So far we have dealt with the position of women as though it depended
alone on human hungers, passions and environment; but while these are
the driving forces of life, they are very subject to the repressing and
diverting power of ideas, working in an environment of economic
conditions. These ideas may themselves date back to earlier passions and
economic conditions, but they often survive the time which created them,
and then they enter into life and conduct as seemingly independent
forces. These ideas played a large part, even in the ancient world.

The Jews organized their religious and political practices about a
patriarchal Deity ruling a patriarchal state; and their tradition
handicapped all women with the sin of Eve, the sin of seeking knowledge.
The Greeks, on the other hand, gave woman a splendid place in the
hierarchy of the gods, and idealized not only her beauty in Aphrodite
but her chaste aloofness in Artemis, her physical strength in the
Amazons, and her wisdom in Athena and Hera. They covered the Acropolis
with matchless monuments in honor of Athena, patron goddess of their
fair city, and celebrated splendid pageants on her anniversaries. So,
too, republican Rome, while it gathered its civic life about patriarchal
ideas in which the father was supreme, gave women positions of high
honor in its religion, whether as deities or as servitors of the gods.
In the Niebelungenlied, the Germans bodied forth their splendid
conceptions of female beauty, strength and passion in such figures as
Brunhilda. These ideas must have done much to offset the physical
weakness and functional handicaps of women in the ancient world.

The Christian ideas, which have dominated us now for nearly two
thousand years, are generally considered to have been favorable to
women. In their insistence on the value of the human soul, and on