The Subjection of Women

This is an AI modernization of The Subjection of Women into contemporary English. The original is available from Standard Ebooks. Also available as an epub.

Editor's Introduction

Mill wrote this in 1861 and then put it away. He judged that nobody was ready for it, and he was probably right: when it finally appeared in 1869 it was mocked by people who had admired On Liberty ten years earlier. In between he had sat in the House of Commons as member for Westminster, and in 1867, during the debate on the Reform Bill, he moved that the word "man" be replaced by "person". It was the first time Parliament voted on votes for women. It was defeated, and no British woman voted in a parliamentary election for another fifty years.

One word will trip a modern reader in silence, and it is everywhere in the book. Disability does not mean an impairment. It means a legal bar — a thing the law forbids you to do because of what you were born as. Mill's subject is the disabilities of women in the sense a lawyer of 1869 would have used, and reading it the modern way turns his argument inside out.

The argument runs in four moves. First, that we do not know what women are like, because the question has never been put to the test: what is called the nature of women is an artificial thing, and you cannot learn the nature of anything by studying it only in chains. Second, and this is the hard chapter, what the law of marriage actually said in 1869, set out point by point beside what the law of slavery said. That comparison is legal rather than figurative, and both halves of it must stand: Mill says twice that wives are not in general treated as slaves are, and that is exactly what licenses him to insist that in law they are worse placed, since a slave has hours off and an acknowledged right to refuse his master the last familiarity. Third, that no occupation should be shut to anybody by an accident of birth, because the only way to find out what a person can do is to let them try. Fourth, the question sceptics actually want answered: what would anyone gain?

His answer to the last one is the surprising part, and it is the reason to read past the reputation. Not chiefly that women would gain, though they would, but that men would — that a boy raised to believe himself the superior of half the human race by birth alone is being taught something that deforms him, and that a man who picks a companion who cannot challenge him has arranged to stop learning. The real obstacle, Mill says flatly, is not any doubt about what women can do. It is that most men cannot yet bear the thought of living with an equal.

The book is complete here, with Mill's own footnotes in place. The 1869 printing heads each chapter with a bare Roman numeral, so the four chapter titles are new writing. The vocabulary of bondage, slavery and despotism is his and has not been softened. Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman of 1792 and Mill's On Liberty of 1859, whose dedication to Harriet Taylor points straight at this book, are both in the collection.

Contents

Chapter One: An Opinion That Has Never Been Put on Trial

Chapter Two: What the Law Makes of a Wife

Chapter Three: Whether Women Should Be Shut Out of Anything

Chapter Four: What Would Be Gained

Chapter One: An Opinion That Has Never Been Put on Trial

The object of this essay is to explain as clearly as I can the grounds of an opinion I have held ever since I first formed any opinions at all about social or political matters, and which, instead of being weakened or modified, has grown steadily stronger with reflection and with the experience of life. It is this: that the principle regulating the existing social relations between the two sexes — the legal subordination of one sex to the other — is wrong in itself, and is now one of the chief obstacles to human improvement; and that it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality, allowing no power or privilege on the one side and no legal disability on the other.

The very words needed to state the task I have taken on show how hard it is. But it would be a mistake to suppose that the difficulty lies in the weakness or obscurity of the reasons my conviction rests on. The difficulty is the one that exists in every case where there is a mass of feeling to be contended with. So long as an opinion is strongly rooted in the feelings, it gains rather than loses in stability from having the weight of argument against it. If it had been accepted as the result of argument, refuting the argument might shake the conviction; but when it rests on feeling alone, the worse it fares in argument the more its adherents are persuaded that their feeling must have some deeper ground the arguments do not reach — and while the feeling lasts it keeps throwing up fresh entrenchments of argument to repair any breach made in the old ones. And there are so many causes tending to make the feelings on this particular subject the most intense and deeply rooted of all the feelings that gather round old institutions and customs to protect them, that we need not be surprised to find them less undermined and loosened so far than any of the rest by the progress of the great modern spiritual and social transition — nor suppose that the barbarisms men cling to longest must be less barbarous than the ones they shake off earlier.

In every respect the burden is heavy on anyone attacking an almost universal opinion. They must be very lucky as well as unusually able to get a hearing at all. They have more trouble obtaining a trial than other litigants have obtaining a verdict. And if they do extort a hearing, they are subjected to a set of logical requirements entirely different from the ones demanded of anyone else. In every other case the burden of proof is supposed to rest with the affirmative. If a man is charged with murder, it rests with his accusers to prove his guilt, not with him to prove his innocence. If there is a difference of opinion about whether some alleged historical event really happened — the Siege of Troy, say, in which men's feelings are not much involved — those who maintain that it happened are expected to produce their proofs before the other side can be required to say anything at all; and even then the other side need do no more than show that the evidence produced is worthless. Again, in practical matters the burden of proof is supposed to lie with those who are against liberty, who argue for some restriction or prohibition, whether a limitation on the general freedom of human action or some disqualification or inequality of privilege affecting one person or one class of persons as against others. The a priori presumption is in favour of freedom and impartiality. The rule is held to be that there should be no restraint the general good does not require, and that the law should be no respecter of persons but should treat everyone alike, except where positive reasons of justice or policy require otherwise.

But none of these rules of evidence will be allowed to benefit those who hold the opinion I profess. It is useless for me to point out that those who maintain the doctrine that men have a right to command and women a duty to obey, or that men are fit for government and women unfit, are on the affirmative side of the question, and are bound to produce positive evidence for their assertions or else see them rejected. It is equally useless for me to point out that those who deny women any freedom or privilege rightly allowed to men have a double presumption against them — they are opposing freedom and recommending partiality — and must therefore be held to the strictest proof of their case, so that unless they succeed beyond all doubt the judgment ought to go against them. These would be thought good pleas in any ordinary case; they will not be thought so in this one. Before I could hope to make any impression I should be expected not only to answer everything that has ever been said on the other side, but to imagine everything that could be said — to supply my opponents with reasons as well as answer all the reasons I find; and besides refuting every argument for the affirmative, I shall be called on for unanswerable positive arguments to prove a negative. And even if I could do all that, and leave the other party with a host of unanswered arguments against them and not a single unrefuted one on their side, I should be thought to have done very little; for a cause supported on the one hand by universal custom, and on the other by such a preponderance of popular feeling, is supposed to have a presumption in its favour stronger than any conviction an appeal to reason can produce in any but a few first-rate minds.

I do not mention these difficulties in order to complain of them. In the first place it would be useless: they are inseparable from having to contend, through people's understandings, against the hostility of their feelings and their practical habits. And truly the understandings of most of mankind would have to be much better cultivated than they have ever yet been before they could be asked to place such reliance on their own power of weighing arguments as to give up practical principles they were born and bred in, principles that much of the existing order of the world rests on, at the first argumentative attack they cannot logically resist. So I do not quarrel with them for having too little faith in argument, but for having too much faith in custom and general feeling. It is one of the characteristic prejudices of the nineteenth century's reaction against the eighteenth to grant to the unreasoning elements of human nature the infallibility that the eighteenth century is supposed to have ascribed to the reasoning ones. For the worship of Reason we have substituted the worship of Instinct — and we call everything instinct that we find in ourselves and cannot trace to 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 to 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 far as the present question goes, I am willing to accept the unfavourable conditions that this prejudice assigns me. I consent that established custom and general feeling shall be taken as conclusive against me — unless that custom and feeling can be shown, age by age, to have owed their existence to something other than their soundness, and to have drawn 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 concession is not as great as it may look, because proving that is by far the easiest part of my task.

That a practice is general is in some cases a strong presumption that it is, or at any rate once was, useful for some praiseworthy end. That holds where the practice was adopted in the first place, or afterwards kept up, as a means to such an end, and was grounded on experience of how the end could best be reached. If the authority of men over women, when it was first established, had been the result of a conscientious comparison between different ways of constituting the government of society — if, after trying various other forms of social organisation, the government of women over men, equality between the two, and whatever mixed and divided arrangements might be devised, it had been decided on the evidence of experience that the arrangement in which women are wholly under the rule of men, with no share at all in public affairs, and each of them privately under a legal obligation to obey the man she has joined her destiny to, was the arrangement most conducive to the happiness and well-being of both — then its general adoption might fairly be thought some evidence that at the time it was adopted it was the best. Even then, the considerations that recommended it might, like so many other primeval social facts of the greatest importance, have ceased in the course of ages to exist.

But the state of the case is the reverse of this in every respect. In the first place, the opinion in favour of the present system, which entirely subordinates the weaker sex to the stronger, rests on theory only, since no other system has ever been tried. So experience, in the sense in which it is commonly contrasted with theory, cannot be claimed to have delivered any verdict at all. And in the second place, the adoption of this system of inequality was never the result of deliberation, or forethought, or any social theory, or any notion whatever of what would benefit humanity or the good order of society. It arose simply from the fact that from the very earliest twilight of human society every woman — because of the value men set on her, combined with her inferiority in muscular strength — was found in a state of bondage to some man. Laws and systems of government always begin by recognising the relations they find already existing between individuals. They convert what was a mere physical fact into a legal right, give it the sanction of society, and chiefly aim at substituting public and organised means of asserting and protecting these rights for the irregular and lawless conflict of physical strength. Those who had already been compelled to obey became in this way legally bound to obey. Slavery, from being a mere matter of force between master and slave, became regularised and a matter of agreement among the masters, who bound themselves to one another for common protection and guaranteed by their collective strength the private possessions of each, slaves included.

In early times the great majority of the male sex were slaves, as well as the whole of the female sex. And many ages went by, some of them ages of high cultivation, before any thinker was bold enough to question the rightfulness — and the absolute social necessity — of either the one slavery or the other. By degrees such thinkers did appear; and, with the general progress of society helping, the slavery of the male sex has at last been abolished in all the countries of Christian Europe, though in one of them only within the last few years, and that of the female sex has been gradually changed into a milder form of dependence. But that dependence as it now exists is not an original institution, taking a fresh start from considerations of justice and social expediency. It is the primitive state of slavery lasting on, through a succession of mitigations and modifications brought about by the same causes that have softened manners in general 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 favour, therefore, can be drawn from the fact that it exists. The only presumption it could be supposed to have must rest on its having lasted until now, when so many other things that came down from the same odious source have been done away with. And that is what makes it sound strange to ordinary ears to hear it asserted that the inequality 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 ways creditable to the progress of civilisation and the improvement of mankind's moral feelings. We now live — that is, 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 have been entirely abandoned as the regulating principle of the world's affairs. Nobody professes it, and in most of the relations between human beings nobody is permitted to practise it. When anyone does succeed in practising it, it is under cover of some pretext that gives him the appearance of having some general social interest on his side. This being how things look, people flatter themselves that the rule of mere force is over, and that the law of the strongest cannot be the reason for the existence of anything that has remained in full operation down to the present day. However any of our present institutions may have begun, they think, it can only have been preserved into this period of advanced civilisation by a well-grounded sense of its fitness for human nature and its usefulness to the general good. They do not understand the great vitality and durability of institutions that put right on the side of might: how intensely such institutions are clung to; how the good propensities of those who hold power, as well as the bad ones, become identified with keeping it; how slowly these bad institutions give way, one at a time, the weakest first, beginning with the ones least interwoven with the daily habits of life; and how very rarely those who obtained legal power because they first had physical power have ever lost their grip on it until the physical power had passed to the other side. No such shift of physical force has taken place in the case of women; and this fact, combined with all the peculiar and characteristic features of the particular case, made it certain from the first that this branch of the system of right founded on might would be the very last to disappear, though its most atrocious features were softened earlier than those of several of the others. It was inevitable that this one case of a social relation grounded on force would survive through generations of institutions grounded on equal justice, an almost solitary exception to the general character of their laws and customs — but one which, so long as it does not proclaim its own origin, and so long as discussion has not brought out its true character, is not felt to jar with modern civilisation, any more than domestic slavery among the Greeks jarred with their idea of themselves as a free people.

The truth is that people of the present generation and the last two or three have lost all practical sense of the primitive condition of humanity, and only the few who have studied history accurately, or have spent much time in the parts of the world occupied by the living representatives of ages long past, can form any mental picture of what society then was. People are not aware how completely, 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 those words imply a feeling that there was something in it to be ashamed of, and no such notion could find a place in the mind of anyone in those ages except a philosopher or a saint. History gives a cruel education in human nature by showing how exactly the regard owed to the life, the possessions and the whole earthly happiness of any class of people was measured by what they had the power to enforce; how all who made any resistance to authorities that had weapons in their hands, however dreadful the provocation, had not only the law of force but every other law and every notion of social obligation against them, and in the eyes of those they resisted were guilty not merely of a crime but of the worst of all crimes, deserving the cruellest punishment human beings could inflict. The first small trace of a feeling of obligation in a superior to acknowledge any right in his inferiors appeared when he had been induced, for convenience, to make them some promise. Though such promises, even when sanctioned by the most solemn oaths, were for many ages revoked or violated on the most trifling provocation or temptation, it is probable that this was seldom done, except by people of worse than average morality, without some twinges of conscience.

The ancient republics, being mostly founded from the first on some kind of mutual compact, or at any rate formed by a union of people not very unequal in strength, gave the first instance of a portion of human relations fenced round and placed under a law other 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 express agreement limited it — between a commonwealth and its subjects or other independent commonwealths, the banishment of that primitive law even from so narrow a field began the regeneration of human nature. It gave birth to sentiments whose immense value even for material interests experience soon demonstrated, and which from then on only needed enlarging, not creating. Though slaves were no part of the commonwealth, it was in the free states that slaves were first felt to have rights as human beings. The Stoics were, I believe, the first, apart from the Jewish law, to teach as part of morality that men were bound by moral obligations to their slaves. After Christianity became dominant, nobody could ever again be a stranger to that belief in theory; nor, after the rise of the Catholic Church, was it ever without people to stand up for it. Yet enforcing it was the most arduous task Christianity ever had to perform. For more than a thousand years the Church kept up the contest with hardly any perceptible success. It was not for want of power over men's minds. Its power was prodigious. It could make kings and nobles hand over their most valued possessions to enrich the Church. It could make thousands, in the prime of life and at the height of worldly advantage, shut themselves up in convents to work out their salvation by poverty, fasting and prayer. It could send hundreds of thousands across land and sea, across Europe and Asia, to give their lives for the deliverance of the Holy Sepulchre. It could make kings give up wives they were passionately attached to, because the Church declared they were within the seventh degree of relationship — the fourteenth, by our way of counting. All this it did; but it could not make men fight one another less, or tyrannise less cruelly over the serfs and, when they could, over the townsmen. It could not make them renounce either use of force, force militant or force triumphant. They could never be induced to give that up until they were in their turn compelled by superior force. Only the growing power of kings put an end to fighting except between kings, or claimants to a throne; only the growth of a wealthy and warlike middle class in the fortified towns, and of a common infantry that proved more powerful in the field than the undisciplined chivalry, brought the insolent tyranny of the nobles over townsmen and peasantry within any bounds. And it was persisted in not only until, but long after, the oppressed had gained power enough to take conspicuous revenge; on the Continent much of it lasted until the French Revolution, though in England the earlier and better organisation of the democratic classes ended it sooner by establishing equal laws and free national institutions.

If people are mostly so little aware how completely, for the greater part of our species' existence, the law of force was the avowed rule of general conduct — any other rule being only a special and exceptional consequence of particular ties — and how very recent it is that the affairs of society in general have even been pretended to be regulated by any moral law, they are just as little inclined to remember or consider how institutions and customs that never had any ground but the law of force last on into ages and states of general opinion that would never have permitted them to be set up in the first place. Less than forty years ago, Englishmen might still legally hold human beings in bondage as saleable property; within the present century they might kidnap them and carry them off and work them literally to death. This absolutely extreme case of the law of force, condemned by people who can tolerate almost every other form of arbitrary power, and presenting features more revolting than any other to the feelings of everyone who looks at it from an impartial position, was the law of civilised and Christian England within the memory of people 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 feeling against it than against any other of the customary abuses of force, but in England at least there was less feeling and less interest in favour of it than of any other — for its motive was the love of gain, unmixed and undisguised, and those who profited by it were a very small fraction of the country, while the natural feeling of everyone not personally interested in it was unmitigated abhorrence.

So extreme an instance makes it almost unnecessary to mention any other; but consider how long absolute monarchy lasted. In England at present it is almost universally agreed that military despotism is a case of the law of force with no other origin or justification. Yet in all the great nations of Europe except England it either still exists or has only just ceased to exist, and even now has a strong party in its favour in every rank of the people, especially among people of station and consequence. Such is the power of an established system, even one that is far from universal — even when in almost every period of history there have been great and well-known examples of the opposite system, and those examples have almost always been furnished by the most illustrious and most prosperous communities. In this case, too, the possessor of the undue power, the person directly interested in it, is only one person, while those who are subject to it and suffer from it are literally everybody else. The yoke is naturally and necessarily humiliating to everyone except the one man on the throne and, at most, the one who expects to succeed him.

How different are these cases from the power of men over women! I am not prejudging the question whether that power is justifiable. I am showing how much more permanent it was bound to be, even if it were not justifiable, than these other dominations that have nevertheless lasted into our own time. Whatever gratification of pride there is in possessing power, and whatever personal interest there is in exercising it, is in this case not confined to a limited class but shared by the whole male sex. Instead of being, for most of its supporters, something desirable chiefly in the abstract — or, like the political ends usually contended for by factions, of little private importance to anyone but the leaders — it comes home to the person and the hearth of every male head of a family, and of everyone who expects to be one. The farm labourer exercises his share of the power, or expects to, just as fully as the greatest nobleman. And it is the case in which the desire for power is strongest: for everyone who wants power wants it most over those nearest to him, the people his life is passed with, the people he has most concerns in common with, and the people whose independence of his authority is likeliest to interfere with his own preferences.

If, in the other cases I have specified, powers plainly grounded on nothing but force, and having so much less to support them, are so slowly and with such difficulty got rid of, this one must be far more so, even if it rested on no better foundation than they did. We should consider, too, that in this case the possessors of the power have greater facilities than in any other for preventing any rising against it. Every one of the subjects lives under the very eye, and almost, one might say, 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 overmastering him, and, on the other side, with the strongest motives for seeking his favour and avoiding giving him offence. In struggles for political emancipation, everybody knows how often the champions are bought off by bribes or frightened off by threats. In the case of women, each individual of the subject class is in a chronic state of bribery and intimidation combined. In raising a standard of resistance, a large number of the leaders, and still more of the followers, must make an almost complete sacrifice of the pleasures or the small comforts of their own lot. If ever a system of privilege and enforced subjection had its yoke tightly riveted on the necks of those it keeps down, this one has. I have not yet shown that it is a wrong system; but anyone capable of thinking about the subject must see that even if it is, it was certain to outlast every other form of unjust authority. And when some of the grossest of those other forms still exist in many civilised countries, and have only recently been got rid of in others, it would be strange if the most deeply rooted of them all had been perceptibly shaken anywhere yet. There is more reason to wonder that the protests and testimonies against it have been as numerous and as weighty as they are.

