4. CHAPTER IV
There remains a question, not of less importance than those already discussed,
and which will be asked the most importunately by those opponents whose conviction
is somewhat shaken on the main point. What good are we to expect from the
changes proposed in our customs and institutions? Would mankind be at all
better off if women were free? If not, why disturb their minds, and attempt
to make a social revolution in the name of an abstract right?
It is hardly to be expected that this question will be asked in respect
to the change proposed in the condition of women in marriage. The sufferings,
immoralities, evils of all sorts, produced in innumerable cases by the subjection
of individual women to individual men, are far too terrible to be overlooked.
Unthinking or uncandid persons, counting those cases alone which are extreme,
or which attain publicity, may say that the evils are exceptional; but no
one can be blind to their existence, nor, in many cases,
to their intensity. And it is perfectly obvious that the abuse of the power cannot be very much
checked while the power remains. It is a power given, or offered, not to
good men, or to decently respectable men, but to all men; the most brutal,
and the most criminal. There is no check but that of opinion, and such men
are in general within the reach of no opinion but that of men like themselves.
If such men did not brutally tyrannise over the one human being whom the
law compels to bear everything from them, society must already have reached
a paradisiacal state. There could be no need any longer of laws to curb men's
vicious propensities. Astraea must not only have returned to earth, but the
heart of the worst man must have become her temple. The law of servitude
in marriage is a monstrous contradiction to all the principles of the modern
world, and to all the experience through which those principles have been
slowly and painfully worked out. It is the sole case, now that negro slavery
has been abolished, in which a human being in the plenitude of every faculty
is delivered up to the tender mercies of another human being, in the hope
forsooth that this other will use the power solely for the good of the person
subjected to it. Marriage is the only actual bondage known to our law. There
remain no legal slaves, except the mistress of every house.
It is not, therefore, on this part of the subject, that the question
is likely to be asked, Cui bono. We may be
told that the evil would outweigh the good, but the reality of the good
admits of no dispute. In regard, however, to the larger question, the
removal of women's disabilities -- their recognition as the equals of
men in all that belongs to citizenship -- the opening to them of all
honourable employments, and of the training and education which
qualifies for those employments -- there are many persons for whom it is
not enough that the inequality has no just or legitimate defence; they
require to be told what express advantage would be obtained by
abolishing it.
To which let me first answer, the advantage of having the most universal
and pervading of all human relations regulated by justice instead of injustice.
The vast amount of this gain to human nature, it is hardly possible, by any
explanation or illustration, to place in a stronger light than it is placed
by the bare statement, to anyone who attaches a moral meaning to words. All
the selfish propensities, the self-worship, the unjust self-preference, which
exist among mankind, have their source and root in, and derive their principal
nourishment from, the present constitution of the relation between men and
women. Think what it is to a boy, to grow up to manhood in the
belief that without any merit or any exertion of his own, though he may be the most frivolous
and empty or the most ignorant and stolid of mankind, by the mere fact of
being born a male he is by right the superior of all and every one of an
entire half of the human race: including probably some whose real superiority
to himself he has daily or hourly occasion to feel; but even if in his whole
conduct he habitually follows a woman's guidance, still, if he is a fool,
she thinks that of course she is not, and cannot be, equal in ability and
judgment to himself; and if he is not a fool, he does worse -- he sees that
she is superior to him, and believes that, notwithstanding her superiority,
he is entitled to command and she is bound to obey. What must be the effect
on his character, of this lesson? And men of the cultivated classes are often
not aware how deeply it sinks into the immense majority of male minds. For,
among right-feeling and wellbred people, the inequality is kept as much as
possible out of sight; above all, out of sight of the children. As much obedience
is required from boys to their mother as to their father: they are not permitted
to domineer over their sisters, nor are they accustomed to see these postponed
to them, but the contrary; the compensations of the chivalrous feeling being
made prominent, while the servitude which requires them is kept in the background.
Well brought-up youths in the higher classes thus often escape the bad influences
of the situation in their early years, and only experience them when, arrived
at manhood, they fall under the dominion of facts as they really exist. Such
people are little aware, when a boy is differently brought up, how early
the notion of his inherent superiority to a girl arises in his mind; how
it grows with his growth and strengthens with his strength; how it is inoculated
by one schoolboy upon another; how early the youth thinks himself superior
to his mother, owing her perhaps forbearance, but no-real respect; ana how
sublime and sultan-like a sense of superiority he feels, above all, over
the woman whom he honours by admitting her to a partnership of his life.
Is it imagined that all this does not pervert the whole manner of existence
of the man, both as an individual and as a social being? It is an exact parallel
to the feeling of a hereditary king that he is excellent above others by
being born a king, or a noble by being born a noble. The relation between
husband and wife is very like that between lord and vassal, except that the
wife is held to more unlimited obedience than the vassal was. However the
vassal's character may have been affected, for better and for worse, by his
subordination, who can help seeing that the lord's was affected greatly for
the worse? whether he was
led to believe that his vassals were really superior to himself, or to feel that he was placed in command over people as good
as himself, for no merits or labours of his own, but merely for having, as
Figaro says, taken the trouble to be born. The self-worship of the monarch,
or of the feudal superior, is matched by the self-worship of the male. Human
beings do not grow up from childhood in the possession of unearned distinctions,
without pluming themselves upon them. Those whom privileges not acquired
by their merit, and which they feel to be disproportioned to it, inspire
with additional humility, are always the few, and the best few. The rest
are only inspired with pride, and the worst sort of pride, that which values
itself upon accidental advantages, not of its own achieving. Above all, when
the feeling of being raised above the whole of the other sex is combined
with personal authority over one individual among them; the situation, if
a school of conscientious and affectionate forbearance to those whose strongest
points of character are conscience and affection, is to men of another quality
a regularly constituted academy or gymnasium for training them in arrogance
and overbearingness; which vices, if curbed by the certainty of resistance
in their intercourse with other men, their equals, break out towards all
who are in a position to be obliged to tolerate them, and often revenge them-
selves upon the unfortunate wife for the involuntary restraint which they are obliged
to submit to elsewhere.
