It is generally accepted that Western patriarchy has been much softened by the concepts of courtly and romantic love. While this is certainly true, such influence has also been vastly overestimated. In comparison with the candour of "machismo" or oriental behaviour, one realises how much of a concession traditional chivalrous behaviour represents - a sporting kind of reparation to allow the subordinate female certain means of saving face.
While a palliative to the injustice of woman's social position, chivalry is also a technique for disguising it. One must acknowledge that the chivalrous stance is a game the master group plays in elevating its subject to pedestal level. Historians of courtly love stress the fact that the raptures of the poets had no effect upon the legal or economic standing of women, and very little upon their social status.
As the sociologist Hugo Beigel has observed, both the courtly and the romantic versions of love are "grants" which the male concedes out of his total powers. Both have had the effect of obscuring the patriarchal character of Western culture and m their general tendency to attribute impossible virtues to women, have ended by confining them in a narrow and often remarkably conscribing sphere of behaviour. It was a Victorian habit, for example, to insist the female assume the function of serving as the male's conscience and living the life of goodness he found tedious but felt someone ought to do anyway.
The concept of romantic love affords a means of emotional manipulation which the male is free to exploit, since love is the only circumstance in which the female is ideologically pardoned for sexual activity. And convictions of romantic love are convenient to both parties since this is often the only condition in which the female can overcome the far more powerful conditioning she has received toward sexual inhibition. Romantic love also obscures the realities of female status and the burden of economic dependency.
As to "chivalry," such gallant gesture as still resides in the middle classes has degenerated to a tired ritualism, which scarcely serves to mask the status situation of the present. Within patriarchy one must often deal with contradictions which ale simply a matter of class style. David Riesman has noted that as the working class has been assimilated into the middle class, so have its sexual mores and attitudes. The fairly blatant male chauvinism which was once a province of the lower class or immigrant male has been absorbed and taken on a certain glamour through a number of contemporary figures, who have made it, and a certain number of other working-class male attitudes, part of a new, and at the moment, fashionable life style.
So influential is this working class ideal of brute virility or more accurately, a literary and therefore middle-class version of it become in our time that it may replace more discreet and "gentlemanly" attitudes of the past. One of the chief effects of class within patriarchy is to set one woman against another, in the past creating a lively antagonism between whore and matron, and in the present between career woman and housewife.
One envies the other her "security" and prestige, while the envied yearns beyond the confines of respectability for what she takes to be the other's freedom, adventure, and contact with the great world. Through the multiple advantages of the double standard, the male participates in both worlds, empowered by his superior social and economic resources to play the estranged women against each other as rivals.
One might also recognise subsidiary status categories among women: Perhaps, in the final analysis, it is possible to argue that women tend to transcend the usual class stratifications in patriarchy, for whatever the class of her birth and education, the female has fewer permanent class association than does the male. Economic dependency renders her affiliations with any class a tangential, vicarious, and temporary matter. Aristotle observed that the only slave to whom a commoner might lay claim was his woman, and the service of an unpaid domestic still provides working-class males with a "cushion" against the buffets of the class system which incidentally provides them with some of the psychic luxuries of the leisure class.
Thrown upon their own resources, few women rise above working class in personal prestige and economic power, and women as a group do not enjoy many of the interests and benefits any class may offer its male members. Women have therefore less of an investment in the class system. But it is important to understand that as with any group whose existence is parasitic to its rulers, women are a dependency class who live on surplus And their marginal life frequently renders them conservative, for like all persons in their situation slaves are a classic example here they identify their own survival with the prosperity of those who feed them.
The hope of seeking liberating radical solutions of their own seems too remote for the majority to dare contemplate and remains so until consciousness on the subject is raised. As race is emerging as one of the final variables in sexual politics, it is pertinent, especially in a discussion of modern literature, to devote a few words to it as well. Traditionally, the white male has been accustomed to concede the female of his own race, in her capacity as "his woman" a higher status than that ascribed to the black male. Yet as white racist ideology is exposed and begins to erode, racism's older protective attitudes toward white women also begin to give way.
And the priorities of maintaining male supremacy might outweigh even those of white supremacy; sexism may be more endemic in our own society than racism. For example, one notes in authors whom we would now term overtly racist, such as D. Lawrence - whose contempt for what he so often designates as inferior breeds is unabashed - instances where the lower-caste male is brought on to master or humiliate the white man's own insubordinate mate.
Needless to say, the female of the non-white races does not figure in such tales save as an exemplum of "true" womanhood's servility, worthy of imitation by other less carefully instructed females. Contemporary white sociology often operates under a similar patriarchal bias when its rhetoric inclines toward the assertion that the "matriarchal" e. Whatever the facts of the matter may be, it can also be suggested that analysis of this kind presupposes patriarchal values without questioning them, and tends to obscure both the true character of and the responsibility for racist injustice toward black humanity of both sexes.
One of the most efficient branches of patriarchal government lies in the agency of its economic hold over its female subjects. In traditional patriarchy, women, as non-persons without legal standing were permitted no actual economic existence as they could neither own nor earn in their own right. Since women have always worked in patriarchal societies, often at the most routine or strenuous tasks, what is at issue here is not labor but economic reward.
In modern reformed patriarchal societies, women have certain economic rights, yet the "woman's work" in which some two thirds of the female population in most developed countries are engaged is work that is not paid for. In a money economy where autonomy and prestige depend upon currency, this is a fact of great importance. In general, the position of women in patriarchy is a continuous function of their economic dependence. Just as their social position is vicarious and achieved often on a temporary or marginal basis though males, their relation to the economy is also typically vicarious or tangential.
Of that third of women who are employed, their average wages represent only half of the average income enjoyed by men. These are the U. Department of Labor statistics for average year-round income: The disparity is made somewhat more remarkable because the educational level of women is generally higher than that of men in comparable income brackets. Further, the kinds of employment open to women in modern patriarchies are, with few exceptions, menial, ill paid and without status.
In modern capitalist countries women also function as a reserve labor force, enlisted in times of war and expansion and discharged in times of peace and recession. In this role American women have replaced immigrant labor and now compete with the racial minorities.
In socialist countries the female labor force is generally in the lower ranks as well, despite a high incidence of women in certain professions such as medicine. Since woman's independence in economic life is viewed with distrust, prescriptive agencies of all kinds religion, psychology, advertising, etc. The toil of working class women is more readily accepted as "need," if not always by the working-class itself, at least by the middle-class. And to be sure, it serves the purpose of making available cheap labor in factory and lower-grade service and clerical positions.
Its wages and tasks are so unremunerative that, unlike more prestigious employment for women, it fails to threaten patriarchy financially or psychologically. Women who are employed have two jobs since the burden of domestic service and child care is unrelieved either by day care or other social agencies, or by the cooperation of husbands. The invention of labor-saving devices has had no appreciable effect on the duration, even if it has affected the quality of their drudgery. Discrimination in matters of hiring, maternity, wages and hours is very great. In terms of industry and production, the situation of women is in many ways comparable both to colonial and to pre-industrial peoples.
Although they achieved their first economic autonomy in the industrial revolution and now constitute a large and underpaid factory population, women do not participate directly in technology or in production. What they customarily produce domestic and personal service has no market value and is, as it were, pre-capital. Nor, where they do participate in production of commodities through employment, do they own or control or even comprehend the process in which they participate. An example might make this clearer: Yet the heavy industries which roll its steel and produce the dies for its parts are in male hands.
The same is true of the typewriter, the auto, etc. Now, while knowledge is fragmented even among the male population, collectively they could reconstruct any technological device. But in the absence of males, women's distance from technology today is sufficiently great that it is doubtful that they could replace or repair such machines on any significant scale. Woman's distance from higher technology is even greater: If knowledge is power, power is also knowledge, and a large factor in their subordinate position is the fairly systematic ignorance patriarchy imposes upon women. Since education and economy are so closely related in the advanced nations, it is significant that the general level and style of higher education for women, particularly in their many remaining segregated institutions, is closer to that of Renaissance humanism than to the skills of mid-twentieth-century scientific and technological society.
Traditionally patriarchy permitted occasional minimal literacy to women while higher education was closed to them. While modern patriarchies have, fairly recently, opened all educational levels to women, the kind and quality of education is not the same for each sex. This difference is of course apparent in early socialisation but it persists and enters into higher education as well. Universities, once p]aces of scholarship and the training of a few professionals, now also produce the personnel of a technocracy.