Some will object that a comparison cannot fairly be made between the government of the male sex and the forms of unjust power I have brought in to illustrate it, since those are arbitrary and the product of mere usurpation, whereas this one is natural. But was there ever a domination that did not appear natural to those who possessed it? There was a time when the division of mankind into two classes, a small one of masters and a numerous one of slaves, appeared even to the most cultivated minds to be a natural condition of the human race, and the only natural one. No less an intellect, and one that contributed no less to the progress of human thought, than Aristotle held this opinion without doubt or misgiving; and he rested it on exactly the same premises on which the same assertion about the dominion of men over women is usually based — that there are different natures among mankind, free natures and slave natures; that the Greeks were of a free nature and the barbarian races of Thracians and Asiatics of a slave nature. But why need I go back to Aristotle? Did not the slave owners of the southern United States maintain the same doctrine, with all the fanaticism with which men cling to theories that justify their passions and legitimise their personal interests? Did they not call heaven and earth to witness that the dominion of the white man over the black is natural, that the black race is by nature incapable of freedom and marked out for slavery? Some of them went so far as to say that the freedom of manual labourers is an unnatural order of things anywhere. Again, the theorists of absolute monarchy have always maintained that it is the only natural form of government, issuing from the patriarchal, which was the primitive and spontaneous form of society, modelled on the paternal, which is older than society itself and, they argue, the most natural authority of all. Indeed, for that matter, the law of force itself, to those who could plead no other, has always seemed the most natural of all grounds for exercising authority. Conquering races hold it to be Nature's own dictate that the conquered should obey the conquerors — or, as they put it more agreeably, that the feebler and less warlike races should submit to the braver and manlier. The slightest acquaintance with human life in the Middle Ages shows how supremely natural the dominion of the feudal nobility over men of low condition seemed to the nobility themselves, and how unnatural the notion seemed of a person of the inferior class claiming equality with them, or exercising authority over them. It hardly seemed less unnatural to the class held in subjection. The emancipated serfs and townsmen, even in their most vigorous struggles, never claimed a share of authority; they only demanded some limit on the power of tyrannising over them.

So true is it that "unnatural" generally means only "uncustomary", and that whatever is usual appears natural. The subjection of women to men being a universal custom, any departure from it naturally appears unnatural. But how entirely the feeling depends on custom, even in this case, is shown by ample experience. Nothing astonishes people in distant parts of the world more, when they first learn anything about England, than being told that it is under a queen: the thing seems to them so unnatural as to be almost incredible. To Englishmen it does not seem in the least 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 for women, because they were 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 ancient peoples, because of the fabulous Amazons, whom they believed to be historical, and the partial example of the Spartan women — who, though no less subordinate by law than women in the other Greek states, were more free in fact, and, being trained in bodily exercises in the same way as men, gave ample proof that they were not naturally disqualified for them. There can be little doubt that Spartan experience suggested to Plato, among many of his other doctrines, that of the social and political equality of the two sexes.

But, it will be said, the rule of men over women differs from all these others in not being a rule of force: it is accepted voluntarily; women make no complaint, and are consenting parties to it. In the first place, a great many women do not accept it. Ever since there have been women able to make their views known by their writing — the only form of publicity society permits them — an increasing number have recorded protests against their present social condition; and recently many thousands of them, led by the most eminent women known to the public, have petitioned Parliament to be admitted to the parliamentary suffrage. The claim of women to be educated as thoroughly, and in the same branches of knowledge, as men is urged with growing intensity and with a good prospect of success, while the demand for their admission to professions and occupations so far closed to them becomes more urgent every year. Though we have not in this country, as they have in the United States, periodic conventions and an organised party agitating for the Rights of Women, there is a numerous and active society organised and managed by women for the more limited object of obtaining the political franchise. Nor is it only in our own country and in America that women are beginning to protest, more or less collectively, against the legal disabilities they labour under. France, Italy, Switzerland and Russia now furnish examples of the same thing. How many more women silently cherish similar aspirations nobody can possibly know; but there are abundant signs how many would cherish them if they were not so strenuously taught to repress them as contrary to the proprieties of their sex.

It must be remembered, too, that no enslaved class ever asked for complete liberty all at once. When Simon de Montfort called the deputies of the commons to sit in Parliament for the first time, did any of them dream of demanding that an assembly elected by their constituents should make and unmake ministries and dictate to the king in affairs of state? No such thought entered the imagination of the most ambitious of them. The nobility already had those pretensions; the commons pretended to nothing but exemption from arbitrary taxation and from the gross individual oppression of the king's officers. It is a political law of nature that those under any power of ancient origin never begin by complaining of the power itself, but only of its oppressive exercise. There is never any shortage of women who complain of ill usage by their husbands. There would be infinitely more of them if complaint were not the greatest of all provocations to a repetition and increase of the ill usage. It is this that frustrates every attempt to maintain the power while protecting the woman against its abuses. In no other case, except that of a child, is a person who has been judicially proved to have suffered an injury placed back under the physical power of the culprit who inflicted it. Accordingly wives, even in the most extreme and prolonged cases of bodily ill usage, hardly ever dare make use of the laws made for their protection; and if, in a moment of irrepressible indignation, or through 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 their tyrant off the punishment he has earned.

All causes, social and natural, combine to make it unlikely that women should be collectively rebellious against the power of men. They are so far in a different position from all other subject classes that their masters require something more from them than actual service. Men do not want only the obedience of women; they want their feelings. All men except the most brutish want the woman most closely connected with them to be not a forced slave but a willing one — not merely a slave, but a favourite. So they have put everything into practice to enslave her mind. The masters of all other slaves rely on fear to maintain obedience, whether fear of themselves or religious fear. The masters of women wanted more than simple obedience, and they turned the whole force of upbringing to achieving it. All women are brought up from their earliest years in the belief that their ideal of character is the exact opposite of men's: not self-will and government by self-control, but submission and yielding to the control of others. All the moralities tell them that it is women's duty, and all the current sentimentalities that it is their nature, to live for others — to renounce themselves completely and have no life except in their affections. And by their affections are meant the only ones they are allowed to have: those for the men they are attached to, or for the children who make an additional and indissoluble tie between them and a man.

Put three things together — first, the natural attraction between opposite sexes; second, the wife's entire dependence on her husband, every privilege or pleasure she has being either his gift or entirely dependent on his will; and last, that the chief object of human pursuit, standing, and every object of social ambition can in general only be sought or obtained by her through him — and it would be a miracle if being attractive to men had not become the pole star of a girl's education and formation of character. And once this great means of influence over women's minds had been acquired, an instinct of selfishness made men use it to the utmost as a way of holding women in subjection, by representing meekness, submissiveness and the surrender of all individual will into a man's hands as an essential part of sexual attractiveness. Can it be doubted that any of the other yokes mankind has managed to break would have lasted until now if the same means had existed and had been as diligently used to bow men's minds under them? Suppose it had been made the object of every young plebeian's life to find personal favour in the eyes of some patrician, of every young serf to find it with some lord; suppose living in his household and having a share of his personal affection had been held out as the prize they should all look for, the most gifted and aspiring being able to count on the most desirable prizes; and suppose that once that prize was obtained they had been shut off by a wall of brass from every interest not centring on him, from every feeling and desire but the ones he shared or instilled. Would serfs and lords, plebeians and patricians, not be as sharply distinguished today as men and women are? And would not everyone, apart from a thinker here and there, have believed the distinction to be a fundamental and unalterable fact of human nature?

The considerations above are quite enough to show that custom, however universal, creates no presumption in this case and ought to create no prejudice in favour of the arrangements that place women in social and political subjection to men. But I can go further, and maintain that the course of history and the tendencies of progressive human society give not merely no presumption in favour of this system of unequal rights but a strong one against it — and that so far as the whole course of human improvement up to now, the whole stream of modern tendency, warrants any inference on the subject, the inference is that this relic of the past is out of keeping with the future and must necessarily disappear.

For what is the peculiar character of the modern world — the difference that chiefly distinguishes modern institutions, modern social ideas, modern life itself, from those of long ago? It is that human beings are no longer born to their place in life and chained to it by an inflexible bond, but are free to use their faculties, and whatever favourable chances come their way, to achieve the lot that seems to them most desirable. Human society in the old days was constituted on a very different principle. Everyone was born to a fixed social position and was mostly kept in it by law, or barred from any means of getting out of it. As some men are born white and others black, so some were born slaves and others free men and citizens; some were born patricians, others plebeians; some were born feudal nobles, others commoners. A slave or a serf could never make himself free, nor become free except by his master's will. In most European countries it was not until towards the close of the Middle Ages, and as a consequence of the growth of royal power, that commoners could be ennobled. Even among nobles, the eldest son was born the exclusive heir to his father's possessions, and a long time passed before it was fully established that the father could disinherit him. Among the working classes, only those born members of a guild, or admitted to it by its members, could lawfully practise their trade within its local limits; and nobody could practise any trade thought important except in the legal manner, by processes laid down by authority. Manufacturers have stood in the pillory for presuming to carry on their business by new and improved methods.

In modern Europe, and most of all in the parts of it that have shared most fully in every other modern improvement, diametrically opposite doctrines now prevail. Law and government do not undertake to prescribe who shall or shall not conduct any social or industrial operation, or what ways of conducting it shall be lawful. These things are left to the unfettered choice of individuals. Even the laws requiring workmen to serve an apprenticeship have been repealed in this country, there being ample assurance that wherever an apprenticeship is necessary, its necessity will be enough to enforce it. The old theory was that as little as possible should be left to the choice of the individual agent, and that everything he had to do should as far as possible 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 concerned never go right except as they are left to his own discretion, and that regulating them by authority, except to protect the rights of others, is sure to do harm. This conclusion, slowly arrived at and not adopted until almost every possible application of the opposite theory had been tried with disastrous results, now prevails universally in industrial matters in the most advanced countries, and almost universally in all countries with any pretension to advancement. It is not that all processes are supposed to be equally good, or all people equally qualified for everything, but that freedom of individual choice is now known to be the only thing that procures the adoption of the best processes and throws each operation into the hands of those best qualified for it. Nobody thinks it necessary to make a law that only a strong-armed man may be a blacksmith. Freedom and competition are enough to make blacksmiths strong-armed men, because the weak-armed can earn more in occupations they are better fitted for. In keeping with this doctrine, it is felt to be a trespass beyond the proper bounds of authority to lay down in advance, on some general presumption, that certain people are unfit to do certain things. It is now thoroughly known and admitted that even where such presumptions exist, none of them is infallible. Even if a presumption is well grounded in most cases — which it is very likely not to be — there will be a minority of exceptional cases where it does not hold, and in those it is both an injustice to the individuals and a loss to society to put barriers in the way of their using their faculties for their own benefit and other people's. And in the cases where the unfitness is real, the ordinary motives of human conduct will on the whole be enough to prevent the incompetent person from making the attempt, or from persisting in it.

If this general principle of social and economic science is not true; if individuals, with such help as they can get from the opinion of those who know them, are not better judges of their own capacities and vocation than the law and the government are, then the world cannot too soon abandon the principle and go back to the old system of regulations and legal bars. But if the principle is true, we ought to act as though we believed it, and not lay it down that being born a girl instead of a boy — any more than being born black instead of white, or a commoner instead of a nobleman — shall settle a person's position for life, and shut them out from all the more elevated social positions and from every respectable occupation but a few. Even if we granted the utmost that is ever claimed about men's superior fitness for all the functions now reserved to them, the same argument applies that forbids a property 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 excluding thousands of unfit people is no gain — for if the make-up of the electorate inclines it to choose unfit people, there are always plenty of unfit people to choose from. In everything of any difficulty and importance, those who can do it well are fewer than the need, even with the most unrestricted freedom of choice; and any narrowing of the field of selection deprives society of some chance of being served by the competent without ever saving it from the incompetent.

At present, in the more improved countries, the legal disabilities of women are the only case but one in which laws and institutions take people at birth and decree that they shall never in all their lives be allowed to compete for certain things. The one exception is royalty. People are still born to the throne; nobody outside the reigning family can ever occupy it, and nobody even inside that family can attain it by any means but the course of hereditary succession. All other dignities and social advantages are open to the whole male sex. Many, indeed, are only attainable by wealth; but wealth may be striven for by anyone, and is in fact obtained by many men of the very humblest origin. The difficulties are indeed insuperable for most of them without the help of lucky accidents; but no male human being is under any legal ban, and neither law nor opinion adds artificial obstacles to the natural ones. Royalty, as I said, is excepted; but there everyone feels it to be an exception — an anomaly in the modern world, in marked opposition to its customs and principles, justifiable only by extraordinary special reasons which, though individuals and nations differ about their weight, unquestionably do exist. And even in this exceptional case, where a high social function is bestowed on birth instead of being thrown open to competition, all free nations contrive to stick in substance to the principle they nominally depart from: they hedge the high function about with conditions avowedly intended to prevent the person it ostensibly belongs to from really performing it, while the person who does perform it, the responsible minister, obtains the post by a competition from which no adult male citizen is legally excluded. The disabilities women are subject to from the mere fact of their birth are therefore the solitary examples of the kind in modern legislation. In no case but this one — which takes in half the human race — are the higher social functions closed to anybody by an accident of birth that no effort and no change of circumstances can overcome. Even religious disabilities, besides having practically almost ceased to exist in England and in Europe, do not close any career to the disqualified person if he converts.

The social subordination of women thus stands out as an isolated fact among modern social institutions, a solitary breach of what has become their fundamental 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 concern — as though a gigantic dolmen, or a vast temple of Olympian Jupiter, stood on the site of St Paul's and received daily worship, while the Christian churches around it were only visited on fasts and festivals. This complete discrepancy between one social fact and all the facts that accompany it, and the radical opposition between its nature and the progressive movement the modern world boasts of, which has swept away everything else of a similar character one after another, surely gives a conscientious observer of human tendencies serious matter for thought. It raises an initial presumption on the unfavourable side far outweighing anything custom and usage could create on the favourable side in such circumstances, and should at least be enough to make this, like the choice between republic and monarchy, an open question.

The least that can be asked is that the question should not be treated as prejudged by existing fact and existing opinion, but should be open to discussion on its merits as a question of justice and expediency, the decision resting, as with any other of mankind's social arrangements, on what an enlightened estimate of tendencies and consequences shows to be most advantageous to humanity in general without distinction of sex. And the discussion must be a real one, going down to foundations and not resting content with vague general assertions. It will not do, for instance, to assert in general terms that the experience of mankind has pronounced in favour of the existing system. Experience cannot possibly have decided between two courses when there has only been experience of one. If it is said that the doctrine of the equality of the sexes rests only on theory, it must be remembered that the opposite doctrine has only theory to rest on too. All that direct experience proves in its favour is that mankind has been able to exist under it and to reach the degree of improvement and prosperity we now see; but whether that prosperity was reached 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 forward has been so invariably accompanied by a step taken in raising the social position of women that historians and philosophers have come to adopt women's elevation or debasement as on the whole the surest test and truest measure of the civilisation of a people or an age. Through the whole progressive period of human history the condition of women has been coming nearer to equality with men. That does not by itself prove that the approach must go on to complete equality, but it certainly gives some presumption that it will.

Nor is it any use to say that the nature of the two sexes fits them for their present functions and position and makes those appropriate to them. Standing on the ground of common sense and the constitution of the human mind, I deny that anybody knows, or can know, the nature of the two sexes as long as they have only been seen in their 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 which the women were not under the control of the men, something might have been positively known about the mental and moral differences that may be inherent in the nature of each. What is now called the nature of women is an eminently artificial thing — the result of forced repression in some directions and unnatural stimulation in others. It can be asserted without hesitation that no other class of dependants has had its character so entirely distorted out of its natural proportions by its relation with its masters. For if conquered peoples and enslaved races have in some respects been more forcibly repressed, whatever in them was not crushed down under an iron heel has generally been left alone, and if left with any liberty of development has developed according to its own laws. But in the case of women, a hothouse cultivation has always been carried on of some of the capabilities of their nature, for the benefit and pleasure of their masters. And then, because certain products of the general vital force sprout luxuriantly and grow to a great size in this heated atmosphere, under this active feeding and watering, while other shoots from the same root, left outside in the wintry air with ice heaped round them on purpose, grow stunted, and some are burnt off and disappear altogether, men — with that inability to recognise their own handiwork which marks the unanalytic mind — lazily believe that the tree grows of itself in the shape they have made it grow, and that it would die if one half of it were not kept in a steam bath and the other half in the snow.

Of all the difficulties that impede the progress of thought and the forming of well-grounded opinions about life and social arrangements, the greatest at present is mankind's unspeakable ignorance of and inattention to the influences that form human character. Whatever any portion of the human species now is, or seems to be, it is supposed to have a natural tendency to be — even when the most elementary knowledge of the circumstances they have been placed in points clearly to the causes that made them what they are. Because a tenant farmer deep in arrears to his landlord is not industrious, there are people who think the Irish are naturally idle. Because constitutions can be overthrown when the authorities appointed to carry them out turn their weapons against them, there are people who think the French incapable of free government. Because the Greeks cheated the Turks, and the Turks only robbed the Greeks, there are people who think the Turks are naturally the more sincere. And because women, as is often said, care nothing about politics except the 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 it used to be, teaches a different lesson, if only by showing how extraordinarily susceptible human nature is to external influences, and how extremely variable are precisely those of its manifestations that 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 to the study of it.

So on that most difficult question, what the natural differences between the two sexes are — a subject on which it is impossible in the present state of society to obtain complete and correct knowledge — almost everybody lays down the law, while almost everybody neglects and makes light of the only means by which any partial insight into it can be got. That means 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 moral and intellectual differences between men and women might be, the evidence that they are natural differences could only be negative. Only those could be inferred to be natural that could not possibly be artificial — the residue, after deducting every characteristic of either sex that can be explained by upbringing or external circumstances. The deepest knowledge of the laws by which character is formed is indispensable to entitle anybody even to affirm that there is any difference, let alone what the difference is, between the two sexes considered as moral and rational beings. And since nobody as yet has that knowledge — for there is hardly any subject that has been so little studied in proportion to its importance — nobody is so far entitled to any positive opinion on the subject. Conjectures are all that can be made at present: conjectures more or less probable according as they are more or less warranted by such knowledge as we have of the laws of psychology applied to the formation of character.

