Women of England Part 1

Women of England.

by Bartlett Burleigh James.

PREFACE

It is no slight task to follow out the windings of a single thread in the infinite weave of society and by loosing it from the general mesh to show how dependent is the pattern of life and custom upon its presence. Such a task was presented in the endeavor to trace along from remotest times to the present day the influence of woman upon the life and character, the efforts and ideals, of that race which has come to be known as English, although this name may not properly be used until time has spun into the vista of the past peoples as vigorous, if not influential, as the one that stands, the inheritor of their virility, at the apex of modern civilization, whose women, clasping hands throughout the British Empire, form a splendid chain of hope for womankind in all the world.

Whether or not continuity and sequence, relation and effect, have been maintained in the retraversing of the footsteps of woman in all ages of the history of those isles where femininity has flowered in the most gracious blossoms, it remains for the reader to say. Certain it is that unaffected pleasure has been afforded the writer in his attempt to draw aside the curtain that the muse of history jealously employs to shut from view the inner sanctuary in which she preserves those vital relics, the destruction of which by some inconceivable iconoclast would bring death to the world for lack of materials for reflection and inspiration. In treating of the prehistoric periods, although the brush necessarily has been laid broadly upon the canvas, fancy has been kept in the leash of fact, and imagination given no more play than its legitimate function. Still, the results of inquiry into the status of woman at this far remote period furnish a fulcrum upon which to rest the lever of investigation, in order to lift into view the strata of undoubted history of the periods immediately subsequent.

As fast as the widening of social interest afforded the materials for use, the writer sought to employ them, until, like a mountain rivulet, ever widening until it reaches the plain, he found himself embarra.s.sed by the wealth of fact that told the marvellous story of the most notable emanc.i.p.ation in the history of mankind,--the complete separation of English woman from the trammels, inherent and environmental, imposed upon the s.e.x. If the successive chapters disclose the philosophical relations of woman in society, it will be because the reader has not failed to grasp the fact that in any such theme as the one treated mere continuity of subject matter would const.i.tute a chronicle and not a history; and that the writer, while seeking not to make obtrusive the connective tissue, has nevertheless given ample scope for the reflective mind to see that which has ever been present to his own.

As to the actual materials employed in constructing the book, it is sufficient to say that no important writer upon any period of the history of the British Isles or their people has been overlooked, and that the pa.s.sing over of the political and const.i.tutional phases in order to select the purely social has been an endeavor much furthered by the writers to whom reference is made in the body of the work, and many others who could not be mentioned without burdening the text.

Each fibre of the thread of interest has been taken hold of at the point of its appearance, and then not lost sight of until the end.

So that if one is interested in the subject of costume, he may find a full and accurate description of dress from the time when tattooing was deemed largely sufficient up to the period of the present, when the variety of feminine attire baffles description. But more serious subjects, such as woman's rights, from the recognition of primal rights in her person to the setting forth of the modern programme under that description, are consecutively treated through the chapters.

A debt of grat.i.tude cannot be discharged, but some recognition may be made of the author's sense of the service rendered him in the writing of this work by Dr. John Martin Vincent, a.s.sociate professor of history in Johns Hopkins University, whose courses in the social history of England furnished the first incentive to range in that field and a guide through the labyrinth of manners and customs of the English people. Thanks are due to Mr. J.A. Burgan, whose close and careful reading of the proof is not the least factor in the presentation of the book free, as the writer believes, of the errors that only eternal vigilance may exclude.

BARTLETT BURLEIGH JAMES.

CHAPTER I

THE WOMEN OF PREHISTORIC BRITAIN

It is to the unpremeditated contributions of savage and barbarous conditions of existence that we must look for those primal elements of social order which became fundamental in English life and character.

Insomuch as those contributions are intimately connected with woman's life and work, they must be sought out and set in order if we are to trace the development of the status of the women of Britain. In doing this, the confines of history proper must be disregarded and the inquiry commenced at the earliest period at which the student of the geology of Britain has been able to discover evidences of human occupancy of the country. If a consecutive account of the history of woman in Britain were intended, we should be content to begin the story with the woman of the Neolithic or Polished Stone Age, for to such remote times may be traced the stream of life and inst.i.tutions in England; but, as we shall aim not solely at consecutiveness, but at completeness as well in our record of woman's life in the British Isles, it will be necessary to go back even further into the geologic ages, when Britain was still a part of the mainland and its inhabitants the same roving savage tribes that wandered over all central Europe.

