From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in the World Volume II: The Masculine Mystique from Feudalism to the French Revolution
336
From Eve to Dawn: A History of Women in the World Volume II: The Masculine Mystique from Feudalism to the French Revolution
336eBook
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Overview
This volume of New York Times–bestselling author Marilyn French’s monumental history analyzes and evaluates the lives of women in societies around the world between feudal times and the French Revolution. Drawing upon fifteen years of collaboration with a team of researchers and prominent historians, the volume opens with fascinating chapters comparing medieval Europe and Japan, disparate cultures which nevertheless shared traditions of male dominated aggression and competitiveness.
French then shows how, in Europe, this tradition led to colonialism and imperialism, and the horrific subjugation of indigenous societies, just as women were subjugated in the conquerors’ home countries. As French makes clear in this impassioned women’s history, only with the French Revolution did the political force women exerted powerfully change the course of history.
“French gives us grand theory at its best, wading through copious amounts of scholarly data on the histories of civilizations and offering up, in readable prose, an important synthesis.” —Library Journal
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781558616219 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Feminist Press at CUNY, The |
| Publication date: | 12/06/2018 |
| Series: | Origins , #2 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 336 |
| Sales rank: | 641,466 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Marilyn French was a novelist and feminist. Her books include The Women’s Room, which has been translated into twenty languages; From Eve to Dawn, a History of Women in the World; A Season in Hell; Her Mother’s Daughter; Our Father; My Summer with George; and The Bleeding Heart. She died in 2009.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
FEUDALISM IN EUROPE
FEUDALISM IS A POLITICAL, economic, and social structure devised to enable men to delegate control. Men conquered more territory than they could rule, and they feared their subordinates' ambition. They devised a system in which parcels of land (fiefs) and the income from this land were granted to vassals, male military aides who managed the fief (maintaining peace, justice, and public works), collected taxes, and offered deferential hospitality and advice to the grantor. This system arose in the militaristic societies of Europe and Japan, where both conquerors and vassals were called lords. A great lord like the king of England granted fiefs in some areas and took them in others; in turn, the vassal of one lord granted fiefs to his vassals, dividing his land. Fiefs could be voluntary: a small land-holder in need of protection might ask a more powerful noble to provide it. In return, he would "pay court" to his overlord (or overlords) at least once a year, attend ceremonies, hold trials, and offer counsel. The system became extremely complex as more and more land was subdivided.
Feudalism is a contractual exchange, with two kinds of contracts — voluntary and hereditary. Before feudalism was established, the two basic classes were free and bound (slaves); afterward, all were bound and all had rights. All lords were vassals of other lords; serfs were bound to their lord and to the land they worked and lived on. The main distinction lay between dignified service, entered by voluntary oaths of fealty to a lord, and hereditary service, being born into bondage. In addition to the static landed community, other large segments of the population — clergy, merchants, and Jews — lived under special laws in a system called "personality of law," which was tied to the feudal system.
As always, the lowest rank of society supported the higher ones. In the manorial system that sometimes accompanied feudalism, farmers were bound to their land. Serfs (or villeins) could not legally leave their land; they were required to work for the lord several days a week and were subject to the jurisdiction of the lord's courts — and, sometimes, to humiliating interventions in their private lives (e.g., the lord might claim the right to deflower all brides). Their lot was hard, but they had advantages that slaves and wageworkers did not possess: the land was bound to them, was theirs to work, and could not be taken from them, as it was from peasants in England in a later age. Serfs had a place to go, a place where they belonged. Only much later, and only in Russia, did lords separate serf families. Most families settled their land on one son and dowered one daughter to marry advantageously, sending the rest out to find a living. After 1100, most daughters went into domestic service. If there were no sons, a daughter could inherit the holding, which enabled her to make a good marriage.
