•^^*i^ '• *». 
 
 Ex Libris 
 
 SIR MICHAEL SADLER 
 
 ACQUIRED 1948 
 
 WITH THE HELP OF ALUMNI OF THE 
 
 SCHOOL OF EDUCATION 

 
 THE SUBJECTION 
 
 OF 
 
 WOMEN
 
 r~O0U, 
 
 1 o 6 4 W "iti ;»o'ii-as .
 
 THE 
 
 SUBJECTION 
 
 07 
 
 WOMEN 
 
 BT 
 
 JOHN STUART MILL 
 
 FOURTH EDITION 
 
 LONDON 
 LONGMANS, GREEN, READER, AND DYER. 
 
 1878
 
 LONDON : 
 
 8AVILL, EDWARD:^ AND CO., PRINTERS, CHAND03 STKEET, 
 
 COVEIIT GARDEN.
 
 1536 
 )876 
 
 THE 
 
 SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 TiHE object of this Essay is to explain as 
 clearly as I am able^ the grounds of an 
 opinion which I have held from the very earliest , 
 period when I had formed any opinions at all on 
 social or political matters, and which; instead of 
 being weakened or modified, has been constantly 
 growing stronger by the progress of reflection and 
 the experience of life. That the princij)le which 
 regulates the existing social relations between the 
 two sexes — the legal subordination of one sex to 
 the other — is wrong in itself, and now one of the 
 chief hindrances to human improvement ; and that l^ 
 it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect 
 equality^ admitting no power or privilege on the 
 one side, nor disability on the other. 
 
 The very words necessary to express the task 
 I have undertaken, show how arduous it is. But 
 it would be a mistake to suppose that the difficulty 
 
 B 
 
 8-38107
 
 2 THE SUBJECTIOX OF WOMEN". 
 
 of the case must lie in tlic insufficiency or obscurity 
 of the grounds of reason on which my conviction 
 rests. The difficulty is that which exists in all 
 cases in which there is a mass of feeling to be 
 contended against. So long as an opinion is 
 strongly rooted in the feelings, it gains rather 
 than loses in stability by having a preponderating 
 weight of argument against it. For if it were 
 accepted as a result of argument^ the refutation of 
 the argument might shake the solidity of the con- 
 viction ; but when it rests solely on feeling, the 
 worse it fares in argumentative contest, the more 
 persuaded its adherents are that their feeling 
 must have some deeper ground, which the argu- 
 ments do not reach; and while the feeling re- 
 mains, it is always throwing up fresh intrench- 
 ments of argument to repair any breach made in 
 the old. And there are so many causes tending to 
 make the feelings connected with this subject the 
 most intense and most deeply-rooted of all those 
 which gather round and protect old institutions 
 and customs, that we need not wonder to find them 
 as yet less undermined and loosened than any of the 
 rest by the progress of the great modern spiritual 
 and social transition ; nor suppose that the bar- 
 barisms to which men cling longest must be less 
 barbarisms than those which they earlier shake ofi".
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 3 
 
 In eveiy respect tlic burthen is hard on those 
 who attack an almost universal opinion. They 
 must he very fortunate as well as unusually capable 
 if they obtain a hearing at all. They have more 
 diflBculty in obtaining a trial, than any other 
 litigants have in getting a verdict. If they do 
 extort a hearing, they are subjected to a set of 
 logical requirements totally different from those 
 exacted from other people. In all other cases, 
 the burthen of proof is supposed to lie with the 
 aflSrmative. If a person is charged with a murder, 
 it rests with those who accuse him to give proof of 
 his guilt, not with himself to prove his innocence. 
 If there is a difference of opinion about the reality 
 of any alleged historical event, in which the feel- 
 ings of men in general are not much interested, as 
 the ^iege of Troy for example, those who maintain 
 that the event took place are expected to produce 
 their proofs, before those who take the other side 
 can be required to say anything ; and at no time 
 are these required to do more than show that the 
 evidence produced by the others is of no value. 
 Again, in practical matters, the burthen of proof is 
 supposed to be with those who are against liberty; 
 who contend for any restriction or prohibition; 
 either any limitation of the general freedom of 
 tuman action, or any disqualification or disparity of
 
 4 THE SUBJECTIOX OF WO.MEN. 
 
 privilege afleeting one person or kind of persons, as 
 compared with others. The a priori presumption 
 is in favour of freedom and impartiality. It is held 
 that there should be no restraint not required by 
 the general good, and that the law should be no 
 respecter of persons, but should treat all alike, save 
 where dissimilarity of treatment is required by 
 positive reasons, either of justice or of policy. But 
 of none of these rules of evidence Avill the benefit be 
 allowed to those who maintain the opinion I pro- 
 fess. It is useless for me to say that those who 
 maintain the doctrine that men have a right to com- 
 mand and women are under an obligation to obey, 
 or that men are fit for government and women unfit, 
 are on the affirmative side of the question, and that 
 they are bound to show positive evidence for the 
 assertions, or submit to their rejection. It is 
 equally unavailing for me to say that those who 
 deny to women any freedom or privilege rightly 
 allowed to men, having the double presumption 
 against them that they are opposing freedom and 
 recommending partiality, must be held to the 
 strictest proof of their case, and unless their success 
 be such as to exclude all doubt, the judgment 
 ought to go agaiost them. These would be thought 
 good pleas in any common case ; but they will not 
 be thought so in this instance. Before I could
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEX. 5 
 
 liopc to make any impression^ I should be expected 
 not only to answer all that has ever been said by 
 those who take the other side of the question, but 
 to imagine all that could ho said by them — to find 
 them in reasons, as avcII as answer all I find : and 
 besides refuting all arguments for the atlirmative, I 
 shall be called upon for invincible positive arguments 
 to prove a negative. And even if I could do all 
 this, and leave the opposite jmrty with a host of un- 
 answered arguments against thera, and not a single 
 unrefuted one on their side, I should be thought to 
 have done little ; for a cause supported on the one 
 hand by universal usage, and on the other by so great 
 a preponderance of popular sentiment, is supposed 
 to have a presumption in its favour, superior to any 
 conviction which an appeal to reason has power to 
 produce in any intellects but those of a high class. 
 
 I do not mention these difficulties to complain 
 of them ; first, because it would be useless ; they 
 are inseparable from having to contend through 
 people^s understandings against the hostility of 
 their feelings and practical tendencies : and truly 
 the understandings of the majority of mankind *\ 
 would need to be much better cultivated than has 
 ever yet been the case, before they can be asked 
 to place such reliance in their own power of esti- 
 mating arguments, as to give up practical prin-
 
 C THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEX. 
 
 ciplcs in Avhich they have been born and bred and 
 which arc the basis of much of the existing order 
 of the world, at the first argumentative attack 
 which they are not capable of logically resisting. 
 I do not therefore quarrel with them for having too 
 little faith in argument, but for having too much 
 faith in custom and the general feeling. It is 
 one of the characteristic prejudices of the reaction 
 of the nineteenth century against the eighteenth, 
 to accord to the unreasoning elements in human 
 nature the infallibility which the eighteenth cen- 
 tury is supposed to have ascribed to the reasoning 
 elements. For the apotheosis of Reason we have 
 substituted that of Instinct ; and we call everything 
 instinct which Ave find in ourselves and for which 
 we cannot trace any rational foundation. This 
 idolatry, infinitely more degrading than the other, 
 and the most pernicious of the false worships 
 of the present day, of all of which it is now the 
 main support, will probably hold its ground 
 until it gives way before a sound psychology 
 laying bare the real root of much that is bowed 
 down to as the intention of Nature and the 
 ordinance of God. As regards the present ques- 
 tion, I am willing to accept the unfavourable 
 conditions which the prejudice assigns to me. I 
 consent that established custom, and the general
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 7 
 
 feelings should be deemed conclusive against mc, 
 unless tliat custom and feeling from age to age 
 can be shown to have OAved their existence to 
 other causes than their soundness, and to have 
 derived their power from the worse rather than the 
 better parts of human nature. I am willing that 
 judgment should go against me, unless I can show 
 that my judge has been tampered with. The con- 
 cession is not so great as it might appear ; for to 
 prove this, is by far the easiest portion of my task. 
 The generality of a practice is in some cases a 
 strong presumption that it is, or at all events once 
 was, conducive to laudable ends. This is the case, 
 when the practice was first adopted, or afterwards 
 kept up, as a means to such ends, and was 
 grounded on experience of the mode in which they 
 could be most effectually attained. If the autho- 
 rity of men over women, when first established, 
 had been the result of a conscientious comparison 
 between different modes of constituting the govern- 
 ment of society ; if, after trying various other 
 modes of social organization — the government of 
 women over men, equality between the two, and 
 such mixed and divided modes of government as 
 might be invented — it had been decided, on the 
 testimony of experience, that the mode in which 
 women are wholly under the rule of men, having
 
 8 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 
 
 no share at all in public concerns, and each in 
 private being under the Jegal obligation of obe- 
 dience to the man with whom she has associated 
 her destiny, M^as the arrangement most conducive 
 to the happiness and well being of both ; its 
 general adoption might then be fairly thought to 
 be some evidence that, at the time when it was* ' 
 adopted, it was the best : though even then the 
 considerations which recommended it may, like so 
 many other primeval social facts of the greatest 
 importance, have subsequently, in the course of 
 ages, ceased to exist. But the state of the case 
 is in every respect the reverse of this. In the 
 first place, the opinion in favour of the present 
 system, which entirely subordinates the weaker sex 
 to the stronger, rests upon theory only ; for there 
 never has been trial made of any other : so that 
 experience, in the sense in which it is vulgarly 
 opposed to theory, cannot be pretended to have 
 pronounced any verdict. And in the second place, 
 the adoption of this system of inequality never was 
 the result of deliberation, or forethought, or any 
 social ideas, or any notion whatever of what con- 
 duced to the benefit of humanity or the good 
 order of society. It arose simply from the fact 
 that from the very earliest twilight of human 
 society, every woman (owing to the value attached
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOIMEN. 9 
 
 to her by men, combined with her inferiority in 
 muscular strength) was found in a state of bon- 
 dage to some man. Laws and systems of polity 
 always begin by recognising the relations they find 
 already existing between individuals. They con- 
 vert what was a mere physical fact into a legal 
 • right, give it the sanction of society, and princi- 
 pally aim at the substitution of public and organ- 
 ized means of asserting and protecting these rights, 
 instead of the irregular and lawless conflict of 
 physical strength. Those who had already been 
 compelled to obedience became in this manner 
 legally bound to it. Slavery, from being a mere 
 affair of force between the master and the slave, 
 became regularized and a matter of compact among 
 the masters, who, binding themselves to one 
 another for common protection, guaranteed by 
 their collective strength the private possessions of 
 each, including his slaves. In early times, the 
 great majority of the male sex were slaves, as well 
 as the whole of the female. And many ages 
 elapsed, some of them ages of high cultivation, 
 before any thinker was bold enough to question 
 the rightfulness, and the absolute social necessity, 
 either of the one slavery or of the other. By 
 degrees such thinkers did arise ; and (the general 
 progress of society assisting) the slavery of the
 
 10 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 
 
 male sex has^ in all tlic countries of Christian 
 Europe at least (though^ in one of them^ only 
 within the last few years) been at length abolished, 
 and that of the female sex has been gradually 
 ^^ changed into a milder form of dependence. But 
 this dependence, as it exists at present, is not an 
 original institution, taking a fresh start from con- 
 siderations of justice and social expediency — it is 
 the primitive state of slavery lasting on, through 
 successive mitigations and modifications occasioned 
 by the same causes whicli have softened the general 
 manners, and brought all human relations more 
 under the control of justice and the influence of 
 humanity. It has not lost the taint of its brutal 
 origin. No presumption in its favom', therefore, 
 can be drawn from the fact of its existence. The 
 only such presumption whicli it could be supposed 
 to have, must be grounded on its having lasted till 
 now, when so many other things which came down 
 from the same odious source have been done away 
 with. And this, indeed, is what makes it strange 
 to ordinary ears, to hear it asserted that the in- 
 equality of rights between men and women has no 
 other source than the law of the strongest. 
 
 /That this statement should have the effect of 
 a paradox, is in some respects creditable to the pro- 
 gress of civilization, and the improvement of the
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 11 
 
 moral sentiments of mankind. Wo now live — 
 that is to say_, one or two of the most advanced 
 nations of the world now live — in a state in which 
 the law of the strongest seems to be entirely 
 abandoned as the regulating principle of the 
 world's affairs : nobody professes it^ and^ as re- 
 gards most of the relations between human beings^ 
 nobody is permitted to practise it. When any one 
 succeeds in doing so^ it is under cover of some 
 pretext which gives him the semblance of having 
 some general social interest on his side. This 
 being the ostensible state of things^ people flatter 
 themselves that the rule of mere force is ended ; 
 that the law of the strongest cannot be the reason 
 of existence of anything which has remained in full 
 operation down to the present time. HoAvever 
 any of our present institutions may have begun^ it 
 can only, they think, have been preserved to this 
 period of advanced civilization by a well-grounded 
 feeling of its adaptation to human nature, and 
 conduciveness to the general good. They do not 
 understand the great vitality and durability of 
 institutions which place right on the side of might ; 
 how intensely they are clung to ; how the good 
 as well as the bad propensities and sentiments of 
 those who have power in their hands, become 
 identified with retaining it ; how slowly these bad
 
 12 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 
 
 institutions give way, one at a time, the weakest 
 first, beginning with those whicli are least inter- 
 woven with the daily habits of life; and how very 
 rarely those who have obtained legal power beeause 
 they first had physical, have ever lost their hold of 
 it until the physical power had passed over to the 
 other side. Such shifting of the physical force not 
 having taken place in the case of women ; this 
 fact, combined with all the peculiar and charac- 
 teristic features of the particular case, made it 
 certain from the first that this branch of the 
 system of right founded on might, though softened 
 in its most atrocious features at an earlier period 
 than several of the others, would be the very last 
 to disappear. It was inevitable that this one case 
 of a social relation grounded on force, would sur- 
 vive through generations of institutions grounded 
 on equal justice, an almost solitary exception to 
 the general character of their laws and customs ; 
 but which, so long as it does not proclaim its own. 
 origin, and as discussion has not brought out its 
 true character, is not felt to jar with modern civi- 
 lization, any more than domestic slavery among 
 the Greeks jarred with their notion of themselves 
 as a free people. 
 
 The truth is, that people of the present and the 
 last two or three generations have lost all practical
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEX. 13 
 
 sense of the primitive condition of humanity ; and 
 only the few who have studied history accurately, 
 or have much frequented the parts of the world 
 occupied by the living representatives of ages long 
 past, are able to form any mental picture of what 
 society then was. People are not aware how 
 entirely, in former ages, the law of superior strength 
 was the rule of life ; how publicly and openly it 
 was avowed, I do not say cynically or shamelessly — 
 for these words imply a feeling that there was some- 
 thing in it to be ashamed of, and no such notion 
 could find a place in the faculties of any person in 
 those ages, except a philosopher or a saint. History 
 gives a cruel experience of human nature, in shew- 
 ing how exactly the regard due to the life, pos- 
 sessions, and entire earthly happiness of any class 
 of persons, was measured by what they had the 
 power of enforcing ; how all who made any re- 
 sistance to authorities that had arms in their hands, 
 however dreadful might be the provocation, had 
 not only the law of force but all other laws, and all 
 the notions of social obligation against them ; and 
 in the eyes of those whom they resisted, were not 
 only guilty of crime, but of the worst of all crimes, 
 deserving the most cruel chastisement which human 
 beings could inflict. The first small vestige of a 
 feeling of obligation in a superior to acknowledge
 
 14 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 
 
 any right iu inferiors^ began when he had been 
 induced, for convenience, to make some promise to 
 them. Though these promises, even when sanc- 
 tioned by the most solemn oaths, were for many 
 ages revoked or violated on the most trifling pro- 
 vocation or temptation, it is probable that this, 
 except by persons of still worse than the average 
 morality, was seldom done without some twinges 
 of conscience. The ancient republics, being mostly 
 grounded from the first upon some kind of mutual 
 compact, or at any rate formed by an union of 
 persons not very unequal in strength, afforded, in 
 consequence, the first instance of a portion of 
 human relations fenced round, and placed under 
 the dominion of another law than that of force. 
 And though the original law of force remained in 
 full operation between them and their slaves, and 
 also (except so far as limited by express compact) 
 between a commonwealth and its subjects, or other 
 independent commonwealths ; the banishment of 
 that primitive law even from so narrow a field, 
 commenced the regeneration of human nature, by 
 giving birth to sentiments of which experience 
 soon demonstrated the immense value even for 
 material interests, and which thenceforward only 
 required to be enlarged, not created. Though 
 slaves were no part of the commonwealth, it was in
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEX. 15 
 
 the free states that slaves were first felt to have 
 rights as human l)cings. The Stoics were, I 
 believe, the first (except so far as the Jewish law 
 constitutes an exception) who taught as a part of 
 morality that men were bound by moral obliga- 
 tions to their slaves. No one, after Christianity 
 became ascendant, could ever again have been a 
 stranger to this belief, in theory; nor, after the 
 rise of the Catholic Church, was it ever without 
 persons to stand up for it. Yet to enforce it was 
 the most arduous task which Christianity ever had 
 to perform. For more than a thousand years the 
 Church kept up the contest, with hardly any per- 
 ceptible success. It was not for want of power 
 over men's minds. Its power was prodigious. It 
 could make kings and nobles resign their most 
 valued possessions to enrich the Church. It could 
 make thousands in the prime of life and the height 
 of worldly advantages, shut themselves up in eon- 
 vents to work out their salvation by poverty, fast- 
 ing, and prayer. It could send hundreds of 
 thousands across land and sea, Europe and Asia, to 
 give their lives for the deliverance of the Holy 
 Sepulchre. It could make kings relinquish wives 
 who were the object of their passionate attachment, 
 because the Church declared that they were within 
 the seventh (by our calculation the fourteenth)
 
 16 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 
 
 degree of relationship. All this it did ; but it 
 could not make men fight less with one another, 
 nor tyrannize less cruelly over the serfs, and when 
 they were able, over burgesses. It could not make 
 them renounce cither of the applications of force ; 
 force militant, or force triumphant. This they 
 could never be induced to do until they were 
 themselves in their turn compelled by superior 
 force. Only by the growing power of kings was 
 an end put to fighting except between kings, or 
 competitors for kingship ; only by the growth of 
 a wealthy and warlike bourgeoisie in the fortified 
 towns, and of a jjlebeian infantry which proved 
 more powerful in the field than the undisciplined 
 chivalry, was the insolent tyranny of the nobles 
 over the bourgeoisie and peasantry brought within 
 some bounds. It was persisted in not only until, 
 but long after, the oppressed had obtained a power 
 enabling them often to take conspicuous vengeance ; 
 and on the Continent much of it continued to the 
 time of the French Revolution, though in England 
 the earlier and better organization of the democratic 
 classes put an end to it sooner, by establishing 
 equal laws and free national institutions. 
 
 If people are mostly so little aware how com- 
 pletely, during the greater part of the duration of 
 our species, the law of force was the avowed rule of
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEX. 17 
 
 general conduct^ any other being only a speeial 
 and exceptional conseqnence of peeuliar ties — and 
 from how very recent a date it is that the affairs 
 of society in general have been even pretended to 
 be regulated according to any moral law ; as little 
 do people remember or consider, how institutions 
 and customs which never had any ground but the 
 law of force, last on into ages and states of general 
 opinion which never would have permitted their 
 first establishment. Less than forty years ago. 
 Englishmen might still by law hold human beings 
 in bondage as saleable property : within the pre- 
 sent century they might kidnap them and carry 
 them off, and work them literally to death. This 
 absolutely extreme case of the law of force, con- 
 demned by those who can tolerate almost every 
 other form of arbitrary power,, and which^ of all 
 others, presents features the most revolting to the 
 feelings of all who look at it from an impartial 
 position, was the, law of civilized and Christian 
 England wdthin the memory of persons now living : 
 and in one half of Anglo-Saxon America three or 
 four years ago, not only did slavery exist, but the 
 slave trade, and the breeding of slaves expressly for 
 it, was a general practice between slave states. 
 Yet not only was there a greater strength of sen- 
 timent against it, but, in England at least, a less 
 
 c
 
 18 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEX. 
 
 amount either of feeling or of interest in favour 
 of it, than of any other of the customary abuses 
 of force : for its motive was the love of gain, 
 unmixed and imdisguised ; and those who profited 
 by it were a very small numerical fraction of the 
 country, while the natural feeling of all who were 
 not personally interested in it, was unmitigated 
 abhorrence. So extreme an instance makes it 
 almost superfluous to refer to any other : but con- 
 sider the long duration of absolute monarchy. 
 In England at present it is the almost universal 
 conviction that military despotism is a case of 
 the law of force, having no other origin or justifi- 
 cation. Yet in all the great nations of Europe 
 except England it either still exists, or has only 
 just ceased to exist, and has even now a strong 
 party favourable to it in all ranks of the people, 
 especially among persons of station and con- 
 sequence. Such is the power of an established 
 system, even when far from universal ; when not 
 only in almost every period of history there have 
 been great and well-known examples of the con- 
 trary system, but these have almost invariably 
 been afibrded by the most illustrious and most 
 prosperous communities. In this case, too, the pos- 
 sessor of the undue power, the person directly inte- 
 rested in it, is only one person, while those who
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEX. 19 
 
 arc subject to it and suffer from it arc literally 
 all the rest. The yoke is naturally and neces- 
 sarily 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 factions, 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
 
 20 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 
 
 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 spe- 
 cified, 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 pre- 
 vent 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 overmaster- 
 ing him, and, on the other hand, with the strongest 
 motives for seeking his favour and avoiding to 
 give him offence. In struggles for political eman- 
 cipation, 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
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEX. 23 
 
 on the model of tlie 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 bur- 
 gesses, 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
 
 24 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEX. 
 
 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 par- 
 tial 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 
 
 I
 
 THE SUBJECTIOX OF WOMEN". 25 
 
 Plato^ amoDg- many otlicr of his doctrines^ that of 
 the social and political equality of the tAvo sexes. 
 
 But, it will be said, the rule of men over women 
 differs from all tliese others in not being a rule of 
 force : it is accej^ted 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 re- 
 corded protests against their present social condi- 
 tion : 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 inten- 
 sity, 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 nume- 
 rous and active Society organized and managed by 
 women, for the more limited object of obtaining
 
 26 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEX. 
 
 tlie 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 llussia noM* afford 
 examples of the same thing. How many more 
 women there are who silently cherish similar aspi- 
 rations, 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 ot 
 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 com- 
 plaining of the power itself, but only of its oppres-
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEX. 27 
 
 sivc 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 rebel- 
 lious 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 senti- 
 ments. All men, except the most brutish, desire
 
 ''/.■ 
 
 28 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 
 
 to liavGj in the woman most nearly connected -witli 
 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 maintain- 
 ing 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 iSeal of character is 
 the very opposite to that of moii ; not self-will, 
 and government by self-control, \ but submission, 
 andyielding 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 abne- 
 gation 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 inde- 
 
 / feasible tie between them and a man. When we 
 put together three things — first, the natural attrac- 
 tion between opposite sexes ; secondly, the wife's 
 
 ^ entire dependence on the husband, every privilege 
 or pleasure she has being either his gift, or depend-
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEX. 29 
 
 ing entirely ou his will ; and lastly^ that the prin« d\ 
 cipal 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 repre- 
 senting to them meekness, submissiveness, and re- 
 signation 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 domesti- 
 cation Avitli him, and a share of his personal affec- 
 tions, 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, Avhen this prize had been obtained.
 
 30 THE SUBJECTIOX OF WOMEX. 
 
 they had been shut out by a Avail 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 patri- 
 cians, 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 distinc- 
 tion to be a fundamental and unalterable fact in 
 human nature ? 
 
