The subjection of women

,

(5,

THE

SUBJECTION

WOMEN

BY

JOHN STUART MILL

SECOND EDITION

LONDON
LONGMANS, GREEN, READER, AND DYER

1869

HO.

ices

T.OWDON :

A *D CO., WIWM*, CHAWOB WMW.
COVBBTGA.BDEK.

& /
<y> 7

CHAPTER I.

fFHE object of this Essay is to explain as
-*- clearly as I am able, the grounds of an
opinion which I have held from the very earliest
period when I had formed any opinions at all on
social or political matters, and which, instead of
being weakened or modified, has been constantly
growing stronger by the progress of reflection
and the experience of life : That the principle
which regulates the existing social relations
between the two sexes the legal subordination of
one sex to the other is wrong in itself, and now
one of the chief hindrances to human improve
ment ; and that it ought to be replaced by a
equality, admitting no

_ 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

B

my conviction rests. The difficulty is that which
exists in all cases in which there is a mass of
feeling to be contended against. So long as
an opinion is strongly rooted in the feelings,
it gains rather than loses in stability by having
a preponderating weight of argument against
it t For if it were accepted as a result of
argument, the refutation of the argument might
shake the solidity of the conviction ; but when it
rests solely on feeling, the worse it fares in argu
mentative contest, the more persuaded its adhe
rents are that their feeling must have some deeper
ground, which the arguments do not reach ;
and while the feeling remains, it is always throw
ing up fresh intrenchments of argument to repair
any breach made in the old. And there are so
many causes tending to make the feelings con
nected with this subject the most intense and
most deeply-rooted of all those which gather
round and protect old institutions and customs,
that we need not wonder to find them as yet less
undermined and loosened than any of the rest
by the progress of the great modern spiritual and
social transition; nor suppose that the barbarisms
to which men cling longest must be less bar
barisms than those which they earlier shake off.
In every respect the burthen is hard on those
who attack an almost universal opinion. They
must be very fortunate as well as unusually

3

capable if they obtain a hearing at all. They
have more difficulty in obtaining a trial, than
any other litigants have in getting a verdict. If
they do extort a hearing, they are subjected to a
set of logical requirements totally different from
those exacted from other people. In all other
cases, the burthen of proof is supposed to lie with
the affirmative. If a person is charged with a
murder, it rests with those who accuse him to
give proof of his guilt, not with himself to prove
his innocence. If there is a difference of opinion
about the reality of any alleged historical event,
in which the feelings of men in general are not
much interested, as the Siege of Troy for
example, those who maintain that the event took
place are expected to produce their proofs, before
those who take the other side can be required to
say anything; and at no time are these re
quired 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 sup
posed to be with those who are against liberty ;
who contend for any restriction or prohibi
tion ; either any limitation of the general freedom
of human action, or any disqualification or dis
parity of privilege affecting one person or kind
of persons, as compared with others. TJae

a priori presumption is in fa,vnnv r>f frppflrvm

and impartiality. It is held that then; should

B 2

be no restraint not required by the general good,
and that the law should be no respecter of persons,
but should treat all alike, save where dissimilarity
of treatment is required by positive rcasons^eithe r
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 use
less for me to say that those who maintain the
doctrine that men have a right to cormmn.d and
women are under an obligation to obey, or tfyat
men arfr fit for government and women unfit, are
on the affirmative side of the question, and that
they are bound to show positive evidence for the
assertions, or submit to their rejection. It is
equally unavailing for me to say that those who
deny to women any freedom or privilege rightly
allowed to men, having the double presumption
against them that they are opposing freedom
and recommending partiality, must be held to
the strictest proof of their case, and unless their
success be such as to exclude all doubt, the judg
ment ought to go against them. These would be
thought good pleas in any common case; but
they will not be thought so in this instance.
Before I could hope to make any impression,
I should be expected not only to answer
all that has ever been said by those who take
the other side of the question, but to imagine
all that could be said by them to find them

in reasons, as well as answer all I find : and
besides refuting all arguments for the affirmative,
I shall be called upon for invincible positive
arguments to prove a negative. And even if I
could do all this, and leave the opposite party
with a host of unanswered arguments against
them, and not a single unrefuted one on their side,
I should be thought to have done little ; for
a cause supported on the one hand by universal
usage, and on the other by so great a preponde
rance of popular sentiment, is supposed to have a
presumption in its favour, superior to any con
viction which an appeal to reason has power to
produce in any intellects but those of a high class.
I do not mention these difficulties to complain
of them ; first, because it would be useless ; they
are inseparable from having to contend through
people s understandings against the hostility
of their feelings and practical tendencies : and
trnlj^ the understandings of the majority of man
kind would need tp bo rrmpli VinH-pr pn1t.ivntp.fi
e casft Tfrnr thtr rm

asked to place such reliance in their own power
of estimating arguments, as to give up practical
principles in which they have been born and bred
and which are the basis of much of the existing
order of the world, at the first argumentative
attack which they are not capable of logically
resisting. I do not therefore quarrel with them

for having too little faith in argument, but for
x having too much faith in custom and the general
feeling. It is one of the characteristic preju
dices of the reaction of the nineteenth century
/against the eighteenth, to accord to the unrea
soning elements in human nature the infallibility
which the eighteenth century is supposed to have
ascribed to the reasoning elements. For the
apotheosis of Reason we have substituted that of
Instinct ; and we call everything instinct which
AVC find in ourselves and for which we cannot
trace any rational foundation. This idolatry,
infinitely more degrading than the other, and
the most pernicious of the false worships of
the present day, of all of which it is now the
main support, will probably hold its ground until
it gives way before a sound psychology, laying
bare the real root of much that is bowed down
to as the intention of Nature and the ordinance
of God. As regards the present question, I am
willing to accept the unfavourable conditions
which the prejudice assigns to me. I consent
that established custom, and the general feeling,
should be deemed conclusive against me, unless
that custom and feeling from age to age can be
shown to have owed their existence to other
causes than their soundness, and to have derived
their power from the worse rather than the better
parts of human nature. I am willing that judg-

/^,A
1/t -1

-

ment should go against me, unless I can show
that my judge has been tampered with. The con
cession 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 irPSf esta
blished, had been the result of a conscientious
comparison between different modes of consti
tuting the government of society; if, after trying
various other modes of social organization the
government of women over men, equality between
the two, and such mixed and divided modes of
government as might be invented it had been
decided, on the testimony of experience, that the
mode in which women are wholly under the_rule
of men, having no share at all in public concerns,
and each in private being under the legal ob-
ligation of obedience to the man with whom sfre
has associated her destiny, was the arrangement
most conducive to the happiness and well being of
both ; its general adoption might then be-iaiEly
thought to be some evidence that, at the time
when it was adopted, it was the best : though even

t

8

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.

j In the first place, the opinion in favour of the
present system, r which entirely subordinates the
weaker sex to_ the_stronger, .re^ts_upon_theory /
only; for there

^__

anyothcrj so that experience, in the sense in
wEcElTjrvujgarlvjDpjgosftd tn theory^ cannot be
prete^g^J^JiaYe-proriQiniced any^verdict._ And
in the second place, the adoption of this system
of mequality^iever jwas the result of deliberation,
or forethought, or any social ideas, or any notion
whaIe^eT-or"wTmFconduced to the benefit of
humanity or lh(5~goord order of society . Tfc^f

the very earliest

muscular strenth was

Laws and systems of polity always begin by
recognising the relations they find already exist
ing between individuals. They convert what
was a mere physical fact into a legal right, give
it the sanction of society, and principally aim at
the substitution of public and organized means
of asserting and protecting these rights, instead

9

of the irregular and lawless conflict of physical
strength4 Those who had already been compelled
to obedience became in this manner legally bound
to it. Slavery, from being a mere affair of force
between the master and the slave, became regu
larized 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 culti
vation, 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

10

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 sup
posed 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
sserted that^jfe.. inequality of rights between

men and women has no other source than the

law of the strongest^ j

That this statement should have the effect of
a paradox, is in some respects creditable to the
progress of civilization, and the improvement of
the moral sentiments of mankind. We now live
that is to say, one or two of the most ad
vanced nations of the world now live in a state
in which the law of the strongest seems to be
entirely abandoned as the regulating principle
of the world s affairs : nobody professes it, and,
as regards most of the relations between human
beings, nobody is permitted to practise it. When
any one succeeds in doing so, it is under cover of
some 1 pretext which gives him the semblance of
having some general social interest on his side.

11

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. How
ever any of our present institutions may have be
gun, it can only, they think, have been preserved
to this period of advanced civilization by a well-
grounded feeling of its adaptation to human na
ture, and conduciveness to the general good. They/
do not understand ^the J[rcat vitality and dura- s
bility of institutions which place right on the side*/
ofjnight ; how intensely they arc clung to ; how
the good as well as the bad propensities and senti
ments 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 parti
cular 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

12

earlier period than several of the others, would be
the very last to disappear, jjt was inevitable that
this one case of a social relation grounded on force,
would survive through generations of institutions
grounded on equal justice, an almost solitary
exception to the general character of their laws
and customs ; but which, so long as it does not

*\

proclaim its own origin, and as discussion has
not brought out its true character, is not felt to
jar with modern civilization, any more than
domestic slavery among the Greeks jarred with
their notion of themselves as a free people*

The truth is, that people of the present and
the last two or three generations have lost all
practical sense of the primitive condition of
humanity; and only the few who have studied
history accurately, or have much frequented the
parts of the world occupied by the living repre
sentatives of ages long past, are able to form any
mental picture of what society then was. People
are not aware how entirely, in former ages, the
la^jjl^ujjerior strength was the rule of lifej: how
publicly :_andjopenly it was avowed, I do not say
cynically or shamelessly for these words imply
a feeling that there was something in it to be
ashamed of, and no such notion could find a
place in the faculties of any person in those ages,
except a philosopher or a saint. History gives a
cruel experience of human nature, in shewing

13

how exactly the regard due to the life, possessions,
and entire earthly happiness of any class of per
sons, was measured by what they had the power
of enforcing; how all who made any resistance
to authorities that had arms in their hands, how
ever dreadful might be the provocation, had not
only the law of force but all other laws, and all
the notions of social obligation against them; and
in the eyes of those whom they resisted, were
not only guilty of crime, but of the worst of all
crimes, deserving the most cruel chastisement
which human beings could inflict. The first
small vestige of a feeling of obligation in a
superior to acknowledge any right in inferiors,
began when he had been induced, for convenience,
to make some promise to them. Though these
promises, even when sanctioned by the most
solemn oaths, were for many ages revoked or
violated on the most trifling provocation or
temptation, it is probable that this, except by
persons of still worse than the average morality,
was seldom done without some twinges of con
science. The ancient republics, being mostly
grounded from the first upon some kind of
mutual compact, or at any rate formed by an
union of persons not very unequal in strength,
afforded, in consequence, the first instance of a
portion of human relations fenced round, and
placed under the dominion of another law than

14

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 common
wealths ; the banishment of that primitive law
even from so narrow a field, commenced the re
generation of human nature, by giving birth to
sentiments of which experience soon demon
strated the immense value even for material in
terests, and which thenceforward only required
to be enlarged, not created. Though slaves were
no part of the commonwealth, it was in the free
states that slaves were first felt to have rights as
human beings. \ The Stoics were, I believe, the
first (except so far as the Jewish law constitutes
an exception) who taught as a part of morality
that men were bound by moral obligations to
their slaves. No one, after Christianity became
ascendant, could ever again have been a stranger
to this belief, in theory ; nor, after the rise of the
Catholic Church, was it ever without persons to
stand up for it. Yet to enforce it was the most
arduous task which Christianity ever had to per
form. For more than a thousand years the
Church kept up the contest, with hardly any per
ceptible 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

15

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 de
liverance of the Holy Sepulchre. It could make
kings relinquish wives who were the object of
their passionate attachment, because the Church
declared that they were within the seventh (by our
calculation the fourteenth) degree of relationship.
All this it did ; but it could not make men fight
less with one another, nor tyrannize less cruelly
over the serfs, and when they were able, over
burgesses. It could not make them renounce
either of the applications of force ; force militant,
or force triumphant. This they could never
be induced to do until they were themselves in
their turn compelled by superior force. Only
by the growing power of kings was an end put to
fighting except between kings, or competitors for
kingship ; only by the growth of a wealthy and
warlike bourgeoisie in the fortified towns, and of a
plebeian infantry which proved more powerful
in the field than the undisciplined chivalry, was the
insolent tyranny of the nobles over the bour
geoisie and peasantry brought within some bounds.
It was persisted in not only until, but long after,

16

the oppressed had obtained a power enabling
them often to take conspicuous vengeance ; and
on the Continent much of it continued to the
time of the French Revolution, though in England
the earlier and better organization of the demo
cratic classes put an end to it sooner, by establish
ing equal laws and free national institutions.

If people are mostly so little aware how com
pletely, 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 establish
ment. 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, pre
sents features the most revolting to the feelings

17

of all who look at it from an impartial position,
was the law of civilized and Christian England
within the memory of persons now living : and
in one half of Anglo-Saxon America three or
four years ago, not only did slavery exist, but
the slave trade, and the breeding of slaves ex
pressly 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 in
terest in favour of it, than of any other of the
customary abuses of force : for its mojive was
the love of gain, unmixed and undisguised ; and
those who profited by it were a very small nu
merical 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

c

18

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 justifi-
ableness. I am showing how vastly more perma
nent it could not but be, even if not justifiable,
than these other dominations which have never
theless lasted down to our own time. What
ever gratification of pride there is in the posses
sion 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 fac
tions, of little private importance to any but the
leaders ; it comes home to the person and hearth
of every male head of a family, and of every one

19

who looks forward to being so. The clodhopper
exercises, or is to exercise, his share of the power
equally with the highest nobleman. fAnd the
case is that in which the desire of power is the
strongest: for every one who desires power, desires
it most over those who are nearest to him, with
whom his life is passed, with whom he has most
concerns in common, and in whom any inde
pendence of his authority is oftenest likely to
interfere with his individual preferences^ If^ jn
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 jfche
possessors of the power have facilities in this
case, greater than in any other, to prevent any v
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 offencej In struggles for
political emancipation, everybody knows how often
its champions are bought off by bribes, or daunted

c2

20

by terrors. In the case of women, each indi
vidual 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 plea
sures or the alleviations of their own individual
lot. If ever any system of privilege and en
forced subjection had its yoke tightly riveted
on the necks of those who are kept down by it,
this has. I have not yet shown that it is a
wrong system : but every one who is capable of
thinking on the subject must see that even if it
is, it was certain to outlast all other forms of
unjust authority. And when some of the grossest
of the other forms still exist in many civilized
countries, and have only recently been got rid
of in others, it would be strange if that which
is so much the deepest-rooted had yet been
perceptibly shaken anywhere. There is more
reason to wonder that the protests and testi
monies 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. f But was

21

there ever any domination which did not appear
natural to those who possessed it? 1 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 culti
vated minds, to be a natural, and the only natural,
condition of the human race. No less an in
tellect, 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 na
tures, and slave natures; that the Greeks were
of a free nature, the barbarian races of Thracians
and Asiatics of a sla.ve nature. But why need I
go back to Aristotle ? Did not the slaveowners
of the Southern United States maintain the same
doctrine, with all the fanaticism with which men
cling to the theories that justify their passions
and legitimate their personal interests? Did
they not call heaven and earth to witness that
the dominion of the white man over the black is
natural, that the black race is by nature inca
pable 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 abso-

22

lute 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. Conquer
ing races hold it to be Nature s own dictate that
the conquered should obey the conquerors, or, as
they euphoniously paraphrase it, that the feebler
and more unwarlike races should submit to the
braver and manlier. The smallest acquaintance
with human life in the middle ages, shows how
supremely natural the dominion of the feudal
nobility over men of low condition appeared to
the nobility themselves, and how unnatural the
conception seemed, of a person of the inferior
class claiming equality with them, or exercising
authority over them. It hardly seemed less so
to the class held in subjection, The emanci
pated serfs and burgesses, even in their most
vigorous struggles, never made any pretension to
a share of authority; they only demanded more
or less of limitation to the power of tyrannizing
over them. So true is it that unnatural gene
rally means only uncustomary, and that every-

23

thing which is usual appears natural. [[The sub
jection of women to men being a universal
custom, any departure from it quite naturally
appears unnaturaLj But how entirely, even in
this case, the feefmg 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 parlia-

tijtLL.

ment. |Li 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 un
natural 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 natu-

24

rally disqualified for them. There can be little
doubt that Spartan experience suggested to Plato,
among many other of his doctrines,, that of the
social and political equality of the two sexes J
u But, it will be said, the rule of men over women
differs from all these others in not being a rule
of force : it is accepted voluntarily ; women make
no complaint, and are consenting parties to itj
In the first place, a great number of women oo
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, ancfin
the same branches of knowledge, as men, is urged
withjrrowing 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 arc not in this country, as there
arc in the United States, periodical Conventions
and an organized party to agitate for the Rights
of Women, there is a numerous and active Society
organized and managed by women, for the more

25

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 Italj., y 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 con
trary 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 indi
vidual oppression of the king^s officers. Jit 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

26

women who complain of ill usage by their hus
bands .n There would be infinitely more, if com
plaint 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 phy
sical 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 after
wards 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 col
lectively rebellious to the power of men. They
are so far in a position different from all other
subject classes, that their masters require some-
1 hi iii;- more from them than actual service. pMen
the obedience of women, they~
Sl men, except the most
to have, m the woman most nearly
connected with them, not a forced slave but a_
willing one, not a slave merely, but a favourite.

L-~

27

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.
^Thejnasters 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 govern
ment 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 natureTio-
live for others; to make complete-abnegation of
themselves, and to haye_np life but in their
affections./? And by their affections arc meant
the only ones they are allowed to have those to
the men with whom they are connected, or to
t]ie_children who constitute an additional and
indefeasible tie between them and a man. When
we put together three thingsHpfirst, the natural
attraction between opposite sexes ; secondly, the
wife s entire dependence on the husband, every
privilege or pleasure she has being cither his
gift, or depending entirely on his will ; and lastly,
that the principal object of human pursuit, consi
deration, and all objects of social ambition, can in
general be sought or obtained by her only through

28

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 minors
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 attractivenes|JJ Can it be doubted
that any^oTTEe^other yokes which mankind have
succeeded in breaking, would have subsisted till
now if the same means had existed, and had been
as sedulously used, to bow down their minds to it ?
If it had been made the object of the life of every
young plebeian to find personal favour in the
eyes of some patrician, of every young serf with
some seigneur ; if domestication with him, and
a share of his personal affections, had been held
out as the prize which they all should look out
for, the most gifted and aspiring being able to
reckon on the most desirable prizes ; and if, when
this prize had been obtained, .they had been shut
out by a wall of brass from all interests not
centering in him, all feelings and desires but
those which he shared or inculcated ; would not
serfs and seigneurs, plebeians and patricians, have
been as broadly distinguished at this dav as men

29

and women are ? and would not all but a
thinker here and there, have believed thedis
tinction to be a fundamental and unalterable fact
in human nature ?