This is not the case with regard to women. Their own colleges typically produce neither scholars nor professionals nor technocrats. Nor are they funded by government and corporations as are male colleges and those co-educational colleges and universities whose primary function is the education of males. As patriarchy enforces a temperamental imbalance of personality traits between the sexes, its educational institutions, segregated or coeducational, accept a cultural programming toward the generally operative division between "masculine" and "feminine" subject matter, assigning the humanities and certain social sciences at least in their lower or marginal branches to the female - and science and technology, the professions, business and engineering to the male.
Of course the balance of employment, prestige and reward at present lie with the latter. Control of these fields is very eminently a matter of political power. And since patriarchy encourages an imbalance in human temperament along sex lines, both divisions of learning science and the humanities reflect this imbalance. The humanities, because not exclusively male, suffer in prestige: In keeping with the inferior sphere of culture to which women in patriarchy have always been restricted, the present encouragement of their "artistic" interests through study of the humanities is hardly more than an extension of the "accomplishments" they once cultivated in preparation for the marriage market.
Achievement in the arts and humanities is reserved, now, as it has been historically, for males. Token representation, be it Susan Sontag's or Lady Murasaki's, does not vitiate this rule. We are not accustomed to associate patriarchy with force. So perfect is its system of socialisation, so complete the general assent to its values, so long and so universally has it prevailed in human society, that it scarcely seems to require violent implementation.
Customarily, we view its brutalities in the past as exotic or "primitive" custom. Those of the present are regarded as the product of individual deviance, confined to pathological or exceptional behaviour, and without general import. And yet, just as under other total ideologies racism and colonialism are somewhat analogous in this respect control in patriarchal society would be imperfect, even inoperable, unless it had the rule of force to rely upon, both in emergencies and as an ever-present instrument of intimidation. Historically, most patriarchies have institutionalised force through their legal systems.
For example, strict patriarchies such as that of Islam, have implemented the prohibition against illegitimacy or sexual autonomy with a death sentence. In Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia the adulteress is still stoned to death with a mullah presiding at the execution. Execution by stoning was once common practice through the Near East.
It is still condoned in Sicily. Needless to say there was and is no penalty imposed upon the male correspondent. Save in recent times or exceptional cases, adultery was not generally recognised in males except as an offence one male might commit against another's property interest. In Tokugawa Japan, for example, an elaborate set of legal distinctions were made according to class. A samurai was entitled, and in the face of public knowledge, even obliged, to execute an adulterous wife, whereas a chonin common citizen or peasant might respond as he pleased.
In cases of cross-class adultery, the lower-class male convicted of sexual intimacy with his employer's wife would, because he had violated taboos of class and property, be beheaded together with her. Upper strata males had, of course, the same license to seduce lower-class women as we are familiar with in Western societies. Indirectly, one form of "death penalty" still obtains even in America today.
Patriarchal legal systems in depriving women of control over their own bodies drive them to illegal abortions; it is estimated that between two and five thousand women die each year from this cause. Excepting a social license to physical abuse among certain class and ethnic groups, force is diffuse and generalised in most contemporary patriarchies.
Significantly, force itself is restricted to the male who alone is psychologically and technically equipped to perpetrate physical violence? Where differences in physical strength have become immaterial through the use of arms, the female is rendered innocuous by her socialisation. Before assault she is almost universally defenceless both by her physical and emotional training. Needless to say, this has the most far-reaching effects on the social and psychological behaviour of both sexes.
Patriarchal force also relies on a form of violence particularly sexual in character and realised most completely in the act of rape. The figures of rapes reported represent only a fraction of those which occur, as the shame of the event is sufficient to deter women from the notion of civil prosecution under the public circumstances of a trial. Traditionally rape has been viewed as an offence one male commits upon another - a matter of abusing "his woman. In rape, the emotions of aggression, hatred, contempt, and the desire to break or violate personality, take a form consummately appropriate to sexual politics.
In the passages analysed at the' outset of this study, such emotions were present at a barely sublimated level and were a key factor in explaining the attitude behind the author's use of language and tone. Patriarchal societies typically link feelings of cruelty with sexuality, the latter often equated both with evil and with power. This is apparent both in the sexual fantasy reported by psychoanalysis and that reported by pornography. The rule here associates sadism with the male "the masculine role" and victimisation with the female "the feminine role''.
Emotional response to violence against women in patriarchy is often curiously ambivalent; references to wife-beating, for example, invariably produce laughter and some embarrassment. Exemplary atrocity, such as the mass murders committed by Richard Speck, greeted at one level with a certain scandalised, possibly hypocritical indignation, is capable of eliciting a mass response of titillation at another level. At such times one even hears from men occasional expressions of envy or amusement. In view of the sadistic character of such public fantasy as caters to male audiences in pornography or semi-pornographic media, one might expect that a certain element of identification is by no means absent from the general response.
Probably a similar collective frisson sweeps through racist society when its more "logical" members have perpetrated a lynching. Unconsciously, both crimes may serve the larger group as a ritual act, cathartic in effect. Hostility is expressed in a number of ways. Misogynist literature, the primary vehicle of masculine hostility, is both an hortatory and comic genre. Of all artistic forms in patriarchy it is the most frankly propagandistic. Its aim is to reinforce both sexual factions in their status.
Ancient, Medieval, and Renaissance literature in the West has each had a large element of misogyny. Nor is the East without a strong tradition here, notably in the Confucian strain which held sway in Japan as well as China. The Western tradition was indeed moderated somewhat by the introduction of courtly love. But the old diatribes and attacks were coterminous with the new idealisation of woman. In the case of Petrarch, Boccaccio, and some others, one can find both attitudes fully expressed, presumably as evidence of different moods, a courtly pose adopted for the ephemeral needs of the vernacular, a grave animosity for sober and eternal Latin.
As courtly love was transformed to romantic love, literary misogyny grew somewhat out of fashion. In some places in the eighteenth century it declined into ridicule and exhortative satire. In the nineteenth century its more acrimonious forms almost disappeared in English. Its resurrection in twentieth-century attitudes and literature is the result of a resentment over patriarchal reform, aided by the growing permissiveness in expression which has taken place at an increasing rate in the last fifty years.
Since the abatement of censorship, masculine hostility psychological or physical in specifically sexual contexts has become far more apparent. Yet as masculine hostility has been fairly continuous, one deals here probably less with a matter of increase than with a new frankness in expressing hostility in specifically sexual contexts. It is a matter of release and freedom to express what was once forbidden expression outside of pornography or other "underground" productions, such as those of De Sade.
As one recalls both the euphemism and the idealism of descriptions of coitus in the Romantic poets Keats's Eve of St. Agnes , or the Victorian novelists Hardy, for example and contrasts it with Miller or William Burroughs, one has an idea of how contemporary literature has absorbed not only the truthful explicitness of pornography, but its anti-social character as well. Since this tendency to hurt or insult has been given free expression, it has become far easier to assess sexual antagonism in the male.
The history of patriarchy presents a variety of cruelties and barbarities: Phenomenon such as clitoridectomy, clitoral incision, the sale and enslavement of women under one guise or another, involuntary and child marriages, concubinage and prostitution, still take place - the first in Africa, the latter in the Near and Far East, the last generally. The rationale which accompanies that imposition of male authority euphemistically referred to as "the battle of the sexes" bears a certain resemblance to the formulas of nations at war, where any heinousness is justified on the grounds that the enemy is either an inferior species or really not human at all.
The patriarchal mentality has concocted a whole series of rationales about women which accomplish this purpose tolerably well. And these traditional beliefs still invade our consciousness and affect our thinking to an extent few of us would be willing to admit. Evidence from anthropology, religious and literary myth all attests to the politically expedient character of patriarchal convictions about women. One anthropologist refers to a consistent patriarchal strain of assumption that "woman's biological differences set her apart.
AS both the primitive and the civilised worlds are male worlds, the ideas which shaped culture in regard to the female were also of male design. The image of women as we know it is an image created by men and fashioned to suit their needs. These needs spring from a fear of the "otherness" of woman.
Yet this notion itself presupposes that patriarchy has already been established and the male has already set himself as the human form, the subject and referent to which the female is "other" or alien. What ever its origin, the function of the male's sexual antipathy is to provide a means of control over a subordinate group and a rationale which justifies the inferior station of those in a lower order, "explaining" the oppression of their lives. The feeling that woman's sexual functions are impure is both world-wide and persistent. One sees evidence of it everywhere in literature, in myth, in primitive and civilised life.
