1792 2026
This is an AI modernization of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman into contemporary English. The original is available from Standard Ebooks. Also available as an epub.
Mary Wollstonecraft wrote this book in six weeks at the beginning of 1792, in London, at thirty-two. She had run a school at Newington Green, worked as a governess, and was by then earning her living by her pen, writing and reviewing for the publisher Joseph Johnson — a rare position for a woman of her time. Two years earlier she had published a reply to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, which is also in this collection. This book carries that argument on to the other half of the population. She dedicated it to Talleyrand, whose recent report on national education in France had proposed that girls be taught at home and stop at eight, and the dedication tells him to his face that he handled the subject too quickly.
One phrase will trip a modern reader in silence. Wollstonecraft writes about "sexual character" constantly, and it is the subject of her second chapter. It does not mean what it now means; it means a character proper to one's sex — the set of qualities a woman was held to have by nature, as distinct from the qualities of a human being. The modern reading is not merely wrong, it is obscene, and it will quietly wreck whole pages. A few of her other words have also moved: sensibility is the capacity for feeling, accomplishments are the drawing and music and scraps of French that a girl was finished with, manners means the whole moral texture of a society, and want means lack.
Her actual claim is harder than her reputation. It is not that women are equal to men. It is that nobody knows what women are like, because nobody has ever let them find out. What passes for the nature of women is the product of an upbringing that tells a girl from infancy that her business is to please, denies her serious work, and then points at the result as proof. Her demand is not for privilege but for the thing that makes privilege unnecessary: an education in reason, work that pays, a civil existence in the state, and national schools where girls and boys are taught together.
About a third of the book is quotation. She sets out Rousseau on the education of Sophia, Dr. Gregory advising his daughters to hide any learning they have, and Dr. Fordyce's sermons, and then takes them apart line by line. Those quotations are modernized alongside her own prose, so the charge stays as followable as the reply; quoted verse is left as printed. The chapter titles here are hers, recovered from the 1792 printing. She wrote fast and would not polish, and says so: she will be employed about things, not words.
Her argument did not stop here. John Stuart Mill's On Liberty of 1859 and his The Subjection of Women, written in 1861 and published in 1869, are both in this collection, and Mill's case for opening every occupation to women begins where hers does.
To Monsieur Talleyrand-Perigord, Late Bishop of Autun
Chapter One: The Rights of Human Beings, and the Duties That Come with Them
Chapter Two: The Common Opinion That Each Sex Has a Character of Its Own
Chapter Three: The Same Subject Continued
Chapter Four: On the Degraded State to Which Various Causes Have Reduced Women
Chapter Five: Criticisms of the Writers Who Have Made Women Objects of Pity, Bordering on Contempt
Chapter Six: The Effect That Early Associations of Ideas Have on Character
Chapter Seven: Modesty, Considered in Full, and Not as a Virtue Belonging to One Sex
Chapter Eight: How Morality Is Undermined by Ideas About a Woman's Reputation
Chapter Nine: The Harm Done by the Unnatural Distinctions Society Establishes
Chapter Ten: Parental Affection
Chapter Eleven: Duty to Parents
Chapter Twelve: On National Education
Sir,
I have read with great pleasure the pamphlet you have lately published on national education, and I dedicate this volume to you. It is the first dedication I have ever written. I write it to persuade you to read the book carefully, and because I believe you will understand me — which is more than I expect of the many pert little wits who may ridicule arguments they are unable to answer. But, sir, my respect for your understanding goes further than that. It goes so far that I am confident you will not throw my work aside and conclude in a hurry that I am wrong simply because you did not see the subject in the same light yourself.
Forgive my frankness, but I must say that you treated it far too quickly, content to consider it as it had always been considered — back when the rights of man, let alone of woman, were dismissed as fantasy. So I call on you now to weigh what I have said about the rights of woman and about national education, and I call in the firm tone of one human being addressing another. My arguments, sir, come from no private interest: I plead for my sex, not for myself. I have long thought independence the great blessing of life and the basis of every virtue, and I will always secure my own by keeping my wants small, even if it meant living on a bare hillside.
It is an affection for the whole human race, then, that sends my pen racing along in support of what I believe to be the cause of virtue. The same motive makes me long to see women placed where they would advance those glorious principles that give morality some substance, instead of holding them back. My view of the rights and duties of women seems to me to follow so naturally from a few simple principles that I can hardly believe some of the broad minds who framed your admirable constitution will not agree with me.
There is certainly a wider spread of knowledge in France than anywhere else in Europe, and I attribute it largely to the long habit of social exchange between the sexes. I say plainly what I think, however: in France the very essence of sensuality has been distilled for the pleasure of the voluptuary, and a kind of sentimental lust has taken hold. That, together with the system of double-dealing taught by the whole tenor of French political and civil government, has given the national character a sinister sort of shrewdness — finesse is the proper word for it — and a polish of manners that damages the substance beneath by hunting sincerity out of society. And modesty, which is virtue's fairest dress, has been more grossly insulted in France than even in England, until French women have come to call it prudish to observe the decencies that animals attend to by instinct.
Manners and morals are so closely related that they are often confused; and though the first ought to be nothing but the natural reflection of the second, still, when various causes have produced artificial and corrupt manners — which are caught very early — morality becomes an empty word. That personal reserve, and that sacred respect for cleanliness and delicacy in family life, which French women almost despise, are the graceful pillars of modesty. Far from despising them, if the pure flame of patriotism has ever reached their hearts, they ought to be labouring to improve the morals of their fellow citizens by teaching men not only to respect modesty in women but to acquire it themselves, since that is the only way to deserve women's regard.
In arguing for the rights of women, my main case rests on this simple principle: that unless a woman is prepared by education to become the companion of a man, she will halt the progress of knowledge. Truth must be common to everyone, or it will have no real influence on how people actually behave. And how can a woman be expected to play her part unless she knows why she ought to be good? Unless freedom strengthens her reason until she understands her duty and sees how it connects with her own real welfare? If children are to be brought up to understand what love of country really means, their mother must love her country too; and a love of humankind, from which an orderly train of virtues springs, can only come from thinking about the moral and civil interests of humankind — and a woman's education and situation at present shut her out from any such enquiry.
In this book I have set out many arguments which seemed to me conclusive, to prove that the prevailing notion that women have a character of their own, distinct from human character, undermines morality. I have argued that if the human body and mind are to be improved, chastity must be far more general than it is; and that chastity will never be respected among men so long as a woman's person is idolised while she has little virtue or sense to give it the grand marks of mental beauty or the appealing simplicity of real affection.
Consider these observations calmly, sir. A glimpse of this truth seemed to open before you when you remarked "that to see one half of the human race excluded by the other from all participation of government, was a political phenomenon that, according to abstract principles, it was impossible to explain." If that is so, what does your constitution rest on? If the abstract rights of man will bear discussion and explanation, then by the same reasoning the rights of woman will not shrink from the same test — though a different opinion prevails in this country, founded on the very argument you use to justify the oppression of women: long custom.
Consider, and I address you as a legislator, whether it is not inconsistent and unjust, when men are contending for their own freedom and for the right to judge for themselves what will make them happy, to keep women in subjection — even though you firmly believe you are acting in the way best calculated to make them happy. Who made man the sole judge, if woman shares with him the gift of reason?
This is exactly how tyrants of every denomination argue, from the weak king down to the weak father of a family. They are all eager to crush reason, and they all insist that they have usurped its throne only in order to be useful. Do you not play a similar part when you force all women, by denying them civil and political rights, to stay shut up in their families groping in the dark? For surely, sir, you will not maintain that a duty can be binding which is not founded on reason? If domestic life really is what women are made for, then arguments can be drawn from reason to show it; and, so nobly supported, the more understanding women acquire the more attached to that duty they will be, because they will comprehend it. Unless they do comprehend it, unless their morals rest on the same unchanging principles as men's, no authority on earth can make them discharge it in any virtuous way. They may be convenient slaves, but slavery will always have its usual effect, degrading the master and the abject dependent alike.
But if women are to be excluded, without any voice of their own, from a share in the natural rights of humankind, then first prove — to fend off the charge of injustice and inconsistency — that they lack reason. Otherwise this flaw in your new constitution, the first constitution ever founded on reason, will always show that man must in some form act the tyrant; and tyranny, in whatever part of society it raises its brazen face, will always undermine morality.
I have said repeatedly, and produced what seem to me unanswerable arguments drawn from plain fact to prove it, that women cannot be confined by force to domestic concerns. However ignorant they are, they will meddle in weightier matters, neglecting their private duties only to disturb, by cunning tricks, the orderly plans of reason that rise above their understanding.
Besides, while women are trained only to acquire personal accomplishments, men will look for pleasure in variety, and unfaithful husbands will make unfaithful wives. Such ignorant creatures will indeed be very excusable when, never taught to respect the public good and never allowed a single civil right, they try to get justice for themselves by retaliation.
Once that box of mischief is open in a society, what is left to preserve private virtue, the only guarantee of public freedom and general happiness?
Let there be no coercion established in society, then; let the common law of gravity take its course, and the sexes will fall into their proper places. And now that more equitable laws are forming your citizens, marriage may become more sacred: your young men may choose their wives out of affection, and your young women may let love root out vanity.
The father of a family will not then weaken his constitution and debase his feelings by visiting the prostitute, nor forget, while obeying the call of appetite, the purpose for which that appetite was planted in him. And the mother will not neglect her children in order to practise the arts of coquetry, once good sense and modesty have secured her the friendship of her husband.
But until men become attentive to the duties of a father, it is useless to expect women to spend time in the nursery which, being "wise in their generation," they choose to spend at the mirror. This exercise of cunning is only an instinct of nature, a way of getting indirectly a little of the power they are unjustly refused a share in. If women are not allowed to enjoy legitimate rights, they will make both themselves and men vicious in order to obtain illegitimate ones.
I wish, sir, to set enquiries of this kind afloat in France; and if they should end by confirming my principles, then when your constitution comes to be revised, the rights of woman may be respected — if it is fully proved that reason calls for that respect, and loudly demands justice for one half of the human race.
I am, sir, yours respectfully,
M. W.
I have looked back over the pages of history and watched the living world with anxious care, and the result has been the most melancholy kind of sorrowful indignation. It has weighed my spirits down. I have sighed as I was forced to admit that either nature has made a great difference between one human being and another, or else the civilization the world has achieved so far has been very partial indeed. I have turned over book after book written on education, and patiently observed how parents behave and how schools are run. And what has come of it? A deep conviction that the neglected education of my fellow creatures is the great source of the misery I am deploring — and that women in particular are made weak and wretched by a whole set of causes working together, all of them springing from one hasty conclusion.
The conduct and manners of women are proof enough that their minds are not in a healthy state. Like flowers planted in soil that is too rich, they have had strength and usefulness sacrificed to beauty, and the showy leaves, having pleased a fastidious eye, fade unnoticed on the stalk long before the season when they should have come to maturity. One cause of this barren blooming I put down to a false system of education, gathered out of books written on the subject by men who, treating women as women rather than as human creatures, have been more anxious to make them alluring mistresses than rational wives. Women's understanding has been so taken in by this plausible flattery that the civilized women of this century, with a few exceptions, are anxious only to inspire love, when they ought to be cherishing a nobler ambition and demanding respect for their abilities and their virtues.
In a book about the rights and manners of women, then, the works written specifically to improve them cannot be passed over — particularly when the charge is stated in so many words: that women's minds are weakened by false refinement; that books of instruction written by men of genius have had the same tendency as far more frivolous productions; and that, in the true Muslim style, women are considered only as females and not as part of the human species, at a time when improvable reason is allowed to be the dignified distinction that raises men above the animals and puts a natural sceptre into a feeble hand.
Still, because I am a woman, I would not have my readers suppose that I mean to stir up the disputed question of the equality or inferiority of the sexes. But the subject lies in my path, and I cannot step over it without laying the main drift of my reasoning open to misunderstanding, so I shall stop a moment to give my opinion in a few words. In the government of the physical world it is observable that the female is generally inferior to the male. The male pursues, the female yields — that is the law of nature, and it does not appear to have been suspended or repealed in favour of woman. This physical superiority cannot be denied, and it is a noble prerogative! But men, not content with this natural pre-eminence, work to sink us lower still, merely to make us alluring objects for a moment; and women, intoxicated by the adoration that men pay them under the influence of their senses, do not try to gain any lasting hold on their hearts, or to become the friends of the fellow creatures who find them amusing company.
I am aware of the obvious retort. From every quarter I have heard people exclaiming against masculine women — but where are they to be found? If by that name men mean to attack women's enthusiasm for hunting, shooting and gambling, I shall join in the cry most heartily. But if it is meant against women imitating manly virtues — or, to put it more properly, acquiring those talents and virtues whose exercise ennobles the human character, and which raise females in the scale of living beings when they are given the comprehensive name of mankind — then everyone who looks at the matter with a philosophical eye must, I should think, wish with me that they may every day grow more and more masculine.
This discussion divides the subject naturally. I shall first consider women in the grand light of human creatures who, like men, are placed on this earth to unfold their faculties; and afterwards I shall point out more particularly what is peculiar to them.
I want also to steer clear of a mistake that many respectable writers have fallen into. The instruction addressed to women so far has really been meant for ladies — with the exception of the little indirect advice scattered through Sandford and Merton. Speaking to my own sex in a firmer tone, I pay particular attention to those in the middle class, because they seem to me to be in the most natural condition. Perhaps the seeds of false refinement, immorality and vanity have always been scattered by the great. Weak, artificial beings, raised above the common wants and affections of their kind in a premature and unnatural way, undermine the very foundation of virtue and spread corruption through the whole mass of society. As a class they have the strongest claim on our pity: the education of the rich tends to make them vain and helpless, and the unfolding mind is not strengthened by practising the duties that give the human character its dignity. They live only to amuse themselves, and by the same law that produces certain effects everywhere in nature, they very soon become merely barren amusement.
But since I intend to look separately at the different ranks of society and at the moral character of women in each, this hint is enough for the present. I have touched on the subject only because it seems to me the very essence of an introduction to give some quick account of what the book it introduces contains.
My own sex, I hope, will forgive me if I treat them as rational creatures instead of flattering their fascinating graces and viewing them as though they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone. I want in earnest to point out where true dignity and human happiness lie. I want to persuade women to try to acquire strength, of mind and of body, and to convince them that the soft phrases — susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, refinement of taste — are very nearly synonyms for weakness, and that beings who are only objects of pity, and of the kind of love that has been called pity's sister, will soon become objects of contempt.
Dismissing, then, those pretty feminine phrases that men use so condescendingly to soften our slavish dependence, and despising that weak elegance of mind, that exquisite sensibility and sweet docility of manners supposed to be the marks of the weaker vessel, I want to show that elegance is inferior to virtue; that the first object of laudable ambition is to obtain a character as a human being, whatever one's sex; and that every secondary aim should be brought to that simple test.
This is a rough sketch of my plan. And if I express my conviction with the energy I feel whenever I think about the subject, then what experience and reflection have taught me will be felt by some of my readers. With that important object in view, I shall not stoop to pick over my phrases or polish my style. I aim at being useful, and sincerity will keep me unaffected. Wishing to persuade by the force of my arguments rather than dazzle by the elegance of my language, I shall not waste my time rounding off periods, or manufacturing the swollen bombast of artificial feelings, which comes from the head and never reaches the heart. I shall be employed about things, not words! And, anxious to make my sex more respectable members of society, I shall try to avoid that flowery diction which has slid out of essays into novels, and out of novels into ordinary letters and conversation.
These pretty nothings, these caricatures of the real beauty of feeling, drop so glibly off the tongue that they spoil the taste and create a kind of sickly delicacy which turns away from plain unadorned truth. A flood of false sentiment and overstretched feeling stifles the natural emotions of the heart and makes insipid those domestic pleasures which ought to sweeten the exercise of the severe duties that educate a rational and immortal being for a nobler field of action.
The education of women has been more attended to lately than it used to be; yet they are still reckoned a frivolous sex, and are ridiculed or pitied by the very writers who try, by satire or by instruction, to improve them. Everyone admits that they spend the first years of their lives acquiring a smattering of accomplishments — a little music, a little drawing, a little French, a little needlework. Meanwhile strength of body and mind is sacrificed to libertine notions of beauty and to the desire of establishing themselves in the only way a woman can rise in the world, which is by marriage. And this desire makes mere animals of them, so that when they do marry they behave as such children may be expected to behave: they dress; they paint, and give God's creatures new names. Surely such weak beings are fit for nothing but the harem! Can they govern a household, or take care of the poor babies they bring into the world?
If, then, it can be fairly concluded from the present conduct of my sex — from the prevailing fondness for pleasure, which takes the place of ambition and of those nobler passions that open and enlarge the soul — that the instruction women have received has only worked, along with the constitution of civil society, to render them insignificant objects of desire, mere breeders of fools; if it can be proved that in aiming to give them accomplishments without cultivating their understandings we take them out of their proper sphere of duties and make them ridiculous and useless once the short-lived bloom of beauty is over, then I presume that rational men will excuse me for trying to persuade women to become more masculine and respectable.
Footnote: A lively writer, whose name I cannot recall, asks what business women over forty have in the world at all.
Indeed the word masculine is only a bogey. There is little reason to fear that women will acquire too much courage or fortitude. Their apparent inferiority in bodily strength must make them to some degree dependent on men in the various relations of life; but why should that dependence be increased by prejudices which give a sex to virtue and confuse simple truths with sensual daydreams?
Women have in fact been so degraded by mistaken notions of female excellence that I am not adding a paradox when I say that this artificial weakness produces a tendency to tyrannize, and gives birth to cunning, the natural opponent of strength, which leads them to play off those contemptible childish airs that undermine esteem even while they excite desire. Stop fostering these prejudices and women will fall naturally into their subordinate, but still respectable, place in life.
It hardly needs saying that I am speaking here of the sex in general. Many individual women have more sense than their male relatives; and since nothing outweighs anything else in a constant struggle for balance unless it naturally has more gravity, some women govern their husbands without degrading themselves, because intellect will always govern.
In the present state of society it seems necessary to go back to first principles in search of the simplest truths, and to fight some prevailing prejudice for every inch of ground. To clear my way I must be allowed to ask a few plain questions. The answers will probably look as unarguable as the axioms that reasoning is built on — though once they get tangled up with the various motives people act from, they are flatly contradicted, either by men's words or by their conduct.
What does man's pre-eminence over the animals consist in? The answer is as clear as that a half is less than a whole: in reason.
What quality raises one being above another? Virtue, we answer without hesitating.
What were the passions planted in us for? So that man, by struggling with them, might reach a degree of knowledge denied to the animals — that is what experience whispers.
It follows that the perfection of our nature, and our capacity for happiness, must be measured by the degree of reason, virtue and knowledge that marks the individual and shapes the laws binding society together. And that knowledge and virtue flow naturally from the exercise of reason is equally undeniable, if you look at humankind as a whole.
Once the rights and duties of man are simplified in this way, it seems almost impertinent to try to illustrate truths that appear so incontestable. Yet prejudices are so deeply rooted, and have so clouded reason, and so many counterfeit qualities have taken the name of virtues, that it is necessary to follow the course of reason through all the confusion and error that accidental circumstances have led it into, comparing the simple axiom against the casual departures from it.
Men in general seem to use their reason to justify prejudices they have absorbed without knowing how, rather than to root them out. A mind must be strong to form its own principles resolutely, for there is a kind of intellectual cowardice about that makes many men shrink from the job, or do it only by halves. And the imperfect conclusions they draw are often very plausible, because they are built on partial experience, on views that are sound as far as they go but narrow.
Go back to first principles, and vice slinks away from close examination with all its native ugliness showing. But a set of shallow reasoners are forever exclaiming that these arguments prove too much, and that a measure rotten at its core may still be expedient. So expediency is set against simple principle again and again, until truth is lost in a fog of words, virtue in forms, and knowledge becomes a sounding nothing, drowned out by the plausible prejudices that borrow its name.
That the society is most wisely built whose constitution is founded on human nature strikes every thinking being so forcibly, in the abstract, that it looks like presumption to offer proof. Yet proof must be offered, or reason will never storm the stronghold of long custom. And to urge long custom as an argument for depriving men, or women, of their natural rights is one of those absurd sophistries that insult common sense daily.
The civilization of most of the people of Europe is very partial. Indeed one might ask whether they have gained any virtues in exchange for innocence worth the misery produced by the vices that have been plastered over their unsightly ignorance, and by the freedom they have bartered away for a splendid slavery. The desire to dazzle by wealth — the surest kind of pre-eminence a man can get — the pleasure of commanding flattering hangers-on, and a hundred other tangled, low calculations of doting self-love have all helped to overwhelm the mass of humanity and make liberty a convenient handle for mock patriotism. For as long as rank and titles are held to be of the utmost importance, before which genius "must hide its diminished head," it is, with a few exceptions, very unlucky for a nation when a man of ability without rank or property pushes himself into notice. What unheard-of misery have thousands suffered to buy a cardinal's hat for some scheming nobody who longed to be ranked with princes, or to lord it over them by seizing the papal crown!
So much wretchedness has flowed from hereditary honours, riches and monarchy that men of strong feeling have come close to blasphemy in the effort to justify the ways of providence. Man has been presented as independent of the power that made him, or as a lawless planet shooting out of its orbit to steal the heavenly fire of reason — and the vengeance of heaven, lurking in that subtle flame, punished his rashness quite sufficiently by bringing evil into the world.
Struck by this view of the misery and disorder running through society, and worn out with jostling against artificial fools, Rousseau fell in love with solitude; and being at the same time an optimist, he labours with uncommon eloquence to prove that man is naturally a solitary animal. Misled by his respect for the goodness of God — who certainly, for what man of sense and feeling can doubt it, gave life only in order to share out happiness — he treats evil as something positive, and as the work of man. He did not notice that he was exalting one divine attribute at the expense of another just as necessary to divine perfection.
Built on a false hypothesis, his arguments for a state of nature are plausible but unsound. Unsound, I say: because to assert that a state of nature is preferable to civilization in its highest possible perfection is, in other words, to put supreme wisdom on trial. And the paradox that God has made all things right and that evil was introduced by the creature he formed — knowing what he was forming — is as unphilosophical as it is impious.
When that wise Being who created us and placed us here saw the fair idea, he willed, by allowing it to be so, that the passions should unfold our reason, because he could see that present evil would produce future good. Could the helpless creature he called out of nothing break loose from his providence and boldly learn to know good by practising evil without his permission? No. How could that energetic champion of immortality argue so inconsistently? If humankind had stayed forever in the brutal state of nature — which even his magic pen cannot paint as a state where a single virtue took root — it would have been plain, though not to the sensitive unreflecting wanderer, that man was born to run the circle of life and death and to decorate God's garden for some purpose not easily squared with God's attributes.
But if, to crown the whole, rational creatures were to be produced, allowed to rise in excellence by exercising the powers planted in them for that very purpose; if kindness itself thought fit to call into existence a creature above the animals, able to think and to improve himself — then why should that priceless gift, and a gift it was if man was created with the capacity to rise above a state in which sensation produced nothing but animal ease, be called in so many words a curse? A curse it might be reckoned if all our existence were bounded by our stay in this world. For why should the gracious fountain of life give us passions and the power of reflection only to embitter our days and fill us with mistaken notions of dignity? Why should he lead us up from love of ourselves to those sublime emotions that the discovery of his wisdom and goodness excites, if those feelings were not set going to improve our nature, of which they form a part, and to make us capable of enjoying a more godlike share of happiness? Firmly persuaded that no evil exists in the world which God did not intend to take place, I build my belief on the perfection of God.
Rousseau exerts himself to prove that everything was right at the beginning; a crowd of authors, that everything is right now; and I, that everything will be right.
But, faithful to his first position, Rousseau ranks barbarism next after the state of nature; and calling on the ghost of Fabricius, he forgets that in conquering the world the Romans never dreamed of founding their own liberty on any solid basis, or of extending the reign of virtue. Eager to prop up his system, he brands every effort of genius as vicious, and, pronouncing savage virtues divine, raises to demigods men who were barely human — the brutal Spartans, who in defiance of justice and gratitude killed in cold blood the slaves who had proved themselves men by rescuing their oppressors.
Disgusted with artificial manners and artificial virtues, the citizen of Geneva threw out the wheat with the chaff instead of properly sifting the subject, never stopping to ask whether the evils his ardent soul turned from in indignation were the consequences of civilization or the leftovers of barbarism. He saw vice trampling on virtue, and the appearance of goodness taking the place of the real thing; he saw talents bent by power to sinister ends, and it never occurred to him to trace the enormous mischief back to arbitrary power, back to the hereditary distinctions that clash with the mental superiority which naturally raises one man above his fellows. He did not see that royal power in a few generations breeds idiocy into the noble stock, and holds out temptations that make thousands idle and vicious.
Nothing shows up the character of kingship more contemptibly than the various crimes that have raised men to that supreme dignity. Vile intrigues, unnatural crimes and every vice that degrades our nature have been the steps to that eminence; and yet millions of men have lain back and let the nerveless limbs of the descendants of such rapacious prowlers rest quietly on their bloodstained thrones.
What but a diseased vapour can hang over a society whose chief director has been educated in nothing but the invention of crimes, or the stupid routine of childish ceremonies? Will men never be wise? Will they never stop expecting corn from weeds, and figs from thistles?
Even when the most favourable circumstances come together, it is impossible for any man to acquire enough knowledge and strength of mind to discharge the duties of a king entrusted with uncontrolled power. How much worse, then, must those duties be violated when his very elevation is an insuperable bar to acquiring either wisdom or virtue; when every human feeling in him is stifled by flattery and every chance of reflection shut out by pleasure! Surely it is madness to make the fate of thousands depend on the whim of a weak fellow creature whose very station sinks him necessarily below the meanest of his subjects. But one power should not be pulled down in order to raise another, for all power intoxicates weak men; and the abuse of it proves that the more equality is established among men, the more virtue and happiness will reign in society. Yet this, and any similar maxim drawn from plain reason, raises an outcry. The church or the state is in danger, we are told, if faith in the wisdom of antiquity is anything less than total; and those who, roused by the sight of human misery, dare to attack human authority are abused as despisers of God and enemies of man. These are bitter slanders, and yet they reached one of the best of men, whose ashes still preach peace, and whose memory deserves a respectful pause whenever subjects so near his heart are being discussed.
Footnote: Dr. Price.
Having attacked the sacred majesty of kings, I shall hardly cause surprise by adding my firm conviction that every profession whose power rests on a great subordination of rank does real damage to morality.
A standing army, for instance, is incompatible with freedom, because subordination and severity are the very sinews of military discipline, and despotism is needed to give force to enterprises directed by a single will. A spirit fed on romantic notions of honour, a kind of morality founded on the fashion of the age, can only be felt by a few officers, while the main body has to be moved by command, like waves of the sea; for the strong wind of authority drives the crowd of junior officers forward with headlong fury, hardly knowing or caring why.
Besides, nothing can be so damaging to the morals of a country town as the occasional residence of a set of idle, superficial young men whose only occupation is flirtation, and whose polished manners make vice more dangerous by hiding its deformity under gay ornamental drapery. An air of fashion, which is really a badge of slavery and proves that the soul has no strong character of its own, overawes simple country people into imitating the vices when they cannot catch the slippery graces of politeness. Every regiment is a chain of little despots who, submitting and tyrannizing without ever exercising their reason, become dead weights of vice and folly on the community. A man of rank or fortune, certain of rising through connections, has nothing to do but pursue some extravagant whim, while the needy gentleman, who is to rise, as the phrase goes, by his merit, turns into a servile hanger-on or a contemptible pimp.
Sailors — the naval gentlemen — come under the same description, except that their vices take a different and coarser cast. They are more positively idle when they are not performing the ceremonies of their station, whereas the insignificant fluttering of soldiers might be called active idleness. Being more confined to the company of men, sailors develop a taste for humour and mischievous practical jokes, while soldiers, mixing often with well-bred women, pick up a sentimental cant. But the mind is equally out of the question, whether they indulge in the horse laugh or the polite simper.
May I extend the comparison to a profession where there is certainly more mind to be found? For the clergy have better opportunities of improvement, though subordination cramps their faculties almost as much. The blind submission to forms of belief that is imposed at college serves as an apprenticeship for the curate, who will most obsequiously respect the opinion of his rector or his patron if he means to get on in his profession. Perhaps there is no more forcible contrast anywhere than between the servile, dependent walk of a poor curate and the courtly bearing of a bishop — and the respect the one inspires and the contempt the other does make both of them equally useless at their separate jobs.
It is very important to notice that every man's character is shaped to some degree by his profession. A man of sense may have no more than a cast of expression, which wears off as you come to know him as an individual; whereas the weak, ordinary man has hardly any character except what belongs to his body — or at least all his opinions have been steeped so long in the vat consecrated by authority that you cannot taste the faint spirit yielded by the grapes of his own vine.
Society, then, as it becomes more enlightened, ought to be very careful not to establish bodies of men who must inevitably be made foolish or vicious by the very constitution of their profession.
In the infancy of society, when men were only just emerging from barbarism, chiefs and priests, touching the most powerful springs of savage conduct — hope and fear — must have had unlimited sway. An aristocracy is naturally the first form of government. But clashing interests soon lose their balance, and a monarchy and a priesthood break out of the confusion of ambitious struggles, both of them then secured on a foundation of feudal tenures. This appears to be the origin of royal and priestly power, and the dawn of civilization. But such combustible materials cannot be shut up for long; and finding a vent in foreign wars and internal rebellions, the people acquire some power in the tumult, which forces their rulers to gloss over their oppression with a show of right. So as war, agriculture, trade and literature expand the mind, despots are driven to use covert corruption to keep a firm grip on the power that used to be snatched by open force. And this lurking gangrene is spread quickest by luxury and superstition, the certain dregs of ambition. The idle puppet of a court first becomes a luxurious monster or a fastidious sensualist, and then turns the contagion his unnatural condition spreads into an instrument of tyranny.
Footnote: Men of ability scatter seeds that grow up and have a great influence on opinion as it forms; and once public opinion has come down on the side of reason, the overthrow of arbitrary power is not far off.
It is the plague-carrying purple of royalty that turns the progress of civilization into a curse and warps the understanding, until men of feeling begin to doubt whether the expansion of intellect produces more happiness or more misery. But the nature of the poison points to the antidote; and if Rousseau had climbed one step higher in his enquiry, or if his eye could have pierced the foggy atmosphere he almost disdained to breathe, his active mind would have darted forward to contemplate the perfection of man in the establishment of a true civilization, instead of taking its ferocious flight back into the night of sensual ignorance.
To account for the tyranny of men, and to excuse it, a great many ingenious arguments have been produced to prove that in acquiring virtue the two sexes ought to be aiming at quite different characters — or, to say it plainly, that women are not allowed enough strength of mind to acquire anything that really deserves the name of virtue. Yet if we grant that women have souls, it would seem that providence has appointed only one road by which mankind can be led to either virtue or happiness.
If women are not a swarm of mayflies born to trifle, then why should they be kept ignorant under the plausible name of innocence? Men complain, and with reason, of the follies and caprices of our sex, when they are not busy sharply satirizing our headstrong passions and grovelling vices. Look, I would answer, at the natural effect of ignorance! A mind will always be unstable that has nothing but prejudices to rest on, and the current will run with destructive fury when there is nothing to break its force. Women are told from infancy, and taught by their mothers' example, that a little knowledge of human weakness — justly called cunning — a soft temper, outward obedience and a scrupulous attention to a childish kind of propriety will win them the protection of a man; and that if they happen to be beautiful, nothing else is needed for at least twenty years of their lives.
This is how Milton describes our first frail mother. Though when he tells us that women are formed for softness and sweet attractive grace, I cannot make out what he means, unless, in the true Muslim strain, he meant to deprive us of souls and to hint that we are beings designed only by sweet attractive grace and docile blind obedience to gratify a man's senses when he can no longer soar on the wing of contemplation.
How grossly they insult us, those who advise us to make ourselves nothing but gentle domestic brutes! Take that winning softness so warmly and so often recommended, which governs by obeying. What childish language, and how insignificant a creature — can it possibly be an immortal one? — who will stoop to govern by such underhand methods. "Certainly," says Lord Bacon, "man is of kin to the beasts by his body: and if he be not of kin to God by his spirit, he is a base and ignoble creature!" Men seem to me to behave in a very unphilosophical way when they try to secure women's good conduct by keeping them permanently in a state of childhood. Rousseau was more consistent when he wished to stop the progress of reason in both sexes; for if men eat of the tree of knowledge, women will get a taste of it too — though from the imperfect cultivation their understandings receive at present, all they arrive at is a knowledge of evil.
Children, I grant, should be innocent; but when the word is applied to a grown man or woman it is only a polite term for weakness. For if we allow that women were meant by providence to acquire human virtues, and by exercising their understandings that stability of character which is the firmest ground for our future hopes, then they must be allowed to turn towards the fountain of light, and not forced to steer by the twinkling of a mere satellite. Milton, I grant, was of a very different opinion, for he bows to the unchallengeable right of beauty — though it would be hard to make the two passages I am about to set side by side consistent with each other. But great men are often led into inconsistencies of just this kind by their senses.