From those barren ages of the Pleistocene era, which were cut off from the Neolithic by great stretches of time that cannot be certainly calculated, and during which there was a lapse in the human occupancy of the country, little of value can be derived. Their chief worth for our purpose is the picture which they present of the initial stage of human organization, the study they afford of woman in her relations to a thoroughly savage stage of society, an era of hunting--that of the Paleolithic or Rough Stone Age, when there was fixity neither of residence nor of relations, and when man's contest with savage nature about him was dependent in its issues upon the slight advantage furnished him by the rude weapons that he fashioned from flint flakes.

During the Polished Stone era, when inhabitants are next met with in Britain, the social organization presented is that of the pastoral stage, which marks a great advance over the hunting.

In all the progressions of uncivilized life, woman is but a part of the phenomena of her times, but in the history of English civilization she appears as one of its most active forces. These, then, are the two correlated views of woman in the history of English life that will be constantly held in mind during our whole study,--woman as a social fact, and woman as a social factor; showing her as a product, as affected by the customs, laws, or manners of a given time, and again as an influencing factor in the inst.i.tutions or the manners of those times. Had her life been as circ.u.mscribed as that of the women of a cultured people, English civilization would not owe to woman the recognition which is her due as a creative force in the arts, in science, in literature, in religion, and in all the ever-widening circle of human interests. An understanding and estimate of her influence in these more conspicuous relations will depend upon a proper appreciation of the English home as the princ.i.p.al source of the English woman's dignity and power. Much that has entered into the ideals of the English race can be fully accounted for only in the light of home ideals. By such considerations, then, as have been thus far set forth, we shall be guided in our endeavor to tell the story of woman's life in the ages of Britain's history.

The people of the earliest part of the Pleistocene age had no real home life, nor was there any social organization excepting that into which men were forced by the necessity for mutual aid in the struggle with the forces of savage nature. This element of self-protection was the only factor that entered into the organized life of those earliest inhabitants of Britain,--the people of the river-drift and the caves.

In this combat between savage man and savage beast were produced the first instruments pointing to civilization,--weapons for defence and offence.

The life of woman among the men of the river-drift was of the most debased order. The only employment of the men was hunting the gigantic savage beasts that ranged through the forests. While the males were in pursuit of the rhinoceros, the lion, the hippopotamus, and the great antlered deer that were a part of the fauna of the whole of that section of the continent of Europe of which Britain in those remote times formed a part, the females roamed through the densely wooded forests whose only clearings were those made by the ravages of fire.

Clad in the skins of beasts but little lower in the scale of being than themselves, and with their naked offspring about them, they wandered about in search of berries or, with no better aids than sharpened sticks, dug up the roots which they dried and stored for the days when the results of the chase fell short of the needs of the people. On the home-coming of the hunters to the place where, in their nomadic wanderings, they had erected temporary shelters, the women prepared the miserable meal. By skilfully rubbing together pieces of hard wood, a fire was soon obtained; if fortune had attended the chase, the hastily skinned animals were cut up with flint flakes, and the meat was thrown upon the stones placed in the fire for that purpose. There were no niceties of taste to be considered, so the half-cooked and badly smoked flesh was s.n.a.t.c.hed from the fire and eaten with no more decorum than might be found in the meals of the cave-hyena that, under the shadows of night, skulked through the underbrush and noisily devoured the remnants of the hunters' feast.

On the day following the hunt, the women undertook the arduous work of curing the skins of the slain animals. In the initial stage of the process they used stone sc.r.a.pers, sharp of edge and probably set in bone handles. Hundreds of these implements have been found. The women acquired great dexterity in this, one of their customary employments; and while the men lounged about, resting from the fatigue of the hunt, or occupied themselves with painting their bodies with ochre, or tracing, with a splinter of stone, rude devices on pieces of polished reindeer antler, the work of the women went industriously on.

