The Subjection of Women
obey. Existing moralities, accordingly, are mainly fitted to a
relation of command and obedience. Yet command and obedience are but
unfortunate necessities of human life: society in equality is its
normal state. Already in modern life, and more and more as it
progressively improves, command and obedience become exceptional
facts in life, equal association its general rule. The morality of
the first ages rested on the obligation to submit to power; that of
the ages next following, on the right of the weak to the forbearance
and protection of the strong. How much longer is one form of society
and life to content itself with the morality made for another? We
have had the morality of submission, and the morality of chivalry and
generosity; the time is now come for the morality of justice.
Whenever, in former ages, any approach has been made to society in
equality, Justice has asserted its claims as the foundation of
virtue. It was thus in the free republics of antiquity. But even in
the best of these, the equals were limited to the free male citizens;
slaves, women, and the unenfranchised residents were under the law of
force. The joint influence of Roman civilization and of Christianity
obliterated these distinctions, and in theory (if only partially in
practice) declared the claims of the human being, as such, to be
paramount to those of sex, class, or social position. The barriers
which had begun to be levelled were raised again by the northern
conquests; and the whole of modern history consists of the slow
process by which they have since been wearing away. We are entering
into an order of things in which justice will again be the primary
virtue; grounded as before on equal, but now also on sympathetic
association; having its root no longer in the instinct of equals for
self-protection, but in a cultivated sympathy between them; and no
one being now left out, but an equal measure being extended to all.
It is no novelty that mankind do not distinctly foresee their own
changes, and that their sentiments are adapted to past, not to coming
ages. To see the futurity of the species has always been the
privilege of the intellectual elite, or of those who have learnt from
them; to have the feelings of that futurity has been the distinction,
and usually the martyrdom, of a still rarer elite. Institutions,
books, education, society, all go on training human beings for the
old, long after the new has come; much more when it is only coming.
But the true virtue of human beings is fitness to live together as
equals; claiming nothing for themselves but what they as freely
concede to every one else; regarding command of any kind as an
exceptional necessity, and in all cases a temporary one; and
preferring, whenever possible, the society of those with whom leading
and following can be alternate and reciprocal. To these virtues,
nothing in life as at present constituted gives cultivation by
exercise. The family is a school of despotism, in which the virtues
of despotism, but also its vices, are largely nourished. Citizenship,
in free countries, is partly a school of society in equality; but
citizenship fills only a small place in modern life, and does not
come near the daily habits or inmost sentiments. The family, justly
constituted, would be the real school of the virtues of freedom. It
is sure to be a sufficient one of everything else. It will always be
a school of obedience for the children, of command for the parents.
What is needed is, that it should be a school of sympathy in
equality, of living together in love, without power on one side or
obedience on the other. This it ought to be between the parents. It
would then be an exercise of those virtues which each requires to fit
them for all other association, and a model to the children of the
feelings and conduct which their temporary training by means of
obedience is designed to render habitual, and therefore natural, to
them. The moral training of mankind will never be adapted to the
conditions of the life for which all other human progress is a
preparation, until they practise in the family the same moral rule
which is adapted to the normal constitution of human society. Any
sentiment of freedom which can exist in a man whose nearest and
dearest intimacies are with those of whom he is absolute master, is
not the genuine or Christian love of freedom, but, what the love of
freedom generally was in the ancients and in the middle ages--an
intense feeling of the dignity and importance of his own personality;
making him disdain a yoke for himself, of which he has no abhorrence
whatever in the abstract, but which he is abundantly ready to impose
on others for his own interest or glorification.