 \The preceding considerations are amply sufficient 
 to show that custom, however universal it ma)"" be, 
 affords in this case no presumption, and ought not 
 to create any prejudice, in favour of the arrange- 
 ments which place women in social and political 
 subjection to men. But I may go farther, and 
 maintain that the course of history, and the ten- 
 dencies 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 the time, the whole stream of 
 modern tendencies, warrants any inference on the 
 subject, it is, that this relic of the past is dis- 
 cordant with the future, and must necessarily 
 disappear. 
 
 For, what is the peculiar character of the modern 
 world — the difference which chiefly distinguishes
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 31 
 
 modern institutions, modern social ideas, modern 
 life itself, from those of times long past ? ^t is, 
 that human beings arc 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 princi|)le. 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 him- 
 self 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 dis- 
 inherit him. Among the industrious classes, only 
 those who were born members of a guild, or were
 
 32 THE SUBJECTION OF TVOMEX. 
 
 admitted into it by its members, could lawfully 
 practise their calling witliiu its local limits ; and 
 nobody could practise any calling deemed important, 
 in any but the legal manner — by processes autho- 
 ritatively 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.
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN". 33 
 
 never go right but as they are left to his owu dis- 
 cretion; and that any regulation of them by 
 authority, except to protect the rights of others, is 
 sure to be mischievonsJ This conclusion, slowly 
 arrived at, and not adopted until almost every pos- 
 sible application of the contrary theory had been 
 made with disastrous result, now (in the industrial 
 department) jjrevails universally in the most ad- 
 vanced 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 every- 
 thing ; 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 occu- 
 pations 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 tho- 
 roughly known and admitted that if some such 
 
 D
 
 34 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEX. 
 
 presumptions cxist^ 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 in- 
 dividuals, and a detriment to society, to place barriers 
 in the way of their using their faculties for theii* 
 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 voca- 
 tion ; the world cannot too soon abandon this prin- 
 ciple, 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 
 jfchat_to_be Jborn a girl ins teacLflf-aJboy, any more 
 than to be born black inste^l of white, or a com- 
 moner instead of a nobleman)v^ sha ll decid e 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.
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 35 
 
 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 argu- 
 ment 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^ne exception is that of royalty. Persons still 
 are bom 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 here- 
 ditary succession, attain it. All other dignities
 
 30 THE SUBJr:CTION OF WOMEN. 
 
 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, 
 /^ arc indeed insuperable without the aid of fortunate 
 accidents; but no male human being is under any 
 legal ban : neither law nor opinion superadd arti- 
 ficial obstacles to the natural ones. Royalty, as I 
 have said, is excepted : but in this case every one 
 feels it to 4)6 an exception — an anomaly in the 
 modern world, in marked opposition to its customs 
 and principles, and to be justified only by extra- 
 ordinary special expediences, which, though indi- 
 viduals and nations difier in estimating their weight, 
 unquestionably do in fact exist. But in this ex- 
 ceptional case, in which a high social function is, 
 for important reasons, bestowed on birth instead of 
 being put up to competition, all free nations con- 
 trive to adhere in substance to the principle from 
 which they nominally derogate ; for they circum- 
 scribe this high function by conditions avowedly in- 
 tended to prevent the person to whom it ostensibly 
 belongs from really performing it ; while the j)erson 
 by whom it is performed, the responsible minister, 
 does obtain the post by a competition from which no 
 full-grown citizen of the male sex is legally excluded.
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 37 
 
 ^The disabilities, therefore^ to which womeu are sub- 
 ject from the mere fact of their birth, arc the soli- 
 tary examples of the kind in modern IcgislationTJ 
 In no instance except this, which comprehends half 
 the human race, are the higher social functions 
 closed against any one by a fatality of birth which 
 no exertions, and no change of circumstances, can 
 overcome ; for even religious disabilities (besides that 
 in England and in Europe they have practically 
 almost ceased to exist) do not close any career to 
 the disqualified person in case of conversion. 
 Cl^The social subordination of womeu thus stands 
 out an isolated fact in modern social instituti£Ui*^''ar~^ 
 solitary breach of what has become their funda- 
 mental law ; a single relic of an old world of 
 thought and practice exploded in everything else, 
 but retained in the one thing of most universal 
 interest ; as if a gigantic dolmen, or a vast temple 
 of Jupiter Olympius, occupied the site of St. PauFs 
 and received daily worship, while the surrounding 
 Christian churches were only resorted to on fasts 
 and festivals. This entire discrepancy between one 
 social fact and all those which accompany it, and 
 the radical opposition between its nature and the 
 progressive movement which is the boast of the 
 modern world, and which has successively swept 
 away everything else of an analogous character.
 
 38 THE SUBJECTIOX OF WOMEN. 
 
 surely affords^ to a conscientious observer of human 
 tendencies^ serious matter for reflection. It raises a 
 prima facie presumption on the unfavourable side, 
 far outweighing any which custom and usage could 
 in such circumstances create on the favourable ; 
 and should at least suffice to make this, like the 
 choice between republicanism and royalty, a 
 balanced question. 
 
 The least that can be demanded is, that the 
 question should not be considered as prejudged by 
 existing fact and existing opinion, but open to dis- 
 cussion on its merits, as a question of justice and 
 expediency : the decision on this, as on any of the 
 other social arrangements of mankind, depending 
 on what an enlightened estimate of tendencies and 
 consequences may show to be most advantageous 
 to humanity in general, without distinction of sex. 
 And the discussion must be a real discussion, de- 
 scending to foundations, and not resting satisfied 
 with vague and general assertions. It will not do, 
 for instance, to assert in general terms, that the ex- 
 perience of mankind has pronounced in favour of 
 the existing system. Experience cannot possibly 
 have decided between two courses, so long as there 
 has only been experience of one. If it be said that 
 the doctrine of the equality of the sexes rests only 
 on theory, it must be remembered that the contrary
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEX. 39 
 
 doctrine also lias only theory to rest upon. All that 
 is proved in its favour by direct experience, is that 
 mankind have been able to exist under itj and to 
 attain the degree of improvement and prosperity 
 which we now see ; but whether that prosperity has 
 been attained sooner, or is now greater, than it 
 would have been under the other system, experience 
 does not say. On the other hand, experience does 
 say, that every step in improvement has been so 
 invariably accompanied by a step made in raising 
 the social position of women, that historians and 
 philosophers have been led to adopt their elevation 
 or debasement as on the whole the surest test and 
 most correct measure of the civilization of a people 
 or an age. Through all the progressive period of 
 human history, the condition of women has been 
 approaching nearer to equality with men. This 
 does not of itself prove that the assimilation must 
 go on to complete equality ; but it assuredly afiPords 
 some presumption that such is the case. 
 
 Neither does it avail anything to say that the 
 nature of the two sexes adapts them to their present 
 functions and position, and renders these appropriate 
 to them. Standing on the ground of common sense 
 and the constitution of the human mind, I deny that 
 any one knows, or can know, the nature of the two_ 
 sexes, as long as they have only been seen in their
 
 40 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 
 
 present relation to one another. If men had ever 
 been found in society without women, or women 
 without men^ or if there had been a society of men 
 and women in whicli the women were not under the 
 control of the men, something might have been 
 positively known about the mental and moral dif- 
 ferences which may be inherent in the nature of 
 
 each. What is now called ihe nature of women is 
 ^ <—~ — — . 
 
 i/ an eminently artificial t iling; — the result of forced 
 repression in some directions, unnatural stimulation 
 in others. It may be asserted without scruple, that 
 no other class of dependents have had their cha- 
 racter so entirely distorted from its natural propor- 
 tions by their relation with their masters -, for, if 
 conquered and slave races have been, in some respects, 
 more forcibly repressed, whatever in them has not 
 been crushed down by an iron heel has generally 
 been let alone, and if left with any liberty of de- 
 velopment, it has developed itself according to its 
 own laws ; but in the case of women, a hot-house 
 and stove cultivation has always been carried on of 
 some of the capabilities of their nature, for the 
 benefit and pleasure of their masters. Then, because 
 certain products of the general vital force sprout 
 luxuriantly and reach a great development in this 
 heated atmosphere and under this active nurture and 
 watering, while other shoots from the same root. 
 
 J
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEX. 41 
 
 whicli are left outside in the wiutry air^ witli ice 
 purposely heaped all round them, have a stunted 
 growth, and some are burnt off with fire and dis- 
 appear ; men, with that inability to recognise their 
 own work which distinguishes the unanalytic mind, 
 indolently believe that the tree grows of itself in the 
 way they have made it grow, and that it would die 
 if one half of it were not kept in a vapour bath 
 and the other half in the snow. 
 
 ^J)f all difficulties which impede the progress of 
 thought, and the formation of well-grounded opi- 
 nions on life and social arrangements, the greatest 
 is now the unspeakable ignorance and inattention of 
 mankind in respect to the influences which form 
 human character.^ Whatever any portion of the 
 human species now are, or seem to be, such, it is 
 supposed, they have a natural tendency to be : 
 even when the most elementary knowledge of the 
 circumstances in which they have been placed, clearly 
 points out the causes that made them what they are. 
 Because a cottier deeply in arrears to his landlord 
 is not industrious, there are people who think that 
 the Irish are naturally idle. Because constitutions 
 can be overthrown when the authorities appointed 
 to execute them turn their arms against them, there 
 are people who think the French incapable of free 
 government. Because the Greeks cheated the
 
 42 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 
 
 Turks, aud the Turks only plundered the Greeks, 
 there are persons who think that the Turks are 
 naturally more sincere : and because women, as is 
 often said, cai'c nothing about politics except their 
 personalities, it is supposed that the general good 
 is naturally less interesting to women than to men. 
 History, which is now so much better understood 
 than formerly, teaches another lesson : if only by 
 showing the extraordinary susceptibility of human 
 nature to external influences, and the extreme vari- 
 ableness of those of its manifestations which are 
 supposed to be most universal and uniform. But 
 in history, as in travelling, men usually see only 
 what they already had in their own minds ; and 
 few learn much from history, who do not bring 
 much with them to its study. 
 
 Hence, in regard to that most diflScult question, 
 what are the natural differences between the two 
 sexes — a subject on which it is impossible in the 
 present state of society to obtain complete and cor- 
 rect knowledge — while almost everybody dogmatizes 
 upon it, almost all neglect and make light of the 
 only means by which any partial insight can be 
 obtained into it. This is, an analytic study of the 
 most important department of psychology, the laws 
 of the influence of circumstances on character. 
 For, however great and apparently ineradicable the
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 43 
 
 moral and intellectual differences between men and 
 women might bc^ the evidence of tlieir being natural 
 differences could only be negative. Those only 
 could be inferred to be natural which could not 
 possibly be artificial — the residuum^ after deducting 
 every characteristic of cither sex which can admit 
 of being explained from education or external cir- 
 cumstances. The profoundest knowledge of the 
 laws of the formation of character is indispensable 
 to entitle any one to affirm even that there is any 
 difference, much more what the difference is, be- 
 tween the two sexes considered as moral and 
 rational beings ; and since no one, as yet, has that 
 knowledge, (for there is hardly any subject which, 
 in proportion to its importance, has been so little 
 studied), no one is thus far entitled to any positive 
 opinion on the subject. Conjectures are all that 
 can at present be made ; conjectures more or less 
 probable, according as more or less authorized by 
 such knowledge as we yet have of the laws of psy- 
 chology, as applied to the formation of character. 
 
 Even the preliminary knowlege, what the dif- 
 ferences between the sexes now are, apart from all 
 question as to how they are made what they are, is 
 still in the crudest and most iucomplete state. 
 Medical practitioners and physiologists have ascer- 
 tained, to some extent, the differences in bodily con-
 
 44 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 
 
 stitution ; aud this is an important element to the 
 psychologist : but hardly any medical practitioner 
 is a psychologist. Respecting the mental charac- 
 teristics of women ; their observations are of no 
 more worth than those of common men. It is a 
 subject on Avhich nothing final can be known, so 
 long as those who alone can really know it, women 
 themselves, have given but little testimony, and that 
 little, mostly suborned. It is easy to know stupid 
 women. Stupidity is much the same all the world 
 over. A stupid person's notions and feelings may 
 confidently be inferred from those which prevail in 
 the circle by which the person is surrounded. Not 
 so with those whose opinions and feelings are an 
 emanation from their own nature and faculties. It 
 is only a man here and there who has any tolerable 
 knowledge of the character even of the women of his 
 own family. I do not mean, of their capabilities ; 
 these nobody knows, not even themselves, because 
 most of them have never been called out. I mean 
 their actually existing thoughts and feelings. Many 
 a man thinks he perfectly understands women, 
 because he has had amatory relations with several, 
 perhaps with many of them. If he is a good ob- 
 server, and his experience extends to quality as well 
 as quantity, he may have learnt something of one 
 narrow department of their nature — an important
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 45 
 
 department, no doubt. But of all the rest of it, 
 few persons are generally more ignorant, because 
 there are few from whom it is so carefully hidden. 
 The most favourable case which a man can gene- 
 rally have for studying the character of a woman, 
 is that of his own wife : for the opportunities are 
 greater, and the cases of complete sympathy not so 
 ■unspeakably rare. And in fact, this is the source 
 from which any knowledge worth having on the 
 subject has, I believe, generally come. But most 
 men have not had the opportunity of studying in 
 this way more than a single case : accordingly one 
 can, to an almost laughable degree, infer what a 
 man^s wife is like, from his opinions about women 
 in general. To make even this one case yield any 
 result, the woman must be worth knowing, and the 
 man not only a competent judge, but of a character 
 so sympathetic in itself, and so well adapted to 
 hers, that he can either read her mind by sympa- 
 thetic intuition, or has nothing in himself which 
 makes her shy of disclosing it. Plardly anything, 
 I believe, can be more rare than this conjunction. 
 It often happens that there is the most complete 
 unity of feeling and community of interests as to 
 all external things, yet the one has as little admis- 
 sion into the internal life of the other as if they 
 were common acquaintance. / Even with true affec-
 
 46 THE SUBJECTION OF WOIVIEN". 
 
 tion, authority on tlie one side and subordination on 
 the other prevent perfect confidence. Though nothing 
 may be intentionally withheld, much is not shown. 
 In the analogous relation of parent and child, the 
 corresponding phenomenon must have been in the 
 observation of every one. As between father and 
 son, how many are the cases in which the father, 
 in spite of real aflection on both sides, obviously to 
 all the world does not know, nor suspect, parts of 
 the son's character familiar to his companions and 
 equals. The truth is, that the position of looking 
 up to another is extremely unpropitious to complete 
 sincerity and openness with him. The fear of losing 
 ground in his opinion or in his feelings is so 
 strong, that even in an upright character, there is 
 an unconscious tendency to show only the best 
 side, or the side which, though not the best, is that 
 which he most likes to see: and it may be confi- 
 dently said that thorough knowledge of one another 
 hardly ever exists, but between persons who, be- 
 sides being intimates, are equals. How much more 
 
 a' true, then, must all this be, when the one is not 
 only under the authority of the other, but has it 
 
 -inculcated on her as a duty to reckon everything 
 else subordinate to his comfort and pleasure, and 
 to let him neither see nor feel anything coming 
 from her, except what is agreeable to him. All
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 47 
 
 these difficulties stand iu the way of a man's obtain- 
 ing any tliorougli knowledge even of the one woman 
 whom alone^ in general, he has sufficient oppor- 
 tunity of studying. When we further consider that 
 to understand one woman is not necessarily to un- 
 derstand any other woman ; that even if he could 
 study many women of one rank, or of one country, 
 he would not thereby understand women of other 
 ranks or countries ; and even if he did, they are 
 still only the women of a single period of history ; 
 we may safely assert that the knowledge which 
 men can acquire of women, even as they have been 
 and are, without reference to what they might be, 
 is wretchedly imperfect and superficial, and always 
 will be so, until women themselves have told all that 
 they have to tell. 
 
 And this time has not come ; nor will it come 
 otherwise than gradually. It is but of yesterday 
 that women have either been qualified by literary 
 accomplishments, or permitted by society, to tell 
 anything to the general public. As yet very few 
 of them dare tell anything, which men, on whom 
 their literary success depends, are unwilling to hear. 
 Let us remember in what manner, up to a very 
 recent time, the expression, even by a male author, 
 of uncustomary opinions, or what are deemed eccen- 
 tric feelings, usually was, and in some degree still
 
 48 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 
 
 is, received ; and we may form some faint concep- 
 tion under wiiat impediments a woman, who is 
 brought up to think custom and opinion her 
 sovereign rule, attempts to express in books any- 
 thing drawn from the depths of her own nature. 
 The greatest woman who has left writings behind 
 her sufficient to give her an eminent rank in the 
 literature of her country, thought it necessary to 
 prefix as a motto to her boldest work, " Un homme 
 pent braver ^opinion ; une fcmme doit s'y sou- 
 mettre/^* The greater part of what women write 
 about women is mere sycophancy to men. In the 
 case of unmarried Avomen, much of it seems only 
 intended to increase their chance of a husband. 
 Many, both married and unmarried, overstep the 
 mark, and inculcate a servility beyond what is de- 
 sired or relished by any man, except the very 
 vulgarest. But this is not so often the case as, even 
 at a quite late period, it still was. Literary women 
 are becoming more freespoken, and more willing 
 to express their real sentiments. Unfortunately, 
 in this country especially, they are themselves such 
 artificial products, that their sentiments are com- 
 pounded of a small element of individual observa- 
 tion and consciousness, and a very large one of 
 acquired associations. This will be less and less the 
 * Title-page of Mme. de Stael's " Delpliine."
 
 THE SUBJECTIOX OF WOMEX. 49 
 
 case, but it will remain true to a great extent^, as 
 long as social institutions do not admit the same 
 free development of originality in women which is 
 possible to men. When that time comes^ and not 
 before, we shall see, and not merely hear, as much 
 as it is necessary to know of the nature of women, 
 and the adaptation of other things to it. 
 
 I have dwelt so much on the difSculties which 
 at present obstruct any real knowledge by men of 
 the true nature of women, because in this as in so 
 many other things " opinio copiffi inter maximas 
 causas inopire est ;" and there is little chance of 
 reasonable thinking on the matter, while people 
 flatter themselves that they perfectly understand a 
 subject of which most men know absolutely no- 
 thing, and of which it is at present impossible that 
 any man, or all men taken together, should have 
 knowledge which can qualify them to lay down 
 the law to women as to what is, or is not, their 
 vocation. Happily, no such knowledge is neces- 
 sary for any practical purpose connected with the 
 position of women in relation to society and life. 
 For, according to all the principles involved in 
 modern society, the question rests with women them- 
 selves — to be decided by their own experience, and 
 by the use of their own faculties. There are no 
 means of finding what either one person or many
 
 r> 
 
 50 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 
 
 can do, hut by trying — and no means by wbicli any 
 one else can discover for tliem what it is for their 
 happiness to do or leave undone. 
 
 One thing we may be certain of — that what is 
 contrary to women^s nature to do, they never will 
 be made to do by simply giving their nature free 
 play. The anxiety of mankind to interfere in be- 
 half of nature, for fear lest nature should not suc- 
 ceed in effecting its purpose, is an altogether un- 
 necessary solicitude. What women by nature cannot 
 
 jA do, it is quite superfluous to forbid them from doing. 
 I ^/What they can do, but not so well as the men who 
 
 \ vy ' are their competitors, competition suffices to exclude 
 '; them from ; since nobody asks for protective duties 
 and bounties in favour of women; it is only asked 
 that the present bounties and protective duties in 
 favour of men should be recalled. If women have 
 a greater natural inclination for some things than 
 for others, there is no need of laws or social incul- 
 cation to make the majority of them do the former 
 in preference to the latter. Whatever women's 
 services are most wanted for, the free play of com- 
 petition will hold out the strongest inducements to 
 them to undertake. And, as the words imply, they 
 are most wanted for the things for which they are 
 most fit ; by the apportionment of which to them, 
 the collectiA^e faculties of the two sexes can be
 
 THE SUBJECTIOX OF WOMEX. 51 
 
 applied on the wliole with the greatest sum of valu- 
 able result. 
 
 The general opinion of men is supposed to be, 
 that the natural vocation of a woman is that of a 
 wife and mother. I say, is supposed to be, because, 
 judging from acts — from the whole of the present 
 constitution of society — one might infer that their 
 opinion was the direct contrary. They might be 
 supposed to think that the alleged natural vocation 
 of women was of all things the most repugnant to 
 their nature ; insomuch that if they are free to 
 do anything else — if any other means of living, 
 or occupation of their time and faculties, is open, 
 which has any chance of appearing desirable to 
 them — there will not be enough of them who 
 will be willing to accept the condition said to be 
 natural to them. If this is the real opinion of 
 men in general, it would be well that it should 
 be spoken out. I should like to hear somebody 
 openly enunciating the doctrine (it is already im- 
 plied in much that is written on the subject) — 
 " It is necessary to society that women should y 
 marry and produce children. They will not do 
 so unless they are compelled. Therefore it is 
 necessary to compel them.''^ The merits of the 
 case would then be clearly defined. It would be 
 exactly that of the slaveholders of South Carolina
 
 52 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN". 
 
 and Louisiana. " It is necessary tliat cotton and 
 sugar should be grown. White men cannot pro- 
 duce them. Negroes will not, for any wages which 
 we choose to give. Ergo they must be com- 
 pelled.'^ An illustration still closer to the point 
 is that of impressment. Sailors must absolutely 
 be had to defend the country. It often happens 
 that they will not voluntarily enlist. Therefore 
 there must be the power of forcing them. How 
 often has this logic been used ! and, but for one 
 flaw in it, without doubt it would have been suc- 
 cessful up to this day. But it is open to the 
 retort — First pay the sailors the honest value of 
 their labour. When you have made it as well 
 ■worth their while to serve you, as to work for 
 other employers, you will have no more difficulty 
 than others have in obtaining their services. To 
 this there is no logical answer except " I will not -." 
 and as people are now not only ashamed, but are 
 not desirous, to rob the labourer of his hire, im- 
 pressment is no longer advocated. Those who 
 attempt to force women into marriage by closing all 
 other doors against them, lay themselves open to a 
 similar retort. If they mean what they say, their 
 opinion must evidently be, that men do not render 
 the married condition so desirable to women, as to 
 induce them to accept it for its own recommenda-
 
 THE SUBJECriOX OF WOMEX. 53 
 
 tions. It is not a sign of one^s thinking the boon 
 one offers very attractive^ when one allows only 
 Hobson^choice^ "that or none." And here, I 
 believe, is the clue to the feelings of those men, 
 who have a real antipathy to the equal freedom of 
 women. I believe they are afraid, not lest women 
 should be unAvilling to marry, for I do not think 
 that any one in reality has that apprehension ; but 
 lest they should insist that marriage should be 
 on equal conditions ; lest all women of spirit and 
 capacity should prefer doing almost anything else, 
 not in their own eyes degrading, rather than 
 marry, when marrying is giving themselves a 
 master, and a master too of all their earthly pos- 
 sessions. And truly, if this consequence were neces- 
 sarily incident to marriage, I think that the appre- 
 hension would be very well founded. I agree in 
 thinking it probable that few women, capable of 
 anything else, would, unless under an irresistible en- 
 trainement, rendering them for the time insensible 
 to anything but itself, choose such a lot, when any 
 other means were open to them of filling a con- 
 ventionally honourable place in life : and if men 
 are determined that the law of marriage shall be 
 a law of despotism, they are quite right, in point 
 of mere policy, in leaving to women only Hobson^'s 
 choice • But, in that case, all that has been done
 
 54 TPIE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 
 
 in the modern world to relax the chain on the 
 minds of Avomen, has been a mistake. They never 
 should have been allowed to reeeive a literary 
 education. [_Women who read^ much more women 
 who write, are, in the existing constitution of 
 things, a contradiction and a disturbing element : 
 and it vSls. wrong to bring women up with any 
 acquirements but those of an odalisque, or of a 
 domestic servant. Blfik\/o / j
 
 THE SUBJECTIOX OF WOMEN". 55 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 IT will be well to commence tLe detailed dis- 
 cussion of the subject by the particular branch 
 of it to which the course of our observations has 
 led us : the conditions which the laws of this and 
 all other countries annex to the marriage contract. 
 Marriage being the destination appointed by society 
 for women, the prospect they are brought up to, 
 and the object which it is intended should be 
 sought 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 every- 
 thing would have been done to make this con- 
 dition 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 sub- 
 stantially persisted in them even to the present day. 
 Originally women were taken by force, or re-
 
 56 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 
 
 gularly 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 " jes," 
 from the woman at the marriage ceremony ; but 
 there was nothing to shew that the consent Avas 
 other than compulsory ; and it was practically im- 
 possible 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 correspond- 
 ing power in regard to him. I?y 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
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEX. 57 
 
 them vrere 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 obliga- 
 tion 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 re- 
 spect 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 ex- 
 ample, 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
 
 58 THE SUBJECTION" OF WOMEN. 
 
 the class feeling of tlicir own sex, a father gene- 
 rally 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 hus- 
 band. 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 ^taver
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEX. 59 
 
 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 re- 
 fuse to her master the last familiarity. Not so 
 the wife : however brutal a tyrant she may un- 
 fortunately 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
 
 60 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 
 
 her and enforce the lowest degradation of a human 
 beingj 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 hy law Ids 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 Tal- 
 fourd'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 com- 
 pel 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 custodv of an exasperated jailer — or which
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. Gl 
 
 timpowers her to apply any earnings to her own 
 uso, 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 per- 
 sonal 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 corol- 
 lary 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 diflferent consideration. The question of di- 
 vorce, 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
 
 62 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 
 
 servitude is tlie only, tliougli 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 super- 
 added, will in England free a wife from her tor- 
 mentor. 
 
