The Subjection of Women
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THE
SUBJECTION
OF
WOMEN
BY
JOHN STUART MILL
LONDON
LONGMANS, GREEN, READER, AND DYER
1869
LONDON:
SAVILL, EDWARDS AND CO., PRINTERS, CHANDOS STREET,
COVENT GARDEN.
CHAPTER I.
The object of this Essay is to explain as clearly as I am able, the
grounds of an opinion which I have held from the very earliest period
when I had formed any opinions at all on social or political matters,
and which, instead of being weakened or modified, has been constantly
growing stronger by the progress of reflection and the experience of
life: That the principle which regulates the existing social
relations between the two sexes--the legal subordination of one sex
to the other--is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances
to human improvement; and that it ought to be replaced by a principle
of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on the one side,
nor disability on the other.
The very words necessary to express the task I have undertaken, show
how arduous it is. But it would be a mistake to suppose that the
difficulty of the case must lie in the insufficiency or obscurity of
the grounds of reason on which my conviction rests. The difficulty is
that which exists in all cases in which there is a mass of feeling to
be contended against. So long as an opinion is strongly rooted in the
feelings, it gains rather than loses in stability by having a
preponderating weight of argument against it. For if it were accepted
as a result of argument, the refutation of the argument might shake
the solidity of the conviction; but when it rests solely on feeling,
the worse it fares in argumentative contest, the more persuaded its
adherents are that their feeling must have some deeper ground, which
the arguments do not reach; and while the feeling remains, it is
always throwing up fresh intrenchments of argument to repair any
breach made in the old. And there are so many causes tending to make
the feelings connected with this subject the most intense and most
deeply-rooted of all those which gather round and protect old
institutions and customs, that we need not wonder to find them as yet
less undermined and loosened than any of the rest by the progress of
the great modern spiritual and social transition; nor suppose that
the barbarisms to which men cling longest must be less barbarisms
than those which they earlier shake off.
In every respect the burthen is hard on those who attack an almost
universal opinion. They must be very fortunate as well as unusually
capable if they obtain a hearing at all. They have more difficulty in
obtaining a trial, than any other litigants have in getting a
verdict. If they do extort a hearing, they are subjected to a set of
logical requirements totally different from those exacted from other
people. In all other cases, the burthen of proof is supposed to lie
with the affirmative. If a person is charged with a murder, it rests
with those who accuse him to give proof of his guilt, not with
himself to prove his innocence. If there is a difference of opinion
about the reality of any alleged historical event, in which the
feelings of men in general are not much interested, as the Siege of
Troy for example, those who maintain that the event took place are
expected to produce their proofs, before those who take the other
side can be required to say anything; and at no time are these
required to do more than show that the evidence produced by the
others is of no value. Again, in practical matters, the burthen of
proof is supposed to be with those who are against liberty; who
contend for any restriction or prohibition; either any limitation of
the general freedom of human action, or any disqualification or
disparity of privilege affecting one person or kind of persons, as
compared with others. The _a priori_ presumption is in favour of
freedom and impartiality. It is held that there should be no
restraint not required by the general good, and that the law should
be no respecter of persons, but should treat all alike, save where
dissimilarity of treatment is required by positive reasons, either of
justice or of policy. But of none of these rules of evidence will the
benefit be allowed to those who maintain the opinion I profess. It is
useless for me to say that those who maintain the doctrine that men
have a right to command and women are under an obligation to obey, or
that men are fit for government and women unfit, are on the
affirmative side of the question, and that they are bound to show
positive evidence for the assertions, or submit to their rejection.
It is equally unavailing for me to say that those who deny to women
any freedom or privilege rightly allowed to men, having the double
presumption against them that they are opposing freedom and
recommending partiality, must be held to the strictest proof of their
case, and unless their success be such as to exclude all doubt, the
judgment ought to go against them. These would be thought good pleas
in any common case; but they will not be thought so in this instance.
Before I could hope to make any impression, I should be expected not
only to answer all that has ever been said by those who take the
other side of the question, but to imagine all that could be said by
them--to find them in reasons, as well as answer all I find: and
besides refuting all arguments for the affirmative, I shall be called
upon for invincible positive arguments to prove a negative. And even
if I could do all this, and leave the opposite party with a host of
unanswered arguments against them, and not a single unrefuted one on
their side, I should be thought to have done little; for a cause
supported on the one hand by universal usage, and on the other by so
great a preponderance of popular sentiment, is supposed to have a
presumption in its favour, superior to any conviction which an appeal
to reason has power to produce in any intellects but those of a high
class.
