Aspasia: The Younger Feminists
BY
DORA RUSSELL
An excerpt from
HYPATIA, OR WOMAN AND KNOWLEDGE
1925
Introduction
Aspasia, a prominent figure in ancient Greece, occupies a unique place in history as one of the most influential and enigmatic women of her time. Born around 470 BCE in the city-state of Miletus, Aspasia rose to prominence in Athens during its Golden Age, a period marked by significant cultural, intellectual, and artistic achievements.
Little is known about Aspasia's early life, but she likely received an education uncommon for women of her time. She possessed intelligence, wit, and charm, qualities that would later captivate some of the most prominent thinkers and statesmen of ancient Greece.
Aspasia's greatest claim to fame is her relationship with Pericles, the influential Athenian statesman and general. Despite being a foreigner and a woman in a society dominated by men, Aspasia's intelligence and charisma won her entry into the highest echelons of Athenian society. She became Pericles' companion and confidante, and their relationship was widely regarded as one of mutual respect and affection.
Aspasia's home in Athens became a gathering place for intellectuals, philosophers, and politicians, where she hosted lively discussions on a wide range of topics. Among her guests were renowned figures such as Socrates, Plato, and Xenophon, who held her in high esteem and valued her intellect.
Despite her influential position, Aspasia faced criticism and scandal due to her status as a foreigner and a woman involved in politics and public life. She was often the target of gossip and slander, with some accusing her of wielding undue influence over Pericles and corrupting Athenian society. Nonetheless, Pericles remained fiercely loyal to Aspasia, defending her reputation and treating her as an equal partner.
Aspasia's influence extended beyond her personal relationships. She was known for her eloquence and rhetorical skills, which she used to advise Pericles and other statesmen on matters of statecraft and diplomacy. Her wisdom and counsel were highly valued, and she played a significant role in shaping Athenian politics and policy during a critical period in its history.
Despite her significant contributions to Athenian society, Aspasia's legacy has been overshadowed by the patriarchal biases of ancient historians, who often portrayed her as a seductress or a corrupting influence. Nevertheless, her story serves as a reminder of the important role that women have played throughout history, even in male-dominated societies, and her enduring influence on the intellectual and cultural life of ancient Greece cannot be denied. Aspasia remains a symbol of intelligence, resilience, and female empowerment, whose legacy continues to inspire generations.
Aspasia: The Younger Feminists
While we have admitted that the first aim of the feminist movement was to open to women the stores of learning, to develop their minds and to teach them to think, and that no attempt was made to handle the problem of sex, it is not quite fair to say that even early feminism has consistently denied or despised the body. The schools and colleges made it their business to give to women opportunities for physical development, for open-air exercise, swimming, tennis, hockey, lacrosse. The Victorian young woman learnt gradually to be ashamed of her tiny waist and fat hips. She learnt that a healthy appetite[1] as well became a young woman as a young man, gave up her snacks in private and did justice to good meals taken at proper intervals. Quietly, and without mention of the fatal word “sex,” the spinster feminists, by emphasis on health and vigour, built up a generation of young women who were to be frank about other desires besides eating and drinking.
I cannot see what is the matter with our figures. Steel rods and rubber are more modern materials than oak beams and pink plaster. Neither we nor our modern lovers admire the opulent Venuses, indolent and rose-embowered, who adorned the ceilings of old-fashioned ballrooms. They were stupid, self-indulgent creatures, not even good mothers, whatever the sentimental elderly gentlemen in their top-hats and whiskers may have to say. What is a good mother we will discuss in a later chapter, but for the present it is enough to say that more dangerous childbirths are due to narrow pelves caused by rickets than to hips contracted by the corsets of vanity. Let the doctors turn socialist and feed the poor, instead of spending their time lamenting the inadequacy for childbirth of a few fashionable women who don’t very much matter. Middle- and upper-class girls nowadays—and most working-class girls, too—go corsetless up to maturity. They do gymnastic exercises, and dances that give suppleness to the body. They swim and they play out of doors. Those who are rich enough to be adequately fed are graceful and active as kittens, and as healthy. By the time adolescence brings, as it always does, a few years of intensive sex-vanity, the corset can do very little harm. The muscular little body does not tolerate it stiff, or very tight, and the bones are well grown. The mystery of feminine dress helps the appearance of slimness. There are few clothes, and no lumpy gathers. Beneath that boyish outline are firm little breasts, clean arching hips, abdominal curves and thighs, lovely as anything the Venus of Milo has to show.
Artemis fashioned this modern woman. That is admitted. Has Artemis her vows?
