Sexual Freeing Of Woman

( Originally Published 1940 )

We have already remarked, in many species of mammals the brutality of the male was greatly feared. And it has unfortunately also gained the upper hand in mankind. In some places sooner, in others later, the friendly relationship of the sexes, such as existed in the matriarchate, has thereby been entirely destroyed.

How did man come to be such a kill-joy?

All the previous social relations were now overturned. Formerly through food-shortage prisoners of war could not be kept alive, but now the boys and girls were driven to work as slaves. Thus man acquired private property, and the first sort of property was female slaves. The conqueror had unlimited power over them; they must live with him and bear his name; and any children they had were his private property and bore his name also. And thus originated marriage with paternal authority that still exists in almost every country in the world.

In this way the original feeling of solidarity in the group system of blood-relations was quite ended; every man sought to conquer new territory by force. And what could the woman do against such deeds of violence? At first she tried, mounted on horseback and armed like a man, to maintain her individuality-hence all the legends of the Amazons, but as Herodotus tells us, she was nowhere successful; and without man, woman would have died out anyway.

The male priesthood which now began to take the upper hand, was not favourably inclined towards woman; because formerly, in the time of ancestor-worship, woman was the honoured priestess with special attributes of sorcery and prophecy! These happy days were gone forever.

Whilst the fertility of Nature was symbolised in the old pagan temples of India by statues of a many-breasted goddess, among the Greeks and Romans the same idea was represented by the masculine symbol, the naked phallus of metal or of stone.

After the favourable period of the old Vedas, the Brahmins of India went the farthest in the subjugation and despisal of woman. There were, for instance, the custom of marrying tiny maidens of school age, the veil that woman must wear, and the cramped court-yard with its open-air kitchen where she must spend all the days of her life even if she belonged to one of the higher castes; and above all the widow's suttee, which indeed has only been repressed very recently.

Thus there were four effective, but very cruel means of protecting public morality as the priests understood it; so at least it was ensured that there was not one single female who was not in some man's power.

Amongst ourselves in Europe the canonical (ecclesiastical) law was even harder for woman than the Roman law; and harder still was the priesthood with their countless burnings of witches, the moment they suspected that one of them had entered into communication with occult powers. And economically, in the Middle Ages and unfortunately even much later, woman who from time immemorial had always done the hardest work, was scornfully called "the weaker sex." A halo was placed around her weary head only as the "mater dolorosa"! Woman as the slave of man! How greatly this must at first have destroyed all the tender feelings of love. Yet Nature is mightier than the power of the priesthood or of any weapons, and the sexual life is so strong that in spite of everything, woman has won the victory through her tenderness and devotion.

Her condition has improved almost everywhere, and even if marriage was a hard lot for her, outside the married state there always remained a trace of individual freedom, which, it is true, might degenerate into licence, but which was often redeemed by heroic devotion and mutual idealism.

Although Greek history according to Herodotus may have opened with some typical cases of marriage by capture, and the history of Rome begins with the rape of the Sabines, still the classic literature of the Greeks and Romans gave us winged Eros and the roguish Cupid. And this god of love reappears in the Renaissance. Minstrels and troubadours glorified love; not, indeed, legalised unions, but only those in which the gallant knight carried off the fair maiden in secret.

Just as in our adolescence the awakening of our sexual spring-time is not publicly announced, but comes to us in quiet dreams, so also in the world-history the love of kindred souls appears as the supreme height of passion, proceeding not from science or from the law, but awakened as a lofty ideal in loving hearts by the charm of poetry and of art. Only much later did this ideal penetrate into formal marriage and lend it a higher meaning.