Jrhe preceding considerations are amply suffi
cient to show that custom, ho AY ever universal it
may be, aifords 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^rourse of history,
and the tendencies of progressive human society,
afford not only no presumption in favour of this
system of inequality of rights, but a strong one
against it ; and that, so far as the whole course of
human improvement up to this time, the whole
stream of modern tendencies, warrants any in
ference 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 dis
tinguishes 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

30

may appear to them most desirable. Human
society of old was constituted on a very different
principle. All were born to a fixed social posi
tion, and were mostly kept in it by law, or inter
dicted 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 dis
inherit 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 im
portant, in any but the legal manner by pro
cesses 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

31

it which have participated most largely in all
other modern improvements,, diametrically op
posite doctrines now prevail. Law and govern
ment 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 Avhich 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 mis
chievous. This conclusion, slowly arrived at, and
not adopted until almost every possible applica
tion of the contrary theory had been made with
disastrous result, now (in the industrial depart
ment) prevails universally in the most advanced

32

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 pro
cesses, and throws each operation into the hands
of those who are best qualified for it. Nobody
V thinks it necessary to make a law that only a
strong-armed man shall be a blacksmith. Free
dom 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 per
sons 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,

33

on the other hand, in which the nnfitness is
real, the ordinary motives of human conduct
will on the whole suffice to prevent the incom
petent person from making, or from persisting
in, the attempt.

If this general principle of social and econo-
mical 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 w r orld cannot
too soon abandon this principle, and return to
the old system of regulations and disabilities.
But if the principle is true, we ought to act
as if we believed it, and not to ordain that to
be born a girl instead of a boy, any more
than to be born black instead of white, or a
commoner instead of a nobleman, shall decide
the^ person s position through all life shall
interdict people from all the more elevated
social positions, and from all, except a few,
respectable occupations. Even were we to admit
the utmost that is ever pretended as to the
superior fitness of men for all the functions now
reserved to them, the same argument applies
which forbids a legal qualification for members of
Parliament. If only once in a dozen years the
conditions of eligibility exclude a fit person,
there is a real loss, while the exclusion of thou-

34

sands of unfit persons is no gain ; for if the con
stitution 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*
[j All other dignities and social advantages are open
to the whole male sex : many indeed are only
attainable by wealth, but wealth may be striven
for by any one^ and is actually obtained by many
men of the very humblest origin. The difficulties,
to the majority, are indeed insuperable without
the aid of fortunate accidents; but no male
human being is under any legal ban : neither
law nor opinion superadd artificial obstacles ta

35

the natural ones-D Royalty, as I have said, is-

r "" " "" f^ ^f

excepted : but in this case every one feels it to be
an exception an anomaly in the modern world,
in marked opposition to its customs and princi
ples, and to be justified only by extraordinary
special expediencies, which, though individuals
and nations differ in estimating their weight,
unquestionably do in fact exist. But in this
exceptional case, in which a high social function
is, for important reasons, bestowed on birth instead
of being put up to competition, all free nations
contrive to adhere in substance to the principle
from which they nominally derogate ; for they
circumscribe this high function by conditions
avowedly intended to prevent the person to whom
it ostensibly beloogs 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. J 7 ^ejddsjibilities,
therefore, to which women are subject from the
mere fact of their birth, are the solitary examples
of the kind in modern legislation. In no
instance except this, which comprehends half the
human race, are the higher social functions
closed against any one by a fatality of birth which
110 exertions, and no change of circumstances,
can overcome ; for even religious disabilities f]
(besides that in England and in Europe they

36

have practically almost ceased to exist) do not
close any career to the disqualified person in case
of conversion.

X 3rhe social subordination of women thus stands
out an isolated fact in modern social institutiony/j
a solitary breach of what has become their funda
mental 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 sur
rounding 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 modem world, and which has
successively swept away everything else of an
analogous character, surely affords, to a con
scientious observer of human tendencies, serious
matter for reflection. It raises a prima facie pre
sumption on the unfavourable side, far outweigh
ing 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

37

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, with
out 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 expe
rience 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, ex
perience does not say. On the other hand, ex
perience does say, that every step in improvement
has been so invariably accompanied by a step

38

made in raising the social position of women,
that historians and philosophers have been led to
adopt their elevation or debasement as on the
whole the surest test and most correct measure of
the civilization of a people or an age. /Through
all the progressive period of human history, the__
condition of women has been approaching nearer
to equality with men. / This docs not of itself
prove that the assimilation must go on to complete
equality ; but it assuredly affords some presump
tion that such is the case.

Neither does it avail anything to say that the
nature of the two sexes adapts them to their
present functions and position, and renders these
appropriate to them. Standing on the ground of
common sense and the constitution of the human
mind, I deny that any one knows, or can know,
the nature of the two sexes, as long as they have
only been seen in their present relation to one
another. If men had ever been found in society
without women, or women without men, or if
there had been a society of men and women in
which the women were not under the control of
the men, something might have been positively
known about the mental and moral differences
which may be inherent in the nature of each.
What is now called the nature of women is an
eminently artificial thing the result of forced
repression in some directions, unnatural stimula-

39

tion in others. It may bo asserted without
scruple, that no other class of dependents have j
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 atmo
sphere and under this active nurture and water
ing, while other shoots from the same root, which
arc left outside in the wintry air, with ice pur
posely 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 un-
analytic 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

40

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 in
fluences 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 land
lord is not industrious, there are people who
think that the Irish are naturally idle. Because
constitutions can be overthrown when the autho
rities 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 FO much better understood than
formerly, teaches another lesson : if only by show
ing the extraordinary susceptibility of human
nature to external influences, and the extreme

41

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
with, them to its stud.

Hence, in regard to that most difficult ques
tion, vhat are the natural differences between
the two sexes a subject on which it is impossible
in the present state of society to obtain com
plete and correct knowledge while almost every
body dogmatizes upon it, almost all neglect and
make light of the only means by which any
partial insight can be obtained into it. This is,
an analytic study of the most important de
partment of psychology, the laws of the influence
of circumstances 011 character. For, however
great and apparently ineradicable the moral and
intellectual differences between men and women
might be, the evidence of their being natural
differences could only be negative. Those only
could be inferred to be natural which could not
possibly be artificial the residuum, after de
ducting every characteristic of either sex which
can admit of being explained from education or
external circumstances. The profoundest know
ledge of the laws of the formation of character
is indispensable to entitle any one to affirm even
that there is anv difference, much more what

42

the difference is, between the two sexes con
sidered as moral and rational beings ; and since
no one, as yet, has that knowledge, (for there is
hardly any subject which, in proportion to its
importance, has been so little studied), no one is
thus far entitled to any positive opinion on the
subject. Conjectures are all that can at present
be made; conjectures more or less probable,
according as more or less authorized by such
knowledge as Are yet have of the laws of psy
chology, 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 incom
plete state. Medical practitioners and physio
logists 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 feel-

43

ings may confidently be inferred from those which
prevail in the circle by which the person is sur
rounded. Not _so with those whose opinions and
feelings are an emanation from their own nature
and faculties. It is only a man here and there
who has any tolerable knowledge of the character
even of the women of his own family. I do
not mean, of their capabilities ; these nobody
knows, not even themselves,, because most of
them have never been called out. I mean their
actually existing thoughts and feelings. Many
a man thinks he perfectly understands women,
because he has had amatory relations Avith
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 gene
rally 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 un
speakably 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

44

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 compe
tent 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 Avhich 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 sub
ordination on the other prevent perfect confi
dence. Though nothing may be intentionally
withheld, much is not shown. In the analogous
relation of parent and child, the corresponding
phenomenon must have been in the observation
of every one. As between father and son, how
many are the cases in which the father, in spite
of real affection on both sides, obviously to all
the world does not know, nor suspect, parts of
the son s character familiar to his companions
and equals. The truth is, that the position of

45

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 cha
racter, 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 study
ing. When we further consider that to under
stand 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

46

been and are, without reference to what
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 Jthem dare tell anything, which men7"pn
whom their literary success depends, are un
willing 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 impedJr _
ments 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 hornme pent braver
Popinion ; une femme doit s y soumettre."* The
greater part of what women write about women
is mere sycophancy to men. In the case of un-
* Title-page of Mine, de StaePs " Delpliine.

47

married women, much of it seems only intended
to increase their chance of a husband. Many,,
both married and unmarried, overstep the mark,
and inculcate a servility beyond what is desired
or relished by any man, except the very vulgarest.
But this is not so often the case as, even at a
quite late period, it still was. Literary women
are becoming more freespoken, and more willing
to express their real sentiments. Unfortunately,
in this country especially, they are themselves
such artificial products, that their sentiments arc
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 " ojmiio copise inter
maximas causas inopise est -" and there is little
chance of reasonable thinking on the matter,
while people flatter themselves that they perfectly

48

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 toge
ther, should have knowledge which can qualify
them to lay down the law to women as to what
is, or is not, their vocation. Happily, no such
knowledge is necessary for any practical purpose
connected with the position of women in relation
to society and life. For; according to all the_
principles involved in modern society, the question
rests with women themselves to be decided by
their own experience, and by the use of their
own faculties. There are no means of finding
what either one person or many can do, but by
trying and no means by which any one else can
discover for them what it is for their happiness
to do or leave undone.

One thing we may be certain of that what is
contrary to women s nature to do, they never
will be made to do by simply giving their nature
free play. The anxiety of mankind to interfere
in behalf of nature, for fear lest nature should
not succeed in effecting its purpose, is an alto
gether 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

49

in favour of women ; it is only asked that the
present bounties and protective duties in favour
of men should be recalled. If women have a
greater natural inclination for some things than
for others, there is no need of laws or social
inculcation to make the majority of them do
the former in preference to the latter. What
ever 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 col
lective 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

E

50

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 sub
ject)" It is necessary to society that women-
should marry and produce children. They will...
not do so unless they are compelled. Therefore
it is necessary to compel them." The merits of
the case would then be clearly defined. It
would be exactly that of the slaveholders of
South Carolina and Louisiana. " It is necessary
that cotton and sugar should be grown. White
men cannot produce them. Negroes will not,
for any wages which we choose to give. Ergo
they must be compelled." An illustration still
closer to the point is that of impressment.
Sailors must absolutely be had to defend the
country. It often happens that they will not
voluntarily enlist. Therefore there must be
the power of forcing them. How often has
this logic been used ! and, but for one flaw
in it, without doubt it would have been suc
cessful up to this day. But it is open to the
retort First pay the sailors the honest value
of their labour. When you have made it as
well worth their while to serve you, as to work for

51

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 them
selves open to a similar retort. If they mean
what they say, their opinion must evidently be,
that men do not render the married condition
so desirable to women, as to induce them to
accept it for its own recommendations. It is
not a sign of one s thinking the boon one offers
very attractive, when one allows only Hobson s
choice, " that or none." And here, I believe,
is the clue to the feelings of those men, who
have a real antipathy to the equal freedom of
women. I believe they are afraid, not lest
women should be unwilling to marry, for I
do not think that any one in reality has that
apprehension; but lest they should insist that
marriage should be on equal conditions ; lest
all women of spirit and capacity should prefer
doing almost anything else, not in their own
eyes degrading, rather than marry, when marry
ing is giving themselves a master, and a master
too of all their earthly possessions. And truly,
if this consequence were necessarily incident to

E 2

52

marriage, I think that ihe apprehension would
be very well founded. 1 1 agree in thinking it
probable that few women, capable of anything
else, would, unless under an irresistible entraine-
ment, rendering them for the time insensible
to anything but itself, choose such a lot, when
any other means were open to them of lilling
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 Hobsoirs 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 con
tradiction and a disturbing element : and it was
wrong to bring women up with any acquire
ments but those of an odalisque, or of a domestic
servant.!

53

CHAPTER II.

IT will be well to commence the detailed dis
cussion of the subject by the particular
branch of it to which the course of our observa
tions has led us : the conditions which the laws
of this and all other countries annex to the
marriage contract. Marriage being the destina
tion 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, ex
cept 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
y were taken by force, or regularly sold by their,
father to the husband. Until a late period in,

54

European history, the father had the power to
dispose of his daughter in marriage at his own
will and pleasure, without any regard to hers.
The Church, indeed, was so far faithful to a better
morality as to require a formal " yes" from the
woman at the marriage ceremony ; but there was
nothing to shew that the consent was other than
compulsory ; and it was practically impossible for
the girl to refuse compliance if the father perse
vered, 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 Christi
anity) 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 corre
sponding 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 distin
guished 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

55

should be in regard to the marriage contract;
and we are continually told that civilization and
Christianity have restored to the woman her just
rights. Meanwhile the wife is the actual bond
servant of her husband : no less so, as far as legal
obligation goes, than slaves commonly so called.
She vows a lifelong obedience to him at the
altar, and is held to it all through her life by
law. Casuists may say that the obligation of
obedience stops short of participation in crime,
but it certainly extends to everything else. Site
can do no act whatever _but. by, MS permission, at
least tacit. She can acquire no property but for
him.;, the instant it becomes hers, even if by
inheritance, Jt_Jbecoms_ ip &Q 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 sKve 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 advan
tage to their women, through special contracts
setting aside the law, by conditions of pin-money,
&c. : since parental feeling being stronger with
fathers than the class feeling of their own sex, a
father generally prefers his own daughter to a
son-in-law who is a stranger to him. By means
of settlements, the rich usually contrive to with-

56

draw 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 hus
band. 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.
Jim far from pretending that wives are in

general no better treated than slaves ; but tin
slave is a slave to the. same lengthsj^aad. in so
full a sense of the word, as a wife is. 1 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^f 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 hejunaster the last fami
liarity. Not so the wife h however brutal a tyrant
she may unfortunatelvjbe rfyi^pfl tn thnurh nhr
nlay"i&no\vthat he haj^J^ejv-tketjgh it iilay iTe
ire tojtQrture her, and though she
may feel it impossible not

him he can
Prom her and enforce the lowest degrada

tion of aThuman "being, that of ""being made the-
instrument oi^nanimaj_fnnpi-mti contrary to her
inclinations.__3yhile she is held in this worst de
scription 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?

58

They arc by law Ids children. He alone has any
legal rights over them. Not one act can she do
towards or in relation to them, except by delega
tion from him. Even after he is dead she is
not their legal guardian, unless lie 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 sne
leaves^Tier 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 inacces
sible to any one out of the higher ranks. Even
now it is only given in cases of desertion, or of

59

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 j favourite of her instead of merely a
drudge, ir^aJTvery cruel aggravation of her fate
that sjie should be allowed to try this chance only

once. The natural sequel and corollarv from
-~t~7- i . .

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,inthe 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 assimila
tion 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 aiio x jim^uni..of jlLusage,
without adultery superadded, will in England
free a wife from her tormentor.

60

I have no desire to exaggerate, iior does the
case stand in any need of exaggeration. I have
described the wife s legal position, not her actual
treatment. The lavs of most countries are jfor
worse than the people who execute them,, jin.<I
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 im
pulses 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 in-
1 vested 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 miti-

61

gations in practice, which arc 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 docs 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 Revolu
tion, 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 pro
scriptions of the Roman civil Avars 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 in-

62

dividual 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 con
templation 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 sur
rounded by their smiles and benedictions. All
this would be very much to the purpose if any
one pretended that there are no such things as
good men. Who doubts that there may be great
goodness, and great happiness, and great affection,
under the absolute government of a good man ?
Meanwhile, laws and institutions require to be

G3

adapted, not to ^odjgoejaj^nt to^bad.^ Marriage
is not jhr I^fftution designed for a select few.
Men are not required, as a preliminary to tlie
marriage ceremony, to prove by testimonials that
they^ are fit to be trusted with the exercise of
absolute power. The tie of affection and obliga
tion 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 hind, 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
tt \aggressions meet with resistance, indulge the
utmost habitual excessesf of bodily violence to
wards the unhappy wife, who alone, at least of
grown persons, can neither repel nor escape from

64

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 Jhe law has
delivered her to them as their thing, taJbe-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 un
punished, 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 expe
rience 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

65

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 ap
palling. 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 tbat 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 represen
tatives of the human species, how many are the
forms and gradations of animalism and selfish
ness, often under an outward varnish of civiliza
tion and even cultivation, living at peace with
the law, maintaining a creditable appearance to
all who are not under their power, yet sufficient
often to make the lives of all who are so, a
torment and a burthen to them ! It would be
tiresome to repeat the commonplaces about the
unfitness of men in general for power, which,
after the political discussions of centuries, every

F

66

one knows by heart, were it not that hardly any
one thinks of applying these maxims to the case
in which above all others they are applicable,
that of power, not placed in the hands of a mail
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 wiU^
be in the unrestraint of home. Even the com
monest men reserve the violent, the sulky, the
undisguisedly selfish side of their character for
those who have no power to withstand it. Thfi
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 submis
sion. 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, over-
beariiigness. unbounded self-indulgence, and a

67

double-dyed and idealized selfishness, of which
sacrifice itself is only a particular form : the care
for the wife and children being only care for
them as parts of the man s own interests and
belongings, and their individual happiness being*
immolated in every shape to his smallest pre
ferences. 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 delibe
rate purpose, almost every one to whom others
yield, goes on encroaching upon them, until a
point is reached at which they are compelled to
resist. Such being the common tendency of
human nature ; the almost unlimited power which
present social institutions give to the man over
at least one human being the one with whom
he resides, and whom he has always present
this power seeks out and evokes the latent germs

i of selfishness in the remotest corners of his

I _^,_

nature fans its faintest sparks and smouldering
embers offers to him a license for the indulgence
of those points of his original character which
in all other relations he would have found it ne
cessary 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-

F 2

68

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 un
comfortable, and by that power is able to carry
many points which she ought, and many which
she ought not, to prevail in. But this instru
ment 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 them
selves had it, and who generally turn this power
to a bad use. The amiable cannot use such an
instrument, the highminded disdain it. And on
the other hand, the husbands against whom it is
used most effectively are the gentler and more
inoffensive; those who cannot be induced, even
by provocation, to resort to any very harsh exer
cise 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,

69

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 chil
dren, 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 .yakia 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^jnJ^uence na
turally acquired over almost all human beings by
those near to their persons (if not actually disagree
able to them) : whpJ?Qth ^thejrjiirec^entreaties,
and by the insensible contagion of their feelings
and dispositions, are often able, unless counter
acted by some equally strong personal influence,
to obtain a degree of command over the conduct
of tlie~ superior, altogether excessive and un
reasonable. Through these various means, the

70

(wife frequently exercises even too much power

lover 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
Jbetter 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-oight
to , but does not enable her to assert her own
rights. A Sultan s favourite slave has slaves
under her, over whom she tyrannizes ; but the
desirable thing would be that she should neither
have slaves nor be a slave. By entirely sinking
her own existence in her husband ; by having no
will (or persuading him that she has no will) but
his, in anything which regards their joint rela
tion, and by making it the business of her life
to work upon his sentiments, a wife may gratify
herself by influencing, and very probably per
verting, his conduct, in those of his external re
lations which she has never qualified herself to
judge of, or in which she is herself wholly in-
fluenced 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

71

^

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 con
scientious opinion on them ; and therefore hardly
ever meddles with them for any legitimate pur
pose/ bul; "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 voJUmtary_. association., next- to marriage,
is partnership in business : and it is not found or
thought necessary to enact that in every partner
ship, one partner shall have entire control over
the concern, and the others shall be bound to
obey his orders. No one would enter into part
nership on terms which would subject him to the
responsibilities of a principal, with only the

72

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 ex
clusive 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 with
drawing from the connexion. The wife has no
such power, and even if she had, it is almost
always desirable that she should try all measures
before resorting to it.

