The Subjection of Women
still more valuable to the other. But when one is much the inferior
of the two in mental ability and cultivation, and is not actively
attempting by the other's aid to rise to the other's level, the whole
influence of the connexion upon the development of the superior of
the two is deteriorating: and still more so in a tolerably happy
marriage than in an unhappy one. It is not with impunity that the
superior in intellect shuts himself up with an inferior, and elects
that inferior for his chosen, and sole completely intimate,
associate. Any society which is not improving, is deteriorating: and
the more so, the closer and more familiar it is. Even a really
superior man almost always begins to deteriorate when he is
habitually (as the phrase is) king of his company: and in his most
habitual company the husband who has a wife inferior to him is always
so. While his self-satisfaction is incessantly ministered to on the
one hand, on the other he insensibly imbibes the modes of feeling,
and of looking at things, which belong to a more vulgar or a more
limited mind than his own. This evil differs from many of those which
have hitherto been dwelt on, by being an increasing one. The
association of men with women in daily life is much closer and more
complete than it ever was before. Men's life is more domestic.
Formerly, their pleasures and chosen occupations were among men, and
in men's company: their wives had but a fragment of their lives. At
the present time, the progress of civilization, and the turn of
opinion against the rough amusements and convivial excesses which
formerly occupied most men in their hours of relaxation--together
with (it must be said) the improved tone of modern feeling as to the
reciprocity of duty which binds the husband towards the wife--have
thrown the man very much more upon home and its inmates, for his
personal and social pleasures: while the kind and degree of
improvement which has been made in women's education, has made them
in some degree capable of being his companions in ideas and mental
tastes, while leaving them, in most cases, still hopelessly inferior
to him. His desire of mental communion is thus in general satisfied
by a communion from which he learns nothing. An unimproving and
unstimulating companionship is substituted for (what he might
otherwise have been obliged to seek) the society of his equals in
powers and his fellows in the higher pursuits. We see, accordingly,
that young men of the greatest promise generally cease to improve as
soon as they marry, and, not improving, inevitably degenerate. If the
wife does not push the husband forward, she always holds him back. He
ceases to care for what she does not care for; he no longer desires,
and ends by disliking and shunning, society congenial to his former
aspirations, and which would now shame his falling-off from them; his
higher faculties both of mind and heart cease to be called into
activity. And this change coinciding with the new and selfish
interests which are created by the family, after a few years he
differs in no material respect from those who have never had wishes
for anything but the common vanities and the common pecuniary
objects.
What marriage may be in the case of two persons of cultivated
faculties, identical in opinions and purposes, between whom there
exists that best kind of equality, similarity of powers and
capacities with reciprocal superiority in them--so that each can
enjoy the luxury of looking up to the other, and can have alternately
the pleasure of leading and of being led in the path of
development--I will not attempt to describe. To those who can
conceive it, there is no need; to those who cannot, it would appear
the dream of an enthusiast. But I maintain, with the profoundest
conviction, that this, and this only, is the ideal of marriage; and
that all opinions, customs, and institutions which favour any other
notion of it, or turn the conceptions and aspirations connected with
it into any other direction, by whatever pretences they may be
coloured, are relics of primitive barbarism. The moral regeneration
of mankind will only really commence, when the most fundamental of
the social relations is placed under the rule of equal justice, and
when human beings learn to cultivate their strongest sympathy with an
equal in rights and in cultivation.
Thus far, the benefits which it has appeared that the world would
gain by ceasing to make sex a disqualification for privileges and a
badge of subjection, are social rather than individual; consisting in
an increase of the general fund of thinking and acting power, and an
improvement in the general conditions of the association of men with
women. But it would be a grievous understatement of the case to omit
the most direct benefit of all, the unspeakable gain in private
happiness to the liberated half of the species; the difference to
them between a life of subjection to the will of others, and a life
of rational freedom. After the primary necessities of food and
raiment, freedom is the first and strongest want of human nature.
While mankind are lawless, their desire is for lawless freedom. When
they have learnt to understand the meaning of duty and the value of
reason, they incline more and more to be guided and restrained by
these in the exercise of their freedom; but they do not therefore
desire freedom less; they do not become disposed to accept the will
of other people as the representative and interpreter of those
guiding principles. On the contrary, the communities in which the
reason has been most cultivated, and in which the idea of social duty
has been most powerful, are those which have most strongly asserted
the freedom of action of the individual--the liberty of each to
govern his conduct by his own feelings of duty, and by such laws and
social restraints as his own conscience can subscribe to.
