It will be well to commence the detailed discussion of the subject by
the particular branch of it to which the course of our observations
has led us: the conditions which the laws of this and all other
countries annex to the marriage contract. Marriage being the
destination appointed by society for women, the prospect they are
brought up to, and the object which it is intended should be sought
by all of them, except those who are too little attractive to be
chosen by any man as his companion; one might have supposed that
everything would have been done to make this condition as eligible to
them as possible, that they might have no cause to regret being
denied the option of any other. Society, however, both in this, and,
at first, in all other cases, has preferred to attain its object by
foul rather than fair means: but this is the only case in which it
has substantially persisted in them even to the present day.
Originally women were taken by force, or regularly sold by their
father to the husband. Until a late period in European history, the
father had the power to dispose of his daughter in marriage at his
own will and pleasure, without any regard to hers. The Church,
indeed, was so far faithful to a better morality as to require a
formal "yes" from the woman at the marriage ceremony; but there was
nothing to shew that the consent was other than compulsory; and it
was practically impossible for the girl to refuse compliance if the
father persevered, except perhaps when she might obtain the
protection of religion by a determined resolution to take monastic
vows. After marriage, the man had anciently (but this was anterior to
Christianity) the power of life and death over his wife. She could
invoke no law against him; he was her sole tribunal and law. For a
long time he could repudiate her, but she had no corresponding power
in regard to him. By the old laws of England, the husband was called
the _lord_ of the wife; he was literally regarded as her sovereign,
inasmuch that the murder of a man by his wife was called treason
(_petty_ as distinguished from _high_ treason), and was more cruelly
avenged than was usually the case with high treason, for the penalty
was burning to death. Because these various enormities have fallen
into disuse (for most of them were never formally abolished, or not
until they had long ceased to be practised) men suppose that all is
now as it should be in regard to the marriage contract; and we are
continually told that civilization and Christianity have restored to
the woman her just rights. Meanwhile the wife is the actual
bond-servant of her husband: no less so, as far as legal obligation
goes, than slaves commonly so called. She vows a lifelong obedience
to him at the altar, and is held to it all through her life by law.
Casuists may say that the obligation of obedience stops short of
participation in crime, but it certainly extends to everything else.
She can do no act whatever but by his permission, at least tacit. She
can acquire no property but for him; the instant it becomes hers,
even if by inheritance, it becomes _ipso facto_ his. In this respect
the wife's position under the common law of England is worse than
that of slaves in the laws of many countries: by the Roman law, for
example, a slave might have his peculium, which to a certain extent
the law guaranteed to him for his exclusive use. The higher classes
in this country have given an analogous advantage to their women,
through special contracts setting aside the law, by conditions of
pin-money, &c.: since parental feeling being stronger with fathers
than the class feeling of their own sex, a father generally prefers
his own daughter to a son-in-law who is a stranger to him. By means
of settlements, the rich usually contrive to withdraw the whole or
part of the inherited property of the wife from the absolute control
of the husband: but they do not succeed in keeping it under her own
control; the utmost they can do only prevents the husband from
squandering it, at the same time debarring the rightful owner from
its use. The property itself is out of the reach of both; and as to
the income derived from it, the form of settlement most favourable to
the wife (that called "to her separate use") only precludes the
husband from receiving it instead of her: it must pass through her
hands, but if he takes it from her by personal violence as soon as
she receives it, he can neither be punished, nor compelled to
restitution. This is the amount of the protection which, under the
laws of this country, the most powerful nobleman can give to his own
daughter as respects her husband. In the immense majority of cases
there is no settlement: and the absorption of all rights, all
property, as well as all freedom of action, is complete. The two are
called "one person in law," for the purpose of inferring that
whatever is hers is his, but the parallel inference is never drawn
that whatever is his is hers; the maxim is not applied against the
man, except to make him responsible to third parties for her acts, as
a master is for the acts of his slaves or of his cattle. I am far
from pretending that wives are in general no better treated than
slaves; but no slave is a slave to the same lengths, and in so full a
sense of the word, as a wife is. Hardly any slave, except one
immediately attached to the master's person, is a slave at all hours
and all minutes; in general he has, like a soldier, his fixed task,
and when it is done, or when he is off duty, he disposes, within
certain limits, of his own time, and has a family life into which the
master rarely intrudes. "Uncle Tom" under his first master had his
own life in his "cabin," almost as much as any man whose work takes
him away from home, is able to have in his own family. But it cannot
be so with the wife. Above all, a female slave has (in Christian
countries) an admitted right, and is considered under a moral
obligation, to refuse to her master the last familiarity. Not so the
wife: however brutal a tyrant she may unfortunately be chained
to--though she may know that he hates her, though it may be his daily
pleasure to torture her, and though she may feel it impossible not to
loathe him--he can claim from her and enforce the lowest degradation
of a human being, that of being made the instrument of an animal
function contrary to her inclinations. While she is held in this
worst description of slavery as to her own person, what is her
position in regard to the children in whom she and her master have a
joint interest? They are by law _his_ children. He alone has any
legal rights over them. Not one act can she do towards or in relation
to them, except by delegation from him. Even after he is dead she is
not their legal guardian, unless he by will has made her so. He could
even send them away from her, and deprive her of the means of seeing
or corresponding with them, until this power was in some degree
restricted by Serjeant Talfourd's Act. This is her legal state. And
from this state she has no means of withdrawing herself. If she
leaves her husband, she can take nothing with her, neither her
children nor anything which is rightfully her own. If he chooses, he
can compel her to return, by law, or by physical force; or he may
content himself with seizing for his own use anything which she may
earn, or which may be given to her by her relations. It is only legal
separation by a decree of a court of justice, which entitles her to
live apart, without being forced back into the custody of an
exasperated jailer--or which empowers her to apply any earnings to
her own use, without fear that a man whom perhaps she has not seen
for twenty years will pounce upon her some day and carry all off.