It is quite true that things which have to
be decided every day, and cannot adjust them
selves 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

73

between the two; each Jbeing 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 suita
bilities. If the two persons chose, they might
pre-_appoint it by the marriage contract, as pe
cuniary arrangements are now often pre-ap-
pointcd. 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 which
ever 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 prepon
derance 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

-J.

74

support. Inequality from this source does not
depend on the law of marriage, but on the
general conditions of human society,, as HQW__
constituted. The influence of mental supe
riority, 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 agree
ment between themselves. They always are so
apportioned, except in cases in which the mar
riage 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,

75

the amenability to it would be a motive with

the plaintiff to agree to almost any arbitration,

but it would be just the reverse with the

defendant. The despotic power which the law

gives to the husband may be a reason to make

the wife assent to any compromise by which

power is practically shared between the two,

but it cannot be the reason why the husband

does. That there is always among decently

conducted people a practical compromise, though

one of them at least is under no physical or

moral necessity of making it, shows that the

natural motives which lead to a voluntary

adjustment of the united life of two persons

in a manner acceptable to both, do on the

whole, except in unfavourable cases, prevail. The

matter is certainly not improved by laying down

as an ordinance of law, that the superstructure of

free government shall be raised upon a legal

basis of despotism on one side and subjection

on the other, and that every concession which

the despot makes may, at his mere pleasure,

and without any warning, be recalled. Besides

that no freedom is worth much when held on

so precarious a tenure, its conditions are not

likely to be the most equitable when the law

throws so prodigious a weight into one scale;

when the adjustment rests between two persons

one of whom is declared to be entitled to

76

v

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 extremi
ties, may say, that husbands indeed are willing
to be reasonable, and to make fair concessions
to their partners without being compelled to it,
but that wives are not : that if allowed any rights
of their own, they will acknowledge no rights at
all in any one else, and never will yield in any
thing, 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 in
sult 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 com
plimentary face upon an injury, and resembling

77

those celebrations of royal clemency which, ac
cording 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 exagge
rated self-abnegation which is the present arti
ficial 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 ow r n will as such a
grand thing that it is actually the law for another
rational being. There is nothing which men so
easily learn as this self- worship : all privileged
persons, and all privileged classes, have had it.
The more we descend in the scale of humanity,
the intenser it is ; and most of all in those who ;
are not, and can never expect to be, raised above
any one except an unfortunate wife and children/ i
The honourable exceptions are proportionally
fewer than in the case of almost any other hu
man infirmity. Philosophy and religion, instead
of keeping it in check, are generally suborned to
defend it; and nothing controls it but that

A^V

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 asso
ciate their lives with them. But the legal sub
ordination 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 encroach
ments. 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 anv

79

high sense, a school of moral cultivation. Though
the truth may not be felt or generally acknow
ledged for generations to come, the only school
of genuine moral sentiment is society between
equals. TJKLJBPtoial 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 obedieflpe. 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
Inore 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

80

the morality of submission, and the morality
of chivalry and generosity ; the time is now
come for the morality of justice. Whenever,
in former ages, any approach has been made
to society in equality, Justice has asserted its
claims as the foundation of virtue. It was
thus in the free republics of antiquity. But
even in the best of these, the equals were limited
to the free male citizens; slaves, women, and
the unenfranchised residents were under the
law of force. The joint influence of Roman
civilization and of Christianity obliterated these
distinctions, and in theory (if only partially in
practice) declared the claims of the human
being, as such, to be paramount to those of
sex, class, or social position. The barriers which
had begun to be levelled were raised again by
the northern conquests ; and the whole of modern
history consists of the slow process by which
they have since been wearing away. We are
entering into an order of things in which justice
will again be the primary virtue ; grounded as
before on equal, but now also on sympathetic
association; having its root no longer in the

instinct of equals for self-protection, but in a
cultivated sympathy between them ; and no one
being now left out, but an equal measure being
extended to all. It is no novelty that mankind
do not distinctly foresee their own changes,

81

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 intel
lectual 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, edu
cation, society, all go on training human beings
for the old, long after the new has come ; much
more when it is only coming. But the true
virtue of human beings is fitness to live together
as equals ; claiming nothing for themselves but
what they as freely concede to every one else;
regarding command of any kind as an excep
tional necessity, and in all cases a temporary
i one ; and preferring, whenever possible, the
society of those with whom leading and fol
lowing can be alternate and reciprocal. To
these virtues, nothing in life as at present con-
/^stituted gives cultivation by exercise. r .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

82

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 associa
tion, 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 train-
ing 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 abun
dantly ready to impose on others for his own
interest or glorification.

83

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 nume
rous persons whose moral sentiments are better k
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 con
ditions of the tie which unites them do not occur
to their thoughts once in a twelvemonth, and be
cause 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

G 2

84

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 possess
ing it. What is more ; in the most naturally
brutal and morally uneducated part of the lower
classes, the legal slavery of the woman, and some
thing 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 opportuni
ties, 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

85

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/ Il_w.asL not St. Paul s business,
nor was it consistent with his object, the propa
gation of Christianity, to incite any one to rebel
lion against existing laws. The apostle s accep
tance 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 mili
tary despotism, and to that alone, as the
Christian form of political government, or com
mands passive obedience to it. To pretend
that Christianity was intended to stereotype
existing forms of government and society, and
protect them against change, is to reduce it to
the level of Islamism or of Brahminism. It is
precisely because Christianity has not done this,
that it has been the religion of the progressive
portion of mankind, and Islamism, Brahminism,
&c., have been those of the stationary portions ;
or rather (for there is no such thing as a really
stationary society) of the declining portions.
There have been abundance of people, in all ages of
Christianity, who tried to make it something of the
same kind ; to convert us into a sort of Christian

86

Mussulmans, with the Bible for a Koran, prohi
biting 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 ob
ligation 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 doe-

87

trine, that what is mine is yours but what is
yours is not mine ; and I should prefer to de
cline entering into such a compact with any
one, though I were myself the person to profit
by it.

This particular injustice and oppression to-
women, which is, to common apprehensions, more
obvious than all the rest, admits of remedy
without interfering with any other mischiefs : and
there can be little doubt that it will be one of
the earliest remedied. Already, in many of the
new and several of the old States of the Ame
rican Confederation, provisions have been in
serted 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 instru
ment 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

88

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
iusually 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 chil
dren and the household, nobody else takes;
those of the children w r ho do not die, grow up
as they best can, and the management of the
household is likely to be so bad, as even in point
of economy to be a great drawback from the
value of the wife s earnings. [_In an otherwise
just state of things, it is not, therefore, I think,
a desirable custom, that the wife should con
tribute 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
m 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 exer
tion?, while he spends most of his time in drink-

89

ing and idleness. The^ci^er of earning is essen
tial 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 en
forced 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 pro
tection, that during marriage she should make
this particular use of her faculties. L-Like a man
when he chooses a profession^o, when a woman >
marries, it may in general be understood that
she makes choice of the management of a house
hold, 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 pur
pose ; and that she renounces, not all other ob
jects and occupations, but all which are not
consistent with the requirements of thisjf 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

90

general rules to individual suitabilities ; and there
ought to be nothing to prevent faculties excep
tionally adapted to any other pursuit,, from
obeying their vocation notwithstanding mar
riage : due provision being made for supplying
otherwise any falling-short which might become
inevitable, in her full performance of the ordinary
functions of mistress of a family. These things,
if once opinion were rightly directed on the
subject, might with perfect safety be left to be
regulated by opinion, without any interference
of law.

V C/

,U SxJ

l\, c * <;
,-.<- / *

91

CHAPTER III.

J the other point which is involved in the
just equality of women, their admissibility
to all the functions and occupations hitherto
retained as the monopoly of the stronger sex,
I should anticipate no difficulty in convincing
any one who has gone with me on the subject of
the equality of women in the family. I believe
that their disabilities elsewhere are only clung to
in order to maintain their subordination in do
mestic life; because the generality of the male
sex cannot yet tolerate the idea of living with
an equal. Were it not for that, I IthmFTFat
almost every one, in the existing state of opinion
in politics and political economy, would admit
the injustice of excluding half the human race
from the greater number of lucrative occupations,
and from almost all high social functions ; or
daining from their birth either that they are not,
and cannot by any possibility become, fit for
employments which are legally open to the
stupidest and basest of the other sex, or else that
however fit they may be, those employments shall

92

be interdicted to them, in order to be preserved
for the exclusive benefit of males. In the last
two centuries, when (which was seldom the case)
any reason beyond the mere existence of the fact
was thought to be required to justify the disabili
ties of women, people seldom assigned as a reason
their inferior mental capacity; which, in times
when there was a real trial of personal faculties
(from which all women were not excluded) in the
struggles of public life, no one really believed in.
The reason given in those days was not women s
unfitness, but the interest of society, by which was
meant the interest of men : just as the raison d etat,
meaning the convenience of the government, and
the support of existing authority, was deemed a
sufficient explanation and excuse for the most flagi
tious crimes. In the present day, power holds
a smoother language, and whomsoever it oppresses,
always pretends to do so for their own good :
accordingly, when anything is forbidden to women, ..
it is thought necessary to say, and desirable to
believe, that they are incapable of doing it, and
that they depart from their real path of success
and happiness when they aspire to it. But to
make this reason plausible (I do not say valid),
those by whom it is urged must be prepared to
carry it to a much greater length than any one
ventures to do in the face of present experience.
It is not sufficient to maintain that women on

93

the average are less gifted than men on the
average, with certain of the higher mental
faculties, or that a smaller number of women
than of men are fit for occupations and functions
of the highest intellectual character. It is
necessary to maintain that no women at all are
fit for them, and that the most eminent women
are inferior in mental faculties to the most
mediocre of the men on whom those functions
at present devolve. For if the performance of the
function is decided either by competition, or by any
mode of choice which secures regard to the public
interest, there needs be no apprehension that any
important employments will fall into the hands of
women inferior to average men, or to the average
of their male competitors. The only result would
be that there would be fewer women than men
in such employments ;/a result certain to happen
in any case, if only from the preference always
likely to be felt by the majority of women for the
one vocation in which there is nobody to compete
with them. Now, the most determined depre
dator of women will not venture to deny, that
when we add the experience of recent times to
that of ages past, women, and not a few merely,
but many women, have proved themselves capable
of everything, perhaps without a single excep
tion, which is done by men, and of doing it suc
cessfully and creditably. The utmost that can be

94

said is, that there are many things which none of
them have succeeded in doing as well as they
have been done by some men many in which
they have not reached the very highest rank.
\ But there are extremely few,, dependent only on
! mental faculties, in which they have not attained
(the rank next to the highest. Is not this enough,
and much more than enough, to make it a
tyranny to them, and a detriment to society, that
they should not be allowed to compete with men
for the exercise of these functions ? Is it not a
mere truism to say, that such functions are often
filled by men far less fit for them than numbers
of women, and who would be beaten by women
in any fair field of competition ? What difference
does it make that there may be men somewhere,
fully employed about other things, who may be
still better qualified for the things in question
than these women? Does not this take place
m all competitions ? Is there so great a super-
fluity of men fit for high duties, that society can
afford to reject the service of any competent
Are we so certain of always finding a
man made to our hands f or any duty or ^J^
socia importance which falls vacant, that we
ose nothing by putting a ban upon one-half of
mankind, and refusing beforehand to make their

/ V a^
be? And even if we could do without

95

them, would it be consistent with justice to refuse
to them their fair share of honour and distinction,,
or to deny to them the equal moral right of all
human beings to choose their occupation (short
of injury to others) according to their own
preferences, at their own risk? Nor is the in
justice confined to them : it is shared by those
who are in a position to benefit by their services.
To ordain that any kind of persons shall not be
physicians, or shall not be advocates, or shall not
be members of parliament, is to injure not them
only, but all who employ physicians or advocates,
or elect members of parliament, and who are
deprived of the stimulating effect of greater com
petition on the exertions of the competitors, as
well as restricted to a narrower range of indi
vidual choice.

It will perhaps be sufficient if I confine
myself, in the details of my argument, to func
tions of a public nature : since, if I am successful
as to those, it probably will be readily granted
that women should be admissible to all other
occupations to which it is at all material whether
they are admitted or not. And here let me
begin by marking out one function, broadly dis
tinguished from all others, their right to which is
entirely independent of any question which can
be raised concerning their faculties. I mean the
suffrage, both parliamentary and municipal. The

96

if 1

right to share in the choice of those who are to

exercise a public trust, is altogether a distinct
thing from that of competing for the trust itself.
If no one could vote for a member of parliament
who was not fit to be a candidate, the govern
ment would be a narrow oligarchy indeed. To
have a voice in choosing those by whom one is
to be governed, is a means of self-protection due
to every one, though he were to remain for ever
excluded from the function of governing : and
that women are considered fit to have such
a choice, may be presumed from the fact, that
the law already gives it to women in the
most important of all cases to themselves : for
the choice of the man who is to govern a
woman to the end of life, is always supposed
to be voluntarily made by herself. In the case
of election to public trusts, it is the business
of constitutional law to surround the right of
suffrage with all needful securities and limita
tions; but whatever securities are sufficient iri
the case of the male sex, no others need be
required in the case of women. Under whatever
conditions, and within whatever limits, men are
admitted to the suffrage, there is not a shadow "pT
justification for not admitting women under the
same: Jhe majority of the women of any class
are not likely to differ in political opinion from
/ the majority of the men of the same class, unless

97

the question be one in which the interests of
women, as such, are in some way involved ; and if
they are so, women require the suffrage, as their
guarantee of just and equal consideration. / This
ought to be obvious even to those wlio coincide
in no other of the doctrines for Avhich I contend.
Even if every woman were a wife, and if every |
wife ought to be a slave, all the more would
these slaves stand in need of legal protection : and
we know what legal protection the slaves have,
where the laws are made by their masters.

With regard to the fitness of w r omen, not only ,
to participate in elections, but themselves to
hold offices or practise professions involving
important public responsibilities ; I have already
observed that this consideration is not essential
to the practical question in dispute : since any
woman, who succeeds in an open profession,
proves by that very fact that she is qualified for
it. And in the case of public offices, if the political
system of the country is such as to exclude
unfit men, it will equally exclude unfit women :
while if it is not, there is no additional evil in the
fact that the unfit persons whom it admits may
be cither women or men. As long therefore as
it is acknowledged that even a few women may
be fit for these duties, the laws which shut the
door on those exceptions cannot be justified by
any opinion which can be held respecting the

98

capacities of women in general. But, though this
last consideration is not essential, it is far from
being irrelevant. An unprejudiced view of it
gives additional strength to the arguments against
the disabilities of women, and reinforces them by
high considerations of practical utility.

Let us at first make entire abstraction of all
psychological considerations tending to show, that
any of the mental differences supposed to exist
between women and men are but the natural
effect of the differences in their education and
circumstances, and indicate no radical difference,
far less radical inferiority, of nature. Let us
consider women only as they already are, or as
they are known to have been ; and the capacities
which they have already practically shown.
What they have done, that at least, if nothing
else, it is proved that they can do. When we
consider how sedulously they are all trained away
from, instead of being trained towards, any of
the occupations or objects reserved for men, it is
evident that I am taking a very humble ground
for them, when I rest their case on what they
have actually achieved. For, in this case, negative
evidence is worth little, while any positive evi
dence is conclusive. It cannot be inferred to be
impossible that a woman should be a Homer, or
an Aristotle, or a Michael Angelo, or a Beet
hoven, because no woman has yet actually pro-

99

duced works comparable to theirs in any of those
lines of excellence. This negative fact at most
leaves the question uncertain, and open to
psychological discussion. But it is quite certain
that a woman can be a Queen Elizabeth, or a
Deborah, or a Joan of Arc, since this is not
inference, but fact. NQwjf:__ia_a, pprions consi
deration, that the only things whieh~the existing ^
law excludes women from doing, are the things (
which they have proved that they are able to do.
There is no law to prevent a woman from having
written all the plays of Shakspeare, or composed
all the operas of Mozart. But Queen Elizabeth
or Queen Victoria, had they not inherited the
throne, could not have been intrusted with the
smallest of the political duties, of which the
former showed herself equal to the greatest.

If anything conclusive could be inferred from
experience, without psychological analysis, it
would be that the things which women are not
allowed to do are the very ones for which they
are peculiarly qualified ; since their vocation for
government has made its way, and become con
spicuous, through the very few opportunities
which have been given ; while in the lines of
distinction which apparently were freely open to
them, they have by no means so eminently dis
tinguished themselves. We know how small a
number of reigning queens history presents, in

H 2

100

comparison with that of kings. Of this smaller
number a far larger proportion have shown
talents for rule; though many of them have
occupied the throne in difficult periods. It is
remarkable, too, that they have, in a great
number of instances, been distinguished by merits
the most opposite to the imaginary and conven
tional character of women : they have been as
much remarked for the firmness and vigour of
their rule, as for its intelligence. When, to
queens and empresses, we add regents, and vice
roys of provinces, the list of women who have
been eminent rulers of mankind swells to a great
length.* This fact is so undeniable, that some
one, long ago, tried to retort the argument, and
turned the admitted truth into an additional
insult, by saying that queens are better than

* Especially is this true if \vc take into consideration Asia
as well as Europe. If a Hindoo principality is strongly, vigi
lantly, and economically governed ; if order is preserved without
oppression; if cultivation is extending, and the people prosperous,
in three cases out of four that principality is under a woman s
rule. This fact, to me an entirely unexpected one, I have col
lected from a long official knowledge of Hindoo governments.
There are many such instances : for though, by Hindoo institutions,
a woman cannot reign, she is the legal regent of a kingdom during
the minority of the heir ; and minorities are frequent, the lives of
the male rulers being so often prematurely terminated through
the effect of inactivity and sensual excesses. When we consider
that these princesses have never been seen in public, have never
conversed with any man not of their own family except from be
hind a curtain, that they do not read, and if they did, there is no

)k m their languages which can give them the smallest in
struction on political affairs; the example they afford of the na-
ural capacity of women for government is very striking

101

kings, because under kings women govern, but
under queens, men.

