SIR,—I am amazed to read (Spectator. June 15) a review
by Virginia Graham of Women in Antiquity by Charles Seltman.
The review seems to me to be a complete distortion of historical fact and balance. Take this: . . up to the Christian era . . . women were' considered equal . . . to men. Mr. Seltman presents a mouth4atering panorama of women untrammelled by social restric- tions . . . `Al married, with extra-marital associations taken as a matter of course. lit Sparta, for instance, a man would lend his wife to another man . so that neither adultery, bastardy, divorce nor prostitution were words to worry over. They simply did not This is no historical description of either the ancient or the mediaeval world. Adultery, bastardy, divorce, prostitution were all there, so were dreadful revenges, sexual jealousies, and inhuman tortures. What was the fate of women captives in war, or under slavery or sold for debt or fallen into a poverty that yearned for food, or as inhabitants of a city given over to rape and sack? What were the effects of plague, disease, insanitation, filth, upon the limbs, sight, skin and beauty of men, women and children? Your reviewer gives no hint of these things but sums it all up in these words: 'Intelligent, athletic, beauti- ful, and profoundly innocent—what magnifi- cent human beings were our ancestors!'
How strangely incomprehensible it is, too, that your reviewer should single out the eighteenth century as 'the enlightened eighteenth century'! It was then that housing for so many was in dark cellars, damp and disease-infected, wages below subsistence level, punishments ferocious, standards of life brutal, government unrepresentative, infants and chil- dren set to hard labour. All through, your reviewer tries to blame Christianity and especially St. Paul, whereas, in fact, the status of women and the freedom and protection of the individual advanced under Christian influence.—Yours faithfully, A. EARLE
Canon of York Wansford Vicarage, priffield, E. Yorks
Previous page
