Artemis: The Early Struggles of Feminism
BY
DORA RUSSELL
An excerpt from
HYPATIA, OR WOMAN AND KNOWLEDGE
1925
Introduction
Artemis, a central figure in ancient Greek mythology, holds a profound significance as a powerful female deity. Revered as the goddess of the wilderness, the hunt, chastity, childbirth, and protector of young women and animals, she embodies the strength, resilience, and grace inherent in the feminine spirit. And as the daughter of Zeus, the king of the gods, and Leto, a Titaness, she stands as a testament to the divine power of womanhood.
Depicted as a youthful and vigorous huntress, Artemis roams through forests and mountains, armed with a bow and arrow, accompanied by her loyal nymphs and hunting dogs. Her presence in the wild symbolizes the untamed essence of nature, a realm where she reigns supreme, guiding and protecting all living beings. Artemis's prowess as a huntress reflects not only her exceptional skill but also her intimate connection to the rhythms of the natural world, where she thrives as a beacon of strength and independence.
Beyond her role as a huntress, she is revered as a patroness of young maidens, overseeing their journey from girlhood to womanhood. In this capacity, she serves as a source of inspiration and empowerment, offering guidance, protection, and support to those who seek her aid. Despite her association with chastity and virginity, she is far from aloof; she embodies the nurturing and protective instincts of motherhood, fiercely guarding her followers against harm and adversity.
Her significance as a female figure extends beyond her mortal and divine realms, resonating with women throughout history as a symbol of liberation, autonomy, and the inherent strength of femininity. Her myths and legends are a testament to the enduring power of women, portraying her as a fearless leader, a compassionate guardian, and a relentless protector of all who call upon her name. In Artemis, we find not only a goddess of the wild but also a timeless embodiment of the eternal feminine, inspiring awe, reverence, and admiration for generations to come.
Artemis: The Early Struggles of Feminism
When the feminist struggle began during the last century, ignorance and beauty were the two qualities most admired in women. It is necessary to remind our masculine critics what was the soil from which the feminist movement sprang and what the current morality which influenced its direction. It was customary in those days to make fun of old or ugly women and to scorn those who showed any signs of intelligence. A man chose a young, beautiful, and blushing creature for his bride, and transformed her by one year of marriage and one childbirth into a gentle and submissive matron. Ugly or intelligent women, for the most part, paid a heavy price. Not only were they rejected in youth, and starved of all their natural joys, but as “old maids” they were the object of general scorn and derision. Small wonder that women adopted artificial aids to beauty and artificial hindrances to their native intelligence. Strongest of all the taboos laid by masculine custom and religion on feminine minds was that regarding sex-knowledge. Their purity was to be preserved only by ignorance, and even as matrons and mothers it was scarcely decent for them to refer to any of the physical changes of their bodies. It is impossible to over-estimate the strength of this tradition, or the harm which has been worked by it to the cause of women.
The feminists were, and are still, howled down by men on the pretence that they invented chastity and scorn of bodily values. History disproves such a ridiculous assertion. The early feminists were what history and tradition made them, and could not at the time of their rebellion have been otherwise. The origin of the stupid ideal of womanhood against which men as well as women to-day are still fighting was the asceticism of the Christian religion; and, unless St. Paul was a woman in disguise, I fail to see how woman is to be blamed for a conception of her place and duty from which she has suffered more than anybody else. Before the conversion of the West to Christianity, barbarian women of the North enjoyed a certain rough equality with their husbands. They stride through the sagas, these fierce women, brides of heroes, glad to reward the warrior with their favours, quick to avenge an insult or a wrong. They had no need to stoop to cajolery. Savage and untamed, they were the fit and equal mates of savage men.
Then came the monks, and the white wimples and courtly dresses and chivalry, chants and cathedrals, and meek and reverent casting up and casting down of eyes. The savage breast that had swelled and throbbed untrammelled in love or anger learnt to flutter and to sigh. Quenched were the fires of Brunhilde, her sunlit rock deserted. Agnes and Mary, tamed and pious, sat cooing in the shade. But for meekness and maternity, the early days of asceticism might have seen a crusade to destroy that temptress—woman. Barely allowed a soul, she slipped through a life of oblivion, praying that it might be a pretty crown with which Heaven would reward her patience and submission at the last. Then came the Puritans and denied her even that, substituting ugliness in this life as well as the negation of body, and a heaven of people in starched nightshirts, rendered oblivious to the horrid spectacle of their figures by the still more horrid chanting of their nasal psalms.