"To whom thus Eve with perfect beauty adorned: My author and disposer, what thou bidst Unargued I obey; so God ordains; God is thy law, thou mine; to know no more Is woman's happiest knowledge and her praise."
These are exactly the arguments I have used with children — except that I added: "Your reason is gaining strength now, and until it comes to some maturity you must look to me for advice. After that you ought to think, and rely on God alone."
Yet in the following lines Milton seems to agree with me, when he has Adam protest to his Maker:
"Hast thou not made me here thy substitute, And these inferior far beneath me set? Among unequals what society Can sort, what harmony or delight? Which must be mutual, in proportion due Given and received; but in disparity The one intense, the other still remiss Cannot well suit with either, but soon prove Tedious alike: of fellowship I speak Such as I seek fit to participate All rational delight."
In discussing the manners of women, then, let us set the sensual arguments aside and trace out what we ought to be trying to make of them, so that they may cooperate — if that is not too bold a way of putting it — with the Supreme Being.
By individual education I mean — since the sense of the word is not precisely fixed — such attention to a child as will slowly sharpen the senses, form the temper, regulate the passions as they begin to ferment, and set the understanding to work before the body reaches maturity; so that the adult has only to carry on the important business of learning to think and reason, not to begin it.
To prevent any misunderstanding I must add that I do not believe a private education can work the wonders some hopeful writers have attributed to it. Men and women are educated in great part by the opinions and manners of the society they live in. In every age there has been a stream of popular opinion that carries everything before it and gives a kind of family character to the century. It may fairly be concluded, then, that until society is differently constituted, not much can be expected from education. For my present purpose, however, it is enough to assert that whatever effect circumstances may have on our abilities, every being can become virtuous by exercising its own reason. For if a single being were created with vicious inclinations — that is, positively bad — what would save us from atheism? Or, if we worship a God, is that God not a devil?
The most perfect education, in my opinion, is therefore the exercise of the understanding best calculated to strengthen the body and form the heart; or, in other words, to enable a person to acquire such habits of virtue as will make them independent. In fact it is a farce to call any being virtuous whose virtues are not the result of exercising its own reason. This was Rousseau's opinion about men. I extend it to women, and confidently assert that they have been drawn out of their proper sphere by false refinement, and not by any attempt to acquire masculine qualities. Still, the royal homage they receive is so intoxicating that until the manners of the age are changed and rebuilt on more reasonable principles it may be impossible to convince them that the illegitimate power they get by degrading themselves is a curse, and that they must return to nature and equality if they want the calm satisfaction that unspoiled affections bring. But for that day we must wait — wait, perhaps, until kings and nobles, enlightened by reason and preferring the real dignity of a human being to childish pomp, throw off their gaudy hereditary trappings. And if women do not then give up the arbitrary power of beauty, they will have proved that they have less mind than men.
I may be accused of arrogance; still I must declare what I firmly believe, which is that every writer on the education and manners of women, from Rousseau to Dr. Gregory, has helped to make women more artificial and weaker characters than they would otherwise have been, and consequently more useless members of society. I might have put this conviction in a lower key, but I am afraid that would have been the whine of affectation rather than the faithful expression of what I feel — of the clear conclusion that experience and reflection have brought me to. When I reach that division of the subject I shall point out the particular passages I object to in the works of the authors I have just named; but first I must say that my objection extends to the whole drift of those books, which tend, in my view, to degrade one half of the human species and to make women pleasing at the cost of every solid virtue.
To reason on Rousseau's ground for a moment: if a man really did reach some perfection of mind at the same time his body reached maturity, then it might be quite proper, in order to make a husband and wife one, that she should rely entirely on his understanding; and the graceful ivy clasping the oak that supports it would make a whole in which strength and beauty were equally conspicuous. But husbands, alas, as well as their helpmates, are often only overgrown children — indeed, thanks to early debauchery, scarcely men even in their outward form. And if the blind lead the blind, nobody needs to come from heaven to tell us what follows.
Many causes, in the present corrupt state of society, help to enslave women by cramping their understandings and sharpening their senses. One that quietly does more mischief than all the rest, perhaps, is their disregard of order.
To do everything in an orderly way is a most important rule, and women, who generally receive only a disorderly sort of education, rarely observe it with the exactness that men do, having been broken into method from infancy. This careless guesswork — and what else can you call the random exertions of a sort of instinctive common sense that is never brought to the test of reason? — prevents them from generalizing from facts, so that they do today what they did yesterday, merely because they did it yesterday.
This contempt for the understanding in early life has worse consequences than is commonly supposed. The little knowledge that women of strong mind do acquire is, for various reasons, of a more scattered kind than men's, and is got more by sheer observation of real life than by comparing what they have individually observed with the results of experience generalized by reflection. Their dependent situation and their domestic employments lead them more into company, so that what they learn comes in snatches; and since learning is generally only a secondary thing with them, they never pursue any one branch with the persevering ardour that gives vigour to the faculties and clearness to the judgment. In the present state of society a little learning is required to keep up the character of a gentleman, and boys are obliged to submit to a few years of discipline. But in a woman's education the cultivation of the understanding is always subordinate to acquiring some bodily accomplishment — and even that fails, since a body weakened by confinement and by false notions of modesty never attains the grace and beauty that slack, half-formed limbs cannot show. Besides, in youth their faculties are not drawn out by competition; and having no serious scientific study, if they have natural shrewdness it is turned far too early onto life and manners. They dwell on effects and variations without tracing them back to causes; and complicated rules for regulating behaviour are a poor substitute for simple principles.
As proof that it is education that gives women this appearance of weakness, take the example of military men, who like women are sent out into the world before their minds have been stocked with knowledge or fortified with principles. The consequences are similar. Soldiers pick up a little superficial knowledge snatched from the muddy current of conversation, and from mixing constantly in society they acquire what is called a knowledge of the world; and this acquaintance with manners and customs has often been confused with a knowledge of the human heart. But can the crude fruit of casual observation, never brought to the test of a judgment formed by comparing reflection with experience, deserve such a name? Soldiers, like women, practise the minor virtues with punctilious politeness. Where is the difference of sex, then, when the education has been the same? All the difference I can see comes from the superior advantage of liberty, which lets the soldier see more of life.
It is wandering from my subject, perhaps, to make a political remark; but since the train of my reflections produced it naturally, I shall not pass it over in silence.
Standing armies can never be made up of resolute, robust men. They may be well-disciplined machines, but they will seldom contain men under the influence of strong passions or possessed of very vigorous faculties. And as for depth of understanding, I will venture to say that it is as rarely found in the army as it is among women — and the cause, I maintain, is the same. It may be added that officers are also particularly attentive to their persons, fond of dancing, crowded rooms, adventures and ridicule. Like the fair sex, the business of their lives is gallantry. They were taught to please, and they live only to please. Yet they do not lose their rank in the distinction of the sexes, for they are still reckoned superior to women — though what their superiority consists in, beyond what I have just mentioned, is difficult to discover.
The great misfortune is this: that both acquire manners before morals, and a knowledge of life before reflection has given them any acquaintance with the grand ideal outline of human nature. The consequence follows naturally. Satisfied with common nature, they fall prey to prejudices, and, taking all their opinions on credit, submit blindly to authority. So that if they have any sense, it is a kind of instinctive glance that catches proportions and decides questions of manners, but fails as soon as an argument has to be followed below the surface or an opinion taken apart.
May the same remark not be applied to women? Indeed the argument can be carried further, for both are thrown out of any useful station by the unnatural distinctions established in civilized life. Riches and hereditary honours have made ciphers of women in order to give consequence to the figure they stand beside; and idleness has produced a mixture of gallantry and despotism in society which leads the very men who are the slaves of their mistresses to tyrannize over their sisters, wives and daughters. It is only keeping them in rank and file, of course. Strengthen the female mind by enlarging it, and there will be an end to blind obedience; but since blind obedience is exactly what power always wants, tyrants and sensualists are quite right to try to keep women in the dark, the first because they only want slaves and the second because they only want a plaything. The sensualist has been the most dangerous tyrant of the two, and women have been duped by their lovers as princes are by their ministers, all the while dreaming that they reigned over them.
I am chiefly referring here to Rousseau, whose character of Sophia is undoubtedly a captivating one, though it seems to me grossly unnatural. It is not the superstructure I mean to attack, however, but the foundation of her character, the principles her education was built on. Warmly as I admire the genius of that able writer, whose opinions I shall often have occasion to quote, indignation always takes the place of admiration in me, and the rigid frown of insulted virtue wipes away the smile of pleasure his eloquent sentences usually raise, when I come to his voluptuous daydreams. Is this the man who in his ardour for virtue would banish all the soft arts of peace and carry us nearly back to Spartan discipline? Is this the man who loves to paint the useful struggles of passion, the triumphs of a good disposition, and the heroic flights that carry a glowing soul out of itself? How those mighty sentiments come down in the world when he is describing the pretty foot and enticing airs of his little favourite! But I shall leave the subject for now; and instead of severely rebuking the passing outpourings of an overweening sensibility, I shall only observe that anyone who has ever looked kindly at society must often have been pleased by the sight of a humble mutual love, not dignified by any sentiment nor strengthened by any shared intellectual pursuit. The domestic trifles of the day have supplied matter for cheerful conversation, and innocent caresses have eased labours that never called for much exercise of mind or stretch of thought. And yet has the sight of that moderate happiness not stirred more tenderness than respect? Something like what we feel watching children at play, or animals at their games — whereas the contemplation of the noble struggles of suffering merit raises admiration, and carries our thoughts to that world where sensation will give place to reason.
Women, then, are to be considered either as moral beings, or as creatures so weak that they must be entirely subject to the superior faculties of men.
Let us examine the question. Rousseau declares that a woman should never for a moment feel herself independent; that she should be governed by fear so as to exercise her natural cunning, and made into a coquettish slave in order to be a more alluring object of desire, a sweeter companion whenever a man chooses to relax. He carries the arguments he pretends to draw from the indications of nature further still, and hints that truth and fortitude, the cornerstones of all human virtue, are to be cultivated in a woman only within certain limits, because for the female character obedience is the great lesson, to be driven home with unrelenting rigour.
What nonsense! When will a great man arise with strength of mind enough to blow away the fumes that pride and sensuality have spread over this subject? If women are by nature inferior to men, their virtues must still be the same in kind, if not in degree — otherwise virtue is a merely relative idea. And consequently their conduct should rest on the same principles and have the same aim.
Connected with men as daughters, wives and mothers, their moral character may be measured by how they fulfil those simple duties; but the end, the great end of their efforts, should be to unfold their own faculties and acquire the dignity of a virtue they are conscious of. They may try to make their road a pleasant one, but they should never forget, any more than men should, that life does not yield the happiness that can satisfy an immortal soul. I do not mean to suggest that either sex should get so lost in abstract reflections or distant prospects as to forget the affections and duties lying in front of them, which are in truth the appointed means of producing the fruit of life. On the contrary, I would warmly recommend those affections and duties, even while I insist that they give most satisfaction when they are seen in their true, subordinate light.
The prevailing opinion that woman was created for man probably had its origin in Moses's poetical story. But since very few people who have given the subject any serious thought have ever supposed that Eve was literally one of Adam's ribs, the inference must be allowed to fall to the ground — or be admitted only so far as it proves that man, from the remotest antiquity, found it convenient to use his strength to subjugate his companion and his ingenuity to show that she ought to have her neck bent under the yoke, because she, like the animals, was created to do his pleasure.
Let no one conclude that I want to turn the order of things upside down. I have already granted that from the constitution of their bodies men appear to be designed by providence to attain a greater degree of virtue. I am speaking of the sexes collectively. But I see not the shadow of a reason for concluding that their virtues should differ in nature. How could they, in fact, if virtue has only one eternal standard? So if I reason consistently I must maintain, as strenuously as I maintain that there is a God, that both sexes have the same simple direction.
It follows, then, that cunning should not be set against wisdom, nor little cares against great exertions, nor an insipid softness varnished over with the name of gentleness against the fortitude that only grand views can inspire.
I shall be told that women would then lose many of their peculiar graces, and a well-known poet may be quoted against my unqualified assertions. For Pope has said, in the name of the whole male sex,
"Yet ne'er so sure our passions to create, As when she touch'd the brink of all we hate."
What light that sally throws on men and women I shall leave the judicious to decide. For myself I shall be content to observe that I cannot see why, unless women are merely mortal creatures with no souls at all, they should always be degraded by being made to serve love or lust.
To speak disrespectfully of love is, I know, high treason against sentiment and fine feeling; but I want to speak the plain language of truth, and to address the head rather than the heart. To try to reason love out of the world would be to out-Quixote Cervantes and would offend just as much against common sense. But to try to restrain this tumultuous passion, and to show that it should not be allowed to dethrone our higher powers or usurp the sceptre that the understanding ought always to wield coolly, seems a less wild undertaking.
Youth is the season for love in both sexes; but in those days of thoughtless enjoyment some provision ought to be made for the more important years of life, when reflection takes the place of sensation. Rousseau, though, and most of the male writers who have followed in his steps, have warmly insisted that the whole tendency of a woman's education should be directed to one point: making her pleasing.
Let me reason with the supporters of this opinion who know anything of human nature. Do they imagine that marriage can uproot the habits of a lifetime? The woman who has been taught nothing but to please will soon find that her charms are slanting sunbeams, and that they cannot have much effect on her husband's heart when he sees them every day and the summer is over. Will she then have enough native energy to look into herself for comfort and cultivate her sleeping faculties? Or is it not more reasonable to expect that she will try to please other men, and, in the excitement of hoping for new conquests, try to forget the humiliation her love or her pride has suffered? When the husband stops being a lover — and the time will inevitably come — her desire to please will grow languid, or turn into a source of bitterness; and love, perhaps the most fleeting of all the passions, gives place to jealousy or vanity.
I am speaking now of women restrained by principle or by prejudice. Such women, though they would shrink from an affair with genuine horror, still want the homage of gallantry to convince them that their husbands are cruelly neglecting them; or else they spend days and weeks dreaming of the happiness enjoyed by kindred souls, until their health is undermined and their spirits broken by discontent. How can the great art of pleasing be such a necessary study, then? It is only useful to a mistress. The chaste wife and the serious mother should think of her power to please as no more than the polish on her virtues, and of her husband's affection as one of the comforts that make her task easier and her life happier. But whether she is loved or neglected, her first wish should be to make herself worthy of respect, and not to depend for all her happiness on a being subject to the same weaknesses as herself.
The amiable Dr. Gregory fell into a similar mistake. I respect his heart, but I entirely disapprove of his celebrated Legacy to His Daughters.
He advises his daughters to cultivate a fondness for dress, because a fondness for dress, he asserts, is natural to them. I cannot understand what either he or Rousseau means when they use that vague word so often. If they told me that in some pre-existent state the soul was fond of dress and brought the inclination with it into a new body, I should listen with a half smile, as I often do when I hear people ranting about innate elegance. But if he only meant that exercising the faculties will produce this fondness, I deny it. It is not natural. It arises, like false ambition in men, from a love of power.
Dr. Gregory goes much further. He actually recommends dissimulation, and advises an innocent girl to give her own feelings the lie and not dance with spirit, at a moment when a light heart would make her feet eloquent without making her movements immodest. In the name of truth and common sense, why should a woman not admit that she can take more exercise than another — or, in other words, that she has a sound constitution? Why, in order to damp an innocent liveliness, must she be darkly told that men will draw conclusions she never dreamed of? Let the libertine draw whatever inference he pleases; but I hope no sensible mother will cramp the natural frankness of youth by instilling such indecent cautions. Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks; and one wiser than Solomon said that it is the heart that should be made clean, and not the trivial ceremonies that are observed — which are not very hard to fulfil with scrupulous exactness while vice reigns inside.
Women ought to try to purify their hearts. But how can they, when their uncultivated understandings leave them entirely dependent on their senses for occupation and amusement, when no noble pursuit lifts them above the little vanities of the day, or lets them curb the wild emotions that shake a reed which every passing breeze has power over? To gain the affection of a virtuous man, is affectation really necessary?
Nature has given woman a weaker frame than man. But to secure her husband's affection, must a wife who has exercised her mind and body while discharging the duties of a daughter, a wife and a mother, and has kept her constitution's natural strength and her nerves in healthy tone — must she, I say, stoop to use artifice and feign a sickly delicacy? Weakness may excite tenderness and gratify the arrogant pride of a man, but the lordly caresses of a protector will not satisfy a noble mind that longs for respect and deserves it. Fondness is a poor substitute for friendship.
In a harem, I grant, all these arts are necessary; the epicure must have his palate tickled or he will sink into apathy. But have women so little ambition that such a condition satisfies them? Can they idly dream their lives away in the lap of pleasure, or in the dullness of boredom, rather than claim their right to pursue reasonable pleasures and make themselves conspicuous by practising the virtues that give humankind its dignity? Surely she has no immortal soul who can loiter her life away employed only in decorating her person, so as to amuse the languid hours and soften the cares of a fellow creature who is willing to be cheered up by her smiles and her tricks when the serious business of the day is over.
Besides, the woman who strengthens her body and exercises her mind will, by managing her family and practising various virtues, become her husband's friend rather than his humble dependent. And if she deserves his regard by possessing such substantial qualities, she will not find it necessary to hide her affection, or to feign an unnatural coldness of constitution to excite his passion. In fact, if we go back to history, we shall find that the women who have distinguished themselves have been neither the most beautiful nor the gentlest of their sex.
Nature — or, to speak with strict propriety, God — has made all things right; but man has sought out many inventions to spoil the work. I am referring now to that part of Dr. Gregory's treatise where he advises a wife never to let her husband know the full extent of her feeling or her affection. A voluptuary's precaution, and as ineffectual as it is absurd. Love, by its very nature, must be transitory. To look for a secret that would make it constant would be as wild a search as the hunt for the philosopher's stone or the universal cure, and the discovery would be as useless — or rather as harmful — to humankind. The most sacred bond of society is friendship. A shrewd satirist put it well when he said that rare as true love is, true friendship is rarer still.
This is an obvious truth, and since its cause does not lie deep, it will not escape a brief glance of enquiry.
Love — the common passion, in which chance and sensation take the place of choice and reason — is felt to some degree by most of humankind; there is no need to speak here of the emotions that rise above love or sink below it. This passion, naturally increased by suspense and difficulty, draws the mind out of its usual state and exalts the affections. But once the security of marriage lets the fever of love subside, a healthy temperature is thought insipid only by those who have not intellect enough to put the calm tenderness of friendship and the confidence of respect in the place of blind admiration and the sensual emotions of fondness.
This is, and must be, the course of nature: friendship or indifference inevitably follows love. And this arrangement seems to harmonize perfectly with the system of government that prevails in the moral world. The passions are spurs to action and they open the mind; but they sink into mere appetites, into a momentary personal gratification, once the object is gained and the satisfied mind settles down to enjoy it. The man who had some virtue while he was struggling for a crown often becomes a voluptuous tyrant once it sits on his head. And when the lover is not lost in the husband, the doting fool, prey to childish whims and fond jealousies, neglects the serious duties of life, and the caresses that ought to build confidence in his children are lavished on his overgrown child, his wife.
If they are to fulfil the duties of life, and to pursue with any vigour the various employments that form a moral character, the master and mistress of a family ought not to go on loving each other with passion. I mean that they ought not to indulge emotions that disturb the order of society and monopolize thoughts that should be otherwise employed. A mind that has never been absorbed by a single object lacks vigour; if it can stay absorbed for long, it is weak.
A mistaken education, a narrow and uncultivated mind, and a great many prejudices about the sexes all tend to make women more constant than men; but I shall not touch on that branch of the subject at present. I will go further, and assert, without dreaming that it is a paradox, that an unhappy marriage is often very advantageous to a family, and that the neglected wife is generally the best mother. And this would nearly always be the result if the female mind were more enlarged. For it seems to be the common dispensation of providence that whatever we gain in present enjoyment is deducted from that treasure of life which is experience, and that while we are gathering the flowers of the day and revelling in pleasure we cannot be picking the solid fruit of labour and wisdom at the same time. The road lies in front of us; we must turn right or left; and the man who spends his life bounding from one pleasure to another must not complain if he acquires neither wisdom nor a character anyone respects.
Suppose for a moment that the soul is not immortal, and that we were created only for this present scene. Then I think we should have reason to complain that love, that infant fondness, ever grows insipid and cloys the senses. Let us eat, drink and love, for tomorrow we die, would in fact be the language of reason and the morality of life; and who but a fool would give up a reality for a passing shadow? But if, awed by observing how far the mind can improve, we disdain to confine our wishes or our thoughts to so comparatively mean a field of action — one that only looks grand and important because it is connected with a boundless prospect and with sublime hopes — then what need is there for falsehood in our conduct? Why must the sacred majesty of truth be violated to hold on to a deceitful good that saps the very foundation of virtue? Why must a woman's mind be tainted with coquettish arts in order to gratify the sensualist, and to stop love from settling into friendship, or into a compassionate tenderness where there are no qualities for friendship to be built on? Let the honest heart show itself, and let reason teach passion to submit to necessity; or else let the dignified pursuit of virtue and knowledge raise the mind above emotions which, when they are not kept within bounds, embitter the cup of life rather than sweeten it.
I do not mean the romantic passion that goes along with genius. Who can clip its wings? But that grand passion, out of all proportion to the puny enjoyments of life, is true only to the sentiment, and feeds on itself. The passions celebrated for lasting have always been unlucky ones. They gained their strength from absence and from a constitutional melancholy. The fancy has hovered round a form of beauty only dimly seen — whereas familiarity might have turned admiration into disgust, or at least into indifference, and given the imagination leisure to start fresh game. Taking this view of things, Rousseau is perfectly right to have Eloisa, the mistress of his soul, love St. Preux when her life was fading; but that is no proof that the passion is immortal.
Of the same complexion is Dr. Gregory's advice about delicacy of sentiment, which he tells a woman not to acquire if she has decided to marry. That decision, however — perfectly consistent with his earlier advice — he calls indelicate, and he earnestly urges his daughters to conceal it even while it governs their conduct: as though it were indelicate to have the common appetites of human nature.
Noble morality! And quite consistent with the cautious prudence of a small soul that cannot see beyond the present minute division of existence. If all the faculties of a woman's mind are to be cultivated only so far as they bear on her dependence on a man; if, once she has got a husband, she has reached her goal and, meanly proud, is satisfied with such a paltry crown, then let her grovel contentedly, raised by her occupations hardly at all above the animals. But if she is struggling for the prize of her high calling, let her cultivate her understanding without stopping to consider what sort of character the husband she is destined for may have. Let her simply determine, without being too anxious about present happiness, to acquire the qualities that ennoble a rational being; and then a rough, inelegant husband may offend her taste without destroying her peace of mind. She will shape her soul not to fit her companion's weaknesses but to bear with them: his character may be a trial to her virtue, but it will not be an obstacle to it.
If Dr. Gregory had confined his remark to romantic expectations of unchanging love and kindred feeling, he should have remembered that experience will banish what advice can never stop us wishing for, so long as the imagination is kept alive at the expense of reason.
I admit it often happens that women who have nursed a romantic and unnatural delicacy of feeling waste their lives imagining how happy they would have been with a husband who could love them with a fervent, daily increasing affection, all day long. But they might as well pine married as single, and would be no more unhappy with a bad husband than they are longing for a good one. That a proper education — or, to be more precise, a well-stocked mind — would let a woman support a single life with dignity, I grant. But that she should avoid cultivating her taste in case her husband occasionally offends it, is giving up substance for shadow. To tell the truth, I do not know what use an improved taste is at all, if it does not make a person more independent of the accidents of life, if it does not open new sources of enjoyment that depend on the solitary operations of the mind. People of taste, married or single alike, will always be disgusted by a variety of things that less observant minds never notice. The argument must not be made to hinge on that. But taking enjoyment as a whole, is taste to be called a blessing?
The question is whether it brings more pain than pleasure. The answer will decide whether Dr. Gregory's advice is sound, and will show how absurd and tyrannical it is to lay down a system of slavery in this way, or to try to educate moral beings by any rules other than those drawn from pure reason, which apply to the whole species.
Gentleness of manner, forbearance and long-suffering are such lovable, godlike qualities that in sublime poetry the Deity himself has been clothed with them; and perhaps no picture of his goodness fastens on human affection so strongly as those that show him abundant in mercy and ready to pardon. Gentleness seen in that light bears every mark of grandeur on its face, combined with the winning graces of stooping from a height. But what a different aspect it takes on when it is the submissive bearing of dependence — the prop of a weakness that loves because it needs protection, and forbears because it must endure injuries in silence, smiling under a lash it dares not snarl at. Abject as that picture is, it is the portrait of an accomplished woman according to the received opinion of female excellence, which plausible reasoners have separated from human excellence altogether. Or else they kindly give back the rib and make one moral being out of a man and a woman — not forgetting to give her all the "submissive charms."
Footnote: See Rousseau, and Swedenborg.
How women are to exist in that state where there is to be neither marrying nor giving in marriage, we are not told. For although moralists agree that the whole tenor of life seems to prove that man is being prepared by various circumstances for a future state, they agree just as consistently in advising woman to provide for the present only. Gentleness, docility and a spaniel-like affection are recommended on this ground as the cardinal virtues of the sex; and, disregarding the arbitrary economy of nature, one writer has declared that it is masculine in a woman to be melancholy. She was created to be the toy of man, his rattle, and it must jingle in his ears whenever he dismisses reason and chooses to be amused.
To recommend gentleness on a broad basis is, of course, strictly philosophical. A frail creature should work at being gentle. But when forbearance confuses right with wrong it stops being a virtue; and however convenient it may be in a companion, that companion will always be considered an inferior, and will inspire nothing but a vapid tenderness that easily degenerates into contempt. Still, if advice really could make a person gentle whose natural disposition did not admit of such a fine polish, something would have been gained for the general order. But if — as could very quickly be shown — this indiscriminate counsel produces nothing but affectation, and throws a stumbling block in the way of gradual improvement and any real bettering of the temper, then women are not much benefited by sacrificing solid virtues to superficial graces, however many years of royal sway those graces may win the individual.
As a philosopher I read with indignation the plausible epithets men use to soften their insults; and as a moralist I ask what is meant by such mongrel phrases as fair defects and amiable weaknesses. If there is only one criterion of morals, only one archetype for humanity, then women appear to be suspended by destiny like Muhammad's coffin in the popular tale: they have neither the unerring instinct of animals, nor are they allowed to fix the eye of reason on a perfect model. They were made to be loved, and must not aim at being respected, in case they should be hunted out of society as masculine.
But let us look at the subject another way. Do passive, indolent women make the best wives? Confining the discussion to this present moment of existence, let us see how such weak creatures play their part. Do the women who have propped up the prevailing prejudice by acquiring a few superficial accomplishments really contribute to their husbands' happiness? Do they display their charms merely to amuse them? And have women who absorbed notions of passive obedience early in life enough character to manage a household or educate children? So far from it, that after surveying the history of women I cannot help agreeing with the harshest satirist, and considering my sex as the weakest as well as the most oppressed half of the species. What does history show but marks of inferiority — and how few women have freed themselves from the galling yoke of sovereign man? So few that the exceptions remind me of an ingenious guess about Newton: that he was probably a being of a superior order accidentally caged in a human body. In the same style I have found myself imagining that the few extraordinary women who have rushed off in eccentric directions out of the orbit prescribed to their sex were male spirits, shut up by mistake in a female frame. But if it is unphilosophical to think of sex at all when the soul is in question, then the inferiority must depend on the bodily organs — or else the heavenly fire that is to quicken the clay is not handed out in equal portions.
But avoiding, as I have so far, any direct comparison of the two sexes as wholes, and frankly admitting women's inferiority as things appear at present, I shall only insist that men have increased that inferiority until women have sunk almost below the standard of rational creatures. Give their faculties room to unfold and their virtues room to gain strength, and then decide where the whole sex must stand on the intellectual scale. Yet let it be remembered that I am not asking for a place on the strength of a small number of distinguished women.
It is difficult for us half-blind mortals to say what heights human discovery and improvement may reach once the gloom of despotism lifts that makes us stumble at every step. But when morality has been settled on a more solid basis, then, without any gift of prophecy, I will venture to predict that woman will be either the friend or the slave of man. We shall no longer be in doubt, as we are now, whether she is a moral agent or the link joining man to the animals. If it should then turn out that, like the animals, women were principally created for the use of men, then men will let them bite the bridle patiently and will not mock them with empty praise. And if their rationality is proved, men will not obstruct their improvement merely to gratify their own sensual appetites. They will not use all the graces of rhetoric to advise women to surrender their understandings entirely to a man's guidance. They will not, when writing about the education of women, assert that women ought never to have the free use of reason, nor recommend cunning and dissimulation to beings who are acquiring, exactly as they are themselves, the virtues of humanity.
Surely there can be only one rule of right, if morality has an eternal foundation; and whoever sacrifices virtue, strictly so called, to present convenience, or whose duty it is said to be to act that way, lives only for the passing day and cannot be an accountable creature.
The poet should have dropped his sneer, then, when he says,
"If weak women go astray, The stars are more in fault than they."
For that women are bound by the adamantine chain of destiny is quite certain, if it is settled that they are never to exercise their own reason, never to be independent, never to rise above opinion, never to feel the dignity of a rational will that bows to God alone, and often forgets that the universe contains anything besides itself and the model of perfection its ardent gaze is fixed on — adoring attributes which, softened into virtues, may be imitated in kind, even though their degree overwhelms the enraptured mind.
If, I say — for I would not try to impress by declamation when reason offers her sober light — if women really are capable of acting like rational creatures, then let them not be treated like slaves, or like the animals that depend on human reason when they live alongside us. Cultivate their minds, give them the wholesome, sublime curb of principle, and let them attain a conscious dignity by feeling themselves dependent on God alone. Teach them, as men are taught, to submit to necessity, instead of giving morals a sex in order to make them more pleasing.
Further: if experience should prove that they cannot attain the same degree of strength of mind, perseverance and fortitude, then let their virtues be the same in kind even though they struggle in vain for the same degree. The superiority of men will be just as clear, or clearer; and truth, being a simple principle admitting of no modification, would be common to both. The order of society as it is now regulated would not even be overturned, for women would then have only the rank reason assigned them, and no arts could be practised to level the balance, much less to tip it.
These may be called Utopian dreams. Thanks be to the Being who impressed them on my soul and gave me strength of mind enough to dare to exercise my own reason, until, depending on him alone to support my virtue, I look with indignation at the mistaken notions that enslave my sex.
I love man as my fellow creature; but his sceptre, real or usurped, does not extend to me, unless the reason of a particular individual demands my homage — and even then the submission is to reason and not to the man. In fact the conduct of an accountable being must be regulated by the workings of its own reason; or on what foundation does the throne of God rest?
It seems necessary to dwell on these obvious truths, because women have been insulted, as it were, in this way: stripped of the virtues that ought to clothe humanity, they have been decked out instead with artificial graces that let them exercise a short-lived tyranny. Love takes the place in them of every nobler passion, so that their sole ambition is to be beautiful, to stir emotion instead of inspiring respect. And this ignoble desire, like the servility of absolute monarchies, destroys all strength of character. Liberty is the mother of virtue; and if women are by their very constitution slaves, and are not allowed to breathe the sharp invigorating air of freedom, they must always languish like hothouse plants and be reckoned beautiful flaws in nature — and let it be remembered too that they are nature's only flaw.
As for the argument drawn from the subjection women have always been held in, it recoils on men. The many have always been enslaved by the few, and monsters who have shown hardly any discernment of human excellence have tyrannized over thousands of their fellow creatures. Why have men of superior endowments submitted to such degradation? For is it not universally acknowledged that kings, taken collectively, have always been inferior in ability and virtue to the same number of men picked out of the common mass — and yet are they not still treated with a reverence that is an insult to reason? China is not the only country where a living man has been made into a god. Men have submitted to superior strength in order to enjoy the pleasure of the moment with impunity; women have only done the same. And so, until it is proved that the courtier who servilely surrenders his birthright as a man is not a moral agent, it cannot be shown that woman is essentially inferior to man because she has always been subjugated.
Brute force has governed the world so far, and that the science of politics is in its infancy is plain from the way philosophers hesitate to give the knowledge most useful to man that definite name.
I shall not pursue the argument beyond establishing one obvious inference: that as sound politics spread liberty, humankind, women included, will become wiser and more virtuous.
Bodily strength, which used to be the mark of heroes, has now sunk into such undeserved contempt that men as well as women seem to think it unnecessary — women because it detracts from their feminine graces and from that lovely weakness which is the source of their undue power, and men because it looks incompatible with the character of a gentleman.
That both have run from one extreme into the other can easily be shown. But first it is worth noticing that a vulgar error has gained enough credit to give force to a false conclusion, in which an effect has been mistaken for a cause.
People of genius have very often damaged their constitutions by study, or by careless inattention to their health; and since the violence of their passions is proportioned to the vigour of their intellects, the sword wearing out the scabbard has become almost proverbial. From this superficial observers have inferred that men of genius usually have weak — or, to use the more fashionable word, delicate — constitutions. Yet I believe the opposite will turn out to be the fact. On careful enquiry I find that strength of mind has in most cases been accompanied by superior strength of body and a naturally sound constitution — not that robust tone of nerve and vigour of muscle which comes from bodily labour while the mind lies idle, or merely directs the hands.
