The Subjection of Women
sentiments. All men, except the most brutish, desire to have, in the
woman most nearly connected with them, not a forced slave but a
willing one, not a slave merely, but a favourite. They have therefore
put everything in practice to enslave their minds. The masters of all
other slaves rely, for maintaining obedience, on fear; either fear of
themselves, or religious fears. The masters of women wanted more than
simple obedience, and they turned the whole force of education to
effect their purpose. All women are brought up from the very earliest
years in the belief that their ideal of character is the very
opposite to that of men; not self-will, and government by
self-control, but submission, and yielding to the control of others.
All the moralities tell them that it is the duty of women, and all
the current sentimentalities that it is their nature, to live for
others; to make complete abnegation of themselves, and to have no
life but in their affections. And by their affections are meant the
only ones they are allowed to have--those to the men with whom they
are connected, or to the children who constitute an additional and
indefeasible tie between them and a man. When we put together three
things--first, the natural attraction between opposite sexes;
secondly, the wife's entire dependence on the husband, every
privilege or pleasure she has being either his gift, or depending
entirely on his will; and lastly, that the principal object of human
pursuit, consideration, and all objects of social ambition, can in
general be sought or obtained by her only through him, it would be a
miracle if the object of being attractive to men had not become the
polar star of feminine education and formation of character. And,
this great means of influence over the minds of women having been
acquired, an instinct of selfishness made men avail themselves of it
to the utmost as a means of holding women in subjection, by
representing to them meekness, submissiveness, and resignation of all
individual will into the hands of a man, as an essential part of
sexual attractiveness. Can it be doubted that any of the other yokes
which mankind have succeeded in breaking, would have subsisted till
now if the same means had existed, and had been as sedulously used,
to bow down their minds to it? If it had been made the object of the
life of every young plebeian to find personal favour in the eyes of
some patrician, of every young serf with some seigneur; if
domestication with him, and a share of his personal affections, had
been held out as the prize which they all should look out for, the
most gifted and aspiring being able to reckon on the most desirable
prizes; and if, when this prize had been obtained, they had been shut
out by a wall of brass from all interests not centering in him, all
feelings and desires but those which he shared or inculcated; would
not serfs and seigneurs, plebeians and patricians, have been as
broadly distinguished at this day as men and women are? and would not
all but a thinker here and there, have believed the distinction to be
a fundamental and unalterable fact in human nature?
The preceding considerations are amply sufficient to show that
custom, however universal it may be, affords in this case no
presumption, and ought not to create any prejudice, in favour of the
arrangements which place women in social and political subjection to
men. But I may go farther, and maintain that the course of history,
and the tendencies of progressive human society, afford not only no
presumption in favour of this system of inequality of rights, but a
strong one against it; and that, so far as the whole course of human
improvement up to this time, the whole stream of modern tendencies,
warrants any inference on the subject, it is, that this relic of the
past is discordant with the future, and must necessarily disappear.
For, what is the peculiar character of the modern world--the
difference which chiefly distinguishes modern institutions, modern
social ideas, modern life itself, from those of times long past? It
is, that human beings are no longer born to their place in life, and
chained down by an inexorable bond to the place they are born to, but
are free to employ their faculties, and such favourable chances as
offer, to achieve the lot which may appear to them most desirable.
Human society of old was constituted on a very different principle.
All were born to a fixed social position, and were mostly kept in it
by law, or interdicted from any means by which they could emerge from
it. As some men are born white and others black, so some were born
slaves and others freemen and citizens; some were born patricians,
others plebeians; some were born feudal nobles, others commoners and
_roturiers_. A slave or serf could never make himself free, nor,
except by the will of his master, become so. In most European
countries it was not till towards the close of the middle ages, and
as a consequence of the growth of regal power, that commoners could
be ennobled. Even among nobles, the eldest son was born the exclusive
heir to the paternal possessions, and a long time elapsed before it
was fully established that the father could disinherit him. Among the
industrious classes, only those who were born members of a guild, or
were admitted into it by its members, could lawfully practise their
calling within its local limits; and nobody could practise any
calling deemed important, in any but the legal manner--by processes
authoritatively prescribed. Manufacturers have stood in the pillory
for presuming to carry on their business by new and improved methods.
