USA > Illinois > Cook County > Chicago > The Congress of Women : held in the Woman's building, World's Columbian exposition, Chicago, U.S.A., 1893 : with portraits, biographies and addresses > Part 14
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I advocate the complete freedom of the woman, because I foresee in the coming education of the masses she will need all her freedom to preserve her best interests and the best interests of the home and family. If I have read history aright, I have learned this lesson from it, that my sex has not received justice from her brother always because of his superior knowledge.
If you are familiar with Greek life as it is given to us in Homer, you are aware that woman, though from our standard she was in a barbarous position, yet she was far higher than she was four centuries after in the time of Plato. Yet during those four centuries the Greeks had made a wonderful advancement. Plato, whose mind and genius were of the greatest that ever existed, saw through the thick veil of prejudice and wrong that shrouded one-half of the human race. He saw what the wise have always seen: that the highest human effort was held back by the degradation of women.
We know that the Spartans were inferior to the Athenians in all the arts and refined accomplishments; yet the Spartan women possessed far more influence than those of Athens. If you read Euripides you will understand the scorn with which the philoso- phers of Athens regarded their wives and sisters. Women then despised the freedom they were denied, as many despise it now. A Greek woman taunted her rival that she wanted to be like a man, and go in through the front door of a house. Under our old régime "free nigger" was the greatest term of reproach, but when emancipation came, which of the scoffers remained in bondage?
Mr. Horace Platt, an able lawyer of San Francisco, in an address of much research, recently, dwelt on the gloomy picture of law as it dealt with us in ancient times. Yet the greatest monument that has come down to us from the Roman Empire is her jurisprudence. Our laws are simply copied from it. Mr. Platt did not tell us, however, that many of the worst laws of England and Germany against women were added after the Reformation. Many of the old brutal statutes that had well-nigh died out under the influence of chivalry were again revived against her. He told us there was one later Roman enactment in favor of women holding property that was in oper- ation when California was a Mexican province. Our state adopted this law into its code and we have the advantage of it. Mr. Platt did not tell us, however, how the Roman women wrested this law from their masters. He did not tell us how they held meetings, made speeches, and pushed themselves into the Senate Chamber to resist the infamous decrees that had culminated in one, that no daughter should inherit either property or money from the family. About the year 600 there lived in Rome Anius Ansellus .* He had acquired a large fortune in trade. He had only one child, a daughter, whom he idolized. His great wealth had only one value for him, that it should enrich his daughter; yet he knew that according to law she could not inherit it.
Roman citizens were divided into six classes. Five of these classes paid taxes. The sixth class were people too poor to own property, and were excluded from all political rights. They were the middle class, between the freeman and the slave, the citizen and the alien. To belong to this class was to be degraded, yet the law, as if in fine sarcasm, allowed its fathers to leave all their effects to their daughters. Ansellus, because of his great love for his child, renounced every privilege dear to the heart of a Roman, and publicly enrolled himself in this class. He gave up every honor in his own life to baffle the cruel injustice of his country, and leave his large fortune to his daughter.
Mr. Platt had sought for no such illustration as the story of Ansellus. In telling
*La Cause de la Manumission des Femmes.
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us of our modern Wyoming, he did not mention that no sooner was suffrage conferred on women than the thieves, tramps and hard characters that infest every new territory vanished. The social evil fled from Wyoming when the first woman sat on the jury. The chief justice gives his testimony that after years of trial, woman's suffrage is a success. There have been less robberies and murders in Wyoming than in any state in the Union. There has never yet been a woman committed to the penitentiary.
. It surprises me how a man like Mr: Platt can go so far in his contempt for injus- tice to women, and yet be willing to perpetuate it. It teaches me the lesson with yet stronger force, that we women must make our own laws, and trust to no man's senti- mental ideas of doling out to us a standard of freedom he would not accept for himself.
The distinguished president of the Stanford University, in his lecture on sex, as it is treated from a scientific standpoint, shows how the old theories are exploded. Alas, how much of the story of the sufferings of women may be traced to this sub- ject? Even the great Aristotle held that the mother was only the nurse of the child; she was but as the field that nourishes the grain. In Eschylus the doctrine laid down is that the son is not a parricide because it was only his mother that he slew. You all know the story of how Agamemnon was slain by Clytemnestra, and how her son avenged the death of his father. Apollo himself pleaded for Orestes. He said the mother does not generate what is called her child.