I’m afraid for once we have to admit that the Bishops are right. In spite of everything the Church can do, in spite of an education committed, so far as the authorities can control it, to sour or religious spinsters, the modern young woman is not very moral. It is a pathetic picture which the author of Lysistrata has drawn for us, of sexless beings going to and fro in tube and bus-like shuttles in a machine to dull work robbed of all joy, earning their livelihood and turning their backs on man in response to feminist propaganda. Man, the enemy—to be defeated in his own professions, to be repelled in every onslaught upon feminine virtue: I wonder? I would hazard a guess that, relatively to the population, fewer women retain their virginity till death than in the Victorian period or the Middle Ages. In all probability it is sex, not sexlessness, which makes women cling so tenaciously to the right to earn their living. Marriage brings a jealous intolerant husband, children, prying and impertinent neighbours—degraded and humiliating slavery for the vast majority of women. Thirty shillings a week and typing or working in a shop, a still tongue, or a toss of the head and the assertion that independence is the best; and, in the background a lover with whom somehow evenings are spent—a lover who has no claim and cannot tyrannize. A lover, perhaps, who pleads to become a husband, but has no chance unless his income is good or secure. Marriage would change him: Aspasia knows it. Marriage would also rob her of that thirty shillings a week, which alone stands between her and the abyss of primeval submission. Or else Aspasia teaches in a school or college. She is a skilled teacher, devoted to her work and pupils. She may be a Research Fellow in some difficult branch of learning which is to her the very breath of life. She may be a doctor in the public service, tending and advising mothers and children. She is lovely, vital, creative. Man approaches. There are holidays of delight and secret dread of the scandal which will end the work Aspasia loves—or marriage and the certainty of that end at once. “Choose,” say the Bishops and the school-managers (often the same thing): “Choose,” say the public authorities who support the Church and rather wish women would get out of this indelicate profession of surgery and medicine; “choose between love and duty to the male and service to the community.” This is not feminism—feminists have fought it persistently—it is medieval Christianity. It presents a choice between physical pleasure and service to the mind or soul; it upholds the time-honoured theory that renunciation of the world, the flesh, and the devil is the path to duty and salvation. I am fully aware of all the arguments about economic pressure, the primary right of married men to work, the awful situation of their dependent children and their wives. None of this is fundamental, and the jealous male knows it. “Divide to conquer” is the principle in dealing with trade unions; it works equally well in the feminist struggle. Persuade the single women that the married woman is an unfair competitor,[2] terrify them so far as you can into believing that to succumb to sex is something unbecoming and disgraceful and punishable with misery everlasting, whether in marriage or outside of it, and you can prevent the women combining against you.
But not if Aspasia will speak. If she but would, and put an end to this lie for ever. She could tell us how, especially during the years of war, young women took the last step towards feminine emancipation by admitting to themselves and their lovers the mutual nature of sex-love between man and woman. It sounds a platitude, but is, in fact, a revolution. Strange to say, the nearness of death from enemy bombs or enemy fire did not intensify the thought of holiness and heaven. It made the little footrules to measure morality look absurd; it mocked the emptiness of female virtue. While poverty and parents forbade the certainty of marriage, with nothing but instability and death around them, our modern Aspasias took the love of man and gave the love of woman, and found this union, free and full on either side, the most priceless gift the immortal gods can bestow. There is nothing new in this, the moralist will say—it is just wickedness. Yes, there is this that is new: that, though these younger women may be driven from fear of starvation to the outward acceptance of old codes and conventions, inwardly they know they have done no wrong and will not admit a conviction of sin. Sex, even without children and without marriage, is to them a thing of dignity, beauty, and delight. All Puritans—and most males so long as they can remember—have tried to persuade women that their part in sex is pregnancy and childbirth, and not momentary delight. As well tell a man his part is the hunting and skinning of animals for food and clothing. To enjoy and admit we enjoy, without terror or regret, is an achievement in honesty. We will go further and say that polygamy, proffered by the male as a solution to our sexless lives, is no solution at all when we are polyandrous. It is useless to go on pretending, as both sexes do, about this question. The plain truth is that there are as many types of lover among women of all classes as among men, and that nothing but honesty and freedom will make instinctive satisfaction possible for all. Grant each man and woman the right to seek his or her own solution without fear of public censure. Moral questions of this kind cannot be decided by some abstract rule. It would not be wrong for a man to have six wives, provided he and they all found mutual happiness in that arrangement; nor for a woman to have six husbands and a child by each, if she and they found such a life satisfactory. The wrong lies in rules that are barriers between human beings who would otherwise reach a fuller and more intense understanding of one another. And any man or woman of intelligence and vitality can testify that to have known each other as lovers is to have completed mental and spiritual, as well as physical, understanding, and to have permanently enriched each other’s lives, capacities, energies, imaginations. There is no need to make these divisions into mind and body. There is no difference. A way of walking, laughter, thoughts spoken or written, gestures of love or anger, colour and light of eyes or hair—these are the human being, man or woman. It is thus that modern individuals think of one another. When we think so, it seems absurd to argue whether or no love between man and woman should stop short of a certain kind of physical expression. It is useless to say that a mental exchange is sufficient. On the contrary, lovers know that it is through sexual understanding they best apprehend the quality of each other’s minds. It is equally futile to argue that woman is cheated of her full rights if children do not result. That is not true.