A breath of rationalism—brief, soon choked, a breath of “nature”—and so to crinolines, pantalettes, and a life still lived in terror of hell-fire, terror of parents, dread of husband, horror of the least breath of adverse public opinion. Anyone who reads the Fairchild Family must marvel that from such nerve-destroying parental tyranny and the intolerable weight of prejudice and religious superstition the nineteenth-century woman ever found the courage to rebel.
Was it astonishing that the revolt had in it something frenzied and ascetic—that it seemed to express the anger of the spinster thwarted and despised in the current schemes of values? I do not think the pioneers were so much Puritan as votaries, hanging the tablet of each achievement in the temple of Athene or of Artemis, pressing on, breathless, swift of foot, sure of aim, in dread of the fate of Atalanta whom the Golden Apples lured to destruction and the marital embrace. “Chaste as the icicle, that hangs on Dian’s temple.” They had need to be, perhaps, who, in an atmosphere of swoons and ringlets, won for us schools and colleges, free limbs, health and the open air; unlocked for us the classics, science, medicine, the history of our world; drew us from our paltry, ladylike accomplishments; wrote upon our school-books: “Knowledge is now no more a fountain sealed,” and flung wide the gate into the world.
They, these pioneers, childless, unwed, created and bore thousands of women, made them anew, body and soul, for lives of mental and physical activity unknown in the past to any but the very exceptional few. Just like the new learning of the Renaissance to men’s minds in Europe was the opening of high school and university to the feminine mind of to-day. Thousands of women of the last generation and this, who would otherwise have passed their existence in genteel poverty and vacancy of mind, have found their happiness in teaching, in medicine, or in some other profession. Thousands of mothers have watched with delight the unfolding of their children’s minds, and enjoyed co-operating over “lessons” and arguing politics with the adolescent.
We, who in a sense are the children of the feminist pioneers, whose thoughts embrace the universe, whose lives are one long round of mental and physical delight, at times intense to ecstasy—we at least will pay our tribute to those who lit the sacred fires, before we take up pen and paper to criticize.
When one reads the lamentations of would-be intelligent men about the iniquities of modern young people, chiefly those of the female sex, one cannot but laugh at their method of approach. It would seem according to them that our modern women just happened like that: no one had a part in forming their bodies or in training their minds. In so far as these people consider education or early training at all, it is to blaspheme at the sex-hating feminists who have trained modern women to dispense with their birth-right—the love of man. How this squares with the wail of the Bishops against the sexual immorality of the younger generation we will leave Jason or the eloquent author of Lysistrata to decide. Our business is not to condemn woman, past or present, but to chronicle faithfully the forces that have made her, and the aspirations which will mould her future. For she, and she alone, shall be the arbiter of her fate, and neither man nor creed stand between her and the realization of her ideals. Men have blasphemed woman and life too long, and it will not be until the issues are clearer, the battle more advanced, that the basis for co-operation between man and woman can be finally established. There is too much evidence at present that man, professing friendship and concern, is still ready to snatch from us what little we have won.
To those elderly gentlemen, then, who watch with horror the upper- and middle-class woman perpetrating similar follies to those of upper- and middle-class men, the first question we would put is: “What education did they give their daughters, and what was taught to their mothers before them? What were the current ideas about feminine destiny which encircled them in their impressionable years?” Many would answer, still far too many, that their daughters were given the education of a gentlewoman and fitted to become the wives of gentlemen. This we know of old. The lady eats, drinks, digests, wears clothes, tinkles the piano, dances, sings, handles a golf-club, submits to sex, bears a child without the smallest notion of anatomy, turns from the whole thing disgusted, and probably bears no more. Whose fault? Not hers. They do not teach mothercraft or physiology in finishing schools for gentlemen’s daughters, and it is no part of the duty of gentlemen’s wives to reproduce their kind. Perhaps there is comfort in that.
