s.sion is strongest, this method of seclusion is carried even to-day to extreme lengths.

Athens becomes in this a pattern for the ancient nations. Woman shares, indeed, her husband's bed, but not his table; she does not address him by name, but "Sir;" she is his maid-servant; she was allowed to appear nowhere openly; on the street she was ever veiled and clad with greatest simplicity. If she committed adultery, she paid for the trespa.s.s, according to the laws of Solon, with her life, or with her freedom. The husband could sell her for a slave.

The position of the Greek woman at the time when Greece was rus.h.i.+ng to the zenith of her development comes into plastic expression in the "Medea" of Euripedes. She complains:

Ay, of all living and of all reasoning things Are women the most miserable race: Who first needs buy a husband at great price, To take him then for owner of our lives: For this ill is more keen than common ills.

And of essays most perilous is this, Whether one good or evil do we take.

For evil-famed to women is divorce, Nor can one spurn a husband. She, so brought Beneath new rule and wont, had surely need To be a prophetess, unless at home She learned the likeliest prospect with her spouse.

And if, we having aptly searched out this, A husband house with us not savagely Drawing in the yoke, ours is an envied life; But if not, most to be desired is death.

And if a man grow sick to herd indoors, He, going forth, stays his heart's weariness, Turning him to some friend or natural peer; But we perforce to one sole being look.

But, say they, we, while they fight with the spear, Lead in our homes a life undangerous: Judging amiss; for I would liefer thrice Bear brunt of arms than once bring forth a child.

Wholly otherwise stood matters for the men. Although with an eye to the begetting of legitimate heirs for his property, he imposed upon woman strict abstinence from other men, he was, nevertheless, not inclined to lay a corresponding abstinence upon himself.

Hetairism sprang up. Women distinguished for their beauty and intellect, and who, as a rule, were aliens, preferred a free life in intimate intercourse with men, to the slavery of marriage. Nothing objectionable was seen in that. The names and fame of these hetairae, who held intimate intercourse with the leading men of Greece, and partic.i.p.ated in their learned discourses, as well as in their revels, has come down to our own days; whereas the names of the legitimate wives are mostly forgotten and lost. Thus the handsome Aspasia was the intimate friend of the celebrated Pericles, who later made her his legitimate wife; the name of Phryne became in later days the generic designation of those women that were to be had for money. Phryne held intimate relations with Hyperides, and she stood for Praxiteles, one of the first sculptors of Greece, as the model for his Aphrodite. Danae was the sweetheart of Epicurus, Archeana.s.sa that of Plato. Other celebrated hetairae, whose names have reached our days, were Lais of Corinth, Gnathanea, etc. There is no celebrated Greek, who had no intercourse with hetairae. It belonged to the style of life of distinguished Greeks. Demosthenes, the great orator, described in his oration against Neara, the s.e.xual life of the rich men of Athens in these words: "_We marry a woman in order to obtain legitimate children, and to have a faithful warder in the house; we keep concubines for our service and daily care; and hetairae for the enjoyment of love._" The wife was, accordingly, only an apparatus for the production of children; a faithful dog, that watched the house. The master of the house, on the contrary, lived according to his _bon plaisir_, as he willed.

In order to satisfy the demand for venal women, particularly with younger males, there arose that which was unknown under the rule of the mother-right,--_prost.i.tution_. Prost.i.tution distinguishes itself from the free s.e.xual intercourse that customs and social inst.i.tutions rendered a matter of course under primitive conditions, and, accordingly, freed from objectionableness, in that the woman sells her body, either to one man or to several, for material benefit.

Prost.i.tution, therefore, exists so soon as woman makes a trade of her charms. Solon, who formulated the new law for Athens, and is, consequently, esteemed the founder of the new legal status, was also the founder of the public houses for women, the "deikterion,"--official houses of prost.i.tution--, and the price to all the customers was the same. According to Philemon it amounted to one obolus, about four cents of our money. Like the temples with the Greeks and Romans, and the Christian churches in Middle Ages, the deikterion was inviolable: it stood under the protection of the Government. Until about a hundred and fifty years before our reckoning, the Temple of Jerusalem also was the usual place of gathering for the _filles de joie_.

