Women during the Renaissance During the Renaissance, life for most women remained about the same as in feudal times. Most marriages were still prearranged at a very early age. While there was an increase in schools and universities, opportunities for education were primarily restricted to males. Some noble or upper-class females were able to received some education--however most universities refused women students. A major concern, was that if women were allowed to attend universities, they might be exposed to dangerous ideas which could lead them to become too independent. Some Renaissance writers, however, began to take a more liberal view towards women's rights. An Italian nobleman named Baldassar Castiglione (1478-1529) wrote on the status of women in his popular book, THE COURTLIER. One speaker in the book laid down the common view toward women: "women are very imperfect creatures, inferior in every respect to man,... [and] since woman was all body, whoever possessed a woman's body was master of her mind." However another speaker presented another view - that women were capable, but were given no freedom. According to this speaker, women "desire to be men", not "in order to become more perfect, but in order to gain freedom and to escape that rule over them which man has arrogated to himself by his own authority." The argument was even advanced that women had the potential to be prudent and just leaders within society: "...if you examine ancient histories (although men have always been very chary in writing praise of women) and modern histories, you will find that worth has constantly prevailed among women as among men; and that there have always been women who have undertaken wars and won glorious victories, governed kingdoms with the greatest prudence and justice, and done all that men have done." (O'Faolain, J., and Martines, L., ed. NOT IN GOD'S IMAGE. WOMEN IN HISTORY FROM THE GREEKS TO THE VICTORIANS, New York: Harper and Row Publishers, Inc., 1973,pp 192-3, as quoted by June Stephenson, WOMEN'S ROOTS, p 229) Renaissance humanist reformers spoke in favor of education in order to read the Bible. Some further extended this view towards educating women as well. The Dutch religious humanist Erasmus, for example, believed that educating women would make them more noble in thought and virtue: "The distaff and spindle are in truth the tools of all women and suitable for avoiding idleness...Even people of wealth and birth train their daughters to weave tapestries or silken cloths...it would be better if they taught them to study, for study busies the whole soul...It is not only a weapon against idleness but also a means of impressing the best precepts upon a girl's mind and of leading her to virtue." (Wrasmuc, CHRISTIANI MATRIMONII INSTITUTIO, Basel, 1526, as quoted in June Stephenson, PHD, Women's Roots, p 232). During the Reformation, Protestants encouraged education so that one could read the Bible.--More women were taught to read for this purpose as well. Protestant priests were allowed to marry, and more emphasis was placed on the strong moral family unit. Protestants also had no parallel to a convent, where recalcitrant women could be forcibly sent to become nuns. Still, most Protestant sects (with the exception of some of the more radical sects such as Quakers) commanded women to remain silent in church matters, and therefore politics. (Footnote: This was based on St. Paul's admonition to women in 1 Cor. 14:34). Until modern times, women were not allowed to hold positions within the priesthood. In some conservative Protestant sects, women are still forbidden to become priests. Womanhood During the Enlightenment/Romantic Period During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, many followers of the Enlightenment philosophy posited that there were NO innate differences between the sexes. They argued that any observed differences were due to education and other cultural variations in upbringing. Romantic philosophers, disagreed--stressing instead the innate biological and physiological differences between males and females. Both positions led to different political implications for the equality of women. The French philosophers of the Enlightenment, for example, argued that if women and men were biologically equal, then women should have more social (and to a certain extent, political) equality with the men. The French philosopher and revolutionary Concorcet is thought to be the first man to explicitly address the issue of equal political rights for women. In 1790, he wrote an essay entitled "The Admission of Women to Full Citizenship". In England, the humanist John Stuart Mill's SUBJECTION OF WOMEN, became the official book for the feminist movement gathering strength there. Romantics maintained a more conservative position on the nature of women. Although women admittedly had "admirable" qualities such as nurturing and love-- they were still held out as weaker then the men. As such, it followed that they should NOT be able to participate equally with the men in social and political matters. For example, Jacques Rousseau, one of the important founders of Romanticism, wrote in his book EMILE (1761) that women do not have the "capacity to judge for themselves" and as such ought to obey their fathers, husband, and priests: "As the