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