A mixture of the two strands of thought regarding the long sweep of history present in the Scottish Enlightenment (of which Alexander is a part), History of Women contains two contradicting theses (1) that history is a story of the long struggle of reason and enlightenment over the forces of "savagism" with humanity slowly advancing from barbarism to gentility and (2) in the prehistorical period, humanity was ruled by a benign, peaceful matriarchy. Alexander resolves the contradiction, like Bachofen would almost a century later, by declaring matriarchy ipso facto proof of an inferior culture. Saturated with ethnocentric bias, Alexander views the people of antiquity, including those of ancient Egypt, classical Greece, and imperial Rome, as primarily barbarous. Likewise, in his own time, he viewed the peoples around the world living in different degrees of barbarism and enlightenment with Native Americans on the bottom, followed by Africans, Asians, and Europeans. Even within Europe his ethnocentrism is pronounced, the English, obviously, exhibiting the pinnacle of Enlightenment.
Alexander's primary means of determining the relative advancement of a society is the chastity of women - the more chaste the women, the more advanced the society. As a secondary means of determining the relative advancement of societies, he looks at the place of women in society with societies who treat their women as china dolls given higher status than societies in which women are productive members of society.
For example, Alexander notes that women in many Native American societies hold political power, that many Native American societies are matrilocal and matrilineal, and that Native Americans are subsistence farmers and hunter-gathers, an economic system which requires all members of the community to pull their own weight. Nonetheless, he gives Native American society a low rating because Native American women work in the fields, while English women are the pampered playthings of their husbands, somehow managing to overlook the fact that the vast majority of European women were not the plaything of their husbands, but rather they were peasant farm women, washerwomen, cooks, servants, dairy maids, etc, women of the working-class. Time and again, Alexander inconsistently judges societies by how one section of women are treated - for example, he rates both ancient Rome and his contemporary France low on his scale for having prostitution, but is completely silent about prostitution in his contemporary England.
There are several small sections where he takes men to task for providing women with a limited education - followed by warnings to women not to become pedantic when they become educated, for whatever education he permits to attain are to be used to benefit the men in their lives.
Alexander's history of women is also a sanitized history - a history in which the really disgusting parts are left out. You will not find anything about the Inquisition or the witch trials here.
What Gage found of value was Alexander's reports of travelers, which are, in some way, early ethnographic studies, reports that validated Gage's theory of a prehistoric, egalitarian or female supremacist matriarchy. Several of these sections will be noted below.
The Introduction is by Jane Rendall. I have included excerpts of that introduction because I find it to be accurate.
- "William Alexander's History of Women deserves to take its place among Enlightenment histories of civil society. It has been neglected because of its length, its rambling and inconsistent character, and its daunting absence of any scholarly references -- an absence which Alexander suggests was determined by a desire to cater for women readers in plain and simple language. Yet in writing such a history Alexander was not undertaking an isolated enterprise, as a lonely forerunner of twentieth-century concerns. He was, rather, participating in a much broader inquiry undertaken by writers of the Enlightenment, who sought to understand and to write a history of women, and of changing gender roles, as one part of their attempt to construct a science of humanity for their own day. In the last thirty years of the eighteenth century, such writers drew on the evidence of the developing sciences of biology, anthropology, and psychology, but also, comparatively, on the evidence of the records of the European past, and the cultural variety of the present. These historical narratives of gender relations have received much less attention than eighteenth-century medical and prescriptive writing on the 'nature of woman.' Yet, they were an essential element -- sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit -- in the new histories of 'civilization' of Scottish conjectural historians of the period. " pp. v - vi
- "In the Introduction to his History of Women, Alexander refers to the lengthy traditions in European literature of misogyny, of men's complaints against women, and also of the new kind of celebration of famous women that had emerged with the spirit of chivalry. He declares that his own intentions are to argue neither for nor against women, in the spirit of the 'querelle des femmes,' but to offer a historical perspective on the revolutions in their character and manners from the Roman Empire onwards, to be contrasted with the unchanging histories of women in eastern and in savage societies (1: xiv-xx). In thus disclaiming the inheritance of past writing, in the spirit of a more general and enlightened investigation, Alexander closely followed the French writer Antoine-Léonard Thomas's Essai sur les femmes (1772). In spite of this disclaimers, however, Alexander, like Thomas, continued to make use of that wealth of past literature, mainly with a biographical focus, which both denigrated and celebrated women's lives, from Plutarch's Mulierum virtutes onward (2:9). It is also clear that he consulted a wide variety of other sources, including the works of classical authors such as Herodotus, Strabo, the two Plinies, Diodorus Siculus, Julius Ceasar, Tacitus, Cicero and Livy; the bible and theological writings; the works of pioneering French scholar of chivalry and romance, Jean-Baptiste de La Curne de Sainte-Palaye; travel literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; and Montesquieu's Spirit of the Laws, along with works by Buffon, Raynal, and other contemporary French thinkers. The only woman whose work is used directly, however, is Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, whose Letters . . . written, during her travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa (1763) is cited at a number of points (1:128-31; 2:62, 254-5).