conduct of a woman is subservient to the public opinion, her faith in matters of religion should, for that very reason, be subject to authority. Every daughter ought to be of the same religion as her mother, and every wife to be of the same religion as her husband: for though such religion be false, that docility which induces the mother and daughter to submit to the order of nature, takes away, in the sight of God, the criminality of their error... they are not in a capacity to judge for themselves, they ought to abide by the decision of their fathers and husbands as confidently as that of the church." (Footnote: Sigmund Freud is frequently identified with the science of the Enlightenment, although Freud's interest in occultist ideas such as telepathy and his opposition to TESTING his theories, places him more in alignment with the Romantic movement. Freud gave a pseudo-scientific basis for viewing women in a secondary (and therefore inferior) role. Emphasizing the anatomical differences between men and women, Freud was convinced that all little girls were "envious" that they "lacked" the male genital organ. (According to Freud, once the young girl discovered that she lacked a penis, she felt castrated--and developed "penis envy") and that this would affect her later relations when she entered into womanhood. Many modern psychologists have refuted this aspect of Freud's views. (See Section V, Chapter 19, where it was shown how Freud was at least somewhat influenced by the popularity of occultist ideals during his career such as telepathy. See Section VIII, Chapter 1, which discusses whether Freud's views fall under the category of "ideology" or "science"). Certain scientific discoveries during this time became intertwined with social-religious attitudes. For example, when chloroform was invented, this was at first DENIED to women in childbirth--because this was believed to circumvent the biblical punishment of REQUIRING women to "suffer" in labor from bearing children. (Footnote: There was no religious opposition to using ether as a GENERAL anesthesia on women--say for use during the amputation of a leg. It was the use of painkillers to alleviate the pain of CHILDBEARING that was so controversial). Queen Victoria set the precedent for mothers to obtain painkillers during childbirth-- when she defied her religious advisors and insisted on receiving chloroform from her doctors during her labor. (see Section V, Chapter 13). The Ideal of Romantic Love and Motherhood The Romantic/Enlightenment movements lead to a novel idea-- that women should marry for romantic love. According to Stanford University's Carl Degler, American magazines did not begin emphasizing romantic love as important in marriage before 1750. The idealized view of children having a happy childhood filled with toys and lovable books did not come into vogue until after the 1800's. (Footnote: One historian who analyzed 330 portraits of children between the years 1670 and 1810, concluded that until after the American Revolutionary War, these pictures "contain no distinctive childish artifacts such as toys, children's furniture, or school books. The stock poses give no signs of play or playfulness, and the faces of the children are as solemn as those of their elders." as quoted by Richard Shenkman, LEGENDS, LIES, AND CHERISHED MYTSH OF AMERICAN HISTORY, William Morrow and Company, inc. New York, 1988). Prior to the American Revolution, children were dressed and expected to act as adults by the age of seven or eight. By the age of ten, children often lived with other families, working as hired servants or laborers. Fairy stories and nursery rhymes are reflections of how cultures perceive the world around them. It can be seen in the original versions of fairy stories and nursery tales, that many of these were ORIGINALLY quite violent. Examples include "Ring around the rosies...we all fall dead", and "Rock a bye baby... down will fall cradle, baby and all." Other examples include the original version of Red Riding Hood where the wolf eats up the grandmother and Red Riding Hood. In Sleeping Beauty, the handsome prince who awakens her is already married. Sleeping Beauty has illegitimate children with the prince, and his wife is so jealous of them she tries to have them killed. (Modern versions leave these details out.) Both the philosophies of the Enlightenment and the Romantic period were influential in shaping the more modern outlooks towards childhood, and consequently motherhood. John Locke had written that children's minds were "blank slates" upon which their parents and instructors could mold good values and virtues. Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote that children were by their very nature, born as innocent beings who should be allowed to enjoy a special pristine state before entering the world of adulthood. Both Locke and Rousseau rejected the doctrine of Original Sin that held that children were born wicked (which was a popular Calvinist belief in colonial America.) With more importance attached to rearing children, women in turn received more recognition from their role as mothers. Mothers became to be seen as the moral guardians of her family, who molded her children to become virtuous citizens within society. The idealized view of motherhood held that mothers should not wield the authoritarian stick for punishing her children. (This role was reserved for the fathers). Instead, the mother should first try more loving, tender measures in guiding her children. Education Public education was not generally available for either boys or girls in the U.S. until the mid 1800s. With the new public schools, girls were readily admitted into grade schools--although there was some opposition to them going to high school. (It was argued that intense study at the high school level would unduly tire women and ruin their ability to have children.) Free high schools for women were first opened in Boston and Philadelphia following the Civil War. The first U.S. college (and also the first to admit blacks) was Oberlin, founded in 1813. At first the coursework for women was directed either towards teaching or homemaking. By the 1850-60's, women were admitted into some midwestern universities. In the east, the trend was to build universities that were exclusively for women--such as Vassar in 1865, Radcliffe in 1879, and Bryn Mawr in 1885. By the mid 1800's, women were moving into industrial jobs, especially in the textile industry. At first, women mainly sewed at home, doing "respectable" work. Later on, they moved into the factories. Because there were limited opportunities for women, there was a large supply of women and wages were kept at a low level. Women in the textile industries were forced to work long hours--often 13 to 14 hours--and at rates that were 1/7 to 1/4 that of men in similar industries. There were some unsuccessful attempts to form labor unions and conduct strikes for better living conditions. For example, in 1835, there was a strike in Paterson, New Jersey, for a 12 hour day. (In the cotton textile mills, work days could be between 14-16 hours long.) Following the Civil War, there was a shortage of male teachers. It was during this time that so many women entered the teaching profession. One factor that favored this development was that women teachers could be paid far less than the men. --For example in 1853 in New York, women teachers received one tenth of a male's teaching salary. In many states, a women could lose her teaching job if she married. This meant single women had to accept their low teaching salaries, as this was often their only means of support. (Deckard, p 256) Women faced discrimination in most professions. For example, Elizabeth Blackwell wanted to become a doctor. After being rejected by 29 medical schools, one finally admitted her as a joke. By 1849, she became the first woman doctor in the state of New York. Because no hospital would admit her, she founded her own hospital in 1857 which was staffed completely by women. To help other women become doctors, she opened her own medical school for women in 1868. (Ibid, p 258). Legal Rights--Suffrage During the nineteenth century, the Industrial Revolution had disrupted the family economic unit on the farm, so that large numbers of people began working in factories and mines. The new mechanized inventions also meant that many women had, relatively speaking, more free time on her hand. Many educated women, shut out from entering into professions, entered into philanthropic work--such as helping the poor, and volunteering work in hospitals. This led to women with strong abilities, becoming active in many of the social services-- fighting alcoholism, cruelty to children, campaigning for the abolition of slavery, working for prison reform, and other general social and legal reforms. Some worked specifically on "women's" issues--reforms for marriage and divorce laws, and more equitable property rights. After the Civil War, the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments to the Constitution, granted blacks the rights to citizenship, but did not include women within its scope. As with most European nations, American women did not gain the right to vote until AFTER WW I, in 1920. (Footnote: New Zealand was the first nation to grant women equal political rights (1893), followed by Australia (1902), Finland (1906), Norway (1913), Denmark and Iceland (1915), the Netherlands and the Soviet Union (1917), Germany and Luxembourg (1919), Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland and Sweden (1918), and the U.S. (1920). Women received some suffrage rights in Great Britain through the Representation of the People Act of 1918, although there were restrictions according to age and marital status, among others. By 1928, these restrictions were waived, and all women in Great Britain had the right to vote. Other nations that followed were Spain (1931), Brazil and Thailand (1932), Cuba, Turkey, and Uruguay (1934), Burma and Romania (1935), and the Philippines (1937). "Women, op cit., p 912) Groups that had been strongly opposed to US women's right to vote were: (1) liquor businesses--who worried women would vote for prohibition. (2) big-city politicians--who worried that women voters would demand reforms-- such as the abolition of child labor & a general cleanup of politics. (3) the Catholic Church--whose leaders taught that it was not a "woman's place" to participate in politics. (4) southern whites -- who did not want to discuss the subject of suffrage, as they might also have to address discrimination against blacks. (5) big