The Second Sex (22 page)

In all these countries, one of the consequences of the “honest wife’s” servitude to the family is prostitution. Hypocritically kept on society’s fringes, prostitutes fill a highly important role. Christianity pours scorn on them but accepts them as a necessary evil. “Getting rid of the prostitutes,” said Saint Augustine, “will trouble society by dissoluteness.” Later, Saint
Thomas—or at least the theologian that signed his name to Book IV of
De regimine principium
—asserted: “Remove public women from society and debauchery will disrupt it by disorder of all kinds. Prostitutes are to a city what a cesspool is to a palace: get rid of the cesspool and the palace will become an unsavory and loathsome place.” In the early Middle Ages, moral license was such that women of pleasure were hardly necessary; but when the bourgeois family became institutionalized and monogamy rigorous, man obviously had to go outside the home for his pleasure.

In vain did one of Charlemagne’s capitularies vigorously forbid it, in vain did Saint Louis order prostitutes to be chased out of the city in 1254 and brothels to be destroyed in 1269: in the town of Damietta, Joinville tells us, prostitutes’ tents were adjacent to the king’s. Later, attempts by Charles IX of France and Marie-Thérèse of Austria in the eighteenth century also failed. The organization of society made prostitution necessary. “Prostitutes,” Schopenhauer would pompously say later, “are human sacrifices on the altar of monogamy.” And Lecky, a historian of European morality, expressed the same idea: “Supreme type of vice, prostitutes are the most active guardians of virtue.” Their situation and the Jews’ were often rightly compared:
¹
usury and money lending were forbidden by the Church exactly as extra-conjugal sex was; but society can no more do without financial speculators than free love, so these functions fell to the damned castes: they were relegated to ghettos or reserved neighborhoods. In Paris, loose women worked in pens where they arrived in the morning and left after the curfew had tolled; they lived on special streets and did not have the right to stray, and in most other cities brothels were outside town walls. Like Jews, they had to wear distinctive signs on their clothes. In France the most common one was a specific-colored aglet hung on the shoulder; silk, fur, and honest women’s apparel were often prohibited. They were
by law
taxed with infamy, had no recourse whatsoever to the police and the courts, and could be thrown out of their lodgings on a neighbor’s simple claim. For most of them, life was difficult and wretched. Some were closed up in public houses. Antoine de Lalaing, a French traveler, left a description of a Spanish establishment in Valencia in the late fifteenth century. “The place,” he said, was

The author even marvels at such effective policing. Many prostitutes lived freely; some of them earned their living well. As in the period of the courtesans, high gallantry provided more possibilities for feminine individualism than the life of an “honest woman.”

A condition unique to France is that of the unmarried woman; legal independence is in stark and shocking contrast to the wife’s servitude; she is an oddity and so customs hasten to withdraw everything law grants her; she has total civil capacity: but those laws are abstract and empty; she has no economic autonomy, no social dignity, and generally the spinster remains hidden in the shadow of the paternal family or finds others like her behind convent walls: there she knows no other form of freedom but disobedience and sin—just as decadent Roman women were emancipated only by vice. Negativity continues to be women’s lot as long as their emancipation remains negative.

In such conditions it is clear how rare it was for a wife to act or merely to make her presence felt: among the working classes, economic oppression cancels out sexual inequality; but it deprives the individual of opportunities; among the nobility and bourgeoisie, the wife is abused because of her sex; she has a parasitic existence; she is poorly educated; she needs exceptional
circumstances if she is to envisage and carry out any concrete project. Queens and regents have that rare good fortune: their sovereignty exalts them above their sex; French Salic law denies women the right of access to the throne; but they sometimes play a great role beside their husbands or after their deaths: for example, Saint Clotilda, Saint Radegunda, and Blanche of Castile. Convent life makes woman independent of man: some abbesses wield great power; Héloïse gained fame as an abbess as much as a lover. In the mystical, thus autonomous, relation that binds them to God, feminine souls draw their inspiration and force from a virile soul; and the respect society grants them enables them to undertake difficult projects. Joan of Arc’s adventure is something of a miracle: and it is, moreover, a very brief adventure. But Saint Catherine of Siena’s story is meaningful; she creates a great reputation in Sienna for charitable activity and for the visions that testify to her intense inner life within a very normal existence; she thus acquires the necessary authority for success generally lacking in women; her influence is invoked to hearten those condemned to death, to bring back to the fold those who are lost, to appease quarrels between families and towns. She is supported by the community that recognizes itself in her, which is how she is able to fulfill her pacifying mission, preaching submission to the pope from city to city, carrying on a vast correspondence with bishops and sovereigns, and finally chosen by Florence as ambassador to go and find the pope in Avignon. Queens, by divine right, and saints, by their shining virtues, are assured of support in the society that allows them to be men’s equal. Of others, a silent modesty is required. The success of a Christine de Pizan is due to exceptional luck: even so, she had to be widowed and burdened with children for her to decide to earn her living by her pen.

