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THE
SUBJECTION
OF
WOMEN
BY
JOHN STUART MILL
LONDON
LONGMANS, GREEN, READER, AND DYER
1869
LONDON:
SAVILL, EDWARDS AND CO., PRINTERS, CHANDOS STREET,
COVENT GARDEN.
CHAPTER I.
The object of this Essay is to explain as clearly as I am able, the
grounds of an opinion which I have held from the very earliest period
when I had formed any opinions at all on social or political matters,
and which, instead of being weakened or modified, has been constantly
growing stronger by the progress of reflection and the experience of
life: That the principle which regulates the existing social
relations between the two sexes--the legal subordination of one sex
to the other--is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances
to human improvement; and that it ought to be replaced by a principle
of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on the one side,
nor disability on the other.
The very words necessary to express the task I have undertaken, show
how arduous it is. But it would be a mistake to suppose that the
difficulty of the case must lie in the insufficiency or obscurity of
the grounds of reason on which my conviction rests. The difficulty is
that which exists in all cases in which there is a mass of feeling to
be contended against. So long as an opinion is strongly rooted in the
feelings, it gains rather than loses in stability by having a
preponderating weight of argument against it. For if it were accepted
as a result of argument, the refutation of the argument might shake
the solidity of the conviction; but when it rests solely on feeling,
the worse it fares in argumentative contest, the more persuaded its
adherents are that their feeling must have some deeper ground, which
the arguments do not reach; and while the feeling remains, it is
always throwing up fresh intrenchments of argument to repair any
breach made in the old. And there are so many causes tending to make
the feelings connected with this subject the most intense and most
deeply-rooted of all those which gather round and protect old
institutions and customs, that we need not wonder to find them as yet
less undermined and loosened than any of the rest by the progress of
the great modern spiritual and social transition; nor suppose that
the barbarisms to which men cling longest must be less barbarisms
than those which they earlier shake off.
In every respect the burthen is hard on those who attack an almost
universal opinion. They must be very fortunate as well as unusually
capable if they obtain a hearing at all. They have more difficulty in
obtaining a trial, than any other litigants have in getting a
verdict. If they do extort a hearing, they are subjected to a set of
logical requirements totally different from those exacted from other
people. In all other cases, the burthen of proof is supposed to lie
with the affirmative. If a person is charged with a murder, it rests
with those who accuse him to give proof of his guilt, not with
himself to prove his innocence. If there is a difference of opinion
about the reality of any alleged historical event, in which the
feelings of men in general are not much interested, as the Siege of
Troy for example, those who maintain that the event took place are
expected to produce their proofs, before those who take the other
side can be required to say anything; and at no time are these
required to do more than show that the evidence produced by the
others is of no value. Again, in practical matters, the burthen of
proof is supposed to be with those who are against liberty; who
contend for any restriction or prohibition; either any limitation of
the general freedom of human action, or any disqualification or
disparity of privilege affecting one person or kind of persons, as
compared with others. The _a priori_ presumption is in favour of
freedom and impartiality. It is held that there should be no
restraint not required by the general good, and that the law should
be no respecter of persons, but should treat all alike, save where
dissimilarity of treatment is required by positive reasons, either of
justice or of policy. But of none of these rules of evidence will the
benefit be allowed to those who maintain the opinion I profess. It is
useless for me to say that those who maintain the doctrine that men
have a right to command and women are under an obligation to obey, or
that men are fit for government and women unfit, are on the
affirmative side of the question, and that they are bound to show
positive evidence for the assertions, or submit to their rejection.
It is equally unavailing for me to say that those who deny to women
any freedom or privilege rightly allowed to men, having the double
presumption against them that they are opposing freedom and
recommending partiality, must be held to the strictest proof of their
case, and unless their success be such as to exclude all doubt, the
judgment ought to go against them. These would be thought good pleas
in any common case; but they will not be thought so in this instance.
Before I could hope to make any impression, I should be expected not
only to answer all that has ever been said by those who take the
other side of the question, but to imagine all that could be said by
them--to find them in reasons, as well as answer all I find: and
besides refuting all arguments for the affirmative, I shall be called
upon for invincible positive arguments to prove a negative. And even
if I could do all this, and leave the opposite party with a host of
unanswered arguments against them, and not a single unrefuted one on
their side, I should be thought to have done little; for a cause
supported on the one hand by universal usage, and on the other by so
great a preponderance of popular sentiment, is supposed to have a
presumption in its favour, superior to any conviction which an appeal
to reason has power to produce in any intellects but those of a high
class.
I do not mention these difficulties to complain of them; first,
because it would be useless; they are inseparable from having to
contend through people's understandings against the hostility of
their feelings and practical tendencies: and truly the understandings
of the majority of mankind would need to be much better cultivated
than has ever yet been the case, before they can be asked to place
such reliance in their own power of estimating arguments, as to give
up practical principles in which they have been born and bred and
which are the basis of much of the existing order of the world, at
the first argumentative attack which they are not capable of
logically resisting. I do not therefore quarrel with them for having
too little faith in argument, but for having too much faith in custom
and the general feeling. It is one of the characteristic prejudices
of the reaction of the nineteenth century against the eighteenth, to
accord to the unreasoning elements in human nature the infallibility
which the eighteenth century is supposed to have ascribed to the
reasoning elements. For the apotheosis of Reason we have substituted
that of Instinct; and we call everything instinct which we find in
ourselves and for which we cannot trace any rational foundation. This
idolatry, infinitely more degrading than the other, and the most
pernicious of the false worships of the present day, of all of which
it is now the main support, will probably hold its ground until it
gives way before a sound psychology, laying bare the real root of
much that is bowed down to as the intention of Nature and the
ordinance of God. As regards the present question, I am willing to
accept the unfavourable conditions which the prejudice assigns to me.
I consent that established custom, and the general feeling, should be
deemed conclusive against me, unless that custom and feeling from age
to age can be shown to have owed their existence to other causes than
their soundness, and to have derived their power from the worse
rather than the better parts of human nature. I am willing that
judgment should go against me, unless I can show that my judge has
been tampered with. The concession is not so great as it might
appear; for to prove this, is by far the easiest portion of my task.
The generality of a practice is in some cases a strong presumption
that it is, or at all events once was, conducive to laudable ends.
