The Subjection of Women
is only one person, while those who are subject to it and suffer from
it are literally all the rest. The yoke is naturally and necessarily
humiliating to all persons, except the one who is on the throne,
together with, at most, the one who expects to succeed to it. How
different are these cases from that of the power of men over women! I
am not now prejudging the question of its justifiableness. I am
showing how vastly more permanent it could not but be, even if not
justifiable, than these other dominations which have nevertheless
lasted down to our own time. Whatever gratification of pride there is
in the possession of power, and whatever personal interest in its
exercise, is in this case not confined to a limited class, but common
to the whole male sex. Instead of being, to most of its supporters, a
thing desirable chiefly in the abstract, or, like the political ends
usually contended for by factious, of little private importance to
any but the leaders; it comes home to the person and hearth of every
male head of a family, and of every one who looks forward to being
so. The clodhopper exercises, or is to exercise, his share of the
power equally with the highest nobleman. And the case is that in
which the desire of power is the strongest: for every one who desires
power, desires it most over those who are nearest to him, with whom
his life is passed, with whom he has most concerns in common, and in
whom any independence of his authority is oftenest likely to
interfere with his individual preferences. If, in the other cases
specified, powers manifestly grounded only on force, and having so
much less to support them, are so slowly and with so much difficulty
got rid of, much more must it be so with this, even if it rests on no
better foundation than those. We must consider, too, that the
possessors of the power have facilities in this case, greater than in
any other, to prevent any uprising against it. Every one of the
subjects lives under the very eye, and almost, it may be said, in the
hands, of one of the masters--in closer intimacy with him than with
any of her fellow-subjects; with no means of combining against him,
no power of even locally over-mastering him, and, on the other hand,
with the strongest motives for seeking his favour and avoiding to
give him offence. In struggles for political emancipation, everybody
knows how often its champions are bought off by bribes, or daunted by
terrors. In the case of women, each individual of the subject-class
is in a chronic state of bribery and intimidation combined. In
setting up the standard of resistance, a large number of the leaders,
and still more of the followers, must make an almost complete
sacrifice of the pleasures or the alleviations of their own
individual lot. If ever any system of privilege and enforced
subjection had its yoke tightly riveted on the necks of those who are
kept down by it, this has. I have not yet shown that it is a wrong
system: but every one who is capable of thinking on the subject must
see that even if it is, it was certain to outlast all other forms of
unjust authority. And when some of the grossest of the other forms
still exist in many civilized countries, and have only recently been
got rid of in others, it would be strange if that which is so much
the deepest-rooted had yet been perceptibly shaken anywhere. There is
more reason to wonder that the protests and testimonies against it
should have been so numerous and so weighty as they are.
Some will object, that a comparison cannot fairly be made between the
government of the male sex and the forms of unjust power which I have
adduced in illustration of it, since these are arbitrary, and the
effect of mere usurpation, while it on the contrary is natural. But
was there ever any domination which did not appear natural to those
who possessed it? There was a time when the division of mankind into
two classes, a small one of masters and a numerous one of slaves,
appeared, even to the most cultivated minds, to be a natural, and the
only natural, condition of the human race. No less an intellect, and
one which contributed no less to the progress of human thought, than
Aristotle, held this opinion without doubt or misgiving; and rested
it on the same premises on which the same assertion in regard to the
dominion of men over women is usually based, namely that there are
different natures among mankind, free natures, and slave natures;
that the Greeks were of a free nature, the barbarian races of
Thracians and Asiatics of a slave nature. But why need I go back to
Aristotle? Did not the slaveowners of the Southern United States
maintain the same doctrine, with all the fanaticism with which men
cling to the theories that justify their passions and legitimate
their personal interests? Did they not call heaven and earth to
witness that the dominion of the white man over the black is natural,
that the black race is by nature incapable of freedom, and marked out
for slavery? some even going so far as to say that the freedom of
manual labourers is an unnatural order of things anywhere. Again, the
theorists of absolute monarchy have always affirmed it to be the only
natural form of government; issuing from the patriarchal, which was
the primitive and spontaneous form of society, framed on the model of
the paternal, which is anterior to society itself, and, as they
contend, the most natural authority of all. Nay, for that matter, the
law of force itself, to those who could not plead any other, has
always seemed the most natural of all grounds for the exercise of
authority. Conquering races hold it to be Nature's own dictate that
the conquered should obey the conquerors, or, as they euphoniously
paraphrase it, that the feebler and more unwarlike races should
submit to the braver and manlier. The smallest acquaintance with
human life in the middle ages, shows how supremely natural the