Dr. Priestley has remarked, in the preface to his biographical chart, that most great men have lived beyond forty-five. And considering the thoughtless way they squandered their strength — investigating some favourite science, burning up the lamp of life and forgetting the midnight hour; or lost in poetic dreams, with fancy peopling the scene and the soul so disturbed by the passions that meditation had raised that it shook the constitution, while the objects of those passions, the baseless fabric of a vision, faded before the exhausted eye — considering all that, they must have had iron frames. Shakespeare never grasped the airy dagger with a nerveless hand, nor did Milton tremble when he led Satan far from the confines of his dreary prison. These were not the ravings of feebleness, the sickly outpourings of a disordered brain, but the exuberance of a fancy which, wandering "in a fine frenzy", was not continually reminded of its material shackles.
I am aware that this argument would carry me further than I may be supposed to want to go; but I follow truth, and, still holding to my first position, I will allow that bodily strength does seem to give men a natural superiority over women. That is the only solid basis on which the superiority of the sex can be built. But I still insist that not only the virtue but the knowledge of the two sexes should be the same in kind, if not in degree; and that women, considered not only as moral but as rational creatures, ought to try to acquire human virtues, or perfections, by the same means as men, instead of being educated as a fanciful sort of half being, one of Rousseau's wild chimeras.
But if strength of body is, with some show of reason, the boast of men, why are women so infatuated as to be proud of a defect? Rousseau has supplied them with a plausible excuse — one that could only have occurred to a man whose imagination had been allowed to run wild and to refine on the impressions made by exquisite senses. Its purpose, if you please, is to give men a pretext for yielding to a natural appetite without violating a romantic species of modesty which gratifies male pride and male libertinism.
Deluded by such sentiments, women sometimes boast of their weakness, cunningly obtaining power by playing on the weakness of men; and they may well glory in their illicit sway, for, like Turkish pashas, they have more real power than their masters. But virtue is sacrificed to momentary gratifications, and the respectability of a whole life to the triumph of an hour.
Women, like despots, have perhaps more power now than they would have if the world, divided and subdivided into kingdoms and families, were governed by laws drawn from the exercise of reason. But in getting that power — to carry the comparison on — their character is degraded, and licentiousness is spread through the whole of society. The many become a pedestal for the few. I will therefore venture to assert that until women are more rationally educated, the progress of human virtue and the improvement of knowledge must suffer continual checks. And if it is granted that woman was not created merely to gratify a man's appetite, nor to be the upper servant who provides his meals and looks after his linen, then it follows that the first care of any mother or father who really attends to a girl's education should be, if not to strengthen her body, at least not to destroy her constitution with mistaken notions of beauty and female excellence; and girls should never be allowed to absorb the pernicious idea that a defect can, by some chemical process of reasoning, be turned into an excellence. I am glad to find that the author of one of the most instructive books our country has produced for children agrees with me here, and I shall quote his apt remarks to lend the weight of his respectable authority to reason.
Footnote: A respectable old man gives the following sensible account of how he set about educating his daughter. "I tried to give both her mind and her body a degree of vigour that is seldom found in the female sex. As soon as she was strong enough for the lighter work of farming and gardening, I made her my constant companion. Selene — for that was her name — soon acquired a dexterity in all these country employments that I watched with equal pleasure and admiration. If women are generally feeble in body and mind alike, it comes less from nature than from education. We encourage a vicious idleness and inactivity which we falsely call delicacy; instead of hardening their minds with the sterner principles of reason and philosophy, we breed them up to useless arts that end in vanity and sensuality. In most of the countries I have visited they are taught nothing higher than a few modulations of the voice or a few useless postures of the body; their time is consumed in idleness or in trifles, and trifles become the only pursuits capable of interesting them. We seem to forget that our own domestic comfort, and the education of our children, must depend on the qualities of the female sex. And what comfort, or what education, is a race of beings corrupted from infancy and unacquainted with every duty of life fitted to give? To touch a musical instrument with useless skill, and to display their natural or affected graces to the eyes of idle, debauched young men who squander their fathers' estates in riotous and needless expense — these are the only arts women cultivate in most of the polished nations I have seen. And the consequences are uniformly what may be expected from such polluted sources: private misery, and public servitude. But Selene's education was regulated by different views and conducted on sterner principles — if that can be called sternness which opens the mind to a sense of moral and religious duty, and arms it most effectually against the inevitable evils of life." —Mr. Day's Sandford and Merton, Volume 3
But suppose it were proved that woman is naturally weaker than man. How does it follow that it is natural for her to labour at becoming weaker still than nature intended? Arguments of this cast are an insult to common sense and smell of passion. The divine right of husbands, like the divine right of kings, may, it is to be hoped, be disputed in this enlightened age without danger; and though conviction may not silence many boisterous disputants, still, when a prevailing prejudice is attacked, the wise will consider, and leave the narrow-minded to rail with thoughtless vehemence against innovation.
The mother who wishes to give her daughter a true dignity of character must, ignoring the sneers of the ignorant, proceed on a plan diametrically opposite to the one Rousseau has recommended with all the deluding charms of eloquence and philosophical sophistry. For his eloquence makes absurdities plausible, and his dogmatic conclusions puzzle without convincing anyone who has not the ability to refute them.
Throughout the whole animal kingdom every young creature needs almost continual exercise, and, in keeping with that hint, the infancy of children should be spent in harmless romping which exercises the feet and hands without needing much direction from the head or the constant attention of a nurse. In fact the care necessary for self-preservation is the first natural exercise of the understanding, just as little inventions to amuse the present moment unfold the imagination. But these wise designs of nature are frustrated by mistaken fondness or blind zeal. The child is never left a moment to its own direction — a girl least of all — and so is made dependent, and the dependence is then called natural.
To preserve personal beauty, woman's glory, the limbs and faculties are cramped with something worse than Chinese bandages; and the sedentary life girls are condemned to, while boys frolic in the open air, weakens the muscles and slackens the nerves. As for Rousseau's observations, since echoed by several writers, that girls have naturally — that is, from birth and independently of education — a fondness for dolls, for dressing up and for chattering, they are so childish that they do not deserve serious refutation. That a girl condemned to sit for hours together listening to the idle chat of feeble nurses, or attending her mother at her dressing table, should try to join in the conversation is indeed very natural. And that she should imitate her mother or her aunts, and amuse herself by adorning her lifeless doll as they adorn her, poor innocent baby, is undoubtedly the most natural consequence in the world. For men of the greatest abilities have seldom had strength enough to rise above the atmosphere around them; and if the page of genius has always been blotted by the prejudices of its age, some allowance should be made for a sex who, like kings, always see things through a false medium.
The fondness for dress so conspicuous in women can be easily accounted for in this way, without supposing it the result of any desire to please the sex they depend on. In short, the absurdity of supposing that a girl is naturally a coquette, and that a desire connected with nature's impulse to propagate the species should show itself even before an improper education has called it out prematurely by heating the imagination, is so unphilosophical that an observer as shrewd as Rousseau would never have adopted it, if he had not been in the habit of letting reason give way to his craving for singularity, and truth to a favourite paradox.
Yet giving a sex to the mind in this way was hardly consistent in a man who argued so warmly, and so well, for the immortality of the soul. But what a weak barrier truth is when it stands in the way of a hypothesis! Rousseau respected — almost adored — virtue, and yet let himself love with a sensual fondness. His imagination was constantly preparing inflammable fuel for his inflammable senses; and in order to reconcile that with his respect for self-denial, fortitude and the heroic virtues, which a mind like his could not admire coolly, he labours to invert the law of nature and puts forward a doctrine pregnant with mischief and insulting to the character of supreme wisdom.
His ridiculous stories, which are meant to prove that girls are naturally attentive to their persons, without laying any weight on daily example, are beneath contempt. And the tale of the little girl with such a correct taste that she gave up the pleasing amusement of making O's merely because she noticed it was an ungraceful attitude belongs with the anecdotes of the learned pig.
Footnote: "I once knew a young person who learned to write before she learned to read, and began to write with her needle before she could handle a pen. At first she took it into her head to make no letter but the O: she was constantly making it, in all sizes, and always the wrong way round. Unluckily, one day when she was intent on this employment, she happened to catch sight of herself in the looking glass; and, taking a dislike to the constrained attitude she sat in while writing, she threw away her pen like another Pallas and resolved never to make an O again. Her brother was equally averse to writing; but with him it was the confinement and not the constrained attitude that was most disgusting." —Rousseau's Emilius
I have probably had more opportunity of observing girls in their infancy than J. J. Rousseau. I can remember my own feelings, and I have looked steadily about me. So far from agreeing with him about the first dawn of the female character, I will venture to affirm that a girl whose spirits have not been damped by inactivity, and whose innocence has not been tainted by false shame, will always be a tomboy, and that a doll will never hold her attention unless confinement leaves her no alternative. In short, girls and boys would play harmlessly together if the distinction of sex were not drummed into them long before nature makes any difference. I will go further, and state it as an indisputable fact that most of the women within my own observation who have acted like rational creatures, or shown any vigour of intellect, have happened to be allowed to run wild — as some of the elegant improvers of the fair sex would put it.
The harmful consequences of neglecting health in infancy and youth reach further than is supposed: dependence of body naturally produces dependence of mind. How can a woman be a good wife or mother when most of her time is spent guarding against illness or enduring it? Nor can we expect a woman to work resolutely at strengthening her constitution and abstaining from enervating indulgences, if artificial notions of beauty and false descriptions of sensibility have been tangled up early with her motives for acting. Most men are obliged now and then to put up with bodily inconvenience and endure the weather; but genteel women are, quite literally, slaves to their bodies, and glory in the subjection.
I once knew a weak woman of fashion who was more than commonly proud of her delicacy and her sensibility. She thought a discriminating taste and a tiny appetite the height of human perfection, and acted accordingly. I have watched this feeble, artificial creature neglect every duty of life and then recline on a sofa in perfect self-satisfaction, boasting that she had no appetite as proof of a delicacy which extended to — or perhaps arose from — her exquisite sensibility; for it is hard to make such ridiculous jargon intelligible. And at that very moment I have seen her insult a worthy old gentlewoman whom unexpected misfortune had made dependent on her ostentatious charity, and who in better days had claims on her gratitude. Is it possible that a human creature could have become so weak and depraved if, like the Sybarites dissolved in luxury, everything resembling virtue had not been worn away, or had been impressed by mere precept — a poor substitute, it is true, for a cultivated mind, though it serves as a fence against vice?
Such a woman is no more an irrational monster than some of those Roman emperors who were depraved by lawless power. Yet since kings have been more under the restraint of law, and under the curb — however weak — of honour, the records of history are not filled with such unnatural instances of folly and cruelty; nor does the despotism that kills virtue and genius in the bud hang over Europe with the destructive blast that lays Turkey waste and leaves the men, like the soil, unfruitful.
Women are everywhere in this deplorable state. In order to preserve their innocence, as ignorance is politely called, truth is hidden from them, and they are made to assume an artificial character before their faculties have gained any strength. Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and, roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison. Men have a variety of employments and pursuits to engage their attention and give some character to the opening mind; but women, confined to one, and with their thoughts constantly directed to the most insignificant part of themselves, seldom look beyond the triumph of the hour. Yet if their understanding were once emancipated from the slavery that male pride and sensuality, and the short-sighted craving for immediate power that tyrants share, have subjected them to, we should probably read of their weaknesses with astonishment. I must be allowed to press the argument a little further.
Perhaps, if we allowed the existence of an evil being who, in the allegorical language of scripture, went about seeking whom he might devour, he could not degrade the human character more effectively than by giving a man absolute power.
This argument branches out in various directions. Birth, riches and every extrinsic advantage that raises a man above his fellows without any mental exertion really sinks him below them. In proportion to his weakness he is played upon by designing men, until the bloated monster has lost every trace of humanity. And that tribes of men, like flocks of sheep, should quietly follow such a leader is a contradiction that nothing but a desire for present enjoyment and a narrowness of understanding can explain. Brought up in slavish dependence, and enfeebled by luxury and sloth, where are we to find men who will stand forward to assert the rights of man, or claim the privilege of moral beings, who ought to have only one road to excellence? Slavery to monarchs and ministers, which the world will be long in freeing itself from, and whose deadly grip stops the progress of the human mind, is not yet abolished.
Let men, then, in the pride of power, not use the same arguments that tyrannical kings and venal ministers have used, and falsely assert that woman ought to be kept in subjection because she has always been so. When man, governed by reasonable laws, enjoys his natural freedom, let him despise woman if she does not share it with him; and until that glorious period arrives, when he holds forth on the folly of my sex let him not overlook his own.
Women who obtain power by unjust means, by practising vice or fostering it, do plainly lose the rank reason would assign them, and become either abject slaves or capricious tyrants. They lose all simplicity and all dignity of mind in acquiring power, and behave exactly as men behave when they have been raised by the same means.
It is time to effect a revolution in female manners, time to give women back their lost dignity, and to make them, as a part of the human species, work at reforming themselves in order to reform the world. It is time to separate unchangeable morals from local manners. If men are demigods, then let us serve them! And if the dignity of the female soul is as disputable as that of animals — if their reason gives too little light to direct their conduct while unerring instinct is denied them — then they are surely of all creatures the most miserable, and, bent beneath the iron hand of destiny, must submit to be a fair defect in creation. But to justify the ways of providence towards them by pointing out some unanswerable reason for making so large a portion of humankind accountable and not accountable at once would puzzle the subtlest casuist alive.
The only solid foundation for morality appears to be the character of the Supreme Being, whose harmony arises from a balance of attributes; and, to speak with reverence, one attribute seems to imply the necessity of another. He must be just, because he is wise; he must be good, because he is omnipotent. To exalt one attribute at the expense of another equally noble and necessary bears the stamp of man's warped reason, and is the homage of passion. Man, accustomed in his savage state to bow down before power, can seldom rid himself of that barbarous prejudice even when civilization has shown him how far mental strength is superior to bodily; and his reason stays clouded by these crude opinions even when he is thinking about the Deity. God's omnipotence is made to swallow up, or to preside over, all his other attributes, and anyone who thinks that power must be regulated by wisdom is supposed to be limiting it irreverently.
I disclaim the kind of humility which, having investigated nature, stops short at nature's author. The high and lofty One who inhabits eternity doubtless possesses many attributes we can form no conception of; but reason tells me that they cannot clash with those I adore, and I am compelled to listen to her voice.
It seems natural for man to search for excellence, and either to trace it in the object he worships or blindly to drape perfection over it like a garment. But what good effect can the second kind of worship have on the moral conduct of a rational being? He bows to power; he adores a dark cloud which may open on a bright prospect or burst in angry, lawless fury on his devoted head, and he does not know why. And if the Deity acts from the vague impulse of an undirected will, then man must follow his own will too, or else act by rules drawn from principles he has just declared it irreverent to apply. Both enthusiasts and cooler thinkers have fallen into this dilemma when they have laboured to free men from the wholesome restraints that a just conception of God's character imposes.
It is not impious to examine the attributes of the Almighty in this way; indeed, who that exercises his faculties at all can avoid it? For to love God as the fountain of wisdom, goodness and power appears to be the only worship of any use to a being who wants to acquire either virtue or knowledge. A blind, unsettled affection may, like the human passions, occupy the mind and warm the heart, while doing justice, loving mercy and walking humbly with our God is forgotten. I shall come back to this subject when I consider religion in a light quite opposite to the one Dr. Gregory recommends, who treats it as a matter of sentiment or taste.
To return from this apparent digression. It is to be wished that women would cherish an affection for their husbands founded on the same principle that devotion ought to rest on. There is no other firm base under heaven, and let them beware of the deceptive light of sentiment, too often used as a softer word for sensuality. It follows then, I think, that from infancy women should either be shut up like eastern princes, or educated in such a way as to be able to think and act for themselves.
Why do men halt between two opinions and expect impossibilities? Why do they expect virtue from a slave, or from a being whom the constitution of civil society has made weak, if not vicious?
Still, I know it will take a considerable time to root out the firmly planted prejudices that sensualists have sown. It will also take some time to convince women that they act against their own real interest, taken on any large scale, when they cherish or affect weakness under the name of delicacy; and to convince the world that the poisoned source of female vices and follies — if custom obliges me to use those words loosely as synonyms — has been the sensual homage paid to beauty. To beauty of feature, that is; for a German writer has shrewdly observed that a pretty woman, as an object of desire, is generally acknowledged so by men of every description, whereas a fine woman, who inspires more sublime emotions by displaying an intellectual beauty, may be overlooked, or noticed with indifference, by men who find their happiness in gratifying their appetites. I foresee the obvious retort: that while man remains as imperfect a being as he has so far shown himself, he will be more or less the slave of his appetites; and that since the women who gratify a dominant appetite obtain the most power, the sex is degraded by a physical if not by a moral necessity.
I grant that this objection has some force. But so long as so sublime a precept exists as "be pure as your heavenly father is pure", it would seem that man's virtues are not limited by the only Being who could limit them, and that he may press forward without asking whether so noble an ambition takes him out of his sphere. To the wild waves it was said, "this far you shall come, and no further; and here your proud waves shall be stopped." So they beat and foam in vain, restrained by the power that keeps the struggling planets in their orbits; matter yields to the great governing Spirit. But an immortal soul, not restrained by mechanical laws and struggling to free itself from the shackles of matter, adds to the order of creation instead of disturbing it, when, cooperating with the Father of spirits, it tries to govern itself by that unvarying rule which regulates the universe to a degree our imagination faints before.
Besides, if women are educated for dependence — that is, to act according to the will of another fallible being and to submit to power whether it is right or wrong — where are we to stop? Are they to be considered as deputies, allowed to reign over a small domain and answerable for their conduct to a higher tribunal, itself liable to error?
It will not be hard to prove that such deputies act like men who have been subdued by fear, and will make their children and servants endure their tyrannical oppression. Since they submit without reason, they will have no fixed rules to square their own conduct by, and will be kind or cruel just as the whim of the moment directs; and we ought not to be surprised if, galled sometimes by their own heavy yoke, they take a malignant pleasure in resting it on weaker shoulders.
But suppose a woman brought up to obedience marries a sensible man who directs her judgment without making her feel the servility of her position, so that she acts with as much propriety by this reflected light as can be expected when reason is taken at second hand. Even so she cannot guarantee the life of her protector. He may die and leave her with a large family.
A double duty then falls on her: to educate them in the character of both father and mother, to form their principles and secure their property. But she has never thought for herself, much less acted for herself. She has only learned to please men and to depend on them gracefully. Encumbered with children, how is she to get another protector — a husband to take the place of reason? A rational man, for we are not on romantic ground here, may think her a pleasing docile creature and still not choose to marry a family for love, when the world contains plenty more pretty creatures. What is to become of her, then? Either she falls an easy prey to some mean fortune hunter who defrauds her children of their father's inheritance and makes her miserable, or she becomes the victim of discontent and blind indulgence. Unable to educate her sons, or to impress them with respect — for it is no play on words to say that people are never respected, however important their station, if they are not respectable — she pines under the anguish of useless, helpless regret. The serpent's tooth enters into her very soul, and the vices of licentious youth bring her with sorrow, and perhaps with poverty as well, to the grave.
This is not an overdrawn picture. On the contrary, it is a very possible case, and something like it must have come under every attentive eye.
I have, however, assumed that she was well disposed, though experience shows that the blind can be led into a ditch as easily as along the beaten road. But suppose — and it is no very improbable guess — that a being taught only to please must go on finding her happiness in pleasing: what an example of folly, not to say of vice, she will be to her innocent daughters! The mother is lost in the coquette; and instead of making friends of her daughters she looks at them sideways, because they are rivals — crueller rivals than any others, because they invite comparison and drive her from the throne of beauty, having never once thought of a seat on the bench of reason.
It needs no lively pencil, no exaggerated outline of caricature, to sketch the domestic miseries and petty vices that such a mistress of a family spreads around her. And still she is only acting as a woman ought to act who has been brought up on Rousseau's system. She can never be reproached for being masculine or stepping out of her sphere. Indeed she may observe another of his grand rules, and, carefully keeping her reputation spotless, be reckoned a good sort of woman. Yet in what sense can she be called good? She abstains, it is true, and without much of a struggle, from committing gross crimes. But how does she fulfil her duties? Duties! In truth she has quite enough to think about in adorning her body and nursing a weak constitution.
As for religion, she never presumed to judge for herself, but conformed, as a dependent creature should, to the ceremonies of the church she was brought up in, piously believing that wiser heads than hers had settled that business, and that never doubting is her point of perfection. So she pays her tithe of mint and cumin, and thanks God that she is not as other women are. These are the blessed effects of a good education! These are the virtues of man's helpmate.
I must relieve myself by drawing a different picture.
Let fancy present a woman of tolerable understanding — I have no wish to leave the line of mediocrity — whose constitution, strengthened by exercise, has let her body reach its full vigour, while her mind has gradually expanded to take in the moral duties of life and to see what human virtue and dignity consist in. Formed in this way by the duties of her station, she marries from affection without losing sight of prudence; and, looking beyond marital bliss, she secures her husband's respect before there is any need to exert mean arts to please him and feed a dying flame which nature doomed to go out once its object became familiar, once friendship and forbearance take the place of a more ardent affection. That is the natural death of love, and domestic peace is not destroyed by struggles to prevent it. I am supposing the husband to be virtuous too; otherwise she needs independent principles even more.
Fate, however, breaks the tie. She is left a widow, perhaps without adequate provision — but she is not desolate. The pang of nature is felt; but after time has softened sorrow into a melancholy resignation, her heart turns to her children with redoubled fondness, and, anxious to provide for them, affection gives her maternal duties a sacred, heroic cast. She thinks that her virtuous efforts are seen not only by the eye from which all her comfort must now flow, and whose approval is life to her; her imagination, a little abstracted and exalted by grief, dwells also on the fond hope that the eyes her trembling hand closed may still see how she subdues every wayward passion to fulfil the double duty of being father as well as mother to her children. Raised to heroism by misfortune, she suppresses the first faint dawning of a natural inclination before it can ripen into love, and in the bloom of life forgets her sex — forgets the pleasure of an awakening passion that might have been inspired and returned again. She no longer thinks of pleasing, and a conscious dignity keeps her from priding herself on the praise her conduct earns. Her children have her love, and her brightest hopes lie beyond the grave, where her imagination often wanders.
I think I can see her surrounded by her children, reaping the reward of her care. The intelligent eye meets hers while health and innocence smile on their chubby cheeks; and as they grow up, the cares of life are lightened by their grateful attention. She lives to see the virtues she tried to plant on principle fixed into habits, and to see her children attain enough strength of character to endure adversity without forgetting their mother's example.
The task of life fulfilled in this way, she waits calmly for the sleep of death; and rising from the grave she may say: you gave me one talent, and here are five.
I wish to sum up what I have said in a few words, for here I throw down my gauntlet and deny the existence of sexual virtues, not excepting modesty. For men and women, truth, if I understand the meaning of the word, must be the same. Yet the fanciful female character so prettily drawn by poets and novelists demands the sacrifice of truth and sincerity; and so virtue becomes a relative idea with no other foundation than utility — and men claim the arbitrary right to judge that utility, shaping it to suit their own convenience.
Women, I allow, may have different duties to fulfil; but they are human duties, and the principles that should regulate the discharge of them, I stoutly maintain, must be the same.
To become respectable, they must exercise their understanding; there is no other foundation for independence of character. I mean explicitly to say that they must bow only to the authority of reason, instead of being the modest slaves of opinion.
In the higher ranks of life, how seldom do we meet a man of superior ability, or even of common attainments? The reason seems to me clear: the state they are born into was an unnatural one. Human character has always been formed by the employments an individual or a class pursues, and if the faculties are not sharpened by necessity they must stay blunt. The argument may fairly be extended to women; for, seldom occupied by any serious business, the pursuit of pleasure gives their character that insignificance which makes the society of the great so insipid. The same lack of firmness, produced by a similar cause, drives both to fly from themselves into noisy pleasures and artificial passions, until vanity takes the place of every social affection and the marks of humanity can hardly be made out at all. Such are the blessings of our civil governments as they are at present organized, that wealth and female softness tend equally to debase humankind, and both are produced by the same cause. But if women are rational creatures they should be spurred on to acquire virtues they can call their own; for how can a rational being be ennobled by anything that is not obtained by its own exertions?
That woman is either naturally weak or has been degraded by a combination of circumstances seems to me clear. But I shall simply set that proposition beside a conclusion I have often heard sensible men draw in favour of aristocracy: that the mass of humankind cannot amount to anything, or else the obsequious slaves who patiently let themselves be penned up would feel their own importance and kick off their chains. Men submit to oppression everywhere, they add, when they have only to lift their heads to throw off the yoke; yet instead of asserting their birthright they quietly lick the dust and say, let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die. Women, I argue by analogy, are degraded by the same tendency to enjoy the present moment, and end by despising a freedom they have not virtue enough to struggle for. But I must be more explicit.
As far as cultivating the heart goes, everyone agrees that sex does not come into it; but the line of subordination in mental powers is never to be crossed. Being merely "absolute in loveliness", the portion of rationality granted to women is a very scanty one indeed; for once you deny her genius and judgment it is hard to guess what is left to constitute an intellect at all.
The very stuff of immortality, if I may put it that way, is the perfectibility of human reason. If man had been created perfect, or if a flood of knowledge broke in on him at maturity that made error impossible, I should doubt whether his existence continued after the body dissolved. But as things are, every difficulty in morals that escapes human discussion, and that baffles profound thought and the lightning glance of genius alike, is an argument on which I build my belief in the immortality of the soul. Reason is accordingly the simple power of improvement — or, more properly, of discerning truth. In this respect every individual is a world in itself. More of it may show in one being than in another, but the nature of reason must be the same in all, if it is an emanation of divinity, the tie connecting the creature with the Creator. For can a soul be stamped with the heavenly image which is not perfected by exercising its own reason? Yet, outwardly ornamented with elaborate care and adorned to delight a man, "that with honour he may love", the soul of woman is not allowed this distinction; and, with a man always placed between her and reason, she is always represented as created only to see through a coarse medium and to take things on trust. But dismissing these fanciful theories, and considering woman as a whole — whatever that whole may be — rather than as a part of man, the question is whether she has reason or not. If she has, which I will assume for the moment, then she was not created merely to be man's comfort, and what belongs to her sex should not be allowed to destroy what belongs to her humanity.
Footnote: See Milton.
Men have probably been led into this error by looking at education in a false light: not as the first step in forming a being who is advancing gradually towards perfection, but only as a preparation for life. On this sensual error, for I must call it that, the whole false system of female manners has been raised, which robs women of their dignity and classes the dark and the fair alike with the smiling flowers that merely decorate the landscape. This has always been the language of men, and the fear of departing from a supposed character proper to their sex has made even women of superior sense adopt the same sentiments. So understanding, strictly speaking, has been denied to woman, and instinct, refined into wit and cunning for the purposes of life, has been put in its place.
Footnote: This word is not strictly the right one, but I cannot find a better.
The power of generalizing ideas, of drawing broad conclusions from individual observations, is the only acquirement for an immortal being that really deserves the name of knowledge. Merely to observe without trying to account for anything may serve, very incompletely, as the common sense of daily life; but where is the store being laid up that is to clothe the soul when it leaves the body?
This power has not only been denied to women; writers have insisted that, with a few exceptions, it is inconsistent with the character of their sex. Let men prove that, and I shall grant that woman exists only for man. First, though, I must remark that the power of generalizing ideas to any great extent is not very common among men or women. But this exercise is the true cultivation of the understanding — and everything conspires to make cultivating the understanding harder for women than for men.
That assertion leads me naturally to the main subject of this chapter, and I shall now try to point out some of the causes that degrade my sex and prevent women from generalizing their observations.
I shall not go back into remote antiquity to trace the history of woman. It is enough to grant that she has always been either a slave or a despot, and to remark that both conditions retard the progress of reason equally. The great source of female folly and vice has always seemed to me to be narrowness of mind; and the very constitution of civil governments has put nearly insuperable obstacles in the way of cultivating the female understanding — yet virtue can be built on no other foundation. The same obstacles are put in the way of the rich, and the same consequences follow.
Necessity has proverbially been called the mother of invention; the saying may be extended to virtue. Virtue is an acquirement, and one for which pleasure must be sacrificed — and who sacrifices pleasure when it lies within reach, if their mind has not been opened and strengthened by adversity, or their pursuit of knowledge goaded on by necessity? It is a happy thing when people have the cares of life to struggle with, for the struggle keeps them from falling prey to enervating vices out of sheer idleness. But if men and women are placed from birth in a tropical zone with the noonday sun of pleasure beating straight down on them, how can they brace their minds enough to discharge the duties of life, or even to relish the affections that carry them out of themselves?
Pleasure is the business of a woman's life as society is at present arranged, and while that goes on being true, little is to be expected of such weak beings. Inheriting in a direct line from the first fair defect in nature the sovereignty of beauty, they have, in order to keep that power, given up the natural rights that exercising their reason might have won them, choosing to be short-lived queens rather than labour for the sober pleasures that come from equality. Exalted by their inferiority — this sounds like a contradiction — they constantly demand homage as women, though experience should teach them that the men who pride themselves on paying this arbitrary, insolent respect to the sex with the most scrupulous exactness are the likeliest to tyrannize over and despise the very weakness they cherish. Often they repeat Mr. Hume's remark, where, comparing the French and Athenian character, he alludes to women. "But what is more singular in this whimsical nation, I say to the Athenians, is that a frolic of yours during the Saturnalia, when the slaves are waited on by their masters, is seriously kept up by them all year round, and all their lives, and with some further circumstances that make the absurdity and the ridicule greater still. Your sport only raises up for a few days those whom fortune has cast down, and whom she may in her own sport really raise above you forever. But this nation gravely exalts those whom nature has made subject to them, and whose inferiority and infirmities are absolutely incurable. The women, though without virtue, are their masters and sovereigns."
Why do women — I write with affectionate concern — condescend to accept from strangers a degree of attention and respect quite different from the reciprocal civility that humanity and the politeness of civilization allow between one man and another? And why do they not discover, while they are "in the noon of beauty's power", that they are treated like queens only so that hollow respect may delude them until they resign, or never claim, their natural prerogatives? Shut up in cages like birds, they have nothing to do but preen themselves and stalk with mock majesty from perch to perch. It is true they are provided with food and clothing for which they neither toil nor spin — but health, liberty and virtue are given in exchange. And where among humankind has there ever been found strength of mind enough to let a creature resign these adventitious privileges: someone who, rising with the calm dignity of reason above opinion, dared to be proud of the privileges inherent in being human? It is vain to expect it while hereditary power chokes the affections and nips reason in the bud.
The passions of men have thus set women on thrones; and until humankind grows more reasonable it is to be feared that women will avail themselves of the power that costs them least exertion and is least disputed. They will smile — yes, they will smile — even when they are told that
"In beauty's empire is no mean, And woman either slave or queen, Is quickly scorn'd when not ador'd."
But the adoration comes first, and the scorn is not looked for.
Louis XIV in particular spread artificial manners and caught the whole nation in his toils by a plausible method: in establishing an artful chain of despotism, he made it every individual's interest to respect his station and support his power. And women, whom he flattered by a childish attention to the whole sex, obtained in his reign that prince-like distinction so fatal to reason and virtue.
A king is always a king, and a woman always a woman: his authority and her sex stand forever between them and rational conversation. With a lover, I grant, she should be a woman, and her sensibility will naturally lead her to try to stir emotion, not to gratify her vanity but her heart. That I do not call coquetry; it is the artless impulse of nature. I protest only against the sexual desire of conquest when the heart is not involved at all.
Footnote: And a wit is always a wit, one might add; the vain fooleries by which wits and beauties get attention and make conquests are much on a level.
This desire is not confined to women. "I have tried," says Lord Chesterfield, "to win the hearts of twenty women whose persons I would not have given a fig for." The libertine who in a gust of passion takes advantage of unsuspecting tenderness is a saint compared with this cold-hearted scoundrel — and I like to use words that mean something. Yet, taught only to please, women are always on the watch to please, and with truly heroic ardour set about winning hearts merely in order to give them up, or spurn them, once the victory is decided and conspicuous.
I must come down to the small details of the subject.
I am sorry to see women systematically degraded by receiving the trivial attentions that men think it manly to pay them, when in fact those attentions are an insulting way of propping up their own superiority. It is not condescension to bow to an inferior. Indeed these ceremonies look so ludicrous to me that I can hardly control my face when I see a man start up with eager and serious concern to pick up a handkerchief or shut a door which the lady could have managed herself if she had only moved a pace or two.
A wild wish has just flown from my heart to my head, and I will not stifle it, though it may raise a horse laugh. I earnestly wish to see the distinction of sex confounded in society, except where love animates the behaviour. For that distinction is, I am firmly persuaded, the foundation of the weakness of character attributed to women; it is why the understanding is neglected while accomplishments are acquired with painstaking care; and the same cause explains why women prefer the graceful virtues to the heroic ones.
