The Subjection of Women
original development even after it had commenced. 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 earliest pieces. What years are to a gifted
individual, generations are to a mass. If 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 accepted models, and guide itself by its own
impulses. 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 example: 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 _prima 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 explanation 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 universally taught
more or less of some branch or other of the fine arts, but not that
they may gain 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 why the
old painters were so greatly superior to the modern, is that a
greatly superior class of men applied themselves to the art. In the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the Italian painters were the most
accomplished 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 conceptions,
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 a 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--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 educated,
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 barely by scores: so that here
again, on 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 why 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 on them for things practical. There is, first, the
superintendence of the family and the domestic expenditure, which
occupies at 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 waste and malversation inseparable from that mode of
conducting it. The superintendence of a household, 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 solution, 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 employment 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 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.[2] 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 speculation, 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 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 chosen and
voluntary ones, ever regarded as excusing her from any of what are
termed the calls of society? Scarcely are her most necessary and
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 consecutive 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 sufficient for living by it, and there is a higher 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
admired, by those whom they see with their eyes: and the proficiency
in knowledge, arts, and accomplishments, which is sufficient for
that, almost always contents them. This is a trait of character which
cannot be left out of the account in judging of women as they are. I
do not at all 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 education and opinion: to "scorn delights and live
laborious days" for its sake, is accounted the part of "noble minds,"
even if spoken of as their "last infirmity," and is stimulated by the
access which fame gives to all objects of ambition, including 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 concentrated upon the impressions made on those who come
into her daily life, when society has ordained 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