The Subjection Of Women / Mill, John Stuart

THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN by JOHN STUART MILL.

Original source: info.umd.edu
/info/ReadingRoom/Miscellaneous/SubjectionofWomen

Digitized August 1993 by:
Paula Gaber <gaber@inform.umd.edu>

Based on the Everyman's Library edition, originally published
in 1929, reprinted 1992. (Only the introduction is copyrighted.)
ISBN 0 460 87173 0

[Fixed several typos, WT, 9/1/93]

Originally published 1869, this text is in the PUBLIC DOMAIN.

                    THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN 
                               BY
                        JOHN STUART MILL

                            CHAPTER I

The object of this Essay is to explain as clearly as I am able
grounds of an opinion which I have held from the very earliest
period when I had formed any opinions at all on social political
matters, and which, instead of being weakened or modified, has been
constantly growing stronger by the progress 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 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 convictions. The
difficulty is that which exists in all cases in which there is a
mass of feeling to be contended against. So long as opinion is
strongly rooted in the feelings, it gains rather than loses
instability 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, worse it fares in argumentative
contest, the more persuaded 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 those
which gather round and protect old institutions and custom, that we
need not wonder to find them as yet less undermined and loosened
than any of the rest by the progress 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 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, 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 an alleged historical event, in which
the feelings of men general are not much interested, as the Siege
of Troy example, those who maintain that the event took place
expected to produce their proofs, before those who take the other
side can be required to say anything; and at no time 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 I general good, and that the law should be no respecter
of persons but should treat all alike, save where dissimilarity of
treatment is required by positive reasons, either of justice or of
policy. But of none of these rules of evidence will the benefit be
allowed to those who maintain the opinion I profess. It is useless
me to say that those who maintain the doctrine that men ha a right
to command and women are under an obligation obey, or that men are
fit for government and women unfit, on the affirmative side of the
question, and that they are bound to show positive evidence for the
assertions, or submit to their rejection. It is equally unavailing
for me to say that those who deny to women any freedom or privilege
rightly allow to men, having the double presumption against them
that they are opposing freedom and recommending partiality, must
held to the strictest proof of their case, and unless their success
be such as to exclude all doubt, the judgment ought to against
them. These would be thought good pleas in any common case; but
they will not be thought so in this instance. 

Before I could hope to make any impression, I should be expected
not only to answer all that has ever been said bye who take the
other side of the question, but to imagine that could be said by
them--to find them in reasons, as I as answer all I find: and
besides refuting all arguments for the affirmative, I shall be
called upon for invincible positive arguments to prove a negative.
And even if I could do all and leave the opposite party with a host
of unanswered arguments against them, and not a single unrefuted
one on side, I should be thought to have done little; for a cause
supported on the one hand by universal usage, and on the r by so
great a preponderance of popular sentiment, is supposed to have a
presumption in its favour, superior to any conviction which an
appeal to reason has power to produce in intellects but those of a
high class. 

I do not mention these difficulties to complain of them; first, use
it would be useless; they are inseparable from having to contend
through people's understandings against the hostility their
feelings and practical tendencies: and truly the understandings of
the majority of mankind would need to be much better cultivated
than has ever yet been the case, before they be asked to place such
reliance in their own power of estimating arguments, as to give up
practical principles in which have been born and bred and which are
the basis of much existing order of the world, at the first
argumentative attack which they are not capable of logically
resisting. I do not therefore quarrel with them for having too
little faith in argument, but for having too much faith in custom
and the general feeling. It is one of the characteristic prejudices
of the ion of the nineteenth century against the eighteenth, to d
to the unreasoning elements in human nature the infallibility which
the eighteenth century is supposed to have ascribed to the
reasoning elements. For the apotheosis of Reason we have
substituted that of Instinct; and we call thing instinct which we
find in ourselves and for which we cannot trace any rational
foundation. This idolatry, infinitely more degrading than the
other, and the most pernicious e false worships of the present day,
of all of which it is the main support, will probably hold its
ground until it way before a sound psychology laying bare the real
root of much that is bowed down to as the intention of Nature and
ordinance of God. As regards the present question, I am going to
accept the unfavourable conditions which the prejudice assigns to
me. I consent that established custom, and the general feelings,
should be deemed conclusive against me, unless that custom and
feeling from age to age can be shown to have owed their existence
to other causes than their soundness, and to have derived their
power from the worse rather than the better parts of human nature.
I am willing that judgment should go against me, unless I can show
that my judge has been tampered with. The concession is not so
great as it might appear; for to prove this, is by far the easiest
portion of my task. 

The generality of a practice is in some cases a strong presumption
that it is, or at all events once was, conducive to laudable ends.
This is the case, when the practice was first adopted, or
afterwards kept up, as a means to such ends, and was grounded on
experience of the mode in which they could be most effectually
attained. If the authority of men over women, when first
established, had been the result of a conscientious comparison
between different modes of constituting the government of society;
if, after trying various other modes of social organisation--the
government of women over men, equality between the two, and such
mixed and divided modes of government as might be invented--it had
been decided, on the testimony of experience, that the mode in
which women are wholly under the rule of men, having no share at
all in public concerns, and each in private being under the legal
obligation of obedience to the man with whom she has associated her
destiny, was the arrangement most conducive to the happiness and
well-being of both; its general adoption might then be fairly
thought to be some evidence that, at the time when it was adopted,
it was the best: though even then the considerations which
recommended it may, like so many other primeval social facts of the
greatest importance, have subsequently, in the course of ages,
ceased to exist. But the state of the case is in every respect the
reverse of this. In the first place, the opinion in favour of the
present system, which entirely subordinates the weaker sex to the
stronger, rests upon theory only; for there never has been trial
made of any other: so that experience, in the sense in which it is
vulgarly opposed to theory, cannot be pretended to have pronounced
any verdict. And in the second place, the adoption of this system
of inequality never was the result of deliberation, or forethought,
or any social ideas, or any notion whatever of what conduced to the
benefit of humanity or the good order of society. It arose simply
from the fact that from the very earliest twilight of human
society, every woman owing to the value attached to her by men,
combined with her inferiority in muscular strength) was found in a
state of bondage to some man. Laws and systems of polity always
begin by recognising the relations they find already existing
between individuals. They convert what was a mere physical fact
into a legal right, give it the sanction of society, and
principally aim at the substitution of public and organised means
of asserting and protecting these rights, instead of the irregular
and lawless conflict of physical strength. Those who had already
been compelled to obedience became in this manner legally bound to
it. Slavery, from be inn a mere affair of force between the master
and the slave, became regularised and a matter of compact among the
masters, who, binding themselves to one another for common
protection, guaranteed by their collective strength the private
possessions of each, including his slaves. In early times, the
great majority of the male sex were slaves, as well as the whole of
the female. And many ages elapsed, some of them ages of high
cultivation, before any thinker was bold enough to question the
rightfulness, and the absolute social necessity, either of the one
slavery or of the other. By degrees such thinkers did arise; and
(the general progress of society assisting) the slavery of the male
sex has, in all the countries of Christian Europe at least (though,
in one of them, only within the last few years) been at length
abolished, and that of the female sex has been gradually changed
into a milder form of dependence. But this dependence, as it exists
at present, is not an original institution, taking a fresh start
from considerations of justice and social expediency--it is the
primitive state of slavery lasting on, through successive
mitigations and modifications occasioned by the same causes which
have softened the general manners, and brought all human relations
more under the control of justice and the influence of humanity. It
has not lost the taint of its brutal origin. No presumption in its
favour, therefore, can be drawn from the fact of its existence. The
only such presumption which it could be supposed to have, must be
grounded on its having lasted till now, when so many other things
which came down from the same odious source have been done away
with. And this, indeed, is what makes it strange to ordinary ears,
to hear it asserted that the inequality of rights between men and
women has no other source than the law of the strongest. 