This legal separation, until lately, the courts of justice would only
give at an expense which made it inaccessible to any one out of the
higher ranks. Even now it is only given in cases of desertion, or of
the extreme of cruelty; and yet complaints are made every day that it
is granted too easily. Surely, if a woman is denied any lot in life
but that of being the personal body-servant of a despot, and is
dependent for everything upon the chance of finding one who may be
disposed to make a favourite of her instead of merely a drudge, it is
a very cruel aggravation of her fate that she should be allowed to
try this chance only once. The natural sequel and corollary from this
state of things would be, that since her all in life depends upon
obtaining a good master, she should be allowed to change again and
again until she finds one. I am not saying that she ought to be
allowed this privilege. That is a totally different consideration.
The question of divorce, in the sense involving liberty of
remarriage, is one into which it is foreign to my purpose to enter.
All I now say is, that to those to whom nothing but servitude is
allowed, the free choice of servitude is the only, though a most
insufficient, alleviation. Its refusal completes the assimilation of
the wife to the slave--and the slave under not the mildest form of
slavery: for in some slave codes the slave could, under certain
circumstances of ill usage, legally compel the master to sell him.
But no amount of ill usage, without adultery superadded, will in
England free a wife from her tormentor.
I have no desire to exaggerate, nor does the case stand in any need
of exaggeration. I have described the wife's legal position, not her
actual treatment. The laws of most countries are far worse than the
people who execute them, and many of them are only able to remain
laws by being seldom or never carried into effect. If married life
were all that it might be expected to be, looking to the laws alone,
society would be a hell upon earth. Happily there are both feelings
and interests which in many men exclude, and in most, greatly temper,
the impulses and propensities which lead to tyranny: and of those
feelings, the tie which connects a man with his wife affords, in a
normal state of things, incomparably the strongest example. The only
tie which at all approaches to it, that between him and his children,
tends, in all save exceptional cases, to strengthen, instead of
conflicting with, the first. Because this is true; because men in
general do not inflict, nor women suffer, all the misery which could
be inflicted and suffered if the full power of tyranny with which the
man is legally invested were acted on; the defenders of the existing
form of the institution think that all its iniquity is justified, and
that any complaint is merely quarrelling with the evil which is the
price paid for every great good. But the mitigations in practice,
which are compatible with maintaining in full legal force this or any
other kind of tyranny, instead of being any apology for despotism,
only serve to prove what power human nature possesses of reacting
against the vilest institutions, and with what vitality the seeds of
good as well as those of evil in human character diffuse and
propagate themselves. Not a word can be said for despotism in the
family which cannot be said for political despotism. Every absolute
king does not sit at his window to enjoy the groans of his tortured
subjects, nor strips them of their last rag and turns them out to
shiver in the road. The despotism of Louis XVI. was not the despotism
of Philippe le Bel, or of Nadir Shah, or of Caligula; but it was bad
enough to justify the French Revolution, and to palliate even its
horrors. If an appeal be made to the intense attachments which exist
between wives and their husbands, exactly as much may be said of
domestic slavery. It was quite an ordinary fact in Greece and Rome
for slaves to submit to death by torture rather than betray their
masters. In the proscriptions of the Roman civil wars it was remarked
that wives and slaves were heroically faithful, sons very commonly
treacherous. Yet we know how cruelly many Romans treated their
slaves. But in truth these intense individual feelings nowhere rise
to such a luxuriant height as under the most atrocious institutions.
