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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Subjection of Women, by John Stuart Mill
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
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+
+Title: The Subjection of Women
+
+Author: John Stuart Mill
+
+Release Date: October 28, 2008 [EBook #27083]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN ***
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+Produced by Michael Roe and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by The
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+
+
+  THE
+  SUBJECTION
+  OF
+  WOMEN
+
+
+  BY
+  JOHN STUART MILL
+
+  LONDON
+  LONGMANS, GREEN, READER, AND DYER
+  1869
+
+  LONDON:
+  SAVILL, EDWARDS AND CO., PRINTERS, CHANDOS STREET,
+  COVENT GARDEN.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+
+The object of this Essay is to explain as clearly as I am able, the
+grounds of an opinion which I have held from the very earliest period
+when I had formed any opinions at all on social or political matters,
+and which, instead of being weakened or modified, has been constantly
+growing stronger by the progress of reflection and the experience of
+life: That the principle which regulates the existing social
+relations between the two sexes--the legal subordination of one sex
+to the other--is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances
+to human improvement; and that it ought to be replaced by a principle
+of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on the one side,
+nor disability on the other.
+
+The very words necessary to express the task I have undertaken, show
+how arduous it is. But it would be a mistake to suppose that the
+difficulty of the case must lie in the insufficiency or obscurity of
+the grounds of reason on which my conviction rests. The difficulty is
+that which exists in all cases in which there is a mass of feeling to
+be contended against. So long as an opinion is strongly rooted in the
+feelings, it gains rather than loses in stability by having a
+preponderating weight of argument against it. For if it were accepted
+as a result of argument, the refutation of the argument might shake
+the solidity of the conviction; but when it rests solely on feeling,
+the worse it fares in argumentative contest, the more persuaded its
+adherents are that their feeling must have some deeper ground, which
+the arguments do not reach; and while the feeling remains, it is
+always throwing up fresh intrenchments of argument to repair any
+breach made in the old. And there are so many causes tending to make
+the feelings connected with this subject the most intense and most
+deeply-rooted of all those which gather round and protect old
+institutions and customs, that we need not wonder to find them as yet
+less undermined and loosened than any of the rest by the progress of
+the great modern spiritual and social transition; nor suppose that
+the barbarisms to which men cling longest must be less barbarisms
+than those which they earlier shake off.
+
+In every respect the burthen is hard on those who attack an almost
+universal opinion. They must be very fortunate as well as unusually
+capable if they obtain a hearing at all. They have more difficulty in
+obtaining a trial, than any other litigants have in getting a
+verdict. If they do extort a hearing, they are subjected to a set of
+logical requirements totally different from those exacted from other
+people. In all other cases, the burthen of proof is supposed to lie
+with the affirmative. If a person is charged with a murder, it rests
+with those who accuse him to give proof of his guilt, not with
+himself to prove his innocence. If there is a difference of opinion
+about the reality of any alleged historical event, in which the
+feelings of men in general are not much interested, as the Siege of
+Troy for example, those who maintain that the event took place are
+expected to produce their proofs, before those who take the other
+side can be required to say anything; and at no time are these
+required to do more than show that the evidence produced by the
+others is of no value. Again, in practical matters, the burthen of
+proof is supposed to be with those who are against liberty; who
+contend for any restriction or prohibition; either any limitation of
+the general freedom of human action, or any disqualification or
+disparity of privilege affecting one person or kind of persons, as
+compared with others. The _a priori_ presumption is in favour of
+freedom and impartiality. It is held that there should be no
+restraint not required by the general good, and that the law should
+be no respecter of persons, but should treat all alike, save where
+dissimilarity of treatment is required by positive reasons, either of
+justice or of policy. But of none of these rules of evidence will the
+benefit be allowed to those who maintain the opinion I profess. It is
+useless for me to say that those who maintain the doctrine that men
+have a right to command and women are under an obligation to obey, or
+that men are fit for government and women unfit, are on the
+affirmative side of the question, and that they are bound to show
+positive evidence for the assertions, or submit to their rejection.
+It is equally unavailing for me to say that those who deny to women
+any freedom or privilege rightly allowed to men, having the double
+presumption against them that they are opposing freedom and
+recommending partiality, must be held to the strictest proof of their
+case, and unless their success be such as to exclude all doubt, the
+judgment ought to go against them. These would be thought good pleas
+in any common case; but they will not be thought so in this instance.
+Before I could hope to make any impression, I should be expected not
+only to answer all that has ever been said by those who take the
+other side of the question, but to imagine all that could be said by
+them--to find them in reasons, as well as answer all I find: and
+besides refuting all arguments for the affirmative, I shall be called
+upon for invincible positive arguments to prove a negative. And even
+if I could do all this, and leave the opposite party with a host of
+unanswered arguments against them, and not a single unrefuted one on
+their side, I should be thought to have done little; for a cause
+supported on the one hand by universal usage, and on the other by so
+great a preponderance of popular sentiment, is supposed to have a
+presumption in its favour, superior to any conviction which an appeal
+to reason has power to produce in any intellects but those of a high
+class.
+
+I do not mention these difficulties to complain of them; first,
+because it would be useless; they are inseparable from having to
+contend through people's understandings against the hostility of
+their feelings and practical tendencies: and truly the understandings
+of the majority of mankind would need to be much better cultivated
+than has ever yet been the case, before they can be asked to place
+such reliance in their own power of estimating arguments, as to give
+up practical principles in which they have been born and bred and
+which are the basis of much of the existing order of the world, at
+the first argumentative attack which they are not capable of
+logically resisting. I do not therefore quarrel with them for having
+too little faith in argument, but for having too much faith in custom
+and the general feeling. It is one of the characteristic prejudices
+of the reaction of the nineteenth century against the eighteenth, to
+accord to the unreasoning elements in human nature the infallibility
+which the eighteenth century is supposed to have ascribed to the
+reasoning elements. For the apotheosis of Reason we have substituted
+that of Instinct; and we call everything instinct which we find in
+ourselves and for which we cannot trace any rational foundation. This
+idolatry, infinitely more degrading than the other, and the most
+pernicious of the false worships of the present day, of all of which
+it is now the main support, will probably hold its ground until it
+gives way before a sound psychology, laying bare the real root of
+much that is bowed down to as the intention of Nature and the
+ordinance of God. As regards the present question, I am willing to
+accept the unfavourable conditions which the prejudice assigns to me.
+I consent that established custom, and the general feeling, should be
+deemed conclusive against me, unless that custom and feeling from age
+to age can be shown to have owed their existence to other causes than
+their soundness, and to have derived their power from the worse
+rather than the better parts of human nature. I am willing that
+judgment should go against me, unless I can show that my judge has
+been tampered with. The concession is not so great as it might
+appear; for to prove this, is by far the easiest portion of my task.
+
+The generality of a practice is in some cases a strong presumption
+that it is, or at all events once was, conducive to laudable ends.
+This is the case, when the practice was first adopted, or afterwards
+kept up, as a means to such ends, and was grounded on experience of
+the mode in which they could be most effectually attained. If the
+authority of men over women, when first established, had been the
+result of a conscientious comparison between different modes of
+constituting the government of society; if, after trying various
+other modes of social organization--the government of women over men,
+equality between the two, and such mixed and divided modes of
+government as might be invented--it had been decided, on the
+testimony of experience, that the mode in which women are wholly
+under the rule of men, having no share at all in public concerns, and
+each in private being under the legal obligation of obedience to the
+man with whom she has associated her destiny, was the arrangement
+most conducive to the happiness and well being of both; its general
+adoption might then be fairly thought to be some evidence that, at
+the time when it was adopted, if was the best: though even then the
+considerations which recommended it may, like so many other primeval
+social facts of the greatest importance, have subsequently, in the
+course of ages, ceased to exist. But the state of the case is in
+every respect the reverse of this. In the first place, the opinion in
+favour of the present system, which entirely subordinates the weaker
+sex to the stronger, rests upon theory only; for there never has been
+trial made of any other: so that experience, in the sense in which it
+is vulgarly opposed to theory, cannot be pretended to have pronounced
+any verdict. And in the second place, the adoption of this system of
+inequality never was the result of deliberation, or forethought, or
+any social ideas, or any notion whatever of what conduced to the
+benefit of humanity or the good order of society. It arose simply
+from the fact that from the very earliest twilight of human society,
+every woman (owing to the value attached to her by men, combined with
+her inferiority in muscular strength) was found in a state of bondage
+to some man. Laws and systems of polity always begin by recognising
+the relations they find already existing between individuals. They
+convert what was a mere physical fact into a legal right, give it the
+sanction of society, and principally aim at the substitution of
+public and organized means of asserting and protecting these rights,
+instead of the irregular and lawless conflict of physical strength.
+Those who had already been compelled to obedience became in this
+manner legally bound to it. Slavery, from being a mere affair of
+force between the master and the slave, became regularized and a
+matter of compact among the masters, who, binding themselves to one
+another for common protection, guaranteed by their collective
+strength the private possessions of each, including his slaves. In
+early times, the great majority of the male sex were slaves, as well
+as the whole of the female. And many ages elapsed, some of them ages
+of high cultivation, before any thinker was bold enough to question
+the rightfulness, and the absolute social necessity, either of the
+one slavery or of the other. By degrees such thinkers did arise: and
+(the general progress of society assisting) the slavery of the male
+sex has, in all the countries of Christian Europe at least (though,
+in one of them, only within the last few years) been at length
+abolished, and that of the female sex has been gradually changed into
+a milder form of dependence. But this dependence, as it exists at
+present, is not an original institution, taking a fresh start from
+considerations of justice and social expediency--it is the primitive
+state of slavery lasting on, through successive mitigations and
+modifications occasioned by the same causes which have softened the
+general manners, and brought all human relations more under the
+control of justice and the influence of humanity. It has not lost the
+taint of its brutal origin. No presumption in its favour, therefore,
+can be drawn from the fact of its existence. The only such
+presumption which it could be supposed to have, must be grounded on
+its having lasted till now, when so many other things which came down
+from the same odious source have been done away with. And this,
+indeed, is what makes it strange to ordinary ears, to hear it
+asserted that the inequality of rights between men and women has no
+other source than the law of the strongest.
+
+That this statement should have the effect of a paradox, is in some
+respects creditable to the progress of civilization, and the
+improvement of the moral sentiments of mankind. We now live--that is
+to say, one or two of the most advanced nations of the world now
+live--in a state in which the law of the strongest seems to be
+entirely abandoned as the regulating principle of the world's
+affairs: nobody professes it, and, as regards most of the relations
+between human beings, nobody is permitted to practise it. When any
+one succeeds in doing so, it is under cover of some pretext which
+gives him the semblance of having some general social interest on his
+side. This being the ostensible state of things, people flatter
+themselves that the rule of mere force is ended; that the law of the
+strongest cannot be the reason of existence of anything which has
+remained in full operation down to the present time. However any of
+our present institutions may have begun, it can only, they think,
+have been preserved to this period of advanced civilization by a
+well-grounded feeling of its adaptation to human nature, and
+conduciveness to the general good. They do not understand the great
+vitality and durability of institutions which place right on the side
+of might; how intensely they are clung to; how the good as well as
+the bad propensities and sentiments of those who have power in their
+hands, become identified with retaining it; how slowly these bad
+institutions give way, one at a time, the weakest first, beginning
+with those which are least interwoven with the daily habits of life;
+and how very rarely those who have obtained legal power because they
+first had physical, have ever lost their hold of it until the
+physical power had passed over to the other side. Such shifting of
+the physical force not having taken place in the case of women; this
+fact, combined with all the peculiar and characteristic features of
+the particular case, made it certain from the first that this branch
+of the system of right founded on might, though softened in its most
+atrocious features at an earlier period than several of the others,
+would be the very last to disappear. It was inevitable that this one
+case of a social relation grounded on force, would survive through
+generations of institutions grounded on equal justice, an almost
+solitary exception to the general character of their laws and
+customs; but which, so long as it does not proclaim its own origin,
+and as discussion has not brought out its true character, is not felt
+to jar with modern civilization, any more than domestic slavery among
+the Greeks jarred with their notion of themselves as a free people.
+
+The truth is, that people of the present and the last two or three
+generations have lost all practical sense of the primitive condition
+of humanity; and only the few who have studied history accurately, or
+have much frequented the parts of the world occupied by the living
+representatives of ages long past, are able to form any mental
+picture of what society then was. People are not aware how entirely,
+in former ages, the law of superior strength was the rule of life;
+how publicly and openly it was avowed, I do not say cynically or
+shamelessly--for these words imply a feeling that there was something
+in it to be ashamed of, and no such notion could find a place in the
+faculties of any person in those ages, except a philosopher or a
+saint. History gives a cruel experience of human nature, in shewing
+how exactly the regard due to the life, possessions, and entire
+earthly happiness of any class of persons, was measured by what they
+had the power of enforcing; how all who made any resistance to
+authorities that had arms in their hands, however dreadful might be
+the provocation, had not only the law of force but all other laws,
+and all the notions of social obligation against them; and in the
+eyes of those whom they resisted, were not only guilty of crime, but
+of the worst of all crimes, deserving the most cruel chastisement
+which human beings could inflict. The first small vestige of a
+feeling of obligation in a superior to acknowledge any right in
+inferiors, began when he had been induced, for convenience, to make
+some promise to them. Though these promises, even when sanctioned by
+the most solemn oaths, were for many ages revoked or violated on the
+most trifling provocation or temptation, it is probable that this,
+except by persons of still worse than the average morality, was
+seldom done without some twinges of conscience. The ancient
+republics, being mostly grounded from the first upon some kind of
+mutual compact, or at any rate formed by an union of persons not very
+unequal in strength, afforded, in consequence, the first instance of
+a portion of human relations fenced round, and placed under the
+dominion of another law than that of force. And though the original
+law of force remained in full operation between them and their
+slaves, and also (except so far as limited by express compact)
+between a commonwealth and its subjects, or other independent
+commonwealths; the banishment of that primitive law even from so
+narrow a field, commenced the regeneration of human nature, by giving
+birth to sentiments of which experience soon demonstrated the immense
+value even for material interests, and which thenceforward only
+required to be enlarged, not created. Though slaves were no part of
+the commonwealth, it was in the free states that slaves were first
+felt to have rights as human beings. The Stoics were, I believe, the
+first (except so far as the Jewish law constitutes an exception) who
+taught as a part of morality that men were bound by moral obligations
+to their slaves. No one, after Christianity became ascendant, could
+ever again have been a stranger to this belief, in theory; nor, after
+the rise of the Catholic Church, was it ever without persons to stand
+up for it. Yet to enforce it was the most arduous task which
+Christianity ever had to perform. For more than a thousand years the
+Church kept up the contest, with hardly any perceptible success. It
+was not for want of power over men's minds. Its power was prodigious.
+It could make kings and nobles resign their most valued possessions
+to enrich the Church. It could make thousands, in the prime of life
+and the height of worldly advantages, shut themselves up in convents
+to work out their salvation by poverty, fasting, and prayer. It could
+send hundreds of thousands across land and sea, Europe and Asia, to
+give their lives for the deliverance of the Holy Sepulchre. It could
+make kings relinquish wives who were the object of their passionate
+attachment, because the Church declared that they were within the
+seventh (by our calculation the fourteenth) degree of relationship.
+All this it did; but it could not make men fight less with one
+another, nor tyrannize less cruelly over the serfs, and when they
+were able, over burgesses. It could not make them renounce either of
+the applications of force; force militant, or force triumphant. This
+they could never be induced to do until they were themselves in their
+turn compelled by superior force. Only by the growing power of kings
+was an end put to fighting except between kings, or competitors for
+kingship; only by the growth of a wealthy and warlike bourgeoisie in
+the fortified towns, and of a plebeian infantry which proved more
+powerful in the field than the undisciplined chivalry, was the
+insolent tyranny of the nobles over the bourgeoisie and peasantry
+brought within some bounds. It was persisted in not only until, but
+long after, the oppressed had obtained a power enabling them often to
+take conspicuous vengeance; and on the Continent much of it continued
+to the time of the French Revolution, though in England the earlier
+and better organization of the democratic classes put an end to it
+sooner, by establishing equal laws and free national institutions.
+
+If people are mostly so little aware how completely, during the
+greater part of the duration of our species, the law of force was the
+avowed rule of general conduct, any other being only a special and
+exceptional consequence of peculiar ties--and from how very recent a
+date it is that the affairs of society in general have been even
+pretended to be regulated according to any moral law; as little do
+people remember or consider, how institutions and customs which never
+had any ground but the law of force, last on into ages and states of
+general opinion which never would have permitted their first
+establishment. Less than forty years ago, Englishmen might still by
+law hold human beings in bondage as saleable property: within the
+present century they might kidnap them and carry them off, and work
+them literally to death. This absolutely extreme case of the law of
+force, condemned by those who can tolerate almost every other form of
+arbitrary power, and which, of all others, presents features the most
+revolting to the feelings of all who look at it from an impartial
+position, was the law of civilized and Christian England within the
+memory of persons now living: and in one half of Anglo-Saxon America
+three or four years ago, not only did slavery exist, but the slave
+trade, and the breeding of slaves expressly for it, was a general
+practice between slave states. Yet not only was there a greater
+strength of sentiment against it, but, in England at least, a less
+amount either of feeling or of interest in favour of it, than of any
+other of the customary abuses of force: for its motive was the love
+of gain, unmixed and undisguised; and those who profited by it were a
+very small numerical fraction of the country, while the natural
+feeling of all who were not personally interested in it, was
+unmitigated abhorrence. So extreme an instance makes it almost
+superfluous to refer to any other: but consider the long duration of
+absolute monarchy. In England at present it is the almost universal
+conviction that military despotism is a case of the law of force,
+having no other origin or justification. Yet in all the great nations
+of Europe except England it either still exists, or has only just
+ceased to exist, and has even now a strong party favourable to it in
+all ranks of the people, especially among persons of station and
+consequence. Such is the power of an established system, even when
+far from universal; when not only in almost every period of history
+there have been great and well-known examples of the contrary system,
+but these have almost invariably been afforded by the most
+illustrious and most prosperous communities. In this case, too, the
+possessor of the undue power, the person directly interested in it,
+is only one person, while those who are subject to it and suffer from
+it are literally all the rest. The yoke is naturally and necessarily
+humiliating to all persons, except the one who is on the throne,
+together with, at most, the one who expects to succeed to it. How
+different are these cases from that of the power of men over women! I
+am not now prejudging the question of its justifiableness. I am
+showing how vastly more permanent it could not but be, even if not
+justifiable, than these other dominations which have nevertheless
+lasted down to our own time. Whatever gratification of pride there is
+in the possession of power, and whatever personal interest in its
+exercise, is in this case not confined to a limited class, but common
+to the whole male sex. Instead of being, to most of its supporters, a
+thing desirable chiefly in the abstract, or, like the political ends
+usually contended for by factious, of little private importance to
+any but the leaders; it comes home to the person and hearth of every
+male head of a family, and of every one who looks forward to being
+so. The clodhopper exercises, or is to exercise, his share of the
+power equally with the highest nobleman. And the case is that in
+which the desire of power is the strongest: for every one who desires
+power, desires it most over those who are nearest to him, with whom
+his life is passed, with whom he has most concerns in common, and in
+whom any independence of his authority is oftenest likely to
+interfere with his individual preferences. If, in the other cases
+specified, powers manifestly grounded only on force, and having so
+much less to support them, are so slowly and with so much difficulty
+got rid of, much more must it be so with this, even if it rests on no
+better foundation than those. We must consider, too, that the
+possessors of the power have facilities in this case, greater than in
+any other, to prevent any uprising against it. Every one of the
+subjects lives under the very eye, and almost, it may be said, in the
+hands, of one of the masters--in closer intimacy with him than with
+any of her fellow-subjects; with no means of combining against him,
+no power of even locally over-mastering him, and, on the other hand,
+with the strongest motives for seeking his favour and avoiding to
+give him offence. In struggles for political emancipation, everybody
+knows how often its champions are bought off by bribes, or daunted by
+terrors. In the case of women, each individual of the subject-class
+is in a chronic state of bribery and intimidation combined. In
+setting up the standard of resistance, a large number of the leaders,
+and still more of the followers, must make an almost complete
+sacrifice of the pleasures or the alleviations of their own
+individual lot. If ever any system of privilege and enforced
+subjection had its yoke tightly riveted on the necks of those who are
+kept down by it, this has. I have not yet shown that it is a wrong
+system: but every one who is capable of thinking on the subject must
+see that even if it is, it was certain to outlast all other forms of
+unjust authority. And when some of the grossest of the other forms
+still exist in many civilized countries, and have only recently been
+got rid of in others, it would be strange if that which is so much
+the deepest-rooted had yet been perceptibly shaken anywhere. There is
+more reason to wonder that the protests and testimonies against it
+should have been so numerous and so weighty as they are.
