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Title: The Subjection of Women

Author: John Stuart Mill

Release Date: October 28, 2008 [EBook #27083]

Language: English

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  THE
  SUBJECTION
  OF
  WOMEN


  BY
  JOHN STUART MILL

  LONDON
  LONGMANS, GREEN, READER, AND DYER
  1869

  LONDON:
  SAVILL, EDWARDS AND CO., PRINTERS, CHANDOS STREET,
  COVENT GARDEN.




CHAPTER I.


The object of this Essay is to explain as clearly as I am able, the
grounds of an opinion which I have held from the very earliest period
when I had formed any opinions at all on social or political matters,
and which, instead of being weakened or modified, has been constantly
growing stronger by the progress of reflection and the experience of
life: That the principle which regulates the existing social
relations between the two sexes--the legal subordination of one sex
to the other--is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances
to human improvement; and that it ought to be replaced by a principle
of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on the one side,
nor disability on the other.

The very words necessary to express the task I have undertaken, show
how arduous it is. But it would be a mistake to suppose that the
difficulty of the case must lie in the insufficiency or obscurity of
the grounds of reason on which my conviction rests. The difficulty is
that which exists in all cases in which there is a mass of feeling to
be contended against. So long as an opinion is strongly rooted in the
feelings, it gains rather than loses in stability by having a
preponderating weight of argument against it. For if it were accepted
as a result of argument, the refutation of the argument might shake
the solidity of the conviction; but when it rests solely on feeling,
the worse it fares in argumentative contest, the more persuaded its
adherents are that their feeling must have some deeper ground, which
the arguments do not reach; and while the feeling remains, it is
always throwing up fresh intrenchments of argument to repair any
breach made in the old. And there are so many causes tending to make
the feelings connected with this subject the most intense and most
deeply-rooted of all those which gather round and protect old
institutions and customs, that we need not wonder to find them as yet
less undermined and loosened than any of the rest by the progress of
the great modern spiritual and social transition; nor suppose that
the barbarisms to which men cling longest must be less barbarisms
than those which they earlier shake off.

In every respect the burthen is hard on those who attack an almost
universal opinion. They must be very fortunate as well as unusually
capable if they obtain a hearing at all. They have more difficulty in
obtaining a trial, than any other litigants have in getting a
verdict. If they do extort a hearing, they are subjected to a set of
logical requirements totally different from those exacted from other
people. In all other cases, the burthen of proof is supposed to lie
with the affirmative. If a person is charged with a murder, it rests
with those who accuse him to give proof of his guilt, not with
himself to prove his innocence. If there is a difference of opinion
about the reality of any alleged historical event, in which the
feelings of men in general are not much interested, as the Siege of
Troy for example, those who maintain that the event took place are
expected to produce their proofs, before those who take the other
side can be required to say anything; and at no time are these
required to do more than show that the evidence produced by the
others is of no value. Again, in practical matters, the burthen of
proof is supposed to be with those who are against liberty; who
contend for any restriction or prohibition; either any limitation of
the general freedom of human action, or any disqualification or
disparity of privilege affecting one person or kind of persons, as
compared with others. The _à priori_ presumption is in favour of
freedom and impartiality. It is held that there should be no
restraint not required by the general good, and that the law should
be no respecter of persons, but should treat all alike, save where
dissimilarity of treatment is required by positive reasons, either of
justice or of policy. But of none of these rules of evidence will the
benefit be allowed to those who maintain the opinion I profess. It is
useless for me to say that those who maintain the doctrine that men
have a right to command and women are under an obligation to obey, or
that men are fit for government and women unfit, are on the
affirmative side of the question, and that they are bound to show
positive evidence for the assertions, or submit to their rejection.
It is equally unavailing for me to say that those who deny to women
any freedom or privilege rightly allowed to men, having the double
presumption against them that they are opposing freedom and
recommending partiality, must be held to the strictest proof of their
case, and unless their success be such as to exclude all doubt, the
judgment ought to go against them. These would be thought good pleas
in any common case; but they will not be thought so in this instance.
Before I could hope to make any impression, I should be expected not
only to answer all that has ever been said by those who take the
other side of the question, but to imagine all that could be said by
them--to find them in reasons, as well as answer all I find: and
besides refuting all arguments for the affirmative, I shall be called
upon for invincible positive arguments to prove a negative. And even
if I could do all this, and leave the opposite party with a host of
unanswered arguments against them, and not a single unrefuted one on
their side, I should be thought to have done little; for a cause
supported on the one hand by universal usage, and on the other by so
great a preponderance of popular sentiment, is supposed to have a
presumption in its favour, superior to any conviction which an appeal
to reason has power to produce in any intellects but those of a high
class.

I do not mention these difficulties to complain of them; first,
because it would be useless; they are inseparable from having to
contend through people's understandings against the hostility of
their feelings and practical tendencies: and truly the understandings
of the majority of mankind would need to be much better cultivated
than has ever yet been the case, before they can be asked to place
such reliance in their own power of estimating arguments, as to give
up practical principles in which they have been born and bred and
which are the basis of much of the existing order of the world, at
the first argumentative attack which they are not capable of
logically resisting. I do not therefore quarrel with them for having
too little faith in argument, but for having too much faith in custom
and the general feeling. It is one of the characteristic prejudices
of the reaction of the nineteenth century against the eighteenth, to
accord to the unreasoning elements in human nature the infallibility
which the eighteenth century is supposed to have ascribed to the
reasoning elements. For the apotheosis of Reason we have substituted
that of Instinct; and we call everything instinct which we find in
ourselves and for which we cannot trace any rational foundation. This
idolatry, infinitely more degrading than the other, and the most
pernicious of the false worships of the present day, of all of which
it is now the main support, will probably hold its ground until it
gives way before a sound psychology, laying bare the real root of
much that is bowed down to as the intention of Nature and the
ordinance of God. As regards the present question, I am willing to
accept the unfavourable conditions which the prejudice assigns to me.
I consent that established custom, and the general feeling, should be
deemed conclusive against me, unless that custom and feeling from age
to age can be shown to have owed their existence to other causes than
their soundness, and to have derived their power from the worse
rather than the better parts of human nature. I am willing that
judgment should go against me, unless I can show that my judge has
been tampered with. The concession is not so great as it might
appear; for to prove this, is by far the easiest portion of my task.

The generality of a practice is in some cases a strong presumption
that it is, or at all events once was, conducive to laudable ends.
This is the case, when the practice was first adopted, or afterwards
kept up, as a means to such ends, and was grounded on experience of
the mode in which they could be most effectually attained. If the
authority of men over women, when first established, had been the
result of a conscientious comparison between different modes of
constituting the government of society; if, after trying various
other modes of social organization--the government of women over men,
equality between the two, and such mixed and divided modes of
government as might be invented--it had been decided, on the
testimony of experience, that the mode in which women are wholly
under the rule of men, having no share at all in public concerns, and
each in private being under the legal obligation of obedience to the
man with whom she has associated her destiny, was the arrangement
most conducive to the happiness and well being of both; its general
adoption might then be fairly thought to be some evidence that, at
the time when it was adopted, if was the best: though even then the
considerations which recommended it may, like so many other primeval
social facts of the greatest importance, have subsequently, in the
course of ages, ceased to exist. But the state of the case is in
every respect the reverse of this. In the first place, the opinion in
favour of the present system, which entirely subordinates the weaker
sex to the stronger, rests upon theory only; for there never has been
trial made of any other: so that experience, in the sense in which it
is vulgarly opposed to theory, cannot be pretended to have pronounced
any verdict. And in the second place, the adoption of this system of
inequality never was the result of deliberation, or forethought, or
any social ideas, or any notion whatever of what conduced to the
benefit of humanity or the good order of society. It arose simply
from the fact that from the very earliest twilight of human society,
every woman (owing to the value attached to her by men, combined with
her inferiority in muscular strength) was found in a state of bondage
to some man. Laws and systems of polity always begin by recognising
the relations they find already existing between individuals. They
convert what was a mere physical fact into a legal right, give it the
sanction of society, and principally aim at the substitution of
public and organized means of asserting and protecting these rights,
instead of the irregular and lawless conflict of physical strength.
Those who had already been compelled to obedience became in this
manner legally bound to it. Slavery, from being a mere affair of
force between the master and the slave, became regularized and a
matter of compact among the masters, who, binding themselves to one
another for common protection, guaranteed by their collective
strength the private possessions of each, including his slaves. In
early times, the great majority of the male sex were slaves, as well
as the whole of the female. And many ages elapsed, some of them ages
of high cultivation, before any thinker was bold enough to question
the rightfulness, and the absolute social necessity, either of the
one slavery or of the other. By degrees such thinkers did arise: and
(the general progress of society assisting) the slavery of the male
sex has, in all the countries of Christian Europe at least (though,
in one of them, only within the last few years) been at length
abolished, and that of the female sex has been gradually changed into
a milder form of dependence. But this dependence, as it exists at
present, is not an original institution, taking a fresh start from
considerations of justice and social expediency--it is the primitive
state of slavery lasting on, through successive mitigations and
modifications occasioned by the same causes which have softened the
general manners, and brought all human relations more under the
control of justice and the influence of humanity. It has not lost the
taint of its brutal origin. No presumption in its favour, therefore,
can be drawn from the fact of its existence. The only such
presumption which it could be supposed to have, must be grounded on
its having lasted till now, when so many other things which came down
from the same odious source have been done away with. And this,
indeed, is what makes it strange to ordinary ears, to hear it
asserted that the inequality of rights between men and women has no
other source than the law of the strongest.

That this statement should have the effect of a paradox, is in some
respects creditable to the progress of civilization, and the
improvement of the moral sentiments of mankind. We now live--that is
to say, one or two of the most advanced nations of the world now
live--in a state in which the law of the strongest seems to be
entirely abandoned as the regulating principle of the world's
affairs: nobody professes it, and, as regards most of the relations
between human beings, nobody is permitted to practise it. When any
one succeeds in doing so, it is under cover of some pretext which
gives him the semblance of having some general social interest on his
side. This being the ostensible state of things, people flatter
themselves that the rule of mere force is ended; that the law of the
strongest cannot be the reason of existence of anything which has
remained in full operation down to the present time. However any of
our present institutions may have begun, it can only, they think,
have been preserved to this period of advanced civilization by a
well-grounded feeling of its adaptation to human nature, and
conduciveness to the general good. They do not understand the great
vitality and durability of institutions which place right on the side
of might; how intensely they are clung to; how the good as well as
the bad propensities and sentiments of those who have power in their
hands, become identified with retaining it; how slowly these bad
institutions give way, one at a time, the weakest first, beginning
with those which are least interwoven with the daily habits of life;
and how very rarely those who have obtained legal power because they
first had physical, have ever lost their hold of it until the
physical power had passed over to the other side. Such shifting of
the physical force not having taken place in the case of women; this
fact, combined with all the peculiar and characteristic features of
the particular case, made it certain from the first that this branch
of the system of right founded on might, though softened in its most
atrocious features at an earlier period than several of the others,
would be the very last to disappear. It was inevitable that this one
case of a social relation grounded on force, would survive through
generations of institutions grounded on equal justice, an almost
solitary exception to the general character of their laws and
customs; but which, so long as it does not proclaim its own origin,
and as discussion has not brought out its true character, is not felt
to jar with modern civilization, any more than domestic slavery among
the Greeks jarred with their notion of themselves as a free people.

The truth is, that people of the present and the last two or three
generations have lost all practical sense of the primitive condition
of humanity; and only the few who have studied history accurately, or
have much frequented the parts of the world occupied by the living
representatives of ages long past, are able to form any mental
picture of what society then was. People are not aware how entirely,
in former ages, the law of superior strength was the rule of life;
how publicly and openly it was avowed, I do not say cynically or
shamelessly--for these words imply a feeling that there was something
in it to be ashamed of, and no such notion could find a place in the
faculties of any person in those ages, except a philosopher or a
saint. History gives a cruel experience of human nature, in shewing
how exactly the regard due to the life, possessions, and entire
earthly happiness of any class of persons, was measured by what they
had the power of enforcing; how all who made any resistance to
authorities that had arms in their hands, however dreadful might be
the provocation, had not only the law of force but all other laws,
and all the notions of social obligation against them; and in the
eyes of those whom they resisted, were not only guilty of crime, but
of the worst of all crimes, deserving the most cruel chastisement
which human beings could inflict. The first small vestige of a
feeling of obligation in a superior to acknowledge any right in
inferiors, began when he had been induced, for convenience, to make
some promise to them. Though these promises, even when sanctioned by
the most solemn oaths, were for many ages revoked or violated on the
most trifling provocation or temptation, it is probable that this,
except by persons of still worse than the average morality, was
seldom done without some twinges of conscience. The ancient
republics, being mostly grounded from the first upon some kind of
mutual compact, or at any rate formed by an union of persons not very
unequal in strength, afforded, in consequence, the first instance of
a portion of human relations fenced round, and placed under the
dominion of another law than that of force. And though the original
law of force remained in full operation between them and their
slaves, and also (except so far as limited by express compact)
between a commonwealth and its subjects, or other independent
commonwealths; the banishment of that primitive law even from so
narrow a field, commenced the regeneration of human nature, by giving
birth to sentiments of which experience soon demonstrated the immense
value even for material interests, and which thenceforward only
required to be enlarged, not created. Though slaves were no part of
the commonwealth, it was in the free states that slaves were first
felt to have rights as human beings. The Stoics were, I believe, the
first (except so far as the Jewish law constitutes an exception) who
taught as a part of morality that men were bound by moral obligations
to their slaves. No one, after Christianity became ascendant, could
ever again have been a stranger to this belief, in theory; nor, after
the rise of the Catholic Church, was it ever without persons to stand
up for it. Yet to enforce it was the most arduous task which
Christianity ever had to perform. For more than a thousand years the
Church kept up the contest, with hardly any perceptible success. It
was not for want of power over men's minds. Its power was prodigious.
It could make kings and nobles resign their most valued possessions
to enrich the Church. It could make thousands, in the prime of life
and the height of worldly advantages, shut themselves up in convents
to work out their salvation by poverty, fasting, and prayer. It could
send hundreds of thousands across land and sea, Europe and Asia, to
give their lives for the deliverance of the Holy Sepulchre. It could
make kings relinquish wives who were the object of their passionate
attachment, because the Church declared that they were within the
seventh (by our calculation the fourteenth) degree of relationship.
All this it did; but it could not make men fight less with one
another, nor tyrannize less cruelly over the serfs, and when they
were able, over burgesses. It could not make them renounce either of
the applications of force; force militant, or force triumphant. This
they could never be induced to do until they were themselves in their
turn compelled by superior force. Only by the growing power of kings
was an end put to fighting except between kings, or competitors for
kingship; only by the growth of a wealthy and warlike bourgeoisie in
the fortified towns, and of a plebeian infantry which proved more
powerful in the field than the undisciplined chivalry, was the
insolent tyranny of the nobles over the bourgeoisie and peasantry
brought within some bounds. It was persisted in not only until, but
long after, the oppressed had obtained a power enabling them often to
take conspicuous vengeance; and on the Continent much of it continued
to the time of the French Revolution, though in England the earlier
and better organization of the democratic classes put an end to it
sooner, by establishing equal laws and free national institutions.

If people are mostly so little aware how completely, during the
greater part of the duration of our species, the law of force was the
avowed rule of general conduct, any other being only a special and
exceptional consequence of peculiar ties--and from how very recent a
date it is that the affairs of society in general have been even
pretended to be regulated according to any moral law; as little do
people remember or consider, how institutions and customs which never
had any ground but the law of force, last on into ages and states of
general opinion which never would have permitted their first
establishment. Less than forty years ago, Englishmen might still by
law hold human beings in bondage as saleable property: within the
present century they might kidnap them and carry them off, and work
them literally to death. This absolutely extreme case of the law of
force, condemned by those who can tolerate almost every other form of
arbitrary power, and which, of all others, presents features the most
revolting to the feelings of all who look at it from an impartial
position, was the law of civilized and Christian England within the
memory of persons now living: and in one half of Anglo-Saxon America
three or four years ago, not only did slavery exist, but the slave
trade, and the breeding of slaves expressly for it, was a general
practice between slave states. Yet not only was there a greater
strength of sentiment against it, but, in England at least, a less
amount either of feeling or of interest in favour of it, than of any
other of the customary abuses of force: for its motive was the love
of gain, unmixed and undisguised; and those who profited by it were a
very small numerical fraction of the country, while the natural
feeling of all who were not personally interested in it, was
unmitigated abhorrence. So extreme an instance makes it almost
superfluous to refer to any other: but consider the long duration of
absolute monarchy. In England at present it is the almost universal
conviction that military despotism is a case of the law of force,
having no other origin or justification. Yet in all the great nations
of Europe except England it either still exists, or has only just
ceased to exist, and has even now a strong party favourable to it in
all ranks of the people, especially among persons of station and
consequence. Such is the power of an established system, even when
far from universal; when not only in almost every period of history
there have been great and well-known examples of the contrary system,
but these have almost invariably been afforded by the most
illustrious and most prosperous communities. In this case, too, the
possessor of the undue power, the person directly interested in it,
is only one person, while those who are subject to it and suffer from
it are literally all the rest. The yoke is naturally and necessarily
humiliating to all persons, except the one who is on the throne,
together with, at most, the one who expects to succeed to it. How
different are these cases from that of the power of men over women! I
am not now prejudging the question of its justifiableness. I am
showing how vastly more permanent it could not but be, even if not
justifiable, than these other dominations which have nevertheless
lasted down to our own time. Whatever gratification of pride there is
in the possession of power, and whatever personal interest in its
exercise, is in this case not confined to a limited class, but common
to the whole male sex. Instead of being, to most of its supporters, a
thing desirable chiefly in the abstract, or, like the political ends
usually contended for by factious, of little private importance to
any but the leaders; it comes home to the person and hearth of every
male head of a family, and of every one who looks forward to being
so. The clodhopper exercises, or is to exercise, his share of the
power equally with the highest nobleman. And the case is that in
which the desire of power is the strongest: for every one who desires
power, desires it most over those who are nearest to him, with whom
his life is passed, with whom he has most concerns in common, and in
whom any independence of his authority is oftenest likely to
interfere with his individual preferences. If, in the other cases
specified, powers manifestly grounded only on force, and having so
much less to support them, are so slowly and with so much difficulty
got rid of, much more must it be so with this, even if it rests on no
better foundation than those. We must consider, too, that the
possessors of the power have facilities in this case, greater than in
any other, to prevent any uprising against it. Every one of the
subjects lives under the very eye, and almost, it may be said, in the
hands, of one of the masters--in closer intimacy with him than with
any of her fellow-subjects; with no means of combining against him,
no power of even locally over-mastering him, and, on the other hand,
with the strongest motives for seeking his favour and avoiding to
give him offence. In struggles for political emancipation, everybody
knows how often its champions are bought off by bribes, or daunted by
terrors. In the case of women, each individual of the subject-class
is in a chronic state of bribery and intimidation combined. In
setting up the standard of resistance, a large number of the leaders,
and still more of the followers, must make an almost complete
sacrifice of the pleasures or the alleviations of their own
individual lot. If ever any system of privilege and enforced
subjection had its yoke tightly riveted on the necks of those who are
kept down by it, this has. I have not yet shown that it is a wrong
system: but every one who is capable of thinking on the subject must
see that even if it is, it was certain to outlast all other forms of
unjust authority. And when some of the grossest of the other forms
still exist in many civilized countries, and have only recently been
got rid of in others, it would be strange if that which is so much
the deepest-rooted had yet been perceptibly shaken anywhere. There is
more reason to wonder that the protests and testimonies against it
should have been so numerous and so weighty as they are.

Some will object, that a comparison cannot fairly be made between the
government of the male sex and the forms of unjust power which I have
adduced in illustration of it, since these are arbitrary, and the
effect of mere usurpation, while it on the contrary is natural. But
was there ever any domination which did not appear natural to those
who possessed it? There was a time when the division of mankind into
two classes, a small one of masters and a numerous one of slaves,
appeared, even to the most cultivated minds, to be a natural, and the
only natural, condition of the human race. No less an intellect, and
one which contributed no less to the progress of human thought, than
Aristotle, held this opinion without doubt or misgiving; and rested
it on the same premises on which the same assertion in regard to the
dominion of men over women is usually based, namely that there are
different natures among mankind, free natures, and slave natures;
that the Greeks were of a free nature, the barbarian races of
Thracians and Asiatics of a slave nature. But why need I go back to
Aristotle? Did not the slaveowners of the Southern United States
maintain the same doctrine, with all the fanaticism with which men
cling to the theories that justify their passions and legitimate
their personal interests? Did they not call heaven and earth to
witness that the dominion of the white man over the black is natural,
that the black race is by nature incapable of freedom, and marked out
for slavery? some even going so far as to say that the freedom of
manual labourers is an unnatural order of things anywhere. Again, the
theorists of absolute monarchy have always affirmed it to be the only
natural form of government; issuing from the patriarchal, which was
the primitive and spontaneous form of society, framed on the model of
the paternal, which is anterior to society itself, and, as they
contend, the most natural authority of all. Nay, for that matter, the
law of force itself, to those who could not plead any other, has
always seemed the most natural of all grounds for the exercise of
authority. Conquering races hold it to be Nature's own dictate that
the conquered should obey the conquerors, or, as they euphoniously
paraphrase it, that the feebler and more unwarlike races should
submit to the braver and manlier. The smallest acquaintance with
human life in the middle ages, shows how supremely natural the
dominion of the feudal nobility over men of low condition appeared to
the nobility themselves, and how unnatural the conception seemed, of
a person of the inferior class claiming equality with them, or
exercising authority over them. It hardly seemed less so to the class
held in subjection. The emancipated serfs and burgesses, even in
their most vigorous struggles, never made any pretension to a share
of authority; they only demanded more or less of limitation to the
power of tyrannizing over them. So true is it that unnatural
generally means only uncustomary, and that everything which is usual
appears natural. The subjection of women to men being a universal
custom, any departure from it quite naturally appears unnatural. But
how entirely, even in this case, the feeling is dependent on custom,
appears by ample experience. Nothing so much astonishes the people of
distant parts of the world, when they first learn anything about
England, as to be told that it is under a queen: the thing seems to
them so unnatural as to be almost incredible. To Englishmen this does
not seem in the least degree unnatural, because they are used to it;
but they do feel it unnatural that women should be soldiers or
members of parliament. In the feudal ages, on the contrary, war and
politics were not thought unnatural to women, because not unusual; it
seemed natural that women of the privileged classes should be of
manly character, inferior in nothing but bodily strength to their
husbands and fathers. The independence of women seemed rather less
unnatural to the Greeks than to other ancients, on account of the
fabulous Amazons (whom they believed to be historical), and the
partial example afforded by the Spartan women; who, though no less
subordinate by law than in other Greek states, were more free in
fact, and being trained to bodily exercises in the same manner with
men, gave ample proof that they were not naturally disqualified for
them. There can be little doubt that Spartan experience suggested to
Plato, among many other of his doctrines, that of the social and
political equality of the two sexes.

