CHAPTER I
The object of this Essay is to explain as clearly as I am able
grounds of an opinion which I have held from the very earliest
period when I had formed any opinions at all on social political
matters, and which, instead of being weakened or modified, has
been constantly growing stronger by the progress 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 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 convictions. The difficulty
is that which exists in all cases in which there is a mass of
feeling to be contended against. So long as opinion is strongly
rooted in the feelings, it gains rather than loses instability
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, worse it fares in argumentative contest,
the more persuaded 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 those which
gather round and protect old institutions and custom, that we
need not wonder to find them as yet less undermined and loosened
than any of the rest by the progress 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 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, 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 an alleged historical event, in
which the feelings of men general are not much interested, as
the Siege of Troy example, those who maintain that the event took
place expected to produce their proofs, before those who take
the other side can be required to say anything; and at no time
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 a priori presumption is in favour
of freedom and impartiality. It is held that there should be no
restraint not required by I 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 me to say that those who maintain the
doctrine that men ha a right to command and women are under an
obligation obey, or that men are fit for government and women
unfit, 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 allow
to men, having the double presumption against them that they are
opposing freedom and recommending partiality, must held to the
strictest proof of their case, and unless their success be such
as to exclude all doubt, the judgment ought to 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 bye who take the
other side of the question, but to imagine that could be said
by them--to find them in reasons, as I 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 and leave the opposite party with a
host of unanswered arguments against them, and not a single unrefuted
one on side, I should be thought to have done little; for a cause
supported on the one hand by universal usage, and on the r 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 intellects but those
of a high class.
I do not mention these difficulties to complain of them; first,
use it would be useless; they are inseparable from having to contend
through people's understandings against the hostility 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 be asked to place such
reliance in their own power of estimating arguments, as to give
up practical principles in which have been born and bred and which
are the basis of much 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 ion
of the nineteenth century against the eighteenth, to d 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 thing 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
e false worships of the present day, of all of which it is the
main support, will probably hold its ground until it way before
a sound psychology laying bare the real root of much that is bowed
down to as the intention of Nature and ordinance of God. As regards
the present question, I am going to accept the unfavourable conditions
which the prejudice assigns to me. I consent that established
custom, and the general feelings, 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 organisation--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, it 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 organised 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 be inn a mere affair of force between the master and the
slave, became regularised 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 civilisation, 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
anyone 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 civilisation 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 civilisation, 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, informer 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 showing 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 probably
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 con;pact, 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 thence
forward 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 thana 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 tyrannise 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
organisation 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 civilised 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 factions, 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 everyone who looks forward
to being so. The clodhopper exercises, oris 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 everyone
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 those who are kept down by it, this has. I have not yet
shown that it is a wrong system: but everyone 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 civilised
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 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 slave-owners of the Southern United States maintain the same
doctrine, with all the fanaticism with which men ding 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 overmen 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 tyrannising 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, t 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 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 organised party to agitate for the Rights of
Women, there is a numerous and active society organised 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 other. 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 so 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 centring 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 the 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 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 so 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 centring 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 the 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 a to the superior fitness of men
for all the functions now reserve 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 anyone,
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 everyone 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 expediences,
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 anyone 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 prima 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 civilisation
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 goon 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 anyone
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 dogmatises 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 there 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 anyone 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 authorised 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 think she 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 everyone. 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 L case as, even at a quite late period,
it still was. Literary women I are becoming more free-spoken,
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 copiae inter maximas
causas inopiae 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 is 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 anyone 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 m 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 somethings 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 slave-holders 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 lt 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
anyone 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.
NOTES
[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 show 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 civilisation 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 livelong 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, etc.
: 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 anyone 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
anyone pretended that there are no such things as goodmen. 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
fora 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 civilisation
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, everyone knows by heart,
were it not that hardly anyone 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
selfish indulgence, and a double-dyed and idealised 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 everyone 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 licence 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 high minded 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 tyrannises; 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 everyday,
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, excepting 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 anyone 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 anyone 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 civilisation 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 elite, 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 elite. 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 everyone
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 twelve month, 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 anyone 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, etc. 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 anyone, 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 belittle 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 another wise 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 anyone 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 everyone, 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 'etat, 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 anyone ventures to do in the face of present experience. It is not sufficient to maintain that women on the average are less gifted the