It may seem a waste of reasoning to argue
against a bad joke ; but such things do affect
people s minds ; and I have heard men quote this
saying, with an air as if they thought that there
was something in it. At any rate, it will serve
as well as anything else for a starting point in
discussion. I say, then, that it is not true that
under kings, women govern. Such cases are
entirely exceptional : and weak kings have quite
as often governed ill through the influence of
male favourites, as of female. When a king
is governed by a woman merely through his
amatory propensities, good government is not
probable, though even then there arc exceptions.
But French history counts two kings who have
voluntarily given the direction of affairs during
many years, the one to his mother, the other to
his sister : one of them, Charles VIII., was a
mere boy, but in doing so he followed the inten
tions of his father Louis XI., the ablest monarch
of his age. The other, Saint Louis, was the
best, and one of the most vigorous rulers, since
the time of Charlemagne. Both these princesses
ruled in a manner hardly equalled by any
prince among their cotemporarics. The emperor
Charles the Fifth, the most politic prince of his
time, who had as great a number of able men in

102

his service as a ruler ever had, and was one of the
least likely of all sovereigns to sacrifice his interest
to personal feelings, made two princesses of his
family successively Governors of the Netherlands,
and kept one or other of them in that post during
his whole life, (they were afterwards succeeded
by a third). Both ruled very successfully, and
one of them, Margaret of Austria, was one of
the ablest politicians of the age. So much for
one side of the question. Now as to the other.
When it is said that under queens men govern,
is the same meaning to be understood as when
kings are said to be governed by women ? Is it
meant that queens choose as their instruments
of government, the associates of their personal
pleasures? The case is rare even with those
who are as unscrupulous on the latter point as
Catherine II. : and it is not in these cases that
the good government, alleged to arise from male
influence, is to be found. If it be true, then, that
the administration is in the hands of better men
under a queen than under an average king, it
must be that queens have a superior capacity
for choosing them ; and women must be better
qualified than men both for the position of sove
reign, and for that of chief minister ; for the
principal business of a prime minister is not to
govern in person, but to find the fittest persons
to conduct every department of public affairs.

103

The more rapid insight into character, which
is one of the admitted points of superiority
in women over men, must certainly make thenx,
with anything like parity of qualifications in
other respects, more apt than men in that choice
of instruments,, which is nearly the most im
portant business of every one who has to do with
governing mankind. Even the unprincipled
Catherine de j Medici could feel the value of a
Chancellor de FHopital. But it is also true
that most great queens have been great by their
own talents for government, and have been
well served precisely for that reason. They
retained the supreme direction of affairs in their
own hands : and if they listened to good advisers,
they gave by that fact the strongest proof that
their judgment fitted them for dealing with the
great questions of government.

Is it reasonable to think that those who are
fit for the greater functions of politics, are in
capable of qualifying themselves for the less?
Is there any reason in the nature of things, that
the wives and sisters of princes should, whenever
called on, be found as competent as the princes
themselves to their business, but that the wives
and sisters of statesmen, and administrators, and
directors of companies, and managers of public
institutions, should be unable to do what is done
by their brothers and husbands? The real

104

reason is plain enough; it is that princesses.,
being more raised above the generality of men
by their rank than placed below them by their
sex, have never been taught that it was improper
for them to concern themselves with politics;
but have been allowed to feel the liberal interest
natural to any cultivated human being, in the
great transactions which took place around them,
and in which they might be called on to take a
\ part. The ladies of reigning families are the/
J only women who are allowed the same range of,
? interests and freedom of development as men;
and it is precisely in their case that there is not
( found to be any inferiority. Exactly where and
in proportion as women s capacities for govern- /
ment have been tried, in that proportion have j
they been found adequate.

This fact is in accordance with the best
general conclusions which the world s imperfect
experience seems as yet to suggest, concerning
the peculiar tendencies and aptitudes charac
teristic of women, as women have hitherto been.
I do not say, as they will continue to be ; for, as
I have already said more than once, I consider
it presumption in any one to pretend to decide y
what women arc or are not, can or cannot be, by
natural constitution. They have always hitherto
been kept, as far as regards spontaneous develop
ment, in so unnatural a state, that their nature

103

cannot but Lave been greatly distorted and dis
guised ; and no one can safely pronounce that if
women s nature were left to choose its direction as
freely as men s, and if no artificial bent were at
tempted to be given to it except tl ^f ypqnivpfl by
thc concHtions of human society,, and given to both
sexes alike, there would be any material diffe
rence, or perhaps any. difference at all, in the
character and capacities which would unfold
themselSis^ .T shall presently show, that even
the least contestable of the differences which
now exist, are such as may very well have been
produced merely by circumstances, without any
difference of natural capacity. But, looking at
women as they are known in experience, it may
be said of them, with more truth than belongs
to most other generalizations on the subject, that
the general bent of their talents is towards the
practical, This statement is conformable to all
the public history of Avomcn, in the present and
the past. It is no less borne out by common
and daily experience. Let tis consider the
special nature of the mental capacities most
characteristic of a woman of talent. They are
all of a kind which fits them for practice, and
makes them tend towards it. What is meant
by a woman s capacity of intuitive perception ?
It means, a rapid and correct insight into present
fact. It has nothing to do with general prin-

106

ciples. Nobody ever perceived a scientific law
of nature by intuition, nor arrived at a general
rule of duty or prudence by it. These are
results of slow and careful collection and com
parison of experience ; and neither the men nor
the women of intuition usually shine in this de
partment,, unless,, indeed, the experience necessary
is such as they can acquire by themselves. For
what is called their intuitive sagacity makes
them peculiarly apt in gathering snch general
truths as can be collected from their individual
means of observation. When, consequently, they
chance to be as well provided as men are with
the results of other peopled experience, " by
reading and education, (I use the word chance
advisedly, for, in respect to the knowledge that
tends to fit them for the greater concerns of
life, the only educated women are the self-
educated) they are better furnished than men
in general with the essential requisites of skilful
and successful practice. Men who have been
/ much taught, are apt to be deficient in the
sense of present fact ; they do not see, in the
facts which they arc called upon to deal with,
what is really there, but what they have been
taught to expect. This is seldom the case with
women of any ability. Their capacity of " in
tuition " preserves them from it. With equality
of experience and of general faculties, a woman

107

usually sees much more than a man of what
is immediately before her. Now this sensibility
to the present, is the main quality on which the
capacity for practice, as distinguished from theory,
depends. To discover general principles, belongs
to the speculative faculty : to discern and dis
criminate the particular cases in which they are
and are not applicable, constitutes practical talent :
ajocF for this, women as they now are have a
peculiar aptitude. I admit that there can be
no good practice without principles, and that
the predominant place which quickness of obser
vation holds among a woman s faculties, makes
her particularly apt to build over-hasty gene
ralizations upon her own observation ; though at
the same time no less ready in rectifying those
generalizations, as her observation takes a wider
range. But the corrective to this defect, is access
to the experience of the human race; general
knowledge exactly the thing which education
can best supply. A woman s mistakes are spe
cifically those of a clever self-educated man, who
often sees what men trained in routine do notf
see, but falls into errors for want of knowing \
things which have long been known. Of course
he has acquired much of the pre-existing know
ledge, or he could not have got on at all ; but
what he knows of it he has picked up in frag
ments and at random, as women do.

108

But this gravitation of women s minds to
the present, to the real, to actual fact, while
in its exclusivcness it is a source of errors, is
also a most useful counteractive of the contrary
error. The principal and most characteristic
aberration of speculative minds as such, consists
precisely in the deficiency of this lively per
ception and ever-present sense of objective fact.
For want of this, they often not only overlook
the contradiction which outward facts oppose
to their theories, but lose sight of the legiti
mate purpose of speculation altogether, and let
their speculative faculties go astray into regions
not peopled with real beings, animate or inani
mate, even idealized, but with personified shadows
created by the illusions of metaphysics or by the
mere entanglement of words, and think these
shadows the proper objects of the highest, the most
transcendant, philosophy. Hardly anything can
be of greater value to a man of theory and
speculation who employs himself not in col
lecting materials of knowledge by observation,
but in working them up by processes of thought
into comprehensive truths of science and laws of
conduct, than to carry on his speculations in the
companionship, and under the criticism, of a really
/superior woman. There is nothing comparable
to it for keeping his thoughts within the limits
of real things, and the actual facts of nature.

109

-an. abstraction. ...
The habitual direction of her mind to dealing
with things as individuals rather than in groups,
and (what is closely connected with it) her more
lively interest in the present feelings of persons,
which makes her consider first of all, in anything
which claims to be applied to practice, in what
manner persons will be affected by it these two
things make her extremely unlikely to put faith
in any speculation which loses sight of individuals,
and deals with things as if they existed for the
benefit of some imaginary entity, some mere
creation of the mind, Dot resolvable into the
feelings of living beings. Women s thoughts $
are thus as useful in giving reality to those of
thinking men, as men s thoughts in giving width
and largeness to those of women. In depth, as
distinguished from breadth, I greatly doubt if
even now, women, compared with men, arc at
any disadvantage.

If the existing mental characteristics of women -
are thus valuable even in aid of speculation, they
are still more important, when speculation has
done its work, for carrying out the results of
speculation into practice. For the reasons already
given, women are comparatively unlikely to fall
into the common error of men, that of sticking
to their rules in a case whose specialities either
take it out of the class to which the rules are

110

applicable, or require a special adaptation of
them. Let us now consider another of the
admitted superiorities of clever women, greater
quickness of apprehension. Is not this pre
eminently a quality which fits a person for
practice ? In action, everything continually
depends upon deciding promptly. In specula
tion, nothing does. A mere thinker can wait,
can take time to consider, can collect additional
evidence; he is not obliged to complete his
philosophy at once, lest the opportunity should
go by. The power of drawing the best con
clusion possible from insufficient data is not
indeed useless in philosophy ; the construction
of a provisional hypothesis consistent with all
known facts is often the needful basis for further
inquiry. But this facility is rather serviceable
in philosophy, than the main qualification for it :
and, for the auxiliary as well as for the main
operation, the philosopher can allow himself any
time he pleases. He is in no need of the capa
city of doing rapidly what he does ; what he rather
needs is patience, to work on slowly until imper
fect lights have become perfect, and a conjecture
has ripened into a theorem. For those, on the
contrary, whose business is with the fugitive and
perishable with individual facts, not kinds of
facts rapidity of thought is a qualification next
only in importance to the power of thought itself.

Ill

He who has not his faculties under immediate
command, in the contingencies of action,, might
as well not have them at all. He may be fit to
criticize, but he is not fit to act. Now it is in
this that women, and the men who are most like
women, confessedly excel. The other sort of man,
however pre-eminent may be his faculties, arrives
slowly at complete command of them : rapidity of
judgment and promptitude of judicious action,
even in the things he knows best, are the gradual
and late result of strenuous effort grown into
habit.

It will be said, perhaps, that the greater
nervous susceptibility of women is a disqualifica
tion for practice, in anything but domestic life,
by rendering them mobile, changeable, too
vehemently under the innueuce of the moment,
incapable of dogged perseverance, unequal and
uncertain in the power of using their faculties.
I think that these phrases sum up the greater

part of the objections commonly made to the
fitness of women for the higher class of serious
business. Much of all this is the mere overflow
of nervous energy run to waste, and would cease
when the energy was directed to a definite end.
Much is also the result of conscious or un
conscious cultivation; as we see by the almost
total disappearance of " hysterics" and fainting ^
fits, since they have gone out of fashion. More-

112

over, when people are brought up, like many
women of the higher classes (though less so in
our own country than in any other) a kind of hot
house plants, shielded from the wholesome vicissi
tudes of air and temperature, and untrained in
any of the occupations and exercises which give
stimulus and development to the circulatory and
muscular system, while their nervous system,
especially in its emotional department, is kept in
unnaturally active play ; it is no wonder if those
of them who do not die of consumption, grow
up with constitutions liable to derangement from
slight causes, both internal and external, and
without stamina to support any task, physical or
mental, requiring continuity of effort. But
women brought up to work for their liveli
hood show none of these morbid characteristics,
unless indeed they are chained to an excess of
sedentary work in confined and unhealthy rooms.
Women who in their early years have shared in
the healthful physical education and bodily free
dom of their brothers, and who obtain a suffi
ciency of pure air and exercise in after-life, very
rarely have any excessive susceptibility of nerves
which can disqualify them for active pursuits.
There is indeed a certain proportion of persons,
in both sexes, in whom an unusual degree of
nervous sensibility is constitutional, and of so
marked a character as to be the feature of their

113

organization which exercises the greatest influence
over the whole character of the vital phenomena.
This constitution, like other physical conformations,
is hereditary, and is transmitted to sons as well
as daughters ; but it is possible, and probable, that
the nervous temperament (as it is called) is in
herited by a greater number of women than of
men . "NVe will assume this as a fact : and let me
then ask, arc men of nervous temperament found
to be unfit for the duties and pursuits usually
followed by men ? If not, why should women of
the same temperament be unfit for them ? The
peculiarities of the temperament are, no doubt,
within certain limits, an obstacle to success in
some employments, though an aid to it in
others. But when the occupation is suitable to
the temperament, and sometimes even when it is
unsuitable, the most brilliant examples of success
arc continually given by the men of high nervous
sensibility. They are distinguished in their prac
tical manifestations chiefly by this, that being-
susceptible of a higher degree of excitement than
those of another physical constitution, their powers
when excited differ more than in the case of other
people, from those shown in their ordinary state :
they are raised, as it were, above themselves,
and do things with case which they arc wholly
incapable of at other times. But this lofty excite
ment is not, except in weak bodily constitutions,

114

a mere flash,, which passes away immediately,
leaving no permanent traces, and incompatible
with persistent and steady pursuit of an object.
It is the character of the nervous temperament
to be capable of sustained excitement, holding
out through long continued efforts. It is what
is meant by spirit. It is what makes the high
bred racehorse run without slackening speed till
he drops down dead. It is what has enabled so
many delicate women to maintain the most sub
lime constancy not only at the stake, but through
a long preliminary succession of mental and
bodily tortures. It is evident that people of this
temperament are particularly apt for what may
be called the executive department of the leader
ship of mankind. They are the material of
great orators, great preachers, impressive diffusers
of moral influences. Their constitution might
be deemed less favourable to the qualities re
quired from a statesman in the cabinet, or from
a judge. It would be so, if the consequence
necessarily followed that because people are ex
citable they must always be in a state of excite
ment. But this is wholly a question of training.
Strong feeling is the instrument and element of
strong self-control : but it requires to be cultivated
in that direction. When it is, it forms not the
heroes of impulse only, but those also of self-
conquest. History and experience prove that

115

the most passionate characters are the most fana
tically rigid in their feelings of duty, when their
passion has been trained to act in that direction.
The judge who gives a just decision in a case
where his feelings are intensely interested on the
other side, derives from that same strength of
feeling the determined sense of the obligation of
justice, which enables him to achieve this victory
over himself. The capability of that lofty en
thusiasm which takes the human being out of
his every-day character, reacts upon the daily
character itself. His aspirations and powers when
he is in this exceptional state, become the type
with which he compares, and by which he esti
mates, his sentiments and proceedings at other
times : and his habitual purposes assume a cha
racter moulded by and assimilated to the mo
ments of lofty excitement, although those, from
the physical nature of a human being, can only
be transient. Experience of races, as well as of
individuals, does not show those of excitable tem
perament to be less fit, on the average, either
for speculation or practice, than the more unex-
citable. The French, and the Italians, are un
doubtedly by nature more nervously excitable
than the Teutonic races, and, compared at least
with the English, they have a much greater
habitual and daily emotional life : but have they
been less great in science, in public business, in

116

legal and judicial eminence, or in war ? There
is abundant evidence that the Greeks were of
old, as their descendants and successors still are,
one of the most excitable of the races of man
kind. It is superfluous to ask, what among the
achievements of men they did not excel in. The
Romans, probably, as an equally southern people,
had the same original temperament : but the
stern character of their national discipline, like
that of the Spartans, made them an example of
the opposite type of national character; the
greater strength of their natural feelings being
chiefly apparent in the intensity which the same
original temperament made it possible to give to
the artificial. If these cases exemplify what a
naturally excitable people may be made, the Irish
Celts afford one of the aptest examples of what
they are when left to themselves ; (if those can
be said to be left to themselves who have been
for centuries under the indirect influence of bad
government, and the direct training of a Catholic
hierarchy and of a sincere belief in the Catholic
religion.) The Irish character must be considered,
therefore, as an unfavourable case : yet, whenever
the circumstances of the individual have been at
all favourable, what people have shown greater
capacity for the most varied and multifarious in
dividual eminence ? Like the French compared
with the English, the Irish with the Swiss, the

117

Greeks or Italians compared with the German
races, sp_women compared with men may be
found, on the average, to do the same things
with some variety in the particular kind of ex
cellence. .But, that they would do them fully
as well on the whole, if their education and
cultivation were adapted to correcting instead of
aggravating the infirmities incident to their tem
perament, I see not the smallest reason to doubt.
Supposing it, however, to be true that women s
minds are by nature more mobile than those
of men, less capable of persisting long in the
same continuous effort, more fitted for dividing
their faculties among many things than for I
travelling in any one path to the highest point j
which can be reached by it : this may be
true of women as they now are (though not
without great and numerous exceptions), and
may account for their having remained behind
the highest order of men in precisely the things
in which this absorption of the whole mind in
one set of ideas and occupations may seem to
lie most requisite. Still, this difference is one
which can only affect the kind of excellence, not
the excellence itself, or its practical worth : and
it remains to be shown whether this exclusive
working of a part of the mind, this absorption of
the whole thinking faculty in a single subject,
and concentration of it on a single work, is the

118

normal and healthful condition of the human
faculties, even for speculative uses. I believe
that what is gained in special development by
this concentration, is lost in the capacity of the
mind for the other purposes of life ; and even in
abstract thought, it is my decided opinion that
the mind does more by frequently returning to
a difficult problem, than by sticking to it with
out interruption. For the purposes, at all events,
of practice, from its highest to its humblest de
partments, the capacity of passing promptly from
one subject of consideration to another, without
letting the active spring of the intellect run
down between the two, is a power far more
valuable; and this power women pre-eminently
possess, by virtue of the very mobility of which
they are accused. They perhaps have it from
nature, but they certainly have it by training
and education ; for nearly the whole of the occu
pations of women consist in the management of
small but multitudinous details, on each of which
the mind cannot dwell even for a minute, but
must pass on to other things, and if anything
requires longer thought, must steal time at odd
moments for thinking of it. The capacity indeed
which women show for doing their thinking in
circumstances and at times which almost any
man would make an excuse to himself for not
attempting it, has often been noticed: and a

119

woman s mind, though it may be occupied only
with small things, can hardly ever permit itself
to be vacant,, as a man s so often is when not
engaged in what he chooses to consider the
business of his life. The business of a woman s
ordinary life is things in general, and can
as little cease to go on as the world to go
round.