But, it will be said, the rule of men over women differs from all
these others in not being a rule of force: it is accepted
voluntarily; women make no complaint, and are consenting parties to
it. In the first place, a great number of women do not accept it.
Ever since there have been women able to make their sentiments known
by their writings (the only mode of publicity which society permits
to them), an increasing number of them have recorded protests against
their present social condition: and recently many thousands of them,
headed by the most eminent women known to the public, have petitioned
Parliament for their admission to the Parliamentary Suffrage. The
claim of women to be educated as solidly, and in the same branches of
knowledge, as men, is urged with growing intensity, and with a great
prospect of success; while the demand for their admission into
professions and occupations hitherto closed against them, becomes
every year more urgent. Though there are not in this country, as
there are in the United States, periodical Conventions and an
organized party to agitate for the Rights of Women, there is a
numerous and active Society organized and managed by women, for the
more limited object of obtaining the political franchise. Nor is it
only in our own country and in America that women are beginning to
protest, more or less collectively, against the disabilities under
which they labour. France, and Italy, and Switzerland, and Russia now
afford examples of the same thing. How many more women there are who
silently cherish similar aspirations, no one can possibly know; but
there are abundant tokens how many _would_ cherish them, were they
not so strenuously taught to repress them as contrary to the
proprieties of their sex. It must be remembered, also, that no
enslaved class ever asked for complete liberty at once. When Simon de
Montfort called the deputies of the commons to sit for the first time
in Parliament, did any of them dream of demanding that an assembly,
elected by their constituents, should make and destroy ministries,
and dictate to the king in affairs of state? No such thought entered
into the imagination of the most ambitious of them. The nobility had
already these pretensions; the commons pretended to nothing but to be
exempt from arbitrary taxation, and from the gross individual
oppression of the king's officers. It is a political law of nature
that those who are under any power of ancient origin, never begin by
complaining of the power itself, but only of its oppressive exercise.
There is never any want of women who complain of ill usage by their
husbands. There would be infinitely more, if complaint were not the
greatest of all provocatives to a repetition and increase of the ill
usage. It is this which frustrates all attempts to maintain the power
but protect the woman against its abuses. In no other case (except
that of a child) is the person who has been proved judicially to have
suffered an injury, replaced under the physical power of the culprit
who inflicted it. Accordingly wives, even in the most extreme and
protracted cases of bodily ill usage, hardly ever dare avail
themselves of the laws made for their protection: and if, in a moment
of irrepressible indignation, or by the interference of neighbours,
they are induced to do so, their whole effort afterwards is to
disclose as little as they can, and to beg off their tyrant from his
merited chastisement.

All causes, social and natural, combine to make it unlikely that
women should be collectively rebellious to the power of men. They are
so far in a position different from all other subject classes, that
their masters require something more from them than actual service.
Men do not want solely the obedience of women, they want their
sentiments. All men, except the most brutish, desire to have, in the
woman most nearly connected with them, not a forced slave but a
willing one, not a slave merely, but a favourite. They have therefore
put everything in practice to enslave their minds. The masters of all
other slaves rely, for maintaining obedience, on fear; either fear of
themselves, or religious fears. The masters of women wanted more than
simple obedience, and they turned the whole force of education to
effect their purpose. All women are brought up from the very earliest
years in the belief that their ideal of character is the very
opposite to that of men; not self-will, and government by
self-control, but submission, and yielding to the control of others.
All the moralities tell them that it is the duty of women, and all
the current sentimentalities that it is their nature, to live for
others; to make complete abnegation of themselves, and to have no
life but in their affections. And by their affections are meant the
only ones they are allowed to have--those to the men with whom they
are connected, or to the children who constitute an additional and
indefeasible tie between them and a man. When we put together three
things--first, the natural attraction between opposite sexes;
secondly, the wife's entire dependence on the husband, every
privilege or pleasure she has being either his gift, or depending
entirely on his will; and lastly, that the principal object of human
pursuit, consideration, and all objects of social ambition, can in
general be sought or obtained by her only through him, it would be a
miracle if the object of being attractive to men had not become the
polar star of feminine education and formation of character. And,
this great means of influence over the minds of women having been
acquired, an instinct of selfishness made men avail themselves of it
to the utmost as a means of holding women in subjection, by
representing to them meekness, submissiveness, and resignation of all
individual will into the hands of a man, as an essential part of
sexual attractiveness. Can it be doubted that any of the other yokes
which mankind have succeeded in breaking, would have subsisted till
now if the same means had existed, and had been as sedulously used,
to bow down their minds to it? If it had been made the object of the
life of every young plebeian to find personal favour in the eyes of
some patrician, of every young serf with some seigneur; if
domestication with him, and a share of his personal affections, had
been held out as the prize which they all should look out for, the
most gifted and aspiring being able to reckon on the most desirable
prizes; and if, when this prize had been obtained, they had been shut
out by a wall of brass from all interests not centering in him, all
feelings and desires but those which he shared or inculcated; would
not serfs and seigneurs, plebeians and patricians, have been as
broadly distinguished at this day as men and women are? and would not
all but a thinker here and there, have believed the distinction to be
a fundamental and unalterable fact in human nature?

The preceding considerations are amply sufficient to show that
custom, however universal it may be, affords in this case no
presumption, and ought not to create any prejudice, in favour of the
arrangements which place women in social and political subjection to
men. But I may go farther, and maintain that the course of history,
and the tendencies of progressive human society, afford not only no
presumption in favour of this system of inequality of rights, but a
strong one against it; and that, so far as the whole course of human
improvement up to this time, the whole stream of modern tendencies,
warrants any inference on the subject, it is, that this relic of the
past is discordant with the future, and must necessarily disappear.

For, what is the peculiar character of the modern world--the
difference which chiefly distinguishes modern institutions, modern
social ideas, modern life itself, from those of times long past? It
is, that human beings are no longer born to their place in life, and
chained down by an inexorable bond to the place they are born to, but
are free to employ their faculties, and such favourable chances as
offer, to achieve the lot which may appear to them most desirable.
Human society of old was constituted on a very different principle.
All were born to a fixed social position, and were mostly kept in it
by law, or interdicted from any means by which they could emerge from
it. As some men are born white and others black, so some were born
slaves and others freemen and citizens; some were born patricians,
others plebeians; some were born feudal nobles, others commoners and
_roturiers_. A slave or serf could never make himself free, nor,
except by the will of his master, become so. In most European
countries it was not till towards the close of the middle ages, and
as a consequence of the growth of regal power, that commoners could
be ennobled. Even among nobles, the eldest son was born the exclusive
heir to the paternal possessions, and a long time elapsed before it
was fully established that the father could disinherit him. Among the
industrious classes, only those who were born members of a guild, or
were admitted into it by its members, could lawfully practise their
calling within its local limits; and nobody could practise any
calling deemed important, in any but the legal manner--by processes
authoritatively prescribed. Manufacturers have stood in the pillory
for presuming to carry on their business by new and improved methods.
In modern Europe, and most in those parts of it which have
participated most largely in all other modern improvements,
diametrically opposite doctrines now prevail. Law and government do
not undertake to prescribe by whom any social or industrial operation
shall or shall not be conducted, or what modes of conducting them
shall be lawful. These things are left to the unfettered choice of
individuals. Even the laws which required that workmen should serve
an apprenticeship, have in this country been repealed: there being
ample assurance that in all cases in which an apprenticeship is
necessary, its necessity will suffice to enforce it. The old theory
was, that the least possible should be left to the choice of the
individual agent; that all he had to do should, as far as
practicable, be laid down for him by superior wisdom. Left to himself
he was sure to go wrong. The modern conviction, the fruit of a
thousand years of experience, is, that things in which the individual
is the person directly interested, never go right but as they are
left to his own discretion; and that any regulation of them by
authority, except to protect the rights of others, is sure to be
mischievous. This conclusion, slowly arrived at, and not adopted
until almost every possible application of the contrary theory had
been made with disastrous result, now (in the industrial department)
prevails universally in the most advanced countries, almost
universally in all that have pretensions to any sort of advancement.
It is not that all processes are supposed to be equally good, or all
persons to be equally qualified for everything; but that freedom of
individual choice is now known to be the only thing which procures
the adoption of the best processes, and throws each operation into
the hands of those who are best qualified for it. Nobody thinks it
necessary to make a law that only a strong-armed man shall be a
blacksmith. Freedom and competition suffice to make blacksmiths
strong-armed men, because the weak-armed can earn more by engaging in
occupations for which they are more fit. In consonance with this
doctrine, it is felt to be an overstepping of the proper bounds of
authority to fix beforehand, on some general presumption, that
certain persons are not fit to do certain things. It is now
thoroughly known and admitted that if some such presumptions exist,
no such presumption is infallible. Even if it be well grounded in a
majority of cases, which it is very likely not to be, there will be a
minority of exceptional cases in which it does not hold: and in those
it is both an injustice to the individuals, and a detriment to
society, to place barriers in the way of their using their faculties
for their own benefit and for that of others. In the cases, on the
other hand, in which the unfitness is real, the ordinary motives of
human conduct will on the whole suffice to prevent the incompetent
person from making, or from persisting in, the attempt.

If this general principle of social and economical science is not
true; if individuals, with such help as they can derive from the
opinion of those who know them, are not better judges than the law
and the government, of their own capacities and vocation; the world
cannot too soon abandon this principle, and return to the old system
of regulations and disabilities. But if the principle is true, we
ought to act as if we believed it, and not to ordain that to be born
a girl instead of a boy, any more than to be born black instead of
white, or a commoner instead of a nobleman, shall decide the person's
position through all life--shall interdict people from all the more
elevated social positions, and from all, except a few, respectable
occupations. Even were we to admit the utmost that is ever pretended
as to the superior fitness of men for all the functions now reserved
to them, the same argument applies which forbids a legal
qualification for members of Parliament. If only once in a dozen
years the conditions of eligibility exclude a fit person, there is a
real loss, while the exclusion of thousands of unfit persons is no
gain; for if the constitution of the electoral body disposes them to
choose unfit persons, there are always plenty of such persons to
choose from. In all things of any difficulty and importance, those
who can do them well are fewer than the need, even with the most
unrestricted latitude of choice: and any limitation of the field of
selection deprives society of some chances of being served by the
competent, without ever saving it from the incompetent.

At present, in the more improved countries, the disabilities of women
are the only case, save one, in which laws and institutions take
persons at their birth, and ordain that they shall never in all their
lives be allowed to compete for certain things. The one exception is
that of royalty. Persons still are born to the throne; no one, not of
the reigning family, can ever occupy it, and no one even of that
family can, by any means but the course of hereditary succession,
attain it. All other dignities and social advantages are open to the
whole male sex: many indeed are only attainable by wealth, but wealth
may be striven for by any one, and is actually obtained by many men
of the very humblest origin. The difficulties, to the majority, are
indeed insuperable without the aid of fortunate accidents; but no
male human being is under any legal ban: neither law nor opinion
superadd artificial obstacles to the natural ones. Royalty, as I have
said, is excepted: but in this case every one feels it to be an
exception--an anomaly in the modern world, in marked opposition to
its customs and principles, and to be justified only by extraordinary
special expediencies, which, though individuals and nations differ in
estimating their weight, unquestionably do in fact exist. But in this
exceptional case, in which a high social function is, for important
reasons, bestowed on birth instead of being put up to competition,
all free nations contrive to adhere in substance to the principle
from which they nominally derogate; for they circumscribe this high
function by conditions avowedly intended to prevent the person to
whom it ostensibly belongs from really performing it; while the
person by whom it is performed, the responsible minister, does obtain
the post by a competition from which no full-grown citizen of the
male sex is legally excluded. The disabilities, therefore, to which
women are subject from the mere fact of their birth, are the solitary
examples of the kind in modern legislation. In no instance except
this, which comprehends half the human race, are the higher social
functions closed against any one by a fatality of birth which no
exertions, and no change of circumstances, can overcome; for even
religious disabilities (besides that in England and in Europe they
have practically almost ceased to exist) do not close any career to
the disqualified person in case of conversion.

The social subordination of women thus stands out an isolated fact in
modern social institutions; a solitary breach of what has become
their fundamental law; a single relic of an old world of thought and
practice exploded in everything else, but retained in the one thing
of most universal interest; as if a gigantic dolmen, or a vast temple
of Jupiter Olympius, occupied the site of St. Paul's and received
daily worship, while the surrounding Christian churches were only
resorted to on fasts and festivals. This entire discrepancy between
one social fact and all those which accompany it, and the radical
opposition between its nature and the progressive movement which is
the boast of the modern world, and which has successively swept away
everything else of an analogous character, surely affords, to a
conscientious observer of human tendencies, serious matter for
reflection. It raises a primâ facie presumption on the unfavourable
side, far outweighing any which custom and usage could in such
circumstances create on the favourable; and should at least suffice
to make this, like the choice between republicanism and royalty, a
balanced question.

The least that can be demanded is, that the question should not be
considered as prejudged by existing fact and existing opinion, but
open to discussion on its merits, as a question of justice and
expediency: the decision on this, as on any of the other social
arrangements of mankind, depending on what an enlightened estimate of
tendencies and consequences may show to be most advantageous to
humanity in general, without distinction of sex. And the discussion
must be a real discussion, descending to foundations, and not resting
satisfied with vague and general assertions. It will not do, for
instance, to assert in general terms, that the experience of mankind
has pronounced in favour of the existing system. Experience cannot
possibly have decided between two courses, so long as there has only
been experience of one. If it be said that the doctrine of the
equality of the sexes rests only on theory, it must be remembered
that the contrary doctrine also has only theory to rest upon. All
that is proved in its favour by direct experience, is that mankind
have been able to exist under it, and to attain the degree of
improvement and prosperity which we now see; but whether that
prosperity has been attained sooner, or is now greater, than it would
have been under the other system, experience does not say. On the
other hand, experience does say, that every step in improvement has
been so invariably accompanied by a step made in raising the social
position of women, that historians and philosophers have been led to
adopt their elevation or debasement as on the whole the surest test
and most correct measure of the civilization of a people or an age.
Through all the progressive period of human history, the condition of
women has been approaching nearer to equality with men. This does not
of itself prove that the assimilation must go on to complete
equality; but it assuredly affords some presumption that such is the
case.

Neither does it avail anything to say that the _nature_ of the two
sexes adapts them to their present functions and position, and
renders these appropriate to them. Standing on the ground of common
sense and the constitution of the human mind, I deny that any one
knows, or can know, the nature of the two sexes, as long as they have
only been seen in their present relation to one another. If men had
ever been found in society without women, or women without men, or if
there had been a society of men and women in which the women were not
under the control of the men, something might have been positively
known about the mental and moral differences which may be inherent in
the nature of each. What is now called the nature of women is an
eminently artificial thing--the result of forced repression in some
directions, unnatural stimulation in others. It may be asserted
without scruple, that no other class of dependents have had their
character so entirely distorted from its natural proportions by their
relation with their masters; for, if conquered and slave races have
been, in some respects, more forcibly repressed, whatever in them has
not been crushed down by an iron heel has generally been let alone,
and if left with any liberty of development, it has developed itself
according to its own laws; but in the case of women, a hot-house and
stove cultivation has always been carried on of some of the
capabilities of their nature, for the benefit and pleasure of their
masters. Then, because certain products of the general vital force
sprout luxuriantly and reach a great development in this heated
atmosphere and under this active nurture and watering, while other
shoots from the same root, which are left outside in the wintry air,
with ice purposely heaped all round them, have a stunted growth, and
some are burnt off with fire and disappear; men, with that inability
to recognise their own work which distinguishes the unanalytic mind,
indolently believe that the tree grows of itself in the way they have
made it grow, and that it would die if one half of it were not kept
in a vapour bath and the other half in the snow.

Of all difficulties which impede the progress of thought, and the
formation of well-grounded opinions on life and social arrangements,
the greatest is now the unspeakable ignorance and inattention of
mankind in respect to the influences which form human character.
Whatever any portion of the human species now are, or seem to be,
such, it is supposed, they have a natural tendency to be: even when
the most elementary knowledge of the circumstances in which they have
been placed, clearly points out the causes that made them what they
are. Because a cottier deeply in arrears to his landlord is not
industrious, there are people who think that the Irish are naturally
idle. Because constitutions can be overthrown when the authorities
appointed to execute them turn their arms against them, there are
people who think the French incapable of free government. Because the
Greeks cheated the Turks, and the Turks only plundered the Greeks,
there are persons who think that the Turks are naturally more
sincere: and because women, as is often said, care nothing about
politics except their personalities, it is supposed that the general
good is naturally less interesting to women than to men. History,
which is now so much better understood than formerly, teaches another
lesson: if only by showing the extraordinary susceptibility of human
nature to external influences, and the extreme variableness of those
of its manifestations which are supposed to be most universal and
uniform. But in history, as in travelling, men usually see only what
they already had in their own minds; and few learn much from history,
who do not bring much with them to its study.

Hence, in regard to that most difficult question, what are the
natural differences between the two sexes--a subject on which it is
impossible in the present state of society to obtain complete and
correct knowledge--while almost everybody dogmatizes upon it, almost
all neglect and make light of the only means by which any partial
insight can be obtained into it. This is, an analytic study of the
most important department of psychology, the laws of the influence of
circumstances on character. For, however great and apparently
ineradicable the moral and intellectual differences between men and
women might be, the evidence of their being natural differences could
only be negative. Those only could be inferred to be natural which
could not possibly be artificial--the residuum, after deducting every
characteristic of either sex which can admit of being explained from
education or external circumstances. The profoundest knowledge of the
laws of the formation of character is indispensable to entitle any
one to affirm even that there is any difference, much more what the
difference is, between the two sexes considered as moral and rational
beings; and since no one, as yet, has that knowledge, (for there is
hardly any subject which, in proportion to its importance, has been
so little studied), no one is thus far entitled to any positive
opinion on the subject. Conjectures are all that can at present be
made; conjectures more or less probable, according as more or less
authorized by such knowledge as we yet have of the laws of
psychology, as applied to the formation of character.

Even the preliminary knowledge, what the differences between the
sexes now are, apart from all question as to how they are made what
they are, is still in the crudest and most incomplete state. Medical
practitioners and physiologists have ascertained, to some extent, the
differences in bodily constitution; and this is an important element
to the psychologist: but hardly any medical practitioner is a
psychologist. Respecting the mental characteristics of women; their
observations are of no more worth than those of common men. It is a
subject on which nothing final can be known, so long as those who
alone can really know it, women themselves, have given but little
testimony, and that little, mostly suborned. It is easy to know
stupid women. Stupidity is much the same all the world over. A stupid
person's notions and feelings may confidently be inferred from those
which prevail in the circle by which the person is surrounded. Not so
with those whose opinions and feelings are an emanation from their
own nature and faculties. It is only a man here and there who has any
tolerable knowledge of the character even of the women of his own
family. I do not mean, of their capabilities; these nobody knows, not
even themselves, because most of them have never been called out. I
mean their actually existing thoughts and feelings. Many a man thinks
he perfectly understands women, because he has had amatory relations
with several, perhaps with many of them. If he is a good observer,
and his experience extends to quality as well as quantity, he may
have learnt something of one narrow department of their nature--an
important department, no doubt. But of all the rest of it, few
persons are generally more ignorant, because there are few from whom
it is so carefully hidden. The most favourable case which a man can
generally have for studying the character of a woman, is that of his
own wife: for the opportunities are greater, and the cases of
complete sympathy not so unspeakably rare. And in fact, this is the
source from which any knowledge worth having on the subject has, I
believe, generally come. But most men have not had the opportunity of
studying in this way more than a single case: accordingly one can, to
an almost laughable degree, infer what a man's wife is like, from his
opinions about women in general. To make even this one case yield any
result, the woman must be worth knowing, and the man not only a
competent judge, but of a character so sympathetic in itself, and so
well adapted to hers, that he can either read her mind by sympathetic
intuition, or has nothing in himself which makes her shy of
disclosing it. Hardly anything, I believe, can be more rare than this
conjunction. It often happens that there is the most complete unity
of feeling and community of interests as to all external things, yet
the one has as little admission into the internal life of the other
as if they were common acquaintance. Even with true affection,
authority on the one side and subordination on the other prevent
perfect confidence. Though nothing may be intentionally withheld,
much is not shown. In the analogous relation of parent and child, the
corresponding phenomenon must have been in the observation of every
one. As between father and son, how many are the cases in which the
father, in spite of real affection on both sides, obviously to all
the world does not know, nor suspect, parts of the son's character
familiar to his companions and equals. The truth is, that the
position of looking up to another is extremely unpropitious to
complete sincerity and openness with him. The fear of losing ground
in his opinion or in his feelings is so strong, that even in an
upright character, there is an unconscious tendency to show only the
best side, or the side which, though not the best, is that which he
most likes to see: and it may be confidently said that thorough
knowledge of one another hardly ever exists, but between persons who,
besides being intimates, are equals. How much more true, then, must
all this be, when the one is not only under the authority of the
other, but has it inculcated on her as a duty to reckon everything
else subordinate to his comfort and pleasure, and to let him neither
see nor feel anything coming from her, except what is agreeable to
him. All these difficulties stand in the way of a man's obtaining any
thorough knowledge even of the one woman whom alone, in general, he
has sufficient opportunity of studying. When we further consider that
to understand one woman is not necessarily to understand any other
woman; that even if he could study many women of one rank, or of one
country, he would not thereby understand women of other ranks or
countries; and even if he did, they are still only the women of a
single period of history; we may safely assert that the knowledge
which men can acquire of women, even as they have been and are,
without reference to what they might be, is wretchedly imperfect and
superficial, and always will be so, until women themselves have told
all that they have to tell.

And this time has not come; nor will it come otherwise than
gradually. It is but of yesterday that women have either been
qualified by literary accomplishments, or permitted by society, to
tell anything to the general public. As yet very few of them dare
tell anything, which men, on whom their literary success depends, are
unwilling to hear. Let us remember in what manner, up to a very
recent time, the expression, even by a male author, of uncustomary
opinions, or what are deemed eccentric feelings, usually was, and in
some degree still is, received; and we may form some faint conception
under what impediments a woman, who is brought up to think custom and
opinion her sovereign rule, attempts to express in books anything
drawn from the depths of her own nature. The greatest woman who has
left writings behind her sufficient to give her an eminent rank in
the literature of her country, thought it necessary to prefix as a
motto to her boldest work, “Un homme peut braver l'opinion; une femme
doit s'y soumettre.”[1] The greater part of what women write about
women is mere sycophancy to men. In the case of unmarried women, much
of it seems only intended to increase their chance of a husband.
Many, both married and unmarried, overstep the mark, and inculcate a
servility beyond what is desired or relished by any man, except the
very vulgarest. But this is not so often the case as, even at a quite
late period, it still was. Literary women are becoming more
freespoken, and more willing to express their real sentiments.
Unfortunately, in this country especially, they are themselves such
artificial products, that their sentiments are compounded of a small
element of individual observation and consciousness, and a very large
one of acquired associations. This will be less and less the case,
but it will remain true to a great extent, as long as social
institutions do not admit the same free development of originality in
women which is possible to men. When that time comes, and not before,
we shall see, and not merely hear, as much as it is necessary to know
of the nature of women, and the adaptation of other things to it.