He who would rightly appreciate the worth of personal independence as
an element of happiness, should consider the value he himself puts
upon it as an ingredient of his own. There is no subject on which
there is a greater habitual difference of judgment between a man
judging for himself, and the same man judging for other people. When
he hears others complaining that they are not allowed freedom of
action--that their own will has not sufficient influence in the
regulation of their affairs--his inclination is, to ask, what are
their grievances? what positive damage they sustain? and in what
respect they consider their affairs to be mismanaged? and if they
fail to make out, in answer to these questions, what appears to him a
sufficient case, he turns a deaf ear, and regards their complaint as
the fanciful querulousness of people whom nothing reasonable will
satisfy. But he has a quite different standard of judgment when he is
deciding for himself. Then, the most unexceptionable administration
of his interests by a tutor set over him, does not satisfy his
feelings: his personal exclusion from the deciding authority appears
itself the greatest grievance of all, rendering it superfluous even
to enter into the question of mismanagement. It is the same with
nations. What citizen of a free country would listen to any offers of
good and skilful administration, in return for the abdication of
freedom? Even if he could believe that good and skilful
administration can exist among a people ruled by a will not their
own, would not the consciousness of working out their own destiny
under their own moral responsibility be a compensation to his
feelings for great rudeness and imperfection in the details of public
affairs? Let him rest assured that whatever he feels on this point,
women feel in a fully equal degree. Whatever has been said or
written, from the time of Herodotus to the present, of the ennobling
influence of free government--the nerve and spring which it gives to
all the faculties, the larger and higher objects which it presents to
the intellect and feelings, the more unselfish public spirit, and
calmer and broader views of duty, that it engenders, and the
generally loftier platform on which it elevates the individual as a
moral, spiritual, and social being--is every particle as true of
women as of men. Are these things no important part of individual
happiness? Let any man call to mind what he himself felt on emerging
from boyhood--from the tutelage and control of even loved and
affectionate elders--and entering upon the responsibilities of
manhood. Was it not like the physical effect of taking off a heavy
weight, or releasing him from obstructive, even if not otherwise
painful, bonds? Did he not feel twice as much alive, twice as much a
human being, as before? And does he imagine that women have none of
these feelings? But it is a striking fact, that the satisfactions and
mortifications of personal pride, though all in all to most men when
the case is their own, have less allowance made for them in the case
of other people, and are less listened to as a ground or a
justification of conduct, than any other natural human feelings;
perhaps because men compliment them in their own case with the names
of so many other qualities, that they are seldom conscious how mighty
an influence these feelings exercise in their own lives. No less
large and powerful is their part, we may assure ourselves, in the
lives and feelings of women. Women are schooled into suppressing them
in their most natural and most healthy direction, but the internal
principle remains, in a different outward form. An active and
energetic mind, if denied liberty, will seek for power: refused the
command of itself, it will assert its personality by attempting to
control others. To allow to any human beings no existence of their
own but what depends on others, is giving far too high a premium on
bending others to their purposes. Where liberty cannot be hoped for,
and power can, power becomes the grand object of human desire; those
to whom others will not leave the undisturbed management of their own
affairs, will compensate themselves, if they can, by meddling for
their own purposes with the affairs of others. Hence also women's
passion for personal beauty, and dress and display; and all the evils
that flow from it, in the way of mischievous luxury and social
immorality. The love of power and the love of liberty are in eternal
antagonism. Where there is least liberty, the passion for power is
the most ardent and unscrupulous. The desire of power over others can
only cease to be a depraving agency among mankind, when each of them
individually is able to do without it: which can only be where
respect for liberty in the personal concerns of each is an
established principle.
But it is not only through the sentiment of personal dignity, that
the free direction and disposal of their own faculties is a source of
individual happiness, and to be fettered and restricted in it, a
source of unhappiness, to human beings, and not least to women. There
is nothing, after disease, indigence, and guilt, so fatal to the
pleasurable enjoyment of life as the want of a worthy outlet for the
active faculties. Women who have the cares of a family, and while
they have the cares of a family, have this outlet, and it generally
suffices for them: but what of the greatly increasing number of
women, who have had no opportunity of exercising the vocation which
they are mocked by telling them is their proper one? What of the
women whose children have been lost to them by death or distance, or
have grown up, married, and formed homes of their own? There are
abundant examples of men who, after a life engrossed by business,
retire with a competency to the enjoyment, as they hope, of rest, but
to whom, as they are unable to acquire new interests and excitements