When Mr. John Smauker and the Bath footmen invited Sam Weller to their
"swarry," consisting of a boiled leg of mutton, each guest had some
expression of contempt and wrath for the humble little green-grocer who
served them,--"in the true spirit," Dickens says, "of the very smallest
tyranny." The very fact that they were subject to being ordered about in
their own persons gave them a peculiar delight in issuing tyrannical orders
to others: just as sophomores in college torment freshmen because other
sophomores once teased the present tormentors themselves; and Irishmen
denounce the Chinese for underbidding them in the labor market, precisely
as they were themselves denounced by native-born Americans thirty years
ago. So it has sometimes seemed to me that the men whose own positions and
claims are really least commanding are those who hold most resolutely that
women should be kept in their proper place of subordination.
A friend of mine maintains the theory that men large and strong in person
are constitutionally inclined to do justice to women, as fearing no
competition from them in the way of bodily strength; but that small and
weak men are apt to be vehemently opposed to anything like equality in the
sexes. He quotes in defence of his theory the big soldier in London who
justified himself for allowing his little wife to chastise him, on the
ground that it pleased her and did not hurt him; and on the other hand
cites the extreme domestic tyranny of the dwarf Quilp. He declares that
in any difficult excursion among woods and mountains, the guides and the
able-bodied men are often willing to have women join the party, while it
is sure to be opposed by those who doubt their own strength or are
reluctant to display their weakness. It is not necessary to go so far as
my friend goes; but many will remember some fact of this kind, making
such theories appear not quite so absurd as at first.
Thus it seems from the "Life and Letters" of Sydney Dobell, the English
poet, that he was opposed both to woman suffrage and woman authorship,
believing the movement for the former to be a "blundering on to the
perdition of womanhood." It appears that against all authorship by women
his convictions yearly grew stronger, he regarding it as "an error and an
anomaly." It seems quite in accordance with my friend's theory to hear,
after this, that Sydney Dobell was slight in person and a lifelong invalid;
nor is it surprising, on the same theory, that his poetry took no deep
root, and that it will not be likely to survive long, except perhaps in his
weird ballad of "Ravelston." But he represents a large class of masculine
intellects, of secondary and mediocre quality, whose opinions on this
subject are not so much opinions as instinctive prejudices against a
competitor who may turn out their superior. Whether they know it, or not,
their aversion to the authorship of women is very much like the conviction
of a weak pedestrian, that women are not naturally fitted to take long
walks; or the opinion of a man whose own accounts are in a muddle, that his
wife is constitutionally unfitted to understand business.
It is a pity to praise either sex at the expense of the other. The social
inequality of the sexes was not produced so much by the voluntary tyranny
of man, as by his great practical advantage at the outset; human history
necessarily beginning with a period when physical strength
was sole ruler. It is unnecessary, too, to consider in how many cases women
may have justified this distrust; and may have made themselves as obnoxious
as Horace Walpole's maids of honor, whose coachman left his savings to his
son on condition that he should never marry a maid of honor. But it is safe
to say that on the whole the feeling of contempt for women, and the love to
exercise arbitrary power over them, is the survival of a crude impulse
which the world is outgrowing, and which is in general least obvious in the
manliest men. That clear and able English writer, Walter Bagehot, well
describes "the contempt for physical weakness and for women which marks
early society. The non-combatant population is sure to fare ill during the
ages of combat. But these defects, too, are cured or lessened; women have
now marvellous means of winning their way in the world; and mind without
muscle has far greater force than muscle without mind." [1]
[Footnote 1: _Physics and Politics_, p. 79.]