+
+Some will object, that a comparison cannot fairly be made between the
+government of the male sex and the forms of unjust power which I have
+adduced in illustration of it, since these are arbitrary, and the
+effect of mere usurpation, while it on the contrary is natural. But
+was there ever any domination which did not appear natural to those
+who possessed it? There was a time when the division of mankind into
+two classes, a small one of masters and a numerous one of slaves,
+appeared, even to the most cultivated minds, to be a natural, and the
+only natural, condition of the human race. No less an intellect, and
+one which contributed no less to the progress of human thought, than
+Aristotle, held this opinion without doubt or misgiving; and rested
+it on the same premises on which the same assertion in regard to the
+dominion of men over women is usually based, namely that there are
+different natures among mankind, free natures, and slave natures;
+that the Greeks were of a free nature, the barbarian races of
+Thracians and Asiatics of a slave nature. But why need I go back to
+Aristotle? Did not the slaveowners of the Southern United States
+maintain the same doctrine, with all the fanaticism with which men
+cling to the theories that justify their passions and legitimate
+their personal interests? Did they not call heaven and earth to
+witness that the dominion of the white man over the black is natural,
+that the black race is by nature incapable of freedom, and marked out
+for slavery? some even going so far as to say that the freedom of
+manual labourers is an unnatural order of things anywhere. Again, the
+theorists of absolute monarchy have always affirmed it to be the only
+natural form of government; issuing from the patriarchal, which was
+the primitive and spontaneous form of society, framed on the model of
+the paternal, which is anterior to society itself, and, as they
+contend, the most natural authority of all. Nay, for that matter, the
+law of force itself, to those who could not plead any other, has
+always seemed the most natural of all grounds for the exercise of
+authority. Conquering races hold it to be Nature's own dictate that
+the conquered should obey the conquerors, or, as they euphoniously
+paraphrase it, that the feebler and more unwarlike races should
+submit to the braver and manlier. The smallest acquaintance with
+human life in the middle ages, shows how supremely natural the
+dominion of the feudal nobility over men of low condition appeared to
+the nobility themselves, and how unnatural the conception seemed, of
+a person of the inferior class claiming equality with them, or
+exercising authority over them. It hardly seemed less so to the class
+held in subjection. The emancipated serfs and burgesses, even in
+their most vigorous struggles, never made any pretension to a share
+of authority; they only demanded more or less of limitation to the
+power of tyrannizing over them. So true is it that unnatural
+generally means only uncustomary, and that everything which is usual
+appears natural. The subjection of women to men being a universal
+custom, any departure from it quite naturally appears unnatural. But
+how entirely, even in this case, the feeling is dependent on custom,
+appears by ample experience. Nothing so much astonishes the people of
+distant parts of the world, when they first learn anything about
+England, as to be told that it is under a queen: the thing seems to
+them so unnatural as to be almost incredible. To Englishmen this does
+not seem in the least degree unnatural, because they are used to it;
+but they do feel it unnatural that women should be soldiers or
+members of parliament. In the feudal ages, on the contrary, war and
+politics were not thought unnatural to women, because not unusual; it
+seemed natural that women of the privileged classes should be of
+manly character, inferior in nothing but bodily strength to their
+husbands and fathers. The independence of women seemed rather less
+unnatural to the Greeks than to other ancients, on account of the
+fabulous Amazons (whom they believed to be historical), and the
+partial example afforded by the Spartan women; who, though no less
+subordinate by law than in other Greek states, were more free in
+fact, and being trained to bodily exercises in the same manner with
+men, gave ample proof that they were not naturally disqualified for
+them. There can be little doubt that Spartan experience suggested to
+Plato, among many other of his doctrines, that of the social and
+political equality of the two sexes.
+
+But, it will be said, the rule of men over women differs from all
+these others in not being a rule of force: it is accepted
+voluntarily; women make no complaint, and are consenting parties to
+it. In the first place, a great number of women do not accept it.
+Ever since there have been women able to make their sentiments known
+by their writings (the only mode of publicity which society permits
+to them), an increasing number of them have recorded protests against
+their present social condition: and recently many thousands of them,
+headed by the most eminent women known to the public, have petitioned
+Parliament for their admission to the Parliamentary Suffrage. The
+claim of women to be educated as solidly, and in the same branches of
+knowledge, as men, is urged with growing intensity, and with a great
+prospect of success; while the demand for their admission into
+professions and occupations hitherto closed against them, becomes
+every year more urgent. Though there are not in this country, as
+there are in the United States, periodical Conventions and an
+organized party to agitate for the Rights of Women, there is a
+numerous and active Society organized and managed by women, for the
+more limited object of obtaining the political franchise. Nor is it
+only in our own country and in America that women are beginning to
+protest, more or less collectively, against the disabilities under
+which they labour. France, and Italy, and Switzerland, and Russia now
+afford examples of the same thing. How many more women there are who
+silently cherish similar aspirations, no one can possibly know; but
+there are abundant tokens how many _would_ cherish them, were they
+not so strenuously taught to repress them as contrary to the
+proprieties of their sex. It must be remembered, also, that no
+enslaved class ever asked for complete liberty at once. When Simon de
+Montfort called the deputies of the commons to sit for the first time
+in Parliament, did any of them dream of demanding that an assembly,
+elected by their constituents, should make and destroy ministries,
+and dictate to the king in affairs of state? No such thought entered
+into the imagination of the most ambitious of them. The nobility had
+already these pretensions; the commons pretended to nothing but to be
+exempt from arbitrary taxation, and from the gross individual
+oppression of the king's officers. It is a political law of nature
+that those who are under any power of ancient origin, never begin by
+complaining of the power itself, but only of its oppressive exercise.
+There is never any want of women who complain of ill usage by their
+husbands. There would be infinitely more, if complaint were not the
+greatest of all provocatives to a repetition and increase of the ill
+usage. It is this which frustrates all attempts to maintain the power
+but protect the woman against its abuses. In no other case (except
+that of a child) is the person who has been proved judicially to have
+suffered an injury, replaced under the physical power of the culprit
+who inflicted it. Accordingly wives, even in the most extreme and
+protracted cases of bodily ill usage, hardly ever dare avail
+themselves of the laws made for their protection: and if, in a moment
+of irrepressible indignation, or by the interference of neighbours,
+they are induced to do so, their whole effort afterwards is to
+disclose as little as they can, and to beg off their tyrant from his
+merited chastisement.
+
+All causes, social and natural, combine to make it unlikely that
+women should be collectively rebellious to the power of men. They are
+so far in a position different from all other subject classes, that
+their masters require something more from them than actual service.
+Men do not want solely the obedience of women, they want their
+sentiments. All men, except the most brutish, desire to have, in the
+woman most nearly connected with them, not a forced slave but a
+willing one, not a slave merely, but a favourite. They have therefore
+put everything in practice to enslave their minds. The masters of all
+other slaves rely, for maintaining obedience, on fear; either fear of
+themselves, or religious fears. The masters of women wanted more than
+simple obedience, and they turned the whole force of education to
+effect their purpose. All women are brought up from the very earliest
+years in the belief that their ideal of character is the very
+opposite to that of men; not self-will, and government by
+self-control, but submission, and yielding to the control of others.
+All the moralities tell them that it is the duty of women, and all
+the current sentimentalities that it is their nature, to live for
+others; to make complete abnegation of themselves, and to have no
+life but in their affections. And by their affections are meant the
+only ones they are allowed to have--those to the men with whom they
+are connected, or to the children who constitute an additional and
+indefeasible tie between them and a man. When we put together three
+things--first, the natural attraction between opposite sexes;
+secondly, the wife's entire dependence on the husband, every
+privilege or pleasure she has being either his gift, or depending
+entirely on his will; and lastly, that the principal object of human
+pursuit, consideration, and all objects of social ambition, can in
+general be sought or obtained by her only through him, it would be a
+miracle if the object of being attractive to men had not become the
+polar star of feminine education and formation of character. And,
+this great means of influence over the minds of women having been
+acquired, an instinct of selfishness made men avail themselves of it
+to the utmost as a means of holding women in subjection, by
+representing to them meekness, submissiveness, and resignation of all
+individual will into the hands of a man, as an essential part of
+sexual attractiveness. Can it be doubted that any of the other yokes
+which mankind have succeeded in breaking, would have subsisted till
+now if the same means had existed, and had been as sedulously used,
+to bow down their minds to it? If it had been made the object of the
+life of every young plebeian to find personal favour in the eyes of
+some patrician, of every young serf with some seigneur; if
+domestication with him, and a share of his personal affections, had
+been held out as the prize which they all should look out for, the
+most gifted and aspiring being able to reckon on the most desirable
+prizes; and if, when this prize had been obtained, they had been shut
+out by a wall of brass from all interests not centering in him, all
+feelings and desires but those which he shared or inculcated; would
+not serfs and seigneurs, plebeians and patricians, have been as
+broadly distinguished at this day as men and women are? and would not
+all but a thinker here and there, have believed the distinction to be
+a fundamental and unalterable fact in human nature?
+
+The preceding considerations are amply sufficient to show that
+custom, however universal it may be, affords in this case no
+presumption, and ought not to create any prejudice, in favour of the
+arrangements which place women in social and political subjection to
+men. But I may go farther, and maintain that the course of history,
+and the tendencies of progressive human society, afford not only no
+presumption in favour of this system of inequality of rights, but a
+strong one against it; and that, so far as the whole course of human
+improvement up to this time, the whole stream of modern tendencies,
+warrants any inference on the subject, it is, that this relic of the
+past is discordant with the future, and must necessarily disappear.
+
+For, what is the peculiar character of the modern world--the
+difference which chiefly distinguishes modern institutions, modern
+social ideas, modern life itself, from those of times long past? It
+is, that human beings are no longer born to their place in life, and
+chained down by an inexorable bond to the place they are born to, but
+are free to employ their faculties, and such favourable chances as
+offer, to achieve the lot which may appear to them most desirable.
+Human society of old was constituted on a very different principle.
+All were born to a fixed social position, and were mostly kept in it
+by law, or interdicted from any means by which they could emerge from
+it. As some men are born white and others black, so some were born
+slaves and others freemen and citizens; some were born patricians,
+others plebeians; some were born feudal nobles, others commoners and
+_roturiers_. A slave or serf could never make himself free, nor,
+except by the will of his master, become so. In most European
+countries it was not till towards the close of the middle ages, and
+as a consequence of the growth of regal power, that commoners could
+be ennobled. Even among nobles, the eldest son was born the exclusive
+heir to the paternal possessions, and a long time elapsed before it
+was fully established that the father could disinherit him. Among the
+industrious classes, only those who were born members of a guild, or
+were admitted into it by its members, could lawfully practise their
+calling within its local limits; and nobody could practise any
+calling deemed important, in any but the legal manner--by processes
+authoritatively prescribed. Manufacturers have stood in the pillory
+for presuming to carry on their business by new and improved methods.
+In modern Europe, and most in those parts of it which have
+participated most largely in all other modern improvements,
+diametrically opposite doctrines now prevail. Law and government do
+not undertake to prescribe by whom any social or industrial operation
+shall or shall not be conducted, or what modes of conducting them
+shall be lawful. These things are left to the unfettered choice of
+individuals. Even the laws which required that workmen should serve
+an apprenticeship, have in this country been repealed: there being
+ample assurance that in all cases in which an apprenticeship is
+necessary, its necessity will suffice to enforce it. The old theory
+was, that the least possible should be left to the choice of the
+individual agent; that all he had to do should, as far as
+practicable, be laid down for him by superior wisdom. Left to himself
+he was sure to go wrong. The modern conviction, the fruit of a
+thousand years of experience, is, that things in which the individual
+is the person directly interested, never go right but as they are
+left to his own discretion; and that any regulation of them by
+authority, except to protect the rights of others, is sure to be
+mischievous. This conclusion, slowly arrived at, and not adopted
+until almost every possible application of the contrary theory had
+been made with disastrous result, now (in the industrial department)
+prevails universally in the most advanced countries, almost
+universally in all that have pretensions to any sort of advancement.
+It is not that all processes are supposed to be equally good, or all
+persons to be equally qualified for everything; but that freedom of
+individual choice is now known to be the only thing which procures
+the adoption of the best processes, and throws each operation into
+the hands of those who are best qualified for it. Nobody thinks it
+necessary to make a law that only a strong-armed man shall be a
+blacksmith. Freedom and competition suffice to make blacksmiths
+strong-armed men, because the weak-armed can earn more by engaging in
+occupations for which they are more fit. In consonance with this
+doctrine, it is felt to be an overstepping of the proper bounds of
+authority to fix beforehand, on some general presumption, that
+certain persons are not fit to do certain things. It is now
+thoroughly known and admitted that if some such presumptions exist,
+no such presumption is infallible. Even if it be well grounded in a
+majority of cases, which it is very likely not to be, there will be a
+minority of exceptional cases in which it does not hold: and in those
+it is both an injustice to the individuals, and a detriment to
+society, to place barriers in the way of their using their faculties
+for their own benefit and for that of others. In the cases, on the
+other hand, in which the unfitness is real, the ordinary motives of
+human conduct will on the whole suffice to prevent the incompetent
+person from making, or from persisting in, the attempt.
+
+If this general principle of social and economical science is not
+true; if individuals, with such help as they can derive from the
+opinion of those who know them, are not better judges than the law
+and the government, of their own capacities and vocation; the world
+cannot too soon abandon this principle, and return to the old system
+of regulations and disabilities. But if the principle is true, we
+ought to act as if we believed it, and not to ordain that to be born
+a girl instead of a boy, any more than to be born black instead of
+white, or a commoner instead of a nobleman, shall decide the person's
+position through all life--shall interdict people from all the more
+elevated social positions, and from all, except a few, respectable
+occupations. Even were we to admit the utmost that is ever pretended
+as to the superior fitness of men for all the functions now reserved
+to them, the same argument applies which forbids a legal
+qualification for members of Parliament. If only once in a dozen
+years the conditions of eligibility exclude a fit person, there is a
+real loss, while the exclusion of thousands of unfit persons is no
+gain; for if the constitution of the electoral body disposes them to
+choose unfit persons, there are always plenty of such persons to
+choose from. In all things of any difficulty and importance, those
+who can do them well are fewer than the need, even with the most
+unrestricted latitude of choice: and any limitation of the field of
+selection deprives society of some chances of being served by the
+competent, without ever saving it from the incompetent.
+
+At present, in the more improved countries, the disabilities of women
+are the only case, save one, in which laws and institutions take
+persons at their birth, and ordain that they shall never in all their
+lives be allowed to compete for certain things. The one exception is
+that of royalty. Persons still are born to the throne; no one, not of
+the reigning family, can ever occupy it, and no one even of that
+family can, by any means but the course of hereditary succession,
+attain it. All other dignities and social advantages are open to the
+whole male sex: many indeed are only attainable by wealth, but wealth
+may be striven for by any one, and is actually obtained by many men
+of the very humblest origin. The difficulties, to the majority, are
+indeed insuperable without the aid of fortunate accidents; but no
+male human being is under any legal ban: neither law nor opinion
+superadd artificial obstacles to the natural ones. Royalty, as I have
+said, is excepted: but in this case every one feels it to be an
+exception--an anomaly in the modern world, in marked opposition to
+its customs and principles, and to be justified only by extraordinary
+special expediencies, which, though individuals and nations differ in
+estimating their weight, unquestionably do in fact exist. But in this
+exceptional case, in which a high social function is, for important
+reasons, bestowed on birth instead of being put up to competition,
+all free nations contrive to adhere in substance to the principle
+from which they nominally derogate; for they circumscribe this high
+function by conditions avowedly intended to prevent the person to
+whom it ostensibly belongs from really performing it; while the
+person by whom it is performed, the responsible minister, does obtain
+the post by a competition from which no full-grown citizen of the
+male sex is legally excluded. The disabilities, therefore, to which
+women are subject from the mere fact of their birth, are the solitary
+examples of the kind in modern legislation. In no instance except
+this, which comprehends half the human race, are the higher social
+functions closed against any one by a fatality of birth which no
+exertions, and no change of circumstances, can overcome; for even
+religious disabilities (besides that in England and in Europe they
+have practically almost ceased to exist) do not close any career to
+the disqualified person in case of conversion.
+
+The social subordination of women thus stands out an isolated fact in
+modern social institutions; a solitary breach of what has become
+their fundamental law; a single relic of an old world of thought and
+practice exploded in everything else, but retained in the one thing
+of most universal interest; as if a gigantic dolmen, or a vast temple
+of Jupiter Olympius, occupied the site of St. Paul's and received
+daily worship, while the surrounding Christian churches were only
+resorted to on fasts and festivals. This entire discrepancy between
+one social fact and all those which accompany it, and the radical
+opposition between its nature and the progressive movement which is
+the boast of the modern world, and which has successively swept away
+everything else of an analogous character, surely affords, to a
+conscientious observer of human tendencies, serious matter for
+reflection. It raises a prima facie presumption on the unfavourable
+side, far outweighing any which custom and usage could in such
+circumstances create on the favourable; and should at least suffice
+to make this, like the choice between republicanism and royalty, a
+balanced question.
