With the increase in population, and the consequent disappearance of game, man was forced to turn his attention to the crude agriculture which woman had begun to develop.  The superior qualities which he had acquired in war and the chase, enabled him slowly to improve on these beginnings and to shape a body of custom which made settled society possible.  With man’s leadership in the family the patriarchal form of government developed, and man’s power over woman was sanctioned by custom and law.  The woman was stolen, or bought; and while sexual attraction did not play the continuous part which it plays in developed society, it must have done much to protect women from abuse and neglect, at least during the years of girlhood and child-bearing.  It is at this point that our historical records begin.

In the pages of Homer, or of the Old Testament, in Tacitus’s “Germania,” or in the writings of Livy, we find woman’s position well defined.  True, she stands second to the man, but she is his assistant, not his slave.  She must be courted, and while marriage presents are exchanged, she is not bought.  In times of emergency, she steps to the front and legislates, judges, or fights.  It is possible in the pages of the Old Testament to find women doing everything which men can do.  Even where the power is not nominally in her own hands, she often, as in the cases of Penelope or Esther, rules by indirection.  Her body and her offspring are protected; and the Hebrew woman of the Proverbs shows us a singularly free and secure industrial position.[16] Such was the condition in primitive Judea, in early Greece, in republican Rome, or among the Germans who invaded southern Europe in the third and fourth centuries of our era.

[16] Proverbs xxxi, 10.

Man’s jealousy of his woman as a source of pleasure and honor to himself, and to his family, must have always acted to limit woman’s freedom, even while it gave her protection and a secure position in society.  With the development of settled government in city states, like Athens or early Rome, the necessity for defining citizenship made the family increasingly a political institution.  A man’s offspring through slave women, concubines, or “strangers” lived outside the citizen group, and so were negligible; but the citizen woman’s children were citizens, and so she became a jealously guarded political institution.  The established family became the test of civic, military, and property rights.  The regulations limiting the freedom of girls and women were jealously enforced, since mismating might open the treasures of citizenship to any low born or foreign adventurer.[17]

[17] T.G.  TUCKER, Life in Ancient Athens, Chapter VIII, Macmillan Co., 1906.

In the ancient Orient, in Greece, Rome, and in later Europe, these stages have been repeated again and again.  Woman is first a slave, stolen or bought, protected by sexual interest to which is later added social custom and religious sanction.  Early civilization centers around the woman, so that she becomes in some degree the center of the home-staying group.  In primitive civilization man takes over woman’s most important activities; but she gains a fixed position, protected, though still further enslaved, by political necessities.