Even the preliminary knowledge of what the differences between the sexes now are, quite apart from how they came to be what they are, is still in the crudest and most incomplete state. Doctors and physiologists have to some extent established the differences in bodily constitution, and that is an important element for the psychologist; but hardly any doctor is a psychologist. On the mental characteristics of women their observations are worth no more than an ordinary man's. It is a subject on which nothing final can be known so long as the only people who can really know it, women themselves, have given so little testimony, and that little mostly bribed. It is easy to know stupid women. Stupidity is much the same all the world over. A stupid person's notions and feelings can confidently be inferred from those prevailing in the circle around them. Not so with people whose opinions and feelings come out of 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 their capabilities — nobody knows those, not even they themselves, because most of them have never been called out. I mean their actual existing thoughts and feelings. Many a man thinks he understands women perfectly because he has had love affairs with several, perhaps with many. If he is a good observer, and his experience extends to quality as well as quantity, he may have learned something about one narrow department of their nature — an important department, no doubt. But about all the rest of it few people are more ignorant, because there are few from whom it is so carefully hidden.

The most favourable case a man can generally have for studying a woman's character is that of his own wife, since the opportunities are greater and cases of complete sympathy are not quite so unspeakably rare. And in fact that 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 more than a single case this way; so one can infer, to an almost laughable degree, what a man's wife is like from his opinions about women in general. And for even this one case to yield any result, the woman must be worth knowing and the man must be not only a competent judge but of a character so sympathetic in itself, and so well suited to hers, that he can either read her mind by sympathetic intuition or has nothing in himself that makes her shy of disclosing it. Hardly anything, I believe, can be rarer than that conjunction. It often happens that there is the most complete unity of feeling and community of interest about all external things, and yet the one has as little admission to the inner life of the other as if they were ordinary acquaintances. Even with true affection, authority on the one side and subordination on the other prevent perfect confidence. Though nothing may be intentionally withheld, much is not shown. In the parallel relation of parent and child the corresponding thing must have come under everybody's observation. Between father and son, how many are the cases in which the father, in spite of real affection on both sides, obviously to all the world does not know, and does not suspect, parts of his son's character that are familiar to his companions and equals. The truth is that being in the position of looking up to somebody is extremely unfavourable to complete sincerity and openness with him. The fear of losing ground in his opinion or 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 that, though not the best, is the one he most likes to see. And it can confidently be said that thorough knowledge of one another hardly ever exists except between people who, besides being intimates, are equals.

How much more true all this must be when the one is not only under the other's authority but has it drummed into her as a duty to count everything else subordinate to his comfort and pleasure, and to let him neither see nor feel anything from her but what is agreeable to him. All these difficulties stand in the way of a man's getting any thorough knowledge even of the one woman he generally has sufficient opportunity to study. When we further consider that understanding one woman is not necessarily understanding any other; that even if he could study many women of one rank or one country he would not thereby understand women of other ranks or countries; and that even if he did, they are still only the women of a single period of history — we may safely say that the knowledge 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 until women themselves have told all they have to tell.

And that time has not come, nor will it come otherwise than gradually. It is only since yesterday that women have been either qualified by literary accomplishment or permitted by society to tell the general public anything. As yet very few of them dare say anything that men, on whom their literary success depends, are unwilling to hear. Let us remember how the expression of uncustomary opinions, or of what are considered eccentric feelings, was received until very recently even from a male author, and to some extent still is; and we may form some faint idea of the obstacles in the way of a woman, brought up to think custom and opinion her sovereign rule, when she tries to express in a book anything drawn from the depths of her own nature. The greatest woman who has left writings behind her enough to give her an eminent rank in her country's literature thought it necessary to put as a motto on her boldest work: "Un homme peut braver l'opinion; une femme doit s'y soumettre" — a man may defy opinion; a woman must submit to it. The greater part of what women write about women is mere flattery of men. In the case of unmarried women, much of it seems intended only to improve their chance of a husband. Many, married and unmarried, overshoot the mark and preach a servility beyond anything wanted or relished by any man but the coarsest. But this is not so often the case as it still was quite lately. Literary women are becoming more outspoken and more willing to express their real feelings. Unfortunately, in this country especially, they are themselves such artificial products that their feelings are compounded of a small element of individual observation and awareness and a very large one of acquired associations. This will be less and less true, but it will remain true to a great extent as long as social institutions do not allow women the same free development of originality that is possible for 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 of what other things are suited to it.

Footnote: Title page of Madame de Staël's Delphine.

I have dwelt so much on the difficulties that at present obstruct any real knowledge by men of the true nature of women because here, as in so many other things, "opinio copiae inter maximas causas inopiae est" — the belief that we have plenty is among the greatest causes of want. 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 nothing, and of which it is at present impossible that any man, or all men together, should have knowledge qualifying them to lay down the law to women about what is or is not their vocation. Happily no such knowledge is necessary for any practical purpose connected with the position of women in relation to society and life. For, by all the principles involved in modern society, the question rests with women themselves, to be decided by their own experience and by the use of their own faculties. There is no way of finding out what one person, or many, can do except by trying — and no way by which anybody else can discover for them what it will make them happy to do or leave undone.

One thing we may be certain of: that what it is contrary to women's nature to do, they will never be made to do by simply giving their nature free play. Mankind's anxiety to intervene on nature's behalf, for fear nature should fail to achieve its purpose, is an entirely unnecessary worry. What women by nature cannot do, it is quite superfluous to forbid them to do. What they can do, but not so well as the men who compete with them, competition is enough to exclude them from — since nobody is asking for protective duties and subsidies in favour of women; all that is asked is that the present subsidies and protective duties in favour of men should be withdrawn. If women have a greater natural inclination for some things than for others, there is no need of laws or social preaching to make most of them do the first in preference to the second. Whatever women's services are most wanted for, the free play of competition will hold out the strongest inducements to them to undertake. And, as the words imply, they are most wanted for the things they are most fit for — and by assigning those things to them, the collective faculties of the two sexes can be applied on the whole with the greatest sum of valuable 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 supposed to be, because judging by their acts — by the whole present constitution of society — one might infer that their opinion was the direct opposite. They might be supposed to think that women's alleged natural vocation was of all things the most repugnant to their nature, since if they are free to do anything else, if any other means of living or of occupying their time and faculties is open that has any chance of looking desirable to them, there will not be enough of them willing to accept the condition said to be natural to them. If this is really men's general opinion, it would be as well if it were said out loud. I should like to hear somebody openly stating the doctrine, which is already implied in much that is written on the subject: "It is necessary to society that women should 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 the case of the slaveholders of South Carolina and Louisiana: "It is necessary that cotton and sugar should be grown. White men cannot produce them. Negroes will not, for any wages which we choose to give. Ergo they must be compelled." An illustration still closer to the point is impressment. Sailors must absolutely be had to defend the country. It often happens that they will not enlist voluntarily. Therefore there must be a power of forcing them. How often has this logic been used! And but for one flaw in it, it would no doubt have been successful 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 much worth their while to serve you as to work for other employers, you will have no more difficulty than anyone else in obtaining their services. To this there is no logical answer except "I will not" — and since people are now not only ashamed but genuinely unwilling to rob the labourer of his hire, impressment is no longer advocated.

Those who try to force women into marriage by closing every other door against them lay themselves open to a similar retort. If they mean what they say, their opinion must evidently be that men do not make the married condition desirable enough to induce women to accept it on its own recommendations. It is not a sign that you think the offer you are making very attractive when you allow only Hobson's choice, that or nothing. And here, I believe, is the clue to the feelings of the men who have a real antipathy to equal freedom for women. I believe they are afraid — not that women would be unwilling to marry, for I do not think anybody really has that fear, but that women would insist on marriage being on equal conditions; that every woman of spirit and capacity would prefer to do almost anything else not degrading in her own eyes rather than marry, when marrying means giving herself a master, and a master over all her earthly possessions too. And truly, if that consequence were a necessary part of marriage, I think the fear would be very well founded. I agree that few women capable of anything else would choose such a lot, unless under an irresistible entraînement that made them for the time insensible to everything but itself, when any other means were open to them of filling a conventionally honourable place in life. And if men are determined that the law of marriage shall be a law of despotism, they are quite right, as a matter of mere policy, to leave women only Hobson's choice. But in that case, everything that has been done in the modern world to loosen the chain on women's minds has been a mistake. They should never have been allowed a literary education. Women who read, and much more women who write, are, as things are now constituted, a contradiction and a disturbing element; and it was wrong to bring women up with any accomplishments but those of an odalisque, a woman of the harem, or of a domestic servant.

Chapter Two: What the Law Makes of a Wife

It will be as well to begin the detailed discussion of the subject with the particular branch of it our observations have led us to: the conditions that the laws of this and every other country attach to the marriage contract. Marriage being the destination society appoints for women, the prospect they are brought up to, and the object all of them are meant to seek — except those too little attractive to be chosen by any man as his companion — one might have supposed that everything would have been done to make this condition as desirable to them as possible, so that they should have no cause to regret being denied the option of any other. Society, however, in this as at first in every other case, has preferred to gain its object by foul means rather than fair; but this is the only case in which it has substantially persisted in them right down to the present day.

Originally women were taken by force, or regularly sold by their father to the husband. Until a late period in European history the father had the power to dispose of his daughter in marriage at his own will and pleasure, with no regard to hers. The Church was indeed faithful enough to a better morality to require a formal "yes" from the woman at the marriage ceremony; but there was nothing to show that the consent was anything other than forced, and it was practically impossible for the girl to refuse if the father persisted, except perhaps where she could obtain the protection of religion by a determined resolution to take monastic vows. After marriage, in ancient times — though this was before Christianity — the man had the power of life and death over his wife. She could invoke no law against him; he was her sole court and her sole law. For a long time he could repudiate her, and she had no corresponding power over him. Under the old laws of England the husband was called the lord of the wife; he was literally regarded as her sovereign, so much so that the murder of a man by his wife was called treason — petty treason, as distinguished from high treason — and was avenged more cruelly than high treason usually was, the penalty being burning to death. Because these various enormities have fallen out of use (most of them were never formally abolished, or not until long after they had ceased to be practised) men suppose that everything is now as it should be with the marriage contract, and we are continually told that civilisation and Christianity have restored to women their just rights.

Meanwhile the wife is the actual bondservant of her husband: no less so, as far as legal obligation goes, than those commonly called slaves. She vows lifelong obedience to him at the altar and is held to it all her life by law. Casuists may say that the obligation of obedience stops short of taking part in a crime, but it certainly extends to everything else. She can do no act whatever except by his permission, at least tacitly. She can acquire no property except for him; the instant it becomes hers, even by inheritance, it becomes his automatically. In this respect the wife's position under the common law of England is worse than that of slaves under the laws of many countries: under Roman law, for instance, a slave might have his own peculium, which to a certain extent the law guaranteed to him for his exclusive use. The higher classes in this country have given a similar advantage to their women through special contracts setting the law aside, by conditions of pin money and the like — since parental feeling is stronger with fathers than the class feeling of their own sex, and a father generally prefers his own daughter to a son-in-law who is a stranger to him. By means of settlements the rich usually contrive to withdraw the whole or part of a wife's inherited property from the absolute control of the husband; but they do not succeed in keeping it under her control. The utmost they can do merely prevents the husband from squandering it, while at the same time barring the rightful owner from using it. The property itself is beyond the reach of both. As for the income from it, the form of settlement most favourable to the wife — the one called "to her separate use" — only prevents the husband from receiving it instead of her. It has to pass through her hands; but if he takes it from her by personal violence the moment she receives it, he can neither be punished nor compelled to give it back. This is the extent of the protection that, under the laws of this country, the most powerful nobleman can give his own daughter as against her husband.

In the immense majority of cases there is no settlement, and the absorption of all rights, all property and all freedom of action is complete. The two are called "one person in law" for the purpose of inferring that whatever is hers is his; but the parallel inference is never drawn that whatever is his is hers. The maxim is never applied against the man, except to make him answerable to third parties for her acts, as a master is for the acts of his slaves or his cattle. I am far from pretending that wives are in general treated no better 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 attached to the master's own person, is a slave at every hour and every minute. 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 the master rarely intrudes into. 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 acknowledged right, and is considered to be under a moral obligation, to refuse her master the last familiarity. Not so the wife. However brutal a tyrant she may unfortunately be chained to — though she may know he hates her, though it may be his daily pleasure to torture her, and though she may find it impossible not to loathe him — he can demand from her, and enforce, the lowest degradation of a human being: that of being made the instrument of a bodily function against her own will.

While she is held in this worst kind of slavery as regards her own person, what is her position with regard to the children she and her master have a joint interest in? By law they are his children. He alone has any legal rights over them. She can do no act towards them or in relation to them except by delegation from him. Even after he is dead she is not their legal guardian, unless he has made her so by will. He could even send them away from her and deprive her of any means of seeing them or writing to them, until this power was to some degree restricted by Serjeant Talfourd's Act. This is her legal state; and from this state she has no means of withdrawing. If she leaves her husband she can take nothing with her, neither her children nor anything rightfully her own. If he chooses he can compel her to return, by law or by physical force; or he may content himself with seizing for his own use anything she may earn, or anything her relations may give her. Only legal separation by a decree of a court entitles her to live apart without being forced back into the custody of an exasperated jailer, or empowers her to put any earnings to her own use without the fear that a man she may not have seen for twenty years will pounce on her one day and carry the lot off. Until recently the courts would only grant this legal separation at an expense that put it out of reach of anyone below the higher ranks. Even now it is granted only in cases of desertion or of extreme cruelty — and yet complaints are made every day that it is granted too easily.

Surely, if a woman is denied any lot in life but that of being the personal body servant of a despot, and depends for everything on the chance of finding one who may be inclined 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 that chance only once. The natural sequel and corollary of this state of things would be that, since her whole life depends on getting a good master, she should be allowed to change again and again until she finds one. I am not saying she ought to be allowed this. That is an entirely separate question. The question of divorce, in the sense that involves liberty to remarry, is one it is no part of my purpose to enter into. All I say now is that for those who are allowed nothing but servitude, free choice of servitude is the only alleviation, insufficient though it is. Refusing it completes the assimilation of the wife to the slave — and to the slave under not the mildest form of slavery, for under some slave codes a slave could, in certain circumstances of ill usage, legally compel his master to sell him. But no amount of ill usage, without adultery added to it, will in England free a wife from her tormentor.

I have no wish to exaggerate, and the case has no 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 administer them, and many of them are only able to remain laws by being seldom or never carried into effect. If married life were everything the laws alone would lead one to expect, society would be a hell on earth. Happily there are both feelings and interests that in many men exclude, and in most greatly temper, the impulses and tendencies that lead to tyranny; and of those feelings, the tie connecting a man to his wife gives, in a normal state of things, incomparably the strongest example. The only tie that comes anywhere near it, the tie between him and his children, tends in all but exceptional cases to strengthen the first rather than to conflict with it. Because this is true — because men in general do not inflict, and women do not suffer, all the misery that could be inflicted and suffered if the full power of tyranny the man is legally invested with were acted on — the defenders of the institution in its existing form think all its iniquity is justified, and that any complaint is merely quarrelling with the evil that is the price paid for every great good. But mitigations in practice, which are perfectly compatible with keeping this or any other kind of tyranny in full legal force, are no apology for despotism. They only serve to prove what power human nature has of reacting against the vilest institutions, and with what vitality the seeds of good, as well as those of evil, spread and propagate themselves in human character.

Not a word can be said for despotism in the family that cannot be said for political despotism. Not every absolute king sits at his window to enjoy the groans of his tortured subjects, or 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 Philip the Fair, or of Nadir Shah, or of Caligula; but it was bad enough to justify the French Revolution, and to excuse even its horrors. If an appeal is made to the intense attachments that exist between wives and their husbands, exactly as much can be said of domestic slavery. It was quite an ordinary thing 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 noticed that wives and slaves were heroically faithful and 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 human nature seems capable of are called out in people towards those who, having the power to crush their earthly existence entirely, voluntarily refrain from using it. How large a place this feeling fills in most men, even in religious devotion, it would be cruel to inquire. We see every day how much their gratitude to Heaven seems to be stimulated by contemplating fellow creatures to whom God has not been as 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 it by its best instances. We are shown pictures of loving exercise of authority on the one side and loving submission to it on the other, superior wisdom arranging everything for the greatest good of the dependants and surrounded by their smiles and blessings. All this would be very much to the purpose if anyone were claiming that there is no such thing as a good man. Who doubts that there can be great goodness, great happiness and great affection under the absolute government of a good man? Meanwhile, laws and institutions have to be adapted not to good men but to bad ones. Marriage is not an institution designed for a select few. Men are not required, as a preliminary to the marriage ceremony, to prove by testimonials that they are fit to be trusted with the exercise of absolute power. The tie of affection and obligation to a wife and children is very strong in those whose social feelings are strong in general, and in many who are hardly sensitive to any other social tie; but there are all degrees of sensitivity and insensitivity to it, as there are all grades of goodness and wickedness in men, right down to those whom no tie will bind and on whom society has no hold except through its last resort, the penalties of the law. At every grade of this descending scale there are men entrusted with all the legal powers of a husband. The vilest criminal has some wretched woman tied to him, against whom he can commit any atrocity except killing her — and, if he is reasonably careful, he can do that too without much danger of the legal penalty.

And how many thousands are there among the lowest classes in every country who, without being criminals in a legal sense in any other respect, because everywhere else their aggressions meet with resistance, indulge in the most extreme habitual bodily violence towards their unhappy wives — who alone, of grown people at least, can neither repel them nor escape from them, and whose very dependence inspires these mean and savage natures not with a generous forbearance, not with a point of honour about behaving well to someone whose whole lot in life is entrusted 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 show her the consideration required of them towards everybody else. The law, which until lately left even these atrocious extremes of domestic oppression practically unpunished, has within the last few years made some feeble attempts to repress them. But its attempts have done little, and cannot be expected to do much, because it is contrary to reason and experience to suppose there can be any real check on brutality while the victim is still left in the executioner's power. Until a conviction for personal violence — or at any rate a repetition of it after a first conviction — automatically entitles the woman 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 the number of men is, 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 one form alone by the abuse of the institution swells to something appalling. Yet these are only the extreme cases. They are the lowest abysses, but there is a sad succession of depth after depth before reaching them. In domestic as in political tyranny, the case of absolute monsters chiefly illustrates the institution by showing that there is hardly any horror that cannot happen under it if the despot pleases, and so throwing a strong light on how terribly frequent things only a little less atrocious must be. Absolute fiends are as rare as angels, perhaps rarer; but ferocious savages with occasional touches of humanity are very frequent indeed. And in the wide interval that separates these from any worthy representative of the human species, how many forms and gradations there are of brutishness and selfishness, often under an outward varnish of civilisation and even of cultivation — living at peace with the law, keeping up a creditable appearance to everyone not in their power, and yet quite enough, often, to make the lives of all who are in their power a torment and a burden.

