Woman and her Master

Front matter

WOMAN AND HER MASTER. BY LADY MORGAN. " As the old law-phrase runs, Baron et Feme — the master and his woman." — Blackstone. VOL. I. LONDON : HENRY COLBURN, PUBLISHER, GREAT MAKLBOROUGH STREET. 1840. LONDON: T. SHOBERL, JUN., PRINTER, 51, RUPERT STREET, HAYMARKET.

ADVERTISEMENT.

. The long delay which has occurred in the pub lication of " Woman and her Master" is solely attributable to an infirmity of vision ; the ultimate appearance of the work in a divided form has been the result of the same painful infliction — the neces sity of temporary repose having been suggested by one, to whose eminent skill and unremitting attention I stand indebted for the comparative recovery of the most precious of the organs. The disadvantage of dividing the work into two distinct publications is manifest; particularly as its strict adherence to chronological order obliged me to bring before the public that portion which, by its remoter associations, may be deemed the least interesting.

Book I. Page

Chapter I. Woman . . . . .3 Chapter II. The Women of Savage Life — Of Semi-Civilized Tribes . . . . . .19 Chapter III. The Women of the East — The Women of Oriental Antiquity, Traditional and Historical — Of India, and China — Of Assyria, and Egypt — Semirarais — The Cleopatras . . . . . .34 Chapter IV. The Women of the Hebrews— Under the Patriarchs — Sarah — Rachael, &c. . . .59 Chapter V. The Women of the Hebrews — Under the Egyptian Captivity — At the Exodus — In the Desart of Shur. Miriam — The Daughters of Zelophehad— The Inheritance of Daughters among the Hebrews . . 84 Chapter VI. Women of the Hebrews under the Judges —Deborah ...... CONTENTS. VIII PAGE Chapter VII. Women of the Hebrews under the Philistines — The Mother of Samson — Naomi and Ruth — Under the Theocracy — Hannah . . . . .115 Chapter VIII.

The Women of the Hebrews under the Monarchy— The Witch of Endor . . 123 Chapter IX. The Hebrew Women under the Monarchy continued — Their Social Condition — Abigail — Michal — Bathsheba 139

Book II

Chapter I. The Women of the Hebrews under the Monarchy — The Queen of Sheba .... 171 Chapter II. The Women of the Hebrews under the Monarchy — The Egyptian Princesses — The Women of Strange Gods in Israel .... . 181 Chapter III. The Women of the Hebrews on the separation of Israel and Judah — Jezebel — Athaliah . . 185 Chapter IV. The Women of the Hebrews — Huldah — Judith — Under the Persian Captivity — Esther . . 201

Book III

Chapter I. The Women of Classical Antiquity — in Greece — The Athenian Women — The Hetaeræ . . . 265 Chapter II. The Domestic Life of Pericles — Aspasia . WOMAN AND HER MASTER. BOOK THE FIRST. " As the old law-phrase runs, Baron et Feme — the master and his woman." Blackstonb. B VOL I. WOMAN AND HER MASTER.

Book I. Chapter

I. WOMAN. " Ce sexe, que nous bornons a des emplois obscurs et domestiques, ne serait il pas destine a des fonctions plus nobles et plus relevees ? N'a-t-il pas donne des exemples de courage, de sagesse, de progres dans toutes les vertus, et dans tous les arts ? Peut-etre que ses qualites se ressentent de sa faiblesse, et sont itferieures auxnotres: s'ensuit-il qu'elles doivent etre inutiles a la patrie ? Non, la nature ne dispense aucun talent pour le rendre sterile ; et le grand art du legis lates est de remettre en jeu tous les ressorts qu'elle foumit, et que nous laissons en repos." Plato de Repuhlica. — As cited by the Abbe Barlhelemy. The chronicles of six thousand years, the records of the known world, lie open for the benefit aud the wonder of mankind, preserving, in pages indited by the lights of their respective times, monuments of the ignorance, the timidity, and the credulity, of suc cessive generations. b2 WOMAN.