It is part of the irony of life, that the strongest feelings of
devoted gratitude of which human nature seems to be susceptible, are
called forth in human beings towards those who, having the power
entirely to crush their earthly existence, voluntarily refrain from
using that power. How great a place in most men this sentiment fills,
even in religious devotion, it would be cruel to inquire. We daily
see how much their gratitude to Heaven appears to be stimulated by
the contemplation of fellow-creatures to whom God has not been so
merciful as he has to themselves.
Whether the institution to be defended is slavery, political
absolutism, or the absolutism of the head of a family, we are always
expected to judge of it from its best instances; and we are presented
with pictures of loving exercise of authority on one side, loving
submission to it on the other--superior wisdom ordering all things
for the greatest good of the dependents, and surrounded by their
smiles and benedictions. All this would be very much to the purpose
if any one pretended that there are no such things as good men. Who
doubts that there may be great goodness, and great happiness, and
great affection, under the absolute government of a good man?
Meanwhile, laws and institutions require to be adapted, not to good
men, but to bad. Marriage is not an institution designed for a select
few. Men are not required, as a preliminary to the marriage ceremony,
to prove by testimonials that they are fit to be trusted with the
exercise of absolute power. The tie of affection and obligation to a
wife and children is very strong with those whose general social
feelings are strong, and with many who are little sensible to any
other social ties; but there are all degrees of sensibility and
insensibility to it, as there are all grades of goodness and
wickedness in men, down to those whom no ties will bind, and on whom
society has no action but through its _ultima ratio_, the penalties
of the law. In every grade of this descending scale are men to whom
are committed all the legal powers of a husband. The vilest
malefactor has some wretched woman tied to him, against whom he can
commit any atrocity except killing her, and, if tolerably cautious,
can do that without much danger of the legal penalty. And how many
thousands are there among the lowest classes in every country, who,
without being in a legal sense malefactors in any other respect,
because in every other quarter their aggressions meet with
resistance, indulge the utmost habitual excesses of bodily violence
towards the unhappy wife, who alone, at least of grown persons, can
neither repel nor escape from their brutality; and towards whom the
excess of dependence inspires their mean and savage natures, not with
a generous forbearance, and a point of honour to behave well to one
whose lot in life is trusted entirely to their kindness, but on the
contrary with a notion that the law has delivered her to them as
their thing, to be used at their pleasure, and that they are not
expected to practise the consideration towards her which is required
from them towards everybody else. The law, which till lately left
even these atrocious extremes of domestic oppression practically
unpunished, has within these few years made some feeble attempts to
repress them. But its attempts have done little, and cannot be
expected to do much, because it is contrary to reason and experience
to suppose that there can be any real check to brutality, consistent
with leaving the victim still in the power of the executioner. Until
a conviction for personal violence, or at all events a repetition of
it after a first conviction, entitles the woman _ipso facto_ to a
divorce, or at least to a judicial separation, the attempt to repress
these "aggravated assaults" by legal penalties will break down for
want of a prosecutor, or for want of a witness.
When we consider how vast is the number of men, in any great country,
who are little higher than brutes, and that this never prevents them
from being able, through the law of marriage, to obtain a victim, the
breadth and depth of human misery caused in this shape alone by the
abuse of the institution swells to something appalling. Yet these are
only the extreme cases. They are the lowest abysses, but there is a
sad succession of depth after depth before reaching them. In domestic
as in political tyranny, the case of absolute monsters chiefly
illustrates the institution by showing that there is scarcely any
horror which may not occur under it if the despot pleases, and thus
setting in a strong light what must be the terrible frequency of
things only a little less atrocious. Absolute fiends are as rare as
angels, perhaps rarer: ferocious savages, with occasional touches of
humanity, are however very frequent: and in the wide interval which
separates these from any worthy representatives of the human species,
how many are the forms and gradations of animalism and selfishness,
often under an outward varnish of civilization and even cultivation,
living at peace with the law, maintaining a creditable appearance to
all who are not under their power, yet sufficient often to make the
lives of all who are so, a torment and a burthen to them! It would be
tiresome to repeat the commonplaces about the unfitness of men in
general for power, which, after the political discussions of
centuries, every one knows by heart, were it not that hardly any one
thinks of applying these maxims to the case in which above all others
they are applicable, that of power, not placed in the hands of a man
here and there, but offered to every adult male, down to the basest
and most ferocious. It is not because a man is not known to have
broken any of the Ten Commandments, or because he maintains a
respectable character in his dealings with those whom he cannot
compel to have intercourse with him, or because he does not fly out
into violent bursts of ill-temper against those who are not obliged
to bear with him, that it is possible to surmise of what sort his
conduct will be in the unrestraint of home. Even the commonest men
reserve the violent, the sulky, the undisguisedly selfish side of
their character for those who have no power to withstand it. The
relation of superiors to dependents is the nursery of these vices of
character, which, wherever else they exist, are an overflowing from
