The Subjection of Women
are, more than any other people, a product of civilization and
discipline. England is the country in which social discipline has
most succeeded, not so much in conquering, as in suppressing,
whatever is liable to conflict with it. The English, more than any
other people, not only act but feel according to rule. In other
countries, the taught opinion, or the requirement of society, may be
the stronger power, but the promptings of the individual nature are
always visible under it, and often resisting it: rule may be stronger
than nature, but nature is still there. In England, rule has to a
great degree substituted itself for nature. The greater part of life
is carried on, not by following inclination under the control of
rule, but by having no inclination but that of following a rule. Now
this has its good side doubtless, though it has also a wretchedly bad
one; but it must render an Englishman peculiarly ill-qualified to
pass a judgment on the original tendencies of human nature from his
own experience. The errors to which observers elsewhere are liable on
the subject, are of a different character. An Englishman is ignorant
respecting human nature, a Frenchman is prejudiced. An Englishman's
errors are negative, a Frenchman's positive. An Englishman fancies
that things do not exist, because he never sees them; a Frenchman
thinks they must always and necessarily exist, because he does see
them. An Englishman does not know nature, because he has had no
opportunity of observing it; a Frenchman generally knows a great deal
of it, but often mistakes it, because he has only seen it
sophisticated and distorted. For the artificial state superinduced by
society disguises the natural tendencies of the thing which is the
subject of observation, in two different ways: by extinguishing the
nature, or by transforming it. In the one case there is but a starved
residuum of nature remaining to be studied; in the other case there
is much, but it may have expanded in any direction rather than that
in which it would spontaneously grow.
I have said that it cannot now be known how much of the existing
mental differences between men and women is natural, and how much
artificial; whether there are any natural differences at all; or,
supposing all artificial causes of difference to be withdrawn, what
natural character would be revealed. I am not about to attempt what I
have pronounced impossible: but doubt does not forbid conjecture, and
where certainty is unattainable, there may yet be the means of
arriving at some degree of probability. The first point, the origin
of the differences actually observed, is the one most accessible to
speculation; and I shall attempt to approach it, by the only path by
which it can be reached; by tracing the mental consequences of
external influences. We cannot isolate a human being from the
circumstances of his condition, so as to ascertain experimentally
what he would have been by nature; but we can consider what he is,
and what his circumstances have been, and whether the one would have
been capable of producing the other.
Let us take, then, the only marked case which observation affords, of
apparent inferiority of women to men, if we except the merely
physical one of bodily strength. No production in philosophy,
science, or art, entitled to the first rank, has been the work of a
woman. Is there any mode of accounting for this, without supposing
that women are naturally incapable of producing them?
In the first place, we may fairly question whether experience has
afforded sufficient grounds for an induction. It is scarcely three
generations since women, saving very rare exceptions, have begun to
try their capacity in philosophy, science, or art. It is only in the
present generation that their attempts have been at all numerous; and
they are even now extremely few, everywhere but in England and
France. It is a relevant question, whether a mind possessing the
requisites of first-rate eminence in speculation or creative art
could have been expected, on the mere calculation of chances, to turn
up during that lapse of time, among the women whose tastes and
personal position admitted of their devoting themselves to these
pursuits. In all things which there has yet been time for--in all but
the very highest grades in the scale of excellence, especially in the
department in which they have been longest engaged, literature (both
prose and poetry)--women have done quite as much, have obtained fully
as high prizes and as many of them, as could be expected from the
length of time and the number of competitors. If we go back to the
earlier period when very few women made the attempt, yet some of
those few made it with distinguished success. The Greeks always
accounted Sappho among their great poets; and we may well suppose
that Myrtis, said to have been the teacher of Pindar, and Corinna,
who five times bore away from him the prize of poetry, must at least
have had sufficient merit to admit of being compared with that great
name. Aspasia did not leave any philosophical writings; but it is an
admitted fact that Socrates resorted to her for instruction, and
avowed himself to have obtained it.