I have dwelt so much on the difficulties which at present obstruct
any real knowledge by men of the true nature of women, because in
this as in so many other things “opinio copiæ inter maximas causas
inopiæ est;” and there is little chance of reasonable thinking on the
matter, while people flatter themselves that they perfectly
understand a subject of which most men know absolutely nothing, and
of which it is at present impossible that any man, or all men taken
together, should have knowledge which can qualify them to lay down
the law to women as to what is, or is not, their vocation. Happily,
no such knowledge is necessary for any practical purpose connected
with the position of women in relation to society and life. For,
according to all the principles involved in modern society, the
question rests with women themselves--to be decided by their own
experience, and by the use of their own faculties. There are no means
of finding what either one person or many can do, but by trying--and
no means by which any one else can discover for them what it is for
their happiness to do or leave undone.

One thing we may be certain of--that what is contrary to women's
nature to do, they never will be made to do by simply giving their
nature free play. The anxiety of mankind to interfere in behalf of
nature, for fear lest nature should not succeed in effecting its
purpose, is an altogether unnecessary solicitude. What women by
nature cannot do, it is quite superfluous to forbid them from doing.
What they can do, but not so well as the men who are their
competitors, competition suffices to exclude them from; since nobody
asks for protective duties and bounties in favour of women; it is
only asked that the present bounties and protective duties in favour
of men should be recalled. If women have a greater natural
inclination for some things than for others, there is no need of laws
or social inculcation to make the majority of them do the former in
preference to the latter. Whatever women's services are most wanted
for, the free play of competition will hold out the strongest
inducements to them to undertake. And, as the words imply, they are
most wanted for the things for which they are most fit; by the
apportionment of which to them, the collective faculties of the two
sexes can be applied on the whole with the greatest sum of valuable
result.

The general opinion of men is supposed to be, that the natural
vocation of a woman is that of a wife and mother. I say, is supposed
to be, because, judging from acts--from the whole of the present
constitution of society--one might infer that their opinion was the
direct contrary. They might be supposed to think that the alleged
natural vocation of women was of all things the most repugnant to
their nature; insomuch that if they are free to do anything else--if
any other means of living, or occupation of their time and faculties,
is open, which has any chance of appearing desirable to them--there
will not be enough of them who will be willing to accept the
condition said to be natural to them. If this is the real opinion of
men in general, it would be well that it should be spoken out. I
should like to hear somebody openly enunciating the doctrine (it is
already implied in much that is written on the subject)--“It is
necessary to society that women should marry and produce children.
They will not do so unless they are compelled. Therefore it is
necessary to compel them.” The merits of the case would then be
clearly defined. It would be exactly that of the slaveholders of
South Carolina and Louisiana. “It is necessary that cotton and sugar
should be grown. White men cannot produce them. Negroes will not, for
any wages which we choose to give. _Ergo_ they must be compelled.” An
illustration still closer to the point is that of impressment.
Sailors must absolutely be had to defend the country. It often
happens that they will not voluntarily enlist. Therefore there must
be the power of forcing them. How often has this logic been used!
and, but for one flaw in it, without doubt it would have been
successful up to this day. But it is open to the retort--First pay
the sailors the honest value of their labour. When you have made it
as well worth their while to serve you, as to work for other
employers, you will have no more difficulty than others have in
obtaining their services. To this there is no logical answer except
“I will not:” and as people are now not only ashamed, but are not
desirous, to rob the labourer of his hire, impressment is no longer
advocated. Those who attempt to force women into marriage by closing
all other doors against them, lay themselves open to a similar
retort. If they mean what they say, their opinion must evidently be,
that men do not render the married condition so desirable to women,
as to induce them to accept it for its own recommendations. It is not
a sign of one's thinking the boon one offers very attractive, when
one allows only Hobson's choice, “that or none.” And here, I believe,
is the clue to the feelings of those men, who have a real antipathy
to the equal freedom of women. I believe they are afraid, not lest
women should be unwilling to marry, for I do not think that any one
in reality has that apprehension; but lest they should insist that
marriage should be on equal conditions; lest all women of spirit and
capacity should prefer doing almost anything else, not in their own
eyes degrading, rather than marry, when marrying is giving themselves
a master, and a master too of all their earthly possessions. And
truly, if this consequence were necessarily incident to marriage, I
think that the apprehension would be very well founded. I agree in
thinking it probable that few women, capable of anything else, would,
unless under an irresistible _entrainement_, rendering them for the
time insensible to anything but itself, choose such a lot, when any
other means were open to them of filling a conventionally honourable
place in life: and if men are determined that the law of marriage
shall be a law of despotism, they are quite right, in point of mere
policy, in leaving to women only Hobson's choice. But, in that case,
all that has been done in the modern world to relax the chain on the
minds of women, has been a mistake. They never should have been
allowed to receive a literary education. Women who read, much more
women who write, are, in the existing constitution of things, a
contradiction and a disturbing element: and it was wrong to bring
women up with any acquirements but those of an odalisque, or of a
domestic servant.

[Footnote 1: Title-page of Mme. de Stael's “Delphine.”]




CHAPTER II.


It will be well to commence the detailed discussion of the subject by
the particular branch of it to which the course of our observations
has led us: the conditions which the laws of this and all other
countries annex to the marriage contract. Marriage being the
destination appointed by society for women, the prospect they are
brought up to, and the object which it is intended should be sought
by all of them, except those who are too little attractive to be
chosen by any man as his companion; one might have supposed that
everything would have been done to make this condition as eligible to
them as possible, that they might have no cause to regret being
denied the option of any other. Society, however, both in this, and,
at first, in all other cases, has preferred to attain its object by
foul rather than fair means: but this is the only case in which it
has substantially persisted in them even to the present day.
Originally women were taken by force, or regularly sold by their
father to the husband. Until a late period in European history, the
father had the power to dispose of his daughter in marriage at his
own will and pleasure, without any regard to hers. The Church,
indeed, was so far faithful to a better morality as to require a
formal “yes” from the woman at the marriage ceremony; but there was
nothing to shew that the consent was other than compulsory; and it
was practically impossible for the girl to refuse compliance if the
father persevered, except perhaps when she might obtain the
protection of religion by a determined resolution to take monastic
vows. After marriage, the man had anciently (but this was anterior to
Christianity) the power of life and death over his wife. She could
invoke no law against him; he was her sole tribunal and law. For a
long time he could repudiate her, but she had no corresponding power
in regard to him. By the old laws of England, the husband was called
the _lord_ of the wife; he was literally regarded as her sovereign,
inasmuch that the murder of a man by his wife was called treason
(_petty_ as distinguished from _high_ treason), and was more cruelly
avenged than was usually the case with high treason, for the penalty
was burning to death. Because these various enormities have fallen
into disuse (for most of them were never formally abolished, or not
until they had long ceased to be practised) men suppose that all is
now as it should be in regard to the marriage contract; and we are
continually told that civilization and Christianity have restored to
the woman her just rights. Meanwhile the wife is the actual
bond-servant of her husband: no less so, as far as legal obligation
goes, than slaves commonly so called. She vows a lifelong obedience
to him at the altar, and is held to it all through her life by law.
Casuists may say that the obligation of obedience stops short of
participation in crime, but it certainly extends to everything else.
She can do no act whatever but by his permission, at least tacit. She
can acquire no property but for him; the instant it becomes hers,
even if by inheritance, it becomes _ipso facto_ his. In this respect
the wife's position under the common law of England is worse than
that of slaves in the laws of many countries: by the Roman law, for
example, a slave might have his peculium, which to a certain extent
the law guaranteed to him for his exclusive use. The higher classes
in this country have given an analogous advantage to their women,
through special contracts setting aside the law, by conditions of
pin-money, &c.: since parental feeling being stronger with fathers
than the class feeling of their own sex, a father generally prefers
his own daughter to a son-in-law who is a stranger to him. By means
of settlements, the rich usually contrive to withdraw the whole or
part of the inherited property of the wife from the absolute control
of the husband: but they do not succeed in keeping it under her own
control; the utmost they can do only prevents the husband from
squandering it, at the same time debarring the rightful owner from
its use. The property itself is out of the reach of both; and as to
the income derived from it, the form of settlement most favourable to
the wife (that called “to her separate use”) only precludes the
husband from receiving it instead of her: it must pass through her
hands, but if he takes it from her by personal violence as soon as
she receives it, he can neither be punished, nor compelled to
restitution. This is the amount of the protection which, under the
laws of this country, the most powerful nobleman can give to his own
daughter as respects her husband. In the immense majority of cases
there is no settlement: and the absorption of all rights, all
property, as well as all freedom of action, is complete. The two are
called “one person in law,” for the purpose of inferring that
whatever is hers is his, but the parallel inference is never drawn
that whatever is his is hers; the maxim is not applied against the
man, except to make him responsible to third parties for her acts, as
a master is for the acts of his slaves or of his cattle. I am far
from pretending that wives are in general no better treated than
slaves; but no slave is a slave to the same lengths, and in so full a
sense of the word, as a wife is. Hardly any slave, except one
immediately attached to the master's person, is a slave at all hours
and all minutes; in general he has, like a soldier, his fixed task,
and when it is done, or when he is off duty, he disposes, within
certain limits, of his own time, and has a family life into which the
master rarely intrudes. “Uncle Tom” under his first master had his
own life in his “cabin,” almost as much as any man whose work takes
him away from home, is able to have in his own family. But it cannot
be so with the wife. Above all, a female slave has (in Christian
countries) an admitted right, and is considered under a moral
obligation, to refuse to her master the last familiarity. Not so the
wife: however brutal a tyrant she may unfortunately be chained
to--though she may know that he hates her, though it may be his daily
pleasure to torture her, and though she may feel it impossible not to
loathe him--he can claim from her and enforce the lowest degradation
of a human being, that of being made the instrument of an animal
function contrary to her inclinations. While she is held in this
worst description of slavery as to her own person, what is her
position in regard to the children in whom she and her master have a
joint interest? They are by law _his_ children. He alone has any
legal rights over them. Not one act can she do towards or in relation
to them, except by delegation from him. Even after he is dead she is
not their legal guardian, unless he by will has made her so. He could
even send them away from her, and deprive her of the means of seeing
or corresponding with them, until this power was in some degree
restricted by Serjeant Talfourd's Act. This is her legal state. And
from this state she has no means of withdrawing herself. If she
leaves her husband, she can take nothing with her, neither her
children nor anything which is rightfully her own. If he chooses, he
can compel her to return, by law, or by physical force; or he may
content himself with seizing for his own use anything which she may
earn, or which may be given to her by her relations. It is only legal
separation by a decree of a court of justice, which entitles her to
live apart, without being forced back into the custody of an
exasperated jailer--or which empowers her to apply any earnings to
her own use, without fear that a man whom perhaps she has not seen
for twenty years will pounce upon her some day and carry all off.
This legal separation, until lately, the courts of justice would only
give at an expense which made it inaccessible to any one out of the
higher ranks. Even now it is only given in cases of desertion, or of
the extreme of cruelty; and yet complaints are made every day that it
is granted too easily. Surely, if a woman is denied any lot in life
but that of being the personal body-servant of a despot, and is
dependent for everything upon the chance of finding one who may be
disposed to make a favourite of her instead of merely a drudge, it is
a very cruel aggravation of her fate that she should be allowed to
try this chance only once. The natural sequel and corollary from this
state of things would be, that since her all in life depends upon
obtaining a good master, she should be allowed to change again and
again until she finds one. I am not saying that she ought to be
allowed this privilege. That is a totally different consideration.
The question of divorce, in the sense involving liberty of
remarriage, is one into which it is foreign to my purpose to enter.
All I now say is, that to those to whom nothing but servitude is
allowed, the free choice of servitude is the only, though a most
insufficient, alleviation. Its refusal completes the assimilation of
the wife to the slave--and the slave under not the mildest form of
slavery: for in some slave codes the slave could, under certain
circumstances of ill usage, legally compel the master to sell him.
But no amount of ill usage, without adultery superadded, will in
England free a wife from her tormentor.

I have no desire to exaggerate, nor does the case stand in any need
of exaggeration. I have described the wife's legal position, not her
actual treatment. The laws of most countries are far worse than the
people who execute them, and many of them are only able to remain
laws by being seldom or never carried into effect. If married life
were all that it might be expected to be, looking to the laws alone,
society would be a hell upon earth. Happily there are both feelings
and interests which in many men exclude, and in most, greatly temper,
the impulses and propensities which lead to tyranny: and of those
feelings, the tie which connects a man with his wife affords, in a
normal state of things, incomparably the strongest example. The only
tie which at all approaches to it, that between him and his children,
tends, in all save exceptional cases, to strengthen, instead of
conflicting with, the first. Because this is true; because men in
general do not inflict, nor women suffer, all the misery which could
be inflicted and suffered if the full power of tyranny with which the
man is legally invested were acted on; the defenders of the existing
form of the institution think that all its iniquity is justified, and
that any complaint is merely quarrelling with the evil which is the
price paid for every great good. But the mitigations in practice,
which are compatible with maintaining in full legal force this or any
other kind of tyranny, instead of being any apology for despotism,
only serve to prove what power human nature possesses of reacting
against the vilest institutions, and with what vitality the seeds of
good as well as those of evil in human character diffuse and
propagate themselves. Not a word can be said for despotism in the
family which cannot be said for political despotism. Every absolute
king does not sit at his window to enjoy the groans of his tortured
subjects, nor strips them of their last rag and turns them out to
shiver in the road. The despotism of Louis XVI. was not the despotism
of Philippe le Bel, or of Nadir Shah, or of Caligula; but it was bad
enough to justify the French Revolution, and to palliate even its
horrors. If an appeal be made to the intense attachments which exist
between wives and their husbands, exactly as much may be said of
domestic slavery. It was quite an ordinary fact in Greece and Rome
for slaves to submit to death by torture rather than betray their
masters. In the proscriptions of the Roman civil wars it was remarked
that wives and slaves were heroically faithful, sons very commonly
treacherous. Yet we know how cruelly many Romans treated their
slaves. But in truth these intense individual feelings nowhere rise
to such a luxuriant height as under the most atrocious institutions.
It is part of the irony of life, that the strongest feelings of
devoted gratitude of which human nature seems to be susceptible, are
called forth in human beings towards those who, having the power
entirely to crush their earthly existence, voluntarily refrain from
using that power. How great a place in most men this sentiment fills,
even in religious devotion, it would be cruel to inquire. We daily
see how much their gratitude to Heaven appears to be stimulated by
the contemplation of fellow-creatures to whom God has not been so
merciful as he has to themselves.

Whether the institution to be defended is slavery, political
absolutism, or the absolutism of the head of a family, we are always
expected to judge of it from its best instances; and we are presented
with pictures of loving exercise of authority on one side, loving
submission to it on the other--superior wisdom ordering all things
for the greatest good of the dependents, and surrounded by their
smiles and benedictions. All this would be very much to the purpose
if any one pretended that there are no such things as good men. Who
doubts that there may be great goodness, and great happiness, and
great affection, under the absolute government of a good man?
Meanwhile, laws and institutions require to be adapted, not to good
men, but to bad. Marriage is not an institution designed for a select
few. Men are not required, as a preliminary to the marriage ceremony,
to prove by testimonials that they are fit to be trusted with the
exercise of absolute power. The tie of affection and obligation to a
wife and children is very strong with those whose general social
feelings are strong, and with many who are little sensible to any
other social ties; but there are all degrees of sensibility and
insensibility to it, as there are all grades of goodness and
wickedness in men, down to those whom no ties will bind, and on whom
society has no action but through its _ultima ratio_, the penalties
of the law. In every grade of this descending scale are men to whom
are committed all the legal powers of a husband. The vilest
malefactor has some wretched woman tied to him, against whom he can
commit any atrocity except killing her, and, if tolerably cautious,
can do that without much danger of the legal penalty. And how many
thousands are there among the lowest classes in every country, who,
without being in a legal sense malefactors in any other respect,
because in every other quarter their aggressions meet with
resistance, indulge the utmost habitual excesses of bodily violence
towards the unhappy wife, who alone, at least of grown persons, can
neither repel nor escape from their brutality; and towards whom the
excess of dependence inspires their mean and savage natures, not with
a generous forbearance, and a point of honour to behave well to one
whose lot in life is trusted entirely to their kindness, but on the
contrary with a notion that the law has delivered her to them as
their thing, to be used at their pleasure, and that they are not
expected to practise the consideration towards her which is required
from them towards everybody else. The law, which till lately left
even these atrocious extremes of domestic oppression practically
unpunished, has within these few years made some feeble attempts to
repress them. But its attempts have done little, and cannot be
expected to do much, because it is contrary to reason and experience
to suppose that there can be any real check to brutality, consistent
with leaving the victim still in the power of the executioner. Until
a conviction for personal violence, or at all events a repetition of
it after a first conviction, entitles the woman _ipso facto_ to a
divorce, or at least to a judicial separation, the attempt to repress
these “aggravated assaults” by legal penalties will break down for
want of a prosecutor, or for want of a witness.

When we consider how vast is the number of men, in any great country,
who are little higher than brutes, and that this never prevents them
from being able, through the law of marriage, to obtain a victim, the
breadth and depth of human misery caused in this shape alone by the
abuse of the institution swells to something appalling. Yet these are
only the extreme cases. They are the lowest abysses, but there is a
sad succession of depth after depth before reaching them. In domestic
as in political tyranny, the case of absolute monsters chiefly
illustrates the institution by showing that there is scarcely any
horror which may not occur under it if the despot pleases, and thus
setting in a strong light what must be the terrible frequency of
things only a little less atrocious. Absolute fiends are as rare as
angels, perhaps rarer: ferocious savages, with occasional touches of
humanity, are however very frequent: and in the wide interval which
separates these from any worthy representatives of the human species,
how many are the forms and gradations of animalism and selfishness,
often under an outward varnish of civilization and even cultivation,
living at peace with the law, maintaining a creditable appearance to
all who are not under their power, yet sufficient often to make the
lives of all who are so, a torment and a burthen to them! It would be
tiresome to repeat the commonplaces about the unfitness of men in
general for power, which, after the political discussions of
centuries, every one knows by heart, were it not that hardly any one
thinks of applying these maxims to the case in which above all others
they are applicable, that of power, not placed in the hands of a man
here and there, but offered to every adult male, down to the basest
and most ferocious. It is not because a man is not known to have
broken any of the Ten Commandments, or because he maintains a
respectable character in his dealings with those whom he cannot
compel to have intercourse with him, or because he does not fly out
into violent bursts of ill-temper against those who are not obliged
to bear with him, that it is possible to surmise of what sort his
conduct will be in the unrestraint of home. Even the commonest men
reserve the violent, the sulky, the undisguisedly selfish side of
their character for those who have no power to withstand it. The
relation of superiors to dependents is the nursery of these vices of
character, which, wherever else they exist, are an overflowing from
that source. A man who is morose or violent to his equals, is sure to
be one who has lived among inferiors, whom he could frighten or worry
into submission. If the family in its best forms is, as it is often
said to be, a school of sympathy, tenderness, and loving
forgetfulness of self, it is still oftener, as respects its chief, a
school of wilfulness, overbearingness, unbounded self-indulgence, and
a double-dyed and idealized selfishness, of which sacrifice itself is
only a particular form: the care for the wife and children being only
care for them as parts of the man's own interests and belongings, and
their individual happiness being immolated in every shape to his
smallest preferences. What better is to be looked for under the
existing form of the institution? We know that the bad propensities
of human nature are only kept within bounds when they are allowed no
scope for their indulgence. We know that from impulse and habit, when
not from deliberate purpose, almost every one to whom others yield,
goes on encroaching upon them, until a point is reached at which they
are compelled to resist. Such being the common tendency of human
nature; the almost unlimited power which present social institutions
give to the man over at least one human being--the one with whom he
resides, and whom he has always present--this power seeks out and
evokes the latent germs of selfishness in the remotest corners of his
nature--fans its faintest sparks and smouldering embers--offers to
him a license for the indulgence of those points of his original
character which in all other relations he would have found it
necessary to repress and conceal, and the repression of which would
in time have become a second nature. I know that there is another
side to the question. I grant that the wife, if she cannot
effectually resist, can at least retaliate; she, too, can make the
man's life extremely uncomfortable, and by that power is able to
carry many points which she ought, and many which she ought not, to
prevail in. But this instrument of self-protection--which may be
called the power of the scold, or the shrewish sanction--has the
fatal defect, that it avails most against the least tyrannical
superiors, and in favour of the least deserving dependents. It is the
weapon of irritable and self-willed women; of those who would make
the worst use of power if they themselves had it, and who generally
turn this power to a bad use. The amiable cannot use such an
instrument, the highminded disdain it. And on the other hand, the
husbands against whom it is used most effectively are the gentler and
more inoffensive; those who cannot be induced, even by provocation,
to resort to any very harsh exercise of authority. The wife's power
of being disagreeable generally only establishes a counter-tyranny,
and makes victims in their turn chiefly of those husbands who are
least inclined to be tyrants.

What is it, then, which really tempers the corrupting effects of the
power, and makes it compatible with such amount of good as we
actually see? Mere feminine blandishments, though of great effect in
individual instances, have very little effect in modifying the
general tendencies of the situation; for their power only lasts while
the woman is young and attractive, often only while her charm is new,
and not dimmed by familiarity; and on many men they have not much
influence at any time. The real mitigating causes are, the personal
affection which is the growth of time, in so far as the man's nature
is susceptible of it, and the woman's character sufficiently
congenial with his to excite it; their common interests as regards
the children, and their general community of interest as concerns
third persons (to which however there are very great limitations);
the real importance of the wife to his daily comforts and enjoyments,
and the value he consequently attaches to her on his personal
account, which, in a man capable of feeling for others, lays the
foundation of caring for her on her own; and lastly, the influence
naturally acquired over almost all human beings by those near to
their persons (if not actually disagreeable to them): who, both by
their direct entreaties, and by the insensible contagion of their
feelings and dispositions, are often able, unless counteracted by
some equally strong personal influence, to obtain a degree of command
over the conduct of the superior, altogether excessive and
unreasonable. Through these various means, the wife frequently
exercises even too much power over the man; she is able to affect his
conduct in things in which she may not be qualified to influence it
for good--in which her influence may be not only unenlightened, but
employed on the morally wrong side; and in which he would act better
if left to his own prompting. But neither in the affairs of families
nor in those of states is power a compensation for the loss of
freedom. Her power often gives her what she has no right to, but does
not enable her to assert her own rights. A Sultan's favourite slave
has slaves under her, over whom she tyrannizes; but the desirable
thing would be that she should neither have slaves nor be a slave. By
entirely sinking her own existence in her husband; by having no will
(or persuading him that she has no will) but his, in anything which
regards their joint relation, and by making it the business of her
life to work upon his sentiments, a wife may gratify herself by
influencing, and very probably perverting, his conduct, in those of
his external relations which she has never qualified herself to judge
of, or in which she is herself wholly influenced by some personal or
other partiality or prejudice. Accordingly, as things now are, those
who act most kindly to their wives, are quite as often made worse, as
better, by the wife's influence, in respect to all interests
extending beyond the family. She is taught that she has no business
with things out of that sphere; and accordingly she seldom has any
honest and conscientious opinion on them; and therefore hardly ever
meddles with them for any legitimate purpose, but generally for an
interested one. She neither knows nor cares which is the right side
in politics, but she knows what will bring in money or invitations,
give her husband a title, her son a place, or her daughter a good
marriage.