I do not mention these difficulties to complain of them; first,
because it would be useless; they are inseparable from having to
contend through people's understandings against the hostility of
their feelings and practical tendencies: and truly the understandings
of the majority of mankind would need to be much better cultivated
than has ever yet been the case, before they can be asked to place
such reliance in their own power of estimating arguments, as to give
up practical principles in which they have been born and bred and
which are the basis of much of the existing order of the world, at
the first argumentative attack which they are not capable of
logically resisting. I do not therefore quarrel with them for having
too little faith in argument, but for having too much faith in custom
and the general feeling. It is one of the characteristic prejudices
of the reaction of the nineteenth century against the eighteenth, to
accord to the unreasoning elements in human nature the infallibility
which the eighteenth century is supposed to have ascribed to the
reasoning elements. For the apotheosis of Reason we have substituted
that of Instinct; and we call everything instinct which we find in
ourselves and for which we cannot trace any rational foundation. This
idolatry, infinitely more degrading than the other, and the most
pernicious of the false worships of the present day, of all of which
it is now the main support, will probably hold its ground until it
gives way before a sound psychology, laying bare the real root of
much that is bowed down to as the intention of Nature and the
ordinance of God. As regards the present question, I am willing to
accept the unfavourable conditions which the prejudice assigns to me.
I consent that established custom, and the general feeling, should be
deemed conclusive against me, unless that custom and feeling from age
to age can be shown to have owed their existence to other causes than
their soundness, and to have derived their power from the worse
rather than the better parts of human nature. I am willing that
judgment should go against me, unless I can show that my judge has
been tampered with. The concession is not so great as it might
appear; for to prove this, is by far the easiest portion of my task.
The generality of a practice is in some cases a strong presumption
that it is, or at all events once was, conducive to laudable ends.
This is the case, when the practice was first adopted, or afterwards
kept up, as a means to such ends, and was grounded on experience of
the mode in which they could be most effectually attained. If the
authority of men over women, when first established, had been the
result of a conscientious comparison between different modes of
constituting the government of society; if, after trying various
other modes of social organization--the government of women over men,
equality between the two, and such mixed and divided modes of
government as might be invented--it had been decided, on the
testimony of experience, that the mode in which women are wholly
under the rule of men, having no share at all in public concerns, and
each in private being under the legal obligation of obedience to the
man with whom she has associated her destiny, was the arrangement
most conducive to the happiness and well being of both; its general
adoption might then be fairly thought to be some evidence that, at
the time when it was adopted, if was the best: though even then the
considerations which recommended it may, like so many other primeval
social facts of the greatest importance, have subsequently, in the
course of ages, ceased to exist. But the state of the case is in
every respect the reverse of this. In the first place, the opinion in
favour of the present system, which entirely subordinates the weaker
sex to the stronger, rests upon theory only; for there never has been
trial made of any other: so that experience, in the sense in which it
is vulgarly opposed to theory, cannot be pretended to have pronounced
any verdict. And in the second place, the adoption of this system of
inequality never was the result of deliberation, or forethought, or
any social ideas, or any notion whatever of what conduced to the
benefit of humanity or the good order of society. It arose simply
from the fact that from the very earliest twilight of human society,
every woman (owing to the value attached to her by men, combined with
her inferiority in muscular strength) was found in a state of bondage
to some man. Laws and systems of polity always begin by recognising
the relations they find already existing between individuals. They
convert what was a mere physical fact into a legal right, give it the
sanction of society, and principally aim at the substitution of
public and organized means of asserting and protecting these rights,
instead of the irregular and lawless conflict of physical strength.
Those who had already been compelled to obedience became in this
manner legally bound to it. Slavery, from being a mere affair of
force between the master and the slave, became regularized and a
matter of compact among the masters, who, binding themselves to one
another for common protection, guaranteed by their collective
strength the private possessions of each, including his slaves. In
early times, the great majority of the male sex were slaves, as well
as the whole of the female. And many ages elapsed, some of them ages
of high cultivation, before any thinker was bold enough to question
the rightfulness, and the absolute social necessity, either of the
one slavery or of the other. By degrees such thinkers did arise: and
(the general progress of society assisting) the slavery of the male
sex has, in all the countries of Christian Europe at least (though,