For the benefit that Solon bestowed upon the Athenian male population, in founding the deikterion, he was praised in song by one of his contemporaries in these words: "Hail to you, Solon! You bought public women for the benefit of the city, for the benefit of the morality of a city that is full of vigorous young men, who, in the absence of your wise inst.i.tution, would give themselves over to the disturbing annoyance of the better women." We shall see that, at the close of the nineteenth century, justification is sought for the regulation of houses of prost.i.tution by Government, and for the necessity of prost.i.tution itself, upon the identical grounds. Thus, actions, committed by men, were recognized by legislation as a natural right, while, committed by women, were held to be shameful, and a serious crime. As is well known, even to-day not few are the men who prefer the company of a pretty female sinner to that of their own wives, and who not infrequently belong to the "Props of the State," the "Pillars of Order," and are "guardians of the sanct.i.ty of marriage and the family."

True enough, it seems, that the Greek women often revenged themselves upon their marital-lords for the yoke placed upon them. If prost.i.tution is the supplement of monogamy, on the one side, adultery among women and the cuckoldry of men is its supplement, on the other. Among the Greek dramatic poets, Euripides is the woman-hater: he loved to make women the object of attacks in his dramas. What all he twitted them with appears best from the speech that a Greek woman flings at him in the "Thesmophoria" of Aristophanes. She says among other things:

With what slanderous dirt does not he (Euripides) besmirch us?

When does the slanderer's tongue hold its peace? In short: Wherever there is an audience, tragedies or choruses, There we are called corner-loafers, anglers for men, Fond of the wine-cup, treasonable arch-gossips, Not a good hair is left us; we are the plague of men.

Therefore, soon as our husbands return to us home from the benches,[10]

Eyes of suspicion upon us they cast, and look about Whether a place of concealment conceal not a rival.

Whereupon, none of the things, at first by us done, Now is allowed us: Such stuff against us Does he in the men's heads stick, that, if a woman Is weaving a garland, she is held to be in love; or when, While hustling the household to keep, something drops, Forthwith the husband inquires: "Whom are those fragments meant for?

Plainly, they are meant for the guest from Corinthos."

We can understand that this ready-tongued Greek woman should serve the a.s.sailer of her s.e.x in such manner; nevertheless, Euripides could not very well have made these accusations, nor could he have found credence with the men, if they knew not but too well that the accusations were justified. To judge by the concluding sentences of this address, the custom--met later in Germany and many other countries--had not yet been naturalized in Greece, that the host placed his own wife or daughter at the disposal of his guest for the night. Murner writes on this custom, prevalent in Holland as late as the fifteenth century, in these words: "It is the custom in the Netherlands, when the host has a dear guest, that he lets his wife sleep with him on faith."[11]

The increasing struggles between the cla.s.ses in the several states of Greece, and the sad state of many of the smaller communities, gave occasion for Plato to inquire into the best const.i.tution and the best inst.i.tutions for the State. In his "Republic," set up by him as ideal, he demands, at least for the first cla.s.s of his citizens, the watchers, the complete equality of woman. Women are to partic.i.p.ate in the exercises of arms, the same as the men, and are to fill the same duties as these, only they are to attend to the lighter ones, "owing to the weakness of the s.e.x." He maintains that the natural inclinations are equally distributed among the two s.e.xes, only that woman is in all matters weaker than man. Furthermore, the women are to be common to the men, and vice versa; likewise are the children to be common, "so that neither the father may know his child, nor the child his father."[12]

Aristotle, in his "Politics," is satisfied with less. Woman should have a free hand in the selection of her husband, but she is to be subordinate to him; nevertheless, she should have the right "to give good advice." Thucydides expresses an opinion that meets with the applause of all modern Philistines. He says: "That wife deserves the highest praise of whom, outside of her home, neither good nor bad is heard."

With such views, respect for woman was bound to sink to a low level; fear of over-population even led to the avoidance of intimate intercourse with her. Unnatural means of satisfying s.e.xual desires were resorted to. The Greek states were cities with small territories, unable to supply the usual sustenance to a population in excess of a given number. Hence the fear of over-population caused Aristotle to recommend to the men abstinence from their wives, and pederasty, instead. Before him, Socrates had praised pederasty as the sign of a higher culture. In the end, the most promising men of Greece became adherents of this unnatural pa.s.sion. Regard for women sank all the deeper. There were now houses for male prost.i.tutes, as there were for female. In such a social atmosphere, it was natural for Thucydides to utter the saying that woman was worse than the storm-lashed ocean's wave, than the fire's glow, than the cascade of the wild mountain torrent. "If it is a G.o.d that invented woman, wherever, he may be, let him know, that he is the unhallowed cause of the greatest evil."[13]

The male population of Greece having become addicted to pederasty, the female population fell into the opposite extreme: it took to the love of members of its own s.e.x. This happened especially with the women of the island of Lesbos, whence this aberration was, and still continues to be named, "Lesbian love," for it has not yet died out: it survives among us. The poetess Sappho, "the Lesbian nightingale," who lived about six hundred years before our reckoning, is considered the leading representative of this form of love. Her pa.s.sion is glowingly expressed in her hymn to Aphrodite, whom she implores:

"Glittering-throned, undying Aphrodite, Wile-weaving daughter of high Zeus, I pray thee, Tame not my soul with heavy woe, dread mistress, Nay, nor with anguish."