 '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, look- 
 ing to the laws alone, society would be a hell upon 
 earth. Happily there are both feelings and in- 
 terests 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.
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 63 
 
 instead of conflicting -vvitli, the first. Because this 
 is true ; because men in general do not inflict, 
 nor women suffer, all the misery which could be 
 inflicted and sufi'ered 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
 
 C4 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 
 
 made to the intense attacliments which exist be- 
 tween 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 
 devoted gratitude of which human nature seems to 
 be susceptible, are called forth in human beings 
 tOAvards 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
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 65 
 
 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 
 inan ? 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 obliga- 
 tion 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 penal- 
 ties of the law. In every grade of this descending 
 scale are men to whom are committed all the legal
 
 66 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 
 
 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 un- 
 punished, has within these few years made some 
 feeble attempts to repress them. But its attempts 
 have done little, and cannot be expected to do
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEX. 67 
 
 mucli, because it is contrary to reason and expe- 
 rience 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 con- 
 viction 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 do- 
 gnestic as in political tyranny, the case of absolute 
 monsters chiefly illustrates the institution by show- 
 ing 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.
 
 68 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 
 
 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 
 wortliy 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 suffi- 
 cient often to make the lives of all who are so, a 
 torment and a burthen to them ! It would be tire- 
 some to repeat the commonplaces about the unfit- 
 ness 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 ofiered 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 Com- 
 mandments, 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
 
 TFIE SUBJECTION OF WOMEX. G9 
 
 Tjear witli him^ tliat 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 de- 
 pendents 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 selfish 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 pro- 
 pensities of human nature are only kept within 
 bounds when they are allowed no scope for their 
 indulgence. We know that from impulse and
 
 70 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 
 
 habit, when not from deliberate purpose, almost 
 every one to whom others yield, goes on encroach- 
 ing 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 — laus its faintest sparks and 
 smouldering embers — offiers 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 repres- 
 sion of which would in time have become asecond 
 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 uncomfort- 
 able, 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
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 71 
 
 deserving dependents. It is tlie 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 effec- 
 tively 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 cor- 
 rupting effects of the power, and makes it com- 
 patible 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
 
 72 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 
 
 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, alto- 
 gether excessive and unreasonable. Through thes& 
 various means, the wife frequently exercises even 
 too much power over the man ; she is able to 
 afleet 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 afiairs of families.
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 73 
 
 nor iu 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 Sultanas favourite 
 slave has slaves under her^ over whom she tyran- 
 nizes ; 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 influencing, and very probably 
 perverting, his conduct, in those of his external re- 
 lations which she has never qualified herself to 
 judge of, or in which she is herself Avholly in- 
 fluenced by some personal or other partiality or 
 prejudice. Accordingly, as things now are, those 
 who act most kindly to their wives, are quite as 
 often made worse, as better, by the wife's influence, 
 in respect to all interests extending beyond the 
 family. She is taught that she has no business 
 with things out of that sphere ; and accordingly 
 she seldom has any honest and conscientious 
 opinion on them ; and therefore hardly ever 
 meddles with them for any legitimate purpose, but 
 generally for an interested one. She neither knows.
 
 74 THE SUBJECTION OF WOJ^IEN. 
 
 nor cares which is the right side in politics, but 
 she knows what will bring in money or invitations, 
 give her husband a title, her son a place, or her 
 daughter a good marriage. 
 
 But hoAv, it will be asked, can any society exist 
 without government? In a family, as in a state, 
 some one person must be the ultimate ruler. Who 
 shall decide when married people differ in opinion ? 
 Both cannot have their way, yet a decision one 
 way or the other must be come to. 
 
 It is not true that iu all voluntary association 
 between two people, one of them must be absolute 
 master : still less that the law must determine 
 which of them it shall be. The most frequent 
 case of voluntary association, next to marriage, is 
 partnership in business : and it is not found or 
 thought necessary to enact that in every partner- 
 ship, one partner shall have entire control over the 
 concern, and the others shall be bound to obey his 
 orders. No one would enter into partnership on 
 terms which would subject him to the responsibi- 
 lities of a principal, with only the powers and 
 privileges of a clerk or agent. If the law dealt 
 with other contracts as it does with marriage, it 
 would ordain that one partner should administer 
 the common business as if it was his private con- 
 cern; that the others should have only delegated
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 75 
 
 powers ; and that this oue should be designated by 
 some general presumption of law, for example as 
 being the eldest. The law never does this : nor 
 does experience show it to be necessary that any 
 theoretical inequality of power should exist between 
 the partners, or that the partnership should have 
 any other conditions than what they may them- 
 selves appoint by their articles of agreement. Yet 
 it might seem that the exclusive power might be 
 conceded with less danger to the rights and inte- 
 rests of the inferior, in the case of partnership than 
 in that of marriage, since he is free to cancel the 
 power by withdrawing from the connexion. The 
 ■wife has no such power, and even if she had, it is 
 almost always desirable that she should try all 
 measures before resorting to it. 
 
 It is quite true that things which have to be 
 decided every day, and cannot adjust themselves 
 gradually, or wait for a compromise, ought to 
 depend on one will ; one person must have their 
 sole control. But it does not follow that this 
 should always be the same person. The natural 
 arrangement is a division of powers between the 
 two ; each being absolute in the executive branch 
 cxf their own department, and any change of 
 system and principle requiring the consent of both. 
 The division neither can nor should be pre-
 
 76 THE SUBJECTIOX OF WOMEN. 
 
 established by the law, since it must depend on in- 
 dividual eapaeities and suitabilities. If the two 
 persons chose, they might pre-appoint it by the 
 marriage contract, as pecuniary arrangements are 
 now often pre-appointed. There would seldom be 
 any difficulty in deciding such things by mutual 
 consent, imless the marriage was one of those 
 unhappy ones in which all other things, as well as 
 this, become subjects of bickering and dispute. 
 The division of rights Avould naturally follow the 
 division of duties and functions ; and that is 
 already made by consent, or at all events not by 
 law, but by general custom, modified and modifiable 
 at the pleasure of the persons concerned. 
 
 The real practical decision of affairs, to which- 
 ever may be given the legal authority, will greatly 
 depend, as it even now does, upon comparative 
 qualifications. The mere fact that he is usually 
 the eldest, will in most cases give the prepon- 
 derance to the man ; at least until they both 
 attain a time of life at which the difierence in 
 their years is of no importance. There will natu- 
 rally also be a more potential voice on the side, 
 whichever it is, that brings the means of support. 
 Inequality from this source does not depend on 
 the law of marriage, but on the general con- 
 ditions of human society, as now constituted. The
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 77 
 
 influence of mental superiority, either general or 
 special, and of superior decision of character, will 
 necessarily tell for much. It always does so at 
 present. And this fact shows how little founda- 
 tion there is for the apprehension that the powers 
 and responsibilities of partners in life (as of 
 partners in business), cannot be satisfactorily ap- 
 portioned by agreement between themselves. They 
 always are so apportioned, except in cases in 
 which the marriage institution is a failure. Things 
 never come to an issue of downright power on one 
 side, and obedience on the other, except where the 
 connexion altogether has been a mistake, and it 
 would be a blessing to both parties to be relieved 
 from it. Some may say that the very thing by 
 which an amicable settlement of differences be- 
 comes possible, is the power of legal compulsion 
 known to be in reserve ; as people submit to an 
 arbitration because there is a court of law in the 
 background, which they know that they can be 
 forced to obey. But to make the cases parallel, 
 we must suppose that the rule of the court 
 of law was, not to try the cause, but to give judg- 
 ment always for the same side, suppose the de- 
 fendant. If so, the amenability to it would be a 
 motive with the plaintiff to agree to almost any 
 arbitration, but it would be just the reverse with.
 
 J8^ THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 
 
 the defendant. The despotic power which the law 
 gives to the husband may be a reason to make 
 the wife assent to any compromise by which power 
 is practically shared between the two, but it can- 
 not be the reason why the husband does. That 
 there is always among decently conducted people 
 a practical compromise, though one of them at 
 least is under no physical or moral necessity of 
 making it, shoAvs that the natural motives which 
 lead to a voluntary adjustment of the united life of 
 two persons in a manner acceptable to both, do on 
 the whole, except in unfavourable cases, prevail. 
 The matter is certainly not improved by laying 
 down as an ordinance of law, that the superstruc- 
 ture of free government shall be raised upon a 
 legal basis of despotism on one side and subjection 
 on the other, and that every concession which the 
 despot makes may, at his mere pleasure, and with- 
 out any warning, be recalled. Besides that no 
 freedom is worth much when held on so precarious 
 a tenure, its conditions are not likely to be the 
 most equitable when the law throws so prodigious 
 a weight into one scale ; when the adjustment 
 rests between two persons one of whom is declared 
 to be entitled to everything, the other not only 
 entitled to nothing except during the good pleasure 
 of the first, but under the strongest moral and
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 79 
 
 religious obligation not to rebel under any excess 
 of oppression. 
 
 A pertinacious adversary, pushed to extremities, 
 may say, that husbands indeed are willing to be 
 reasonable, and to make fair concessions to their 
 partners without being compelled to it, but that 
 wives are not : that if allowed any rights of their 
 own, they will acknowledge no rights at all in 
 any one else, and never will yield in anything, 
 unless they can be compelled, by the man^s mere 
 authority, to yield in everything. This would 
 have been said by many persons some generations 
 ago, when satires on women were in vogue, and 
 men thought it a clever thing to insult women for 
 being what men made them. But it will be said 
 by no one now who is worth replying to. It is 
 not the doctrine of the present day that women 
 are less susceptible of good feeling, and consi- 
 deration for those with whom they are united by 
 the strongest ties, than men are. On the con- 
 trary, we are perpetually told that women are , 
 better than men, by those who are totally opposed 
 to treating them as if they were as good ; so that 
 the saying has passed into a piece of tiresome cant, 
 intended to put a complimentary face upon an 
 injury, and resembling those celebrations of royal 
 clemency which, according to Gulliver, the king of
 
 80 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 
 
 Lillipiit always prefixed to his most sanguinary- 
 decrees. If women are better than men in any- 
 thing, it surely is in individual self-sacrifice for 
 those of their own family. But I lay little stress 
 on this, so long as they are universally taught that 
 they are born and created for self-sacrifice. I 
 believe that equality of rights would abate the ex- 
 aggerated self-abnegation which is the present arti- 
 ficial ideal of feminine character,, and that a good 
 ■woman would not be more self-sacrificing than the 
 best man : but on the other hand, men would be 
 much more unselfish and self-sacrificing than at 
 presentj because they would no longer be taught 
 to worship their own will as such a grand thing 
 that it is actually the law for another rational 
 being. There is nothing which men so easily 
 learn as this self-worsliip : all privileged persons, 
 and all privileged classes, have had it. The more 
 we descend in the scale of humanity, the intenser 
 it is ; and most of all in those who are not, and 
 can never expect to be, raised above any one 
 except an unfortunate wife and children. The 
 honourable exceptions are proportionally fewer than 
 in the case of almost any other human infirmity. 
 Philosophy and religion, instead of keeping it in 
 check, are generally suborned to defend it ; and 
 nothing controls it but that practical feeling of the
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 81 
 
 equality of human beings, which is the theory of 
 Christianity, but which Christianity will never 
 practically teach, while it sanctions institutions 
 grounded on an arbitrary preference of one human 
 being over another. 
 
 There are, no doubt, women, as there are men, 
 whom equality of consideration will not satisfy; 
 with whom there is no peace while any will or 
 wish is regarded but their own. Such persons 
 are a proper subject for the law of divorce. They 
 are only fit to live alone, and no human beings 
 ought to be compelled to associate their lives with 
 them. But the legal subordination tends to make 
 such characters among women more, rather than 
 less, frequent. If the man exerts his whole power, 
 the woman is of course crushed : but if she is 
 treated with indulgence, and permitted to assume 
 power, there is no rule to set limits to her en- 
 croachments. The law, not determining her rights, 
 but theoretically allowing her none at all, practi- 
 cally declares that the measure of what she has a 
 right to, is what she can contrive to get. 
 
 The equality of married persons before the law, 
 is not only the sole mode in which that particular 
 relation can be made consistent with justice to 
 both sides, and conducive to the happiness of both, 
 but it is the only means of rendering the daily 
 
 G
 
 82 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 
 
 life of mankind, in any high sense, a school of 
 moral cultivation. Though the truth may not be 
 felt or generally acknowledged for generations to 
 come, the only school of genuine moral sentiment 
 is society between equals. The moral education 
 of mankind has hitherto emanated chiefly from 
 the law of force, and is adapted almost solely to 
 the relations which force creates. In the less 
 advanced states of society, people hardly recognise 
 any relation with their equals. To be an equal is 
 to be an enemy. Society, from its highest place 
 to its lowest, is one long chain, or rather ladder, 
 •where every individual is either above or below his 
 nearest neighbour, and wherever he does not com- 
 mand he must obey. Existing moralities, accord- 
 ingly, are mainly fitted to a relation of command 
 and obedience. Yet command and obedience are 
 but unfortunate necessities of human life : society 
 in equality is its normal state. Already in modern 
 life, and more and more as it progressively im- 
 proves, command and obedience become exceptional 
 facts in life, equal association its general rule. 
 The morality of the first age^ 'rested on the obli- 
 gation to submit to power ; Aat of the ages next 
 following, on the right of tflb weak to the forbear- 
 ance and protection of tM^trong. How much 
 longer is one form of society and life to content
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 83 
 
 itself "vvitli the morality made for another? We 
 have had the morality of submission, and the 
 morality of chivalry and generosity ; the time is 
 now come for the morality of justice. Whenever, 
 in former ages, any approach has been made to 
 society in equality, Justice has asserted its claims 
 as the foundation of virtue. It was thus in the 
 free republics of antiquity. But even in the best of 
 these, the equals were limited to the free male 
 citizens; slaves, women, and the unenfranchised re- 
 sidents were under the law of force. The joint 
 influence of Roman civilization and of Christianity 
 obliterated these distinctions, and in theory (if only 
 partially in practice) declared the claims of the 
 human being, as such, to be paramount to those of 
 sex, class, or social position. The barriers which 
 had begun to be levelled were raised again by the 
 northern conquests; and the whole of modern his- 
 tory consists of the slow process by which they 
 have since been wearing away. We are entering 
 into an order of things in which justice will again 
 be the primary virtue ; grounded as before on equal, 
 but now also on sympathetic association ; having 
 its root no longer in^he instinct of equals for self- 
 protection, but in ^Jiltivated sympathy between 
 them ; and no one^wipng now left out, but an 
 equal measure be^g extended to all. It is no 
 
 G 2
 
 <54 THE SUBJECTIOX OF WOMEN". 
 
 novelty that mankind do not distinctly foresee 
 their own changes, and that their sentiments are 
 adapted to past, not to coming ages. To see the 
 futurity of the species has always been the privilege 
 of the intellectual elite, or of those who have learnt 
 from them ; to have the feelings of that futurity has 
 been the distinction, and usually the martyrdom, 
 of a still rarer elite. Institutions, books, educa- 
 tion, society, all go on training human beings for 
 the old, long after the new has come ; much more 
 when it is only coming. l/But the true virtue of 
 human beings is fitness to live together as equals; 
 claiming nothing for themselves but what they as 
 freely concede to every one else ; regarding com- 
 mand of any kind as an exceptional necessity, and 
 in all cases a temporary one ; and preferring, 
 whenever possible, the society of those with whom 
 leading and following can be alternate and reci- 
 procal. To these virtues, nothing in life as at 
 present constituted gives cultivation by exercise. 
 The family is a school of despotism, in which the 
 virtues of despotism, but also its vices, are largely 
 nourished. [Citizenship, in free countries, is partly 
 a school of society in equality ; but citizenship fills 
 only a small place in modern life, and does not 
 come near the daily habits or inmost sentiments. 
 The family, justly constituted, would be the real
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN". 85 
 
 school of the virtues of freedom. It is sure to be 
 a sufficient one of everything else. It will always 
 be a school of obedience for the children, of com- 
 mand for the parents. What is needed is, that it 
 should be a school of sympathy in equality, of 
 living together in love, without power on one side 
 or obedience on the other. This it ought to be 
 between the parents. It would then be an exer- 
 cise of those virtues which each requires to fit 
 them for all other association, and a model to the 
 children of the feelings and conduct which their 
 temporary training by means of obedience is de- 
 signed to render habitual, and therefore natural, to 
 them. ; The moral training of mankind will never 
 be adapted to the conditions of the life for which 
 all other human progress is a preparation, until 
 they practise in the family the same moral rule 
 which is adapted to the normal constitution of 
 human society. Any sentiment of freedom which 
 can exist in a man whose nearest and dearest in- 
 timacies are with those of whom he is absolute 
 master, is not the genuine or Christian love of 
 freedom, but, what the love of freedom generally 
 was in the ancients and in the middle ages — an 
 intense feeling of the dignity and importance of 
 his own personality; making him disdain a yoke 
 for himself, of which he has no abhorrence what-
 
 ^6 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN". 
 
 ever in the abstract, but which he is abundantly 
 ready to impose on others for his own interest or 
 glorification. 
 
 I readily admit (and it is the very foundation of 
 my hopes) that numbers of married people even 
 under the present law, (in the higher classes of 
 England probably a great majority,) live in the 
 spirit of a just law of equality. "" Laws never would 
 be improved, if there were not numerous persons 
 whose moral sentiments are better than the existing 
 laws.) Such persons ought to support the prin- 
 ciples here advocated ; of which the only object is 
 to make all other married couples similar to what 
 these are now. But persons even of considerable 
 moral worth, unless they are also thinkers, are very 
 ready to believe that laws or practices, the evils of 
 which they have not personally experienced, do 
 not produce any evils, but (if seeming to be gene- 
 rally approved of) probably do good, and that it 
 is wrong to object to them. It would, however, 
 be a great mistake in such married people to 
 suppose, because the legal conditions of the tie 
 which unites them do not occur to their thoughts 
 once in a twelvemonth, and because they live and 
 feel in all respects as if they were legally equals, 
 that the same is the ease with all other married 
 couples, wherever the husband is not a notorious
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 87 
 
 ruffian. To suppose this, would be to show equal 
 ignorance of human nature and of fact. The less 
 fit a man is for the possession of power — the less 
 likely to be allowed to exercise it over any person 
 with that person^s voluntary consent — the more 
 does he hug himself in the consciousness of the 
 power the law gives him, exact its legal rights to 
 the utmost point which custom (the custom of men 
 like himself) will tolerate, and take pleasure in 
 using the power, merely to enliven the agreeable 
 sense of possessing it. What is more ; in the most 
 naturally brutal and morally uneducated part of 
 the lower classes, the legal slavery of the woman, 
 and something in the merely physical subjection to 
 their will as an instrunlent, causes them to feel a 
 sort of disrespect and contempt towards their own 
 wife which they do not feel towards any other 
 woman, or any other human being, with whom 
 they come in contact ; and which makes her seem 
 to them an appropriate subject for any kind of 
 indignity. Let an acute observer of the signs of 
 feeling, who has the requisite opportunities, judge 
 for himself whether this is not the case : and if he 
 finds that it is, let him not wonder at any amount 
 of disgust and indignation that can be felt against 
 institutions which lead naturally to this depraved 
 state of the human mind.
 
 88 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 
 
 We shall be told^ perhaps^ that religion imposes 
 the duty of obedience ; as every established faet 
 which is too bad to admit of any other defence, is 
 always presented to us as an injunction of religion. 
 The Church, it is very true, enjoins it in her 
 formularies, but it would be difficult to derive any 
 such injunction from Christianity. We are told 
 that St. Paul said, " Wives, obey your husbands :" 
 but he also said, " Slaves, obey your masters.''^ It 
 was not St. PauFs business, nor was it consistent 
 with his object, the propagation of Christianity, to 
 incite any one to rebellion against existing laws. 
 The Apostle^s acceptance of all social institutions 
 as he found them, is no more to be construed as 
 a disapproval of attempts to improve them at the 
 proper time, than his declaration, " The powers 
 that be are ordained of God," gives his sanction to 
 military despotism, and to that alone, as the Chris- 
 tian form of political government, or commands 
 passive obedience to it. To pretend that Chris- 
 tianity was intended to stereotype existing forms of 
 government and society, and protect them against 
 change, is to reduce it to the level of Islamism or 
 of Brahminism. It is precisely because Christianity 
 has not done this, that it has been the religion of 
 the progressive portion of mankind, and Islamism, 
 Brahminism, &c., have been those of the stationary
 
 THE SUBJECTION OP WOMEN. 89 
 
 portions; or rather (for there is no sueh thing as 
 a really stationary society) of the declining portions. 
 There have been abundance of people, in all ages 
 of Christianity, who tried to make it something of 
 the same kind ; to convert us into a sort of Chris- 
 tian Mussulmans, with the Bible for a Koran, pro- 
 hibiting all improvement : and great has been their 
 power, and many have had to sacrifice their lives 
 in resisting them. But they have been resisted, 
 and the resistance has made us what we are, and 
 will yet make us what we are to be. 
 
 (\A.fter what has been said respecting the obli- 
 gation of obedience, it is almost superfluous to say 
 anything concerning the more special point in- 
 cluded in the general one — a womau^s right to her 
 own property ; for I need not hope that this 
 treatise can make any impression upon those who 
 need anything to convince them that a woman's 
 inheritance or gains ought to be as much her own 
 after marriage as before. The rule is simple : 
 whatever would be the husband's or wife's if they 
 were not married, should be under their exclusive 
 control during marriage ; which need not interfere 
 with the power to tie up property by settlement, in 
 order to preserve it for children. Some people are 
 sentimentally shocked at the idea of a separate 
 interest in money matters, as inconsistent with the
 
 90 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 
 
 ideal fasion of two lives into one. For my own 
 part, I am one of the strongest supporters of com- 
 munity of goods^ when resulting from an entire 
 unity of feeling in the owners, which makes all 
 things common between them. But I have no 
 relish for a community of goods resting on the 
 doctrine, that what is mine is yours, but what is 
 yours is not mine ; and I should prefer to decline 
 entering into such a compact with any one, though 
 I were myself the person to profit by it. 
 