But how, it will be asked, can any society exist without government?
In a family, as in a state, some one person must be the ultimate
ruler. Who shall decide when married people differ in opinion? Both
cannot have their way, yet a decision one way or the other must be
come to.

It is not true that in all voluntary association between two people,
one of them must be absolute master: still less that the law must
determine which of them it shall be. The most frequent case of
voluntary association, next to marriage, is partnership in business:
and it is not found or thought necessary to enact that in every
partnership, one partner shall have entire control over the concern,
and the others shall be bound to obey his orders. No one would enter
into partnership on terms which would subject him to the
responsibilities of a principal, with only the powers and privileges
of a clerk or agent. If the law dealt with other contracts as it does
with marriage, it would ordain that one partner should administer the
common business as if it was his private concern; that the others
should have only delegated powers; and that this one should be
designated by some general presumption of law, for example as being
the eldest. The law never does this: nor does experience show it to
be necessary that any theoretical inequality of power should exist
between the partners, or that the partnership should have any other
conditions than what they may themselves appoint by their articles of
agreement. Yet it might seem that the exclusive power might be
conceded with less danger to the rights and interests of the
inferior, in the case of partnership than in that of marriage, since
he is free to cancel the power by withdrawing from the connexion. The
wife has no such power, and even if she had, it is almost always
desirable that she should try all measures before resorting to it.

It is quite true that things which have to be decided every day, and
cannot adjust themselves gradually, or wait for a compromise, ought
to depend on one will: one person must have their sole control. But
it does not follow that this should always be the same person. The
natural arrangement is a division of powers between the two; each
being absolute in the executive branch of their own department, and
any change of system and principle requiring the consent of both. The
division neither can nor should be pre-established by the law, since
it must depend on individual capacities and suitabilities. If the two
persons chose, they might pre-appoint it by the marriage contract, as
pecuniary arrangements are now often pre-appointed. There would
seldom be any difficulty in deciding such things by mutual consent,
unless the marriage was one of those unhappy ones in which all other
things, as well as this, become subjects of bickering and dispute.
The division of rights would naturally follow the division of duties
and functions; and that is already made by consent, or at all events
not by law, but by general custom, modified and modifiable at the
pleasure of the persons concerned.

The real practical decision of affairs, to whichever may be given the
legal authority, will greatly depend, as it even now does, upon
comparative qualifications. The mere fact that he is usually the
eldest, will in most cases give the preponderance to the man; at
least until they both attain a time of life at which the difference
in their years is of no importance. There will naturally also be a
more potential voice on the side, whichever it is, that brings the
means of support. Inequality from this source does not depend on the
law of marriage, but on the general conditions of human society, as
now constituted. The influence of mental superiority, either general
or special, and of superior decision of character, will necessarily
tell for much. It always does so at present. And this fact shows how
little foundation there is for the apprehension that the powers and
responsibilities of partners in life (as of partners in business),
cannot be satisfactorily apportioned by agreement between themselves.
They always are so apportioned, except in cases in which the marriage
institution is a failure. Things never come to an issue of downright
power on one side, and obedience on the other, except where the
connexion altogether has been a mistake, and it would be a blessing
to both parties to be relieved from it. Some may say that the very
thing by which an amicable settlement of differences becomes
possible, is the power of legal compulsion known to be in reserve; as
people submit to an arbitration because there is a court of law in
the background, which they know that they can be forced to obey. But
to make the cases parallel, we must suppose that the rule of the
court of law was, not to try the cause, but to give judgment always
for the same side, suppose the defendant. If so, the amenability to
it would be a motive with the plaintiff to agree to almost any
arbitration, but it would be just the reverse with the defendant. The
despotic power which the law gives to the husband may be a reason to
make the wife assent to any compromise by which power is practically
shared between the two, but it cannot be the reason why the husband
does. That there is always among decently conducted people a
practical compromise, though one of them at least is under no
physical or moral necessity of making it, shows that the natural
motives which lead to a voluntary adjustment of the united life of
two persons in a manner acceptable to both, do on the whole, except
in unfavourable cases, prevail. The matter is certainly not improved
by laying down as an ordinance of law, that the superstructure of
free government shall be raised upon a legal basis of despotism on
one side and subjection on the other, and that every concession which
the despot makes may, at his mere pleasure, and without any warning,
be recalled. Besides that no freedom is worth much when held on so
precarious a tenure, its conditions are not likely to be the most
equitable when the law throws so prodigious a weight into one scale;
when the adjustment rests between two persons one of whom is declared
to be entitled to everything, the other not only entitled to nothing
except during the good pleasure of the first, but under the strongest
moral and religious obligation not to rebel under any excess of
oppression.

A pertinacious adversary, pushed to extremities, may say, that
husbands indeed are willing to be reasonable, and to make fair
concessions to their partners without being compelled to it, but that
wives are not: that if allowed any rights of their own, they will
acknowledge no rights at all in any one else, and never will yield in
anything, unless they can be compelled, by the man's mere authority,
to yield in everything. This would have been said by many persons
some generations ago, when satires on women were in vogue, and men
thought it a clever thing to insult women for being what men made
them. But it will be said by no one now who is worth replying to. It
is not the doctrine of the present day that women are less
susceptible of good feeling, and consideration for those with whom
they are united by the strongest ties, than men are. On the contrary,
we are perpetually told that women are better than men, by those who
are totally opposed to treating them as if they were as good; so that
the saying has passed into a piece of tiresome cant, intended to put
a complimentary face upon an injury, and resembling those
celebrations of royal clemency which, according to Gulliver, the king
of Lilliput always prefixed to his most sanguinary decrees. If women
are better than men in anything, it surely is in individual
self-sacrifice for those of their own family. But I lay little stress
on this, so long as they are universally taught that they are born
and created for self-sacrifice. I believe that equality of rights
would abate the exaggerated self-abnegation which is the present
artificial ideal of feminine character, and that a good woman would
not be more self-sacrificing than the best man: but on the other
hand, men would be much more unselfish and self-sacrificing than at
present, because they would no longer be taught to worship their own
will as such a grand thing that it is actually the law for another
rational being. There is nothing which men so easily learn as this
self-worship: all privileged persons, and all privileged classes,
have had it. The more we descend in the scale of humanity, the
intenser it is; and most of all in those who are not, and can never
expect to be, raised above any one except an unfortunate wife and
children. The honourable exceptions are proportionally fewer than in
the case of almost any other human infirmity. Philosophy and
religion, instead of keeping it in check, are generally suborned to
defend it; and nothing controls it but that practical feeling of the
equality of human beings, which is the theory of Christianity, but
which Christianity will never practically teach, while it sanctions
institutions grounded on an arbitrary preference of one human being
over another.

There are, no doubt, women, as there are men, whom equality of
consideration will not satisfy; with whom there is no peace while any
will or wish is regarded but their own. Such persons are a proper
subject for the law of divorce. They are only fit to live alone, and
no human beings ought to be compelled to associate their lives with
them. But the legal subordination tends to make such characters among
women more, rather than less, frequent. If the man exerts his whole
power, the woman is of course crushed: but if she is treated with
indulgence, and permitted to assume power, there is no rule to set
limits to her encroachments. The law, not determining her rights, but
theoretically allowing her none at all, practically declares that the
measure of what she has a right to, is what she can contrive to get.

The equality of married persons before the law, is not only the sole
mode in which that particular relation can be made consistent with
justice to both sides, and conducive to the happiness of both, but it
is the only means of rendering the daily life of mankind, in any high
sense, a school of moral cultivation. Though the truth may not be
felt or generally acknowledged for generations to come, the only
school of genuine moral sentiment is society between equals. The
moral education of mankind has hitherto emanated chiefly from the law
of force, and is adapted almost solely to the relations which force
creates. In the less advanced states of society, people hardly
recognise any relation with their equals. To be an equal is to be an
enemy. Society, from its highest place to its lowest, is one long
chain, or rather ladder, where every individual is either above or
below his nearest neighbour, and wherever he does not command he must
obey. Existing moralities, accordingly, are mainly fitted to a
relation of command and obedience. Yet command and obedience are but
unfortunate necessities of human life: society in equality is its
normal state. Already in modern life, and more and more as it
progressively improves, command and obedience become exceptional
facts in life, equal association its general rule. The morality of
the first ages rested on the obligation to submit to power; that of
the ages next following, on the right of the weak to the forbearance
and protection of the strong. How much longer is one form of society
and life to content itself with the morality made for another? We
have had the morality of submission, and the morality of chivalry and
generosity; the time is now come for the morality of justice.
Whenever, in former ages, any approach has been made to society in
equality, Justice has asserted its claims as the foundation of
virtue. It was thus in the free republics of antiquity. But even in
the best of these, the equals were limited to the free male citizens;
slaves, women, and the unenfranchised residents were under the law of
force. The joint influence of Roman civilization and of Christianity
obliterated these distinctions, and in theory (if only partially in
practice) declared the claims of the human being, as such, to be
paramount to those of sex, class, or social position. The barriers
which had begun to be levelled were raised again by the northern
conquests; and the whole of modern history consists of the slow
process by which they have since been wearing away. We are entering
into an order of things in which justice will again be the primary
virtue; grounded as before on equal, but now also on sympathetic
association; having its root no longer in the instinct of equals for
self-protection, but in a cultivated sympathy between them; and no
one being now left out, but an equal measure being extended to all.
It is no novelty that mankind do not distinctly foresee their own
changes, and that their sentiments are adapted to past, not to coming
ages. To see the futurity of the species has always been the
privilege of the intellectual élite, or of those who have learnt from
them; to have the feelings of that futurity has been the distinction,
and usually the martyrdom, of a still rarer élite. Institutions,
books, education, society, all go on training human beings for the
old, long after the new has come; much more when it is only coming.
But the true virtue of human beings is fitness to live together as
equals; claiming nothing for themselves but what they as freely
concede to every one else; regarding command of any kind as an
exceptional necessity, and in all cases a temporary one; and
preferring, whenever possible, the society of those with whom leading
and following can be alternate and reciprocal. To these virtues,
nothing in life as at present constituted gives cultivation by
exercise. The family is a school of despotism, in which the virtues
of despotism, but also its vices, are largely nourished. Citizenship,
in free countries, is partly a school of society in equality; but
citizenship fills only a small place in modern life, and does not
come near the daily habits or inmost sentiments. The family, justly
constituted, would be the real school of the virtues of freedom. It
is sure to be a sufficient one of everything else. It will always be
a school of obedience for the children, of command for the parents.
What is needed is, that it should be a school of sympathy in
equality, of living together in love, without power on one side or
obedience on the other. This it ought to be between the parents. It
would then be an exercise of those virtues which each requires to fit
them for all other association, and a model to the children of the
feelings and conduct which their temporary training by means of
obedience is designed to render habitual, and therefore natural, to
them. The moral training of mankind will never be adapted to the
conditions of the life for which all other human progress is a
preparation, until they practise in the family the same moral rule
which is adapted to the normal constitution of human society. Any
sentiment of freedom which can exist in a man whose nearest and
dearest intimacies are with those of whom he is absolute master, is
not the genuine or Christian love of freedom, but, what the love of
freedom generally was in the ancients and in the middle ages--an
intense feeling of the dignity and importance of his own personality;
making him disdain a yoke for himself, of which he has no abhorrence
whatever in the abstract, but which he is abundantly ready to impose
on others for his own interest or glorification.

I readily admit (and it is the very foundation of my hopes) that
numbers of married people even under the present law, (in the higher
classes of England probably a great majority,) live in the spirit of
a just law of equality. Laws never would be improved, if there were
not numerous persons whose moral sentiments are better than the
existing laws. Such persons ought to support the principles here
advocated; of which the only object is to make all other married
couples similar to what these are now. But persons even of
considerable moral worth, unless they are also thinkers, are very
ready to believe that laws or practices, the evils of which they have
not personally experienced, do not produce any evils, but (if seeming
to be generally approved of) probably do good, and that it is wrong
to object to them. It would, however, be a great mistake in such
married people to suppose, because the legal conditions of the tie
which unites them do not occur to their thoughts once in a
twelvemonth, and because they live and feel in all respects as if
they were legally equals, that the same is the case with all other
married couples, wherever the husband is not a notorious ruffian. To
suppose this, would be to show equal ignorance of human nature and of
fact. The less fit a man is for the possession of power--the less
likely to be allowed to exercise it over any person with that
person's voluntary consent--the more does he hug himself in the
consciousness of the power the law gives him, exact its legal rights
to the utmost point which custom (the custom of men like himself)
will tolerate, and take pleasure in using the power, merely to
enliven the agreeable sense of possessing it. What is more; in the
most naturally brutal and morally uneducated part of the lower
classes, the legal slavery of the woman, and something in the merely
physical subjection to their will as an instrument, causes them to
feel a sort of disrespect and contempt towards their own wife which
they do not feel towards any other woman, or any other human being,
with whom they come in contact; and which makes her seem to them an
appropriate subject for any kind of indignity. Let an acute observer
of the signs of feeling, who has the requisite opportunities, judge
for himself whether this is not the case: and if he finds that it is,
let him not wonder at any amount of disgust and indignation that can
be felt against institutions which lead naturally to this depraved
state of the human mind.

We shall be told, perhaps, that religion imposes the duty of
obedience; as every established fact which is too bad to admit of any
other defence, is always presented to us as an injunction of
religion. The Church, it is very true, enjoins it in her formularies,
but it would be difficult to derive any such injunction from
Christianity. We are told that St. Paul said, “Wives, obey your
husbands:” but he also said, “Slaves, obey your masters.” It was not
St. Paul's business, nor was it consistent with his object, the
propagation of Christianity, to incite any one to rebellion against
existing laws. The apostle's acceptance of all social institutions as
he found them, is no more to be construed as a disapproval of
attempts to improve them at the proper time, than his declaration,
“The powers that be are ordained of God,” gives his sanction to
military despotism, and to that alone, as the Christian form of
political government, or commands passive obedience to it. To pretend
that Christianity was intended to stereotype existing forms of
government and society, and protect them against change, is to reduce
it to the level of Islamism or of Brahminism. It is precisely because
Christianity has not done this, that it has been the religion of the
progressive portion of mankind, and Islamism, Brahminism, &c., have
been those of the stationary portions; or rather (for there is no
such thing as a really stationary society) of the declining portions.
There have been abundance of people, in all ages of Christianity, who
tried to make it something of the same kind; to convert us into a
sort of Christian Mussulmans, with the Bible for a Koran, prohibiting
all improvement: and great has been their power, and many have had to
sacrifice their lives in resisting them. But they have been resisted,
and the resistance has made us what we are, and will yet make us what
we are to be.

After what has been said respecting the obligation of obedience, it
is almost superfluous to say anything concerning the more special
point included in the general one--a woman's right to her own
property; for I need not hope that this treatise can make any
impression upon those who need anything to convince them that a
woman's inheritance or gains ought to be as much her own after
marriage as before. The rule is simple: whatever would be the
husband's or wife's if they were not married, should be under their
exclusive control during marriage; which need not interfere with the
power to tie up property by settlement, in order to preserve it for
children. Some people are sentimentally shocked at the idea of a
separate interest in money matters, as inconsistent with the ideal
fusion of two lives into one. For my own part, I am one of the
strongest supporters of community of goods, when resulting from an
entire unity of feeling in the owners, which makes all things common
between them. But I have no relish for a community of goods resting
on the doctrine, that what is mine is yours but what is yours is not
mine; and I should prefer to decline entering into such a compact
with any one, though I were myself the person to profit by it.

This particular injustice and oppression to women, which is, to
common apprehensions, more obvious than all the rest, admits of
remedy without interfering with any other mischiefs: and there can be
little doubt that it will be one of the earliest remedied. Already,
in many of the new and several of the old States of the American
Confederation, provisions have been inserted even in the written
Constitutions, securing to women equality of rights in this respect:
and thereby improving materially the position, in the marriage
relation, of those women at least who have property, by leaving them
one instrument of power which they have not signed away; and
preventing also the scandalous abuse of the marriage institution,
which is perpetrated when a man entraps a girl into marrying him
without a settlement, for the sole purpose of getting possession of
her money. When the support of the family depends, not on property,
but on earnings, the common arrangement, by which the man earns the
income and the wife superintends the domestic expenditure, seems to
me in general the most suitable division of labour between the two
persons. If, in addition to the physical suffering of bearing
children, and the whole responsibility of their care and education in
early years, the wife undertakes the careful and economical
application of the husband's earnings to the general comfort of the
family; she takes not only her fair share, but usually the larger
share, of the bodily and mental exertion required by their joint
existence. If she undertakes any additional portion, it seldom
relieves her from this, but only prevents her from performing it
properly. The care which she is herself disabled from taking of the
children and the household, nobody else takes; those of the children
who do not die, grow up as they best can, and the management of the
household is likely to be so bad, as even in point of economy to be a
great drawback from the value of the wife's earnings. In an otherwise
just state of things, it is not, therefore, I think, a desirable
custom, that the wife should contribute by her labour to the income
of the family. In an unjust state of things, her doing so may be
useful to her, by making her of more value in the eyes of the man who
is legally her master; but, on the other hand, it enables him still
farther to abuse his power, by forcing her to work, and leaving the
support of the family to her exertions, while he spends most of his
time in drinking and idleness. The _power_ of earning is essential to
the dignity of a woman, if she has not independent property. But if
marriage were an equal contract, not implying the obligation of
obedience; if the connexion were no longer enforced to the oppression
of those to whom it is purely a mischief, but a separation, on just
terms (I do not now speak of a divorce), could be obtained by any
woman who was morally entitled to it; and if she would then find all
honourable employments as freely open to her as to men; it would not
be necessary for her protection, that during marriage she should make
this particular use of her faculties. Like a man when he chooses a
profession, so, when a woman marries, it may in general be understood
that she makes choice of the management of a household, and the
bringing up of a family, as the first call upon her exertions, during
as many years of her life as may be required for the purpose; and
that she renounces, not all other objects and occupations, but all
which are not consistent with the requirements of this. The actual
exercise, in a habitual or systematic manner, of outdoor occupations,
or such as cannot be carried on at home, would by this principle be
practically interdicted to the greater number of married women. But
the utmost latitude ought to exist for the adaptation of general
rules to individual suitabilities; and there ought to be nothing to
prevent faculties exceptionally adapted to any other pursuit, from
obeying their vocation notwithstanding marriage: due provision being
made for supplying otherwise any falling-short which might become
inevitable, in her full performance of the ordinary functions of
mistress of a family. These things, if once opinion were rightly
directed on the subject, might with perfect safety be left to be
regulated by opinion, without any interference of law.




CHAPTER III.


On the other point which is involved in the just equality of women,
their admissibility to all the functions and occupations hitherto
retained as the monopoly of the stronger sex, I should anticipate no
difficulty in convincing any one who has gone with me on the subject
of the equality of women in the family. I believe that their
disabilities elsewhere are only clung to in order to maintain their
subordination in domestic life; because the generality of the male
sex cannot yet tolerate the idea of living with an equal. Were it not
for that, I think that almost every one, in the existing state of
opinion in politics and political economy, would admit the injustice
of excluding half the human race from the greater number of lucrative
occupations, and from almost all high social functions; ordaining
from their birth either that they are not, and cannot by any
possibility become, fit for employments which are legally open to the
stupidest and basest of the other sex, or else that however fit they
may be, those employments shall be interdicted to them, in order to
be preserved for the exclusive benefit of males. In the last two
centuries, when (which was seldom the case) any reason beyond the
mere existence of the fact was thought to be required to justify the
disabilities of women, people seldom assigned as a reason their
inferior mental capacity; which, in times when there was a real trial
of personal faculties (from which all women were not excluded) in the
struggles of public life, no one really believed in. The reason given
in those days was not women's unfitness, but the interest of society,
by which was meant the interest of men: just as the _raison d'état_,
meaning the convenience of the government, and the support of
existing authority, was deemed a sufficient explanation and excuse
for the most flagitious crimes. In the present day, power holds a
smoother language, and whomsoever it oppresses, always pretends to do
so for their own good: accordingly, when anything is forbidden to
women, it is thought necessary to say, and desirable to believe, that
they are incapable of doing it, and that they depart from their real
path of success and happiness when they aspire to it. But to make
this reason plausible (I do not say valid), those by whom it is urged
must be prepared to carry it to a much greater length than any one
ventures to do in the face of present experience. It is not
sufficient to maintain that women on the average are less gifted than
men on the average, with certain of the higher mental faculties, or
that a smaller number of women than of men are fit for occupations
and functions of the highest intellectual character. It is necessary
to maintain that no women at all are fit for them, and that the most
eminent women are inferior in mental faculties to the most mediocre
of the men on whom those functions at present devolve. For if the
performance of the function is decided either by competition, or by
any mode of choice which secures regard to the public interest, there
needs be no apprehension that any important employments will fall
into the hands of women inferior to average men, or to the average of
their male competitors. The only result would be that there would be
fewer women than men in such employments; a result certain to happen
in any ease, if only from the preference always likely to be felt by
the majority of women for the one vocation in which there is nobody
to compete with them. Now, the most determined depreciator of women
will not venture to deny, that when we add the experience of recent
times to that of ages past, women, and not a few merely, but many
women, have proved themselves capable of everything, perhaps without
a single exception, which is done by men, and of doing it
successfully and creditably. The utmost that can be said is, that
there are many things which none of them have succeeded in doing as
well as they have been done by some men--many in which they have not
reached the very highest rank. But there are extremely few, dependent
only on mental faculties, in which they have not attained the rank
next to the highest. Is not this enough, and much more than enough,
to make it a tyranny to them, and a detriment to society, that they
should not be allowed to compete with men for the exercise of these
functions? Is it not a mere truism to say, that such functions are
often filled by men far less fit for them than numbers of women, and
who would be beaten by women in any fair field of competition? What
difference does it make that there may be men somewhere, fully
employed about other things, who may be still better qualified for
the things in question than these women? Does not this take place in
all competitions? Is there so great a superfluity of men fit for high
duties, that society can afford to reject the service of any
competent person? Are we so certain of always finding a man made to
our hands for any duty or function of social importance which falls
vacant, that we lose nothing by putting a ban upon one-half of
mankind, and refusing beforehand to make their faculties available,
however distinguished they may be? And even if we could do without
them, would it be consistent with justice to refuse to them their
fair share of honour and distinction, or to deny to them the equal
moral right of all human beings to choose their occupation (short of
injury to others) according to their own preferences, at their own
risk? Nor is the injustice confined to them: it is shared by those
who are in a position to benefit by their services. To ordain that
any kind of persons shall not be physicians, or shall not be
advocates, or shall not be members of parliament, is to injure not
them only, but all who employ physicians or advocates, or elect
members of parliament, and who are deprived of the stimulating effect
of greater competition on the exertions of the competitors, as well
as restricted to a narrower range of individual choice.