In Greece the mother has no other part in the marriage of her children than to bear the nuptial torch, and to prepare the peculiar repast for the women. In the marriage of Iphigenia at Aulis, the mother, Clytemnestra, angrily demanded a place near her daughter during the ceremony as a' maternal right. Agamemnon had not asked her consent. She asks him anxiously of what country Achilles is, and where he will carry her child.
It was an illustrious French physician who first attacked the robbery of the mother. Armed with all the resources of modern science, he claimed for her that she was equal in all things from the first. Nature had always proclaimed the equality of the mother in her child. She suffers for it. She knows neither pain nor fatigue when it is in danger. What mother ever forgets the death of her little one? The newly-made mound that covers it is always fresh in her memory. Neither the mar- riage nor the death of her children divide them from her. For them she has endured through the ages the barbarity of men's laws. Many a husband has held his wife silent under the worst outrage because she knew he would strike her through her children.
Almost all fanious men declare they owed what they have become to their mothers. Schiller, Lamartine and our own Washington are examples. St. Augustine was con- verted by his mother; St. Chrysostom was educated by his mother; St. Basil was saved, he tells us, through maternal love, and St. Louis was sanctified by his strong and holy mother. Professor Jordan says that the first difference came from the female having the care of the young. The male works to feed her and the little ones. The valuation of the male by the female is measured by this care for herself and young. Nature here stamps the legitimate use of man. He was made to toil for and care for his family. He is a miserable wretch when he shirks this task; he is so made that he finds his chief happiness with wife and child. There is a fiction in law and society that all men support their families, and that all women are supported by them. Never was there a greater fallacy. Fully two-thirds of the women of today earn their own bread. In San Francisco, one-half of the married women of the poorer class help to support their families. In my school of more than one thousand pupils, more than half the mothers support their children. Numbers of them are not widows, but have the sole support of their families because of worthless husbands.
No man of the nineteenth century has had a wider influence on its thought than John Stuart Mill. No man's influence of our time will last longer or weigh more with the generations that will come after us. If there is a woman here who has not read
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Mill on "Liberty, or the Subjection of Woman," I would advise her at once to beg, buy or borrow this book. Mill demands the liberty of women, not alone for the benefit that it will confer on the whole human race, but because it is her inalienable right. Herbert Spencer, like our Mr. Platt, has shown the barbarities of the subjugation of women, and then he shirks her enfranchisement. He has shown that the fine intuition possessed by women would be of incalculable value and benefit to man in all his researches, if she were only educated enough to use her God-given faculties. Henry Thomas Buckle declares that so far from the mind of women being inferior to that of men, those men who have gained the greatest victories in science have approached their studies after the manner of women. He avers that the flimsy thing called woman's education has been solely to blame that so few women are distinguished in thought. He points out how men reason from induction. They collect first facts and build their theories from these facts. This is the modern method of scientific investigation, but he says the great achievements in science have not been mastered in this way. Newton discovered the law of gravitation because he had great imagination. He could follow the force that made the apple fall, to great heights-to the moon --- and saw how our Earth kept her satellites in order. From this he followed the same law to the planets, and saw how the sun held them in their courses. There was no inductive reasoning in this. It was pure deduction. It was what is sneered at in woman as intuition, that grasped the mighty problem. It was the same sublime power of imagination that taught Keppler his three wonderful laws, that revealed a true knowledge of the plan- etary worlds to us. It is akin to the mind of the poet. Shakespeare had it when he drew forth his creations of real beings, who live through all the generations. Hamlet, Shylock, Othello, Rosalind, Desdemona and Portia are as real to us as they were to the people of three hundred years ago. George Eliot, whom the foremost critics of our age declare to be the greatest creator of character since Shakespeare, who is, in fact, the only writer of our own time that has ever been classed with the master, had it. This woman, whose works will live in literature with increasing value as the ages come and go, showed what might be accomplished by women of genius if they were fully educated. Her mind did not receive the ordinary training of her sex. It was developed and strengthened by the same processes that go to build up scholarship in men.