+
+The least that can be demanded is, that the question should not be
+considered as prejudged by existing fact and existing opinion, but
+open to discussion on its merits, as a question of justice and
+expediency: the decision on this, as on any of the other social
+arrangements of mankind, depending on what an enlightened estimate of
+tendencies and consequences may show to be most advantageous to
+humanity in general, without distinction of sex. And the discussion
+must be a real discussion, descending to foundations, and not resting
+satisfied with vague and general assertions. It will not do, for
+instance, to assert in general terms, that the experience of mankind
+has pronounced in favour of the existing system. Experience cannot
+possibly have decided between two courses, so long as there has only
+been experience of one. If it be said that the doctrine of the
+equality of the sexes rests only on theory, it must be remembered
+that the contrary doctrine also has only theory to rest upon. All
+that is proved in its favour by direct experience, is that mankind
+have been able to exist under it, and to attain the degree of
+improvement and prosperity which we now see; but whether that
+prosperity has been attained sooner, or is now greater, than it would
+have been under the other system, experience does not say. On the
+other hand, experience does say, that every step in improvement has
+been so invariably accompanied by a step made in raising the social
+position of women, that historians and philosophers have been led to
+adopt their elevation or debasement as on the whole the surest test
+and most correct measure of the civilization of a people or an age.
+Through all the progressive period of human history, the condition of
+women has been approaching nearer to equality with men. This does not
+of itself prove that the assimilation must go on to complete
+equality; but it assuredly affords some presumption that such is the
+case.
+
+Neither does it avail anything to say that the _nature_ of the two
+sexes adapts them to their present functions and position, and
+renders these appropriate to them. Standing on the ground of common
+sense and the constitution of the human mind, I deny that any one
+knows, or can know, the nature of the two sexes, as long as they have
+only been seen in their present relation to one another. If men had
+ever been found in society without women, or women without men, or if
+there had been a society of men and women in which the women were not
+under the control of the men, something might have been positively
+known about the mental and moral differences which may be inherent in
+the nature of each. What is now called the nature of women is an
+eminently artificial thing--the result of forced repression in some
+directions, unnatural stimulation in others. It may be asserted
+without scruple, that no other class of dependents have had their
+character so entirely distorted from its natural proportions by their
+relation with their masters; for, if conquered and slave races have
+been, in some respects, more forcibly repressed, whatever in them has
+not been crushed down by an iron heel has generally been let alone,
+and if left with any liberty of development, it has developed itself
+according to its own laws; but in the case of women, a hot-house and
+stove cultivation has always been carried on of some of the
+capabilities of their nature, for the benefit and pleasure of their
+masters. Then, because certain products of the general vital force
+sprout luxuriantly and reach a great development in this heated
+atmosphere and under this active nurture and watering, while other
+shoots from the same root, which are left outside in the wintry air,
+with ice purposely heaped all round them, have a stunted growth, and
+some are burnt off with fire and disappear; men, with that inability
+to recognise their own work which distinguishes the unanalytic mind,
+indolently believe that the tree grows of itself in the way they have
+made it grow, and that it would die if one half of it were not kept
+in a vapour bath and the other half in the snow.
+
+Of all difficulties which impede the progress of thought, and the
+formation of well-grounded opinions on life and social arrangements,
+the greatest is now the unspeakable ignorance and inattention of
+mankind in respect to the influences which form human character.
+Whatever any portion of the human species now are, or seem to be,
+such, it is supposed, they have a natural tendency to be: even when
+the most elementary knowledge of the circumstances in which they have
+been placed, clearly points out the causes that made them what they
+are. Because a cottier deeply in arrears to his landlord is not
+industrious, there are people who think that the Irish are naturally
+idle. Because constitutions can be overthrown when the authorities
+appointed to execute them turn their arms against them, there are
+people who think the French incapable of free government. Because the
+Greeks cheated the Turks, and the Turks only plundered the Greeks,
+there are persons who think that the Turks are naturally more
+sincere: and because women, as is often said, care nothing about
+politics except their personalities, it is supposed that the general
+good is naturally less interesting to women than to men. History,
+which is now so much better understood than formerly, teaches another
+lesson: if only by showing the extraordinary susceptibility of human
+nature to external influences, and the extreme variableness of those
+of its manifestations which are supposed to be most universal and
+uniform. But in history, as in travelling, men usually see only what
+they already had in their own minds; and few learn much from history,
+who do not bring much with them to its study.
+
+Hence, in regard to that most difficult question, what are the
+natural differences between the two sexes--a subject on which it is
+impossible in the present state of society to obtain complete and
+correct knowledge--while almost everybody dogmatizes upon it, almost
+all neglect and make light of the only means by which any partial
+insight can be obtained into it. This is, an analytic study of the
+most important department of psychology, the laws of the influence of
+circumstances on character. For, however great and apparently
+ineradicable the moral and intellectual differences between men and
+women might be, the evidence of their being natural differences could
+only be negative. Those only could be inferred to be natural which
+could not possibly be artificial--the residuum, after deducting every
+characteristic of either sex which can admit of being explained from
+education or external circumstances. The profoundest knowledge of the
+laws of the formation of character is indispensable to entitle any
+one to affirm even that there is any difference, much more what the
+difference is, between the two sexes considered as moral and rational
+beings; and since no one, as yet, has that knowledge, (for there is
+hardly any subject which, in proportion to its importance, has been
+so little studied), no one is thus far entitled to any positive
+opinion on the subject. Conjectures are all that can at present be
+made; conjectures more or less probable, according as more or less
+authorized by such knowledge as we yet have of the laws of
+psychology, as applied to the formation of character.
+
+Even the preliminary knowledge, what the differences between the
+sexes now are, apart from all question as to how they are made what
+they are, is still in the crudest and most incomplete state. Medical
+practitioners and physiologists have ascertained, to some extent, the
+differences in bodily constitution; and this is an important element
+to the psychologist: but hardly any medical practitioner is a
+psychologist. Respecting the mental characteristics of women; their
+observations are of no more worth than those of common men. It is a
+subject on which nothing final can be known, so long as those who
+alone can really know it, women themselves, have given but little
+testimony, and that little, mostly suborned. It is easy to know
+stupid women. Stupidity is much the same all the world over. A stupid
+person's notions and feelings may confidently be inferred from those
+which prevail in the circle by which the person is surrounded. Not so
+with those whose opinions and feelings are an emanation from their
+own nature and faculties. It is only a man here and there who has any
+tolerable knowledge of the character even of the women of his own
+family. I do not mean, of their capabilities; these nobody knows, not
+even themselves, because most of them have never been called out. I
+mean their actually existing thoughts and feelings. Many a man thinks
+he perfectly understands women, because he has had amatory relations
+with several, perhaps with many of them. If he is a good observer,
+and his experience extends to quality as well as quantity, he may
+have learnt something of one narrow department of their nature--an
+important department, no doubt. But of all the rest of it, few
+persons are generally more ignorant, because there are few from whom
+it is so carefully hidden. The most favourable case which a man can
+generally have for studying the character of a woman, is that of his
+own wife: for the opportunities are greater, and the cases of
+complete sympathy not so unspeakably rare. And in fact, this is the
+source from which any knowledge worth having on the subject has, I
+believe, generally come. But most men have not had the opportunity of
+studying in this way more than a single case: accordingly one can, to
+an almost laughable degree, infer what a man's wife is like, from his
+opinions about women in general. To make even this one case yield any
+result, the woman must be worth knowing, and the man not only a
+competent judge, but of a character so sympathetic in itself, and so
+well adapted to hers, that he can either read her mind by sympathetic
+intuition, or has nothing in himself which makes her shy of
+disclosing it. Hardly anything, I believe, can be more rare than this
+conjunction. It often happens that there is the most complete unity
+of feeling and community of interests as to all external things, yet
+the one has as little admission into the internal life of the other
+as if they were common acquaintance. Even with true affection,
+authority on the one side and subordination on the other prevent
+perfect confidence. Though nothing may be intentionally withheld,
+much is not shown. In the analogous relation of parent and child, the
+corresponding phenomenon must have been in the observation of every
+one. As between father and son, how many are the cases in which the
+father, in spite of real affection on both sides, obviously to all
+the world does not know, nor suspect, parts of the son's character
+familiar to his companions and equals. The truth is, that the
+position of looking up to another is extremely unpropitious to
+complete sincerity and openness with him. The fear of losing ground
+in his opinion or in his feelings is so strong, that even in an
+upright character, there is an unconscious tendency to show only the
+best side, or the side which, though not the best, is that which he
+most likes to see: and it may be confidently said that thorough
+knowledge of one another hardly ever exists, but between persons who,
+besides being intimates, are equals. How much more true, then, must
+all this be, when the one is not only under the authority of the
+other, but has it inculcated on her as a duty to reckon everything
+else subordinate to his comfort and pleasure, and to let him neither
+see nor feel anything coming from her, except what is agreeable to
+him. All these difficulties stand in the way of a man's obtaining any
+thorough knowledge even of the one woman whom alone, in general, he
+has sufficient opportunity of studying. When we further consider that
+to understand one woman is not necessarily to understand any other
+woman; that even if he could study many women of one rank, or of one
+country, he would not thereby understand women of other ranks or
+countries; and even if he did, they are still only the women of a
+single period of history; we may safely assert that the knowledge
+which men can acquire of women, even as they have been and are,
+without reference to what they might be, is wretchedly imperfect and
+superficial, and always will be so, until women themselves have told
+all that they have to tell.
+
+And this time has not come; nor will it come otherwise than
+gradually. It is but of yesterday that women have either been
+qualified by literary accomplishments, or permitted by society, to
+tell anything to the general public. As yet very few of them dare
+tell anything, which men, on whom their literary success depends, are
+unwilling to hear. Let us remember in what manner, up to a very
+recent time, the expression, even by a male author, of uncustomary
+opinions, or what are deemed eccentric feelings, usually was, and in
+some degree still is, received; and we may form some faint conception
+under what impediments a woman, who is brought up to think custom and
+opinion her sovereign rule, attempts to express in books anything
+drawn from the depths of her own nature. The greatest woman who has
+left writings behind her sufficient to give her an eminent rank in
+the literature of her country, thought it necessary to prefix as a
+motto to her boldest work, "Un homme peut braver l'opinion; une femme
+doit s'y soumettre."[1] The greater part of what women write about
+women is mere sycophancy to men. In the case of unmarried women, much
+of it seems only intended to increase their chance of a husband.
+Many, both married and unmarried, overstep the mark, and inculcate a
+servility beyond what is desired or relished by any man, except the
+very vulgarest. But this is not so often the case as, even at a quite
+late period, it still was. Literary women are becoming more
+freespoken, and more willing to express their real sentiments.
+Unfortunately, in this country especially, they are themselves such
+artificial products, that their sentiments are compounded of a small
+element of individual observation and consciousness, and a very large
+one of acquired associations. This will be less and less the case,
+but it will remain true to a great extent, as long as social
+institutions do not admit the same free development of originality in
+women which is possible to men. When that time comes, and not before,
+we shall see, and not merely hear, as much as it is necessary to know
+of the nature of women, and the adaptation of other things to it.
+
+I have dwelt so much on the difficulties which at present obstruct
+any real knowledge by men of the true nature of women, because in
+this as in so many other things "opinio copiae inter maximas causas
+inopiae est;" and there is little chance of reasonable thinking on the
+matter, while people flatter themselves that they perfectly
+understand a subject of which most men know absolutely nothing, and
+of which it is at present impossible that any man, or all men taken
+together, should have knowledge which can qualify them to lay down
+the law to women as to what is, or is not, their vocation. Happily,
+no such knowledge is necessary for any practical purpose connected
+with the position of women in relation to society and life. For,
+according to all the principles involved in modern society, the
+question rests with women themselves--to be decided by their own
+experience, and by the use of their own faculties. There are no means
+of finding what either one person or many can do, but by trying--and
+no means by which any one else can discover for them what it is for
+their happiness to do or leave undone.
+
+One thing we may be certain of--that what is contrary to women's
+nature to do, they never will be made to do by simply giving their
+nature free play. The anxiety of mankind to interfere in behalf of
+nature, for fear lest nature should not succeed in effecting its
+purpose, is an altogether unnecessary solicitude. What women by
+nature cannot do, it is quite superfluous to forbid them from doing.
+What they can do, but not so well as the men who are their
+competitors, competition suffices to exclude them from; since nobody
+asks for protective duties and bounties in favour of women; it is
+only asked that the present bounties and protective duties in favour
+of men should be recalled. If women have a greater natural
+inclination for some things than for others, there is no need of laws
+or social inculcation to make the majority of them do the former in
+preference to the latter. Whatever women's services are most wanted
+for, the free play of competition will hold out the strongest
+inducements to them to undertake. And, as the words imply, they are
+most wanted for the things for which they are most fit; by the
+apportionment of which to them, the collective faculties of the two
+sexes can be applied on the whole with the greatest sum of valuable
+result.
+
+The general opinion of men is supposed to be, that the natural
+vocation of a woman is that of a wife and mother. I say, is supposed
+to be, because, judging from acts--from the whole of the present
+constitution of society--one might infer that their opinion was the
+direct contrary. They might be supposed to think that the alleged
+natural vocation of women was of all things the most repugnant to
+their nature; insomuch that if they are free to do anything else--if
+any other means of living, or occupation of their time and faculties,
+is open, which has any chance of appearing desirable to them--there
+will not be enough of them who will be willing to accept the
+condition said to be natural to them. If this is the real opinion of
+men in general, it would be well that it should be spoken out. I
+should like to hear somebody openly enunciating the doctrine (it is
+already implied in much that is written on the subject)--"It is
+necessary to society that women should marry and produce children.
+They will not do so unless they are compelled. Therefore it is
+necessary to compel them." The merits of the case would then be
+clearly defined. It would be exactly that of the slaveholders of
+South Carolina and Louisiana. "It is necessary that cotton and sugar
+should be grown. White men cannot produce them. Negroes will not, for
+any wages which we choose to give. _Ergo_ they must be compelled." An
+illustration still closer to the point is that of impressment.
+Sailors must absolutely be had to defend the country. It often
+happens that they will not voluntarily enlist. Therefore there must
+be the power of forcing them. How often has this logic been used!
+and, but for one flaw in it, without doubt it would have been
+successful up to this day. But it is open to the retort--First pay
+the sailors the honest value of their labour. When you have made it
+as well worth their while to serve you, as to work for other
+employers, you will have no more difficulty than others have in
+obtaining their services. To this there is no logical answer except
+"I will not:" and as people are now not only ashamed, but are not
+desirous, to rob the labourer of his hire, impressment is no longer
+advocated. Those who attempt to force women into marriage by closing
+all other doors against them, lay themselves open to a similar
+retort. If they mean what they say, their opinion must evidently be,
+that men do not render the married condition so desirable to women,
+as to induce them to accept it for its own recommendations. It is not
+a sign of one's thinking the boon one offers very attractive, when
+one allows only Hobson's choice, "that or none." And here, I believe,
+is the clue to the feelings of those men, who have a real antipathy
+to the equal freedom of women. I believe they are afraid, not lest
+women should be unwilling to marry, for I do not think that any one
+in reality has that apprehension; but lest they should insist that
+marriage should be on equal conditions; lest all women of spirit and
+capacity should prefer doing almost anything else, not in their own
+eyes degrading, rather than marry, when marrying is giving themselves
+a master, and a master too of all their earthly possessions. And
+truly, if this consequence were necessarily incident to marriage, I
+think that the apprehension would be very well founded. I agree in
+thinking it probable that few women, capable of anything else, would,
+unless under an irresistible _entrainement_, rendering them for the
+time insensible to anything but itself, choose such a lot, when any
+other means were open to them of filling a conventionally honourable
+place in life: and if men are determined that the law of marriage
+shall be a law of despotism, they are quite right, in point of mere
+policy, in leaving to women only Hobson's choice. But, in that case,
+all that has been done in the modern world to relax the chain on the
+minds of women, has been a mistake. They never should have been
+allowed to receive a literary education. Women who read, much more
+women who write, are, in the existing constitution of things, a
+contradiction and a disturbing element: and it was wrong to bring
+women up with any acquirements but those of an odalisque, or of a
+domestic servant.
+
+[Footnote 1: Title-page of Mme. de Stael's "Delphine."]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+
+It will be well to commence the detailed discussion of the subject by
+the particular branch of it to which the course of our observations
+has led us: the conditions which the laws of this and all other
+countries annex to the marriage contract. Marriage being the
+destination appointed by society for women, the prospect they are
+brought up to, and the object which it is intended should be sought
+by all of them, except those who are too little attractive to be
+chosen by any man as his companion; one might have supposed that
+everything would have been done to make this condition as eligible to
+them as possible, that they might have no cause to regret being
+denied the option of any other. Society, however, both in this, and,
+at first, in all other cases, has preferred to attain its object by
+foul rather than fair means: but this is the only case in which it
+has substantially persisted in them even to the present day.
+Originally women were taken by force, or regularly sold by their
+father to the husband. Until a late period in European history, the
+father had the power to dispose of his daughter in marriage at his
+own will and pleasure, without any regard to hers. The Church,
+indeed, was so far faithful to a better morality as to require a
+formal "yes" from the woman at the marriage ceremony; but there was
+nothing to shew that the consent was other than compulsory; and it
+was practically impossible for the girl to refuse compliance if the
+father persevered, except perhaps when she might obtain the
+protection of religion by a determined resolution to take monastic
+vows. After marriage, the man had anciently (but this was anterior to
+Christianity) the power of life and death over his wife. She could
+invoke no law against him; he was her sole tribunal and law. For a
+long time he could repudiate her, but she had no corresponding power
+in regard to him. By the old laws of England, the husband was called
+the _lord_ of the wife; he was literally regarded as her sovereign,
+inasmuch that the murder of a man by his wife was called treason
+(_petty_ as distinguished from _high_ treason), and was more cruelly
+avenged than was usually the case with high treason, for the penalty
+was burning to death. Because these various enormities have fallen
+into disuse (for most of them were never formally abolished, or not
+until they had long ceased to be practised) men suppose that all is
+now as it should be in regard to the marriage contract; and we are
+continually told that civilization and Christianity have restored to
+the woman her just rights. Meanwhile the wife is the actual
+bond-servant of her husband: no less so, as far as legal obligation
+goes, than slaves commonly so called. She vows a lifelong obedience
+to him at the altar, and is held to it all through her life by law.
+Casuists may say that the obligation of obedience stops short of
+participation in crime, but it certainly extends to everything else.