From the earliest aggregations of society, man, in his shallow pride, has laboured to perpetuate the memory of his own imperfection, the story of his selfishness and his errors ; and the annals which he has bequeathed from age to age, for the benefit of posterity, are but evidences of the long and painful struggles, by which the human species, on isolated points, and for periods brief and remote, have suc ceeded in partially escaping from physical evil, and from moral darkness. It is thus the artless illuminations of antique mis sals, in preserving the rude outlines of the dark ori ginals they were meant to honour, perpetuate, also, in vivid tints, that expression of feebleness and suffering, which is the inseparable characteristic of suspicious and unaccommodated ignorance in all ages.* It was not till the close of a long and unmitigated reign of barbarism, even in regions most favourable to intellectual culture, that mind began at last to assume some supremacy over brute force ; but, from its first inroad of inquiry upon the density of ignorance and prejudice, it has proceeded steadily on- * Obvious even in the fine heads of Cimabue and Giotto.

WOMAN. ward in its high career, unsubdued by penalties and persecutions, undaunted by calumnies and con tempt. Neglected, when not discouraged, often repelled, and occasionally crushed, amidst the conflicts of races, and the fall of empires, science has receded only to advance ; multiplying the blessings of physical exis tence to the species, and " purging the general weal " by its extorted truths. Before its luminous progress, many maladies have disappeared, many crimes fallen into dissuetude ; and vices, once boastfully indulged, are now scarcely breathed. Society has become less cruel ; and the appetite for blood, the ferocious in stinct of semi -civilized man, has diminished. The scaffold is less frequently erected, the stake has been torn up ; the faggot has been quenched ; and the rack and the wheel, banished from codes (once miscalled) of justice, are now preserved with other relics of older times, as warnings to illustrate a principle, as images to enforce its observance.

The monopoly of knowledge is no longer cloistered and exclusive ; and, if all those who run may not read, and all who live have not at their disposition the means of learning, yet a respect for education and WOMAN a desire for its acquisition are in active operation throughout all the great European communities, and penetrating all classes of society. Under this mighty influence, the relations of time and space to human power have been changed, till minutes comprise the labours of days ; facts have been substituted for figments, and experiment for learning; and, above all, the intellectual machine itself, released from its scholastic trammels, and worked in obedience to its own laws, like the me chanic engine of modern improvement, realizes, with certainty and precision, effects which the combined exertions of past ages were inadequate to accom plish.

Mind, the universal mind, is now every where in action, producing new and endless combinations, political, moral, and material; and, though the in terests of a few, or the lingering prejudices of the many, may oppose and delay its march, still (as the martyr of physical truth was heard to mutter when he left the tribunal of his inquisitors for his dungeon), epure si muove. Much, however, as has been effected, that progress serves but to disclose the more that remains to be done. As the acquirement of a physical elevation, WOMAN 7 in expanding the sphere of vision, and opening new and vast regions to the sense, obscures and diminishes the individual details comprehended in its grasp ; so, that intellectual and moral elevation, which has opened to the mind's eye the wider fields of scientific research and of social combination, has caused the relative value of the smaller facts presented to its apprehension to be either overlooked, or mistaken.

Society has become complicated more rapidly than philosophy and legislation can follow : the actions of man upon man, and those of the species upon nature, have multiplied faster than observation can co-ordinate, or reason control ; until a positive advance has assumed the appearance of a relative retrogradation. A large and formidable sum of suffering, therefore, still subsists in the bosom of the most civilized com munities, untouched by science, unmitigated by laws. Crimes, necessitated and inevitable, are still committed with a fearful regularity, and in pre-assignable pro portions. The arithmetic of statistics can foreshew the numbers of the victims of violence, and determine the instruments of its perpetration.* It can calculate * See that curious and admirable work, " Sur l'Homme, ou Essai de la Physique Social," by Monsieur Quetelet, Astronomer Royal and Secretaire Perpetuel de I'Acac'emie Royale de Bruxelles.

