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