It is striking how the notion persists today. The event of menstruation, for example, is a largely clandestine affair, and the psycho-social effect of the stigma attached must have great effect on the female ego. There is a large anthropological literature on menstrual taboo; the practice of isolating offenders in huts at the edge of the village occurs throughout the primitive world. Contemporary slang denominates menstruation as "the curse. That this may also be true to some extent of labor and delivery is attested to by the recent experiment with "painless childbirth.
Primitive peoples explain the phenomenon of the female's genitals in terms of a wound, sometimes reasoning that she was visited by a bird or snake and mutilated into her present condition. Once she was wounded, now she bleeds. Contemporary slang for the vagina is "gash. The uneasiness and disgust female genitals arouse in patriarchal societies is attested to through religious, cultural, and literary proscription.
In preliterate groups fear is also a factor, as in the belief in a castrating vagina dentata. The penis, badge of the male's superior status in both preliterate and civilised patriarchies, is given the most crucial significance, the subject both of endless boasting and endless anxiety. Nearly all patriarchies enforce taboos against women touching ritual objects those of war or religion or food. In ancient and preliterate societies women are generally not permitted to eat with men. Women eat apart today in a great number of cultures, chiefly those of the Near and Far East. Some of the inspiration of such custom appears to lie in fears of contamination, probably sexual in origin.
In their function of domestic servants, females are forced to prepare food, yet at the same time may be liable to spread their contagion through ;L A similar situation obtains with blacks in the United States. They are considered filthy and infectious, yet as domestics they are forced to prepare food for their queasy superiors. In both cases the dilemma is generally solved in a deplorably illogical fashion by segregating the act of eating itself, while cooking is carried on out of sight by the very group who would infect the table.
With an admirable consistency, some Hindu males do not permit their wives to touch their food at all. In nearly every patriarchal group it is expected that the dominant male will eat first or eat better, and even where the sexes feed together, the male shall be served by the female. All patriarchies have hedged virginity and defloration in elaborate rites and interdictions. Among preliterates virginity presents an interesting problem in ambivalence. On the one hand, it is, as in every patriarchy, a mysterious good because a sign of property received intact.
On the other hand, it represents an unknown evil associated with the mana of blood and terrifyingly "other. Fears of defloration appear to originate in a fear of the alien sexuality of the female. Although any physical suffering endured in defloration must be on the part of the female and most societies cause her - bodily and mentally - to suffer anguish , the social interest, institutionalised in patriarchal ritual and custom, is exclusively on the side of the male's property interest, prestige, or among preliterates hazard.
Patriarchal myth typically posits a golden age before the arrival of women, while its social practices permit males to be relieved of female company. Sexual segregation is so prevalent in patriarchy that one encounters evidence of it everywhere. Nearly every powerful circle in contemporary patriarchy is a men's group. But men form groups of their own on every level. Women's groups are typically auxiliary in character, imitative of male efforts and methods on a generally trivial or ephemeral plane. They rarely operate without recourse to male authority, church or religious groups appealing to the superior authority of a cleric, political groups to male legislators, etc.
In sexually segregated situations the distinctive quality of culturally enforced temperament becomes very vivid. This is particularly true of those exclusively masculine organisations which anthropology generally refers to as men's house institutions. The men's house is a fortress of patriarchal association and emotion. Men's houses in preliterate society strengthen masculine communal experience through dances, gossip, hospitality, recreation, and religious ceremony.
They are also the arsenals of male weaponry. David Riesman has pointed out that sports and some other activities provide males with a supportive solidarity which society does not trouble to provide for females. While hunting, politics, religion, and commerce may play a role, sport and warfare are consistently the chief cement of men's house comradery. Scholars of men's house culture from Hutton Webster and Heinrich Schurtz to Lionel Tiger tend to be sexual patriots whose aim is to justify the apartheid the institution represents.
Schurtz believes an innate gregariousness and a drive toward fraternal pleasure among peers urges the male away from the inferior and constricting company of women. Notwithstanding his conviction that a mystical "bonding instinct" exists in males, Tiger exhorts the public, by organised effort, to preserve the men's house tradition from its decline. The institution's less genial function of power center within a state of sexual antagonism is an aspect of the phenomenon which often goes unnoticed.
The men's house of Melanesia fulfil a variety of purposes and are both armory and the site of masculine ritual initiation ceremony. Their atmosphere is not very remote from that of military institutions in the modern world: They are the scenes of scarification, head-hunting celebrations, and boasting sessions. Here young men are to be "hardened" into manhood. In the men's houses boys have such low status they are often called the "wives" of their initiators, the term "wife" implying both inferiority and the status of sexual object.
Untried youths become the erotic interest of their elders and betters, a relationship also encountered in the Samurai order, in oriental priesthood, and in the Greek gymnasium. Preliterate wisdom decrees that while inculcating the young with the masculine ethos, it is necessary first to intimidate them with the tutelary status of the female. An anthropologist's comment on Melanesian men's houses is applicable equally to Genet's underworld, or Mailer's U.
Like any hazing procedure, initiation once endured produces devotees who will ever after be ardent initiators, happily inflicting their own former sufferings on the newcomer. The psychoanalytic term for the generalised adolescent tone of men's house culture is "phallic state. The Hungarian psychoanalytic anthropologist Geza Roheim stressed the patriarchal character of men's house organisation in the preliterate tribes he studied, defining their communal and religious practices in terms of a "group of men united in the cult of an object that is a materialised penis and excluding the women from their society.
The men's house inference that the penis is a weapon, endlessly equated with other weapons is also clear. The practice of castrating prisoners is itself a comment on the cultural confusion of anatomy and status with weaponry. Much of the glamorisation of masculine comradery in warfare originates in what one might designate as "the men's house sensibility.
A great deal of our culture partakes of this tradition, and one might locate its first statement in Western literature in the heroic intimacy of Patroclus and Achilles. Its development can be traced through the epic and the saga to the chanson de geste. The tradition still flourishes in war novel and movie, not to mention the comic book.
Considerable sexual activity does take place in the men's house, all of it, needless to say, homosexual. But the taboo against homosexual behaviour at least among equals is almost universally of far stronger force than the impulse and tends to effect a rechannelling of the libido into violence. This association of sexuality and violence is a particularly militaristic habit of mind.
The negative and militaristic coloring of such men's house homosexuality as does exist, is of course by no means the whole character of homosexual sensibility. Indeed, the warrior caste of mind with its ultravirility, is more incipiently homosexual, in its exclusively male orientation, than it is overtly homosexual. The Nazi experience is an extreme case in point here. And the heterosexual role-playing indulged in, and still more persuasively, the contempt in which the younger, softer, or more "feminine" members are held, is proof that the actual ethos is misogynist, or perversely rather than positively heterosexual.
The true inspiration of men's house association therefore comes from the patriarchal situation rather than from any circumstances inherent in the homo-amorous relationship. If a positive attitude toward heterosexual love is not quite, in Seignebos' famous dictum, the invention of the twelfth century, it can still claim to be a novelty. Most patriarchies go to great length to exclude love as a basis of mate selection. Modern patriarchies tend to do so through class, ethnic, and religious factors. Western classical thought was prone to see in heterosexual love either a fatal stroke of ill luck bound to end in tragedy, or a contemptible and brutish consorting with inferiors.
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Medieval opinion was firm in its conviction that love was sinful if sexual, and sex sinful if loving. Primitive society practices its misogyny in terms of taboo and mana which evolve into explanatory myth. In historical cultures, this is transformed into ethical, then literary, and in the modern period, scientific rationalisations for the sexual politic. Myth is, of course, a felicitous advance in the level of propaganda, since it so often bases its arguments on ethics or theories of origins.
The two leading myths of Western culture are the classical tale of Pandora's box and the Biblical story of the Fall. In both cases earlier mana concepts of feminine evil have passed through a final literary phase to become highly influential ethical justifications of things as they are. Pandora appears to be a discredited version of a Mediterranean fertility goddess, for in Hesiod's Theogony she wears a wreath of flowers and a sculptured diadem in which are caned all the creatures of land and sea. Hesiod ascribes to her the introduction of sexuality which puts an end to the golden age when "the races of men had been living on earth free from all evils, free from laborious work, and free from all wearing sickness.