The example afforded, and the education given to the sentiments, by laying
the foundation of domestic existence upon a relation contradictory to the
first principles of social justice must, from the very nature of man, have
a perverting influence of such magnitude, that it is hardly possible with
our present experience to raise our imaginations to the conception of so
great a change for the better as would be made by its removal. All that education
and civilisation are doing to efface the influences on character of the law
of force, and replace them by those of justice, remains merely on the surface,
as long as the citadel of the enemy is not attacked. The principle of the
modern movement in morals and politics, is that conduct, and conduct alone,
entitles to respect: that not what men are, but what they do, constitutes
their claim to deference; that, above all, merit, and not birth, is the only
rightful claim to power and authority. If no authority, not in its nature
temporary, were allowed to one human being over another, society would not
be employed in building up propensities with one hand which it has to curb
with the other. The child would really, for the first time in man's existence
on earth, be trained in the way he should go, and
when he was old there would be a chance that he would not depart from it. But so long as the right of
the strong to power over the weak rules in the very heart of society, the
attempt to make the equal right of the weak the principle of its outward
actions will always be an uphill struggle; for the law of justice, which
is also that of Christianity, will never get possession of men's inmost sentiments;
they will be working against it, even when bending to it.
The second benefit to be expected from giving to women the free use of
their faculties, by leaving them the free choice of their employments, and
opening to them the same field of occupation and the same prizes and encouragements
as to other human beings, would be that of doubling the mass of mental faculties
available for the higher service of humanity. Where there is now one person
qualified to benefit mankind and promote the general improvement, as a public
teacher, or an administrator of some branch of public or social affairs,
there would then be a chance of two. Mental superiority of any kind is at
present everywhere so much below the demand; there is such a deficiency of
persons competent to do excellently anything which it requires any considerable
amount of ability to do; that the loss to the world, by refusing to make
use of one half of the whole quantity of talent it possesses, is
extremely serious. It is true that this amount of mental power is not totally lost.
Much of it is employed, and would in any case be employed, in domestic management,
and in the few other occupations open to women; and from the remainder indirect
benefit is in many individual cases obtained, through the personal influence
of individual women over individual men. But these benefits are partial;
their range is extremely circumscribed; and if they must be admitted, on
the one hand, as a deduction from the amount of fresh social power that would
be acquired by giving freedom to one-half of the whole sum of human intellect,
there must be added, on the other, the benefit of the stimulus that would
be given to the intellect of men by the competition; or (to use a more true
expression) by the necessity that would be imposed on them of deserving precedency
before they could expect to obtain it.
This great accession to the intellectual power of the species, and to
the amount of intellect available for the good management of its affairs,
would be obtained, partly, through the better and more complete intellectual
education of women, which would then improve pari passu with that of men.
Women in general would be brought up equally capable of understanding business,
public affairs, and the higher matters of speculation, with men In the same
class of society; and the select
few of the one as well as of the other sex, who were qualified not only to comprehend what is done or thought by others,
but to think or do something considerable themselves, would meet with the
same facilities for improving and training their capacities in the one sex
as in the other. In this way, the widening of the sphere of action for women
would operate for good, by raising their education to the level of that of
men, and making the one participate in all improvements made in the other.
But independently of this, the mere breaking down of the barrier would of
itself have an educational virtue of the highest worth. The mere getting
rid of the idea that all the wider subjects of thought and action, all the
things which are of general and not solely of private interest, are men's
business, from which women are to be warned off -- positively interdicted
from most of it, coldly tolerated in the little which is allowed them --
the mere consciousness a woman would then have of being a human being like
any other, entitled to choose her pursuits, urged or invited by the same
inducements as anyone else to interest herself in whatever is interesting
to human beings, entitled to exert the share of influence on all human concerns
which belongs to an individual opinion, whether she attempted actual participation
in them or not -- this alone would effect an immense expansion of
the faculties of women, as well as enlargement of the range of their moral sentiments.
