The Subjection of Women
devoted gratitude of which human nature seems to be susceptible, are
called forth in human beings towards those who, having the power
entirely to crush their earthly existence, voluntarily refrain from
using that power. How great a place in most men this sentiment fills,
even in religious devotion, it would be cruel to inquire. We daily
see how much their gratitude to Heaven appears to be stimulated by
the contemplation of fellow-creatures to whom God has not been so
merciful as he has to themselves.
Whether the institution to be defended is slavery, political
absolutism, or the absolutism of the head of a family, we are always
expected to judge of it from its best instances; and we are presented
with pictures of loving exercise of authority on one side, loving
submission to it on the other--superior wisdom ordering all things
for the greatest good of the dependents, and surrounded by their
smiles and benedictions. All this would be very much to the purpose
if any one pretended that there are no such things as good men. Who
doubts that there may be great goodness, and great happiness, and
great affection, under the absolute government of a good man?
Meanwhile, laws and institutions require to be adapted, not to good
men, but to bad. Marriage is not an institution designed for a select
few. Men are not required, as a preliminary to the marriage ceremony,
to prove by testimonials that they are fit to be trusted with the
exercise of absolute power. The tie of affection and obligation to a
wife and children is very strong with those whose general social
feelings are strong, and with many who are little sensible to any
other social ties; but there are all degrees of sensibility and
insensibility to it, as there are all grades of goodness and
wickedness in men, down to those whom no ties will bind, and on whom
society has no action but through its _ultima ratio_, the penalties
of the law. In every grade of this descending scale are men to whom
are committed all the legal powers of a husband. The vilest
malefactor has some wretched woman tied to him, against whom he can
commit any atrocity except killing her, and, if tolerably cautious,
can do that without much danger of the legal penalty. And how many
thousands are there among the lowest classes in every country, who,
without being in a legal sense malefactors in any other respect,
because in every other quarter their aggressions meet with
resistance, indulge the utmost habitual excesses of bodily violence
towards the unhappy wife, who alone, at least of grown persons, can
neither repel nor escape from their brutality; and towards whom the
excess of dependence inspires their mean and savage natures, not with
a generous forbearance, and a point of honour to behave well to one
whose lot in life is trusted entirely to their kindness, but on the
contrary with a notion that the law has delivered her to them as
their thing, to be used at their pleasure, and that they are not
expected to practise the consideration towards her which is required
from them towards everybody else. The law, which till lately left
even these atrocious extremes of domestic oppression practically
unpunished, has within these few years made some feeble attempts to
repress them. But its attempts have done little, and cannot be
expected to do much, because it is contrary to reason and experience
to suppose that there can be any real check to brutality, consistent
with leaving the victim still in the power of the executioner. Until
a conviction for personal violence, or at all events a repetition of
it after a first conviction, entitles the woman _ipso facto_ to a
divorce, or at least to a judicial separation, the attempt to repress
these "aggravated assaults" by legal penalties will break down for
want of a prosecutor, or for want of a witness.
When we consider how vast is the number of men, in any great country,
who are little higher than brutes, and that this never prevents them
from being able, through the law of marriage, to obtain a victim, the
breadth and depth of human misery caused in this shape alone by the
abuse of the institution swells to something appalling. Yet these are
only the extreme cases. They are the lowest abysses, but there is a
sad succession of depth after depth before reaching them. In domestic
as in political tyranny, the case of absolute monsters chiefly
illustrates the institution by showing that there is scarcely any
horror which may not occur under it if the despot pleases, and thus
setting in a strong light what must be the terrible frequency of
things only a little less atrocious. Absolute fiends are as rare as
angels, perhaps rarer: ferocious savages, with occasional touches of
humanity, are however very frequent: and in the wide interval which
separates these from any worthy representatives of the human species,
how many are the forms and gradations of animalism and selfishness,
often under an outward varnish of civilization and even cultivation,
living at peace with the law, maintaining a creditable appearance to
all who are not under their power, yet sufficient often to make the
lives of all who are so, a torment and a burthen to them! It would be
tiresome to repeat the commonplaces about the unfitness of men in
general for power, which, after the political discussions of
centuries, every one knows by heart, were it not that hardly any one
thinks of applying these maxims to the case in which above all others
they are applicable, that of power, not placed in the hands of a man
here and there, but offered to every adult male, down to the basest
and most ferocious. It is not because a man is not known to have
broken any of the Ten Commandments, or because he maintains a
respectable character in his dealings with those whom he cannot
compel to have intercourse with him, or because he does not fly out