A still more pa.s.sionate sensuousness is attested in her hymn to the handsome Atthis.

While in Athens, along with the rest of Greece, the father-right ruled, Sparta, the rival for supremacy with Athens, still continued under the mother-right, a condition that had become wholly foreign to most Greeks.

The story runs that one day a Greek asked a Spartan what punishment was meted out in Sparta to the adulterer. He answered: "Stranger, among us there are no adulterers." "But if there should be any?" "For punishment," the Spartan replied, sarcastically, "he must donate an ox, so large as to be able to reach over Taygetus with his head, and drink out of Eurotas." Upon the startled question, put by the stranger, "How can an ox be so large?" the Spartan answered laughing: "How is it possible that there could be an adulterer in Sparta?" At the same time the self-consciousness of the Spartan woman appears in the proud answer given a stranger by the wife of Leonidas. On his saying to her: "You female Lacedaemonians are the only women who rule over your men," she answered: "So are we the only women who bring men into the world."

The free condition of women under the mother-right promoted her beauty, raised her pride, her dignity and her self-reliance. The judgment of all ancient writers is to the effect that, during the period of the gyneocracy, these qualities were highly developed among women. The constrained condition that later supervened, necessarily had its evil effect upon them. The difference appears even in the garb of the two periods. The garb of the Doric woman hung loose from her shoulders; it left the arms free, and thighs exposed: it is the garb of Diana, who is represented as free and bold in our museums. The Ionian garb, on the contrary, concealed the body and hampered its motion. The garb of woman to-day is, far more than usually realized, a sign of her dependence and helplessness. The style of woman's dress amongst most peoples, down to our own days, renders her awkward, forces on her a sense of weakness, and makes her timid; and this, finally, finds its expression in her att.i.tude and character. The custom among the Spartans of letting the girls go naked until marriageable age--a custom that the climate allowed--contributed considerably, in the opinion of an ancient writer, to impart to them a taste for simplicity and for attention to decency.

Nor was there in the custom, according to the views of those days, aught offensive to decorum, or inciting to l.u.s.t. Furthermore, the girls partic.i.p.ated in all the bodily exercises, just as the boys, and thus there was reared a vigorous, proud, self-conscious race, a race that was conscious of its own merit, as proved by the answer of Leonidas' wife to the stranger.

In intimate connection with the mother-right, after it had ceased to be a ruling social principle, stood certain customs, which modern writers, ignorant of their meaning, designate as "prost.i.tution." In Babylon, it was a religious duty with the maid, who had reached p.u.b.erty, to appear once in the temple of Mylitta in order to offer her maidenhood as a sacrifice, by surrendering herself to some man. Similarly happened in the Serapeum of Memphis; in Armenia, in honor of the G.o.ddess Anaitis; in Cyprus; in Tyrus and Sidon, in honor of Astarte or Aphrodite. The festivals of Isis among the Egyptians served similar customs. This sacrifice of virginity was demanded in order to atone with the G.o.ddess for the exclusive surrender of woman to one man in marriage:--"Not that she may wilt in the arms of a single man is woman arrayed by nature with all the charms at its command."[14] The continued favor of the G.o.ddess had to be purchased by the sacrifice of virginity to a stranger. It was likewise in line with the old idea that the Lybian maids earned their dower by prost.i.tuting their bodies. In accord with the mother-right, these women were s.e.xually free during their unmarried status; and the men saw so little objection in these pickings, that those were taken by them for wives who had been most in demand. It was thus also among the Thracians, in the days of Herodotus: "They do not watch the maidens, but leave them full freedom to a.s.sociate with whom they please. The women, however, they watch strictly. They buy them from their parents for large sums." Celebrated were the Hierodulae of the temple of Aphrodite at Corinth, where always more than one thousand maidens were gathered, and const.i.tuted a chief point of attraction for the men of Greece. Of the daughter of King Cheops of Egypt, the legend relates that she had a pyramid built out of the proceeds of prost.i.tution of her charms.