It would be tiresome to repeat the commonplaces about the general unfitness of men for power, which after centuries of political discussion everyone knows by heart, were it not that hardly anyone thinks of applying these maxims to the case where they apply above all others: power that is not placed in the hands of a man here and there but offered to every adult male, down to the basest and most ferocious. It is not because a man is not known to have broken any of the Ten Commandments, or because he keeps up a respectable character in his dealings with people he cannot compel to have anything to do with him, or because he does not fly into violent bursts of temper against those who are not obliged to put up with him, that we can guess 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 dependants is the nursery of these vices of character, which wherever else they appear are an overflow from that source. A man who is morose or violent to his equals is sure to be one who has lived among inferiors he could frighten or badger into submission. If the family at its best is, as it is often said to be, a school of sympathy, tenderness and loving self-forgetfulness, it is still more often, as far as its head is concerned, a school of wilfulness, overbearingness, unbounded self-indulgence and a double-dyed and idealised selfishness of which self-sacrifice itself is only a particular form — the care for wife and children being only care for them as parts of the man's own interests and belongings, and their individual happiness being sacrificed in every shape to his smallest preferences.

What better is to be expected under the existing form of the institution? We know that the bad tendencies of human nature are only kept within bounds when they are allowed no scope for indulgence. We know that from impulse and habit, when not from deliberate purpose, almost everybody to whom others give way goes on encroaching until a point is reached at which they are forced to resist. Such being the common tendency of human nature, the almost unlimited power that present social institutions give a man over at least one human being — the one he lives with, and who is always there — seeks out and calls up the latent germs of selfishness in the remotest corners of his nature. It fans their faintest sparks and smouldering embers. It offers him a licence to indulge those points of his original character which in every other relation he would have found it necessary to repress and conceal, and the repression of which would in time have become second nature.

I know there is another side to the question. I grant that the wife, if she cannot effectually resist, can at least retaliate; she too can make the man's life extremely uncomfortable, and by that power can carry many points that she ought to carry, and many that she ought not. 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 works best against the least tyrannical superiors and in favour of the least deserving dependants. It is the weapon of irritable and self-willed women, of those who would make the worst use of power if they had it, and who generally do turn this power to bad use. The amiable cannot use such an instrument, and the high-minded disdain it. And on the other hand, the husbands it is used against most effectively are the gentler and more inoffensive ones, 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 sets up a counter-tyranny, and makes victims in their turn chiefly of the husbands least inclined to be tyrants.

What is it, then, that really tempers the corrupting effects of this power and makes it compatible with the amount of good we actually see? Mere feminine charm, though it has great effect in individual cases, has very little effect in modifying the general tendencies of the situation, since its power lasts only while the woman is young and attractive, often only while her charm is new and not dimmed by familiarity — and on many men it has not much influence at any time. The real mitigating causes are these: the personal affection that grows with time, so far as the man's nature is capable of it and the woman's character is congenial enough with his to call it out; their common interest in the children, and their general community of interest as regards other people, though there are very great limits to that; the real importance of the wife to his daily comforts and enjoyments, and the value he consequently sets on her for his own sake, which in a man capable of feeling for others lays the foundation of caring for her for her own sake; and lastly, the influence naturally acquired over almost all human beings by those who are close to them, if they are not positively disagreeable to them — people who, both by direct entreaty and by the imperceptible contagion of their feelings and dispositions, are often able, unless counteracted by some equally strong personal influence, to obtain a degree of command over their superior's conduct that is altogether excessive and unreasonable.

Through these various means the wife frequently exercises even too much power over the man. She is able to affect his conduct in matters she may not be qualified to influence for good, in which her influence may be not only unenlightened but exerted on the morally wrong side, and in which he would act better if left to his own promptings. But neither in the affairs of families nor in those of states is power any compensation for the loss of freedom. Her power often gives her what she has no right to, but does not enable her to assert her own rights. A Sultan's favourite slave has slaves under her whom she tyrannises over; but the desirable thing would be that she should neither have slaves nor be one. By sinking her own existence entirely in her husband, by having no will — or persuading him that she has none — but his in anything concerning their joint relation, and by making it the business of her life to work on his feelings, a wife may gratify herself by influencing, and very probably perverting, his conduct in those of his external relations she has never qualified herself to judge, or in which she is herself wholly swayed by some personal partiality or prejudice. And so, 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 everything that extends beyond the family. She is taught that she has no business with anything outside that sphere, and accordingly she seldom has any honest and conscientious opinion about it, and so hardly ever meddles with it for any legitimate purpose, but generally for an interested one. She neither knows nor cares which is the right side in politics, but she knows what will bring in money or invitations, get her husband a title, her son a place, or her daughter a good marriage.

But how, it will be asked, can any society exist without government? In a family, as in a state, somebody must be the ultimate ruler. Who is to decide when a married couple differ in opinion? Both cannot have their way, and yet a decision one way or the other has to be reached.

It is not true that in every 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 commonest case of voluntary association after marriage is partnership in business, and nobody finds it necessary, or thinks it necessary, to enact that in every partnership one partner shall have entire control of the concern and the others shall be bound to obey his orders. Nobody would enter a partnership on terms that subjected him to the responsibilities of a principal with only the powers and privileges of a clerk or an agent. If the law dealt with other contracts as it deals with marriage, it would ordain that one partner should administer the common business as though it were his private concern, that the others should have only delegated powers, and that this one should be picked out by some general presumption of law — being the eldest, for example. The law never does this; nor does experience show that any theoretical inequality of power between partners is necessary, or that a partnership needs any conditions except the ones the partners themselves set down in their articles of agreement. And yet one might think that exclusive power could be conceded with less danger to the rights and interests of the inferior in a partnership than in a marriage, since a partner is free to cancel the power by withdrawing from the connection. The wife has no such power; and even if she had, it is almost always desirable that she should try every other measure 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 sole control of them. But it does not follow that it should always be the same person. The natural arrangement is a division of powers between the two, each being absolute in the executive branch of their own department, and any change of system or principle requiring the consent of both. The division neither can nor should be settled in advance by law, since it must depend on individual capacities and suitabilities. If the two people chose, they might settle it in advance in the marriage contract, as financial arrangements are now often settled in advance. There would seldom be any difficulty in deciding such things by mutual consent, unless the marriage were one of those unhappy ones in which everything else becomes a subject of bickering and dispute as well. The division of rights would naturally follow the division of duties and functions, and that is already made by consent — or at any rate not by law but by general custom, modified and modifiable at the pleasure of the people concerned.

The real practical decision of affairs, whichever of them is given the legal authority, will depend greatly, as it already does, on their comparative qualifications. The mere fact that he is usually the elder will in most cases give the man the preponderance, at least until they both reach an age at which the difference in their years is of no importance. Naturally there will also be a more powerful voice on whichever side brings in the means of support. Inequality from that source does not depend on the law of marriage but on the general conditions of human society as now constituted. The influence of mental superiority, whether general or particular, and of a more decided character, will necessarily count for much. It always does at present. And this fact shows how little foundation there is for the fear that the powers and responsibilities of partners in life, like those of partners in business, cannot be satisfactorily apportioned by agreement between themselves. They always are so apportioned, except where the institution of marriage has failed. Things never come to a plain issue of power on one side and obedience on the other except where the connection has been a mistake altogether, and it would be a blessing to both parties to be released from it.

Some may say that the very thing which makes a friendly settlement of differences possible is the known reserve of legal compulsion — as people submit to arbitration because there is a court of law in the background which they know can force them to obey. But to make the cases parallel, we must suppose that the court's rule was not to try the case but always to give judgment for the same side, the defendant, say. If so, being subject to it would be a motive for the plaintiff to agree to almost any arbitration, but it would have exactly the opposite effect on the defendant. The despotic power the law gives the husband may be a reason for the wife to agree to any compromise by which power is practically shared between them, but it cannot be the reason why the husband agrees. That there is always a practical compromise among decently behaved people, though at least one of them is under no physical or moral necessity of making it, shows that the natural motives leading to a voluntary adjustment of the shared life of two people in a way acceptable to both do on the whole prevail, except in unfavourable cases. Matters are certainly not improved by laying it down as an ordinance of law that the superstructure of free government shall be raised on a legal foundation of despotism on one side and subjection on the other, and that every concession the despot makes may be recalled at his mere pleasure and without warning. Quite apart from the fact that no freedom is worth much when it is held on so precarious a tenure, its terms are not likely to be the most equitable when the law throws so prodigious a weight into one scale — when the adjustment lies between two people, one of whom is declared entitled to everything, while the other is not only entitled to nothing except during the first one's good pleasure, but is under the strongest moral and religious obligation not to rebel however excessive the oppression becomes.

A persistent opponent, pushed to extremes, may say that husbands are indeed willing to be reasonable and to make fair concessions to their partners without being compelled to, but that wives are not — that if allowed any rights of their own they will acknowledge no rights at all in anybody else, and will never 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 people a few generations ago, when satires on women were in fashion and men thought it clever to insult women for being what men had made them. But it will be said now by nobody worth answering. It is not the doctrine of the present day that women are less capable of good feeling, and of consideration for those they are bound to by the strongest ties, than men are. On the contrary, we are perpetually told that women are better than men, by people totally opposed to treating them as if they were as good — so that the saying has passed into a piece of tiresome cant, meant to put a complimentary face on an injury, rather like those celebrations of royal clemency which, according to Gulliver, the king of Lilliput always prefixed to his bloodiest decrees. If women are better than men in anything, it is surely in individual self-sacrifice for their own family. But I lay little stress on this while they are universally taught that they were born and created for self-sacrifice. I believe that equality of rights would reduce the exaggerated self-abnegation that is the present artificial ideal of the feminine character, and that a good woman would be no more self-sacrificing than the best man; but on the other hand men would be much more unselfish and self-sacrificing than at present, 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 men learn so easily as this self-worship. All privileged people and all privileged classes have had it. The further we descend in the scale of humanity the more intense it is — and it is most intense of all in those who are not, and can never expect to be, raised above anyone except an unfortunate wife and children. The honourable exceptions are proportionally fewer than with almost any other human failing. Philosophy and religion, instead of keeping it in check, are generally suborned to defend it; and nothing controls it but that practical sense of the equality of human beings which is the theory of Christianity, but which Christianity will never teach in practice 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 but their own is regarded. Such people are a proper subject for the law of divorce. They are only fit to live alone, and no human being ought to be compelled to join their life to theirs. But legal subordination tends to make such characters among women more frequent, not less. If the man exerts his whole power the woman is of course crushed; but if she is treated with indulgence and allowed to assume power, there is no rule setting any limit to her encroachments. The law, by not determining her rights but theoretically allowing her none at all, practically declares that the measure of what she has a right to is whatever she can contrive to get.

The equality of married people before the law is not only the sole way in which that particular relation can be made consistent with justice to both sides and conducive to the happiness of both; it is also the only means of making the daily 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 feeling is society between equals. The moral education of mankind has so far come chiefly from the law of force, and is adapted almost solely to the relations 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, on which every individual is either above or below his nearest neighbour, and wherever he does not command he must obey. Existing moralities, accordingly, are mainly fitted for a relation of command and obedience. Yet command and obedience are only unfortunate necessities of human life; society in equality is its normal state. Already in modern life, and more and more as it improves, command and obedience are becoming exceptional facts and equal association the general rule. The morality of the first ages rested on the obligation to submit to power; that of the ages after them on the right of the weak to the forbearance and protection of the strong. How much longer is one form of society and life to content itself with the morality made for another? We have had the morality of submission, and the morality of chivalry and generosity; the time has now come for the morality of justice.

Whenever in former ages any approach was made to society between equals, justice asserted its claim to be the foundation of virtue. So it was in the free republics of antiquity. But even in the best of them, the equals were limited to the free male citizens; slaves, women and unenfranchised residents were under the law of force. The joint influence of Roman civilisation and of Christianity obliterated these distinctions, and in theory, if only partially in practice, declared the claims of the human being as such to outweigh those of sex, class or social position. The barriers that had begun to be levelled were raised again by the northern conquests, and the whole of modern history consists of the slow process by which they have been wearing away ever since. We are entering an order of things in which justice will again be the primary virtue — grounded, as before, on equal association, but now on sympathetic association too; rooted no longer in the instinct of equals for self-protection but in a cultivated sympathy between them; and with nobody now left out, an equal measure being extended to all.

It is no novelty that mankind does not clearly foresee its own changes, and that people's feelings are adapted to past ages rather than coming ones. To see the future of the species has always been the privilege of the intellectual elite, or of those who have learned from them; to have the feelings of that future has been the distinction, and usually the martyrdom, of a still rarer elite. Institutions, books, education, society, all go on training human beings for the old long after the new has arrived — much more when it is only coming. 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 everyone else; regarding command of any kind as an exceptional necessity and in every case a temporary one; and preferring, wherever possible, the society of those with whom leading and following can be alternate and reciprocal. Life as at present constituted gives none of these virtues any cultivation by exercise. The family is a school of despotism, in which the virtues of despotism, but also its vices, are richly 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 people's daily habits or innermost feelings. The family, justly constituted, would be the real school of the virtues of freedom. It is sure to be a sufficient school of everything else. It will always be a school of obedience for the children and of command for the parents. What is needed is that it should be a school of sympathy in equality, of living together in love, with no power on one side and no obedience on the other. That is what it ought to be between the parents. It would then exercise the very virtues each of them needs to fit them for every other association, and would model for the children the feelings and conduct that their temporary training through obedience is meant to make habitual, and so natural, to them. The moral training of mankind will never be adapted to the conditions of the life that all other human progress is a preparation for, until people practise in the family the same moral rule that suits the normal constitution of human society. Any feeling of freedom that can exist in a man whose nearest and dearest intimacies are with people he is absolute master of is not the genuine or Christian love of freedom, but what the love of freedom generally was among the ancients and in the Middle Ages: an intense sense of the dignity and importance of his own personality, making him scorn a yoke for himself, though he has no abhorrence of it in the abstract and is abundantly ready to impose it on others for his own interest or glory.

I readily admit — and it is the very foundation of my hopes — that numbers of married people even under the present law, probably a great majority in the higher classes of England, live in the spirit of a just law of equality. Laws would never be improved if there were not numerous people whose moral feelings are better than the existing laws. Such people ought to support the principles argued for here, whose only object is to make all other married couples like what these already are. But people even of considerable moral worth, unless they are thinkers as well, are very ready to believe that laws or practices whose evils they have not personally experienced produce no evils at all, and probably do good if they seem to be generally approved of, and that it is wrong to object to them. It would, however, be a great mistake for such married people to suppose that because the legal conditions of the tie uniting them do not enter their thoughts once in a twelvemonth, and because they live and feel in every respect as if they were legally equals, the same is true of every other married couple where the husband is not a notorious ruffian. To suppose that would be to show equal ignorance of human nature and of fact. The less fit a man is to possess power — the less likely he is to be allowed to exercise it over anybody with that person's voluntary consent — the more he hugs himself in the consciousness of the power the law gives him, exacts its legal rights to the utmost point that custom (the custom of men like himself) will tolerate, and takes 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 of her to their will as an instrument, makes them feel a kind of disrespect and contempt towards their own wife that they do not feel towards any other woman, or any other human being they come into contact with — and which makes her seem to them a fit subject for any sort of indignity. Let any acute observer of the signs of feeling who has the necessary opportunities judge for himself whether this is not so; 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.

We shall be told, perhaps, that religion imposes the duty of obedience — as every established fact 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 Paul's business, nor was it consistent with his object of propagating Christianity, to incite anyone to rebel against existing laws. The apostle's acceptance of all social institutions as he found them is no more to be read as disapproval of attempts to improve them at the proper time than his declaration that "the powers that be are ordained of God" gives his sanction to military despotism, and to that alone, as the Christian form of political government, or commands passive obedience to it. To pretend that Christianity was intended to fix existing forms of government and society in place and protect them against change is to reduce it to the level of Islam or of Brahminism. It is precisely because Christianity has not done this that it has been the religion of the progressive portion of mankind, while Islam and Brahminism have been the religions of the stationary portions — or rather, since there is no such thing as a really stationary society, of the declining portions. There have been plenty of people in every age of Christianity who tried to make it something of the same kind, to convert us into a sort of Christian Muslims with the Bible for a Koran, prohibiting all improvement; and their power has been great, and many have had to give their lives 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.

After what has been said about the obligation of obedience, it is almost superfluous to say anything about the more particular point contained in it, a woman's right to her own property; for I cannot hope that this essay will make any impression on anyone who needs convincing that a woman's inheritance or earnings ought to be as much her own after marriage as before. The rule is simple: whatever would be the husband's or the wife's if they were not married should be under their exclusive control during the 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 ideal fusion of two lives into one. For my own part I am one of the strongest supporters of community of goods, when it results from an entire unity of feeling in the owners that makes everything common between them. But I have no taste 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 anybody, even if I were the one who profited by it.

This particular injustice and oppression to women, which to ordinary understanding is more obvious than all the rest, can be remedied without touching any of the other mischiefs, and there can be little doubt it will be among the first to be remedied. Already, in many of the new and several of the old states of the American Confederation, provisions have been inserted even in the written constitutions securing women equality of rights in this respect. This materially improves the position within marriage of those women at least who have property, by leaving them one instrument of power they have not signed away; and it also prevents the scandalous abuse of the marriage institution that is committed when a man traps a girl into marrying him without a settlement, for the sole purpose of getting hold of her money.