That this statement should have the effect of a paradox, is in some
respects creditable to the progress of civilisation, and the
improvement of the moral sentiments of mankind. We now live--that
is to say, one or two of the most advanced nations of the world now
live--in a state in which the law of the strongest seems to be
entirely abandoned as the regulating principle of the world's
affairs: nobody professes it, and, as regards most of the relations
between human beings, nobody is permitted to practise it. When
anyone succeeds in doing so, it is under cover of some pretext
which gives him the semblance of having some general social
interest on his side. This being the ostensible state of things,
people flatter themselves that the rule of mere force is ended;
that the law of the strongest cannot be the reason of existence of
anything which has remained in full operation down to the present
time. However any of our present institutions may have begun, it
can only, they think, have been preserved to this period of
advanced civilisation by a well-grounded feeling of its adaptation
to human nature, and conduciveness to the general good. They do not
understand the great vitality and durability of institutions which
place right on the side of might; how intensely they are clung to;
how the good as well as the bad propensities and sentiments of
those who have power in their hands, become identified with
retaining it; how slowly these bad institutions give way, one at a
time, the weakest first. beginning with those which are least
interwoven with the daily habits of life;and how very rarely those
who have obtained legal power because they first had physical, have
ever lost their hold of it until the physical power had passed over
to the other side. Such shifting of the physical force not having
taken place in the case of women; this fact, combined with all the
peculiar and characteristic features of the particular case, made
it certain from the first that this branch of the system of right
founded on might, though softened in its most atrocious features at
an earlier period than several of the others, would be the very
last to disappear. It was inevitable that this one case of a social
relation grounded on force, would survive through generations of
institutions grounded on equal justice, an almost solitary
exception to the general character of their laws and customs; but
which, so long as it does not proclaim its own origin, and as
discussion has not brought out its true character, is not felt to
jar with modern civilisation, any more than domestic slavery among
the Greeks jarred with their notion of themselves as a free people.

The truth is, that people of the present and the last two or three
generations have lost all practical sense of the primitive
condition of humanity; and only the few who have studied history
accurately, or have much frequented the parts of the world occupied
by the living representatives of ages long past, are able to form
any mental picture of what society then was. People are not aware
how entirely, informer ages, the law of superior strength was the
rule of life; how publicly and openly it was avowed, I do not say
cynically or shamelessly--for these words imply a feeling that
there was something in it to be ashamed of, and no such notion
could find a place in the faculties of any person in those ages,
except a philosopher or a saint. History gives a cruel experience
of human nature, in showing how exactly the regard due to the life,
possessions, and entire earthly happiness of any class of persons,
was measured by what they had the power of enforcing; how all who
made any resistance to authorities that had arms in their hands,
however dreadful might be the provocation, had not only the law of
force but all other laws, and all the notions of social obligation
against them; and in the eyes of those whom they resisted, were not
only guilty of crime, but of the worst of all crimes, deserving the
most cruel chastisement which human beings could inflict. The first
small vestige of a feeling of obligation in a superior to
acknowledge any right in inferiors, began when he had been induced,
for convenience, to make some promise to them. Though these
promises, even when sanctioned by the most solemn oaths, were for
many ages revoked or violated on the most trifling provocation or
temptation, it is probably that this, except by persons of still
worse than the average morality, was seldom done without some
twinges of conscience. The ancient republics, being mostly grounded
from the first upon some kind of mutual con;pact, or at any rate
formed by an union of persons not very unequal in strength,
afforded, in consequence, the first instance of a portion of human
relations fenced round, and placed under the dominion of another
law than that of force. And though the original law of force
remained in full operation between them and their slaves, and also
(except so far as limited by express compact) between a
commonwealth and its subjects, or other independent commonwealths;
the banishment of that primitive law even from so narrow a field,
commenced the regeneration of human nature, by giving birth to
sentiments of which experience soon demonstrated the immense value
even for material interests, and which thence forward only required
to be enlarged, not created. Though slaves were no part of the
commonwealth, it was in the free states that slaves were first felt
to have rights as human beings. The Stoics were, I believe, the
first (except so far as the Jewish law constitutes an exception)
who taught as a part of morality that men were bound by moral
obligations to their slaves. No one, after Christianity became
ascendant, could ever again have been a stranger to this belief, in
theory; nor, after the rise of the Catholic Church, was it ever
without persons to stand up for it. Yet to enforce it was the most
arduous task which Christianity ever had to perform. For more thana
thousand years the Church kept up the contest, with hardly any
perceptible success. It was not for want of power over men's minds.
Its power was prodigious. It could make kings and nobles resign
their most valued possessions to enrich the Church. It could make
thousands in the prime of life and the height of worldly
advantages, shut themselves up in convents to work out their
salvation by poverty, fasting, and prayer. It could send hundreds
of thousands across land and sea, Europe and Asia, to give their
lives for the deliverance of the Holy Sepulchre. It could make
kings relinquish wives who were the object of their passionate
attachment, because the Church declared that they were within the
seventh (by our calculation the fourteenth) degree of relationship.
All this it did; but it could not make men fight less with one
another, nor tyrannise less cruelly over the serfs, and when they
were able, over burgesses. It could not make them renounce either
of the applications of force; force militant, or force triumphant.
This they could never be induced to do until they were themselves
in their turn compelled by superior force. Only by the growing
power of kings was an end put to fighting except between kings, or
competitors for kingship; only by the growth of a wealthy and
warlike bourgeoisie in the fortified towns, and of a plebeian
infantry which proved more powerful in the field than the
undisciplined chivalry, was the insolent tyranny of the nobles over
the bourgeoisie and peasantry brought within some bounds. It was
persisted in not only until, but long after, the oppressed had
obtained a power enabling them often to take conspicuous vengeance;
and on the Continent much of it continued to the time of the French
Revolution, though in England the earlier and better organisation
of the democratic classes put an end to it sooner, by establishing
equal laws and free national institutions. 