Altogether, men’s opinion in the Middle Ages is not favorable to women. Courtly poets did exalt love; many codes of courtly love appear, such as André le Chapelain’s poem and the famous
Roman de la Rose
, in which Guillaume de Lorris encourages young men to devote themselves to the service of ladies. But against this troubadour-inspired literature are pitted bourgeois-inspired writings that cruelly attack women: fabliaux, farces, and plays criticize women for their laziness, coquetry, and lust. Their worst enemies are the clergy. They incriminate marriage. The Church made it a sacrament and yet prohibited it for the Christian elite: this is the source of the contradiction of the
querelle des femmes
.
^*
It is denounced with singular
vigor in
The Lamentations of Matheolus
, famous in its time, published fifteen years after the first part of the
Roman de la Rose
, and translated into French one hundred years later. Matthew lost his “clergy” by taking a wife; he cursed his marriage, cursed women and marriage in general. Why did God create woman if there is this incompatibility between marriage and clergy? Peace cannot exist in marriage: it had to be the devil’s work; or else God did not know what he was doing. Matthew hopes that woman will not rise on Judgment Day. But God responds to him that marriage is a purgatory thanks to which heaven is reached; and carried to the heavens in a dream, Matthew sees a legion of husbands welcoming him to the shouts of “Here, here the true martyr!” Jean de Meung, another cleric, is similarly inspired; he enjoins young men to get out from under the yoke of women; first he attacks love:

He attacks marriage that reduces man to slavery, that dooms him to be cuckolded; and he directs a violent diatribe against woman. In return, woman’s champions strive to demonstrate her superiority. Here are some of the arguments apologists for the weaker sex drew on until the seventeenth century:

To which their opponents replied that if Christ first appeared to women, it is because he knew they were talkative, and he was in a hurry to make his resurrection known.

The quarrel continues throughout the fifteenth century. The author of
The Fifteen Joys of Marriage
indulgently describes the misfortunes of poor husbands. Eustache Deschamps writes an interminable poem on the same theme. It is here that the “quarrel of the
Roman de la Rose
” begins. This is the first time a woman takes up her pen to defend her sex: Christine de Pizan attacks the clerics energetically in
The Epistle to the God of Love
. The clerics rise up immediately to defend Jean de Meung; but Gerson, chancellor of the University of Paris, takes Christine’s side; he writes his treatise in French to reach a wide public. Martin Le Franc throws the indigestible
Ladies’ Chaperon
—still being read two hundred years later—onto the battlefield.
^*
And Christine intervenes once again. Her main demand is for women’s right to education: “If the custom were to put little girls in school and they were normally taught sciences like the boys, they would learn as perfectly and would understand the subtleties of all the arts and sciences as they do.”

In truth this dispute concerns women only indirectly. No one dreams of demanding a social role for them other than what they are assigned. It is more a question of comparing the life of the cleric to the state of marriage; it is a masculine problem brought up by the Church’s ambiguous attitude to marriage. Luther settles this conflict by rejecting the celibacy of priests. Woman’s condition is not influenced by this literary war. While railing against society as it is, the satire of farces and fabliaux does not claim to change it: it mocks women but does not plot against them. Courtly poetry glorifies femininity: but such a cult does not in any way imply the assimilation of the sexes. The
querelle
is a secondary phenomenon in which society’s attitude is reflected but which does not modify it.

It has already been said that the wife’s legal status remained practically unchanged from the early fifteenth century to the nineteenth century; but in the privileged classes her concrete condition does change. The Italian Renaissance is a period of individualism propitious to the burgeoning of strong personalities, regardless of sex. There were some women at that time who were powerful sovereigns, like Jean of Aragon, Joan of Naples, and Isabella d’Este; others were adventurer condottieri who took up arms like men: thus Girolamo Riario’s wife fought for Forli’s freedom; Hippolyta Fioramenti commanded the Duke of Milan’s troops and during the siege of Pavia led a company of noblewomen to the ramparts. To defend their city
against Montluc, Sienese women marshaled three thousand female troops commanded by women. Other Italian women became famous thanks to their culture or talents: for example, Isotta Nogarola, Veronica Gambara, Gaspara Stampa, Vittoria Colonna, who was Michelangelo’s friend, and especially Lucrezia Tornabuoni, mother of Lorenzo and Giuliano de’ Medici, who wrote, among other things, hymns and a life of Saint John the Baptist and the Virgin. A majority of these distinguished women were courtesans; joining free moral behavior with freethinking, ensuring their economic autonomy through their profession, many were treated by men with deferential admiration; they protected the arts and were interested in literature and philosophy, and they themselves often wrote or painted: Isabella da Luna, Caterina di San Celso, and Imperia, who was a poet and musician, took up the tradition of Aspasia and Phryne. For many of them, though, freedom still takes the form of license: the orgies and crimes of these great Italian ladies and courtesans remain legendary.