Where the support of the family depends not on property but on earnings, the common arrangement by which the man earns the income and the wife manages the domestic spending seems to me in general the most suitable division of labour between the two. If, on top of the physical suffering of bearing children and the whole responsibility for their care and education in the early years, the wife undertakes the careful and economical application of the husband's earnings to the general comfort of the family, she is taking not merely her fair share but usually the larger share of the bodily and mental exertion their joint existence requires. If she takes on any additional portion, it seldom relieves her of this and only prevents her from doing it properly. Nobody else takes the care of the children and the household that she is thereby prevented from taking; those of the children who do not die grow up as best they can, and the management of the household is likely to be so bad that even in point of economy it is a great deduction from the value of the wife's earnings. In an otherwise just state of things it is not, therefore, I think, a desirable custom that the wife should contribute to the family income by her labour. In an unjust state of things her doing so may be useful to her, by making her of more value in the eyes of the man who is legally her master; but on the other hand it lets him abuse his power still further, by forcing her to work and leaving the support of the family to her exertions while he spends most of his time drinking and idling. The power of earning is essential to a woman's dignity if she has no independent property. But if marriage were an equal contract, not implying an obligation of obedience; if the connection were no longer enforced to the oppression of those to whom it is purely a misery, but a separation on just terms — I am not speaking now of a divorce — could be obtained by any woman morally entitled to it; and if she would then find every honourable employment as freely open to her as to men, then it would not be necessary for her protection that during marriage she should use her faculties in this particular way. Just as a man chooses a profession, so, when a woman marries, it may in general be understood that she chooses the management of a household and the bringing up of a family as the first call on her exertions for as many years of her life as that requires, and that she gives up not all other objects and occupations but all those that are inconsistent with the requirements of this one. The habitual or systematic exercise of outdoor occupations, or of any that cannot be carried on at home, would by this principle be practically ruled out for the greater number of married women. But the utmost latitude ought to exist for adapting general rules to individual suitabilities, and there ought to be nothing to prevent faculties exceptionally suited to some other pursuit from obeying their vocation in spite of marriage, provided that whatever inevitable falling short there might be in her full performance of the ordinary functions of the mistress of a family is otherwise provided for. These things, once opinion was rightly directed on the subject, might with perfect safety be left to be regulated by opinion, with no interference from the law.

Chapter Three: Whether Women Should Be Shut Out of Anything

On the other point involved in the just equality of women — their admissibility to all the functions and occupations so far kept as the monopoly of the stronger sex — I should expect no difficulty in convincing anyone who has gone along with me about the equality of women in the family. I believe their legal disabilities elsewhere are only clung to in order to maintain their subordination in domestic life, because most of the male sex cannot yet tolerate the idea of living with an equal. Were it not for that, I think almost everybody, in the present state of opinion about politics and political economy, would admit the injustice of excluding half the human race from most of the lucrative occupations and from almost all high social functions — decreeing from their birth either that they are not and cannot by any possibility become fit for employments legally open to the stupidest and basest of the other sex, or else that however fit they may be, those employments shall be closed to them in order to be preserved for the exclusive benefit of men.

In the last two centuries, on the rare occasions when any reason beyond the mere existence of the fact was thought necessary to justify women's disabilities, people seldom gave as a reason their inferior mental capacity — which, in times when there was a real trial of personal faculties in the struggles of public life, and not all women were excluded from it, nobody 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 reasons of state, meaning the convenience of the government and the support of existing authority, were held a sufficient explanation and excuse for the most outrageous crimes. In the present day power speaks a smoother language, and whoever it oppresses, it always pretends to be doing it for their own good. So 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 are departing from their real road to success and happiness when they aspire to it. But to make this reason plausible — I do not say valid — those who urge it must be prepared to carry it much further than anyone dares to do in the face of present experience. It is not enough to maintain that women on average are less gifted than men on average with certain of the higher mental faculties, or that fewer women than 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 method of choice that secures regard for the public interest, there need be no fear that any important employments 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 employments — a result certain to happen in any case, if only because most women will always be likely to prefer the one vocation in which nobody competes with them.

Now the most determined disparager of women will not venture to deny that when we add the experience of recent times to that of ages past, women — and not a few of them merely, but many — have proved themselves capable of everything, perhaps without a single exception, that is done by men, and of doing it successfully and creditably. The utmost that can be said is that there are many things none of them has succeeded in doing as well as it has been done by some men, and many in which they have not reached the very highest rank. But there are extremely few things depending on mental faculties alone in which they have not reached the rank next to the highest. Is that not enough, and much more than enough, to make it a tyranny to them and a loss 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 numbers of women, men who would be beaten by women in any fair field of competition? What difference does it make that there may be men somewhere, fully occupied with other things, who might be still better qualified for the tasks in question than these women? Does that not happen in every competition? Is there such a superfluity of men fit for high duties that society can afford to reject the service of any competent person? Are we so certain of always finding a man ready made for any duty or function of social importance that falls vacant, that we lose nothing by putting a ban on one half of mankind and refusing in advance to make their faculties available, however distinguished those faculties may be? And even if we could do without them, would it be consistent with justice to refuse them their fair share of honour and distinction, or to deny them the equal moral right of every human being to choose their occupation, short of injuring others, according to their own preferences and at their own risk? Nor is the injustice confined to them: it is shared by everyone in a position to benefit from their services. To ordain that people of a certain kind shall not be physicians, or shall not be advocates, or shall not be members of parliament, is to injure not only them but everybody who employs physicians or advocates or elects members of parliament, and who is deprived of the stimulating effect of greater competition on the competitors' exertions, as well as being restricted to a narrower range of individual choice.

It will perhaps be enough if I confine the details of my argument to functions of a public nature, since if I succeed as to those it will probably be readily granted that women should be admissible to all the other occupations in which it makes any material difference whether they are admitted or not. And let me begin here by marking out one function, broadly distinguished from all the rest, whose rightful exercise by women is entirely independent of any question that can be raised about their faculties. I mean the vote, both parliamentary and municipal. The right to share in choosing those who are to exercise a public trust is an altogether different thing from the right to compete for the trust itself. If nobody could vote for a member of parliament who was 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 everybody, even if 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 presumed from the fact that the law already gives it to them in the most important case of all to themselves — for the choice of the man who is to govern a woman to the end of her life is always supposed to be made voluntarily by her. In the case of election to public trusts it is the business of constitutional law to surround the right of voting with all the necessary securities and limitations; but whatever securities are sufficient for the male sex, no others need be required for women. Under whatever conditions and within whatever limits men are admitted to the vote, there is not a shadow of justification for not admitting women on the same terms. Most of the women of any class are unlikely to differ in political opinion from most of the men of the same class, unless the question is one in which the interests of women as such are somehow involved — and if they are, then women need the vote as their guarantee of just and equal consideration. This ought to be obvious even to those who agree with none of the other doctrines I am arguing for. 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 protection slaves get where the laws are made by their masters.

As to women's fitness not merely to take part 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 practical 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 is such as to exclude unfit men, it will equally exclude unfit women; while if it is not, there is no additional evil in the fact that the unfit people it admits may be women as well as men. So long, therefore, as it is acknowledged that even a few women may be fit for these duties, the laws that shut the door on those exceptions cannot be justified by any opinion that can be held about the capacities of women in general. But though this last consideration is not essential, it is far from irrelevant. An unprejudiced view of it adds strength to the arguments against the disabilities of women and reinforces them with high considerations of practical utility.

Let us begin by setting aside entirely all the psychological considerations tending to show that any of the mental differences supposed to exist between women and men are merely the natural effect of the differences in their education and circumstances, and indicate no radical difference of nature, far less any radical inferiority. Let us consider women only as they already are, or as they are known to have been, and only the capacities they have already shown in practice. What they have done, at least, if nothing else, is proved that they can do. When we consider how carefully they are all trained away from, instead of towards, any of the occupations or objects reserved for men, it is obvious that I am taking very humble ground for them when I rest their case on what they have actually achieved. For here negative evidence is worth little, while any positive evidence is conclusive. It cannot be inferred to be impossible that a woman should be a Homer, or an Aristotle, or a Michelangelo, or a Beethoven, merely because no woman has yet produced work comparable to theirs in any of those lines. That negative fact at most leaves the question uncertain and open to psychological 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 here is a curious consideration: the only things the existing law excludes women from doing are the things they have proved they can do. There is no law to prevent a woman from having written all the plays of Shakespeare, or composed all the operas of Mozart. But Queen Elizabeth or Queen Victoria, had they not inherited the throne, could not have been entrusted with the smallest of the political duties of which the first showed herself equal to the greatest.

If anything conclusive could be inferred from experience without psychological analysis, it would be that the things women are not allowed to do are the very ones they are peculiarly qualified for; since their vocation for government has made its way and become conspicuous through the very few opportunities they have been given, while in the lines of distinction that were apparently freely open to them they have by no means distinguished themselves so eminently. We know how small a number of reigning queens history shows, compared with the number of kings. Of this smaller number a far larger proportion have shown talent for rule, though many of them occupied the throne in difficult periods. It is remarkable too that in a great many instances they have been distinguished by merits most opposite to the imaginary and conventional character of women: they have been as much remarked for the firmness and vigour of their rule as for its intelligence. When we add to queens and empresses the regents and the viceroys of provinces, the list of women who have been eminent rulers of mankind swells to a great length. The fact is so undeniable that somebody long ago tried to turn the argument back and convert the admitted truth into an additional insult by saying that queens are better than kings, because under kings women govern, but under queens, men.

Footnote: This is especially true if we take Asia into consideration as well as Europe. If a Hindu principality is strongly, vigilantly and economically governed; if order is preserved without oppression; if cultivation is spreading and the people are prosperous, then in three cases out of four that principality is under a woman's rule. This fact, an entirely unexpected one to me, I have gathered from long official acquaintance with Hindu governments. There are many such instances; for although under Hindu institutions a woman cannot reign, she is the legal regent of a kingdom during the heir's minority, and minorities are frequent, the lives of the male rulers being so often cut short by the effects of inactivity and sensual excess. When we consider that these princesses have never been seen in public, have never talked with any man not of their own family except from behind a curtain, that they do not read, and that if they did there is no book in their languages that could give them the smallest instruction in political affairs, the example they give of the natural capacity of women for government is very striking.

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 suggesting that they thought there was something in it. At any rate it will do as well as anything else for a starting point. I say, then, that it is not true that under kings women govern. Such cases are entirely exceptional, and weak kings have governed badly quite as often through the influence of male favourites as of female ones. When a king is governed by a woman merely through his amorous inclinations, good government is not probable, though even then there are exceptions. But French history counts two kings who voluntarily handed over the direction of affairs for many years, the one to his mother and the other to his sister. One of them, Charles VIII, was a mere boy, but in doing it he was following 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 way hardly equalled by any prince among their contemporaries. The Emperor Charles V, the most politic prince of his time, who had as many able men in his service as any ruler ever had, and was one of the sovereigns least likely to sacrifice his interests to personal feelings, made two princesses of his family successively Governors of the Netherlands and kept one or other of them in that post his whole life, and a third succeeded them afterwards. 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 for the other. When it is said that under queens men govern, is the same thing meant as when kings are said to be governed by women? Is it meant that queens choose as their instruments of government the companions of their personal pleasures? The case is rare even with those who are as unscrupulous on that point as Catherine II, and it is not in those cases that the good government supposedly arising from male influence is to be found. If it is true, then, that the administration is in better men's hands 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, since the principal business of a prime minister is not to govern in person but to find the fittest people to run every department of public affairs. The quicker 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 at that choice of instruments, which is very nearly the most important business of everyone who has anything to do with governing mankind. Even the unprincipled Catherine de' Medici could feel the value of a Chancellor de l'Hôpital. But it is also true that most great queens have been great through their own talents for government, and have been well served precisely for that reason. They kept the supreme direction of affairs in their own hands; and if they listened to good advisers, they gave by that very fact the strongest proof that their judgment fitted them to deal with the great questions of government.

Is it reasonable to think that those who are fit for the greater functions of politics are incapable of qualifying themselves for the lesser? Is there any reason in the nature of things why the wives and sisters of princes should be found, whenever they are called on, as competent as the princes themselves at their business, while the wives and sisters of statesmen and administrators and directors of companies and managers of public institutions should be unable to do what their brothers and husbands do? The real reason is plain enough. It is that princesses, being raised above ordinary men by their rank more than they are 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 going on around them, in which they might be called on to take a part. The ladies of reigning families are the only women allowed the same range of interests and freedom of development as men; and it is precisely in their case that no inferiority is found. Exactly where, and in proportion as, women's capacities for government have been tried, in that proportion have they been found adequate.

This fact agrees with the best general conclusions the world's imperfect experience seems so far to suggest about the peculiar tendencies and aptitudes characteristic of women, as women have been up to now. I do not say as they will continue to be; for, as I have already said more than once, I consider it presumption in anybody to pretend to decide what women are or are not, can or cannot be, by natural constitution. So far as spontaneous development goes, they have always been kept in so unnatural a state that their nature cannot but have been greatly distorted and disguised; and nobody can safely pronounce that if women's nature were left to choose its own direction as freely as men's, and if no artificial bent were given to it except what the conditions of human society require and is given to both sexes alike, there would be any material difference — or perhaps any difference at all — in the character and capacities that would unfold. I shall presently show that even the least contestable of the differences that now exist may very well have been produced merely by circumstances, without any difference of natural capacity. But looking at women as they are known in experience, it may be said of them, with more truth than belongs to most other generalisations on the subject, that the general bent of their talents is towards the practical.

This statement agrees with the whole public history of women, past and present, and is no less borne out by common daily experience. Consider the special nature of the mental capacities most characteristic of a woman of talent. They are all of a kind that fits her for practice and makes her tend towards it. What is meant by a woman's capacity for 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 intuition, or arrived at a general rule of duty or prudence by it. Those are the results of a slow and careful collection and comparison of experience, and neither the men nor the women of intuition usually shine in that department — unless, indeed, the experience they need is such as they can acquire for themselves. For what is called their intuitive sagacity makes them peculiarly apt at gathering such general truths as can be collected from their own individual means of observation. Consequently, when they happen to be as well provided as men are with the results of other people's experience, through reading and education — and I use the word "happen" advisedly, for as regards the knowledge that tends to fit them for the greater concerns of life, the only educated women are the self-educated — they are better furnished than men in general with the essential requisites of skilful and successful practice. Men who have been much taught are apt to be deficient in the sense of present fact; they do not see, in the facts they are called on 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 for "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 immediately in front of her. Now this sensitivity to the present is the main quality on which the capacity for practice, as distinct from theory, depends. To discover general principles belongs to the speculative faculty; to discern and distinguish the particular cases in which they do and do not apply constitutes practical talent, and for that women as they now are have a peculiar aptitude. I admit that there can be no good practice without principles, and that the leading place quickness of observation holds among a woman's faculties makes her particularly apt to build overhasty generalisations on her own observation, though at the same time she is no less ready to correct them as her observation widens. But the corrective for this defect is access to the experience of the human race, general knowledge — exactly the thing 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 that have long been known. Of course he has picked up 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 towards the present, the real, the actual fact, while in its exclusiveness it is a source of errors, is also a most useful counteractive of the opposite error. The principal and most characteristic aberration of speculative minds as such consists precisely in the lack of this lively perception and ever-present sense of objective fact. For want of it they often not only overlook the contradiction that outward facts present to their theories, but lose sight of the legitimate purpose of speculation altogether, and let their speculative faculties wander off into regions peopled not with real beings, animate or inanimate, even idealised, but with personified shadows created by the illusions of metaphysics or by the mere entanglement of words — and they think these shadows the proper objects of the highest, the most transcendent, philosophy. Hardly anything can be of greater value to a man of theory and speculation, who employs himself not in collecting the materials of knowledge by observation 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 company, and under the criticism, of a really superior woman. There is nothing comparable 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 livelier interest in the present feelings of people, which makes her consider first of all, in anything claiming to be applied in practice, how people will be affected by it: these two things make her extremely unlikely to put faith in any speculation that loses sight of individuals and deals with things as if they existed for the 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 are in giving width and largeness to those of women. In depth, as distinguished from breadth, I greatly doubt whether even now women are at any disadvantage compared with men.

If the existing mental characteristics of women are thus valuable even as an aid to speculation, they are still more important, once speculation has done its work, for carrying its results 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 special features either take it out of the class the rules apply to or require a special adaptation of them. Let us now consider another of the admitted superiorities of clever women, greater quickness of apprehension. Is that not pre-eminently a quality that fits a person for practice? In action, everything continually depends on 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 for fear the opportunity will pass. The power of drawing the best possible conclusion from insufficient data is not useless in philosophy — the construction of a provisional hypothesis consistent with all known facts is often the necessary basis for further inquiry. But this faculty is useful in philosophy rather than the main qualification for it; and for the auxiliary operation as well as the main one, the philosopher can allow himself all the time he pleases. He does not need to be able to do quickly what he does; what he needs rather 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 fleeting and perishable — with individual facts, not kinds of facts — rapidity of thought is a qualification second in importance only to the power of thought itself. A man 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 criticise, but he is not fit to act. Now it is here that women, and the men who are most like women, confessedly excel. The other sort of man, however pre-eminent his faculties, comes slowly to complete command of them: rapid judgment and prompt, judicious action, even in the things he knows best, are the gradual and late result of strenuous effort grown into habit.

It will be said, perhaps, that women's greater nervous susceptibility disqualifies them for practice in anything but domestic life, by making them changeable, unsteady, too much under the influence of the moment, incapable of dogged perseverance, unequal and uncertain in their power of using their faculties. I think these phrases sum up most of the objections commonly made to women's fitness for the higher class of serious business. Much of it is the mere overflow of nervous energy running to waste, and would cease once the energy was directed to a definite end. Much is also the result of conscious or unconscious cultivation, as we see from the almost total disappearance of "hysterics" and fainting fits since they went out of fashion. Moreover, when people are brought up, as many women of the higher classes are — though less so in our own country than anywhere else — like hothouse plants, sheltered from the wholesome changes of air and temperature and untrained in any of the occupations and exercises that stimulate and develop the circulatory and muscular systems, while their nervous system, especially on its emotional side, is kept in unnaturally active play, it is no wonder if those of them who do not die of consumption grow up with constitutions liable to be disordered by slight causes, internal and external, and without the stamina to sustain any task, physical or mental, that requires continuity of effort. But women brought up to work for their living show none of these morbid characteristics, unless indeed they are chained to an excess of sedentary work in confined and unhealthy rooms. Women who in their early years have shared the healthy physical education and bodily freedom of their brothers, and who get enough fresh air and exercise in later life, very rarely have any excessive nervous susceptibility that could disqualify them for active pursuits.

There is indeed a certain proportion of people in both sexes in whom an unusual degree of nervous sensibility is constitutional, and so marked as to be the feature of their organisation that most influences the whole character of their 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 more women than men. Let us assume this as a fact. And then let me ask: are men of a nervous temperament found to be unfit for the duties and pursuits men usually follow? If not, why should women of the same temperament be unfit for them? The peculiarities of the temperament are no doubt, within certain limits, an obstacle to success in some employments, though a help in others. But when the occupation suits the temperament, and sometimes even when it does not, the most brilliant examples of success are continually given by men of high nervous sensibility. In their practical manifestations they are distinguished chiefly by this: being capable of a higher degree of excitement than people of another physical constitution, their powers when excited differ more than other people's do from those they show in their ordinary state. They are raised, as it were, above themselves, and do things with ease that they are wholly incapable of at other times. But this lofty excitement is not, except in weak bodily constitutions, a mere flash that passes away at once leaving no permanent trace, incompatible with persistent and steady pursuit of an object. It is the character of the nervous temperament to be capable of sustained excitement, holding out through long-continued effort. It is what is meant by spirit. It is what makes the high-bred racehorse run without slackening speed until he drops down dead. It is what has enabled so many delicate women to maintain the most sublime constancy, not only at the stake but through a long preliminary succession of mental and bodily tortures.