But (it is said) there is anatomical evidence
of the superior mental capacity of men compared
with women : they have a larger brain. I reply,
that in the first place the fact itself is doubtful.
It is by no means established that the brain of a
woman is smaller than that of a man. If it is
inferred merely because a woman s bodily frame
generally is of less dimensions than a man s, this
criterion would lead to strange consequences.
A tall and large-boned man must on this showing
be wonderfully superior in intelligence to a small
man, and an elephant or a whale must prodi
giously excel mankind. The size of the brain in
human beings, anatomists say, varies much less
than the size of the body, or even of the head,
and the one cannot be at all inferred from the
other. It is certain that some women have as
large a brain as any man. It is within my
knowledge that a man who had weighed many
human brains, said that the heaviest he knew of,
heavier even than Cuvier s (the heaviest pre-

120

viously recorded,) was that of a woman. Next,
I must observe that the precise relation which
exists between the brain and the intellectual
powers is not vet well understood, but is a
subject of great dispute. That there is a very
close relation we cannot doubt. The brain is
certainly the material organ of thought and
feeling: and (making abstraction of the great
unsettled controversy respecting the appropriation
of different parts of the brain to different mental
faculties) I admit that it would be an anomaly,
and an exception to all we know of the general
laws of life and organization, if the size of the
organ were wholly indifferent to the function ; if
no accession of power were derived from the
greater magnitude of the instrument. But the
exception and the anomaly would be fully as
great if the organ exercised influence by its
magnitude only. In all the more delicate opera
tions of nature of which those of the animated
creation are the most delicate, and those of the
nervous system by far the most delicate of these
differences in the effect depend as much on
differences of quality in the physical agents, as
on their quantity : and if the quality of an in
strument is to be tested by the nicety and deli
cacy of the work it can do, the indications point
to a greater average fineness of quality in the
brain and nervous system of women than of men.

121

Dismissing abstract difference of quality, a thing
difficult to verify, the efficiency of an organ is
known to depend not solely on its size but on its
activity : and of this we have an approximate
measure in the energy with which the blood
circulates through it, both the stimulus and the
reparativc force being mainly dependent on the
circulation. It would not be surprising it is
indeed an hypothesis which accords well with the
differences actually observed between the mental
operations of the two sexes if men on the
average should have the advantage in the size of
the brain, and women in activity of cerebral cir
culation. The results which conjecture, founded
on analogy, would lead us to expect from this
difference of organization, would correspond to
some of those which we most commonly see. In
the first place, the mental operations of men
might be expected to be slower. They would
neither be so prompt as women in thinking, nor
so quick to feel. Large bodies take more time
to get into full action. On the other hand,
when once got thoroughly into play, men s brain
would bear more work. It would be more per
sistent in the line first taken; it would have
more difficulty in changing from one mode of
action to another, but, in the one thing it was
doing, it could go on longer without loss of
power or sense of fatigue. And do we not find that

122

the things in which men most excel women are
those which require most plodding and long
hammering at a single thought, while women do
best what must be done rapidly? A woman s
brain is sooner fatigued,, sooner exhausted ; but
given the degree of exhaustion, we should expect
to find that it would recover itself sooner. I
repeat that this speculation is entirely hypo
thetical ; it pretends to no more than to suggest
a line of enquiry. I have before repudiated the
notion of its being yet certainly known that
there is any natural difference at all in the
average strength or direction of the mental ca
pacities of the two sexes, much less what that
difference is. Nor is it possible that this should
be known, so long as the psychological laws of the
formation of character have been so little studied,
even in a general way, and in the particular
case never scientifically applied at all ; so long
as the most obvious external causes of difference
of character are habitually disregarded left un
noticed by the observer, and looked down upon
with a kind of supercilious contempt by the
prevalent schools both of natural history and of
mental philosophy : who, whether they look for
the source of what mainly distinguishes human
beings from one another, in the world of matter
or in that of spirit, agree in running down those
who prefer to explain these differences by the

123

different relations of human beings to society
and life.

To so ridiculous an extent are the notions
formed of the nature of women., mere empirical
generalizations, framed, without philosophy or
analysis, upon the first instances which present
themselves, that the popular idea of it is different
in different countries, according as the opinions
and social circumstances of the country have given
to the women living in it any speciality of develop
ment or non-development. An Oriental thinks
that women are by nature peculiarly voluptuous ;
see the violent abuse of them on this ground in
Hindoo Avritings. An Englishman usually thinks
that they are by nature cold. The sayings about
women^s fickleness arc mostly of French origin ;
from the famous distich of Francis the First, up
ward and downward. In England it is a common
remark, how much more constant women are than
men. Inconstancy has been longer reckoned dis
creditable to a woman, in England than in France ;
and Englishwomen are besides, in their inmost
nature, much more subdued to opinion. It may
be remarked by the way, that Englishmen arc in
peculiarly unfavourable circumstances for attempt
ing to judge what is or is not natural, not merely
to women, but to men, or to human beings alto
gether, at least if they have only English expe
rience to go upon : because there is no place where

124

Immaii nature shows so little of its original linea
ments. Both in a good and a bad sense, the Eng
lish are farther from a state of nature than any
other modern people. They are, more than any
other people, a product of civilization and discipline.
England is the country in which social discipline
: has most succeeded, not so much in conquering, as
in suppressing, whatever is liable to conflict with
it. The English, more than any other people, not
only act but feel according to rule. In other
countries, the taught opinion, or the requirement
of society, may be the stronger power, but the
promptings of the individual nature are always
visible under it, and often resisting it : rule may
be stronger than nature, but nature is still there.
In England, rule has to a great degree substituted
itself for nature. The greater part of life is
carried on, not by following inclination under the
control of rule, but by having no inclination but
that of following a rule. Now this has its good
-side doubtless, though it has also a wretchedly
bad one; but it must render an Englishman
peculiarly ill-qualified to pass a judgment on the
original tendencies of human nature from his own
experience. The errors to which observers else
where are liable on the subject, are of a different
character. An Englishman is ignorant respecting
human nature, a Frenchman is prejudiced. An
Englishman s errors are negative, a Frenchman s

positive. An Englishman fancies that things do
not exist, because he never sees them; aFrenchmau
thinks they must always and necessarily exist,
because he does see them. An Englishman does
not know nature, because he has had no oppor
tunity of observing it; a Frenchman gcncrally
know^s a great deal of it, but often mistakes it,
because he has only seen it sophisticated and dis
torted. For the artificial state superinduced by
society disguises the natural tendencies of the
thing which is the subject of observation, in two
different ways : by extinguishing the nature, or by/
transforming it. In the one case there is but
a starved residuum of nature remaining to be
studied ; in the other case there is much, but it
may have expanded in any direction rather than
that in which it would spontaneously grow.

I have said that it cannot now be known how )
much of the existing mental differences between v
men and w r omen is natural, and how much arti-j
ficial ; whether there are any natural differences ax
all ; or, supposing all artificial causes of difference
to be withdrawn, w r hat natural character would
be revealed. I am not about to attempt what I
have pronounced impossible : but doubt does not
forbid conjecture, and where certainty is unat
tainable, there may yet be the means of ar
riving at some degree of probability. The first
point, the origin of the differences actually

126

observed, is the one most accessible to specula
tion ; and I shall attempt to approach it, by the
only path by which it can be reached; by tracing
the mental consequences of external influences.
We cannot isolate a human being from the cir
cumstances of his condition, so as to ascertain ex
perimentally what he would have been by nature ;
but we can consider what he is, and what his cir
cumstances have been, and whether the one would
have been capable of producing the other.

Let us take, then, the only marked case which

observation affords, of apparent inferiority of

women to men, if we except the merely physical

one of bodily strength. No production in philo-

f sophy, science, or art, entitled to the first rank,

7 has been the work of a woman. Is there anv

mode of accounting for this, without supposing

that women are naturally incapable of producing

them ?

In the first place, we may fairly question
whether experience has afforded sufficient grounds
for an induction. It is scarcely three generations
since women, saving very rare exceptions, have
begun to try their capacity in philosophy, science,
or art. It is only in the present generation that
their attempts have been at all numerous; and
they are even now extremely few, everywhere but
in England and France. It is a relevant ques
tion, whether a mind possessing the requisites of

127

first-rate eminence in speculation or creative art
could have been expected, on the mere calculation
of chances, to turn up during that lapse of time,
among the women whose tastes and personal
position admitted of their devoting themselves to
these pursuits. In all things which there has yet
been time for in all but the very highest grades
in the scale of excellence, especially in the depart
ment in which they have been longest engaged,
literature (both prose and poetry) women have
done quite as much, have obtained fully as high
prizes and as many of them, as could be expected
from the length of time and the number of com
petitors. If we go back to the earlier period
when very few women made the attempt, yet some
of those few made it with distinguished success.
The Greeks always accounted Sappho among
their great poets ; and we may well suppose that
Myrtis, said to have been the teacher of Pindar,
and Corinna, who five times bore away from him
the prize of poetry, must at least have had sufficient
merit to admit of being compared with that great
name. Aspasia did not leave any philosophical
writings ; but it is an admitted fact that Socrates
resorted to her for instruction, and avowed himself
to have obtained it.

I^we consider the works of women in modern
timesj and contrast them with those of men,
either in the literary or the artistic department,

138

inferiority as may be observed resolves
itself essentially into one thing : but that is a
most material one ; deficiency of originality, l^ot
total deficiency; for every production of mind
which is of any substantive value, has an origi
nality of its own is a conception of the mind
itself, not a copy of something else. Thoughts
original, in the sense of being unborrowed of
being derived from the thinker s own observations
or intellectual processes are abundant in the
writings of women. But they hay_e_not M! j^et
produced any of those great and luminous new
idea s which form an era in thought, nor those
fundamentally new conceptions in art, which
open a vista of possible effects not before thought
of, and found a new school. Their compositions
arc mostly grounded on the existing fund of
, thought, and their creations do not deviate widely
from existing types. This is the sort of inferiority
which their works manifest : for in point of exe
cution, in the detailed application of thought,
and the perfection of style, there is no inferiority.
Our best novelists in point of composition, and
of the management of detail, have mostly been
women ; and there is not in all modern literature
a more eloquent vehicle of thought than the style
of Madame de Stael, nor, as a specimen of purely
artistic excellence, anything superior to the prose
of Madame Sand, whose style acts upon the

129

nervous system like a symphony of Haydu or
Mozart. High originality of conception is, as I
have said, what is chiefly wanting. And now to
examine if there is any manner in which this,
deficiency can be accounted for.

Let us remember, then, so far as regards
mere thought, that during all that period in the
world s existence, and in the progress of cultiva
tion, in which great and fruitful new truths
could be arrived at by mere force of genius,
with little previous study and accumulation of
knowledge during all that time women did not
cpjicej 11 themselves with speculation at all. From
the days of Hypatia to those of the Reformation,
the illustrious Heloisa is almost the only woman
to whom any such achievement might have been
possible ; and we know not how great a capacity
of speculation in her may have been lost to
mankind by the misfortunes of her life. Never
since any considerable number of women have
began to cultivate serious thought, has origi
nality been possible on easy terms. Nearly all
the thoughts which can be reached by mere
strength of original faculties, have long since
been arrived at; and originality, in any high
sense of the word, is now scarcely ever attained
but by minds which have undergone elaborate
discipline, and are deeply versed in the results
of previous thinking. It is Mr. Maurice, I think,

130

who has remarked on the present age, that its
most original thinkers are those who have known
most thoroughly^ what had been thought by their
predecessors : and this will always henceforth be
the case. Every fresh stone in the edifice lias
now to be placed on the top of so many others,
that a long process of climbing, and of carrying-
tip materials, has to be gone through by whoever
aspires to take a share in the present stage of
the work. How many women are there w r ho
have gone through any such process ? Mrs.
Somerville, alone perhaps of women, knows as
muc.li of mathematics as is now needful for
making any considerable mathematical discovery:
is it any proof of inferiority in women, that she
has not happened to be one of the two or three
persons who in her lifetime have associated their
names with some striking advancement of the
science? Two women, since political economy
has been made a science, have known enough of
it to write usefully on the subject : of how many
of the innumerable men who have written on it
during the same time, is it possible with truth to
say more ? If no woman has hitherto been a
great historian, what woman has had the neces
sary erudition ? If no woman is a great philo
logist, what woman has studied Sanscrit and
Slavonic, the Gothic of Ulphila and the Persic
of the Zeudavesta? Even in practical matters

131

we all know what is the value of the originality f ^ l f ~
of untaught geniuses. It means, inventing*""
over again in its rudimentary form something
already invented and improved upon by many
successive inventors. When women have had
the preparation which all men now require to be
eminently original, it will be time enough to
begin judging by experience of their capacity for
originality.

It no doubt often happens that a person, who
has not widely and accurately studied the thoughts
of others on a subject, has by natural sagacity a
happy intuition, which he can suggest, but cannot
prove, which yet when matured may be an im
portant addition to knowledge : but even then,
no justice can be done to it until some other
person, who does possess the previous acquire
ments, takes it in hand, tests it, gives it a scientific
or practical form, and fits it into its place among
the existing truths of philosophy or science. Is
it supposed that such felicitous thoughts do not
occur to women ? They occur by hundreds to
every woman of intellect. But they are mostly
lost, for want of a husband or friend who has the
other knowledge which can enable him to estimate
them properly and bring them before the world :
and even when they are brought before it, they
generally appear as his ideas, not their real
author s. Who can tell how many of the most

B 2

132

original thoughts put forth by male writers,
belong to a woman by suggestion, to themselves
only by verifying and working out ? If I may
judge by my own case, a very large proportion

indeed.

If we turn from pure speculation to literature
in the narrow sense of the term, and the fine arts,
there is a very obvious reason why women s
literature is, in its general conception and in its
main features, an imitation of men s. Why is the
Roman literature, as critics proclaim to satiety,
not original, but an imitation of the Greek?
Simply because the Greeks came first. If women
lived in a different country from men, and had
never read any of their writings, they would have
had a literature of their own. As it is, they have
not created one, because they found a highly ad
vanced literature already created. If there had
been no suspension of the knowledge of antiquity,
or if the Renaissance had occurred before the
Gothic cathedrals were built, they never would
have been built. We see that, in France and
Italy, imitation of the ancient literature stopped
the original development even after it had com
menced. All women who write are pupils of the
great male writers. A painter s early pictures,
even if he be a Raffaelle, are undistinguishable in
style from those of his master. Even a Mozart
does not display his powerful originality in his

133

earliest pieces. What years are to a gifted indi
vidual, generations are to a mass. 4~ women s
literature is destined to have a different collective
character from that of men,, depending on any
difference of natural tendencies, much longer
time is necessary than has yet elapsed, before it
can emancipate itself from the influence of ac- ^
cepted models, and guide itself by its own im
pulses. But if, as I believe, there will not prove
to be any natural tendencies common to women,
and distinguishing their genius from that of men,
yet every individual writer among them has her
individual tendencies, which at present are still
subdued by the influence of precedent and ex
ample : and it will require generations more, before
their individuality is sufficiently developed to make
head against that influence.

It is in the fine arts, properly so called, that
the primd facie evidence of inferior original
powers in women at first sight appears the
strongest : since opinion (it may be said) does not
exclude them from these, but rather encourages
them, and their education, instead of passing over
this department, is in the affluent classes mainly
composed of it. Yet in this line of exertion they
have fallen still more short than in many others,
of the highest eminence attained by men. This
shortcoming, however, needs no other explana
tion than the familiar fact, more universally true

In the fine arts than in anything else ; the vast
superiority of professional persons over amateurs.
Women in the educated classes are almost uni
versally taught more or less of some branch or
other of the fine arts,, but not that they may gain
x their living or their social consequence by it.
Women artists are all amateurs. The exceptions
are only of the kind which confirm the general
truth. Women are taught music, but not for
the purpose of composing, only of executing it :
and accordingly it is only as composers, that
men, in music, are superior to women. The only
one of the fine arts which women do follow, to
any extent, as a profession, and an occupation
for life, is the histrionic ; and in that they are
confessedly equal, if not superior, to men. To
make the comparison fair, it should be made
between the productions of women in any branch
of art, and those of men not following it as a
profession. In musical composition, for example,
women surely have produced fully as good things
as have ever been produced by male amateurs.
There are now a few women, a very few, who
practise painting as a profession, and these are
already beginning to show quite as much talent
as could be expected. Even male painters (pace
Mr. Ruskin) have not made any very remarkable
figure these last centuries, and it will be long
before they do so. The reason whyjheold painters

135

were so greatly superior to the modem, is that
:i greatly superior class of men applied themselves
to_tlie~art. In the fourteenth and fifteenth cen
turies the Italian painters were the most accom
plished men of their age. The greatest of them were
men of encyclopaedical acquirements and powers,
like the great men of Greece. But in their
times fine art was, to men s feelings and concep
tions, among the grandest things in which a human
being could excel ; and by it men were made, what
only political or military distinction now makes
them, the companions of sovereigns, and the equals
of the highest nobility. In the present age, men
of anything like similar calibre find something
more important to do, for their own fame and
the uses of the modern world, than painting :
and it is only now and then that a Reynolds or
$i Turner (of whose relative rank among eminent
men I do not pretend to an opinion) applies himself
to that art. Music belongs to a different order
of things ; it does not require the same general
powers of mind, but seems more dependant on a
natural gift : and it may be thought surprising
that no one of the great musical composers has
been a woman. But even this natural gift, to be
made available for great creations, requires study,
and professional devotion to the pursuit. The only
countries which have produced first-rate composers,
even of the male sex, are Germany and Italy

136

countries in which, both in point of special and
of general cultivation, women have remained far
behind France and England, being generally (it
may be said without exaggeration) very little edu
cated, and having scarcely cultivated at all any
of the higher faculties of mind. And in those
countries the men who are acquainted with the
principles of musical composition must be counted
$\ by hundreds, or more probably by thousands, the
; women barelv by scores : so that here again, on

-k A^ y

> the doctrine of averages, we cannot reasonably
expect to see more than one eminent woman to
fifty eminent men ; and the last three centuries
have not produced fifty eminent male composers
either in Germany or in Italy.