This is the case, when the practice was first adopted, or afterwards
kept up, as a means to such ends, and was grounded on experience of
the mode in which they could be most effectually attained. If the
authority of men over women, when first established, had been the
result of a conscientious comparison between different modes of
constituting the government of society; if, after trying various
other modes of social organization--the government of women over men,
equality between the two, and such mixed and divided modes of
government as might be invented--it had been decided, on the
testimony of experience, that the mode in which women are wholly
under the rule of men, having no share at all in public concerns, and
each in private being under the legal obligation of obedience to the
man with whom she has associated her destiny, was the arrangement
most conducive to the happiness and well being of both; its general
adoption might then be fairly thought to be some evidence that, at
the time when it was adopted, if was the best: though even then the
considerations which recommended it may, like so many other primeval
social facts of the greatest importance, have subsequently, in the
course of ages, ceased to exist. But the state of the case is in
every respect the reverse of this. In the first place, the opinion in
favour of the present system, which entirely subordinates the weaker
sex to the stronger, rests upon theory only; for there never has been
trial made of any other: so that experience, in the sense in which it
is vulgarly opposed to theory, cannot be pretended to have pronounced
any verdict. And in the second place, the adoption of this system of
inequality never was the result of deliberation, or forethought, or
any social ideas, or any notion whatever of what conduced to the
benefit of humanity or the good order of society. It arose simply
from the fact that from the very earliest twilight of human society,
every woman (owing to the value attached to her by men, combined with
her inferiority in muscular strength) was found in a state of bondage
to some man. Laws and systems of polity always begin by recognising
the relations they find already existing between individuals. They
convert what was a mere physical fact into a legal right, give it the
sanction of society, and principally aim at the substitution of
public and organized means of asserting and protecting these rights,
instead of the irregular and lawless conflict of physical strength.
Those who had already been compelled to obedience became in this
manner legally bound to it. Slavery, from being a mere affair of
force between the master and the slave, became regularized and a
matter of compact among the masters, who, binding themselves to one
another for common protection, guaranteed by their collective
strength the private possessions of each, including his slaves. In
early times, the great majority of the male sex were slaves, as well
as the whole of the female. And many ages elapsed, some of them ages
of high cultivation, before any thinker was bold enough to question
the rightfulness, and the absolute social necessity, either of the
one slavery or of the other. By degrees such thinkers did arise: and
(the general progress of society assisting) the slavery of the male
sex has, in all the countries of Christian Europe at least (though,
in one of them, only within the last few years) been at length
abolished, and that of the female sex has been gradually changed into
a milder form of dependence. But this dependence, as it exists at
present, is not an original institution, taking a fresh start from
considerations of justice and social expediency--it is the primitive
state of slavery lasting on, through successive mitigations and
modifications occasioned by the same causes which have softened the
general manners, and brought all human relations more under the
control of justice and the influence of humanity. It has not lost the
taint of its brutal origin. No presumption in its favour, therefore,
can be drawn from the fact of its existence. The only such
presumption which it could be supposed to have, must be grounded on
its having lasted till now, when so many other things which came down
from the same odious source have been done away with. And this,
indeed, is what makes it strange to ordinary ears, to hear it
asserted that the inequality of rights between men and women has no
other source than the law of the strongest.
That this statement should have the effect of a paradox, is in some
respects creditable to the progress of civilization, and the
improvement of the moral sentiments of mankind. We now live--that is
to say, one or two of the most advanced nations of the world now
live--in a state in which the law of the strongest seems to be
entirely abandoned as the regulating principle of the world's
affairs: nobody professes it, and, as regards most of the relations
between human beings, nobody is permitted to practise it. When any
one succeeds in doing so, it is under cover of some pretext which
gives him the semblance of having some general social interest on his
side. This being the ostensible state of things, people flatter
themselves that the rule of mere force is ended; that the law of the
strongest cannot be the reason of existence of anything which has
remained in full operation down to the present time. However any of
our present institutions may have begun, it can only, they think,
have been preserved to this period of advanced civilization by a
well-grounded feeling of its adaptation to human nature, and
conduciveness to the general good. They do not understand the great
vitality and durability of institutions which place right on the side
of might; how intensely they are clung to; how the good as well as
the bad propensities and sentiments of those who have power in their
hands, become identified with retaining it; how slowly these bad
institutions give way, one at a time, the weakest first, beginning
with those which are least interwoven with the daily habits of life;
and how very rarely those who have obtained legal power because they
first had physical, have ever lost their hold of it until the
physical power had passed over to the other side. Such shifting of
the physical force not having taken place in the case of women; this
fact, combined with all the peculiar and characteristic features of
the particular case, made it certain from the first that this branch
of the system of right founded on might, though softened in its most
atrocious features at an earlier period than several of the others,
would be the very last to disappear. It was inevitable that this one
case of a social relation grounded on force, would survive through
generations of institutions grounded on equal justice, an almost
solitary exception to the general character of their laws and
customs; but which, so long as it does not proclaim its own origin,
and as discussion has not brought out its true character, is not felt
to jar with modern civilization, any more than domestic slavery among
the Greeks jarred with their notion of themselves as a free people.