Besides the addition to the amount of individual talent available for
the conduct of human affairs, which certainly are not at present so abundantly
provided in that respect that they can afford to dispense with one-half of
what nature proffers; the opinion of women would then possess a more beneficial,
rather than a greater, influence upon the general mass of human belief and
sentiment. I say a more beneficial, rather than a greater influence; for
the influence of women over the general tone of opinion has always, or at
least from the earliest known period, been very considerable. The influence
of mothers on the early character of their sons, and the desire of young
men to recommend themselves to young women, have in all recorded times been
important agencies in the formation of character, and have determined some
of the chief steps in the progress of civilisation. Even in the Homeric age,
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Hector. The moral influence of women has had two modes of operation. First,
it has been a softening influence. Those who were most liable to be the victims
of violence, have naturally tended as much as they could towards limiting
its sphere and mitigating
its excesses. Those who were not taught to fight, have naturally inclined in favour of any other mode of settling differences
rather than that of fighting. In general, those who have been the greatest
sufferers by the indulgence of selfish passion, have been the most earnest
supporters of any moral law which offered a means of bridling passion. Women
were powerfully instrumental in inducing the northern conquerors to adopt
the creed of Christianity, a creed so much more favourable to women than
any that preceded it. The conversion of the Anglo-Saxons and of the Franks
may be said to have been begun by the wives of Ethelbert and Clovis. The
other mode in which the effect of women's opinion has been conspicuous, is
by giving, a powerful stimulus to those qualities in men, which, not being
themselves trained in, it was necessary for them that they should find in
their protectors. Courage, and the military virtues generally, have at all
times been greatly indebted to the desire which men felt of being admired
by women: and the stimulus reaches far beyond this one class of eminent qualities,
since, by a very natural effect of their position, the best passport to the
admiration and favour of women has always been to be thought highly of by
men. From the combination of the two kinds of moral influence thus exercised
by women, arose the spirit
of chivalry: the peculiarity of which is, to aim at combining the highest standard of the warlike qualities with the cultivation
of a totally different class of virtues -- those of gentleness, generosity,
and self-abnegation, towards the non-military and defenseless classes generally,
and a special submission and worship directed towards women; who were distinguished
from the other defenceless classes by the high rewards which they had it
in their power voluntarily to bestow on those who endeavoured to earn their
favour, instead of extorting their subjection. Though the practice of chivalry
fell even more sadly short of its theoretic standard than practice generally
falls below theory, it remains one of the most precious monuments of the
moral history of our race; as a remarkable instance of a concerted and organised
attempt by a most disorganised and distracted society, to raise up and carry
into practice a moral ideal greatly in advance of its social condition and
institutions; so much so as to have been completely frustrated in the main
object, yet never entirely inefficacious, and which has left a most sensible,
and for the most part a highly valuable impress on the ideas and feelings
of all subsequent times.
The chivalrous ideal is the acme of the influence of women's sentiments
on the moral cultivation of mankind: and if women are to remain in their
subordinate situation, it were
greatly to be lamented that the chivalrous standard should have passed away, for it is the only one at all capable of
mitigating the demoralising influences of that position. But the changes
in the general state of the species rendered inevitable the substitution
of a totally different ideal of morality for the chivalrous one. Chivalry
was the attempt to infuse moral elements into a state of society in which
everything depended for good or evil on individual prowess, under the softening
influences of individual delicacy and generosity. In modern societies, all
things, even in the military department of affairs, are decided, not by individual
effort, but by the combined operations of numbers; while the main occupation
of society has changed from fighting to business, from military to industrial
life. The exigencies of the new life are no more exclusive of the virtues
of generosity than those of the old, but it no longer entirely depends on
them. The main foundations of the moral life of modern times must be justice
and prudence; the respect of each for the rights of every other, and the
ability of each to take care of himself. Chivalry left without legal check
all forms of wrong which reigned unpunished throughout society; it only encouraged
a few to do right in preference to wrong, by the direction it gave to the
instruments of praise and admiration. But the real depen-
dence of morality must always be upon its penal sanctions -- its power to deter from evil.
The security of society cannot rest on merely rendering honour to right,
a motive so comparatively weak in all but a few, and which on very many does
not operate at all. Modern society is able to repress wrong through all departments
of life, by a fit exertion of the superior strength which civilisation has
given it, and thus to render the existence of the weaker members of society
(no longer defenseless but protected by law) tolerable to them, without reliance
on the chivalrous feelings of those who are in a position to tyrannise. The
beauties and graces of the chivalrous character are still what they were,
but the rights of the weak, and the general comfort of human life, now rest
on a far surer and steadier support; or rather, they do so in every relation
of life except the conjugal.
At present the moral influence of women is no less real, but it is no
longer of so marked and definite a character: it has more nearly merged in
the general influence of public opinion. Both through the contagion of sympathy,
and through the desire of men to shine in the eyes of women, their feelings
have great effect in keeping alive what remains of the chivalrous ideal --
in fostering the sentiments and continuing the traditions of spirit and generosity.
In these
points of character, their standard is higher than that of men; in the quality of justice, somewhat lower. As regards the relations of private
life it may be said generally, that their influence is, on the whole, encouraging
to the softer virtues, discouraging to the sterner: though the statement
must be taken with all the modifications dependent on individual character.
In the chief of the greater trials to which virtue is subject in the concerns
of life -- the conflict between interest and principle -- the tendency of
women's influence -- is of a very mixed character. When the principle involved
happens to be one of the very few which the course of their religious or
moral education has strongly impressed upon themselves, they are potent auxiliaries
to virtue: and their husbands and sons are often prompted by them to acts
of abnegation which they never would have been capable of without that stimulus.
But, with the present education and position of women, the moral principles
which have been impressed on them cover but a comparatively small part of
the field of virtue, and are, moreover, principally negative; forbidding
particular acts, but having little to do with the general direction of the
thoughts and purposes. I am afraid it must be said, that disinterestedness
in the general conduct of life -- the devotion of the energies to purposes
which hold
out no promise of private advantages to the family -- is very
seldom encouraged or supported by women's influence. It is small blame to
them that they discourage objects of which they have not learnt to see the
advantage, and which withdraw their men from them, and from the interests
of the family. But the consequence is that women's influence is often anything
but favourable to public virtue.