Alexander owed his greatest debt to contemporary Scottish historians, and the History of Women is part of a broader, contested set of Scottish narratives of gender relations published in the 1770s. In a single chapter of his Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) on 'the History of Rude Nations', Adam Ferguson had offered the briefest remarks -- drawn form Lafitau's Moeurs des sauvages amériquains comparées aux moeurs des premiers temps (1724) -- on the condition of women iun tribal societies. He contrasted the matrilocal and matrilineal patterns of residence and of inheritance with the 'real servitude' and 'continual toil' undertaken by women, though suggesting that such labour did not constitute 'the cruel establishment of slavery'. The ambiguity of his account was to be explored in later conflicting versions. John Millar's Observations concerning the Distinction of Ranks<> (1771), William Robertson's History of the Reign of Charles V (1769) and History of American (1777), and Lord Kames's essays 'Of the Progress of the Female Sex' and 'Manners' in his Sketches of the History of Man (1774) (to which Alexander's History of Women appears to have been particularly indebted) offered one such version. The comments of all three writers upon the situation of women in 'savage' and 'barbarous' societies consistently deployed what was by the second half of the eighteenth century one of the familiar tropes of European commentary: the 'savage' woman as drudge, labourer, slave and servant. As Robertson put it in the History of America, 'to despise and degrade the female sex, is the characteristic of the savage state i n every part of the globe.'
These historians were writing a history of progress, a history to be charted, though not rigidly, through the different stages of economic development: hunting, pastoral, agricultural and commercial. Two themes were most clearly stressed in their accounts of improvements in the condition of women: the impact of material progress and the coming of chivalry. To Millar, it was only the later stages of material development, and particularly the acquisition of settled property, which brought with the inequality of property and rank, a higher status for women, and a degree of leisure and tranquillity which allowed the imagination to focus on those objects of desire rendered less accessible by a concern for the protection of legitimate succession. All these historians argued, too, that the impact of chivalric ideals had brought what Millar termed 'a great respect and veneration for the female sex' (Observations, p. 57), which had a lasting effect on European manners.
Not until the emergence of commercial society, however, did 'women become, neither the slaves, nor the idols of the other sex, but the friends and companions,' in the modern and domesticated family, divided by labour but united by 'esteem and affection,' according to Millar (pp. 63-5). yet there were still dangers, for such progressive historians did not entirely resolve the problems inherent in the pursuit of wealth; polished and opulent societies could display forms of corruption. And the effects of wealth and luxury might be seen at their unchanging worst in the corrupt societies of the East. The literature of misogyny could be replayed, as the dangers of the corruption of female manners for the body politic were stressed. In his translation of Thomas's Essai sur les femmes, William Russell, a self-educated Edinburgh printer, added not only extracts from the works of Ferguson, Millar and Robertson, but his own essay on the history of British women in the eighteenth century, to which he appended a warning of the dangers of excessive luxury and opulence.
A different narrative of the condition of women was being simultaneously forged in the historical work of Paul-Henri Mallet, James Macpherson, and Gilbert Stuart. All wrote, drawing heavily on the evidence of Tacitus' Germania, of the distinctive history of northern European peoples, the 'Goths', including Celts, Germans, and Saxons. They challenged the view that the women of early European tribal societies could be compared to the drudges and slaves found among the American Indians. Gilbert Stuart argued, in his View of Society in Europe (1778), that 'the state of society which precedes the knowledge of an extensive property and the meannesses which from refinement and commerce, is in a high degree propitious to women.' To Stuart, the institutions of chivalry which were to be so favourable to women had clearly developed from those of the early German peoples described by Tacitus.
Two strands of Scottish historical writing here come into conflict, and the points at issue related to the status and power relations of the sexes. So, for instance, the nature of the marriage contract and what it represented -- the brideprice of slavery, or an early form of jointure -- was constantly contested. So, too, was the issue of the public status of women in early societies: the question of matrilineality, their participation in councils, their appearance in war.