The truth is, that people of the present and the last two or three
generations have lost all practical sense of the primitive condition
of humanity; and only the few who have studied history accurately, or
have much frequented the parts of the world occupied by the living
representatives of ages long past, are able to form any mental
picture of what society then was. People are not aware how entirely,
in former ages, the law of superior strength was the rule of life;
how publicly and openly it was avowed, I do not say cynically or
shamelessly--for these words imply a feeling that there was something
in it to be ashamed of, and no such notion could find a place in the
faculties of any person in those ages, except a philosopher or a
saint. History gives a cruel experience of human nature, in shewing
how exactly the regard due to the life, possessions, and entire
earthly happiness of any class of persons, was measured by what they
had the power of enforcing; how all who made any resistance to
authorities that had arms in their hands, however dreadful might be
the provocation, had not only the law of force but all other laws,
and all the notions of social obligation against them; and in the
eyes of those whom they resisted, were not only guilty of crime, but
of the worst of all crimes, deserving the most cruel chastisement
which human beings could inflict. The first small vestige of a
feeling of obligation in a superior to acknowledge any right in
inferiors, began when he had been induced, for convenience, to make
some promise to them. Though these promises, even when sanctioned by
the most solemn oaths, were for many ages revoked or violated on the
most trifling provocation or temptation, it is probable that this,
except by persons of still worse than the average morality, was
seldom done without some twinges of conscience. The ancient
republics, being mostly grounded from the first upon some kind of
mutual compact, or at any rate formed by an union of persons not very
unequal in strength, afforded, in consequence, the first instance of
a portion of human relations fenced round, and placed under the
dominion of another law than that of force. And though the original
law of force remained in full operation between them and their
slaves, and also (except so far as limited by express compact)
between a commonwealth and its subjects, or other independent
commonwealths; the banishment of that primitive law even from so
narrow a field, commenced the regeneration of human nature, by giving
birth to sentiments of which experience soon demonstrated the immense
value even for material interests, and which thenceforward only
required to be enlarged, not created. Though slaves were no part of
the commonwealth, it was in the free states that slaves were first
felt to have rights as human beings. The Stoics were, I believe, the
first (except so far as the Jewish law constitutes an exception) who
taught as a part of morality that men were bound by moral obligations
to their slaves. No one, after Christianity became ascendant, could
ever again have been a stranger to this belief, in theory; nor, after
the rise of the Catholic Church, was it ever without persons to stand
up for it. Yet to enforce it was the most arduous task which
Christianity ever had to perform. For more than a thousand years the
Church kept up the contest, with hardly any perceptible success. It
was not for want of power over men's minds. Its power was prodigious.
It could make kings and nobles resign their most valued possessions
to enrich the Church. It could make thousands, in the prime of life
and the height of worldly advantages, shut themselves up in convents
to work out their salvation by poverty, fasting, and prayer. It could
send hundreds of thousands across land and sea, Europe and Asia, to
give their lives for the deliverance of the Holy Sepulchre. It could
make kings relinquish wives who were the object of their passionate
attachment, because the Church declared that they were within the
seventh (by our calculation the fourteenth) degree of relationship.
All this it did; but it could not make men fight less with one
another, nor tyrannize less cruelly over the serfs, and when they
were able, over burgesses. It could not make them renounce either of
the applications of force; force militant, or force triumphant. This
they could never be induced to do until they were themselves in their
turn compelled by superior force. Only by the growing power of kings
was an end put to fighting except between kings, or competitors for
kingship; only by the growth of a wealthy and warlike bourgeoisie in
the fortified towns, and of a plebeian infantry which proved more
powerful in the field than the undisciplined chivalry, was the
insolent tyranny of the nobles over the bourgeoisie and peasantry
brought within some bounds. It was persisted in not only until, but
long after, the oppressed had obtained a power enabling them often to
take conspicuous vengeance; and on the Continent much of it continued
to the time of the French Revolution, though in England the earlier
and better organization of the democratic classes put an end to it
sooner, by establishing equal laws and free national institutions.
If people are mostly so little aware how completely, during the
greater part of the duration of our species, the law of force was the
avowed rule of general conduct, any other being only a special and
exceptional consequence of peculiar ties--and from how very recent a
date it is that the affairs of society in general have been even
pretended to be regulated according to any moral law; as little do
people remember or consider, how institutions and customs which never
had any ground but the law of force, last on into ages and states of
general opinion which never would have permitted their first
establishment. Less than forty years ago, Englishmen might still by
law hold human beings in bondage as saleable property: within the
present century they might kidnap them and carry them off, and work
them literally to death. This absolutely extreme case of the law of
force, condemned by those who can tolerate almost every other form of
arbitrary power, and which, of all others, presents features the most
revolting to the feelings of all who look at it from an impartial
position, was the law of civilized and Christian England within the
memory of persons now living: and in one half of Anglo-Saxon America
three or four years ago, not only did slavery exist, but the slave
trade, and the breeding of slaves expressly for it, was a general
practice between slave states. Yet not only was there a greater
strength of sentiment against it, but, in England at least, a less
amount either of feeling or of interest in favour of it, than of any
other of the customary abuses of force: for its motive was the love
of gain, unmixed and undisguised; and those who profited by it were a
very small numerical fraction of the country, while the natural
feeling of all who were not personally interested in it, was
unmitigated abhorrence. So extreme an instance makes it almost
superfluous to refer to any other: but consider the long duration of
absolute monarchy. In England at present it is the almost universal
conviction that military despotism is a case of the law of force,
having no other origin or justification. Yet in all the great nations
of Europe except England it either still exists, or has only just
ceased to exist, and has even now a strong party favourable to it in
all ranks of the people, especially among persons of station and
consequence. Such is the power of an established system, even when
far from universal; when not only in almost every period of history
there have been great and well-known examples of the contrary system,
but these have almost invariably been afforded by the most
illustrious and most prosperous communities. In this case, too, the
possessor of the undue power, the person directly interested in it,
is only one person, while those who are subject to it and suffer from
it are literally all the rest. The yoke is naturally and necessarily
humiliating to all persons, except the one who is on the throne,
together with, at most, the one who expects to succeed to it. How
different are these cases from that of the power of men over women! I
am not now prejudging the question of its justifiableness. I am
showing how vastly more permanent it could not but be, even if not
justifiable, than these other dominations which have nevertheless
lasted down to our own time. Whatever gratification of pride there is
in the possession of power, and whatever personal interest in its
exercise, is in this case not confined to a limited class, but common
to the whole male sex. Instead of being, to most of its supporters, a
thing desirable chiefly in the abstract, or, like the political ends
usually contended for by factious, of little private importance to
any but the leaders; it comes home to the person and hearth of every
male head of a family, and of every one who looks forward to being
so. The clodhopper exercises, or is to exercise, his share of the
power equally with the highest nobleman. And the case is that in
which the desire of power is the strongest: for every one who desires
power, desires it most over those who are nearest to him, with whom
his life is passed, with whom he has most concerns in common, and in
whom any independence of his authority is oftenest likely to
interfere with his individual preferences. If, in the other cases
specified, powers manifestly grounded only on force, and having so
much less to support them, are so slowly and with so much difficulty
got rid of, much more must it be so with this, even if it rests on no
better foundation than those. We must consider, too, that the
possessors of the power have facilities in this case, greater than in
any other, to prevent any uprising against it. Every one of the
subjects lives under the very eye, and almost, it may be said, in the
hands, of one of the masters--in closer intimacy with him than with
any of her fellow-subjects; with no means of combining against him,
no power of even locally over-mastering him, and, on the other hand,
with the strongest motives for seeking his favour and avoiding to
give him offence. In struggles for political emancipation, everybody
knows how often its champions are bought off by bribes, or daunted by
terrors. In the case of women, each individual of the subject-class
is in a chronic state of bribery and intimidation combined. In
setting up the standard of resistance, a large number of the leaders,
and still more of the followers, must make an almost complete
sacrifice of the pleasures or the alleviations of their own
individual lot. If ever any system of privilege and enforced
subjection had its yoke tightly riveted on the necks of those who are
kept down by it, this has. I have not yet shown that it is a wrong
system: but every one who is capable of thinking on the subject must
see that even if it is, it was certain to outlast all other forms of
unjust authority. And when some of the grossest of the other forms
still exist in many civilized countries, and have only recently been
got rid of in others, it would be strange if that which is so much
the deepest-rooted had yet been perceptibly shaken anywhere. There is
more reason to wonder that the protests and testimonies against it
should have been so numerous and so weighty as they are.