 This particular injustice and oppression to 
 women, which is, to common apprehensions, more 
 obvious than all the rest, admits of remedy without 
 interfering with any other mischiefs : and there can 
 be little doubt that it will be one of the earliest 
 remedied. Already, in many of the new and 
 several of the old States of the American Confede- 
 ration, provisions have been inserted even in the 
 written Constitutions, securing to women equality 
 of rights in this respect : and thereby improving 
 materially the position, in the marriage relation, of 
 those women at least who have property, by leaving 
 them one instrument of power which they have not 
 signed away ; and preventing also the scandalous 
 abuse of the marriage institution, which is perpe- 
 trated when a man entraps a girl into marrying 
 him without a settlement, for the sole purpose of
 
 THE SUBJECTION OP WOMEN. 91 
 
 getting possession of lier money. "When the sup-^ 
 port of the family depends, not on property, but on 
 earnings, the common arrangement, by which the 
 man earns the income and the wife superintends 
 the domestic expenditure, seems to me in genera 
 the most suitable division of labour between the 
 two persons. If, in addition to the physical suffer- 
 ing of bearing children, and the whole responsi- 
 bility of their care and education in early years, 
 the wife undertakes the careful and economical 
 application of the husband's earnings to the general 
 comfort of the family ; she takes not only her fair 
 share, but usually the larger share, of the bodily 
 and mental exertion required by their joint exis- 
 tence. If she undertakes any additional portion, 
 it seldom relieves her from this, but only prevents 
 her from performing it properly. The care which 
 she is herself disabled from taking of the children 
 and the household, nobody else takes ; those of the 
 children who do not die, grow up as they best can, 
 and the management of the household is likely to 
 be so bad, as even in point of economy to be a 
 great drawback from the value of the wife's earn- 
 ings. In an otherwise just state of things, it is 
 not, therefore, I think, a desirable custom, that the 
 wife should contribute by her labour to the income 
 of the family. In an unjust state of things, her 
 
 ■A
 
 92 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 
 
 doing so may be useful to licr, by making her of 
 more value in the eyes of the man who is legally 
 her master; but, on the other hand^ it enables 
 him still farther to abuse his power, by forcing her 
 to work, and leaving the support of the family to 
 her exertions, while he spends most of his time 
 in drinking and idleness. The power of earning is 
 essential to the dignit y of a wo man, if she has not 
 ■ y^ independent property. But if marriage were an 
 equal contract, not implying the obligation of obe- 
 dience ; if the connexion were no longer enforced 
 to the oppression of those to whom it is purely a 
 mischief, but a separation, on just terms (I do not 
 now speak of a divorce), could be obtained by any 
 woman who was morally entitled to it ; and if she 
 would then find all honourable employments as freely 
 open to her as to men ; it would not be necessary 
 for her protection, that during marriage she should 
 make this particular use of her faculties. Like a 
 man when he chooses a profession, so, when a 
 / woman marries, it may in general be understood 
 / that she makes choice of the management of a 
 household, and the bringing up of a family, as the 
 first call upon her exertions, during as many years 
 of her life as may be required for the purpose ; and 
 that she renounces, not all other objects and occu- 
 pations, but all which are not consistent with the 
 
 I
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 93 
 
 requirements of this. The actual exercise^ in a 
 habitual or systematic manner, of outdoor occupa- 
 tions, or such as cannot be carried on at home, 
 would by this principle be practically interdicted 
 to the greater number of married women. But 
 the utmost latitude ought to exist for the adapta- 
 tion of general rules to individual suitabilities ; 
 and there ought to be nothing to prevent faculties 
 exceptionally adapted to any other pursuit, from 
 obeying their vocation notwithstanding marriage : 
 due provision being made for supplying otherwise 
 any falling-short which might become inevitable, 
 in her full performance of the ordinary functions 
 of mistress of a family. These things, if once 
 opinion were rightly directed on the subject, might 
 with perfect safety be left to be regulated by 
 opinion, without any interference of law.
 
 94 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 ON tlie other point which is involved in the just 
 equality of women, their admissibility to all 
 the functions and occupations hitherto retained as 
 the monopoly of the stronger sex, I should anti- 
 cipate no difficulty in convincing any one who has 
 gone with me on the subject of the equality of 
 women in the family. I believe that their dis- 
 abilities elsewhere are only clung to in order to 
 maintain their subordination in domestic life ; 
 because the generality of the male sex cannot yet 
 tolerate the idea of living with an equal. Were 
 it not for that, I think that almost every one, 
 in the existing state of opinion in politics and 
 political economy, would admit the injustice of 
 -excluding half the human race from the greater 
 number of lucrative occupations, and from almost 
 all high social functions ; ordaining from their 
 birth either that they are not, and cannot by any 
 possibility become, fit for employments which are 
 legally open to the stupidest and basest of the
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 95 
 
 other sex, or else that however fit they may he, 
 those employments shall be interdicted to them, 
 in order to be preserved for the exclusive benefit 
 of males. In the last two centuries, when (which 
 was seldom the case) any reason beyond the mere 
 existence of the fact was thought to be required to 
 justify the disabilities of women, people seldom 
 assigned as a reason their inferior mental capacity ; 
 which, in times when there was a real trial of 
 personal faculties (from which all women were not 
 excluded) in the struggles of public life, no one 
 really believed in. The reason given in those 
 days was not women's unfitness, but the interest 
 of society, by which was meant the interest of 
 men : just as the raison d'etat, meaning the con- 
 venience of the government, and the support of 
 existing authority, was deemed a sufficient expla- 
 nation and excuse for the most flagitious crimes. 
 In the present day, power holds a smoother lan- 
 guage, and whomsoever it oppresses, always pre- 
 tends to do so for their own good : accordingly, 
 when anything is forbidden to women, it is thought 
 necessary to say, and desirable to believe, that they 
 are incapable of doing it, and that they depart from 
 their real path of success and happiness when they 
 aspire to it. But to make this reason plausible (I 
 <lo not say valid), those by whom it is urged must
 
 96 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEX. 
 
 be prepared to carry it to a mucli greater length 
 than any one ventures to do in the face of present 
 experience. It is not sufficient to maintain that 
 women on the average are less gifted than men on 
 the average^ with certain of the higher mental facul- 
 ties, or that a smaller number of women than of 
 men are fit for occupations and functions of the 
 highest intellectual character. It is necessary to 
 maintain that no women at all are fit for them, 
 and that the most eminent women are inferior in 
 mental faculties to the most mediocre of the men 
 on whom those functions at present devolve. For 
 if the performance of the function is decided either 
 by competition, or by any mode of choice which 
 secures regard to the public interest, there needs 
 be no apprehension that any important employ- 
 ments will fall into the hands of women inferior 
 to average men, or to the average' of their male 
 competitors. The only result would be that there 
 would be fewer women than men in such employ- 
 ments; a result certain to happen in any case, if 
 only from the preference always likely to be felt by 
 the majority of women for the one vocation in 
 which there is nobody to compete with them. 
 Now, the most determined depredator of women 
 will not venture to deny, that when we add the 
 experience of recent times to that of ages past.
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 97 
 
 ■women, and not a few merely, but many women, 
 have proved themselves capable of every thin j^, 
 perhaps without a single exception, which is done 
 by men, and of doing it successfully and creditably. 
 The utmost that can be said is, that there are 
 many things which none of them have succeeded 
 in doing as well as they have been done by some 
 men — many in which they have not reached the 
 very highest rank. But there are extremely few, 
 dependent only on mental faculties, in which they 
 have not attained the rank next to the highest. Is 
 not this enough, and much more than enough, to 
 make it a tyranny to them, and a detriment to 
 society, that they should not be allowed to compete 
 with men for the exercise of these functions ? Is 
 it not a mere truism to say, that such functions are 
 often filled by men far less fit for them than num- 
 bers of women, and who would be beaten by women 
 in any fair field of competition ? What difference 
 does it make that there may be men somewhere, 
 fully employed about other things, who may be still 
 better qualified for the things in question than these 
 women? Does not this take place in all competi- 
 tions ? Is there so great a superfluity of men fit 
 for high duties, that society can afford to reject the 
 service of any competent person ? Are we so cer- 
 tain of always finding a man made to our hands 
 
 H
 
 98 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 
 
 for any duty or function of social importance which 
 falls vacant, that we lose nothing by putting a ban 
 upon one-half of mankind, and refusing beforehand 
 to make their faculties available, however distin- 
 guished they may be ? And even if we could do 
 without them, would it be consistent with justice to 
 refuse to them their fair share of honour and dis- 
 tinction, or to deny to them the equal moral right 
 of all human beings to choose their occupation 
 (short of injury to others) according to their own 
 preferences, at their own risk ? Nor is the inj us- 
 tice confined to them : it is shared by those who 
 are in a position to benefit by their services. To 
 ordain that any kind of persons shall not be physi- 
 cians, or shall not be advocates, or shall not be 
 members of parliament, is to injure not them only, 
 but all who employ physicians or advocates, or elect 
 members of parliament, and who are deprived of 
 the stimulating effect of greater competition on the 
 exertions of the competitors, as well as restricted 
 to a narrower range of individual choice. 
 
 It will perhaps be sufficient if I confine myself, 
 in the details of my argument, to functions of a 
 public nature : since, if I am successful as to those, 
 it probably will be readily granted that women 
 should be admissible to all other occupations to 
 which it is at all material whether they are ad-
 
 "iHT 
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 91) 
 
 mitted or not. Aud here let mc begin by marking 
 out one function^ broadly distinguished from all 
 others_, their right to whieh is entirely independent 
 of any question which can be raised concerning QjJ^ 
 
 their faculties. I mean the suffrage, both par- 
 liamentary and municipal. The right to share in 
 the choice of those who are to exercise a public 
 trust, is altogether a distinct thing from that of 
 competing for the trust itself. If no one could 
 vote for a member of parliament who w^as not fit 
 to be a candidate, the government would be a 
 narrow oligarchy indeed. To have a voice in 
 choosing those by whom one is to be governed, is 
 a means of self-protection due to every one, 
 though he were to remain for ever excluded from 
 the function of governing : and that women are 
 considered fit to have such a choice, may be pre- 
 sumed from the fact, that the law already gives it 
 to women in the most important of all cases to 
 themselves : for the choice of the man who is to 
 govern a woman to the end of life, is always sup- 
 posed to be voluntarily made by herself. In the 
 case of election to public trusts, it is the business 
 of constitutional law to surround the right of 
 suffrage with all needful securities and limitations ; 
 but whatever securities are sufficient in the case of 
 the male sex, no others need be required in the 
 
 H 2
 
 100 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 
 
 case of women. Under whatever conditions^ and 
 within whatever limits, men are admitted to the 
 suffrage, there is not a shadow of justification for 
 n6t admitting women under the same. The 
 majority of the women of any class are not likely 
 to differ in political opinion from the majority of 
 the men of the same class, unless the question be 
 one in which the interests of women, as such, are 
 in some way involved ; and if they are so, women 
 require the suffrage, as their guarantee of just and 
 equal consideration. This ought to be obvious 
 even to those who coincide in no other of the 
 doctrines for which I contend. Even if every 
 woman were a wife, and if every wife ought to be 
 a slave, all the more would these slaves stand in 
 need of legal protection : and we know what legal 
 ]3rotection the slaves have, where the laws are made 
 by their masters. 
 
 With regard to the fitness of women, not only 
 to participate in elections, but themselves to hold 
 offices or practise professions involving important 
 public responsibilities; I have already observed 
 that this consideration is not essential to the prac- 
 tical question in dispute : since any woman, who 
 succeeds in an open profession, proves by that very 
 fact that she is qualified for it. And in the case of 
 public offices, if the political system of the country
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF AVO^MEN. 101 
 
 is such as to exclude unfit men, it will equally ex- 
 clude unfit women : while if it is not, there is no 
 additional evil in the fact that the unfit persons 
 whom it admits may be either women or men. As 
 long therefore as it is acknowledged that even a 
 few women may be fit for these duties, the laws 
 which shut the door on those exceptions cannot be 
 justified by any opinion which can be held respect- 
 ing the capacities of women in general. But, though 
 this last consideration is not essential, it is far from 
 being irrelevant. An unprejudiced view of it gives 
 additional strength to the arguments against the 
 disabilities of women, and reinforces them by high 
 considerations of practical utility. 
 
 Let us at first make entire abstraction of all psy- 
 chological considerations tending to show, that any 
 of the mental diff'erences supposed to exist between 
 women and men are but the natural effect of the 
 diff'erences in their education and circumstances, 
 and indicate no radical diff'erence, far less radical 
 inferiority, of nature. Let us consider women only 
 as they already are, or as they are known to have 
 been ; and the capacities which they have already 
 practically shown. What they have done, that at 
 least, if nothing else, it is proved that they can do. 
 When we consider how sedulously they are all 
 trained away from, instead of being trained to-
 
 102 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 
 
 wards, any of the occupations or objects reserved 
 for men, it is evident that I am taking a very 
 liumble ground for them, when I rest their case on 
 what they have actually achieved. For, in this 
 case, negative evidence is worth little, while any 
 positive evidence is conclusive. It cannot be in- 
 ferred to be impossible that a woman should be a 
 Homer, or an Aristotle, or a Michael Angelo, or a 
 Beethoven, because no woman has yet actually pro- 
 duced works comparable to theirs in any of those 
 lines of excellence. This negative fact at most 
 leaves the question uncertain, and open to psycho- 
 logical discussion. But it is quite certain that a 
 woman can be a Queen Elizabeth, or a Deborah, 
 or a Joan of Arc, since this is not inference, but 
 fact. Now it is a curious consideration, that the 
 only things which the existing law excludes women 
 from doing, are the things which they have proved 
 that they are able to do. There is no law to pre- 
 vent a woman from having written all the plays of 
 Shakspeare, or composed all the operas of Mozart. 
 But Queen Elizabeth or Queen Victoria, had they 
 not inherited the throne, could not have been in- 
 trusted with the smallest of the political duties, of 
 which the former showed herself equal to the 
 greatest. 
 
 If anything conclusive could be inferred from
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 103 
 
 experience^ without psychological analysis^ it would 
 be that the things which women are not allowed 
 to do are the very ones for which they are pecu- 
 liarly qualified ; since their vocation for government 
 has made its way, and become conspicuoiis, through 
 the very few opportunities which have been given; 
 while in the lines of distinction which apparently 
 were freely open to them, they have by no means 
 so eminently distiuguished themselves. We know 
 how small a number of reigning queens history 
 presents, in comparison with that of kings. Of 
 this smaller number a far larger proportion have 
 shown talents for rule ; though many of them have 
 occupied the throne in difficult periods. It is re- 
 markable, too, that they have, in a great number 
 of instances, been distinguished by merits the most 
 opposite to the imaginary and conventional cha- 
 racter of women : they have been as much re- 
 marked for the firmness and vigour of their rule, 
 as for its intelligence. When, to queens and 
 empresses, we add regents, and viceroys of pro- 
 vinces, the list of women who have been eminent 
 rulers of mankind swells to a great length.* This 
 
 * Especially is this true if we take into consideration Asia as well 
 as Europe. If a Hindoo principality is strongly, vigilantly, and 
 economically governed ; if order is preserved witiiout oppression ; 
 if cultivation is extending, and the people prosperous, in three cases 
 out of four that principality is under a woman's rule. This fact, to 
 me an entirely unexpected one, I have collected from a long ofEcial
 
 104 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 
 
 fact is so undeniable, that some one, long ago, 
 trifid to retort the argument, and turned the ad- 
 mitted truth into an additional insult, by saying 
 that queens are better than kings, because under 
 kings women govern, but under queens, men. 
 
 It may seem a waste of reasoning to argue 
 against a bad joke; but such things do affect 
 people^s minds ; and I have heard men quote this 
 saying, with an air as if they thought that there 
 was something in it. At any rate, it will serve as 
 well as anything else for a starting-point in dis- 
 cussion. I say, then, that it is not true that under 
 kings, women govern. Such cases are entirely 
 exceptional : and weak kings have quite as often 
 governed ill through the influence of male favour- 
 ites, as of female. When a king is governed by a 
 woman merely through his amatory propensities, 
 good government is not probable, though even then 
 there are exceptions. But French history counts 
 two kings who have voluntarily given the direction 
 
 knowledge of Hindoo governments. There are many such instances ; 
 for though, by Hindoo institutions, a woman cannot reign, she is 
 the legal regent of a kingdom during the minority of the heir ; and 
 minorities are frequent, the lives of the male rulers being so often 
 prematurely terminated through the effect of inactivity and sensual 
 excesses. When we consider that these princesses have never been 
 eeeu in public, have never conversed with any man not of their own 
 family except from behind a curtain, that they do not read, and if 
 they did, there is no book in their languages which can give them 
 the smallest instruction on political affairs ; the example they afford 
 of the natural capacity of women for government is very striking.
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 105 
 
 of affairs during many years, the one to his mother, 
 the other to his sister : one of them, Charles VIII., 
 was a mere boy, but in doing so he followed the 
 intentions of his father Louis XI., the ablest 
 monarch of his age. The other, Saint Louis, was 
 the best, and one of the most vigorous rulers, since 
 the time of Charlemagne. Both these princesses 
 ruled in a manner hardly equalled by any prince 
 among their cotemporaries. The Emperor Charles 
 the Fifth, the most politic prince of his time, who 
 had as great a number of able men in his service 
 as a ruler ever had, and was one of the least likely 
 of all sovereigns to sacrifice his interest to personal 
 feelings, made two princesses of his family succes- 
 sively Governors of the Netherlands, and kept one 
 or other of them in that post during his whole life, 
 (they were afterwards succeeded by a third). Both 
 ruled very successfully, and one of them, Margaret 
 of Austria, was one of the ablest politicians of the 
 age. So much for one side of the question. Now 
 as to the other. When it is said that under queens 
 men govern, is the same meaning to be understood 
 as when kings are said to be governed by w^omen? 
 Is it meant that queens choose as their instruments 
 -of government, the associates of their personal plea- 
 sures ? The case is rare even with those who are as 
 •unscrupulous on tlie latter point as Catherine II. :
 
 IOC THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 
 
 and it is not in these cases that the good govern- 
 ment, alleged to arise from male influence, is to be 
 found. If it be true, then, that the administration 
 is in the hands of better men under a queen than 
 under an average king, it must be that queens have 
 a superior capacity for choosing them ; and women 
 must be better qualified than men both for the 
 position of sovereign, and for that of chief minister ; 
 for the principal business of a prime minister is not 
 to govern in person, but to find the fittest persons 
 to conduct every department of public affairs. The 
 more rapid insight into character, which is one of 
 the admitted points of superiority in women over 
 men, must certainly make them, with anything like 
 parity of qualifications in other respects, more apt 
 than men in that choice of instruments, which is 
 nearly the most important business of every one 
 who has to do with governing mankind. Even 
 the unprincipled Catherine de' Medici could feel 
 the value of a Chancellor de FHopital. But it 
 is also true that most great queens have been 
 great by their own talents for government, and 
 have been well served precisely for that reason. 
 They retained the supreme direction of affairs 
 in their own hands : and if they listened to 
 good advisers, they gave by that fact the 
 strongest proof that their judgment fitted them
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 107 
 
 for dealing with the great questions of govern- 
 ment. 
 
 Is it reasonable to think that those who are fit 
 for the greater functions of politics^ arc incapable 
 of qualifying themselves for the less ? Is there any 
 reason in the nature of things^ that the Avives and 
 sisters of princes should, whenever called on, be 
 found as competent as the princes themselves to 
 their business, but that the wives and sisters of 
 statesmen, and administrators, and directors of 
 companies, and managers of public institutions, 
 should be unable to do what is done by their 
 brothers and husbands ? The real reason is plain 
 enough ; it is that princesses, being more raised 
 above the generality of men by their rank than 
 placed below them by their sex, have never been 
 taught that it was improper for them to concern 
 themselves with politics ; but have been allowed 
 to feel the liberal interest natural to any cultivated 
 human being, in the great transactions which took 
 place around them, and in which they might be 
 called on to take a part. The ladies of reigning 
 families are the only women who are allowed the 
 same range of interests and freedom of develop- 
 ment as men ; and it is precisely in their case 
 that there is not found to be any inferiority. 
 Exactly where and in proportion as women^s capa-
 
 lOS THE SUBJECTION OF ATOMEN. 
 
 cities for government liave been tried, in that pro- 
 portion liave tliey been found adequate. 
 
 'This fact is in aceordance with the best general 
 conclusions which the world^s imperfect experience 
 seems as yet to suggest, concerning the peculiar 
 tendencies and aptitudes characteristic of women, 
 as women have hitherto been. I do not say, as 
 they will continue to be ; for, as I have already 
 said more than ouce, I consider it presumption in 
 any one to pretend to decide what women are or 
 are not, can or cannot be, by natural constitution. 
 They have always hitherto been kept, as far as 
 regards spontaneous development, in so unnatural 
 a state, that their nature cannot but have been 
 greatly distorted and disguised; and no one can 
 safely pronounce that if women^s nature were left 
 to choose its direction as freely as men^s, and if 
 no artificial bent were attempted to be given to it 
 except that required by the conditions of human 
 society, and given to both sexes alike, there would 
 be any material difierence, or perhaps any dif- 
 ference at all, in the character and capacities 
 which would unfold themselves. I shall pre- 
 sently show, that even the least contestable of the 
 differences which now exist, are such as may very 
 well have been produced merely by circumstances, 
 without any difference of natural capacity. But,
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF. WOMEN. 109 
 
 looking at women as they are known in expe- 
 riencBj it may be said of them, with more trutli 
 than belongs to most other generah'zations on the 
 subject, that the/general bent of their talents is 
 towards the practical. ! This statement is confor- 
 mable to all the public history of women, in the 
 present and the past. It is no less borne out by 
 common and daily experience. Let us consider 
 the special nature of the mental capacities most 
 characteristic of a woman of talent. They are all 
 of a kind which fits them for practice, and makes 
 them tend towards it. What is meant by a 
 woman's capacity of intuitive perception ? It means, 
 a(rapid and correct insight into present fact. It 
 has nothing to do with general principles. Nobody 
 ever perceived a scientific law of nature by in- 
 tuition, nor arrived at a general rule of duty or 
 prudence by it. These are results of slow and 
 careful collection and comparison of experience; 
 and neither the men nor the women of intuition 
 usually shine in this department, unless, indeed, the 
 experience necessary is such as they can acquire by 
 themselves. For what is called their intuitive saga- 
 city makes them peculiarly apt in gathering such 
 general truths as can be collected from their indi- 
 vidual means of observation. When, consequently, 
 they chance to be as well provided as men are with
 
 110 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 
 
 the results of other people^s experience, by reading 
 and education, (I use the word chance advisedlj^, 
 for, in respect to the knowledge that tends to fit 
 them for the greater concerns of life, the only- 
 educated women are the self-educated) they are 
 better famished than men in general with the 
 essential requisites of skilful and successful prac- 
 tice. Men who have been much taught, are apt 
 to be deficient in the sense of present fact ; they 
 do not see, in the facts which they are called upon 
 to deal with, what is really there, but what they 
 have been taught to expect. This is seldom the 
 case with women of any ability. Their capacity of 
 '^ intuition^' preserves them from it. With equality 
 of experience and of general faculties, a woman 
 usually sees much more than a man of what is im- 
 mediately before her. Now this sensibility to the 
 present, is the main quality on which the capacity 
 for practice, as distinguished from theory, depends. 
 To discover general principles, belongs to the specu- 
 lative faculty : to discern and discriminate the par- 
 ticular cases in which they are and are not appli- 
 cable, constitutes practical talent : and for this, 
 women as they now are have a peculiar aptitude. 
 1 admit that there can be no good practice without 
 principles, and that the predominant place which 
 quickness of observation holds among a woman^s
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. Ill 
 
 faculties, makes her particularly apt to build over- 
 liasty generalizations upon her own observation ; 
 though at the same time no less ready in rectifying 
 those generalizations, as her observation takes a 
 wider range. But the corrective to this defect, is 
 •access to the experience of the human race ; general 
 knowledge — exactly the thing which education can 
 best supply. A woman^s mistakes are specifically 
 those of a clever self-educated man, who often sees 
 what men trained in routine do not see, but falls 
 into errors for want of knowing things which have 
 long been known. Of course he has acquired 
 much of the pre-existing knowledge, or he could 
 not have got on at all ; but what he knows of it 
 he has picked up in fragments and at random, as 
 women do. 
 