If people are mostly so little aware how completely, during the
greater part of the duration of our species, the law of force was
the avowed rule of general conduct, any other being only a special
and exceptional consequence of peculiar ties---and from how very
recent a date it is that the affairs of society in general have
been even pretended to be regulated according to any moral law; as
little do people remember or consider, how institutions and customs
which never had any ground but the law of force, last on into ages
and states of general opinion which never would have permitted
their first establishment. Less than forty years ago, Englishmen
might still by law hold human beings in bondage as saleable
property: within the present century they might kidnap them and
carry them off, and work them literally to death. This absolutely
extreme case of the law of force, condemned by those who can
tolerate almost every other form of arbitrary power, and which, of
all others presents features the most revolting to the feelings of
all who look at it from an impartial position, was the law of
civilised and Christian England within the memory of persons now
living: and in one half of Anglo-Saxon America three or four years
ago, not only did slavery exist, but the slave-trade, and the
breeding of slaves expressly for it, was a general practice between
slave states. Yet not only was there a greater strength of
sentiment against it, but, in England at least, a less amount
either of feeling or of interest in favour of it, than of any other
of the customary abuses of force: for its motive was the love of
gain, unmixed and undisguised; and those who profited by it were a
very small numerical fraction of the country, while the natural
feeling of all who were not personally interested in it, was
unmitigated abhorrence. So extreme an instance makes it almost
superfluous to refer to any other: but consider the long duration of
absolute monarchy. In England at present it is the almost universal
conviction that military despotism is a case of the law of force,
having no other origin or justification. Yet in all the great
nations of Europe except England it either still exists, or has
only just ceased to exist, and has even now a strong party
favourable to it in all ranks of the people, especially among
persons of station and consequence. Such is the power of an
established system, even when far from universal; when not only in
almost every period of history there have been great and well-known
examples of the contrary system, but these have almost invariably
been afforded by the most illustrious and most prosperous
communities. In this case, too, the possessor of the undue power,
the person directly interested in it, is only one person, while
those who are subject to it and suffer from it are literally all
the rest. The yoke is naturally and necessarily humiliating to all
persons, except the one who is on the throne, together with, at
most, the one who expects to succeed to it. How different are these
cases from that of the power of men over women!I am not now
prejudging the question-of its justifiableness. I am showing how
vastly more permanent it could not but be, even if not justifiable,
than these other dominations which have nevertheless lasted down to
our own time. Whatever gratification of pride there is in the
possession of power, and whatever personal interest in its
exercise, is in this case not confined to a limited class, but
common to the whole male sex. Instead of being, to most of its
supporters) a thing desirable chiefly in the abstract, or, like the
political ends usually contended for by factions, of little private
importance to any but the leaders; it comes home to the person and
hearth of every male head of a family, and of everyone who looks
forward to being so. The clodhopper exercises, oris to exercise,
his share of the power equally with the highest nobleman. And the
case is that in which the desire of power is the strongest: for
everyone who desires power, desires it most over those who are
nearest to him, with whom his life is passed, with whom he has most
concerns in common and in whom any independence of his authority is
oftenest likely to interfere with his individual preferences. If,
in the other cases specified, powers manifestly grounded only on
force, and having so much less to support them, are so slowly and
with so much difficulty got rid of, much more must it be so with
this, even if it rests on no better foundation than those. We must
consider, too, that the possessors of the power have facilities in
this case, greater than in any other, to prevent any uprising
against it. Every one of the subjects lives under the very eye, and
almost, it may be said, in the hands, of one of the masters in
closer intimacy with him than with any of her fellow-subjects; with
no means of combining against him, no power of even locally over
mastering him, and, on the other hand, with the strongest motives
for seeking his favour and avoiding to give him offence. In
struggles for political emancipation, everybody knows how often its
champions are bought off by bribes, or daunted by terrors. In the
case of women, each individual of the subject-class is in a chronic
state of bribery and intimidation combined. In setting up the
standard of resistance, a large number of the leaders, and still
more of the followers, must make an almost complete sacrifice of
the pleasures or the alleviations of their own individual lot. If
ever any system of privilege and enforced subjection had its yoke
tightly riveted on the those who are kept down by it, this has. I
have not yet shown that it is a wrong system: but everyone who is
capable of thinking on the subject must see that even if it is, it
was certain to outlast all other forms of unjust authority. And
when some of the grossest of the other forms still exist in many
civilised countries, and have only recently been got rid of in
others, it would be strange if that which is so much the deepest
rooted had yet been perceptibly shaken anywhere. There is more
reason to wonder that the protests and testimonies against it
should have been so numerous and so weighty as they are. 

Some will object, that a comparison cannot fairly be made between
the government of the male sex and the forms of unjust power which
I have adduced in illustration of it, since these are arbitrary,
and the effect of mere usurpation, while it on the contrary is
natural. But was there ever any domination which did not appear
natural to those who possessed it? There was a time when the
division of mankind into two classes, a small one of masters and a
numerous one of slaves, appeared, even to the most cultivated
minds, to be natural, and the only natural, condition of the human
race. No less an intellect, and one which contributed no less to
the progress of human thought, than Aristotle, held this opinion
without doubt or misgiving; and rested it on the same premises on
which the same assertion in regard to the dominion of men over
women is usually based, namely that there are different natures
among mankind, free natures, and slave natures; that the Greeks
were of a free nature, the barbarian races of Thracians and
Asiatics of a slave nature. But why need I go back to Aristotle?
Did not the slave-owners of the Southern United States maintain the
same doctrine, with all the fanaticism with which men ding to the
theories that justify their passions and legitimate their personal
interests? Did they not call heaven and earth to witness that the
dominion of the white man over the black is natural, that the black
race is by nature incapable of freedom, and marked out for slavery?
some even going so far as to say that the freedom of manual
labourers is an unnatural order of things anywhere. Again, the
theorists of absolute monarchy have always affirmed it to be the
only natural form of government; issuing from the patriarchal,
which was the primitive and spontaneous form of society, framed on
the model of the paternal, which is anterior to society itself,
and, as they contend, the most natural authority of all. Nay, for
that matter, the law of force itself, to those who could not plead
any other has always seemed the most natural of all grounds for the
exercise of authority. Conquering races hold it to be Nature's own
dictate that the conquered should obey the conquerors, or as they
euphoniously paraphrase it, that the feebler and more unwarlike
races should submit to the braver and manlier. The smallest
acquaintance with human life in the middle ages, shows how
supremely natural the dominion of the feudal nobility overmen of
low condition appeared to the nobility themselves, and how
unnatural the conception seemed, of a person of the inferior class
claiming equality with them, or exercising authority over them. It
hardly seemed less so to the class held in subjection. The
emancipated serfs and burgesses, even in their most vigorous
struggles, never made any pretension to a share of authority; they
only demanded more or less of limitation to the power of
tyrannising over them. So true is it that unnatural generally means
only uncustomary, and that everything which is usual appears
natural. The subjection of women to men being a universal custom,
any departure from it quite naturally appears unnatural. But how
entirely, even in this case, the feeling is dependent on custom,
appears by ample experience. Nothing so much astonishes the people
of distant parts of the world, when they first learn anything about
England, as to be told that it is under a queen; the thing seems to
them so unnatural as to be almost incredible. To Englishmen this
does not seem in the least degree unnatural, because they are used
to it; but they do feel it unnatural that women should be soldiers
or Members of Parliament. In the feudal ages, on the contrary, war
and politics were not thought unnatural to women, because not
unusual; it seemed natural that women of the privileged classes
should be of manly character, inferior in nothing but bodily
strength to their husbands and fathers. The independence of women
seemed rather less unnatural to the Greeks than to other ancients,
on account of the fabulous Amazons (whom they believed to be
historical), and the partial example afforded by the Spartan women;
who, though no less subordinate by law than in other Greek states,
were more free in fact, and being trained to bodily exercises in
the same manner with men, gave ample proof that they were not
naturally disqualified for them. There can be little doubt that
Spartan experience suggested to Plato, among many other of his
doctrines, t of the social and political equality of the two sexes.

