The Subjection of Women
by all of them, except those who are too little attractive to be
chosen by any man as his companion; one might have supposed that
everything would have been done to make this condition as eligible to
them as possible, that they might have no cause to regret being
denied the option of any other. Society, however, both in this, and,
at first, in all other cases, has preferred to attain its object by
foul rather than fair means: but this is the only case in which it
has substantially persisted in them even to the present day.
Originally women were taken by force, or regularly sold by their
father to the husband. Until a late period in European history, the
father had the power to dispose of his daughter in marriage at his
own will and pleasure, without any regard to hers. The Church,
indeed, was so far faithful to a better morality as to require a
formal "yes" from the woman at the marriage ceremony; but there was
nothing to shew that the consent was other than compulsory; and it
was practically impossible for the girl to refuse compliance if the
father persevered, except perhaps when she might obtain the
protection of religion by a determined resolution to take monastic
vows. After marriage, the man had anciently (but this was anterior to
Christianity) the power of life and death over his wife. She could
invoke no law against him; he was her sole tribunal and law. For a
long time he could repudiate her, but she had no corresponding power
in regard to him. By the old laws of England, the husband was called
the _lord_ of the wife; he was literally regarded as her sovereign,
inasmuch that the murder of a man by his wife was called treason
(_petty_ as distinguished from _high_ treason), and was more cruelly
avenged than was usually the case with high treason, for the penalty
was burning to death. Because these various enormities have fallen
into disuse (for most of them were never formally abolished, or not
until they had long ceased to be practised) men suppose that all is
now as it should be in regard to the marriage contract; and we are
continually told that civilization and Christianity have restored to
the woman her just rights. Meanwhile the wife is the actual
bond-servant of her husband: no less so, as far as legal obligation
goes, than slaves commonly so called. She vows a lifelong obedience
to him at the altar, and is held to it all through her life by law.
Casuists may say that the obligation of obedience stops short of
participation in crime, but it certainly extends to everything else.
She can do no act whatever but by his permission, at least tacit. She
can acquire no property but for him; the instant it becomes hers,
even if by inheritance, it becomes _ipso facto_ his. In this respect
the wife's position under the common law of England is worse than
that of slaves in the laws of many countries: by the Roman law, for
example, a slave might have his peculium, which to a certain extent
the law guaranteed to him for his exclusive use. The higher classes
in this country have given an analogous advantage to their women,
through special contracts setting aside the law, by conditions of
pin-money, &c.: since parental feeling being stronger with fathers
than the class feeling of their own sex, a father generally prefers
his own daughter to a son-in-law who is a stranger to him. By means
of settlements, the rich usually contrive to withdraw the whole or
part of the inherited property of the wife from the absolute control
of the husband: but they do not succeed in keeping it under her own
control; the utmost they can do only prevents the husband from
squandering it, at the same time debarring the rightful owner from
its use. The property itself is out of the reach of both; and as to
the income derived from it, the form of settlement most favourable to
the wife (that called "to her separate use") only precludes the
husband from receiving it instead of her: it must pass through her
hands, but if he takes it from her by personal violence as soon as
she receives it, he can neither be punished, nor compelled to
restitution. This is the amount of the protection which, under the
laws of this country, the most powerful nobleman can give to his own
daughter as respects her husband. In the immense majority of cases
there is no settlement: and the absorption of all rights, all
property, as well as all freedom of action, is complete. The two are
called "one person in law," for the purpose of inferring that
whatever is hers is his, but the parallel inference is never drawn
that whatever is his is hers; the maxim is not applied against the
man, except to make him responsible to third parties for her acts, as
a master is for the acts of his slaves or of his cattle. I am far
from pretending that wives are in general no better treated than
slaves; but no slave is a slave to the same lengths, and in so full a
sense of the word, as a wife is. Hardly any slave, except one
immediately attached to the master's person, is a slave at all hours
and all minutes; in general he has, like a soldier, his fixed task,
and when it is done, or when he is off duty, he disposes, within
certain limits, of his own time, and has a family life into which the
master rarely intrudes. "Uncle Tom" under his first master had his
own life in his "cabin," almost as much as any man whose work takes
him away from home, is able to have in his own family. But it cannot
be so with the wife. Above all, a female slave has (in Christian
countries) an admitted right, and is considered under a moral
obligation, to refuse to her master the last familiarity. Not so the
wife: however brutal a tyrant she may unfortunately be chained
to--though she may know that he hates her, though it may be his daily
pleasure to torture her, and though she may feel it impossible not to
loathe him--he can claim from her and enforce the lowest degradation
of a human being, that of being made the instrument of an animal
function contrary to her inclinations. While she is held in this
worst description of slavery as to her own person, what is her
position in regard to the children in whom she and her master have a
joint interest? They are by law _his_ children. He alone has any
legal rights over them. Not one act can she do towards or in relation
to them, except by delegation from him. Even after he is dead she is
not their legal guardian, unless he by will has made her so. He could
even send them away from her, and deprive her of the means of seeing
or corresponding with them, until this power was in some degree
restricted by Serjeant Talfourd's Act. This is her legal state. And
from this state she has no means of withdrawing herself. If she
leaves her husband, she can take nothing with her, neither her
children nor anything which is rightfully her own. If he chooses, he
can compel her to return, by law, or by physical force; or he may
content himself with seizing for his own use anything which she may
earn, or which may be given to her by her relations. It is only legal
separation by a decree of a court of justice, which entitles her to
live apart, without being forced back into the custody of an
exasperated jailer--or which empowers her to apply any earnings to
her own use, without fear that a man whom perhaps she has not seen
for twenty years will pounce upon her some day and carry all off.