Some will object, that a comparison cannot fairly be made between the
government of the male sex and the forms of unjust power which I have
adduced in illustration of it, since these are arbitrary, and the
effect of mere usurpation, while it on the contrary is natural. But
was there ever any domination which did not appear natural to those
who possessed it? There was a time when the division of mankind into
two classes, a small one of masters and a numerous one of slaves,
appeared, even to the most cultivated minds, to be a natural, and the
only natural, condition of the human race. No less an intellect, and
one which contributed no less to the progress of human thought, than
Aristotle, held this opinion without doubt or misgiving; and rested
it on the same premises on which the same assertion in regard to the
dominion of men over women is usually based, namely that there are
different natures among mankind, free natures, and slave natures;
that the Greeks were of a free nature, the barbarian races of
Thracians and Asiatics of a slave nature. But why need I go back to
Aristotle? Did not the slaveowners of the Southern United States
maintain the same doctrine, with all the fanaticism with which men
cling to the theories that justify their passions and legitimate
their personal interests? Did they not call heaven and earth to
witness that the dominion of the white man over the black is natural,
that the black race is by nature incapable of freedom, and marked out
for slavery? some even going so far as to say that the freedom of
manual labourers is an unnatural order of things anywhere. Again, the
theorists of absolute monarchy have always affirmed it to be the only
natural form of government; issuing from the patriarchal, which was
the primitive and spontaneous form of society, framed on the model of
the paternal, which is anterior to society itself, and, as they
contend, the most natural authority of all. Nay, for that matter, the
law of force itself, to those who could not plead any other, has
always seemed the most natural of all grounds for the exercise of
authority. Conquering races hold it to be Nature's own dictate that
the conquered should obey the conquerors, or, as they euphoniously
paraphrase it, that the feebler and more unwarlike races should
submit to the braver and manlier. The smallest acquaintance with
human life in the middle ages, shows how supremely natural the
dominion of the feudal nobility over men of low condition appeared to
the nobility themselves, and how unnatural the conception seemed, of
a person of the inferior class claiming equality with them, or
exercising authority over them. It hardly seemed less so to the class
held in subjection. The emancipated serfs and burgesses, even in
their most vigorous struggles, never made any pretension to a share
of authority; they only demanded more or less of limitation to the
power of tyrannizing over them. So true is it that unnatural
generally means only uncustomary, and that everything which is usual
appears natural. The subjection of women to men being a universal
custom, any departure from it quite naturally appears unnatural. But
how entirely, even in this case, the feeling is dependent on custom,
appears by ample experience. Nothing so much astonishes the people of
distant parts of the world, when they first learn anything about
England, as to be told that it is under a queen: the thing seems to
them so unnatural as to be almost incredible. To Englishmen this does
not seem in the least degree unnatural, because they are used to it;
but they do feel it unnatural that women should be soldiers or
members of parliament. In the feudal ages, on the contrary, war and
politics were not thought unnatural to women, because not unusual; it
seemed natural that women of the privileged classes should be of
manly character, inferior in nothing but bodily strength to their
husbands and fathers. The independence of women seemed rather less
unnatural to the Greeks than to other ancients, on account of the
fabulous Amazons (whom they believed to be historical), and the
partial example afforded by the Spartan women; who, though no less
subordinate by law than in other Greek states, were more free in
fact, and being trained to bodily exercises in the same manner with
men, gave ample proof that they were not naturally disqualified for
them. There can be little doubt that Spartan experience suggested to
Plato, among many other of his doctrines, that of the social and
political equality of the two sexes.
But, it will be said, the rule of men over women differs from all
these others in not being a rule of force: it is accepted
voluntarily; women make no complaint, and are consenting parties to
it. In the first place, a great number of women do not accept it.
Ever since there have been women able to make their sentiments known
by their writings (the only mode of publicity which society permits
to them), an increasing number of them have recorded protests against
their present social condition: and recently many thousands of them,
headed by the most eminent women known to the public, have petitioned
Parliament for their admission to the Parliamentary Suffrage. The
claim of women to be educated as solidly, and in the same branches of
knowledge, as men, is urged with growing intensity, and with a great
prospect of success; while the demand for their admission into
professions and occupations hitherto closed against them, becomes
every year more urgent. Though there are not in this country, as
there are in the United States, periodical Conventions and an
organized party to agitate for the Rights of Women, there is a
numerous and active Society organized and managed by women, for the
more limited object of obtaining the political franchise. Nor is it
only in our own country and in America that women are beginning to
protest, more or less collectively, against the disabilities under
which they labour. France, and Italy, and Switzerland, and Russia now
afford examples of the same thing. How many more women there are who
silently cherish similar aspirations, no one can possibly know; but
there are abundant tokens how many _would_ cherish them, were they
not so strenuously taught to repress them as contrary to the
proprieties of their sex. It must be remembered, also, that no
enslaved class ever asked for complete liberty at once. When Simon de
Montfort called the deputies of the commons to sit for the first time
in Parliament, did any of them dream of demanding that an assembly,
elected by their constituents, should make and destroy ministries,
and dictate to the king in affairs of state? No such thought entered
into the imagination of the most ambitious of them. The nobility had
already these pretensions; the commons pretended to nothing but to be
exempt from arbitrary taxation, and from the gross individual
oppression of the king's officers. It is a political law of nature
that those who are under any power of ancient origin, never begin by
complaining of the power itself, but only of its oppressive exercise.