Origins
The dominant peoples in Europe during the Early Middle Ages were Visigoths in Spain, Franks in France, Germany, and the Lowlands, Anglo-Saxons in Britain, and Ostrogoths and Lombards in Italy (the name Lombard may be derived from "Longbeards," women who tied their long hair under their chins to simulate beards when they fought in battle). The Scandinavian Vikings were isolated from Europe until they invaded it in the ninth and tenth centuries. Many of these peoples had traditionally lived in landholding patrilineal communities that allotted land to all households. Women were often prophets, consulted about major decisions like wars or raids. Hannibal had to negotiate with a women's council before his armies could pass through Gaul. Women led armies. The most famous, Boudica (Boadicea), queen of the Iceni, went to war against the Romans in Britain. Until they saw Boudica standing with her four daughters in a war chariot, red hair flying, sword raised, the Romans had considered the inhabitants slaves. Boudica nearly drove Rome off the island, but, out-fought, she died with 80,000 followers. In the tenth century Queen Aethelflaed commanded her own armies, built fortresses, and repaired them.
Customs varied widely in a decentralized Europe of small kingdoms and duchies, but in most places marriage was a partnership: grooms gave brides oxen, a plow, and armor; brides gave grooms weapons. Both plowed fields, went to war, and were supposed to be chaste until they were twenty. From the fourth to the seventh centuries, Franks, then Danes and Anglo-Saxons, hired landless men in units of a hundred as soldier-colonists. The king/chief granted his soldiers citizenship and land: they owed him taxes, labor, and military service; he owed them and their dependents protection. The bond between chief and retinue became the base of a new system that eroded women's independence.
War was constant; military retinues (of nonclan men) grew more important than clan councils. Because women no longer did military service, chiefs granted land only to men. Such grants antiquated clan functions. Unlike clans, retinues only fought, leaving plowing to women and old men. The retinues grew, eroding the lineages. Chiefs forbade soldiers to marry — and possibly shift loyalty — while in service. Lords responsible for protecting vassals claimed fines for harm to their bodies; a man who raped a woman had to indemnify her lord. Women who married non-kin lost their tie to their clans and claims to their land. By the seventh century, wives were dependent; in Wessex, they had to call their husbands "lord." Peasants were property. Because the church banned polygyny, men took concubines, who had no inheritance rights. Only a few elite women still owned large tracts of land and serfs. Chiefs and their retainers became manor-holders, kings, and nobles. This arrangement became feudalism.
A new, elaborate set of incest regulations barred marriages the church had previously accepted: if Adam had had sexual congress with Lilith, Eve's second cousin, Eve could not marry Adam. The dissolution of kin-groups, which respected women's claims to land, and the celibacy demanded of soldiers left many women destitute. Unmarried mothers had an especially hard time. Earlier, kin-groups raised all the children: in some, a mother had only to name the father to win his material support for the child. It became easier in Anglo-Saxon kingdoms for fathers to deny paternity, and destitute mothers often had to sell themselves and their young into slavery. Men's kin-groups began to disown "illegitimate" children, even if they were acknowledged by their fathers.
England, Germany, and France accomplished in a few hundred years what Mesopotamia, China, and India took thousands of years to achieve: turning women into property. Once kin-groups were gone, only men had rights or property; women were subject to men and to male rules. In most of Europe, female adultery was severely punished: women were stripped of property, publicly flogged, exiled, or executed, according to the region. In Burgundy, husbands could kill adulterous wives or give them to the king as slaves. Male adultery was of course accepted. Aristocratic women kept their rights a bit longer. As late as the ninth century, elite continental women made trial marriages without exchanging gifts or harming their reputations. Royal Anglo-Saxon women still received kingdoms at marriage and determined their children's marriages and inheritances. Elite Celtic and German women kept their family status: more men than women were hypergamic, improving their social status through marriage.
In the ninth century the pope, in need of military assistance, gave a successful Frankish soldier, Charlemagne, the title of Holy Roman Emperor. In return, Charlemagne barred nuns from many activities and tried to conform secular to canon (church) law. He virtually ended bride purchase when he decreed that grooms should give brides, not their families, a gift, usually of land, over which they had full rights. But he also barred women from power in their own right and placed noblewomen in guardianship, in absolute subjection to husbands who controlled their wealth. (He himself married four times but never let his daughters marry. They had lovers and large inheritances to keep them independent after he died.) Wives shared husbands' power, however. While in principle the entire kingdom belonged to the king, his wealth and power were rooted in his fiefs, which were managed by the queen. She ran his estates and controlled the finances and domestic affairs in his domain. As in Sparta, women did business while men did the more important thing — making war.