Everybody, of every description, wishes to be loved and respected for something, and the common herd will always take the shortest road to what it wants. The respect paid to wealth and beauty is the most certain and unmistakable, and so it will always catch the vulgar eye of ordinary minds. Ability and virtue are absolutely necessary to raise a man out of the middle rank of life into notice, and the natural consequence is notorious: the middle rank contains most of the virtue and most of the ability. Men have, in that station at least, a chance of exerting themselves with dignity and of rising by exertions that really improve a rational creature. But women as a whole are, until their characters are formed, in the same condition as the rich: they are born — I am speaking of a state of civilization — with certain privileges of sex; and while those are granted them for nothing, few will ever think of doing more than is required in order to earn the esteem of a small number of superior people.
When do we hear of women who, starting out of obscurity, boldly claim respect for their great abilities or their daring virtues? Where are they to be found? "To be observed, to be attended to, to be taken notice of with sympathy, complacency and approval, is all the advantage they look for." True, my male readers will probably exclaim. But before they draw any conclusion, let them recollect that this was not originally written to describe women, but to describe the rich. In Dr. Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments I have found a general character of people of rank and fortune which might, in my opinion, be applied with the greatest propriety to women. I refer the shrewd reader to the whole comparison, but I must be allowed to quote a passage in support of the argument I mean to press as the most conclusive of all against the notion of a character proper to each sex. For if, warriors excepted, no great men of any description have ever appeared among the nobility, may we not fairly infer that their situation swallowed up the man, and produced a character like that of women, who are localized, if I may use the word, by the rank they are placed in — by courtesy? Women, commonly called ladies, are not to be contradicted in company, are not allowed to exert any physical strength, and are expected to show only the negative virtues, when any virtues are expected of them at all: patience, docility, good humour and pliancy, virtues incompatible with any vigorous exertion of intellect. Besides, living more with each other and being seldom absolutely alone, they are more under the influence of sentiments than of passions. Solitude and reflection are needed to give wishes the force of passions, and to let the imagination enlarge an object until it becomes the most desirable thing in the world. The same may be said of the rich: they do not deal enough in general ideas, collected by dispassionate thinking or calm investigation, to acquire the strength of character on which great resolutions are built. But hear what an acute observer says of the great.
"Do the great seem unaware how cheaply they may acquire the public's admiration? Or do they imagine that for them, as for other men, it must be bought with sweat or with blood? By what important accomplishments is the young nobleman taught to support the dignity of his rank, and to make himself worthy of that superiority over his fellow citizens which the virtue of his ancestors won for them? Is it by knowledge, by industry, by patience, by self-denial, by any virtue at all? Since all his words and all his movements are attended to, he acquires a habitual regard for every circumstance of ordinary behaviour, and studies to perform all those small duties with the most exact propriety. Conscious of how closely he is watched, and how ready people are to indulge all his inclinations, he acts on the most trivial occasions with the freedom and elevation this naturally inspires. His air, his manner, his bearing all mark that elegant and graceful sense of his own superiority which those born to a lower station can hardly ever arrive at. These are the arts by which he means to make people submit more easily to his authority and govern their inclinations according to his own pleasure — and in this he is seldom disappointed. These arts, supported by rank and pre-eminence, are enough on ordinary occasions to govern the world. Louis XIV, during most of his reign, was regarded not only in France but all over Europe as the most perfect model of a great prince. But what were the talents and virtues by which he acquired that great reputation? Was it the scrupulous and inflexible justice of everything he undertook, the immense dangers and difficulties attending his enterprises, or the unwearied and unrelenting application with which he pursued them? Was it his extensive knowledge, his exquisite judgment, his heroic valour? It was none of these. He was, first of all, the most powerful prince in Europe and consequently held the highest rank among kings; and then, says his historian, 'he surpassed all his courtiers in the gracefulness of his figure and the majestic beauty of his features. The sound of his voice, noble and affecting, won the hearts that his presence intimidated. He had a step and a bearing that could suit nobody but him and his rank, and that would have been ridiculous in anyone else. The embarrassment he caused those who spoke to him flattered the secret satisfaction with which he felt his own superiority.' These frivolous accomplishments, supported by his rank and no doubt by some degree of other talents and virtues — which seem, however, to have been not much above mediocrity — established this prince in the esteem of his own age, and have drawn even from posterity a good deal of respect for his memory. Compared with these, in his own time and in his own presence, no other virtue seemed to have any merit at all. Knowledge, industry, valour and beneficence trembled, were abashed, and lost all their dignity before them."
Woman too, being thus "in herself complete" by possessing all these frivolous accomplishments, so changes the nature of things that
—"That what she wills to do or say Seems wisest, virtuousest, discreetest, best; All higher knowledge in her presence falls Degraded. Wisdom in discourse with her Loses discountenanc'd, and like folly shows; Authority and reason on her wait."—
And all of it is built on her loveliness!
In the middle rank of life, to carry the comparison on, men are prepared in youth for a profession, and marriage is not considered the great event of their lives; whereas women have no other scheme to sharpen their faculties on. It is not business, or extensive plans, or any of the roving flights of ambition that engage their attention; their thoughts are not employed in raising such noble structures. To rise in the world and win the liberty of running from one pleasure to another, they must marry advantageously; and to that object their time is sacrificed and their persons often legally prostituted. A man entering a profession has his eye steadily fixed on some future advantage — and the mind gains great strength from having all its efforts directed to one point — and, full of his business, he thinks of pleasure as mere relaxation; whereas women look for pleasure as the main purpose of existence. In fact, from the education society gives them, the love of pleasure may be said to govern them all. But does that prove that there is a sex in souls? It would be just as reasonable to declare that the courtiers of France, when a destructive system of despotism had formed their character, were not men, because liberty, virtue and humanity had been sacrificed to pleasure and vanity. Fatal passions, which have always domineered over the whole race!
The same love of pleasure, fostered by the whole tendency of their education, gives a trifling turn to women's conduct in most situations. They are forever anxious about secondary things, and on the lookout for adventures instead of being occupied with duties.
A man setting out on a journey generally has the end of it in view; a woman thinks more about the incidental occurrences, the strange things that may happen on the road, the impression she may make on her fellow travellers — and above all she is anxiously intent on looking after the finery she has brought with her, which is more than ever a part of herself when she is going to appear in a new scene, when, to borrow an apt French turn of phrase, she is going to produce a sensation. Can dignity of mind survive such trivial cares?
In short, women in general, like the rich of both sexes, have acquired all the follies and vices of civilization and missed its useful fruit. I need not keep repeating that I am speaking of the condition of women as a whole and leaving exceptions out of the question. Their senses are inflamed and their understandings neglected; so they fall prey to their senses, delicately named sensibility, and are blown about by every momentary gust of feeling. They are therefore in a much worse condition than they would be in a state nearer to nature. Forever restless and anxious, their over-exercised sensibility makes them not only uncomfortable in themselves but troublesome, to use a soft phrase, to others. All their thoughts turn on things calculated to excite emotion; and, feeling where they should reason, their conduct is unstable and their opinions wavering — not the wavering produced by deliberation or by a widening view, but by contradictory emotions. By fits and starts they are warm about many pursuits, but that warmth, never concentrated into perseverance, soon exhausts itself, evaporated by its own heat, or else it meets some other fleeting passion to which reason has never given any weight, and neutrality follows. Miserable indeed must that being be whose cultivation of mind has only inflamed its passions! A distinction should be drawn between inflaming them and strengthening them. What can be expected to follow when the passions are pampered in this way while the judgment is left unformed? Undoubtedly a mixture of madness and folly.
This observation should not be confined to the fair sex; but for the present I mean to apply it only to them.
Novels, music, poetry and gallantry all tend to make women creatures of sensation, and their character is formed in this way during the years when they are acquiring accomplishments — the only improvement their station in society encourages them to seek. This over-stretched sensibility naturally slackens the other powers of the mind and stops the intellect from attaining the sovereignty it ought to have if a rational creature is to be useful to others and content in its own station; for exercising the understanding, as life goes on, is the only method nature points out for calming the passions.
Satiety has a very different effect, and I have often been forcibly struck by a vivid description of damnation in which the spirit is shown hovering forever with futile eagerness round the defiled body, unable to enjoy anything without the organs of sense. And yet women are made slaves to their senses, because it is through their sensibility that they get their present power.
And will moralists pretend to say that this is the condition in which one half of the human race should be encouraged to stay, in listless inactivity and stupid acquiescence? Kind instructors! What were we created for? To remain innocent, it may be said — by which they mean, in a state of childhood. We might as well never have been born, unless it were necessary that we should be created to enable man to acquire the noble privilege of reason, the power of telling good from evil, while we lie down in the dust we were taken from, never to rise again.
It would be an endless task to trace all the varieties of meanness, care and sorrow into which women are plunged by the prevailing opinion that they were created to feel rather than to reason, and that all the power they can get must be got by their charms and their weakness —
"Fine by defect, and amiably weak!"
And, made entirely dependent by this amiable weakness — dependent on men for advice as well as protection, except for what they gain by illicit sway — is it surprising that, neglecting the duties reason alone points out and shrinking from any trial that might strengthen their minds, they exert themselves only to give their defects a graceful covering, which may heighten their charms in the voluptuary's eye though it sinks them below the scale of moral excellence?
Fragile in every sense of the word, they are obliged to look up to a man for every comfort. In the most trifling danger they cling to their support with parasitic tenacity, piteously begging for help; and their natural protector extends his arm or raises his voice to defend the lovely trembler — from what? Perhaps the frown of an old cow, or the jump of a mouse; a rat would be a serious danger. In the name of reason, and even of common sense, what can save such beings from contempt, however soft and fair they may be?
These fears, when they are not put on, may be very pretty; but they show a degree of feebleness that degrades a rational creature in a way women do not realise — for love and esteem are very different things.
I am fully persuaded we should hear nothing of these infantile airs if girls were allowed enough exercise and were not shut up in close rooms until their muscles are slack and their digestion ruined. To carry the remark further: if fear in girls, instead of being encouraged and perhaps even created, were treated the way cowardice in boys is treated, we should soon see women with more dignified faces. It is true they could not then be called with equal propriety the sweet flowers that smile along man's path; but they would be more respectable members of society and would discharge the important duties of life by the light of their own reason. "Educate women like men," says Rousseau, "and the more they resemble our sex the less power will they have over us." That is precisely the point I am aiming at. I do not wish them to have power over men, but over themselves.
I have heard men argue in exactly the same strain against instructing the poor, for aristocracy takes many forms. "Teach them to read and write," they say, "and you take them out of the station nature assigned them." An eloquent Frenchman has answered them, and I will borrow his sentiments. They do not know that when they make a man into a brute they may expect at any instant to see him transformed into a ferocious beast. Without knowledge there can be no morality.
Ignorance is a frail base for virtue! Yet that ignorance is the condition woman was made for has been insisted on by the very writers who have argued most vehemently for the superiority of man — a superiority not of degree but of essence; though, to soften the argument, they have laboured to prove with chivalrous generosity that the sexes ought not to be compared at all: man was made to reason, woman to feel, and together, flesh and spirit, they make the most perfect whole by happily blending reason and sensibility into one character.
And what is sensibility? "Quickness of sensation; quickness of perception; delicacy." So Dr. Johnson defines it, and the definition gives me no idea except of an exquisitely polished instinct. I can discern no trace of the image of God in either sensation or matter. Refined seventy times seven, they are still material; intellect does not live there; nor will fire ever turn lead into gold.
I come round to my old argument. If woman is allowed to have an immortal soul, she must have an understanding to improve as the employment of her life. And when, to make the present state more complete — though everything proves it to be only a fraction of a mighty sum — she is tempted by present gratification to forget her grand destination, then nature is thwarted, or else she was born only to breed and rot. Or, if we grant animals of every description a soul, though not a rational one, the exercise of instinct and sensibility may be the step they are to take in this life towards attaining reason in the next; so that through all eternity they will lag behind man, who, for reasons we cannot tell, was given the power of attaining reason in his first mode of existence.
When I come to the duties peculiar to women, as I should come to the duties peculiar to a citizen or a father, it will be seen that I do not mean to hint that women should be taken out of their families — speaking of the majority. "He who has a wife and children," says Lord Bacon, "has given hostages to fortune; for they are impediments to great enterprises, whether of virtue or of mischief. Certainly the best works, and those of greatest merit to the public, have come from unmarried or childless men." I say the same of women. But the welfare of society is not built on extraordinary exertions; and if society were more reasonably organized there would be even less need of great abilities or heroic virtues.
In the regulation of a family and the education of children, understanding in the plainest sense is particularly required, and strength of body and mind as well. Yet the men who have laboured hardest in their writings to keep women at home have tried, with arguments dictated by a coarse appetite that satiety had made fastidious, to weaken their bodies and cramp their minds. If even by these underhand methods they really did persuade women, by working on their feelings, to stay at home and fulfil the duties of a mother and mistress of a family, I should be cautious about opposing opinions that led women to right conduct, by getting them to make the discharge of a duty the business of life, even though reason was insulted in the process. Yet — and I appeal to experience — if by neglecting the understanding women are as much detached from those domestic duties as they could be by the most serious intellectual pursuit, and indeed more so, then, though it may be observed that most people will never vigorously pursue any intellectual object, I may be allowed to infer that reason is absolutely necessary to enable a woman to perform any duty properly. And I must repeat once more that sensibility is not reason.
The comparison with the rich keeps occurring to me; for when men neglect the duties of humanity, women will do the same, since a common stream hurries them both along with thoughtless speed. Riches and honours prevent a man from enlarging his understanding and enervate all his powers by reversing the order of nature, which has always made true pleasure the reward of labour. Pleasure — enervating pleasure — is likewise within a woman's reach without her earning it. But until hereditary possessions are spread more widely, how can we expect men to be proud of virtue? And until they are, women will govern them by the most direct means, neglecting their dull domestic duties to catch the pleasure that is on the wing of time.
"The power of a woman," some author says, "is her sensibility"; and men, not seeing the consequence, do everything they can to make that power swallow up every other. Those who constantly employ their sensibility will have most of it — poets, painters and composers, for example. Yet when sensibility is increased in this way at the expense of reason, and even of imagination, why do philosophical men complain of women's fickleness? The sexual attentions of men act particularly on female sensibility, and this sympathy has been exercised in them from their youth up. A husband cannot go on paying those attentions with the passion needed to excite lively emotions, and a heart used to lively emotions turns to a new lover, or pines in secret, the prey of virtue or of prudence. I mean where the heart really has been made susceptible and the taste formed; for from what I have seen of fashionable life I am inclined to conclude that the mode of education, and the intercourse between the sexes that I have been condemning, foster vanity oftener than sensibility, and that coquetry comes more often from vanity than from the inconstancy that overstrained sensibility naturally produces.
Another argument that has weighed a great deal with me must, I think, have some force with every considerate and benevolent heart. Girls who have been educated in this feeble way are often cruelly left by their parents with no provision at all, and so depend not only on their brothers' reason but on their brothers' generosity. Those brothers are, to put the case at its fairest, decent sorts of men, and give as a favour what children of the same parents had an equal right to. A docile woman may stay in this ambiguous, humiliating position for some time with a tolerable degree of comfort. But when the brother marries, as he probably will, she stops being regarded as the mistress of the house and is looked at sideways as an intruder, an unnecessary burden on the benevolence of its master and his new partner.
Who can count the misery that so many unfortunate beings, weak in mind and body alike, suffer in such a position — unable to work and ashamed to beg? The wife, a cold-hearted, narrow-minded woman — and this is not an unfair supposition, since the present mode of education does no more to enlarge the heart than the understanding — is jealous of the small kindnesses her husband shows his relations; and, her sensibility never rising as far as humanity, she resents seeing her children's property lavished on a helpless sister.
These are matters of fact that have come under my eye again and again. The consequence is obvious. The wife resorts to cunning to undermine an habitual affection she is afraid to oppose openly, and neither tears nor caresses are spared until the spy has been worked out of her home and thrown on a world she is unprepared for; or else sent off, as a great effort of generosity or out of some regard for propriety, with a small allowance and an uncultivated mind, into joyless solitude.
These two women may be much on a par as to reason and humanity, and if their situations were exchanged might have acted just the same selfish part. But if they had been educated differently the case would have been very different too. The wife would not have had that kind of sensibility whose centre is herself, and reason might have taught her not to expect her husband's affection — nor even to be flattered by it — if it led him to violate earlier duties. She would want to love him not merely because he loved her but on account of his virtues; and the sister might have been able to fight her own way instead of eating the bitter bread of dependence.
I am persuaded that cultivation opens the heart as well as the understanding, and that strengthening the bodily organs does too, though that may seem less obvious. I am not talking now about momentary flashes of feeling, but about the affections. And perhaps the hardest task in educating either sex is to adjust the instruction so that it does not narrow the understanding while the heart is being warmed by the generous juices of spring, just raised by the electric fermentation of the season; nor dry up the feelings by employing the mind on investigations remote from life.
When women do receive a careful education, they are made either into fine ladies, brimful of sensibility and teeming with capricious fancies, or into merely capable managing women. The latter are often friendly, honest creatures with a shrewd kind of good sense joined to worldly prudence, which often makes them more useful members of society than the fine sentimental lady, though they have neither greatness of mind nor taste. The intellectual world is shut against them. Take them out of their family or their neighbourhood and they come to a standstill; the mind finds nothing to do, since literature offers a fund of amusement that they have never tried to enjoy, and often try to despise. The sentiments and taste of more cultivated minds look ridiculous to them even in people whom chance and family connection have led them to love; and in mere acquaintances they think it all affectation.
A man of sense can only love such a woman on account of her sex, and respect her because she is a trustworthy servant. To keep his own peace he lets her scold the servants and go to church in clothes made of the very best material. A man of her own size of understanding would probably not get on with her so well, since he might want to trespass on her prerogative and manage some of the household himself. Yet women whose minds have not been enlarged by cultivation, or whose natural selfishness of feeling has not been expanded by reflection, are very unfit to manage a family; for by an undue stretch of power they are always tyrannizing to maintain a superiority that rests on nothing but the arbitrary distinction of money. Sometimes the evil is more serious, and the servants are deprived of innocent indulgences and made to work beyond their strength so that the capable woman can keep a better table and outshine her neighbours in finery and display. If she attends to her children, it is generally to dress them expensively; and whether that attention comes from vanity or from fondness, it is equally pernicious.
Besides, how many women of this description pass their days, or at least their evenings, in discontent. Their husbands acknowledge that they are good managers and chaste wives, and then leave home in search of more agreeable — may I be allowed a significant French word? — more piquant society. And the patient drudge who does her task like a blind horse in a mill is cheated of her proper reward, since the wages owed her are her husband's caresses; and women who have so few resources in themselves do not bear the loss of this natural right very patiently.
A fine lady, on the other hand, has been taught to look down with contempt on the vulgar employments of life, though she has only been encouraged to acquire accomplishments that rise a single degree above sense; for not even bodily accomplishments can be acquired with any precision unless the understanding has been strengthened by exercise. Without a foundation of principles, taste is superficial, and grace must come from something deeper than imitation. The imagination, however, is heated and the feelings made fastidious, if not sophisticated, when no counterweight of judgment has been acquired — while the heart still remains artless, even as it grows too tender.
These women are often lovable, and their hearts are really more open to general benevolence, more alive to the sentiments that civilize life, than the square-elbowed family drudge's. But, wanting a due proportion of reflection and self-government, they can only inspire love; they are their husbands' mistresses while they keep any hold on their affections, and the platonic friends of their husbands' male acquaintance. These are the fair defects of nature, the women who seem to have been created not to enjoy the fellowship of men but to save them from sinking into absolute brutality by rubbing off the rough corners of their characters, and by playful dalliance to give some dignity to the appetite that draws them there. Gracious Creator of the whole human race! Have you created such a being as woman, who can trace your wisdom in your works and feel that you alone are by your nature exalted above her — for no better purpose than this? Can she believe she was made only to submit to man, her equal, a being sent into the world as she was to acquire virtue? Can she consent to be occupied merely in pleasing him, merely in adorning the earth, when her soul is capable of rising to you? And can she rest supinely dependent on man for reason, when she ought to be climbing the steep paths of knowledge alongside him?
If love is the supreme good, then let women be educated for nothing but to inspire it, and let every charm be polished to intoxicate the senses. But if they are moral beings, let them have a chance of becoming intelligent; and let their love for men be only a part of that glowing flame of universal love which, after encircling humanity, rises as grateful incense to God.
Fulfilling domestic duties takes a great deal of resolution, and a serious kind of perseverance that needs a firmer support than emotions, however lively and true to nature they may be. To set an example of order, which is the soul of virtue, some austerity of behaviour must be adopted, and that is hardly to be expected from a being who has been made from infancy the weathercock of her own sensations. Anyone who rationally intends to be useful must have a plan of conduct; and in discharging the simplest duty we are often obliged to act against the immediate impulse of tenderness or compassion. Severity is often the surest as well as the most sublime proof of affection. It is the lack of this power over the feelings, and of that lofty, dignified affection which makes a person prefer the future good of the person they love to a present gratification, that leads so many fond mothers to spoil their children; and it has made it a real question whether neglect or indulgence does more harm. I am inclined to think indulgence has done most.
Everyone seems to agree that children should be left in the care of women during childhood. Now from all the observation I have been able to make, women of sensibility are the least fit for this task, because, carried away by their feelings, they will infallibly spoil a child's temper. The management of the temper, the first and most important branch of education, needs the sober steady eye of reason and a plan of conduct equally far from tyranny and from indulgence — and those are exactly the extremes people of sensibility fall into by turns, always shooting past the mark. I have followed this line of reasoning much further, until I concluded that a person of genius is the most unsuitable person imaginable to employ in education, public or private. Minds of that rare species see things too much in the mass, and seldom if ever have a good temper. That habitual cheerfulness we call good humour is perhaps as rarely combined with great mental powers as it is with strong feelings. And people who follow the flights of genius with interest and admiration, or who with cooler approval absorb the instruction a profound thinker has laboriously prepared for them, ought not to be disgusted if they find the first choleric and the second morose; for liveliness of fancy, and a tenacious grasp of mind, are scarcely compatible with the pliant urbanity that leads a man to bend at least a little to the opinions and prejudices of others instead of confronting them roughly.
But in discussing education or manners, minds of the superior class are not what we have to consider; they may be left to chance. It is the multitude of moderate abilities who need instruction and who take the colour of the atmosphere they breathe. This respectable crowd, men and women alike, should not have their sensations heightened in the hothouse of luxurious idleness at the expense of their understanding; for unless there is some ballast of understanding they will never become either virtuous or free, and an aristocracy founded on property or on sterling talents will always sweep the alternately timid and ferocious slaves of feeling before it.
To take another view of the subject: the arguments men have used to degrade women, morally and physically, are numberless, and they are all brought forward with a show of reason because they are supposed to be drawn from nature. I must notice a few.
The female understanding has often been spoken of with contempt for reaching maturity sooner than the male. I shall not answer this argument by pointing to the early proofs of reason, and of genius, in Cowley, Milton and Pope; I shall simply appeal to experience to decide whether young men who are introduced into company early — and examples abound now — do not acquire the same precocity. The fact is so notorious that merely mentioning it must bring before anyone who goes into the world at all the image of a number of swaggering apes of men, whose understandings have been narrowed by being brought into the society of men when they ought to have been spinning a top or trundling a hoop.
Footnote: Many other names might be added.
Some naturalists have also asserted that men do not reach their full growth and strength until thirty, but that women are mature by twenty. I think they are reasoning on false ground, led astray by the male prejudice that makes beauty the perfection of a woman — mere beauty of feature and complexion, in the vulgar sense of the word, while male beauty is allowed some connection with the mind. Strength of body, and that character in the face which the French call a physionomie, women no more acquire before thirty than men do. The little artless tricks of children are, it is true, particularly pleasing and attractive; yet once the pretty freshness of youth has worn off, those artless graces become studied airs and disgust everyone of taste. In a girl's face we look only for vivacity and a bashful modesty; but once the springtide of life is over we look for soberer sense in a face, and for the traces of passion rather than the dimples of animal spirits, expecting to see that individuality of character which is the only thing that fastens the affections. Then we want to converse, not to fondle; to give scope to our imaginations as well as to the sensations of our hearts.
At twenty the beauty of the two sexes is equal, but men's libertinism leads them to make the distinction, and superannuated coquettes commonly agree with them, for when they can no longer inspire love they pay for the vigour and vivacity of youth. The French, who let more mind into their notion of beauty, prefer women of thirty. What I mean is that they allow a woman to be at her most perfect when vivacity gives place to reason and to that majestic seriousness of character which marks maturity, the resting point. In youth, up to twenty, the body shoots out; until thirty the solid parts are gaining density, and the flexible muscles, growing more rigid every day, give the face its character — that is, they trace the workings of the mind with the iron pen of fate, and tell us not only what powers are within but how they have been used.
It is worth observing that the animals who arrive slowly at maturity live longest and are of the noblest species. Men cannot, however, claim any natural superiority from the grandeur of longevity, for in that respect nature has not distinguished the male.
Polygamy is another physical degradation, and a plausible argument for a custom that blights every domestic virtue is drawn from the well-attested fact that in the countries where it is established more girls are born than boys. This looks like an indication of nature, and apparently reasonable speculations must give way to nature. A further conclusion obviously offers itself: if polygamy is necessary, then woman must be inferior to man and made for him.
We are very ignorant about how the foetus is formed in the womb, but it seems to me likely that some accidental physical cause may account for this phenomenon and show that it is not a law of nature. I have met with some pertinent observations on the subject in Forster's Account of the Isles of the South Sea, which will explain what I mean. After observing that among animals the sex with the more vigorous and hotter constitution always prevails and reproduces its own kind, he adds: "If this is applied to the inhabitants of Africa, it is evident that the men there, being accustomed to polygamy, are enervated by the use of so many women and are therefore less vigorous; while the women, on the contrary, are of a hotter constitution, not only because of their more irritable nerves, more sensitive organization and livelier fancy, but also because in their marriages they are deprived of the share of physical love which in a monogamous condition would all be theirs. And so, for these reasons, most children are born female."
"In the greater part of Europe it has been proved by the most accurate lists of mortality that the proportion of men to women is nearly equal, or that, if there is any difference, more males are born, in the proportion of 105 to 100."
The necessity of polygamy, then, does not appear. Yet when a man seduces a woman, it ought, I think, to be called a left-handed marriage, and the man should be legally obliged to maintain the woman and her children, unless adultery, which is a natural divorce, cancelled the obligation. And this law should stay in force as long as women's weakness allows the word seduction to be used as an excuse for their frailty and want of principle — as long, that is, as they depend on men for a living instead of earning it by the exercise of their own hands or heads. But such women should not be called wives in the full meaning of the relationship, or the whole purpose of marriage would be subverted, and all those endearing charities that flow from personal fidelity and give the tie its sanctity, when neither love nor friendship unites the hearts, would melt away into selfishness. The woman who is faithful to the father of her children deserves respect and should not be treated like a prostitute — though I readily grant that if a man and a woman need to live together in order to bring up their children, nature never intended a man to have more than one wife.
Still, highly as I respect marriage as the foundation of almost every social virtue, I cannot help feeling the liveliest compassion for those unfortunate women who are cut off from society and torn by a single mistake from all the affections and relationships that improve the heart and mind. Often it does not even deserve the name of a mistake, for many innocent girls become the dupes of a sincere and affectionate heart, and still more are — as one may emphatically call it — ruined before they know the difference between virtue and vice; prepared for infamy by their education, they become infamous. Refuges and Magdalen hospitals are not the proper remedies for these abuses. It is justice, not charity, that the world is short of.
A woman who has lost her honour imagines she cannot fall lower; and as for recovering her former station, that is impossible, since no effort can wash the stain away. Losing every spur in this way, and having no other means of support, prostitution becomes her only refuge, and her character is quickly depraved by circumstances the poor wretch has little power over, unless she possesses an uncommon share of sense and loftiness of spirit. Necessity never makes prostitution the business of a man's life, though numberless women are made systematically vicious this way. And that comes in great part from the idleness in which women are educated, always taught to look up to a man for a living and to consider their persons the proper return for his exertions in supporting them. Meretricious airs and the whole science of wantonness then have a more powerful stimulus behind them than either appetite or vanity — which lends force to the prevailing opinion that with chastity a woman loses everything respectable about her. Her character depends on observing one virtue, though the only passion fostered in her heart is love. Indeed a woman's honour is not even made to depend on her own will.
When Richardson makes Clarissa tell Lovelace that he had robbed her of her honour, he must have had strange notions of honour and of virtue. For miserable beyond all names of misery is the condition of a being who could be degraded without its own consent. I have heard this excess of strictness defended as a salutary error. I shall answer in the words of Leibniz: "Errors are often useful, but usually to remedy other errors."
Most of the evils of life come from a desire for present enjoyment that outruns itself. The obedience required of women in marriage comes under this description. The mind, naturally weakened by depending on authority, never exerts its own powers, and the obedient wife is turned into a weak, indolent mother. Or, supposing that is not always the consequence, a future state of existence is hardly taken into the reckoning when nothing but negative virtues are cultivated. For in writing about morals, and particularly when women are the subject, writers have too often considered virtue in a very limited sense, and made its foundation solely worldly utility. Indeed a still more fragile base has been given to this stupendous structure, and the wayward, fluctuating feelings of men have been made the standard of virtue. Yes — virtue, like religion, has been made subject to the decisions of taste.
It would almost raise a smile of contempt, if the vain absurdities of men did not strike us on every side, to see how eager men are to degrade the very sex from whom they pretend to receive the chief pleasure of life; and I have often turned Pope's sarcasm back on them with complete conviction — or rather, it has seemed to me to apply to the whole human race. A love of pleasure or of power seems to divide humankind between them, and the husband who lords it in his little harem thinks only of his pleasure or his convenience. Indeed an intemperate love of pleasure carries some prudent men, or worn-out libertines who marry to have a safe companion, to such lengths that they seduce their own wives. Marriage banishes modesty, and chaste love takes flight.
Love, considered as an animal appetite, cannot feed on itself for long without expiring; and this extinction in its own flame may be called the violent death of love. But a wife who has been made licentious this way will probably try to fill the gap left when her husband's attentions stop, for she cannot contentedly become merely an upper servant after being treated like a goddess. She is still handsome; and instead of transferring her fondness to her children she dreams only of enjoying the sunshine of life. Besides, there are many husbands so devoid of sense and of parental affection that during the first effervescence of voluptuous fondness they refuse to let their wives nurse their own children. The wives are only to dress and live to please them — and love, even innocent love, soon sinks into lasciviousness when a duty is sacrificed to indulging it.
Personal attachment is a very happy foundation for friendship; yet when even two virtuous young people marry, it might be a good thing if some circumstance checked their passion — if the memory of a previous attachment or a disappointed affection made it, on one side at least, a match founded rather on esteem. In that case they would look beyond the present moment and try to make the whole of life respectable by forming a plan to regulate a friendship that only death ought to dissolve.
Friendship is a serious affection, the most sublime of all, because it is founded on principle and cemented by time. The exact opposite may be said of love. To a great extent love and friendship cannot exist in the same breast; even when they are inspired by different objects they weaken or destroy each other, and for the same object they can only be felt one after the other. The vain fears and fond jealousies that fan the flame of love, when they are judiciously or artfully managed, are both incompatible with the tender confidence and sincere respect of friendship.
Love as the glowing pen of genius has drawn it does not exist on earth, or exists only in those exalted, fervid imaginations that have sketched such dangerous pictures. Dangerous, because they not only offer a plausible excuse to the voluptuary who disguises sheer sensuality under a sentimental veil, but because they spread affectation and take away from the dignity of virtue. Virtue, as the very word implies, should look serious if not austere; and to try to dress her up in the garb of pleasure, because the word has been used as another name for beauty, is to set her on a quicksand — a most insidious attempt to hasten her fall under the appearance of respect. Virtue and pleasure are not in fact so closely allied in this life as some eloquent writers have laboured to prove. Pleasure prepares the fading wreath and mixes the intoxicating cup; but the fruit virtue gives is the reward of toil, and, seen gradually as it ripens, offers nothing but a calm satisfaction — indeed, appearing to be simply the result of the natural tendency of things, it is hardly noticed at all. Bread, the common food of life, is seldom thought of as a blessing, and yet it supports the constitution and preserves health; while feasts delight the heart of man, though disease and even death lurk in the cup or the dainty that raises the spirits or tickles the palate. In the same way the lively, heated imagination draws its picture of love as it draws every other picture, in the glowing colours that a daring hand will steal from the rainbow, when it is directed by a mind condemned in a world like this to prove its noble origin by panting after an unattainable perfection, forever pursuing what it admits to be a fleeting dream. An imagination of this vigorous cast can give existence to insubstantial forms and stability to the shadowy reveries the mind naturally falls into when realities are found flat. It can then paint love with heavenly charms and dote on the grand ideal object; it can imagine a degree of mutual affection that shall refine the soul and not expire once it has served as a "ladder to heavenly things"; and, like devotion, make the soul absorb every meaner affection and desire. In each other's arms, as in a temple whose summit is lost in the clouds, the world is to be shut out, and every thought and wish that does not nourish pure affection and permanent virtue. Permanent virtue! Alas, Rousseau, respectable visionary, your paradise would soon be violated by some unexpected guest walking in. Like Milton's, it could only hold angels, or men sunk below the dignity of rational creatures. Happiness is not material; it cannot be seen or handled. Yet the eager pursuit of a good that everyone shapes to his own fancy proclaims man the lord of this lower world, and an intelligent creature who is not to receive happiness but to acquire it. Those who complain of the delusions of passion, therefore, do not recollect that they are exclaiming against a strong proof of the immortality of the soul.
