Most significant, however, upon the whole in the “prehistoric” woman movement, are innumerable women whose souls found expression only in the strong, quiet acts of every day life but yet remained living and growing. As a reason for the “enslavement” of woman by man, the primitive division of labour is still occasionally cited. This division of labour made war and the chase man’s task and so developed in him courage, energy, and daring, while the woman remained the “beast of burden.” But we forget that, in this labour arrangement, the handicraft and husbandry which woman practised at that time made her, to perhaps a higher degree than man, the conservator of civilisation and probably developed her psychic power in more comprehensive manner than his.
Even after this division of labour ceased there remained—and remain still in innumerable country households—in and through many of the important and difficult tasks of the mother of the house, numerous possibilities for spiritual development. And exactly in this respect industrial work robs the woman of much.
By the side of these innumerable nameless women who, century after century, in and through the material work of culture which they performed, increased their psychic power, we must remember all the unnamed women who with flower-like quiet mien turned their souls to the light.
Antique sepulchres and Tanagra figures tell us more about the harmonious, refined corporeality of the Hellenic woman than the famous statues of Aphrodite or Athena. In like manner it is not the illustrious but the nameless women who most clearly reveal the will of the woman soul, in antiquity, for light and life.
Numbers of Greek women were disciples of the philosophers, some even were their inspiration. Generally courtesans, these women represented the “emancipation” of that time from the servile condition of the legitimate married women and also showed that women already longed to share in the interests of men and to acquire their culture. History has preserved also words and deeds of wives and mothers of the past which show that these also at times attained “masculine” greatness of soul and civic virtue. Pythias and Sibyls, Vestals and Valas, are other witnesses that the power of woman’s soul was active and recognised long before Christianity. Even among the purely primitive races there were found—and are found—cases in which woman in power and rights was placed, not only on an equality with man, but even above him. And if, on the one hand, the rigid exactions which men from the earliest time have fixed upon the wife’s fidelity—while they themselves had full freedom for promiscuity—show that the wife was considered as the property of the husband, so, on the other hand, this very conception was a means of elevating and refining the soul life of woman. For the self-control which she had to impose upon herself deepened her feeling for a devotion which embraced only one, the man to whom she belonged. Nothing would be more superficial than to estimate the real position of woman, among any special people, only by what we know of their laws. It is as if one, in a few centuries from now, should judge the actual position of the modern European wife by referring it to the wretched marriage laws which now obtain. They forget the deep gulf between law and custom who declare that marriage devotion, veneration for the sanctity of the home, esteem for the spiritual being of the wife first arose as a result of Christianity.