There is never any want of women who complain of ill usage by their
husbands. There would be infinitely more, if complaint were not the
greatest of all provocatives to a repetition and increase of the ill
usage. It is this which frustrates all attempts to maintain the power
but protect the woman against its abuses. In no other case (except
that of a child) is the person who has been proved judicially to have
suffered an injury, replaced under the physical power of the culprit
who inflicted it. Accordingly wives, even in the most extreme and
protracted cases of bodily ill usage, hardly ever dare avail
themselves of the laws made for their protection: and if, in a moment
of irrepressible indignation, or by the interference of neighbours,
they are induced to do so, their whole effort afterwards is to
disclose as little as they can, and to beg off their tyrant from his
merited chastisement.
All causes, social and natural, combine to make it unlikely that
women should be collectively rebellious to the power of men. They are
so far in a position different from all other subject classes, that
their masters require something more from them than actual service.
Men do not want solely the obedience of women, they want their
sentiments. All men, except the most brutish, desire to have, in the
woman most nearly connected with them, not a forced slave but a
willing one, not a slave merely, but a favourite. They have therefore
put everything in practice to enslave their minds. The masters of all
other slaves rely, for maintaining obedience, on fear; either fear of
themselves, or religious fears. The masters of women wanted more than
simple obedience, and they turned the whole force of education to
effect their purpose. All women are brought up from the very earliest
years in the belief that their ideal of character is the very
opposite to that of men; not self-will, and government by
self-control, but submission, and yielding to the control of others.
All the moralities tell them that it is the duty of women, and all
the current sentimentalities that it is their nature, to live for
others; to make complete abnegation of themselves, and to have no
life but in their affections. And by their affections are meant the
only ones they are allowed to have--those to the men with whom they
are connected, or to the children who constitute an additional and
indefeasible tie between them and a man. When we put together three
things--first, the natural attraction between opposite sexes;
secondly, the wife's entire dependence on the husband, every
privilege or pleasure she has being either his gift, or depending
entirely on his will; and lastly, that the principal object of human
pursuit, consideration, and all objects of social ambition, can in
general be sought or obtained by her only through him, it would be a
miracle if the object of being attractive to men had not become the
polar star of feminine education and formation of character. And,
this great means of influence over the minds of women having been
acquired, an instinct of selfishness made men avail themselves of it
to the utmost as a means of holding women in subjection, by
representing to them meekness, submissiveness, and resignation of all
individual will into the hands of a man, as an essential part of
sexual attractiveness. Can it be doubted that any of the other yokes
which mankind have succeeded in breaking, would have subsisted till
now if the same means had existed, and had been as sedulously used,
to bow down their minds to it? If it had been made the object of the
life of every young plebeian to find personal favour in the eyes of
some patrician, of every young serf with some seigneur; if
domestication with him, and a share of his personal affections, had
been held out as the prize which they all should look out for, the
most gifted and aspiring being able to reckon on the most desirable
prizes; and if, when this prize had been obtained, they had been shut
out by a wall of brass from all interests not centering in him, all
feelings and desires but those which he shared or inculcated; would
not serfs and seigneurs, plebeians and patricians, have been as
broadly distinguished at this day as men and women are? and would not
all but a thinker here and there, have believed the distinction to be
a fundamental and unalterable fact in human nature?
The preceding considerations are amply sufficient to show that
custom, however universal it may be, affords in this case no
presumption, and ought not to create any prejudice, in favour of the
arrangements which place women in social and political subjection to
men. But I may go farther, and maintain that the course of history,
and the tendencies of progressive human society, afford not only no
presumption in favour of this system of inequality of rights, but a
strong one against it; and that, so far as the whole course of human
improvement up to this time, the whole stream of modern tendencies,
warrants any inference on the subject, it is, that this relic of the
past is discordant with the future, and must necessarily disappear.
For, what is the peculiar character of the modern world--the
difference which chiefly distinguishes modern institutions, modern
social ideas, modern life itself, from those of times long past? It
is, that human beings are no longer born to their place in life, and
chained down by an inexorable bond to the place they are born to, but
are free to employ their faculties, and such favourable chances as
offer, to achieve the lot which may appear to them most desirable.
Human society of old was constituted on a very different principle.
All were born to a fixed social position, and were mostly kept in it
by law, or interdicted from any means by which they could emerge from
it. As some men are born white and others black, so some were born
slaves and others freemen and citizens; some were born patricians,
others plebeians; some were born feudal nobles, others commoners and
_roturiers_. A slave or serf could never make himself free, nor,
except by the will of his master, become so. In most European
countries it was not till towards the close of the middle ages, and
as a consequence of the growth of regal power, that commoners could
be ennobled. Even among nobles, the eldest son was born the exclusive
heir to the paternal possessions, and a long time elapsed before it
was fully established that the father could disinherit him. Among the
industrious classes, only those who were born members of a guild, or
were admitted into it by its members, could lawfully practise their
calling within its local limits; and nobody could practise any
calling deemed important, in any but the legal manner--by processes
authoritatively prescribed. Manufacturers have stood in the pillory
for presuming to carry on their business by new and improved methods.
In modern Europe, and most in those parts of it which have
participated most largely in all other modern improvements,
diametrically opposite doctrines now prevail. Law and government do
not undertake to prescribe by whom any social or industrial operation
shall or shall not be conducted, or what modes of conducting them
shall be lawful. These things are left to the unfettered choice of
individuals. Even the laws which required that workmen should serve
an apprenticeship, have in this country been repealed: there being
ample assurance that in all cases in which an apprenticeship is
necessary, its necessity will suffice to enforce it. The old theory
was, that the least possible should be left to the choice of the
individual agent; that all he had to do should, as far as
practicable, be laid down for him by superior wisdom. Left to himself
he was sure to go wrong. The modern conviction, the fruit of a
thousand years of experience, is, that things in which the individual
is the person directly interested, never go right but as they are
left to his own discretion; and that any regulation of them by
authority, except to protect the rights of others, is sure to be
mischievous. This conclusion, slowly arrived at, and not adopted
until almost every possible application of the contrary theory had
been made with disastrous result, now (in the industrial department)
prevails universally in the most advanced countries, almost
universally in all that have pretensions to any sort of advancement.
