LECTURE ON WOMAN

Manawatu Standard, Volume LIII, Issue 257, 27 September 1933, Page 12

LECTURE ON WOMAN

MRS L. BENNETT’S ADDRESS. In delivering a lecture on “Woman” to a very well attended meeting of the Palmerston North W.E.A. on Monday evening, Mrs L. Bennett traced woman’s existence through the ages from earliest times to the present and showed the development of her status in national life as it took place in the different eras among the various nations. At the close of the lecture there was a lively discussion, showing the interest that had been taken. In Babylon, the Code of Hammurabai, the oldest code we knew, was promulgated about 2350 8.C., said Mrs Bennett. Under that code woman was legally independent. Her dowry was her own and descended to her children. Divorce was optional to the man, who was responsible for his wife’s debts, but if he divorced her he had to return the dowry. A widow took her husband’s place as guardian of the children and their property, even if she married again, and women could bo judges, elders, witnesses and scribes. That presented a much brighter picture than that of 19th Century England. In Egypt there were women property owners as late as Ptolemaic times. Even the king then acknowledged the queen as his equal. In Greece, Homer’s women were dignified and free, but in the time of Pericles it was a very different story. Women were then cloistered slaves. Such men as Socrates, Plato, Sophocles and Demosthenes achieved their eminence at the cost, not only of a horde of male slaves, but also at the cost of the enslavement of the whole of the female sex. Plato classed together children, women and servants just as the Tenth Commandment classed together one’s" wife, servants, ox, ass and the rest of the man’s property. That attitude was retrograde even in primitive societies, because women’s duties were performed by slaves, leaving them nothing to do. Yet in Sparta, the eugenist’s paradise, women were as healthy animals as their men. They were sacrificed not to purity of blood and strength of muscle but to war. The softer sentiments were crushed out. In Rome there was a different development. The woman there in the early times was utterly dependent on her father or her husband. She was legally her husband’s daughter. Perpetual guardianship died out gradually and, as the guardianship became obsolete, woman attained independence of person and property. But the Roman matron, even in early times, was a formidable figure, besides being influential. That was a contrast to Greece, where no wives became notable. The early Christian church definitely degraded woman, the speaker added. The teaching made woman’s life purposeless. In the Middle Ages land was held from the overlord by military service and if the woman inherited land she had either to marry or re-marry. The speaker then traced the development of woman’s position in later times and spent some time in discussing the work of those who had fought to establish the idea that woman was an individual, counterpart, but not subject, to the male being. With regard to the future, the speaker thought that one of the most obvious tendencies was for the disappearance of the family as we knew it. That was actualy happening in America and Russia. Russia had accepted the idea of complete equality for women with men and they worked side by side.