It is obvious that people of this temperament 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, powerful spreaders of moral influence. Their constitution might be thought less favourable to the qualities required of a statesman in the cabinet, or of a judge. And so it would be, if it necessarily followed that because people are excitable they must always be in a state of excitement. But that is wholly a question of training. Strong feeling is the instrument and the element of strong self-control, but it needs to be cultivated in that direction. When it is, it produces not only the heroes of impulse but the heroes of self-conquest. History and experience prove that the most passionate characters are the most fanatically rigid in their sense of duty, once 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 engaged on the other side derives from that same strength of feeling the determined sense of the obligation of justice which enables him to win this victory over himself. The capacity for that lofty enthusiasm which takes a human being out of his everyday character reacts on the everyday character itself. His aspirations and powers in that exceptional state become the standard by which he compares and judges his feelings and his conduct at other times, and his habitual purposes take on a character moulded by and assimilated to those moments of lofty excitement, although, from the physical nature of a human being, they can only be transient.

Experience of races, as well as of individuals, does not show those of excitable temperament to be less fit on average either for speculation or for practice than the less excitable. The French and the Italians are undoubtedly by nature more nervously excitable than the Teutonic races, and, compared with the English at least, 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 of old were, as their descendants and successors still are, one of the most excitable of the races of mankind. It is superfluous to ask which of the achievements of men they did not excel in. The Romans, probably, being an equally southern people, had the same original temperament; but the stern character of their national discipline, like that of the Spartans, made them an example of the opposite type of national character, the greater strength of their natural feelings being chiefly apparent in the intensity that the same original temperament made it possible to give to the artificial ones. If these cases illustrate what a naturally excitable people can be made into, the Irish Celts give 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 influence of bad government and the direct training of a Catholic hierarchy and a sincere belief in the Catholic religion. The Irish character must therefore be considered an unfavourable case; and yet, wherever the circumstances of the individual have been at all favourable, what people have shown greater capacity for the most varied and multifarious individual eminence? As the French compare with the English, the Irish with the Swiss, the Greeks or Italians with the German races, so women compared with men may be found on average to do the same things with some variety in the particular kind of excellence. But that they would do them fully as well on the whole, if their education and cultivation were adapted to correcting instead of aggravating the weaknesses that go with their temperament, I see not the smallest reason to doubt.

Suppose it were true, however, that women's minds are by nature more mobile than men's, less capable of persisting long in the same continuous effort, better fitted for dividing their faculties among many things than for travelling along any one path to the highest point it can reach. This may be true of women as they now are, though not without great and numerous exceptions, and may account for their having remained behind the highest order of men in precisely the things where this absorption of the whole mind in one set of ideas and occupations seems most necessary. Still, this difference is one that 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 one part of the mind, this absorption of the whole thinking faculty in a single subject and concentration of it on a single work, is the normal and healthy condition of the human faculties even for speculative purposes. I believe that what is gained in special development by such concentration is lost in the mind's capacity for the other purposes of life; and even in abstract thought it is my decided opinion that the mind does more by returning frequently to a difficult problem than by sticking at it without interruption. For the purposes of practice at any rate, 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 in between is a far more valuable power; and women pre-eminently possess it, by virtue of the very mobility they are accused of. They perhaps have it from nature, but they certainly have it from training and education, for nearly the whole of women's occupations consists in the management of small but multitudinous details, on none of which the mind can dwell even for a minute but must pass on to other things — and if anything requires longer thought, it must be stolen at odd moments. The capacity women show for doing their thinking in circumstances and at times in 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 allow itself to be vacant, as a man's so often is when he is not engaged in what he chooses to consider the business of his life. The business of a woman's ordinary life is things in general, and it can no more stop going on than the world can stop going 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 a woman's brain is smaller than a man's. If it is inferred merely from the fact that a woman's body is generally smaller than a man's, that criterion would lead to strange consequences. A tall, big-boned man must on this showing be wonderfully superior in intelligence to a small one, and an elephant or a whale must prodigiously excel mankind. The size of the brain in human beings, anatomists say, varies much less than the size of the body or even of the head, and the one cannot be inferred from the other at all. It is certain that some women have as large a brain as any man. I know of a man who had weighed many human brains and said that the heaviest he knew of, heavier even than Cuvier's, the heaviest previously recorded, was a woman's.

Next, I must observe that the precise relation between the brain and the intellectual powers is not yet well understood and is a subject of great dispute. That there is a very close relation we cannot doubt. The brain is certainly the material organ of thought and feeling; and, setting aside the great unsettled controversy about which parts of the brain belong to which mental faculties, I admit that it would be an anomaly, and an exception to everything we know of the general laws of life and organisation, if the size of the organ were wholly irrelevant to the function, and no accession of power came from a greater size of the instrument. But the exception and the anomaly would be just as great if the organ exercised influence by its size only. In all the more delicate operations of nature — of which those of animate 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 in the quality of the physical agents as on their quantity. And if the quality of an instrument 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. Setting aside abstract difference of quality, a thing difficult to verify, the efficiency of an organ is known to depend not solely on its size but on its activity; and of that we have an approximate measure in the energy with which the blood circulates through it, since both the stimulus and the restorative force depend mainly on the circulation. It would not be surprising — indeed it is a hypothesis that fits well with the differences actually observed between the mental operations of the two sexes — if men on average had the advantage in size of brain and women in activity of cerebral circulation.

The results that conjecture founded on analogy would lead us to expect from such a difference of organisation would correspond to some of those we most commonly see. In the first place, men's mental operations might be expected to be slower. They would be neither as prompt as women in thinking nor as quick to feel. Large bodies take longer to get into full action. On the other hand, once thoroughly in play, men's brains would bear more work. They would be more persistent along the line first taken; they would have more difficulty changing from one mode of action to another, but in the one thing they were doing they could go on longer without loss of power or sense of fatigue. And do we not find that the things men most excel women in are those requiring the most plodding and long hammering at a single thought, while women do best what has to be done rapidly? A woman's brain is sooner tired and sooner exhausted; but given the same degree of exhaustion we should expect to find that it recovered sooner. I repeat that this speculation is entirely hypothetical; it pretends to no more than to suggest a line of inquiry. I have already repudiated the notion that it is yet certainly 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 while the psychological laws of the formation of character have been so little studied even in a general way, and in this particular case never scientifically applied at all; and while the most obvious external causes of difference of character are habitually disregarded, left unnoticed by the observer and looked down on with a kind of supercilious contempt by the prevailing schools both of natural history and of mental philosophy, who — whether they look for the source of what chiefly distinguishes human beings from one another in the world of matter or in the world of spirit — agree in running down those who prefer to explain these differences by the different relations of human beings to society and to life.

The notions formed about the nature of women are mere empirical generalisations, framed without philosophy or analysis on the first instances that present themselves — and to such a ridiculous extent that the popular idea of it differs from country to country, according as the opinions and social circumstances of the country have given the women living in it some speciality of development or of non-development. A man in the East thinks women are by nature peculiarly voluptuous; see the violent abuse of them on that ground in Hindu writings. An Englishman usually thinks they are by nature cold. The sayings about women's fickleness are mostly of French origin, from the famous couplet of Francis I onwards. In England it is a common remark how much more constant women are than men. Inconstancy has been counted discreditable to a woman longer in England than in France, and Englishwomen are besides, in their innermost nature, much more subdued to opinion.

It may be remarked in passing that Englishmen are in peculiarly unfavourable circumstances for judging what is or is not natural, not merely to women but to men, or to human beings altogether — at least if they have only English experience to go on, because there is nowhere human nature shows so little of its original lineaments. In a good sense and a bad one, the English are further from a state of nature than any other modern people. They are, more than any other people, a product of civilisation and discipline. England is the country where 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. Most of life is carried on not by following inclination under the control of rule, but by having no inclination except to follow a rule. Now this has its good side, no doubt, though it also has a wretchedly bad one; but it must make an Englishman peculiarly ill qualified to pass judgment on the original tendencies of human nature from his own experience. The errors observers elsewhere are liable to on the subject are of a different character. An Englishman is ignorant about human nature; a Frenchman is prejudiced. An Englishman's errors are negative, a Frenchman's positive. An Englishman fancies things do not exist because he never sees them; a Frenchman thinks they must always and necessarily exist because he does see them. An Englishman does not know nature because he has had no opportunity 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 that society brings on disguises the natural tendencies of the thing observed in two different ways: by extinguishing the nature, or by transforming it. In the one case only a starved residue of nature remains to be studied; in the other there is much, but it may have expanded in any direction rather than the one it would grow in spontaneously.

I have said that it cannot now be known how much of the existing mental difference between men and women is natural and how much artificial; whether there are any natural differences at all; or, supposing all artificial causes of difference were withdrawn, what natural character would be revealed. I am not about to attempt what I have pronounced impossible; but doubt does not forbid conjecture, and where certainty is unattainable there may still be means of reaching some degree of probability. The first point, the origin of the differences actually observed, is the one most accessible to speculation, and I shall try to approach it by the only path that can reach it: by tracing the mental consequences of external influences. We cannot isolate a human being from the circumstances of his condition so as to find out experimentally what he would have been by nature; but we can consider what he is, and what his circumstances have been, and whether the second could have produced the first.

Let us take, then, the one marked case observation affords of apparent inferiority of women to men, leaving aside the merely physical one of bodily strength. No production in philosophy, science or art entitled to the first rank has been the work of a woman. Is there any way 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 yet given sufficient grounds for an induction. It is barely three generations since women, save very rare exceptions, began to try their capacity in philosophy, science or art. It is only in the present generation that their attempts have been at all numerous, and even now they are extremely few anywhere 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 in that space of time among the women whose tastes and personal position allowed them to devote themselves to these pursuits. In everything there has yet been time for — in everything but the very highest grades on the scale of excellence, especially in the department they have been engaged in longest, literature both in prose and poetry — women have done quite as much, and have carried off 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, some of those few made it with distinguished success. The Greeks always counted Sappho among their great poets; and we may well suppose that Myrtis, said to have been Pindar's teacher, and Corinna, who five times carried off the prize for poetry against him, must at least have had merit enough to bear comparison with that great name. Aspasia left no philosophical writings, but it is an admitted fact that Socrates went to her for instruction and declared that he had received it.

If we consider the works of women in modern times and contrast them with men's, in either the literary or the artistic department, such inferiority as can be observed resolves itself essentially into one thing — but that one thing is most material: a deficiency of originality. Not a total deficiency, for every production of the mind that has any substantive value has an originality of its own, being a conception of the mind itself and not a copy of something else. Thoughts that are original in the sense of being unborrowed, of being derived from the thinker's own observation or intellectual processes, are abundant in the writings of women. But they have not yet produced any of those great and luminous new ideas that make an era in thought, nor those fundamentally new conceptions in art that open a vista of possible effects nobody had thought of before 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. That is the sort of inferiority their works show; for in point of execution, in the detailed application of thought and the perfection of style, there is no inferiority. Our best novelists in point of composition and 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 Staël, nor, as a specimen of purely artistic excellence, anything superior to the prose of Madame Sand, whose style acts on 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 let us examine whether there is any way this deficiency can be accounted for.

Let us remember, then, so far as mere thought is concerned, that during the whole period of the world's existence, and of the progress of cultivation, in which great and fruitful new truths could be reached by mere force of genius, with little previous study and accumulation of knowledge, women did not concern themselves with speculation at all. From the days of Hypatia to those of the Reformation, the illustrious Héloïse is almost the only woman to whom any such achievement might have been possible, and we do not know how great a capacity for speculation in her may have been lost to mankind through the misfortunes of her life. Never since any considerable number of women began to cultivate serious thought has originality been possible on easy terms. Nearly all the thoughts that can be reached by mere strength of original faculties have long since been reached, and originality in any high sense of the word is now hardly ever attained except by minds that have undergone elaborate discipline and are deeply versed in the results of previous thinking. It is Mr Maurice, I think, who remarked of the present age that its most original thinkers are those who have known most thoroughly what their predecessors thought; and this will always be the case from now on. Every fresh stone in the building now has to be placed on top of so many others that a long process of climbing, and of carrying up materials, has to be gone through by anyone who aspires to take a share in the present stage of the work. How many women have gone through any such process? Mrs Somerville, alone perhaps among women, knows as much mathematics as is now needed to make 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 people who in her lifetime have attached their names to some striking advance in the science? Two women, since political economy became a science, have known enough of it to write usefully on the subject; of how many of the innumerable men who have written on it in the same period can it truthfully be said that they knew more? If no woman has yet been a great historian, what woman has had the necessary learning? If no woman is a great philologist, what woman has studied Sanskrit and Slavonic, the Gothic of Ulfilas and the Persian of the Zend-Avesta? Even in practical matters we all know what the originality of untaught geniuses is worth. It means inventing over again, in its rudimentary form, something already invented and improved on by many successive inventors. When women have had the preparation all men now require in order to be eminently original, it will be time enough to begin judging their capacity for originality by experience.

It no doubt often happens that a person who has not widely and accurately studied other people's thoughts on a subject has by natural sagacity a happy intuition, which he can suggest but cannot prove, and which yet when matured may be an important addition to knowledge. But even then no justice can be done to it until somebody else, who does have the previous acquirements, takes it in hand, tests it, gives it a scientific or practical form, and fits it into its place among the existing truths of philosophy or science. Is it supposed that such lucky thoughts do not occur to women? They occur by the hundred to every woman of intellect. But they are mostly lost, for want of a husband or a friend who has the other knowledge that would enable him to value them properly and bring them before the world; and even when they are brought before it, they generally appear as his ideas and 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, and to themselves only by the verifying and working out? If I may judge from my own case, a very large proportion indeed.

If we turn from pure speculation to literature in the narrow sense, and to the fine arts, there is a very obvious reason why women's literature is, in its general conception and its main features, an imitation of men's. Why is Roman literature, as the critics proclaim to satiety, not original but an imitation of the Greek? Simply because the Greeks came first. If women lived in a different 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 already created. If there had been no interruption in the knowledge of antiquity, or if the Renaissance had happened before the Gothic cathedrals were built, they would never have been built. We see that in France and Italy imitation of the ancient literature stopped the original development even after it had begun. All women who write are pupils of the great male writers. A painter's early pictures, even if he is a Raphael, are indistinguishable in style from his master's. Even a Mozart does not display his powerful originality in his earliest pieces. What years are to a gifted individual, generations are to a mass. If women's literature is destined to have a different collective character from men's, depending on some difference of natural tendency, much more time is needed than has passed yet before it can emancipate itself from the influence of accepted models and steer by its own impulses. But if, as I believe, there prove to be no natural tendencies common to women that distinguish their genius from men's, still every individual writer among them has her individual tendencies, which at present are subdued by the influence of precedent and example; and it will take generations more before their individuality is developed enough to make headway against that influence.

It is in the fine arts, properly so called, that the initial evidence of inferior original powers in women appears at first sight strongest, since opinion, it may be said, does not exclude them from these but rather encourages them, and their education, instead of passing this department over, consists mainly of it in the wealthy classes. Yet in this line of exertion they have fallen still further short than in many others of the highest eminence attained by men. This shortfall, however, needs no explanation beyond the familiar fact, more universally true in the fine arts than in anything else: the vast superiority of professionals over amateurs. Women in the educated classes are almost universally taught something or other of some branch of the fine arts, but not so that they may earn their living or their social standing by it. Women artists are all amateurs. The exceptions are only of the kind that confirms the general truth. Women are taught music, but not for the purpose of composing, only of performing it — and accordingly it is only as composers that men in music are superior to women. The one fine art women do follow to any extent as a profession and an occupation for life is acting, and in that they are confessedly equal to men, if not superior. To make the comparison fair, it should be made between the productions of women in any branch of art and those of men who do not follow it as a profession. In musical composition, for example, women have surely produced things fully as good as any that have ever been produced by male amateurs. There are now a few women, a very few, who practise painting as a profession, and they are already beginning to show quite as much talent as could be expected. Even male painters, with all respect to Mr Ruskin, have not cut any very remarkable figure these last few centuries, and it will be long before they do. The reason the old painters were so greatly superior to the modern ones 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 encyclopaedic acquirements and powers, like the great men of Greece. But in their day fine art was, to men's feelings and conceptions, among the grandest things a human being could excel in, and it made men what only political or military distinction now makes them: the companions of sovereigns and the equals of the highest nobility. In the present age, men of anything like similar calibre find something 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 — on whose relative rank among eminent men I pretend to no 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 dependent on a natural gift, and it may be thought surprising that none 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 devotion to the pursuit. The only countries that have produced first-rate composers even of the male sex are Germany and Italy — countries where, in both special and general cultivation, women have remained far behind France and England, being generally, it may be said without exaggeration, very little educated and having hardly cultivated any of the higher faculties of the mind at all. And in those countries the men acquainted with the principles of musical composition must be counted by hundreds, or more probably by thousands, and 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 last three centuries have not produced fifty eminent male composers in Germany or in Italy either.

There are other reasons besides those I have given that help to explain why women remain behind men even in the pursuits open to both. For one thing, very few women have time for them. This may seem a paradox; it is an undoubted social fact. Every woman's time and thoughts have to satisfy great prior demands on them for practical things. There is, first, the superintendence of the family and the domestic spending, which occupies at least one woman in every family, generally the one of mature years and acquired experience, unless the family is rich enough to delegate the task to hired help and to submit to all the waste and mismanagement inseparable from doing it that way. The superintendence of a household, even when not otherwise laborious, is extremely burdensome to the thoughts. It requires unceasing vigilance and an eye that no detail escapes, and it presents questions for consideration and solution, foreseen and unforeseen, at every hour of the day, from which the person responsible for them can hardly ever shake herself free. If a woman is of a rank and circumstances that relieve her to some extent from these cares, she still has devolving on her the management of the whole family's dealings with other people — of what is called society; and the less the first duty calls on her, the greater is always the development of the second: the dinner parties, concerts, evening parties, morning visits, letter writing and everything that goes with them. And all this is over and above the engrossing duty society imposes exclusively on women, of making themselves charming. A clever woman of the higher ranks finds nearly enough employment for 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 that every woman who attaches any value to dressing well — I do not mean expensively, but with taste and a perception of natural and artificial convenance — has to spend on her own dress, and perhaps on her daughters' too, would by itself go a long way towards achieving respectable results in art or science or literature, and does in fact exhaust much of the time and mental power she might have to spare for either. If it were possible for all this number of little practical interests, which are made great to them, to leave them either much leisure or much energy and freedom of mind to devote to art or speculation, they would have to have a far greater original supply of active faculty than the vast majority of men. But this is not all. Quite apart from the regular offices of life that fall to a woman, she is expected to have her time and her faculties always at everybody's disposal. If a man has no profession to exempt him from such demands, still, if he has a pursuit, he offends nobody by devoting his time to it; occupation is accepted as a valid excuse for not answering every casual demand made on him. Are a woman's occupations, especially her chosen and voluntary ones, ever regarded as excusing her from any of what are called the claims of society? Hardly even her most necessary and recognised duties are allowed as an exemption. It takes an illness in the family, or something else out of the common way, to entitle her to give her own business precedence over other people's amusement. 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 whatever short interval happens to occur to be employed in it. A celebrated woman, in a work I hope will one day be published, remarks truly that everything a woman does is done at odd times. Is it any wonder, then, if she does not reach the highest eminence in things that require consecutive 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 has to be kept in constant exercise to attain high skill.