It is not that all processes are supposed to be equally good, or all
persons to be equally qualified for everything; but that freedom of
individual choice is now known to be the only thing which procures
the adoption of the best processes, and throws each operation into
the hands of those who are best qualified for it. Nobody thinks it
necessary to make a law that only a strong-armed man shall be a
blacksmith. Freedom and competition suffice to make blacksmiths
strong-armed men, because the weak-armed can earn more by engaging in
occupations for which they are more fit. In consonance with this
doctrine, it is felt to be an overstepping of the proper bounds of
authority to fix beforehand, on some general presumption, that
certain persons are not fit to do certain things. It is now
thoroughly known and admitted that if some such presumptions exist,
no such presumption is infallible. Even if it be well grounded in a
majority of cases, which it is very likely not to be, there will be a
minority of exceptional cases in which it does not hold: and in those
it is both an injustice to the individuals, and a detriment to
society, to place barriers in the way of their using their faculties
for their own benefit and for that of others. In the cases, on the
other hand, in which the unfitness is real, the ordinary motives of
human conduct will on the whole suffice to prevent the incompetent
person from making, or from persisting in, the attempt.
If this general principle of social and economical science is not
true; if individuals, with such help as they can derive from the
opinion of those who know them, are not better judges than the law
and the government, of their own capacities and vocation; the world
cannot too soon abandon this principle, and return to the old system
of regulations and disabilities. But if the principle is true, we
ought to act as if we believed it, and not to ordain that to be born
a girl instead of a boy, any more than to be born black instead of
white, or a commoner instead of a nobleman, shall decide the person's
position through all life--shall interdict people from all the more
elevated social positions, and from all, except a few, respectable
occupations. Even were we to admit the utmost that is ever pretended
as to the superior fitness of men for all the functions now reserved
to them, the same argument applies which forbids a legal
qualification for members of Parliament. If only once in a dozen
years the conditions of eligibility exclude a fit person, there is a
real loss, while the exclusion of thousands of unfit persons is no
gain; for if the constitution of the electoral body disposes them to
choose unfit persons, there are always plenty of such persons to
choose from. In all things of any difficulty and importance, those
who can do them well are fewer than the need, even with the most
unrestricted latitude of choice: and any limitation of the field of
selection deprives society of some chances of being served by the
competent, without ever saving it from the incompetent.
At present, in the more improved countries, the disabilities of women
are the only case, save one, in which laws and institutions take
persons at their birth, and ordain that they shall never in all their
lives be allowed to compete for certain things. The one exception is
that of royalty. Persons still are born to the throne; no one, not of
the reigning family, can ever occupy it, and no one even of that
family can, by any means but the course of hereditary succession,
attain it. All other dignities and social advantages are open to the
whole male sex: many indeed are only attainable by wealth, but wealth
may be striven for by any one, and is actually obtained by many men
of the very humblest origin. The difficulties, to the majority, are
indeed insuperable without the aid of fortunate accidents; but no
male human being is under any legal ban: neither law nor opinion
superadd artificial obstacles to the natural ones. Royalty, as I have
said, is excepted: but in this case every one feels it to be an
exception--an anomaly in the modern world, in marked opposition to
its customs and principles, and to be justified only by extraordinary
special expediencies, which, though individuals and nations differ in
estimating their weight, unquestionably do in fact exist. But in this
exceptional case, in which a high social function is, for important
reasons, bestowed on birth instead of being put up to competition,
all free nations contrive to adhere in substance to the principle
from which they nominally derogate; for they circumscribe this high
function by conditions avowedly intended to prevent the person to
whom it ostensibly belongs from really performing it; while the
person by whom it is performed, the responsible minister, does obtain
the post by a competition from which no full-grown citizen of the
male sex is legally excluded. The disabilities, therefore, to which
women are subject from the mere fact of their birth, are the solitary
examples of the kind in modern legislation. In no instance except
this, which comprehends half the human race, are the higher social
functions closed against any one by a fatality of birth which no
exertions, and no change of circumstances, can overcome; for even
religious disabilities (besides that in England and in Europe they
have practically almost ceased to exist) do not close any career to
the disqualified person in case of conversion.
The social subordination of women thus stands out an isolated fact in
modern social institutions; a solitary breach of what has become
their fundamental law; a single relic of an old world of thought and
practice exploded in everything else, but retained in the one thing
of most universal interest; as if a gigantic dolmen, or a vast temple
of Jupiter Olympius, occupied the site of St. Paul's and received
daily worship, while the surrounding Christian churches were only
resorted to on fasts and festivals. This entire discrepancy between
one social fact and all those which accompany it, and the radical
opposition between its nature and the progressive movement which is
the boast of the modern world, and which has successively swept away
everything else of an analogous character, surely affords, to a
conscientious observer of human tendencies, serious matter for
reflection. It raises a 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 civilization of a people or an age.
Through all the progressive period of human history, the condition of
women has been approaching nearer to equality with men. This does not
of itself prove that the assimilation must go on to complete
equality; but it assuredly affords some presumption that such is the
case.
Neither does it avail anything to say that the _nature_ of the two
sexes adapts them to their present functions and position, and
renders these appropriate to them. Standing on the ground of common
sense and the constitution of the human mind, I deny that any one
knows, or can know, the nature of the two sexes, as long as they have
only been seen in their present relation to one another. If men had
ever been found in society without women, or women without men, or if
there had been a society of men and women in which the women were not
under the control of the men, something might have been positively
known about the mental and moral differences which may be inherent in
the nature of each. What is now called the nature of women is an
eminently artificial thing--the result of forced repression in some
directions, unnatural stimulation in others. It may be asserted
without scruple, that no other class of dependents have had their
character so entirely distorted from its natural proportions by their
relation with their masters; for, if conquered and slave races have
been, in some respects, more forcibly repressed, whatever in them has
not been crushed down by an iron heel has generally been let alone,
and if left with any liberty of development, it has developed itself
according to its own laws; but in the case of women, a hot-house and
stove cultivation has always been carried on of some of the
capabilities of their nature, for the benefit and pleasure of their
masters. Then, because certain products of the general vital force
sprout luxuriantly and reach a great development in this heated
atmosphere and under this active nurture and watering, while other
shoots from the same root, which are left outside in the wintry air,
with ice purposely heaped all round them, have a stunted growth, and
some are burnt off with fire and disappear; men, with that inability
to recognise their own work which distinguishes the unanalytic mind,
indolently believe that the tree grows of itself in the way they have
made it grow, and that it would die if one half of it were not kept
in a vapour bath and the other half in the snow.