There are other reasons, besides those which we
have now given, that help to explain wliy_women
remain behind men, even in the pursuits which are
open to both. For one thing, very few women
have time for them. This may seem a paradox ;
it is an undoubted social fact, The time and
thoughts of every woman have to satisfy great
previous demands 011 them for things practical.
There is, first, the superintendence of the family
and the domestic expenditure, which occupieTat
least one woman in every family, generally the one
of mature years and acquired experience ; unless
the family is so rich as to admit of delegating that
task to hired agency, and submitting to all the

137

waste and malversation inseparable from that mode
of conducting it. The superintendence of a house-
holcL even when not in other respects laborious, is
extremely onerous to the thoughts ; it requires
incessant vigilance, an eye which no detail escapes,
and presents questions for consideration and solu
tion, foreseen and unforeseen, at every hour of the
day, from which the person responsible for them
can hardly ever shake herself free. If a woman
is of a rank and circumstances which relieve her in
a measure from these cares, she has still devolving
on her the management for the whole family of its
intercourse with others of what is called society,
and the less the call made on her by the former
duty, the greater is always the development of the
latter : the dinner parties, concerts, evening parties,
morning visits, letter writing, and all that goes with
them. All this is over and above the engrossing
duty which society imposes exclusively on women,
of making themselves charming. A clever woman
of the higher ranks finds nearly a sufficient em
ployment of her talents in cultivating the graces
of manner and the arts of conversation. To look
only at the outward side of the subject : the great
and continual exercise of thought which all women
who attach any value to dressing well (I do not
mean expensively, but with taste, and perception
of natural and of artificial convenance) must
bestow upon their own dress, perhaps also upon

138

that of their daughters, would alone go a great
way towards achieving respectable results in art,
or science,, or literature, and does actually exhaust
much of the time and mental power they might
have to spare for either.* If it were possible
that all this number of little practical interests
(which are made great to them) should leave
them either much leisure, or much energy and
freedom of mind, to be devoted to art or specula
tion, they must have a much greater original
supply of active faculty than the vast majority of
men. But this is not all. Independently of the
regular offices of life which devolve upon a woman,
she is expected to have her time and faculties
always at the disposal of everybody. If a man
has not a profession to exempt him from such
demands, still, if he has a pursuit, he offends
nobody by devoting his time to it ; occupation is

"It appears to be the same right turn of mind which enables
i man to acquire the truth, or the just idea of what is right in
the ornaments, as in the more stable principles of art. It has
1 the same centre of perfection, though it is the centre of a
smaller cirde.--To illustrate this by the fashion of dress, in
winch there >s allowed tobea good or bad taste. The component
part of dress are continually changing from great to little, from
* to long; but the general form still remains: it is still the
1S com P ara ^el y ^ed, though on a very

v n - aslon mus <*. He who

invent with the most success, or dresses in the best taste, would

6 ^^^ployed to greater purposes,
" rhavef ed the same correctLte

H I

Disc v S art ^ J Shua ^ nM1 Bourses,

139

received as a valid excuse for his not answering
to every casual demand which may be made on
him. Are a woman s occupations, especially her j
chosen and voluntary ones, ever regarded as excus- 1
ing her from any of what are termed the calls of \ ^
society? Scarcely are her most necessary andj
recognised duties allowed as an exemption. It
requires an illness in the family, or something
else out of the common way, to entitle her to
give her own business the precedence over other
people s amusement. She must always be at^the
beck and call of somebody, generally of everybody.
If she has a study or a pursuit, she must snatch
any short interval which accidentally occurs to be
employed in it. A celebrated woman, in a work
which I hope will some day be published, remarks
truly that everything a woman does is done at odd
times. Is it wonderful, then, if she does not attain
the highest eminence in things which require con
secutive attention, and the concentration on them
of the chief interest of life ? Such is philosophy,
and such, above all, is art, in which, besides the
devotion of the thoughts and feelings, the hand
also must be kept in constant exercise to attain
high skill.

There is another consideration to be added to
all these. In the various arts and intellectual
occupations, there is a degree of proficiency suffi
cient for living by it, and there is a higher

140

degree on which depend the great productions
which immortalize a name. To the attainment
of the former, there are adequate motives in the
case of all who follow the pursuit professionally :
the other is hardly ever attained where there is
not,, or where there has not been at some period
of life,, an ardent desire of celebrity. Nothing-
less is commonly a sufficient stimulus to undergo
the long and patient drudgery, which, in the case
even of the greatest natural gifts, is absolutely
required for great eminence in pursuits in which
we already possess so many splendid memorials
of the highest genius. Now, whether the cause
be natural or artificial, women seldom have this
eagerness for fame. Their ambition is generally
confined within narrower bounds. The influence
they seek is over those who immediately surround
them. Their desire is to be liked, loved, or ad-
mired, by those whom they see with their eyes:
and the proficiency in knowledge, arts, and ac
complishments, which is sufficient for that, almost
always contents them. This is a trait of cha
racter which cannot be left out of the account
,jn judging of women as they are. I do not at
^11 believe that it is inherent in women. It is
..only the natural result of their circumstances.
The love of fame in men is encouraged, by edu
cation and opinion : to -scorn delights and live
laborious days for its sake, is accounted the part

141

of "noble minds/ even if spoken of as tlieir
"last infirmity/ and is stimulated by the access
which fame gives to all objects of ambition, in
cluding even the favour of women; while to
women themselves all these objects are closed,
and the desire of fame itself considered daring
and unfeminine. Besides,, how could it be that
a woman s interests should not be all concen
trated upon the impressions made on those who
come into her daily life, when society has or
dained that all her duties should be to them, and
has contrived that all her comforts should depend/
on them? The natural desire of consideration
from our fellow creatures is as strong in a woman
as in a man ; but society has so ordered things
that public consideration is, in all ordinary cases,
only attainable by her through the consideration
of her husband or of her male relations, while
her private consideration is forfeited by making /
herself individually prominent, or appearing in
any other character than that of an appendage
to men. Whoever is in the least capable of
estimating the influence on the mind of the
entire domestic and social position and the whole
habit of a life, must easily recognise in that in
fluence a complete explanation of nearly all the
apparent differences between women and men,
including the whole of those which imply any
inferiority.

142

As for moral differences, considered as dis
tinguished from intellectual,, the distinction com
monly drawn is to the advantage of women.
They are declared to be better than men ; an
empty compliment, which must provoke a bitter
smile from every woman of spirit,, since there is
no other situation in life in which it is the esta
blished order, and considered quite natural and
suitable, that the better should obey the worse.
If this piece of idle talk is good for anything,, it
is only as an admission by men, of the corrupting-
influence of power ; for that is certainly the
only truth which the fact, if it be a fact, either
proves or illustrates. And it is true that servi
tude, except when it actually brutalizes, though
corrupting to both, is less so to the slaves than
to the slave-masters. It is wholcsomer for the
moral nature to be restrained, even by arbitrary
power, than to be alloAved to exercise arbitrary
power without restraint. Women, it is said,
seldomer fall under the penal law contribute a
much smaller number of offenders to the criminal
calendar, than men. I doubt not that the same
thing may be said, with the same truth, of negro
slaves. Those who are under the control of
others cannot often commit crimes, unless at the
command and for the purposes of their masters.
I do not know a more signal instance of the
blindness with which the world, including the

143

herd of studious men, ignore and pass over all
thlfinnuences of social circumstances, than their
silly depreciation of the intellectual, and silly C
panegyrics on the moral, nature of women.

The complimentary dictum about women s
superior moral goodness may be allowed to pair
off with the disparaging one respecting their
greater liability to moral bias. Women, wejare
told, arc not capable of resisting their personal
partialities : their judgment in grave affairs is
warped by their sympathies and antipathies. "
Assuming it to be so, it is still to be proved that
women are oftener misled by their personal
feelings than men by their personal interests.
The chief difference would seem in that case to
be, that men are led from the course of duty
arid the public interest by their regard for them
selves, women (not being allowed to have private
interests of their own) by their regard for somc^
body else. It is also to be considered, that all
the education which women receive from society
inculcates on them the feeling that the individuals
connected with them are the only ones to whom
they owe any duty the only ones whose interest
they are called upon to care for ; while, as far as
education is concerned, they are left strangers
even to the elementary ideas which arc presup
posed in any intelligent regard for larger in
terests or higher moral objects. The complaint

144

against them resolves itself merely into this,
that they fulfil only too faithfully the sole duty
which they are taught,, and almost the only one
which they are permitted to practise.

The concessions of the privileged to the un
privileged arc so seldom brought about by any
better motive than the power of the unprivileged
to extort them, that any arguments against the
prerogative of sex are likely to be little attended
to by the generality, as long as they are able to
say to themselves that women do not complain
of it. That fact certainly enables men to retain
the unjust privilege some time longer ; but does
not render it less unjust. Exactly the same
thing may be said of the women in the harem of
an Oriental : they do not complain of not being
allowed the freedom of European women. They
think our women insufferably bold and unfemi-
nine. How rarely it is that even men complain
of the general order of society ; and how much
rarer still would such complaint be, if they did
not know of any different order existing any
where else. Women do not complain of the
general lot of women; or rather they do, for
plaintive elegies on it are very common in the
writings of women, and were still more so as
long as the lamentations could not be suspected
of having any practical object. Their complaints
are like the complaints which men make of the

145

general unsatisfactoriness of human life; they
are not meant to imply blame, or to plead for
any change. But though women do not com
plain of the power of husbands, each complains
of her own husband, or of the husbands of her
friends. It is the same in all other cases of
servitude, at least in the commencement of the }
emancipatory movement. The serfs did not at
first complain of the power of their lords, but
only of their tyranny. The Commons began by
claiming a few municipal privileges; they next
asked an exemption for themselves from being
taxed without their own consent ; but they would
at that time have thought it a great presumption
to claim any share in the king s sovereign autho
rity. The_case. of women is now the only case
in which to rebel against established rules is still
looked upon with the same eyes as was formerly
a subject s claim to the right of rebelling against
his king. A woman who joins in any movement
which her husband disapproves, makes herself a
martyr, without even being able to be an apostle,
for the husband can legally put a stop to her
apostleship. Women cannot be expected to
devote themselves to the emancipation of women, \
until men in considerable number are prepared
to join with them in the undertaking.

146

CHAPTER IV.

HPHERE remains a question, not of less im-
-*- portance than those already discussed, and
which will be asked the most importunately by
those opponents whose conviction is somewhat
shaken on the main point. What good are we
to expect from the changes proposed in our
customs and institutions? Would mankind be
at all better off if women were free ? If not,
why disturb their minds, and attempt to make
a social revolution in the name of an abstract
right ?

It is hardly to be expected that this question
will be asked in respect to the change proposed
in the condition of women in marriage. The
sufferings, immoralities, evils of all sorts, produced
in innumerable cases by the subjection of indi
vidual women to individual men, are far too
terrible to be overlooked. Unthinking or un-
candid persons, counting those cases alone which
are extreme, or which attain publicity, may say
that the evils are exceptional; but no one can
be blind to their existence, nor, in many cases,

147

to their intensity. And it is perfectly obvious
that the abuse of the power cannot be very much
checked while the power remains. It is a power
given, or offered, not to good men, or to decently
respectable men, but to. all men.; the most brutal,
and the most criminal. There is no check but
that of opinion, and such men are in general
within the reach of no opinion but that of men
like themselves. If such men did not brutally
tyrannize over the one human being whom the
law compels to bear everything from them, society
must already have reached a paradisiacal state.
There could be no need any longer of laws to
curb men s vicious propensities. Astea must
not only have returned to earth, but the heart of
the worst man must have become her temple. The
law of servitude in marriage is a monstrous con- _.p
fTfr<lTfvHnp to nil tTin prin pipits of the modern worlck
and to all the experience through which those
principles have been slowly and painfully worked
out. It_isjthe sole case, now that negro slavery has
been abolished, in which ahumanbeinginthe pleni
tude of every faculty is delivered up to the tender
mercies of another human being, in the hope
forsooth that this other will use the power solely
for the good of the person subjected to it.
Marriage is the only actual bondage known to
_ourlaw. There remain no legal slaves, except
the mistress of every house.

L2

148

It is not, therefore, OIL this part of the subject,
that the question is likely to be asked, Cui bono ?
We may be told that the evil Avould outweigh
the good, but the reality of the good admits of
no dispute. In regard, however, to the larger
question, the removal of women s disabilities
their recognition as the equals of men in all that
belongs to citizenship the opening to them of
all honourable employments, and of the training
and education which qualifies for those enmbv^
Gients there are many persons for whom it is
not enough that the inequality has no just or
legitimate defence; they require to be told
what express advantage would be obtained by
abolishing it.

To which let me first answer, the_advantage of
having the most universal and pervading of all
human relations regulated by justice instead of
injustice. The vast amount of this gain to
human nature, it is hardly possible, by any expla
nation or illustration, to place in a stronger light
than it is placed by the bare statement, to any one
fvHl ii ho attaches a moral meaning to words. AlLthfi-
f selfish propensities, the self-worship, theunjustself-
j preference, which exist among mankind, have their
) source and root in, and derive their principal

J/* 7 *--.-*...

1 nourishment from, the present constitution of the
. relation between men and women. Think what

( J^ NV/ "" " " ~~ __ .- _

it is to a boy, to grow up to manhood in the

149

belief that without any merit or any exertion of
his own, though he may he the most frivolous
; and empty or the most ignorant and stolid of
mankind, by the mere fact of being born a male
he is by right the superior of all and every one
of an entire half of the human race : including
probably some whose real superiority to himself
he has daily or hourly occasion to feel ; but even
if in his whole conduct he habitually follows
a woman s guidance, still , if he is a fool, she
thinks that of course she is not, and cannot be,
equal in ability and judgment to himself ; and if
he is not a fool, he does worse he sees that she
is superior to him, arid believes that, notwithstand
ing her superiority, he is entitled to command and
Che is bound to obey. What must be the effect
on his character, of this lesson ? And men of the
cultivated classes are often not aware how deeply
it sinks into the immense majority of male minds.
For, among right-feeling and well-bred people, the
inequality is kept as much as possible out of sight ;
above all, out of sight of the children. As much
obedience is required from boys to their mother
as to their father : they arc not permitted to
domineer over their sisters, nor are they accus
tomed to see these postponed to them, but the
contrary; the compensations of the chivalrous
feeling being made prominent, while the servitude
which requires them is kept in the background.

150

Well brought-up youths in the higher classes
thus often escape the bad influences of the situa
tion in their early years, and only experience them
when, arrived at manhood, they fall under the
dominion of facts as they really exist. Such
people are little aware, when a boy is differently
brought up, how early the notion of his inherent
superiority to" a girl arises in his mind ; how it
grows with his growth and strengthens witfc-feis
strength ; how it is inoculated by one schoolboy
upon another ; how early the youth thinks him
self superior to his mother, owing her perhaps
forbearance, but no real respect ; and how sublime
and sultan-like a sense of superiority he feels,
above all, over the woman whom he honours by
admitting her to a partnership of his lifjb. Is it
imagined that all this does not pervert the whole
manner of existence of the man, both as an in
dividual and as a social being? It is an exact
parallel to the feeling of a hereditary king that
he is excellent above others by being born "asking,
or a noble by being born a noble. The relation
between husband and wife is very like that
between lord and vassal, except that the wife is
held to more unlimited obedience than the vassal
was. However the vassal s character may have
been affected, for better and for worse, by his
subordination, who can help seeing that the lord s
was affected greatly for the worse ? whether he was

151

led to believe that his vassals were really superior
to himself, or to feel that he was placed in com
mand over people as good as himself, for no merits
or labours of his own, but merely for having, as
Eigaro says, taken the trouble to be born. The
self-worship of the monarch, or of the feudal supe
rior, is matched by the self-worship of the male.
Human beings do not grow up from childhood in
the possession of unearned distinctions, without
pluming themselves upon them. Those whom
privileges not acquired by their merit, and which
they feel to be disproportioned to it, inspire with
additional humility, are always the few, and the
best few. The rest are only inspired with pride,
and the worst sort of pride, that which values
itself upon accidental advantages, not of its own
achieving. Above all, when the feeling of being ]
raised above the whole of the other sex is com- j
bined with personal authority over one individual
among them ; the situation, if a school of con
scientious and affectionate forbearance to those
whose strongest points of character are conscience
and affection, is to men of another quality a re
gularly constituted Academy or Gymnasium for
training them in arrogance and overbearingness ;
which vices, if curbed by the certainty of resistance
in their intercourse with other men, their equals,
break out towards all who are in a position to be
obliged to tolerate them, and often revenge them-

152

selves upon the unfortunate wife for the involun
tary restraint which they are obliged to submit to I
elsewhere. *J!

The example afforded, and the education given
to the sentiments, by laying the foundation of
domestic existence upon a relation contradictory
to the first principles of social justice, must, from
the very nature of man, have a perverting influ
ence of such magnitude, that it is hardly possible
with our present experience to raise our imagi
nations to the conception of so great a change
for the better as would be made by its removal.
All that education arid civilization are doing to
efface the influences on character of the law of
force, and replace them by those of justice, remains
merely on the surface, as long as the citadel of
the enemy is not attacked. The principle of the
modem movement in morals and politics, is that
Conduct] and conduct alone, entitles to respect :
that not what men are, but what they do, con
stitutes their claim to deference ; that, above all,
merit, and not birth, is the only rightful claim to
power and authority. If no authority, not in its
nature temporary, were allowed to one human
being over another, society would not be em
ployed in building up propensities with one hand
which it has to curb with the other. The child
would really, for the first time in man s existence
on earth, be trained in the way he should go, and

153

when lie was old there would be a chance that
he would not depart from it. But so long as the
right of the strong to power over the weak rules
in the very heart of society, the attempt to make
the equal right of the weak the principle of its
outward actions will always be an uphill struggle ;
for the law of justice,, which is also that of
Christianity, will never get possession of men s
inmost sentiments ; they will be working against
it, even when bending to it.

