ABSTRACT

IT is generally thought that the social position of its women is one of the truest ways of measuring the height of a people’s culture. In reality, however, this is the case only in a very small degree. We have already seen that many peoples who are looked down upon as savages, the Hurons and Iroquois, for example, gave women a particularly high position, while civilized nations, like the Periclean Greeks, had an astonishingly low regard for women. The social position of women is not only dependent on the height of the civilization, but upon a great number of other conditions that we have in part come to recognize in the foregoing chapters. Since woman is the pivot of geneonomy, it is our desire to review briefly here the road—for the most part a path of suffering—that woman has passed over in the growth of civilization, and to try to compare the general causes that have determined her lot.