Men of such undisciplined natures as those of the people of the river-drift could not exist together harmoniously; very little, indeed, was necessary to embroil them in bitter strife. Their women were a frequent cause of b.l.o.o.d.y encounters, a circ.u.mstance which was due to the fact that there was no permanence in the relations of the s.e.xes; such rights--seldom individual--to the women as were vested in the men were always those acquired by brute force, and held good only so long as the fancy or strength of the men permitted. In such a promiscuous society there was nothing to suggest the home of civilization. To men, women simply represented their chief possession and were held by them in common, like other forms of property.

Such an age was almost as barren of material utilities as of moral conceptions; so that one looks in vain for evidence of the knowledge of such arts as are commonly a.s.sociated with the life of women in savage societies. Basket work, weaving, and spinning were occupations of which, it is thought, the women of those times knew nothing.

Pottery was unknown; gourds served for drinking cups and for the holding of liquids, and were used also for cooking. Among the memorials of woman of these remote times appears no trace of the charms and fetiches which usually accompany the performance of domestic duties among primitive races. Nothing lower in the scale of human existence could be imagined than the lives of these women of the river-drift, to whom nature made no appeal save that of fear of its furious moods, to whom s.e.x meant not the possibilities of pure wifehood and motherhood, but servitude to the demands of pa.s.sion.

When children were not vigorous, or when for any reason their nurture became irksome, they were ruthlessly slain, even by the mothers themselves; and every woman knew that the lot of abandonment was reserved for her when she could no longer fulfil the hard conditions of her existence.

In some respects, the life of the women of the cave-dwellers of the later Pleistocene period was of a higher order than that which we have just described--not that there was any essential difference in the social grade of the two peoples, but that the cave-dwellers had learned to make better implements of the chase and to fashion more effectively all their weapons and tools. The greater security to life afforded by these improvements and the greater a.s.surance of subsistence led to more settled living, and thereby afforded an opportunity to develop a social organization that should have for its basis something of greater permanence than a temporary need. While it would be hazardous, then, to a.s.sume too much in the way of improvement in the life of the women of the cave-dwellers over that of the women of the river-drift, yet it should be borne in mind that in states of society such as those represented by these remote inhabitants of Britain, even a slight advance in the scale of living marks an epoch of progress.

The cave-dwellers succeeded the people of the river-drift as inhabitants of Britain, and the combined occupancy of the country by these peoples covered a vast stretch of time. It is very probable that their periods overlapped, and that the later people were in part contemporary with the former. Though the people of the river-drift and the dwellers in caves may have avoided intermixture, as have the Esquimaux and the American Indians, yet there is nothing absolutely to preclude the idea that such race distinction was observed during great periods of time. So that all we have to say of the women of the cave-dwellers may be equally applied to the women of the later times of the river-drift.

The cave-dwellers, like their predecessors, were hunters. For their dwellings they chose the caves from which they had driven out the bear and the lion. These rude homes the women hung about with the skins of the horse or the wolf, and spread on the floor for couches the hides of these or of other beasts that had fallen by the arrows of the hunters or had been ensnared in their pitfalls. Here the tribe remained until the scarcity of game or the a.s.sault of enemies impelled it to migrate. Where there were no caves, huts were constructed. These were framed with the branches and trunks of trees and covered with skins and hides.

The woman of the cave-dwellers was a st.u.r.dy specimen of her s.e.x, and the long and arduous migrations in which the burden of the work fell upon her shoulders were probably borne with little sense of hardship.

We can imagine a tribe, travelling afoot, for as yet neither the horse nor any other animal had been domesticated: the men with their long fish spears across their backs, their stone arrows hanging at their sides, and their bows in hand, always alert for the wild beasts with which they waged a relentless warfare; the women laden with all the paraphernalia of their simple existence, many with a babe slung at the back, and their naked, uncouth progeny following or gambolling about them. The strange personal appearance of both men and women would add to the oddity of the scene in modern eyes, for their bodies were painted in grotesque patterns, and, if the rigors of the season made any covering necessary, a simple skin, laced about them with reindeer sinews, sufficed for clothing. On coming to a fresh hunting region, near to some body of water or flowing stream, where the game would naturally come to slake their thirst,--perhaps upon the gra.s.sy plains that still extended over what is now the English Channel and formed a part of the original land connection with the continent,--they paused for another term of settled residence. Again the caves were resorted to, or rudely thatched huts were erected. If the wild beasts pressed the wanderers too hard, they sometimes had recourse to huts erected upon rough stone heaps in the midst of an oozy swamp.