WOMAN the minds that must degrade, the hearts which must break, the felons who must suffer, the suicides who must perish. The future murderer, while yet smiling in innocence on his mother's bosom, is already sur rounded by the circumstances which foredoom him to crime ; and the fair and blooming hope of many a parent's heart must tread her fated path to shame and reprobation, because institutions are still unex plored, and laws are at war with the ends for which they were enacted. There are, then, still unmastered, some great im pediments to the working of the social machinery ; there are unfitnesses and incongruities obstructing its play, and clogging its movements, that are yet scarcely suspected. The discordant fragments of elder systems still remain, which work not smoothly with a newer principle of action.

In the great and ge neral progress of knowledge, much has been neg lected, much overstepped ; and, amidst the most be neficial reforms and sagacious improvements, great moral incoherences still linger, which require to be eleminated, before the interests of humanity can be based upon a system, consonant with nature, and conducive to general happiness. WOMAN. But where lies the oversight ? Can it be one, astounding in its obviousness, and all-important in its mischiefs ? While codes have been reformed, institutes rationalized, and the interests of orders and classes have been minutely attended to, has one half of the human species been left, even to the present moment, where the first rude arrangements of a barbarous society and its barbarous laws had placed it. Is woman still a thing of sufferance and not of rights, as in the ignorant infancy of early aggregation, when the law of the strongest* was the only law acted on ? and in the great impulsion to a regenerating reform, has that most applicable and intelligible instrument of social improvement and national well-being, has Woman, been forgotten ?

Even now, when supremacy has been transferred from muscle to mind, has that most subtle spirit, that being of most mobile fibre, that most sensitive and apprehensive organization — has she, whom God has placed, to be a " mate and a help to man," at the ♦ " The husband, by the old law, might give his wife moderate correction ; for, as he is to answer for her misbehaviour, the law thought reasonable to intrust him with this power of restraining her by domestic chastisement, allowing him— (iagellis et fustibus acriter verberare uxorem," &c. — Blachstone. b5 WOMAN head of his creation, the foundress of nations, the em bellisher of races,* has she alone been left behind, at the very starting-post of civilization, while around her all progresses and improves ? And is man still " the master," and does he, by a misdirected self-love, still perpetuate her ignorance and her dependance, when her emancipation and improvement are most wanting, as the crowning element of his own hap piness ?

If, in the progress of refinement, he has brightened instead of breaking the chain of his slave, lie has only linked a more shewy nucleus of evil to his own destiny, and bound up, with his noblest views of national and social development, a principle that too * " That the blood of the Persians is naturally gross, appears from the Gnebres, who are a remnant of the ancient Persians, and are an ugly, ill-made, and rough-skinned people. But, in the other parts of the kingdom, the Persians' blood is now highly refined by frequent admixture with the Georgians and Circassians, two nations which surpass all the world in personal beauty. There is hardly a man of rank in Persia who is not born of a Georgian or Circassian mother ; and even the king himself is commonly sprung, on the female side, from one or other of these nations.

As it is long since this admix ture commenced, the Persian women have become very beautiful, the men tall, noble, and graceful. But these qualities they inherit not from their remote progenitors ; and, without the alliances alluded to above, the men of rank in Persia (as descendants of the Tartars) would be extremely ugly and deformed." — Chardin " Voyages en Perse," 1, 2. See Plates of Antiquities in Mr. Morier's " Travels in Persia." WOMAN 11 often thwarts the progress and enfeebles the results of his best reforms. If, in the first era of society, woman was the victim of man's physical superiority, she is still, in the last, the subject of laws, in the enactment of which she has had no voice — amenable to the penalties of a code, from which she derives but little protection. While man, in his first crude attempts at jurisprudence, has surrounded the sex with restraints and dis abilities, he has left its natural rights unguarded, and its liberty unacknowledged.

Merging the very existence of woman in his own, he has allowed her no separate interest, assigned her no independent possessions : " for," says the law — the law of man — " the husband is the head of the wife, and all that she has belongs to him."* Even the fruit of her own labour is torn from her, unless she is protected by the solitary blessedness of a derided but innocent celibacy, or by an infamous frailty. Thus, (to adopt the bar- * " The very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or, at least, is incorporated or consolidated into that of the husband, under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs every thing (and is therefore called, in our law-French, a feme coverte, or covert Baron, or, under the protection and influence of her husband, her Baron, or Lord ; and her condition during her marriage is called her coverture)." — Blackstone.