Alexander's history drew on these contradictory strands of historical writings about women." p. viii - xiii
- "Although there is nothing in nature that so much engages our attention, or so forcibly draws our inclinations, as the other sex, yet to strong is our partiality to ourselves, that we have never in any period, nor in any country, sufficiently attended to the happiness and the interest of those beings, whom in every period, and in every country, we have professed to love and to adore: And while the charms which they possess, have everywhere extorted from us the tribute of love, they have only in a few places so far softened the ferocity of our nature, as to obtain from us good usage.
Almost every man is full of complaints against the sex, but we rarely meet with any one who seriously endeavours to rectify the evils against which he acclaims so loudly. He who considers women only as objects of his love, and pleasure; complains, that in his connections with them, they are inconstant, unfaithful, and ever open to flattery and seduction. The philosophers, who would wish to mingle the joys of friendship and of conversation with those of love, complains that the sex are destitute of every idea, but such as flow from gallantry and self-admiration; and consequently incapable of giving or receiving any of the more refined and intellectual pleasures. The man of business complains, that they are giddy and thoughtless, and want the plodding head, and the saving hand, so necessary towards thieving in the world. And almost every man complains, of their idleness, extravagance, disregard to admonitions, and neglect of the duties of domestic and social life.
Without examining how far these complaints are well or ill founded, we shall only observe, that in cases where they are well founded, when we trace them to their source, we generally find that source to be ourselves. Does not the man of love and gallantry, commonly set the example of inconstancy, to the females with whom he is connected? And do not men in general, but too obviously, chalk out to the other sex, the way that leads to every levity and folly? What made the philosopher so susceptible of the intellectual pleasures? doubtless, the education bestowed upon him; and the same education might have given his wife or his daughter, an equal, or even superior relish for them: It is folly in him therefore to expect the fruit without the culture necessary to bring it to perfection. The plodding and steadiness of the man of business, he has acquired in his early years; and they are augmented by his being sole master of what he can amass, and having a power to spend or dispose of it as he thinks proper. But his wife was brought up in no such school, and has no such motives to industry; for, should she toil with the utmost assiduity, she can not appropriate to herself what she acquires; nor even expend any part of it without leave of her husband. Nor is the idleness, extravagance, and neglect of domestic duties, with which we charge the sex, so much the fault of nature as of education. Can we expect that the girl whom we train up in every fashionable levity and folly, whom we use our utmost efforts to flatter and to amuse, shall, the moment of her marriage, totally change her plan, and become the sober and economical housewife> As well may we sow tares and expect to reap wheat." pp. i - iv
- "Much has already been said and wrote in this adulatory strain: but Hilario da Costa, a monk, resolving to exceed all who had gone before him, published two quarto volumes, of eight hundred pages each; containing, according to his account, the panegyrics of all the women of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, who had distinguished themselves by any remarkable talents or virtues. But as if no valuable talent, nor any virtue could exist without the pale of the catholic church, the partial ecclesiastic passed in silence over every woman of other principles; and while he loudly praised the virtues of Mary queen [sic] of England, whose memory succeeding ages have held in contempt; of her sister, whom her country still remembers with gratitude, he made no mention. The eulogies of this monk amount to one hundred and seventy. But who, in this delusory world, can ensure to himself the summit of greatness or of fame? The voluminous labours of our monk were soon after greatly surpassed by Paul de Ribera, who was delivered of a monstrous work, which he called "The Triumphs and heroic Enterprizes of Eight Hundred Women." " pp. xi-xii
- "When the ancient Germans sallied from their woods and caverns, to give laws and customs to the rest of Europe, their women, we shall see afterward, were, in many respects, of equal, and sometimes even greater, consideration and consequence than their men." p. xv
- "Sometime previous to the reign of queen Elizabeth, the sex began to recover that delicacy and decency which they had lost. From her time, to that of the Protector, their manners were still refining; but during his administration, the whole nation became sanctimoniously enthusiastic, devotion struggled hard to exclude nature, and slovenliness and superstition to substitute themselves for religion. The restoration changed again the manners of the people, and gave them a direction only to pleasure and licentious love. The distractions during the reign of James II, somewhat abated that fervour for pleasure; and the settled situation of affairs under William III, together with the disapprobation shewn by his court to unlawful gallantry, communicated to the female character that turn towards decency and politeness of manners, in which it has now made so considerable a progress. We cannot help taking notice here, that if we may credit the declaimer, the satirist, and the preacher, the female virtues are at present on the decline. For our parts, we pretend not to decide on so delicate a point; and only express our hopes, that the conduct of our fair country-women, will, in this particular, contribute to give the lie to the satirist, the declaimer, and even to the preacher himself.