Of all difficulties which impede the progress of thought, and the
formation of well-grounded opinions on life and social arrangements,
the greatest is now the unspeakable ignorance and inattention of
mankind in respect to the influences which form human character.
Whatever any portion of the human species now are, or seem to be,
such, it is supposed, they have a natural tendency to be: even when
the most elementary knowledge of the circumstances in which they have
been placed, clearly points out the causes that made them what they
are. Because a cottier deeply in arrears to his landlord is not
industrious, there are people who think that the Irish are naturally
idle. Because constitutions can be overthrown when the authorities
appointed to execute them turn their arms against them, there are
people who think the French incapable of free government. Because the
Greeks cheated the Turks, and the Turks only plundered the Greeks,
there are persons who think that the Turks are naturally more
sincere: and because women, as is often said, care nothing about
politics except their personalities, it is supposed that the general
good is naturally less interesting to women than to men. History,
which is now so much better understood than formerly, teaches another
lesson: if only by showing the extraordinary susceptibility of human
nature to external influences, and the extreme variableness of those
of its manifestations which are supposed to be most universal and
uniform. But in history, as in travelling, men usually see only what
they already had in their own minds; and few learn much from history,
who do not bring much with them to its study.
Hence, in regard to that most difficult question, what are the
natural differences between the two sexes--a subject on which it is
impossible in the present state of society to obtain complete and
correct knowledge--while almost everybody dogmatizes upon it, almost
all neglect and make light of the only means by which any partial
insight can be obtained into it. This is, an analytic study of the
most important department of psychology, the laws of the influence of
circumstances on character. For, however great and apparently
ineradicable the moral and intellectual differences between men and
women might be, the evidence of their being natural differences could
only be negative. Those only could be inferred to be natural which
could not possibly be artificial--the residuum, after deducting every
characteristic of either sex which can admit of being explained from
education or external circumstances. The profoundest knowledge of the
laws of the formation of character is indispensable to entitle any
one to affirm even that there is any difference, much more what the
difference is, between the two sexes considered as moral and rational
beings; and since no one, as yet, has that knowledge, (for there is
hardly any subject which, in proportion to its importance, has been
so little studied), no one is thus far entitled to any positive
opinion on the subject. Conjectures are all that can at present be
made; conjectures more or less probable, according as more or less
authorized by such knowledge as we yet have of the laws of
psychology, as applied to the formation of character.
Even the preliminary knowledge, what the differences between the
sexes now are, apart from all question as to how they are made what
they are, is still in the crudest and most incomplete state. Medical
practitioners and physiologists have ascertained, to some extent, the
differences in bodily constitution; and this is an important element
to the psychologist: but hardly any medical practitioner is a
psychologist. Respecting the mental characteristics of women; their
observations are of no more worth than those of common men. It is a
subject on which nothing final can be known, so long as those who
alone can really know it, women themselves, have given but little
testimony, and that little, mostly suborned. It is easy to know
stupid women. Stupidity is much the same all the world over. A stupid
person's notions and feelings may confidently be inferred from those
which prevail in the circle by which the person is surrounded. Not so
with those whose opinions and feelings are an emanation from their
own nature and faculties. It is only a man here and there who has any
tolerable knowledge of the character even of the women of his own
family. I do not mean, of their capabilities; these nobody knows, not
even themselves, because most of them have never been called out. I
mean their actually existing thoughts and feelings. Many a man thinks
he perfectly understands women, because he has had amatory relations
with several, perhaps with many of them. If he is a good observer,
and his experience extends to quality as well as quantity, he may
have learnt something of one narrow department of their nature--an
important department, no doubt. But of all the rest of it, few
persons are generally more ignorant, because there are few from whom
it is so carefully hidden. The most favourable case which a man can
generally have for studying the character of a woman, is that of his
own wife: for the opportunities are greater, and the cases of
complete sympathy not so unspeakably rare. And in fact, this is the
source from which any knowledge worth having on the subject has, I
believe, generally come. But most men have not had the opportunity of
studying in this way more than a single case: accordingly one can, to
an almost laughable degree, infer what a man's wife is like, from his
opinions about women in general. To make even this one case yield any
result, the woman must be worth knowing, and the man not only a
competent judge, but of a character so sympathetic in itself, and so
well adapted to hers, that he can either read her mind by sympathetic
intuition, or has nothing in himself which makes her shy of
disclosing it. Hardly anything, I believe, can be more rare than this
conjunction. It often happens that there is the most complete unity
of feeling and community of interests as to all external things, yet
the one has as little admission into the internal life of the other
as if they were common acquaintance. Even with true affection,
authority on the one side and subordination on the other prevent
perfect confidence. Though nothing may be intentionally withheld,
much is not shown. In the analogous relation of parent and child, the
corresponding phenomenon must have been in the observation of every
one. As between father and son, how many are the cases in which the
father, in spite of real affection on both sides, obviously to all
the world does not know, nor suspect, parts of the son's character
familiar to his companions and equals. The truth is, that the
position of looking up to another is extremely unpropitious to
complete sincerity and openness with him. The fear of losing ground
in his opinion or in his feelings is so strong, that even in an
upright character, there is an unconscious tendency to show only the
best side, or the side which, though not the best, is that which he
most likes to see: and it may be confidently said that thorough
knowledge of one another hardly ever exists, but between persons who,
besides being intimates, are equals. How much more true, then, must
all this be, when the one is not only under the authority of the
other, but has it inculcated on her as a duty to reckon everything
else subordinate to his comfort and pleasure, and to let him neither
see nor feel anything coming from her, except what is agreeable to
him. All these difficulties stand in the way of a man's obtaining any
thorough knowledge even of the one woman whom alone, in general, he
has sufficient opportunity of studying. When we further consider that
to understand one woman is not necessarily to understand any other
woman; that even if he could study many women of one rank, or of one
country, he would not thereby understand women of other ranks or
countries; and even if he did, they are still only the women of a
single period of history; we may safely assert that the knowledge
which men can acquire of women, even as they have been and are,
without reference to what they might be, is wretchedly imperfect and
superficial, and always will be so, until women themselves have told
all that they have to tell.