that source. A man who is morose or violent to his equals, is sure to
be one who has lived among inferiors, whom he could frighten or worry
into submission. If the family in its best forms is, as it is often
said to be, a school of sympathy, tenderness, and loving
forgetfulness of self, it is still oftener, as respects its chief, a
school of wilfulness, overbearingness, unbounded self-indulgence, and
a double-dyed and idealized selfishness, of which sacrifice itself is
only a particular form: the care for the wife and children being only
care for them as parts of the man's own interests and belongings, and
their individual happiness being immolated in every shape to his
smallest preferences. What better is to be looked for under the
existing form of the institution? We know that the bad propensities
of human nature are only kept within bounds when they are allowed no
scope for their indulgence. We know that from impulse and habit, when
not from deliberate purpose, almost every one to whom others yield,
goes on encroaching upon them, until a point is reached at which they
are compelled to resist. Such being the common tendency of human
nature; the almost unlimited power which present social institutions
give to the man over at least one human being--the one with whom he
resides, and whom he has always present--this power seeks out and
evokes the latent germs of selfishness in the remotest corners of his
nature--fans its faintest sparks and smouldering embers--offers to
him a license for the indulgence of those points of his original
character which in all other relations he would have found it
necessary to repress and conceal, and the repression of which would
in time have become a second nature. I know that there is another
side to the question. I grant that the wife, if she cannot
effectually resist, can at least retaliate; she, too, can make the
man's life extremely uncomfortable, and by that power is able to
carry many points which she ought, and many which she ought not, to
prevail in. But this instrument of self-protection--which may be
called the power of the scold, or the shrewish sanction--has the
fatal defect, that it avails most against the least tyrannical
superiors, and in favour of the least deserving dependents. It is the
weapon of irritable and self-willed women; of those who would make
the worst use of power if they themselves had it, and who generally
turn this power to a bad use. The amiable cannot use such an
instrument, the highminded disdain it. And on the other hand, the
husbands against whom it is used most effectively are the gentler and
more inoffensive; those who cannot be induced, even by provocation,
to resort to any very harsh exercise of authority. The wife's power
of being disagreeable generally only establishes a counter-tyranny,
and makes victims in their turn chiefly of those husbands who are
least inclined to be tyrants.
What is it, then, which really tempers the corrupting effects of the
power, and makes it compatible with such amount of good as we
actually see? Mere feminine blandishments, though of great effect in
individual instances, have very little effect in modifying the
general tendencies of the situation; for their power only lasts while
the woman is young and attractive, often only while her charm is new,
and not dimmed by familiarity; and on many men they have not much
influence at any time. The real mitigating causes are, the personal
affection which is the growth of time, in so far as the man's nature
is susceptible of it, and the woman's character sufficiently
congenial with his to excite it; their common interests as regards
the children, and their general community of interest as concerns
third persons (to which however there are very great limitations);
the real importance of the wife to his daily comforts and enjoyments,
and the value he consequently attaches to her on his personal
account, which, in a man capable of feeling for others, lays the
foundation of caring for her on her own; and lastly, the influence
naturally acquired over almost all human beings by those near to
their persons (if not actually disagreeable to them): who, both by
their direct entreaties, and by the insensible contagion of their
feelings and dispositions, are often able, unless counteracted by
some equally strong personal influence, to obtain a degree of command
over the conduct of the superior, altogether excessive and
unreasonable. Through these various means, the wife frequently
exercises even too much power over the man; she is able to affect his
conduct in things in which she may not be qualified to influence it
for good--in which her influence may be not only unenlightened, but
employed on the morally wrong side; and in which he would act better
if left to his own prompting. But neither in the affairs of families
nor in those of states is power a compensation for the loss of
freedom. Her power often gives her what she has no right to, but does
not enable her to assert her own rights. A Sultan's favourite slave
has slaves under her, over whom she tyrannizes; but the desirable
thing would be that she should neither have slaves nor be a slave. By
entirely sinking her own existence in her husband; by having no will
(or persuading him that she has no will) but his, in anything which
regards their joint relation, and by making it the business of her
life to work upon his sentiments, a wife may gratify herself by
influencing, and very probably perverting, his conduct, in those of
his external relations which she has never qualified herself to judge
of, or in which she is herself wholly influenced by some personal or
other partiality or prejudice. Accordingly, as things now are, those
who act most kindly to their wives, are quite as often made worse, as
better, by the wife's influence, in respect to all interests
extending beyond the family. She is taught that she has no business
with things out of that sphere; and accordingly she seldom has any
honest and conscientious opinion on them; and therefore hardly ever
meddles with them for any legitimate purpose, but generally for an
interested one. She neither knows nor cares which is the right side
in politics, but she knows what will bring in money or invitations,
give her husband a title, her son a place, or her daughter a good
marriage.
But how, it will be asked, can any society exist without government?