The second benefit to be expected from giving
to women the free use of their faculties, by leav
ing them the free choice of their employments,
and opening to them the same field of occupation
and the same prizes and encouragements as to
other human beings, would be th^t of doubling

higher service of humanity,. Where there is now
one person qualified to benefit mankind and
promote the general improvement, as a public
teacher, or an administrator of some branch of pub
lic or social affairs, there would then be a chance of
two. Mental superiority of any kind is at present
everywhere so much below the demand ; there is
such a deficiency of persons competent to do
excellently anything which it requires any con
siderable amount of ability to do ; that the loss
to the world, by refusing to make use of one-half
of the whole quantity of talent it possesses, is

154

extremely serious. It is true that this amount
of mental power is not totally lost. Much of
it is employed, and would in any case be em
ployed, in domestic management, and in the few
other occupations open to women ; and from the
remainder indirect benefit is in many individual
cases obtained, through the personal influence
of individual women over individual men. But
these benefits are partial ; their range is extremely
circumscribed ; and if they must be admitted, on
the one hand, as a deduction from the amount
of fresh social power that would be acquired by
giving freedom to one-half of the whole sum of
human intellect, there must be added, on the
other, the benefit of the stimulus that would be
given to the intellect of men by the competition ;
or (to use a more true expression) by the necessity
that would be imposed on them of deserving
precedency before they could expect to obtain it.

This great accession to the intellectual power
of the species, and to the amount of intellect
available for the good management of its affairs,
would be obtained, partly, through the better and
more complete intellectual education of women,
which would then improve pari passu with that
of men. Women in general would be brought up
equally capable of understanding business, public
affairs, and the higher matters of speculation, with
men in the same class of society ; and the select

A
o*

155

few of the one as well as of the other sex, who
were qualified not only to comprehend what is
done or thought by others, but to think or do
something considerable themselves,, would meet
with the same facilities for improving and training
their capacities in the one sex as in the other.
In this way, the widening of the sphere of action
for women would operate for good, by raising
their education to the level of that of men, and
making the one participate in all improvements
made in the other. But independently of this,
the mere breaking down of the barrier would of
itself have an educational virtue of the highest
worth. The mere getting rid of the idea that all
the wider subjects of thought and action, all the
things which are of general and not so]ely of
private interest, are men^s business, from which
women are to be warned off positively interdicted
from most of it, coldly tolerated in the little
which is allowed them the mere consciousness a
woman would then have of being a human being-
like any other, entitled to choose her pursuits,
urged or invited by the same inducements as any
one else to interest herself in whatever is in
teresting to human beings, entitled to exert the
share of influence on all human concerns which
belongs to an individual opinion, whether she
attempted actual participation in them or not
this alone would effect an immense expansion of

156

the faculties of women, as well as enlargement of
the range of their moral sentiments.

Besides the addition to the amount of indi
vidual talent available for the conduct of human
affairs, which certainly are not at present so
abundantly provided in that respect that they
can afford to dispense with, one-half of what
nature proffers ; the opinion of women would then
possess a more beneficial, rather than a greater,
influence upon the general mass of human belief
and sentiment. I say a more beneficial, rather
than a greater influence ; for the influence of
women over the general tone of opinion has
always, or at least from the earliest known period,
been very considerable. The influence of mothers
on the early character of their sons, and the
desire of young men to recommend themselves to
young women, have in all recorded times been
important agencies in the formation of cha
racter, and have determined some of the chief
steps in the progress of civilization. Even in
the Homeric age, aiSwt towards the T/owaSac
A/c(T(7rt7rAou is an acknowledged and powerful
motive of action in the great Hector. The moral
influence of women has had two modes of opera
tion. First, it has been a softening influence.
Those who were most liable to be the victims
of violence, have naturally tended as much as they
could towards limiting its sphere and mitigating

157

its excesses. Those who were not taught to fight,
have naturally inclined in favour of any other
mode of settling differences rather than that of
fighting. In general, those who have been the )
greatest sufiferers"by the indulgence of selfish S
passion, have been the most earnest supporters of
any moral law which offered a means of bridling )
passion. Women were powerfully instrumental
in inducing the northern conquerors to adopt
the creed of Christianity, a creed so much more
favourable to women than any that preceded it.
The conversion of the Anglo-Saxons and of the
Pranks may be said to have been begun by the
wives of Ethelbert and Clovis. The other mode
in which the effect of women^s opinion has bee
conspicuous, is by giving a powerful stimulus to
those qualities in men, which, not being them
selves trained in, it was necessary for them that
they should find in their protectors. Courage,
and the military virtues generally, have at all
times been greatly indebted to the desire which
men felt of being admired by women : and the
stimulus reaches far beyond this one class of
eminent qualities, since, by a very natural effect
of their position, the best passport to the ad
miration and favour of women has always been
to be thought highly of by men. From the
combination of the two kinds of moral in
fluence thus exercised by women, arose the spirit

158

-of chivalry : the peculiarity of which is, to aim at
combining the highest standard of the warlike
qualities with the cultivation of a totally different
class of virtues those of gentleness, generosity, o
and self-abnegation, towards the non-military and
defenceless classes generally, and a special sub
mission and worship directed towards women; who
were distinguished from the other defenceless
classes by the high rewards which they had it
in their power voluntarily to bestow 011 those
who endeavoured to earn their favour, instead of
extorting their subjection. Though the practice of
rivalry fell even more sadly short of its theoretic
standard than practice generally falls below theory,
it remains one of the most precious monuments of
the moral history of our race ; as a remarkable in
stance of a concerted and organized attempt by a
most disorganized and distracted society, to raise
up and carry into practice a moral ideal greatly
in advance of its social condition and institutions ;
so much so as to have been completely frustrated
in the main object, yet never entirely inefficacious,
and which has left a most sensible, and for the
most part a highly valuable impress on the ideas
and feelings of all subsequent times.

The chivalrous ideal is the acme of the
influence of women s sentiments on the moral
cultivation of mankind : and if women are to
remain in their subordinate situation, it were

159

greatly to be lamented that the chivalrous stan
dard should have passed away, for it is the only
one at all capable of mitigating the demoralizing
influences of that position. But the changes in
the general state of the species rendered inevi
table the substitution of a totally different ideal of
morality for the chivalrous one. Chivalry was;
the attempt to infuse moral elements into a state/
of society in which everything depended for gooA
or evil on individual prowess, under the softenin *
influences of individual delicacy and generosity.
In modern societies, all things, even in the military
department of affairs, are decided, not by indi
vidual effort, but by the combined operations of
numbers; while the main occupation of society
has changed from fighting to business, from mili
tary to industrial life. The exigencies of the
new life are no more exclusive of the virtues of
generosity than those of the old, but it no
longer entirely depends on them. The main foun
dations of the moral life of modern times must
bejustice and prudence; the respect of each
for the rights of every other, and the ability
of each to take care of himself. Chivalry left
without legal check all forms of wrong which
reigned unpunished throughout society ; it only
encouraged a few to do right in preference to
wrong, by the direction it gave to the instruments
of praise and admiration. But the_jeal depen- .

160

; dcnce of morality must always be upon its penal
I sanctions its power to deter from evil. The
Security. of society cannot rest on merely rendering
honour to right, a motive so comparatively weak in
all but a few, and which on very many does not
operate at all. Modern society is able to repress
wrong through all departments of life, by a fit
exertion of the superior strength which civiliza
tion has given it, and thus to render the exis
tence of the weaker members of society (no
longer defenceless but protected by law) tole
rable to them, without reliance on the chivalrous
feelings of those who are in a position to tyran
nize. The beauties and graces of the chivalrous
character are still what they were, but the rights
of the weak, and the general comfort of human
life, now rest on a far surer and steadier support;
or rather, they do so in every relation of life
except the conjugal.

At present the moral influence of women is
no less real, but it is no longer of so marked
and definite a character : it has more nearly
merged in the general influence of public opinion.
Both through the contagion of sympathy, and
through the desire of men to shine in the eyes
of women, their feelings have great effect in
keeping alive what remains of the chivalrous
ideal in fostering the sentiments and continuing
the traditions of spirit and generosity. In these

161

points of character, their standard is higher than
that of men; in the quality of justice, somewhat
lower. As regards the relations of private life
it may be said generally, that their influence is,
on the whole, encouraging to the softer virtues,
discouraging to the sterner: though the state
ment must be taken with all the modifications
dependent on individual character. In the
chief of the greater trials to which virtue is
subject in the concerns of life the conflict be
tween interest and principle the tendency of
women s influence is of a very mixed character.
"When the principle involved happens to be one
of the very few which the course of their reli
gious or moral education has strongly impressed
upon themselves, they are potent auxiliaries to
virtue : and their husbands and sons are often
prompted by them to acts of abnegation which
they never would have been capable of without
that stimulus. But, with the present education
and position of women, the moral principles
which have been impressed on them cover but a
comparatively small part of the field of virtue,
and are, moreover, principally negative ; forbid
ding particular acts, but having little to do with
the general direction of the thoughts and pur
poses. I am afraid it must be said, that disinte
restedness in the general conduct of life the
devotion of the energies to purposes which hold

M

(y

162

out no promise of private advantages to the
family is very seldom encouraged or supported
by women s influence. It is small blame to them
that they discourage objects of which they have
not learnt to see the advantage, and which with
draw their men from them, and from the interests
of the family. But the consequence is that
women s influence is often anything but favour
able to public virtue.

Women have, however, some share of influence
in giving the tone to public moralities since their
sphere of action has been a little widened, and
since a considerable number of them have occupied
themselves practically in the promotion of objects
reaching beyond their own family and household.
The influence of women counts for a great deal
in two of the most marked features of modern
European life its aversion to war, and its addic
tion to philanthropy. Excellent characteristics
both ; but unhappily, if the influence of women
is valuable in the encouragement it gives to these
feelings in general, in the particular applications
the direction it gives to them is_At. least as often
mischievous as useful. In the philanthropic de
partment more particularly, the two provinces
chiefly cultivated by women are religious prose-
lytism and charity. Religious prosely tism _at, _
home, is but another word for embittering of
religious animosities: abroad, it is usually a

163

junning at an object, without either know
ing or heeding the fatal mischiefs fatal to the
religious object itself as well as to all other
desirable objects which may be produced by the
means employed. As for charity, it is a matter
in which the immediate effect on the persons
directly concerned, and the ultimate consequence
to the general good, are apt to be at complete
war with one another : while the education given
to women an education of the sentiments rather
than of the understanding and the habit incul
cated by their whole life, of looking to imme
diate effects on persons, and not to remote effects
on classes of persons make them both unable
to see, and unwilling to admit, the ultimate evil
tendency of any form of charity or philanthropy
which commends itself to their sympathetic feel
ings. The great and continually increasing mass
of unenlightened and shortsighted benevolence,
which, taking the care of people s lives out of
their own hands, and relieving them from the
disagreeable consequences of their own acts, saps
the very foundations of the self-respect, self-help,
and self-control which, are the essential condi
tions both of individual prosperity and of social
virtue this waste of resources and of benevolent
feelings in doing harm instead of good, is im
mensely swelled by women s contributions, and
stimulated by their influence. Not that this is

M 2

164

a mistake likely to be made by women, where
they have actually the practical management of
schemes of beneficence. It sometimes happens
that women who administer public charities with
that insight into present fact, and especially into
the minds and feelings of those with whom they
are in immediate contact, in which women gene
rally excel men recognise in the clearest manner
the demoralizing influence of the alms given or
the help afforded, and could give lessons on the
subject to many a male political economist. But
women who only give their money, and are not
brought face to face with the effects it produces,
how can they be expected to foresee them ? A
woman born to the present lot of women, and
content with it, how should she appreciate the
value of self-dependence? She is not self-de
pendent ; she is not taught self-dependence ; her
destiny is to receive everything from others, and
why should what is good enough for her be bad
for the poor? Her familiar notions of good are
of blessings descending from a superior. She
forgets that she is not free, and that the poor
are ; that if what they need is given to them un
earned, they cannot be compelled to earn it : that
everybody cannot be taken care of by everybody,
but there must be some motive to induce people
to take care of themselves ; and that to be helped
to help themselves, if they are physically capable

165

of it, is the only charity which proves to be
charity in the end.

These considerations shew how usefully the
part which women take in the formation of
general opinion, would be modified for the better
by that more enlarged instruction, and practical
conversancy with the things which their opinions
influence, that would necessarily arise from their
social and political emancipation. But the im
provement it would work through the influence
they exercise, each in her own family, would be
still more remarkable.

It is often said that in the classes most ex
posed to temptation, a man s wife and children
tend to keep him honest and respectable, both by
the wife s direct influence, and by the concern he
feels for their future welfare. This may be so,
and no doubt often is so, with those who are
more weak than wicked; and this beneficial in
fluence Avould be preserved and strengthened
under equal laAvs; it does not depend on the
woman s servitude, but is, on the contrary, dimi
nished by the disrespect which the inferior class
of men always at heart feel towards those who
are subject to their power. Butjwhenjye a&cend
higher in the scale, we come among a totally
different set of moving forces. The wife s in
fluence tends, as far as it goes, to prevent the
husband from falling below the common standard

166

of approbation of the country. It tends quite as
strongly to hinder him from rising above it.
The wife is the auxiliary of the common public
opinion. A man who is married to a woman
his inferior in intelligence, finds her a perpetual
dead weight, or, worse than a dead weight, a
drag, upon every aspiration of his to be better
than public opinion requires him to be. It is
hardly possible for one who is in these bonds, to
attain exalted virtue. If he differs in his opinion
from the mass if he sees truths which have not
yet dawned upon them, or if, feeling in his heart
truths which they nominally recognise, he would
like to act up to those truths more conscien
tiously than the generality of mankind to all
such thoughts and desires, marriage is the heaviest
of drawbacks, unless he be so fortunate as to
have a wife as much above the common level as
he himself is.

For, in the first place, there is always some
sacrifice of personal interest required ; either of
social consequence, or of pecuniary means ; per
haps the risk of even the means of subsistence.
These sacrifices and risks he may be willing to
encounter for himself; but he will pause before
he imposes them on his family. And his family
in this case means his wife and daughters; for
he always hopes that his sons will feel as he feels
himself, and that what he can do without, they

167

will do without, willingly, in the same cause.
But his daughters their marriage may depend
upon it : and his wife, who is unable to enter
into or understand the objects for which these
sacrifices are made who, if she thought them
worth any sacrifice, would think so on trust, and
solely for his sake who can participate in none
of the enthusiasm or the self- approbation he
himself may feel, while the things which he is
disposed to sacrifice are all in all to her; will
not the best and most unselfish man hesitate
the longest before bringing on her this conse
quence ? If it be not the comforts of life, but
only social consideration, that is at stake, the
burthen upon his conscience and feelings is still
very severe. Whoever has a wife and children
has given hostages to Mrs. Gruiidy. The appro
bation of that potentate may be a matter of in
difference to him, but it is of great importance
to his wife. The man himself may be above
opinion, or may find sufficient compensation in
the opinion of those of his own way of thinking.
But to the women connected with him, he can
offer no compensation. The almost invariable
tendency of the wife to place her influence in the
same scale with social consideration, is sometimes
made a reproach to women, and represented as
a peculiar trait of feebleness and childishness of
character in them : surely with great injustice.

168

J Society makes the whole life of a woman, in the
easy classes, a continued self-sacrifice ; it exacts
from her an unremitting restraint of the whole
of her natural inclinations, and the sole return it
makes to her for what often deserves the name
of a martyrdom, is consideration. Her conside
ration is inseparably connected with that of her
husband, and after paying the full price for it, she
tinds that she is to lose it, for no reason of which
she can feel the cogency. She has sacrificed her
whole life to it, and her husband will not sacri
fice to it a whim, a freak, an eccentricity ; some
thing not recognised or allowed for by the world,
and which the world will agree with her in
thinking a folly, if it thinks no worse ! The
dilemma is hardest upon that very meritorious
class of men, who, without possessing talents
which qualify them to make a figure among those
with whom they agree in opinion, hold their
opinion from conviction, and feel bound in
honour and conscience to serve it, by making
profession of their belief, and giving their time,
labour, and means, to anything undertaken in its
behalf. The worst case of all is when such men
happen to be of a rank and position which of
itself neither gives them, nor excludes them
from, what is considered the best society ; when
their admission to it depends mainly on what is
thought of them personally and however unex-

169

ceptionable their breeding and habits, their being-
identified with opinions and public conduct un
acceptable to those who give the tone to society
Avould operate as an effectual exclusion. Many
a woman flatters herself (nine times out of ten
quite erroneously) that nothing prevents her and
her husband from moving in the highest society
of her neighbourhood society in which others
well known to her,, and in the same class of life,
mix freely except that her husband is unfortu
nately a Dissenter,, or has the reputation of
mingling in low radical politics. That it is, she
thinks, which hinders George from getting a
commission or a place, Caroline from making an
advantageous match, and prevents her and her hus
band from obtaining invitations, perhaps honours,
which, for aught she sees, they are as well entitled
to as some folks. With such an influence in
every house, either exerted actively, or operating
all the more powerfully for not being asserted, is
it any wonder that people in general^ are kept
down in that mediocrity ofrTespectabilit^ which
is becoming a marked characteristic of modern
times ?