Women have, however, some share of influence in giving the tone to public
moralities since their sphere of action has been a little widened, and since
a considerable number of them have occupied themselves practically in the
promotion of objects reaching beyond their own family and household. The
influence of women counts for a great deal in two of the most marked features
of modern European life -- its aversion to war, and its addiction to philanthropy.
Excellent characteristics both; but unhappily, if the influence of women
is valuable in the encouragement it gives to these feelings in general, in
the particular applications the direction it gives to them is at least as
often mischievous as useful. In the philanthropic department more particularly,
the two provinces chiefly cultivated by women are religious proselytism and
charity. Religious proselytism at home, is but another word for embittering
of religious animosities: abroad, it is usually a
blind running at an object, without either knowing or heeding the fatal mischiefs -- fatal to the religious
object itself as well as to all other desirable objects -- which may be produced
by the means employed. As for charity, it is a matter in which the immediate
effect on the persons directly concerned, and the ultimate consequence to
the general good, are apt to be at complete war with one another: while the
education given to women -- an education of the sentiments rather than of
the understanding -- and the habit inculcated by their whole life, of looking
to immediate effects on persons, and not to remote effects on classes of
persons -- make them both unable to see, and unwilling to admit, the ultimate
evil tendency of any form of charity or philanthropy which commends itself
to their sympathetic feelings. The great and continually increasing mass
of unenlightened and shortsighted benevolence, which, taking the care of
people's lives out of their own hands, and relieving them from the disagreeable
consequences of their own acts, saps the very foundations of the self-respect,
self-help, and self-control which are the essential conditions both of individual
prosperity and of social virtue -- this waste of resources and of benevolent
feelings in doing harm instead of good, is immensely swelled by women's contributions,
and stimulated by their influence. Not that this is
a mistake likely to be made by women, where they have actually the practical management of schemes
of beneficence. It sometimes happens that women who administer public charities
-- with that insight into present fact, and especially into the minds and
feelings of those with whom they are in immediate contact, in which women
generally excel men -- recognise in the clearest manner the demoralising
influence of the alms given or the help afforded, and could give lessons
on the subject to many a male political economist. But women who only give
their money, and are not brought face to face with the effects it produces,
how can they be expected to foresee them? A woman born to the present lot
of women, and content with it, how should she appreciate the value of self-dependence?
She is not self-dependent; she is not taught self-dependence; her destiny
is to receive everything from others, and why should what is good enough
for her be bad for the poor? Her familiar notions of good are of blessings
descending from a superior. She forgets that she is not free, and that the
poor are; that if what they need is given to them unearned, they cannot be
compelled to earn it: that everybody cannot be taken care of by everybody,
but there must be some motive to induce people to take care of themselves;
and that to be helped-to help themselves, if they are physically capable
of it, is the only charity which proves to be charity in the end.
These considerations show how usefully the part which women take in the
formation of general opinion, would be modified for the better by that more
enlarged instruction, and practical conversancy with the things which their
opinions influence, that would necessarily arise from their social and political
emancipation. But the improvement it would work through the influence they
exercise, each in her own family, would be still more remarkable.
It is often said that in the classes most exposed to temptation, a man's
wife and children tend to keep him honest and respectable, both by the wife's
direct influence, and by the concern he feels for their future welfare. This
may be so, and no doubt often is so, with those who are more weak than wicked;
and this beneficial influence would be preserved and strengthened under equal
laws; it does not depend on the woman's servitude, but is, on the contrary,
diminished by the disrespect which the inferior class of men always at heart
feel towards those who are subject to their power. But when we ascend higher
in the scale, we come among a totally different set of moving forces. The
wife's influence tends, as far as it goes, to prevent the husband from falling
below the common standard
of approbation of the country. It tends quite as strongly to hinder him from rising above it. The wife is the auxiliary of
the common public opinion. A man who is married to a woman his inferior in
intelligence, finds her a perpetual dead weight, or, worse than a dead weight,
a drag, upon every aspiration of his to be better than public opinion requires
him to be. It is hardly possible for one who is in these bonds, to attain
exalted virtue. If he differs in his opinion from the mass -- if he sees
truths which have not yet dawned upon them, or if, feeling in his heart truths
which they nominally recognise, he would like to act up to those truths more
conscientiously than the generality of mankind -- to all such thoughts and
desires, marriage is the heaviest of drawbacks, unless he be so fortunate
as to have a wife as much above the common level as he himself is.
For, in the first place, there is always some sacrifice of personal interest
required; either of social consequence, or of pecuniary means; perhaps the
risk of even the means of subsistence. These sacrifices and risks he may
be willing to encounter for himself; but he will pause before he imposes
them on his family. And his family in this case means his wife and daughters;
for he always hopes that his sons will feel as he feels himself, and that
what he can do without, they
will do without, willingly, is the same cause.
But his daughters -- their marriage may depend upon it: and his wife, who
is unable to enter into or understand the objects for which these sacrifices
are made -- who, if she thought them worth any sacrifice, would think so
on trust, and solely for his sake -- who could participate in none of the
enthusiasm or the self-approbation he himself may feel, while the things
which he is disposed to sacrifice are all in all to her; will not the best
and most unselfish man hesitate the longest before bringing on her this consequence?
If it be not the comforts of life, but only social consideration, that is
at stake, the burthen upon his conscience and feelings is still very severe.