It will perhaps be sufficient if I confine myself, in the details of
my argument, to functions of a public nature: since, if I am
successful as to those, it probably will be readily granted that
women should be admissible to all other occupations to which it is at
all material whether they are admitted or not. And here let me begin
by marking out one function, broadly distinguished from all others,
their right to which is entirely independent of any question which
can be raised concerning their faculties. I mean the suffrage, both
parliamentary and municipal. The right to share in the choice of
those who are to exercise a public trust, is altogether a distinct
thing from that of competing for the trust itself. If no one could
vote for a member of parliament who was not fit to be a candidate,
the government would be a narrow oligarchy indeed. To have a voice in
choosing those by whom one is to be governed, is a means of
self-protection due to every one, though he were to remain for ever
excluded from the function of governing: and that women are
considered fit to have such a choice, may be presumed from the fact,
that the law already gives it to women in the most important of all
cases to themselves: for the choice of the man who is to govern a
woman to the end of life, is always supposed to be voluntarily made
by herself. In the case of election to public trusts, it is the
business of constitutional law to surround the right of suffrage with
all needful securities and limitations; but whatever securities are
sufficient in the case of the male sex, no others need be required in
the case of women. Under whatever conditions, and within whatever
limits, men are admitted to the suffrage, there is not a shadow of
justification for not admitting women under the same. The majority of
the women of any class are not likely to differ in political opinion
from the majority of the men of the same class, unless the question
be one in which the interests of women, as such, are in some way
involved; and if they are so, women require the suffrage, as their
guarantee of just and equal consideration. This ought to be obvious
even to those who coincide in no other of the doctrines for which I
contend. Even if every woman were a wife, and if every wife ought to
be a slave, all the more would these slaves stand in need of legal
protection: and we know what legal protection the slaves have, where
the laws are made by their masters.

With regard to the fitness of women, not only to participate in
elections, but themselves to hold offices or practise professions
involving important public responsibilities; I have already observed
that this consideration is not essential to the practical question in
dispute: since any woman, who succeeds in an open profession, proves
by that very fact that she is qualified for it. And in the case of
public offices, if the political system of the country is such as to
exclude unfit men, it will equally exclude unfit women: while if it
is not, there is no additional evil in the fact that the unfit
persons whom it admits may be either women or men. As long therefore
as it is acknowledged that even a few women may be fit for these
duties, the laws which shut the door on those exceptions cannot be
justified by any opinion which can be held respecting the capacities
of women in general. But, though this last consideration is not
essential, it is far from being irrelevant. An unprejudiced view of
it gives additional strength to the arguments against the
disabilities of women, and reinforces them by high considerations of
practical utility.

Let us at first make entire abstraction of all psychological
considerations tending to show, that any of the mental differences
supposed to exist between women and men are but the natural effect of
the differences in their education and circumstances, and indicate no
radical difference, far less radical inferiority, of nature. Let us
consider women only as they already are, or as they are known to have
been; and the capacities which they have already practically shown.
What they have done, that at least, if nothing else, it is proved
that they can do. When we consider how sedulously they are all
trained away from, instead of being trained towards, any of the
occupations or objects reserved for men, it is evident that I am
taking a very humble ground for them, when I rest their case on what
they have actually achieved. For, in this case, negative evidence is
worth little, while any positive evidence is conclusive. It cannot be
inferred to be impossible that a woman should be a Homer, or an
Aristotle, or a Michael Angelo, or a Beethoven, because no woman has
yet actually produced works comparable to theirs in any of those
lines of excellence. This negative fact at most leaves the question
uncertain, and open to psychological discussion. But it is quite
certain that a woman can be a Queen Elizabeth, or a Deborah, or a
Joan of Arc, since this is not inference, but fact. Now it is a
curious consideration, that the only things which the existing law
excludes women from doing, are the things which they have proved that
they are able to do. There is no law to prevent a woman from having
written all the plays of Shakspeare, or composed all the operas of
Mozart. But Queen Elizabeth or Queen Victoria, had they not inherited
the throne, could not have been intrusted with the smallest of the
political duties, of which the former showed herself equal to the
greatest.

If anything conclusive could be inferred from experience, without
psychological analysis, it would be that the things which women are
not allowed to do are the very ones for which they are peculiarly
qualified; since their vocation for government has made its way, and
become conspicuous, through the very few opportunities which have
been given; while in the lines of distinction which apparently were
freely open to them, they have by no means so eminently distinguished
themselves. We know how small a number of reigning queens history
presents, in comparison with that of kings. Of this smaller number a
far larger proportion have shown talents for rule; though many of
them have occupied the throne in difficult periods. It is remarkable,
too, that they have, in a great number of instances, been
distinguished by merits the most opposite to the imaginary and
conventional character of women: they have been as much remarked for
the firmness and vigour of their rule, as for its intelligence. When,
to queens and empresses, we add regents, and viceroys of provinces,
the list of women who have been eminent rulers of mankind swells to a
great length.[1] This fact is so undeniable, that some one, long ago,
tried to retort the argument, and turned the admitted truth into an
additional insult, by saying that queens are better than kings,
because under kings women govern, but under queens, men.

It may seem a waste of reasoning to argue against a bad joke; but
such things do affect people's minds; and I have heard men quote this
saying, with an air as if they thought that there was something in
it. At any rate, it will serve as well as anything else for a
starting point in discussion. I say, then, that it is not true that
under kings, women govern. Such cases are entirely exceptional: and
weak kings have quite as often governed ill through the influence of
male favourites, as of female. When a king is governed by a woman
merely through his amatory propensities, good government is not
probable, though even then there are exceptions. But French history
counts two kings who have voluntarily given the direction of affairs
during many years, the one to his mother, the other to his sister:
one of them, Charles VIII., was a mere boy, but in doing so he
followed the intentions of his father Louis XI., the ablest monarch
of his age. The other, Saint Louis, was the best, and one of the most
vigorous rulers, since the time of Charlemagne. Both these princesses
ruled in a manner hardly equalled by any prince among their
contemporaries. The emperor Charles the Fifth, the most politic
prince of his time, who had as great a number of able men in his
service as a ruler ever had, and was one of the least likely of all
sovereigns to sacrifice his interest to personal feelings, made two
princesses of his family successively Governors of the Netherlands,
and kept one or other of them in that post during his whole life,
(they were afterwards succeeded by a third). Both ruled very
successfully, and one of them, Margaret of Austria, was one of the
ablest politicians of the age. So much for one side of the question.
Now as to the other. When it is said that under queens men govern, is
the same meaning to be understood as when kings are said to be
governed by women? Is it meant that queens choose as their
instruments of government, the associates of their personal
pleasures? The case is rare even with those who are as unscrupulous
on the latter point as Catherine II.: and it is not in these cases
that the good government, alleged to arise from male influence, is to
be found. If it be true, then, that the administration is in the
hands of better men under a queen than under an average king, it must
be that queens have a superior capacity for choosing them; and women
must be better qualified than men both for the position of sovereign,
and for that of chief minister; for the principal business of a prime
minister is not to govern in person, but to find the fittest persons
to conduct every department of public affairs. The more rapid insight
into character, which is one of the admitted points of superiority in
women over men, must certainly make them, with anything like parity
of qualifications in other respects, more apt than men in that choice
of instruments, which is nearly the most important business of every
one who has to do with governing mankind. Even the unprincipled
Catherine de' Medici could feel the value of a Chancellor de
l'Hôpital. But it is also true that most great queens have been great
by their own talents for government, and have been well served
precisely for that reason. They retained the supreme direction of
affairs in their own hands: and if they listened to good advisers,
they gave by that fact the strongest proof that their judgment fitted
them for dealing with the great questions of government.

Is it reasonable to think that those who are fit for the greater
functions of politics, are incapable of qualifying themselves for the
less? Is there any reason in the nature of things, that the wives and
sisters of princes should, whenever called on, be found as competent
as the princes themselves to _their_ business, but that the wives and
sisters of statesmen, and administrators, and directors of companies,
and managers of public institutions, should be unable to do what is
done by their brothers and husbands? The real reason is plain enough;
it is that princesses, being more raised above the generality of men
by their rank than placed below them by their sex, have never been
taught that it was improper for them to concern themselves with
politics; but have been allowed to feel the liberal interest natural
to any cultivated human being, in the great transactions which took
place around them, and in which they might be called on to take a
part. The ladies of reigning families are the only women who are
allowed the same range of interests and freedom of development as
men; and it is precisely in their case that there is not found to be
any inferiority. Exactly where and in proportion as women's
capacities for government have been tried, in that proportion have
they been found adequate.

This fact is in accordance with the best general conclusions which
the world's imperfect experience seems as yet to suggest, concerning
the peculiar tendencies and aptitudes characteristic of women, as
women have hitherto been. I do not say, as they will continue to be;
for, as I have already said more than once, I consider it presumption
in any one to pretend to decide what women are or are not, can or
cannot be, by natural constitution. They have always hitherto been
kept, as far as regards spontaneous development, in so unnatural a
state, that their nature cannot but have been greatly distorted and
disguised; and no one can safely pronounce that if women's nature
were left to choose its direction as freely as men's, and if no
artificial bent were attempted to be given to it except that required
by the conditions of human society, and given to both sexes alike,
there would be any material difference, or perhaps any difference at
all, in the character and capacities which would unfold themselves. I
shall presently show, that even the least contestable of the
differences which now exist, are such as may very well have been
produced merely by circumstances, without any difference of natural
capacity. But, looking at women as they are known in experience, it
may be said of them, with more truth than belongs to most other
generalizations on the subject, that the general bent of their
talents is towards the practical. This statement is conformable to
all the public history of women, in the present and the past. It is
no less borne out by common and daily experience. Let us consider the
special nature of the mental capacities most characteristic of a
woman of talent. They are all of a kind which fits them for practice,
and makes them tend towards it. What is meant by a woman's capacity
of intuitive perception? It means, a rapid and correct insight into
present fact. It has nothing to do with general principles. Nobody
ever perceived a scientific law of nature by intuition, nor arrived
at a general rule of duty or prudence by it. These are results of
slow and careful collection and comparison of experience; and neither
the men nor the women of intuition usually shine in this department,
unless, indeed, the experience necessary is such as they can acquire
by themselves. For what is called their intuitive sagacity makes them
peculiarly apt in gathering such general truths as can be collected
from their individual means of observation. When, consequently, they
chance to be as well provided as men are with the results of other
people's experience, by reading and education, (I use the word chance
advisedly, for, in respect to the knowledge that tends to fit them
for the greater concerns of life, the only educated women are the
self-educated) they are better furnished than men in general with the
essential requisites of skilful and successful practice. Men who have
been much taught, are apt to be deficient in the sense of present
fact; they do not see, in the facts which they are called upon to
deal with, what is really there, but what they have been taught to
expect. This is seldom the case with women of any ability. Their
capacity of “intuition” preserves them from it. With equality of
experience and of general faculties, a woman usually sees much more
than a man of what is immediately before her. Now this sensibility to
the present, is the main quality on which the capacity for practice,
as distinguished from theory, depends. To discover general
principles, belongs to the speculative faculty: to discern and
discriminate the particular cases in which they are and are not
applicable, constitutes practical talent: and for this, women as they
now are have a peculiar aptitude. I admit that there can be no good
practice without principles, and that the predominant place which
quickness of observation holds among a woman's faculties, makes her
particularly apt to build over-hasty generalizations upon her own
observation; though at the same time no less ready in rectifying
those generalizations, as her observation takes a wider range. But
the corrective to this defect, is access to the experience of the
human race; general knowledge--exactly the thing which education can
best supply. A woman's mistakes are specifically those of a clever
self-educated man, who often sees what men trained in routine do not
see, but falls into errors for want of knowing things which have long
been known. Of course he has acquired much of the pre-existing
knowledge, or he could not have got on at all; but what he knows of
it he has picked up in fragments and at random, as women do.

But this gravitation of women's minds to the present, to the real, to
actual fact, while in its exclusiveness it is a source of errors, is
also a most useful counteractive of the contrary error. The principal
and most characteristic aberration of speculative minds as such,
consists precisely in the deficiency of this lively perception and
ever-present sense of objective fact. For want of this, they often
not only overlook the contradiction which outward facts oppose to
their theories, but lose sight of the legitimate purpose of
speculation altogether, and let their speculative faculties go astray
into regions not peopled with real beings, animate or inanimate, even
idealized, but with personified shadows created by the illusions of
metaphysics or by the mere entanglement of words, and think these
shadows the proper objects of the highest, the most transcendant,
philosophy. Hardly anything can be of greater value to a man of
theory and speculation who employs himself not in collecting
materials of knowledge by observation, but in working them up by
processes of thought into comprehensive truths of science and laws of
conduct, than to carry on his speculations in the companionship, and
under the criticism, of a really superior woman. There is nothing
comparable to it for keeping his thoughts within the limits of real
things, and the actual facts of nature. A woman seldom runs wild
after an abstraction. The habitual direction of her mind to dealing
with things as individuals rather than in groups, and (what is
closely connected with it) her more lively interest in the present
feelings of persons, which makes her consider first of all, in
anything which claims to be applied to practice, in what manner
persons will be affected by it--these two things make her extremely
unlikely to put faith in any speculation which loses sight of
individuals, and deals with things as if they existed for the benefit
of some imaginary entity, some mere creation of the mind, not
resolvable into the feelings of living beings. Women's thoughts are
thus as useful in giving reality to those of thinking men, as men's
thoughts in giving width and largeness to those of women. In depth,
as distinguished from breadth, I greatly doubt if even now, women,
compared with men, are at any disadvantage.

If the existing mental characteristics of women are thus valuable
even in aid of speculation, they are still more important, when
speculation has done its work, for carrying out the results of
speculation into practice. For the reasons already given, women are
comparatively unlikely to fall into the common error of men, that of
sticking to their rules in a case whose specialities either take it
out of the class to which the rules are applicable, or require a
special adaptation of them. Let us now consider another of the
admitted superiorities of clever women, greater quickness of
apprehension. Is not this pre-eminently a quality which fits a person
for practice? In action, everything continually depends upon deciding
promptly. In speculation, nothing does. A mere thinker can wait, can
take time to consider, can collect additional evidence; he is not
obliged to complete his philosophy at once, lest the opportunity
should go by. The power of drawing the best conclusion possible from
insufficient data is not indeed useless in philosophy; the
construction of a provisional hypothesis consistent with all known
facts is often the needful basis for further inquiry. But this
faculty is rather serviceable in philosophy, than the main
qualification for it: and, for the auxiliary as well as for the main
operation, the philosopher can allow himself any time he pleases. He
is in no need of the capacity of doing rapidly what he does; what he
rather needs is patience, to work on slowly until imperfect lights
have become perfect, and a conjecture has ripened into a theorem. For
those, on the contrary, whose business is with the fugitive and
perishable--with individual facts, not kinds of facts--rapidity of
thought is a qualification next only in importance to the power of
thought itself. He who has not his faculties under immediate command,
in the contingencies of action, might as well not have them at all.
He may be fit to criticize, but he is not fit to act. Now it is in
this that women, and the men who are most like women, confessedly
excel. The other sort of man, however pre-eminent may be his
faculties, arrives slowly at complete command of them: rapidity of
judgment and promptitude of judicious action, even in the things he
knows best, are the gradual and late result of strenuous effort grown
into habit.

It will be said, perhaps, that the greater nervous susceptibility of
women is a disqualification for practice, in anything but domestic
life, by rendering them mobile, changeable, too vehemently under the
influence of the moment, incapable of dogged perseverance, unequal
and uncertain in the power of using their faculties. I think that
these phrases sum up the greater part of the objections commonly made
to the fitness of women for the higher class of serious business.
Much of all this is the mere overflow of nervous energy run to waste,
and would cease when the energy was directed to a definite end. Much
is also the result of conscious or unconscious cultivation; as we see
by the almost total disappearance of “hysterics” and fainting fits,
since they have gone out of fashion. Moreover, when people are
brought up, like many women of the higher classes (though less so in
our own country than in any other) a kind of hot-house plants,
shielded from the wholesome vicissitudes of air and temperature, and
untrained in any of the occupations and exercises which give stimulus
and development to the circulatory and muscular system, while their
nervous system, especially in its emotional department, is kept in
unnaturally active play; it is no wonder if those of them who do not
die of consumption, grow up with constitutions liable to derangement
from slight causes, both internal and external, and without stamina
to support any task, physical or mental, requiring continuity of
effort. But women brought up to work for their livelihood show none
of these morbid characteristics, unless indeed they are chained to an
excess of sedentary work in confined and unhealthy rooms. Women who
in their early years have shared in the healthful physical education
and bodily freedom of their brothers, and who obtain a sufficiency of
pure air and exercise in after-life, very rarely have any excessive
susceptibility of nerves which can disqualify them for active
pursuits. There is indeed a certain proportion of persons, in both
sexes, in whom an unusual degree of nervous sensibility is
constitutional, and of so marked a character as to be the feature of
their organization which exercises the greatest influence over the
whole character of the vital phenomena. This constitution, like other
physical conformations, is hereditary, and is transmitted to sons as
well as daughters; but it is possible, and probable, that the nervous
temperament (as it is called) is inherited by a greater number of
women than of men. We will assume this as a fact: and let me then
ask, are men of nervous temperament found to be unfit for the duties
and pursuits usually followed by men? If not, why should women of the
same temperament be unfit for them? The peculiarities of the
temperament are, no doubt, within certain limits, an obstacle to
success in some employments, though an aid to it in others. But when
the occupation is suitable to the temperament, and sometimes even
when it is unsuitable, the most brilliant examples of success are
continually given by the men of high nervous sensibility. They are
distinguished in their practical manifestations chiefly by this, that
being susceptible of a higher degree of excitement than those of
another physical constitution, their powers when excited differ more
than in the case of other people, from those shown in their ordinary
state: they are raised, as it were, above themselves, and do things
with ease which they are wholly incapable of at other times. But this
lofty excitement is not, except in weak bodily constitutions, a mere
flash, which passes away immediately, leaving no permanent traces,
and incompatible with persistent and steady pursuit of an object. It
is the character of the nervous temperament to be capable of
_sustained_ excitement, holding out through long continued efforts.
It is what is meant by _spirit_. It is what makes the high-bred
racehorse run without slackening speed till he drops down dead. It is
what has enabled so many delicate women to maintain the most sublime
constancy not only at the stake, but through a long preliminary
succession of mental and bodily tortures. It is evident that people
of this temperament are particularly apt for what may be called the
executive department of the leadership of mankind. They are the
material of great orators, great preachers, impressive diffusers of
moral influences. Their constitution might be deemed less favourable
to the qualities required from a statesman in the cabinet, or from a
judge. It would be so, if the consequence necessarily followed that
because people are excitable they must always be in a state of
excitement. But this is wholly a question of training. Strong feeling
is the instrument and element of strong self-control: but it requires
to be cultivated in that direction. When it is, it forms not the
heroes of impulse only, but those also of self-conquest. History and
experience prove that the most passionate characters are the most
fanatically rigid in their feelings of duty, when their passion has
been trained to act in that direction. The judge who gives a just
decision in a case where his feelings are intensely interested on the
other side, derives from that same strength of feeling the determined
sense of the obligation of justice, which enables him to achieve this
victory over himself. The capability of that lofty enthusiasm which
takes the human being out of his every-day character, reacts upon the
daily character itself. His aspirations and powers when he is in this
exceptional state, become the type with which he compares, and by
which he estimates, his sentiments and proceedings at other times:
and his habitual purposes assume a character moulded by and
assimilated to the moments of lofty excitement, although those, from
the physical nature of a human being, can only be transient.
Experience of races, as well as of individuals, does not show those
of excitable temperament to be less fit, on the average, either for
speculation or practice, than the more unexcitable. The French, and
the Italians, are undoubtedly by nature more nervously excitable than
the Teutonic races, and, compared at least with the English, they
have a much greater habitual and daily emotional life: but have they
been less great in science, in public business, in legal and judicial
eminence, or in war? There is abundant evidence that the Greeks were
of old, as their descendants and successors still are, one of the
most excitable of the races of mankind. It is superfluous to ask,
what among the achievements of men they did not excel in. The Romans,
probably, as an equally southern people, had the same original
temperament: but the stern character of their national discipline,
like that of the Spartans, made them an example of the opposite type
of national character; the greater strength of their natural feelings
being chiefly apparent in the intensity which the same original
temperament made it possible to give to the artificial. If these
cases exemplify what a naturally excitable people may be made, the
Irish Celts afford one of the aptest examples of what they are when
left to themselves; (if those can be said to be left to themselves
who have been for centuries under the indirect influence of bad
government, and the direct training of a Catholic hierarchy and of a
sincere belief in the Catholic religion.) The Irish character must be
considered, therefore, as an unfavourable case: yet, whenever the
circumstances of the individual have been at all favourable, what
people have shown greater capacity for the most varied and
multifarious individual eminence? Like the French compared with the
English, the Irish with the Swiss, the Greeks or Italians compared
with the German races, so women compared with men may be found, on
the average, to do the same things with some variety in the
particular kind of excellence. But, that they would do them fully as
well on the whole, if their education and cultivation were adapted to
correcting instead of aggravating the infirmities incident to their
temperament, I see not the smallest reason to doubt.

Supposing it, however, to be true that women's minds are by nature
more mobile than those of men, less capable of persisting long in the
same continuous effort, more fitted for dividing their faculties
among many things than for travelling in any one path to the highest
point which can be reached by it: this may be true of women as they
now are (though not without great and numerous exceptions), and may
account for their having remained behind the highest order of men in
precisely the things in which this absorption of the whole mind in
one set of ideas and occupations may seem to be most requisite.
Still, this difference is one which can only affect the kind of
excellence, not the excellence itself, or its practical worth: and it
remains to be shown whether this exclusive working of a part of the
mind, this absorption of the whole thinking faculty in a single
subject, and concentration of it on a single work, is the normal and
healthful condition of the human faculties, even for speculative
uses. I believe that what is gained in special development by this
concentration, is lost in the capacity of the mind for the other
purposes of life; and even in abstract thought, it is my decided
opinion that the mind does more by frequently returning to a
difficult problem, than by sticking to it without interruption. For
the purposes, at all events, of practice, from its highest to its
humblest departments, the capacity of passing promptly from one
subject of consideration to another, without letting the active
spring of the intellect run down between the two, is a power far more
valuable; and this power women pre-eminently possess, by virtue of
the very mobility of which they are accused. They perhaps have it
from nature, but they certainly have it by training and education;
for nearly the whole of the occupations of women consist in the
management of small but multitudinous details, on each of which the
mind cannot dwell even for a minute, but must pass on to other
things, and if anything requires longer thought, must steal time at
odd moments for thinking of it. The capacity indeed which women show
for doing their thinking in circumstances and at times which almost
any man would make an excuse to himself for not attempting it, has
often been noticed: and a woman's mind, though it may be occupied
only with small things, can hardly ever permit itself to be vacant,
as a man's so often is when not engaged in what he chooses to
consider the business of his life. The business of a woman's ordinary
life is things in general, and can as little cease to go on as the
world to go round.