While the men gave themselves wholly to hunting, the women went about their domestic pursuits. To them was a.s.signed the making of such scanty clothing as was imperatively required in the cold season; for though the crude carvings of the time invariably represent the hunters as naked, it cannot be concluded from such evidence that clothing was not worn at all. The extremely serviceable reindeer sinews served the women for thread, and a thin reindeer p.r.o.ng, pierced through at the thick end, made a satisfactory needle. The skins were simply sewed together at the edges, without shaping, but with apertures through which to pa.s.s the head and arms. The women devised many ornaments; these consisted of amulets and necklaces made of bone, ivory, and sh.e.l.ls, which, shaped and polished, they painstakingly punctured and fastened together in long strings for the decoration of their necks and arms. Apparently, it was not customary to wear foot covering of any kind, as the feet of such skeletons of this period as have been found are so symmetrical as to preclude the probability of constraint during growth. The men may have worn some form of foot covering when engaged in such exposed work as spearing the seal in the winter season; but the women, who remained in shelter during the severities of the winter, did not avail themselves of any such protection. The fact that gloves were worn by men seems to be established by some of the rude etchings of the period, for in them such articles appear to be discernible.

The sanitary condition of the homes of these hunting tribes was of the worst description; the offal and refuse were thrown at the very doors of the cave, there to decay and poison the air. The caves themselves were smoke-begrimed and foul, for house cleaning had not yet entered into the economy of woman. While, by reason of their simple, open-air life, they were a vigorous race, the ills to which the cave-dwellers fell a prey, the injuries they suffered in warfare or from the attacks of wild beasts, or the diseases contracted through unsanitary living, must have been sources of great dread to them, as they were without any medical knowledge of which we have trace. When the women, particularly, became too sick to perform their allotted tasks, they were carried out to die or to become the victims of savage beasts; but this was only one of the inevitable phases of an existence that was replete with tragedies.

From the evidence afforded by the great abundance of arrow heads and spear points surviving from this period, there is no doubt that the cave men were much given to warfare. Aside from the natural pugnacity and ferocity of savage races, which lead them to fight upon very little provocation, there was with the cave-dwellers another source of constant hostility. As has been stated with reference to the river-drift people, the women were not permanently attached to the men. It is just as true that they were not permanently attached to their tribes, for when, through disease or the ravages of wild beasts, the women of any horde became greatly diminished in number, their ranks were recruited by forays upon other tribes. These attacks for the purpose of stealing the women of their enemies were especially provocative of fierce conflicts, as the depletion of its stock of women often seriously crippled a tribe and sometimes even threatened its extinction. Such forcible transfers of ownership must have added greatly to the hardness of the woman's lot, for by such means many mothers were permanently separated from their offspring.

The weight of probability and of evidence seems to leave little room for doubt that the early inhabitants of Britain were cannibals. While there was no scarcity of game as a rule, it is quite likely that these savage peoples, as those of the same grade of culture in all times, when experiencing the delirium of a victory over their enemies, put to death by cruel tortures the unhappy captives that fell into their hands, and then, to complete their triumph, roasted and ate the flesh of the slain. Aside from the deductive probability of the case, human bones dating back to this period have been found along with the remains of weapons and in a.s.sociation with the ashes of camp fires; and in such cases the bones have invariably been broken, in order to extract from them their marrow. The story of the battle, the tortures, and the feast is eloquently suggested by the silent memorials that have been preserved through the lapse of ages. As we picture the far-off scene of human savagery, the figure of woman flits through the lights and shadows of the horrid orgy: for she it was who prepared the gruesome repast; it was in defence of her, perhaps, that the fierce battle was fought; some of her own near of kin, it may be, she has been forced to prepare for the unnatural appet.i.tes of her enemies.