In Works And Days Hesiod elaborates on Pandora and what she represents - a perilous temptation with "the mind of a bitch and a thievish nature," full of "the cruelty of desire and longings that wear out the body," 'lies and cunning words and a deceitful soul," a snare sent by Zeus to be "the ruin of men. Patriarchy has God on its side. One of its most effective agents of control is the powerfully expeditious character of its doctrines as to the nature and origin of the female and the attribution to her alone of the dangers and evils it imputes to sexuality.
The Greek example is interesting here: Patriarchal religion and ethics tend to lump the female and sex together as if the whole burden of the onus and stigma it attaches to sex were the fault of the female alone. Thereby sex, which is known to be unclean, sinful, and debilitating, pertains to the female, and the male identity is preserved as a human, rather than a sexual one.
The Pandora myth is one of two important Western archetypes which condemn the female through her sexuality and explain her position as her well-deserved punishment for the primal sin under whose unfortunate consequences the race yet labours. Ethics have entered the scene, replacing the simplicities of ritual, taboo, and mana.
The more sophisticated vehicle of myth also provides official explanations of sexual history. In Hesiod's tale, Zeus, a rancorous and arbitrary father figure, in sending Epimetheus evil in the form of female genitalia, is actually chastising him for adult heterosexual knowledge and activity. In opening the vessel she brings the vulva or hymen, Pandora's "Box" the male satisfies his curiosity but sustains the discovery only by punishing himself at the hands of the father god with death and the assorted calamities of postlapsarian life.
The patriarchal trait of male rivalry across age or status line, particularly those of powerful father and rival son, is present as well as the ubiquitous maligning of the female. The myth of the Fall is a highly finished version of the same themes. As the central myth of the Judeo-Christian imagination and therefore of our immediate cultural heritage, it is well that we appraise and acknowledge the enormous power it still holds over us even in a rationalist era which has long ago given up literal belief in it while maintaining its emotional assent intact. This mythic version of the female as the cause of human suffering, knowledge, and sin is still the foundation of sexual attitudes, for it represents the most crucial argument of the patriarchal tradition in the West.
The Israelites lived in a continual state of war with the fertility cults of their neighbours; these latter afforded sufficient attraction to be the source of constant defection, and the figure of Eve, like that of Pandora, has vestigial traces of a fertility goddess overthrown. There is some, probably unconscious, evidence of this in the Biblical account which announces, even before the narration of the fall has begun - "Adam called his wife's name Eve; because she was the mother of all living things. The tale of Adam and Eve is, among many other things, a narrative of how humanity invented sexual intercourse.
Many such narratives exist in preliterate myth and folk tale. Most of them strike us now as delightfully funny stories of primal innocents who require a good deal of helpful instruction to figure it out. There are other major themes in the story: All of them revolve about sex. Adam is forbidden to eat of the fruit of life or of the knowledge of good and evil, the warning states explicitly what should happen if he tastes of the latter: But at the moment when the pair eat of the forbidden tree they awake to their nakedness and feel shame. Sexuality is clearly involved, though the fable insists it is only tangential to a higher prohibition against disobeying orders in the matter of another and less controversial appetite - one for food.
Roheim points out that the Hebrew verb for "eat" can also mean coitus. Everywhere in the Bible "knowing" is synonymous with sexuality, and clearly a product of contact with the phallus, here in the fable objectified as a snake. To blame the evils and sorrows of life - loss of Eden and the rest - on sexuality, would all too logically implicate the male, and such implication is hardly the purpose of the story, designed as it is expressly in order to blame all this world's discomfort on the female.
Researchers know few details of early Germanic activity, except through the tribes' recorded interactions with the Roman Empire , through etymological research and from archaeological finds. In the first years of the 1st century AD Roman legions conducted a long campaign in Germania, the area north of the Upper Danube and east of the Rhine , in an attempt to expand the Empire's frontiers and to shorten its frontier line.
Rome subdued several Germanic tribes, such as the Cherusci. The tribes became familiar with Roman tactics of warfare while maintaining their tribal identity. In 9 AD a Cherusci chieftain known to the Romans as Arminius defeated a Roman army in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest , a victory credited with stopping the Roman advance into Germanic territories and marking the beginning of recorded German history.
The 3rd century saw the emergence of a number of large West Germanic tribes: Around the Germanic peoples broke through the limes and the Danube frontier into Roman-controlled lands. Christianity was spread to western Germany during the Roman era, and Christian religious structures such as the Aula Palatina of Trier were built during the reign of Constantine I r. At the end of the 4th century the Huns invaded the unoccupied part [ citation needed ] of present-day Germany and the Migration Period began.
Hunnic hegemony over Germania lasted until the death of Attila's son Dengizich in Stem duchies tribal duchies in Germany originated as the areas of the Germanic tribes of a given region. The concept of such duchies survived especially in the areas which in the mid-9th century would become part of East Francia [20] for example: Burgundy , [22] Lorraine [23] [24]. Tribes that became stem duchies were originally the Alamanni , the Thuringii , the Saxons , the Franks , the Burgundians , and the Rugii. Over the next few centuries, some tribes warred, migrated, and merged.
Eventually the Franks subjugated all these tribes in Germania. In the east, successive rulers of the German lands founded a series of border counties or marches. To the north, these included Lusatia , the North March which would become Brandenburg and the heart of the future Prussia , and the Billung March. In the south, the marches included Carniola , Styria , and the March of Austria that would become Austria. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century, the Franks, like other post-Roman Western Europe, emerged as a tribal confederacy in the Rhine-Weser region referred to as " Austrasia ," now Franconia.
They absorbed much former Roman territory as they spread west into Gaul beginning in , unlike the Alamanni to their south in Swabia. By , the Frankish king Clovis I , of the Merovingian dynasty , had united the Frankish tribes and ruled all of Gaul, [28] and was proclaimed king some time from to The faith of the Franks, the vast size of Francia , and the Franks' control of the passes through the Alps led to the alliance between the Merovingian realm, which by now extended Gaul and north-western Germany to include Swabia, Burgundy and western Switzerland by extension , with the Pope in Rome against the Lombards, who now posed the greatest threat to the Holy See.
Swabia became a duchy under the Frankish Empire in , following the Battle of Tolbiac ; in the Saxons and the Franks destroyed the Kingdom of Thuringia. In the 5th and 6th centuries the Merovingian kings conquered several [ quantify ] other Germanic tribes and kingdoms. King Chlothar I reigned — ruled the greater part of what is now Germany and made expeditions into Saxony , while the Southeast of modern Germany remained under the influence of the Ostrogoths.
Saxons inhabited the area down [ clarification needed ] to the Unstrut River. The Merovingians placed the various regions of their Frankish Empire under the control of semi-autonomous dukes — Franks or local rulers. The territories which would later become parts of modern Germany came under the region of Austrasia meaning "eastern land" , the northeastern portion of the Kingdom of the Merovingian Franks.
After the death of the Frankish king Clovis I in , his four sons partitioned his kingdom including Austrasia. Authority over Austrasia passed back and forth from autonomy to royal subjugation, as successive Merovingian kings alternately united and subdivided the Frankish lands. Now the Frankish kings were set up [ by whom? The campaigns and insurrections of the Saxon Wars lasted from to The Franks eventually overwhelmed the Saxons and Avars, forcibly converted the people to Christianity , and annexed their lands to the Carolingian Empire.
After the death of Frankish king Pepin the Short in , his oldest son " Charlemagne " "Charles the Great" consolidated his power over and expanded the Kingdom. In , Charlemagne ended years of Royal Lombard rule with the Siege of Pavia , and installed himself as King of the Lombards and loyal Frankish nobles replaced the old Lombard elite following a rebellion in Fighting among Charlemagne's grandchildren caused the Carolingian empire to be partitioned into three parts in The Holy Roman Empire at its greatest territorial extent during the Hohenstaufen dynasty in the early and middle 13th century.
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The Holy Roman Empire at its greatest territorial extent during the Hohenstaufen dynasty in the early and middle 13th century detailed. The Holy Roman Empire at its greatest territorial extent during the Hohenstaufen dynasty in the early and middle 13th century superimposed on modern borders. The prince-electors of the Holy Roman Empire.
Additionally, Otto revived the old Carolingian program of appointing missionaries in the border lands. Otto continued to support celibacy for the higher clergy, so ecclesiastical appointments never became hereditary. Outside threats to the kingdom were contained with the decisive defeat of the Hungarian Magyars at the Battle of Lechfeld in The Slavs between the Elbe and the Oder rivers were also subjugated.