But leaving superior minds to correct themselves and pay dearly for their experience, I must point out that it is not against strong, persevering passions that I want to guard the female heart by exercising the understanding, but against romantic, wavering feelings; for these daydreams of paradise are more often the effect of idleness than of a lively fancy.
Women seldom have enough serious employment to silence their feelings. A round of little cares or vain pursuits frittering away all strength of mind and body, they naturally become objects of sense and nothing more. In short, the whole tenor of female education — the education society gives — tends to make the best-disposed romantic and inconstant, and the rest vain and mean. In the present state of society I am afraid this evil can hardly be remedied in the slightest degree; but should a more praiseworthy ambition ever gain ground, women may be brought nearer to nature and reason, and become more virtuous and useful as they grow more respectable.
But I will venture to assert that their reason will never gain strength enough to regulate their conduct while making an appearance in the world is the first wish of most of humankind. To this weak wish the natural affections and the most useful virtues are sacrificed. Girls marry merely to better themselves, to borrow a significant common phrase, and have such perfect power over their hearts as never to let themselves fall in love until a man with a superior fortune makes an offer. I mean to enlarge on this subject in a later chapter; a hint is enough at present, though women are so often degraded by letting the selfish prudence of age chill the ardour of youth.
From the same source flows the opinion that young girls ought to devote a great part of their time to needlework — an employment that contracts their faculties more than any other that could have been chosen for them, by confining their thoughts to their own persons. Men order their clothes to be made and have done with the subject; women make their own clothes, necessary or ornamental, and talk about them continually, and their thoughts follow their hands. It is not the making of necessities that weakens the mind, but the frippery of dress. When a woman in the lower ranks of life makes her husband's and children's clothes, she does her duty; that is part of her business. But when women work only to dress better than they could otherwise afford, it is worse than a sheer waste of time. To make the poor virtuous they must be employed; and women in the middle rank of life, if they did not ape the fashions of the nobility without catching their ease, might employ them, while they managed their own families, taught their own children, and exercised their own minds. Gardening, experimental science and literature would give them things to think about and matter for conversation that would exercise their understandings to some degree. The conversation of French women, who are not so rigidly nailed to their chairs twisting lappets and knotting ribbons, is often superficial; but I maintain it is not half so insipid as that of those English women whose time is spent making caps and bonnets and all the mischief of trimmings, not to mention shopping and bargain-hunting and the rest. And it is the decent, prudent women who are most degraded by these practices, since their motive is simply vanity. The wanton who exercises her taste to make herself alluring has something more in view.
All these observations branch out of a general one I have made before, and which cannot be insisted on too often: that whether we are speaking of men, of women or of professions, it will be found that the employment of the thoughts shapes the character, generally and individually. Women's thoughts hover forever around their own persons — and is it surprising that their persons are reckoned their most valuable possession? Yet some degree of liberty of mind is necessary even to form the person, and this may be one reason why some gentle wives have so few attractions besides sex. Add to this that sedentary employments make most women sickly, and that false notions of female excellence make them proud of this delicacy, though it is another fetter, and one that cramps the activity of the mind by calling attention continually to the body.
Women of quality seldom do any of the manual part of their dress, so only their taste is exercised; and, thinking less about the finery once the business of the dressing table is over, they acquire an ease that rarely appears in the bearing of women who dress merely for the sake of dressing. In fact the observation about the middle rank, the one where talents thrive best, does not extend to women; for those of the higher class, by catching at least a smattering of literature and talking with men on general topics, acquire more knowledge than the women who ape their fashions and their faults without sharing their advantages. As for virtue, in the widest sense of the word, I have seen most of it in low life. Many poor women maintain their children by the sweat of their brow and hold together families that the vices of the fathers would have scattered; but gentlewomen are too indolent to be actively virtuous, and are softened by civilization rather than refined by it. Indeed the good sense I have met with among poor women who have had few advantages of education, and who have yet acted heroically, has strongly confirmed me in the opinion that trifling employments have made women trifling. Men take the body, and leave the mind to rust; so that while physical love enervates man, being his favourite recreation, he will go on trying to enslave woman. And who can say how many generations may be needed to give vigour to the virtue and talents of the freed descendants of abject slaves?
Footnote: "I take her body," says Ranger.
Footnote: "Supposing that women are voluntary slaves — slavery of any kind is unfavourable to human happiness and improvement." —Knox's Essays
In tracing the causes that have, in my opinion, degraded women, I have confined myself to those that act universally on the morals and manners of the whole sex; and it seems clear to me that they all spring from a want of understanding. Whether that comes from a physical or an accidental weakness of the faculties, time alone can determine. For I shall lay no great weight on the example of a few women who, having received a masculine education, have acquired courage and resolution. I only maintain that the men who have been placed in similar situations have acquired a similar character — I am speaking of whole bodies of men — and that men of genius and talent have emerged from a class in which women have never yet been placed.
Footnote: Sappho, Eloisa, Mrs. Macaulay, the Empress of Russia, Madame d'Eon and the rest. These, and many more, may be counted exceptions; and are not all heroes, as well as heroines, exceptions to general rules? I wish to see women neither heroines nor brutes, but reasonable creatures.
It remains now to examine the opinions plausibly maintained in certain modern publications on the female character and female education, which have set the tone for most of what is said, more casually, about women.
I shall begin with Rousseau, and give a sketch of his character of women in his own words, with comments and reflections in between. My comments, it is true, all spring from a few simple principles and might have been deduced from what I have already said; but the artificial structure has been raised with so much ingenuity that it seems necessary to attack it in more detail, and to make the application myself.
Sophia, says Rousseau, should be as perfect a woman as Emilius is a man; and to make her so, we must examine the character nature has given to her sex.
He then proceeds to prove that women ought to be weak and passive because a woman has less bodily strength than a man; from which he infers that she was formed to please him and to be subject to him, and that it is her duty to make herself agreeable to her master, this being the grand end of her existence.
If women were formed only to please men and be subject to them, the conclusion is sound: she ought to sacrifice every other consideration to making herself agreeable to him, and let this brutal instinct of self-preservation be the mainspring of everything she does, once it is proved to be the iron bed of fate, to fit which her character must be stretched or lopped, regardless of every moral or physical distinction. But if, as I think can be shown, the purposes even of this life, taken as a whole, are defeated by practical rules built on so ignoble a base, then I may be allowed to doubt whether woman was created for man. And though the cry of irreligion, or even of atheism, be raised against me, I will simply declare that if an angel from heaven told me that Moses's beautiful poetical cosmogony and his account of the fall of man were literally true, I could not believe what my reason told me was insulting to the character of the Supreme Being. Having no fear of the devil before my eyes, I venture to call this a suggestion of reason, rather than rest my weakness on the broad shoulders of the first seducer of my frail sex.
"Once it is demonstrated," Rousseau continues, "that man and woman are not, and ought not to be, constituted alike in temperament and character, it follows that they should not be educated in the same way. In following the directions of nature they ought certainly to act in concert, but they should not be engaged in the same employments. The end of their pursuits should be the same, but the means they take to accomplish it, and consequently their tastes and inclinations, should be different."
Footnote: Rousseau's Emilius, Volume 3, page 176.
"Girls are fond of dress from their earliest infancy. Not content with being pretty, they want to be thought so; all their little airs show that this thought occupies them, and they are hardly capable of understanding what is said to them before they can be governed by talk of what people will think of their behaviour. The same motive, used indiscreetly with boys, has no such effect: provided they are allowed to pursue their amusements as they please, they care very little what people think of them. It takes time and pains to make boys subject to this motive.
"Wherever girls get this first lesson from, it is a very good one. As the body is born, in a manner, before the soul, our first concern should be to cultivate the body; this order is common to both sexes, but the object of the cultivation differs. In one sex it is the development of bodily powers, in the other of personal charms — not that either strength or beauty ought to belong exclusively to one sex, but that the order of cultivating both is in this respect reversed. Women certainly need as much strength as will let them move and act gracefully, and men as much address as will let them act with ease."
"Children of both sexes have a great many amusements in common, and so they should; do they not have many in common when they are grown up as well? Each sex also has its own particular taste to distinguish it here. Boys love noisy, active games — beating a drum, whipping a top, dragging little carts about; girls, on the other hand, are fonder of things of show and ornament, such as mirrors, trinkets and dolls. The doll is the particular amusement of the female; and from this we see their taste plainly adapted to their destination. The physical part of the art of pleasing lies in dress, and that is all of the art children are capable of cultivating."
"Here, then, we see a primary propensity firmly established, which you need only follow up and regulate. The little creature will doubtless be very eager to know how to dress up her doll, to make its sleeve knots, its flounces, its head dress and so on. She is obliged to have so much recourse to the people about her for help with these things that it would be far more agreeable to her to owe them all to her own industry. Here we have a good reason for the first lessons usually taught to young girls, in which we do not seem to be setting them a task, but obliging them, by teaching them what is immediately useful to themselves. And in fact almost all of them learn to read and write with reluctance, but take very readily to the needle. They imagine themselves already grown up, and think with pleasure that such accomplishments will let them decorate themselves."
This is certainly nothing but an education of the body; but Rousseau is not the only man who has said indirectly that a young woman's person, without any mind at all — unless animal spirits count as one — is very pleasing. To keep it weak, and what some may call beautiful, the understanding is neglected, and girls are made to sit still, play with dolls and listen to foolish conversation; and then the effect of habit is urged on us as an undoubted indication of nature. I know it was Rousseau's opinion that the first years of youth should be spent forming the body, though in educating Emilius he departs from this plan. But the difference between strengthening the body, on which strength of mind largely depends, and merely giving it an easy motion, is a very wide one.
It is worth remarking that Rousseau's observations were made in a country where the art of pleasing had been refined only far enough to strain the coarseness out of vice. He did not go back to nature; or else his ruling appetite disturbed the operations of reason, or he would never have drawn such crude inferences.
In France, boys and girls, and girls particularly, are educated only to please, to manage their persons and regulate their outward behaviour; and their minds are corrupted at a very early age by the worldly and pious cautions they are given to guard them against immodesty. I am speaking of times past. The very confessions that mere children are obliged to make, and the questions the holy men ask — I state these facts on good authority — were enough to stamp a separate character on their sex; and the education society gave them was a school of coquetry and artifice. At ten or eleven, and often much sooner, girls began to flirt, and talked without reproof about establishing themselves in the world by marriage.
In short they were made women almost from birth, and listened to compliments instead of instruction. These weakened the mind — and then nature was supposed to have behaved like a stepmother when she formed this afterthought of creation.
Not allowing women any understanding, it was at least consistent to subject them to an authority independent of reason; and to prepare them for that subjection he gives the following advice:
"Girls ought to be active and diligent; nor is that all. They should also be subjected early to restraint. This misfortune, if it really is one, is inseparable from their sex, and they never throw it off except to suffer crueller evils. They must be subject all their lives to the most constant and severe restraint, which is decorum; so it is necessary to accustom them early to such confinement, that it may not cost them too dear later, and to the suppression of their whims, so that they may submit more readily to the will of others. If they are fond of being always at work, they should sometimes be made to lay it aside. Dissipation, levity and inconstancy are faults that spring up readily from their first propensities when those are corrupted or perverted by too much indulgence. To prevent this abuse we should teach them above all things to lay a due restraint on themselves. The life of a modest woman is reduced by our absurd institutions to a perpetual conflict with herself — though it is only just that this sex should share in the sufferings that arise from the evils it has caused us."
And why is the life of a modest woman a perpetual conflict? I should answer that this very system of education makes it one. Modesty, temperance and self-denial are the sober offspring of reason; but when sensibility is nursed at the expense of the understanding, such weak beings must be restrained by arbitrary means and subjected to continual conflicts. Give their mental activity a wider range, and nobler passions and motives will govern their appetites and sentiments.
"The ordinary attachment and regard of a mother — indeed, mere habit — will make her beloved by her children, if she does nothing to earn their hatred. Even the restraint she puts them under, if it is well directed, will increase their affection instead of lessening it; because, a state of dependence being natural to the sex, they perceive that they were formed for obedience."
This is begging the question; for servitude not only debases the individual, its effects seem to be passed on to posterity. Considering how long women have been dependent, is it surprising that some of them hug their chains and fawn like the spaniel? "These dogs," a naturalist observes, "at first kept their ears erect; but custom has overruled nature, and a token of fear has become a beauty."
"For the same reason," Rousseau adds, "women have, or ought to have, very little liberty; they are apt to indulge themselves excessively in whatever is allowed them. Addicted to extremes in everything, they are even more transported by their amusements than boys are."
The answer to this is very simple. Slaves and mobs have always indulged themselves in the same excesses once they broke loose from authority. A bent bow recoils violently when the hand that was forcibly holding it is suddenly relaxed; and sensibility, the plaything of outward circumstances, must either be subjected to authority or moderated by reason.
"From this habitual restraint," he goes on, "there results a tractableness that women have need of all their lives, since they remain constantly under subjection either to men or to the opinions of humankind, and are never permitted to set themselves above those opinions. The first and most important qualification in a woman is good nature, or sweetness of temper. Formed to obey a being as imperfect as man, often full of vices and always full of faults, she ought to learn early to endure even injustice, and to bear a husband's insults without complaining. It is not for his sake but for her own that she should be of a mild disposition. The perverseness and ill nature of women only aggravate their own misfortunes and their husbands' misconduct; they might easily see that these are not the weapons by which they gain the upper hand."
Formed to live with a being as imperfect as man, women ought to learn from exercising their faculties that forbearance is necessary. But all the sacred rights of humanity are violated by insisting on blind obedience — or else the most sacred rights belong only to man.
The being who patiently endures injustice and silently bears insults will soon become unjust herself, or unable to tell right from wrong. Besides, I deny the fact: this is not the true way to form or improve a temper. As a sex, men have better tempers than women, because they are occupied by pursuits that interest the head as well as the heart, and steadiness in the head gives the heart a healthy temperature. People of sensibility have seldom good tempers. The formation of the temper is the cool work of reason, mixing jarring elements with a happy art as life goes on. I never knew a weak or ignorant person with a good temper, though that constitutional good humour and that docility which fear stamps on the behaviour often go by the name. I say behaviour; for genuine meekness never reached the heart or mind except as the effect of reflection. And many sensible men, who find some of these gentle irritable creatures very troublesome company, will admit that simple restraint produces a great many bad humours in family life.
"Each sex," he argues further, "should preserve its own tone and manner: a meek husband may make a wife impertinent, but mildness of disposition on the woman's side will always bring a man back to reason, at least if he is not an absolute brute, and will sooner or later triumph over him." True — the mildness of reason will. But abject fear always inspires contempt, and tears are only eloquent when they run down fair cheeks.
What can a heart be made of that melts when it is insulted, and, instead of revolting at injustice, kisses the rod? Is it unfair to infer that her virtue is built on narrow views and on selfishness, when she can caress a man with true feminine softness at the very moment he is treating her tyrannically? Nature never dictated such insincerity; and though prudence of this sort is called a virtue, morality becomes a vague thing when any part of it is supposed to rest on falsehood. These are mere expedients, and expedients are only useful for the moment.
Let the husband beware of trusting too implicitly to this servile obedience. For if his wife can caress him with winning sweetness when he is angry — and when she ought to be angry herself, unless contempt has stifled a natural effervescence — she may do the same after parting from a lover. These are all preparations for adultery. Or, if the fear of the world or of hell restrains her desire to please other men when she can no longer please her husband, what substitute is to be found by a being formed by nature and art for no purpose but to please men? What can make up to her for the loss, and where is she to look for a fresh employment? Where is she to find strength of mind enough to decide to begin the search, when her habits are fixed and vanity has long ruled her chaotic mind?
But this partial moralist recommends cunning systematically and plausibly.
"Daughters should always be submissive; their mothers, however, should not be inexorable. To make a young person tractable she must not be made unhappy; to make her modest she must not be made stupid. On the contrary, I should not be displeased at her being permitted to use a little art — not to escape punishment for disobedience, but to exempt herself from the necessity of obeying. It is not necessary to make her dependence burdensome, only to let her feel it. Subtlety is a talent natural to the sex; and as I am persuaded that all our natural inclinations are right and good in themselves, I think this one should be cultivated like the rest. We need only prevent its abuse."
"Whatever is, is right," he then proceeds triumphantly to infer. Granted — yet perhaps no aphorism ever contained a more paradoxical assertion. It is a solemn truth with respect to God. He, I speak reverently, sees the whole at once, and saw its just proportions in the womb of time. But man, who can only inspect disjointed parts, finds a great many things wrong; and it is part of the system, and therefore right, that he should try to alter what looks wrong to him, even while he bows to the wisdom of his Creator and respects the darkness he is labouring to disperse.
The inference that follows is sound, supposing the principle to be sound: "The superior address peculiar to the female sex is a very equitable compensation for their inferiority in strength. Without it woman would not be man's companion but his slave; it is by her superior art and ingenuity that she preserves her equality and governs him while she pretends to obey. Woman has everything against her — our faults as well as her own timidity and weakness. She has nothing in her favour but her subtlety and her beauty. Is it not very reasonable, then, that she should cultivate both?" Greatness of mind can never live with cunning, or with address — for I shall not quibble about words when their plain meaning is insincerity and falsehood. I shall content myself with observing that if any class of humankind is so created that it must necessarily be educated by rules not strictly deducible from truth, then virtue is a matter of convention. How could Rousseau dare to assert, after giving this advice, that the object of both sexes in the grand end of existence should be the same, when he knew perfectly well that the mind is formed by its pursuits, and either expands as great views swallow up little ones, or becomes little itself?
Men have superior strength of body; but if it were not for mistaken notions of beauty, women would acquire enough of it to earn their own living, which is the true definition of independence, and to bear the bodily inconveniences and exertions that are needed to strengthen the mind.
Let us, then, by being allowed the same exercise as boys, not only in infancy but in youth, arrive at bodily perfection, so that we may know how far the natural superiority of man really extends. For what reason or virtue can be expected from a creature whose seedtime of life has been neglected? None — except that the winds of heaven happen to scatter a good many useful seeds on the fallow ground.
"Beauty cannot be acquired by dress, and coquetry is an art not so quickly or so early learned. While girls are still young, however, they are quite capable of studying an agreeable gesture, a pleasing modulation of voice, an easy carriage and bearing, and of learning to adapt their looks and attitudes gracefully to the time, the place and the occasion. Their application, therefore, should not be confined solely to the arts of industry and the needle, when they come to display other talents whose usefulness is already apparent."
"For my part, I would have a young Englishwoman cultivate her agreeable talents in order to please her future husband with as much care and assiduity as a young Circassian cultivates hers to fit her for the harem of an eastern pasha."
To make women completely insignificant, he adds: "The tongues of women are very voluble; they speak earlier, more readily and more agreeably than men, and they are accused of speaking a great deal more. So it ought to be, and I should be very ready to turn the reproach into a compliment. Their lips and their eyes have the same activity, and for the same reason. A man speaks of what he knows, a woman of what pleases her; the one requires knowledge, the other taste. The principal object of a man's talk should be what is useful, of a woman's what is agreeable. There ought to be nothing in common between their two kinds of conversation but truth."
"We ought not, therefore, to check the prattle of girls as we check that of boys, with the severe question 'What are you talking for?', but with another that is no less hard to answer: 'How will what you say be received?' In infancy, while they are still incapable of telling good from evil, they ought to observe it as a law never to say anything disagreeable to the person they are speaking to; and what will make this rule harder still to keep is that it must always be subordinate to the earlier one, of never speaking falsely or telling an untruth." To govern the tongue in that fashion must require great address indeed; and both men and women practise it too much. Out of the abundance of the heart, how few speak! So few that I, who love simplicity, would gladly give up politeness for a quarter of the virtue that has been sacrificed to an equivocal quality which at best should be nothing more than the polish on virtue.
But to finish the sketch. "It is easy to conceive that if male children are in no condition to form any true notions of religion, such ideas must be far beyond the conception of girls. That is the very reason why I would begin to speak to them earlier on the subject; for if we waited until they were capable of discussing such profound questions methodically, we should run the risk of never speaking to them about it as long as they lived. Reason in women is a practical reason, which makes them skilful at discovering the means to a known end, but would never enable them to discover the end itself. The social relations of the sexes are truly admirable: from their union there results a moral person of which woman may be called the eyes and man the hand, with this dependence on each other, that it is from the man that the woman learns what she is to see, and from the woman that the man learns what he ought to do. If woman could go back to first principles as well as man, and man could enter into details as well as woman, each being always independent of the other, they would live in perpetual discord and their union could not last. But in the harmony that naturally subsists between them, their different faculties tend to one common end. It is hard to say which of them contributes most to it: each follows the other's impulse; each obeys, and both are masters."
"Since a woman's conduct is subservient to public opinion, her faith in matters of religion should for that very reason be subject to authority. 'Every daughter ought to be of her mother's religion, and every wife of her husband's; for even if that religion were false, the docility which leads the mother and daughter to submit to the order of nature takes away, in the sight of God, the criminality of their error.' As they are in no condition to judge for themselves, they ought to abide by the decision of their fathers and their husbands as confidently as by that of the church."
Footnote: And what is the consequence if the mother's opinion and the husband's happen to disagree? An ignorant person cannot be reasoned out of an error, and when she is persuaded to give up one prejudice for another, her mind is unsettled. Indeed the husband may have no religion at all to teach her, though in such a situation she will greatly need some support for her virtue that is independent of worldly considerations.
"Since authority ought to regulate women's religion, it is not so necessary to explain the reasons for their belief as to lay down precisely what they are to believe. For a creed that offers the mind nothing but obscure ideas is the source of fanaticism, and one that offers absurdities leads to unbelief."
Absolute, unquestioned authority, it seems, must exist somewhere. But is this not a direct and exclusive appropriation of reason? The rights of humanity have been confined in this way to the male line from Adam downwards. Rousseau would carry his male aristocracy further still, for he hints that he would not blame those who argue for leaving woman in the profoundest possible ignorance, if it were not necessary — in order to preserve her chastity and justify a man's choice in the eyes of the world — to give her a little knowledge of men and of the customs human passions produce; otherwise she might breed at home without being made any less voluptuous and innocent by the exercise of her understanding. Except, of course, during the first year of marriage, when she might employ that understanding on dress, as Sophia does. "Her dress is extremely modest in appearance and yet very coquettish in fact. She does not display her charms, she conceals them; but in concealing them she knows how to work on your imagination. Everyone who sees her will say: there is a modest, discreet girl. But while you are near her, your eyes and affections wander all over her person and you cannot draw them away; and you would conclude that every part of her dress, simple as it looks, was put in order only to be taken to pieces by the imagination." Is this modesty? Is this a preparation for immortality? And again: what opinion are we to form of a system of education when its author says of his heroine "that with her, doing things well is only a secondary concern; her principal concern is to do them neatly"?
Secondary indeed are all her virtues and qualities. On religion, he has her parents address her — accustomed as she is to submission — with: "Your husband will instruct you in good time."
Having cramped a woman's mind in this way, if he has not made it a complete blank in order to keep it fair, he then advises her to reflect, so that a reflecting man may not yawn in her company once he is tired of caressing her. What has she to reflect about, who must obey? And would it not be a refinement of cruelty merely to open her mind so as to make the darkness and misery of her fate visible? Yet these are his sensible remarks; how consistent they are with what I have already had to quote, in order to give a fair view of the subject, the reader may decide.
"Those who spend their whole lives working for their daily bread have no ideas beyond their business or their interest, and all their understanding seems to lie in their fingers' ends. This ignorance is prejudicial neither to their integrity nor to their morals; it is often of service to them. Sometimes, by means of reflection, we are led to compound with our duty and end by substituting a jargon of words for things. Our own conscience is the most enlightened philosopher. A man need not be acquainted with Cicero's Offices to be a man of probity; and perhaps the most virtuous woman in the world is the least acquainted with any definition of virtue. But it is no less true that only an improved understanding can make society agreeable; and it is a melancholy thing for the father of a family who is fond of home to be obliged to be always wrapped up in himself, with nobody about him to whom he can communicate his thoughts.
"Besides, how should a woman without reflection be capable of educating her children? How should she discern what is proper for them? How should she incline them to virtues she does not know, or to a merit she has no idea of? She can only soothe them or scold them, make them insolent or timid; she will turn them into formal coxcombs or ignorant blockheads, but she will never make them sensible or amiable." How indeed should she, when her husband is not always at hand to lend her his reason — when the two of them together make only one moral being? A blind will, "eyes without hands", would go a very little way. And perhaps his abstract reason, which is supposed to concentrate the scattered beams of her practical reason, may be occupied in judging the flavour of a wine, or holding forth on the right sauces for turtle; or, more profoundly intent at a card table, he may be generalizing his ideas as he bets away his fortune, leaving all the details of education to his helpmate or to chance.
But granting that woman ought to be beautiful, innocent and silly in order to make her a more alluring and indulgent companion — what is her understanding being sacrificed for? And why is all this preparation necessary only, by Rousseau's own account, to make her her husband's mistress for a very short time? For no man ever insisted more on the transient nature of love. Hear the philosopher: "Sensual pleasures are transient. The habitual state of the affections always loses by their gratification. The imagination, which decks out the object of our desires, is lost in fruition. Except for the Supreme Being, who is self-existent, there is nothing beautiful but what is ideal."
But he returns to his unintelligible paradoxes when he addresses Sophia in these terms: "Emilius, in becoming your husband, has become your master and claims your obedience. Such is the order of nature. When a man is married, however, to such a wife as Sophia, it is proper that he should be directed by her: this too agrees with the order of nature. It is therefore in order to give you as much authority over his heart as his sex gives him over your person that I have made you the arbiter of his pleasures. It may cost you some disagreeable self-denial; but you will be certain of keeping your empire over him if you can keep it over yourself; and what I have already observed shows me that this difficult attempt is not beyond your courage.
"Would you have your husband constantly at your feet? Then keep him at some distance from your person. You will long maintain the authority of love if you know how to make your favours rare and valuable. This is how you may employ even the arts of coquetry in the service of virtue, and those of love in the service of reason."
I shall close my extracts with an accurate description of a comfortable couple. "And yet you must not imagine that even such management will always be enough. Whatever precautions are taken, enjoyment will by degrees take the edge off passion. But when love has lasted as long as it can, a pleasing habit takes its place, and the attachment of a mutual confidence succeeds the transports of passion. Children often form a more agreeable and permanent connection between married people than even love itself. When you cease to be the mistress of Emilius, you will go on being his wife and his friend; you will be the mother of his children."
Footnote: Rousseau's Emilius.
Children, he truly observes, form a much more permanent connection between married people than love does. Beauty, he declares, will not be valued, or even noticed, after a couple have lived six months together, and artificial graces and coquetry will pall on the senses just as surely. Why, then, does he say that a girl should be educated for her husband with the same care as for an eastern harem?
I now appeal from the daydreams of fancy and refined licentiousness to the good sense of humankind. If the object of education is to prepare women to become chaste wives and sensible mothers, is the method so plausibly recommended in that sketch really the one best calculated to produce those ends? Will anyone allow that the surest way to make a wife chaste is to teach her to practise the wanton arts of a mistress — called virtuous coquetry by the sensualist who can no longer relish the artless charms of sincerity, or taste the pleasure that arises from a tender intimacy, where confidence is unchecked by suspicion and made interesting by sense?
The man who can be content to live with a pretty, useful companion who has no mind has lost, among his voluptuous gratifications, the taste for more refined enjoyments. He has never felt the calm satisfaction that refreshes a parched heart like the silent dew of heaven — the satisfaction of being loved by someone who could understand him. In his wife's company he is still alone, except when the man has sunk into the brute. "The charm of life," says a grave philosophical reasoner, "is sympathy; nothing pleases us more than to observe in other men a fellow feeling with all the emotions of our own breast."
But according to the reasoning that keeps women away from the tree of knowledge, the important years of youth, the usefulness of age and the rational hopes of a future life are all to be sacrificed in order to make a woman an object of desire for a short time. Besides, how could Rousseau expect women to be virtuous and constant when reason is not allowed to be the foundation of their virtue, nor truth the object of their enquiries?
But all Rousseau's errors of reasoning arose out of sensibility — and women are very ready to forgive a sensibility to their own charms. Where he should have reasoned he became impassioned, and reflection inflamed his imagination instead of enlightening his understanding. Even his virtues led him further astray; for, born with a warm constitution and a lively fancy, nature carried him towards the other sex with such eager fondness that he soon became lascivious. If he had given way to those desires the fire would have gone out naturally; but virtue, and a romantic kind of delicacy, made him practise self-denial. And then, when fear or delicacy or virtue held him back, he debauched his imagination instead; and, brooding on sensations that fancy had given force to, he traced them in the most glowing colours and sank them deep into his soul.
So he sought solitude — not to sleep beside the man of nature, or to investigate the causes of things calmly in the shade where Sir Isaac Newton indulged his contemplations, but merely to indulge his feelings. And he has painted what he felt so strongly, and with such warmth, that his readers' hearts are engaged and their imaginations inflamed; and, in proportion to the strength of their fancy, they imagine that their understanding has been convinced, when all they have done is sympathize with a poetic writer who skilfully exhibits the objects of sense, most voluptuously shadowed or gracefully veiled. And so, making us feel while we dream that we are reasoning, he leaves erroneous conclusions in our minds.
Why was Rousseau's life divided between ecstasy and misery? What other answer can be given than that the effervescence of his imagination produced both — and that if his fancy had been allowed to cool he might possibly have acquired more strength of mind? Still, if the purpose of life is to educate the intellectual part of us, then everything about him was right. Yet if death did not lead on to a nobler scene of action, it is likely he would have enjoyed a steadier happiness on earth, and felt the calm sensations of the man of nature, instead of being prepared for another stage of existence by nourishing the passions that agitate civilized man.
But peace to his spirit! I make war on his opinions, not his ashes. I make war only on the sensibility that led him to degrade woman by making her the slave of love.
… "Curs'd vassalage, First idoliz'd till love's hot fire be o'er, Then slaves to those who courted us before." —Dryden
The pernicious tendency of those books in which the writers insidiously degrade women while prostrating themselves before their personal charms cannot be exposed too often or too severely.
Let us rise above such narrow prejudices, my dear contemporaries! If wisdom is desirable for its own sake, if virtue must be founded on knowledge to deserve the name, then let us try to strengthen our minds by reflection until our heads make a counterweight for our hearts. Let us not confine all our thoughts to the petty occurrences of the day, nor all our knowledge to an acquaintance with our lovers' or our husbands' hearts; but let every duty we practise be subordinate to the grand duty of improving our minds and preparing our affections for a more exalted state.
Beware, then, my friends, of letting your hearts be moved by every trivial incident. The reed is shaken by a breeze and dies every year, but the oak stands firm and braves the storm for centuries.
If we really were created only to flutter out our hour and die, then let us indulge our sensibility by all means, and laugh at the severity of reason. Yet even then, alas, we should want strength of body and mind, and life would be lost in feverish pleasures or wearisome languor.
But the system of education I so earnestly wish to see exploded seems to take for granted what ought never to be taken for granted: that virtue shields us from the accidents of life, and that fortune, slipping off her blindfold, will smile on a well-educated girl and bring an Emilius or a Telemachus along in her hand. Whereas in fact the reward virtue promises her followers is plainly confined to their own hearts; and often they must contend with the most vexatious worldly cares and put up with the vices and moods of relations they can never feel any friendship for.
There have been many women in the world who, instead of being supported by the reason and virtue of their fathers and brothers, have strengthened their own minds by struggling against those men's vices and follies — and who have never met a hero in the shape of a husband to pay them the debt humankind owed them and perhaps restore their reason to its natural dependent state, handing back to man the usurped prerogative of rising above opinion.
Dr. Fordyce's sermons have long formed part of a young woman's library; girls at school are even allowed to read them. But I should dismiss them instantly from my own pupil's shelf if I wanted to strengthen her understanding by leading her to form sound principles on a broad basis — or even if I were only anxious to cultivate her taste, though the sermons must be allowed to contain a good many sensible observations.
Dr. Fordyce may have had a very praiseworthy end in view; but these discourses are written in such an affected style that on that account alone, and even if I had nothing to object to in his mellifluous precepts, I should not let girls read them, unless I intended to hunt every spark of nature out of their composition and melt every human quality down into female weakness and artificial grace. I say artificial, because true grace arises from some kind of independence of mind.
Children, careless of pleasing anyone and anxious only to amuse themselves, are often very graceful; and the nobility, who have mostly lived among inferiors and always had money at command, acquire a graceful ease of bearing which should rather be called a habitual grace of body than that higher gracefulness which is really an expression of the mind. This mental grace, unnoticed by vulgar eyes, often flashes across a rough face and lights up every feature, showing simplicity and independence of mind. Then we read characters of immortality in the eye and see the soul in every gesture, though at rest neither the face nor the limbs may have much beauty to recommend them, nor the manner anything remarkable enough to attract general attention. Most people, however, look for something more tangible in the way of beauty; yet simplicity is generally admired when people do not stop to consider what they are admiring — and can there be simplicity without sincerity? But enough of these remarks, which are somewhat rambling, though the subject naturally called them up.