+She can do no act whatever but by his permission, at least tacit. She
+can acquire no property but for him; the instant it becomes hers,
+even if by inheritance, it becomes _ipso facto_ his. In this respect
+the wife's position under the common law of England is worse than
+that of slaves in the laws of many countries: by the Roman law, for
+example, a slave might have his peculium, which to a certain extent
+the law guaranteed to him for his exclusive use. The higher classes
+in this country have given an analogous advantage to their women,
+through special contracts setting aside the law, by conditions of
+pin-money, &c.: since parental feeling being stronger with fathers
+than the class feeling of their own sex, a father generally prefers
+his own daughter to a son-in-law who is a stranger to him. By means
+of settlements, the rich usually contrive to withdraw the whole or
+part of the inherited property of the wife from the absolute control
+of the husband: but they do not succeed in keeping it under her own
+control; the utmost they can do only prevents the husband from
+squandering it, at the same time debarring the rightful owner from
+its use. The property itself is out of the reach of both; and as to
+the income derived from it, the form of settlement most favourable to
+the wife (that called "to her separate use") only precludes the
+husband from receiving it instead of her: it must pass through her
+hands, but if he takes it from her by personal violence as soon as
+she receives it, he can neither be punished, nor compelled to
+restitution. This is the amount of the protection which, under the
+laws of this country, the most powerful nobleman can give to his own
+daughter as respects her husband. In the immense majority of cases
+there is no settlement: and the absorption of all rights, all
+property, as well as all freedom of action, is complete. The two are
+called "one person in law," for the purpose of inferring that
+whatever is hers is his, but the parallel inference is never drawn
+that whatever is his is hers; the maxim is not applied against the
+man, except to make him responsible to third parties for her acts, as
+a master is for the acts of his slaves or of his cattle. I am far
+from pretending that wives are in general no better treated than
+slaves; but no slave is a slave to the same lengths, and in so full a
+sense of the word, as a wife is. Hardly any slave, except one
+immediately attached to the master's person, is a slave at all hours
+and all minutes; in general he has, like a soldier, his fixed task,
+and when it is done, or when he is off duty, he disposes, within
+certain limits, of his own time, and has a family life into which the
+master rarely intrudes. "Uncle Tom" under his first master had his
+own life in his "cabin," almost as much as any man whose work takes
+him away from home, is able to have in his own family. But it cannot
+be so with the wife. Above all, a female slave has (in Christian
+countries) an admitted right, and is considered under a moral
+obligation, to refuse to her master the last familiarity. Not so the
+wife: however brutal a tyrant she may unfortunately be chained
+to--though she may know that he hates her, though it may be his daily
+pleasure to torture her, and though she may feel it impossible not to
+loathe him--he can claim from her and enforce the lowest degradation
+of a human being, that of being made the instrument of an animal
+function contrary to her inclinations. While she is held in this
+worst description of slavery as to her own person, what is her
+position in regard to the children in whom she and her master have a
+joint interest? They are by law _his_ children. He alone has any
+legal rights over them. Not one act can she do towards or in relation
+to them, except by delegation from him. Even after he is dead she is
+not their legal guardian, unless he by will has made her so. He could
+even send them away from her, and deprive her of the means of seeing
+or corresponding with them, until this power was in some degree
+restricted by Serjeant Talfourd's Act. This is her legal state. And
+from this state she has no means of withdrawing herself. If she
+leaves her husband, she can take nothing with her, neither her
+children nor anything which is rightfully her own. If he chooses, he
+can compel her to return, by law, or by physical force; or he may
+content himself with seizing for his own use anything which she may
+earn, or which may be given to her by her relations. It is only legal
+separation by a decree of a court of justice, which entitles her to
+live apart, without being forced back into the custody of an
+exasperated jailer--or which empowers her to apply any earnings to
+her own use, without fear that a man whom perhaps she has not seen
+for twenty years will pounce upon her some day and carry all off.
+This legal separation, until lately, the courts of justice would only
+give at an expense which made it inaccessible to any one out of the
+higher ranks. Even now it is only given in cases of desertion, or of
+the extreme of cruelty; and yet complaints are made every day that it
+is granted too easily. Surely, if a woman is denied any lot in life
+but that of being the personal body-servant of a despot, and is
+dependent for everything upon the chance of finding one who may be
+disposed to make a favourite of her instead of merely a drudge, it is
+a very cruel aggravation of her fate that she should be allowed to
+try this chance only once. The natural sequel and corollary from this
+state of things would be, that since her all in life depends upon
+obtaining a good master, she should be allowed to change again and
+again until she finds one. I am not saying that she ought to be
+allowed this privilege. That is a totally different consideration.
+The question of divorce, in the sense involving liberty of
+remarriage, is one into which it is foreign to my purpose to enter.
+All I now say is, that to those to whom nothing but servitude is
+allowed, the free choice of servitude is the only, though a most
+insufficient, alleviation. Its refusal completes the assimilation of
+the wife to the slave--and the slave under not the mildest form of
+slavery: for in some slave codes the slave could, under certain
+circumstances of ill usage, legally compel the master to sell him.
+But no amount of ill usage, without adultery superadded, will in
+England free a wife from her tormentor.
+
+I have no desire to exaggerate, nor does the case stand in any need
+of exaggeration. I have described the wife's legal position, not her
+actual treatment. The laws of most countries are far worse than the
+people who execute them, and many of them are only able to remain
+laws by being seldom or never carried into effect. If married life
+were all that it might be expected to be, looking to the laws alone,
+society would be a hell upon earth. Happily there are both feelings
+and interests which in many men exclude, and in most, greatly temper,
+the impulses and propensities which lead to tyranny: and of those
+feelings, the tie which connects a man with his wife affords, in a
+normal state of things, incomparably the strongest example. The only
+tie which at all approaches to it, that between him and his children,
+tends, in all save exceptional cases, to strengthen, instead of
+conflicting with, the first. Because this is true; because men in
+general do not inflict, nor women suffer, all the misery which could
+be inflicted and suffered if the full power of tyranny with which the
+man is legally invested were acted on; the defenders of the existing
+form of the institution think that all its iniquity is justified, and
+that any complaint is merely quarrelling with the evil which is the
+price paid for every great good. But the mitigations in practice,
+which are compatible with maintaining in full legal force this or any
+other kind of tyranny, instead of being any apology for despotism,
+only serve to prove what power human nature possesses of reacting
+against the vilest institutions, and with what vitality the seeds of
+good as well as those of evil in human character diffuse and
+propagate themselves. Not a word can be said for despotism in the
+family which cannot be said for political despotism. Every absolute
+king does not sit at his window to enjoy the groans of his tortured
+subjects, nor strips them of their last rag and turns them out to
+shiver in the road. The despotism of Louis XVI. was not the despotism
+of Philippe le Bel, or of Nadir Shah, or of Caligula; but it was bad
+enough to justify the French Revolution, and to palliate even its
+horrors. If an appeal be made to the intense attachments which exist
+between wives and their husbands, exactly as much may be said of
+domestic slavery. It was quite an ordinary fact in Greece and Rome
+for slaves to submit to death by torture rather than betray their
+masters. In the proscriptions of the Roman civil wars it was remarked
+that wives and slaves were heroically faithful, sons very commonly
+treacherous. Yet we know how cruelly many Romans treated their
+slaves. But in truth these intense individual feelings nowhere rise
+to such a luxuriant height as under the most atrocious institutions.
+It is part of the irony of life, that the strongest feelings of
+devoted gratitude of which human nature seems to be susceptible, are
+called forth in human beings towards those who, having the power
+entirely to crush their earthly existence, voluntarily refrain from
+using that power. How great a place in most men this sentiment fills,
+even in religious devotion, it would be cruel to inquire. We daily
+see how much their gratitude to Heaven appears to be stimulated by
+the contemplation of fellow-creatures to whom God has not been so
+merciful as he has to themselves.
+
+Whether the institution to be defended is slavery, political
+absolutism, or the absolutism of the head of a family, we are always
+expected to judge of it from its best instances; and we are presented
+with pictures of loving exercise of authority on one side, loving
+submission to it on the other--superior wisdom ordering all things
+for the greatest good of the dependents, and surrounded by their
+smiles and benedictions. All this would be very much to the purpose
+if any one pretended that there are no such things as good men. Who
+doubts that there may be great goodness, and great happiness, and
+great affection, under the absolute government of a good man?
+Meanwhile, laws and institutions require to be adapted, not to good
+men, but to bad. Marriage is not an institution designed for a select
+few. Men are not required, as a preliminary to the marriage ceremony,
+to prove by testimonials that they are fit to be trusted with the
+exercise of absolute power. The tie of affection and obligation to a
+wife and children is very strong with those whose general social
+feelings are strong, and with many who are little sensible to any
+other social ties; but there are all degrees of sensibility and
+insensibility to it, as there are all grades of goodness and
+wickedness in men, down to those whom no ties will bind, and on whom
+society has no action but through its _ultima ratio_, the penalties
+of the law. In every grade of this descending scale are men to whom
+are committed all the legal powers of a husband. The vilest
+malefactor has some wretched woman tied to him, against whom he can
+commit any atrocity except killing her, and, if tolerably cautious,
+can do that without much danger of the legal penalty. And how many
+thousands are there among the lowest classes in every country, who,
+without being in a legal sense malefactors in any other respect,
+because in every other quarter their aggressions meet with
+resistance, indulge the utmost habitual excesses of bodily violence
+towards the unhappy wife, who alone, at least of grown persons, can
+neither repel nor escape from their brutality; and towards whom the
+excess of dependence inspires their mean and savage natures, not with
+a generous forbearance, and a point of honour to behave well to one
+whose lot in life is trusted entirely to their kindness, but on the
+contrary with a notion that the law has delivered her to them as
+their thing, to be used at their pleasure, and that they are not
+expected to practise the consideration towards her which is required
+from them towards everybody else. The law, which till lately left
+even these atrocious extremes of domestic oppression practically
+unpunished, has within these few years made some feeble attempts to
+repress them. But its attempts have done little, and cannot be
+expected to do much, because it is contrary to reason and experience
+to suppose that there can be any real check to brutality, consistent
+with leaving the victim still in the power of the executioner. Until
+a conviction for personal violence, or at all events a repetition of
+it after a first conviction, entitles the woman _ipso facto_ to a
+divorce, or at least to a judicial separation, the attempt to repress
+these "aggravated assaults" by legal penalties will break down for
+want of a prosecutor, or for want of a witness.
+
+When we consider how vast is the number of men, in any great country,
+who are little higher than brutes, and that this never prevents them
+from being able, through the law of marriage, to obtain a victim, the
+breadth and depth of human misery caused in this shape alone by the
+abuse of the institution swells to something appalling. Yet these are
+only the extreme cases. They are the lowest abysses, but there is a
+sad succession of depth after depth before reaching them. In domestic
+as in political tyranny, the case of absolute monsters chiefly
+illustrates the institution by showing that there is scarcely any
+horror which may not occur under it if the despot pleases, and thus
+setting in a strong light what must be the terrible frequency of
+things only a little less atrocious. Absolute fiends are as rare as
+angels, perhaps rarer: ferocious savages, with occasional touches of
+humanity, are however very frequent: and in the wide interval which
+separates these from any worthy representatives of the human species,
+how many are the forms and gradations of animalism and selfishness,
+often under an outward varnish of civilization and even cultivation,
+living at peace with the law, maintaining a creditable appearance to
+all who are not under their power, yet sufficient often to make the
+lives of all who are so, a torment and a burthen to them! It would be
+tiresome to repeat the commonplaces about the unfitness of men in
+general for power, which, after the political discussions of
+centuries, every one knows by heart, were it not that hardly any one
+thinks of applying these maxims to the case in which above all others
+they are applicable, that of power, not placed in the hands of a man
+here and there, but offered to every adult male, down to the basest
+and most ferocious. It is not because a man is not known to have
+broken any of the Ten Commandments, or because he maintains a
+respectable character in his dealings with those whom he cannot
+compel to have intercourse with him, or because he does not fly out
+into violent bursts of ill-temper against those who are not obliged
+to bear with him, that it is possible to surmise of what sort his
+conduct will be in the unrestraint of home. Even the commonest men
+reserve the violent, the sulky, the undisguisedly selfish side of
+their character for those who have no power to withstand it. The
+relation of superiors to dependents is the nursery of these vices of
+character, which, wherever else they exist, are an overflowing from
+that source. A man who is morose or violent to his equals, is sure to
+be one who has lived among inferiors, whom he could frighten or worry
+into submission. If the family in its best forms is, as it is often
+said to be, a school of sympathy, tenderness, and loving
+forgetfulness of self, it is still oftener, as respects its chief, a
+school of wilfulness, overbearingness, unbounded self-indulgence, and
+a double-dyed and idealized selfishness, of which sacrifice itself is
+only a particular form: the care for the wife and children being only
+care for them as parts of the man's own interests and belongings, and
+their individual happiness being immolated in every shape to his
+smallest preferences. What better is to be looked for under the
+existing form of the institution? We know that the bad propensities
+of human nature are only kept within bounds when they are allowed no
+scope for their indulgence. We know that from impulse and habit, when
+not from deliberate purpose, almost every one to whom others yield,
+goes on encroaching upon them, until a point is reached at which they
+are compelled to resist. Such being the common tendency of human
+nature; the almost unlimited power which present social institutions
+give to the man over at least one human being--the one with whom he
+resides, and whom he has always present--this power seeks out and
+evokes the latent germs of selfishness in the remotest corners of his
+nature--fans its faintest sparks and smouldering embers--offers to
+him a license for the indulgence of those points of his original
+character which in all other relations he would have found it
+necessary to repress and conceal, and the repression of which would
+in time have become a second nature. I know that there is another
+side to the question. I grant that the wife, if she cannot
+effectually resist, can at least retaliate; she, too, can make the
+man's life extremely uncomfortable, and by that power is able to
+carry many points which she ought, and many which she ought not, to
+prevail in. But this instrument of self-protection--which may be
+called the power of the scold, or the shrewish sanction--has the
+fatal defect, that it avails most against the least tyrannical
+superiors, and in favour of the least deserving dependents. It is the
+weapon of irritable and self-willed women; of those who would make
+the worst use of power if they themselves had it, and who generally
+turn this power to a bad use. The amiable cannot use such an
+instrument, the highminded disdain it. And on the other hand, the
+husbands against whom it is used most effectively are the gentler and
+more inoffensive; those who cannot be induced, even by provocation,
+to resort to any very harsh exercise of authority. The wife's power
+of being disagreeable generally only establishes a counter-tyranny,
+and makes victims in their turn chiefly of those husbands who are
+least inclined to be tyrants.
+
+What is it, then, which really tempers the corrupting effects of the
+power, and makes it compatible with such amount of good as we
+actually see? Mere feminine blandishments, though of great effect in
+individual instances, have very little effect in modifying the
+general tendencies of the situation; for their power only lasts while
+the woman is young and attractive, often only while her charm is new,
+and not dimmed by familiarity; and on many men they have not much
+influence at any time. The real mitigating causes are, the personal
+affection which is the growth of time, in so far as the man's nature
+is susceptible of it, and the woman's character sufficiently
+congenial with his to excite it; their common interests as regards
+the children, and their general community of interest as concerns
+third persons (to which however there are very great limitations);
+the real importance of the wife to his daily comforts and enjoyments,
+and the value he consequently attaches to her on his personal
+account, which, in a man capable of feeling for others, lays the
+foundation of caring for her on her own; and lastly, the influence
+naturally acquired over almost all human beings by those near to
+their persons (if not actually disagreeable to them): who, both by
+their direct entreaties, and by the insensible contagion of their
+feelings and dispositions, are often able, unless counteracted by
+some equally strong personal influence, to obtain a degree of command
+over the conduct of the superior, altogether excessive and
+unreasonable. Through these various means, the wife frequently
+exercises even too much power over the man; she is able to affect his
+conduct in things in which she may not be qualified to influence it
+for good--in which her influence may be not only unenlightened, but
+employed on the morally wrong side; and in which he would act better
+if left to his own prompting. But neither in the affairs of families
+nor in those of states is power a compensation for the loss of
+freedom. Her power often gives her what she has no right to, but does
+not enable her to assert her own rights. A Sultan's favourite slave
+has slaves under her, over whom she tyrannizes; but the desirable
+thing would be that she should neither have slaves nor be a slave. By
+entirely sinking her own existence in her husband; by having no will
+(or persuading him that she has no will) but his, in anything which
+regards their joint relation, and by making it the business of her
+life to work upon his sentiments, a wife may gratify herself by
+influencing, and very probably perverting, his conduct, in those of
+his external relations which she has never qualified herself to judge
+of, or in which she is herself wholly influenced by some personal or
+other partiality or prejudice. Accordingly, as things now are, those
+who act most kindly to their wives, are quite as often made worse, as
+better, by the wife's influence, in respect to all interests
+extending beyond the family. She is taught that she has no business
+with things out of that sphere; and accordingly she seldom has any
+honest and conscientious opinion on them; and therefore hardly ever
+meddles with them for any legitimate purpose, but generally for an
+interested one. She neither knows nor cares which is the right side
+in politics, but she knows what will bring in money or invitations,
+give her husband a title, her son a place, or her daughter a good
+marriage.
+
+But how, it will be asked, can any society exist without government?
+In a family, as in a state, some one person must be the ultimate
+ruler. Who shall decide when married people differ in opinion? Both
+cannot have their way, yet a decision one way or the other must be
+come to.
+
+It is not true that in all voluntary association between two people,
+one of them must be absolute master: still less that the law must
+determine which of them it shall be. The most frequent case of
+voluntary association, next to marriage, is partnership in business:
+and it is not found or thought necessary to enact that in every
+partnership, one partner shall have entire control over the concern,
+and the others shall be bound to obey his orders. No one would enter
+into partnership on terms which would subject him to the
+responsibilities of a principal, with only the powers and privileges
+of a clerk or agent. If the law dealt with other contracts as it does
+with marriage, it would ordain that one partner should administer the
+common business as if it was his private concern; that the others
+should have only delegated powers; and that this one should be
+designated by some general presumption of law, for example as being
+the eldest. The law never does this: nor does experience show it to
+be necessary that any theoretical inequality of power should exist
+between the partners, or that the partnership should have any other
+conditions than what they may themselves appoint by their articles of
+agreement. Yet it might seem that the exclusive power might be
+conceded with less danger to the rights and interests of the
+inferior, in the case of partnership than in that of marriage, since
+he is free to cancel the power by withdrawing from the connexion. The
+wife has no such power, and even if she had, it is almost always
+desirable that she should try all measures before resorting to it.
+
+It is quite true that things which have to be decided every day, and
+cannot adjust themselves gradually, or wait for a compromise, ought
+to depend on one will: one person must have their sole control. But
+it does not follow that this should always be the same person. The
+natural arrangement is a division of powers between the two; each
+being absolute in the executive branch of their own department, and
+any change of system and principle requiring the consent of both. The
+division neither can nor should be pre-established by the law, since
+it must depend on individual capacities and suitabilities. If the two
+persons chose, they might pre-appoint it by the marriage contract, as
+pecuniary arrangements are now often pre-appointed. There would
+seldom be any difficulty in deciding such things by mutual consent,
+unless the marriage was one of those unhappy ones in which all other
+things, as well as this, become subjects of bickering and dispute.
