WOMAN IN TRADITION AND LITERATURE. 
Once upon a time, in those good old days when an 
infallible Church settled all mooted questions, an au¬ 
gust council of greater and lesser prelates assembled in 
a stately hall at Nancy, in France. What had brought 
together these grave and reverend seigneurs? Was 
Church or State in peril ? Not at all. They had met 
simply to discuss this question: “ Ought women to be 
considered human beings?” 
The number taking part in this discussion was from 
two to three hundred, The war of words ran high, 
days passed in secret session. At last, thanks to the 
gallantry of the younger prelates, a very small majority 
decided in the affirmative. Even this was a triumph 
for woman the old pagan Hindu and Hebrew traditions 
would not have granted her. “Woman is by nature 
perverse,” say the ancient Jewish legends; false, weak, 
foolish as the first mother herself, wily as the serpent 
through whom she fell.” The Buddhist scriptures, after 
stating woman’s duties and limitations at full length, 
declare that her crowning duty as wife arid mother is 
to be immolated on her husband’s funeral pile. 
A vein of contempt for woman runs through the 
classic literature of Greece, and gives color to most of 
its myths and legends. She is always, as in the case of 
the first of woman-kind, Pandora, made the instniment 
of man’s chastisement. 
The Romans kept their women under perpetual tute¬ 
lage; they remained children and minors their whole' 
life long. The Gospel lifted the curse that had rested so 
heavily upon woman. “ There is neither Jew nor 
Greek, nor bond nor free, nor male nor female; ye are 
all one in Christ Jesus,” were the words uttered by the 
greatest of the apostles, that proclaimed her religious 
enfranchisement. One in faith with man, she became 
one with him in Baptism and at the sacramental table 
of her Lord. But civil emancipation did not follow; 
she remained, in the eye of the law, an underling and a 
minor. 
Year by year, through the centuries of the Christian 
era, link after link in the chain of her humiliation 
has been rent. But the old traditions linger. Even in 
the most enlightened lands, woman is still in the eye of 
the law man’s inferior. 
“ To see one-half of the human race excluded by the 
other half from all participation in government,” says 
Talleyrand, “is a political phenomenon that, according 
to abstract principles of right, it is impossible to ex¬ 
plain.” 
With all its progress, the world lags far behind in its 
ideas concerning woman. Michelet’s ideal—a perpetu¬ 
al invalid, a child to be shielded, petted and humored, 
no matter how unreasonable—remains that of so- 
called polite circles. “ Woman is never stronger than 
when armed with her weakness,”, says some modern 
Solomon. 
Through all the ages, from King Solomon until now, 
one perpetual cry has been going up about “ woman’s 
sphere.” 
“To woman silence gives her proper grace,” said 
Sophocles. 
“ One tongue is enough for a woman !” echoed John 
Milton, nearly two thousand years afterward. 
“ Hear, O my people,” cries ACschylus: “ women are 
an evil, and yet we cannot conduct our houses without 
this evil.” 
“A daughter is a troublesome and ticklish posses¬ 
sion,” says Euripides. 
“ If a daughter you have, she’s the plague of your life; 
Small peace shalTyou know, though you’ve buried your wife.” 
“ One thing only I believe in a woman,” says Aristo¬ 
phanes—“that she will not come to life again after she 
is dead; in all else I distrust her until she is dead.” 
Euripides thus sums up his indictment of the sex: 
“ To be brief, if any one does, or hereafter shall, revile 
woman, in one short sentence I shall comprise the 
whole—It is a breed whose like neither sea nor earth 
produces. He who is always with them knows them 
best.” 
Turning to the old Latin authors, we are all familiar 
with Virgil’s oft-quoted line— 
“ Varium et mutabile semper foemina ”— 
the text, undoubtedly, of Shakespeare’s 
“ Frailty, thy name is woman.” 
“ Women, like children, are impotent and weak of 
soul,” says Terrence. 
“ Dress and adornment are the woman’s world,” 
says Pliny. 
“The man who wants to be fully employed.’' says 
Plautus, “ should procure a woman and a ship. These 
two can never be rigged enough.” 
The German authors, when treating of this subject, 
have been only servile imitators of their masters of 
Greece and Rome. The ideal German woman is a good 
hausfrau and nothing more. In fact, when modern 
wiseacres 'of any nation have attempted to define 
woman’s sphere and limitations, they have only re¬ 
vamped saws and traditions old as the Acropolis and 
the Janiculum. 
Quotations from the great English writers are useless, 
because familiar to every student of our literature. 
Milton’s idea, which he reiterates ad nauseam, is 
summed up in these words of Eve to Adam: 
“My author and disposer, what thou bid’st, 
Unargued I obey ; so God ordains. 
God is thy law, thou mine ; to know no more 
Is woman’s happiest knowledge and her praise!” 
“Women,” says the elegant Lord Chesterfield, “are 
but children of a larger growth. They have speech and 
sometimes wit, but I have never met one of them who 
possessed good sense, or who acted reasonably for twen¬ 
ty-four hours in succession. A man of sense trifles 
with them, flatters them, amuses them as he would a 
child, but he never confides important secrets to them. 
Although he often persuades them that he does so, it 
is only to flatter their vanity. Weak men, indeed, con¬ 
sult them, but wise men only pretend to do so. No 
flattery is too strong or too disgusting for them ; they 
swallow all with avidity. (These are secrets, and must 
be kept inviolable, if like Orpheus, a man does not want 
to be torn in pieces by the fair sex.)” ' 