There is another very injurious aspect in which
the effect, not of women s disabilities directly, but
of the broad line of difference which those dis
abilities create between the education and cha
racter of a woman and that of a man, requires to

170

be considered. Nothing can be more unfavour
able to that union of thoughts and inclinations
which is the ideal of married life. Intimate
society between people radically dissimilar to one
another, is an idle dream. Unlikeness may attract,
but it is likeness which retains ; and in proportion
to the likeness is the suitability of the individuals
to give each other a happy life. While women
are so unlike men, it is not wonderful that selfish
men should feel the need of arbitrary power in
their own hands, to arrest in limine the life-long
conflict of inclinations, by deciding every question
on the side of their own preference. When people
are extremely unlike, there can be no real identity
of interest. Very often there is conscientious
difference of opinion between married people, on
the highest points of duty. Is there any reality
in the marriage union where this takes place?
Yet it is not uncommon anywhere, when the
woman has any earnestness of character ; and it
is a very general case indeed in Catholic countries,
when she is supported in her dissent by the only
other authority to which she is taught to bow, the
priest. With the usual barefacedness of power
not accustomed to find itself disputed, the in
fluence of priests over women is attacked by Pro
testant and Liberal writers, less for being bad in
itself, than because it is a rival authority to the
husband, and raises up a revolt against his infal-

171

In England,, similar differences occa
sionally exist when an Evangelical wife has allied
herself with a husband of a different quality ; but
in general this source at least of dissension is got
rid of, by reducing the minds of women to such a
nullity, that they have no opinions but those of
Mrs. Grundy, or those which the husband tells
them to have. When there is no difference of
opinion,, differences merely of taste may be suffi
cient to detract greatly from the happiness of
married life. And though it may stimulate the
amatory propensities of men, it does not conduce
to married happiness, to exaggerate by differences
of education whatever may be the native diffe
rences of the sexes. If the married pair are
well-bred and well-behaved people, they tolerate
each other s tastes ; but is mutual toleration what
people look forward to, when they enter into
marriage ? These differences of inclination will
naturally make their wishes different, if not
restrained by affection or duty, as to almost all
domestic questions which arise. What a diffe
rence there must be in the society which the two
persons will wish to frequent, or be frequented
by ! Each will desire associates who share their
own tastes : the persons agreeable to one, will be
indifferent or positively disagreeable to the other ;
yet there can be none who are not common to
both, for married people do not now live in dif-

172

ferent parts of the house and have totally diffe
rent visiting lists, as in the reign of Louis XV.
They cannot help having different wishes as to
the bringing up of the children : each will wish to
see reproduced in them their own tastes and senti
ments : and there is either a compromise, and only
a half-satisfaction to either, or the wife has to
yield often with hitter suffering ; an4, with or I
without intention, her occult influence continues
to counterwork the husband s purposes.

It would of course be extreme folly to suppose
that these differences of feeling and inclination
only exist because women are brought up diffe
rently from men, and that there would not be
differences of taste under any imaginable circum
stances. But there is nothing beyond the mark
in saying that the distinction in bringing-up
immensely aggravates those differences, and
renders them wholly inevitable. While women
are brought up as they are, a man and a woman
will but rarely find in one another real agree
ment of tastes and wishes as to daily life. They
will generally have to give it up as hopeless, and
renounce the attempt to have, in the intimate
associate of their daily life, that idem velle, idem
nolle, which is the recognised bond of any society
that is really such: or if the man succeeds in
obtaining it, he does so by choosing a woman
who is so complete a nullity that she has no

173

velle or nolle at all, and is as ready to comply
with one thing as another if anybody tells her to
do so. Even this calculation is apt to fail ; dul-
ness and want of spirit are not always a guarantee
of the submission which is so confidently expected
from them. But if they were, is this the ideal
of marriage ? What, in this case, does the man
obtain by it, except an upper servant, a nurse,
or a mistress? On the contrary, when each
of two persons, instead of being a nothing, is
a something; when they are attached to one
another, and are not too much unlike to begin
with ; the constant partaking in the same things,
assisted by their sympathy, draws out the latent
capacities of each for being interested in the
things which were at first interesting only to the
other; and works a gradual assimilation of the
tastes and characters to one another, partly by
the insensible modification of each, but more by
a real enriching of the two natures, each ac
quiring the tastes and capacities of the other in
addition to its own. This often happens between
two friends of the same sex, who are much asso
ciated in their daily life : and it would be a
common, if not the commonest, case in marriage,
did not the totally different bring! ng-up of the
two sexes make it next to an impossibility to
form a really well- assorted union. Were this
remedied, whatever differences there might still

174

be in individual tastes, there would at least be,
as a general rule, complete unity and unanimity as
to the great objects of life. When the two per
sons both care for great objects, and are a help
and encouragement to each other in whatever
regards these, the minor matters on which their
tastes may differ are not all-important to them;
and there is a foundation for solid friendship, of
an enduring character, more likely than anything
else to make it, through the Avhole of life, a greater
pleasure to each to give pleasure to the other,
than to receive it.

I have considered, thus far, the effects on the
pleasures and benefits of the marriage union which
depend on the mere unlikeness between the wife
and the husband : but the evil tendency is pro
digiously aggravated when the unlikeness is in
feriority. Mere unlikeness, when it only means
difference of good qualities, may be more a
benefit in the way of mutual improvement, than
a drawback from comfort. When each emulates,
and desires and endeavours to acquire, the other s
peculiar qualities, the difference does not produce
diversity of interest, but increased identity of it,
and makes each still more valuable to the other.
But when one is much the inferior of the two in
mental ability and cultivation, and is not actively
attempting by the other s aid to rise to the other s
level, the whole influence of the connexion upon

175

the development of the superior of the two is
deteriorating: and still more so in a tolerably
happy marriage than in an unhappy one. It is
not with impunity that the superior in intellect
shuts himself up with an inferior, and elects
that inferior for his chosen,, and sole completely
intimate, associate. Any society which is not im
proving, is deteriorating : and the more so, the
closer and more familiar it is. Even a really
superior man almost always begins to deteriorate
when he is habitually (as the phrase is) king of his
company : and in his most habitual company the
husband who has a wife inferior to him is always so.
While his self-satisfaction is incessantly ministered
to on the one hand, on the other he insensibly
imbibes the modes of feeling, and of looking at
things, which belong to a more vulgar or a more
limited mind than his own. This evil differs
from many of those which have hitherto been
dwelt on, by being an increasing one. The
association of men with women in daily life is
much closer and more complete than it ever was
before. Men s life is more domestic. Formerly,
their pleasures and chosen occupations were
among men, and in men s company : their wives
had but a fragment of their lives. At the present
time, the progress of civilization, and the turn of
opinion against the rough amusements and con
vivial excesses which formerly occupied most men

176

in their hours of relaxation together with (it
must be said) the improved tone of modern feel
ing as to the reciprocity of duty which binds
the husband towards the wife have thrown the
man very much more upon home and its inmates,
for his personal and social pleasures : while the
kind and degree of improvement which has been
made in women s education, has made them in
some degree capable of being his companions in
ideas and mental tastes, while leaving them, in
most cases, still hopelessly inferior to him. His
desire of mental communion is thus in general
satisfied by a communion from which he learns
nothing. An unimproving and unstimulating
companionship is substituted for (what he might
otherwise have been obliged to seek) the society
of his equals in powers and his fellows in the
higher pursuits. We see, accordingly, that young
men of the greatest promise generally cease to
improve as soon as they marrv, and, not im
proving, inevitably degenerate, flf the wife does
not push the husband forward, s^e always holds
him back. He ceases to care for what she does
not care for ; he no longer desires, and ends by
disliking and shunning, society congenial to his
former aspirations, and which would now shame
his falling-off from theraj7his higher faculties
both of mind and heart cease to be called into acti
vity. And this change coinciding with the new and

177

selfish interests which are created by the family,
after a few years he differs in no material respect
from those who have never had wishes for any
thing but the common vanities and the common
pecuniary objects.

What marriage may be in the case of two
persons of cultivated faculties, identical in opi
nions and purposes, between whom there exists
that best kind of equality, similarity of powers
and capacities with reciprocal superiority in them
so that each can enjoy the luxury of looking up
to the other, and can have alternately the pleasure
of leading and of being led in the path of develop
ment I will not attempt to describe. To those
who can conceive it, there is no need ; to those
who cannot, it would appear the dream of an
enthusiast. But I maintain, with the profoundest
conviction, that this, and this only, is the ideal of
marriage ; and that all opinions, customs, and in
stitutions which favour any other notion of it, or
turn the conceptions and aspirations connected
with it into any other direction, by whatever pre
tences they may be coloured, are relics of primitive
barbarism. The moral regeneration of mankind
will only really commence, when the most funda
mental of the social relations is placed under the
rule of equal justice, and when human beings
learn to cultivate their strongest sympathy with
an equal in rights and in cultivation.

N

178

Thus far, the benefits which it has appeared
that the world would gain by ceasing to make
/ sex a disqualification for privileges and a badge
of subjection, are social rather than individual;
consisting in an increase of the general fund of
thinking and acting power, and an improvement
in the general conditions of the association of
men with women. But it would be a grievous
understatement of the case to omit the most
direct benefit of all, the unspeakable gain in
private happiness to the liberated half of the
species ; the difference to them between a life of
subjection to the will of Bothers, and~alife of
rational freedom. After the primary necessities
of food and raiment, freedom is the first and
trongest want ot human nature; "While

kind are lawless, their desire is tor lawless free
dom. When they have learnt to understand the
meaning of duty and the value of reason, they
incline more and more to be guided and restrained
by these in the exercise of their freedom ; but
they do not therefore desire freedom less ; they
do not become disposed to accept the will of
other people as the representative and inter
preter of those guiding principles. On the con
trary, the communities in which the reason has
been most cultivated, and in which the idea of
social duty has been most powerful, are those
which have most strongly asserted the freedom

179

of action of the individual the liberty of each to
govern his conduct by his own feelings of duty,
and by such laws and social restraints as his own
conscience can subscribe to.

He who would rightly appreciate the worth of
gersonaFliidcpciidcncc as an element of happi-
jness, should consider the value he himself puts
upon it as an ingredient of his own. There is no
subject on which there is a greater habitual diffe
rence of judgment between a man judging for
himself, and the same man judging for other
people. When he hears others complaining that
they are not allowed freedom of action that their
own will has not sufficient influence in the regu
lation of their affairs his inclination is, to ask,
what are their grievances? what positive damage
they sustain ? and in what respect they consider
their affairs to be mismanaged ? and if they fail
to make out, in answer to these questions, what
appears to him a sufficient case, he turns a deaf
ear, and regards their complaint as the fanciful
querulousness of people whom nothing reasonable
will satisfy. But he has a quite different standard
of judgment when he is deciding for himself.
Then, the most unexceptionable administration of
his interests by a tutor set over him, docs not
satisfy his feelings : his personal exclusion from
the deciding authority appears itself the greatest
grievance of all, rendering it superfluous even to

180

enter into the question of mismanagement. It is
the same with nations. "What citizen of a free
country would listen to any offers of good and
skilful administration, in return for the abdica
tion of freedom ? Even if he could believe that
good and skilful administration can exist among
a people ruled by a will not their own, would
not the consciousness of working out their
own destiny under their own moral respon
sibility be a compensation to his feelings for
great rudeness and imperfection in the details of
public affairs ? Let him rest assured that what
ever he feels on this point, w r omen feel in a fully
equal degree. Whatever has been said or written,
from the time of Herodotus to the present, of the
ennobling influence of free government the nerve
and spring which it gives to all the faculties, the
larger and higher objects which it presents to the
intellect and feelings, the more unselfish public
spirit, and calmer and broader views of duty,
that it engenders, and the generally loftier plat
form on which it elevates the individual as a moral,
spiritual, and social being is every particle
as true of women as of men. Are these things
no important part of individual happiness ? Let
any man call to mind what he himself felt on
emerging from boyhood from the tutelage and
control of even loved and affectionate elders and
entering upon the responsibilities of manhood.

181

Was it not like tlie physical effect of taking off a
heavy weight, or releasing him from obstructive,
even if not otherwise painful, bonds ? Did he
not feel twice as much alive, twice as much a
human being, as before ? And does he imagine
that women have none of these feelings ? But it
is a striking fact, that the satisfactions and
mortifications of personal pride, though all in all
to most men when the case is their own, have
less allowance made for them in the case of other
people, and are less listened to as a ground or a
justification of conduct, than any other natural
human feelings ; perhaps because men compliment
them in their own case with the names of so
many other qualities, that they are seldom
conscious how mighty an influence these feelings
exercise in their own lives. Nc^Jess^ large and
powerful is their part, we may assure ourselves, in
the lives and feelings of women. Women are
schooled into suppressing them in their most
natural and most healthy direction, but the in
ternal principle remains, in a different outward
form. An active and energetic, mind, if denied
.liberty, will seek for powcrjjfns^l *h

mand of itself, it will assert its personality b
attempting to conli Ol pikers: Toallow to an
human beings noexistencc ot their own but
what depends on others, is giving far too
high a premium on bending others to their pur-

182

poses. Where liberty cannot be hoped for, and
power can, power becomes the grand object of
human desire; those to whom others will not
leave the undisturbed management of their own
affairs, will compensate themselves, if they can, by
meddling for their own purposes with the affairs
of others. Hence also women s passion for per
sonal beauty, and dress and display ; and all the
evils that flow from it, in the way of mischievous
luxury and social immorality. The love of power
\ and the love of liberty are in eternal antagonism.
Where there is least liberty, the passion for power
is the most ardent and unscrupulous. The desire
of power over others can only cease to be a de
praving agency among mankind, when each of
them individually is able to do without it : which
can only be where respect for liberty in the per
sonal concerns of each is an established principle.
But it is not only through the sentiment of
personal dignity, that the free direction and dis
posal of their own faculties is a source of indi
vidual happiness, and tobe fettered and restricted in
it, a source of unhappiness, to human beings, and
not least to women. There is nothing, after disease,
indigence, and guilt, so fatal to the pleasurable
enjoyment of life as the want of a worthy outlet
for the active faculties. Women who have the
cares of a family, and while they have the cares
of a family, have this outlet, and it generally

183

suffices for them : but what of the greatly in
creasing number of women, who have had na
opportunity of exercising the vocation which
they are mocked by telling them is their proper
one ? AVhat of the women whose children have
been lost to them by death or distance, or have
grown up, married, and formed homes of their
own? There are abundant examples of men
who, after a life engrossed by business, retire with
a competency to the enjoyment, as they hope, of
rest, but to whom, as they are unable to acquire
new interests and excitements that can replace
the old, the change to a life of inactivity brings
ennui, melancholy, and premature death. Yet
no one thinks of the parallel case of so many
worthy and devoted women, who, having paid what
they are told is their debt to society having
brought up a family blamelessly to manhood and
womanhood having kept a house as long as they
had a house needing to be kept are deserted by
the sole occupation for which they have fitted
themselves ; and remain with undiminished activity
but with no employment for it, unless perhaps a
daughter or daughter-in-law is willing to abdicate
in their favour the discharge of the same func
tions in her younger household. Surely a hard
lot for the old age of those who have worthily
discharged, as long as it was given to them to
discharge, what the world accounts their only

184

social duty. Of such women, and of those others
to whom this duty has not been committed at
all many of whom pine through life with the
consciousness of thwarted vocations, and acti
vities which are not suffered to expand the
only resources, speaking generally, are religion
and charity. But their religion) though it may
he one of feeling, and of ceremonial observance,
cannot be a religion of action, unless in the
t form of charity. For charity many of them are
\^ by nature admirably fitted ; but to practise it
usefully, or even without doing mischief, requires
the education, the manifold preparation, the know
ledge and the thinking powers, of a skilful ad
ministrator. There are few of the administrative
functions of government for which a person would
not be fit, who is fit to bestow charity usefully.
In this as in other cases (pre-eminently in that
of the education of children), the duties per
mitted to women cannot be performed properly,
without their being trained for duties which, to
the great loss of society, are not permitted to
them. And here let me notice the singular way
in which the question of women s disabilities is
frequently presented to view, by those who find
it easier to draw a ludicrous picture of what they
do not like, than to answer the arguments for it.
When it is suggested that women s executive
capacities and prudent counsels might sometimes

185

be found valuable in affairs of state, these lovers
of fun hold up to the ridicule of the world, as
sitting in parliament or in the cabinet, girls in
their teens, or young wives of two or three and
twenty, transported bodily, exactly as they are,
from the drawing-room to the House of Com
mons. They forget that males are not usually
selected at this early age for a seat in Par
liament, or for responsible political functions.
Common sense would tell them that if such
trusts were confided to women, it would be
to such as having no special vocation for mar
ried life, or preferring another employment of
their faculties (as many women even now prefer
to marriage some of the few honourable occupa
tions within their reach), have spent the best
years of their youth in attempting to qualify
themselves for the pursuits in which they desire
to engage j or still more frequently perhaps,
widows or wives of forty or fifty, by whom the
knowledge of life and faculty of government
which they have acquired in their families, could
by the aid of appropriate studies be made avail
able on a less contracted scale. There is no
country of Europe in which the ablest men have
not frequently experienced, and keenly appreciated,
the value of the advice and help of clever and
experienced women of the world, in the attain
ment both of private and of public objects ; and

186

there are important matters of public administra
tion to which few men are equally competent
with such women ; among others, the detailed
control of expenditure. But what we are now
discussing is not the need which society has of
the services of women in public business, but the
dull and hopeless life to which it so often con
demns them, by forbidding them to exercise the
practical abilities which many of them are con
scious of, in any wider field than one which to
some of them never was, and to others is no
longer, open. If there is anything vitally im
portant to the happiness of human beings, it is
that they should relish their habitual pursuit.
This requisite of an enjoyable life is very imper
fectly granted, or altogether denied, to a large
part of mankind ; and by its absence many a life
is a failure, which is provided, in appearance, with
every requisite of success. But if circumstances
which society is not yet skilful enough to over
come, render such failures often for the present
inevitable, society need not itself inflict them.
The injudiciousness of parents, a youth s own
inexperience, or the absence of external oppor
tunities for the congenial vocation, and their
presence for an uncongenial, condemn numbers
of men to pass their lives in doing one thing reluc
tantly and -ill, when there are other things which
they could have done well and happily. But on

187

women this sentence is imposed by actual law,
and_b customs ^g^plfiaaJLJta law. What, in
unenlightened societies, colour, race, religion, or
in the case of a conquered country, nationality,
are to some men, sex is to all women; a
peremptory exclusion from almost all honourable
occupations, but either such as cannot be fulfilled
by others, or such as those others do not think
worthy of their acceptance. Sufferings arising
from causes of this nature usually meet with so
little sympathy, that few persons are aware of the
great amount of unhappiuess even now pro
duced by the feeling of a wasted life. The case
will be even more frequent, as increased cultiva
tion creates a greater and greater disproportion
between the ideas and faculties of women, and
the scope which society allows to their activity.

When we consider the positive evil caused to
the disqualified half of the human race by their
disqualification first in the loss of the most in
spiriting and elevating kind of personal enjoy
ment, and next in the weariness, disappointment,
and profound dissatisfaction with life, which are
so often the substitute for it; one feels that
among all the lessons which men require for
carrying on the struggle against the inevitable
imperfections of their lot on earth, there is no
lesson which they more need, than not to add to
the evils which nature inflicts, by their jealous

188

and prejudiced restrictions on one another.
Their vain fears only substitute other and worse
evils for those which they are idly apprehensive
of: while every restraint on the freedom of
conduct of any of their human fellow creatures,
(otherwise than by making them responsible for
any evil actually caused by it), dries up pro tanto
the principal fountain of human happiness, and
leaves the species less rich, to an inappreciable
degree, in all that makes life valuable to the
individual human being.

THE END.

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HQ Mill, John Stuart

1596 The subjection of women

M52

1869