"[41] With all its admitted beauty, this ideal represented
not the institution of the family, but the institution of the church.
Chivalry carried over from the church to the castle this concept of
womanhood and set it to the shaping of The Lady,[42] who was finally
given a rank in the ideals of knighthood only a little below that to
which Mary had been elevated by the ecclesiastical authorities. This
concept of the lady was the result of the necessity for a new social
standardization which must combine beauty, purity, meekness and angelic
goodness. Only by such a combination could religion and family life be
finally reconciled. By such a combination, earthly motherhood could be
made to approximate the divine motherhood.
With the decline of the influence of chivalry, probably as the result of
industrial changes, The Lady was replaced by a feminine ideal which may
well be termed the "Model Woman." Although less ethereal than her
predecessor, The Lady, the Model Woman is quite as much an attempt to
reconcile the dualistic attitude, with its Divine Mother cult on the one
hand, and its belief in the essential evil of the procreative process
and the uncleanness of woman on the other, to human needs. The
characteristics of the Model Woman must approximate those of the Holy
Virgin as closely as possible.
Pages:
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179