businesses (including the railroads, oil industries, and manufacturers)-- who did not want to change the status quo. (taken from Barbara Sinclair Deckard, THE WOMEN'S MOVEMENT-- Political, Socioeconomic, and Psychological Issues, 3rd edition, Harper & Row Publishers, 1983, pp 279-80.) Property Rights Prior to the Revolutionary War and up to the mid 1800's, when a woman married, all of her property--including property from a dowry or inheritance-- belonged to her husband. Married women had no legal rights--and thus could not sign legal papers, testify in court, nor keep any wages they earned. As the husband controlled all the finances--he could literally spend all the family's money any way he chose-- including in extreme cases, where he was a drunk or gambler. A woman's children were also the property of her husband. If a man beat or sexually abused his wife or children, he was not considered to have broken the law, as his wife and children were considered his own property. Women first began to gain the right to keep their own earnings and property in western frontier states beginning around 1840. The eastern states were slower in granting women property rights. Even in 1900, for example, a married woman from Pennsylvania was not allowed to sign a contact without first obtaining the approval of her husband. In some states, a woman had to forfeit everything if divorced for adultery.-- The reverse was not true if it was the husband who was divorced by his wife for adultery. Even today, in some states, women have less legal rights than men. In Utah, for example, divorced women must obtain permission from their ex-husbands, before the state will grant them the right to use their maiden names on their driver's licenses. Women's Biological Rights In July, 1912, a young, uneducated nurse and a doctor in New York traveled to the poor Lower East Side tenement in response to a desperate call placed by a truck driver named Jake. His wife Sadie, lay unconscious on the floor, surrounded by three young frightened children. Sadie had attempted a self-induced abortion by inserting a sharp object up through her uterus, and was now suffering from blood poisoning. After three weeks of intensive care, Sadie recovered. Afterwards, her doctor warned her that another pregnancy would be fatal. Sadie turned to the doctor and inquired, "But how can I prevent it?" "Tell Jake to sleep on the roof", replied the doctor. After the doctor had left, Sadie then turned to the nurse and begged her to tell her "the secret" for not getting pregnant again. The nurse replied that she knew of no secret. Three months later, the nurse was summoned again. She found Sadie pregnant, and this time in a coma. Sadie died shortly after her arrival. The nurse's name was Margaret Sanger, and the memory of Sadie Sach's desperate face haunted her for the rest of her life. Margaret Sanger saw Sadie as a symbol of the victimization of millions of women throughout the world who were trapped in an endless chain of poverty and pregnancy. She thereupon determined to take up a one-woman's crusade to help women control their biology, and with it their own destiny. Margaret Sanger's determination was met with outright hostility. According to one of her biographers, Emily Taft Douglas: "When she [Sanger] started her crusade, in 1914, federal, state, and local laws were all arraigned against her. She was jailed eight times. The medical profession denounced her, the churches excoriated her, the press condemned her, and even liberal reformers shunned her. She entered the fight alone, a frail young woman without much education. with no social or financial backing, with nothing but conviction." She was unable to tell "the secret" of birth control to Sadie Sochs in 1912, because they fell under the Comstock obscenity laws (which were passed by Congress in 1873 because of concern regarding the morality of large numbers of rootless young workingmen and women in the large cities) Margaret Sanger began a personal search, which took her to Holland, where she learned about the diaphragm. She returned to the States from Holland, determined to disseminate the new knowledge she had gained to women everywhere. Sanger had her first run in with Comstock in 1912 (who was personally given powers of a postal agent in the legislation), after writing a series for the woman's section of a socialist paper, THE CALL. In the article entitled "What Every Girl Should Know", Sanger included the words "syphilis" and "gonorrhea", and was immediately censored under Comstock. What appeared in the paper, ran something like this: WHAT EVERY GIRL SHOULD KNOW N O T H I N G ! By Order of THE POST-OFFICE DEPARTMENT Other reformers had searched for ingenious ways for overturning the Comstock Laws. In 1926, Joseph Lewis, the President of Freethinkers of America, published THE BIBLE UNMASKED, which identified a number of sexually explicit passages of the Old and New Testament. Lewis attempted to argue, that under a strict interpretation of the Comstock Laws, the Bible itself should be banned. (Needless to say, the Bible was not banned, and the Comstock Laws were not revoked.) Margaret Sanger opened America's first birth control clinic in New York City in 1916. The clinic was raided, and Sanger was thrown in jail. According to her autobiography, the prison