Conditions, similar to these, prevail down to now, on the Mariana, the Philippine and the Polynesian islands; according to Waitz, also among several African tribes. Another custom, prevalent till late on the Balearic islands, and indicative of the right of all men to a woman, was that, on the wedding night, the male kin had access to the bride in order of seniority. The bridegroom came last; he then took her as wife into his own possession. This custom has been changed among other people so that the priest or the tribal chiefs (kings) exercise the privilege over the bride, as representatives of the men of the tribe. On Malabar, the Caimars hire patamars (priests) to deflower their wives.... The chief priest (Namburi) is in duty bound to render this service to the king (Zamorin) at his wedding, and the king rewards him with fifty gold pieces.[15] In Further India, and on several islands of the great ocean, it is sometimes the priests and sometimes the tribal chiefs who undertake the function.[16] The same happens in Senegambia, where the tribal chief exercises, as a duty of his office, the deflowering of maids, and receives therefor a present. Again, with other peoples, the custom was, and continues here and yonder, that the deflowering of a maid, sometimes even of a child only a few months old, is done by means of images of deities, fas.h.i.+oned expressly for this purpose. It may also be accepted as certain that the "jus primae noctis" (the right of the first night), prevalent in Germany and all Europe until late in the Middle Ages, owes its origin to the same tradition, as Frederick Engels observes. The landlord, who, as master of his dependents and serfs, looked upon himself as their chief, exercised the right of the head of the tribe, a right that he considered had pa.s.sed over to himself as the arbiter of their lives and existence.

Echoes of the mother-right are further detected in the singular custom among some South American tribes, that, instead of the lying-in woman, the man goes to bed, there acts like a woman in labor, and is tended by the wife. The custom implies that the father recognizes the new born child as his own. By imitating the pains of child-birth, the man fills the fiction that the birth is also his work; that he, therefore, has a right to the child, who, according to the former custom, belonged to the mother and the mother's gens, respectively. The custom is said to have also maintained itself among the Basques, who must be looked upon as a people of primitive usages and customs. Likewise is the custom said to prevail among several mountain tribes in China. It prevailed until not long since in Corsica.

In Greece likewise did woman become an article of purchase. So soon as she stepped into the house of her marital lord, she ceased to exist for her family. This was symbolically expressed by burning before the door the handsomely decked wagon which took her to the house of her husband.

Among the Ostiaks of Siberia, to this day, the father sells his daughter: he chaffers with the representative of the bridegroom about the price to be paid. Likewise among several African tribes, the same as in the days of Jacob, the custom is that a man who courts a maid, enters in the service of his future mother-in-law. Even with us, marriage by purchase has not died out: it prevails in bourgeois society worse than ever. Marriage for money, almost everywhere customary among the ruling cla.s.ses, is nothing other than marriage by purchase. Indeed, the marriage gift, which in all civilized countries the bridegroom makes to the bride, is but a symbol of the purchase of the wife as property.

Along with marriage by purchase, there was the custom of marriage by rape. The rape of women was a customary practice, not alone among the ancient Jews, but everywhere in antiquity. It is met with among almost all nations. The best known historic instance is the rape of the Sabine women by the Romans. The rape of women was an easy remedy where women ran short, as, according to the legend, happened to the early Romans; or where polygamy was the custom, as everywhere in the Orient. There it a.s.sumed large proportions during the supremacy of the Arabs, from the seventh to the twelfth century.

Symbolically, the rape of woman still occurs, for instance among the Araucans of South Chile. While the friends of the bridegroom are negotiating with the father of the bride, the bridegroom steals with his horse into the neighborhood of the house, and seeks to capture the bride. So soon as he catches her, he throws her upon his horse, and makes off with her to the woods. The men, women and children thereupon raise a great hue and cry, and seek to prevent the escape. But when the bridegroom has reached the thick of the woods, the marriage is considered consummated. This holds good also when the abduction takes place against the will of the parents. Similar customs prevail among the peoples of Australia.

Among ourselves, the custom of "wedding trips" still reminds us of the former rape of the wife: the bride is carried off from her domestic flock. On the other hand, the exchange of rings is a reminiscence of the subjection and enchainment of the woman to the man. The custom originated in Rome. The bride received an iron ring from her husband as a sign of her bondage to him. Later the ring was made of gold; much later the exchange of rings was introduced, as a sign of mutual union.

The old family ties of the gens had, accordingly, lost their foundation through the development of the conditions of production, and through the rule of private property. Upon the abolition of the gens, grounded on mother-right, the gens, grounded on the father-right first took its place, although not for long, and with materially weakened functions.