 But this! gravitation of women's minds to the 
 present,") to the real, to actual fact, while in its 
 exciusivencss it is a source of errors, is also a most 
 useful counteractive of the contrary error. The 
 principal and most characteristic aberration of spe- 
 culative minds as such, consists precisely in tlie 
 deficiency of this lively perception and ever- 
 present sense of objective fact. For want of this, 
 they often not only overlook the contradiction 
 which outward facts oppose to their theories, but 
 lose sight of the legitimate purpose of speculation.
 
 112 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 
 
 altogether, and let their speculative faculties go 
 astray into regions not peopled with real beings, 
 animate or inanimate, even idealized, but with 
 personified shadows created by the illusions of 
 metaphysics or by the mere entanglement of 
 words, and think these shadows the proper objects 
 of the highest, the most transcendant, philosophy. 
 Hardly anything can be of greater value to a man 
 of theory and speculation who employs himself 
 not in collecting materials of knowledge by obser- 
 A'ation, but in working them up by processes of 
 thought into comprehensive truths of science and 
 laws of conduct, than to carry on his speculations 
 in the companionship, and under the criticism, of 
 a really superior woman. There is nothing com- 
 parable to it for keeping his thoughts within the 
 limits of real things, and the actual facts of nature. 
 A woman seldom runs wild after an abstraction. 
 The habitual direction of her mind to dealing with 
 things as individuals rather than in groups, and 
 (what is closely connected with it) her more lively 
 interest in the present feelings of persons, which 
 makes her consider first of all, in anything which 
 claims to be applied to practice, in what manner 
 persons will be aff'ected by it — these two things 
 make her extremely unlikely to put ' faith in any 
 speculation which loses sight of individuals, and
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN". 113 
 
 tleals with things as if they existed for tlie benefit 
 of some imaginary entity, some mere creation of 
 the mind_, not resolvable into the feelings of living 
 beings. Women^s thoughts are thus as useful in 
 giving reality to those of thinking men, as men's 
 thoughts in giving width and largeness to those of 
 women. In depth, as distinguished from breadth, 
 I greatly doubt if even now, women, compared 
 with men, are at any disadvantage. 
 
 If the existing mental characteristics of women 
 are thus valuable even in aid of speculation, they 
 are still more important, when speculation has done 
 its work, for carrying out the results of speculation 
 into practice. For the reasons already given, women 
 are comparatively unlikely to fall into the common 
 error of men, that of sticking to their rules in a 
 case whose specialities either take it out of the class 
 to which the rules are applicable, or require a special 
 adaptation of them. Let us now consider another 
 of the admitted superiorities of clever women, 
 greater quickness of ajjprehension.! Is not this pre- 
 eminently a quality which fits a person for prac- 
 tice ? In action, everything continually depends 
 upon deciding promptly. In speculation, nothing- 
 does. A mere thinker can wait, can take time to 
 consider, can collect additional evidence ; he is not 
 obliged to complete his philosophy at once, lest the 
 
 I
 
 114 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 
 
 opportunity should go by. The power of drawing 
 the best conclusion possible from insufficient data is 
 not indeed useless in philosophy; the construction 
 of a provisional hypothesis consistent with all known 
 facts is often the needful basis for further inquiry. 
 But this faculty is rather serviceable in philosophy, 
 than the main qualification for it : and, for the 
 auxiliary as well as for the main operation, the 
 philosopher can allow himself any time he pleases. 
 He is in no need of the capacity of doing rapidly 
 what he does ; what he rather needs is patience, 
 to work on slowly until imperfect lights have 
 become perfect, and a conjecture has ripened into 
 a theorem. For those, on the contrary, whose 
 business is with the fugitive and perishable — with 
 individual facts, not kinds of facts — rapidity of 
 thought is a qualification nest only in importance 
 to the power of thought itself. He who has not 
 his faculties under immediate command, in the 
 contingencies of action, might as well not have 
 them at all. He may be fit to criticize, but he is 
 not fit to act. Now it is in this that women, and 
 the men who arc most like women, confessedly 
 excel. The other sort of man, however pre- 
 eminent may be his faculties, arrives slowly at 
 complete command of them : rapidity of judgment 
 and promptitude of judicious action, even in the
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 115 
 
 tilings he knows best, are the gradual and late 
 result of strenuous effort grown into habit. 
 
 It will be said, perhaps, that the greater nervous 
 susceptibility of women is a disqualification for 
 practice, in anything but domestic life, by render- 
 ing them mobile, changeable, too vehemently under 
 the influence of the moment, incapable of dogged 
 perseverance, unequal and uncertain in the power 
 of using their faculties. I think that these phrases 
 sum up the greater part of the objections commonly 
 made to the fitness of women for the higher class 
 of serious business. Much of all this is the mere 
 overflow of nervous energy run to waste, and would 
 cease when the energy was directed to a defi- 
 nite end.J Much is also the result of conscious or 
 unconscious cultivation ; as we see by the almost 
 total disappearance of " hysterics" and fainting-fits, 
 since they have gone out of fashion. Moreover, 
 when people are brought up, like many women of 
 the higher classes (though less so in our own 
 country than in any other) a kind of hothouse 
 plants, shielded from the wholesome vicissitudes of 
 air and temperature, and untrained in any of the 
 occupations and exercises which give stimulus and 
 development to the circulatory and muscular 
 system, while their nervous system, especially in its 
 emotional department, is kept in unnaturally active 
 
 I 3
 
 116 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 
 
 play ; it is no wonder if those of them who do not 
 die of consumption, grow up with constitutions 
 liable to derangement from slight causes, both in- 
 ternal and external, and without stamina to support 
 any task, physical or mental, requiring continuity 
 of effort. But women brought up to work for 
 their livelihood show none of these morbid charac- 
 teristics, unless indeed they are chained to an 
 excess of sedentary work in confined and unhealthy 
 rooms. Women who in their early years have 
 shared in the healthful physical education and bodily 
 freedom of their brothers, and who obtain a suffi- 
 ciency of pure air and exercise in after-life, very 
 rarely have any excessive susceptibility of nerves 
 which can disqualify them for active pursuits. 
 There is indeed a certain proportion of persons, 
 in both sexes, in whom an unusual degree of 
 nervous sensibility is constitutional, and of so 
 marked a character as to be the feature of their 
 organization which exercises the greatest influence 
 over the whole character of the vital phenomena. 
 This constitution, like other physical conformations, 
 is hereditary, and is transmitted to sons as well as 
 daughters ; but it is possible, and probable, that the 
 nervous temperament (as it is called) is inherited 
 by a greater number of women than of men. We 
 will assume this as a fact : and let me then ask>
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEX. 117 
 
 are men of nervous temperament found to be unfit 
 for the duties and pursuits usually followed by 
 men ? If not, why should women of the same tem- 
 perament be unfit for them ? The peculiarities of 
 the temperament are, no doubt, within certain 
 limits, an obstacle to success in some employments, 
 though an aid to it in others. , But when the occu- 
 pation is suitable to the temperament, and some- 
 times even when it is unsuitable, the most brilliant 
 examples of success are continually given by the 
 men of high nervous sensibility. They are dis- 
 tinguished in their practical manifestations chiefly 
 by this, that being susceptible of a higher degree 
 of excitement than those of another physical con- 
 stitution, their powers when excited differ more than 
 in the case of other people, from those shown in 
 their ordinary state : they are raised, as it were, 
 above themselves, and do things with ease which 
 they are wholly incapable of at other times. Bat 
 this lofty excitement is not, except in weak bodily 
 constitutions, a mere flash, which passes away im- 
 mediately, leaving no permanent traces, and incom- 
 patible with persistent and steady pursuit of an 
 object. It is the character of the nervous tem- 
 perament to be capable of sustained excitement, 
 holding out through long-continued efforts. It i 
 Trhat is meant by spirit. It is what makes the
 
 118 THE SUBJECTION" OF WOMEN. 
 
 liigli-brcd racehorse run without sLackeniug speed 
 till he drops down dead. It is what has enabled 
 so many delicate women to maintain the most sub- 
 lime constancy not only at the stake, but through 
 a long preliminary succession of mental and bodily 
 tortures. It is evident that people of this tem- 
 perament are particularly apt for what may be 
 called the executive department of the leadership 
 of mankind. They are the material of great 
 orators, great preachers, impressive diff'users of 
 moral influences. Their constitution might be 
 deemed less favourable to the qualities required 
 from a statesman in the cabinet, or from a judge. 
 It would be so, if the consequence necessarily fol- 
 lowed that because people are excitable they must 
 always be in a state of excitement. But this is 
 wholly a question of training. Strong feeling is 
 the instrument and element of strong self-control : 
 but it requires to be cultivated in that direction. 
 When it is, it forms not the heroes of impulse 
 only, but those also of self-conquest. History and 
 experience prove that the most passionate characters 
 are the most fanatically rigid in their feelings of 
 duty, when their passion has been trained to act 
 in that direction. The judge who gives a just 
 decision in a case where his feelings are intensely 
 interested on the other side, derives from that same
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 119 
 
 strength of feeling the determined sense of the 
 obligation of justice^ which enables him to achieve 
 this victory over himself. The capal)ility of that 
 lofty enthusiasm which takes the human being out 
 of his every-day character, reacts upon the daily 
 character itself. His aspirations and powers when 
 he is in this exceptional state, become the type 
 with which he compares, and by which he estimates, 
 his sentiments and proceedings at other times : and 
 his habitual purposes assume a character moulded 
 by and assimilated to the moments of lofty excite- 
 ment, although those, from the physical nature of 
 a human being, can only be transient. Expe- 
 rience of races, as well as of individuals, does not 
 show those of excitable temperament to be less fit, 
 on the average, either for speculation or practice, 
 than the more unexcitable. The French, and the 
 Italians, are undoubtedly by nature more nervously 
 excitable than the Teutonic races, and, compared at 
 least with the English, they have a much greater 
 habitual and daily emotional life : but have they 
 been less great in science, in public business, in 
 legal and judicial eminence, or in war? There is 
 abundant evidence that the Greeks were of old, as 
 their descendants and successors still are, one of 
 the most excitable of the races of mankind. It is 
 superfluous to ask, what among the achievements
 
 120 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 
 
 of men they did not excel in. The Romans, pro- 
 bably, as an equally southern people, had the same 
 original temperament : but the stern character of 
 their national discipline, Hke that of the Spartans, 
 made them an example of the opposite type of 
 national character ; the greater strenj^th of their 
 natural feeliugs being chiefly apparent in the in- 
 tensity which the same original temperament made 
 it possible to give to the artificial. If these cases 
 exemplify what a naturally excitable people may 
 be made, the Irish Celts afibrd one of the aptest 
 examples of what they are when left to themselves ; 
 (if those can be said to be left to themselves who 
 have been for centuries under the indirect in- 
 fluence of bad government, and the direct training 
 of a Catholic hierarchy and of a sincere belief in 
 the Catholic religion.) The Irish character must 
 be considered, therefore, as an unfavourable case : 
 yet, whenever the circumstances of the individual 
 have been at all favourable, what people have shown 
 greater capacity for the most varied and multi- 
 farious individual eminence ? Like the French 
 compared with the English, the Irish with the 
 Swiss, the Greeks or Italians compared with the 
 German races, so women compared with men may 
 be found, on the average, to do the same things 
 "with some variety in the particular kind of excel-
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 121 
 
 lence. But^ that they woukl do them fully as 
 well ou the \yhole^ if their education and culti- 
 vation were adapted to correcting instead of aggra- 
 vating the infirmities incident to their tcmpera- 
 mentj I see not the smallest reason to doubt. 
 
 Supposing it, however,, to be true that women^s 
 minds are by nature more mobile than those of 
 men, less capable of persisting long in the same 
 continuous effort, more fitted for dividing their 
 faculties among many things than for travelling in. 
 any one path to the highest point which can be 
 reached by it : this may be true of women as they 
 now are (though not without great and numerous 
 exceptions), and may account for their having re- 
 mained behind the highest order of men in pre- 
 cisely the things in which this absorption of the 
 whole mind in one set of ideas and occupations 
 may seem to be most requisite. Still, this dif- 
 ference is one which can only affect the kind of 
 excellence, not the excellence itself, or its practical 
 worth : and it remains to be shown whether this 
 exclusive working of a part of the mind, this ab- 
 sorption of the whole thinking faculty in a single 
 subject, and concentration of it on a single work, is 
 the normal and healthful condition of the human 
 faculties, even for speculative uses. I believe that 
 what is gained in special development by this
 
 122 THE SUBJECTIOX OF WOMEN. 
 
 ■concentration, is lost in the capacity of the mind 
 for the other purposes of life ; and even in abstract 
 thought, it is my decided opinion that the mind 
 does more by frequently returning to a difficult 
 problem, than by sticking to it without inter- 
 ruption. For the purposes, at all events, of prac- 
 tice, from its highest to its humblest departments, 
 the capacity of passing promptly from one subject 
 of consideration to another, without letting the 
 active spring of the intellect run down between the 
 two, is a power far more valuable ; and this power 
 women pre-eminently possess, by virtue of the 
 very mobility of which they are accused. They 
 perhaps have it from nature, but they certainly 
 have it by training and education; for nearly the 
 whole of the occupations of women consist in the 
 management of small but multitudinous details, on 
 each of which the mind cannot dwell even for a 
 minute, but must pass on to other things, and if 
 anything requires longer thought, must steal time 
 at odd moments for thinking of it. The capacity 
 indeed which women show for doing their thinking 
 in circumstances and at times which almost any 
 man would make an excuse to himself for not 
 attempting it, has often been noticed : and a 
 woman''s mind, though it may be occupied only 
 with small things, can hardly ever permit itself to
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 123 
 
 he vacant, as a man's so often is when not engaged 
 in what he ehooses to consider the business of his 
 life. The business of a woman's ordinary life is 
 things in general, and can as little cease to go on 
 as the world to go round. 
 
 But (it is said) there is anatomical evidence of 
 the superior mental capacity of men compared with 
 women : they have a larger brain. I reply, that in 
 the first place the fact itself is doubtful. It is by 
 no means established that the brain of a woman 
 is smaller than that of a man. If it is inferred 
 merely because a woman's bodily frame generally is 
 of less dimensions than a man's, this criterion would 
 lead to strange consequences. A tall and large- 
 boned man must on this showing be wonderfully 
 superior in intelligence to a small man, and an 
 elephant or a whale must prodigiously excel man- 
 kind. The size of the brain in human beings, ana- 
 tomists say, varies much less than the size of the 
 body, or even of the head, and the one cannot be at 
 -all inferred from the other. It is certain that some 
 women have as large a brain as any man. It is 
 within my knowledge that a man who had weighed 
 many human brains, said that the heaviest he knew 
 of, heavier even than Cuvier's (the heaviest pre- 
 viously recorded), was that of a woman. Next, 
 I must observe that the precise relation which
 
 124 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 
 
 exists between the brain and the intellectual 
 powers is not yet well understood, but is a subject 
 of great dispute. That there is a very close re- 
 lation we cannot doubt. The brain is certainly 
 the material organ of thought and feeling : and 
 (making abstraction of the great unsettled con- 
 troversy respecting the appropriation of different 
 parts of the brain to different mental faculties) I 
 admit that it would be an anomaly, and an excep- 
 tion to all we know of the general laws of life and 
 organization, if the size of the organ were wholly 
 indifferent to the function ; if no accession of power 
 were derived from the greater magnitude of the 
 instrument. But the exception and the anomaly 
 would be fully as great if the organ exercised in- 
 fluence by its magnitude only. In all the more 
 delicate operations of nature — of which those of 
 the animated creation are the most delicate, and 
 those of the nervous system by far the most 
 delicate of these — differences in the effect depend as 
 much on differences of quality in the physical agents, 
 as on their quantity : and if the quality of an in- 
 strument is to be tested by the nicety and delicacy 
 of the work it can do, the indications point to a 
 greater average fineness of quality in the brain 
 and nervous system of women than of men. Dis- 
 missing abstract difference of quality, a thing diffi-
 
 THE SUBJECTIOX OF WOMEX. 125 
 
 <;ult to verify^ the efficiency of an organ is known 
 to depend not solely on its size but on its activity : 
 tind of this we have an approximate measure in the 
 energy with which the blood circulates through it, 
 both the stimulus and the reparative force being 
 mainly dependent on the circulation. It would not 
 be surprising — it is indeed an hypothesis which 
 accords well with the differences actually observed 
 between the mental operations of the two sexes — 
 if men on the average should have the advantage 
 in the size of the brain, and women in activity of 
 cerebral circulation. The results which conjecture, 
 founded on analogy, would lead us to expect from 
 this difference of organization, would correspond to 
 •some of those which we most commonly see. In the 
 first place, the mental operations of men might bo 
 expected to be slower. They would neither be so 
 prompt as women in thinking, nor so quick to feel. 
 Large bodies take more time to get into full action. 
 On the other hand, when once got thoroughly into 
 play, men^s brain would bear more work. It would 
 be more persistent in the line first taken ; it would 
 liave more difficulty in changing from one mode of 
 action to another, but, in the one thing it was 
 doing, it could go on longer without loss of power 
 or sense of fatigue. And do we not find that 
 the thiiiss in which men most excel women are
 
 126 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEX. 
 
 those which require most plodding and long ham- 
 mering at a single thought, while women do best 
 what must be done rapidly ? A woman^s brain is 
 sooner fatigued, sooner exhausted ; but given the 
 degree of exhaustion, we should cxpeet to find that 
 it would recover itself sooner, I repeat that this 
 speculation is entirely hypothetical ; it pretends to 
 no more than to suggest a line of inquiry. I have 
 before repudiated the notion of its being yet cer- 
 tainly known that there is any natural difference 
 at all in the average strength or direction of the 
 mental capacities of the two sexes, much less what 
 that difference is. Nor is it possible that this 
 should be known, so long as the psychological laws 
 of the formation of character have been so little 
 studied, even in a general way, and in the parti- 
 cular case never scientifically applied at all; so 
 long as the most obvious external causes of diffe- 
 rence of character are habitually disregarded — left 
 unnoticed by the observer, and looked down upon 
 with a kind of supercilious contempt by the pre- 
 valent schools both of natural history and of 
 mental philosophy : who, whether they look for 
 the source of what mainly distinguishes human 
 beings from one another, in the Avorld of matter 
 or in that of spirit, agree in running down, 
 those who prefer to explain these differences by
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 127 
 
 the different relations of human beings to society 
 and life. 
 
 To so ridiculous an extent are the notions 
 formed of the nature of women, mere empirical gene- 
 ralizations, framed, without philosophy or analysis, 
 upon the first instances which present themselves, 
 that the popular idea of it is different in different 
 countries, according as the opinions and social cir- 
 cumstances of the country have given to the women 
 living in it any speciality of development or non- 
 development. An Oriental thinks that women are 
 by nature peculiarly voluptuous ; see the violent 
 abuse of them on this ground in Hindoo writings. 
 An Englishman usually thinks that they are by 
 nature cold. The sayings about women^s fickleness 
 are mostly of French origin ; from the famous 
 distich of Francis the First, upward and downward. 
 In England it is a common remark, how much 
 more constant women are than men. Inconstancy 
 has been longer reckoned discreditable to a woman, 
 in England than in France ; and Englishwomen 
 are besides, in their inmost nature, much more sub- 
 dued to opinion. It may be remarked by the 
 way, that Englishmen are in peculiarly unfavourable 
 circumstances for attempting to judge what is or is 
 not natural, not merely to women, but to men, or 
 to human beings altogether, at least if they have
 
 128 THE SUBJFXTION OF WOMEX. 
 
 only English experience to go upon : because there 
 is no place where human nature shows so little of 
 its original lineaments. Both in a good and a bad 
 sense, the English are farther from a state of 
 nature than any other modern people. They are^ 
 more than any other people, a product of civiliza- 
 tion and discipline. England is the country in 
 which social discipline has most succeeded, not so 
 much in conquering, as in suppressing, whatever is 
 liable to conflict with it. The English, more than 
 any other people, not only act but feel according 
 to rule. In other countries, the taught opinion, 
 or the requirement of society, may be the stronger 
 power, but the promptings of the individual nature 
 are always visible under it, and often resisting it : 
 rule may be stronger than nature, but nature is still 
 there. In England, rule has to a great degree 
 substituted itself for nature. The greater part of 
 life is carried on, not by following inclination under 
 the control of rule, but by having no inclination 
 but that of following a rule. Now this has its 
 good side doubtless, though it has also a wretchedly 
 bad one ; but it must render an Englishman pecu- 
 liarly ill-qualified to pass a judgment on the 
 original tendencies of human nature from his own 
 experience. The errors to which observers else- 
 where are liable on the subject, are of a difierent
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 129 
 
 character. An Euglisliman is ignorant respecting 
 human nature, a Frencliman is prejudiced. An 
 Englishman's errors are negative, a Frenchman's 
 positive. An Englishman fancies that things do 
 not exist, because he never sees them ; a Frencli- 
 man thinks they must always and necessarily exist, 
 because he does see them. An Englishman does 
 not know nature, because he has had no opportu- 
 nity of observing it ; a Frenchman generally knows 
 a great deal of it, but often mistakes it, because he 
 has only seen it sophisticated and distorted. For 
 the artificial state superinduced by society disguises 
 the natural tendencies of the thing which is the 
 subject of observation, in two different ways : by 
 extinguishing the nature, or by transforming it. In 
 the one case there is but a starved residuum of 
 nature remaining to be studied ; in the other case 
 there is much, but it may have expanded in any 
 direction rather than that in which it would spon- 
 taneously grow. 
 
 I have said that it cannot now be known how 
 much of the existing mental differences between 
 men and women is natural, and liow much artifi- 
 cial ; whether there are any natural differences at 
 all ; or, supposing all artificial causes of difierence 
 to be withdrawn, what natural character would be 
 revealed. I am not about to attempt what I havci
 
 130 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 
 
 pronounced impossible : but doubt does not forbid 
 conjecture, and where certainty is unattainable, 
 there may yet be the means of arriving at some 
 degree of probability. The first point, the origin 
 of the differences actually observed, is the one most 
 accessible to speculation ; and I shall attempt to 
 approach it, by the only path by which it can be 
 reached ; by tracing the mental consequences of 
 external influences. We cannot isolate a human 
 being from the circumstances of his condition, so 
 as to ascertain experimentally what he would have 
 been by nature ; but we can consider what he is, 
 and what his circumstances have been, and whether 
 the one would have been capable of producing the 
 other. 
 