In a family, as in a state, some one person must be the ultimate
ruler. Who shall decide when married people differ in opinion? Both
cannot have their way, yet a decision one way or the other must be
come to.
It is not true that in all voluntary association between two people,
one of them must be absolute master: still less that the law must
determine which of them it shall be. The most frequent case of
voluntary association, next to marriage, is partnership in business:
and it is not found or thought necessary to enact that in every
partnership, one partner shall have entire control over the concern,
and the others shall be bound to obey his orders. No one would enter
into partnership on terms which would subject him to the
responsibilities of a principal, with only the powers and privileges
of a clerk or agent. If the law dealt with other contracts as it does
with marriage, it would ordain that one partner should administer the
common business as if it was his private concern; that the others
should have only delegated powers; and that this one should be
designated by some general presumption of law, for example as being
the eldest. The law never does this: nor does experience show it to
be necessary that any theoretical inequality of power should exist
between the partners, or that the partnership should have any other
conditions than what they may themselves appoint by their articles of
agreement. Yet it might seem that the exclusive power might be
conceded with less danger to the rights and interests of the
inferior, in the case of partnership than in that of marriage, since
he is free to cancel the power by withdrawing from the connexion. The
wife has no such power, and even if she had, it is almost always
desirable that she should try all measures before resorting to it.
It is quite true that things which have to be decided every day, and
cannot adjust themselves gradually, or wait for a compromise, ought
to depend on one will: one person must have their sole control. But
it does not follow that this should always be the same person. The
natural arrangement is a division of powers between the two; each
being absolute in the executive branch of their own department, and
any change of system and principle requiring the consent of both. The
division neither can nor should be pre-established by the law, since
it must depend on individual capacities and suitabilities. If the two
persons chose, they might pre-appoint it by the marriage contract, as
pecuniary arrangements are now often pre-appointed. There would
seldom be any difficulty in deciding such things by mutual consent,
unless the marriage was one of those unhappy ones in which all other
things, as well as this, become subjects of bickering and dispute.
The division of rights would naturally follow the division of duties
and functions; and that is already made by consent, or at all events
not by law, but by general custom, modified and modifiable at the
pleasure of the persons concerned.
The real practical decision of affairs, to whichever may be given the
legal authority, will greatly depend, as it even now does, upon
comparative qualifications. The mere fact that he is usually the
eldest, will in most cases give the preponderance to the man; at
least until they both attain a time of life at which the difference
in their years is of no importance. There will naturally also be a
more potential voice on the side, whichever it is, that brings the
means of support. Inequality from this source does not depend on the
law of marriage, but on the general conditions of human society, as
now constituted. The influence of mental superiority, either general
or special, and of superior decision of character, will necessarily
tell for much. It always does so at present. And this fact shows how
little foundation there is for the apprehension that the powers and
responsibilities of partners in life (as of partners in business),
cannot be satisfactorily apportioned by agreement between themselves.
They always are so apportioned, except in cases in which the marriage
institution is a failure. Things never come to an issue of downright
power on one side, and obedience on the other, except where the
connexion altogether has been a mistake, and it would be a blessing
to both parties to be relieved from it. Some may say that the very
thing by which an amicable settlement of differences becomes
possible, is the power of legal compulsion known to be in reserve; as
people submit to an arbitration because there is a court of law in
the background, which they know that they can be forced to obey. But
to make the cases parallel, we must suppose that the rule of the
court of law was, not to try the cause, but to give judgment always
for the same side, suppose the defendant. If so, the amenability to
it would be a motive with the plaintiff to agree to almost any
arbitration, but it would be just the reverse with the defendant. The
despotic power which the law gives to the husband may be a reason to
make the wife assent to any compromise by which power is practically
shared between the two, but it cannot be the reason why the husband
does. That there is always among decently conducted people a
practical compromise, though one of them at least is under no
physical or moral necessity of making it, shows that the natural
motives which lead to a voluntary adjustment of the united life of
two persons in a manner acceptable to both, do on the whole, except
in unfavourable cases, prevail. The matter is certainly not improved
by laying down as an ordinance of law, that the superstructure of
free government shall be raised upon a legal basis of despotism on
one side and subjection on the other, and that every concession which
the despot makes may, at his mere pleasure, and without any warning,
be recalled. Besides that no freedom is worth much when held on so
precarious a tenure, its conditions are not likely to be the most
equitable when the law throws so prodigious a weight into one scale;
when the adjustment rests between two persons one of whom is declared
to be entitled to everything, the other not only entitled to nothing
except during the good pleasure of the first, but under the strongest
moral and religious obligation not to rebel under any excess of
oppression.
