Page:The rights of women and the sexual relations.djvu/369

Rh the chief points of excellence in their feminine ideal. For did they not designate the girdle of the goddess of love as the seat of her charms, and even give her the surname of Kallopygos, by which they glorified the beauty of her back? An expressive and intellectual face did not harmonize with the conception of a slave. Venus might be a ruler in so far as she could subdue men by her physical charms; but she must be a slave, like all women, in so far as she was not allowed to be intellectually equal to man, and thus, as an equal, to make the same claims upon him as he made upon her. In my opinion the contemptuous conception of woman in Grecian mythology is nowhere brought out more significantly than in the choice of a husband for the beautiful Venus. According to human and aesthetic logic it ought to have married her to Apollo, the god of beauty and of light; but instead of that, it gave her to his direct opposite, the god of ugliness and darkness, the blacksmith Hephaestos, or Vulcan, whose only qualification for a husband consisted in his ability to forge chains. To be sure, the sentiment of justice and common sense tried to correct this incongruity by allowing Venus to seek compensation in the society of Mars, Bacchus, and other friends; but, after all, the antique goddess of beauty, and of love, never really advanced beyond the position of a slave or a prostitute, be she called Urania or Vulgivaga. Wherever the mythology of the ancients accorded to woman a higher, an intellectual