While the manners and the character of European women have been held out in such a variety of different lights; while they have been liable to so many mutations, from the changes of fashion, of government, and religion; the women of the East have exhibited always the same appearance: their manners, customs, and fashions, unalterable, like their rocks, have stood the test of many revolving ages; though the kingdoms of their county have often changed masters; though they have submitted to the arms and the regulations of almost every invader; yet the laws by which their sex are governed and enslaved, have never been revised nor amended." pp. xix - xx
- "By the Mosaic history of the creation, it appears, that the males and females of all the brute animals, were formed, not only of the same material, and in t he same manner, but also at the same time. When the sacred historian, however, described the creation of the human genus; he informs us, that the female was distinguished from the male by being formed, not of the dust of the earth, as he was, but of a part of the body of the male himself. Those who have ascribed to t he fair sex a superiority over ours, pretend, that from being thus formed of matter doubly refined, they derive their superior beauty and excellence." pp. 27-28
- "In whatever light we view the Egyptians, they do more honour to human nature than any of the ancients, as they excelled them all in laws, in arts, and in government; sciences in which they believed, or pretended to believe, they had been improving for no less than one hundred thousand years. However uncertain this notion of their antiquity may be, it is certain that they were allowed by most of the ancients, to have been one of the first people who were civilized and formed into a nation, governed by laws founded on equity and wisdom; in short they were, even in the distant periods we are speaking of, a people not much inferior to many of those which in our times make no despicable figure in the present civilized system of Europe." pp. 39-40
- "Almost every writer on ancient Egypt mentions, that the women managed the greatest part of such business as was transacted without doors, and that the commerce of the nation was peculiarly allotted to them; it is therefore highly probable, that they were taught the use of numbers and figures: science, without which trade must have been exceedingly imperfect and irregular. As writing was also known at an early period in Egypt, and as it is hardly less necessary in commerce than figures, it is probable also, that the women were taught the writing then in use." pp. 40-41
- "However this be, when we survey the accounts given us by the ancients, of the arts, sciences, laws; and, above all, of the culture and wisdom of the Egyptians; when we consider the high estimation, in which women were held, and the powers with which they were invested; when, to these, we add the literary fame of the nation, we have the strongest reasons to conclude, that though we are at this period unacquainted with they system of female education, it certainly was such as suited the dignity of so wise a people, and of a sex so loved and respected." p. 42
- "If we except the Egyptian, the whole history of antiquity exhibits to us a scene in which we find women groaning under the hard hand of oppression, deprived of almost every privilege; and till we arrive at the Romans, never attaining to any natural or political consequence." p. 55
- "Should this imperfect attempt, to write a History of the Fair, survive the present, and be read in any future generation, when this frivolous mode of female education shall have given place to a better, that our readers may then have some idea of what it was towards the close of the eighteenth century, we shall just sketch the outlines of it as now practiced in the politest countries of Europe. Among the first lessons, which a mother teachers her daughter, is that important article, according to the modern phrase, of holding up her head, and learning a proper carriage. This begins to be inculcated at the age of three or four at latest; and is strenuously insisted on for many years afterward. When the young lady has learned imperfectly to read her own language, and sometimes even sooner, she is sent to a boarding-school, where she is instructed in the most flimsy and useless parts of needlework, and left entirely ignorant of those which are useful and necessary. While she is here, some part of her time is spent in further learning to read, either her own language, or the language of some of the neighboring kingdoms; all which are too frequently taught without a proper attention to Grammar or Orthography. Writing and Arithmetic, likewise employ a part of her time; but these, particularly the last, are only considered as auxiliary accomplishments, which are not to be carried into life, and consequently deserve but little attention. The grand effort is generally made to teach the girl what the woman will relinquish; such as drawing, music, and dancing. These, as they are arts agreeable to youthful sprightliness, often engage the young lady so much, as to make her neglect, or forget every thing else. To what we have now mentioned are added, the modes of dressing in fashion. The punctilios of behaving in company. And we are sorry to say, that into some schools have been introduced masters to teach the fashionable games at cards; a dissipation, if not a vice, which already prevails too much among both sexes, and may perhaps still gain ground by this early initiation.