A pertinacious adversary, pushed to extremities, may say, that
husbands indeed are willing to be reasonable, and to make fair
concessions to their partners without being compelled to it, but that
wives are not: that if allowed any rights of their own, they will
acknowledge no rights at all in any one else, and never will yield in
anything, unless they can be compelled, by the man's mere authority,
to yield in everything. This would have been said by many persons
some generations ago, when satires on women were in vogue, and men
thought it a clever thing to insult women for being what men made
them. But it will be said by no one now who is worth replying to. It
is not the doctrine of the present day that women are less
susceptible of good feeling, and consideration for those with whom
they are united by the strongest ties, than men are. On the contrary,
we are perpetually told that women are better than men, by those who
are totally opposed to treating them as if they were as good; so that
the saying has passed into a piece of tiresome cant, intended to put
a complimentary face upon an injury, and resembling those
celebrations of royal clemency which, according to Gulliver, the king
of Lilliput always prefixed to his most sanguinary decrees. If women
are better than men in anything, it surely is in individual
self-sacrifice for those of their own family. But I lay little stress
on this, so long as they are universally taught that they are born
and created for self-sacrifice. I believe that equality of rights
would abate the exaggerated self-abnegation which is the present
artificial ideal of feminine character, and that a good woman would
not be more self-sacrificing than the best man: but on the other
hand, men would be much more unselfish and self-sacrificing than at
present, because they would no longer be taught to worship their own
will as such a grand thing that it is actually the law for another
rational being. There is nothing which men so easily learn as this
self-worship: all privileged persons, and all privileged classes,
have had it. The more we descend in the scale of humanity, the
intenser it is; and most of all in those who are not, and can never
expect to be, raised above any one except an unfortunate wife and
children. The honourable exceptions are proportionally fewer than in
the case of almost any other human infirmity. Philosophy and
religion, instead of keeping it in check, are generally suborned to
defend it; and nothing controls it but that practical feeling of the
equality of human beings, which is the theory of Christianity, but
which Christianity will never practically teach, while it sanctions
institutions grounded on an arbitrary preference of one human being
over another.
There are, no doubt, women, as there are men, whom equality of
consideration will not satisfy; with whom there is no peace while any
will or wish is regarded but their own. Such persons are a proper
subject for the law of divorce. They are only fit to live alone, and
no human beings ought to be compelled to associate their lives with
them. But the legal subordination tends to make such characters among
women more, rather than less, frequent. If the man exerts his whole
power, the woman is of course crushed: but if she is treated with
indulgence, and permitted to assume power, there is no rule to set
limits to her encroachments. The law, not determining her rights, but
theoretically allowing her none at all, practically declares that the
measure of what she has a right to, is what she can contrive to get.
The equality of married persons before the law, is not only the sole
mode in which that particular relation can be made consistent with
justice to both sides, and conducive to the happiness of both, but it
is the only means of rendering the daily life of mankind, in any high
sense, a school of moral cultivation. Though the truth may not be
felt or generally acknowledged for generations to come, the only
school of genuine moral sentiment is society between equals. The
moral education of mankind has hitherto emanated chiefly from the law
of force, and is adapted almost solely to the relations which force
creates. In the less advanced states of society, people hardly
recognise any relation with their equals. To be an equal is to be an
enemy. Society, from its highest place to its lowest, is one long
chain, or rather ladder, where every individual is either above or
below his nearest neighbour, and wherever he does not command he must
obey. Existing moralities, accordingly, are mainly fitted to a
relation of command and obedience. Yet command and obedience are but
unfortunate necessities of human life: society in equality is its
normal state. Already in modern life, and more and more as it
progressively improves, command and obedience become exceptional
facts in life, equal association its general rule. The morality of
the first ages rested on the obligation to submit to power; that of
the ages next following, on the right of the weak to the forbearance
and protection of the strong. How much longer is one form of society
and life to content itself with the morality made for another? We
have had the morality of submission, and the morality of chivalry and
generosity; the time is now come for the morality of justice.
Whenever, in former ages, any approach has been made to society in
equality, Justice has asserted its claims as the foundation of
virtue. It was thus in the free republics of antiquity. But even in
the best of these, the equals were limited to the free male citizens;
slaves, women, and the unenfranchised residents were under the law of
force. The joint influence of Roman civilization and of Christianity
obliterated these distinctions, and in theory (if only partially in
practice) declared the claims of the human being, as such, to be
paramount to those of sex, class, or social position. The barriers
which had begun to be levelled were raised again by the northern
conquests; and the whole of modern history consists of the slow
process by which they have since been wearing away. We are entering
into an order of things in which justice will again be the primary
virtue; grounded as before on equal, but now also on sympathetic
association; having its root no longer in the instinct of equals for
self-protection, but in a cultivated sympathy between them; and no
one being now left out, but an equal measure being extended to all.