Footnote: "It appears to be the same right turn of mind which enables a man to acquire the truth, or the just idea of what is right, in the ornaments, as in the 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 continually 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 on 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, Discourse VII.

There is another consideration to be added to all these. In the various arts and intellectual occupations there is a degree of proficiency sufficient to live by, and there is a higher degree on which the great productions that immortalise a name depend. For attaining the first there are adequate motives in the case of everyone who follows the pursuit professionally. The second is hardly ever attained where there is not, or has not been at some period of life, an ardent desire for fame. Nothing less is commonly a sufficient stimulus to undergo the long and patient drudgery which, even with the greatest natural gifts, is absolutely required for great eminence in pursuits where we already possess so many splendid memorials of the highest genius. Now, whether the cause is 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 immediately around them. Their desire is to be liked, loved or admired by the people they see with their own eyes; and the proficiency in knowledge, arts and accomplishments that is sufficient for that almost always contents them. This is a trait of character that cannot be left out of account in judging women as they are. I do not at all believe 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 by opinion; to "scorn delights and live laborious days" for its sake is counted the mark of "noble minds", even if it is spoken of as their "last infirmity", and it is stimulated by the access fame gives to all the objects of ambition, including even the favour of women — while to women themselves all these objects are closed, and the desire for fame itself is considered daring and unfeminine. Besides, how could a woman's interests not be entirely concentrated on the impressions she makes on those who come into her daily life, when society has ordained that all her duties are to them, and has contrived that all her comforts shall depend on them? The natural desire for the regard of our fellow creatures is as strong in a woman as in a man; but society has so arranged things that public regard is, in all ordinary cases, only attainable by her through the regard shown to her husband or her male relations, while her private regard is forfeited by making herself individually prominent, or appearing in any character other than that of an appendage to men. Anybody in the least capable of estimating the influence on the mind of a person's entire domestic and social position, and of the whole habit of a life, must easily recognise in that influence a complete explanation of nearly all the apparent differences between women and men, including all those that imply any inferiority.

As for moral differences, as distinguished from intellectual ones, the distinction commonly drawn is to women's advantage. 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, and considered quite natural and suitable, that the better should 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 the fact, if it is a fact, either proves or illustrates. And it is true that servitude, except when it actually brutalises, though corrupting to both, is less corrupting to the slaves than to the slave masters. It is healthier 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, less often fall under the penal law and contribute a much smaller number of offenders to the criminal calendar than men. I do not doubt that the same thing could be said, with the same truth, of enslaved people. Those under the control of others cannot often commit crimes, except at their masters' command and for their masters' purposes. I do not know a more signal instance of the blindness with which the world, including the herd of studious men, ignores and passes over all the influences of social circumstances, than its silly disparagement of the intellectual nature of women and its silly panegyrics on their moral nature.

The complimentary dictum about women's superior moral goodness may be allowed to pair off with the disparaging one about their greater liability to moral bias. Women, we are told, are not capable of resisting their personal partialities; their judgment in grave affairs is warped by their sympathies and antipathies. Assuming this to be so, it still remains to be proved that women are more often misled by their personal feelings than men by their personal interests. The chief difference would seem in that case to be that men are led away from the course of duty and the public interest by regard for themselves, and women — not being allowed to have private interests of their own — by regard for somebody else. It should also be considered that all the education women receive from society instils in them the feeling that the individuals connected with them are the only ones they owe any duty to, the only ones whose interest they are called on to care about; while as far as education goes they are left strangers even to the elementary ideas presupposed in any intelligent regard for larger interests or higher moral objects. The complaint against them resolves itself merely into this, that they fulfil only too faithfully the sole duty they are taught, and almost the only one they are permitted to practise.

The concessions of the privileged to the unprivileged are so seldom brought about by any better motive than the power of the unprivileged to extort them, that any argument against the prerogative of sex is likely to get little attention from most people so long as they can say to themselves that women do not complain of it. That fact certainly enables men to keep the unjust privilege a while longer, but it does not make it less unjust. Exactly the same thing may be said of the women in an Eastern harem: they do not complain of not being allowed the freedom of European women. They think our women insufferably bold and unfeminine. How rarely even men complain of the general order of society, and how much rarer still such a complaint would be if they did not know of any different order existing anywhere else. Women do not complain 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 suspected of having any practical object. Their complaints are like the complaints 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 the same in every other case of servitude, at least at the beginning of the movement for emancipation. 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 privileges; next they asked to be exempt 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 sovereign authority. The case of women is now the only one in which rebelling against established rules is still looked on with the same eyes as a subject's claim to the right of rebelling against his king used to be. A woman who joins any movement her husband disapproves of makes herself a martyr 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 numbers are prepared to join them in the undertaking.

Chapter Four: What Would Be Gained

There remains a question no less important than those already discussed, and it is the one that will be asked most insistently by the opponents whose conviction has been somewhat shaken on the main point. What good are we to expect from the changes proposed in our customs and institutions? Would mankind be at all better off if women were free? And if not, why disturb their minds and attempt a social revolution in the name of an abstract right?

It is hardly to be expected that the question will be asked about the change proposed in the condition of women in marriage. The suffering, the immorality, the evils of every sort produced in innumerable cases by the subjection of individual women to individual men are far too terrible to be overlooked. Unthinking or disingenuous people, counting only the cases that are extreme or that become public, may say the evils are exceptional; but nobody can be blind to their existence, or in many cases to their intensity. And it is perfectly obvious that the abuse of the power cannot be much checked while the power remains. It is a power given, or offered, not to good men or to decently respectable men but to all men, the most brutal and the most criminal included. There is no check but opinion, and such men are in general within reach of no opinion but that of men like themselves. If such men did not brutally tyrannise over the one human being the law compels to put up with everything from them, society must already have reached a state of paradise. There could be no further need of laws to curb men's vicious tendencies. Astraea must not only have returned to earth, but the heart of the worst of men must have become her temple.

The law of servitude in marriage is a monstrous contradiction of all the principles of the modern world, and of all the experience through which those principles have been slowly and painfully worked out. It is the one case, now that slavery has been abolished, in which a human being in the fullness of every faculty is handed over to the tender mercies of another human being, in the hope, forsooth, that the other will use the power solely for the good of the person subjected to it. Marriage is the only actual bondage known to our law. There remain no legal slaves, except the mistress of every house.

It is not, therefore, on this part of the subject that the question is likely to be asked: what good will it do? We may be told that the evil would outweigh the good, but the reality of the good is not in dispute. On the larger question, however — the removal of women's legal disabilities, their recognition as the equals of men in everything belonging to citizenship, the opening to them of all honourable employments and of the training and education that qualifies people for those employments — there are many people 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 gained by abolishing it.

To which let me first answer: the advantage of having the most universal and pervading of all human relations regulated by justice instead of injustice. To anyone who attaches a moral meaning to words, the vast size of this gain to human nature can hardly be put in a stronger light by any explanation or illustration than it is by the bare statement of it. All the selfish tendencies, the self-worship, the unjust self-preference that exist among mankind have their source and root in the present constitution of the relation between men and women, and draw their principal nourishment from it. Think what it is to a boy to grow up to manhood believing that without any merit or any effort 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 having been born male he is by right the superior of every single 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. 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 cannot be equal in ability and judgment to him; and if he is not a fool, he does worse — he sees that she is superior to him, and believes that in spite of her superiority he is entitled to command and she is bound to obey. What must the effect of that lesson be on his character?

Men of the cultivated classes are often unaware 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 possible out of sight, and above all out of the children's sight. As much obedience is required from boys towards their mother as towards their father; they are not permitted to domineer over their sisters, nor are they used to seeing their sisters put after them — quite the contrary — and the compensations of the chivalrous feeling are made prominent, while the servitude that calls for them is kept in the background. Well brought-up youths in the higher classes thus often escape the bad influences of the situation in their early years, and only meet them when, having reached manhood, they fall under the dominion of facts as they really are. Such people are little aware, when a boy is brought up differently, 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 passed from one schoolboy to another like an infection; 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 superiority he feels above all towards the woman he honours by admitting her to a partnership in his life. Is it imagined that all this does not pervert the whole manner of the man's existence, 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 of a nobleman that he is so by being born noble. The relation between husband and wife is very like that between lord and vassal, except that the wife is held to a more unlimited obedience than the vassal was. However the vassal's character may have been affected, for better and for worse, by his subordination, 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 command over people as good as himself for no merit or labour 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 possession of unearned distinctions without pluming themselves on them. Those in whom privileges not acquired by merit, and which they feel to be out of proportion to it, inspire additional humility are always the few, and the best few. The rest are only inspired with pride, and the worst sort of pride, the sort that values itself on accidental advantages that are 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 — which for those whose strongest points of character are conscience and affection is a school of conscientious and affectionate forbearance — is for men of another quality a regularly constituted academy or gymnasium for training them in arrogance and overbearingness. And those vices, curbed in their dealings with other men, their equals, by the certainty of resistance, break out towards everyone who is in a position of having to tolerate them, and often revenge themselves on the unfortunate wife for the involuntary restraint they have to submit to elsewhere.

The example set, and the education given to the feelings, by founding domestic existence on a relation that contradicts the first principles of social justice must, from the very nature of man, have a perverting influence of such magnitude that with our present experience we can hardly raise our imaginations to conceive how great a change for the better its removal would make. Everything that education and civilisation are doing to efface the influences of the law of force on character, and to replace them with the influences of justice, stays 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 a person to respect; that not what men are but what they do constitutes their claim to deference; and that above all merit, and not birth, is the only rightful claim to power and authority. If no authority that was not temporary in its nature were allowed to one human being over another, society would not be building up with one hand the tendencies it has to curb with the other. The child would really, for the first time in the existence of man on earth, be trained up in the way he should go, and when 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 the law of Christianity, will never take possession of men's innermost feelings, and they will be working against it even while they bend to it.

The second benefit to be expected from giving women the free use of their faculties, by leaving them free choice of their employments and opening to them the same field of occupation and the same prizes and encouragements as to other human beings, would be the doubling of the mass of mental faculty available for the higher service of humanity. Where there is now one person qualified to benefit mankind and promote the general improvement, as a public teacher or an administrator 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 far below the demand, there is such a shortage of people competent to do excellently anything that requires any considerable amount of ability, that the loss to the world in 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 women; and from the remainder an indirect benefit is obtained in many individual cases, through the personal influence of individual women over individual men. But these benefits are partial, their range is extremely narrow; and if they must be admitted on the one hand as a deduction from the amount of fresh social power that would be gained by giving freedom to one half of the whole sum of human intellect, there must be added on the other the benefit of the stimulus that would be given to men's intellects by the competition — or, to put it more truly, by the necessity that would be imposed on them of deserving precedence before they could expect to get it.

This great addition to the intellectual power of the species, and to the amount of intellect available for the good management of its affairs, would be gained partly through the better and more complete intellectual education of women, which would then improve at the same pace as that of men. Women in general would be brought up equally capable of understanding business, public affairs and the higher matters of speculation as men in the same class of society; and the select few of the one sex as well as of the other, who were qualified not merely to understand what is done or thought by others but to think or do something considerable themselves, would find the same facilities for improving and training their capacities in the one sex as in the other. In this way, widening the sphere of action for women would work for good by raising their education to the level of men's, and making the one share in every improvement made in the other. But quite apart from this, merely breaking down the barrier would in itself have an educational value of the highest worth. Merely getting rid of the idea that all the wider subjects of thought and action, everything that is of general and not solely private interest, is men's business, from which women are to be warned off — positively forbidden most of it, coldly tolerated in the little that is allowed them — merely the consciousness a woman would then have of being a human being like any other, entitled to choose her pursuits, urged or invited by the same inducements as anyone else to interest herself in whatever interests human beings, entitled to exert the share of influence over all human concerns that belongs to an individual opinion, whether she attempted actual participation in them or not: this alone would produce an immense expansion of women's faculties, as well as an enlargement of the range of their moral feelings.

Besides the addition to the amount of individual talent available for conducting human affairs — which are certainly not at present so abundantly provided in that respect that they can afford to dispense with half of what nature offers — the opinion of women would then have a more beneficial, rather than a greater, influence on the general mass of human belief and feeling. I say a more beneficial rather than a greater influence, because the influence of women over the general tone of opinion has always, or at least since the earliest known period, been very considerable. The influence 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 agents in the formation of character, and have determined some of the chief steps in the progress of civilisation. Even in the Homeric age, αἰδώς — the sense of shame and reverence — towards the Τρωάδας ἑλκεσιπέπλους, the Trojan women with their trailing robes, is an acknowledged and powerful motive of action in the great Hector.

The moral influence of women has worked in two ways. First, it has been a softening influence. Those most liable to be the victims of violence have naturally tended as much as they could towards limiting its sphere and moderating its excesses. Those who were not taught to fight have naturally leaned in favour of any other way of settling differences than fighting. In general, those who have suffered most from the indulgence of selfish passion have been the most earnest supporters of any moral law offering a means of bridling passion. Women were powerfully instrumental in inducing the northern conquerors to adopt the creed of Christianity, 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 way in which the effect of women's opinion has been conspicuous is by giving a powerful stimulus to the qualities in men that, not being trained in them themselves, they needed to find in their protectors. Courage, and the military virtues generally, have at all times been greatly indebted to men's desire to be 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 highly thought of by men.

From the combination of these two kinds of moral influence exercised by women arose the spirit of chivalry, whose peculiarity is that it aims at combining the highest standard of the warlike qualities with the cultivation of a totally different class of virtues: 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 rewards it was in their power to bestow voluntarily on those who tried to earn their favour instead of extorting their submission. Though the practice of chivalry fell even more sadly short of its theoretical standard than practice generally falls below theory, it remains one of the most precious monuments of the moral history of our race — a remarkable instance of a concerted and organised attempt, by a most disorganised and distracted society, to raise up and put into practice a moral ideal greatly in advance of its social condition and institutions; so far in advance that it was completely frustrated in its main object, and yet never entirely ineffective, and has left a very perceptible and for the most part a highly valuable mark on the ideas and feelings of all later times.

The chivalrous ideal is the high point of the influence of women's feelings on the moral cultivation of mankind; and if women are to remain in their subordinate situation, it is greatly to be regretted that the chivalrous standard has passed away, for it is the only one at all capable of moderating the demoralising influences of that position. But changes in the general state of the species made it inevitable that a totally different ideal of morality would be substituted 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 influence of individual delicacy and generosity. In modern societies everything, even in the military department of affairs, is 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 demands of the new life exclude the virtues of generosity no more than the old ones did, but they no longer depend on them entirely. The main foundations of the moral life of modern times must be justice and prudence: the respect of each for the rights of everyone else, and the ability of each to take care of himself. Chivalry left without legal check all the forms of wrong that reigned unpunished throughout society; it merely encouraged a few to do right rather than wrong, by the direction it gave to the instruments of praise and admiration. But morality must always really depend on its penal sanctions, on its power to deter people from evil. The security of society cannot rest on merely doing honour to what is right — a motive comparatively weak in all but a few, and with very many people not operative at all. Modern society is able to repress wrong throughout every department of life, by a fit exertion of the superior strength civilisation has given it, and so to make the existence of the weaker members of society — no longer defenceless, but protected by law — tolerable to them, without relying on the chivalrous feelings of those in a position to tyrannise. 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 they do so in every relation of life except the conjugal one.

At present the moral influence of women is no less real, but it no longer has so marked and definite a character; it has more nearly merged into the general influence of public opinion. Both through the contagion of sympathy and through men's desire to shine in women's eyes, 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 men's; in the quality of justice, somewhat lower. As regards the relations of private life it may be said generally that their influence is on the whole encouraging to the softer virtues and discouraging to the sterner ones, though the statement must be taken with all the modifications that individual character makes necessary. In the chief of the greater trials to which virtue is subject in the concerns of life — the conflict 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 their religious or moral education has strongly impressed on them, they are potent allies of virtue, and their husbands and sons are often prompted by them to acts of self-denial they would never have been capable of without that stimulus. But with the present education and position of women, the moral principles impressed on them cover only a comparatively small part of the field of virtue and are moreover mainly negative, 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 disinterestedness in the general conduct of life — devoting one's energies to purposes that hold out no promise of private advantage to the family — is very seldom encouraged or supported by women's influence. It is small blame to them that they discourage objects whose advantage they have not been taught to see, and which draw their men away from them and from the interests of the family. But the consequence is that women's influence is often anything but favourable to public virtue.

Women do, however, have some share of influence in setting the tone of public morality, now that their sphere of action has been a little widened and a considerable number of them have occupied themselves practically in promoting objects that reach beyond their own family and household. The influence of women counts for a great deal in two of the most marked features of modern European life: its aversion to war and its addiction to philanthropy. Excellent characteristics both; but unhappily, though women's influence is valuable in the encouragement it gives to these feelings in general, in particular applications the direction it gives them is at least as often mischievous as useful. In the philanthropic department especially, the two provinces chiefly cultivated by women are religious proselytising and charity. Religious proselytising at home is only another word for embittering religious animosities; abroad it is usually a blind rush at an object, without either knowing or heeding the fatal mischiefs — fatal to the religious object itself as well as to every other desirable object — that the means employed may produce. As for charity, it is a matter in which the immediate effect on the people 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 feelings rather than of the understanding, and the habit instilled by their whole life of looking to immediate effects on individuals rather than remote effects on classes of people, make them both unable to see and unwilling to admit the ultimately bad tendency of any form of charity or philanthropy that recommends itself to their sympathetic feelings. The great and continually increasing mass of unenlightened and short-sighted benevolence which, by taking the care of people's lives out of their own hands and relieving them of the disagreeable consequences of their own acts, saps the very foundations of the self-respect, self-help and self-control that are the essential conditions both of individual prosperity and of social virtue — this waste of resources and of benevolent feeling on doing harm instead of good is immensely swollen by women's contributions and stimulated by their influence.