Mr. Buckle also points out to us that it was the womanly intuition or poetic faculty that brought about the greatest discoveries in botany. Everyone who takes up this interesting study now knows that the stamens, pistils, corolla and petals are simply modified leaves. These parts, unlike in shape, color and function, we know are the successive stages of the leaf. No botanist discovered thissecret. It was found by the greatest poet that Germany has known. When Goethe announced his discovery, the botanists received it with scorn. They who had collected their facts and filled their herbariums were the ones to find nature's secret of the morphological generali- zation of plants. What had a poet with his verses and imagination to do with it? Nevertheless, time, that works out her slow revenges, saw the botanists of the whole world receive Goethe's idea and join in praise of it. Nor was that the only one of the poet's discoveries. Wandering like Hamletthrough a cemetery he came upon a skull lying on the freshly turned earth beside an open grave. Like Hamlet, he took it up and mused upon it. Suddenly there flashed into his mind the then unknown truth that the skull was composed of vertebra, that the bony covering of the head was an expansion of the bony covering of the spine. This great discovery was stubbornly fought in England, and it was fifty years after it was known in Germany and France before English anatomists would acknowledge that the mind of the poet had soared above all their facts and dissections .* What the world has lost in denying the mind of women free development, only future civilization can tell.
Our last lecturer on this subject, Professor Clark, of Stanford University, in his excellent paper, gave us much hope for this future. His eloquent appeal to women to stand by their cause until the last shackle of bondage was removed, must have found
*From Henry T. Buckle.
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an answering echo in every heart worthy of beating in the nineteenth century. The woman whom such an appeal does not reach should have lived in the feudal age and not in ours. Professor Clark is a product of the modern education of the West, where the boy and girl, working side by side in the same schoolroom, learn to properly respect each other, and understand that brains like souls are sexless.
I claim complete freedom for women because, without it, she cannot be the equal of father, brother, husband or son. I claim, with Harriet Beecher Stowe, that liberty for a nation means liberty for every individual of that nation. I claim for women an equal voice in making the laws that govern her, and an equal chance in developing the gifts with which a just God has endowed her. I claim, in short, an equal right to all that man claims for himself.
HOMER AND HIS POEMS. By MRS. NINA MORAIS COHEN.
From the storm and stress of political strife, the grand old man of England turns to Homer for rest. In an age so supremely subjective as our own, the objective out- look of the antique life, its heroic action as opposed to the introspection of our time, carries the sharp salt breath of the boundless sea to the dweller in crowded cities. Let us also turn to Homer seeking that fair- flowing fountain of the young world for a draught which shall help to banish the "obstinate question- ings" of the world grown old. Our talk today shall be of the poet and of his winged words-what is known of his personality and of his works. We shall review briefly his stories, linger a moment upon some of his beauties, and give our attention especially to the Homeric criticism which aims to decide whether Homer is, or is not, the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey.
For over two thousand five hundred years tradi- tion told its tale of a blind minstrel of Asia Minor, who begged his way from door to door singing his immortal verses. These verses, committed to mem- ory by professional singers or reciters, became the supreme treasure of intellectual Greece, and their text was as familiar to the ordinary Greek as that of MRS. NINA MORAIS COHEN. the Bible to the English peasant. The poems entered into the curriculum of common-school education; they were the authority upon the genealogies of families; to them vexed questions in theology and custom were referred; the current stock of quotation was mainly drawn from them. Learned men dis- cussed in hair-splitting debate such questions as these: "Why did Nausicaä use clear water instead of sea water to wash her clothes?" "In which hand was Aphrodite wounded?" Alcibiades did not scruple to strike a schoolmaster who did not possess a "Homer"; and Alexander, it is well known, slept with a gold-encased copy under his pillow. The poems were inextricably interwoven with the life of the most cultivated nation that ever existed. What did this people know of Homer?
Of his actual life nothing was known in historic Greek times, nor is known today. The word "Homerus" means fitted together, and is used generally to denote a hostage in war, and not a fitter of verses. Gladstone thinks Homer an appellation and not a genuine name; but upon this, as upon almost all other points of criticism, the doctors disagree.