It is no novelty that mankind do not distinctly foresee their own
changes, and that their sentiments are adapted to past, not to coming
ages. To see the futurity of the species has always been the
privilege of the intellectual elite, or of those who have learnt from
them; to have the feelings of that futurity has been the distinction,
and usually the martyrdom, of a still rarer elite. Institutions,
books, education, society, all go on training human beings for the
old, long after the new has come; much more when it is only coming.
But the true virtue of human beings is fitness to live together as
equals; claiming nothing for themselves but what they as freely
concede to every one else; regarding command of any kind as an
exceptional necessity, and in all cases a temporary one; and
preferring, whenever possible, the society of those with whom leading
and following can be alternate and reciprocal. To these virtues,
nothing in life as at present constituted gives cultivation by
exercise. The family is a school of despotism, in which the virtues
of despotism, but also its vices, are largely nourished. Citizenship,
in free countries, is partly a school of society in equality; but
citizenship fills only a small place in modern life, and does not
come near the daily habits or inmost sentiments. The family, justly
constituted, would be the real school of the virtues of freedom. It
is sure to be a sufficient one of everything else. It will always be
a school of obedience for the children, of command for the parents.
What is needed is, that it should be a school of sympathy in
equality, of living together in love, without power on one side or
obedience on the other. This it ought to be between the parents. It
would then be an exercise of those virtues which each requires to fit
them for all other association, and a model to the children of the
feelings and conduct which their temporary training by means of
obedience is designed to render habitual, and therefore natural, to
them. The moral training of mankind will never be adapted to the
conditions of the life for which all other human progress is a
preparation, until they practise in the family the same moral rule
which is adapted to the normal constitution of human society. Any
sentiment of freedom which can exist in a man whose nearest and
dearest intimacies are with those of whom he is absolute master, is
not the genuine or Christian love of freedom, but, what the love of
freedom generally was in the ancients and in the middle ages--an
intense feeling of the dignity and importance of his own personality;
making him disdain a yoke for himself, of which he has no abhorrence
whatever in the abstract, but which he is abundantly ready to impose
on others for his own interest or glorification.
I readily admit (and it is the very foundation of my hopes) that
numbers of married people even under the present law, (in the higher
classes of England probably a great majority,) live in the spirit of
a just law of equality. Laws never would be improved, if there were
not numerous persons whose moral sentiments are better than the
existing laws. Such persons ought to support the principles here
advocated; of which the only object is to make all other married
couples similar to what these are now. But persons even of
considerable moral worth, unless they are also thinkers, are very
ready to believe that laws or practices, the evils of which they have
not personally experienced, do not produce any evils, but (if seeming
to be generally approved of) probably do good, and that it is wrong
to object to them. It would, however, be a great mistake in such
married people to suppose, because the legal conditions of the tie
which unites them do not occur to their thoughts once in a
twelvemonth, and because they live and feel in all respects as if
they were legally equals, that the same is the case with all other
married couples, wherever the husband is not a notorious ruffian. To
suppose this, would be to show equal ignorance of human nature and of
fact. The less fit a man is for the possession of power--the less
likely to be allowed to exercise it over any person with that
person's voluntary consent--the more does he hug himself in the
consciousness of the power the law gives him, exact its legal rights
to the utmost point which custom (the custom of men like himself)
will tolerate, and take pleasure in using the power, merely to
enliven the agreeable sense of possessing it. What is more; in the
most naturally brutal and morally uneducated part of the lower
classes, the legal slavery of the woman, and something in the merely
physical subjection to their will as an instrument, causes them to
feel a sort of disrespect and contempt towards their own wife which
they do not feel towards any other woman, or any other human being,
with whom they come in contact; and which makes her seem to them an
appropriate subject for any kind of indignity. Let an acute observer
of the signs of feeling, who has the requisite opportunities, judge
for himself whether this is not the case: and if he finds that it is,
let him not wonder at any amount of disgust and indignation that can
be felt against institutions which lead naturally to this depraved
state of the human mind.
We shall be told, perhaps, that religion imposes the duty of
obedience; as every established fact which is too bad to admit of any
other defence, is always presented to us as an injunction of
religion. The Church, it is very true, enjoins it in her formularies,
but it would be difficult to derive any such injunction from
Christianity. We are told that St. Paul said, "Wives, obey your
husbands:" but he also said, "Slaves, obey your masters." It was not
St. Paul's business, nor was it consistent with his object, the
propagation of Christianity, to incite any one to rebellion against
existing laws. The apostle's acceptance of all social institutions as
he found them, is no more to be construed as a disapproval of
attempts to improve them at the proper time, than his declaration,
"The powers that be are ordained of God," gives his sanction to
military despotism, and to that alone, as the Christian form of
political government, or commands passive obedience to it. To pretend
that Christianity was intended to stereotype existing forms of
government and society, and protect them against change, is to reduce
it to the level of Islamism or of Brahminism. It is precisely because
Christianity has not done this, that it has been the religion of the
progressive portion of mankind, and Islamism, Brahminism, &c., have
been those of the stationary portions; or rather (for there is no
such thing as a really stationary society) of the declining portions.
