1. 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 other by so great a preponderance
of popular sentiment, is supposed to have a presumption in its favour, superior
to any conviction which an appeal to reason has power to produce in 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
accord to the unreasoning elements in human nature the infallibility which
the eighteenth century is supposed to have ascribed to the reasoning elements.
For the apotheosis of Reason we have substituted that of Instinct; and we
call 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 of the 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 judg-
ment 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 compact, or at any rate formed by
an union of persons not very unequal in strength, afforded, in consequence,
the first instance of a portion of human relations fenced round, and placed
under the dominion of another law than
that of force. And though the original law of force remained in full operation between them and their slaves, and
also (except so far as limited by express compact) between a commonwealth
and its subjects, or other independent commonwealths; the banishment of that
primitive law even from so narrow a field, commenced the regeneration of
human nature, by giving birth to sentiments of which experience soon demonstrated
the immense value even for material interests, and which 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 than a thousand years the Church kept up the
contest, with hardly any perceptible success. It was not for want of power
over men's minds. Its power was prodigious. It could make kings and nobles
resign their most
valued possessions to enrich the Church. It could make thousands in the prime of life and the height of worldly advantages, shut
themselves up in convents to work out their salvation by poverty, fasting,
and prayer. It could send hundreds of thousands across land and sea, Europe
and Asia, to give their lives for the deliverance of the Holy Sepulchre.
It could make kings relinquish wives who were the object of their passionate
attachment, because the Church declared that they were within the seventh
(by our calculation the fourteenth) degree of relationship. All this it did;
but it could not make men fight less with one another, nor 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, or is to
exercise, his share of the power equally with the highest nobleman. And the
case is that in which the desire of power is the strongest: for 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 abso-
lute 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 every-
thing 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 natu-
rally disqualified for them. There can be little
doubt that Spartan experience suggested to Plato, among many other of his
doctrines, that of the social and political equality of the two sexes.
But, it will be said, the rule of men over women differs from all these
others in not being a rule 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 thou-
sands 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 go on to complete equality; but it assuredly
affords some presumption that such is the case.
Neither does it avail anything to say that the nature of the two sexes
adapts them to their present functions and position, and renders these appropriate
to them. Standing on the ground of common sense and the constitution of the
human mind, I deny that 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 stimula-
tion 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 cottiers 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 feel-
ings 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." The greater part of what women write about women is
mere sycophancy to men. In the case of un-
married women, much of it seems only intended to increase their chance of a husband. Many, both married
and unmarried, overstep the mark, and inculcate a servility beyond what
is desired or relished by any man, except the very vulgarest. But this
is not so often the case as, even at a quite late period, it still was.
Literary women 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 in effecting its purpose, is an altogether unnecessary
solicitude. What women by nature cannot do, it is quite superfluous to forbid
them from doing. What they can do, but not so well as the men who are their
competitors, competition suffices to exclude them from; since nobody asks
for protective duties and bounties
in favour of women; it is only asked that the present bounties and protective duties in favour of men should be recalled.
If women have a greater natural inclination for some things than for others,
there is no need of laws or social inculcation to make the majority of them
do the former in preference to the latter. Whatever women's services are
most wanted for, the free play of competition will hold out the strongest
inducements to them to undertake. And, as the words imply, they are most
wanted for the things for which they are most fit; by the apportionment of
which to them, the collective faculties of the two sexes can be applied on
the whole with the greatest sum of valuable result.
The general opinion of men is supposed to be, that the natural vocation
of a woman is that of a wife and mother. I say, is supposed to be, because,
judging from acts -- from the whole of the present constitution of society
-- one might infer that their opinion was the direct contrary. They might
be supposed to think that the alleged natural vocation of women was of all
things the most repugnant to their nature; insomuch that if they are free
to do anything else -- if any other means of living or occupation of their
time and faculties, is open, which has any chance of appearing desirable
to them -- there
will not be enough of them who will be willing to accept the condition said to be natural to them. If this is the real opinion of
men in general, it would be well that it should be spoken out. I should like
to hear somebody openly enunciating the doctrine (it is already implied in
much that is written on the subject) -- It is necessary to society that women
should marry and produce children. They will not do so unless they are compelled.
Therefore it is necessary to compel them." The merits of the case would
then be clearly defined. It would be exactly that of the 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 it is open to the retort -- First
pay the sailors the honest value of their labour. When you have made it as
well worth their while to serve you, as to work for
other employers, you will have no more difficulty than others have in obtaining their services.
To this there is no logical answer except "I will not": and as
people are now not only ashamed, but are not desirous, to rob the labourer
of his hire, impressment is no longer advocated. Those who attempt to force
women into marriage by closing all other doors against them, lay themselves
open to a similar retort. If they mean what they say, their opinion must
evidently be, that men do not render the married condition so desirable to
women, as to induce them to accept it for its own recommendations. It is
not a sign of one's thinking the boon one offers very attractive, when one
allows only Hobson's choice, "that or none." And here, I believe,
is the clue to the feelings of those men, who have a real antipathy to the
equal freedom of women. I believe they are afraid, not lest women should
be unwilling to marry, for I do not think that 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 entrainment, 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.