WOMAN barous jargon of these barbarous laws,) as femme sole, or femme couverte, she is equally the victim of violence and injustice, those universal and invariable attributes of the law of the strongest. But there is still a more terrible outrage committed against all that is most dear to her nature ; she may be deprived of the possession of her own child — of that child, which, but an hour before, was shrined in her bosom, a portion of herself, flesh of her flesh, and bone of her bone — her infant may be torn from her while it is still drawing its nourishment from her breast, and while she is still " thanking the gods for all her labour past," as she gazes tenderly on its helplessness. In the progress of moral improvement, it is true, some faint rays of light have broken on the darkness of these wrongs ; and equity, the common sense of advancing civilization, has endeavoured, by a system of fictions, to defeat the law.

Timidly admitting the possible injustice of early institutes, it hesitatingly evades the consequences, and ventures not to touch the principle. Thus has the destiny of woman be come only more complicated and uncertain; and rights, on which the nature of things has already de cided, are kept for years at anxious issue, through WOMAN. the incoherences and contradictions of the machinery by which they have been bolstered, until a life of hope deferred may be worn out, before the industry and intelligence of its defenders can acquire a mastery of the case, and ripen it to a decision.* But in vain has opinion, the new depository of power, the antagonist of physical force, opened its tribunals to the wrongs of the aggrieved ! Even there her master meets her, citing against her what he calls philosophy and science ; and if, even while these lines are tracing, a scanty measure of partial and reluctant amelioration has been wrung from the legislature, the exceptional fact has only been made an occasion for the sterner assertion of the outrageous principle.

The natural dependance of the sex on its master, its imputed in aptitude for the higher intellectual pursuits, and pre sumed incapacity for concentration, are still insisted upon ; and, while woman is permitted to cultivate the arts which merely please, and which frequently cor rupt, she is denounced as a thing unsexed, a lusus natures, if she directs her thoughts to pursuits which aspire to serve, and which never fail to elevate. * See an Essay on the Equitable Rights of Married Women, by J. Clancy, Esq., Barrister-at-law. WOMAN Educating her for the Harem, but calling on her for the practices of the Portico, man expects from his odalisque the firmness of the stoic, and demands from his servant the exercise of those virtues which, placing the flite of his own sex at the head of its muster-roll, give immortality to the master.

He tells her " that obscurity is her true glory, insig nificance her distinction, ignorance her lot, and pas sive obedience the perfection of her nature ;" yet he expects from her, as the daily and hourly habit of her existence, that conquest over the passions by the strength of reason, that triumph of moral energy over the senses and their appetites, and that endurance of personal privations and self-denials, which with him (even under all the excitements of ambition and incen tives to renown) are qualities of rare exception, the practices of most painful acquirement. Such has been the destiny of woman amongst the most highly-organized and intellectual of the human races, and in the regions most favourable to their moral development. Among the inferior varieties, and in less temperate regions, she is even yet more degraded and helpless.

The object and the victim of a brutal sensuality, her life passes in humiliating restriction WOMAN. 15 and debasing ignorance ; while her death is not un usually an act of murderous violence, or of refined torture. But how has this Pariah of the species, this alien to law, this dupe of fictions and subject of force — how has she felt, how acted, how borne the destiny as signed her ? Has she bowed her head to the yoke with tame acquiescence, as one for whose nature it was fitted and adapted ? or has she, as slave, concubine, or wife, felt and protested ? Has she not, under the corrupting influence of oppression, sometimes converted those qualities of her sex, which were designed as the supplement of the intellectual system of the species, as an aid to man in his war with the elements, into weapons against him ?

Has not her quick apprehen sion often degenerated into cunning under his misrule ? Has she not, in discovering how little was to be hoped from his justice, succeeded in founding an empire over his passions ? And has not man, who denies every right that interferes with his own supremacy, sub mitted to the spell which undermines it ; and, by thus giving influence, direct or indirect, where he has withheld knowledge and denied rights, established an insidious, ignorant tyranny that perpetually thwarts WOMAN his own designs, injures the best interests of society, and retards its progress to reform ? Still, notwithstanding her false position, woman has struggled through all disabilities and degradations, has justified the intentions of Nature in her behalf, and demonstrated her claim to share in the moral agency of the world.

