(Dubois, I., 271.) Here, as everywhere in former times, woman existed
not for her own sake but for man's convenience, comfort, and pleasure;
why, therefore, should he bother to do anything to please her? In the
_Kaniasoutram_ there is a chapter on the duties of a model wife, in
which she is instructed to do all the work not only at home but in
garden, field, and stable. She must go to bed after her husband and
get up before him. She must try to excel all other wives in faithfully
serving her lord and master. She must not even allow the maid-servant
to wash his feet, but must do it with her own hands. The _Laws of
Manu_ are full of such precepts, most of them amazingly ungallant. The
horrible maltreatment of women in India, which it would be an
unpardonable euphuism to call simply ungallant, will be dwelt on in a
later chapter.
It has been said a thousand times that the best measure of a nation's
civilization is its treatment of women. It would be more accurate to
say that kind, courteous treatment of women is the last and highest
product of civilization. The Greeks and Hindoos had reached a high
level of culture in many respects, yet, judged by their treatment of
women, the Greeks were barbarians and the Hindoos incarnate fiends.
Scholars are sometimes surprisingly reckless in their assumptions.
Thus Hommel (1., 417) declares that woman must have held an honored
position in Babylonia,[32] because in the ancient texts that have come
down to us the words mother and wife always precede the words father
and husband. Yet, as Dubois mentions incidentally, the Brahmin texts
also place the feminine word before the masculine, and the Brahmins
treat women more cruelly than the lowest savages treat them.
EGYPTIAN LOVE
I have not been able to find evidence of a gallant, chivalrous,
magnanimous attitude toward women in the records of any ancient
nation, and as romantic love is inconceivable without such an
attitude, and a constant interchange of kindnesses, we may infer from
this alone that these nations were strangers to such love. Professor
Ebers makes a special plea for the Egyptians. Noting the statements of
Herodotus and Diodorus regarding the greater degree of liberty enjoyed
by their women as compared with the Greek, he bases thereon the
inference that in their treatment of women the Egyptians were superior
to all other nations of antiquity. Perhaps they were; it is not
claiming much. But Professor Kendrick notes (I., 46) that although it
may be true that the Egyptian women went to market and carried on
trades while the men remained at home working at the loom, this is
capable of receiving quite a different interpretation from that given
by Ebers. The Egyptians regarded work at the loom more as a matter of
skill than the Greeks did; and if they allowed the women to do the
marketing, that may have been because they preferred to have them
carry the heavy burdens and do the harder work, after the fashion of
savages and barbarians.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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