+The division of rights would naturally follow the division of duties
+and functions; and that is already made by consent, or at all events
+not by law, but by general custom, modified and modifiable at the
+pleasure of the persons concerned.
+
+The real practical decision of affairs, to whichever may be given the
+legal authority, will greatly depend, as it even now does, upon
+comparative qualifications. The mere fact that he is usually the
+eldest, will in most cases give the preponderance to the man; at
+least until they both attain a time of life at which the difference
+in their years is of no importance. There will naturally also be a
+more potential voice on the side, whichever it is, that brings the
+means of support. Inequality from this source does not depend on the
+law of marriage, but on the general conditions of human society, as
+now constituted. The influence of mental superiority, either general
+or special, and of superior decision of character, will necessarily
+tell for much. It always does so at present. And this fact shows how
+little foundation there is for the apprehension that the powers and
+responsibilities of partners in life (as of partners in business),
+cannot be satisfactorily apportioned by agreement between themselves.
+They always are so apportioned, except in cases in which the marriage
+institution is a failure. Things never come to an issue of downright
+power on one side, and obedience on the other, except where the
+connexion altogether has been a mistake, and it would be a blessing
+to both parties to be relieved from it. Some may say that the very
+thing by which an amicable settlement of differences becomes
+possible, is the power of legal compulsion known to be in reserve; as
+people submit to an arbitration because there is a court of law in
+the background, which they know that they can be forced to obey. But
+to make the cases parallel, we must suppose that the rule of the
+court of law was, not to try the cause, but to give judgment always
+for the same side, suppose the defendant. If so, the amenability to
+it would be a motive with the plaintiff to agree to almost any
+arbitration, but it would be just the reverse with the defendant. The
+despotic power which the law gives to the husband may be a reason to
+make the wife assent to any compromise by which power is practically
+shared between the two, but it cannot be the reason why the husband
+does. That there is always among decently conducted people a
+practical compromise, though one of them at least is under no
+physical or moral necessity of making it, shows that the natural
+motives which lead to a voluntary adjustment of the united life of
+two persons in a manner acceptable to both, do on the whole, except
+in unfavourable cases, prevail. The matter is certainly not improved
+by laying down as an ordinance of law, that the superstructure of
+free government shall be raised upon a legal basis of despotism on
+one side and subjection on the other, and that every concession which
+the despot makes may, at his mere pleasure, and without any warning,
+be recalled. Besides that no freedom is worth much when held on so
+precarious a tenure, its conditions are not likely to be the most
+equitable when the law throws so prodigious a weight into one scale;
+when the adjustment rests between two persons one of whom is declared
+to be entitled to everything, the other not only entitled to nothing
+except during the good pleasure of the first, but under the strongest
+moral and religious obligation not to rebel under any excess of
+oppression.
+
+A pertinacious adversary, pushed to extremities, may say, that
+husbands indeed are willing to be reasonable, and to make fair
+concessions to their partners without being compelled to it, but that
+wives are not: that if allowed any rights of their own, they will
+acknowledge no rights at all in any one else, and never will yield in
+anything, unless they can be compelled, by the man's mere authority,
+to yield in everything. This would have been said by many persons
+some generations ago, when satires on women were in vogue, and men
+thought it a clever thing to insult women for being what men made
+them. But it will be said by no one now who is worth replying to. It
+is not the doctrine of the present day that women are less
+susceptible of good feeling, and consideration for those with whom
+they are united by the strongest ties, than men are. On the contrary,
+we are perpetually told that women are better than men, by those who
+are totally opposed to treating them as if they were as good; so that
+the saying has passed into a piece of tiresome cant, intended to put
+a complimentary face upon an injury, and resembling those
+celebrations of royal clemency which, according to Gulliver, the king
+of Lilliput always prefixed to his most sanguinary decrees. If women
+are better than men in anything, it surely is in individual
+self-sacrifice for those of their own family. But I lay little stress
+on this, so long as they are universally taught that they are born
+and created for self-sacrifice. I believe that equality of rights
+would abate the exaggerated self-abnegation which is the present
+artificial ideal of feminine character, and that a good woman would
+not be more self-sacrificing than the best man: but on the other
+hand, men would be much more unselfish and self-sacrificing than at
+present, because they would no longer be taught to worship their own
+will as such a grand thing that it is actually the law for another
+rational being. There is nothing which men so easily learn as this
+self-worship: all privileged persons, and all privileged classes,
+have had it. The more we descend in the scale of humanity, the
+intenser it is; and most of all in those who are not, and can never
+expect to be, raised above any one except an unfortunate wife and
+children. The honourable exceptions are proportionally fewer than in
+the case of almost any other human infirmity. Philosophy and
+religion, instead of keeping it in check, are generally suborned to
+defend it; and nothing controls it but that practical feeling of the
+equality of human beings, which is the theory of Christianity, but
+which Christianity will never practically teach, while it sanctions
+institutions grounded on an arbitrary preference of one human being
+over another.
+
+There are, no doubt, women, as there are men, whom equality of
+consideration will not satisfy; with whom there is no peace while any
+will or wish is regarded but their own. Such persons are a proper
+subject for the law of divorce. They are only fit to live alone, and
+no human beings ought to be compelled to associate their lives with
+them. But the legal subordination tends to make such characters among
+women more, rather than less, frequent. If the man exerts his whole
+power, the woman is of course crushed: but if she is treated with
+indulgence, and permitted to assume power, there is no rule to set
+limits to her encroachments. The law, not determining her rights, but
+theoretically allowing her none at all, practically declares that the
+measure of what she has a right to, is what she can contrive to get.
+
+The equality of married persons before the law, is not only the sole
+mode in which that particular relation can be made consistent with
+justice to both sides, and conducive to the happiness of both, but it
+is the only means of rendering the daily life of mankind, in any high
+sense, a school of moral cultivation. Though the truth may not be
+felt or generally acknowledged for generations to come, the only
+school of genuine moral sentiment is society between equals. The
+moral education of mankind has hitherto emanated chiefly from the law
+of force, and is adapted almost solely to the relations which force
+creates. In the less advanced states of society, people hardly
+recognise any relation with their equals. To be an equal is to be an
+enemy. Society, from its highest place to its lowest, is one long
+chain, or rather ladder, where every individual is either above or
+below his nearest neighbour, and wherever he does not command he must
+obey. Existing moralities, accordingly, are mainly fitted to a
+relation of command and obedience. Yet command and obedience are but
+unfortunate necessities of human life: society in equality is its
+normal state. Already in modern life, and more and more as it
+progressively improves, command and obedience become exceptional
+facts in life, equal association its general rule. The morality of
+the first ages rested on the obligation to submit to power; that of
+the ages next following, on the right of the weak to the forbearance
+and protection of the strong. How much longer is one form of society
+and life to content itself with the morality made for another? We
+have had the morality of submission, and the morality of chivalry and
+generosity; the time is now come for the morality of justice.
+Whenever, in former ages, any approach has been made to society in
+equality, Justice has asserted its claims as the foundation of
+virtue. It was thus in the free republics of antiquity. But even in
+the best of these, the equals were limited to the free male citizens;
+slaves, women, and the unenfranchised residents were under the law of
+force. The joint influence of Roman civilization and of Christianity
+obliterated these distinctions, and in theory (if only partially in
+practice) declared the claims of the human being, as such, to be
+paramount to those of sex, class, or social position. The barriers
+which had begun to be levelled were raised again by the northern
+conquests; and the whole of modern history consists of the slow
+process by which they have since been wearing away. We are entering
+into an order of things in which justice will again be the primary
+virtue; grounded as before on equal, but now also on sympathetic
+association; having its root no longer in the instinct of equals for
+self-protection, but in a cultivated sympathy between them; and no
+one being now left out, but an equal measure being extended to all.
+It is no novelty that mankind do not distinctly foresee their own
+changes, and that their sentiments are adapted to past, not to coming
+ages. To see the futurity of the species has always been the
+privilege of the intellectual elite, or of those who have learnt from
+them; to have the feelings of that futurity has been the distinction,
+and usually the martyrdom, of a still rarer elite. Institutions,
+books, education, society, all go on training human beings for the
+old, long after the new has come; much more when it is only coming.
+But the true virtue of human beings is fitness to live together as
+equals; claiming nothing for themselves but what they as freely
+concede to every one else; regarding command of any kind as an
+exceptional necessity, and in all cases a temporary one; and
+preferring, whenever possible, the society of those with whom leading
+and following can be alternate and reciprocal. To these virtues,
+nothing in life as at present constituted gives cultivation by
+exercise. The family is a school of despotism, in which the virtues
+of despotism, but also its vices, are largely nourished. Citizenship,
+in free countries, is partly a school of society in equality; but
+citizenship fills only a small place in modern life, and does not
+come near the daily habits or inmost sentiments. The family, justly
+constituted, would be the real school of the virtues of freedom. It
+is sure to be a sufficient one of everything else. It will always be
+a school of obedience for the children, of command for the parents.
+What is needed is, that it should be a school of sympathy in
+equality, of living together in love, without power on one side or
+obedience on the other. This it ought to be between the parents. It
+would then be an exercise of those virtues which each requires to fit
+them for all other association, and a model to the children of the
+feelings and conduct which their temporary training by means of
+obedience is designed to render habitual, and therefore natural, to
+them. The moral training of mankind will never be adapted to the
+conditions of the life for which all other human progress is a
+preparation, until they practise in the family the same moral rule
+which is adapted to the normal constitution of human society. Any
+sentiment of freedom which can exist in a man whose nearest and
+dearest intimacies are with those of whom he is absolute master, is
+not the genuine or Christian love of freedom, but, what the love of
+freedom generally was in the ancients and in the middle ages--an
+intense feeling of the dignity and importance of his own personality;
+making him disdain a yoke for himself, of which he has no abhorrence
+whatever in the abstract, but which he is abundantly ready to impose
+on others for his own interest or glorification.
+
+I readily admit (and it is the very foundation of my hopes) that
+numbers of married people even under the present law, (in the higher
+classes of England probably a great majority,) live in the spirit of
+a just law of equality. Laws never would be improved, if there were
+not numerous persons whose moral sentiments are better than the
+existing laws. Such persons ought to support the principles here
+advocated; of which the only object is to make all other married
+couples similar to what these are now. But persons even of
+considerable moral worth, unless they are also thinkers, are very
+ready to believe that laws or practices, the evils of which they have
+not personally experienced, do not produce any evils, but (if seeming
+to be generally approved of) probably do good, and that it is wrong
+to object to them. It would, however, be a great mistake in such
+married people to suppose, because the legal conditions of the tie
+which unites them do not occur to their thoughts once in a
+twelvemonth, and because they live and feel in all respects as if
+they were legally equals, that the same is the case with all other
+married couples, wherever the husband is not a notorious ruffian. To
+suppose this, would be to show equal ignorance of human nature and of
+fact. The less fit a man is for the possession of power--the less
+likely to be allowed to exercise it over any person with that
+person's voluntary consent--the more does he hug himself in the
+consciousness of the power the law gives him, exact its legal rights
+to the utmost point which custom (the custom of men like himself)
+will tolerate, and take pleasure in using the power, merely to
+enliven the agreeable sense of possessing it. What is more; in the
+most naturally brutal and morally uneducated part of the lower
+classes, the legal slavery of the woman, and something in the merely
+physical subjection to their will as an instrument, causes them to
+feel a sort of disrespect and contempt towards their own wife which
+they do not feel towards any other woman, or any other human being,
+with whom they come in contact; and which makes her seem to them an
+appropriate subject for any kind of indignity. Let an acute observer
+of the signs of feeling, who has the requisite opportunities, judge
+for himself whether this is not the case: and if he finds that it is,
+let him not wonder at any amount of disgust and indignation that can
+be felt against institutions which lead naturally to this depraved
+state of the human mind.
+
+We shall be told, perhaps, that religion imposes the duty of
+obedience; as every established fact which is too bad to admit of any
+other defence, is always presented to us as an injunction of
+religion. The Church, it is very true, enjoins it in her formularies,
+but it would be difficult to derive any such injunction from
+Christianity. We are told that St. Paul said, "Wives, obey your
+husbands:" but he also said, "Slaves, obey your masters." It was not
+St. Paul's business, nor was it consistent with his object, the
+propagation of Christianity, to incite any one to rebellion against
+existing laws. The apostle's acceptance of all social institutions as
+he found them, is no more to be construed as a disapproval of
+attempts to improve them at the proper time, than his declaration,
+"The powers that be are ordained of God," gives his sanction to
+military despotism, and to that alone, as the Christian form of
+political government, or commands passive obedience to it. To pretend
+that Christianity was intended to stereotype existing forms of
+government and society, and protect them against change, is to reduce
+it to the level of Islamism or of Brahminism. It is precisely because
+Christianity has not done this, that it has been the religion of the
+progressive portion of mankind, and Islamism, Brahminism, &c., have
+been those of the stationary portions; or rather (for there is no
+such thing as a really stationary society) of the declining portions.
+There have been abundance of people, in all ages of Christianity, who
+tried to make it something of the same kind; to convert us into a
+sort of Christian Mussulmans, with the Bible for a Koran, prohibiting
+all improvement: and great has been their power, and many have had to
+sacrifice their lives in resisting them. But they have been resisted,
+and the resistance has made us what we are, and will yet make us what
+we are to be.
+
+After what has been said respecting the obligation of obedience, it
+is almost superfluous to say anything concerning the more special
+point included in the general one--a woman's right to her own
+property; for I need not hope that this treatise can make any
+impression upon those who need anything to convince them that a
+woman's inheritance or gains ought to be as much her own after
+marriage as before. The rule is simple: whatever would be the
+husband's or wife's if they were not married, should be under their
+exclusive control during marriage; which need not interfere with the
+power to tie up property by settlement, in order to preserve it for
+children. Some people are sentimentally shocked at the idea of a
+separate interest in money matters, as inconsistent with the ideal
+fusion of two lives into one. For my own part, I am one of the
+strongest supporters of community of goods, when resulting from an
+entire unity of feeling in the owners, which makes all things common
+between them. But I have no relish for a community of goods resting
+on the doctrine, that what is mine is yours but what is yours is not
+mine; and I should prefer to decline entering into such a compact
+with any one, though I were myself the person to profit by it.
+
+This particular injustice and oppression to women, which is, to
+common apprehensions, more obvious than all the rest, admits of
+remedy without interfering with any other mischiefs: and there can be
+little doubt that it will be one of the earliest remedied. Already,
+in many of the new and several of the old States of the American
+Confederation, provisions have been inserted even in the written
+Constitutions, securing to women equality of rights in this respect:
+and thereby improving materially the position, in the marriage
+relation, of those women at least who have property, by leaving them
+one instrument of power which they have not signed away; and
+preventing also the scandalous abuse of the marriage institution,
+which is perpetrated when a man entraps a girl into marrying him
+without a settlement, for the sole purpose of getting possession of
+her money. When the support of the family depends, not on property,
+but on earnings, the common arrangement, by which the man earns the
+income and the wife superintends the domestic expenditure, seems to
+me in general the most suitable division of labour between the two
+persons. If, in addition to the physical suffering of bearing
+children, and the whole responsibility of their care and education in
+early years, the wife undertakes the careful and economical
+application of the husband's earnings to the general comfort of the
+family; she takes not only her fair share, but usually the larger
+share, of the bodily and mental exertion required by their joint
+existence. If she undertakes any additional portion, it seldom
+relieves her from this, but only prevents her from performing it
+properly. The care which she is herself disabled from taking of the
+children and the household, nobody else takes; those of the children
+who do not die, grow up as they best can, and the management of the
+household is likely to be so bad, as even in point of economy to be a
+great drawback from the value of the wife's earnings. In an otherwise
+just state of things, it is not, therefore, I think, a desirable
+custom, that the wife should contribute by her labour to the income
+of the family. In an unjust state of things, her doing so may be
+useful to her, by making her of more value in the eyes of the man who
+is legally her master; but, on the other hand, it enables him still
+farther to abuse his power, by forcing her to work, and leaving the
+support of the family to her exertions, while he spends most of his
+time in drinking and idleness. The _power_ of earning is essential to
+the dignity of a woman, if she has not independent property. But if
+marriage were an equal contract, not implying the obligation of
+obedience; if the connexion were no longer enforced to the oppression
+of those to whom it is purely a mischief, but a separation, on just
+terms (I do not now speak of a divorce), could be obtained by any
+woman who was morally entitled to it; and if she would then find all
+honourable employments as freely open to her as to men; it would not
+be necessary for her protection, that during marriage she should make
+this particular use of her faculties. Like a man when he chooses a
+profession, so, when a woman marries, it may in general be understood
+that she makes choice of the management of a household, and the
+bringing up of a family, as the first call upon her exertions, during
+as many years of her life as may be required for the purpose; and
+that she renounces, not all other objects and occupations, but all
+which are not consistent with the requirements of this. The actual
+exercise, in a habitual or systematic manner, of outdoor occupations,
+or such as cannot be carried on at home, would by this principle be
+practically interdicted to the greater number of married women. But
+the utmost latitude ought to exist for the adaptation of general
+rules to individual suitabilities; and there ought to be nothing to
+prevent faculties exceptionally adapted to any other pursuit, from
+obeying their vocation notwithstanding marriage: due provision being
+made for supplying otherwise any falling-short which might become
+inevitable, in her full performance of the ordinary functions of
+mistress of a family. These things, if once opinion were rightly
+directed on the subject, might with perfect safety be left to be
+regulated by opinion, without any interference of law.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+
+On the other point which is involved in the just equality of women,
+their admissibility to all the functions and occupations hitherto
+retained as the monopoly of the stronger sex, I should anticipate no
+difficulty in convincing any one who has gone with me on the subject
+of the equality of women in the family. I believe that their
+disabilities elsewhere are only clung to in order to maintain their
+subordination in domestic life; because the generality of the male
+sex cannot yet tolerate the idea of living with an equal. Were it not
+for that, I think that almost every one, in the existing state of
+opinion in politics and political economy, would admit the injustice
+of excluding half the human race from the greater number of lucrative
+occupations, and from almost all high social functions; ordaining
+from their birth either that they are not, and cannot by any
+possibility become, fit for employments which are legally open to the
+stupidest and basest of the other sex, or else that however fit they
+may be, those employments shall be interdicted to them, in order to
+be preserved for the exclusive benefit of males. In the last two
+centuries, when (which was seldom the case) any reason beyond the
+mere existence of the fact was thought to be required to justify the
+disabilities of women, people seldom assigned as a reason their
+inferior mental capacity; which, in times when there was a real trial
+of personal faculties (from which all women were not excluded) in the
+struggles of public life, no one really believed in. The reason given
+in those days was not women's unfitness, but the interest of society,
+by which was meant the interest of men: just as the _raison d'etat_,
+meaning the convenience of the government, and the support of
+existing authority, was deemed a sufficient explanation and excuse
+for the most flagitious crimes. In the present day, power holds a
+smoother language, and whomsoever it oppresses, always pretends to do
+so for their own good: accordingly, when anything is forbidden to
+women, it is thought necessary to say, and desirable to believe, that
+they are incapable of doing it, and that they depart from their real
+path of success and happiness when they aspire to it. But to make
+this reason plausible (I do not say valid), those by whom it is urged
+must be prepared to carry it to a much greater length than any one
+ventures to do in the face of present experience. It is not
+sufficient to maintain that women on the average are less gifted than
+men on the average, with certain of the higher mental faculties, or
+that a smaller number of women than of men are fit for occupations
+and functions of the highest intellectual character. It is necessary
+to maintain that no women at all are fit for them, and that the most
+eminent women are inferior in mental faculties to the most mediocre
+of the men on whom those functions at present devolve. For if the
+performance of the function is decided either by competition, or by
+any mode of choice which secures regard to the public interest, there
+needs be no apprehension that any important employments will fall
+into the hands of women inferior to average men, or to the average of
+their male competitors. The only result would be that there would be
+fewer women than men in such employments; a result certain to happen
+in any ease, if only from the preference always likely to be felt by
+the majority of women for the one vocation in which there is nobody
+to compete with them. Now, the most determined depreciator of women
+will not venture to deny, that when we add the experience of recent
+times to that of ages past, women, and not a few merely, but many
+women, have proved themselves capable of everything, perhaps without
+a single exception, which is done by men, and of doing it
+successfully and creditably. The utmost that can be said is, that
+there are many things which none of them have succeeded in doing as
+well as they have been done by some men--many in which they have not
+reached the very highest rank. But there are extremely few, dependent
+only on mental faculties, in which they have not attained the rank
+next to the highest. Is not this enough, and much more than enough,
+to make it a tyranny to them, and a detriment to society, that they
+should not be allowed to compete with men for the exercise of these
+functions? Is it not a mere truism to say, that such functions are
+often filled by men far less fit for them than numbers of women, and
+who would be beaten by women in any fair field of competition? What
+difference does it make that there may be men somewhere, fully
+employed about other things, who may be still better qualified for
+the things in question than these women? Does not this take place in
+all competitions? Is there so great a superfluity of men fit for high
+duties, that society can afford to reject the service of any
+competent person? Are we so certain of always finding a man made to
+our hands for any duty or function of social importance which falls
+vacant, that we lose nothing by putting a ban upon one-half of
+mankind, and refusing beforehand to make their faculties available,
+however distinguished they may be? And even if we could do without
+them, would it be consistent with justice to refuse to them their
+fair share of honour and distinction, or to deny to them the equal
+moral right of all human beings to choose their occupation (short of
+injury to others) according to their own preferences, at their own
+risk? Nor is the injustice confined to them: it is shared by those
+who are in a position to benefit by their services. To ordain that
+any kind of persons shall not be physicians, or shall not be
+advocates, or shall not be members of parliament, is to injure not
+them only, but all who employ physicians or advocates, or elect
+members of parliament, and who are deprived of the stimulating effect
+of greater competition on the exertions of the competitors, as well
+as restricted to a narrower range of individual choice.