But, it will be said, the rule of men over women differs from all
these others in not being a rule a rule of force: it is accepted
voluntarily; women make no complaint, and are consenting parties to
it. In the first place, a great number of women do not accept it.
Ever since there have been women able to make their sentiments
known by their writings (the only mode of publicity which society
permits to them), an increasing number of them have recorded
protests against their present social condition: and recently many
thousands of them, headed by the most eminent women known to the
public, have petitioned Parliament for their admission to the
Parliamentary Suffrage The claim of women to be educated as
solidly, and in the same branches of knowledge, as men, is urged
with growing intensity, and with a great prospect of success; while
the demand for their admission into professions and occupations
hitherto closed against them, becomes every year more urgent.
Though there are not in this country, as there are in the United
States, periodical conventions and an organised party to agitate
for the Rights of Women, there is a numerous and active society
organised and managed by women, for the more limited object of
obtaining the political franchise. Nor is it only in our own
country and in America that women are beginning to protest, more or
less collectively, against the disabilities under which they
labour. France, and Italy, and Switzerland, and Russia now afford
examples of the same thing. How many more women there are who
silently cherish similar aspirations, no one can possibly know; but
there are abundant tokens how many would cherish them, were they
not so strenuously taught to repress them as contrary to the
proprieties of their sex. It must be remembered, also, that no
enslaved class ever asked for complete liberty at once. When Simon
de Montfort called the deputies of the commons to sit for the first
time in Parliament, did any of them dream of demanding that an
assembly, elected by their constituents)should make and destroy
ministries, and dictate to the king in affairs of State ? No such
thought entered into the imagination of the most ambitious of them.
The nobility had already these pretensions; the commons pretended
to nothing but to be exempt from arbitrary taxation, and from the
gross individual oppression of the king's officers. It is a
political law of nature that those who are under any power of
ancient origin, never begin by complaining of the power itself, but
only of its oppressive exercise. There is never any want of women
who complain of ill-usage by their husbands. There would be
infinitely more, if complaint were not the greatest of all
provocatives to a repetition and increase of the ill-usage. It is
this which frustrates all attempts to maintain the power but
protect the woman against its abuses. In no other case (except that
of a child) is the person who has been proved judicially to have
suffered an injury, replaced under the physical power of the
culprit who inflicted it. Accordingly wives, even in the most
extreme and protracted cases of bodily ill-usage, hardly ever dare
avail themselves of the laws made for their protection: and if, in
a moment of irrepressible indignation, or by the interference of
neighbours, they are induced to do so, their whole effort
afterwards is to disclose as little as they can, and to beg off
their tyrant from his merited chastisement. 

All causes, social and natural, combine to make it unlikely that
women should be collectively rebellious to the power of men. They
are so far in a position different from all other subject classes,
that their masters require something more from them than actual
service. Men do not want solely the obedience of women, they want
their sentiments. All men, except the most brutish, desire to have,
in the woman most nearly connected with them, not a forced slave
but a willing one, not a slave merely, but a favourite. They have
therefore put everything in practice to enslave their minds. The
masters of all other slaves rely, for maintaining obedience, on
fear; either fear of themselves, or religious fears. The masters of
women wanted more than simple obedience, and they turned the whole
force of education to effect their purpose. All women are brought
up from the very earliest years in the belief that their ideal of
character is the very opposite to that of men; not self will, and
government by self-control, but submission, and yielding to the
control of other. All the moralities tell them that it is the duty
of women, and all the current sentimentalities that it is their
nature, to live for others; to make complete abnegation of
themselves, and to have no life but in their affections. And by
their affections are meant the only ones they are allowed to have -
- those to the men with whom they are connected, or to the children
who constitute an additional and indefeasible tie between them and
a man. When we put together three things -- first, the natural
attraction between opposite sexes; secondly, the wife's entire
dependence on the husband, every privilege or pleasure she has
being either his gift, or depending entirely on his will; and
lastly, that the principal object of human pursuit, consideration,
and all objects of social ambition, can in general be sought or
obtained by her only through him, it would be a miracle if the
object of being attractive to men had not become the polar star of
feminine education and formation of character. And, this great
means of influence over the minds of women having been acquired, an
instinct of selfishness made men avail themselves of it to the
utmost as a means of holding women in subjection, by representing
to them meekness, submissiveness, and resignation of all individual
will into the hands of a man, as an essential part of sexual
attractiveness. Can it be doubted that any of the other yokes which
mankind have succeeded in breaking, would have subsisted till now
if the same means had existed, and had been so sedulously used, to
bow down their minds to it? If it had been made the object of the
life of every young plebeian to find personal favour in the eyes of
some patrician, of every young serf with some seigneur; if
domestication with him, and a share of his personal affections, had
been held out as the prize which they all should look out for, the
most gifted and aspiring being able to reckon on the most desirable
prizes; and if, when this prize had been obtained, they had been
shut out by a wall of brass from all interests not centring in him,
all feelings and desires but those which he shared or inculcated;
would not serfs and seigneurs, plebeians and patricians, have been
as broadly distinguished at this day as men and women are? and
would not all but a thinker here and there, have believed the
distinction to be a fundamental and unalterable fact in human
nature?

The preceding considerations are amply sufficient to show that
custom, however universal it may be, affords in this case no
presumption, and ought not to create any prejudice, in favour of
the arrangements which place women in social and political
subjection to men. But I may go farther, and maintain that the
course of history, and the tendencies of progressive human society,
afford not only no presumption in favour of this system of
inequality of rights, but a strong one against it; and that, so far
as the whole course of human improvement up to the time, the whole
stream of modern tendencies, warrants any inference on the subject,
it is, that this relic of the past is discordant with the future,
and must necessarily disappear. 