Possibilities! but read in the light of the times, they become probabilities, and probabilities furnish much of the data of history.

The tragedy of woman's life is again brought before us with startling vividness when we look upon the skull of a woman of this remote race, as it lies in a cave, with a little stone hatchet beside it, where it was ruthlessly cast after the commission of a b.l.o.o.d.y crime; for in that skull is a jagged hole into which fits the blade of the hatchet.

The scene, sketched from a remote past, might have been an occurrence of yesterday, so close to us is it brought by the silent witnesses; these and similar relics disclose the sad lot of woman in that savage society.

There are fuller evidences of the state of domestic resources among the women of the cave-dwellers than with those of the river-drift. The remains show, too, a greater variety and adaptation; for while there is no clear proof of the existence of pottery, yet the cave people appear not to have lacked subst.i.tutes for it. Vessels for boiling meats were probably fashioned of small stones cemented together, and they had, also, vessels of hollowed wood. The skulls of animals served well for drinking purposes, besides which receptacles for holding liquids were made from the skins of beasts. Water was heated by placing hot stones in a vessel containing it, by which means the fluid could be raised to any desired temperature. Long flint flakes set in handles answered for knives; when rounded at the edge, the same material made serviceable sc.r.a.pers. Spoons were constructed from pieces of reindeer antlers, hollowed at the thick end, or if they were intended to be used to scoop out the marrow from bones, the tapered end was hollowed. For their food, the cave-dwellers, though they possessed no domesticated animals, had a wide choice of large and small game, birds, fish, reptiles, and grubs; to these they added edible roots and berries.

This almost indispensable domestic handicraft was not, however, the limit of their achievement in designing. We have seen that woman's thought and some of her activities were applied to the production of merely decorative objects. She had already acquired an appreciative taste for the auxiliary attractions of personal adornment. The art of designing certainly found a place in the occupations of these cave-dwellers, and the most familiar animated objects would be their necessary choice. Hence, we may readily conceive that, in the moments of respite from the chase, the rude artist of this age would make of the cave pa.s.sages a canvas for his work and thereon delineate the animals whose importance to his existence rendered them the most interesting objects. Nor, for this reason, would his subject fail of appreciative criticism and of educational value.

It is impossible to state the nature or the extent of the social organization among these people, but that there must have been something of the sort there can be no doubt. It seems equally plausible that there could have been no recognition of law in the lives of these pa.s.sionate savages, excepting as the will of some more than ordinarily forceful warrior was for the time so recognized.

An a.s.sociation of this kind admitted of the sloughing of the groups whenever a difference of inclination or of interest suggested such a course. Promiscuity undoubtedly remained the characteristic form of the relation of the s.e.xes, the conditions of life admitting of no more enduring relations.

The culture of the peoples of the river-drift and of the caves signified little in British civilization, as these shadowy tribes pa.s.sed completely out of view. For a period of time that could be expressed only in the term of vague geological computation, the country remained devoid of inhabitants. Meantime, changes were wrought in Britain's physical features. The land became insular, although the subsidence that gave rise to the English Channel was not yet complete.

In an indirect way, the earliest peoples may be said to have pa.s.sed on the elements of their culture; for, while there was a lapse in the continuity of social development, the Neolithic races that are next met with in Britain became the inheritors of the culture of the ruder hunter stages of society represented by the river-drift and cave peoples.

The social grade of the Neolithic races was a great advance over that of the peoples last considered. Instead of bands of nomadic wanderers, we find a pastoral people whose migrations were doubtless periodical and made only in search of new pastures. Hunting did not form an important part of their lives, for their food was supplied by the flesh of domesticated animals and the cereals that they raised for their own needs and, in the winter season, for those of their stock.

Although caves continued to be used to some extent for dwellings, they were not characteristic of the civilization of the times. Man had become a home builder. The evolution from the cave dwellings is seen in the style of houses that were first constructed. They consisted of pits dug to a depth of seven to ten feet, and about seven feet wide at the base. These pits were roofed over with a sort of thatch, filled in with imperfectly burnt clay. They were built singly and in groups, and were sometimes connected by a system of underground pa.s.sages. Access was had to these dwellings by a slanting, shaftlike entrance. A pit village was usually stockaded to protect it against the a.s.saults of foes. Outside it were the arable lands and the common pasture lands for the sheep and goats; enclosing these, the forest stretched out in all directions.