It is said that modern human beings, by dint of not valuing the body, are physically degenerate and lose the finest ecstasies of love. Their digestions are poor, we are told, their breath foul, their teeth bad. Was love more delightful, then, in the old days when baths were unknown, when “sweet breath” in a woman was so rare as to be sung by poets, and the reek of stale sweat was barely stifled by a strong perfume? John Donne wrote verses to the flea he saw nestling in his lady’s bosom. There is scarcely a fine gentleman to-day who could face the prospect of making love to one of the fine ladies of the past six or seven hundred years in Europe, if she could be presented to him just as she was to her contemporary lovers. It is true that neither vermin, filth, nor squalor—being equal for both—can stay the passion of sex whether now or in the past, but I do not believe in the theory that the rougher our physique the more intense our bodily delights. Health, to be sure, is essential; but health is to be secured in the modern world, not by a return to savagery, but by the use of intelligence. I believe the bodies of young people of to-day to whom fair opportunities have been given are more healthy within and without than they were in past times. And I believe that the disappearance of religious and moral dualism between mind and matter—not by an oppressive victory of either, neither by rational and moral control, nor by abandonment to sensual materialism, but by a better understanding of psychology and physiology based on the discoveries of physical science—is bringing to the whole of life, but especially to sex-love, maternity, the rearing and education of children, joy and rapture and promise surpassing anything known to the purely instinctive life of the past. Of course we are bewildered. Civilization without decay is at last a possibility. Let us have knowledge and patience: blaspheming and violence will ruin all.
It is for modern women and for men who can understand the problem to make an end to secrecy, shame, and starvation where sex is concerned. There has been a good deal of freedom in action, but less boldness in speech, because of the heavy penalties involved. For some women speech is impossible; those who are secure must fight their battle. How old and proper people love a vigorous and god-like young male! How they look askance upon, brow-beat, and bully his equivalent in the opposite sex! Here is a community for ever starving and choking its finest women, stifling their voices in education and public life; then turning and rending the submissive residue for being what years of intimidation have made them. Let them marry, you say, and make a success of that and their children. That would be well enough but for the taboos and disabilities with which marriage is surrounded. Feminism led women away from the home that they might return armed and unsubdued to make marriage tolerable. Women who have been free remember the horror of the approach to marriage: a barrier for most of us to free public activity; a life-long contract only to be broken in disgrace and public disgust; aunts, uncles, social duties that exasperate and are totally unnecessary; the common view that henceforward husband and wife are one and indivisible, and the wife for ever to be burdened with her husband’s duties and affairs; looks of surprise and reproach if we enjoy other male society; constraint in the manner of men formerly our friends; income, if we have any or can still earn, taxed as a part of our husband’s; children, which, had we had them illegitimate, would have been our own but now are our husband’s; worst of all, the looks and smiles from silly women broken in to slavery, congratulating us on having done well and made ourselves secure for life.
Let no one think this is petulant abuse. It is the accumulation of these details, and the pressure of public opinion which gradually destroy the nerve and independent judgment of married women who, in their free state, have been brilliant and remarkable. It is the fact that, by marriage, we conform and place ourselves in a line with millions of others whose view of what we have done is entirely foreign to our own. As a Labour Minister is corrupted by Court dress, so is a free woman by the marriage-contract. Nothing but our desire for children would make us endure it. We, to whom the mutual nature of sex-love is sacred, to whom a partnership involving children is of equal dignity on both sides, to whom the surrender of our whole being in love is a free gift—the highest we can bestow; who would neither bind ourselves nor others where love is non-existent; we must submit to a contract based on rights of property and possession, buying and selling of our bodies; a law whose conception of conjugal wrongs is sin, punishment, and just revenge; and a Church whose utmost concession is to bid us “serve” instead of “obey” our husbands. Build, O Aspasia, a trade union of lovers to conquer the world, and cry aloud that feminism is nowhere so much needed as in the home.
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[1] There may be a biological cause of the alleged smallness of feminine appetite. Watching a raven and his consort with fresh meat, I observed that she obtained only a minute portion beneath the contempt of the male. Can it be that, in the savage state, only those females survived who could exist on the little the male allowed them? Is this a case of sex-linked heredity?
[2] This scheme no longer works, as is evidenced by the attitude of the National Union of Women Teachers this year (1925). Intelligent women are more appreciated than they were, and teachers know they may all want to marry some day.