If we consider the works of women in modern times, and contrast them
with those of men, either in the literary or the artistic department,
such inferiority as may be observed resolves itself essentially into
one thing: but that is a most material one; deficiency of
originality. Not total deficiency; for every production of mind which
is of any substantive value, has an originality of its own--is a
conception of the mind itself, not a copy of something else. Thoughts
original, in the sense of being unborrowed--of being derived from the
thinker's own observations or intellectual processes--are abundant in
the writings of women. But they have not yet produced any of those
great and luminous new ideas which form an era in thought, nor those
fundamentally new conceptions in art, which open a vista of possible
effects not before thought of, and found a new school. Their
compositions are mostly grounded on the existing fund of thought, and
their creations do not deviate widely from existing types. This is
the sort of inferiority which their works manifest: for in point of
execution, in the detailed application of thought, and the perfection
of style, there is no inferiority. Our best novelists in point of
composition, and of the management of detail, have mostly been women;
and there is not in all modern literature a more eloquent vehicle of
thought than the style of Madame de Stael, nor, as a specimen of
purely artistic excellence, anything superior to the prose of Madame
Sand, whose style acts upon the nervous system like a symphony of
Haydn or Mozart. High originality of conception is, as I have said,
what is chiefly wanting. And now to examine if there is any manner in
which this deficiency can be accounted for.
Let us remember, then, so far as regards mere thought, that during
all that period in the world's existence, and in the progress of
cultivation, in which great and fruitful new truths could be arrived
at by mere force of genius, with little previous study and
accumulation of knowledge--during all that time women did not concern
themselves with speculation at all. From the days of Hypatia to those
of the Reformation, the illustrious Heloisa is almost the only woman
to whom any such achievement might have been possible; and we know
not how great a capacity of speculation in her may have been lost to
mankind by the misfortunes of her life. Never since any considerable
number of women have begun to cultivate serious thought, has
originality been possible on easy terms. Nearly all the thoughts
which can be reached by mere strength of original faculties, have
long since been arrived at; and originality, in any high sense of the
word, is now scarcely ever attained but by minds which have undergone
elaborate discipline, and are deeply versed in the results of
previous thinking. It is Mr. Maurice, I think, who has remarked on
the present age, that its most original thinkers are those who have
known most thoroughly what had been thought by their predecessors:
and this will always henceforth be the case. Every fresh stone in the
edifice has now to be placed on the top of so many others, that a
long process of climbing, and of carrying up materials, has to be
gone through by whoever aspires to take a share in the present stage
of the work. How many women are there who have gone through any such
process? Mrs. Somerville, alone perhaps of women, knows as much of
mathematics as is now needful for making any considerable
mathematical discovery: is it any proof of inferiority in women, that
she has not happened to be one of the two or three persons who in her
lifetime have associated their names with some striking advancement
of the science? Two women, since political economy has been made a
science, have known enough of it to write usefully on the subject: of
how many of the innumerable men who have written on it during the
same time, is it possible with truth to say more? If no woman has
hitherto been a great historian, what woman has had the necessary
erudition? If no woman is a great philologist, what woman has studied
Sanscrit and Slavonic, the Gothic of Ulphila and the Persic of the
Zendavesta? Even in practical matters we all know what is the value
of the originality of untaught geniuses. It means, inventing over
again in its rudimentary form something already invented and improved
upon by many successive inventors. When women have had the
preparation which all men now require to be eminently original, it
will be time enough to begin judging by experience of their capacity
for originality.
It no doubt often happens that a person, who has not widely and
accurately studied the thoughts of others on a subject, has by
natural sagacity a happy intuition, which he can suggest, but cannot
prove, which yet when matured may be an important addition to
knowledge: but even then, no justice can be done to it until some
other person, who does possess the previous acquirements, takes it in
hand, tests it, gives it a scientific or practical form, and fits it
into its place among the existing truths of philosophy or science. Is
it supposed that such felicitous thoughts do not occur to women? They
occur by hundreds to every woman of intellect. But they are mostly
lost, for want of a husband or friend who has the other knowledge
which can enable him to estimate them properly and bring them before
the world: and even when they are brought before it, they generally
appear as his ideas, not their real author's. Who can tell how many
of the most original thoughts put forth by male writers, belong to a
woman by suggestion, to themselves only by verifying and working out?
If I may judge by my own case, a very large proportion indeed.
If we turn from pure speculation to literature in the narrow sense of
the term, and the fine arts, there is a very obvious reason why
women's literature is, in its general conception and in its main
features, an imitation of men's. Why is the Roman literature, as
critics proclaim to satiety, not original, but an imitation of the
Greek? Simply because the Greeks came first. If women lived in a
different country from men, and had never read any of their writings,
they would have had a literature of their own. As it is, they have
not created one, because they found a highly advanced literature
already created. If there had been no suspension of the knowledge of
antiquity, or if the Renaissance had occurred before the Gothic
cathedrals were built, they never would have been built. We see that,
in France and Italy, imitation of the ancient literature stopped the