Whoever has a wife and children has given hostages to Mrs Grundy. The approbation
of that potentate may be a matter of indifference to him, but it is of great
importance to his wife. The man himself may be above opinion, or may find
sufficient compensation in the opinion of those of his own way of thinking.
But to the women connected with him, he can offer no compensation. The almost
invariable tendency of the wife to place her influence in the same scale
with social consideration, is sometimes made a reproach to women, and represented
as a peculiar trait of feebleness and childishness of character in them:
surely with great injustice.
Society makes the whole life of a woman, in the easy classes, a continued self sacrifice; it exacts from her an unremitting
restraint of the whole of her natural inclinations, and the sole return it
makes to her for what often deserves the name of a martyrdom, is consideration.
Her consideration is inseparably connected with that of her husband, and
after paying the full price for it, she finds that she is to lose it, for
no reason of which she can feel the cogency. She has sacrificed her whole
life to it, and her husband will not sacrifice to it a whim, a freak, an
eccentricity; something not recognised or allowed for by the world, and which
the world will agree with her in thinking a folly, if it thinks no worse!
The dilemma is hardest upon that very meritorious class of men, who, without
possessing talents which qualify them to make a figure among those with whom
they agree in opinion, hold their opinion from conviction, and feel bound
in honour and conscience to serve it, by making profession of their belief,
and giving their time, labour, and means, to anything undertaken in its behalf.
The worst case of all is when such men happen to be of a rank and position
which of itself neither gives them, nor excludes them from, what is considered
the best society; when their admission to it depends mainly on what is thought
of them personally -- and however unex-
ceptionable their breeding and habits, their being identified with opinions and public conduct unacceptable to those
who give the tone to society would operate as an effectual exclusion. Many
a woman flatters herself (nine times out of ten quite erroneously) that nothing
prevents her and her husband from moving in the highest society of her neighbourhood
-- society in which others well known to her, and in the same class of life,
mix freely -- except that her husband is unfortunately a Dissenter, or has
the reputation of mingling in low radical politics. That it is, she thinks,
which hinders George from getting a commission or a place, Caroline from
making an advantageous match, and prevents her and her husband from obtaining
invitations, perhaps honours, which, for aught she sees, they are as well
entitled to as some folks. With such an influence in every house, either
exerted actively, or operating all the more powerfully for not being asserted,
is it any wonder that people in general are kept down in that mediocrity
of respectability which is becoming a marked characteristic of modern times?
There is another very injurious aspect in which the effect, not of women's
disabilities directly, but of the broad line of difference which those disabilities
create between the education and character of a woman and that of a man,
requires to
be considered. Nothing can be more unfavourable to that union
of thoughts and inclinations which is the ideal of married life. Intimate
society between people radically dissimilar to one another, is an idle dream.
Unlikeness may attract, but it is likeness which retains; and in proportion
to the likeness is the suitability of the individuals to give each other
a happy life. While women are so unlike men, it is not wonderful that selfish
men should feel the need of arbitrary power in their own hands, to arrest
in limine the life-long conflict of inclinations, by deciding every question
on the side of their own preference. When people are extremely unlike, there
can be no real identity of interest. Very often there is conscientious difference
of opinion between married people, on the highest points of duty. Is there
any reality in the marriage union where this takes place? Yet it is not uncommon
anywhere, when the woman has any earnestness of character; and it is a very
general case indeed in Catholic countries, when she is supported in her dissent
by the only other authority to which she is taught to bow, the priest. With
the usual barefacedness of power not accustomed to find itself disputed,
the influence of priests over women is attacked by Protestant and Liberal
writers, less for being bad in itself, than because it is a rival authority
to the husband, and raises up a revolt against his infal-
libility. In England, similar differences occasionally exist when an Evangelical wife has allied
herself with a husband of a different quality; but in general this source
at least of dissension is got rid of, by reducing the minds of women to such
a nullity, that they have no opinions but those of Mrs. Grundy, or those
which the husband tells them to have. When there is no difference of opinion,
differences merely of taste may be sufficient to detract greatly from the
happiness of married life. And though it may stimulate the amatory propensities
of men, it does not conduce to married happiness, to exaggerate by differences
of education whatever may be the native differences of the sexes. If the
married pair are well-bred and well-behaved people, they tolerate each other's
tastes; but is mutual toleration what people look forward to, when they enter
into marriage? These differences of inclination will naturally make their
wishes different, if not restrained by affection or duty, as to almost all
domestic questions which arise. What a difference there must be in the society
which the two persons will wish to frequent, or be frequented by! Each will
desire associates who share their own tastes: the persons agreeable to one,
will be indifferent or positively disagreeable to the other; yet there can
be none who are not common to both, for married people do not now live in
dif-
ferent parts of the house and have totally different visiting lists, as
in the reign of Louis XV. They cannot help having different wishes as to
the bringing up of the children: each will wish to see reproduced in them
their own tastes and sentiments: and there is either a compromise, and only
a half satisfaction to either, or the wife has to yield -- often with bitter
suffering; and, with or without intention, her occult influence continues
to counterwork the husband's purposes.