But (it is said) there is anatomical evidence of the superior mental
capacity of men compared with women: they have a larger brain. I
reply, that in the first place the fact itself is doubtful. It is by
no means established that the brain of a woman is smaller than that
of a man. If it is inferred merely because a woman's bodily frame
generally is of less dimensions than a man's, this criterion would
lead to strange consequences. A tall and large-boned man must on this
showing be wonderfully superior in intelligence to a small man, and
an elephant or a whale must prodigiously excel mankind. The size of
the brain in human beings, anatomists say, varies much less than the
size of the body, or even of the head, and the one cannot be at all
inferred from the other. It is certain that some women have as large
a brain as any man. It is within my knowledge that a man who had
weighed many human brains, said that the heaviest he knew of, heavier
even than Cuvier's (the heaviest previously recorded,) was that of a
woman. Next, I must observe that the precise relation which exists
between the brain and the intellectual powers is not yet well
understood, but is a subject of great dispute. That there is a very
close relation we cannot doubt. The brain is certainly the material
organ of thought and feeling: and (making abstraction of the great
unsettled controversy respecting the appropriation of different parts
of the brain to different mental faculties) I admit that it would be
an anomaly, and an exception to all we know of the general laws of
life and organization, if the size of the organ were wholly
indifferent to the function; if no accession of power were derived
from the greater magnitude of the instrument. But the exception and
the anomaly would be fully as great if the organ exercised influence
by its magnitude _only_. In all the more delicate operations of
nature--of which those of the animated creation are the most
delicate, and those of the nervous system by far the most delicate of
these--differences in the effect depend as much on differences of
quality in the physical agents, as on their quantity: and if the
quality of an instrument is to be tested by the nicety and delicacy
of the work it can do, the indications point to a greater average
fineness of quality in the brain and nervous system of women than of
men. Dismissing abstract difference of quality, a thing difficult to
verify, the efficiency of an organ is known to depend not solely on
its size but on its activity: and of this we have an approximate
measure in the energy with which the blood circulates through it,
both the stimulus and the reparative force being mainly dependent on
the circulation. It would not be surprising--it is indeed an
hypothesis which accords well with the differences actually observed
between the mental operations of the two sexes--if men on the average
should have the advantage in the size of the brain, and women in
activity of cerebral circulation. The results which conjecture,
founded on analogy, would lead us to expect from this difference of
organization, would correspond to some of those which we most
commonly see. In the first place, the mental operations of men might
be expected to be slower. They would neither be so prompt as women in
thinking, nor so quick to feel. Large bodies take more time to get
into full action. On the other hand, when once got thoroughly into
play, men's brain would bear more work. It would be more persistent
in the line first taken; it would have more difficulty in changing
from one mode of action to another, but, in the one thing it was
doing, it could go on longer without loss of power or sense of
fatigue. And do we not find that the things in which men most excel
women are those which require most plodding and long hammering at a
single thought, while women do best what must be done rapidly? A
woman's brain is sooner fatigued, sooner exhausted; but given the
degree of exhaustion, we should expect to find that it would recover
itself sooner. I repeat that this speculation is entirely
hypothetical; it pretends to no more than to suggest a line of
enquiry. I have before repudiated the notion of its being yet
certainly known that there is any natural difference at all in the
average strength or direction of the mental capacities of the two
sexes, much less what that difference is. Nor is it possible that
this should be known, so long as the psychological laws of the
formation of character have been so little studied, even in a general
way, and in the particular case never scientifically applied at all;
so long as the most obvious external causes of difference of
character are habitually disregarded--left unnoticed by the observer,
and looked down upon with a kind of supercilious contempt by the
prevalent schools both of natural history and of mental philosophy:
who, whether they look for the source of what mainly distinguishes
human beings from one another, in the world of matter or in that of
spirit, agree in running down those who prefer to explain these
differences by the different relations of human beings to society and
life.

To so ridiculous an extent are the notions formed of the nature of
women, mere empirical generalizations, framed, without philosophy or
analysis, upon the first instances which present themselves, that the
popular idea of it is different in different countries, according as
the opinions and social circumstances of the country have given to
the women living in it any speciality of development or
non-development. An Oriental thinks that women are by nature
peculiarly voluptuous; see the violent abuse of them on this ground
in Hindoo writings. An Englishman usually thinks that they are by
nature cold. The sayings about women's fickleness are mostly of
French origin; from the famous distich of Francis the First, upward
and downward. In England it is a common remark, how much more
constant women are than men. Inconstancy has been longer reckoned
discreditable to a woman, in England than in France; and Englishwomen
are besides, in their inmost nature, much more subdued to opinion. It
may be remarked by the way, that Englishmen are in peculiarly
unfavourable circumstances for attempting to judge what is or is not
natural, not merely to women, but to men, or to human beings
altogether, at least if they have only English experience to go upon:
because there is no place where human nature shows so little of its
original lineaments. Both in a good and a bad sense, the English are
farther from a state of nature than any other modern people. They
are, more than any other people, a product of civilization and
discipline. England is the country in which social discipline has
most succeeded, not so much in conquering, as in suppressing,
whatever is liable to conflict with it. The English, more than any
other people, not only act but feel according to rule. In other
countries, the taught opinion, or the requirement of society, may be
the stronger power, but the promptings of the individual nature are
always visible under it, and often resisting it: rule may be stronger
than nature, but nature is still there. In England, rule has to a
great degree substituted itself for nature. The greater part of life
is carried on, not by following inclination under the control of
rule, but by having no inclination but that of following a rule. Now
this has its good side doubtless, though it has also a wretchedly bad
one; but it must render an Englishman peculiarly ill-qualified to
pass a judgment on the original tendencies of human nature from his
own experience. The errors to which observers elsewhere are liable on
the subject, are of a different character. An Englishman is ignorant
respecting human nature, a Frenchman is prejudiced. An Englishman's
errors are negative, a Frenchman's positive. An Englishman fancies
that things do not exist, because he never sees them; a Frenchman
thinks they must always and necessarily exist, because he does see
them. An Englishman does not know nature, because he has had no
opportunity of observing it; a Frenchman generally knows a great deal
of it, but often mistakes it, because he has only seen it
sophisticated and distorted. For the artificial state superinduced by
society disguises the natural tendencies of the thing which is the
subject of observation, in two different ways: by extinguishing the
nature, or by transforming it. In the one case there is but a starved
residuum of nature remaining to be studied; in the other case there
is much, but it may have expanded in any direction rather than that
in which it would spontaneously grow.

I have said that it cannot now be known how much of the existing
mental differences between men and women is natural, and how much
artificial; whether there are any natural differences at all; or,
supposing all artificial causes of difference to be withdrawn, what
natural character would be revealed. I am not about to attempt what I
have pronounced impossible: but doubt does not forbid conjecture, and
where certainty is unattainable, there may yet be the means of
arriving at some degree of probability. The first point, the origin
of the differences actually observed, is the one most accessible to
speculation; and I shall attempt to approach it, by the only path by
which it can be reached; by tracing the mental consequences of
external influences. We cannot isolate a human being from the
circumstances of his condition, so as to ascertain experimentally
what he would have been by nature; but we can consider what he is,
and what his circumstances have been, and whether the one would have
been capable of producing the other.

Let us take, then, the only marked case which observation affords, of
apparent inferiority of women to men, if we except the merely
physical one of bodily strength. No production in philosophy,
science, or art, entitled to the first rank, has been the work of a
woman. Is there any mode of accounting for this, without supposing
that women are naturally incapable of producing them?

In the first place, we may fairly question whether experience has
afforded sufficient grounds for an induction. It is scarcely three
generations since women, saving very rare exceptions, have begun to
try their capacity in philosophy, science, or art. It is only in the
present generation that their attempts have been at all numerous; and
they are even now extremely few, everywhere but in England and
France. It is a relevant question, whether a mind possessing the
requisites of first-rate eminence in speculation or creative art
could have been expected, on the mere calculation of chances, to turn
up during that lapse of time, among the women whose tastes and
personal position admitted of their devoting themselves to these
pursuits. In all things which there has yet been time for--in all but
the very highest grades in the scale of excellence, especially in the
department in which they have been longest engaged, literature (both
prose and poetry)--women have done quite as much, have obtained fully
as high prizes and as many of them, as could be expected from the
length of time and the number of competitors. If we go back to the
earlier period when very few women made the attempt, yet some of
those few made it with distinguished success. The Greeks always
accounted Sappho among their great poets; and we may well suppose
that Myrtis, said to have been the teacher of Pindar, and Corinna,
who five times bore away from him the prize of poetry, must at least
have had sufficient merit to admit of being compared with that great
name. Aspasia did not leave any philosophical writings; but it is an
admitted fact that Socrates resorted to her for instruction, and
avowed himself to have obtained it.

If we consider the works of women in modern times, and contrast them
with those of men, either in the literary or the artistic department,
such inferiority as may be observed resolves itself essentially into
one thing: but that is a most material one; deficiency of
originality. Not total deficiency; for every production of mind which
is of any substantive value, has an originality of its own--is a
conception of the mind itself, not a copy of something else. Thoughts
original, in the sense of being unborrowed--of being derived from the
thinker's own observations or intellectual processes--are abundant in
the writings of women. But they have not yet produced any of those
great and luminous new ideas which form an era in thought, nor those
fundamentally new conceptions in art, which open a vista of possible
effects not before thought of, and found a new school. Their
compositions are mostly grounded on the existing fund of thought, and
their creations do not deviate widely from existing types. This is
the sort of inferiority which their works manifest: for in point of
execution, in the detailed application of thought, and the perfection
of style, there is no inferiority. Our best novelists in point of
composition, and of the management of detail, have mostly been women;
and there is not in all modern literature a more eloquent vehicle of
thought than the style of Madame de Stael, nor, as a specimen of
purely artistic excellence, anything superior to the prose of Madame
Sand, whose style acts upon the nervous system like a symphony of
Haydn or Mozart. High originality of conception is, as I have said,
what is chiefly wanting. And now to examine if there is any manner in
which this deficiency can be accounted for.

Let us remember, then, so far as regards mere thought, that during
all that period in the world's existence, and in the progress of
cultivation, in which great and fruitful new truths could be arrived
at by mere force of genius, with little previous study and
accumulation of knowledge--during all that time women did not concern
themselves with speculation at all. From the days of Hypatia to those
of the Reformation, the illustrious Heloisa is almost the only woman
to whom any such achievement might have been possible; and we know
not how great a capacity of speculation in her may have been lost to
mankind by the misfortunes of her life. Never since any considerable
number of women have begun to cultivate serious thought, has
originality been possible on easy terms. Nearly all the thoughts
which can be reached by mere strength of original faculties, have
long since been arrived at; and originality, in any high sense of the
word, is now scarcely ever attained but by minds which have undergone
elaborate discipline, and are deeply versed in the results of
previous thinking. It is Mr. Maurice, I think, who has remarked on
the present age, that its most original thinkers are those who have
known most thoroughly what had been thought by their predecessors:
and this will always henceforth be the case. Every fresh stone in the
edifice has now to be placed on the top of so many others, that a
long process of climbing, and of carrying up materials, has to be
gone through by whoever aspires to take a share in the present stage
of the work. How many women are there who have gone through any such
process? Mrs. Somerville, alone perhaps of women, knows as much of
mathematics as is now needful for making any considerable
mathematical discovery: is it any proof of inferiority in women, that
she has not happened to be one of the two or three persons who in her
lifetime have associated their names with some striking advancement
of the science? Two women, since political economy has been made a
science, have known enough of it to write usefully on the subject: of
how many of the innumerable men who have written on it during the
same time, is it possible with truth to say more? If no woman has
hitherto been a great historian, what woman has had the necessary
erudition? If no woman is a great philologist, what woman has studied
Sanscrit and Slavonic, the Gothic of Ulphila and the Persic of the
Zendavesta? Even in practical matters we all know what is the value
of the originality of untaught geniuses. It means, inventing over
again in its rudimentary form something already invented and improved
upon by many successive inventors. When women have had the
preparation which all men now require to be eminently original, it
will be time enough to begin judging by experience of their capacity
for originality.

It no doubt often happens that a person, who has not widely and
accurately studied the thoughts of others on a subject, has by
natural sagacity a happy intuition, which he can suggest, but cannot
prove, which yet when matured may be an important addition to
knowledge: but even then, no justice can be done to it until some
other person, who does possess the previous acquirements, takes it in
hand, tests it, gives it a scientific or practical form, and fits it
into its place among the existing truths of philosophy or science. Is
it supposed that such felicitous thoughts do not occur to women? They
occur by hundreds to every woman of intellect. But they are mostly
lost, for want of a husband or friend who has the other knowledge
which can enable him to estimate them properly and bring them before
the world: and even when they are brought before it, they generally
appear as his ideas, not their real author's. Who can tell how many
of the most original thoughts put forth by male writers, belong to a
woman by suggestion, to themselves only by verifying and working out?
If I may judge by my own case, a very large proportion indeed.

If we turn from pure speculation to literature in the narrow sense of
the term, and the fine arts, there is a very obvious reason why
women's literature is, in its general conception and in its main
features, an imitation of men's. Why is the Roman literature, as
critics proclaim to satiety, not original, but an imitation of the
Greek? Simply because the Greeks came first. If women lived in a
different country from men, and had never read any of their writings,
they would have had a literature of their own. As it is, they have
not created one, because they found a highly advanced literature
already created. If there had been no suspension of the knowledge of
antiquity, or if the Renaissance had occurred before the Gothic
cathedrals were built, they never would have been built. We see that,
in France and Italy, imitation of the ancient literature stopped the
original development even after it had commenced. All women who write
are pupils of the great male writers. A painter's early pictures,
even if he be a Raffaelle, are undistinguishable in style from those
of his master. Even a Mozart does not display his powerful
originality in his earliest pieces. What years are to a gifted
individual, generations are to a mass. If women's literature is
destined to have a different collective character from that of men,
depending on any difference of natural tendencies, much longer time
is necessary than has yet elapsed, before it can emancipate itself
from the influence of accepted models, and guide itself by its own
impulses. But if, as I believe, there will not prove to be any
natural tendencies common to women, and distinguishing their genius
from that of men, yet every individual writer among them has her
individual tendencies, which at present are still subdued by the
influence of precedent and example: and it will require generations
more, before their individuality is sufficiently developed to make
head against that influence.

It is in the fine arts, properly so called, that the _primâ facie_
evidence of inferior original powers in women at first sight appears
the strongest: since opinion (it may be said) does not exclude them
from these, but rather encourages them, and their education, instead
of passing over this department, is in the affluent classes mainly
composed of it. Yet in this line of exertion they have fallen still
more short than in many others, of the highest eminence attained by
men. This shortcoming, however, needs no other explanation than the
familiar fact, more universally true in the fine arts than in
anything else; the vast superiority of professional persons over
amateurs. Women in the educated classes are almost universally taught
more or less of some branch or other of the fine arts, but not that
they may gain their living or their social consequence by it. Women
artists are all amateurs. The exceptions are only of the kind which
confirm the general truth. Women are taught music, but not for the
purpose of composing, only of executing it: and accordingly it is
only as composers, that men, in music, are superior to women. The
only one of the fine arts which women do follow, to any extent, as a
profession, and an occupation for life, is the histrionic; and in
that they are confessedly equal, if not superior, to men. To make the
comparison fair, it should be made between the productions of women
in any branch of art, and those of men not following it as a
profession. In musical composition, for example, women surely have
produced fully as good things as have ever been produced by male
amateurs. There are now a few women, a very few, who practise
painting as a profession, and these are already beginning to show
quite as much talent as could be expected. Even male painters (_pace_
Mr. Ruskin) have not made any very remarkable figure these last
centuries, and it will be long before they do so. The reason why the
old painters were so greatly superior to the modern, is that a
greatly superior class of men applied themselves to the art. In the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the Italian painters were the most
accomplished men of their age. The greatest of them were men of
encyclopædical acquirements and powers, like the great men of Greece.
But in their times fine art was, to men's feelings and conceptions,
among the grandest things in which a human being could excel; and by
it men were made, what only political or military distinction now
makes them, the companions of sovereigns, and the equals of the
highest nobility. In the present age, men of anything like similar
calibre find something more important to do, for their own fame and
the uses of the modern world, than painting: and it is only now and
then that a Reynolds or a Turner (of whose relative rank among
eminent men I do not pretend to an opinion) applies himself to that
art. Music belongs to a different order of things; it does not
require the same general powers of mind, but seems more dependant on
a natural gift: and it may be thought surprising that no one of the
great musical composers has been a woman. But even this natural gift,
to be made available for great creations, requires study, and
professional devotion to the pursuit. The only countries which have
produced first-rate composers, even of the male sex, are Germany and
Italy--countries in which, both in point of special and of general
cultivation, women have remained far behind France and England, being
generally (it may be said without exaggeration) very little educated,
and having scarcely cultivated at all any of the higher faculties of
mind. And in those countries the men who are acquainted with the
principles of musical composition must be counted by hundreds, or
more probably by thousands, the women barely by scores: so that here
again, on the doctrine of averages, we cannot reasonably expect to
see more than one eminent woman to fifty eminent men; and the last
three centuries have not produced fifty eminent male composers either
in Germany or in Italy.

There are other reasons, besides those which we have now given, that
help to explain why women remain behind men, even in the pursuits
which are open to both. For one thing, very few women have time for
them. This may seem a paradox; it is an undoubted social fact. The
time and thoughts of every woman have to satisfy great previous
demands on them for things practical. There is, first, the
superintendence of the family and the domestic expenditure, which
occupies at least one woman in every family, generally the one of
mature years and acquired experience; unless the family is so rich as
to admit of delegating that task to hired agency, and submitting to
all the waste and malversation inseparable from that mode of
conducting it. The superintendence of a household, even when not in
other respects laborious, is extremely onerous to the thoughts; it
requires incessant vigilance, an eye which no detail escapes, and
presents questions for consideration and solution, foreseen and
unforeseen, at every hour of the day, from which the person
responsible for them can hardly ever shake herself free. If a woman
is of a rank and circumstances which relieve her in a measure from
these cares, she has still devolving on her the management for the
whole family of its intercourse with others--of what is called
society, and the less the call made on her by the former duty, the
greater is always the development of the latter: the dinner parties,
concerts, evening parties, morning visits, letter writing, and all
that goes with them. All this is over and above the engrossing duty
which society imposes exclusively on women, of making themselves
charming. A clever woman of the higher ranks finds nearly a
sufficient employment of her talents in cultivating the graces of
manner and the arts of conversation. To look only at the outward side
of the subject: the great and continual exercise of thought which all
women who attach any value to dressing well (I do not mean
expensively, but with taste, and perception of natural and of
artificial _convenance_) must bestow upon their own dress, perhaps
also upon that of their daughters, would alone go a great way towards
achieving respectable results in art, or science, or literature, and
does actually exhaust much of the time and mental power they might
have to spare for either.[2] If it were possible that all this number
of little practical interests (which are made great to them) should
leave them either much leisure, or much energy and freedom of mind,
to be devoted to art or speculation, they must have a much greater
original supply of active faculty than the vast majority of men. But
this is not all. Independently of the regular offices of life which
devolve upon a woman, she is expected to have her time and faculties
always at the disposal of everybody. If a man has not a profession to
exempt him from such demands, still, if he has a pursuit, he offends
nobody by devoting his time to it; occupation is received as a valid
excuse for his not answering to every casual demand which may be made
on him. Are a woman's occupations, especially her chosen and
voluntary ones, ever regarded as excusing her from any of what are
termed the calls of society? Scarcely are her most necessary and
recognised duties allowed as an exemption. It requires an illness in
the family, or something else out of the common way, to entitle her
to give her own business the precedence over other people's
amusement. She must always be at the beck and call of somebody,
generally of everybody. If she has a study or a pursuit, she must
snatch any short interval which accidentally occurs to be employed in
it. A celebrated woman, in a work which I hope will some day be
published, remarks truly that everything a woman does is done at odd
times. Is it wonderful, then, if she does not attain the highest
eminence in things which require consecutive attention, and the
concentration on them of the chief interest of life? Such is
philosophy, and such, above all, is art, in which, besides the
devotion of the thoughts and feelings, the hand also must be kept in
constant exercise to attain high skill.

There is another consideration to be added to all these. In the
various arts and intellectual occupations, there is a degree of
proficiency sufficient for living by it, and there is a higher degree
on which depend the great productions which immortalize a name. To
the attainment of the former, there are adequate motives in the case
of all who follow the pursuit professionally: the other is hardly
ever attained where there is not, or where there has not been at some
period of life, an ardent desire of celebrity. Nothing less is
commonly a sufficient stimulus to undergo the long and patient
drudgery, which, in the case even of the greatest natural gifts, is
absolutely required for great eminence in pursuits in which we
already possess so many splendid memorials of the highest genius.
Now, whether the cause be natural or artificial, women seldom have
this eagerness for fame. Their ambition is generally confined within
narrower bounds. The influence they seek is over those who
immediately surround them. Their desire is to be liked, loved, or
admired, by those whom they see with their eyes: and the proficiency
in knowledge, arts, and accomplishments, which is sufficient for
that, almost always contents them. This is a trait of character which
cannot be left out of the account in judging of women as they are. I
do not at all believe that it is inherent in women. It is only the
natural result of their circumstances. The love of fame in men is
encouraged by education and opinion: to “scorn delights and live
laborious days” for its sake, is accounted the part of “noble minds,”
even if spoken of as their “last infirmity,” and is stimulated by the
access which fame gives to all objects of ambition, including even
the favour of women; while to women themselves all these objects are
closed, and the desire of fame itself considered daring and
unfeminine. Besides, how could it be that a woman's interests should
not be all concentrated upon the impressions made on those who come
into her daily life, when society has ordained that all her duties
should be to them, and has contrived that all her comforts should
depend on them? The natural desire of consideration from our fellow
creatures is as strong in a woman as in a man; but society has so
ordered things that public consideration is, in all ordinary cases,
only attainable by her through the consideration of her husband or of
her male relations, while her private consideration is forfeited by
making herself individually prominent, or appearing in any other
character than that of an appendage to men. Whoever is in the least
capable of estimating the influence on the mind of the entire
domestic and social position and the whole habit of a life, must
easily recognise in that influence a complete explanation of nearly
all the apparent differences between women and men, including the
whole of those which imply any inferiority.

As for moral differences, considered as distinguished from
intellectual, the distinction commonly drawn is to the advantage of
women. They are declared to be better than men; an empty compliment,
which must provoke a bitter smile from every woman of spirit, since
there is no other situation in life in which it is the established
order, and considered quite natural and suitable, that the better
should obey the worse. If this piece of idle talk is good for
anything, it is only as an admission by men, of the corrupting
influence of power; for that is certainly the only truth which the
fact, if it be a fact, either proves or illustrates. And it _is_ true
that servitude, except when it actually brutalizes, though corrupting
to both, is less so to the slaves than to the slave-masters. It is
wholesomer for the moral nature to be restrained, even by arbitrary
power, than to be allowed to exercise arbitrary power without
restraint. Women, it is said, seldomer fall under the penal
law--contribute a much smaller number of offenders to the criminal
calendar, than men. I doubt not that the same thing may be said, with
the same truth, of negro slaves. Those who are under the control of
others cannot often commit crimes, unless at the command and for the
purposes of their masters. I do not know a more signal instance of
the blindness with which the world, including the herd of studious
men, ignore and pass over all the influences of social circumstances,
than their silly depreciation of the intellectual, and silly
panegyrics on the moral, nature of women.