Such, with a few trifling variations, is the common course of European education; a course, which seems almost entirely calculated to cultivate the personal graces, while the care of the head, and of the heart, are little, if at all, attended to; and the useful duties of domestic life, but too often turned into ridicule, as the obsolete employments of such silly women as drawled out an incipid existence a century or two ago, unacquainted with fashion and pleasure. Women so educated, may be sought after to help n trifling away an idle hour; but whatever progress their personal charms may make on the passions, when the hours of trifling and of passion are over, they must infallibly be neglected, if not despised. We would wish them therefore to consider, that when youth and beauty shall be no more, when the crowd of flatterers and admirers shall have ceased to attend, something will then be necessary to fill up the void, and prevent the peevishness and disgust which the want of such attendance often occasions; that the natural source of this something, is friendship; and that friendship cannot exist, unless it is built upon the foundations of reason and of sense." pp. 71-73
- "When we take a retrospective view of these sketches of the education of women, it affords matter of astonishment, that a sex, who are the sharers of our nature, and destined to be the companions of our lives, should have been constantly either shamefully neglected, or perverted by what was meant to serve as instruction. In Europe, their education seems only calculated to inspire them with love of admiration, of trifling, and of amusement. In most other places of the globe, it goes a step farther; it tends to eradicate every moral sentiment, and introduce vice dressed up in the garb of voluptuous refinement. Scarcely has there ever appeared in any period, on in any nation, a legislator, who has made it the subject of his serious attention, who are greatly interested, that women should be sensible and virtuous, seem, by their conduct towards that sex, to have entered into a general conspiracy to render them otherwise." pp. 85-86
- "While our warmest wishes are, that female education were an object more considered by the legislature, and better planned by parents and guardians, we would not have it understood as our opinion, that women should pore out their fair eye in becoming adepts in literature. Nature seems not to have intended them for the more intense and severe studies. Besides, should they proceed so far as to rival, or even to equal us in learning, we should perhaps grudge them the laurels of fame, as much as we do the breeches: and the gaining of these laurels would rob their brows of many of those charms, which to them are more valuable, as they are by us more esteemed. We pretend not to chalk out the plan in which women should be educated; only, this we venture to affirm, that it should, if possible, be such as to avoid ignorance on the one hand, and pedantry on the other: Ignorance makes a female companion contemptible, pedantry makes her ridiculous; nor is it easy to say which of the two are most disgusting." pp. 87-88
- Helen of Troy, p. 197
Rape of the Sabine women, pp 202-207
Tanaquil, consort of Tarquin, p. 211
Vestal Virgins, pp. 213-214
- "The mythology of all antiquity is full of female as well as of male deities. The Hebrews, and many of their neighboring nations, worshipped the Queen of Heaven; the Phoenicians adored Astarte; the Scythians, Apia; and the Scandinavians, Frigga, the consort of Odin. Wherever female deities have obtained a place in the religion of a people, it is a sign that women are of some consequence; for those modern nations where the sex are held in the most despicable light, have even their deities all of the masculine gender." p. 226
- "It was thus that women first became subject to a species of confinement in the North, not because they were, as is alleged in the South, wicked and libidinous, but because they were beautiful, weak and defenseless. But as it was not jealousy, but a desire of securing their women from the insults of lawless banditti, which was the cause of this confinement; when a woman found a lover, or a husband, to protect her from the rudeness and barbarity of the times, she could then venture abroad with impunity in his company. Hence every woman naturally wished to engage such a champion; and every man of spirit, fond of the honour arising from it, as naturally inlisted himself in such service. In this manner arose the institution of chivalry; an institution, which, though it owed its birth to chance and the necessity of the times, made so rapid a progress, that in a little while it was a sufficient protection for a fair lady to have it publicly known, that such a gallant warrior was her declared champion, and would revenge every wrong done to her, whether in his presence or absence: this enlarged still the circle of her liberty, and more restrained the hand of insult and violence." pp. 230-231
- "And in the reign of Edward III, summonses were sent to several noble ladies of England, to send their proxies to sit in parliament." p. 248
- "The same man, who, in the middle ages, would at the command, or for the defence of a woman, have encountered giants, or gigantic difficulties, had but little idea of adding to her happiness, by supplying her with the comforts and elegancies of life; and would have thought himself affronted, had she asked him to stoop and ease her of a part of that domestic slavery, which almost in every country falls to the lot of women. But, besides, men had in those ages nothing else than that kind of romantic gallantry to recommend them. Ignorant of letters, arts, sciences, and every thing, where gallantry was not concerned, rough and unpolished in their manners and behavour. Their time was spent in drinking, war, gallantry, and idleness. In their hours of relaxation, they were but little in company with their women; and when they were, the indelicacies of the carousal, or the cruelties of the field, were almost the only subjects they had to talk of. Hence they could not be proper companions for a sex, who, shrinking with reluctance from indelicacy and barbarity, generally turn their thoughts to softer subjects." pp. 249-250
- "When the Iroquois have taken any prisoners of war, the council of the nation dispose of them as they think proper. But such, in this particular, is the power of the mothers of families, that they may, if they please, invalidate the determination of the council, dispose of the prisoners otherwise, or become sole arbitrresses of the life or death of such as have been absolved or condemned by it. We have already observed that the dignity of a chief among savages, depending upon personal prowess, is commonly elective. Among the Hurons it is, however, not only hereditary, but descends in the female line, so that it is not the sons of the chief, but his sister's son who succeeds him; and if this whole line be extinct, then the sole power of choosing another chief is vested in the noblest matron. The Huron chief is always assisted by a council, and one of this council must be chosen out of every distinguished family; this choice too is the prerogative of the women, and they may, and even sometimes do, appoint one of their own sex. It is farther related by some authors, that every thing among this people is transacted in the name of the women; but those who have had the best opportunities of being acquainted with their politics assure us, that this authority is no more than nominal, and that the men acquaint the women only with such affairs as they think proper, and make use of their names as in other countries one uses the seal of an office.