It would of course be extreme folly to suppose that these differences
of feeling and inclination only exist because women are brought up differently
from men, and that there would not be differences of taste under any imaginable
circumstances. But there is nothing beyond the mark in saying that the distinction
in bringing up immensely aggravates those differences, and renders them wholly
inevitable. While women are brought up as they are, a man and a woman will
but rarely find in one another real agreement of tastes and wishes as to
daily life. They will generally have to give it up as hopeless, and renounce
the attempt to have, in the intimate associate of their daily life, that
idem velle, idem nolle, which is the recognised bond of any society that
is really such: or if the man succeeds in obtaining it, he does so by choosing
a woman who is so complete a nullity that she has no
velle or nolle at all, and is as ready to comply with one thing as another if anybody tells her
to do so. Even this calculation is apt to fail; dullness and want of spirit
are not always a guarantee of the submission which is so confidently expected
from them. But if they were, is this the ideal of marriage? What, in this
case, does the man obtain by it, except an upper servant, a nurse, or a mistress?
on the contrary, when each of two persons, instead of being a nothing, is
a something; when they are attached to one another, and are not too much
unlike to begin with; the constant partaking in the same things, assisted
by their sympathy, draws out the latent capacities of each for being interested
in the things which were at first interesting only to the other; and works
a gradual assimilation of the tastes and characters to one another, partly
by the insensible modification of each, but more by a real enriching of the
two natures, each acquiring the tastes and capacities of the other in addition
to its own. This often happens between two friends of the same sex, who are
much associated in their daily life: and it would be a common, if not the
commonest, case in marriage, did not the totally different bringing up of
the two sexes make it next to an impossibility to form a really well-assorted
union. Were this remedied, whatever differences there might still
be in individual tastes, there would at least be, as a general rule, complete unity and unanimity
as to the great objects of life. When the two persons both care for great
objects, and are a help and encouragement to each other in whatever regards
these, the minor matters on which their tastes may differ are not all-important
to them; and there is a foundation for solid friendship, of an enduring character,
more likely than anything else to make it, through the whole of life, a greater
pleasure to each to give pleasure to the other, than to receive it.
I have considered, thus far, the effects on the pleasures and benefits
of the marriage union which depend on the mere unlikeness between the wife
and the husband: but the evil tendency is prodigiously aggravated when the
unlikeness is inferiority. Mere unlikeness, when it only means difference
of good qualities, may be more a benefit in the way of mutual improvement,
than a drawback from comfort. When each emulates, and desires and endeavours
to acquire, the other's peculiar qualities the difference does not produce
diversity of interest, but increased identity of it, and makes each still
more valuable to the other. But when one is much the inferior of the to in
mental ability and cultivation, and is not actively attempting by the other's
aid to rise to the other's level, the whole influence of the connexion upon
the development of the superior of the two is deteriorating: and still more
so in a tolerably happy marriage than in an unhappy one. It is not with impunity
that the superior in intellect shuts himself up with an inferior, and elects
that inferior for his chosen, and sole completely intimate, associate. Any
society which is not improving is deteriorating: and the more so, the closer
and more familiar it is. Even a really superior man almost always begins
to deteriorate when he is habitually (as the phrase is) king of his company:
and in his most habitual company the husband who has a wife inferior to him
is always so. While his self-satisfaction is incessantly ministered to on
the one hand, on the other he insensibly imbibes the modes of feeling, and
of looking at things, which belong to a more vulgar or a more limited mind
than his own. This evil differs from many of those which have hitherto been
dwelt on, by being an increasing one. The association of men with women in
daily life is much closer and more complete than it ever was before. Men's
life is more domestic. Formerly, their pleasures and chosen occupations were
among men, and in men's company: their wives had but a fragment of their
lives. At the present time, the progress of civilisation, and the turn of
opinion against the rough amusements and convivial excesses which formerly
occupied most men
in their hours of relaxation -- together with (it must
be said) the improved tone of modern feeling as to the reciprocity of duty
which binds the husband towards the wife -- have thrown the man very much
more upon home and its inmates, for his personal and social pleasures: while
the kind and degree of improvement which has been made in women's education,
has made them in some degree capable of being his companions in ideas and
mental taste, while leaving them, in most cases, still hopelessly inferior
to him. His desire of mental communion is thus in general satisfied by a
communion from which he learns nothing. An unimproving and unstimulating
companionship is substituted for (what he might otherwise have been obliged
to seek) the society of his equals in powers and his fellows in the higher
pursuits. We see, accordingly, that young men of the greatest promise generally
cease to improve as soon as they marry, and, not improving, inevitably degenerate.
If the wife does not push the husband forward, she always holds him back.
He ceases to care for what she does not care for; he no longer desires, and
ends by disliking and shunning, society congenial to his former aspirations,
and which would now shame his falling-off from them; his higher faculties
both of mind and heart cease to be called into activity. And this change
coinciding with the new and
selfish interests which are created by the family, after a few years he differs in no material respect from those who have never
had wishes for anything but the common vanities and the common pecuniary
objects.
What marriage may be in the case of two persons of cultivated faculties,
identical in opinions and purposes, between whom there exists that best kind
of equality, similarity of powers and capacities with reciprocal superiority
in them -- so that each can enjoy the luxury of looking up to the other,
and can have alternately the pleasure of leading and of being led in the
path of development -- I will not attempt to describe. To those who can conceive
it, there is no need; to those who cannot, it would appear the dream of an
enthusiast. But I maintain, with the profoundest conviction, that this, and
this only, is the ideal of marriage; and that all opinions, customs, and
institutions which favour any other notion of it, or turn the conceptions
and aspirations connected with it into any other direction, by whatever pretences
they may be coloured, are relics of primitive barbarism. The moral regeneration
of mankind will only really commence, when the most fundamental of the social
relations is placed under the rule of equal justice, and when human beings
learn to cultivate their strongest sympathy with an equal in nights and in
cultivation.