The complimentary dictum about women's superior moral goodness may be
allowed to pair off with the disparaging one respecting their greater
liability to moral bias. Women, we are told, are not capable of
resisting their personal partialities: their judgment in grave
affairs is warped by their sympathies and antipathies. Assuming it to
be so, it is still to be proved that women are oftener misled by
their personal feelings than men by their personal interests. The
chief difference would seem in that case to be, that men are led from
the course of duty and the public interest by their regard for
themselves, women (not being allowed to have private interests of
their own) by their regard for somebody else. It is also to be
considered, that all the education which women receive from society
inculcates on them the feeling that the individuals connected with
them are the only ones to whom they owe any duty--the only ones whose
interest they are called upon to care for; while, as far as education
is concerned, they are left strangers even to the elementary ideas
which are presupposed in any intelligent regard for larger interests
or higher moral objects. The complaint against them resolves itself
merely into this, that they fulfil only too faithfully the sole duty
which they are taught, and almost the only one which they are
permitted to practise.

The concessions of the privileged to the unprivileged are so seldom
brought about by any better motive than the power of the unprivileged
to extort them, that any arguments against the prerogative of sex are
likely to be little attended to by the generality, as long as they
are able to say to themselves that women do not complain of it. That
fact certainly enables men to retain the unjust privilege some time
longer; but does not render it less unjust. Exactly the same thing
may be said of the women in the harem of an Oriental: they do not
complain of not being allowed the freedom of European women. They
think our women insufferably bold and unfeminine. How rarely it is
that even men complain of the general order of society; and how much
rarer still would such complaint be, if they did not know of any
different order existing anywhere else. Women do not complain of the
general lot of women; or rather they do, for plaintive elegies on it
are very common in the writings of women, and were still more so as
long as the lamentations could not be suspected of having any
practical object. Their complaints are like the complaints which men
make of the general unsatisfactoriness of human life; they are not
meant to imply blame, or to plead for any change. But though women do
not complain of the power of husbands, each complains of her own
husband, or of the husbands of her friends. It is the same in all
other cases of servitude, at least in the commencement of the
emancipatory movement. The serfs did not at first complain of the
power of their lords, but only of their tyranny. The Commons began by
claiming a few municipal privileges; they next asked an exemption for
themselves from being taxed without their own consent; but they would
at that time have thought it a great presumption to claim any share
in the king's sovereign authority. The case of women is now the only
case in which to rebel against established rules is still looked upon
with the same eyes as was formerly a subject's claim to the right of
rebelling against his king. A woman who joins in any movement which
her husband disapproves, makes herself a martyr, without even being
able to be an apostle, for the husband can legally put a stop to her
apostleship. Women cannot be expected to devote themselves to the
emancipation of women, until men in considerable number are prepared
to join with them in the undertaking.

[Footnote 1: Especially is this true if we take into consideration
Asia as well as Europe. If a Hindoo principality is strongly,
vigilantly, and economically governed; if order is preserved without
oppression; if cultivation is extending, and the people prosperous,
in three cases out of four that principality is under a woman's rule.
This fact, to me an entirely unexpected one, I have collected from a
long official knowledge of Hindoo governments. There are many such
instances: for though, by Hindoo institutions, a woman cannot reign,
she is the legal regent of a kingdom during the minority of the heir;
and minorities are frequent, the lives of the male rulers being so
often prematurely terminated through the effect of inactivity and
sensual excesses. When we consider that these princesses have never
been seen in public, have never conversed with any man not of their
own family except from behind a curtain, that they do not read, and
if they did, there is no book in their languages which can give them
the smallest instruction on political affairs; the example they
afford of the natural capacity of women for government is very
striking.]

[Footnote 2: “It appears to be the same right turn of mind which
enables a man to acquire the _truth_, or the just idea of what is
right, in the ornaments, as in the more stable principles of art. It
has still the same centre of perfection, though it is the centre of a
smaller circle.--To illustrate this by the fashion of dress, in which
there is allowed to be a good or bad taste. The component parts of
dress are continually changing from great to little, from short to
long; but the general form still remains: it is still the same
general dress which is comparatively fixed, though on a very slender
foundation; but it is on this which fashion must rest. He who invents
with the most success, or dresses in the best taste, would probably,
from the same sagacity employed to greater purposes, have discovered
equal skill, or have formed the same correct taste, in the highest
labours of art.”--_Sir Joshua Reynolds' Discourses_, Disc. vii.]




CHAPTER IV.


There remains a question, not of less importance than those already
discussed, and which will be asked the most importunately by those
opponents whose conviction is somewhat shaken on the main point. What
good are we to expect from the changes proposed in our customs and
institutions? Would mankind be at all better off if women were free?
If not, why disturb their minds, and attempt to make a social
revolution in the name of an abstract right?

It is hardly to be expected that this question will be asked in
respect to the change proposed in the condition of women in marriage.
The sufferings, immoralities, evils of all sorts, produced in
innumerable cases by the subjection of individual women to individual
men, are far too terrible to be overlooked. Unthinking or uncandid
persons, counting those cases alone which are extreme, or which
attain publicity, may say that the evils are exceptional; but no one
can be blind to their existence, nor, in many cases, to their
intensity. And it is perfectly obvious that the abuse of the power
cannot be very much checked while the power remains. It is a power
given, or offered, not to good men, or to decently respectable men,
but to all men; the most brutal, and the most criminal. There is no
check but that of opinion, and such men are in general within the
reach of no opinion but that of men like themselves. If such men did
not brutally tyrannize over the one human being whom the law compels
to bear everything from them, society must already have reached a
paradisiacal state. There could be no need any longer of laws to curb
men's vicious propensities. Astræa must not only have returned to
earth, but the heart of the worst man must have become her temple.
The law of servitude in marriage is a monstrous contradiction to all
the principles of the modern world, and to all the experience through
which those principles have been slowly and painfully worked out. It
is the sole case, now that negro slavery has been abolished, in which
a human being in the plenitude of every faculty is delivered up to
the tender mercies of another human being, in the hope forsooth that
this other will use the power solely for the good of the person
subjected to it. Marriage is the only actual bondage known to our
law. There remain no legal slaves, except the mistress of every
house.

It is not, therefore, on this part of the subject, that the question
is likely to be asked, _Cui bono_? We may be told that the evil would
outweigh the good, but the reality of the good admits of no dispute.
In regard, however, to the larger question, the removal of women's
disabilities--their recognition as the equals of men in all that
belongs to citizenship--the opening to them of all honourable
employments, and of the training and education which qualifies for
those employments--there are many persons for whom it is not enough
that the inequality has no just or legitimate defence; they require
to be told what express advantage would be obtained by abolishing it.

To which let me first answer, the advantage of having the most
universal and pervading of all human relations regulated by justice
instead of injustice. The vast amount of this gain to human nature,
it is hardly possible, by any explanation or illustration, to place
in a stronger light than it is placed by the bare statement, to any
one who attaches a moral meaning to words. All the selfish
propensities, the self-worship, the unjust self-preference, which
exist among mankind, have their source and root in, and derive their
principal nourishment from, the present constitution of the relation
between men and women. Think what it is to a boy, to grow up to
manhood in the belief that without any merit or any exertion of his
own, though he may be the most frivolous and empty or the most
ignorant and stolid of mankind, by the mere fact of being born a male
he is by right the superior of all and every one of an entire half of
the human race: including probably some whose real superiority to
himself he has daily or hourly occasion to feel; but even if in his
whole conduct he habitually follows a woman's guidance, still, if he
is a fool, she thinks that of course she is not, and cannot be, equal
in ability and judgment to himself; and if he is not a fool, he does
worse--he sees that she is superior to him, and believes that,
notwithstanding her superiority, he is entitled to command and she is
bound to obey. What must be the effect on his character, of this
lesson? And men of the cultivated classes are often not aware how
deeply it sinks into the immense majority of male minds. For, among
right-feeling and well-bred people, the inequality is kept as much as
possible out of sight; above all, out of sight of the children. As
much obedience is required from boys to their mother as to their
father: they are not permitted to domineer over their sisters, nor
are they accustomed to see these postponed to them, but the contrary;
the compensations of the chivalrous feeling being made prominent,
while the servitude which requires them is kept in the background.
Well brought-up youths in the higher classes thus often escape the
bad influences of the situation in their early years, and only
experience them when, arrived at manhood, they fall under the
dominion of facts as they really exist. Such people are little aware,
when a boy is differently brought up, how early the notion of his
inherent superiority to a girl arises in his mind; how it grows with
his growth and strengthens with his strength; how it is inoculated by
one schoolboy upon another; how early the youth thinks himself
superior to his mother, owing her perhaps forbearance, but no real
respect; and how sublime and sultan-like a sense of superiority he
feels, above all, over the woman whom he honours by admitting her to
a partnership of his life. Is it imagined that all this does not
pervert the whole manner of existence of the man, both as an
individual and as a social being? It is an exact parallel to the
feeling of a hereditary king that he is excellent above others by
being born a king, or a noble by being born a noble. The relation
between husband and wife is very like that between lord and vassal,
except that the wife is held to more unlimited obedience than the
vassal was. However the vassal's character may have been affected,
for better and for worse, by his subordination, who can help seeing
that the lord's was affected greatly for the worse? whether he was
led to believe that his vassals were really superior to himself, or
to feel that he was placed in command over people as good as himself,
for no merits or labours of his own, but merely for having, as Figaro
says, taken the trouble to be born. The self-worship of the monarch,
or of the feudal superior, is matched by the self-worship of the
male. Human beings do not grow up from childhood in the possession of
unearned distinctions, without pluming themselves upon them. Those
whom privileges not acquired by their merit, and which they feel to
be disproportioned to it, inspire with additional humility, are
always the few, and the best few. The rest are only inspired with
pride, and the worst sort of pride, that which values itself upon
accidental advantages, not of its own achieving. Above all, when the
feeling of being raised above the whole of the other sex is combined
with personal authority over one individual among them; the
situation, if a school of conscientious and affectionate forbearance
to those whose strongest points of character are conscience and
affection, is to men of another quality a regularly constituted
Academy or Gymnasium for training them in arrogance and
overbearingness; which vices, if curbed by the certainty of
resistance in their intercourse with other men, their equals, break
out towards all who are in a position to be obliged to tolerate them,
and often revenge themselves upon the unfortunate wife for the
involuntary restraint which they are obliged to submit to elsewhere.

The example afforded, and the education given to the sentiments, by
laying the foundation of domestic existence upon a relation
contradictory to the first principles of social justice, must, from
the very nature of man, have a perverting influence of such
magnitude, that it is hardly possible with our present experience to
raise our imaginations to the conception of so great a change for the
better as would be made by its removal. All that education and
civilization are doing to efface the influences on character of the
law of force, and replace them by those of justice, remains merely on
the surface, as long as the citadel of the enemy is not attacked. The
principle of the modern movement in morals and politics, is that
conduct, and conduct alone, entitles to respect: that not what men
are, but what they do, constitutes their claim to deference; that,
above all, merit, and not birth, is the only rightful claim to power
and authority. If no authority, not in its nature temporary, were
allowed to one human being over another, society would not be
employed in building up propensities with one hand which it has to
curb with the other. The child would really, for the first time in
man's existence on earth, be trained in the way he should go, and
when he was old there would be a chance that he would not depart from
it. But so long as the right of the strong to power over the weak
rules in the very heart of society, the attempt to make the equal
right of the weak the principle of its outward actions will always be
an uphill struggle; for the law of justice, which is also that of
Christianity, will never get possession of men's inmost sentiments;
they will be working against it, even when bending to it.

The second benefit to be expected from giving to women the free use
of their faculties, by leaving them the free choice of their
employments, and opening to them the same field of occupation and the
same prizes and encouragements as to other human beings, would be
that of doubling the mass of mental faculties available for the
higher service of humanity. Where there is now one person qualified
to benefit mankind and promote the general improvement, as a public
teacher, or an administrator of some branch of public or social
affairs, there would then be a chance of two. Mental superiority of
any kind is at present everywhere so much below the demand; there is
such a deficiency of persons competent to do excellently anything
which it requires any considerable amount of ability to do; that the
loss to the world, by refusing to make use of one-half of the whole
quantity of talent it possesses, is extremely serious. It is true
that this amount of mental power is not totally lost. Much of it is
employed, and would in any case be employed, in domestic management,
and in the few other occupations open to women; and from the
remainder indirect benefit is in many individual cases obtained,
through the personal influence of individual women over individual
men. But these benefits are partial; their range is extremely
circumscribed; and if they must be admitted, on the one hand, as a
deduction from the amount of fresh social power that would be
acquired by giving freedom to one-half of the whole sum of human
intellect, there must be added, on the other, the benefit of the
stimulus that would be given to the intellect of men by the
competition; or (to use a more true expression) by the necessity that
would be imposed on them of deserving precedency before they could
expect to obtain it.

This great accession to the intellectual power of the species, and to
the amount of intellect available for the good management of its
affairs, would be obtained, partly, through the better and more
complete intellectual education of women, which would then improve
_pari passu_ with that of men. Women in general would be brought up
equally capable of understanding business, public affairs, and the
higher matters of speculation, with men in the same class of society;
and the select few of the one as well as of the other sex, who were
qualified not only to comprehend what is done or thought by others,
but to think or do something considerable themselves, would meet with
the same facilities for improving and training their capacities in
the one sex as in the other. In this way, the widening of the sphere
of action for women would operate for good, by raising their
education to the level of that of men, and making the one participate
in all improvements made in the other. But independently of this, the
mere breaking down of the barrier would of itself have an educational
virtue of the highest worth. The mere getting rid of the idea that
all the wider subjects of thought and action, all the things which
are of general and not solely of private interest, are men's
business, from which women are to be warned off--positively
interdicted from most of it, coldly tolerated in the little which is
allowed them--the mere consciousness a woman would then have of being
a human being like any other, entitled to choose her pursuits, urged
or invited by the same inducements as any one else to interest
herself in whatever is interesting to human beings, entitled to exert
the share of influence on all human concerns which belongs to an
individual opinion, whether she attempted actual participation in
them or not--this alone would effect an immense expansion of the
faculties of women, as well as enlargement of the range of their
moral sentiments.

Besides the addition to the amount of individual talent available for
the conduct of human affairs, which certainly are not at present so
abundantly provided in that respect that they can afford to dispense
with one-half of what nature proffers; the opinion of women would
then possess a more beneficial, rather than a greater, influence upon
the general mass of human belief and sentiment. I say a more
beneficial, rather than a greater influence; for the influence of
women over the general tone of opinion has always, or at least from
the earliest known period, been very considerable. The influence of
mothers on the early character of their sons, and the desire of young
men to recommend themselves to young women, have in all recorded
times been important agencies in the formation of character, and have
determined some of the chief steps in the progress of civilization.
Even in the Homeric age, αιδως towards the Τρωαδας ἑλκεσιπεπλους is
an acknowledged and powerful motive of action in the great Hector.
The moral influence of women has had two modes of operation. First,
it has been a softening influence. Those who were most liable to be
the victims of violence, have naturally tended as much as they could
towards limiting its sphere and mitigating its excesses. Those who
were not taught to fight, have naturally inclined in favour of any
other mode of settling differences rather than that of fighting. In
general, those who have been the greatest sufferers by the indulgence
of selfish passion, have been the most earnest supporters of any
moral law which offered a means of bridling passion. Women were
powerfully instrumental in inducing the northern conquerors to adopt
the creed of Christianity, a creed so much more favourable to women
than any that preceded it. The conversion of the Anglo-Saxons and of
the Franks may be said to have been begun by the wives of Ethelbert
and Clovis. The other mode in which the effect of women's opinion has
been conspicuous, is by giving a powerful stimulus to those qualities
in men, which, not being themselves trained in, it was necessary for
them that they should find in their protectors. Courage, and the
military virtues generally, have at all times been greatly indebted
to the desire which men felt of being admired by women: and the
stimulus reaches far beyond this one class of eminent qualities,
since, by a very natural effect of their position, the best passport
to the admiration and favour of women has always been to be thought
highly of by men. From the combination of the two kinds of moral
influence thus exercised by women, arose the spirit of chivalry: the
peculiarity of which is, to aim at combining the highest standard of
the warlike qualities with the cultivation of a totally different
class of virtues--those of gentleness, generosity, and
self-abnegation, towards the non-military and defenceless classes
generally, and a special submission and worship directed towards
women; who were distinguished from the other defenceless classes by
the high rewards which they had it in their power voluntarily to
bestow on those who endeavoured to earn their favour, instead of
extorting their subjection. Though the practice of chivalry fell even
more sadly short of its theoretic standard than practice generally
falls below theory, it remains one of the most precious monuments of
the moral history of our race; as a remarkable instance of a
concerted and organized attempt by a most disorganized and distracted
society, to raise up and carry into practice a moral ideal greatly in
advance of its social condition and institutions; so much so as to
have been completely frustrated in the main object, yet never
entirely inefficacious, and which has left a most sensible, and for
the most part a highly valuable impress on the ideas and feelings of
all subsequent times.

The chivalrous ideal is the acme of the influence of women's
sentiments on the moral cultivation of mankind: and if women are to
remain in their subordinate situation, it were greatly to be lamented
that the chivalrous standard should have passed away, for it is the
only one at all capable of mitigating the demoralizing influences of
that position. But the changes in the general state of the species
rendered inevitable the substitution of a totally different ideal of
morality for the chivalrous one. Chivalry was the attempt to infuse
moral elements into a state of society in which everything depended
for good or evil on individual prowess, under the softening
influences of individual delicacy and generosity. In modern
societies, all things, even in the military department of affairs,
are decided, not by individual effort, but by the combined operations
of numbers; while the main occupation of society has changed from
fighting to business, from military to industrial life. The
exigencies of the new life are no more exclusive of the virtues of
generosity than those of the old, but it no longer entirely depends
on them. The main foundations of the moral life of modern times must
be justice and prudence; the respect of each for the rights of every
other, and the ability of each to take care of himself. Chivalry left
without legal check all forms of wrong which reigned unpunished
throughout society; it only encouraged a few to do right in
preference to wrong, by the direction it gave to the instruments of
praise and admiration. But the real dependence of morality must
always be upon its penal sanctions--its power to deter from evil. The
security of society cannot rest on merely rendering honour to right,
a motive so comparatively weak in all but a few, and which on very
many does not operate at all. Modern society is able to repress wrong
through all departments of life, by a fit exertion of the superior
strength which civilization has given it, and thus to render the
existence of the weaker members of society (no longer defenceless but
protected by law) tolerable to them, without reliance on the
chivalrous feelings of those who are in a position to tyrannize. The
beauties and graces of the chivalrous character are still what they
were, but the rights of the weak, and the general comfort of human
life, now rest on a far surer and steadier support; or rather, they
do so in every relation of life except the conjugal.

At present the moral influence of women is no less real, but it is no
longer of so marked and definite a character: it has more nearly
merged in the general influence of public opinion. Both through the
contagion of sympathy, and through the desire of men to shine in the
eyes of women, their feelings have great effect in keeping alive what
remains of the chivalrous ideal--in fostering the sentiments and
continuing the traditions of spirit and generosity. In these points
of character, their standard is higher than that of men; in the
quality of justice, somewhat lower. As regards the relations of
private life it may be said generally, that their influence is, on
the whole, encouraging to the softer virtues, discouraging to the
sterner: though the statement must be taken with all the
modifications dependent on individual character. In the chief of the
greater trials to which virtue is subject in the concerns of
life--the conflict between interest and principle--the tendency of
women's influence is of a very mixed character. When the principle
involved happens to be one of the very few which the course of their
religious or moral education has strongly impressed upon themselves,
they are potent auxiliaries to virtue: and their husbands and sons
are often prompted by them to acts of abnegation which they never
would have been capable of without that stimulus. But, with the
present education and position of women, the moral principles which
have been impressed on them cover but a comparatively small part of
the field of virtue, and are, moreover, principally negative;
forbidding particular acts, but having little to do with the general
direction of the thoughts and purposes. I am afraid it must be said,
that disinterestedness in the general conduct of life--the devotion
of the energies to purposes which hold out no promise of private
advantages to the family--is very seldom encouraged or supported by
women's influence. It is small blame to them that they discourage
objects of which they have not learnt to see the advantage, and which
withdraw their men from them, and from the interests of the family.
But the consequence is that women's influence is often anything but
favourable to public virtue.

Women have, however, some share of influence in giving the tone to
public moralities since their sphere of action has been a little
widened, and since a considerable number of them have occupied
themselves practically in the promotion of objects reaching beyond
their own family and household. The influence of women counts for a
great deal in two of the most marked features of modern European
life--its aversion to war, and its addiction to philanthropy.
Excellent characteristics both; but unhappily, if the influence of
women is valuable in the encouragement it gives to these feelings in
general, in the particular applications the direction it gives to
them is at least as often mischievous as useful. In the philanthropic
department more particularly, the two provinces chiefly cultivated by
women are religious proselytism and charity. Religious proselytism at
home, is but another word for embittering of religious animosities:
abroad, it is usually a blind running at an object, without either
knowing or heeding the fatal mischiefs--fatal to the religious object
itself as well as to all other desirable objects--which may be
produced by the means employed. As for charity, it is a matter in
which the immediate effect on the persons directly concerned, and the
ultimate consequence to the general good, are apt to be at complete
war with one another: while the education given to women--an
education of the sentiments rather than of the understanding--and the
habit inculcated by their whole life, of looking to immediate effects
on persons, and not to remote effects on classes of persons--make
them both unable to see, and unwilling to admit, the ultimate evil
tendency of any form of charity or philanthropy which commends itself
to their sympathetic feelings. The great and continually increasing
mass of unenlightened and shortsighted benevolence, which, taking the
care of people's lives out of their own hands, and relieving them
from the disagreeable consequences of their own acts, saps the very
foundations of the self-respect, self-help, and self-control which
are the essential conditions both of individual prosperity and of
social virtue--this waste of resources and of benevolent feelings in
doing harm instead of good, is immensely swelled by women's
contributions, and stimulated by their influence. Not that this is a
mistake likely to be made by women, where they have actually the
practical management of schemes of beneficence. It sometimes happens
that women who administer public charities--with that insight into
present fact, and especially into the minds and feelings of those
with whom they are in immediate contact, in which women generally
excel men--recognise in the clearest manner the demoralizing
influence of the alms given or the help afforded, and could give
lessons on the subject to many a male political economist. But women
who only give their money, and are not brought face to face with the
effects it produces, how can they be expected to foresee them? A
woman born to the present lot of women, and content with it, how
should she appreciate the value of self-dependence? She is not
self-dependent; she is not taught self-dependence; her destiny is to
receive everything from others, and why should what is good enough
for her be bad for the poor? Her familiar notions of good are of
blessings descending from a superior. She forgets that she is not
free, and that the poor are; that if what they need is given to them
unearned, they cannot be compelled to earn it: that everybody cannot
be taken care of by everybody, but there must be some motive to
induce people to take care of themselves; and that to be helped to
help themselves, if they are physically capable of it, is the only
charity which proves to be charity in the end.

These considerations show how usefully the part which women take in
the formation of general opinion, would be modified for the better by
that more enlarged instruction, and practical conversancy with the
things which their opinions influence, that would necessarily arise
from their social and political emancipation. But the improvement it
would work through the influence they exercise, each in her own
family, would be still more remarkable.