Charlemagne made marriage indissoluble: a man could not repudiate his wife except for adultery. According to the church, even adultery was not cause for divorce. A system of no divorce may seem to us a dubious benefit, but women in that era appreciated it. Barred from supporting themselves, they feared being repudiated by husbands who resented being limited to one wife. Laws forbidding divorce gave them some security, although there were always men who simply killed unwanted wives. Whatever the law, men with power could override it.
European Women from the Tenth to the Thirteenth Centuries
The Carolingian Empire collapsed in the late ninth century, ushering in a century so strife torn that historians call it "the age of iron." Noblemen of this period were goons who preferred to raid defenceless villages than attack the precincts of a rival noble, and they did little but fight. They lived on meat from their forests and fish from their streams, and their serfs were forbidden to take either. In the early years, their wooden manor houses, which frequently burned down, consisted of a broad central hall, a large semidetached kitchen, and outbuildings. Some noble couples had a bedroom, but most slept in the hall with the rest of the family, servants, and retainers. They pushed back the furniture — trestle tables, benches, maybe a clothes press, loom, and spinning tools — to lay sleeping pallets on the floor.
As prosperity increased, lords built stone castles with several rooms, furnished with couches, beds, chests, and hangings. They dressed more elegantly and fought less. But from the eleventh to the thirteenth century, they went on crusades. The first crusade (the only successful one) lasted from 1095 to 1099. At home, men held jousts, competitions in which they could display their skill with horses, lances, and other weapons. Early tournaments were brutal, but they were refined over the twelfth and thirteenth centuries into courts of courtesy. Women, who frequently ruled in this era, usually as surrogates for absent husbands or as regents for minor sons, refined the culture and favored literature presenting a new image — the "gentil parfit knight."
The most stable institution in this contentious time was the family, where women are always strong. As chatelaines of castles and estates, wealthy women held tremendous power; they acted as judicial authorities, participated in political assemblies both ecclesiastical and secular, and led armies. In Germany, nuns turned great monasteries into flourishing centers of learning; in Italy, noblewomen held huge influence over the church. Abbesses sent knights to war, while noblewomen acted as judges and defended their castles when men were away. The Countess Almodis of Barcelona co-authored an early written law code in this era.
By the twelfth century, queens no longer automatically controlled finance, but royal women with authority and strength still wielded personal power, especially in small courts. Adelaide of Maurienne, queen of Louis VI of France, shared his power — her name appears with his on royal documents. She appointed ecclesiastics, proferred benefactions, settled cases brought before the king's court, gave charters of privilege, and issued safe-conducts in her own name. Matilda, wife of Henry I of England, though she separated from him after bearing two children, lived alone in great splendor and ruled as regent when Henry was in Normandy. She supported writers and musicians and founded the leper hospital of St. Giles, a priory, and one of the first public baths.
Reforms made under Pope Gregory forced priests to give up their wives, ended lay influence over church offices, confined nuns, and subordinated the Holy Roman Emperor to church authority (see volume 1, chapter 10). By the thirteenth century the church had centralized its hold on Europe. Bureaucratic courts and churches enforced laws governing women's inheritance. The properties that queens brought to marriage were swallowed by the crown and thereafter managed by the king's clerks. Even the great twelfth-century Eleanor of Aquitaine could not annul this new ruling.
Eleanor's life was extraordinary. Extremely intelligent, well educated, and a patron of literature, she was heir to Aquitaine, an important province that she governed herself. Married young to Louis VII of France, she found him dull and in fifteen years of marriage produced only two children — both daughters, to Louis' and his advisers' sorrow. In 1147 Louis decided to lead a crusade; he refused Eleanor's request to be regent in his absence, so she went with him. In the east she enjoyed herself and her uncle, Raymond of Antioch, who was eight years older than she. When Louis objected, Eleanor divorced him. The divorce was eased by the church's incest regulations (she was a distant relative of Louis) and by the French bishops, who wanted Louis to marry someone who would produce a male heir.