Thus far, the benefits which it has appeared that the world would gain
by ceasing to make sex a disqualification for privileges and a badge of subjection,
are social rather than individual; consisting in an increase of the general
fund of thinking and acting power, and an improvement in the general conditions
of the association of men with women. But it would be a grievous understatement
of the case to omit the most direct benefit of all, the unspeakable gain
in private happiness to the liberated half of the species; the difference
to them between a life of subjection to the will of others, and a life of
rational freedom. After the primary necessities of food and raiment, freedom
is the first and strongest want of human nature. While mankind are lawless,
their desire is for lawless freedom. When they have learnt to understand
the meaning of duty and the value of reason, they incline more and more to
be guided and restrained by these in the exercise of their freedom; but they
do not therefore desire freedom less; they do not become disposed to accept
the will of other people as the representative and interpreter of those guiding
principles. On the contrary, the communities in which the reason has been
most cultivated, and in which the idea of social duty has been most powerful,
are those which have most strongly asserted the freedom
of action of the individual -- the liberty of each to govern his conduct by his own feelings
of duty, and by such laws and social restraints as his own conscience can
subscribe to.
He who would rightly appreciate the worth of personal independence as
an element of happiness, should consider the value he himself puts upon it
as an ingredient of his own. There is no subject on which there is a greater
habitual difference of judgment between a man judging for himself, and the
same man judging for other people. When he hears others complaining that
they are not allowed freedom of action -- that their own will has not sufficient
influence in the regulation of their affairs -- his inclination is, to ask,
what are their grievances? what positive damage they sustain? and in what
respect they consider their affairs to be mismanaged? and if they fail to
make out, in answer to these questions, what appears to him a sufficient
case, he turns a deaf ear, and regards their complaint as the fanciful querulousness
of people whom nothing reasonable will satisfy. But he has a quite different
standard of judgment when he is deciding for himself. Then, the most unexceptionable
administration of his interests by a tutor set over him, does not satisfy
his feelings: his personal exclusion from the deciding authority appears
itself the greatest grievance of all, rendering it superfluous even to
enter into the question of mismanagement. It is the same with nations. What citizen
of a free country would listen to any offers of good and skilful administration,
in return for the abdication of freedom? Even if he could believe that good
and skilful administration can exist among a people ruled by a will not their
own, would not the consciousness of working out their own destiny under their
own moral responsibility be a compensation to his feelings for great rudeness
and imperfection in the details of public affairs? Let him rest assured that
whatever he feels on this point, women feel in a fully equal degree. Whatever
has been said or written, from the time of Herodotus to the present, of the
ennobling influence of free government -- the nerve and spring which it gives
to all the faculties, the larger and higher objects which it presents to
the intellect and feelings, the more unselfish public spirit, and calmer
and broader views of duty, that it engenders, and the generally loftier platform
on which it elevates the individual as a moral, spiritual, and social being
-- is every particle as true of women as of men. Are these things no important
part of individual happiness? Let any man call to mind what he himself felt
on emerging from boyhood -- from the tutelage and control of even loved and
affectionate elders -- and entering upon the responsibilities of manhood.
Was it not like the physical effect of taking off a heavy weight, or releasing
him from obstructive, even if not otherwise painful, bonds? Did he not feel
twice as much alive, twice as much a human being, as before? And does he
imagine that women have none of these feelings? But it is a striking fact,
that the satisfactions and mortifications of personal pride, though all in
all to most men when the case is their own, have less allowance made for
them in the case of other people, and are less listened to as a ground or
a justification of conduct, than any other natural human feelings; perhaps
because men compliment them in their own case with the names of so many other
qualities, that they are seldom conscious how mighty an influence these feelings
exercise in their own lives. No less large and powerful is their part, we
may assure ourselves, in the lives and feelings of women. Women are schooled
into suppressing them in their most natural and most healthy direction, but
the internal principle remains, in a different outward form. An active and
energetic mind, if denied liberty, will seek for power: refused the command
of itself, it will assert its personality by attempting to control others.
To allow to any human beings no existence of their own but what depends on
others, is giving far too high a premium on bending others to their pur-
poses. Where liberty cannot be hoped for, and power can, power becomes the grand
object of human desire; those to whom others will not leave the undisturbed
management of their own affairs, will compensate themselves, if they can,
by meddling for their own purposes with the affairs of others. Hence also
women's passion for personal beauty, and dress and display; and all the evils
that flow from it, in the way of mischievous luxury and social immorality.
The love of power and the love of liberty are in eternal antagonism. Where
there is least liberty, the passion for power is the most ardent and unscrupulous.
The desire of power over others can only cease to be a depraving agency among
mankind, when each of them individually is able to do without it: which can
only be where respect for liberty in the personal concerns of each is an
established principle.