 '^Let us take, then, the only marked case which 
 observation affords, of apparent inferiority of 
 women to men, if we except the merely physical 
 one of bodily strength. No production in philo- 
 sophy, science, or art, entitled to the first rank, 
 has been the work of a woman. Is there any 
 mode of accounting for this, without supposing that 
 women are naturally incapable of producing them ? 
 In the first place, we may fairly question whether 
 experience has afforded sufficient grounds for an 
 induction. It is scarcely three generations since 
 women, saving very rare exceptions, have begun to
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEX. 131 
 
 try their capacity in philosophy, science, or art. 
 It is only in the present generation that their 
 attempts have been at all numerous ; and they are 
 even now extremely few, everywhere but in 
 England and France. It is a relevant question, 
 whether a mind possessing the requisites of first- 
 rate eminence in speculation or creative art could 
 have been expected, on the mere calculation of 
 chances, to turn up during that lapse of time, 
 among the women whose tastes and personal posi- 
 tion admitted of their devoting themselves to these 
 pursuits. In all things which there has yet been 
 time for — in all but the very highest grades in the 
 scale of excellence, especially in the department in 
 which they have been longest engaged, literature 
 (both prose and poetry) — women have done quite 
 as much, have obtained fully as high prizes and as 
 many of them, as could be expected from the 
 length of time and the number of competitors. If 
 we go back to the earlier period when very few 
 women made the attempt, yet some of those few 
 made it with distinguished success. The Greeks 
 always accounted Sappho among their great poets ; 
 and we may well suppose that Myrtis, said to have 
 been the teacher of Pindar, and Corinna, who five 
 times bore away from him the prize of poetry, must 
 at least have had sufficient merit to admit of being
 
 132 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 
 
 compared with that great name. Aspasia did not 
 leave any philosophical writings ; but it is an ad- 
 mitted fact that Socrates resorted to her for in- 
 structionj and avowed himself to have obtained it. 
 
 If we consider the works of women in modern 
 times, and contrast them with those of men, either 
 in the literary or the artistic department, such infe- 
 riority as may be observed resolves itself essentially 
 into one thing : but that is a most material one ; 
 -•deficiency of originality. Not total deficiency ; for 
 every production of mind which is of any substan- 
 tive value, has an originality of its own — is a con- 
 ception of the mind itself, not a copy of something 
 else. Thoughts original, in the sense of being un- 
 borrowed — of being derived from the thinker's own 
 observations or intellectual processes — are abundant 
 in the writings of women. But they have not yet 
 produced any of those great and luminous new ideas 
 which form an era in thought, nor those fundamen- 
 tally new conceptions in art, which open a vista of 
 possible efi'ects not before thought of, and found a 
 new school. Their compositions are mostly grounded 
 on the existing fund of thought, and their creations 
 do not deviate widely from existing types. This is 
 the sort of inferiority which their works manifest : 
 for in point of execution, in the detailed application 
 of thought, and the perfection of style, there is no
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 133 
 
 inferiority. Our best novelists in point of com- 
 position, and of the management of detail, have 
 mostly been women ; and there is not in all modern 
 literature a more eloquent vehicle of thought than 
 the style of Madame de Stael, nor, as a specimen of 
 purely artistic excellence, anything superior to the 
 prose of Madame Sand, whose style acts upon the 
 nervous system like a symphony of Haydn or 
 Mozart. \^ High originality of conception is, as I 
 have said, what is chiefly wanting. And now to 
 examine if there is any manner in which this defi- 
 ciency can be accounted for. 
 
 Let us remember, then, so far as regards mere 
 thought, that during all that period in the world^s 
 existence, and in the progress of cultivation, in 
 which great and fruitful new truths could be 
 arrived at by mere force of genius, with little pre- 
 vious study and accumulation of knowledge — 
 daring all that time women did not concern them- 
 selves with speculation at all. From the days of 
 Hypatia to those of the Reformation, the illus- 
 trious Heloisa is almost the only woman to whom 
 any such achievement might have been possible ; 
 and we know not how great a capacity of specula- 
 tion in her may have been lost to mankind by the 
 misfortunes of her life. Never since any con- 
 siderable number of women have began to cul-
 
 134 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 
 
 tivate serious thouglit, has originality been pos- 
 sible on easy terms. Nearly all the tlioughts 
 "whieli can be readied by mere strength of ori- 
 ginal faculties, have long since been arrived at ; 
 and originality, in any high sense of the word, is 
 now scarcely ever attained but by minds which 
 have undergone elaborate discipline, and are 
 deeply versed in the results of previous thinking. 
 It is Mr. Maurice, I think, who has remarked on 
 the present age, that its most original thinkers are 
 those who have known most thoroughly what had 
 been thought by their predecessors : and this will 
 always henceforth be the case. Every fresh stone 
 in the edifice has now to be placed on the top of 
 so many others, that a long process of climbing, 
 and of carrying up materials, has to be gone 
 through by whoever aspires to take a share in the 
 present stage of the work. How many women are 
 there who have gone through any such process? 
 Mrs. Somerville, alone perhaps of women, knows 
 as much of mathematics as is now needful for 
 making any considerable mathematical discovery : 
 is it any proof of inferiority in women, that she 
 has not happened to be one of the two or three 
 persons who in her lifetime have associated their 
 names with some striking advancement of the 
 science ? Two women, since political economy has
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 185 
 
 been made a science^ have known enough of it to 
 write usefully on the subject : of how many of the 
 innumerable men who have Avritten on it during 
 the same time, is it possible with truth to say more ? 
 If no woman has hitherto been a great historian, 
 what woman has had the necessary erudition ? If 
 no woman is a great philologist, what woman has 
 studied Sanscrit and Slavonic, the Gothic of Ulphila 
 and the Persic of the Zendavesta? Even in prac- 
 tical matters we all know what is the value of the 
 originality of untaught geniuses. It means, invent- 
 ing over again in its rudimentary form something 
 already invented and improved upon by many 
 successive inventors. When women have had the 
 preparation which all men now require to be 
 eminently original, it will be time enough to 
 begin judging by experience of their capacity for 
 originality. 
 
 It no doubt often happens that a person, who 
 has not widely and accurately studied the thoughts 
 of others on a subject, has by natural sagacity a 
 happy intuition, which he can suggest, but cannot 
 prove, which yet when matured may be an impor- 
 tant addition to knowledge : but even then, no 
 justice can be done to it until some other person, 
 who does possess the previous acquirements, takes 
 it in hand, tests it, gives it a scientific or practical
 
 \S6 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 
 
 form, and fits it into its place among the existing^ 
 trutlis of philosophy or science. \Is it supposed that 
 such felicitous thoughts do not occur to women ? 
 They occur by hundreds to every woman of intel- 
 lect. But they are mostly lost, for want of a hus- 
 band or friend who has the other knowledge which 
 can enable him to estimate them properly and bring 
 them before the world : and even when they are 
 brought before it, they generally appear as his ideas, 
 not their real author^s. Who can tell how many 
 of the most original thoughts put forth by male 
 writers, belong to a woman by suggestion, to them- 
 selves only by verifying and working out ? If I 
 may judge by my own case, a very large proportion, 
 indeed. 
 
 If we turn from pure speculation to literature in 
 the narrow sense of the term, and the fine arts,, 
 there is a very obvious reason why women's litera- 
 ture is, in its general conception and in its main 
 features, an imitation of men's. Why is the Roman 
 literature, as critics proclaim to satiety, not original, 
 but an imitation of the Greek ? Simply because 
 the Greeks came first. If women lived in a diffe- 
 rent country from men, and had never read any of 
 their writings, they would have had a literature of 
 their own. As it is, they have not created one, 
 because they found a highly advanced literature
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 137 
 
 already created. If there had been no suspension 
 of the knowledge of antiquity^ or if the Renaissance 
 had occurred before the Gothic cathedrals were built, 
 they never would have been built. We see that, in 
 France and Italy, imitation of the ancient literature 
 stopped the original development even after it had 
 commenced. All women who write are pupils of 
 the great male writers. A painter^s early pictures, 
 even if he be a Raffaelle, are undistinguishable in 
 style from those of his master. Even a Mozart 
 does not display his powerful originality in his 
 earliest pieces. What years are to a gifted indi- 
 vidual, generations are to a mass. '\Jf women's 
 literature is destined to have a different collective 
 character from that of men, depending on any 
 difference of natural tendencies, much longer time 
 is necessary than has yet elapsed, before it can 
 emancipate itself from the influence of accepted 
 models, and guide itself by its own impulses. But 
 if, as I believe, there will not prove to be any natural 
 tendencies common to women, and distinguishing 
 their genius from that of men, yet every individual 
 writer among them has her individual tendencies, 
 which at present are still subdued by the influence 
 of precedent and example : and it will require genera- 
 tions more, before their individuality is sufficiently 
 developed to make head against that influence.
 
 1:38 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEX. 
 
 It is iu tlie fine arts^ pro[)erly so called, that the 
 prima facie evidence of infci'ior original powers in 
 women at first sight appears the strongest : since 
 opinion (it may he said) docs not exclude them 
 from these, but rather encourages them, and their 
 education, instead of passing over this department, 
 is in the affluent classes mainly composed of it. 
 Yet in this line of exertion they have fallen still 
 more short than in many others, of the highest 
 eminence attained by men. This shortcoming, 
 however, needs no other explanation than the 
 familiar fact, more universally true in the fine 
 arts than in anything else; the vast superiority of 
 professional persons over amateurs. Women in 
 the educated classes are almost universally taught 
 more or less of some branch or other of the fine 
 arts, but not that they may gain their living or 
 their social consequence by it. Women artists 
 are all amateurs. The exceptions are only of the 
 kind which confirm the general truth. Women 
 are taugLt music, but not for the purpose of com- 
 posing, only of executing it : and accordingly it is 
 only as composers, that men, in music, are superior 
 to women. The only one of the fine arts which 
 women do follow, to any extent, as a profession, 
 and an occupation for life, is the histrionic ; and in. 
 that they are confessedly equal, if not superior, to
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 139 
 
 men. To make the comparison fair, it should be 
 made between the productions of women in any 
 branch of art, and those of men not following it 
 as a profession. In musical composition, for ex- 
 ample, women surely have produced fully as good 
 things as have ever been produced by male 
 amateurs. There are now a few women, a very 
 few, who practise painting as a profession, and 
 these are already beginning to show quite as much 
 talent as could be expected. Even male painters 
 {pace Mr. Huskin) have not made any very re- 
 markable figure these last centuries, and it will 
 be long before they do so. The reason why the 
 old painters were so greatly superior to the modern, 
 is that a greatly superior class of men applied 
 themselves to the art. In the fourteenth and 
 fifteenth centuries the Italian painters were the 
 most accomplished men of their age. The greatest 
 of them were men of encyclopaedical acquirements 
 and powers, like the great men of Greece. But 
 in their times fine art was, to men's feelings and 
 conceptions, among the grandest things in which 
 a human being could excel; and by it men were 
 made, what only political or military distinction, 
 now makes them, the companions of sovereigns, and . 
 tlie equals of the highest nobility. In the present 
 age, men of ar)ything like similar calibre find some-
 
 140 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 
 
 thing more important to do, for their own fame and 
 the uses of the modern world, than painting : and 
 it is only now and then that a Reynolds or a Turner 
 (of whose relative rank among eminent men I do- 
 not pretend to an opinion) applies himself to that 
 art. Music belongs to a different order of things ; 
 it does not require the same general powers of 
 mind, but seems more dependant on a natural gift : 
 and it may be thought surprising that no one of 
 the great musical composers has been a woman. 
 But even this natural gift, to be made available for 
 great creations, requires study, and professional de- 
 votion to the pursuit. The only countries which 
 have produced first-rate composers, even of the male 
 sex, are Germany and Italy — countries in which,, 
 both in point of special and of general cultivation, 
 women have remained far behind France and 
 England, being generally (it may be said without 
 exaggeration) very little educated, and having 
 scarcely cultivated at all any of the higher faculties 
 of mind. And in those countries the men who are 
 acquainted with the principles of musical composi-^ 
 tion must be counted by hundreds, or more pro- 
 bably by thousands, the women barely by scores : 
 so that here again, on the doctrine of averages,, 
 we cannot reasonably expect to see more than 
 one eminent woman to fifty eminent men; and the
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 141 
 
 last three centuries have not produced fifty eminent 
 male composers either in Germany or in Italy. 
 
 There are other reasons, besides those which we 
 have now given, that help to explain why women 
 remain behind men, even in the pursuits which arc 
 open to both. For one thing, very few women 
 have time for them. This may seem a paradox ; 
 it is an undoubted social fact. The time and 
 thoughts of every woman have to satisfy great 
 previous demands on them for things practical. 
 There is, first, the superintendence of the family 
 and the domestic expenditure, which occupies at 
 least one woman in every family, generally the one 
 of mature years and acquired experience ; unless 
 the family is so rich as to admit of delegating that 
 task to hired agency, and submitting to all the 
 waste and malversation inseparable from that mode 
 of conducting it. The superintendence of a house- 
 hold, even when not in other respects laborious, is 
 extremely onerous to the thoughts ; it requires in- 
 cessant vigilance, an eye which no detail escapes, 
 and presents questions for consideration and solu- 
 tion, foreseen and unforeseen, at every hour of the 
 ■day, from which the person responsible for tliem 
 can hardly ever shake herself free. If a woman is 
 of a rank and circumstances which relieve her in a 
 measure from these cares, she has still devolving on
 
 142 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEX. 
 
 her the management for the whole family of its in- 
 tercourse with others — of what is called society, and 
 the less the call made on her by the former duty, 
 the greater is always the development of the latter : 
 the dinner parties, concerts, evening parties, morn- 
 ing visits, letter writing, and all that goes with them. 
 fAll this is over and above the engrossing duty 
 which society imposes exclusively on women, of 
 making themselves charming. A clever woman of 
 the higher ranks finds nearly a sufficient employ- 
 ment of her talents in cultivating the graces of 
 manner and the arts of conversation. To look only 
 at the outward side of the subject : the great and 
 continual exercise of thought which all women who 
 attach any value to dressing well (I do not mean 
 expensively, but with taste, and perception of 
 natural and of artificial convenance) must bestow 
 upon their own dress, perhaps also upon that of 
 their daughters, would alone go a great way towards 
 achieving respectable results in art, or science, or 
 literature, and does actually exhaust much of the 
 time and mental power they might have to spare 
 for either.* If it were possible that all this number 
 
 * " It appears to be the same right turn of mind which enables 
 a roan to acquire the truth, or the just idea of what is right, in the 
 ornaments, as in tlie more stable principles of art. It has still the 
 same centre of perfection, though it is the centre of a smaller circle. 
 — To illustrate this by the fashion of dress, in which there is allowed 
 to be a good or bad taste. The component parts of dress are conti-
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEX. 143 
 
 of little practical interests (which are made great to 
 them) should leave them either much leisure, or 
 much energy and freedom of mind, to be devoted 
 to art or speculation, they must have a much 
 greater original supply of active faculty than the 
 vast majority of men. But this is not all. Inde- 
 pendently of the regular offices of life which de- 
 volve upon a woman, she is expected to have her 
 time and faculties always at the disposal of every- 
 body. If a man has not a profession to exempt 
 him from such demands, still, if he has a pursuit, 
 he offends nobody by devoting his time to it ; occu- 
 pation is received as a valid excuse for his not 
 answering to every casual demand which may be 
 made on him. Are a woman^s occupations, espe- 
 cially her chosen and voluntary ones, ever regarded 
 as excusing her from any of what are termed the 
 calls of society ? Scarcely are her most necessary 
 and recognised duties allowed as an exemption. It 
 requires an illness in the family, or something else 
 out of the common way, to entitle her to give her 
 own business the precedence over other people's 
 
 Dually changing from great to little, from short to long ; but the 
 general form still remains : it is still the same general dress which is 
 comparatively fixed, though oa a very slender foundation ; but it is 
 on this which fashion must rest. He who invents with the most 
 success, or dresses in the best taste, would probably, from the same 
 sagacity employed to greater purposes, have discovered equal skill, 
 or have formed the same correct taste, in the highest labours of art," 
 — Sir Joshua Reynolds' Discourses, Disc. vii.
 
 144 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN". 
 
 amuscmeut. She must always be at the beck and 
 call of somebody, generally of everybody. If she 
 has a study or a pursuit, she must snatch any short 
 interval which accidentally occurs to be employed 
 in it. A celebrated woman, in a work which I 
 liope will some day be published, remarks truly 
 that everything a woman does is done at odd times. 
 Is it wonderful, then, if she does not attain the 
 highest eminence in things which require con- 
 secutive attention, and the concentration on them 
 of the chief interest of life ? Such is philosophy, 
 and such, above all, is art, in which, besides the 
 devotion of the thoughts and feelings, the hand 
 also must be kept in constant exercise to attain 
 high skill. 
 
 There is another consideration to be added to all 
 these. In the various arts and intellectual occu- 
 pations, there is a degree of proficiency sufficient 
 for living by it, and there is a higher degree on 
 which depend the great productions which immor- 
 talize a name. To the attainment of the former, 
 there are adequate motives in the case of all who 
 follow the pursuit professionally : the other is 
 hardly ever attained where there is not, or where 
 there has not been at some period of life, an ardent 
 desire of celebrity. Nothing less is commonly a 
 sufficient stimulus to undergo the long and patient
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 145 
 
 drudgery, -which, in the case even of the greatest 
 natural gifts, is absolutely required for great emi- 
 nence in pursuits in which we already possess so 
 niauy splendid memorials of the highest genius. 
 Now, whether the cause be natural or artificial, 
 women seldom have this eagerness for fame. ■ Their 
 ambition is generally confined within narrower 
 bounds. The influence they seek is over those 
 who immediately surround them. Their desire is to 
 be liked, loved, or admired, by those whom they see 
 with their eyes : and the proficiency in knowledge, 
 arts, and accomplishments, which is sufficient for 
 that, almost always contents them. This is a trait 
 of character which cannot be left out of the account 
 in judging of women as they are. I do not at all 
 believe that it is inherent in women. It is only 
 the natural result of their circumstances. The 
 love of fame in men is encouraged by education 
 and opinion : to " scorn delights and live laborious 
 days^"" for its sake, is accounted the part of " noble 
 minds,'^ even if spoken of as their " last infirmity," 
 and is stimulated by the access which fame gives to 
 all objects of ambition, including even the favour 
 of women ; while to women themselves all these 
 objects are closed, and the desire of fame itself 
 considered daring and unfeminine. Besides, how 
 could it be that a woman's interests should not be 
 
 L
 
 14G THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 
 
 all concentrated upon the impressions made on those 
 who come into her daily life, when society has or- 
 dained that all her duties should be to them, and 
 has contrived that all her comforts should depend 
 on them ? The natural desire of consideration from 
 our fellow- creatures is as strong in a woman as in 
 a man ; but society has so ordered things that 
 public consideration is, in all ordinary cases, only 
 attainable by her through the consideration of her 
 husband or of her male relations, while her private 
 consideration is forfeited by making herself indi- 
 vidually prominent, or appearing in any other cha- 
 racter than that of an appendage to men. /Whoever 
 is in the least capable of estimating the influence 
 on the mind of the entire domestic and social posi- 
 tion and the whole habit of a life, must easily re- 
 cognise in that influence a complete explanation of 
 nearly all the apparent diflerences between women 
 and men, including the whole of those which imply 
 any inferiority.^ 
 
 S4a__formoral diflQsrg.nces, considered as dis- 
 tinguished from intellectual, the distinction com- 
 monly drawn is to the advantage of women. They 
 are declared to be better than men ; an empty 
 compliment, which must provoke a bitter smile 
 from every woman of spirit, since there is no other 
 situation in life in which it is the established order.
 
 THE SUBJECTIOX OF WOMEN. 147 
 
 aucl considered quite natural aud suitable, that the 
 better sliould obey the worse. If this piece of idle 
 talk is good for anything, it is only as an admission 
 by men, of the corrupting influence of power ; for 
 that is certainly the only truth Avliieh the fact, if it 
 be a fact, either proves or illustrates. And it is 
 true that servitude, except when it actually bru- 
 talizes, though corrupting to both, is less so to 
 the slaves than to the slave-masters. It is whole- 
 -somer for the moral nature to be restrained, even 
 by arbitrary power, than to be allowed to exercise 
 arbitrary power without restraint. Women, it is 
 said, seldom er fall under the penal law — contri- 
 bute a much smaller number of offenders to the 
 criminal calendar, than men. I doubt not that 
 the same thing may be said, with the same truth, 
 of negro slaves. Those who are under the control 
 of others cannot often commit crimes, unless at the 
 command and for the purposes of their masters. 
 I do not know a more signal instance of the blind- 
 ness with which the world, including the herd of 
 studious men, ignore and pass over all the influences 
 of social circumstances, than their silly depreciation 
 of the intellectual, and silly panegyrics on the moral, 
 nature of women. 
 
 The complimentary dictum about women's supe- 
 rior moral goodness may be allowed to pair off with 
 
 I. 2
 
 148 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN". 
 
 the disparaging one respecting their greater liability 
 to moral bias. Women, -we are told, are not capable 
 of resisting their personal partialities : their judg- 
 ment in grave affairs is warped by their sympathies 
 and antipathies. Assuming it to be so, it is still to be 
 proved that women arc oftcner misled by their per- 
 sonal feelings than men by their personal interests? 
 Thp: chief difterence would seem in that case to be^ 
 that men are led from the course of duty and the 
 public interest by their regard for themselves, women 
 (not being allowed to have private interests of their 
 own) by their regard for somebody else. It is also 
 to be considered, that all the education which women 
 receive from society inculcates on them the feeling 
 that the individuals connected with them are the 
 only ones to whom they owe any duty — the- only 
 ones whose interest they are called upon to care for ; 
 while, as far as education is concerned, they are left 
 strangers even to the elementary ideas which are 
 presupposed in any intelligent regard for larger in- 
 terests or higher moral objects. The complaint 
 against them resolves itself merely into this, that 
 they fulfil only too faithfully the sole duty which 
 they are taught, and almost the only one which 
 they are permitted to practise. 
 
 The concessions of the privileged to the un- 
 privileged are so seldom brought about by any
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN". 149 
 
 better motive tliau the power of the unprivileged 
 to extort them, that any arguments against the 
 prerogative of sex are likely to be little attended to 
 by the generality, as long as they are able to say to 
 themselves that women do not complain of it. That 
 faet certainly enables men to retain the unjust pri- 
 vilege some time longer; but does not render it 
 less unjust. Exactly the same thing may be said 
 of the women in the harem of an Oriental : they 
 do not complain of not being allowed the freedom 
 •of European women. They think our women in- 
 sufferably bold and unfeminine. How rarely it is 
 that even men complain of the general order of 
 society; and how much rarer still would such com- 
 plaint be, if they did not know of any different 
 order existing anywhere else. Women do not com- 
 plain of the general lot of women; or rather they 
 do, for plaintive elegies on it are very common 
 in the writings of women, and were still more so 
 as long as the lamentations could not be sus- 
 pected of having any practical object. Their com- 
 plaints are like the complaints which men make of 
 the general unsatisfactoriness of human life; they 
 are not meant to imply blame, or to plead for any 
 change. But though women do not complain of 
 the power of husbands, each complains of her own 
 husband, or of the husbands of her friends. It is
 
 160 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN". 
 
 the same in all otlier cases of servitude, at least in 
 the commencement of the emancipatory movement. 
 The serfs did not at first complain of the power of 
 their lords, but only of their tyranny. The 
 Commons began by claiming a few municipal pri- 
 vileges ; they next asked an exemption for them- 
 selves from being taxed without their own consent ; 
 but they would at that time have thought it a great 
 presumption to claim any share in the king's sove- 
 reign authority. The case of women is now the 
 only case in which to rebel against established rules 
 is still looked upon with the same eyes as was for- 
 merly a subject^s claim to the right of rebelling 
 against his king. A woman who joins in any move- 
 ment which her husband disapproves, makes herself 
 a martyi', without even being able to be an apostle, 
 for the husband can legally put a stop to her 
 apostleship. -Women cannot be expected to devote 
 themselves to the emancipation of women, until 
 men in considerable number are prepared to join 
 with them in the undertaking.
 
 TIIK SUBJECTION OF WOI^IEN. 151 
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 rilHERE remains a question, not of less im- 
 -*- portance than those already discussed, and 
 which will be asked the most importunately by 
 those opponents whose conviction is somewhat 
 shaken on the main point. What good are we to ex- 
 pect from the changes proposed in our customs and 
 institutions? Would mankind be at all better off if 
 women were free ? If not, why disturb their minds, 
 and attempt to make a social revolution in the 
 name of an abstract right ? 
 