Otto marched on Rome and drove John XII from the papal throne and for years controlled the election of the pope, setting a firm precedent for imperial control of the papacy for years to come. During the reign of Conrad II's son, Henry III to , the empire supported the Cluniac reforms of the Church, the Peace of God , prohibition of simony the purchase of clerical offices , and required celibacy of priests. Imperial authority over the Pope reached its peak.
In the Investiture Controversy which began between Henry IV and Pope Gregory VII over appointments to ecclesiastical offices, the emperor was compelled to submit to the Pope at Canossa in , after having been excommunicated. In a temporary reconciliation was reached between Henry V and the Pope with the Concordat of Worms. The consequences of the investiture dispute were a weakening of the Ottonian church Reichskirche , and a strengthening of the Imperial secular princes. The time between and was the age of the crusades.
The term sacrum imperium Holy Empire was first used under Friedrich I, documented first in , [ citation needed ] but the words Sacrum Romanum Imperium , Holy Roman Empire, were only combined in July and would never consistently appear on official documents from onwards. The Hanseatic League was a business alliance of trading cities and their guilds that dominated trade along the coast of Northern Europe.
Each of the Hanseatic cities had its own legal system and a degree of political autonomy. The German colonisation and the chartering of new towns and villages began into largely Slav-inhabited territories east of the Elbe , such as Bohemia , Silesia , Pomerania , and Livonia. The native Baltic Prussians were conquered and Christianized by the Knights with much warfare, and numerous German towns were established along the eastern shore of the Baltic Sea.
Adalbert began to assert the powers of the Church against secular authorities, that is, the Emperor. This precipitated the "Crisis of ", part of the long-term Investiture Controversy.
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The first faction called themselves the " Welfs " or "Guelphs" after Henry the Proud's family, which was the ruling dynasty in Bavaria; the other faction was known as the "Waiblings. The Waiblings, on the other hand, stood for control of the Church by a strong central Imperial government. Between and , during the reign of Frederick I Barbarossa , of the Hohenstaufen dynasty, an accommodation was reached with the rival Guelph party by the grant of the duchy of Bavaria to Henry the Lion , duke of Saxony.
Austria became a separate duchy by virtue of the Privilegium Minus in In a final reconciliation was reached between the emperor and the Pope in Venice. Otto founded the Wittelsbach dynasty , which was to rule Bavaria until From to , the Hohenstaufen empire under Frederick I Barbarossa reached its peak in the Reichsfest imperial celebrations held at Mainz and the marriage of his son Henry in Milan to the Norman princess Constance of Sicily.
The power of the feudal lords was undermined by the appointment of "ministerials" unfree servants of the Emperor as officials. Chivalry and the court life flowered, leading to a development of German culture and literature see Wolfram von Eschenbach. Between and , Frederick II established a modern, professionally administered state from his base in Sicily. He resumed the conquest of Italy, leading to further conflict with the Papacy.
In the Empire, extensive sovereign powers were granted to ecclesiastical and secular princes, leading to the rise of independent territorial states. The struggle with the Pope sapped the Empire's strength, as Frederick II was excommunicated three times. After his death, the Hohenstaufen dynasty fell, followed by an interregnum during which there was no Emperor.
The failure of negotiations between Emperor Louis IV and the papacy led in to the declaration at Rhense by six electors to the effect that election by all or the majority of the electors automatically conferred the royal title and rule over the empire, without papal confirmation. As result, the monarch was no longer subject to papal approbation and became increasingly dependent on the favour of the electors.
The Golden Bull of stipulated that in future the emperor was to be chosen by four secular electors and three spiritual electors. Around , Germany and almost the whole of Europe were ravaged by the Black Death. Jews were persecuted on religious and economic grounds; many fled to Poland. The Black Death is estimated to have killed 30—60 percent of Europe's population [49] in the 14th century. After the disasters of the 14th century — war, plague , and schism — early-modern European society gradually came into being as a result of economic, religious, and political changes.
A money economy arose which provoked social discontent among knights and peasants. Gradually, a proto-capitalistic system evolved out of feudalism. The Fugger family gained prominence through commercial and financial activities and became financiers to both ecclesiastical and secular rulers. The knightly classes established their monopoly on arms and military skill. However, it was undermined by the introduction of mercenary armies and foot soldiers. Predatory activity by "robber knights" became common. From the Habsburgs , who controlled most of the southeast of the Empire more or less modern-day Austria and Slovenia , and Bohemia and Moravia after the death of King Louis II in , maintained a constant grip on the position of the Holy Roman Emperor until with the exception of the years between and This situation, however, gave rise to increased disunity among the Holy Roman Empire's territorial rulers and prevented sections of the country from coming together to form nations in the manner of France and England.
During his reign from to , Maximilian I tried to reform the Empire. An Imperial supreme court Reichskammergericht was established, imperial taxes were levied, and the power of the Imperial Diet Reichstag was increased. The reforms, however, were frustrated by the continued territorial fragmentation of the Empire.
The German lands had a population of about 5 or 6 million. The great majority were farmers, typically in a state of serfdom under the control of nobles and monasteries. From , new towns were founded around imperial strongholds, castles, bishops' palaces, and monasteries. The towns began to establish municipal rights and liberties see German town law.
Several cities such as Cologne became Imperial Free Cities , which did not depend on princes or bishops, but were immediately subject to the Emperor. Craftsmen formed guilds , governed by strict rules, which sought to obtain control of the towns; a few were open to women. Society was divided into sharply demarcated classes: Political tensions arose from issues of taxation, public spending, regulation of business, and market supervision, as well as the limits of corporate autonomy.
Cologne's central location on the Rhine river placed it at the intersection of the major trade routes between east and west and was the basis of Cologne's growth. It was the seat of the archbishops, who ruled the surrounding area and from to built the great Cologne Cathedral , with sacred relics that made it a destination for many worshippers. By the city had secured its independence from the archbishop who relocated to Bonn , and was ruled by its burghers.
From the early medieval period and continuing through to the 18th century, Germanic law assigned women to a subordinate and dependent position relative to men. Salic Frankish law , from which the laws of the German lands would be based, placed women at a disadvantage with regard to property and inheritance rights.
Germanic widows required a male guardian to represent them in court. Social status was based on military and biological roles, a reality demonstrated in rituals associated with newborns, when female infants were given a lesser value than male infants. The use of physical force against wives was condoned until the 18th century in Bavarian law.
Some women of means asserted their influence during the Middle Ages, typically in royal court or convent settings. Hildegard of Bingen , Gertrude the Great , Elisabeth of Bavaria — , and Argula von Grumbach are among the women who pursued independent accomplishments in fields as diverse as medicine, music composition, religious writing, and government and military politics. Benedictine abbess Hildegard von Bingen — wrote several influential theological, botanical, and medicinal texts, as well as letters, liturgical songs, poems, and arguably the oldest surviving morality play , while supervising brilliant miniature Illuminations.
About years later, Walther von der Vogelweide c. Around , Johannes Gutenberg of Mainz , used movable type printing and issued the Gutenberg Bible. He was the global inventor of the printing press , thereby starting the Printing Revolution. Cheap printed books and pamphlets played central roles for the spread of the Reformation and the Scientific Revolution.
By then, the emperors had lost their influence in Italy and Burgundy. Hildegard von Bingen — Walther von der Vogelweide c. In the early 16th century there was much discontent occasioned by abuses such as indulgences in the Catholic Church, and a general desire for reform. In the Reformation began with the publication of Martin Luther 's 95 Theses ; he posted them in the town square and gave copies of them to German nobles, but it is debated whether he nailed them to the church door in Wittenberg as is commonly said. The list detailed 95 assertions Luther believed to show corruption and misguidance within the Catholic Church.
One often cited example, though perhaps not Luther's chief concern, is a condemnation of the selling of indulgences ; another prominent point within the 95 Theses is Luther's disagreement both with the way in which the higher clergy, especially the pope, used and abused power, and with the very idea of the pope. In Luther was outlawed at the Diet of Worms. A curious fact is that Luther spoke a dialect which had minor importance in the German language of that time. After the publication of his Bible, his dialect suppressed the others and evolved into what is now the modern German.
In the German Peasants' War broke out in Swabia , Franconia and Thuringia against ruling princes and lords, following the preaching of Reformers. As many as , German peasants were massacred during the revolt. From the Counter-Reformation began in Germany.
The main force was provided by the Jesuit order , founded by the Spaniard Ignatius of Loyola. Central and northeastern Germany were by this time almost wholly Protestant, whereas western and southern Germany remained predominantly Catholic. But the treaty also stipulated that the religion of a state was to be that of its ruler Cuius regio, eius religio.