The moment she was divorced, Eleanor rode to Poitiers to tell Henry Plantagenet she wanted to marry him: they had met earlier, with sparks. Eleanor was thirty, Henry nineteen; she was the richest, most powerful woman in Europe; and he was ambitious. To reach him, Eleanor sneaked out of her lodgings in the middle of the night to avoid two ambushes on the journey. First she had to evade Count Thibaut of Blois, then Henry's brother, Geoffrey of Anjou, both of whom planned to kidnap her and force her into marriage, for they wanted control of her property. She reached Henry safely and they married; she bore him four sons and a daughter in the first five years, and three more children in the next decade. When Henry attained the English throne, she ruled with him in the early years of their marriage and as regent when he was away. But a quarrel sprang up between them and became irrevocable: she wanted a younger son to inherit Aquitaine, but Henry was adamant that her property was his and should pass to his chosen heir. She encouraged her sons to rebel against him: he defeated and pardoned them but kept Eleanor locked up for the rest of his life.
When Henry died after fifteen years, Eleanor was freed and, indeed, her favorite son, Richard, Coeur de Lion, succeeded Henry. He was imprisoned as he returned from a crusade, and the sixty-seven-year-old queen ran the kingdom, holding her ambitious younger son John at bay until she could reconcile the brothers. At seventy-two she retired to a convent but emerged five years later when Richard died and John became king. Foiling his rival (her grandson Arthur), she ensured Aquitaine's loyalty to John. At seventy-eight, having outlived eight of her ten children, she crossed the Pyrenees in winter to visit her daughter at the court of Castile and arrange a marriage between her granddaughter Blanche and the French dauphin, to seal peace between John and the French. Over the strong opposition of the French nobility, Blanche — a foreigner, Spaniard, and woman — ruled France. She became regent for her son, and when he came of age, she handed him a kingdom unified by her diplomacy and brilliant military strategy. When he was captured on a crusade, she raised the money to ransom him. She was, throughout her life, the strongest influence on him.
Generally, loss of control over property meant loss of power for women. Clever queens with strong personalities could subtly move kings, but most limited themselves to patronizing the arts and doing good works. A royal mistress had as much chance as a queen to influence policy.
Nonroyal noblewomen had busy, responsible lives. A medium-sized barony had a staff of about twenty-five, not counting attendant knights and squires. Husbands were absent, sometimes for years at a time; women had to be good administrators for families to prosper. Wives oversaw production on the manor and managed food, goods, money, and staff. Since women were married very young, a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old girl often had responsibility for adjudicating quarrels among staff and servants and for managing a castle that was also a small industry, with a mill, textile workshop, and ale-making facilities. With the lord away, the lady had to oversee bailiffs and stewards, represent the family in local litigation, appoint attorneys to handle court matters, and ensure that rents were paid. Many lords owned several manors, each with a castle: families traveled (made a "progress") from one to another. Each time they moved they took all their belongings with them: household linens, furniture, kitchen utensils, food, plate, dishes, candles, books, household accounts, wall hangings, rugs, as well as the clothes and personal property of the family and its retainers.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "From Eve to Dawn"
by .
Copyright © 2002 Marilyn French.
Excerpted by permission of Feminist Press.
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Table of Contents
Foreword by Margaret Atwood,
Introduction,
Part One: Reaching for Order and Control,
Chapter 1: Feudalism in Europe,
Chapter 2: Feudalism in Japan,
Part Two: Expansion and Appropriation, 1500–1800,
Chapter 3: Control Tightens in Europe,
Chapter 4: European Appropriation of Africa,
Chapter 5: European Appropriation of Latin America,
Chapter 6: European Appropriation of North America,
Chapter 7: Black Experience in North America,
Chapter 8: The French Revolution,
Afterword,
Notes,
Selected Bibliography,
Index,