+
+It will perhaps be sufficient if I confine myself, in the details of
+my argument, to functions of a public nature: since, if I am
+successful as to those, it probably will be readily granted that
+women should be admissible to all other occupations to which it is at
+all material whether they are admitted or not. And here let me begin
+by marking out one function, broadly distinguished from all others,
+their right to which is entirely independent of any question which
+can be raised concerning their faculties. I mean the suffrage, both
+parliamentary and municipal. The right to share in the choice of
+those who are to exercise a public trust, is altogether a distinct
+thing from that of competing for the trust itself. If no one could
+vote for a member of parliament who was not fit to be a candidate,
+the government would be a narrow oligarchy indeed. To have a voice in
+choosing those by whom one is to be governed, is a means of
+self-protection due to every one, though he were to remain for ever
+excluded from the function of governing: and that women are
+considered fit to have such a choice, may be presumed from the fact,
+that the law already gives it to women in the most important of all
+cases to themselves: for the choice of the man who is to govern a
+woman to the end of life, is always supposed to be voluntarily made
+by herself. In the case of election to public trusts, it is the
+business of constitutional law to surround the right of suffrage with
+all needful securities and limitations; but whatever securities are
+sufficient in the case of the male sex, no others need be required in
+the case of women. Under whatever conditions, and within whatever
+limits, men are admitted to the suffrage, there is not a shadow of
+justification for not admitting women under the same. The majority of
+the women of any class are not likely to differ in political opinion
+from the majority of the men of the same class, unless the question
+be one in which the interests of women, as such, are in some way
+involved; and if they are so, women require the suffrage, as their
+guarantee of just and equal consideration. This ought to be obvious
+even to those who coincide in no other of the doctrines for which I
+contend. Even if every woman were a wife, and if every wife ought to
+be a slave, all the more would these slaves stand in need of legal
+protection: and we know what legal protection the slaves have, where
+the laws are made by their masters.
+
+With regard to the fitness of women, not only to participate in
+elections, but themselves to hold offices or practise professions
+involving important public responsibilities; I have already observed
+that this consideration is not essential to the practical question in
+dispute: since any woman, who succeeds in an open profession, proves
+by that very fact that she is qualified for it. And in the case of
+public offices, if the political system of the country is such as to
+exclude unfit men, it will equally exclude unfit women: while if it
+is not, there is no additional evil in the fact that the unfit
+persons whom it admits may be either women or men. As long therefore
+as it is acknowledged that even a few women may be fit for these
+duties, the laws which shut the door on those exceptions cannot be
+justified by any opinion which can be held respecting the capacities
+of women in general. But, though this last consideration is not
+essential, it is far from being irrelevant. An unprejudiced view of
+it gives additional strength to the arguments against the
+disabilities of women, and reinforces them by high considerations of
+practical utility.
+
+Let us at first make entire abstraction of all psychological
+considerations tending to show, that any of the mental differences
+supposed to exist between women and men are but the natural effect of
+the differences in their education and circumstances, and indicate no
+radical difference, far less radical inferiority, of nature. Let us
+consider women only as they already are, or as they are known to have
+been; and the capacities which they have already practically shown.
+What they have done, that at least, if nothing else, it is proved
+that they can do. When we consider how sedulously they are all
+trained away from, instead of being trained towards, any of the
+occupations or objects reserved for men, it is evident that I am
+taking a very humble ground for them, when I rest their case on what
+they have actually achieved. For, in this case, negative evidence is
+worth little, while any positive evidence is conclusive. It cannot be
+inferred to be impossible that a woman should be a Homer, or an
+Aristotle, or a Michael Angelo, or a Beethoven, because no woman has
+yet actually produced works comparable to theirs in any of those
+lines of excellence. This negative fact at most leaves the question
+uncertain, and open to psychological discussion. But it is quite
+certain that a woman can be a Queen Elizabeth, or a Deborah, or a
+Joan of Arc, since this is not inference, but fact. Now it is a
+curious consideration, that the only things which the existing law
+excludes women from doing, are the things which they have proved that
+they are able to do. There is no law to prevent a woman from having
+written all the plays of Shakspeare, or composed all the operas of
+Mozart. But Queen Elizabeth or Queen Victoria, had they not inherited
+the throne, could not have been intrusted with the smallest of the
+political duties, of which the former showed herself equal to the
+greatest.
+
+If anything conclusive could be inferred from experience, without
+psychological analysis, it would be that the things which women are
+not allowed to do are the very ones for which they are peculiarly
+qualified; since their vocation for government has made its way, and
+become conspicuous, through the very few opportunities which have
+been given; while in the lines of distinction which apparently were
+freely open to them, they have by no means so eminently distinguished
+themselves. We know how small a number of reigning queens history
+presents, in comparison with that of kings. Of this smaller number a
+far larger proportion have shown talents for rule; though many of
+them have occupied the throne in difficult periods. It is remarkable,
+too, that they have, in a great number of instances, been
+distinguished by merits the most opposite to the imaginary and
+conventional character of women: they have been as much remarked for
+the firmness and vigour of their rule, as for its intelligence. When,
+to queens and empresses, we add regents, and viceroys of provinces,
+the list of women who have been eminent rulers of mankind swells to a
+great length.[1] This fact is so undeniable, that some one, long ago,
+tried to retort the argument, and turned the admitted truth into an
+additional insult, by saying that queens are better than kings,
+because under kings women govern, but under queens, men.
+
+It may seem a waste of reasoning to argue against a bad joke; but
+such things do affect people's minds; and I have heard men quote this
+saying, with an air as if they thought that there was something in
+it. At any rate, it will serve as well as anything else for a
+starting point in discussion. I say, then, that it is not true that
+under kings, women govern. Such cases are entirely exceptional: and
+weak kings have quite as often governed ill through the influence of
+male favourites, as of female. When a king is governed by a woman
+merely through his amatory propensities, good government is not
+probable, though even then there are exceptions. But French history
+counts two kings who have voluntarily given the direction of affairs
+during many years, the one to his mother, the other to his sister:
+one of them, Charles VIII., was a mere boy, but in doing so he
+followed the intentions of his father Louis XI., the ablest monarch
+of his age. The other, Saint Louis, was the best, and one of the most
+vigorous rulers, since the time of Charlemagne. Both these princesses
+ruled in a manner hardly equalled by any prince among their
+contemporaries. The emperor Charles the Fifth, the most politic
+prince of his time, who had as great a number of able men in his
+service as a ruler ever had, and was one of the least likely of all
+sovereigns to sacrifice his interest to personal feelings, made two
+princesses of his family successively Governors of the Netherlands,
+and kept one or other of them in that post during his whole life,
+(they were afterwards succeeded by a third). Both ruled very
+successfully, and one of them, Margaret of Austria, was one of the
+ablest politicians of the age. So much for one side of the question.
+Now as to the other. When it is said that under queens men govern, is
+the same meaning to be understood as when kings are said to be
+governed by women? Is it meant that queens choose as their
+instruments of government, the associates of their personal
+pleasures? The case is rare even with those who are as unscrupulous
+on the latter point as Catherine II.: and it is not in these cases
+that the good government, alleged to arise from male influence, is to
+be found. If it be true, then, that the administration is in the
+hands of better men under a queen than under an average king, it must
+be that queens have a superior capacity for choosing them; and women
+must be better qualified than men both for the position of sovereign,
+and for that of chief minister; for the principal business of a prime
+minister is not to govern in person, but to find the fittest persons
+to conduct every department of public affairs. The more rapid insight
+into character, which is one of the admitted points of superiority in
+women over men, must certainly make them, with anything like parity
+of qualifications in other respects, more apt than men in that choice
+of instruments, which is nearly the most important business of every
+one who has to do with governing mankind. Even the unprincipled
+Catherine de' Medici could feel the value of a Chancellor de
+l'Hopital. But it is also true that most great queens have been great
+by their own talents for government, and have been well served
+precisely for that reason. They retained the supreme direction of
+affairs in their own hands: and if they listened to good advisers,
+they gave by that fact the strongest proof that their judgment fitted
+them for dealing with the great questions of government.
+
+Is it reasonable to think that those who are fit for the greater
+functions of politics, are incapable of qualifying themselves for the
+less? Is there any reason in the nature of things, that the wives and
+sisters of princes should, whenever called on, be found as competent
+as the princes themselves to _their_ business, but that the wives and
+sisters of statesmen, and administrators, and directors of companies,
+and managers of public institutions, should be unable to do what is
+done by their brothers and husbands? The real reason is plain enough;
+it is that princesses, being more raised above the generality of men
+by their rank than placed below them by their sex, have never been
+taught that it was improper for them to concern themselves with
+politics; but have been allowed to feel the liberal interest natural
+to any cultivated human being, in the great transactions which took
+place around them, and in which they might be called on to take a
+part. The ladies of reigning families are the only women who are
+allowed the same range of interests and freedom of development as
+men; and it is precisely in their case that there is not found to be
+any inferiority. Exactly where and in proportion as women's
+capacities for government have been tried, in that proportion have
+they been found adequate.
+
+This fact is in accordance with the best general conclusions which
+the world's imperfect experience seems as yet to suggest, concerning
+the peculiar tendencies and aptitudes characteristic of women, as
+women have hitherto been. I do not say, as they will continue to be;
+for, as I have already said more than once, I consider it presumption
+in any one to pretend to decide what women are or are not, can or
+cannot be, by natural constitution. They have always hitherto been
+kept, as far as regards spontaneous development, in so unnatural a
+state, that their nature cannot but have been greatly distorted and
+disguised; and no one can safely pronounce that if women's nature
+were left to choose its direction as freely as men's, and if no
+artificial bent were attempted to be given to it except that required
+by the conditions of human society, and given to both sexes alike,
+there would be any material difference, or perhaps any difference at
+all, in the character and capacities which would unfold themselves. I
+shall presently show, that even the least contestable of the
+differences which now exist, are such as may very well have been
+produced merely by circumstances, without any difference of natural
+capacity. But, looking at women as they are known in experience, it
+may be said of them, with more truth than belongs to most other
+generalizations on the subject, that the general bent of their
+talents is towards the practical. This statement is conformable to
+all the public history of women, in the present and the past. It is
+no less borne out by common and daily experience. Let us consider the
+special nature of the mental capacities most characteristic of a
+woman of talent. They are all of a kind which fits them for practice,
+and makes them tend towards it. What is meant by a woman's capacity
+of intuitive perception? It means, a rapid and correct insight into
+present fact. It has nothing to do with general principles. Nobody
+ever perceived a scientific law of nature by intuition, nor arrived
+at a general rule of duty or prudence by it. These are results of
+slow and careful collection and comparison of experience; and neither
+the men nor the women of intuition usually shine in this department,
+unless, indeed, the experience necessary is such as they can acquire
+by themselves. For what is called their intuitive sagacity makes them
+peculiarly apt in gathering such general truths as can be collected
+from their individual means of observation. When, consequently, they
+chance to be as well provided as men are with the results of other
+people's experience, by reading and education, (I use the word chance
+advisedly, for, in respect to the knowledge that tends to fit them
+for the greater concerns of life, the only educated women are the
+self-educated) they are better furnished than men in general with the
+essential requisites of skilful and successful practice. Men who have
+been much taught, are apt to be deficient in the sense of present
+fact; they do not see, in the facts which they are called upon to
+deal with, what is really there, but what they have been taught to
+expect. This is seldom the case with women of any ability. Their
+capacity of "intuition" preserves them from it. With equality of
+experience and of general faculties, a woman usually sees much more
+than a man of what is immediately before her. Now this sensibility to
+the present, is the main quality on which the capacity for practice,
+as distinguished from theory, depends. To discover general
+principles, belongs to the speculative faculty: to discern and
+discriminate the particular cases in which they are and are not
+applicable, constitutes practical talent: and for this, women as they
+now are have a peculiar aptitude. I admit that there can be no good
+practice without principles, and that the predominant place which
+quickness of observation holds among a woman's faculties, makes her
+particularly apt to build over-hasty generalizations upon her own
+observation; though at the same time no less ready in rectifying
+those generalizations, as her observation takes a wider range. But
+the corrective to this defect, is access to the experience of the
+human race; general knowledge--exactly the thing which education can
+best supply. A woman's mistakes are specifically those of a clever
+self-educated man, who often sees what men trained in routine do not
+see, but falls into errors for want of knowing things which have long
+been known. Of course he has acquired much of the pre-existing
+knowledge, or he could not have got on at all; but what he knows of
+it he has picked up in fragments and at random, as women do.
+
+But this gravitation of women's minds to the present, to the real, to
+actual fact, while in its exclusiveness it is a source of errors, is
+also a most useful counteractive of the contrary error. The principal
+and most characteristic aberration of speculative minds as such,
+consists precisely in the deficiency of this lively perception and
+ever-present sense of objective fact. For want of this, they often
+not only overlook the contradiction which outward facts oppose to
+their theories, but lose sight of the legitimate purpose of
+speculation altogether, and let their speculative faculties go astray
+into regions not peopled with real beings, animate or inanimate, even
+idealized, but with personified shadows created by the illusions of
+metaphysics or by the mere entanglement of words, and think these
+shadows the proper objects of the highest, the most transcendant,
+philosophy. Hardly anything can be of greater value to a man of
+theory and speculation who employs himself not in collecting
+materials of knowledge by observation, but in working them up by
+processes of thought into comprehensive truths of science and laws of
+conduct, than to carry on his speculations in the companionship, and
+under the criticism, of a really superior woman. There is nothing
+comparable to it for keeping his thoughts within the limits of real
+things, and the actual facts of nature. A woman seldom runs wild
+after an abstraction. The habitual direction of her mind to dealing
+with things as individuals rather than in groups, and (what is
+closely connected with it) her more lively interest in the present
+feelings of persons, which makes her consider first of all, in
+anything which claims to be applied to practice, in what manner
+persons will be affected by it--these two things make her extremely
+unlikely to put faith in any speculation which loses sight of
+individuals, and deals with things as if they existed for the benefit
+of some imaginary entity, some mere creation of the mind, not
+resolvable into the feelings of living beings. Women's thoughts are
+thus as useful in giving reality to those of thinking men, as men's
+thoughts in giving width and largeness to those of women. In depth,
+as distinguished from breadth, I greatly doubt if even now, women,
+compared with men, are at any disadvantage.
+
+If the existing mental characteristics of women are thus valuable
+even in aid of speculation, they are still more important, when
+speculation has done its work, for carrying out the results of
+speculation into practice. For the reasons already given, women are
+comparatively unlikely to fall into the common error of men, that of
+sticking to their rules in a case whose specialities either take it
+out of the class to which the rules are applicable, or require a
+special adaptation of them. Let us now consider another of the
+admitted superiorities of clever women, greater quickness of
+apprehension. Is not this pre-eminently a quality which fits a person
+for practice? In action, everything continually depends upon deciding
+promptly. In speculation, nothing does. A mere thinker can wait, can
+take time to consider, can collect additional evidence; he is not
+obliged to complete his philosophy at once, lest the opportunity
+should go by. The power of drawing the best conclusion possible from
+insufficient data is not indeed useless in philosophy; the
+construction of a provisional hypothesis consistent with all known
+facts is often the needful basis for further inquiry. But this
+faculty is rather serviceable in philosophy, than the main
+qualification for it: and, for the auxiliary as well as for the main
+operation, the philosopher can allow himself any time he pleases. He
+is in no need of the capacity of doing rapidly what he does; what he
+rather needs is patience, to work on slowly until imperfect lights
+have become perfect, and a conjecture has ripened into a theorem. For
+those, on the contrary, whose business is with the fugitive and
+perishable--with individual facts, not kinds of facts--rapidity of
+thought is a qualification next only in importance to the power of
+thought itself. He who has not his faculties under immediate command,
+in the contingencies of action, might as well not have them at all.
