34.3
"Call to
mind all the regulations respecting women by which our ancestors curbed
their licence and made them obedient to their husbands, and yet in spite of all
those restrictions you can scarcely hold them in. If you allow them to pull
away these restraints and wrench them out one after another, and finally put
themselves on an equality with their husbands, do you imagine that you will
be able to tolerate them? From the moment that they become your fellows
they will become your masters. But surely, you say, what they object to is
having a new restriction imposed upon them, they are not deprecating the
assertion of a right but the infliction of a wrong. No, they are demanding the
abrogation of a law which you enacted by your suffrages and which the
practical experience of all these years has approved and justified. This they
would have you repeal; that means that by rescinding this they would have
you weaken all. No law is equally agreeable to everybody, the only question
is whether it is beneficial on the whole and good for the majority. If everyone
who feels himself personally aggrieved by a law is to destroy it and get rid of
it, what is gained by the whole body of citizens making laws which those
against whom they are enacted can in a short time repeal? I want, however,
to learn the reason why these excited matrons have run out into the streets
and scarcely keep away from the Forum and the Assembly. Is it that those
taken prisoners by Hannibal -their fathers and husbands and children and
brothers -may be ransomed? The republic is a long way from this
misfortune, and may it ever remain so! Still, when this did happen, you
refused to do so in spite of their dutiful entreaties. But, you may say, it is not
dutiful affection and solicitude for those they love that has brought them
together; they are going to welcome Mater Idaea on her way from Phrygian
Pessinus. What pretext in the least degree respectable is put forward for this
female insurrection? 'That we may shine,' they say, 'in gold and purple, that
we may ride in carriages on festal and ordinary days alike, as though in
triumph for having defeated and repealed a law after capturing and forcing
from you your votes.'