In declamatory periods Dr. Fordyce spins out Rousseau's eloquence, and in the most sentimental rant sets out his opinions about the female character and the behaviour a woman should adopt in order to make herself lovely.
He shall speak for himself, for this is how he makes nature address man: "Look at these smiling innocents, whom I have graced with my fairest gifts and committed to your protection; look on them with love and respect; treat them with tenderness and honour. They are timid and need to be defended. They are frail; oh, do not take advantage of their weakness! Let their fears and their blushes endear them to you. Let their confidence in you never be abused. But is it possible that any of you could be such barbarians, so supremely wicked, as to abuse it? Can you find it in your hearts to despoil these gentle, trusting creatures of their treasure, or to do anything to strip them of their native robe of virtue? Cursed be the impious hand that would dare to violate the unblemished form of Chastity! You wretch! You ruffian! Forbear, and do not venture to provoke heaven's fiercest vengeance." I know of no comment that could be made seriously on this curious passage, and I could produce a great many like it — some of them so very sentimental that I have heard rational men use the word indecent when they mentioned them with disgust.
Footnote: Can you? Can you? would be the most emphatic comment, if it were drawled out in a whining voice.
Throughout there is a display of cold, artificial feeling, and that parade of sensibility which boys and girls alike should be taught to despise as the sure mark of a small vain mind. Florid appeals are made to heaven, and to the beauteous innocents who are heaven's fairest images here below, while sober sense is left far behind. This is not the language of the heart, and it will never reach the heart, though it may tickle the ear.
I shall be told, perhaps, that the public have been pleased with these volumes. True — and Hervey's Meditations are still read, though he sinned equally against sense and taste.
I particularly object to the lover-like phrases of pumped-up passion scattered everywhere through them. If women are ever to be allowed to walk without leading-strings, why must they be coaxed into virtue by artful flattery and compliments on their sex? Speak to them in the language of truth and soberness, and away with the lullaby strains of condescending endearment. Let them be taught to respect themselves as rational creatures, instead of being led into a passion for their own insipid persons. It stirs my bile to hear a preacher holding forth on dress and needlework, and still more to hear him address the "British fair, the fairest of the fair", as if they had nothing but feelings.
Even when he is recommending piety he uses this argument: "Never, perhaps, does a fine woman strike more deeply than when, composed into pious recollection and possessed by the noblest considerations, she assumes, without knowing it, a superior dignity and new graces, so that the beauties of holiness seem to radiate about her and the bystanders are almost induced to fancy her already worshipping among her kindred angels." Why are women to be brought up like this with a desire for conquest? The very word, used in that sense, gives me a sickly qualm. Do religion and virtue offer no stronger motives, no brighter reward? Must women always be debased by being made to think about the sex of their companions? Must they always be taught to be pleasing? And when they level their small artillery at the heart of man, is it necessary to tell them that a little sense is enough to make their attention incredibly soothing? "As a small degree of knowledge entertains in a woman, so from a woman, though for a different reason, a small expression of kindness delights, particularly if she is beautiful." I should have supposed it was for the same reason.
Why are girls told that they resemble angels, when the effect is to sink them below women? Or that a gentle, innocent woman is the object that comes nearest to our idea of an angel? And yet they are told at the same time that they are only like angels while they are young and beautiful — so that it is their persons, not their virtues, that earn them this homage.
Idle, empty words! What can such delusive flattery lead to but vanity and folly? A lover, it is true, has a poetic licence to exalt his mistress; his reason is the bubble of his passion, and he tells no lie when he borrows the language of adoration. His imagination may raise the idol of his heart above humanity and go unblamed; and it would be a happy thing for women if they were only flattered by the men who loved them — I mean, who love the individual and not the sex. But should a grave preacher lard his discourses with such fooleries?
In sermons or in novels, however, voluptuousness is always true to its text. Moralists allow men to cultivate different qualities, as nature directs, and to take on the different characters that the same passions, modified almost infinitely, give to each individual. A virtuous man may have a choleric or a sanguine constitution, may be gay or grave without reproach; he may be so firm as to be nearly overbearing, or so weakly submissive as to have no will or opinion of his own. But all women are to be levelled by meekness and docility into a single character of yielding softness and gentle compliance.
I will use the preacher's own words. "Let it be observed that in your sex manly exercises are never graceful; that in a woman a masculine tone and figure, and a masculine air and bearing, are always forbidding; and that men of sensibility desire soft features and a flowing voice in every woman, a form that is not robust, and a delicate and gentle manner."
Is the following portrait not the portrait of a house slave? "I am astonished at the folly of many women who are still reproaching their husbands for leaving them alone, for preferring this or that company to theirs, for treating them with this or the other mark of disregard or indifference — when, to tell the truth, they have themselves largely to blame. Not that I would justify the men in anything wrong on their side. But if you had behaved to them with more respectful observance and a more equal tenderness; studying their humours, overlooking their mistakes, submitting to their opinions in matters of indifference, passing over little instances of unevenness, caprice or temper, giving soft answers to hasty words, complaining as seldom as possible, and making it your daily care to relieve their anxieties and anticipate their wishes, to enliven the dull hour and call up ideas of happiness — if you had pursued this conduct, I do not doubt that you would have kept and even increased their esteem, so far as to secure every degree of influence that could conduce to their virtue or to your mutual satisfaction; and your house might this day have been the home of domestic bliss." Such a woman ought to be an angel — or else she is an ass; for I can discern no trace of human character in this domestic drudge, neither reason nor passion, whose whole being is absorbed into a tyrant's.
Still, Dr. Fordyce must have very little acquaintance with the human heart if he really supposed such conduct would bring back a wandering love, instead of exciting contempt. No: beauty and gentleness and the rest may win a heart, but esteem, the only lasting affection, can only be got by virtue supported by reason. It is respect for the understanding that keeps tenderness for the person alive.
Since these volumes are so often put into the hands of young people, I have taken more notice of them than, strictly speaking, they deserve; but as they have helped to spoil the taste and weaken the understanding of so many of my fellow creatures, I could not pass over them in silence.
Such fatherly concern runs through Dr. Gregory's Legacy to His Daughters that I begin the work of criticism with affectionate respect. But since this little volume has many attractions to recommend it to the most respectable part of my sex, I cannot silently pass over arguments that so plausibly support opinions which I believe have had the most damaging effect on the morals and manners of the female world.
His easy, familiar style is particularly suited to the tenor of his advice, and the melancholy tenderness that his respect for the memory of a beloved wife spreads through the whole work makes it very affecting. Yet there is a degree of concise elegance visible in many passages that disturbs this sympathy, and we come upon the author when we only expected to meet the father.
Besides, having two objects in view, he seldom held steadily to either. Wishing to make his daughters amiable, and afraid that unhappiness would be the only consequence of instilling sentiments that might draw them out of the track of common life without enabling them to act with a matching independence and dignity, he checks the natural flow of his thoughts and advises neither one thing nor the other.
In the preface he tells them a mournful truth: "that they will hear, at least once in their lives, the genuine sentiments of a man who has no interest in deceiving them."
Hapless woman! What can be expected of you, when the beings you are said naturally to depend on for reason and support all have an interest in deceiving you? This is the root of the evil that has cast a corroding mildew over all your virtues, and, blighting your opening faculties in the bud, has made you the weak thing you are. It is this separate interest, this insidious state of warfare, that undermines morality and divides humankind.
If love has made some women wretched, how many more has the cold, meaningless intercourse of gallantry made vain and useless? Yet this heartless attention to women is reckoned so manly, so polite, that until society is very differently organized I am afraid this relic of gothic manners will not be replaced by a more reasonable and affectionate way of behaving. Besides, to strip it of its imaginary dignity, I must observe that in the most civilized European states this lip service prevails to a very great degree, accompanied by an extreme dissoluteness of morals. In Portugal, the country I have particularly in mind, it takes precedence of the most serious moral obligations: a man is seldom assassinated while he is in a woman's company. The savage hand of robbery is unnerved by this chivalrous spirit; and if the blow of vengeance cannot be stayed, the lady is begged to pardon the rudeness and depart in peace, though sprinkled, perhaps, with her husband's or her brother's blood.
I shall pass over his remarks on religion, because I mean to discuss that subject in a separate chapter.
His remarks about behaviour, though many of them are very sensible, I entirely disapprove of, because it seems to me to be beginning at the wrong end. A cultivated understanding and an affectionate heart will never need starched rules of decorum; something more substantial than seemliness will be the result. And without understanding, the behaviour he recommends would be rank affectation. Decorum, indeed, is the one thing needful! Decorum is to supplant nature and banish all simplicity and variety of character from the female world. Yet what good can all this superficial counsel do? It is, however, much easier to prescribe this or that mode of behaviour than to set the reason to work; and when the mind has been stocked with useful knowledge and strengthened by being employed, the regulation of the behaviour may safely be left to its guidance.
Why, for instance, should the following caution be given, when art of every kind must contaminate the mind? Why entangle the grand motives of action, which reason and religion combine to enforce, with pitiful worldly shifts and sleight-of-hand tricks to gain the applause of gaping, tasteless fools? "Be even cautious in displaying your good sense. It will be thought that you are assuming a superiority over the rest of the company. But if you happen to have any learning, keep it a profound secret, especially from the men, who generally look with a jealous and malignant eye on a woman of great parts and a cultivated understanding." If men of real merit are above this meanness, as he afterwards observes, where is the necessity for the behaviour of a whole sex to be modulated to please fools, or to please men who, having little claim to respect as individuals, choose to keep close together in their phalanx? Men who insist on the superiority they share with all men, having no other, are certainly very excusable.
Footnote: Let women once acquire good sense, and, if it deserves the name, it will teach them how to employ it — or else of what use is it?
There would be no end to rules of behaviour if it were proper always to take the tone of the company; for by changing key forever in that way, a flat would often pass for a natural note.
Surely it would have been wiser to advise women to improve themselves until they rose above the fumes of vanity, and then let public opinion come round. For where are rules of accommodation to stop? The narrow path of truth and virtue inclines neither to the right nor to the left; it is a straightforward business, and those who are earnestly pursuing their road may leap over a good many decorous prejudices without leaving modesty behind. Make the heart clean and give the head employment, and I will venture to predict that there will be nothing offensive in the behaviour.
The air of fashion that so many young people are eager to acquire always strikes me like the studied attitudes in certain modern prints, copied with tasteless servility from the antique: the soul is left out, and none of the parts are tied together by anything that could properly be called character. This varnish of fashion, which seldom sticks very close to sense, may dazzle the weak; but leave nature to itself and it will seldom disgust the wise. Besides, when a woman has sense enough not to pretend to anything she does not understand to some degree, there is no need for any resolution to hide her talents under a bushel. Let things take their natural course and all will be well.
It is this system of dissimulation, running through the whole volume, that I despise. Women are always to seem to be this or that — and yet virtue might address them in Hamlet's words: Seems! I know not seems! I have that within which passes show!
The same note keeps sounding. In another place, after recommending delicacy without sufficiently distinguishing what he means by it, he adds: "The men will complain of your reserve. They will assure you that a franker behaviour would make you more amiable. But trust me, they are not sincere when they tell you so. I acknowledge that on some occasions it might make you more agreeable as companions, but it would make you less amiable as women — an important distinction that many of your sex are not aware of."
This desire to be always women is the very consciousness that degrades the sex. Except with a lover, I must repeat an earlier observation with emphasis: it would be well if women were only agreeable or rational companions. But in this respect his advice is even inconsistent with a passage I mean to quote with the most marked approval.
"The idea that a woman may allow all innocent freedoms provided her virtue is secure is both grossly indelicate and dangerous, and has proved fatal to many of your sex." With this opinion I entirely agree. Any man or woman of feeling must always wish to convince the person they love that it is the caresses of the individual, not of the sex, that are received and returned with pleasure, and that the heart is moved rather than the senses. Without this natural delicacy, love becomes a selfish personal gratification that soon degrades the character.
I carry the sentiment further still. Affection, where love is out of the question, authorises many personal endearments which, flowing naturally from an innocent heart, give life to behaviour; but the personal familiarity of appetite, gallantry or vanity is contemptible. When a man squeezes the hand of a pretty woman he has never seen before as he hands her into a carriage, she will regard the impertinent liberty as an insult, if she has any true delicacy, instead of being flattered by this meaningless homage to beauty. These are the privileges of friendship, or the momentary homage the heart pays to virtue when it flashes suddenly into view. Mere animal spirits have no claim on the kindnesses of affection.
Wishing to feed the affections with what is now the food of vanity, I would gladly persuade my sex to act on simpler principles. Let them deserve love, and they will get it, even if nobody ever tells them that "the power of a fine woman over the hearts of men, and of men of the finest parts, is even beyond what she imagines."
I have already noticed his narrow cautions about duplicity, female softness and delicacy of constitution; these are the changes he rings without ceasing, more decorously than Rousseau, it is true, but it all comes home to the same point. Anyone who takes the trouble to analyse these sentiments will find the first principles not quite so delicate as the structure raised on them.
The subject of amusements is treated too cursorily, and in the same spirit.
When I come to friendship, love and marriage it will be found that we differ materially in opinion. I shall not anticipate here what I have to say on those important subjects, but confine my remarks to the general tenor of his — to that cautious family prudence, and those confined views of a partial, unenlightened affection, which shut out pleasure and improvement in the vain hope of warding off sorrow and error, and which, in guarding the heart and mind so carefully, destroy all their energy as well. It is far better to be often deceived than never to trust; to be disappointed in love than never to love; to lose a husband's fondness than to forfeit his esteem.
How happy it would be for the world, and for individuals too, if all this useless anxiety to attain worldly happiness on a confined plan were turned into an anxious desire to improve the understanding. "Wisdom is the principal thing: therefore get wisdom; and with all your getting, get understanding." "How long, you simple ones, will you love simplicity, and hate knowledge?" says Wisdom to the daughters of men.
I do not mean to go through all the writers who have written on the manners of women; that would only be going over the old ground, for they have generally written in the same strain. But in attacking the boasted prerogative of man — the prerogative that may emphatically be called the iron sceptre of tyranny, the original sin of tyrants — I declare against all power built on prejudice, however venerable with age.
If the submission demanded is founded on justice, there is no appealing to a higher power, for God is justice itself. Let us, then, as children of the same parent, and not bastards merely because we were born later, reason together, and learn to submit to the authority of reason when her voice is distinctly heard. But if it can be shown that this throne of prerogative rests on nothing but a chaotic mass of prejudices with no inherent principle of order to hold them together — or on an elephant, or a tortoise, or even the mighty shoulders of a son of the earth — then those who dare to brave the consequences may escape, without any breach of duty and without sinning against the order of things.
While reason raises man above the brutal herd, and death is big with promises, only those are subject to blind authority who have no reliance on their own strength. "They are free who will be free!"
Footnote: "He is the free man, whom truth makes free!" —Cowper
The being who can govern itself has nothing to fear in life; but if anything is dearer to it than its own self-respect, the price must be paid to the last farthing. Virtue, like everything else that is valuable, must be loved for herself alone, or she will not come and live with us. She will not give us that peace "which passes understanding" when she is used merely as the stilts of a reputation and respected with pharisaical exactness because honesty is the best policy.
That the plan of life which lets us carry some knowledge and virtue into another world is also the one best calculated to give us contentment in this one cannot be denied. Yet few people act on the principle, though everyone allows that it is beyond dispute. Present pleasure, or present power, carries these sober convictions before it, and man bargains with happiness for the day and not for a lifetime. How few — how very few — have foresight or resolution enough to endure a small evil now in order to avoid a greater one later.
Woman in particular, whose virtue is built on mutual prejudices, seldom attains this greatness of mind. So, becoming the slave of her own feelings, she is easily subdued by other people's. Degraded in this way, her reason — her misty reason — is employed in polishing her chains rather than in snapping them.
Footnote: I mean to use a word that takes in more than chastity, the virtue that is supposed to belong to one sex.
I have listened with indignation to women arguing in the same track as men, and adopting with all the pertinacity of ignorance the very sentiments that brutalize them.
I must illustrate my point with a few examples. Mrs. Piozzi, who often repeated by rote what she did not understand, comes forward in Johnsonian periods.
"Do not look for happiness in singularity, and dread a refinement of wisdom as a deviation into folly." So she dogmatically addresses a newly married man; and to explain this pompous opening she adds: "I said that your lady's person would not grow more pleasing to you, but pray let her never suspect that it grows less so. That a woman will pardon an affront to her understanding much sooner than one to her person is well known, and none of us will contradict it. All our attainments, all our arts, are employed to gain and keep the heart of man; and what mortification can exceed the disappointment if the end is not obtained? There is no reproof, however pointed, no punishment, however severe, that a woman of spirit will not prefer to neglect; and if she can endure it without complaining, that only proves that she means to make it up to herself by other men's attention for her husband's slights."
These are truly masculine sentiments. "All our arts are employed to gain and keep the heart of man" — and what is the inference? That if her person is neglected, and was there ever a person, even one formed with the symmetry of a Medici Venus, that was not slighted in the end, she will make it up to herself by trying to please other men. Noble morality! And so the understanding of a whole sex is insulted and their virtue is deprived of the common basis of all virtue. A woman must know that her person cannot be as pleasing to her husband as it was to her lover; and if she is offended with him for being a human creature, she may as well whine about the loss of his heart as about any other foolish thing. This very want of discernment, or unreasonable anger, proves that he could not have changed his fondness for her person into an affection for her virtues or a respect for her understanding.
While women avow such opinions and act on them, their understandings at least deserve the contempt and abuse that men who never insult their persons have pointedly aimed at the female mind. And it is the sentiments of these polite men, who do not wish to be encumbered with a mind, that vain women thoughtlessly adopt. Yet they ought to know that only an insulted reason can spread that sacred reserve about the person which makes human affections — for human affections always have some base alloy in them — as permanent as is consistent with the grand end of existence, the attainment of virtue.
The Baroness de Staël speaks the same language as the lady just quoted, with more enthusiasm. Her eulogy on Rousseau happened to fall into my hands, and her sentiments, which are the sentiments of too many of my sex, may serve as a text for a few comments. "Though Rousseau," she observes, "has tried to prevent women from interfering in public affairs and playing a brilliant part in the theatre of politics, yet how much he has done, in speaking of them, to satisfy them! If he wished to deprive them of some rights foreign to their sex, how completely has he restored to them all those they have a claim to! And in trying to diminish their influence over the deliberations of men, how sacredly has he established the empire they hold over men's happiness! In helping them down from a usurped throne, he has seated them firmly on the one nature destined them for; and though he is full of indignation against them when they try to resemble men, yet when they come before him with all the charms, weaknesses, virtues and errors of their sex, his respect for their persons amounts almost to adoration." True! For there never was a sensualist who paid more fervent adoration at the shrine of beauty. So devout, indeed, was his respect for the person that, chastity excepted for obvious reasons, he only wished to see it embellished by charms, weaknesses and errors. He was afraid that the austerity of reason would disturb the soft playfulness of love. The master wanted a meretricious slave to fondle, entirely dependent on his reason and his bounty; he did not want a companion he would be obliged to esteem, or a friend he could entrust with the education of his children if death took their father before he had finished the sacred task. He denies woman reason, shuts her out from knowledge and turns her away from truth — and yet he is pardoned, because "he admits the passion of love." It would take some ingenuity to show why women should be under such an obligation to him for admitting love, when it is clear that he admits it only for the relaxation of men and the perpetuation of the species. But he talked with passion, and that powerful spell worked on the sensibility of a young admirer. "What does it matter to women," this rhapsodist goes on, "that his reason disputes the empire with them, when his heart is devotedly theirs?" It is not empire but equality that they ought to be contending for. Yet if all they wanted was to prolong their sway, they should not trust entirely to their persons; for though beauty may win a heart, it cannot keep one, even in full bloom, unless the mind lends it at least a few graces.
Once women are enlightened enough to see their real interest on any grand scale, they will, I am persuaded, be very ready to give up all the prerogatives of love that are not mutual — speaking of them as lasting prerogatives — for the calm satisfaction of friendship and the tender confidence of a settled esteem. They will not put on insolent airs before marriage, or submit abjectly afterwards; but, trying to act like reasonable creatures in both situations, they will not be tumbled from a throne to a stool.
Madame de Genlis has written several entertaining books for children, and her letters on education offer many useful hints that sensible parents will certainly make use of; but her views are narrow, and her prejudices are as unreasonable as they are strong.
I shall pass over her vehement argument for the eternity of future punishments, because I blush to think that a human being should ever argue vehemently in such a cause, and shall make only a few remarks on her absurd way of making parental authority supplant reason. For everywhere she inculcates not only blind submission to parents but blind submission to the opinion of the world.
Footnote: A person is not to act in this or that way, though convinced it is right, because some ambiguous circumstance might lead the world to suspect that they acted from other motives. This is sacrificing the substance for a shadow. Let people watch their own hearts and act rightly as far as they can judge, and they may wait patiently until the opinion of the world comes round. It is best to be directed by a simple motive, for justice has too often been sacrificed to propriety — which is another word for convenience.
She tells the story of a young man engaged at his father's express wish to a girl with a fortune. Before the marriage can take place the girl loses her fortune and is thrown friendless on the world. The father practises the most infamous arts to separate his son from her; and when the son detects his villainy and, following the dictates of honour, marries the girl, nothing but misery follows, because, if you please, he married without his father's consent. What ground can religion or morality rest on, when justice is defied like this? In the same style she presents an accomplished young woman as ready to marry anybody her mamma chose to recommend, and as actually marrying the young man of her own choice without feeling any emotion of passion at all, because a well-educated girl had not had time to fall in love. Is it possible to have much respect for a system of education that insults reason and nature in this way?
Many similar opinions occur in her writings, mixed with sentiments that do honour to her head and heart. Yet so much superstition is mixed with her religion, and so much worldly wisdom with her morality, that I would not let a young person read her works unless I could talk the subjects over afterwards and point out the contradictions.
Mrs. Chapone's Letters are written with such good sense and such unaffected humility, and contain so many useful observations, that I mention them only to pay their worthy author this tribute of respect. I cannot always agree with her, it is true, but I always respect her.
The very word respect brings Mrs. Macaulay to my mind — undoubtedly the woman of the greatest abilities this country has ever produced. And yet this woman has been allowed to die without sufficient respect being paid to her memory.
Posterity, however, will be more just, and will remember that Catharine Macaulay was an example of intellectual attainments supposed to be incompatible with the weakness of her sex. Indeed, no sex appears in her style of writing; it is like the sense it conveys, strong and clear.
I will not call her understanding masculine, because I do not admit any such arrogant assumption of reason; but I maintain that it was a sound one, and that her judgment, the matured fruit of profound thinking, proved that a woman can acquire judgment in the fullest sense of the word. Possessing more penetration than shrewdness and more understanding than fancy, she writes with a sober energy and a closeness of argument; yet sympathy and benevolence give her sentiments an interest and give her arguments the vital heat that forces a reader to weigh them.
Footnote: Since I agree with Mrs. Macaulay about many branches of education, I refer the reader to her valuable work rather than quoting her sentiments in support of my own.
When I first thought of writing these criticisms I anticipated Mrs. Macaulay's approval with a little of that sanguine ardour it has been the business of my life to hold down; but I soon heard, with the sickly qualm of disappointed hope and the still seriousness of regret, that she was no more.
In surveying the various works that have been written on education, Lord Chesterfield's Letters must not be passed over in silence. Not that I mean to analyse his unmanly, immoral system, or even to pick out the useful shrewd remarks that occur in his frivolous correspondence. I only mean to make a few reflections on their avowed purpose: the art of acquiring an early knowledge of the world. It is an art that preys secretly, like the worm in the bud, on the expanding powers, and turns to poison the generous juices that should be rising with vigour in a young frame and inspiring warm affections and great resolves.
For everything, says the wise man, there is a season; and who would look for the fruits of autumn during the kindly months of spring? But this is mere declamation, and I mean to reason with those worldly-wise instructors who, instead of cultivating the judgment, instil prejudices, and harden a heart that gradual experience would only have cooled. An early acquaintance with human infirmity, or what is called knowledge of the world, is in my opinion the surest way to contract the heart and damp that natural youthful ardour which produces not only great talents but great virtues. For the vain attempt to bring forth the fruit of experience before the sapling has put out its leaves only exhausts its strength and prevents it taking a natural form — just as the form and strength of cooling metals are injured when the attraction that holds them together is disturbed.
Tell me, you who have studied the human mind, is it not a strange way of fixing principles to show young people that principles are seldom stable? And how can they be fortified into habits when they are proved fallacious by example? Why should the ardour of youth be damped like this, and the luxuriance of fancy cut back to the quick? This dry caution may guard a character against worldly mischances, it is true; but it will infallibly rule out any excellence in virtue or in knowledge. The stumbling block that suspicion throws across every path will prevent any vigorous exertion of genius or benevolence, and life will be stripped of its most alluring charm long before its calm evening, when a man should be able to retire into contemplation for comfort and support.
A young man who has been brought up among friends at home, and encouraged to store his mind with as much speculative knowledge as reading can give, along with the natural reflections that youthful ebullitions of animal spirits and instinctive feelings inspire, will enter the world with warm and mistaken expectations. But this seems to be the course of nature; and in morals as in works of taste we should observe her sacred indications, and not presume to lead where we ought obediently to follow.
In the world few people act from principle: present feelings and early habits are the great springs of action. But how deadened the first would be, and how much like corroding iron fetters the second, if the world were shown to young people exactly as it is, before any knowledge of humankind or of their own hearts, slowly gained by experience, had made them forbearing. Their fellow creatures would not then be seen as frail beings like themselves, condemned to struggle with human infirmities and showing now the light and now the dark side of their character, drawing out alternate feelings of love and disgust; they would be guarded against like beasts of prey, until every enlarged social feeling — in a word, humanity — had been rooted out.
In life, by contrast, as we gradually discover the imperfections of our nature we discover virtues too; and various circumstances attach us to our fellow creatures when we mix with them and look at the same objects — circumstances never thought of in acquiring a hasty, unnatural knowledge of the world. We see a folly swell into a vice by almost imperceptible degrees, and pity even while we blame. But if the hideous monster burst on our sight all at once, then fear and disgust, making us more severe than any man ought to be, might lead us in blind zeal to usurp the character of omnipotence and pronounce damnation on our fellow mortals — forgetting that we cannot read the heart, and that the seeds of the same vices lurk in our own.
I have already remarked that we expect more from instruction than mere instruction can give. Instead of preparing young people to meet the evils of life with dignity, and to acquire wisdom and virtue by exercising their own faculties, we heap precept on precept and demand blind obedience where conviction should be brought home to the reason.
Suppose, for instance, that a young person in the first ardour of friendship makes a god of the person they love. What harm can come of this mistaken, enthusiastic attachment? Perhaps it is necessary for virtue to appear first in a human form in order to make an impression on young hearts; the ideal model that a more mature and exalted mind looks up to and shapes for itself would escape their sight altogether. If a person does not love the brother he has seen, how can he love God? asked the wisest of men.
It is natural for youth to adorn the first object of its affection with every good quality; and the emulation produced by ignorance — or, to speak more properly, by inexperience — brings forward the very mind that is capable of forming such an affection. Then, when in the course of time perfection turns out not to be within mortal reach, virtue in the abstract is thought beautiful and wisdom sublime. Admiration gives place to friendship properly so called, because it is cemented by esteem; and the person walks alone, depending on heaven alone for that emulous panting after perfection which always glows in a noble mind. But a man must gain this knowledge by exerting his own faculties; and surely it is the blessed fruit of disappointed hope. For He who delights to spread happiness and show mercy to the weak creatures who are learning to know him never planted a good propensity in us to be a tormenting will-o'-the-wisp.
We now let our trees spread with a wild luxuriance, and do not expect to combine the majestic marks of time with youthful graces by force; we wait patiently until they have struck their roots deep and braved many a storm. Is the mind, then, which advances towards perfection more slowly in proportion to its dignity, to be treated with less respect? Reasoning by analogy, everything around us is in a progressive state; and when an unwelcome knowledge of life produces something like a satiety of living, and we discover in the natural course of things that all that is done under the sun is vanity, we are drawing near the awful close of the drama. The days of activity and hope are over, and the opportunities the first stage of existence has offered for advancing in the scale of intelligence must soon be summed up. A knowledge of the futility of life at that period — or earlier, if it is gained by experience — is very useful, because it is natural. But when a frail being is shown the follies and vices of humankind so that he may be taught to guard prudently against the common accidents of life by sacrificing his heart, then surely it is not speaking harshly to call it the wisdom of this world, as against the nobler fruit of piety and experience.
I will venture a paradox and give my opinion without reserve. If men were born only to complete a circle of life and death, it would be wise to take every step foresight could suggest to make life happy. Moderation in every pursuit would then be the supreme wisdom, and the prudent voluptuary might enjoy a degree of contentment though he neither cultivated his understanding nor kept his heart pure. Prudence, supposing we were mortal, would be true wisdom, or, to be more explicit, would procure the greatest portion of happiness taking life as a whole; but knowledge beyond the conveniences of life would be a curse.
Why should we injure our health with close study? The exalted pleasure that intellectual pursuits give would hardly be equivalent to the hours of languor that follow, especially if we have to reckon in the doubts and disappointments that cloud our researches. Vanity and vexation close every enquiry, for the cause we particularly wished to discover flies before us as we advance, like the horizon. The ignorant, on the contrary, are like children, and suppose that if they could only walk straight forward they would arrive at last where the earth and the clouds meet. Yet, disappointed as we are in our researches, the mind gains strength from the exercise — enough, perhaps, to comprehend the answers it may receive at another stage of existence to the anxious questions it asked here, when the understanding was fluttering on feeble wings round the visible effects and trying to dive down to the hidden cause.
The passions too, the winds of life, would be useless if not injurious, if the substance that composes our thinking selves, after we had thought in vain, merely became the support of vegetable life and went to invigorate a cabbage or blush in a rose. The appetites would answer every earthly purpose and produce a more moderate and lasting happiness. But the powers of the soul that are of so little use here, and that probably disturb our animal enjoyments even while a conscious dignity makes us glory in having them, prove that life is only an education, a state of infancy, whose one hope worth cherishing should not be thrown away. I mean to infer, therefore, that we ought to have a precise idea of what we want education to achieve; for the immortality of the soul is contradicted by the actions of a great many people who firmly profess to believe in it.
If your first consideration is to secure ease and prosperity on earth and to leave the future to look after itself, then you act prudently in giving your child an early insight into the weaknesses of his nature. You may not, it is true, make an Inkle of him; but do not imagine that a boy who has absorbed a mean opinion of human nature very early will stick to anything more than the letter of the law, or think it necessary to rise much above the common standard. He may avoid gross vices, because honesty is the best policy; but he will never aim at great virtues. The example of writers and artists will illustrate the remark.
I must therefore venture to doubt whether what has been treated as an axiom in morals may not have been a dogmatic assertion made by men who have coolly seen humankind through the medium of books; and I say, in direct contradiction to them, that the regulation of the passions is not always wisdom. On the contrary, it would seem that one reason why men have better judgment and more fortitude than women is undoubtedly that they give freer scope to the grand passions and, by going astray more often, enlarge their minds. If they then fix on some stable principle by exercising their own reason, they probably have to thank the force of their passions, nourished by false views of life and allowed to leap over the boundary that keeps a man contented. But if in the dawn of life we could soberly survey the scene before us as if in perspective, and see everything in its true colours, how could the passions ever gain strength enough to unfold our faculties?
Let me now, as from a height, survey the world stripped of all its false, deluding charms. The clear air lets me see each object in its true perspective, while my heart is still. I am as calm as the prospect on a morning when the mists disperse slowly and silently unveil the beauties of nature, refreshed by rest.
In what light does the world appear now? I rub my eyes and think, perhaps, that I am only just waking from a vivid dream.
I see the sons and daughters of men pursuing shadows and anxiously wasting their powers to feed passions that have no adequate object — unless the very excess of these blind impulses, pampered by that lying yet constantly trusted guide the imagination, does in fact prepare them for some other state and so make short-sighted mortals wiser without their meaning to be, or, what comes to the same thing, while they were chasing some imaginary present good.
Having looked at things in this light, it would not be very fanciful to imagine that this world is a stage on which a pantomime is performed daily for the amusement of superior beings. How they would be entertained to see the ambitious man consuming himself in the pursuit of a phantom, chasing the bubble fame into "the cannon's mouth" that was to blow him into nothing — for once consciousness is gone it does not matter whether we go up in a whirlwind or come down in rain. And if they compassionately sharpened his sight and showed him the thorny path that leads to eminence, sinking like a quicksand as he climbs and disappointing his hopes when they are almost within his grasp, would he not leave the honour of amusing them to somebody else and set about securing the present moment — though, from the constitution of his nature, he would not find it easy to catch that flying stream? Such slaves we are to hope and fear!
But vain as the ambitious man's pursuit is, he is often striving for something more substantial than fame; fame alone would be the veriest meteor, the wildest fire that ever lured a man to ruin. What — renounce the most trifling gratification in order to be applauded when he is no longer there to hear it! Why this struggle, whether man is mortal or immortal, if that noble passion did not really raise him above his fellows?