In all outbursts of mind, in every forward rush of the great march of improve ment, she has borne a part ; permitting herself to be used as an instrument, without hope of reward, and faithfully fulfilling her mission, without expectation of acknowledgment. She has, in various ages, given her secret services to her task-master, without par taking in his triumph, or sharing in his success. Her subtlety has insinuated views which man has shrank from exposing, and her adroitness found favour for doctrines, which he had the genius to conceive, but not the art to divulge. Priestess, prophetess, the oracle of the tripod, the sibyl of the cave, the veiled idol of the temple, the shrouded teacher of the academy, the martyr or missionary of a spiritual truth, the armed champion of a political cause, she has been covertly used for every purpose, by which man, when he has failed to reason his species into WOMAN 17 truth, has endeavoured to fanaticise it into good ; whenever mind has triumphed by indirect means over the inertia of masses.

In all moral impulsions, woman has aided and been adopted; but, her efficient utility accomplished, the temporary part assigned her for temporary purposes performed, she has been ever hurled back into her natural obscurity, and conventional insignificance : no law against her has been repealed, no injury redressed, no right admitted. Alluded to, rather as an incident than a principal in the chronicles of nations, her influence, which cannot be denied, has been turned into a reproach; her genius, which could not be concealed, has been treated as a phenomenon, when not con sidered as monstrosity ! But where exist the evidences of these merits un acknowledged, of these penalties unrepealed ? They are to be found carelessly scattered through all that is known in the written history of mankind, from the first to the last of its indited pages.

They may be detected in the habits of the untamed savage, in the traditions of the semi-civilized barbarian ! and in those fragments of the antiquity of our antiquity, scattered through undated epochs, — monuments of WOMAN some great moral debris, which, like the fossil remains of long-imbedded and unknown species, serve to found a theory, or to establish a fact. Wherever woman has been, there has she left the track of her humanity, to mark her passage — inci dentally impressing the seal of her sensibility and her wrongs upon every phasis of society, and in every region, " from Indus to the Pole." Humbly but " fearlessly " to plead her cause, and to illustrate her agency, by traits more graphic than didactic, is the object of the following pages.

Chapter II

The Women of Savage Life — Of Semi civilized Tribes. Towards the commencement of the sixteenth cen tury, the accidents of civilization awakened through out Europe an universal zeal for maritime discovery. A geographical theory took possession of the public mind, that there stood out, at the southern pole of the earth, some great continent, (named, before it was discovered, Terra Australis incognita), which, from its mighty extent, deserved to be considered as a fifth division of the globe. Of this continent much was assumed before any thing was proved. Its latitudes were assigned, its im portance predetermined ; and some visionary voyagers even believed that they had coasted a part of its shores. In later times, navigators ascertained that no such continent existed : but, in the vain pursuit, ; numerous islands were discovered in the mighty ocean of the southern hemisphere, whose aggregate extent was scarcely inferior; and science and research, in replacing the dream of idle speculation by observed fact, in some sense confirmed its conjectures.

These islands have received from modern geographers the name of Australasia. The climes and local aspects of this islandcontinent were infinitely diversified ; but all was new, all was original. There was, however, one division which seemed wanting in the foregone conclusions, drawn, of the general beauty and brightness of nature, in that region, — a spot where vegetation was dark and dull, and where animal life bore scarce any resemblance to the types of the other quarters of the globe. The foliage was cori aceous and spiny ; the fruits ligneous and devoid of nutriment ; and nothing recalled the majesty of the virgin forests of the western world, or the rich variety of the vegetable genera of the East. The birds, the quadrupeds, and the fishes, partook equally of these characteristics ; the hideous amphibious mole, the frightful wombat, the wild dog that looked and howled a wolf, squirrels which flew, swans that were black, and various other specimens of helpless deformity and monstrous vitality, proper only to the spells of witch craft — the poetry of disgusting terror.