Its causes were the conflicts between Catholics and Protestants, the efforts by the various states within the Empire to increase their power, and the Catholic Emperor's attempt to achieve the religious and political unity of the Empire. The immediate occasion for the war was the uprising of the Protestant nobility of Bohemia against the emperor, but the conflict was widened into a European war by the intervention of King Christian IV of Denmark —29 , Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden —48 and France under Cardinal Richelieu. Germany became the main theatre of war and the scene of the final conflict between France and the Habsburgs for predominance in Europe.
The fighting often was out of control, with marauding bands of hundreds or thousands of starving soldiers spreading plague, plunder, and murder. The armies that were under control moved back and forth across the countryside year after year, levying heavy taxes on cities, and seizing the animals and food stocks of the peasants without payment. The enormous social disruption over three decades caused a dramatic decline in population because of killings, disease, crop failures, declining birth rates and random destruction, and the out-migration of terrified people.
It took generations for Germany to fully recover. The war ended in with the Peace of Westphalia. Alsace was permanently lost to France, Pomerania was temporarily lost to Sweden, and the Netherlands officially left the Empire. Imperial power declined further as the states' rights were increased. The German population reached about twenty million people, the great majority of whom were peasant farmers. The Reformation was a triumph of literacy and the new printing press.
Luther's translation of the Bible into German was a decisive moment in the spread of literacy, and stimulated as well the printing and distribution of religious books and pamphlets. From onward religious pamphlets flooded Germany and much of Europe. By over 10, publications are known, with a total of ten million copies. The Reformation was thus a media revolution. Luther strengthened his attacks on Rome by depicting a "good" against "bad" church.
From there, it became clear that print could be used for propaganda in the Reformation for particular agendas. Illustrations in the newly translated Bible and in many tracts popularized Luther's ideas. Lucas Cranach the Elder — , the great painter patronized by the electors of Wittenberg, was a close friend of Luther, and illustrated Luther's theology for a popular audience.
He dramatized Luther's views on the relationship between the Old and New Testaments, while remaining mindful of Luther's careful distinctions about proper and improper uses of visual imagery. His bible promoted the development of non-local forms of language and exposed all speakers to forms of German from outside their own area.
Decisive scientific developments took place during the 16th and 17th centuries, especially in the fields of astronomy, mathematics and physics. The German astronomical community played a dominant role in Europe at this time, as its scientists kept in close touch with one another. Several non-German scientists influenced this community too, like astronomers Copernicus who worked in Poland and Tycho Brahe , who worked in Denmark and Bohemia. Copernicus, for example, was better known inside the German community. He is best known for his laws of planetary motion. His ideas influenced contemporary Italian scientist Galileo Galilei and provided one of the foundations for Englishman Isaac Newton 's theory of universal gravitation.
The Peace of Westphalia in strengthened it even further, through the acquisition of East Pomerania. From to , King Frederick William I , also known as the "Soldier King", established a highly centralized, militarized state with a heavily rural population of about three million compared to the nine million in Austria. In terms of the boundaries of , Germany in had a population of 16 million, increasing slightly to 17 million by , and growing more rapidly to 24 million by Wars continued, but they were no longer so devastating to the civilian population; famines and major epidemics did not occur, but increased agricultural productivity led to a higher birth rate, and a lower death rate.
Afterwards Hungary was reconquered from the Turks; Austria, under the Habsburgs, developed into a great power. Frederick II "the Great" is best known for his military genius, his reorganization of Prussian armies, his battlefield successes, his enlightened rule, and especially his making Prussia one of the great powers, as well as escaping from almost certain national disaster at the last minute. He was especially a role model for an aggressively expanding Germany down to , and even today retains his heroic image in Germany.
In the War of Austrian Succession — Maria Theresa fought successfully for recognition of her succession to the throne. After the Peace of Hubertsburg in between Austria, Prussia and Saxony , Prussia won recognition as a great power, thus launching a century-long rivalry with Austria for the leadership of the German peoples. From , against resistance from the nobility and citizenry, an " enlightened absolutism " was established in Prussia and Austria, according to which the ruler governed according to the best precepts of the philosophers.
The economies developed and legal reforms were undertaken, including the abolition of torture and the improvement in the status of Jews. Emancipation of the peasants slowly began. Compulsory education was instituted. In — Prussia took the lead in the partitions of Poland , with Austria and Russia splitting the rest. Prussia occupied the western territories of the former Polish—Lithuanian Commonwealth that surrounded existing Prussian holdings.
Poland again became independent in Completely overshadowed by Prussia and Austria, according to historian Hajo Holborn , the smaller German states were generally characterized by political lethargy and administrative inefficiency, often compounded by rulers who were more concerned with their mistresses and their hunting dogs than with the affairs of state. Bavaria was especially unfortunate in this regard; it was a rural land with very heavy debts and few growth centers. Saxony was in economically good shape, although its government was seriously mismanaged, and numerous wars had taken their toll.
During the time when Prussia rose rapidly within Germany, Saxony was distracted by foreign affairs. The house of Wettin concentrated on acquiring and then holding on to the Polish throne which was ultimately unsuccessful. Many of the city-states of Germany were run by bishops, who in reality were from powerful noble families and showed scant interest in religion.
None developed a significant reputation for good government. He combined Enlightenment ideas with Christian values, cameralist plans for central control of the economy, and a militaristic approach toward diplomacy. Hanover did not have to support a lavish court—its rulers were also kings of England and resided in London. George III , elector ruler from to , never once visited Hanover. Baden sported perhaps the best government of the smaller states. Karl Friedrich ruled well for 73 years — and was an enthusiast for The Enlightenment ; he abolished serfdom in The smaller states failed to form coalitions with each other, and were eventually overwhelmed by Prussia.
In the process, Prussia became too heterogeneous, lost its identity, and by the s had become an administrative shell of little importance. In a heavily agrarian society, land ownership played a central role. Germany's nobles, especially those in the East — called Junkers — dominated not only the localities, but also the Prussian court, and especially the Prussian army. Increasingly after , a centralized Prussian government based in Berlin took over the powers of the nobles, which in terms of control over the peasantry had been almost absolute.
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To help the nobility avoid indebtedness, Berlin set up a credit institution to provide capital loans in , and extended the loan network to peasants in When the German Empire was established in , the Junker nobility controlled the army and the Navy, the bureaucracy, and the royal court; they generally set governmental policies. Peasants continued to center their lives in the village, where they were members of a corporate body, and to help manage the community resources and monitor the community life.
In the East, they were serfs who were bound permanently to parcels of land. In most of Germany, farming was handled by tenant farmers who paid rents and obligatory services to the landlord, who was typically a nobleman. Peasant leaders supervised the fields and ditches and grazing rights, maintained public order and morals, and supported a village court which handled minor offenses.
Inside the family the patriarch made all the decisions, and tried to arrange advantageous marriages for his children. Much of the villages' communal life centered around church services and holy days. In Prussia, the peasants drew lots to choose conscripts required by the army. The noblemen handled external relationships and politics for the villages under their control, and were not typically involved in daily activities or decisions.
The emancipation of the serfs came in —, beginning with Schleswig in The peasants were now ex-serfs and could own their land, buy and sell it, and move about freely. The nobles approved for now they could buy land owned by the peasants. The chief reformer was Baron vom Stein — , who was influenced by The Enlightenment , especially the free market ideas of Adam Smith. A bank was set up so that landowners could borrow government money to buy land from peasants the peasants were not allowed to use it to borrow money to buy land until The result was that the large landowners obtained larger estates, and many peasants became landless tenants, or moved to the cities or to America.
The other German states imitated Prussia after In sharp contrast to the violence that characterized land reform in the French Revolution, Germany handled it peacefully. In Schleswig the peasants, who had been influenced by the Enlightenment, played an active role; elsewhere they were largely passive. Indeed, for most peasants, customs and traditions continued largely unchanged, including the old habits of deference to the nobles whose legal authority remained quite strong over the villagers.
Although the peasants were no longer tied to the same land as serfs had been, the old paternalistic relationship in East Prussia lasted into the 20th century. The agrarian reforms in northwestern Germany in the era — were driven by progressive governments and local elites. They abolished feudal obligations and divided collectively owned common land into private parcels and thus created a more efficient market-oriented rural economy, which increased productivity and population growth and strengthened the traditional social order because wealthy peasants obtained most of the former common land, while the rural proletariat was left without land; many left for the cities or America.