I readily admit (and it is the very foundation of my hopes) that
numbers of married people even under the present law, (in the higher
classes of England probably a great majority,) live in the spirit of
a just law of equality. Laws never would be improved, if there were
not numerous persons whose moral sentiments are better than the
existing laws. Such persons ought to support the principles here
advocated; of which the only object is to make all other married
couples similar to what these are now. But persons even of
considerable moral worth, unless they are also thinkers, are very
ready to believe that laws or practices, the evils of which they have
not personally experienced, do not produce any evils, but (if seeming
to be generally approved of) probably do good, and that it is wrong
to object to them. It would, however, be a great mistake in such
married people to suppose, because the legal conditions of the tie
which unites them do not occur to their thoughts once in a
twelvemonth, and because they live and feel in all respects as if
they were legally equals, that the same is the case with all other
married couples, wherever the husband is not a notorious ruffian. To
suppose this, would be to show equal ignorance of human nature and of
fact. The less fit a man is for the possession of power--the less
likely to be allowed to exercise it over any person with that
person's voluntary consent--the more does he hug himself in the
consciousness of the power the law gives him, exact its legal rights
to the utmost point which custom (the custom of men like himself)
will tolerate, and take pleasure in using the power, merely to
enliven the agreeable sense of possessing it. What is more; in the
most naturally brutal and morally uneducated part of the lower
classes, the legal slavery of the woman, and something in the merely
physical subjection to their will as an instrument, causes them to
feel a sort of disrespect and contempt towards their own wife which
they do not feel towards any other woman, or any other human being,
with whom they come in contact; and which makes her seem to them an
appropriate subject for any kind of indignity. Let an acute observer
of the signs of feeling, who has the requisite opportunities, judge
for himself whether this is not the case: and if he finds that it is,
let him not wonder at any amount of disgust and indignation that can
be felt against institutions which lead naturally to this depraved
state of the human mind.
We shall be told, perhaps, that religion imposes the duty of
obedience; as every established fact which is too bad to admit of any
other defence, is always presented to us as an injunction of
religion. The Church, it is very true, enjoins it in her formularies,
but it would be difficult to derive any such injunction from
Christianity. We are told that St. Paul said, "Wives, obey your
husbands:" but he also said, "Slaves, obey your masters." It was not
St. Paul's business, nor was it consistent with his object, the
propagation of Christianity, to incite any one to rebellion against
existing laws. The apostle's acceptance of all social institutions as
he found them, is no more to be construed as a disapproval of
attempts to improve them at the proper time, than his declaration,
"The powers that be are ordained of God," gives his sanction to
military despotism, and to that alone, as the Christian form of
political government, or commands passive obedience to it. To pretend
that Christianity was intended to stereotype existing forms of
government and society, and protect them against change, is to reduce
it to the level of Islamism or of Brahminism. It is precisely because
Christianity has not done this, that it has been the religion of the
progressive portion of mankind, and Islamism, Brahminism, &c., have
been those of the stationary portions; or rather (for there is no
such thing as a really stationary society) of the declining portions.
There have been abundance of people, in all ages of Christianity, who
tried to make it something of the same kind; to convert us into a
sort of Christian Mussulmans, with the Bible for a Koran, prohibiting
all improvement: and great has been their power, and many have had to
sacrifice their lives in resisting them. But they have been resisted,
and the resistance has made us what we are, and will yet make us what
we are to be.
After what has been said respecting the obligation of obedience, it
is almost superfluous to say anything concerning the more special
point included in the general one--a woman's right to her own
property; for I need not hope that this treatise can make any
impression upon those who need anything to convince them that a
woman's inheritance or gains ought to be as much her own after
marriage as before. The rule is simple: whatever would be the
husband's or wife's if they were not married, should be under their
exclusive control during marriage; which need not interfere with the
power to tie up property by settlement, in order to preserve it for
children. Some people are sentimentally shocked at the idea of a
separate interest in money matters, as inconsistent with the ideal
fusion of two lives into one. For my own part, I am one of the
strongest supporters of community of goods, when resulting from an
entire unity of feeling in the owners, which makes all things common
between them. But I have no relish for a community of goods resting
on the doctrine, that what is mine is yours but what is yours is not
mine; and I should prefer to decline entering into such a compact
with any one, though I were myself the person to profit by it.
This particular injustice and oppression to women, which is, to
common apprehensions, more obvious than all the rest, admits of
remedy without interfering with any other mischiefs: and there can be
little doubt that it will be one of the earliest remedied. Already,
in many of the new and several of the old States of the American
Confederation, provisions have been inserted even in the written
Constitutions, securing to women equality of rights in this respect:
and thereby improving materially the position, in the marriage
relation, of those women at least who have property, by leaving them
one instrument of power which they have not signed away; and
preventing also the scandalous abuse of the marriage institution,
which is perpetrated when a man entraps a girl into marrying him
without a settlement, for the sole purpose of getting possession of
her money. When the support of the family depends, not on property,
but on earnings, the common arrangement, by which the man earns the
income and the wife superintends the domestic expenditure, seems to
me in general the most suitable division of labour between the two
persons. If, in addition to the physical suffering of bearing
children, and the whole responsibility of their care and education in
early years, the wife undertakes the careful and economical
application of the husband's earnings to the general comfort of the
family; she takes not only her fair share, but usually the larger