The Women of the Renaissance; A Study of Feminism (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II THE MARRIED WOMAN " WoMAK, in my judgment, is the stumbling-block in a man's career. To love a woman and yet do anything worth doing is very difficult, and the only way to escape being reduced by love to a life of idleness is to marry." There is nothing new in this reflection, put by Tolstoi into the mouth of one of his characters.1 Such was the theory of the Middle Ages ?fatal love! The new-fledged husband was under no illusion in the matter: he had married to cure himself of love, or rather to have done with it for ever, to turn from woman and towards higher things; he would never have imagined any connection between his marital duties and his soul. First and last, wedlock had no romance for him. Marriage was the worn and dusty highway of materialities. Nor did the expectations of the young girl soar any higher. Shown the simple truth by the solemn personages to whom she owed her upbringing, sedulously guarded against any kind of illusion, she knew all there was to know about her new duties, and in regard to these it was thought peculiarly necessary to arm her against errors and enthusiasms that might bring disappointments in their train. Marriage she had always looked upon as a natural function with excellent precedents, and she had studied its rules, in their rudiments at least, so as to be able to guide her steps intelligently in a career that had necessarily its technical side. This was why Champier the physician compiled expressly for Suzanne de Bourbon?that peerless flower among noble maidens?a little treatise quite foreign in its nature to what is in these days called " literature for young people." Yetit must be confessed that this treatise, frankly physiological as it is, constituted the best imaginable safeguard against being swept away o...