warden routinely asked Sanger her religion. She replied, "Humanity". According to Sanger: "He [the warden] had never heard of this form of belief, and rephrased the question, 'Well, what church do you go to?' None. He looked at me in sharp surprise. All inmates of the penitentiary went to church." She was later release. Anthony Comstock had died and Sanger's trial was creating a great deal of unwanted publicity--whereby various prominent individuals were arising to her defense. The Court of Appeals ruled that contraceptive information could be disseminated for the "cure and prevention of disease." Because "disease" was not specified, Sanger and her followers decided to define (for purposes of the operations of their clinic), that pregnancy itself was a disease--so as to allow them a loophole within the law. Margaret Sanger perceived the need for birth control not only as a humanitarian effort --but also as a vital means to control a Malthean population explosion. At first, feminists who were largely fighting for legal rights, were slow to support Sanger's battle for biological rights. Many of her early supporters were instead humanist leaders, such as H. G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, Clarence Darrow-- even Gandhi reportedly admired her. It was not until 1936 during the Great Depression, that birth control information became legally available to women. However, even when legal barriers were lifted, some government agencies still sought to prevent the dissemination of birth control information. (For example, the city of Chicago prohibited its public health nurses from distributing contraceptive information, upon threat of being fired, into the 1950's.) It was not until 1965, that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the case of GRISWOLD vs CONN., that birth control information could legally be distributed throughout all fifty states. Margaret Sanger continued her crusade until she died in 1966. A few years before her death, she summarized her cause as follows: "No woman can call herself free who does not own or control her body. No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother." Some feminists today, believe it was the invention of birth control devices-- more than any legal right, that has done more to liberate women. According to Victoria Branden: "With rare and sensational exceptions, women have always been prevented from taking dominant roles by the inescapable facts of biology. By the time they were through with child-bearing and -rearing, they were exhausted or dead. Average life expectancy for most of the history of the human race was less than thirty years; it wasn't until the nineteenth century, in the most favored Western countries, that it increased to forty. The liberation of women was effected by the birth control pill, without which feminism is a lost cause." (Victoria Branden, "Spiritual Values and 'the Goddess', FREE INQUIRY, Fall 1990, Vol. 10, No, 4, p36) Some feminists also believe that the rise in militancy among American fundamentalist arose, at least in part, as a response to the visible growth of women's rights groups. According to the feminist writer Marilyn French, Protestant fundamentalists became more involved in politics AFTER the ROE vs WADE decision legalizing abortion. Likewise, according to French, it is no coincidence that it was after 1968, that the Catholic Church viewed abortion as a MORE serious offence than adultery--and simultaneously launched a massive world-wide campaign, proclaiming that all life is sacred--including the fetus at conception. (Ms. French notes that fundamentalists generally do not oppose war or capital punishment on the ground that life is sacred.) Modern Trends Today, women in many countries of the industrialized world have more rights than in any age in history. One of the more interesting debates going on right now is in the "scientific" arena-- regarding whether most of the differences seen between men or women are cultural or biological. Sifting through the massive studies on the subject, it seems clear that CULTURAL factors almost certainly play "some" part in the role models of men vs women. However, it has also been demonstrated that men are naturally MORE AGRESSIVE than women, because men possess more of the chemical testosterone, than women. It is of course, the realm of philosophy (and not science) that will ultimately take up the question of whether this means that women should be allowed equal access with the men to assume leadership roles within society. Despite the current controversy, there are today a number of success stories of women in business and government, who are serving as positive role models for the next generations of women. The bad news is that there are still a large number of negative views on women--going back to the Genesis story of Eve's guilty role in losing the paradise of Eden. (Examples include St. Augustine's view that women are responsible for any physical abuse received from their husbands, are solely responsible for their pregnancies, etc.) Until the cultural biases and myths from the past are fully acknowledged and understood-- even though women may begin to approach LEGAL equality with men in society, they may still find themselves lacking in EMOTIONAL satisfaction with their male counterparts.