into violent bursts of ill-temper against those who are not obliged
to bear with him, that it is possible to surmise of what sort his
conduct will be in the unrestraint of home. Even the commonest men
reserve the violent, the sulky, the undisguisedly selfish side of
their character for those who have no power to withstand it. The
relation of superiors to dependents is the nursery of these vices of
character, which, wherever else they exist, are an overflowing from
that source. A man who is morose or violent to his equals, is sure to
be one who has lived among inferiors, whom he could frighten or worry
into submission. If the family in its best forms is, as it is often
said to be, a school of sympathy, tenderness, and loving
forgetfulness of self, it is still oftener, as respects its chief, a
school of wilfulness, overbearingness, unbounded self-indulgence, and
a double-dyed and idealized selfishness, of which sacrifice itself is
only a particular form: the care for the wife and children being only
care for them as parts of the man's own interests and belongings, and
their individual happiness being immolated in every shape to his
smallest preferences. What better is to be looked for under the
existing form of the institution? We know that the bad propensities
of human nature are only kept within bounds when they are allowed no
scope for their indulgence. We know that from impulse and habit, when
not from deliberate purpose, almost every one to whom others yield,
goes on encroaching upon them, until a point is reached at which they
are compelled to resist. Such being the common tendency of human
nature; the almost unlimited power which present social institutions
give to the man over at least one human being--the one with whom he
resides, and whom he has always present--this power seeks out and
evokes the latent germs of selfishness in the remotest corners of his
nature--fans its faintest sparks and smouldering embers--offers to
him a license for the indulgence of those points of his original
character which in all other relations he would have found it
necessary to repress and conceal, and the repression of which would
in time have become a second nature. I know that there is another
side to the question. I grant that the wife, if she cannot
effectually resist, can at least retaliate; she, too, can make the
man's life extremely uncomfortable, and by that power is able to
carry many points which she ought, and many which she ought not, to
prevail in. But this instrument of self-protection--which may be
called the power of the scold, or the shrewish sanction--has the
fatal defect, that it avails most against the least tyrannical
superiors, and in favour of the least deserving dependents. It is the
weapon of irritable and self-willed women; of those who would make
the worst use of power if they themselves had it, and who generally
turn this power to a bad use. The amiable cannot use such an
instrument, the highminded disdain it. And on the other hand, the
husbands against whom it is used most effectively are the gentler and
more inoffensive; those who cannot be induced, even by provocation,
to resort to any very harsh exercise of authority. The wife's power
of being disagreeable generally only establishes a counter-tyranny,
and makes victims in their turn chiefly of those husbands who are
least inclined to be tyrants.
What is it, then, which really tempers the corrupting effects of the
power, and makes it compatible with such amount of good as we
actually see? Mere feminine blandishments, though of great effect in
individual instances, have very little effect in modifying the
general tendencies of the situation; for their power only lasts while
the woman is young and attractive, often only while her charm is new,
and not dimmed by familiarity; and on many men they have not much
influence at any time. The real mitigating causes are, the personal
affection which is the growth of time, in so far as the man's nature
is susceptible of it, and the woman's character sufficiently
congenial with his to excite it; their common interests as regards
the children, and their general community of interest as concerns
third persons (to which however there are very great limitations);
the real importance of the wife to his daily comforts and enjoyments,
and the value he consequently attaches to her on his personal
account, which, in a man capable of feeling for others, lays the
foundation of caring for her on her own; and lastly, the influence
naturally acquired over almost all human beings by those near to
their persons (if not actually disagreeable to them): who, both by
their direct entreaties, and by the insensible contagion of their
feelings and dispositions, are often able, unless counteracted by
some equally strong personal influence, to obtain a degree of command
over the conduct of the superior, altogether excessive and
unreasonable. Through these various means, the wife frequently
exercises even too much power over the man; she is able to affect his
conduct in things in which she may not be qualified to influence it
for good--in which her influence may be not only unenlightened, but
employed on the morally wrong side; and in which he would act better
if left to his own prompting. But neither in the affairs of families
nor in those of states is power a compensation for the loss of
freedom. Her power often gives her what she has no right to, but does
not enable her to assert her own rights. A Sultan's favourite slave
has slaves under her, over whom she tyrannizes; but the desirable
thing would be that she should neither have slaves nor be a slave. By
entirely sinking her own existence in her husband; by having no will
(or persuading him that she has no will) but his, in anything which
regards their joint relation, and by making it the business of her
life to work upon his sentiments, a wife may gratify herself by