And love! What diverting scenes it would produce — Pantaloon's tricks must yield to a more egregious folly. To see a mortal adorn an object with imaginary charms, and then fall down and worship the idol he set up himself — how ridiculous! But what serious consequences follow, to rob a man of the portion of happiness that the Deity, in calling him into existence, has indubitably promised him — for on what else can his attributes rest? Would not all the purposes of life have been much better served if he had only felt what has been called physical love? And would not the sight of the object, seen without the medium of imagination, soon reduce the passion to an appetite, if reflection, the noble distinction of man, did not give it force and make it an instrument for raising him above this earthly dross, by teaching him to love the centre of all perfection — whose wisdom appears clearer and clearer in the works of nature as reason is illuminated and exalted by contemplation, and by acquiring that love of order which the struggles of passion produce?
The habit of reflection, and the knowledge gained by nursing any passion, could be shown to be equally useful even if the object proved equally illusory; for all objects would look the same if they were not magnified by the governing passion the Author of all good implanted in us to call out and strengthen the faculties of each individual, and to let it gather all the experience an infant can gather, who does certain things and cannot tell why.
I come down from my height and, mixing with my fellow creatures, feel myself hurried along in the common stream. Ambition, love, hope and fear exert their usual power, though reason has convinced us that their present and most attractive promises are only lying dreams. But if the cold hand of circumspection had damped every generous feeling before it left any permanent mark on the character or fixed any habit, what could be expected but a selfish prudence and a reason rising only just above instinct? Who that has read Dean Swift's disgusting description of the Yahoos, and his insipid one of the Houyhnhnms, with a philosophical eye can fail to see the futility of degrading the passions, or of making a man rest content?
A young man should act; for if he had the experience of a grey head he would be fitter for death than for life, and his virtues, residing in his head rather than his heart, could produce nothing great, while his understanding, prepared for this world, would not prove by any noble flights that it had a title to a better one.
Besides, it is not possible to give a young person a just view of life. He must have struggled with his own passions before he can estimate the force of the temptation that betrayed his brother into vice. Those who are entering life and those who are leaving it see the world from such very different points of view that they can seldom think alike, unless the unfledged reason of the first has never attempted a solitary flight.
When we hear of some daring crime, it comes on us full in the deepest shade of turpitude and rouses indignation; but the eye that watched the darkness thicken by degrees must look at it with a more compassionate forbearance. The world cannot be seen by an unmoved spectator; we must mix in the crowd and feel as men feel before we can judge of their feelings. If we mean, in short, to live in the world in order to grow wiser and better, and not merely to enjoy the good things of life, we must acquire a knowledge of others at the same time that we become acquainted with ourselves. Knowledge acquired any other way only hardens the heart and perplexes the understanding.
I may be told that the knowledge gained in this way is sometimes bought too dear. I can only answer that I very much doubt whether any knowledge can be got without labour and sorrow, and that those who wish to spare their children both should not complain if their children turn out neither wise nor virtuous. They only aimed at making them prudent — and prudence, early in life, is nothing but the cautious craft of an ignorant self-love.
I have observed that young people whose education has had particular attention paid to it are generally very superficial and conceited, and far from pleasing in any respect, because they had neither the unsuspecting warmth of youth nor the cool depth of age. I cannot help imputing this unnatural appearance chiefly to the hasty, premature instruction that leads them to repeat presumptuously all the crude notions they have taken on trust — so that the careful education they received makes them the slaves of prejudice for the rest of their lives.
Mental exertion, like bodily exertion, is irksome at first, so much so that most people would gladly let others both work and think for them. An observation I have often made will illustrate what I mean. When, in a circle of strangers or acquaintances, a person of moderate abilities asserts an opinion heatedly, I will venture to say — for I have traced this to its source very often — that the opinion is a prejudice. These echoes have a high respect for the understanding of some relation or friend, and, without fully comprehending the opinions they are so eager to retail, they maintain them with an obstinacy that would astonish even the person who concocted them.
I know a fashion now prevails of respecting prejudices, and that when anyone dares to face them, though moved by humanity and armed with reason, he is superciliously asked whether his ancestors were fools. No, I should answer; opinions of every description were probably all considered at first, and so were founded on some reason. But quite often, of course, it was a local expedient rather than a fundamental principle that would be reasonable at all times. Moss-covered opinions take on the disproportionate form of prejudices when they are lazily adopted only because age has given them a venerable look, though the reason they were built on has ceased to be a reason, or cannot be traced. Why are we to love prejudices merely because they are prejudices? A prejudice is a fond, obstinate persuasion for which we can give no reason; for the moment a reason can be given for an opinion it stops being a prejudice, though it may be an error of judgment. Are we, then, advised to cherish opinions only in order to set reason at defiance? This way of arguing, if it can be called arguing, reminds me of what is vulgarly called a woman's reason. For women sometimes declare that they love or believe certain things because they love or believe them.
It is impossible to converse to any purpose with people who in this style use nothing but affirmatives and negatives. Before you can bring them to a point to start fairly from, you must go back to the simple principles that came before the prejudices power has broached; and it is ten to one that you are stopped by the philosophical assertion that certain principles are as practically false as they are abstractly true. Indeed one may infer that reason has whispered some doubts, for it generally happens that people assert their opinions most heatedly when they are beginning to waver: striving to drive out their own doubts by convincing an opponent, they grow angry when those gnawing doubts are thrown back to prey on themselves.
The fact is that men expect from education what education cannot give. A sagacious parent or tutor may strengthen the body and sharpen the instruments the child is to gather knowledge with; but the honey must be the reward of the individual's own industry. It is almost as absurd to try to make a boy wise on somebody else's experience as to expect a body to grow strong on exercise that is only talked about, or watched.
Many of the children whose conduct has been most narrowly watched become the weakest men, because their instructors only instil into their minds certain notions that have no foundation except the instructor's authority; and if that instructor is loved or respected, the mind is cramped in its exertions and unsteady in its advances. In such a case the business of education is only to guide the shooting tendrils to a proper pole; and yet, after laying precept on precept without ever letting a child acquire judgment for itself, parents expect them to act by this borrowed, fallacious light exactly as if they had lit it themselves, and to be, when they enter life, what their parents are at the close of it. They do not consider that a tree, and even the human body, does not strengthen its fibres until it has reached its full growth.
There seems to be something analogous in the mind. The senses and the imagination give the character its form during childhood and youth; and the understanding, as life advances, gives firmness to the first fair purposes of feeling — until virtue arises from the clear conviction of reason rather than from the impulse of the heart, and morality is made to rest on a rock that the storms of passion beat against in vain.
I hope I shall not be misunderstood when I say that religion will not have this consolidating power unless it is founded on reason. If it is merely the refuge of weakness or of wild fanaticism, and not a governing principle of conduct drawn from self-knowledge and from a rational opinion about the attributes of God, what can it be expected to produce? The religion that consists in warming the affections and exalting the imagination is only the poetical part of it, and may give an individual pleasure without making that individual any more moral. It may be a substitute for worldly pursuits and still narrow the heart instead of enlarging it. Virtue must be loved as sublime and excellent in itself, and not for the advantages it brings or the evils it wards off, if any great degree of excellence is to be expected. Men will not become moral by building castles in the air in a future world to make up for the disappointments they meet with in this one, if they turn their thoughts away from the duties in front of them towards religious daydreams.
Most prospects in life are spoiled by the shuffling worldly wisdom of men who, forgetting that they cannot serve God and money, try to blend contradictory things. If you wish to make your son rich, take one road; if you are only anxious to make him virtuous, you must take another. But do not imagine that you can bound from one to the other without losing your way.
Footnote: See an excellent essay on this subject by Mrs. Barbauld, in Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose.
Educated in the enervating style recommended by the writers I have been criticizing, and given no chance by their subordinate place in society to recover the ground they have lost, is it surprising that women everywhere look like a defect in nature? Is it surprising, when we consider how decisively an early association of ideas affects the character, that they neglect their understandings and turn all their attention to their persons?
The great advantages that naturally follow from stocking the mind with knowledge are obvious from these considerations. The association of our ideas is either habitual or instantaneous, and the second kind seems to depend on the original temperature of the mind rather than on the will. Once ideas and matters of fact have been taken in, they lie by for use until some chance circumstance makes information that was received at very different periods of our lives dart into the mind with illustrative force. Many recollections are like a flash of lightning, one idea assimilating and explaining another with astonishing speed. I am not talking here about that quick perception of truth which is so intuitive that it baffles investigation, and leaves us unable to decide whether it is memory or reasoning, lost sight of in its own swiftness, that opens the dark cloud. Over those instantaneous associations we have little power; for once the mind has been enlarged by roving flights or by profound reflection, the raw materials will to some degree arrange themselves. The understanding, it is true, may keep us from going out of drawing when we group our thoughts, or transcribe the warm sketches of fancy from the imagination; but it is the animal spirits, the individual character, that give the colouring. How little power we have over that subtle electric fluid, and how little power reason can gain over it! These fine, intractable spirits appear to be the essence of genius, and, beaming in its eagle eye, produce in the highest degree that happy energy of associating thoughts which surprises, delights and instructs. These are the glowing minds that concentrate pictures for their fellow creatures, forcing them to look with interest at objects reflected from an impassioned imagination which they had passed over in nature itself.
Footnote: When I have felt inclined to laugh at materialists, I have sometimes asked whether, since the most powerful effects in nature are apparently produced by fluids — the magnetic and so on — the passions might not be fine volatile fluids that embrace humanity and hold its more refractory elementary parts together; or whether they are simply a liquid fire pervading the more sluggish materials and giving them life and heat.
I must be allowed to explain myself. Most people cannot see or feel poetically; they lack fancy, and so they fly from solitude in search of tangible objects. But when an author lends them his eyes they can see as he saw, and be entertained by images they could never have picked out for themselves, though the images lay in front of them.
Education, then, only supplies the man of genius with knowledge to give variety and contrast to his associations. But there is also an habitual association of ideas, growing "with our growth", which has a great effect on the moral character of humankind and gives the mind a turn that usually stays with it for life. The understanding is so ductile, and yet so stubborn, that the associations formed by accidental circumstances during the period the body takes to reach maturity can seldom be untangled by reason. One idea calls up another, its old associate, and memory, faithful to first impressions — particularly when the intellectual powers are not employed in cooling our sensations — retraces them with mechanical exactness.
This habitual slavery to first impressions has a more damaging effect on the female character than on the male, because business and the other dry employments of the understanding tend to deaden the feelings and break associations that do violence to reason. But women, who are made women of while they are mere children and brought back to childhood when they ought to be leaving the go-cart forever, have not strength of mind enough to rub out the artificial additions that have smothered nature.
Everything they see or hear serves to fix impressions, call up emotions and form associations that give their minds a character supposed to belong to their sex. False notions of beauty and delicacy stunt the growth of their limbs and produce a sickly tenderness rather than a fineness of organs; and, weakened in this way by being employed in unfolding their first associations rather than examining them — associations forced on them by every object around them — how are they to attain the vigour they would need to throw off their artificial character? Where are they to find the strength to fall back on reason and rise above a system of oppression that blights the fair promises of spring? This cruel association of ideas, which everything conspires to twist into all their habits of thinking, or, to be more precise, of feeling, gains new force when they begin to act a little for themselves; for they then see that pleasure and power are only to be got through their skill in exciting emotion in men. Besides, all the books written expressly for their instruction, which make the first impression on their minds, teach the same opinions. Educated in a bondage worse than Egyptian, it is unreasonable as well as cruel to reproach them with faults they could hardly avoid, unless we suppose a degree of native vigour that falls to the lot of very few people of either sex.
The severest sarcasms, for instance, have been aimed at women, and they have been ridiculed for repeating "a set of phrases learnt by rote", when nothing could be more natural, considering the education they get and the fact that their "highest praise is to obey, unargued" the will of man. If they are not allowed enough reason to govern their own conduct, then everything they learn must be learned by rote. And when all their ingenuity is called out to arrange their dress, "a passion for a scarlet coat" is so natural that it has never surprised me. And granting that Pope's summary of their character is just, "that every woman is at heart a rake", why should they be bitterly censured for looking for a congenial mind and preferring a rake to a man of sense?
Rakes know how to work on their sensibility, while the modest merit of reasonable men naturally has less effect on their feelings; such men cannot reach the heart by way of the understanding, because they have few sentiments in common with it.
It seems a little absurd to expect women to be more reasonable than men in their likings, and still to deny them the uncontrolled use of reason. When do men fall in love with sense? When do they, with all their superior powers and advantages, turn from the person to the mind? And how can they then expect women, taught only to observe behaviour and to acquire manners rather than morals, to despise what they have spent their whole lives labouring to attain? Where are they suddenly to find judgment enough to weigh patiently the good sense of an awkward, virtuous man, when his manners, which they are made critical judges of, are off-putting, and his conversation cold and dull because it does not consist of pretty repartees or well-turned compliments? To admire or esteem anything for any length of time, we must at least have our curiosity roused by knowing to some degree what we admire; for we cannot estimate the value of qualities and virtues that are above our comprehension. Such a respect, when it is felt, may be very sublime, and the confused consciousness of humility may make the dependent creature an interesting object from some points of view; but human love must have coarser ingredients, and the person will very naturally come in for its share — an ample share, in most cases.
Love is to a great extent an arbitrary passion, and will reign, like certain other stalking mischiefs, on its own authority, without condescending to reason. It can also be easily distinguished from esteem, the foundation of friendship, because it is often excited by fleeting beauties and graces — though to give the sentiment any energy something more solid must deepen the impression and set the imagination to work, making what is fairest into what is first and best.
Common passions are excited by common qualities. Men look for beauty and the simper of good-humoured docility; women are captivated by easy manners. A gentlemanly man seldom fails to please them, and their thirsty ears drink in the insinuating nothings of politeness eagerly, while they turn away from the unintelligible sounds of that charmer, reason, however wisely he charms. As for superficial accomplishments, the rake certainly has the advantage, and of those women can form an opinion, since it is their own ground. Made gay and giddy by the whole tenor of their lives, the very look of wisdom, or the severe graces of virtue, must seem lugubrious to them and produce a kind of restraint that they, and love, that sportive child, naturally revolt from. Having no taste except of the lighter kind, since taste is the offspring of judgment, how can they discover that true beauty and grace must arise from the play of the mind? And how can they be expected to relish in a lover what they do not possess themselves, or possess very imperfectly? The sympathy that unites hearts and invites confidence is so very faint in them that it cannot catch fire and rise into passion. No, I say it again: the love such minds cherish must have coarser fuel.
The inference is obvious. Until women are led to exercise their understandings, they should not be satirized for their attachment to rakes, nor even for being rakes at heart, when that appears to be the inevitable consequence of their education. Those who live to please must find their enjoyment, their happiness, in pleasure. It is a trite remark, but a true one, that we never do anything well unless we love it for its own sake.
Suppose, however, for a moment that women were, in some future revolution of time, to become what I sincerely wish them to be. Then even love would acquire a more serious dignity and be purified in its own fires; and virtue, giving their affections a true delicacy, would make them turn from a rake in disgust. Reasoning then, as well as feeling — which is at present woman's only province — they could easily guard against exterior graces, and would quickly learn to despise a sensibility that had been excited and worn out among women whose trade was vice and allurement's wanton airs. They would remember that the flame they wished to kindle — one must use the appropriate expressions — had been burnt out by lust, and that a sated appetite, having lost all relish for pure and simple pleasures, could only be roused by the licentious arts of variety. What satisfaction could a woman of delicacy promise herself in a union with such a man, when the very artlessness of her affection might seem insipid to him? This is how Dryden describes the situation:
"Where love is duty on the female side, On theirs mere sensual gust, and sought with surly pride."
But there is one grand truth women have still to learn, though it matters a great deal that they should act on it. In choosing a husband they should not be led astray by the qualities of a lover — for a lover is what a husband, even supposing him wise and virtuous, cannot long remain.
If women were more rationally educated, and could take a more comprehensive view of things, they would be content to love only once in their lives, and after marriage would calmly let passion subside into friendship — into that tender intimacy which is the best refuge from care, and which is built on affections so pure and so quiet that idle jealousies would not be allowed to disturb the discharge of the sober duties of life, or to monopolize thoughts that ought to be otherwise employed. Many men live in that state; but few, very few women. And the difference can easily be accounted for without falling back on a character proper to each sex. Men, for whom we are told women were made, have occupied women's thoughts too much; and this association has so entangled love with all their motives for acting that — to harp a little on an old string — having been employed solely either in preparing themselves to excite love or in actually putting their lessons into practice, they cannot live without it. But when a sense of duty, or the fear of shame, obliges them to restrain this pampered desire to please beyond a certain point — too far for delicacy, it is true, though far short of criminality — they obstinately determine to love their husbands, I am speaking of their passion, to the end of the chapter. And then, acting the part they foolishly demanded of their lovers, they become abject wooers and fond slaves.
Men of wit and fancy are often rakes, and fancy is the food of love. Such men will inspire passion. Half of my sex, in its present infantile state, would pine for a Lovelace, a man so witty, so graceful and so valiant; and can they deserve blame for acting on principles so constantly drummed into them? They want a lover and a protector, and here he is, kneeling in front of them — bravery prostrate before beauty! A husband's virtues are thrown into the background by love, and gay hopes and lively emotions banish reflection until the day of reckoning comes. And come it surely will, to turn the sprightly lover into a surly, suspicious tyrant who contemptuously insults the very weakness he fostered. Or, supposing the rake reformed, he cannot get rid of old habits quickly. When a man of ability is first carried away by his passions, sentiment and taste have to varnish the enormities of vice and give a zest to brutal indulgences; but once the gloss of novelty has worn off and pleasure palls on the senses, lasciviousness becomes barefaced and enjoyment is nothing but the desperate effort of a weakness fleeing from reflection as from a legion of devils. Oh, virtue, you are no empty name! All that life can give, you give.
If not much comfort is to be expected from the friendship of a reformed rake of superior abilities, what is the consequence when he lacks sense as well as principles? Truly, misery in its most hideous shape. When the habits of weak people have been consolidated by time, reform is barely possible, and actually makes wretched the very people who have not mind enough to be amused by innocent pleasure. As with the tradesman who retires from the hurry of business, nature presents them with nothing but a universal blank, and their restless thoughts prey on their damped spirits. Their reformation, like his retirement, actually makes them miserable, because it takes away all their employment by quenching the hopes and fears that used to set their sluggish minds in motion.
If such is the force of habit, if such is the bondage of folly, how carefully we ought to guard the mind against storing up vicious associations! And how equally careful we should be to cultivate the understanding, and save the poor creature from the weak, dependent state of even a harmless ignorance. For it is the right use of reason alone that makes us independent of everything except the unclouded Reason itself — "whose service is perfect freedom".
Modesty! Sacred offspring of sensibility and reason! True delicacy of mind! May I presume, without blame, to investigate your nature, and trace to its hiding place that mild charm which mellows every harsh feature of a character and makes lovely what would otherwise inspire nothing but cold admiration? You that smooth the wrinkles of wisdom, and soften the tone of the more sublime virtues until they all melt into humanity; you that spread the ethereal cloud which, surrounding love, heightens every beauty it half shades, breathing those coy sweets that steal into the heart and charm the senses — modulate for me the language of persuasive reason, until I have roused my sex from the flowery bed where they lie sleeping their lives away.
In speaking of the association of our ideas I noticed two distinct modes; and in defining modesty it seems to me equally proper to distinguish that purity of mind which is the effect of chastity from the simplicity of character that leads us to form a just opinion of ourselves — equally far from vanity and from presumption, though by no means incompatible with a lofty consciousness of our own dignity. Modesty in the second sense of the word is that soberness of mind which teaches a man not to think more highly of himself than he ought; and it should be distinguished from humility, because humility is a kind of self-abasement.
A modest man often conceives a great plan and holds to it tenaciously, conscious of his own strength, until success gives it a sanction that settles its character. Milton was not arrogant when he let slip a suggestion of his judgment that turned out to be a prophecy; nor was General Washington when he accepted command of the American forces. Washington has always been described as a modest man; but if he had been merely humble he would probably have shrunk back irresolute, afraid to trust himself with the direction of an enterprise on which so much depended.
A modest man is steady, a humble man timid, and a vain one presumptuous: that is the judgment which observing many characters has led me to form. Jesus Christ was modest, Moses was humble, and Peter was vain.
Having distinguished modesty from humility in the one case, I do not mean to confound it with bashfulness in the other. Bashfulness is in fact so distinct from modesty that the most bashful girl, or the rawest country lout, often becomes the most impudent; for their bashfulness being merely the instinctive timidity of ignorance, custom soon turns it into assurance.
Footnote: "Such is the country maiden's fright, when first a redcoat is in sight; behind the door she hides her face, next time at distance eyes the lace: she now can all his terrors stand, nor from his squeeze withdraws her hand, she plays familiar in his arms, and every soldier has his charms; from tent to tent she spreads her flame; for custom conquers fear and shame."
The shameless behaviour of the prostitutes who infest the streets of London, rousing pity and disgust by turns, may serve to illustrate the remark. They trample on virgin bashfulness with a sort of bravado and, glorying in their shame, become more audaciously lewd than men ever appear to be, however depraved — men to whom the quality has not been gratuitously granted along with their sex. But these poor ignorant wretches never had any modesty to lose when they consigned themselves to infamy, for modesty is a virtue and not a quality. No: they were only bashful, shamefaced innocents, and when they lost their innocence their shamefacedness was rudely brushed off. A virtue would have left some traces in the mind, even if it had been sacrificed to passion, to make us respect the grand ruin.
Purity of mind, or that genuine delicacy which is the only virtuous support of chastity, is near kin to the refinement of humanity that never lives in any but a cultivated mind. It is something nobler than innocence: it is the delicacy of reflection, and not the coyness of ignorance. This reserve of reason, which, like habitual cleanliness, is seldom seen to any great degree unless the soul is active, is easily distinguished from rustic shyness or wanton skittishness; and so far from being incompatible with knowledge, it is knowledge's fairest fruit. What a gross idea of modesty the writer of the following remark had! "The lady who asked whether women may be instructed in the modern system of botany, consistently with female delicacy, was accused of ridiculous prudery. Nevertheless, if she had put the question to me, I should certainly have answered: they cannot." So the fair book of knowledge is to be shut with an everlasting seal. On reading passages like that I have reverently lifted my eyes and my heart to Him who lives forever and ever, and said: O my Father, have you, by the very constitution of her nature, forbidden your child to seek you in the fair forms of truth? And can her soul be sullied by the knowledge that calls her so awfully towards you?
Then I have philosophically pursued these reflections until I concluded that the women who have improved their reason most must have the most modesty, though a dignified sedateness of manner may have taken the place of the playful, bewitching bashfulness of youth.
Footnote: Modesty is the graceful calm virtue of maturity; bashfulness is the charm of vivacious youth.
And this is how I have argued. To make chastity the virtue from which an unaffected modesty naturally flows, the attention must be drawn away from employments that only exercise the sensibility, and the heart must be made to beat time to humanity rather than throb with love. The woman who has devoted a considerable part of her time to purely intellectual pursuits, and whose affections have been exercised by humane plans of usefulness, must as a natural consequence have more purity of mind than the ignorant creatures whose time and thoughts have been taken up with gay pleasures or with schemes for conquering hearts. Regulating the behaviour is not modesty, though the women who study the rules of decorum are generally called modest. Make the heart clean, let it expand and feel for everything human instead of being narrowed by selfish passions; let the mind often contemplate subjects that exercise the understanding without heating the imagination; and an artless modesty will put the finishing touches to the picture.
The woman who can discern the dawn of immortality in the streaks shooting across the misty night of ignorance, promising a clearer day, will respect as a sacred temple the body that houses such an improvable soul. True love likewise spreads this kind of mysterious sanctity round the beloved object, making the lover most modest in her presence. Affection is so reserved that in giving or receiving personal endearments it wishes not only to avoid the human eye, as a kind of profanation, but to draw a cloudy obscurity all round to shut out even the saucy sparkling sunbeams. Yet no affection deserves the name of chaste that does not take on a sublime gloom of tender melancholy, allowing the mind to stand still for a moment and enjoy the present satisfaction, when a consciousness of the Divine presence is felt — for that must always be the food of joy.
Since I have always been fond of tracing any prevailing custom back to its source in nature, I have often thought that what gave rise to the respect for relics, so much abused by selfish priests, was a feeling of affection for whatever has touched the person of an absent or a lost friend. Devotion, or love, may be allowed to hallow the clothes as well as the person; for a lover must be short of fancy who has no sort of sacred respect for his mistress's glove or slipper. He could not confuse them with common things of the same kind.
This fine sentiment, perhaps, would not bear analysis by the experimental philosopher — but this is the stuff human rapture is made of. A shadowy phantom glides in front of us, obscuring every other object; yet when the soft cloud is grasped, the form melts into common air, leaving a solitary void, or a sweet perfume stolen from the violet, which memory holds dear for a long time afterwards. But I have wandered onto fairy ground without meaning to, and feel the balmy breeze of spring stealing over me though November is frowning.
As a sex, women are more chaste than men; and since modesty is the effect of chastity, they may deserve to have the virtue ascribed to them in a rather special sense. Yet I must be allowed to add a hesitating if. For I doubt whether chastity will produce modesty, though it may produce propriety of conduct, when it is merely a respect for the opinion of the world, and when coquetry and the lovelorn tales of novelists occupy the thoughts. Indeed, experience and reason would lead me to expect more modesty among men than among women, simply because men exercise their understandings more.
But as far as propriety of behaviour goes, one class of women excepted, women plainly have the advantage. What can be more disgusting than that impudent dross of gallantry, thought so manly, which makes so many men stare insultingly at every woman they meet? Is this respect for the sex? Such loose behaviour shows so habitual a depravity, such a weakness of mind, that it is useless to expect much public or private virtue until both men and women grow more modest — until men, curbing a sensual fondness for women, or an affectation of manly assurance, or, more properly speaking, impudence, treat each other with respect, instead of letting appetite or passion set the tone of their behaviour. I mean personal respect: the modest respect of humanity and fellow feeling, not the libidinous mockery of gallantry, nor the insolent condescension of protection.
To carry the observation further still, modesty must heartily disown and refuse to live with that debauchery of mind which lets a man coolly produce indecent allusions or obscene witticisms, without blushing, in the presence of a fellow creature. Women are out of the question here, for in their presence it is brutality. Respect for a man as a man is the foundation of every noble sentiment. How much more modest is the libertine who obeys the call of appetite or fancy than the lewd joker who sets the table in a roar.
This is one of many instances in which the distinction of the sexes with regard to modesty has proved fatal to virtue and to happiness. It is carried further still, for woman — weak woman, made by her education the slave of sensibility — is required on the most trying occasions to resist that very sensibility. "Can anything," says Knox, "be more absurd than keeping women in a state of ignorance, and yet insisting so vehemently on their resisting temptation?" So when virtue or honour makes it proper to check a passion, the burden is thrown on the weaker shoulders, contrary to reason and to true modesty, which should at least make the self-denial mutual — to say nothing of the generosity of bravery, which is supposed to be a manly virtue.
Rousseau's and Dr. Gregory's advice about modesty, strangely so called, runs in the same strain; for they both want a wife to leave it in doubt whether it was sensibility or weakness that brought her into her husband's arms. The woman is immodest who can let the shadow of such a doubt stay in her husband's mind for a moment.
But to put the subject in a different light. The want of modesty that I chiefly deplore as subversive of morality arises from that state of warfare which voluptuous men so strenuously maintain to be the very essence of modesty, though it is in fact modesty's bane; for it is a refinement on sensual desire that men fall into who have not virtue enough to relish the innocent pleasures of love. A man of delicacy carries his notions of modesty further, for neither weakness nor sensibility will satisfy him: he is looking for affection.
Again: men boast of their triumphs over women. What are they boasting of? Truly, that a creature of sensibility was surprised by her own sensibility into folly, into vice; and the dreadful reckoning falls heavily on her own weak head when reason wakes. For where are you to find comfort, forlorn and disconsolate creature? The man who ought to have directed your reason and supported your weakness has betrayed you. In a dream of passion you consented to wander through flowery meadows, and, stepping heedlessly over the precipice to which your guide lured you instead of guarding you, you start out of your dream only to face a sneering, frowning world and find yourself alone in a wilderness; for the man who triumphed in your weakness is off pursuing new conquests. But for you there is no redemption this side of the grave. And what resource do you have, with an enfeebled mind, to lift a sinking heart?
Footnote: The poor moth fluttering round a candle burns its wings.
But if the sexes really must live in a state of warfare, if nature has marked it out for them, then let men act nobly, or let their pride whisper to them that it is a mean victory merely to overcome a woman's sensibility. The real conquest is over an affection that was not taken by surprise — when, like Heloisa, a woman deliberately gives up the whole world for love. I am not considering the wisdom or the virtue of such a sacrifice now; I only maintain that it was a sacrifice to affection and not merely to sensibility, though sensibility had its share. And I must be allowed to call her a modest woman before I leave this part of the subject, saying only that until men are more chaste, women will be immodest. Where indeed could modest women find husbands they would not be continually turning from in disgust? Modesty must be cultivated equally by both sexes, or it will always be a sickly hothouse plant, while the affectation of it, that fig leaf borrowed by wantonness, gives a zest to voluptuous enjoyments.
Men will probably still insist that a woman ought to have more modesty than a man; but it is not the dispassionate reasoners who will oppose my opinion most earnestly. No: it is the men of fancy, the favourites of the sex, who outwardly respect and inwardly despise the weak creatures they play with. They cannot bring themselves to give up the highest sensual gratification, or even to relish the epicurism of virtue, which is self-denial.
To take another view of the subject, confining my remarks to women.
The ridiculous falsehoods told to children out of mistaken notions of modesty tend very early to inflame their imaginations and set their little minds working on subjects nature never intended them to think about until the body had reached some degree of maturity — when the passions naturally begin to take the place of the senses as instruments for unfolding the understanding and forming the moral character.
I am afraid it is in nurseries and boarding schools that girls are first spoiled, and particularly in boarding schools. A number of girls sleep in the same room and wash together. And though I should be sorry to contaminate an innocent creature's mind by instilling a false delicacy, or those indecent prudish notions that early cautions about the other sex naturally breed, I should be very anxious to prevent their acquiring indelicate or immodest habits; and since a great many girls have learned very indelicate tricks from ignorant servants, mixing them together indiscriminately in this way is very improper.
To tell the truth, women are in general too familiar with one another, and this leads to the gross familiarity that so often makes married life unhappy. Why in the name of decency are sisters, or female friends, or ladies and their maids, to be so grossly familiar as to forget the respect one human creature owes another? The squeamish delicacy that shrinks from the most disgusting offices when affection or humanity calls us to sit up beside a sickbed is contemptible. But why women in health should be more familiar with each other than men are, when they boast of their superior delicacy, is a puzzle in manners I have never been able to solve.
To preserve health and beauty I would earnestly recommend frequent washing — to dignify my advice so that it may not offend a fastidious ear. And girls ought to be taught by example to wash and dress alone, whatever their rank; and if custom has made them need a little assistance, let them not need it until that part of the business is over which ought never to be done in front of a fellow creature, because it is an insult to the majesty of human nature. Not on the score of modesty, but of decency: for the care some modest women take not to let their legs be seen, while making a display of taking it, is as childish as it is immodest.
Footnote: I remember coming across a sentence in a book on education that made me smile: "It would be needless to caution you against putting your hand, by chance, under your neck handkerchief; for a modest woman never did such a thing."
I could go further, and criticize customs more indelicate still, which men never fall into. Secrets are told where silence ought to reign; and that regard for cleanliness which some religious sects have perhaps carried too far — the Essenes among the Jews particularly, by making an insult to God of what is only an insult to humanity — is violated in a brutal fashion. How can delicate women force on other people's notice that part of the animal economy which is so very disgusting? And is it not quite reasonable to conclude that women who have not been taught to respect the human nature of their own sex in these particulars will not long respect the mere difference of sex in their husbands? Once their maidenly bashfulness is lost, I have generally observed that women fall back into old habits and treat their husbands as they used to treat their sisters or their female acquaintance.
Besides, women, because their minds are not cultivated, have recourse very often to what I familiarly call bodily wit, and their intimacies are of the same kind. In short, in mind and in body alike, they are too intimate. That decent personal reserve which is the foundation of dignity of character must be kept up between women, or their minds will never gain either strength or modesty.
On this account too I object to numbers of women being shut up together in nurseries, schools or convents. I cannot recall without indignation the jokes and hoyden tricks that knots of young women indulged in when, in my youth, accident threw me, an awkward country girl, in their way. They were almost on a level with the double meanings that shake a convivial table once the glass has gone round freely. But it is useless to try to keep the heart pure unless the head is furnished with ideas and set to work comparing them, so as to acquire judgment by generalizing the simple ones, and modesty by making the understanding damp down the sensibility.