The date of Homer's existence was greatly debated among the ancients. Aris- tarchus, a very distinguished critic of the Alexandrian school, places him as early as 1044 B. C., while Herodotus, the historian, thinks 850 the proper date. Could the question of time be settled it would be of vital import as bearing upon the historic
Nina Morais Cohen is a native of Philadelphia, Pa. She was born December 6, 1855. Her parents were S. Morais, LL. D., minister of the Jewish Congregation Meckoé Israel, of Philadelphia, and Clara E. Weil Morais. Her father is an Italian from Leghorn, her mother an American. Mrs. Cohen was educated in Philadelphia. She married Emanuel Cohen, of the law firm of Ketchel, Cohen & Shaw, Minneapolis, Minn. She is a contributor to various journals. In relig- ious faith she is a Jewess. Her postoffice address is care of Mr. Emanuel Cohen, Minneapolis, Minn.
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authority of Homer; for, were he but a generation or two later than the events described in the poems, his exposition of the social life, religion, morals, learning and general character of the Greeks would be possessed of a supreme historic value. In regard to this value of Homer, modern critics form a sliding-scale of disagreenient. Gladstone believes Homer to have lived at a very ancient date, and accepts his dictum, in gen- eral, as a final test of the Greek status. Prof. Evelyn Abbott, at the other pole, regards the Homeric life as almost entirely imaginative. If it be true that the author of the Iliad composed his verses several centuries after the Fall of Troy, that tale would, for obvious reasons, be much less authoritative as a standard of Greek life than George Eliot's " Romola " is of life in Florence during the Revival of Learning.
Eight biographies of Homer were known in historic Greece, but by general ver- dict they are all spurious. We know that " Seven cities now contend for Homer dead, through which the living Homer begged his bread," and so vigorous did this conten- tion grow that the people of Smyrna displayed Homer's monument, and the people of Ios his grave. The general belief is that the poems were brought in historic times from the Ionian cities of Asia Minor into Greece proper; some cities, however, claim that the poems, being very ancient and originally composed in Greece, were carried into Asia by the Achæans fleeing from the Doric invasion, and were afterward reim- ported by them. Gladstone brings many arguments to bear in support of this view, the most important being Homer's thorough acquaintance with Greece proper, both on the coast and in the interior, and his slight descriptions of the Asiatic country.
The tradition of Homer's blindness seems to have arisen from a mention thereof in a so-called Homeric hymn to Apollo, which is considered spurious. In support of this popular notion it may be observed that the minstrel of Scheria in the Odyssey, praised most tenderly by Homer, is blind; that color is rarely mentioned in the poems, and when mentioned not very appropriately. But the descriptions of sea and shore, of movement and action, render it almost impossible that Homer should have been blind, at least until of a very mature age. That he honored the office of bard is like- wise shown in his characterization of the same blind minstrel. Minstrelship in his day was one of the very few learned professions, and it was held in great honor. The bard was usually retained by some noble house; but this does not seem to have been Homer's position, as he left no traces of any patron's influence upon his work-such traces as may be seen in the writings of Horace or Tasso, or even of later recipients of noble patronage. Thus Homer speaks of Demodocus, the Divine minstrel of Scheria:
"Then the henchman drew near, leading with him the beloved minstrel, whom the Muse loved dearly, and she gave him both good and evil; of his sight she reft him, but granted him sweet song. Then Pontonus, the henchman, set for him a high chair, inlaid with silver, in the midst of the guests, leaning it against the tall pillar, and he hung the loud lyre on a pin, close above his head, and showed him how to lay his hands on it. And close by him he placed a basket, and a fair table, and a goblet of wine by his side, to drink when his spirit bade him. So they stretched forth their hands upon the good cheer spread before them. But after they had put from them the desire of meat and drink, the Muse stirred the minstrel to sing the songs of famous men.
On another occasion Odysseus, the hero, thus honors the minstrel:
" Lo, henchman, take this mess, and hand it to Demodocus, that he may cat, and I will bid him hail, despite my sorrow. For minstrels from all men on earth get their meed of honor and worship; inasmuch as the Muse teaches them the paths of song, and loveth the tribe of minstrels."