+He may be fit to criticize, but he is not fit to act. Now it is in
+this that women, and the men who are most like women, confessedly
+excel. The other sort of man, however pre-eminent may be his
+faculties, arrives slowly at complete command of them: rapidity of
+judgment and promptitude of judicious action, even in the things he
+knows best, are the gradual and late result of strenuous effort grown
+into habit.
+
+It will be said, perhaps, that the greater nervous susceptibility of
+women is a disqualification for practice, in anything but domestic
+life, by rendering them mobile, changeable, too vehemently under the
+influence of the moment, incapable of dogged perseverance, unequal
+and uncertain in the power of using their faculties. I think that
+these phrases sum up the greater part of the objections commonly made
+to the fitness of women for the higher class of serious business.
+Much of all this is the mere overflow of nervous energy run to waste,
+and would cease when the energy was directed to a definite end. Much
+is also the result of conscious or unconscious cultivation; as we see
+by the almost total disappearance of "hysterics" and fainting fits,
+since they have gone out of fashion. Moreover, when people are
+brought up, like many women of the higher classes (though less so in
+our own country than in any other) a kind of hot-house plants,
+shielded from the wholesome vicissitudes of air and temperature, and
+untrained in any of the occupations and exercises which give stimulus
+and development to the circulatory and muscular system, while their
+nervous system, especially in its emotional department, is kept in
+unnaturally active play; it is no wonder if those of them who do not
+die of consumption, grow up with constitutions liable to derangement
+from slight causes, both internal and external, and without stamina
+to support any task, physical or mental, requiring continuity of
+effort. But women brought up to work for their livelihood show none
+of these morbid characteristics, unless indeed they are chained to an
+excess of sedentary work in confined and unhealthy rooms. Women who
+in their early years have shared in the healthful physical education
+and bodily freedom of their brothers, and who obtain a sufficiency of
+pure air and exercise in after-life, very rarely have any excessive
+susceptibility of nerves which can disqualify them for active
+pursuits. There is indeed a certain proportion of persons, in both
+sexes, in whom an unusual degree of nervous sensibility is
+constitutional, and of so marked a character as to be the feature of
+their organization which exercises the greatest influence over the
+whole character of the vital phenomena. This constitution, like other
+physical conformations, is hereditary, and is transmitted to sons as
+well as daughters; but it is possible, and probable, that the nervous
+temperament (as it is called) is inherited by a greater number of
+women than of men. We will assume this as a fact: and let me then
+ask, are men of nervous temperament found to be unfit for the duties
+and pursuits usually followed by men? If not, why should women of the
+same temperament be unfit for them? The peculiarities of the
+temperament are, no doubt, within certain limits, an obstacle to
+success in some employments, though an aid to it in others. But when
+the occupation is suitable to the temperament, and sometimes even
+when it is unsuitable, the most brilliant examples of success are
+continually given by the men of high nervous sensibility. They are
+distinguished in their practical manifestations chiefly by this, that
+being susceptible of a higher degree of excitement than those of
+another physical constitution, their powers when excited differ more
+than in the case of other people, from those shown in their ordinary
+state: they are raised, as it were, above themselves, and do things
+with ease which they are wholly incapable of at other times. But this
+lofty excitement is not, except in weak bodily constitutions, a mere
+flash, which passes away immediately, leaving no permanent traces,
+and incompatible with persistent and steady pursuit of an object. It
+is the character of the nervous temperament to be capable of
+_sustained_ excitement, holding out through long continued efforts.
+It is what is meant by _spirit_. It is what makes the high-bred
+racehorse run without slackening speed till he drops down dead. It is
+what has enabled so many delicate women to maintain the most sublime
+constancy not only at the stake, but through a long preliminary
+succession of mental and bodily tortures. It is evident that people
+of this temperament are particularly apt for what may be called the
+executive department of the leadership of mankind. They are the
+material of great orators, great preachers, impressive diffusers of
+moral influences. Their constitution might be deemed less favourable
+to the qualities required from a statesman in the cabinet, or from a
+judge. It would be so, if the consequence necessarily followed that
+because people are excitable they must always be in a state of
+excitement. But this is wholly a question of training. Strong feeling
+is the instrument and element of strong self-control: but it requires
+to be cultivated in that direction. When it is, it forms not the
+heroes of impulse only, but those also of self-conquest. History and
+experience prove that the most passionate characters are the most
+fanatically rigid in their feelings of duty, when their passion has
+been trained to act in that direction. The judge who gives a just
+decision in a case where his feelings are intensely interested on the
+other side, derives from that same strength of feeling the determined
+sense of the obligation of justice, which enables him to achieve this
+victory over himself. The capability of that lofty enthusiasm which
+takes the human being out of his every-day character, reacts upon the
+daily character itself. His aspirations and powers when he is in this
+exceptional state, become the type with which he compares, and by
+which he estimates, his sentiments and proceedings at other times:
+and his habitual purposes assume a character moulded by and
+assimilated to the moments of lofty excitement, although those, from
+the physical nature of a human being, can only be transient.
+Experience of races, as well as of individuals, does not show those
+of excitable temperament to be less fit, on the average, either for
+speculation or practice, than the more unexcitable. The French, and
+the Italians, are undoubtedly by nature more nervously excitable than
+the Teutonic races, and, compared at least with the English, they
+have a much greater habitual and daily emotional life: but have they
+been less great in science, in public business, in legal and judicial
+eminence, or in war? There is abundant evidence that the Greeks were
+of old, as their descendants and successors still are, one of the
+most excitable of the races of mankind. It is superfluous to ask,
+what among the achievements of men they did not excel in. The Romans,
+probably, as an equally southern people, had the same original
+temperament: but the stern character of their national discipline,
+like that of the Spartans, made them an example of the opposite type
+of national character; the greater strength of their natural feelings
+being chiefly apparent in the intensity which the same original
+temperament made it possible to give to the artificial. If these
+cases exemplify what a naturally excitable people may be made, the
+Irish Celts afford one of the aptest examples of what they are when
+left to themselves; (if those can be said to be left to themselves
+who have been for centuries under the indirect influence of bad
+government, and the direct training of a Catholic hierarchy and of a
+sincere belief in the Catholic religion.) The Irish character must be
+considered, therefore, as an unfavourable case: yet, whenever the
+circumstances of the individual have been at all favourable, what
+people have shown greater capacity for the most varied and
+multifarious individual eminence? Like the French compared with the
+English, the Irish with the Swiss, the Greeks or Italians compared
+with the German races, so women compared with men may be found, on
+the average, to do the same things with some variety in the
+particular kind of excellence. But, that they would do them fully as
+well on the whole, if their education and cultivation were adapted to
+correcting instead of aggravating the infirmities incident to their
+temperament, I see not the smallest reason to doubt.
+
+Supposing it, however, to be true that women's minds are by nature
+more mobile than those of men, less capable of persisting long in the
+same continuous effort, more fitted for dividing their faculties
+among many things than for travelling in any one path to the highest
+point which can be reached by it: this may be true of women as they
+now are (though not without great and numerous exceptions), and may
+account for their having remained behind the highest order of men in
+precisely the things in which this absorption of the whole mind in
+one set of ideas and occupations may seem to be most requisite.
+Still, this difference is one which can only affect the kind of
+excellence, not the excellence itself, or its practical worth: and it
+remains to be shown whether this exclusive working of a part of the
+mind, this absorption of the whole thinking faculty in a single
+subject, and concentration of it on a single work, is the normal and
+healthful condition of the human faculties, even for speculative
+uses. I believe that what is gained in special development by this
+concentration, is lost in the capacity of the mind for the other
+purposes of life; and even in abstract thought, it is my decided
+opinion that the mind does more by frequently returning to a
+difficult problem, than by sticking to it without interruption. For
+the purposes, at all events, of practice, from its highest to its
+humblest departments, the capacity of passing promptly from one
+subject of consideration to another, without letting the active
+spring of the intellect run down between the two, is a power far more
+valuable; and this power women pre-eminently possess, by virtue of
+the very mobility of which they are accused. They perhaps have it
+from nature, but they certainly have it by training and education;
+for nearly the whole of the occupations of women consist in the
+management of small but multitudinous details, on each of which the
+mind cannot dwell even for a minute, but must pass on to other
+things, and if anything requires longer thought, must steal time at
+odd moments for thinking of it. The capacity indeed which women show
+for doing their thinking in circumstances and at times which almost
+any man would make an excuse to himself for not attempting it, has
+often been noticed: and a woman's mind, though it may be occupied
+only with small things, can hardly ever permit itself to be vacant,
+as a man's so often is when not engaged in what he chooses to
+consider the business of his life. The business of a woman's ordinary
+life is things in general, and can as little cease to go on as the
+world to go round.
+
+But (it is said) there is anatomical evidence of the superior mental
+capacity of men compared with women: they have a larger brain. I
+reply, that in the first place the fact itself is doubtful. It is by
+no means established that the brain of a woman is smaller than that
+of a man. If it is inferred merely because a woman's bodily frame
+generally is of less dimensions than a man's, this criterion would
+lead to strange consequences. A tall and large-boned man must on this
+showing be wonderfully superior in intelligence to a small man, and
+an elephant or a whale must prodigiously excel mankind. The size of
+the brain in human beings, anatomists say, varies much less than the
+size of the body, or even of the head, and the one cannot be at all
+inferred from the other. It is certain that some women have as large
+a brain as any man. It is within my knowledge that a man who had
+weighed many human brains, said that the heaviest he knew of, heavier
+even than Cuvier's (the heaviest previously recorded,) was that of a
+woman. Next, I must observe that the precise relation which exists
+between the brain and the intellectual powers is not yet well
+understood, but is a subject of great dispute. That there is a very
+close relation we cannot doubt. The brain is certainly the material
+organ of thought and feeling: and (making abstraction of the great
+unsettled controversy respecting the appropriation of different parts
+of the brain to different mental faculties) I admit that it would be
+an anomaly, and an exception to all we know of the general laws of
+life and organization, if the size of the organ were wholly
+indifferent to the function; if no accession of power were derived
+from the greater magnitude of the instrument. But the exception and
+the anomaly would be fully as great if the organ exercised influence
+by its magnitude _only_. In all the more delicate operations of
+nature--of which those of the animated creation are the most
+delicate, and those of the nervous system by far the most delicate of
+these--differences in the effect depend as much on differences of
+quality in the physical agents, as on their quantity: and if the
+quality of an instrument is to be tested by the nicety and delicacy
+of the work it can do, the indications point to a greater average
+fineness of quality in the brain and nervous system of women than of
+men. Dismissing abstract difference of quality, a thing difficult to
+verify, the efficiency of an organ is known to depend not solely on
+its size but on its activity: and of this we have an approximate
+measure in the energy with which the blood circulates through it,
+both the stimulus and the reparative force being mainly dependent on
+the circulation. It would not be surprising--it is indeed an
+hypothesis which accords well with the differences actually observed
+between the mental operations of the two sexes--if men on the average
+should have the advantage in the size of the brain, and women in
+activity of cerebral circulation. The results which conjecture,
+founded on analogy, would lead us to expect from this difference of
+organization, would correspond to some of those which we most
+commonly see. In the first place, the mental operations of men might
+be expected to be slower. They would neither be so prompt as women in
+thinking, nor so quick to feel. Large bodies take more time to get
+into full action. On the other hand, when once got thoroughly into
+play, men's brain would bear more work. It would be more persistent
+in the line first taken; it would have more difficulty in changing
+from one mode of action to another, but, in the one thing it was
+doing, it could go on longer without loss of power or sense of
+fatigue. And do we not find that the things in which men most excel
+women are those which require most plodding and long hammering at a
+single thought, while women do best what must be done rapidly? A
+woman's brain is sooner fatigued, sooner exhausted; but given the
+degree of exhaustion, we should expect to find that it would recover
+itself sooner. I repeat that this speculation is entirely
+hypothetical; it pretends to no more than to suggest a line of
+enquiry. I have before repudiated the notion of its being yet
+certainly known that there is any natural difference at all in the
+average strength or direction of the mental capacities of the two
+sexes, much less what that difference is. Nor is it possible that
+this should be known, so long as the psychological laws of the
+formation of character have been so little studied, even in a general
+way, and in the particular case never scientifically applied at all;
+so long as the most obvious external causes of difference of
+character are habitually disregarded--left unnoticed by the observer,
+and looked down upon with a kind of supercilious contempt by the
+prevalent schools both of natural history and of mental philosophy:
+who, whether they look for the source of what mainly distinguishes
+human beings from one another, in the world of matter or in that of
+spirit, agree in running down those who prefer to explain these
+differences by the different relations of human beings to society and
+life.
+
+To so ridiculous an extent are the notions formed of the nature of
+women, mere empirical generalizations, framed, without philosophy or
+analysis, upon the first instances which present themselves, that the
+popular idea of it is different in different countries, according as
+the opinions and social circumstances of the country have given to
+the women living in it any speciality of development or
+non-development. An Oriental thinks that women are by nature
+peculiarly voluptuous; see the violent abuse of them on this ground
+in Hindoo writings. An Englishman usually thinks that they are by
+nature cold. The sayings about women's fickleness are mostly of
+French origin; from the famous distich of Francis the First, upward
+and downward. In England it is a common remark, how much more
+constant women are than men. Inconstancy has been longer reckoned
+discreditable to a woman, in England than in France; and Englishwomen
+are besides, in their inmost nature, much more subdued to opinion. It
+may be remarked by the way, that Englishmen are in peculiarly
+unfavourable circumstances for attempting to judge what is or is not
+natural, not merely to women, but to men, or to human beings
+altogether, at least if they have only English experience to go upon:
+because there is no place where human nature shows so little of its
+original lineaments. Both in a good and a bad sense, the English are
+farther from a state of nature than any other modern people. They
+are, more than any other people, a product of civilization and
+discipline. England is the country in which social discipline has
+most succeeded, not so much in conquering, as in suppressing,
+whatever is liable to conflict with it. The English, more than any
+other people, not only act but feel according to rule. In other
+countries, the taught opinion, or the requirement of society, may be
+the stronger power, but the promptings of the individual nature are
+always visible under it, and often resisting it: rule may be stronger
+than nature, but nature is still there. In England, rule has to a
+great degree substituted itself for nature. The greater part of life
+is carried on, not by following inclination under the control of
+rule, but by having no inclination but that of following a rule. Now
+this has its good side doubtless, though it has also a wretchedly bad
+one; but it must render an Englishman peculiarly ill-qualified to
+pass a judgment on the original tendencies of human nature from his
+own experience. The errors to which observers elsewhere are liable on
+the subject, are of a different character. An Englishman is ignorant
+respecting human nature, a Frenchman is prejudiced. An Englishman's
+errors are negative, a Frenchman's positive. An Englishman fancies
+that things do not exist, because he never sees them; a Frenchman
+thinks they must always and necessarily exist, because he does see
+them. An Englishman does not know nature, because he has had no
+opportunity of observing it; a Frenchman generally knows a great deal
+of it, but often mistakes it, because he has only seen it
+sophisticated and distorted. For the artificial state superinduced by
+society disguises the natural tendencies of the thing which is the
+subject of observation, in two different ways: by extinguishing the
+nature, or by transforming it. In the one case there is but a starved
+residuum of nature remaining to be studied; in the other case there
+is much, but it may have expanded in any direction rather than that
+in which it would spontaneously grow.
+
+I have said that it cannot now be known how much of the existing
+mental differences between men and women is natural, and how much
+artificial; whether there are any natural differences at all; or,
+supposing all artificial causes of difference to be withdrawn, what
+natural character would be revealed. I am not about to attempt what I
+have pronounced impossible: but doubt does not forbid conjecture, and
+where certainty is unattainable, there may yet be the means of
+arriving at some degree of probability. The first point, the origin
+of the differences actually observed, is the one most accessible to
+speculation; and I shall attempt to approach it, by the only path by
+which it can be reached; by tracing the mental consequences of
+external influences. We cannot isolate a human being from the
+circumstances of his condition, so as to ascertain experimentally
+what he would have been by nature; but we can consider what he is,
+and what his circumstances have been, and whether the one would have
+been capable of producing the other.
+
+Let us take, then, the only marked case which observation affords, of
+apparent inferiority of women to men, if we except the merely
+physical one of bodily strength. No production in philosophy,
+science, or art, entitled to the first rank, has been the work of a
+woman. Is there any mode of accounting for this, without supposing
+that women are naturally incapable of producing them?
+
+In the first place, we may fairly question whether experience has
+afforded sufficient grounds for an induction. It is scarcely three
+generations since women, saving very rare exceptions, have begun to
+try their capacity in philosophy, science, or art. It is only in the
+present generation that their attempts have been at all numerous; and
+they are even now extremely few, everywhere but in England and
+France. It is a relevant question, whether a mind possessing the
+requisites of first-rate eminence in speculation or creative art
+could have been expected, on the mere calculation of chances, to turn
+up during that lapse of time, among the women whose tastes and
+personal position admitted of their devoting themselves to these
+pursuits. In all things which there has yet been time for--in all but
+the very highest grades in the scale of excellence, especially in the
+department in which they have been longest engaged, literature (both
+prose and poetry)--women have done quite as much, have obtained fully
+as high prizes and as many of them, as could be expected from the
+length of time and the number of competitors. If we go back to the
+earlier period when very few women made the attempt, yet some of
+those few made it with distinguished success. The Greeks always
+accounted Sappho among their great poets; and we may well suppose
+that Myrtis, said to have been the teacher of Pindar, and Corinna,
+who five times bore away from him the prize of poetry, must at least
+have had sufficient merit to admit of being compared with that great
+name. Aspasia did not leave any philosophical writings; but it is an
+admitted fact that Socrates resorted to her for instruction, and
+avowed himself to have obtained it.
+
+If we consider the works of women in modern times, and contrast them
+with those of men, either in the literary or the artistic department,
+such inferiority as may be observed resolves itself essentially into
+one thing: but that is a most material one; deficiency of
+originality. Not total deficiency; for every production of mind which
+is of any substantive value, has an originality of its own--is a
+conception of the mind itself, not a copy of something else. Thoughts
+original, in the sense of being unborrowed--of being derived from the
+thinker's own observations or intellectual processes--are abundant in
+the writings of women. But they have not yet produced any of those
+great and luminous new ideas which form an era in thought, nor those
+fundamentally new conceptions in art, which open a vista of possible
+effects not before thought of, and found a new school. Their
+compositions are mostly grounded on the existing fund of thought, and
+their creations do not deviate widely from existing types. This is
+the sort of inferiority which their works manifest: for in point of
+execution, in the detailed application of thought, and the perfection
+of style, there is no inferiority. Our best novelists in point of
+composition, and of the management of detail, have mostly been women;
+and there is not in all modern literature a more eloquent vehicle of
+thought than the style of Madame de Stael, nor, as a specimen of
+purely artistic excellence, anything superior to the prose of Madame
+Sand, whose style acts upon the nervous system like a symphony of
+Haydn or Mozart. High originality of conception is, as I have said,
+what is chiefly wanting. And now to examine if there is any manner in
+which this deficiency can be accounted for.