Nor was man himself an exception : the lord of a soil, which seemed thus created by another power than that which moulded the elegant form of the antelope, and brightened the eye of the gazel, he was not formed to resemble those godlike creatures, whose high aspirations banished them their Eden, to people a scarcely less paradisaical earth with races of angelic form and glorious mind ; * he seemed of another creation, a specimen apart from man. In his person he was all deformity and disproportion ; in his intellectual frame he was all density and insensibility. His head was immense and misshapen, his eyes dim and sunk, his brows bushy, and his mouth (frightful as that of a crocodile) opened extravagantly wide to shew enormous teeth above a prominent lower jaw. His nose was flat, his nostrils wide, his colour swarthy, his hair long and straight, his limbs dwindled, his trunk swollen, and his whole aspect horrible and * Blumenbach is inclined to believe that the primitive form of the human race was that which belongs to the Caucasian variety : from the finely formed head of this race, as from a primitive con figuration, the other forms descend by an easy and simple gradation, on the one hand to the Mongolian, on the other to the Ethiopian variety. ; disgusting.

Thus framed by nature, his appearance was still further degraded by the symbols of brutal taste, and of fierce cruelty, with which he adorned his unsightly person. The teeth of men or of kangaroos were fastened in his gum-clotted hair ; the bones of fish were stuck through his nostrils ; and incisions made in his arms and breasts marked his callous insensibility to pain. " Naked and unaccommodated," he was indifferent to the inclemencies of clime and season, and inappre hensive of decency : humanity has in vain interfered to improve his native condition; and civilization has failed to draw him within her lines. As huntsman, he still made the hollow of a tree his den ; as fisherman, a hole in the rock his dwelling. He slept, like the wild beast of the forest, the deep sleep of fatigue and sur feit ; and he awakened, without forethought or fear of the coming day, to destroy, or to be destroyed, with equal indifference.

Human nature could go no lower : yet this defective and ill-conditioned creature, this unideal and un awakened animal, had one strong moral conviction — that of his own superiority over the female of his own species ! He. believed that woman was of another nature from himself, and that he was born her master — she his servant by the divine right of the strongest. He marked her at the hour of her birth for his slave, by breaking the joints of her fore-fingers ; he renewed the covenant of his supremacy in her first youth by knocking out her front teeth ; and when he elected this bond-slave as the object of his passions, he inti mated his preference by spitting in her face, and forcing her to his den. Thus affianced through con tempt and suffering, the servant submitted, and the master assumed, uncontrolled, a power of life, death, and property over her.* He loaded her shoulders (wounded by his stripes) with weights which his own indolence refused to bear, and speared her to the earth, if she resisted the imposition.

It is curious to inquire into the nature of the creature thus subjugated and ill-treated. " In the * " Their remorseless cruelty , their unfeeling barbarity to their women and children, their immoderate revenge for the most trivial affronts, their want of natural affection, are hardly redeemed by the slightest trait of goodness. They are insensible to all distinctions, and without any idea of a supreme being and a future state." — Law rence on the Natural History of Man. Peron also observes " that the natives of Van Dieman's Land are the most wretched examples of the rudest barbarism." ; women of New Holland," (says a modern voyager) " that feminine delicacy, which is to be found among white people, was to be traced in their dusky cheeks ; and though the female, like the male, may be seen in the streets of Sydney and Paramatta, scarcely more draped by the hand of modesty than the first mother in Paradise, yet the habit of their savage state has not extinguished all instinct of moral feeling — for they blush."

These victims of violence, then, have a moral feel ing ; they have, too, as all writers on their nation de clare, a devotedness, the general characteristic of their sex of all races ; and, amidst all the sufferings they endure, and all the wrongs to which they submit, they are the depositories of what little virtue distinguishes their tribe from the brutes of the field. Such is the relation of the sexes in the last-discovered specimens of humanity, the unclassed race of an unknown creation, the " woman and her master " of the southern regions. Passing to the further extremity of the globe, across the world of waters of the great Pacific, to the vast tracts in the northern regions of America, tribes are still found living in their primitive savagery, as when they were first discovered by the followers of Co lumbus.