In modern Europe, and most in those parts of it which have
participated most largely in all other modern improvements,
diametrically opposite doctrines now prevail. Law and government do
not undertake to prescribe by whom any social or industrial operation
shall or shall not be conducted, or what modes of conducting them
shall be lawful. These things are left to the unfettered choice of
individuals. Even the laws which required that workmen should serve
an apprenticeship, have in this country been repealed: there being
ample assurance that in all cases in which an apprenticeship is
necessary, its necessity will suffice to enforce it. The old theory
was, that the least possible should be left to the choice of the
individual agent; that all he had to do should, as far as
practicable, be laid down for him by superior wisdom. Left to himself
he was sure to go wrong. The modern conviction, the fruit of a
thousand years of experience, is, that things in which the individual
is the person directly interested, never go right but as they are
left to his own discretion; and that any regulation of them by
authority, except to protect the rights of others, is sure to be
mischievous. This conclusion, slowly arrived at, and not adopted
until almost every possible application of the contrary theory had
been made with disastrous result, now (in the industrial department)
prevails universally in the most advanced countries, almost
universally in all that have pretensions to any sort of advancement.
It is not that all processes are supposed to be equally good, or all
persons to be equally qualified for everything; but that freedom of
individual choice is now known to be the only thing which procures
the adoption of the best processes, and throws each operation into
the hands of those who are best qualified for it. Nobody thinks it
necessary to make a law that only a strong-armed man shall be a
blacksmith. Freedom and competition suffice to make blacksmiths
strong-armed men, because the weak-armed can earn more by engaging in
occupations for which they are more fit. In consonance with this
doctrine, it is felt to be an overstepping of the proper bounds of
authority to fix beforehand, on some general presumption, that
certain persons are not fit to do certain things. It is now
thoroughly known and admitted that if some such presumptions exist,
no such presumption is infallible. Even if it be well grounded in a
majority of cases, which it is very likely not to be, there will be a
minority of exceptional cases in which it does not hold: and in those
it is both an injustice to the individuals, and a detriment to
society, to place barriers in the way of their using their faculties
for their own benefit and for that of others. In the cases, on the
other hand, in which the unfitness is real, the ordinary motives of
human conduct will on the whole suffice to prevent the incompetent
person from making, or from persisting in, the attempt.
If this general principle of social and economical science is not
true; if individuals, with such help as they can derive from the
opinion of those who know them, are not better judges than the law
and the government, of their own capacities and vocation; the world
cannot too soon abandon this principle, and return to the old system
of regulations and disabilities. But if the principle is true, we
ought to act as if we believed it, and not to ordain that to be born
a girl instead of a boy, any more than to be born black instead of
white, or a commoner instead of a nobleman, shall decide the person's
position through all life--shall interdict people from all the more
elevated social positions, and from all, except a few, respectable
occupations. Even were we to admit the utmost that is ever pretended
as to the superior fitness of men for all the functions now reserved
to them, the same argument applies which forbids a legal
qualification for members of Parliament. If only once in a dozen
years the conditions of eligibility exclude a fit person, there is a
real loss, while the exclusion of thousands of unfit persons is no
gain; for if the constitution of the electoral body disposes them to
choose unfit persons, there are always plenty of such persons to
choose from. In all things of any difficulty and importance, those
who can do them well are fewer than the need, even with the most
unrestricted latitude of choice: and any limitation of the field of
selection deprives society of some chances of being served by the
competent, without ever saving it from the incompetent.
At present, in the more improved countries, the disabilities of women
are the only case, save one, in which laws and institutions take
persons at their birth, and ordain that they shall never in all their
lives be allowed to compete for certain things. The one exception is
that of royalty. Persons still are born to the throne; no one, not of
the reigning family, can ever occupy it, and no one even of that
family can, by any means but the course of hereditary succession,
attain it. All other dignities and social advantages are open to the
whole male sex: many indeed are only attainable by wealth, but wealth
may be striven for by any one, and is actually obtained by many men
of the very humblest origin. The difficulties, to the majority, are
indeed insuperable without the aid of fortunate accidents; but no
male human being is under any legal ban: neither law nor opinion
superadd artificial obstacles to the natural ones. Royalty, as I have
said, is excepted: but in this case every one feels it to be an
exception--an anomaly in the modern world, in marked opposition to
its customs and principles, and to be justified only by extraordinary
special expediencies, which, though individuals and nations differ in
estimating their weight, unquestionably do in fact exist. But in this
exceptional case, in which a high social function is, for important
reasons, bestowed on birth instead of being put up to competition,
all free nations contrive to adhere in substance to the principle
from which they nominally derogate; for they circumscribe this high
function by conditions avowedly intended to prevent the person to