Among the Natches the supreme authority is also hereditary, and descends not only in the female line, but seems to devolve equally on a male and female of that line. The male is called the man chief, and the female the woman chief. The woman chief is not the wife, but the sister, or other nearest relation of the man chief. She is attended by as numerous a retinue, and has the same authority, deference, and respect as the man chief; but these are not all, she has, besides, the most singular female privilege that history gives any account of: when she dies, he husband and all her retinue are obliged to follow her into the other world, that they may serve and attend her in the same manner they did in this." p. 272
- "Thus, in Otaheite [Tahiti], an island lately discovered in the South Sea, the inhabitants, though hitherto unacquainted with any part of the globe, but a few islands scattered around them; though sons of pure nature, and almost entirely fed and clothed by her hand; though without the least knowledge of art, or glimmering of science, are, nevertheless, social among themselves, civil and polite to the fair sex, allowing them every rank and dignity, and even the supreme authority of the island, when it is their birthright; treating them with a deference and indulgence, which the weakness and softness of their nature seems to require; and yet, though they have carried their politeness thus far; though the two sexes constantly live together in promiscuous society; at meals, which bring the people of polite nations together, the sexes in Otaheite are separated. The women sometimes serve the men at their repasts, but never eat with them, or in their company; so that it is presumable, the action of eating or drinking is, in this island, ranked among the number of female indelicacies. [After noting the highly egalitarian societies in 'savage' American and in Tahiti, notice what Alexander says on page 300. :-) ]
It is somewhat remarkable, that over the greatest part of America, which, at present, may be called the native country of savage barbarism, the men have in general but one wife; while in Asia and Africa, where they are commonly a little more civilized, an unrestrained polygamy still takes place. But so permanent and unalterable are the customs of the East, and particularly this of a plurality of wives, that, in all probability, it will be among the last of the chains of female slavery that will be broken; and if we may credit the missionaries, who were sent to propagate Christianity among them, there were none of the precepts of that religion, which they found so much difficulty of making them confirm to, as that of confining themselves to one wife; a restriction which they thought so absurd and unreasonable, that they could not believe it to be agreeable to the will of the great Lord of the universe." pp. 297-299
- "In these imperfect sketches, which we have given of the rank and condition of women, we are sorry to say, that it was long before we found them getting into possession of the common rights of mankind; that at present, in more than one quarter of the globe, they are the most abject slaves; and in much more than another, perpetual prisoners: while it is only in that little corner of it, called Europe, that they possess the consequences to which they seem entitled by nature, in the scale of intelligent beings." p. 300
- "The Salique lands among the Franks, seem to have been of a tenure similar to those in the times of the foedal system, held under a lord, for which the tenant was to perform military service; women were not admitted as inheritors, or tenants, for a plain reason, because they were not qualified to perform the military service by which these lands were held; but methods were afterwards discovered to elude this prohibition: he who wanted to make his daughter equal to his son, carried her before the commissary, and said, 'My dear child, an ancient and impious custom bars a young woman from succeeding to her father; but as all my children are equally given me by God, I ought to love them equally; therefore, my dear child, my will is, that my effects shall be shared equally between you and your brethren.' This Salique law, which in modern French seems hardly to operate on the subject, is still in force with regard to the crown, no woman is ever allowed to inherit it." p. 311
- "We have already observed, that power, when not influenced by humanity, is commonly made use of only to enslave. On this principle, we may assert, that the most general and extensive cause of the ill-treatment of women, is their weakness and consequent impossibility of asserting the rights of nature, against a sex so much superior in strength. The next cause, is the insensibility of the men, or that savageness of disposition, which not only eradicates humanity, but prompts only to animal appetite, instead of the sentimental feelings of love; a cause which, more or less, prevails in almost every country, and particularly in those, where society and the various refinements thereon depending, are but little and imperfectly known. . . . .