 It is hardly to be expected that this question will 
 be asked in respect to the change proposed in the 
 condition of women in marriage. The sufferings, 
 immoralities, evils of all sorts, produced in innu- 
 merable cases by the subjection of individual women 
 to individual men, are far too terrible to be over- 
 looked. Unthinking or uncandid persons, counting 
 those cases alone which are extreme, or which 
 attain publicity, may say that the evils are excep- 
 tional ; but no one can be blind to their existence, 
 nor, in many cases, to their intensity. And it is
 
 152 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 
 
 perfectly obvious that the abuse of the power 
 cannot be very much cheeked while the power re- 
 iiiaius. It is a power given, or oH'ercdj not to good 
 men, or to decently respectable men, but to all men ; 
 the most brutal, and the most criminal. There is 
 no check but that of opinion, and such men are in 
 general within the reach of no opinion but that of 
 men like themselves. If such men did not brutally 
 tyrannize over the one human being whom the law 
 compels to bear everything from them, society must 
 already have reached a paradisiacal state. There 
 could be no need any longer of laws to curb men's 
 vicious jjropensities. Astrsea must not only have 
 returned to earth, but the heart of the worst man 
 must have become her temple. The law of servi- 
 tude in marriage is a monstrous contradiction to all 
 the principles of the modern world, and to all the 
 experience through which those principles have been 
 slowly and painfully worked out. It is the sole case, 
 now that negro slavery has been abolished, in which 
 a human being in the plenitude of every faculty is 
 delivered up to the tender mercies of another human 
 being, in the hope forsooth that this other will use 
 the power solely for the good of the person sub- 
 jected to it. Marriage is the only actual bondage 
 known to our law. There remain no legal slaves, 
 except the mistress of every house.
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 153 
 
 It is not, therefore, on this part of the subject, 
 that the question is likely to be asked, Cai bono? 
 We may be told that the evil would outweigh the 
 good, but the reality of the good admits of no 
 dispute. In regard, howevei', to the larger question, 
 the removal of women^s disabilities — their recogni- 
 tion as the equals of men in all that belongs to 
 citizenship — the opening to them of all honourable 
 €mployments, and of the training and education 
 which qualifies for those employments — there are 
 many persons for whom it is not enough that the 
 inequality has no just or legitimate defence ; they 
 require to be told what express advantage would be 
 obtained by abolishing it. 
 
 To which let me first answer, the advantage of 
 having the most universal and pervad ing , of all 
 human relations regulated _by.. justice instead of 
 injustice. The vast amount of this gain to human 
 nature, it is hardly possible, by any explanation or 
 illustration, to place in a stronger light than it is 
 placed by the bare statement, to any one who 
 -attaches a moral meaning to words. All the selfish 
 propensities, the self- worship, the unjust self-pre- 
 ference, which exist among mankind, have their 
 source and root in, and derive their principal 
 nourishment from, the present constitution of the 
 -relation between men and women. Think what it
 
 154 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEX. 
 
 is to a boy^ to grow up to manhood in the belief 
 that without any merit or any exertion of his own, 
 though he may be the most frivolous and empty or 
 the most ignorant and stolid of mankind, by the 
 mere fact of being born a male he is by right the 
 superior of all and every one of an entire half of 
 the human race : including probably some whose 
 real superiority to himself he has daily or hourly 
 occasion to feel; but even if in his whole conduct 
 he habitually follows a woman^s guidance, still, if 
 he is a fool, she thinks that of course she is not, 
 and cannot be, equal in ability and judgment to 
 himself; and if he is not a fool, he does worse — he 
 sees that she is superior to him, and believes that, 
 notwithstanding her superiority, he is entitled to 
 command and she is bound to obey. What must 
 be the effect on his character, of this lesson ? And 
 men of the cultivated classes are often not aware 
 how deeply it sinks into the immense majority of 
 male minds. For, among right-feeling and well- 
 bred people, the inequality is kept as much as pos- 
 sible out of sight ; above all, out of sight of the 
 children. As much obedience is required from boys 
 to their mother as to their father : they are not per- 
 mitted to domineer over their sisters, nor are they 
 accustomed to see these postponed to them, but the 
 contrary ; the compensations of the chivalrous feel-
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WO.AIEN". 155 
 
 ing being made prominent^ while the servitude which 
 requires them is kept in the background. "Well 
 brought-np youths in the higher classes thus often 
 escape the bad influences of the situation in their 
 early years, and only experience them when, arrived 
 at manhood, they fall under the dominion of facts 
 as they really exist. Such people are little aware, 
 when a boy is differently brought up, how early 
 the notion of his inherent superiority to a girl 
 arises in his mind ; how it grows with his growth 
 and strengthens with his strength ; how it is inocu- 
 lated by one schoolboy upon another ; how early 
 the youth thinks himself superior to his mother, 
 owing her perhaps forbearance, but no real respect ; 
 and how sublime and sultan-like a sense of supe- 
 riority he feels, above all, over the woman whom 
 he honours by admitting her to a partnership of 
 his life. Is it imagined that all this does not per- 
 vert the whole manner of existence of the man, both 
 as an individual and as a social being ? It is an 
 exact parallel to the feeling of a hereditary king 
 that he is excellent above others by being born a 
 king, or a noble by being born a noble. The rela- 
 tion between husband and wife is very like that 
 between lord and vassal, except that the wife is 
 held to more unlimited obedience than the vassal 
 was. However the vassal's character may have
 
 15G THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEX. 
 
 been affected, for better and for worse^ by his sub- 
 ordiuation, who can help seeing that the lord's was 
 affected greatly for the worse ? whether he was 
 led to believe that his vassals were really superior 
 to himself, or to feel that he was placed in com- 
 mand over people as good as himself, for no merits 
 or labours of his own, but merely for having, as 
 Figaro says, taken the trouble to be born. The 
 self-worship of the monarch, or of the feudal superior, 
 is matched by the self- worship of the male. Human, 
 beings do not grow up from childhood in the pos- 
 session of unearned distinctions, without pluming 
 themselves upon them. Those whom privileges not 
 acquired by their merit, and which they feel to be 
 disproportioned to it, inspire with additional humility, 
 are always the few, and the best few. The rest are 
 only inspired with pride, and the worst sort of pride, 
 that which values itself upon accidental advantages^ 
 not of its own achieving. Above all, when the 
 feeling of being raised above the whole of the other 
 sex is combined with personal authority over one 
 individual among them ; the situation, if a school 
 of conscientious and aileetionate forbearance to those 
 whose strongest points of character are conscience 
 and affection, is to men of another quality a regu- 
 larly constituted Academy or Gymnasium for train- 
 ing them in arrogance and overbearingness ; which
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 157 
 
 vices, if curbed by tlic certainty of resistauce in 
 their intercourse with other men, their equals, break 
 out towards all who are in a position to be obliged 
 to tolerate them, and often revenge themselves upon 
 the unfortunate wife for the involuntary restraint 
 which they are obliged to submit to elsewhere. 
 
 The example afforded, and the education given 
 to the sentiments, by laying the foundation of 
 domestic existence upon a relation contradictory to 
 the first principles of social justice, must, from the 
 very nature of man, have a perverting influence of 
 such magnitude, that it is hardly possible with our 
 present experience to raise our imaginations to the 
 conception of so great a change for the better as 
 would be made by its removal. All that education 
 and civilization are doing to efface the influences on 
 character of the law of force, and replace them by 
 those of justice, remains merely on the surface, as 
 long as the citadel of the enemy is not attacked. 
 The principle of the modern movement in morals 
 and politics, is that conduct, and conduct alone, 
 entitles to respect : that not what men are, but 
 what they do, constitutes their claim to deference ; 
 that, above all, merit, and not birth, is the only 
 rightful claim to power and authority. If no 
 authority, not in its nature temporary, were allowed 
 to one human being over another, society would not
 
 158 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 
 
 "be employed iu building up propensities with one 
 hand which it has to eurb with the other. The 
 child would really^, for the first time in man^s exis- 
 tence on earth, be trained in the way he should go, 
 and Avhcn he was old there would be a chance that 
 he would not depart from it. But so long as the 
 right of the strong to power over the weak rules in 
 the very heart of society, the attempt to make the 
 equal right of the weak the principle of its outward 
 actions will always be an uphill struggle ; for the 
 law of justice, which is also that of Christianity, will 
 never get possession of men^s inmost sentiments ; 
 they will be working against it, even when bending 
 to it. 
 
 The second benefit to be expected from giving 
 to women the free use of their faculties, by leaving 
 them the free choice of their employments, and 
 opening to them the same field of occupation and 
 the same prizes and encouragements as to other 
 hiiman beings, would be that of doubling the mass 
 of mental faculties available for the higher service 
 of humanity. Where there is now one person quali- 
 fied to benefit mankind and promote the general 
 improvement, as a public teacher, or an adminis- 
 trator of some branch of public or social affairs, 
 there would then be a chance of two. Mental 
 superiority of any kind is at present everywhere so
 
 THE SUBJECTIOX OF WOMEN. 159 
 
 much below the demand; there is such a deficiency 
 ■of persons competent to do excellently anything 
 which it requires any considerable amount of ability 
 to do ; that the loss to the world, by refusing to 
 make use of one-half of the whole quantity of talent 
 it possesses, is extremely serious. It is true that 
 this amount of mental power is not totally lost. 
 Much of it is employed, and would in any case be 
 employed, in domestic management, and in the few 
 other occupations open to Avomen ; and from the re- 
 mainder indirect benefit is in many individual cases 
 obtained, through the personal influence of indivi- 
 dual women over individual men. But these bene- 
 fits are partial; their range is extremely circum- 
 scribed ; and if they must be admitted, on the one 
 hand, as a deduction from the amount of fresh 
 social power that would be acquired by giving free- 
 dom to one-half of the whole sum of human intel- 
 lect, there must be added, on the other, the benefit 
 of the stimulus that would be given to the intellect 
 of men by the comj)etition ; or (to use a more true 
 expression) by the necessity that would be imposed 
 on them of deserving precedency before they could 
 expect to obtain it. 
 
 This great accession to the intellectual power of 
 the species, and to the amount of intellect available 
 for the good management of its affairs, would be
 
 inO THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEX. 
 
 obtained, partly, tlirough the better and more com- 
 plete intellectual education of women, which would 
 then improve pari passu with that of men. Women 
 in general would be brought up equally capable of 
 understanding business, public affairs, and the higher 
 matters of speculation, with men in the same class 
 of society ; and the select few of the one as well as 
 of the other sex, who were qualified not only to 
 comprehend what is done or thought by others, but 
 to think or do something considerable themselves, 
 would meet with the same facilities for improving 
 and training their capacities in the one sex as in the 
 other. In this way, the widening of the sphere of 
 action for women would operate for good, by raising 
 their education to the level of that of men, and 
 making the one participate in all improvements 
 made in the other. But independently of this, the 
 mere breaking down of the barrier would of itself 
 have an educational virtue of the highest worth. 
 The mere getting rid of the idea that all the wider 
 subjects of thought and action, all the things which 
 are of general and not solely of private interest, 
 are men's business, from Avhich women are to be 
 warned off — positively interdicted from most of it, 
 coldly tolerated in the little which is allowed them 
 — the mere consciousness a woman would then have 
 of being a human being like any other, entitled to
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. IGl 
 
 choose her pursuits, urged or iuvitcd hy the same 
 inducements as any one else to interest herself in 
 "whatever is interesting to human beings, entitled to 
 exert the share of influence on all human concerns 
 which belongs to an individual opinion, whether 
 «he attempted actual participation in them or not 
 — this alone would effect an immense expansion of 
 the faculties of women, as well as enlargement of 
 the range of their moral sentiments. 
 
 Besides the addition to the amount of individual 
 talent available for the conduct of human affairs, 
 which certainly are not at present so abundantly 
 provided in that respect that they can afford to 
 dispense with one-half of what nature proffers ; the 
 opinion of women would then possess a more bene- 
 ficial, rather than a greater, influence upon the 
 general mass of human belief and sentiment. I say 
 a more beneficial, rather than a greater influence ; 
 for the influence of women over the general tone of 
 opinion has always, or at least from the earliest 
 known period, been very considerable. The in- 
 fluence of mothers on the early character of their 
 sons, and the desire of young men to recommend 
 themselves to young women, have in all recorded 
 times been important agencies in the formation of 
 character, and have determined some of the chief 
 steps in the progress of civilization. Even in. 
 
 M
 
 1G2 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 
 
 the Homeric age, a'l^ojc towards the TptoaBaQ 
 iXKeanrtirXovg is an acknowledged and powerful 
 motive of action in the great Hector. The moral 
 influence of women has had two modes of opera- 
 tion. (First, it has been a softening influence. 
 Those who were most liable to be the victims of 
 violence, have naturally tended as much as they 
 could towards limiting its sphere and mitigating 
 its excesses. Those who were not taught to fight, 
 have naturally inclined in favour of any other mode 
 of settling differences rather than that of fighting. 
 In general, those who have been the greatest suf- 
 ferers by the indulgence of selfish passion, have 
 been the most earnest supporters of any moral law 
 which oflfered a means of bridling passion. Women 
 were powerfully instrumental in inducing the 
 northern conquerors to adopt the creed of Chris- 
 tianity, a creed so much more favourable to women 
 than any that preceded it. The conversion of the 
 Anglo-Saxons and of the Franks may be said to 
 have been begun by the wives of Ethelbert and 
 Clovis. The other mode in which the efifect of 
 women^s opinion has been conspicuous, is by giving 
 a powerful stimulus to those qualities in men,' 
 which, not being themselves trained in, it was 
 necessary for them that they should find in their 
 protectors. Courage, and the military virtues gene-
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEIs\ 163 
 
 rally, have at all times been greatly indebted to 
 the desire which men felt of being admired by 
 women : and the stimulus reaches far beyond this 
 one class of eminent qualities, since, by a very natural 
 effect of their position, the best passport to the 
 admiration and favour of women has always been to 
 be thought highly of by men. [ From the combi- 
 nation of the two kinds of moral influence thus exer- 
 cised by women, arose the spirit of chivalry : the 
 peculiarity of which is, to aim at combining the 
 highest standard of the warlike qualities with the 
 cultivation of a totally different class of virtues — 
 those of gentleness, generosity, and self-abnegation, 
 towards the non-military and defenceless classes 
 generally, and a special submission and worship 
 directed towards women ; who were distinguished 
 from the other defenceless classes by the high re- 
 wards which they had it in their power voluntarily 
 to bestow on those who endeavoured to earn their 
 favour, instead of extorting their subjection. Though 
 the practice of chivalry fell even more sadly short 
 of its theoretic standard than practice generally 
 falls below theory, it remains one of the most pre- | 
 cious monuments of the moral history of our race ; 
 as a remarkable instance of a concerted and orga- 
 nized attempt by a most disorganized and distracted 
 society, to raise up and carry into practice a moral 
 
 M 2
 
 104 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN, 
 
 ideal greatly in advance of its social condition and 
 institutions ; so much so as to have been com- 
 pletely frustrated in the main object, yet never 
 entirely inefficacious, and Avhich has left a most sen- 
 sible, and for the most part a highly valuable impress 
 on the ideas and feelings of all subsequent times. 
 
 The chivalrous ideal is the acme of the influence 
 of women's sentiments on the moral cultivation of 
 mankind : and if women arc to remain in their 
 subordinate situation, it were greatly to be lamented 
 that the chivalrous standard should have passed 
 away, for it is the only one at all capable of miti- 
 gating the demoralizing influences of that position. 
 But the changes in the general state of the species 
 rendered inevitable the substitution of a totally 
 different ideal of morality for the chivalrous one. 
 Chivalry was the attempt to infuse moral elements 
 into a state of society in which everything depended 
 for good or evil on individual prowess, under the 
 softening influences of individual delicacy and gene- 
 rosity. In modern societies, all things, even in the 
 military department of aflairs, are decided, not by 
 individual effort, but by the combined operations of 
 numbers ; while the main occupation of society has 
 changed from fighting to business, from military to 
 industrial life. The exigencies of the new life are 
 no more exclusive of the virtues of generosity than.
 
 THE SUBJECTION" OF WOMEN. 1G5 
 
 those of tlic old, but it no longer entirely depends 
 on them. The main foundations of the moral life 
 of modern times must be justice and prudence ; the 
 respect of each for the rights of every other, and 
 the ability of each to take care of himself. Chivalry 
 left without legal check all forms of wrong which 
 reigned unpunished throughout society ; it only 
 encouraged a few to do right in preference to 
 wrong, by the direction it gave to the instruments 
 of praise and admiration. But the real dependence 
 of morality must always be upon its penal sanctions 
 — its power to deter from evil. The security of 
 society cannot rest on merely rendering honour 
 to right, a motive so comparatively weak in all but 
 a few, and which on very many does not operate at 
 all. Modern society is able to repress wrong 
 through all departments of life, by a fit exertion 
 of tlie superior strength which civilization has given 
 it, and thus to render the existence of the weaker 
 members of society (no longer defenceless but 
 protected by law) tolerable to them, without 
 reliance on the chivalrous feelings of those who 
 are in a position to tyrannize. The beauties 
 and graces of the chivalrous character are still 
 what they were, but the rights of the weak, 
 and the general comfort of human life, now rest 
 on a far surer and steadier support ; or rather.
 
 166 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 
 
 they do so iu every relation of life except the 
 conjugal. 
 
 \ At present the moral influence of women is no 
 less real, but it is no longer of so marked and 
 definite a character : it has more nearly merged in 
 the general influence of public opinion. Both 
 through the contagion of sympathy, and through 
 the desire of men to shine in the eyes of women, 
 their feelings have great effect in keeping alive 
 what remains of the chivalrous ideal — in fostering 
 the sentiments and continuing the traditions of 
 spirit and generosity In these points of character, 
 their standard is higher than that of men ; in the 
 quality of justice, somewhat lower. As regards 
 the relations of private life it may be said gene- 
 rally, that their influence is, on the whole, encou- 
 raging to the softer virtues, discouraging to the 
 sterner : though the statement must be taken with 
 all the modifications dependent on individual cha- 
 racter. In the chief of the greater trials to which 
 virtue is subject in the concerns of life — the con- 
 flict between interest and principle — the tendency 
 of women^s influence is of a very mixed character. 
 When the principle involved happens to be one of 
 the very few which the course of their religious or 
 moral education has strongly impressed upon tliepa- 
 selves, they are potent auxiliaries to virtue : and
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 167 
 
 their husbands and sons are often prompted by 
 them to acts of abnegation which they never would 
 have been capable of without that stimulus. But, 
 with the present education and position of women, 
 the moral principles which have been impressed on 
 them cover but a comparatively small part of the 
 field of virtue, and are, moreover, principally nega- 
 tive j forbidding particular acts, but having little to 
 do with the general direction of the thoughts and 
 purposes. I am afraid it must be said, that disin- 
 terestedness in the general conduct of life — the 
 devotion of the energies to purposes which hold 
 out no promise of private advantages to the family 
 — is very seldom encouraged or supported by 
 women^s influence. It is small blame to them that 
 they discourage objects of which they have not 
 learnt to see the advantage, and which withdraw 
 their men from them, and from the interests of the 
 family. But the consequence is that woraen^s in- 
 fluence is often anything but favourable to public 
 virtue. 
 
 Women have, however, some share of influence in 
 giving the tone to public moralities since their 
 sphere of action has been a little widened, and 
 since a considerable number of them have occupied 
 themselves practically in the promotion of objects 
 reaching beyond their own family and household.
 
 168 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 
 
 I The influence of women counts for a great deal ia 
 two of the most marked features of modern Euro- 
 pean life — its aversion to war^ and its addiction to 
 philanthropy. Excellent characteristics both ; but 
 unhappily, if the influence of women is valuable in 
 the encouragement it gives to these feelings in 
 general, in the particular applications the direction 
 it gives to them is at least as often mischievous as^ 
 useful. In the philanthropic department more parr 
 ticularly, the two provinces chiefly cultivated by 
 women are religious proselytism and charity. Ptcli- 
 gious proselytism at home, is but another word for 
 embittering of religious animosities : abroad, it is 
 usually a blind running at an object, without either 
 knowing or heeding the fatal mischiefs — fatal to 
 the religious object itself as well as to all other 
 desirable objects — which may be produced by the 
 means employed. As for charity, it is a matter in 
 which the immediate efffect on the persons directly 
 concerned, and the ultimate consequence to the 
 general good, are apt to be at complete war with one 
 another : while the education given to women — 
 an education of the sentiments rather than of the 
 understanding — and the habit inculcated by their 
 whole life, of looking to immediate effects on 
 persons, and not to remote effects on classes of 
 persons — make them both unable to see, and un-
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. IGO 
 
 ■willing to admits the ultimate evil tendency of any 
 form of charity or philanthropy "which commends 
 itself to their sympathetic feelings. The great and 
 continually increasing mass of unenlightened and 
 short-sighted benevolence, which, taking the care of 
 peojile's lives out of their OAvn hands, and relieving 
 them from tlie disagreeable consequences of their 
 own acts, saps the very foundations of the self-respect, 
 self-help, and self-control which are the essential 
 conditions both of individual prosperity and of social 
 virtue — this waste of resources and of benevolent 
 feelings in doing harm instead of good, is immensely 
 swelled by Avomen's contributions, and stimulated by 
 their influence. Not that this is a mistake likely 
 to be made by women, where they have actually the 
 practical management of schemes of beneficence. 
 It sometimes happens that women who administer 
 public charities — with that insight into present fact, 
 and especially into the minds and feelings of those 
 ■with whom they are in immediate contact, in which 
 women generally excel men — recognise in the 
 clearest manner the demoralizing influence of the 
 alms given or the help afforded, and could give 
 lessons on the subject to many a male political 
 economist. But women who only give their money, 
 and are not brought face to face with the effects it 
 produces, how can they be expected to foresee
 
 170 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 
 
 them ? A woman born to the present lot of 
 women, and content with it, how should she appre- 
 ciate tlie value of self-dependence ? She is not 
 self-dependent ; she is not taught self-dependence ; 
 her destiny is to receive everything from others, 
 and why should what is good enough for her be 
 bad for the poor? Her familiar notions of good 
 are of blessings descending from a superior. She 
 forgets that she is not free, and that the poor are ; 
 that if what they need is given to them unearned, 
 they cannot be compelled to earn it : that every- 
 body cannot be taken care of by everybody, but 
 there must be some motive to induce people to 
 take care of themselves ; and that to be helped to 
 belp themselves, if they are physically capable of 
 it, is the only charity which proves to be charity 
 in the end. 
 
 These considerations shew how usefully the part 
 which women take in the formation of general 
 opinion, would be modified for the better by that 
 more enlarged instruction, and practical conver- 
 sancy with the things which their opinions in- 
 fluence, that would necessarily arise from their 
 social and political emancipation. But the improve- 
 ment it would work through the influence they 
 exercise, each in her own family, would be still 
 more remarkable.
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 171 
 
 It is often suid that in the classes most exposed 
 to temptation, a man^s wife and children tend to 
 keep him honest and respectable, both by the wife's 
 direct influence, and by the concern he feels for 
 their future welfare. This may be so_, and no doubt 
 often is so_, with those who are more weak than 
 wicked ; and this beneficial influence would be pre- 
 served and strengthened under equal laws ; it does 
 not depend on the woman's servitude, but is, on the 
 contrary, diminished by the disrespect which the 
 inferior class of men always at heart feel towards 
 those who are subject to their power. But when 
 we ascend higher in the scale, we come among a 
 totally different set of moving forces. The wife's 
 influence tends, as far as it goes, to prevent the 
 husband from falling below the common standard 
 of approbation of the country. It tends quite as 
 strongly to hinder him from rising above it. The 
 wife is the auxiliary of the common public opinion. 
 A man who is married to a woman his inferior in 
 intelligence, finds her a perpetual dead weight, or, 
 worse than a dead weight, a drag, upon every 
 aspiration of his to be better than public opinion 
 requires him to be. It is hardly possible for one 
 who is in these bonds, to attain exalted virtue. If 
 he differs in his opinion from the mass — if he sees 
 truths which have not yet dawned upon them, or if,
 
 172 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEX. 
 
 feeling in his heart truths which they nominally 
 recognise, he would like to act up to those truths 
 more conscientiously than the generality of man- 
 kind — to all such thoughts and desires, marriage is 
 the heaviest of drawbacks, unless he be so fortunate 
 as to have a wife as much above the common level 
 as he himself is. 
 