For, what is the peculiar character of the modern world-- the
difference which chiefly distinguishes modern institutions, modern
social ideas, modern life itself, from those of times long past? It
is, that human beings are no longer born to their place in life,
and chained down by an inexorable bond to the would be infinitely
more, if complaint were not the greatest of all provocatives to a
repetition and increase of the ill-usage. It is this which
frustrates all attempts to maintain the power but protect the woman
against its abuses. In no other case (except that of a child) is
the person who has been proved judicially to have suffered an
injury, replaced under the physical power of the culprit who
inflicted it. Accordingly wives, even in the most extreme and
protracted cases of bodily ill-usage, hardly ever dare avail
themselves of the laws made for their protection: and if, in a
moment of irrepressible indignation, or by the interference of
neighbours, they are induced to do so, their whole effort
afterwards is to disclose as little as they can, and to beg off
their tyrant from his merited chastisement. All causes, social and
natural, combine to make it unlikely that women should be
collectively rebellious to the power of . men. They are so far in
a position different from all other subject classes, that their
masters require something more from them than actual service Men do
not want solely the obedience of women, they want their sentiments.
All men, except the most brutish, desire to have, in the woman most
nearly connected with them, not a forced slave but a willing one,
not a slave merely, but a favourite. They have therefore put
everything in practice to enslave their minds. The masters of all
other slaves rely, for maintaining obedience, on fear; either fear
of themselves, or religious fears. The masters of women wanted more
than simple obedience, and they turned the whole force of education
to effect their purpose. All women are brought up from the very
earliest years in the belief that their ideal of character is the
very opposite to that of men; not self-will, and government by
self-control, but submission, and yielding to the control of
others. All the moralities tell them that it is the duty of women,
and all the current sentimentalities that it is their nature, to
live for others; to make complete abnegation of themselves, and to
have no life but in their affections. And by their affections are
meant the only ones they are allowed to have--those to the men with
whom they are connected, or to the children who constitute an
additional and indefeasible tie between them and a man. When we put
together three things--first, the natural attraction between
opposite sexes; secondly, the wife's entire dependence on the
husband, every privilege or pleasure she has being either his gift,
or depending entirely on his will; and lastly, that the principal
object of human pursuit, consideration, and all objects of social
ambition, can in general be sought or obtained by her only through
him, it would be a miracle if the object of being attractive to men
had not become the polar star of feminine education and formation
of character. And, this great means of influence over the minds of
women having been acquired, an instinct of selfishness made men
avail themselves of it to the utmost as a means of holding women in
subjection, by representing to them meekness, submissiveness, and
resignation of all individual will into the hands of a man, as an
essential part of sexual attractiveness. Can it be doubted that any
of the other yokes which mankind have succeeded in breaking, would
have subsisted till now if the same means had existed, and had been
so sedulously used, to bow down their minds to it? If it had been
made the object of the life of every young plebeian to find
personal favour in the eyes of some patrician, of every young serf
with some seigneur; if domestication with him, and a share of his
personal affections, had been held out as the prize which they all
should look out for, the most gifted and aspiring being able to
reckon on the most desirable prizes; and if, when this prize had
been obtained, they had been shut out by a wall of brass from all
interests not centring in him, all feelings and desires but those
which he shared or inculcated; would not serfs and seigneurs,
plebeians and patricians, have been as broadly distinguished at
this day as men and women are? and would not all but a thinker here
and there, have believed the distinction to be a fundamental and
unalterable fact in human nature? The preceding considerations are
amply sufficient to show that custom, however universal it may be,
affords in this case no presumption, and ought not to create any
prejudice, in favour of the arrangements which place women in
social and political subjection to men. But I may go farther, and
maintain that the course of history, and the tendencies of
progressive human society, afford not only no presumption in favour
of this system of inequality of rights, but a strong one against
it; and that, so far as the whole course of human improvement up to
the time, the whole stream of modern tendencies, warrants any
inference on the subject, it is, that this relic of the past is
discordant with the future, and must necessarily disappear. For,
what is the peculiar character of the modern world-- the difference
which chiefly distinguishes modern institutions, modern social
ideas, modern life itself, from those of times long past? It is,
that human beings are no longer born to their place in life, and
chained down by an inexorable bond to the place they are born to,
but are free to employ their faculties, and such favourable chances
as offer, to achieve the lot which may appear to them most
desirable. Human society of old was constituted on a very different
principle. All were born to a fixed social position, and were
mostly kept in it by law, or interdicted from any means by which
they could emerge from it. As some men are born white and others
black, so some were born slaves and others freemen and citizens;
some were born patricians, others plebeians; some were born feudal
nobles, others commoners and roturiers. A slave or serf could never
make himself free, nor, except by the will of his master, become
so. In most European countries it was not till towards the close of
the middle ages, and as a consequence of the growth of regal power,
that commoners could be ennobled. Even among nobles, the eldest son
was born the exclusive heir to the paternal possessions, and a long
time elapsed before it was fully established that the father could
disinherit him. Among the industrious classes, only those who were
born members of a guild, or were admitted into it by its members,
could lawfully practise their calling within its local limits; and
nobody could practise any calling deemed important, in any but the
legal manner--by processes authoritatively prescribed.
Manufacturers have stood in the pillory for presuming to carry on
their business by new and improved methods. In modern Europe, and
most in those parts of it which have participated most largely in
all other modern improvements, diametrically opposite doctrines now
prevail. Law and government do not undertake to prescribe by whom
any social or industrial operation shall or shall not be conducted,
or what modes of conducting them shall be lawful. These things are
left to the unfettered choice of individuals. Even the laws which
required that workmen should serve an apprenticeship, have in this
country been repealed: there being ample assurance that in all
cases in which an apprenticeship is necessary, its necessity will
suffice to enforce it. The old theory was, that the least possible
should be left to the choice of the individual agent; that all he
had to do should, as far as practicable, be laid down for him by
superior wisdom. Left to himself he was sure to go wrong. The
modern conviction, the fruit of a thousand years of experience, is,
that things in which the individual is the person directly
interested, never go right but as they are left to his own
discretion; and that any regulation of them by authority, except to
protect the rights of others, is sure to be mischievous. This
conclusion slowly arrived at, and not adopted until almost every
possible application of the contrary theory had been made with
disastrous result, now (in the industrial department) prevails
universally in the most advanced countries, almost universally in
all that have pretensions to any sort of advancement. It is not
that all processes are supposed to be equally good, or all persons
to be equally qualified for everything; but that freedom of
individual choice is now known to be the only thing which procures
the adoption of the best processes, and throws each operation into
the hands of those who are best qualified for it. Nobody thinks it
necessary to make a law that only a strong-armed man shall be a
blacksmith. Freedom and competition suffice to make blacksmiths
strong-armed men, because the weak armed can earn more by engaging
in occupations for which they are more fit. In consonance with this
doctrine, it is felt to be an overstepping of the proper bounds of
authority to fix beforehand, on some general presumption, that
certain persons are not fit to do certain things. It is now
thoroughly known and admitted that if some such presumptions exist,
no such presumption is infallible. Even if it be well grounded in
a majority of cases, which it is very likely not to be, there will
be a minority of exceptional cases in which it does not hold: and
in those it is both an injustice to the individuals, and a
detriment to society, to place barriers in the way of their using
their faculties for their own benefit and for that of others. In
the cases, on the other hand, in which the unfitness is real, the
ordinary motives of human conduct will on the whole suffice to
prevent the incompetent person from making, or from persisting in,
the attempt. 