A third cause of the ill-treatment of the sex is, their general want of a proper education and instruction. In savage life, without any engaging qualification of mind, without any ornament of body, they have nothing but sex to engage the attention, and soften the rugged nature of man. . . . .
A fourth cause of the ill-treatment of women is, their inattention to the means of making themselves agreeable. This is commonly the case in savage life, where, if nature has denied them charms, they have no method of attracting the heart; and where, if she has not denied them, the possessors have not learned to set a proper value upon them, nor to improve their power by correspondent qualifications of the mind." pp. 322-325
- "In a preceding chapter we have observed that, during the whole of what are called the heroic ages, the history of Greece is nothing but a compound of the most absurd fable; from that fable it however appears, that their gods and men employed much of their time and ingenuity in seducing, stealing, and forcibly debauching their young women, circumstances which naturally suggest an idea that those women could not be obtained by any other means must have been virtuous. But this favourable idea, is unhappily overturned by almost all the other circumstances of their history, for we hardly meet with any thing in their early period but murders, rapes, and usurpations; witness the transactions of the kingdom of Mycene; of Pelops, and his descendants. The rapes of Io, Proserpine, Helena, &c. which stain the character of their gods and men with the foulest infamy; and as it has never happened in any nation that one sex has been exceedingly vicious, and the other not participated of its crimes, we may suppose that the Greek women were, in the heroic age, far from being famous for any of the moral virtues; but the proof does not rest on this supposition, for the greatest part of the princes who assembled at the siege of Troy, were, after they returned, flagitiously murdered by their wives. A thing nearly incredible, when we consider that in those times custom had condemned the wife who had lost a husband to perpetual widowhood." pp. 361-362
- Writing about imperial Rome, "Debauchery reduced fertility; but in order to reduce it still more, they learned to procure abortions, that their pleasures might suffer the less interruption." p. 380
- "Soon after the Portuguese had conquered India, laying aside that martial spirit for which they were then so famous, they gave themselves up to all those excesses which render the human race odious, and became such monsters, that poison, conflagration, assassination, and every other crime, grew familiar to them. They massacred the natives; they destroyed one another; and while they raised the hatred of these natives, they lost the courage necessary to keep them in subjection. In the island of Amboyna, a Portuguese at a public festival, seized upon a beautiful woman, and regardless of decency, preceded to force her to his hated embrace. One of the islanders resenting so flagitious a conduct, first armed his fellow-citizens, and afterward calling together the Portuguese, addressed them in the following manner: "To revenge affronts of so cruel a nature as these we have received from you, would require actions, not words; yet we will speak to you. You preach to us a Deity, who delights, you say, in generous actions,; but theft, murder, obscenity, and drunkenness, are your common practices. Your hearts are inflamed with every vice; our manners can never agree with yours. Nature foresaw this, when she separated us by immense oceans, but ye have overleaped her barriers: this audacity, of which you are not ashamed to boast, is a proof of the corruption of your hearts. Take my advice, leave to their repose these nations that resemble you so little: go, fix your habitations among those who are as brutal as yourselves. An intercourse with you would be more fatal to us, than all the evils which it is in the power of you god to inflict upon us. We renounce your alliance for ever. Your arms are superior to ours, but we are more just than you, and we do not fear you; the Itons are from this day your enemies, fly from this country, and beware how you approach it any more.' Such were the sentiments of one whom we should blush to call a savage." pp. 434-435
- "Some authors as we have mentioned would make us believe, that vice and folly were equally unknown to the happy beings they have placed in the first ages of the world; but all that remains of the history of these ages, teaches quite another doctrine, and demonstrates that, almost from the remotest antiquity, there were wars, entered into with the most flagrant injustice, and carried on with the most shocking inhumanity; murders and robberies constantly committed, and wanton cruelties often executed without any provocation; that brother cheated in the most solemn manner his brother; that the fair sex were maltreated and abused, and in fine, that a savage barbarity of manners subjected every thing to superior strength. They would likewise persuade us, that pomp and luxury were then altogether unknown; but these are only comparative, not absolute terms; as what might well deserve the name of luxury in one period, would be the utmost simplicity in another. We grant indeed, that those elegant pleasures which are the result of knowledge, industry, and the fine arts, had then no existence; but they had a pomp and a luxury proportioned to their riches, and to the pleasures with which they were acquainted, and in these they exerted, nay even overstretched themselves perhaps as much as in our modern times.
