The Truth About Woman — Story, Setting & Ideas

Property and Personhood in Babylon

Hartley devotes considerable attention to Babylonian women's legal rights, citing specific contract tablets. One deed records a woman named Gugua who disposes property among her children but reserves the right to reclaim it. Another shows a father assigning his remaining property to his daughter on condition she provide him maintenance. These examples, Hartley argues, demonstrate women's active participation in commerce and finance. She quotes Lecky on female management restoring fortunes and notes Mill's well-known views. Hartley then makes a pointed comparison: "Against one woman who mismanages her income at least six men may be placed who mismanage theirs, not from any special extravagance, but from sheer male inability to adapt expenditure to income." This claim, grounded in the Babylonian evidence, serves her broader argument that women's civic equality—recognized slowly over centuries—was a wise foundation for family and state.

Greek Shadows: The Bruised Herb

Turning to Greece, Hartley juxtaposes the Babylonian record with a starkly different reality. She quotes Euripides' Medea—"Of all things upon earth that breathe and grow / A herb most bruised is woman"—to encapsulate the Greek view of women as purchased masters of the flesh. The excerpt breaks off mid-line, but the contrast is clear: where Babylon granted property rights, Greece imposed dependence. Hartley uses this juxtaposition to argue that a civilization's treatment of women determines its broader character. She does not claim completeness; the Greek section is fragmentary. Yet the pattern she establishes—comparing legal systems and literary voices—reveals her method: using specific, traceable evidence to challenge assumptions about women's inherent capacities. The Greek material, though incomplete, underscores her thesis that women's subordination is not natural but historical.

The Maternalist Argument and Its Tensions

Hartley's central claim—that motherhood is the "main stream of the racial life"—creates a tension with her evidence of women's independent property dealings. She celebrates Babylonian women's financial acumen while insisting that individual life is "but as a bubble or cluster of foam on the great tide of humanity." This duality runs through the excerpts: women are both capable managers and vessels of racial destiny. Hartley does not resolve the contradiction; instead, she presents it as a faith. The preface warns that critics will find "apparent contradictions of statement and errors in thought." Readers should note how Hartley navigates between celebrating women's historical agency and subsuming it into a maternalist framework. Her use of Ibsen's epigraph—"The social revolution which is impending in Europe is chiefly concerned with the future of the workers and the women"—signals her progressive intent, but the excerpts leave open how she reconciles individual rights with racial duty.

Hartley's book is best approached as a polemical work of comparative history, not a dispassionate survey. Readers should attend to the specific legal and literary evidence she marshals—Babylonian contracts, Greek tragedies—and note how she wields them to support a maternalist philosophy. The excerpts reveal a writer deeply invested in proving women's capacity while anchoring their liberation in motherhood. This tension, rather than any single argument, gives the book its character. For those interested in early twentieth-century feminist thought, Hartley offers a distinctive voice that combines scholarly citation with personal conviction.

That rainy afternoon, Hartley’s Babylonian contracts made me feel how loudly women once spoke. Later, I kept thinking about silenced voices, and my hand drifted to The American Prejudice Against Color An Authentic Narrative, Showing How Easily the Nation Got into an Uproar. — Story, Setting & Ideas—another record of a public clamor, told from the other side of the room. The rain never stopped.