A great many parents, however, would tell us that they gave their daughters a good and liberal education in such schools as were available, good ordinary boarding- and day-schools which have sprung up during the last fifty years in response to the feminist propaganda. Then we have the working woman, who has shared with her brothers in what education is permitted to trickle through the elementary schools. It must not be forgotten that this ends at fourteen.
Is there something wrong with this education of women, and if so, what? I think we must judge that there is. The reason lies in the sense of inferiority bred in women by so much oppression, and the natural result that their chief aim as they struggled upwards was to prove that in all respects they were just as good as men. The second aim was to prove that they could jolly well do without them. In exactly the same way the worker, rising in the social scale, seeks to prove himself a bourgeois. Both efforts are mistaken. Each class and sex has that to give to the common stock of achievement, knowledge, thought, which it alone can give, and robs itself and the community by inferior imitation. The feminist movement, like one dissentient voice in an excited public meeting, was querulous, hysterical, uncertain of itself. It dared not cry out that women had bodies. Its one hope of success was to prove that women had minds. And it was right in this, that the primary fact about men and women is not that they are two sexes apart, but that they are human beings and as such should share all knowledge in the world and make it the basis of their partnership and the rearing of their children.
Many an ardent feminist spinster in a girls’ secondary school has sighed over the state of public opinion which forced her to drive her girls’ minds along channels for which they were not always suited, that they might do well at college and show that women could surpass the men. Many another, well drilled by a mother or tradition in ideals of feminine virtue, gloried in the sexless learned women she was creating and in the thought that one day they would force those savage, lustful men to conform to the ideals which they set up for women. Why blame her? Lay the blame where it is due. It will be but a just retribution for that lustful male and his ideal of feminine virtue if one day, in a world full of prohibitions, he finds himself forced to kneel before the Mumbo-Jumbo[1] he himself built up to terrify his wives and daughters to submission.
Feminist ideals of education, then, had the defect that they did in a certain measure deny sex, or ignore it. The feminists had a pathetic hope that by so doing they would convince the dominant male that a woman might be learned and yet remain a lady. But I wish to emphasize the fact that this feature has belonged to all education of women, especially of ladies, from time immemorial, and it is, therefore, unbecoming in a male, whether young or old, to use this as a cause for reproach to our sex. We went as far as we dared with an eye to male hostility. Young feminists to-day would be the first to admit that it would probably have paid us to go further. There never has been a period when education has trained women for the possibility of motherhood, and it is time that such training was begun. There never was a period when the education of women was completely honest, and it is time that that training was begun. What knowledge is of more vital importance to women than anatomy and physiology? They were allowed it if they were to be doctors, and then only with caution. Turning casually the pages of a book on anatomy in a girls’ secondary school library, I found the diagrams connected with sex and maternity carefully stuck fast. What is more calculated to inspire prying and prurience? We have no right to blame young women for shirking marriage, sex, or motherhood, or for moulding their figures on boyish lines, when we carefully treat them as boys and withhold from them as long as we can all knowledge of the difference of their physique and possibly of their destiny. I have no wish to go back on the great achievements of feminism, or to drive women from the professions in which they have a just right to be employed. I want to break down the last barriers. Artemis is slim and bold; Athene is stately. We have done well to worship at their shrines.
But the call of Demeter the Fruitful is insistent. If we would add to the achievements of those who came before us, let us freely admit that we have but been playing mock modesty, and that to us the body is no mere box to hold the mind, but a temple of delight and ecstasy: a temple to hold the future if we will. To me the important task of modern feminism is to accept and proclaim sex; to bury for ever the lie that has too long corrupted our society—the lie that the body is a hindrance to the mind, and sex a necessary evil to be endured for the perpetuation of our race. To understand sex—to bring to it dignity and beauty and knowledge born of science, in place of brute instinct and squalor—that is the bridge that will span the breach between Jason and Medea.
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[1] Mumbo-Jumbo was an idol set up by the men in Nigeria to terrify erring women. The men, but not the women, knew him to be a fake.