Those abandoned cities which were consumed by fire from heaven, need not be brought as examples of the total corruption of ancient manners. We have unhappily too many other proofs of it, and of these the diffidence that every one then entertained of his neighbor, is not the weakest. Abraham and Isaac, both apprehended that they would be slain for the sake of their wives; and it was no uncommon thing for a man to require an oath of his neighbor that he would do him no harm. The stories of Judah and Tamar, his daughter-in-law, and of the rape of Dinah, give us some idea of the debauchery and injustice which then reigned upon the earth. Judah condemned Tamar to suffer death for the crime that he had committed with her, and the perfidious sons of Jacob slew the Schemites after they had ratified a treaty of peace with them in the most solemn manner. Nor were fidelity and honour more respected in private than in public life; Jacob bargained with his uncle to serve him seven years his daughter Rachel; when the service was accomplished, Laban shamefully imposed upon Leah, and had even the effrontery to justify what he had done, and exact another seven years service for Rachel. Jacob deceived his brother Esau; and the sons of Jacob sold Joseph their brother as a slave. Such were mankind in the patriarchal ages.
When we trace their character through the subsequent periods mentioned in the Old Testament, we meet with a numerous list of the same enormities and crimes. When from this sacred repository, we turn towards the traditions and fragments of the history of other nations, they do not give us a more favourable idea of these primitive times; from them we learn, that me lived at first without government, and without law, without mutual confidence, or mutual friendship; passion and appetite dictated what they should do, and they were not solicitous about the justice, but only about the convenience and utility of their actions. The whole of the political history of ancient Egypt is a scene of slaughter and injustice. The cruelty and other crimes of Semiramis excite our indignation, and the mad exploits of Alexander, were they not so much marked with blood, would almost excite our laughter. The heroic ages of Greece exhibit little besides rape, murder, and adultery; and the subsequent periods are full of tyranny, proscription, and oppression.
The Romans were at first a set of lawless banditti; after they had formed themselves into a community, and peopled Rome, they became famous for moderation and justice, if the interest of the republic was not concerned; at last, they turned the most venal and profligate of mankind. When the Roman empire was destroyed, were the crimes of the people extirpated; or does history paint mankind as meliorated by so great an event? The reverse we are afraid is the case; gloomy superstition now started up, persecution stalked terribly behind her, and drenched Europe in blood. Rome erected a spiritual, where she had lost a temporal authority, and indiscriminately trampled on the rights of heaven and earth. Scarcely was there a nation among us, whose roads were not infested with gangs of lawless assassins, who robbed and murdered the traveler as he went along, and the laws were too feeble to bring these, or even single offenders, to justice. Nor was even a man's own house an asylum, his stronger neighbor often entered it in the night, and bereaved him at once of property and of life. Cruelty reigned triumphant, and sported with human misery and affliction. Tortures were prolonged amid a croud [sic] of exulting spectators, nor could childhood, nor dotage, nor rank, nor sex, plead exemption. The rich had it always in their power to destroy the poor, and whoever was able to pay four hundred crowns, might, from revenge or wantonness, murder a bishop,; for half that sum he might kill a priest, commit a rape, or poison his neighbor. In the eight and ninth centuries, the Greek empire of Constantinople, exhibited a scene hardly to be equaled in the annals of mankind; all was stratagem, poison, and assassination; nothing was secure but strength, and even that was no longer so than it continued watchful. Nor was the rest of Europe in a much happier state, the barons forced out their vassals to destroy neighbors who had not offended them, and set at nought the mandate of the monarch who ordered them to remain in peace; nay, they even condemned the power of the church, great as it then was; and her feeble edicts, ordaining that there should be no fighting from Thursday till Monday at day break, nor in the time of Lent, nor in that of other solemnities, were but little regarded. But what regard could the church expect to be paid to edicts, which she held out in one hand against crimes, while in the other she held indulgences for those who should, and remissions for those who had already committed them? Such was the picture of Europe till the beginning of the sixteenth century, when by a variety of causes, which it is not our province o enumerate, manners began to soften, justice to triumph over oppression, and society to assume that order and security in which we now happily behold it." pp. 471-474
- "Woman, the fruitful source of half our joys, and perhaps of more than half our sorrows, was not intended solely to propagate and nourish the species, but to form us for society, to give an elegance to our manners, a relish to our pleasures, to soothe our afflictions, and to soften our cares. Of all the various causes which influence our conduct, our feelings, and our sentiments, none operate so powerfully as the society of women." p. 475
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