Looking down from one of the surrounding hilltops upon such a village, it would have presented to the eye of the observer the appearance of a number of round hillocks but little higher than the ground level.

Thin lines of smoke, slowly ascending, would mark the places where the common meals were in course of preparation. As the traveller descended the hillside, his approach would be challenged by gaunt, savage sheep dogs, from whose attacks he would need to defend himself. As he pa.s.sed out into the clearing, he would be confronted by the men, some of them tilling the soil, others acting as shepherds or swineherds. Perhaps a field of golden wheat would lend its beauty to the scene, Approaching the dwellings, the women would be seen at their several employments; some busy cutting up the meat and swinging it over the fires to roast, or boiling it in pots with herbs and roots to make a savory stew, others mixing dough and spreading it upon flat stones over hot embers to bake. Sitting about on the rocks or squatting upon skins spread upon the ground, other women would be found busily making pottery, modelling the clay with their hands, and scratching upon it lines, circles, and pyramids in various combinations, or fashioning designs by pressing reindeer sinews into the substance. Still others would be discovered busily spinning and weaving flax and wool into fabrics for the clothing that marked one of the advances of the Neolithic people.

In the distance would be heard the dull strokes of the stone axes with which, in the depth of the wood, the men felled the tall timber.

For the industries presented in this picture of a Neolithic village, there were suitable implements. For all domestic purposes, the art of pottery making had solved the question of satisfactory vessels. These were generally in two colors, either brown or black. The potter's wheel had not yet been invented, so that the vessels lacked the grace and uniformity of later work of the sort. Wheat was ground by means of a mortar and pestle. Knives for various uses, saws, and sc.r.a.pers were all made of highly polished and very keen-edged flint flakes. The great superiority of their stone implements over those of earlier races has given a name to the people, but the culture of the Polished Stone Age reveals, as its most salient fact, not this, but rather the domestication of animals and the tilling of the soil. It is significant to note that these most characteristic features of the Polished Stone Age denote the advance of society in the arts of peaceful living. War was prevalent enough, but human development had discovered another line of advancement, and, by reason of the increased incentives to peaceful living, war was not usually undertaken simply for the pleasure of fighting. Protection of flocks and herds, of cleared fields and settled homes, became the chief occasion of the wars waged by the Neolithic people.

In such a society as we have described, there is a community of interest that tends to give stability to the ties of relationship. The fairly settled state of life was undoubtedly accompanied by a social organization of some sort that could properly deal with the matters of individual rights. The family had become evolved from the horde; promiscuity had doubtless given place to polygamy, or, under the exceptional conditions of a greater number of men than of women, to polyandry. Neither of these forms of marriage carried with it the idea of fixity and of family responsibility.

A feature of the Neolithic age was its commerce. By a system of intertribal traffic, the simple commodities of the widely dispersed peoples of Europe became distributed among the various tribes. By this means, many articles not of domestic manufacture were added to the comfort of the people of Britain. Thus, the women were enabled to adorn themselves with jade beads that must have come from the region of the Mediterranean Sea, and even with gold ornaments from as distant points. These instances, however, were exceptional, and are to be accounted for in the same manner that we account for the most unlikely things in the possession of the tribes of Central Africa--by gradual hand-to-hand pa.s.sage.

There was probably an absence of religious ideas among the predecessors of the Polished Stone races; but among the remains of the latter are ample proofs of the prevalence among them of such notions.

Caves that once had served them as residences were later used for places of burial, the bodies being piled up with earth until the cavities were completely filled. Accompanying human remains have been found urns, supposedly for burning incense, personal ornaments, implements, and weapons, placed there for the use of the dead. If the people possessed religious conceptions that led them to believe in an after life, there is no room for doubt that religion had a place in the economy of their living. The women of this time, then, could look forward to something better than abandonment to starvation after they became enfeebled by age or sickness, and they may not have lacked religious a.s.sociations in their everyday life to give to it deeper meaning and interest.