Homer's works are traditionally believed to be the Iliad (the story of Ilium or Troy ) and the Odyssey (the adventures of Odysseus on his return home). Several hymns, smaller epics and other works formerly attributed to him, are now generally considered spurious. "Sing, goddess, the wrath of Achilles " are the opening words in the poem miscalled the Iliad. It is essentially the tale of the Wrath. At the open-
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ing of the poem the Greeks ( then called Achaans) are sitting before Troy in the ninth year of the siege. The story of the seduction of Helen is not set forth by Homer, nor any of the now famous events preceding the ninth year; neither is the conclusion of the struggle pictured, nor the oft-foreboded death of its chief hero, Achilles. The action is confined to a few days, covered by the Wrath and its sad termination.
The story of the Iliad is as follows: In the distribution of spoil after the plunder- ing of the town of Chryse, Chryseis, the daughter of Chryses, the priest of Apollo, had fallen to the lot of Agamemnon, chief of the Achæans. The father of the maiden came to her captor with a ransom, which, being refused, the old man prayed to Apollo to revenge his wrong.
" So spake he in prayer, and Phœbus Apollo heard him, and came down from the peaks of Olympus wroth at heart, bearing on his shoulders his bow and covered quiver. And the arrows clanged upon his shoulders in his wrath as the god moved; and he descended like to night. Then he sate him aloof from the ships, and let an arrow fly; and there was heard a dread clanging of the silver bow. First did he assail the mules and fleet dogs, but afterward, aiming at the men his piercing dart, he smote; and the pyres of the dead burnt continually in multitude."
After nine days of the plague, a council of the nobles is summoned, and Agamem- non is by them advised to return the maiden. Now the chief of these advisers is Achilles, fleet-footed, golden-haired Achilles, like unto the gods. Agamemnon enraged at this advice threatens to take from Achilles his captive maiden Briseis, whom Achilles loves. Words wax hot between them and Achilles is about to draw his sword when the gray-eyed Athene catches him by his golden hair, being visible to him alone. Terribly shines her eyes as she forbids him to take any action. So Achilles must needs submit to the loss of his maiden, but he nurses his resentment in his breast, and weeps anon, and sits upon the shore of the gray sea, gazing moodily across the boundless main. His mother, the sea-nymph Thetis, arises like a mist from the depths at the prayer of her son, agrees to petition Zeus that the battle may go against the Achæans, so that they may bitterly rue the injustice done to Achilles. This petition Thetis makes, and here we are introduced to the Olympic Court, which is divided in interest between the Achæans and Trojans, and which aids and frustrates the various heroes, and even participates in the combats. Interesting indeed is the theurgy of Homer; distinct, picturesque and full of subtle individuality are his char- acterizations of gods and goddesses. But we must perforce confine our attention to the main action.
Achilles sulks in his tent, and his wish is fulfilled. The Achæans meet fearful reverses. During the retirement of Achilles the several books are filled with accounts of the doings of the various chiefs, with descriptions of wounds in all conceivable forms, with pictures of Troy and Trojan life; yet so rapid is the movement of the poems, so vivid the individuality of each chieftain, that these details rarely drag. Even the famous catalogue of the ships is enlivened by bits of gracious description and fitting epithet.
After serious losses Agamemnon sends ambassadors to the tent of Achilles with ample apologies, full of restitution and promises of large gifts. Achilles, with mar- velous eloquence, refuses all. The Trojans continue to gain upon the Achæans, driv- ing them behind their ramparts, and setting fire to their ships. All the noted chieftains are wounded and disabled. At this juncture Achilles' dear friend, the companion of his boyhood, whom he loves with a love passing that of woman, Patroclus, begs Achilles to join the combat. Achilles refuses, but he allows Patroclus to don the famous armor of Achilles and to lead the Myrmidons into the battle. The Trojans, thinking that Patroclus is Achilles, are driven back in flight; but the valiant Hector, leader of the Trojans, fights with Patroclus and slays him. When the news is brought to Achilles he tears his hair, lies in the dust moaning terribly, and swears never to taste food until he has revenged his friend. His mother and her sea-maidens rise from the deep to comfort Achilles. Again Thetis proceeds to Olympus with a petition to obtain from
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