 For, in the first place, there is always some 
 sacrifice of personal interest required ; cither of 
 social consequence, or of pecuniar^'- means ; perhaps^ 
 the risk of even the means of subsistence. These 
 sacrifices and risks he may be willing to encounter 
 for himself; but he will pause before he imposes 
 them on his family. And his family in this case 
 means his wife and daughters ; for he always hopes 
 that his sons will feel as he feels himself, and that 
 Avhat he can do without, they will do without, will- 
 ingly, in the same cause. But his daughters — their 
 marriage may depend upon it : and his wife, who 
 is unable to enter into or understand the objects 
 for which these sacrifices are made — who, if she 
 thought them worth any sacrifice, would think sa 
 on trust, and solely for his sake — who could parti- 
 cipate in none of the enthusiasm or the self-appro- 
 bation he himself may feel, while the things which 
 lie is disposed to sacrifice are all in all to her; will 
 not the best and most unselfish man hesitate the
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. J 73 
 
 longest l)eforc bringing on licr this consequence? 
 If it be not the comforts of life^ but only social 
 consideration, that is at stake, the burthen upon, 
 his conscience and feelings is still very severe. 
 Whoever has a wife and children has given hos- 
 tages to Mrs. Grundy. The approbation of that 
 potentate may be a matter of indifference to him, 
 but it is of great importance to his wife. The man. 
 himself may be above opinion, or may find sufficient 
 compensation in the opinion of those of his own 
 way of thinking. But to the women connected with 
 him, he can offer no compensation. The almost in- 
 variable tendency of the Avife to jilace her influence 
 in the same scale with social consideration, is some- 
 times made a reproach to women, and represented 
 ns a peculiar trait of feebleness and childishness 
 of character in them : surely with great injustice. 
 Society makes the whole life of a woman, in the 
 easy classes, a continued self-sacrifice; it exacts 
 from her an unremitting restraint of the whole 
 of her natural inclinations, and the sole return it 
 makes to her for wduit often deserves the name of a 
 martyrdom, is consideration. Her consideration is 
 inseparably connected with that of her husband, 
 and after paying the full price for it, she finds that 
 she is to lose it, for no reason of which she can feel 
 the cogencv. She has sacrificed her whole life to
 
 174 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 
 
 it, and her husband will not sacrifice to it a whim, 
 a freak, an eccentricity ; something not recognised 
 or allowed for by the world, and which the world 
 will agree with her in thinking a folly, if it thinks 
 no worse ! The dilemma is hardest npon that very 
 meritorious class of men, who, without possessing 
 talents which qualify them to make a figure among 
 those with whom they agree in opinion, hold their 
 opinion from conviction, and feel bound in honour 
 and conscience to serve it, by making profession 
 of their belief, and giving their time, labour, and 
 means, to anything undertaken in its behalf. The 
 worst case of all is when such men happen to be 
 of a rank and position which of itself neither gives 
 them, nor excludes them from, what is considered 
 the best society; when their admission to it de- 
 pends mainly on what is thought of them per- 
 sonally — and however unexceptionable their breed- 
 ing and habits, their being identified with opinions 
 and public conduct unacceptable to those who give 
 the tone to society would operate as an effectual 
 exclusion. INIany a woman flatters herself (nine 
 times out of ten quite erroneously) that nothing 
 prevents her and her husband from moving in the 
 highest society of her neighbourhood — society in 
 which others well known to her, and in the same 
 class of life, mix freely — except that her husband
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 175 
 
 is unfortunately a Dissenter, or has the reputation 
 of mingling in low radical politics. That it is, she 
 thinks, which hinders George from getting a com- 
 mission or a place, Caroline from making an advan- 
 tageous match, and prevents her and her husband 
 from obtaining invitations, perhaps honours, which, 
 for aught she sees, they are as well entitled to as 
 some folks. With such an influence in every house, 
 either exerted actively, or operating all the more 
 powerfully for not being asserted, is it any wonder 
 that people in general are kept down in that medio- 
 crity of respectability which is becoming a marked 
 characteristic of modern times ? 
 
 There is another very injurious aspect in which 
 the effect, not of women's disabilities directly, but 
 of the broad line of difference which those dis- 
 abilities create between the education and character 
 of a woman and that of a man, requires to be con- 
 sidered. Nothing can be more unfavourable to 
 that union of thoughts and inclinations which i& 
 the ideal of married life. Intimate society between 
 people radically dissimilar to one another, is an 
 idle dream. Unlikeness may attract, but it is like- 
 ness which retains ; and in proportion to the like- 
 ness is the suitability of the individuals to give 
 each other a happy life. While women are so un- 
 like meUj it is not wonderful that selfish men should
 
 17G THH SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 
 
 feci the need of arbitrary power in their own* hands, 
 to arrest in limine the life-long conflict of inclina- 
 tions^ by deciding every question on the side of 
 their own preference. When people are extremely 
 unlike, there can be no real identity of interest. 
 Very often there is conscientious difference of 
 opinion between married people, on tlie highest 
 points of duty. Is there any reality in tlie marriage 
 union where this takes place ? Yet it is not un- 
 common anywhere, when the woman has any earnest- 
 ness of character ; and it is a very general case in- 
 deed, in Catholic countries, when she is supported 
 in her dissent by the only other authority to which 
 she is taught to bow, the priest. With the usual 
 barefacedness of power not accustomed to find itself 
 disputed, the influence of priests over women is 
 attacked by Protestant and Liberal writers, less for 
 being bad in itself, than because it is a rival authority 
 to the husband, and raises up a revolt against his 
 infallibility. In England, similar difi^'erences occa- 
 sionally exist when an Evangelical wife has allied 
 herself Avitli a husband of a different quality; but 
 in general this source at least of dissension is got 
 rid of, by reducing the minds of women to such a 
 nullity, that they have no opinions but those of 
 Mrs. Grundy, or those which the husband tells 
 them to have. When there is no difference of
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEX. 177 
 
 opinion, differences merely of taste may be suffi- 
 cient to detract greatly from the happiness of 
 married life. And though it may stimulate the 
 amatory propensities of men, it does not eouduec 
 to married happiness, to exaggerate by differences 
 of education whatever may be the native differences 
 of the sexes. If the married pair are well-bred 
 and well-behaved people, they tolerate each other's 
 tastes; but is mutual toleration what people look 
 forward to, when they enter into marriage? These 
 differences of inclination will naturally make their 
 wishes different, if not restrained by affection or 
 duty, as to almost all domestic questions which 
 arise. What a difference there must be in the 
 society which the two persons will wish to frequent, 
 or be frequented by ! Each will desire associates 
 who share their own tastes : the persons agreeable 
 to one, will be indifferent or positively disagreeable 
 to the other ; yet there can be none who are not 
 common to both, for married people do not now 
 live in different parts of the house and have totally 
 different visiting lists, as in the reign of Louis XV. 
 They cannot help having different wishes as to the 
 bringing up of the children : each will wish to sec 
 reproduced in them their own tastes and senti- 
 ments : and there is either a compromise, and only 
 a half-satisfaction to either, or the wife has to 
 
 N
 
 178 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 
 
 yield — often ^Yith bitter suffering ; and, with or 
 without intention, her oceult influenec continues to 
 ■counterwork the husband^s purposes. 
 
 It would of course be extreme folly to suppose 
 that these differences of feeling and inclination 
 only exist because women are brought up dif- 
 ferently from men, and that there would not be 
 differences of taste under any imaginable circum- 
 stances. But there is nothing beyond the mark 
 in saying that the distinction in bringing-up im- 
 mensely aggravates those differences, and renders 
 them wholly inevitable. While women are brought 
 up as they are, a man and a woman will but rarely 
 find in one another real agreement of tastes and 
 ■wishes as to daily life. They will generally have 
 to give it up as hopeless, and renounce the attempt 
 to have, in the intimate associate of their daily life, 
 that idem velle, idem nolle, which is the recognised 
 bond of any society that is really such : or if the 
 man succeeds in obtaining it, he does so by 
 choosing a woman who is so complete a nullity that 
 she has no velle or nolle at all, and is as ready to 
 comply with one thing as another if anybody tells 
 her to do so. Even this calculation is apt to 
 fail ; dulness and want of spirit are not always a 
 guarantee of the submission which is so confidently 
 expected from them. But if they were, is this the
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 179 
 
 ideal of marriage ? What;, in this case, does the 
 man obtain by it, except an upper servant, a 
 nurse, or a mistress ? On the contrary, when each 
 of two persons, instead of being a nothing, is a 
 something ; when they are attached to one another, 
 and are not too much unlike to bogin with ; the 
 constant partaking in the same things, assisted by 
 their sympathy, draws out the latent capacities of 
 each for being interested in the things which were 
 at first interesting only to the other ; and works 
 a gradual assimilation of the tastes and characters 
 to one another, partly by the insensible modification 
 of each, but more by a real enriching of the two 
 natures, each acquiring the tastes and capacities of 
 the other in addition to its own. This often 
 happens between two friends of the same sex, who 
 are much associated in their daily life : and it 
 would be a common, if not the commonest, case in 
 marriage, did not the totally diff'erent bringing-uj) 
 of the two sexes make it next to an impossibility 
 to form a really well-assorted union. Were this 
 remedied, whatever differences there might still be 
 in individual tastes, there would at least be, as a 
 general rule, complete unity and unanimity as to 
 the great objects of life. When the two persons 
 both care for great objects, and are a help and 
 encouragement to each other in whatever regards 
 
 N 2
 
 180 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. , 
 
 these, the minor matters on which their tastes may- 
 differ are not all-important to them; and there is. 
 a foundation for solid friendship, of an enduring 
 character, more likely than anything else to make 
 it, through the whole of life, a greater pleasure 
 to each to give pleasure to the other, than to 
 receive it. 
 
 I have considered, thus far, the effects on the 
 pleasures and benefits of the marriage union which 
 depend on the mere unlikeness between the wife 
 and the husband : but the evil tendency is pro- 
 digiously aggravated when the unlikeness is infe- 
 riority. Mere unlikeness, when it only means 
 difference of good qualities, may be more a benefit 
 in the way of mutual improvement, than a draw- 
 back from comfort. When each emulates, and 
 desires and endeavours to acquire, the other^s pecu- 
 liar qualities, the difference does not produce diver- 
 sity of interest, but increased identity of it, and 
 makes each still more valuable to the other. But 
 when one is much the inferior of the two in mental 
 ability and cultivation, and is not actively attempt- 
 ing by the other's aid to rise to the other's level, 
 the whole influence of the connexion upon the deve- 
 lopment of the superior of the two is deteriorating : 
 and still more so in a tolerably happy marriage than 
 in an unhappy one. It is not with impunity that
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF AVOMEN. 181 
 
 the superior in intellect shuts himself up with an 
 inferior^ and elects that inferior for his chosen, and 
 sole completely intimate, associate. Any society 
 which is not improving, is deteriorating : and the 
 more so, the closer and more familiar it is. Even 
 a really superior man almost always begins to dete- 
 riorate when he is habitually (as the phrase is) king 
 of his company : and in his most habitual company 
 the husband who has a wife inferior to him is 
 always so. While his self-satisfaction is incessantly 
 ministered to on the one hand, on the other he 
 insensibly imbibes the modes of feeling, and of 
 looking at things, which belong to a more vulgar 
 or a more limited mind than his own. This evil 
 differs from many of those which have hitherto 
 been dwelt on, by being an increasing one. The 
 association of men with women in daily life is 
 much closer and more complete than it ever was 
 before. Men's life is more domestic. Formerly, 
 their pleasures and chosen occupations were among 
 men, and in men's company : their wives had but 
 a fragment of their lives. At the present time, the 
 progress of civilization, and the turn of opinion 
 against the rough amusements and convivial ex- 
 cesses which formerly occupied most men in their 
 hours of relaxation — together with (it must be said) 
 the improved tone of modern feeling as to the reci-
 
 182 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 
 
 procity of duty which binds the husband towards- 
 the wife — have thrown the man very much more 
 upon home and its inmates, for his personal and 
 social pleasures : while the kind and degree of im- 
 provement which has been made in women's educa- 
 tion, has made them in some degree capable of 
 being his companions in ideas and mental taste, 
 while leaving them, in most cases, still hopelessly 
 inferior to him. His desire of mental communion. 
 is thus in general satisfied by a communion from 
 which he learns nothing. An unimproving and 
 unstimulating companionship is substituted for 
 (what he might otherwise have been obliged to 
 seek) the society of his equals in powers and his 
 fellows in the higher pursuits. We see, accordingly, 
 that young men of the greatest promise generally 
 cease to improve as soon as they marry, and, not 
 improving, inevitably degenerate. If the wife does 
 not iiush the husband forward, she always holds 
 him back. He ceases to care for what she does not 
 care for ; he no longer desires, and ends by dislik- 
 ing and shunning, society congenial to his former 
 aspirations, and which would now shame his falling- 
 off from them ; his higher faculties both of mind 
 and heart cease to be called into activity. And this 
 change coinciding with the new and selfish interests 
 which are created by the family, after a few years
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 18^3 
 
 he differs in no material respect from those who 
 have never had wishes for anything but the com- 
 mon vanities and the common pecuniary objects. 
 
 What marriage may be in the case of two per- 
 sons of cultivated faculties^ identical in opinions 
 and purposes, between whom there exists that best 
 kind of equality, similarity of powers and capa- 
 cities with reciprocal superiority in them — so that 
 each can enjoy the luxury of looking np to the 
 other, and can have alternately the pleasure of 
 leading and of being led in the path of develop- 
 ment — I will not attempt to describe. To those 
 who can conceive it, there is no need ; to those who 
 cannot, it would appear the dream of an enthusiast. 
 But I maintain, with the profoundest conviction, 
 that this, and this only, is the ideal of mar- 
 riage ; and that all opinions, customs, and insti- 
 tutions which favour any other notion of it, or turn 
 the conceptions and aspirations connected with it 
 into any other direction, by whatever pretences 
 they may be coloured, are relics of primitive bar- 
 barism. The moral regeneration of mankind will 
 only really commence, Avhen the most fundamental 
 of the social relations is placed under the rule of 
 equal justice, and when human beings learn to cul- 
 tivate their strongest sympathy with an equal in 
 rights and in cultivation.
 
 184 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 
 
 Tims far, the benefits -which it has appeared 
 that the world would gain by ceasing to make sex 
 a disqualification for privileges and a badge of 
 subjection, are social rather than individual; con- 
 sisting in an increase of the general fund of think- 
 ing and acting power, and an improvement in the 
 general conditions of the association of men with 
 women. But it would be a grievous understate- 
 ment of the case to omit the most direct benefit 
 of all, the unspeakable gain in private happiness 
 to the liberated half of the species ; the difference 
 to them between a life of subjection to the will of 
 others, and a life of rational freedom. After the 
 primary necessities of food and raiment, freedom is 
 the first and strongest want of human nature. 
 While mankind are lawless, their desire is for 
 lawless freedom. When they have learnt to un- 
 derstand the meaning of duty and the value of 
 reason, they incline more and more to be guided 
 and restrained by these in the exercise of their 
 freedom; but they do not therefore desire freedom 
 less ; they do not become disposed to accept the 
 will of other people as the representative and 
 interpreter of those guiding principles. On the 
 contrary, the communities in which the reason has 
 been most cultivated, and in which the idea of 
 social duty has been most powerful, are those
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 185 
 
 which have most strongly asserted the freedom of 
 action of the individual — the liberty of each to 
 govern his conduct by his own feelings of duty, 
 and by such laws and social restraints as his own 
 •conscience can subscribe to. 
 
 He who would rightly appreciate the worth of 
 personal independence as an element of happiness, 
 should consider the value he himself puts upon it 
 as an ingredient of his own. There is no subject 
 on which there is a greater habitual difference of 
 judgment between a man judging for himself, and 
 the same man judging for other people. When he 
 hears others complaining that they are not allowed 
 freedom of action — that their own will has not 
 sufficient influence in the regulation of their affairs 
 — his inclination is, to ask, what are their griev- 
 ances ? what positive damage they sustain ? and in 
 what respect they consider their affairs to be mis- 
 managed ? and if they fail to make out, in answer 
 to these questions, what appears to him a sufficient 
 •case, he turns a deaf ear, and regards their complaint 
 as the fanciful querulousness of people whom nothing 
 reasonable will satisfy. But he has a quite different 
 standard of judgment when he is deciding for him- 
 self. Then, the most unexceptionable administration 
 of his interests by a tutor set over him, does not 
 ■satisfy his feelings : his personal exclusion from
 
 186 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN". 
 
 the deciding authority appears itself the gi'eatest 
 grievance of all, rendering it superfluous even to 
 enter into the question of mismanagement. It is 
 the same with nations. What citizen of a free 
 country would listen to any offers of good and skil- 
 ful administration, in return for the abdication of 
 freedom ? Even if he could believe that good and 
 skilful administration can exist among a people 
 ruled by a Avill not their own, Avould not the con- 
 sciousness of working out their own destiny under 
 their own moral responsibility be a compensation 
 to his feelings for great rudeness and imperfection 
 in the details of public affairs ? Let him rest 
 assured that whatever he feels on this point, women 
 feel in a fully equal degree. Whatever has been 
 said or written, from the time of Herodotus to the 
 present, of the ennobling influence of free govern- 
 ment — the nerve and spring which it gives to all 
 the faculties, the larger and higher objects which it 
 presents to the intellect and feelings, the more 
 unselfish public spirit, and calmer and broader 
 views of duty, that it engenders, and the generally 
 loftier platform on which it elevates the individual 
 as a moral, spiritual, and social being — is every 
 particle as true of women as of men. Are these 
 things no important part of individual happiness ? 
 Let anv man call to mind what he himself felt on.
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 187 
 
 emerging from boyhood — from the tutelage and 
 control of even loved and affectionate elders — 
 and entering upon the responsibilities of manhood. 
 Was it not like the physical effect of taking off a 
 heavy weight, or releasing him from obstructive, 
 even if not otherwise painful, bonds ? Did he not 
 feel twice as much alive, twice as much a human 
 being, as before ? And does he imagine that 
 "women have none of these feelings ? But it is a 
 striking fact, that the satisfactions and mortifica- 
 tions of personal pride, though all in all to most 
 men when the case is their own, have less allow- 
 ance made for them in the case of other people, 
 and are less listened to as a ground or a justifi- 
 cation of conduct, than any other natural human 
 feelings ; perhaps because men compliment them 
 in. their own case with the names of so many 
 other qualities, that they are seldom conscious how 
 mighty an influence these feelings exercise in their 
 own lives. No less large and powerful is their 
 part, we may assure ourselves, in the lives and 
 feelings of women. Women are schooled into sup- 
 pressing them in their most natural and most 
 healthy direction, but the internal principle remains, 
 in a different outward form. An active and 7 
 energetic mind, if denied liberty, ivill seek for 
 power : refused the command of itself, it will assert
 
 18S THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 
 
 its personality by attempting to control others. 
 To allow to any human beings no existence of 
 their own but what depends on others, is giving 
 far too high a premium on bending others to 
 their purposes. Where liberty cannot be hoped 
 for, and power can, power becomes the grand object 
 of human desire ; those to whom others will not 
 leave the undisturbed management of their own 
 aflairs, will compensate themselves, if they can, 
 by meddling for their own purposes with the 
 aifairs of others. Hence also women's passion for 
 personal beauty, and dress and display ; and all 
 the evils that flow from it, in the way of mischievous 
 luxury and social immorality. The love of power 
 and the love of liberty are in eternal antagonism. 
 Where there is least liberty, the passion for power 
 is the most ardent and unscrupulous. The desire 
 of power over others can only cease to be a de- 
 praving agency among mankind, when each of 
 them individually is able to do without it : which 
 can only be where respect for liberty in the per- 
 sonal concerns of each is an established principle. 
 
 But it is not only through the sentiment of per- 
 gonal dignity, that the free direction and disposal 
 of their own faculties is a source of individual hap- 
 piness, and to be fettered and restricted in it, a 
 source of unhappiness, to human beings, and not
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF W0:MEN'. IS^ 
 
 least to women. There is nothing, after disease, 
 indigence, and guilt, so fatal to the pleasurable 
 enjoyment of life as the want of a worthy outlet 
 for the active faculties. Women who have the 
 cares of a family, and while they have the cares of 
 a family, have this outlet, and it generally suffices 
 for them : but what of the greatly increasing 
 number of women, who have had no opportunity 
 of exercising the vocation which they are mocked 
 by telling them is their proper one ? What of the 
 women whose children have been lost to them by 
 death or distance, or have grown up, married, and 
 formed homes of their own ? There are abundant 
 examples of men who, after a life engrossed by busi- 
 ness, retire with a competency to the enjoyment, 
 as they hope, of rest, but to whom, as they are 
 unable to acquire new interests and excitements 
 that can replace the old, the change to a life of in- 
 activity 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
 
 190 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 
 
 but with no employment for it, unless perliaps a 
 daugliter or daughter-in-law is willing to abdicate 
 in their favour the discharge of the same func- 
 tions 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 con- 
 sciousness of thwarted vocations, and activities 
 which arc not suffered to expand — the only re- 
 sources, 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 per- 
 formed properly, without their being trained for
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 191 
 
 duties ■which, to the great loss of society, arc 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 tliose 
 who find it easier to draw a ludicrous picture of 
 what they do not like, than to answer the argu- 
 ments for it. When it is suggested that women's 
 executive capacities and prudent counsels might 
 sometimes be found valuable in afi'airs of state, 
 these lovers of fuu 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 
 tliis 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 occupatious 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 per- 
 haps, widows or wives of forty or fifty, by whom.
 
 192 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 
 
 the knowledge of life and faculty of government 
 ■which they have acquired in their families^ could 
 hy the aid of appropriate studies be made avail- 
 able 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 attain- 
 ment both of private and of public objects ; and 
 there are important matters of public administra- 
 tion 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 hope- 
 less 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, i If there is any- 
 thing 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
 
 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 193 
 
 which society is not yet skilful enough to over- 
 come, render such failures often for the present 
 inevitable, society need not itself inflict them. 
 The injudiciousness of parents, a youtVs own in- 
 experience, 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 unen- 
 lightened societies, colour, race, religion, or in the 
 case of a conquered country, nationality, are to 
 some men, sex is to all women ; a peremptory ex- 
 clusion 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. Sufierings 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 fre- 
 quent, as increased cultivation creates a greater and 
 greater disproportion between the ideas and facul- 
 ties of women, and the scope which society allows 
 to their activity. 
 
 o
 
 I 
 
 194 THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN. 
 
 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 in- 
 spiriting and elevating kind of personal enjoy ment^ 
 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 re- 
 strictions 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 thaa by making them 
 responsible for any evil actually caused by it), dries 
 up pro tanto the principal fountain of human hap- 
 piness, and leaves the species less rich, to an 
 inappreciable degree, in all that makes life valuable 
 to the individual human being. 
 
 THE END.
 
 I
 
 This book is Uh'Z on the last date stam ->e.-i bf ' 
 
 ■' '^",^fe"^**'"j«r' '*" 
 
 .^i^ 
 
 &
 
 3 1158 00111 9758 
 
 f