If this general principle of social and economical science is not
true; if individuals, with such help as they can derive from the
opinion of those who know them, are not better judges than the law
and the government, of their own capacities and vocation; the world
cannot too soon abandon this principle, and return to the old
system of regulations and disabilities. But if the principle is
true, we ought to act as if we believed it, and not to ordain that
to be born a girl instead of a boy, any more than to be born black
instead of white, or a commoner instead of a nobleman, shall decide
the person's position through all life--shall interdict people from
all the more elevated social positions, and from all, except a few,
respectable occupations. Even were we to admit the utmost that is
ever pretended a to the superior fitness of men for all the
functions now reserve to them, the same argument applies which
forbids a legal qualification for Members of Parliament. If only
once in a dozen years the conditions of eligibility exclude a fit
person, there is a real loss, while the exclusion of thousands of
unfit persons is no gain; for if the constitution of the electoral
body disposes them to choose unfit persons, there are always plenty
of such persons to choose from. In all things of any difficulty and
importance, those who can do them well are fewer than the need,
even with the most unrestricted latitude of choice: and any
limitation of the field of selection deprives society of some
chances of being served by the competent, without ever saving it
from the incompetent. 

At present, in the more improved countries, the disabilities of
women are the only case, save one, in which laws and institutions
take persons at their birth, and ordain that they shall never in
all their lives be allowed to compete for certain things. The one
exception is that of royalty. Persons still are born to the
throne; no one, not of the reigning family, can ever occupy it, and
no one even of that family can, by any means but the course of
hereditary succession, attain it. All other dignities and social
advantages are open to the whole male sex: many indeed are only
attainable by wealth, but wealth may be striven for by anyone, and
is actually obtained by many men of the very humblest origin. The
difficulties, to the majority, are indeed insuperable without the
aid of fortunate accidents; but no male human being is under any
legal ban: neither law nor opinion superadd artificial obstacles to
the natural ones. Royalty, as I have said, is excepted: but in this
case everyone feels it to be an exception--an anomaly in the modern
world, in marked opposition to its customs and principles, and to
be justified only by extraordinary special expediences, which,
though individuals and nations differ in estimating their weight,
unquestionably do in fact exist. But in this exceptional case, in
which a high social function is, for important reasons, bestowed on
birth instead of being put up to competition, all free nations
contrive to adhere in substance to the principle from which they
nominally derogate; for they circumscribe this high function by
conditions avowedly intended to prevent the person to whom it
ostensibly belongs from really performing it; while the person by
whom it is performed, the responsible minister, does obtain the
post by a competition from which no full-grown citizen of the male
sex is legally excluded. The disabilities, therefore, to which
women are subject from the mere fact of their birth, are the
solitary examples of the kind in modern legislation. In no instance
except this, which comprehends half the human race, are the higher
social functions closed against anyone by a fatality of birth which
no exertions, and no change of circumstances, can overcome; for
even religious disabilities (besides that in England and in Europe
they have practically almost ceased to exist) do not close any
career to the disqualified person in case of conversion. 

The social subordination of women thus stands out an isolated fact
in modern social institutions; a solitary breach of what has become
their fundamental law; a single relic of an old world of thought
and practice exploded in everything else, but retained in the one
thing of most universal interest; as if a gigantic dolmen, or a
vast temple of Jupiter Olympius, occupied the site of St. Paul's
and received daily worship, while the surrounding Christian
churches were only resorted to on fasts and festivals. This entire
discrepancy between one social fact and all those which accompany
it, and the radical opposition between its nature and the
progressive movement which is the boast of the modern world, and
which has successively swept away everything else of an analogous
character, surely affords, to a conscientious observer of human
tendencies, serious matter for reflection. It raises a prima facie
presumption on the unfavourable side, far outweighing any which
custom and usage could in such circumstances create on the
favourable;and should at least suffice to make this, like the
choice between republicanism and royalty, a balanced question. 

The least that can be demanded is, that the question should not be
considered as prejudged by existing fact and existing opinion, but
open to discussion on its merits, as a question of justice and
expediency: the decision on this, as on any of the other social
arrangements of mankind, depending on what an enlightened estimate
of tendencies and consequences may show to be most advantageous to
humanity in general, without distinction of sex. And the discussion
must be a real discussion, descending to foundations, and not
resting satisfied with vague and general assertions. It will not
do, for instance to assert in general terms, that the experience of
mankind has pronounced in favour of the existing system. Experience
cannot possibly have decided between two courses, so long as there
has only been experience of one. If it be said that the doctrine of
the equality of the sexes rests only on theory, it must be
remembered that the contrary doctrine also has only theory to rest
upon. All that is proved in its favour by direct experience, is
that mankind have been able to exist under it, and to attain the
degree of improvement and prosperity which we now see; but whether
that prosperity has been attained sooner, or is now greater, than
it would have been under the other system, experience does not say.
on the other hand, experience does say, that every step in
improvement has been so invariably accompanied by a step made in
raising the social position of women, that historians and
philosophers have been led to adopt their elevation or debasement
as on the whole the surest test and most correct measure of the
civilisation of a people or an age. Through all the progressive
period of human history, the condition of women has been
approaching nearer to equality with men. This does not of itself
prove that the assimilation must goon to complete equality; but it
assuredly affords some presumption that such is the case. 

Neither does it avail anything to say that the nature of the two
sexes adapts them to their present functions and position, and
renders these appropriate to them. Standing on the ground of common
sense and the constitution of the human mind, I deny that anyone
knows, or can know, the nature of the two sexes, as long as they
have only been seen in their present relation to one another. If
men had ever been found in society without women, or women without
men, or if there had been a society of men and women in which the
women were not under the control of the men, something might have
been positively known about the mental and moral differences which
may be inherent in the nature of each. What is now called the
nature of women is an eminently artificial thing--the result of
forced repression in some directions, unnatural stimulation in
others. It may be asserted without scruple, that no other class of
dependents have had their character so entirely distorted from its
natural proportions by their relation with their masters; for, if
conquered and slave races have been, in some respects, more
forcibly repressed, whatever in them has not been crushed down by
an iron heel has generally been let alone, and if left with any
liberty of development, it has developed itself according to its
own laws; but in the case of women, a hot-house and stove
cultivation has always been carried on of some of the capabilities
of their nature, for the benefit and pleasure of their masters
Then, because certain products of the general vital force sprout
luxuriantly and reach a great development in this heated atmosphere
and under this active nurture and watering, while other shoots from
the same root, which are left outside in the wintry air, with ice
purposely heaped all round them, have a stunted growth, and some
are burnt off with fire and disappear; men, with that inability to
recognise their own work which distinguishes the unanalytic mind,
indolently believe that the tree grows of itself in the way they
have made it grow, and that it would die if one half of it were not
kept in a vapour bath and the other half in the snow. 