Meanwhile, the division of the common land served as a buffer preserving social peace between nobles and peasants. Around the Catholic monasteries, which had large land holdings, were nationalized and sold off by the government. A major social change occurring between —, depending on region, was the end of the traditional "whole house" "ganzes Haus" system, in which the owner's family lived together in one large building with the servants and craftsmen he employed.
No longer did the owner's wife take charge of all the females in the different families in the whole house. In the new system, farm owners became more professionalized and profit-oriented. They managed the fields and the household exterior according to the dictates of technology, science, and economics. Farm wives supervised family care and the household interior, to which strict standards of cleanliness, order, and thrift applied. The result was the spread of formerly urban bourgeois values into rural Germany. The lesser families were now living separately on wages.
They had to provide for their own supervision, health, schooling, and old-age. At the same time, because of the demographic transition, there were far fewer children, allowing for much greater attention to each child. Increasingly the middle-class family valued its privacy and its inward direction, shedding too-close links with the world of work. This allowed for the emergence of working-class organizations. It also allowed for declining religiosity among the working-class, who were no longer monitored on a daily basis. Before the German upper classes looked to France for intellectual, cultural and architectural leadership; French was the language of high society.
Christian Wolff — was the pioneer as a writer who expounded the Enlightenment to German readers; he legitimized German as a philosophic language. Prussia took the lead among the German states in sponsoring the political reforms that Enlightenment thinkers urged absolute rulers to adopt. However, there were important movements as well in the smaller states of Bavaria, Saxony, Hanover, and the Palatinate.
In each case Enlightenment values became accepted and led to significant political and administrative reforms that laid the groundwork for the creation of modern states. The reforms were aided by the country's strong urban structure and influential commercial groups, and modernized pre Saxony along the lines of classic Enlightenment principles. Johann Gottfried von Herder — broke new ground in philosophy and poetry, as a leader of the Sturm und Drang movement of proto-Romanticism.
Weimar Classicism "Weimarer Klassik" was a cultural and literary movement based in Weimar that sought to establish a new humanism by synthesizing Romantic, classical, and Enlightenment ideas. The movement, from until , involved Herder as well as polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe — and Friedrich Schiller — , a poet and historian. Herder argued that every folk had its own particular identity, which was expressed in its language and culture. This legitimized the promotion of German language and culture and helped shape the development of German nationalism. Schiller's plays expressed the restless spirit of his generation, depicting the hero's struggle against social pressures and the force of destiny.
German music, sponsored by the upper classes, came of age under composers Johann Sebastian Bach — , Joseph Haydn — , and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart — Kant's work contained basic tensions that would continue to shape German thought — and indeed all of European philosophy — well into the 20th century. The German Enlightenment won the support of princes, aristocrats, and the middle classes, and it permanently reshaped the culture.
Before the 19th century, young women lived under the economic and disciplinary authority of their fathers until they married and passed under the control of their husbands. In order to secure a satisfactory marriage, a woman needed to bring a substantial dowry. In the wealthier families, daughters received their dowry from their families, whereas the poorer women needed to work in order to save their wages so as to improve their chances to wed. Under the German laws, women had property rights over their dowries and inheritances, a valuable benefit as high mortality rates resulted in successive marriages.
The Age of Reason did not bring much more for women: Within the educated classes, there was the belief that women needed to be sufficiently educated to be intelligent and agreeable interlocutors to their husbands. However, the lower-class women were expected to be economically productive in order to help their husbands make ends meet.
German reaction to the French Revolution was mixed at first. German intellectuals celebrated the outbreak, hoping to see the triumph of Reason and The Enlightenment.
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The royal courts in Vienna and Berlin denounced the overthrow of the king and the threatened spread of notions of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Reformers said the solution was to have faith in the ability of Germans to reform their laws and institutions in peaceful fashion. Europe was racked by two decades of war revolving around France's efforts to spread its revolutionary ideals, and the opposition of reactionary royalty. War broke out in as Austria and Prussia invaded France, but were defeated at the Battle of Valmy The German lands saw armies marching back and forth, bringing devastation albeit on a far lower scale than the Thirty Years' War , almost two centuries before , but also bringing new ideas of liberty and civil rights for the people.
Prussia and Austria ended their failed wars with France but with Russia partitioned Poland among themselves in and The French took control of the Rhineland , imposed French-style reforms, abolished feudalism, established constitutions, promoted freedom of religion, emancipated Jews, opened the bureaucracy to ordinary citizens of talent, and forced the nobility to share power with the rising middle class. Napoleon created the Kingdom of Westphalia — as a model state. When the French tried to impose the French language, German opposition grew in intensity.
Napoleon established direct or indirect control over most of western Europe, including the German states apart from Prussia and Austria. The old Holy Roman Empire was little more than a farce; Napoleon simply abolished it in while forming new countries under his control.
Prussia tried to remain neutral while imposing tight controls on dissent, but with German nationalism sharply on the rise, the small nation blundered by going to war with Napoleon in Its economy was weak, its leadership poor, and the once mighty Prussian army was a hollow shell. Napoleon easily crushed it at the Battle of Jena Napoleon occupied Berlin, and Prussia paid dearly. Prussia lost its recently acquired territories in western Germany, its army was reduced to 42, men, no trade with Britain was allowed, and Berlin had to pay Paris heavy reparations and fund the French army of occupation.
Saxony changed sides to support Napoleon and join his Confederation of the Rhine; its elector was rewarded with the title of king and given a slice of Poland taken from Prussia. After Napoleon's fiasco in Russia in , including the deaths of many Germans in his invasion army, Prussia joined with Russia. Major battles followed in quick order, and when Austria switched sides to oppose Napoleon, his situation grew tenuous. He was defeated in a great Battle of Leipzig in late , and Napoleon's empire started to collapse.
One after another the German states switched to oppose Napoleon, but he rejected peace terms. Allied armies invaded France in early , Paris fell, and in April Napoleon surrendered. He returned for days in , but was finally defeated by the British and German armies at Waterloo.
Prussia was the big winner at the Vienna peace conference, gaining extensive territory. Europe in was a continent in a state of complete exhaustion following the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars , and started to turn from the liberal ideas of the Enlightenment and Revolutionary era and to Romanticism under such writers as Edmund Burke , Joseph de Maistre , and Novalis. Politically, the victorious allies set out to build a new balance of powers in order to keep the peace, and decided that a stable German region would be able to keep French imperialism at bay.
To make this a possibility, the idea of reforming the defunct Holy Roman Empire was discarded, and Napoleon 's reorganization of the German states was kept and the remaining princes were allowed to keep their titles. The German Confederation German: Deutscher Bund was the loose association of 39 states created in to coordinate the economies of separate German-speaking countries. It acted as a buffer between the powerful states of Austria and Prussia.
Britain approved of it because London felt that there was need for a stable, peaceful power in central Europe that could discourage aggressive moves by France or Russia. According to Lee , most historians have judged the Confederation to be weak and ineffective, as well as an obstacle to German nationalist aspirations.
It collapsed because of the rivalry between Prussia and Austria known as German dualism , warfare, the revolution, and the inability of the multiple members to compromise. It was a transition from high birth rates and high death rates to low birth and death rates as the country developed from a pre-industrial to a modernized agriculture and supported a fast-growing industrialized urban economic system.
In previous centuries, the shortage of land meant that not everyone could marry, and marriages took place after age After , increased agricultural productivity meant a larger food supply, and a decline in famines, epidemics, and malnutrition. This allowed couples to marry earlier, and have more children. Arranged marriages became uncommon as young people were now allowed to choose their own marriage partners, subject to a veto by the parents. The high birthrate was offset by a very high rate of infant mortality and emigration, especially after about , mostly to the German settlements in the United States , plus periodic epidemics and harvest failures.
The upper and middle classes began to practice birth control, and a little later so too did the peasants. Before Germany lagged far behind the leaders in industrial development — Britain, France, and Belgium. In , Germany's social structure was poorly suited to entrepreneurship or economic development. Domination by France during the era of the French Revolution s to , however, produced important institutional reforms.
Reforms included the abolition of feudal restrictions on the sale of large landed estates, the reduction of the power of the guilds in the cities, and the introduction of a new, more efficient commercial law. Nevertheless, traditionalism remained strong in most of Germany. Until mid-century, the guilds, the landed aristocracy, the churches, and the government bureaucracies had so many rules and restrictions that entrepreneurship was held in low esteem, and given little opportunity to develop.