dominion of the feudal nobility over men of low condition appeared to
the nobility themselves, and how unnatural the conception seemed, of
a person of the inferior class claiming equality with them, or
exercising authority over them. It hardly seemed less so to the class
held in subjection. The emancipated serfs and burgesses, even in
their most vigorous struggles, never made any pretension to a share
of authority; they only demanded more or less of limitation to the
power of tyrannizing over them. So true is it that unnatural
generally means only uncustomary, and that everything which is usual
appears natural. The subjection of women to men being a universal
custom, any departure from it quite naturally appears unnatural. But
how entirely, even in this case, the feeling is dependent on custom,
appears by ample experience. Nothing so much astonishes the people of
distant parts of the world, when they first learn anything about
England, as to be told that it is under a queen: the thing seems to
them so unnatural as to be almost incredible. To Englishmen this does
not seem in the least degree unnatural, because they are used to it;
but they do feel it unnatural that women should be soldiers or
members of parliament. In the feudal ages, on the contrary, war and
politics were not thought unnatural to women, because not unusual; it
seemed natural that women of the privileged classes should be of
manly character, inferior in nothing but bodily strength to their
husbands and fathers. The independence of women seemed rather less
unnatural to the Greeks than to other ancients, on account of the
fabulous Amazons (whom they believed to be historical), and the
partial example afforded by the Spartan women; who, though no less
subordinate by law than in other Greek states, were more free in
fact, and being trained to bodily exercises in the same manner with
men, gave ample proof that they were not naturally disqualified for
them. There can be little doubt that Spartan experience suggested to
Plato, among many other of his doctrines, that of the social and
political equality of the two sexes.
But, it will be said, the rule of men over women differs from all
these others in not being a rule of force: it is accepted
voluntarily; women make no complaint, and are consenting parties to
it. In the first place, a great number of women do not accept it.
Ever since there have been women able to make their sentiments known
by their writings (the only mode of publicity which society permits
to them), an increasing number of them have recorded protests against
their present social condition: and recently many thousands of them,
headed by the most eminent women known to the public, have petitioned
Parliament for their admission to the Parliamentary Suffrage. The
claim of women to be educated as solidly, and in the same branches of
knowledge, as men, is urged with growing intensity, and with a great
prospect of success; while the demand for their admission into
professions and occupations hitherto closed against them, becomes
every year more urgent. Though there are not in this country, as
there are in the United States, periodical Conventions and an
organized party to agitate for the Rights of Women, there is a
numerous and active Society organized and managed by women, for the
more limited object of obtaining the political franchise. Nor is it
only in our own country and in America that women are beginning to
protest, more or less collectively, against the disabilities under
which they labour. France, and Italy, and Switzerland, and Russia now
afford examples of the same thing. How many more women there are who
silently cherish similar aspirations, no one can possibly know; but
there are abundant tokens how many _would_ cherish them, were they
not so strenuously taught to repress them as contrary to the
proprieties of their sex. It must be remembered, also, that no
enslaved class ever asked for complete liberty at once. When Simon de
Montfort called the deputies of the commons to sit for the first time
in Parliament, did any of them dream of demanding that an assembly,
elected by their constituents, should make and destroy ministries,
and dictate to the king in affairs of state? No such thought entered
into the imagination of the most ambitious of them. The nobility had
already these pretensions; the commons pretended to nothing but to be
exempt from arbitrary taxation, and from the gross individual
oppression of the king's officers. It is a political law of nature
that those who are under any power of ancient origin, never begin by
complaining of the power itself, but only of its oppressive exercise.
There is never any want of women who complain of ill usage by their
husbands. There would be infinitely more, if complaint were not the
greatest of all provocatives to a repetition and increase of the ill
usage. It is this which frustrates all attempts to maintain the power
but protect the woman against its abuses. In no other case (except
that of a child) is the person who has been proved judicially to have
suffered an injury, replaced under the physical power of the culprit
who inflicted it. Accordingly wives, even in the most extreme and
protracted cases of bodily ill usage, hardly ever dare avail
themselves of the laws made for their protection: and if, in a moment
of irrepressible indignation, or by the interference of neighbours,
they are induced to do so, their whole effort afterwards is to
disclose as little as they can, and to beg off their tyrant from his
merited chastisement.
All causes, social and natural, combine to make it unlikely that
women should be collectively rebellious to the power of men. They are
so far in a position different from all other subject classes, that
their masters require something more from them than actual service.
Men do not want solely the obedience of women, they want their