Not that this is a mistake women are likely to make where they actually have the practical management of schemes of beneficence. It sometimes happens that women who administer public charities recognise in the clearest way the demoralising influence of the alms given or the help afforded — with that insight into present fact, and especially into the minds and feelings of those they are in immediate contact with, in which women generally excel men — and could give lessons on the subject to many a male political economist. But women who only give their money, and are never brought face to face with the effects it produces, how can they be expected to foresee them? A woman born to the present lot of women, and content with it, how should she appreciate the 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 everybody cannot be taken care of by everybody, but that there must be some motive to induce people to take care of themselves; and that to be helped to help themselves, if they are physically capable of it, is the only charity that proves to be charity in the end.

These considerations show how usefully the part women take in forming general opinion would be modified for the better by that wider instruction, and that practical acquaintance with the things their opinions influence, which would necessarily follow from their social and political emancipation. But the improvement it would work through the influence they exercise, each in her own family, would be still more remarkable.

It is often said that in the classes most exposed to temptation a man's wife and children tend to keep him honest and respectable, both through the wife's direct influence and through 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 preserved and strengthened under equal laws. It does not depend on the woman's servitude, but is on the contrary diminished by the disrespect that the inferior class of men always feel at heart towards those who are subject to their power. But when we go higher up 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 country's common standard of approval. It tends quite as strongly to stop him from rising above it. The wife is the auxiliary of common public opinion. A man married to a woman who is his inferior in intelligence finds her a perpetual dead weight — or worse than a dead weight, a drag — on every aspiration of his to be better than public opinion requires him to be. It is hardly possible for a man in these bonds to attain exalted virtue. If he differs in opinion from the mass; if he sees truths that have not yet dawned on them; or if, feeling in his heart truths they nominally recognise, he would like to live up to those truths more conscientiously than most of mankind — to all such thoughts and desires marriage is the heaviest of drawbacks, unless he is fortunate enough to have a wife as far above the common level as he is himself.

For in the first place, some sacrifice of personal interest is always required: of social standing, or of money, perhaps even the risk of his means of subsistence. He may be willing to face these sacrifices and risks for himself, but he will pause before imposing them on his family. And his family in this case means his wife and daughters, for he always hopes his sons will feel as he does, and that what he can do without they will do without willingly, in the same cause. But his daughters — their marriages may depend on it; and his wife, who is unable to enter into or understand the objects these sacrifices are made for, who if she thought them worth any sacrifice would think so on trust and solely for his sake, who can share none of the enthusiasm or the self-approval he himself may feel, while the things he is prepared to sacrifice are everything to her: will not the best and most unselfish man hesitate longest before bringing this consequence on her? If it is not the comforts of life but only social standing that is at stake, the burden on his conscience and his feelings is still very severe. Whoever has a wife and children has given hostages to Mrs Grundy. The approval 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 people who think as he does. But to the women connected with him he can offer no compensation.

The almost invariable tendency of a wife to throw her influence into the same scale as social standing is sometimes made a reproach to women, and represented as a peculiar mark of feebleness and childishness in them — surely with great injustice. Society makes the whole life of a woman in the comfortable classes one continued self-sacrifice. It exacts from her an unremitting restraint of the whole of her natural inclinations, and the sole return it makes her for what often deserves the name of martyrdom is standing. Her standing is inseparably bound up with her husband's; and after paying the full price for it she finds she is to lose it, for a reason whose force she cannot feel. She has sacrificed her whole life to it, and her husband will not sacrifice to it a whim, a freak, an eccentricity — something the world does not recognise or make allowance for, and which the world will agree with her in thinking a folly, if it thinks no worse of it. The dilemma falls hardest on that very meritorious class of men who, without possessing the talents to cut a figure among those they agree with in opinion, hold their opinion from conviction and feel bound in honour and conscience to serve it, by professing their belief and giving their time, labour and money to anything undertaken on its behalf. The worst case of all is when such men happen to be of a rank and position that by itself neither gives them nor excludes them from what is considered the best society, so that their admission to it depends mainly on what is thought of them personally — and however unexceptionable their breeding and habits, being identified with opinions and public conduct unacceptable to those who set the tone of society would work as an effectual exclusion. Many a woman flatters herself, nine times out of ten quite mistakenly, that nothing prevents her and her husband from moving in the highest society of her neighbourhood — society in which others she knows well, and in the same class of life, mix freely — except that her husband is unfortunately a Dissenter, or has a reputation for mixing in low radical politics. That, she thinks, is what stops George from getting a commission or a place, and Caroline from making an advantageous match, and keeps her and her husband from getting invitations, perhaps honours, that for all she can see they are as well entitled to as some people. With such an influence in every house, either actively exerted or working all the more powerfully for not being stated, is it any wonder that people in general are kept down in that mediocrity of respectability which is becoming a marked characteristic of modern times?

There is another very injurious aspect of the matter that needs considering — the effect not of women's disabilities directly, but of the broad line of difference those disabilities create between the education and character of a woman and those of a man. Nothing can be more unfavourable to that union of thoughts and inclinations which is the ideal of married life. Intimate society between people radically unlike one another is an idle dream. Unlikeness may attract, but it is likeness that keeps, and the suitability of two individuals to give each other a happy life is in proportion to their likeness. While women are so unlike men, it is not surprising that selfish men should feel the need of arbitrary power in their own hands, to cut short at the outset the lifelong conflict of inclinations 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 a conscientious difference of opinion between married people on the highest points of duty. Is there any reality in the marriage union where that happens? Yet it is not uncommon anywhere when the woman has any earnestness of character, and it is a very general case indeed in Catholic countries, where she is supported in her dissent by the only other authority she is taught to bow to, the priest. With the usual barefacedness of a power not used to finding 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 a revolt against his infallibility. In England similar differences occasionally exist when an Evangelical wife has allied herself with a husband of a different quality; but in general this source of dissension at least is got rid of by reducing women's minds to such a nullity that they have no opinions but those of Mrs Grundy, or those the husband tells them to have.

Where there is no difference of opinion, mere differences of taste may be enough to detract greatly from the happiness of married life. And though it may stimulate the amorous inclinations of men, it does not conduce to married happiness to exaggerate by differences of education whatever the native differences of the sexes may be. If the married pair are well-bred, 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, unless restrained by affection or duty, on almost every domestic question that arises. What a difference there must be in the society the two of them will wish to visit, or to be visited by! Each will want associates who share their own tastes; the people agreeable to one will be indifferent or positively disagreeable to the other — and yet there can be none who are not common to both, since married people no longer live in different parts of the house and keep totally different visiting lists, as they did in the reign of Louis XV. They cannot help having different wishes about the bringing up of the children; each will want to see their own tastes and feelings reproduced in them. Either there is a compromise, and only half satisfaction for either, or the wife has to give way, often with bitter suffering — and, with or without intention, her hidden influence goes on working against her husband's purposes.

It would of course be extreme folly to suppose that these differences of feeling and inclination exist only because women are brought up differently from men, and that there would be no differences of taste in any imaginable circumstances. But it is not going beyond the mark to say that the distinction in bringing up immensely aggravates those differences and makes them wholly unavoidable. While women are brought up as they are, a man and a woman will only rarely find in one another real agreement of tastes and wishes about daily life. They will generally have to give it up as hopeless, and abandon the attempt to have in the intimate companion of their daily life that idem velle, idem nolle — wanting the same things and refusing the same things — which is the acknowledged bond of any society that is really a society. Or, if the man does succeed in getting 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 with another if anybody tells her to. Even this calculation is apt to fail: dullness and lack of spirit are not always a guarantee of the submission so confidently expected from them. But if they were, is this the ideal of marriage? What in that case does the man get by it, except an upper servant, a nurse or a mistress?

On the contrary, when each of two people, instead of being a nothing, is a something; when they are attached to one another and are not too unlike to begin with, then constantly sharing in the same things, helped by their sympathy, draws out the latent capacity of each for taking an interest in the things that at first interested only the other, and works a gradual assimilation of their tastes and characters — partly by the imperceptible 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 thrown together in daily life; and it would be a common case in marriage, if not the commonest, were it not that the totally different bringing up of the two sexes makes it next to impossible to form a really well-matched union. If that were remedied, then whatever differences there might still be in individual tastes, there would at least be, as a general rule, complete unity and unanimity about the great objects of life. When two people both care about great objects, and are a help and an encouragement to each other in everything concerning them, the minor matters their tastes may differ about are not all-important to them; and there is a foundation for solid friendship of an enduring kind, 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.

So far I have considered the effects on the pleasures and benefits of the marriage union that depend on the mere unlikeness between the wife and the husband. But the harmful tendency is prodigiously aggravated when the unlikeness is inferiority. Mere unlikeness, when it only means a difference of good qualities, may be more a benefit in the way of mutual improvement than a subtraction from comfort. When each envies, and wants and tries to acquire, the other's particular qualities, the difference does not produce a diversity of interest but an increased identity of it, and makes each still more valuable to the other. But when one of the two is much the inferior in mental ability and cultivation, and is not actively attempting with the other's help to rise to the other's level, the whole influence of the connection on the development of the superior one is deteriorating — and still more so in a tolerably happy marriage than in an unhappy one. It is not without penalty that the superior in intellect shuts himself up with an inferior and elects that inferior as his chosen and only completely intimate companion. Any society that 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 deteriorate when he is habitually, as the phrase goes, king of his company — and in his most habitual company the husband who has a wife inferior to him always is. While his self-satisfaction is being incessantly fed on the one hand, on the other he imperceptibly absorbs the ways of feeling and of looking at things that belong to a more limited or more vulgar mind than his own.

This evil differs from many of those dwelt on so far in that it is 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 lives are more domestic. Formerly their pleasures and chosen occupations were among men and in men's company; their wives had only a fragment of their lives. At present, the progress of civilisation and the turn of opinion against the rough amusements and convivial excesses that used to occupy most men in their hours of relaxation — together with, it must be said, the improved tone of modern feeling about the reciprocal duty binding a husband towards his wife — have thrown a man much more on his home and the people in it for his personal and social pleasures; while the kind and degree of improvement made in women's education has made them to some extent capable of being his companions in ideas and mental tastes, while still leaving them in most cases hopelessly inferior to him. So his desire for mental communion is generally satisfied by a communion from which he learns nothing. An unimproving, 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. Accordingly we see that young men of the greatest promise generally stop improving as soon as they marry — and, not improving, they inevitably degenerate. If the wife does not push the husband forward, she always holds him back. He stops caring for what she does not care for; he no longer wants, and ends by disliking and avoiding, the society congenial to his former aspirations, which would now shame him for having fallen away from them; his higher faculties of mind and heart stop being called into activity. And with this change coinciding with the new and selfish interests the family creates, after a few years he differs in no material respect from men who have never wished for anything but the common vanities and the common money objects.

What marriage may be in the case of two people of cultivated faculties, identical in opinions and purposes, between whom there exists that best kind of equality — similarity of powers and capacities with reciprocal superiority in them, so that each can enjoy the luxury of looking up to the other, and can take it in turns to have the pleasure of leading and of being led along the path of development — I will not attempt to describe. To those who can conceive it there is no need; to those who cannot, it would seem the dream of an enthusiast. But I maintain, with the profoundest conviction, that this and this alone is the ideal of marriage, and that all opinions, customs and institutions that favour any other notion of it, or turn the conceptions and aspirations connected with it in any other direction, whatever pretences they may be coloured with, are relics of primitive barbarism. The moral regeneration of mankind will only really begin when the most fundamental of the social relations is placed under the rule of equal justice, and when human beings learn to cultivate their strongest sympathy with an equal in rights and in cultivation.

So far, the benefits the world would gain by ceasing to make sex a disqualification for privileges and a badge of subjection have appeared to be social rather than individual: an increase in the general fund of thinking and acting power, and an improvement in the general conditions of the association of men with women. But it would be a grievous understatement of the case to leave out 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 clothing, freedom is the first and strongest want of human nature. While mankind are lawless, their desire is for lawless freedom. When they have learned to understand 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 on that account desire freedom less, and they do not become willing to accept the will of other people as the representative and interpreter of those guiding principles. On the contrary, the communities in which reason has been most cultivated, and in which the idea of social duty has been most powerful, are the ones that have most strongly asserted the freedom of action of the individual — the liberty of each to govern his conduct by his own sense of duty, and by such laws and social restraints as his own conscience can subscribe to.

Anyone who would rightly appreciate the worth of personal independence as an element of happiness should consider the value he himself puts on 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 their grievances are, what positive damage they suffer, and in what respect they consider their affairs mismanaged; and if they fail to make out in answer what seems 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 quite a different standard of judgment when he is deciding for himself. Then the most unexceptionable administration of his interests by a guardian set over him does not satisfy his feelings; his personal exclusion from the deciding authority appears in itself the greatest grievance of all, making 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 offer of good and skilful administration in return for abdicating his freedom? Even if he could believe that good and skilful administration can exist among a people ruled by a will that is not their own, would not the consciousness of working out their own destiny under their own moral responsibility compensate his feelings for great roughness 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.

Everything that has been said or written, from the time of Herodotus to the present, about the ennobling influence of free government — the nerve and spring it gives to all the faculties, the larger and higher objects it presents to the intellect and the feelings, the more unselfish public spirit and the calmer and broader views of duty it engenders, and the generally loftier platform on which it raises 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 any man call to mind what he himself felt on emerging from boyhood, from the tutelage and control of even loved and affectionate elders, and entering on the responsibilities of manhood. Was it not like the physical effect of taking off a heavy weight, or of being released from bonds that obstructed him even if they were not otherwise painful? 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 mortifications of personal pride, though everything to most men when the case is their own, have less allowance made for them in other people's case, and are less listened to as a ground or a justification for 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. Their part in the lives and feelings of women is, we may be sure, no less large and powerful. Women are schooled into suppressing them in their most natural and healthy direction, but the internal principle remains, in a different outward form.

An active and energetic mind, if denied liberty, will seek power. Refused the command of itself, it will assert its personality by trying to control others. To allow human beings no existence of their own except what depends on others is to put 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 whom others will not leave to the undisturbed management of their own affairs will compensate themselves, if they can, by meddling for their own purposes in the affairs of others. Hence also women's passion for personal beauty and for 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 for power over others can only stop being a depraving agency among mankind when each of them individually is able to do without it — which can only happen where respect for liberty in the personal concerns of each is an established principle.

But it is not only through the sense of personal dignity that the free direction and disposal of their own faculties is a source of individual happiness to human beings, and being fettered and restricted in it a source of unhappiness — and not least to women. There is nothing, after disease, poverty and guilt, so fatal to the pleasurable enjoyment of life as the lack of a worthy outlet for the active faculties. Women who have the cares of a family have this outlet while they have those cares, and it generally suffices for them. But what of the greatly increasing number of women who have had no opportunity of exercising the vocation they are mocked by being told 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 made homes of their own? There are abundant examples of men who, after a life engrossed by business, retire with a competence to the enjoyment, as they hope, of rest, but who, being unable to acquire new interests and excitements to replace the old ones, find that the change to a life of inactivity brings boredom, melancholy and premature death. Yet nobody 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 that needed keeping — are deserted by the sole occupation they have fitted themselves for, and remain with undiminished activity but with no employment for it, unless perhaps a daughter or daughter-in-law is willing to abdicate in their favour the discharge of the same functions in her own younger household. Surely a hard lot for the old age of those who have worthily discharged, as long as it was given them to discharge it, what the world counts their only social duty.

For such women, and for the others to whom this duty has never been committed at all, many of whom pine through life conscious of thwarted vocations and of activities not allowed to expand, the only resources, generally speaking, are religion and charity. But their religion, though it may be a religion of feeling and of ceremonial observance, cannot be a religion of action except in the form of charity. Many of them are by nature admirably fitted for charity; 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 that a person would not be fit for who is fit to bestow charity usefully. In this as in other cases — pre-eminently in the education of children — the duties permitted to women cannot be performed properly without their being trained for duties which, to the great loss of society, are not permitted to them.

And here let me notice the peculiar way in which the question of women's disabilities is often presented by those who find it easier to draw a ludicrous picture of what they dislike than to answer the arguments for it. When it is suggested that women's executive capacities and prudent counsel might sometimes be found valuable in affairs of state, these lovers of fun hold up to the world's ridicule the image of 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 that 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 women who, 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 occupations within their reach — had spent the best years of their youth trying to qualify themselves for the pursuits they wished to engage in; or, still more frequently perhaps, to widows or wives of forty or fifty, whose knowledge of life and faculty of government acquired in their families could with the help of appropriate study be made available on a less cramped scale. There is no country in Europe where 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 attaining both private and public objects; and there are important matters of public administration for which few men are as competent as such women — among others, the detailed control of expenditure.

But what we are discussing now is not society's need of women's services in public business, but the dull and hopeless life to which it so often condemns them by forbidding them to exercise the practical abilities many of them are conscious of, in any wider field than one which for some of them never was, and for others is no longer, open. If anything is 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 for want of it many a life is a failure that has to all appearance every requisite for success. But if circumstances that society is not yet skilful enough to overcome make such failures often unavoidable for the present, society need not inflict them itself. The bad judgment of parents, a young person's own inexperience, or the absence of external opportunities for the congenial vocation and their presence for an uncongenial one condemn numbers of men to spend their lives doing one thing reluctantly and badly when there are other things they could have done well and happily. But on women this sentence is imposed by actual law, and by customs equivalent to law. What colour, race, religion, or in a conquered country nationality, are to some men in unenlightened societies, sex is to all women: a peremptory exclusion from almost every honourable occupation except those that others cannot carry out, or those that others do not think worth accepting. Suffering arising from causes of this kind usually meets with so little sympathy that few people are aware of the great amount of unhappiness even now produced by the feeling of a wasted life. It will grow more frequent still, as increased cultivation creates a greater and greater disproportion between the ideas and faculties of women and the scope society allows to their activity.

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 inspiriting and elevating kind of personal enjoyment, and next in the weariness, disappointment and profound dissatisfaction with life that is so often the substitute for it — one feels that among all the lessons men need for carrying on the struggle against the inevitable imperfections of their lot on earth, there is none they need more than not to add to the evils nature inflicts by their jealous and prejudiced restrictions on one another. Their vain fears only substitute other and worse evils for the ones they are idly apprehensive of; while every restraint on the freedom of conduct of any of their fellow creatures — otherwise than by making them answerable for any harm actually caused by it — dries up to that extent the principal fountain of human happiness, and leaves the species less rich, to an incalculable degree, in everything that makes life valuable to the individual human being.