There have been abundance of people, in all ages of Christianity, who
tried to make it something of the same kind; to convert us into a
sort of Christian Mussulmans, with the Bible for a Koran, prohibiting
all improvement: and great has been their power, and many have had to
sacrifice their lives in resisting them. But they have been resisted,
and the resistance has made us what we are, and will yet make us what
we are to be.
After what has been said respecting the obligation of obedience, it
is almost superfluous to say anything concerning the more special
point included in the general one--a woman's right to her own
property; for I need not hope that this treatise can make any
impression upon those who need anything to convince them that a
woman's inheritance or gains ought to be as much her own after
marriage as before. The rule is simple: whatever would be the
husband's or wife's if they were not married, should be under their
exclusive control during marriage; which need not interfere with the
power to tie up property by settlement, in order to preserve it for
children. Some people are sentimentally shocked at the idea of a
separate interest in money matters, as inconsistent with the ideal
fusion of two lives into one. For my own part, I am one of the
strongest supporters of community of goods, when resulting from an
entire unity of feeling in the owners, which makes all things common
between them. But I have no relish for a community of goods resting
on the doctrine, that what is mine is yours but what is yours is not
mine; and I should prefer to decline entering into such a compact
with any one, though I were myself the person to profit by it.
This particular injustice and oppression to women, which is, to
common apprehensions, more obvious than all the rest, admits of
remedy without interfering with any other mischiefs: and there can be
little doubt that it will be one of the earliest remedied. Already,
in many of the new and several of the old States of the American
Confederation, provisions have been inserted even in the written
Constitutions, securing to women equality of rights in this respect:
and thereby improving materially the position, in the marriage
relation, of those women at least who have property, by leaving them
one instrument of power which they have not signed away; and
preventing also the scandalous abuse of the marriage institution,
which is perpetrated when a man entraps a girl into marrying him
without a settlement, for the sole purpose of getting possession of
her money. When the support of the family depends, not on property,
but on earnings, the common arrangement, by which the man earns the
income and the wife superintends the domestic expenditure, seems to
me in general the most suitable division of labour between the two
persons. If, in addition to the physical suffering of bearing
children, and the whole responsibility of their care and education in
early years, the wife undertakes the careful and economical
application of the husband's earnings to the general comfort of the
family; she takes not only her fair share, but usually the larger
share, of the bodily and mental exertion required by their joint
existence. If she undertakes any additional portion, it seldom
relieves her from this, but only prevents her from performing it
properly. The care which she is herself disabled from taking of the
children and the household, nobody else takes; those of the children
who do not die, grow up as they best can, and the management of the
household is likely to be so bad, as even in point of economy to be a
great drawback from the value of the wife's earnings. In an otherwise
just state of things, it is not, therefore, I think, a desirable
custom, that the wife should contribute by her labour to the income
of the family. In an unjust state of things, her doing so may be
useful to her, by making her of more value in the eyes of the man who
is legally her master; but, on the other hand, it enables him still
farther to abuse his power, by forcing her to work, and leaving the
support of the family to her exertions, while he spends most of his
time in drinking and idleness. The _power_ of earning is essential to
the dignity of a woman, if she has not independent property. But if
marriage were an equal contract, not implying the obligation of
obedience; if the connexion were no longer enforced to the oppression
of those to whom it is purely a mischief, but a separation, on just
terms (I do not now speak of a divorce), could be obtained by any
woman who was morally entitled to it; and if she would then find all
honourable employments as freely open to her as to men; it would not
be necessary for her protection, that during marriage she should make
this particular use of her faculties. Like a man when he chooses a
profession, so, when a woman marries, it may in general be understood
that she makes choice of the management of a household, and the
bringing up of a family, as the first call upon her exertions, during
as many years of her life as may be required for the purpose; and
that she renounces, not all other objects and occupations, but all
which are not consistent with the requirements of this. The actual
exercise, in a habitual or systematic manner, of outdoor occupations,
or such as cannot be carried on at home, would by this principle be
practically interdicted to the greater number of married women. But
the utmost latitude ought to exist for the adaptation of general
rules to individual suitabilities; and there ought to be nothing to
prevent faculties exceptionally adapted to any other pursuit, from
obeying their vocation notwithstanding marriage: due provision being
made for supplying otherwise any falling-short which might become
inevitable, in her full performance of the ordinary functions of
mistress of a family. These things, if once opinion were rightly
directed on the subject, might with perfect safety be left to be
regulated by opinion, without any interference of law.