Of all difficulties which impede the progress of thought, and the
formation of well-grounded opinions on life and social
arrangements, the greatest is now the unspeakable ignorance and
inattention of mankind in respect to the influences which form
human character. Whatever any portion of the human species now are,
or seem to be, such, it is supposed, they have a natural tendency
to be: even when the most elementary knowledge of the circumstances
in which they have been placed, clearly points out the causes that
made them what they are. Because a cottier deeply in arrears to his
landlord is not industrious, there are people who think that the
Irish are naturally idle. Because constitutions can be overthrown
when the authorities appointed to execute them turn their arms
against them, there are people who think the French incapable of
free government. Because the Greeks cheated the Turks, and the
Turks only plundered the Greeks, there are persons who think that
the Turks are naturally more sincere: and because women, as is
often said, care nothing about politics except their personalities,
it is supposed that the general good is naturally less interesting
to women than to men. History, which is now so much better
understood than formerly, teaches another lesson: if only by
showing the extraordinary susceptibility of human nature to
external influences, and the extreme variableness of those of its
manifestations which are supposed to be most universal and uniform.
But in history, as in travelling, men usually see only what they
already had in their own minds; and few learn much from history,
who do not bring much with them to its study. 

Hence, in regard to that most difficult question, what are the
natural differences between the two sexes--a subject on which it is
impossible in the present state of society to obtain complete and
correct knowledge--while almost everybody dogmatises upon it,
almost all neglect and make light of the only means by which any
partial insight can be obtained into it. This is, an analytic study
of the most important department of psychology, the laws of the
influence of circumstances on character. For, however great and
apparently ineradicable the moral and intellectual differences
between men and women might be, the evidence of there being natural
differences could only be negative. Those only could be inferred to
be natural which could not possibly be artificial--the residuum,
after deducting every characteristic of either sex which can admit
of being explained from education or external circumstances. The
profoundest knowledge of the laws of the formation of character is
indispensable to entitle anyone to affirm even that there is any
difference, much more what the difference is, between the two sexes
considered as moral and rational beings; and since no one, as yet,
has that knowledge (for there is hardly any subject which, in
proportion to its importance, has been so little studied), no one
is thus far entitled to any positive opinion on the subject.
Conjectures are all that can at present be made;conjectures more or
less probable, according as more or less authorised by such
knowledge as we yet have of the laws of psychology, as applied to
the formation of character. 

Even the preliminary knowledge, what the differences between the
sexes now are, apart from all question as to how they are made what
they are, is still in the crudest and most' incomplete state.
Medical practitioners and physiologists have ascertained, to some
extent, the differences in bodily constitution; and this is an
important element to the psychologist: but hardly any medical
practitioner is a psychologist. Respecting the mental
characteristics of women; their observations are of no more worth
than those of common men. It is a subject on which nothing final
can be known, so long as those who alone can really know it, women
themselves, have given but little testimony, and that little,
mostly suborned. It is easy to know stupid women. Stupidity is much
the same all the world over. A stupid person's notions and feelings
may confidently be inferred from those which prevail in the circle
by which the person is surrounded. Not so with those whose opinions
and feelings are an emanation from their own nature and faculties.
It is only a man here and there who has any tolerable knowledge of
the character even of the women of his own family. I do not mean,
of their capabilities; these nobody knows, not even themselves,
because most of them have never been called out. I mean their
actually existing thoughts and feelings. Many a man think she
perfectly understands women, because he has had amatory relations
with several, perhaps with many of them. 

If he is a good observer, and his experience extends to quality as
well as quantity, he may have learnt something of one narrow
department of their nature--an important department, no doubt. But
of all the rest of it, few persons are generally more ignorant,
because there are few from whom it is so carefully hidden. The most
favourable case which a man can generally have for studying the
character of a woman, is that of his own wife: for the
opportunities are greater, and the cases of complete sympathy not
so unspeakably rare. And in fact, this is the source from which any
knowledge worth having on the subject has, I believe, generally
come. But most men have not had the opportunity of studying in this
way more than a single case: accordingly one can, to an almost
laughable degree, infer what a man's wife is like, from his
opinions about women in general. To make even this one case yield
any result, the woman must be worth knowing, and the man not only
a competent judge, but of a character so sympathetic in itself, and
so well adapted to hers, that he can either read her mind by
sympathetic intuition, or has nothing in himself which makes her
shy of disclosing it, Hardly anything, I believe, can be more rare
than this conjunction. It often happens that there is the most
complete unity of feeling and community of interests as to all
external things, yet the one has as little admission into the
internal life of the other as if they were common acquaintance.
Even with true affection, authority on the one side and
subordination on the other prevent perfect confidence. Though
nothing may be intentionally withheld, much is not shown. In the
analogous relation of parent and child, the corresponding
phenomenon must have been in the observation of everyone. As
between father and son, how many are the cases in which the father,
in spite of real affection on both sides, obviously to all the
world does not know, nor suspect, parts of the son's character
familiar to his companions and equals. The truth is, that the
position of looking up to another is extremely unpropitious to
complete sincerity and openness with him. The fear of losing ground
in his opinion or in his feelings is so strong, that even in an
upright character, there is an unconscious tendency to show only
the best side, or the side which, though not the best, is that
which he most likes to see: and it may be confidently said that
thorough knowledge of one another hardly ever exists, but between
persons who, besides being intimates, are equals. How much more
true, then, must all this be, when the one is not only under the
authority of the other, but has it inculcated on her as a duty to
reckon everything else subordinate to his comfort and pleasure, and
to let him neither see nor feel anything coming from her, except
what is agreeable to him. All these difficulties stand in the way
of a man's obtaining any thorough knowledge even of the one woman
whom alone, in general, he has sufficient opportunity of studying.
When we further consider that to understand one woman is not
necessarily to understand any other woman; that even if he could
study many women of one rank, or of one country, he would not
thereby understand women of other ranks or countries; and even if
he did, they are still only the women of a single period of
history; we may safely assert that the knowledge which men can
acquire of women, even as they have been and are, without reference
to what they might be, is wretchedly imperfect and superficial, and
always will be so, until women themselves have told all that they
have to tell. 

