The Subjection of Women
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 influence a complete explanation of nearly
all the apparent differences between women and men, including the
whole of those which imply any inferiority.
As for moral differences, considered as distinguished from
intellectual, the distinction commonly 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 established
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 servitude, except when it actually brutalizes, though corrupting
to both, is less so to the slaves than to the slave-masters. It is
wholesomer for the moral nature to be restrained, even by arbitrary
power, than to be allowed 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 herd of studious
men, ignore and pass over all the influences of social circumstances,
than their silly depreciation of the intellectual, and silly
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, we are told, are 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 and the public interest by their regard for
themselves, women (not being allowed to have private interests of
their own) by their regard for somebody 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 are presupposed in any intelligent regard for larger interests
or higher moral objects. The complaint 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 unprivileged are 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 unfeminine. 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 anywhere 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 general unsatisfactoriness of human life; they are not
meant to imply blame, or to plead for any change. But though women do
not complain 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 authority. 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.
[Footnote 1: Especially is this true if we take into consideration
Asia as well as Europe. If a Hindoo principality is strongly,
vigilantly, 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 collected 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 behind a curtain, that they do not read, and
if they did, there is no book in their languages which can give them
the smallest instruction on political affairs; the example they
afford of the natural capacity of women for government is very
striking.]
[Footnote 2: "It appears to be the same right turn of mind which
enables a 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 still the same centre of perfection, though it is the centre of a
smaller circle.--To illustrate this by the fashion of dress, in which
there is allowed to be a good or bad taste. The component parts of
dress are continually changing from great to little, from short to
long; but the general form still remains: it is still the same
general dress which is comparatively fixed, though on a very slender
foundation; but it is on this which fashion must rest. He who invents
with the most success, or dresses in the best taste, would probably,
from the same sagacity employed to greater purposes, have discovered
equal skill, or have formed the same correct taste, in the highest
labours of art."--_Sir Joshua Reynolds' Discourses_, Disc. vii.]
CHAPTER IV.
There remains a question, not of less importance 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 individual women to individual
men, are far too terrible to be overlooked. Unthinking or uncandid
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, 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. Astraea 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 contradiction to all
the principles of the modern world, and to all the experience through
which those principles have been slowly and painfully worked out. It
is the sole case, now that negro slavery has been abolished, in which
a human being in the plenitude 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 our
law. There remain no legal slaves, except the mistress of every
house.
It is not, therefore, on this part of the subject, that the question
is likely to be asked, _Cui bono_? We may be told that the evil would
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 employments--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 explanation or illustration, to place
in a stronger light than it is placed by the bare statement, to any
one who attaches a moral meaning to words. All the selfish
propensities, the self-worship, the unjust self-preference, which
exist among mankind, have their source and root in, and derive their
principal nourishment from, the present constitution of the relation
between men and women. Think what it is to a boy, to grow up to
manhood in the belief that without any merit or any exertion of his
own, though he may be the most frivolous and empty or the most
ignorant and stolid of mankind, by the mere fact of being born a male