From the s and s, Prussia, Saxony, and other states reorganized agriculture. The introduction of sugar beets, turnips, and potatoes yielded a higher level of food production, which enabled a surplus rural population to move to industrial areas. The beginnings of the industrial revolution in Germany came in the textile industry, and was facilitated by eliminating tariff barriers through the Zollverein, starting in By mid-century, the German states were catching up. By Germany was a world leader in industrialization, along with Britain and the United States.
Historian Thomas Nipperdey sums it up:. Industrialization brought rural Germans to the factories, mines and railways. After , the urban population grew rapidly, due primarily to the influx of young people from the rural areas. Berlin grew from , in , to , in ; Hamburg grew from , to ,; Munich from 40, to ,; and Dresden from 60, to , Offsetting this growth, there was extensive emigration, especially to the United States. Emigration totaled , in the s, 1,, in the s, and , in the s.
The takeoff stage of economic development came with the railroad revolution in the s, which opened up new markets for local products, created a pool of middle managers, increased the demand for engineers, architects and skilled machinists and stimulated investments in coal and iron. Political disunity of three dozen states and a pervasive conservatism made it difficult to build railways in the s.
However, by the s, trunk lines did link the major cities; each German state was responsible for the lines within its own borders. Economist Friedrich List summed up the advantages to be derived from the development of the railway system in Lacking a technological base at first, the Germans imported their engineering and hardware from Britain, but quickly learned the skills needed to operate and expand the railways.
In many cities, the new railway shops were the centres of technological awareness and training, so that by , Germany was self-sufficient in meeting the demands of railroad construction, and the railways were a major impetus for the growth of the new steel industry. However, German unification in stimulated consolidation, nationalisation into state-owned companies, and further rapid growth. Unlike the situation in France, the goal was support of industrialisation, and so, heavy lines crisscrossed the Ruhr and other industrial districts, and provided good connections to the major ports of Hamburg and Bremen.
By , Germany had 9, locomotives pulling 43, passengers and 30, tons of freight a day, and forged ahead of France. A large number of newspapers and magazines flourished; A typical small city had one or two newspapers; Berlin and Leipzig had dozens. The audience was limited to perhaps five percent of the adult men, chiefly from the aristocratic and middle classes, who followed politics.
Liberal papers outnumbered conservative ones by a wide margin. Foreign governments bribed editors to guarantee a favorable image. After , strict press laws were used by Bismarck to shut down the Socialist, and to threaten hostile editors. There were no national newspapers. Editors focused on political commentary, but also included in a nonpolitical cultural page, focused on the arts and high culture. Especially popular was the serialized novel, with a new chapter every week. Magazines were politically more influential, and attracted the leading intellectuals as authors.
German artists and intellectuals, heavily influenced by the French Revolution and by the great German poet and writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe — , turned to Romanticism after a period of Enlightenment. Philosophical thought was decisively shaped by Immanuel Kant — Ludwig van Beethoven — was the leading composer of Romantic music. His use of tonal architecture in such a way as to allow significant expansion of musical forms and structures was immediately recognized as bringing a new dimension to music.
His later piano music and string quartets, especially, showed the way to a completely unexplored musical universe, and influenced Franz Schubert — and Robert Schumann — In opera, a new Romantic atmosphere combining supernatural terror and melodramatic plot in a folkloric context was first successfully achieved by Carl Maria von Weber — and perfected by Richard Wagner — in his Ring Cycle.
At the universities high-powered professors developed international reputations, especially in the humanities led by history and philology, which brought a new historical perspective to the study of political history, theology, philosophy, language, and literature. With Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel — in philosophy, Friedrich Schleiermacher — in theology and Leopold von Ranke — in history, the University of Berlin , founded in , became the world's leading university. Von Ranke, for example, professionalized history and set the world standard for historiography.
By the s mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology had emerged with world class science, led by Alexander von Humboldt — in natural science and Carl Friedrich Gauss — in mathematics. Young intellectuals often turned to politics, but their support for the failed Revolution of forced many into exile. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe — Alexander von Humboldt — Ludwig van Beethoven — Carl Friedrich Gauss — Two main developments reshaped religion in Germany. Across the land, there was a movement to unite the larger Lutheran and the smaller Reformed Protestant churches.
The churches themselves brought this about in Baden, Nassau, and Bavaria. His goal was to unify the Protestant churches, and to impose a single standardized liturgy, organization and even architecture. The long-term goal was to have fully centralized royal control of all the Protestant churches. In a series of proclamations over several decades the Church of the Prussian Union was formed, bringing together the more numerous Lutherans, and the less numerous Reformed Protestants.
The government of Prussia now had full control over church affairs, with the king himself recognized as the leading bishop. Opposition to unification came from the "Old Lutherans" in Silesia who clung tightly to the theological and liturgical forms they had followed since the days of Luther. The government attempted to crack down on them, so they went underground. Tens of thousands migrated, to South Australia , and especially to the United States, where they formed the Missouri Synod , which is still in operation as a conservative denomination.
Finally in a new king Frederick William IV offered a general amnesty and allowed the Old Lutherans to form a separate church association with only nominal government control. From the religious point of view of the typical Catholic or Protestant, major changes were underway in terms of a much more personalized religiosity that focused on the individual more than the church or the ceremony. The rationalism of the late 19th century faded away, and there was a new emphasis on the psychology and feeling of the individual, especially in terms of contemplating sinfulness, redemption, and the mysteries and the revelations of Christianity.
Pietistic revivals were common among Protestants. Among Catholics there was a sharp increase in popular pilgrimages. In alone, half a million pilgrims made a pilgrimage to the city of Trier in the Rhineland to view the Seamless robe of Jesus , said to be the robe that Jesus wore on the way to his crucifixion.
Catholic bishops in Germany had historically been largely independent Of Rome, but now the Vatican exerted increasing control, a new " ultramontanism " of Catholics highly loyal to Rome. The government passed laws to require that these children always be raised as Protestants, contrary to Napoleonic law that had previously prevailed and allowed the parents to make the decision. It put the Catholic Archbishop under house arrest.
In , the new King Frederick William IV sought reconciliation and ended the controversy by agreeing to most of the Catholic demands. However Catholic memories remained deep and led to a sense that Catholics always needed to stick together in the face of an untrustworthy government. After the fall of Napoleon, Europe's statesmen convened in Vienna in for the reorganisation of European affairs, under the leadership of the Austrian Prince Metternich.
The political principles agreed upon at this Congress of Vienna included the restoration, legitimacy and solidarity of rulers for the repression of revolutionary and nationalist ideas. Deutscher Bund was founded, a loose union of 39 states 35 ruling princes and 4 free cities under Austrian leadership, with a Federal Diet German: Bundestag meeting in Frankfurt am Main. It was a loose coalition that failed to satisfy most nationalists. The member states largely went their own way, and Austria had its own interests. In a student radical assassinated the reactionary playwright August von Kotzebue , who had scoffed at liberal student organisations.
In one of the few major actions of the German Confederation, Prince Metternich called a conference that issued the repressive Carlsbad Decrees , designed to suppress liberal agitation against the conservative governments of the German states. Burschenschaften , removed liberal university professors, and expanded the censorship of the press. The decrees began the "persecution of the demagogues", which was directed against individuals who were accused of spreading revolutionary and nationalist ideas.
In the Zollverein was established, a customs union between Prussia and most other German states, but excluding Austria. As industrialisation developed, the need for a unified German state with a uniform currency, legal system, and government became more and more obvious. Growing discontent with the political and social order imposed by the Congress of Vienna led to the outbreak, in , of the March Revolution in the German states.
But the revolution turned out to be unsuccessful: King Frederick William IV of Prussia refused the imperial crown, the Frankfurt parliament was dissolved, the ruling princes repressed the risings by military force, and the German Confederation was re-established by Many leaders went into exile, including a number who went to the United States and became a political force there.
The s were a period of extreme political reaction. Dissent was vigorously suppressed, and many Germans emigrated to America following the collapse of the uprisings. Frederick William IV became extremely depressed and melancholy during this period, and was surrounded by men who advocated clericalism and absolute divine monarchy. The Prussian people once again lost interest in politics. Prussia not only expanded its territory but began to industrialize rapidly, while maintaining a strong agricultural base. In , the king had a stroke and his brother William became regent, then became King William I in Although conservative, William I was far more pragmatic.
His most significant accomplishment was naming Otto von Bismarck as chancellor in