And this time has not come; nor will it come otherwise than
gradually. It is but of yesterday that women have either been
qualified by literary accomplishments or permitted by society, to
tell anything to the general public. As yet very few of them dare
tell anything, which men, on whom their literary success depends,
are unwilling to hear. Let us remember in what manner, up to a very
recent time, the expression, even by a male author, of uncustomary
opinions, or what are deemed eccentric feelings, usually was, and
in some degree still is, received; and we may form some faint
conception under what impediments a woman, who is brought up to
think custom and opinion her sovereign rule, attempts to express in
books anything drawn from the depths of her own nature. The
greatest woman who has left writings behind her sufficient to give
her an eminent rank in the literature of her country, thought it
necessary to prefix as a motto to her boldest work, " Un homme peut
braver l'opinion; une femme doit s'y soumettre." [1] The greater
part of what women write about women is mere sycophancy to men. In
the case of unmarried women, much of it seems only intended to
increase their chance of a husband. Many, both married and
unmarried, overstep the mark, and inculcate a servility beyond what
is desired or relished by any man, except the very vulgarest. But
this is not so often the L case as, even at a quite late period, it
still was. Literary women I are becoming more free-spoken, and more
willing to express their real sentiments. Unfortunately, in this
country especially, they are themselves such artificial products,
that their sentiments are compounded of a small element of
individual observation and consciousness, and a very large one of
acquired associations. This will be less and less the case, but it
will remain true to a great extent, as long as social institutions
do not admit the same free development of originality in women
which is possible to men. When that time comes, and not before, we
shall see, and not merely hear, as much as it is necessary to know
of the nature of women, and the adaptation of other things to it. 

I have dwelt so much on the difficulties which at present obstruct
any real knowledge by men of the true nature of women, because in
this as in so many other things "opinio copiae inter maximas causas
inopiae est"; and there is little chance of reasonable thinking on
the matter while people flatter themselves that they perfectly
understand a subject of which most men know absolutely nothing, and
of which it is at present impossible that any man, or all men taken
together, should have knowledge which can qualify them to lay down
the law to women as to what is, or is not, their vocation. Happily,
no such knowledge is necessary for any practical purpose connected
with the position of women is relation to society and life. For,
according to all the principles involved in modern society, the
question rests with women themselves--to be decided by their own
experience, and by the use of their own faculties. There are no
means of finding what either one person or many can do, but by
trying--and no means by which anyone else can discover for them
what it is for their happiness to do or leave undone. 

One thing we may be certain of--that what is contrary to women's
nature to do, they never will be made to do by simply giving their
nature free play. The anxiety of mankind to interfere in behalf of
nature, for fear lest nature should not succeed m effecting its
purpose, is an altogether unnecessary solicitude. What women by
nature cannot do, it is quite superfluous to forbid them from
doing. What they can do, but not so well as the men who are their
competitors, competition suffices to exclude them from; since
nobody asks for protective duties and bounties in favour of women;
it is only asked that the present bounties and protective duties in
favour of men should be recalled. If women have a greater natural
inclination for somethings than for others, there is no need of
laws or social inculcation to make the majority of them do the
former in preference to the latter. Whatever women's services are
most wanted for, the free play of competition will hold out the
strongest inducements to them to undertake. And, as the words
imply, they are most wanted for the things for which they are most
fit; by the apportionment of which to them, the collective
faculties of the two sexes can be applied on the whole with the
greatest sum of valuable result. The general opinion of men is
supposed to be, that the natural vocation of a woman is that of a
wife and mother. I say, is supposed to be, because, judging from
acts--from the whole of the present constitution of society--one
might infer that their opinion was the direct contrary. They might
be supposed to think that the alleged natural vocation of women was
of all things the most repugnant to their nature; insomuch that if
they are free to do anything else--if any other means of living or
occupation of their time and faculties, is open, which has any
chance of appearing desirable to them- there will not be enough of
them who will be willing to accept the condition said to be natural
to them. If this is the real opinion of men in general, it would be
well that it should be spoken out. I should like to hear somebody
openly enunciating the doctrine (it is already implied in much that
is written on the subJect)- It is necessary to society that women
should marry and produce children. They will not do so unless they
are compelled. Therefore it is necessary to compel them. " The
merits of the case would then be clearly defined. It would be
exactly that of the slave-holders of South Carolina and Louisiana.
" It is necessary that cotton and sugar should be grown. White men
cannot produce them. Negroes will not, for any wages which we
choose to give. Ergo they must be compelled. " An illustration
still closer to the point is that of impressment. Sailors must
absolutely be had to defend the country. It often happens that they
will not voluntarily enlist. Therefore there must be the power of
forcing them. How often has this logic been used!and, but for one
flaw in it, without doubt it would have been successful up to this
day. But lt is open to the retort-- First pay the sailors the
honest value of their labour. When you have made it as well worth
their while to serve you, as to work for other employers, you will
have no more difficulty than others have in obtaining their
services. To this there is no logical answer except"I will not":
and as people are now not only ashamed, but are not desirous, to
rob the labourer of his hire, impressment is no longer advocated.
Those who attempt to force women into marriage by closing all other
doors against them, lay themselves open to a similar retort. If
they mean what they say, their opinion must evidently be, that men
do not render the married condition so desirable to women, as to
induce them to accept it for its own recommendations. It is not a
sign of one's thinking the boon one offers very attractive, when
one allows only Hobson's choice, "that or none. " And here, I
believe, is the clue to the feelings of those men, who have a real
antipathy to the equal freedom of women. I believe they are afraid,
not lest women should be unwilling to marry, for I do not think
that anyone in reality has that apprehension; but lest they should
insist that marriage should be on equal conditions; lest all women
of spirit and capacity should prefer doing almost anything else,
not in their own eyes degrading, rather than marry, when marrying
is giving themselves a master, and a master too of all their
earthly possessions. And truly, if this consequence were
necessarily incident to marriage, I think that the apprehension
would be very well founded. I agree in thinking it probable that
few women, capable of anything else, would, unless under an
irresistible entrainement, rendering them for the time insensible
to anything but itself, choose such a lot, when any other means
were open to them of filling a conventionally honourable place in
life: and if men are determined that the law of marriage shall be
a law of despotism, they are quite right, in point of mere policy,
in leaving to women only Hobson's choice. But, in that case, all
that has been done in the modern world to relax the chain on the
minds of women, has been a mistake. They never should have been
allowed to receive a literary education. Women who read, much more
women who write, are, in the existing constitution of things, a
contradiction and a disturbing element: and it was wrong to bring
women up with any acquirements but those of an odalisque, or of a
domestic servant. 

                              NOTES

[1]  Title-page of Mme de Stael's Delphine.

                           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 show 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 civilisation 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 livelong 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, etc. : 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 anyone 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 anyone pretended that there are no such
things as goodmen. 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 fora 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 civilisation 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, everyone knows by heart, were it not that hardly anyone
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 selfish indulgence, and a double-dyed and idealised
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 everyone 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 licence 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 high minded 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 tyrannises; 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 everyday, 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, excepting
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 anyone 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 anyone 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
civilisation 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 everyone 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
twelve month, 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 anyone
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, etc. 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 anyone, 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
belittle 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 another wise 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