The Subjection of Women
that can replace the old, the change to a life of inactivity brings
ennui, melancholy, and premature death. Yet no one thinks of the
parallel case of so many worthy and devoted women, who, having paid
what they are told is their debt to society--having brought up a
family blamelessly to manhood and womanhood--having kept a house as
long as they had a house needing to be kept--are deserted by the sole
occupation for which they have fitted themselves; and remain with
undiminished activity but with no employment for it, unless perhaps a
daughter or daughter-in-law is willing to abdicate in their favour
the discharge of the same functions in her younger household. Surely
a hard lot for the old age of those who have worthily discharged, as
long as it was given to them to discharge, what the world accounts
their only social duty. Of such women, and of those others to whom
this duty has not been committed at all--many of whom pine through
life with the consciousness of thwarted vocations, and activities
which are not suffered to expand--the only resources, speaking
generally, are religion and charity. But their religion, though it
may be one of feeling, and of ceremonial observance, cannot be a
religion of action, unless in the form of charity. For charity many
of them are by nature admirably fitted; but to practise it usefully,
or even without doing mischief, requires the education, the manifold
preparation, the knowledge and the thinking powers, of a skilful
administrator. There are few of the administrative functions of
government for which a person would not be fit, who is fit to bestow
charity usefully. In this as in other cases (pre-eminently in that of
the education of children), the duties permitted to women cannot be
performed properly, without their being trained for duties which, to
the great loss of society, are not permitted to them. And here let me
notice the singular way in which the question of women's disabilities
is frequently presented to view, by those who find it easier to draw
a ludicrous picture of what they do not like, than to answer the
arguments for it. When it is suggested that women's executive
capacities and prudent counsels might sometimes be found valuable in
affairs of state, these lovers of fun hold up to the ridicule of the
world, as sitting in parliament or in the cabinet, girls in their
teens, or young wives of two or three and twenty, transported bodily,
exactly as they are, from the drawing-room to the House of Commons.
They forget that males are not usually selected at this early age for
a seat in Parliament, or for responsible political functions. Common
sense would tell them that if such trusts were confided to women, it
would be to such as having no special vocation for married life, or
preferring another employment of their faculties (as many women even
now prefer to marriage some of the few honourable occupations within
their reach), have spent the best years of their youth in attempting
to qualify themselves for the pursuits in which they desire to
engage; or still more frequently perhaps, widows or wives of forty or
fifty, by whom the knowledge of life and faculty of government which
they have acquired in their families, could by the aid of appropriate
studies be made available on a less contracted scale. There is no
country of Europe in which the ablest men have not frequently
experienced, and keenly appreciated, the value of the advice and help
of clever and experienced women of the world, in the attainment both
of private and of public objects; and there are important matters of
public administration to which few men are equally competent with
such women; among others, the detailed control of expenditure. But
what we are now discussing is not the need which society has of the
services of women in public business, but the dull and hopeless life
to which it so often condemns them, by forbidding them to exercise
the practical abilities which many of them are conscious of, in any
wider field than one which to some of them never was, and to others
is no longer, open. If there is anything vitally important to the
happiness of human beings, it is that they should relish their
habitual pursuit. This requisite of an enjoyable life is very
imperfectly granted, or altogether denied, to a large part of
mankind; and by its absence many a life is a failure, which is
provided, in appearance, with every requisite of success. But if
circumstances which society is not yet skilful enough to overcome,
render such failures often for the present inevitable, society need
not itself inflict them. The injudiciousness of parents, a youth's
own inexperience, or the absence of external opportunities for the
congenial vocation, and their presence for an uncongenial, condemn
numbers of men to pass their lives in doing one thing reluctantly and
ill, when there are other things which they could have done well and
happily. But on women this sentence is imposed by actual law, and by
customs equivalent to law. What, in unenlightened societies, colour,
race, religion, or in the case of a conquered country, nationality,
are to some men, sex is to all women; a peremptory exclusion from
almost all honourable occupations, but either such as cannot be
fulfilled by others, or such as those others do not think worthy of
their acceptance. Sufferings arising from causes of this nature
usually meet with so little sympathy, that few persons are aware of
the great amount of unhappiness even now produced by the feeling of a
wasted life. The case will be even more frequent, as increased
cultivation creates a greater and greater disproportion between the
ideas and faculties of women, and the scope which society allows to
their activity.
When we consider the positive evil caused to the disqualified half of
the human race by their disqualification--first in the loss of the
most inspiriting and elevating kind of personal enjoyment, and next
in the weariness, disappointment, and profound dissatisfaction with
life, which are so often the substitute for it; one feels that among
all the lessons which men require for carrying on the struggle
against the inevitable imperfections of their lot on earth, there is
no lesson which they more need, than not to add to the evils which
nature inflicts, by their jealous and prejudiced restrictions on one
another. Their vain fears only substitute other and worse evils for
those which they are idly apprehensive of: while every restraint on
the freedom of conduct of any of their human fellow creatures,
(otherwise than by making them responsible for any evil actually
caused by it), dries up _pro tanto_ the principal fountain of human
happiness, and leaves the species less rich, to an inappreciable
degree, in all that makes life valuable to the individual human
being.
THE END.