But it is not only through the sentiment of personal dignity, that the
free direction and disposal of their own faculties is a source of individual
happiness, and to be fettered and restricted in it, a source of unhappiness,
to human beings, and not least to women. There is nothing, after disease,
indigence, and guilt, so fatal to the pleasurable enjoyment of life as the
want of a worthy outlet for the active faculties. Women who have the cares
of a family, and while they have the cares of a family, have this outlet,
and it generally
suffices for them: but what of the greatly increasing number of women, who have had no opportunity of exercising the vocation which they
are mocked by telling them is their proper one? What of the women whose children
have been lost to them by death or distance, or have grown up, married, and
formed homes of their own? There are abundant examples of men who, after
a life engrossed by business, retire with a competency to the enjoyment,
as they hope, of rest, but to whom, as they are unable to acquire new interests
and excitements that can replace the old, the change to a life of inactivity
brings ennui, melancholy, and premature death. Yet no one thinks of the parallel
case of so many worthy and devoted women, who, having paid what they are
told is their debt to society -- having brought up a family blamelessly to
manhood and womanhood -- having kept a house as long as they had a house
needing to be kept -- are deserted by the sole occupation for which they
have fitted themselves; and remain with undiminished activity but with no
employment for it, unless perhaps a daughter or daughter-in-law is willing
to abdicate in their favour the discharge of the same functions in her younger
household. Surely a hard lot for the old age of those who have worthily discharged,
as long as it was given to them to discharge, what the world accounts their
only
social duty. Of such women, and of those others to whom this duty has
not been committed at all -- many of whom pine through life with the consciousness
of thwarted vocations, and activities which are not suffered to expand --
the only resources, speaking generally, are religion and charity. But their
religion, though it may be one of feeling, and of ceremonial observance,
cannot be a religion of action, unless in the form of charity. For charity
many of them are by nature admirably fitted; but to practise it usefully,
or even without doing mischief, requires the education, the manifold preparation,
the knowledge and the thinking powers, of a skilful administrator. There
are few of the administrative functions of government for which a person
would not be fit, who is fit to bestow charity usefully. In this as in other
cases (pre-eminently in that of the education of children), the duties permitted
to women cannot be performed properly, without their being trained for duties
which, to the great loss of society, are not permitted to them. And here
let me notice the singular way in which the question of women's disabilities
is frequently presented to view, by those who find it easier to draw a ludicrous
picture of what they do not like, than to answer the arguments for it. When
it is suggested that women's executive capacities and prudent counsels might
sometimes
be found valuable in affairs of State, these lovers of fun hold up to the ridicule of the world, as sitting in Parliament or in the Cabinet,
girls in their teens, or young wives of two or three and twenty, transported
bodily, exactly as they are, from the drawing-room to the House of Commons.
They forget that males are not usually selected at this early age for a seat
in Parliament, or for responsible political functions. Common sense would
tell them that if such trusts were confided to women, it would be to such
as having no special vocation for married life, or preferring another employment
of their faculties (as many women even now prefer to marriage some of the
few honourable occupations within their reach), have spent the best years
of their youth in attempting to qualify themselves for the pursuits in which
they desire to engage; or still more frequently perhaps, widows or wives
of forty or fifty, by whom the know- ledge of life and faculty of government
which they have acquired in their families, could by the aid of appropriate
studies be made available on a less contracted scale. There is no country
of Europe in which the ablest men have not frequently experienced, and keenly
appreciated, the value of the advice and help of clever and experienced women
of the world, in the attainment both of private and of public objects; and
there are important matters of public administration to which few men are
equally competent with such women; among others, the detailed control of
expenditure. But what we are now discussing is not the need which society
has of the services of women in public business, but the dull and hopeless
life to which it so often condemns them, by forbidding them to exercise the
practical abilities which many of them are conscious of, in any wider field
than one which to some of them never was, and to others is no longer, open.
If there is anything vitally important to the happiness of human beings,
it is that they should relish their habitual pursuit. This requisite of an
enjoyable life is very imperfectly granted, or altogether denied, to a large
part of mankind; and by its absence many a life is a failure, which is provided,
in appearance, with every requisite of success. But if circumstances which
society is not yet skilful enough to overcome, render such failures often
for the present inevitable, society need not itself inflict them. The injudiciousness
of parents, a youth's own inexperience, or the absence of external opportunities
for the congenial vocation, and their presence for an uncongenial, condemn
numbers of men to pass their lives in doing one thing reluctantly and ill,
when there are other things which they could have done well and happily.
But on
women this sentence is imposed by actual law, and by customs equivalent
to law. What, in unenlightened societies, colour, race, religion, or in the
case of a conquered country, nationality, are to some men, sex is to all
women; a peremptory exclusion from almost all honourable occupations, but
either such as cannot be fulfilled by others, or such as those others do
not think worthy of their acceptance. Sufferings arising from causes of this
nature usually meet with so little sympathy, that few persons are aware of
the great amount of unhappiness even now produced by the feeling of a wasted
life. The case will be even more frequent, as increased cultivation creates
a greater and greater disproportion between the ideas and faculties -- of
women, and the scope which society allows to their activity.
When we consider the positive evil caused to the disqualified half of
the human race by their disqualification -- first in the loss of the most
inspiriting and elevating kind of personal enjoyment, and next in the weariness,
disappointment, and profound dissatisfaction with life, which are so often
the substitute for it; one feels that among all the lessons which men require
for carrying on the struggle against the inevitable imperfections of their
lot on earth, there is no lesson which they more need, than not to add to
the evils which nature inflicts, by their jealous
and prejudiced restrictions on one another. Their vain fears only substitute other and worse evils for
those which they are idly apprehensive of: while every restraint on the freedom
of conduct of any of their human fellow-creatures (otherwise than by making
them responsible for any evil actually caused by it), dries up pro tanto
the principal fountain of human happiness, and leaves the species less rich,
to an inappreciable degree, in all that makes life valuable to the individual
human being.
the end.