+
+Let us remember, then, so far as regards mere thought, that during
+all that period in the world's existence, and in the progress of
+cultivation, in which great and fruitful new truths could be arrived
+at by mere force of genius, with little previous study and
+accumulation of knowledge--during all that time women did not concern
+themselves with speculation at all. From the days of Hypatia to those
+of the Reformation, the illustrious Heloisa is almost the only woman
+to whom any such achievement might have been possible; and we know
+not how great a capacity of speculation in her may have been lost to
+mankind by the misfortunes of her life. Never since any considerable
+number of women have begun to cultivate serious thought, has
+originality been possible on easy terms. Nearly all the thoughts
+which can be reached by mere strength of original faculties, have
+long since been arrived at; and originality, in any high sense of the
+word, is now scarcely ever attained but by minds which have undergone
+elaborate discipline, and are deeply versed in the results of
+previous thinking. It is Mr. Maurice, I think, who has remarked on
+the present age, that its most original thinkers are those who have
+known most thoroughly what had been thought by their predecessors:
+and this will always henceforth be the case. Every fresh stone in the
+edifice has now to be placed on the top of so many others, that a
+long process of climbing, and of carrying up materials, has to be
+gone through by whoever aspires to take a share in the present stage
+of the work. How many women are there who have gone through any such
+process? Mrs. Somerville, alone perhaps of women, knows as much of
+mathematics as is now needful for making any considerable
+mathematical discovery: is it any proof of inferiority in women, that
+she has not happened to be one of the two or three persons who in her
+lifetime have associated their names with some striking advancement
+of the science? Two women, since political economy has been made a
+science, have known enough of it to write usefully on the subject: of
+how many of the innumerable men who have written on it during the
+same time, is it possible with truth to say more? If no woman has
+hitherto been a great historian, what woman has had the necessary
+erudition? If no woman is a great philologist, what woman has studied
+Sanscrit and Slavonic, the Gothic of Ulphila and the Persic of the
+Zendavesta? Even in practical matters we all know what is the value
+of the originality of untaught geniuses. It means, inventing over
+again in its rudimentary form something already invented and improved
+upon by many successive inventors. When women have had the
+preparation which all men now require to be eminently original, it
+will be time enough to begin judging by experience of their capacity
+for originality.
+
+It no doubt often happens that a person, who has not widely and
+accurately studied the thoughts of others on a subject, has by
+natural sagacity a happy intuition, which he can suggest, but cannot
+prove, which yet when matured may be an important addition to
+knowledge: but even then, no justice can be done to it until some
+other person, who does possess the previous acquirements, takes it in
+hand, tests it, gives it a scientific or practical form, and fits it
+into its place among the existing truths of philosophy or science. Is
+it supposed that such felicitous thoughts do not occur to women? They
+occur by hundreds to every woman of intellect. But they are mostly
+lost, for want of a husband or friend who has the other knowledge
+which can enable him to estimate them properly and bring them before
+the world: and even when they are brought before it, they generally
+appear as his ideas, not their real author's. Who can tell how many
+of the most original thoughts put forth by male writers, belong to a
+woman by suggestion, to themselves only by verifying and working out?
+If I may judge by my own case, a very large proportion indeed.
+
+If we turn from pure speculation to literature in the narrow sense of
+the term, and the fine arts, there is a very obvious reason why
+women's literature is, in its general conception and in its main
+features, an imitation of men's. Why is the Roman literature, as
+critics proclaim to satiety, not original, but an imitation of the
+Greek? Simply because the Greeks came first. If women lived in a
+different country from men, and had never read any of their writings,
+they would have had a literature of their own. As it is, they have
+not created one, because they found a highly advanced literature
+already created. If there had been no suspension of the knowledge of
+antiquity, or if the Renaissance had occurred before the Gothic
+cathedrals were built, they never would have been built. We see that,
+in France and Italy, imitation of the ancient literature stopped the
+original development even after it had commenced. All women who write
+are pupils of the great male writers. A painter's early pictures,
+even if he be a Raffaelle, are undistinguishable in style from those
+of his master. Even a Mozart does not display his powerful
+originality in his earliest pieces. What years are to a gifted
+individual, generations are to a mass. If women's literature is
+destined to have a different collective character from that of men,
+depending on any difference of natural tendencies, much longer time
+is necessary than has yet elapsed, before it can emancipate itself
+from the influence of accepted models, and guide itself by its own
+impulses. But if, as I believe, there will not prove to be any
+natural tendencies common to women, and distinguishing their genius
+from that of men, yet every individual writer among them has her
+individual tendencies, which at present are still subdued by the
+influence of precedent and example: and it will require generations
+more, before their individuality is sufficiently developed to make
+head against that influence.
+
+It is in the fine arts, properly so called, that the _prima facie_
+evidence of inferior original powers in women at first sight appears
+the strongest: since opinion (it may be said) does not exclude them
+from these, but rather encourages them, and their education, instead
+of passing over this department, is in the affluent classes mainly
+composed of it. Yet in this line of exertion they have fallen still
+more short than in many others, of the highest eminence attained by
+men. This shortcoming, however, needs no other explanation than the
+familiar fact, more universally true in the fine arts than in
+anything else; the vast superiority of professional persons over
+amateurs. Women in the educated classes are almost universally taught
+more or less of some branch or other of the fine arts, but not that
+they may gain their living or their social consequence by it. Women
+artists are all amateurs. The exceptions are only of the kind which
+confirm the general truth. Women are taught music, but not for the
+purpose of composing, only of executing it: and accordingly it is
+only as composers, that men, in music, are superior to women. The
+only one of the fine arts which women do follow, to any extent, as a
+profession, and an occupation for life, is the histrionic; and in
+that they are confessedly equal, if not superior, to men. To make the
+comparison fair, it should be made between the productions of women
+in any branch of art, and those of men not following it as a
+profession. In musical composition, for example, women surely have
+produced fully as good things as have ever been produced by male
+amateurs. There are now a few women, a very few, who practise
+painting as a profession, and these are already beginning to show
+quite as much talent as could be expected. Even male painters (_pace_
+Mr. Ruskin) have not made any very remarkable figure these last
+centuries, and it will be long before they do so. The reason why the
+old painters were so greatly superior to the modern, is that a
+greatly superior class of men applied themselves to the art. In the
+fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the Italian painters were the most
+accomplished men of their age. The greatest of them were men of
+encyclopaedical acquirements and powers, like the great men of Greece.
+But in their times fine art was, to men's feelings and conceptions,
+among the grandest things in which a human being could excel; and by
+it men were made, what only political or military distinction now
+makes them, the companions of sovereigns, and the equals of the
+highest nobility. In the present age, men of anything like similar
+calibre find something more important to do, for their own fame and
+the uses of the modern world, than painting: and it is only now and
+then that a Reynolds or a Turner (of whose relative rank among
+eminent men I do not pretend to an opinion) applies himself to that
+art. Music belongs to a different order of things; it does not
+require the same general powers of mind, but seems more dependant on
+a natural gift: and it may be thought surprising that no one of the
+great musical composers has been a woman. But even this natural gift,
+to be made available for great creations, requires study, and
+professional devotion to the pursuit. The only countries which have
+produced first-rate composers, even of the male sex, are Germany and
+Italy--countries in which, both in point of special and of general
+cultivation, women have remained far behind France and England, being
+generally (it may be said without exaggeration) very little educated,
+and having scarcely cultivated at all any of the higher faculties of
+mind. And in those countries the men who are acquainted with the
+principles of musical composition must be counted by hundreds, or
+more probably by thousands, the women barely by scores: so that here
+again, on the doctrine of averages, we cannot reasonably expect to
+see more than one eminent woman to fifty eminent men; and the last
+three centuries have not produced fifty eminent male composers either
+in Germany or in Italy.
+
+There are other reasons, besides those which we have now given, that
+help to explain why women remain behind men, even in the pursuits
+which are open to both. For one thing, very few women have time for
+them. This may seem a paradox; it is an undoubted social fact. The
+time and thoughts of every woman have to satisfy great previous
+demands on them for things practical. There is, first, the
+superintendence of the family and the domestic expenditure, which
+occupies at least one woman in every family, generally the one of
+mature years and acquired experience; unless the family is so rich as
+to admit of delegating that task to hired agency, and submitting to
+all the waste and malversation inseparable from that mode of
+conducting it. The superintendence of a household, even when not in
+other respects laborious, is extremely onerous to the thoughts; it
+requires incessant vigilance, an eye which no detail escapes, and
+presents questions for consideration and solution, foreseen and
+unforeseen, at every hour of the day, from which the person
+responsible for them can hardly ever shake herself free. If a woman
+is of a rank and circumstances which relieve her in a measure from
+these cares, she has still devolving on her the management for the
+whole family of its intercourse with others--of what is called
+society, and the less the call made on her by the former duty, the
+greater is always the development of the latter: the dinner parties,
+concerts, evening parties, morning visits, letter writing, and all
+that goes with them. All this is over and above the engrossing duty
+which society imposes exclusively on women, of making themselves
+charming. A clever woman of the higher ranks finds nearly a
+sufficient employment of her talents in cultivating the graces of
+manner and the arts of conversation. To look only at the outward side
+of the subject: the great and continual exercise of thought which all
+women who attach any value to dressing well (I do not mean
+expensively, but with taste, and perception of natural and of
+artificial _convenance_) must bestow upon their own dress, perhaps
+also upon that of their daughters, would alone go a great way towards
+achieving respectable results in art, or science, or literature, and
+does actually exhaust much of the time and mental power they might
+have to spare for either.[2] If it were possible that all this number
+of little practical interests (which are made great to them) should
+leave them either much leisure, or much energy and freedom of mind,
+to be devoted to art or speculation, they must have a much greater
+original supply of active faculty than the vast majority of men. But
+this is not all. Independently of the regular offices of life which
+devolve upon a woman, she is expected to have her time and faculties
+always at the disposal of everybody. If a man has not a profession to
+exempt him from such demands, still, if he has a pursuit, he offends
+nobody by devoting his time to it; occupation is received as a valid
+excuse for his not answering to every casual demand which may be made
+on him. Are a woman's occupations, especially her chosen and
+voluntary ones, ever regarded as excusing her from any of what are
+termed the calls of society? Scarcely are her most necessary and
+recognised duties allowed as an exemption. It requires an illness in
+the family, or something else out of the common way, to entitle her
+to give her own business the precedence over other people's
+amusement. She must always be at the beck and call of somebody,
+generally of everybody. If she has a study or a pursuit, she must
+snatch any short interval which accidentally occurs to be employed in
+it. A celebrated woman, in a work which I hope will some day be
+published, remarks truly that everything a woman does is done at odd
+times. Is it wonderful, then, if she does not attain the highest
+eminence in things which require consecutive attention, and the
+concentration on them of the chief interest of life? Such is
+philosophy, and such, above all, is art, in which, besides the
+devotion of the thoughts and feelings, the hand also must be kept in
+constant exercise to attain high skill.
+
+There is another consideration to be added to all these. In the
+various arts and intellectual occupations, there is a degree of
+proficiency sufficient for living by it, and there is a higher degree
+on which depend the great productions which immortalize a name. To
+the attainment of the former, there are adequate motives in the case
+of all who follow the pursuit professionally: the other is hardly
+ever attained where there is not, or where there has not been at some
+period of life, an ardent desire of celebrity. Nothing less is
+commonly a sufficient stimulus to undergo the long and patient
+drudgery, which, in the case even of the greatest natural gifts, is
+absolutely required for great eminence in pursuits in which we
+already possess so many splendid memorials of the highest genius.
+Now, whether the cause be natural or artificial, women seldom have
+this eagerness for fame. Their ambition is generally confined within
+narrower bounds. The influence they seek is over those who
+immediately surround them. Their desire is to be liked, loved, or
+admired, by those whom they see with their eyes: and the proficiency
+in knowledge, arts, and accomplishments, which is sufficient for
+that, almost always contents them. This is a trait of character which
+cannot be left out of the account in judging of women as they are. I
+do not at all believe that it is inherent in women. It is only the
+natural result of their circumstances. The love of fame in men is
+encouraged by education and opinion: to "scorn delights and live
+laborious days" for its sake, is accounted the part of "noble minds,"
+even if spoken of as their "last infirmity," and is stimulated by the
+access which fame gives to all objects of ambition, including even
+the favour of women; while to women themselves all these objects are
+closed, and the desire of fame itself considered daring and
+unfeminine. Besides, how could it be that a woman's interests should
+not be all concentrated upon the impressions made on those who come
+into her daily life, when society has ordained that all her duties
+should be to them, and has contrived that all her comforts should
+depend on them? The natural desire of consideration from our fellow
+creatures is as strong in a woman as in a man; but society has so
+ordered things that public consideration is, in all ordinary cases,
+only attainable by her through the consideration of her husband or of
+her male relations, while her private consideration is forfeited by
+making herself individually prominent, or appearing in any other
+character than that of an appendage to men. Whoever is in the least
+capable of estimating the influence on the mind of the entire
+domestic and social position and the whole habit of a life, must
+easily recognise in that influence a complete explanation of nearly
+all the apparent differences between women and men, including the
+whole of those which imply any inferiority.
+
+As for moral differences, considered as distinguished from
+intellectual, the distinction commonly drawn is to the advantage of
+women. They are declared to be better than men; an empty compliment,
+which must provoke a bitter smile from every woman of spirit, since
+there is no other situation in life in which it is the established
+order, and considered quite natural and suitable, that the better
+should obey the worse. If this piece of idle talk is good for
+anything, it is only as an admission by men, of the corrupting
+influence of power; for that is certainly the only truth which the
+fact, if it be a fact, either proves or illustrates. And it _is_ true
+that servitude, except when it actually brutalizes, though corrupting
+to both, is less so to the slaves than to the slave-masters. It is
+wholesomer for the moral nature to be restrained, even by arbitrary
+power, than to be allowed to exercise arbitrary power without
+restraint. Women, it is said, seldomer fall under the penal
+law--contribute a much smaller number of offenders to the criminal
+calendar, than men. I doubt not that the same thing may be said, with
+the same truth, of negro slaves. Those who are under the control of
+others cannot often commit crimes, unless at the command and for the
+purposes of their masters. I do not know a more signal instance of
+the blindness with which the world, including the herd of studious
+men, ignore and pass over all the influences of social circumstances,
+than their silly depreciation of the intellectual, and silly
+panegyrics on the moral, nature of women.
+
+The complimentary dictum about women's superior moral goodness may be
+allowed to pair off with the disparaging one respecting their greater
+liability to moral bias. Women, we are told, are not capable of
+resisting their personal partialities: their judgment in grave
+affairs is warped by their sympathies and antipathies. Assuming it to
+be so, it is still to be proved that women are oftener misled by
+their personal feelings than men by their personal interests. The
+chief difference would seem in that case to be, that men are led from
+the course of duty and the public interest by their regard for
+themselves, women (not being allowed to have private interests of
+their own) by their regard for somebody else. It is also to be
+considered, that all the education which women receive from society
+inculcates on them the feeling that the individuals connected with
+them are the only ones to whom they owe any duty--the only ones whose
+interest they are called upon to care for; while, as far as education
+is concerned, they are left strangers even to the elementary ideas
+which are presupposed in any intelligent regard for larger interests
+or higher moral objects. The complaint against them resolves itself
+merely into this, that they fulfil only too faithfully the sole duty
+which they are taught, and almost the only one which they are
+permitted to practise.
+
+The concessions of the privileged to the unprivileged are so seldom
+brought about by any better motive than the power of the unprivileged
+to extort them, that any arguments against the prerogative of sex are
+likely to be little attended to by the generality, as long as they
+are able to say to themselves that women do not complain of it. That
+fact certainly enables men to retain the unjust privilege some time
+longer; but does not render it less unjust. Exactly the same thing
+may be said of the women in the harem of an Oriental: they do not
+complain of not being allowed the freedom of European women. They
+think our women insufferably bold and unfeminine. How rarely it is
+that even men complain of the general order of society; and how much
+rarer still would such complaint be, if they did not know of any
+different order existing anywhere else. Women do not complain of the
+general lot of women; or rather they do, for plaintive elegies on it
+are very common in the writings of women, and were still more so as
+long as the lamentations could not be suspected of having any
+practical object. Their complaints are like the complaints which men
+make of the general unsatisfactoriness of human life; they are not
+meant to imply blame, or to plead for any change. But though women do
+not complain of the power of husbands, each complains of her own
+husband, or of the husbands of her friends. It is the same in all
+other cases of servitude, at least in the commencement of the
+emancipatory movement. The serfs did not at first complain of the
+power of their lords, but only of their tyranny. The Commons began by
+claiming a few municipal privileges; they next asked an exemption for
+themselves from being taxed without their own consent; but they would
+at that time have thought it a great presumption to claim any share
+in the king's sovereign authority. The case of women is now the only
+case in which to rebel against established rules is still looked upon
+with the same eyes as was formerly a subject's claim to the right of
+rebelling against his king. A woman who joins in any movement which
+her husband disapproves, makes herself a martyr, without even being
+able to be an apostle, for the husband can legally put a stop to her
+apostleship. Women cannot be expected to devote themselves to the
+emancipation of women, until men in considerable number are prepared
+to join with them in the undertaking.
+
+[Footnote 1: Especially is this true if we take into consideration
+Asia as well as Europe. If a Hindoo principality is strongly,
+vigilantly, and economically governed; if order is preserved without
+oppression; if cultivation is extending, and the people prosperous,
+in three cases out of four that principality is under a woman's rule.
+This fact, to me an entirely unexpected one, I have collected from a
+long official knowledge of Hindoo governments. There are many such
+instances: for though, by Hindoo institutions, a woman cannot reign,
+she is the legal regent of a kingdom during the minority of the heir;
+and minorities are frequent, the lives of the male rulers being so
+often prematurely terminated through the effect of inactivity and
+sensual excesses. When we consider that these princesses have never
+been seen in public, have never conversed with any man not of their
+own family except from behind a curtain, that they do not read, and
+if they did, there is no book in their languages which can give them
+the smallest instruction on political affairs; the example they
+afford of the natural capacity of women for government is very
+striking.]
+
+[Footnote 2: "It appears to be the same right turn of mind which
+enables a man to acquire the _truth_, or the just idea of what is
+right, in the ornaments, as in the more stable principles of art. It
+has still the same centre of perfection, though it is the centre of a
+smaller circle.--To illustrate this by the fashion of dress, in which
+there is allowed to be a good or bad taste. The component parts of
+dress are continually changing from great to little, from short to
+long; but the general form still remains: it is still the same
+general dress which is comparatively fixed, though on a very slender
+foundation; but it is on this which fashion must rest. He who invents
+with the most success, or dresses in the best taste, would probably,
+from the same sagacity employed to greater purposes, have discovered
+equal skill, or have formed the same correct taste, in the highest
+labours of art."--_Sir Joshua Reynolds' Discourses_, Disc. vii.]
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+
+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
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