It is often said that in the classes most exposed to temptation, a
man's wife and children tend to keep him honest and respectable, both
by the wife's direct influence, and by the concern he feels for their
future welfare. This may be so, and no doubt often is so, with those
who are more weak than wicked; and this beneficial influence would be
preserved and strengthened under equal laws; it does not depend on
the woman's servitude, but is, on the contrary, diminished by the
disrespect which the inferior class of men always at heart feel
towards those who are subject to their power. But when we ascend
higher in the scale, we come among a totally different set of moving
forces. The wife's influence tends, as far as it goes, to prevent the
husband from falling below the common standard of approbation of the
country. It tends quite as strongly to hinder him from rising above
it. The wife is the auxiliary of the common public opinion. A man who
is married to a woman his inferior in intelligence, finds her a
perpetual dead weight, or, worse than a dead weight, a drag, upon
every aspiration of his to be better than public opinion requires him
to be. It is hardly possible for one who is in these bonds, to attain
exalted virtue. If he differs in his opinion from the mass--if he
sees truths which have not yet dawned upon them, or if, feeling in
his heart truths which they nominally recognise, he would like to act
up to those truths more conscientiously than the generality of
mankind--to all such thoughts and desires, marriage is the heaviest
of drawbacks, unless he be so fortunate as to have a wife as much
above the common level as he himself is.

For, in the first place, there is always some sacrifice of personal
interest required; either of social consequence, or of pecuniary
means; perhaps the risk of even the means of subsistence. These
sacrifices and risks he may be willing to encounter for himself; but
he will pause before he imposes them on his family. And his family in
this case means his wife and daughters; for he always hopes that his
sons will feel as he feels himself, and that what he can do without,
they will do without, willingly, in the same cause. But his
daughters--their marriage may depend upon it: and his wife, who is
unable to enter into or understand the objects for which these
sacrifices are made--who, if she thought them worth any sacrifice,
would think so on trust, and solely for his sake--who can participate
in none of the enthusiasm or the self-approbation he himself may
feel, while the things which he is disposed to sacrifice are all in
all to her; will not the best and most unselfish man hesitate the
longest before bringing on her this consequence? If it be not the
comforts of life, but only social consideration, that is at stake,
the burthen upon his conscience and feelings is still very severe.
Whoever has a wife and children has given hostages to Mrs. Grundy.
The approbation of that potentate may be a matter of indifference to
him, but it is of great importance to his wife. The man himself may
be above opinion, or may find sufficient compensation in the opinion
of those of his own way of thinking. But to the women connected with
him, he can offer no compensation. The almost invariable tendency of
the wife to place her influence in the same scale with social
consideration, is sometimes made a reproach to women, and represented
as a peculiar trait of feebleness and childishness of character in
them: surely with great injustice. Society makes the whole life of a
woman, in the easy classes, a continued self-sacrifice; it exacts
from her an unremitting restraint of the whole of her natural
inclinations, and the sole return it makes to her for what often
deserves the name of a martyrdom, is consideration. Her consideration
is inseparably connected with that of her husband, and after paying
the full price for it, she finds that she is to lose it, for no
reason of which she can feel the cogency. She has sacrificed her
whole life to it, and her husband will not sacrifice to it a whim, a
freak, an eccentricity; something not recognised or allowed for by
the world, and which the world will agree with her in thinking a
folly, if it thinks no worse! The dilemma is hardest upon that very
meritorious class of men, who, without possessing talents which
qualify them to make a figure among those with whom they agree in
opinion, hold their opinion from conviction, and feel bound in honour
and conscience to serve it, by making profession of their belief, and
giving their time, labour, and means, to anything undertaken in its
behalf. The worst case of all is when such men happen to be of a rank
and position which of itself neither gives them, nor excludes them
from, what is considered the best society; when their admission to it
depends mainly on what is thought of them personally--and however
unexceptionable their breeding and habits, their being identified
with opinions and public conduct unacceptable to those who give the
tone to society would operate as an effectual exclusion. Many a woman
flatters herself (nine times out of ten quite erroneously) that
nothing prevents her and her husband from moving in the highest
society of her neighbourhood--society in which others well known to
her, and in the same class of life, mix freely--except that her
husband is unfortunately a Dissenter, or has the reputation of
mingling in low radical politics. That it is, she thinks, which
hinders George from getting a commission or a place, Caroline from
making an advantageous match, and prevents her and her husband from
obtaining invitations, perhaps honours, which, for aught she sees,
they are as well entitled to as some folks. With such an influence in
every house, either exerted actively, or operating all the more
powerfully for not being asserted, is it any wonder that people in
general are kept down in that mediocrity of respectability which is
becoming a marked characteristic of modern times?

There is another very injurious aspect in which the effect, not of
women's disabilities directly, but of the broad line of difference
which those disabilities create between the education and character
of a woman and that of a man, requires to be considered. Nothing can
be more unfavourable to that union of thoughts and inclinations which
is the ideal of married life. Intimate society between people
radically dissimilar to one another, is an idle dream. Unlikeness may
attract, but it is likeness which retains; and in proportion to the
likeness is the suitability of the individuals to give each other a
happy life. While women are so unlike men, it is not wonderful that
selfish men should feel the need of arbitrary power in their own
hands, to arrest _in limine_ the life-long conflict of inclinations,
by deciding every question on the side of their own preference. When
people are extremely unlike, there can be no real identity of
interest. Very often there is conscientious difference of opinion
between married people, on the highest points of duty. Is there any
reality in the marriage union where this takes place? Yet it is not
uncommon anywhere, when the woman has any earnestness of character;
and it is a very general case indeed in Catholic countries, when she
is supported in her dissent by the only other authority to which she
is taught to bow, the priest. With the usual barefacedness of power
not accustomed to find itself disputed, the influence of priests over
women is attacked by Protestant and Liberal writers, less for being
bad in itself, than because it is a rival authority to the husband,
and raises up a revolt against his infallibility. In England, similar
differences occasionally exist when an Evangelical wife has allied
herself with a husband of a different quality; but in general this
source at least of dissension is got rid of, by reducing the minds of
women to such a nullity, that they have no opinions but those of Mrs.
Grundy, or those which the husband tells them to have. When there is
no difference of opinion, differences merely of taste may be
sufficient to detract greatly from the happiness of married life. And
though it may stimulate the amatory propensities of men, it does not
conduce to married happiness, to exaggerate by differences of
education whatever may be the native differences of the sexes. If the
married pair are well-bred and well-behaved people, they tolerate
each other's tastes; but is mutual toleration what people look
forward to, when they enter into marriage? These differences of
inclination will naturally make their wishes different, if not
restrained by affection or duty, as to almost all domestic questions
which arise. What a difference there must be in the society which the
two persons will wish to frequent, or be frequented by! Each will
desire associates who share their own tastes: the persons agreeable
to one, will be indifferent or positively disagreeable to the other;
yet there can be none who are not common to both, for married people
do not now live in different parts of the house and have totally
different visiting lists, as in the reign of Louis XV. They cannot
help having different wishes as to the bringing up of the children:
each will wish to see reproduced in them their own tastes and
sentiments: and there is either a compromise, and only a
half-satisfaction to either, or the wife has to yield--often with
bitter suffering; and, with or without intention, her occult
influence continues to counterwork the husband's purposes.

It would of course be extreme folly to suppose that these differences
of feeling and inclination only exist because women are brought up
differently from men, and that there would not be differences of
taste under any imaginable circumstances. But there is nothing beyond
the mark in saying that the distinction in bringing-up immensely
aggravates those differences, and renders them wholly inevitable.
While women are brought up as they are, a man and a woman will but
rarely find in one another real agreement of tastes and wishes as to
daily life. They will generally have to give it up as hopeless, and
renounce the attempt to have, in the intimate associate of their
daily life, that _idem velle, idem nolle_, which is the recognised
bond of any society that is really such: or if the man succeeds in
obtaining it, he does so by choosing a woman who is so complete a
nullity that she has no _velle_ or _nolle_ at all, and is as ready to
comply with one thing as another if anybody tells her to do so. Even
this calculation is apt to fail; dulness and want of spirit are not
always a guarantee of the submission which is so confidently expected
from them. But if they were, is this the ideal of marriage? What, in
this case, does the man obtain by it, except an upper servant, a
nurse, or a mistress? On the contrary, when each of two persons,
instead of being a nothing, is a something; when they are attached to
one another, and are not too much unlike to begin with; the constant
partaking in the same things, assisted by their sympathy, draws out
the latent capacities of each for being interested in the things
which were at first interesting only to the other; and works a
gradual assimilation of the tastes and characters to one another,
partly by the insensible modification of each, but more by a real
enriching of the two natures, each acquiring the tastes and
capacities of the other in addition to its own. This often happens
between two friends of the same sex, who are much associated in their
daily life: and it would be a common, if not the commonest, case in
marriage, did not the totally different bringing-up of the two sexes
make it next to an impossibility to form a really well-assorted
union. Were this remedied, whatever differences there might still be
in individual tastes, there would at least be, as a general rule,
complete unity and unanimity as to the great objects of life. When
the two persons both care for great objects, and are a help and
encouragement to each other in whatever regards these, the minor
matters on which their tastes may differ are not all-important to
them; and there is a foundation for solid friendship, of an enduring
character, more likely than anything else to make it, through the
whole of life, a greater pleasure to each to give pleasure to the
other, than to receive it.

I have considered, thus far, the effects on the pleasures and
benefits of the marriage union which depend on the mere unlikeness
between the wife and the husband: but the evil tendency is
prodigiously aggravated when the unlikeness is inferiority. Mere
unlikeness, when it only means difference of good qualities, may be
more a benefit in the way of mutual improvement, than a drawback from
comfort. When each emulates, and desires and endeavours to acquire,
the other's peculiar qualities, the difference does not produce
diversity of interest, but increased identity of it, and makes each
still more valuable to the other. But when one is much the inferior
of the two in mental ability and cultivation, and is not actively
attempting by the other's aid to rise to the other's level, the whole
influence of the connexion upon the development of the superior of
the two is deteriorating: and still more so in a tolerably happy
marriage than in an unhappy one. It is not with impunity that the
superior in intellect shuts himself up with an inferior, and elects
that inferior for his chosen, and sole completely intimate,
associate. Any society which is not improving, is deteriorating: and
the more so, the closer and more familiar it is. Even a really
superior man almost always begins to deteriorate when he is
habitually (as the phrase is) king of his company: and in his most
habitual company the husband who has a wife inferior to him is always
so. While his self-satisfaction is incessantly ministered to on the
one hand, on the other he insensibly imbibes the modes of feeling,
and of looking at things, which belong to a more vulgar or a more
limited mind than his own. This evil differs from many of those which
have hitherto been dwelt on, by being an increasing one. The
association of men with women in daily life is much closer and more
complete than it ever was before. Men's life is more domestic.
Formerly, their pleasures and chosen occupations were among men, and
in men's company: their wives had but a fragment of their lives. At
the present time, the progress of civilization, and the turn of
opinion against the rough amusements and convivial excesses which
formerly occupied most men in their hours of relaxation--together
with (it must be said) the improved tone of modern feeling as to the
reciprocity of duty which binds the husband towards the wife--have
thrown the man very much more upon home and its inmates, for his
personal and social pleasures: while the kind and degree of
improvement which has been made in women's education, has made them
in some degree capable of being his companions in ideas and mental
tastes, while leaving them, in most cases, still hopelessly inferior
to him. His desire of mental communion is thus in general satisfied
by a communion from which he learns nothing. An unimproving and
unstimulating companionship is substituted for (what he might
otherwise have been obliged to seek) the society of his equals in
powers and his fellows in the higher pursuits. We see, accordingly,
that young men of the greatest promise generally cease to improve as
soon as they marry, and, not improving, inevitably degenerate. If the
wife does not push the husband forward, she always holds him back. He
ceases to care for what she does not care for; he no longer desires,
and ends by disliking and shunning, society congenial to his former
aspirations, and which would now shame his falling-off from them; his
higher faculties both of mind and heart cease to be called into
activity. And this change coinciding with the new and selfish
interests which are created by the family, after a few years he
differs in no material respect from those who have never had wishes
for anything but the common vanities and the common pecuniary
objects.

What marriage may be in the case of two persons of cultivated
faculties, identical in opinions and purposes, between whom there
exists that best kind of equality, similarity of powers and
capacities with reciprocal superiority in them--so that each can
enjoy the luxury of looking up to the other, and can have alternately
the pleasure of leading and of being led in the path of
development--I will not attempt to describe. To those who can
conceive it, there is no need; to those who cannot, it would appear
the dream of an enthusiast. But I maintain, with the profoundest
conviction, that this, and this only, is the ideal of marriage; and
that all opinions, customs, and institutions which favour any other
notion of it, or turn the conceptions and aspirations connected with
it into any other direction, by whatever pretences they may be
coloured, are relics of primitive barbarism. The moral regeneration
of mankind will only really commence, when the most fundamental of
the social relations is placed under the rule of equal justice, and
when human beings learn to cultivate their strongest sympathy with an
equal in rights and in cultivation.

Thus far, the benefits which it has appeared that the world would
gain by ceasing to make sex a disqualification for privileges and a
badge of subjection, are social rather than individual; consisting in
an increase of the general fund of thinking and acting power, and an
improvement in the general conditions of the association of men with
women. But it would be a grievous understatement of the case to omit
the most direct benefit of all, the unspeakable gain in private
happiness to the liberated half of the species; the difference to
them between a life of subjection to the will of others, and a life
of rational freedom. After the primary necessities of food and
raiment, freedom is the first and strongest want of human nature.
While mankind are lawless, their desire is for lawless freedom. When
they have learnt to understand the meaning of duty and the value of
reason, they incline more and more to be guided and restrained by
these in the exercise of their freedom; but they do not therefore
desire freedom less; they do not become disposed to accept the will
of other people as the representative and interpreter of those
guiding principles. On the contrary, the communities in which the
reason has been most cultivated, and in which the idea of social duty
has been most powerful, are those which have most strongly asserted
the freedom of action of the individual--the liberty of each to
govern his conduct by his own feelings of duty, and by such laws and
social restraints as his own conscience can subscribe to.

He who would rightly appreciate the worth of personal independence as
an element of happiness, should consider the value he himself puts
upon it as an ingredient of his own. There is no subject on which
there is a greater habitual difference of judgment between a man
judging for himself, and the same man judging for other people. When
he hears others complaining that they are not allowed freedom of
action--that their own will has not sufficient influence in the
regulation of their affairs--his inclination is, to ask, what are
their grievances? what positive damage they sustain? and in what
respect they consider their affairs to be mismanaged? and if they
fail to make out, in answer to these questions, what appears to him a
sufficient case, he turns a deaf ear, and regards their complaint as
the fanciful querulousness of people whom nothing reasonable will
satisfy. But he has a quite different standard of judgment when he is
deciding for himself. Then, the most unexceptionable administration
of his interests by a tutor set over him, does not satisfy his
feelings: his personal exclusion from the deciding authority appears
itself the greatest grievance of all, rendering it superfluous even
to enter into the question of mismanagement. It is the same with
nations. What citizen of a free country would listen to any offers of
good and skilful administration, in return for the abdication of
freedom? Even if he could believe that good and skilful
administration can exist among a people ruled by a will not their
own, would not the consciousness of working out their own destiny
under their own moral responsibility be a compensation to his
feelings for great rudeness and imperfection in the details of public
affairs? Let him rest assured that whatever he feels on this point,
women feel in a fully equal degree. Whatever has been said or
written, from the time of Herodotus to the present, of the ennobling
influence of free government--the nerve and spring which it gives to
all the faculties, the larger and higher objects which it presents to
the intellect and feelings, the more unselfish public spirit, and
calmer and broader views of duty, that it engenders, and the
generally loftier platform on which it elevates the individual as a
moral, spiritual, and social being--is every particle as true of
women as of men. Are these things no important part of individual
happiness? Let any man call to mind what he himself felt on emerging
from boyhood--from the tutelage and control of even loved and
affectionate elders--and entering upon the responsibilities of
manhood. Was it not like the physical effect of taking off a heavy
weight, or releasing him from obstructive, even if not otherwise
painful, bonds? Did he not feel twice as much alive, twice as much a
human being, as before? And does he imagine that women have none of
these feelings? But it is a striking fact, that the satisfactions and
mortifications of personal pride, though all in all to most men when
the case is their own, have less allowance made for them in the case
of other people, and are less listened to as a ground or a
justification of conduct, than any other natural human feelings;
perhaps because men compliment them in their own case with the names
of so many other qualities, that they are seldom conscious how mighty
an influence these feelings exercise in their own lives. No less
large and powerful is their part, we may assure ourselves, in the
lives and feelings of women. Women are schooled into suppressing them
in their most natural and most healthy direction, but the internal
principle remains, in a different outward form. An active and
energetic mind, if denied liberty, will seek for power: refused the
command of itself, it will assert its personality by attempting to
control others. To allow to any human beings no existence of their
own but what depends on others, is giving far too high a premium on
bending others to their purposes. Where liberty cannot be hoped for,
and power can, power becomes the grand object of human desire; those
to whom others will not leave the undisturbed management of their own
affairs, will compensate themselves, if they can, by meddling for
their own purposes with the affairs of others. Hence also women's
passion for personal beauty, and dress and display; and all the evils
that flow from it, in the way of mischievous luxury and social
immorality. The love of power and the love of liberty are in eternal
antagonism. Where there is least liberty, the passion for power is
the most ardent and unscrupulous. The desire of power over others can
only cease to be a depraving agency among mankind, when each of them
individually is able to do without it: which can only be where
respect for liberty in the personal concerns of each is an
established principle.

But it is not only through the sentiment of personal dignity, that
the free direction and disposal of their own faculties is a source of
individual happiness, and to be fettered and restricted in it, a
source of unhappiness, to human beings, and not least to women. There
is nothing, after disease, indigence, and guilt, so fatal to the
pleasurable enjoyment of life as the want of a worthy outlet for the
active faculties. Women who have the cares of a family, and while
they have the cares of a family, have this outlet, and it generally
suffices for them: but what of the greatly increasing number of
women, who have had no opportunity of exercising the vocation which
they are mocked by telling them is their proper one? What of the
women whose children have been lost to them by death or distance, or
have grown up, married, and formed homes of their own? There are
abundant examples of men who, after a life engrossed by business,
retire with a competency to the enjoyment, as they hope, of rest, but
to whom, as they are unable to acquire new interests and excitements
that can replace the old, the change to a life of inactivity brings
ennui, melancholy, and premature death. Yet no one thinks of the
parallel case of so many worthy and devoted women, who, having paid
what they are told is their debt to society--having brought up a
family blamelessly to manhood and womanhood--having kept a house as
long as they had a house needing to be kept--are deserted by the sole
occupation for which they have fitted themselves; and remain with
undiminished activity but with no employment for it, unless perhaps a
daughter or daughter-in-law is willing to abdicate in their favour
the discharge of the same functions in her younger household. Surely
a hard lot for the old age of those who have worthily discharged, as
long as it was given to them to discharge, what the world accounts
their only social duty. Of such women, and of those others to whom
this duty has not been committed at all--many of whom pine through
life with the consciousness of thwarted vocations, and activities
which are not suffered to expand--the only resources, speaking
generally, are religion and charity. But their religion, though it
may be one of feeling, and of ceremonial observance, cannot be a
religion of action, unless in the form of charity. For charity many
of them are by nature admirably fitted; but to practise it usefully,
or even without doing mischief, requires the education, the manifold
preparation, the knowledge and the thinking powers, of a skilful
administrator. There are few of the administrative functions of
government for which a person would not be fit, who is fit to bestow
charity usefully. In this as in other cases (pre-eminently in that of
the education of children), the duties permitted to women cannot be
performed properly, without their being trained for duties which, to
the great loss of society, are not permitted to them. And here let me
notice the singular way in which the question of women's disabilities
is frequently presented to view, by those who find it easier to draw
a ludicrous picture of what they do not like, than to answer the
arguments for it. When it is suggested that women's executive
capacities and prudent counsels might sometimes be found valuable in
affairs of state, these lovers of fun hold up to the ridicule of the
world, as sitting in parliament or in the cabinet, girls in their
teens, or young wives of two or three and twenty, transported bodily,
exactly as they are, from the drawing-room to the House of Commons.
They forget that males are not usually selected at this early age for
a seat in Parliament, or for responsible political functions. Common
sense would tell them that if such trusts were confided to women, it
would be to such as having no special vocation for married life, or
preferring another employment of their faculties (as many women even
now prefer to marriage some of the few honourable occupations within
their reach), have spent the best years of their youth in attempting
to qualify themselves for the pursuits in which they desire to
engage; or still more frequently perhaps, widows or wives of forty or
fifty, by whom the knowledge of life and faculty of government which
they have acquired in their families, could by the aid of appropriate
studies be made available on a less contracted scale. There is no
country of Europe in which the ablest men have not frequently
experienced, and keenly appreciated, the value of the advice and help
of clever and experienced women of the world, in the attainment both
of private and of public objects; and there are important matters of
public administration to which few men are equally competent with
such women; among others, the detailed control of expenditure. But
what we are now discussing is not the need which society has of the
services of women in public business, but the dull and hopeless life
to which it so often condemns them, by forbidding them to exercise
the practical abilities which many of them are conscious of, in any
wider field than one which to some of them never was, and to others
is no longer, open. If there is anything vitally important to the
happiness of human beings, it is that they should relish their
habitual pursuit. This requisite of an enjoyable life is very
imperfectly granted, or altogether denied, to a large part of
mankind; and by its absence many a life is a failure, which is
provided, in appearance, with every requisite of success. But if
circumstances which society is not yet skilful enough to overcome,
render such failures often for the present inevitable, society need
not itself inflict them. The injudiciousness of parents, a youth's
own inexperience, or the absence of external opportunities for the
congenial vocation, and their presence for an uncongenial, condemn
numbers of men to pass their lives in doing one thing reluctantly and
ill, when there are other things which they could have done well and
happily. But on women this sentence is imposed by actual law, and by
customs equivalent to law. What, in unenlightened societies, colour,
race, religion, or in the case of a conquered country, nationality,
are to some men, sex is to all women; a peremptory exclusion from
almost all honourable occupations, but either such as cannot be
fulfilled by others, or such as those others do not think worthy of
their acceptance. Sufferings arising from causes of this nature
usually meet with so little sympathy, that few persons are aware of
the great amount of unhappiness even now produced by the feeling of a
wasted life. The case will be even more frequent, as increased
cultivation creates a greater and greater disproportion between the
ideas and faculties of women, and the scope which society allows to
their activity.

When we consider the positive evil caused to the disqualified half of
the human race by their disqualification--first in the loss of the
most inspiriting and elevating kind of personal enjoyment, and next
in the weariness, disappointment, and profound dissatisfaction with
life, which are so often the substitute for it; one feels that among
all the lessons which men require for carrying on the struggle
against the inevitable imperfections of their lot on earth, there is
no lesson which they more need, than not to add to the evils which
nature inflicts, by their jealous and prejudiced restrictions on one
another. Their vain fears only substitute other and worse evils for
those which they are idly apprehensive of: while every restraint on
the freedom of conduct of any of their human fellow creatures,
(otherwise than by making them responsible for any evil actually
caused by it), dries up _pro tanto_ the principal fountain of human
happiness, and leaves the species less rich, to an inappreciable
degree, in all that makes life valuable to the individual human
being.

  THE END.






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