This legal separation, until lately, the courts of justice would only
give at an expense which made it inaccessible to any one out of the
higher ranks. Even now it is only given in cases of desertion, or of
the extreme of cruelty; and yet complaints are made every day that it
is granted too easily. Surely, if a woman is denied any lot in life
but that of being the personal body-servant of a despot, and is
dependent for everything upon the chance of finding one who may be
disposed to make a favourite of her instead of merely a drudge, it is
a very cruel aggravation of her fate that she should be allowed to
try this chance only once. The natural sequel and corollary from this
state of things would be, that since her all in life depends upon
obtaining a good master, she should be allowed to change again and
again until she finds one. I am not saying that she ought to be
allowed this privilege. That is a totally different consideration.
The question of divorce, in the sense involving liberty of
remarriage, is one into which it is foreign to my purpose to enter.
All I now say is, that to those to whom nothing but servitude is
allowed, the free choice of servitude is the only, though a most
insufficient, alleviation. Its refusal completes the assimilation of
the wife to the slave--and the slave under not the mildest form of
slavery: for in some slave codes the slave could, under certain
circumstances of ill usage, legally compel the master to sell him.
But no amount of ill usage, without adultery superadded, will in
England free a wife from her tormentor.
I have no desire to exaggerate, nor does the case stand in any need
of exaggeration. I have described the wife's legal position, not her
actual treatment. The laws of most countries are far worse than the
people who execute them, and many of them are only able to remain
laws by being seldom or never carried into effect. If married life
were all that it might be expected to be, looking to the laws alone,
society would be a hell upon earth. Happily there are both feelings
and interests which in many men exclude, and in most, greatly temper,
the impulses and propensities which lead to tyranny: and of those
feelings, the tie which connects a man with his wife affords, in a
normal state of things, incomparably the strongest example. The only
tie which at all approaches to it, that between him and his children,
tends, in all save exceptional cases, to strengthen, instead of
conflicting with, the first. Because this is true; because men in
general do not inflict, nor women suffer, all the misery which could
be inflicted and suffered if the full power of tyranny with which the
man is legally invested were acted on; the defenders of the existing
form of the institution think that all its iniquity is justified, and
that any complaint is merely quarrelling with the evil which is the
price paid for every great good. But the mitigations in practice,
which are compatible with maintaining in full legal force this or any
other kind of tyranny, instead of being any apology for despotism,
only serve to prove what power human nature possesses of reacting
against the vilest institutions, and with what vitality the seeds of
good as well as those of evil in human character diffuse and
propagate themselves. Not a word can be said for despotism in the
family which cannot be said for political despotism. Every absolute
king does not sit at his window to enjoy the groans of his tortured
subjects, nor strips them of their last rag and turns them out to
shiver in the road. The despotism of Louis XVI. was not the despotism
of Philippe le Bel, or of Nadir Shah, or of Caligula; but it was bad
enough to justify the French Revolution, and to palliate even its
horrors. If an appeal be made to the intense attachments which exist
between wives and their husbands, exactly as much may be said of
domestic slavery. It was quite an ordinary fact in Greece and Rome
for slaves to submit to death by torture rather than betray their
masters. In the proscriptions of the Roman civil wars it was remarked
that wives and slaves were heroically faithful, sons very commonly
treacherous. Yet we know how cruelly many Romans treated their
slaves. But in truth these intense individual feelings nowhere rise
to such a luxuriant height as under the most atrocious institutions.
It is part of the irony of life, that the strongest feelings of