And this time has not come; nor will it come otherwise than
gradually. It is but of yesterday that women have either been
qualified by literary accomplishments, or permitted by society, to
tell anything to the general public. As yet very few of them dare
tell anything, which men, on whom their literary success depends, are
unwilling to hear. Let us remember in what manner, up to a very
recent time, the expression, even by a male author, of uncustomary
opinions, or what are deemed eccentric feelings, usually was, and in
some degree still is, received; and we may form some faint conception
under what impediments a woman, who is brought up to think custom and
opinion her sovereign rule, attempts to express in books anything
drawn from the depths of her own nature. The greatest woman who has
left writings behind her sufficient to give her an eminent rank in
the literature of her country, thought it necessary to prefix as a
motto to her boldest work, "Un homme peut braver l'opinion; une femme
doit s'y soumettre."[1] The greater part of what women write about
women is mere sycophancy to men. In the case of unmarried women, much
of it seems only intended to increase their chance of a husband.
Many, both married and unmarried, overstep the mark, and inculcate a
servility beyond what is desired or relished by any man, except the
very vulgarest. But this is not so often the case as, even at a quite
late period, it still was. Literary women are becoming more
freespoken, and more willing to express their real sentiments.
Unfortunately, in this country especially, they are themselves such
artificial products, that their sentiments are compounded of a small
element of individual observation and consciousness, and a very large
one of acquired associations. This will be less and less the case,
but it will remain true to a great extent, as long as social
institutions do not admit the same free development of originality in
women which is possible to men. When that time comes, and not before,
we shall see, and not merely hear, as much as it is necessary to know
of the nature of women, and the adaptation of other things to it.
I have dwelt so much on the difficulties which at present obstruct
any real knowledge by men of the true nature of women, because in
this as in so many other things "opinio 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 in relation to society and life. For,
according to all the principles involved in modern society, the
question rests with women themselves--to be decided by their own
experience, and by the use of their own faculties. There are no means
of finding what either one person or many can do, but by trying--and
no means by which any one else can discover for them what it is for
their happiness to do or leave undone.
One thing we may be certain of--that what is contrary to women's
nature to do, they never will be made to do by simply giving their
nature free play. The anxiety of mankind to interfere in behalf of
nature, for fear lest nature should not succeed in effecting its
purpose, is an altogether unnecessary solicitude. What women by
nature cannot do, it is quite superfluous to forbid them from doing.
What they can do, but not so well as the men who are their
competitors, competition suffices to exclude them from; since nobody
asks for protective duties and bounties in favour of women; it is
only asked that the present bounties and protective duties in favour
of men should be recalled. If women have a greater natural
inclination for some things than for others, there is no need of laws
or social inculcation to make the majority of them do the former in
preference to the latter. Whatever women's services are most wanted
for, the free play of competition will hold out the strongest
inducements to them to undertake. And, as the words imply, they are
most wanted for the things for which they are most fit; by the
apportionment of which to them, the collective faculties of the two
sexes can be applied on the whole with the greatest sum of valuable
result.
The general opinion of men is supposed to be, that the natural
vocation of a woman is that of a wife and mother. I say, is supposed
to be, because, judging from acts--from the whole of the present
constitution of society--one might infer that their opinion was the
direct contrary. They might be supposed to think that the alleged
natural vocation of women was of all things the most repugnant to
their nature; insomuch that if they are free to do anything else--if
any other means of living, or occupation of their time and faculties,
is open, which has any chance of appearing desirable to them--there
will not be enough of them who will be willing to accept the
condition said to be natural to them. If this is the real opinion of
men in general, it would be well that it should be spoken out. I
should like to hear somebody openly enunciating the doctrine (it is
already implied in much that is written on the subject)--"It is
necessary to society that women should marry and produce children.
They will not do so unless they are compelled. Therefore it is
necessary to compel them." The merits of the case would then be
clearly defined. It would be exactly that of the slaveholders of
South Carolina and Louisiana. "It is necessary that cotton and sugar
should be grown. White men cannot produce them. Negroes will not, for
any wages which we choose to give. _Ergo_ they must be compelled." An
illustration still closer to the point is that of impressment.
Sailors must absolutely be had to defend the country. It often
happens that they will not voluntarily enlist. Therefore there must
be the power of forcing them. How often has this logic been used!
and, but for one flaw in it, without doubt it would have been
successful up to this day. But it is open to the retort--First pay
the sailors the honest value of their labour. When you have made it
as well worth their while to serve you, as to work for other
employers, you will have no more difficulty than others have in
obtaining their services. To this there is no logical answer except
"I will not:" and as people are now not only ashamed, but are not
desirous, to rob the labourer of his hire, impressment is no longer
advocated. Those who attempt to force women into marriage by closing
all other doors against them, lay themselves open to a similar
retort. If they mean what they say, their opinion must evidently be,
that men do not render the married condition so desirable to women,
as to induce them to accept it for its own recommendations. It is not
a sign of one's thinking the boon one offers very attractive, when
one allows only Hobson's choice, "that or none." And here, I believe,
is the clue to the feelings of those men, who have a real antipathy
to the equal freedom of women. I believe they are afraid, not lest
women should be unwilling to marry, for I do not think that any one
in reality has that apprehension; but lest they should insist that
marriage should be on equal conditions; lest all women of spirit and
capacity should prefer doing almost anything else, not in their own
eyes degrading, rather than marry, when marrying is giving themselves
a master, and a master too of all their earthly possessions. And
truly, if this consequence were necessarily incident to marriage, I
think that the apprehension would be very well founded. I agree in
thinking it probable that few women, capable of anything else, would,
unless under an irresistible _entrainement_, rendering them for the
time insensible to anything but itself, choose such a lot, when any
other means were open to them of filling a conventionally honourable
place in life: and if men are determined that the law of marriage
shall be a law of despotism, they are quite right, in point of mere
policy, in leaving to women only Hobson's choice. But, in that case,
all that has been done in the modern world to relax the chain on the
minds of women, has been a mistake. They never should have been
allowed to receive a literary education. Women who read, much more
women who write, are, in the existing constitution of things, a
contradiction and a disturbing element: and it was wrong to bring
women up with any acquirements but those of an odalisque, or of a
domestic servant.
[Footnote 1: Title-page of Mme. de Stael's "Delphine."]