It may be thought that I lay too much stress on personal reserve; but reserve is always the handmaid of modesty. So that if I were to name the graces that ought to adorn beauty, I should exclaim at once: cleanliness, neatness and personal reserve. It is obvious, I suppose, that the reserve I mean has nothing to do with sex, and that I think it equally necessary in both. So necessary indeed is that reserve, and that cleanliness which indolent women too often neglect, that I will venture to say that where two or three women live in the same house, the one who is most respected by the men of the family living with them — leaving love entirely out of the question — will be the one who pays this kind of habitual respect to her own person.
When friends who live together meet in the morning, an affectionate seriousness naturally prevails, especially if each is looking forward to the duties of the day. It may be reckoned fanciful, but this feeling has often risen unbidden in my mind. After breathing the sweet bracing morning air I have been pleased to see the same freshness in the faces I particularly loved; I was glad to see them braced, as it were, for the day, and ready to run their course with the sun. The greetings of affection in the morning are in this way more respectful than the familiar tenderness that so often prolongs the evening's talk. Indeed I have often felt hurt, not to say disgusted, when a friend I parted from fully dressed the evening before appeared with her clothes huddled on, because she had chosen to indulge herself in bed until the last moment.
Domestic affection can only be kept alive by these neglected attentions. Yet if men and women took half as much trouble to be habitually neat as they take to ornament, or rather to disfigure, their persons, a great deal would be done towards attaining purity of mind. But women only dress to gratify men of gallantry; a lover is always best pleased with the simple garment that sits close to the shape. There is an impertinence about ornament that repels affection, because love always clings round the idea of home.
As a sex, women are habitually indolent, and everything conspires to make them so. I do not forget the starts of activity that sensibility produces; but as these flights of feeling only increase the evil, they must not be confused with the slow, orderly walk of reason. So great in reality is their indolence of body and mind that until the body is strengthened and the understanding enlarged by active exertion there is little reason to expect modesty to take the place of bashfulness. They may find it prudent to assume the appearance of it; but the fair veil will only be worn on gala days.
Perhaps there is no virtue that mixes so kindly with every other as modesty. It is the pale moonbeam that makes every virtue it softens more interesting, giving a mild grandeur to a narrow horizon. Nothing could be more beautiful than the poetic fiction that makes Diana, with her silver crescent, the goddess of chastity. I have sometimes thought that as she wandered with sedate step in some lonely place, a modest lady of antiquity must have felt a glow of conscious dignity when, after contemplating the soft shadowy landscape, she invited with placid fervour the mild reflection of her sister's beams to turn towards her own chaste breast.
A Christian has still nobler motives for preserving her chastity and acquiring modesty, for her body has been called the temple of the living God — of that God who requires more than a modest bearing. His eye searches the heart; and let her remember that if she hopes to find favour in the sight of purity itself, her chastity must be founded on modesty and not on worldly prudence, or truly a good reputation will be her only reward. For that awful intercourse, that sacred communion which virtue establishes between a human being and its Maker must give rise to the wish to be as pure as he is pure.
After these remarks it is almost superfluous to add that I consider all those feminine airs of maturity that succeed bashfulness to be immodest — the airs to which truth is sacrificed in order to secure a husband's heart, or rather to force him to go on being a lover when nature, if she had not been interrupted, would have made love give place to friendship. The tenderness a man feels for the mother of his children is an excellent substitute for the ardour of unsatisfied passion; but to prolong that ardour it is indelicate, not to say immodest, for a woman to feign an unnatural coldness of constitution. Women, like men, ought to have the common appetites and passions of their nature; those are only brutal when they are unchecked by reason, and the obligation to check them is a human duty, not a duty of one sex. In these respects nature may safely be left to herself. Let women only acquire knowledge and humanity, and love will teach them modesty. There is no need of falsehoods as disgusting as they are futile, for studied rules of behaviour only impose on shallow observers; a man of sense soon sees through the affectation and despises it.
The behaviour of young people towards each other as men and women is the last thing that should be thought about in education. In fact behaviour is now so much thought about in most circumstances that simplicity of character is rarely to be seen. Yet if men were only anxious to cultivate each virtue and let it take firm root in the mind, the grace that results from it, which is its natural outward mark, would soon strip affectation of its flaunting plumes; for conduct that is not founded on truth is as fallacious as it is unstable.
Footnote: The behaviour of many newly married women has often disgusted me. They seem anxious never to let their husbands forget the privilege of marriage, and to find no pleasure in his company unless he is playing the lover. The reign of love must indeed be short when the flame is constantly blown up like that without being given any solid fuel.
If you would really possess modesty, O my sisters, you must remember that the possession of virtue of any kind is incompatible with ignorance and vanity. You must acquire that soberness of mind which only the exercise of duties and the pursuit of knowledge can inspire, or you will still be left in a doubtful, dependent situation, and be loved only while you are beautiful. The downcast eye, the rosy blush, the retiring grace are all proper in their season; but modesty, being the child of reason, cannot exist for long alongside a sensibility untempered by reflection. Besides, when love, even innocent love, is the whole employment of your lives, your hearts will be too soft to give modesty that tranquil retreat where she loves to live, in close union with humanity.
It occurred to me long ago that the advice about behaviour, and all the various ways of preserving a good reputation, which have been so strenuously drummed into the female world, were plausible poisons that encrusted morality and ate away its substance — and that this measuring of shadows produced a false calculation, since a shadow's length depends so much on the height of the sun and on other accidental circumstances.
Where does a courtier's easy, deceptive manner come from? From his situation, undoubtedly; for, needing dependants, he is obliged to learn the art of refusing without giving offence, and of feeding hope evasively on the chameleon's diet of air. So politeness plays with truth, and, eating away the sincerity and humanity natural to a man, produces the fine gentleman.
Women in the same way acquire, from a supposed necessity, an equally artificial way of behaving. Yet truth is not to be played with unpunished, for the practised dissembler ends by becoming the dupe of his own arts. He loses that shrewdness which has justly been called common sense — a quick perception of the common truths that an unsophisticated mind always accepts as truths, even if it would not have had energy enough to discover them for itself when they were obscured by local prejudice. Most people take their opinions on trust to save themselves the trouble of exercising their own minds, and these indolent beings naturally cling to the letter rather than the spirit of a law, divine or human. "Women," says an author whose name I cannot recall, "do not mind what only heaven sees." And why indeed should they? It is the eye of man they have been taught to dread; and if they can lull their Argus to sleep they seldom think about heaven or about themselves, because their reputation is safe. And it is reputation, not chastity with all its fair train, that they are employed in keeping spotless — not as a virtue, but to preserve their station in the world.
To prove the truth of this remark I need only point to the intrigues of married women, particularly in high life, and in countries where women are married off suitably to their respective ranks by their parents. If an innocent girl falls prey to love, she is degraded forever, though her mind has not been polluted by the arts that married women practise under the convenient cloak of marriage, and though she has violated no duty except the duty of respecting herself. The married woman, on the contrary, breaks a most sacred engagement, and becomes a cruel mother when she becomes a false and faithless wife. If her husband still has any affection for her, the arts she must practise to deceive him will make her the most contemptible of human beings; and in any case the contrivances necessary to keep up appearances will keep her mind in that childish or vicious turmoil which destroys all its energy. Besides, in time, like people who habitually take cordials to raise their spirits, she will need an intrigue to give life to her thoughts, having lost all relish for pleasures that are not highly seasoned with hope or fear.
Sometimes married women behave still more audaciously. I will mention an instance.
A woman of quality, notorious for her gallantries, though nobody chose to place her in the class where she belonged since she still lived with her husband, made a point of treating with the most insulting contempt a poor timid creature who was abashed by the memory of her own former weakness, and whom a neighbouring gentleman had seduced and afterwards married. This woman had actually confused virtue with reputation; and I do believe she prided herself on the propriety of her behaviour before marriage, though once she was settled to her family's satisfaction, she and her lord were equally faithless — so that the half-alive heir to an immense estate came from heaven knows where.
To look at the subject in another light.
I have known a number of women who, if they did not love their husbands, loved nobody else either, giving themselves up entirely to vanity and dissipation and neglecting every domestic duty — even squandering money that should have been saved for their helpless younger children — and who yet plumed themselves on an unsullied reputation, as though the whole compass of their duty as wives and mothers were simply to preserve it. Other indolent women, neglecting every personal duty, have thought they deserved their husbands' affection because in this one respect they behaved with propriety.
Weak minds are always fond of resting in the ceremonies of duty, but morality offers much simpler motives; and it would have been better if superficial moralists had said less about behaviour and outward observances. For unless virtue of any kind is built on knowledge, it will produce nothing but a kind of insipid decency. Respect for the opinion of the world has, however, been called a woman's chief duty in so many words, for Rousseau declares "that reputation is no less indispensable than chastity". "A man," he adds, "secure in his own good conduct, depends only on himself and may brave public opinion; but a woman in behaving well performs only half her duty, since what is thought of her is as important to her as what she really is. It follows that the system of a woman's education should in this respect be directly contrary to ours. Opinion is the grave of virtue among men, but its throne among women." It is strictly logical to infer that a virtue resting on opinion is merely worldly, and that it is the virtue of a being to whom reason has been denied. But even as far as the opinion of the world goes, I am convinced that this class of reasoners is mistaken.
This regard for reputation, quite apart from being one of the natural rewards of virtue, took its rise from a cause I have already deplored as the grand source of female depravity: the impossibility of regaining respectability by returning to virtue, while men keep theirs throughout the indulgence of vice. It was natural, then, for women to try to preserve what, once lost, was lost forever, until this one care swallowed up every other, and a reputation for chastity became the one thing needful. But the scrupulousness of ignorance is vain; for neither religion nor virtue, when they live in the heart, requires such childish attention to mere ceremonies, since behaviour must on the whole be proper when the motive is pure.
I can produce very respectable authority in support of my opinion; and the authority of a cool reasoner ought to carry weight enough to enforce consideration, if not to establish a sentiment. Speaking of the general laws of morality, Dr. Smith observes: "By some very extraordinary and unlucky circumstance a good man may come to be suspected of a crime he was altogether incapable of, and may on that account be most unjustly exposed for the rest of his life to the horror and aversion of humankind. By an accident of this kind he may be said to lose everything, in spite of his integrity and justice, in the same way that a cautious man may be ruined by an earthquake or a flood in spite of the utmost circumspection. Accidents of the first kind, however, are perhaps rarer still, and still more contrary to the common course of things, than those of the second; and it remains true that the practice of truth, justice and humanity is a certain and almost infallible method of acquiring what those virtues chiefly aim at, the confidence and love of the people we live among. A person may easily be misrepresented with regard to a particular action; but it is scarcely possible that he should be misrepresented with regard to the general tenor of his conduct. An innocent man may be believed to have done wrong; this, however, will rarely happen. On the contrary, the established opinion of the innocence of his conduct will often lead us to acquit him where he really has been at fault, in spite of very strong presumptions."
I entirely agree with this writer, for I truly believe that few people of either sex have ever been despised for certain vices without deserving to be. I am not speaking of the slander of the moment, which hangs over a character like one of the dense November fogs over this city until it gradually clears in the common light of day. I only maintain that the daily conduct of most people stamps their character with the impression of truth. Quietly the clear light, shining day after day, refutes the ignorant guess or the malicious tale that has thrown dirt on a pure character. A false light distorted its shadow, reputation, for a short time; but the shadow seldom fails to become true again once the cloud that caused the trick of vision has dispersed.
Many people, undoubtedly, obtain a better reputation in various respects than, strictly speaking, they deserve, for unremitting industry will generally reach its goal in every kind of race. Those who strive only for this paltry prize, like the Pharisees who prayed at the street corners to be seen by men, do truly get the reward they were after; for the heart of one human being cannot be read by another. Still, the fair fame that is naturally reflected by good actions, when a man is only concerned to direct his own steps rightly and pays no attention to onlookers, is generally not only truer but surer.
There are trials, it is true, in which a good man must appeal to God against the injustice of men, and, amid the whining candour or the hissing of envy, must build a pavilion in his own mind to retire into until the rumour has passed over. The darts of undeserved censure may indeed pierce an innocent, tender heart through with many sorrows. But these are all exceptions to the general rule, and it is by the common laws that human behaviour ought to be regulated. The eccentric orbit of a comet never affects astronomical calculations about the unvarying order established in the motion of the principal bodies of the solar system.
I will venture to say, then, that once a man has reached maturity, the general outline of his character in the world is a just one, allowing for the exceptions I have mentioned. I do not say that a prudent, worldly-wise man with nothing but negative virtues and qualities may not sometimes get a smoother reputation than a wiser or a better man. So far from it, that I am inclined to conclude from experience that where two people's virtue is roughly equal, the more negative character will be better liked by the world at large, while the other may have more friends in private life. But the hills and valleys, the clouds and sunshine so conspicuous in the virtues of great men set each other off; and though they give envious weakness a fairer mark to shoot at, the real character will still work its way into the light, however bespattered by weak affection or ingenious malice.
Footnote: I have various biographical writings in mind, but particularly Boswell's Life of Johnson.
As for the anxiety to preserve a hard-earned reputation, which leads shrewd people to analyse it, I shall not make the obvious comment; but I am afraid that morality is very insidiously undermined in the female world by attention being turned to the show instead of the substance. A simple thing is thus made strangely complicated; indeed, virtue and its shadow are sometimes set at odds. We should probably never have heard of Lucretia if she had died to preserve her chastity instead of her reputation. If we really deserve our own good opinion we shall generally be respected in the world; but if we long for higher improvement and higher attainments, it is not enough to see ourselves as we suppose others see us, though this has been ingeniously argued to be the foundation of our moral sentiments — because every bystander has his own prejudices, besides the prejudices of his age and country. We should rather try to see ourselves as we suppose that Being sees us who watches each thought ripen into action, and whose judgment never swerves from the eternal rule of right. Righteous are all his judgments, and as just as they are merciful.
Footnote: Smith.
The humble mind that seeks to find favour in his sight, and calmly examines its conduct when only his presence is felt, will seldom form a very mistaken opinion of its own virtues. In the still hour of self-collection, the angry brow of offended justice will be fearfully deprecated, or else the tie that draws a human being to the Deity will be recognized in that pure sentiment of reverential adoration which swells the heart without stirring up any tumultuous emotion. In these solemn moments a man discovers in himself the germ of the vices that, like the Java tree, shed a pestilential vapour all round them — death is in the shade! — and he sees them without abhorrence, because he feels himself drawn by some cord of love to all his fellow creatures, whose follies he is anxious to find every excuse for in their nature, and in his own. If I, he may argue, who exercise my own mind and have been refined by tribulation, find the serpent's egg in some fold of my own heart and crush it only with difficulty, shall I not pity those who were stamped with less vigour, or who heedlessly nursed the insidious reptile until it poisoned the vital stream it fed on? Can I, conscious of my own secret sins, cast off my fellow creatures and watch calmly while they drop into the chasm of perdition that yawns to receive them? No, no. The agonized heart will cry out with suffocating impatience: I too am human, and have vices, hidden perhaps from every human eye, that bend me to the dust before God, and that tell me loudly when everything else is silent that we are formed of the same earth and breathe the same air. Humanity rises naturally out of humility in this way, and twists the cords of love that wind about the heart in so many convolutions.
This sympathy reaches further still, until a man is well pleased to see force in arguments that carry no conviction to his own breast, and gladly puts in the fairest light for himself the shows of reason that have led others astray, glad to find some reason in all the errors of humankind, though he was convinced already that He who rules the day makes his sun shine on everyone. Yet even while shaking hands, as it were, with corruption, with one foot on the earth, the other mounts with bold strides to heaven and claims kinship with higher natures. Virtues unnoticed by men drop their balmy fragrance at this cool hour, and the thirsty land, refreshed by the pure streams of comfort that suddenly gush out, is crowned with smiling green. This is the living green on which that eye may look with pleasure which is too pure to look on iniquity.
But my spirits are flagging, and I must silently indulge the reverie these reflections lead to, unable to describe the feelings that have calmed my soul when, watching the rising sun, a soft shower drizzling through the leaves of the neighbouring trees seemed to fall on my languid but tranquil spirits, cooling a heart that had been heated by the passions reason was labouring to tame.
The leading principles running through all my discussions would make it unnecessary to enlarge on this subject, if a constant attention to keeping the varnish of the character fresh and in good condition were not so often taught as the sum total of a woman's duty, and if rules for regulating the behaviour and preserving the reputation did not so frequently supersede moral obligations. But where reputation is concerned, all the attention is confined to a single virtue: chastity. If a woman's honour, as it is absurdly called, is safe, she may neglect every social duty, and even ruin her family by gambling and extravagance, and still present a shameless front — for truly she is an honourable woman.
Mrs. Macaulay has justly observed that "there is only one fault a woman of honour may not commit with impunity." She then adds, justly and humanely: "This has given rise to the trite and foolish observation that a woman's first fault against chastity has a radical power to deprave her character. But no such frail beings come out of the hands of nature. The human mind is built of nobler materials than to be corrupted so easily; and with all their disadvantages of situation and education, women seldom become entirely abandoned until they are thrown into a state of desperation by the venomous rancour of their own sex."
But in proportion as this regard for a reputation of chastity is prized by women, it is despised by men; and the two extremes are equally destructive to morality.
Men are certainly more under the influence of their appetites than women, and their appetites are more depraved by unbridled indulgence and by the fastidious contrivances of satiety. Luxury has introduced a refinement in eating that destroys the constitution, and a degree of gluttony so beastly that all sense of seemliness must be worn away before one human being could eat immoderately in the presence of another and afterwards complain of the oppression his own intemperance naturally produced. Some women, and Frenchwomen particularly, have also lost their sense of decency here, for they will talk very calmly about an indigestion. It is to be wished that idleness were not allowed to breed on the rank soil of wealth those swarms of summer insects that feed on putrefaction; then we should not be disgusted by the sight of such brutal excesses.
There is one rule about behaviour that I think ought to govern every other, and it is simply to cherish such a habitual respect for humankind as will keep us from disgusting a fellow creature for the sake of some present indulgence. The shameful indolence of many married women, and of others a little advanced in life, often leads them to sin against delicacy. For though they are convinced that the person is the bond of union between the sexes, how often, out of sheer indolence or to enjoy some trifling indulgence, do they disgust?
The depravity of the appetite that brings the sexes together has had a still more fatal effect. Nature must always be the standard of taste, the gauge of appetite — and yet how grossly the voluptuary insults nature. Leaving the refinements of love out of the question, nature, by making the gratification of this appetite, like every other, a natural and imperious law for preserving the species, exalts the appetite and mixes a little mind and affection with a sensual relish. The feelings of a parent, mingling with an instinct that is merely animal, give it dignity; and, since the man and the woman often meet on the child's account, a mutual interest and affection is excited by the exercise of a common sympathy. Women, then, having some duty to fulfil nobler than adorning their persons, would not be content to be the slaves of a casual appetite, which is the present situation of a very considerable number of them who are, quite literally, standing dishes that any glutton may help himself from.
I may be told that, great as this enormity is, it affects only a devoted portion of my sex — devoted for the salvation of the rest. But quite apart from the falsity, easily proved, of any assertion that recommends sanctioning a small evil to produce a greater good, the mischief does not stop there. The moral character and peace of mind of the chaster part of the sex is undermined by the conduct of the very women they allow no refuge from guilt; whom they inexorably consign to practising the arts that lure their husbands from them, debauch their sons, and force them — let no modest woman start at this — to take on something of the same character themselves. For I will venture to assert that all the causes of female weakness, and of female depravity, that I have already enlarged on branch out of one grand cause: the want of chastity in men.
This intemperance, so prevalent, depraves the appetite to such a degree that a wanton stimulus is needed to rouse it; but nature's parental design is forgotten, and the mere person, and that only for a moment, engrosses the thoughts. Indeed the lustful prowler often grows so voluptuous that he refines on female softness.
To satisfy this taste in men, women are made systematically voluptuous; and though they may not all carry their libertinism to the same length, this heartless intercourse that men allow themselves with the sex depraves both sexes, because men's taste is vitiated, and women of every class naturally square their behaviour to gratify the taste through which they obtain pleasure and power. Women, consequently becoming weaker in mind and body than they ought to be if one of the grand ends of their being were taken into account, the bearing and nursing of children, have not strength enough to discharge a mother's first duty; and, sacrificing to lasciviousness the parental affection that ennobles instinct, they either destroy the embryo in the womb or cast it off once it is born. Nature demands respect in everything, and those who violate her laws seldom violate them with impunity. The weak, enervated women who particularly catch a libertine's attention are unfit to be mothers though they may conceive; so that the rich sensualist who has rioted among women, spreading depravity and misery, receives from his wife, when he wishes to perpetuate his name, nothing but a half-formed being that inherits both its father's and its mother's weakness.
In contrasting the humanity of the present age with the barbarism of antiquity, great stress has been laid on the savage custom of exposing children whom their parents could not maintain; while the man of sensibility who perhaps makes the complaint produces by his promiscuous amours a most destructive barrenness and a contagious viciousness of manners. Surely nature never intended that women, by satisfying an appetite, should defeat the very purpose that appetite was implanted for.
I have observed before that men ought to maintain the women they have seduced; this would be one means of reforming female manners and stopping an abuse that has an equally fatal effect on population and on morals. Another, no less obvious, would be to turn women's attention to the real virtue of chastity. For a woman has little claim to respect on the score of modesty, though her reputation may be white as driven snow, if she smiles on the libertine while she spurns the victims of his lawless appetites and their own folly.
Besides, pure as she thinks herself, she has a taint of the same folly when she studiously adorns her person only to be looked at by men, to excite respectful sighs and all the idle homage of what is called innocent gallantry. If women really respected virtue for its own sake, they would not look for compensation in vanity for the self-denial they must practise to preserve their reputation, nor would they keep company with men who defy reputation altogether.
The two sexes mutually corrupt and mutually improve each other. I believe this to be an indisputable truth, and I extend it to every virtue. Chastity, modesty, public spirit and all the noble train of virtues on which social virtue and happiness are built should be understood and cultivated by everyone, or they will be cultivated to little effect. And instead of giving the vicious or the idle a pretext for violating some sacred duty by calling it a duty of one sex only, it would be wiser to show that nature has made no such difference — that the unchaste man doubly defeats the purpose of nature, by making women barren and destroying his own constitution, though he escapes the shame that pursues the same crime in the other sex. Those are the physical consequences; the moral ones are more alarming still. For virtue is only a name when the duties of citizens, husbands, wives, fathers, mothers and heads of families become nothing but the selfish ties of convenience.
Why, then, do philosophers look for public spirit? Public spirit must be nourished by private virtue, or it will be like that artificial sentiment which makes women careful of their reputation and men careful of their honour — a sentiment that often exists without any virtue to support it, and without that sublime morality which makes the habitual breach of one duty a breach of the whole moral law.
From the respect paid to property flow, as from a poisoned spring, most of the evils and vices that make this world such a dreary scene to a contemplative mind. For it is in the most polished society that noisome reptiles and venomous serpents lurk under the rank grass; and there voluptuousness is pampered by the still, sultry air, which relaxes every good disposition before it can ripen into virtue.
One class presses on another, since all are aiming to win respect on account of their property; and property, once gained, will procure the respect that is only due to talents and virtue. Men neglect the duties that belong to them as men and are treated like demigods all the same; religion too is separated from morality by a ceremonial veil — and then men wonder that the world is almost literally a den of sharpers or of oppressors.
There is a homely proverb that speaks a shrewd truth: whoever the devil finds idle, he will employ. And what but habitual idleness can hereditary wealth and titles produce? For a man is so constituted that he can only come to a proper use of his faculties by exercising them, and he will not exercise them unless necessity of some kind first sets the wheels in motion. Virtue likewise can only be acquired by discharging the duties we owe to one another; but the importance of these sacred duties will hardly be felt by a being who has been flattered out of his humanity by sycophants. There must be more equality established in society, or morality will never gain ground; and this virtuous equality will not stand firm even when it is founded on a rock, if one half of humankind is chained to the bottom of it by fate, for they will be continually undermining it out of ignorance or pride.
It is vain to expect virtue from women until they are to some degree independent of men. It is vain, indeed, to expect that strength of natural affection which would make them good wives and good mothers. While they are absolutely dependent on their husbands they will be cunning, mean and selfish; and men who can be gratified by the fawning fondness of a spaniel-like affection have not much delicacy, for love is not to be bought in any sense of the word — its silken wings shrivel up the instant anything but a return in kind is looked for. Yet while wealth enervates men, and women live, as it were, by their personal charms, how can we expect either to discharge those ennobling duties that require exertion and self-denial alike? Hereditary property sophisticates the mind, and its unfortunate victims, if I may put it that way, swaddled from their birth, seldom exert the locomotive faculty of body or of mind. Seeing everything through one medium, and that a false one, they cannot make out where true merit and happiness lie. False indeed the light must be, when the drapery of a situation hides the man and makes him stalk about in masquerade, dragging from one scene of dissipation to another the nerveless limbs that hang in stupid listlessness, and rolling the vacant eye that tells us plainly there is nobody at home.
I mean to infer, therefore, that any society is improperly organized which does not compel men and women to discharge their respective duties by making that the only road to the good opinion of their fellow creatures, which every human being wants to gain somehow. The respect paid to wealth and to mere personal charms is consequently a true north-east wind, blighting the tender blossoms of affection and virtue. Nature has wisely attached affections to duties, to sweeten labour and to give the exertions of reason the vigour that only the heart can give. But an affection put on merely because it is the badge assigned to a certain character, while its duties go unfulfilled, is one of those empty compliments that vice and folly are obliged to pay to virtue and to the real nature of things.
To illustrate my opinion I need only observe that when a woman is admired for her beauty and lets herself be so far intoxicated by the admiration that she neglects the indispensable duty of a mother, she sins against herself by neglecting to cultivate an affection that would equally tend to make her useful and happy. True happiness — by which I mean all the contentment and virtuous satisfaction that can be snatched in this imperfect state — must arise from well-regulated affections, and every affection includes a duty. Men are not aware of the misery they cause, and the vicious weakness they encourage, by urging women to do nothing but make themselves pleasing. They do not consider that they thus set natural and artificial duties clashing, sacrificing the comfort and respectability of a woman's whole life to voluptuous notions of beauty, when in nature all of it harmonizes.
Cold must be the heart of a husband, unless early debauchery has made him unnatural, who does not feel more delight in seeing his child nursed by its mother than the most artful wanton tricks could ever raise in him. Yet wealth leads women to spurn this natural way of cementing the marriage tie and twining esteem in with fonder recollections. To preserve their beauty and wear the flowery crown of the day, which gives them a sort of right to reign for a short time, they neglect to stamp impressions on their husbands' hearts that would be remembered with more tenderness, when the snow on the head began to chill the breast, than even their virgin charms. The maternal solicitude of a reasonable, affectionate woman is a most affecting thing, and the chastened dignity with which a mother returns the caresses that she and her child receive from a father who has been fulfilling the serious duties of his station is not only a respectable but a beautiful sight. So peculiar are my feelings — and I have tried not to catch any artificial ones — that after being wearied by the sight of insipid grandeur, and of the slavish ceremonies that supply the place of domestic affection with cumbrous pomp, I have turned to some other scene to relieve my eye by resting it on the refreshing green nature scatters everywhere. I have looked with pleasure then at a woman nursing her children and discharging the duties of her station with, perhaps, only one servant to take the drudgery of the household off her hands. I have seen her prepare herself and her children, with no luxury but cleanliness, to receive her husband, who came home weary in the evening to find smiling babies and a clean hearth. My heart has loitered among the group, and has even throbbed with sympathetic emotion when the scraping of the well-known foot outside raised a pleasing tumult.
While my benevolence was gratified by contemplating this artless picture, I have thought that a couple of this description, equally necessary to and independent of each other because each fulfilled the duties of their station, possessed everything life can give. Raised far enough above abject poverty not to have to weigh the consequence of every farthing they spend, and with enough not to be driven to the frigid system of economy that narrows heart and mind together. My conceptions are so vulgar, I confess, that I do not know what more is wanted to make this the happiest as well as the most respectable situation in the world, except a taste for literature to throw a little variety and interest into their conversation, and some spare money to give to the needy and to buy books with. For it is not pleasant, when the heart is opened by compassion and the head busy arranging plans of usefulness, to have a prim little imp forever twitching your elbow back to keep your hand from drawing out an almost empty purse, and whispering some prudential maxim about justice coming first.
Destructive as riches and inherited honours are to the human character, women are if possible more debased and cramped by them than men, because men may still unfold their faculties to some degree by becoming soldiers and statesmen.
As soldiers, I grant, they can now mostly gather nothing but vainglorious laurels, while they adjust the European balance to a hair, taking particular care that no bleak northern corner or strait tips the beam. But the days of true heroism are over, when a citizen fought for his country like a Fabricius or a Washington and then went back to his farm to let his virtuous fervour run in a more placid but no less wholesome stream. No: our British heroes come more often from the gaming table than from the plough, and their passions have been inflamed by hanging in dumb suspense on the turn of a die rather than sublimated by panting after the adventurous march of virtue in the pages of history.
The statesman, it is true, might more properly leave the faro bank or the card table to take the helm, for he has still only to shuffle and to trick. The whole system of British politics, if it may courteously be called a system, consists in multiplying dependants and contriving taxes that grind the poor to pamper the rich; so a war, or any wild goose chase, is what common speech calls a lucky turn-up of patronage for the minister, whose chief merit is the art of keeping himself in place.
It is not necessary, then, that he should have any bowels for the poor, so long as he can secure the odd trick for his family. Or if some show of respect for what is called with ignorant ostentation an Englishman's birthright happens to be expedient, in order to fool the gruff mastiff he has to lead by the nose, he can make an empty show very safely by giving his own single vote and letting his light squadron file off to the other side. And when a question of humanity is raised, he may dip a sop in the milk of human kindness to silence Cerberus, and talk of the interest his heart takes in an attempt to stop the earth crying out for vengeance as it drinks in its children's blood — while his cold hand at that very moment rivets their chains by sanctioning the abominable trade. A minister is a minister only so long as he can carry a point he is determined to carry. Yet it is not necessary for a minister to feel like a man, when a bold push might shake his seat.
But to have done with these episodes, let me come back to the more plausible slavery that chains the very soul of woman, keeping her forever in the bondage of ignorance.
The preposterous distinctions of rank, which make civilization a curse by dividing the world between voluptuous tyrants and cunning, envious dependants, corrupt almost every class of people equally; because respectability is attached not to discharging the duties of life but to the station, and when the duties are not fulfilled, the affections cannot gain strength enough to fortify the virtue they are the natural reward of. Still, there are a few loopholes a man may creep out of and dare to think and act for himself; but for a woman it is a herculean task, because she has difficulties peculiar to her sex to overcome, which take almost superhuman powers.
A truly benevolent legislator always tries to make it every individual's interest to be virtuous; and so, private virtue becoming the cement of public happiness, an orderly whole is consolidated by the tendency of all the parts towards a common centre. But the private or public virtue of women is very doubtful, for Rousseau and a long list of male writers insist that she should be subject all her life to a severe restraint, the restraint of propriety. Why subject her to propriety — blind propriety — if she is capable of acting from a nobler spring, if she is an heir of immortality? Is sugar always to be produced by human blood? Is one half of the human species, like the enslaved Africans, to be subject to prejudices that brutalize them, when principles would be a surer guard, and all so that the cup of man may be sweetened? Is this not an indirect way of denying women reason? For a gift is a mockery if it is unfit for use.
Women, like men, are made weak and luxurious by the relaxing pleasures wealth procures; but besides that, they are made slaves to their persons, and must make themselves alluring so that a man may lend them his reason to guide their tottering steps aright. Or, if they are ambitious, they must govern their tyrants by underhand tricks; for where there are no rights there can be no duties either. The laws respecting women, which I mean to discuss in a later part, make an absurd unit of a man and his wife; and then, by the easy transition of considering only him as responsible, she is reduced to a mere cipher.
The being who discharges the duties of its station is independent; and, speaking of women at large, their first duty is to themselves as rational creatures, and the next in importance, as citizens, is the one that includes so many others, the duty of a mother. Any rank in life that excuses them from fulfilling this duty necessarily degrades them by turning them into dolls. Or, if they do turn to something more important than fitting drapery on a smooth block, their minds are occupied by some soft platonic attachment; or the actual management of an intrigue may keep their thoughts moving. For when they neglect domestic duties they have no power to take the field and march and countermarch like soldiers, or to wrangle in the senate, to keep their faculties from rusting.
I know that Rousseau has exultingly exclaimed, as proof of the inferiority of the sex, how can they leave the nursery for the camp? And the camp has been called by some moralists the school of the most heroic virtues, though I think it would puzzle a keen casuist to prove the reasonableness of most of the wars that have dubbed men heroes. I do not mean to consider the question critically, because, having often looked on these freaks of ambition as the first natural mode of civilization, when the ground must be torn up and the woods cleared by fire and sword, I do not choose to call them pests. But surely the present system of war has little connection with virtue of any description, being rather the school of finesse and effeminacy than of fortitude.
Yet if defensive war, the only justifiable war in the present advanced state of society, where virtue can show its face and ripen amid the rigours that purify the air on a mountain top, were alone adopted as just and glorious, then the true heroism of antiquity might animate women's breasts again. But gently, gentle reader, male or female, do not alarm yourself; for though I have contrasted the character of a modern soldier with that of a civilized woman, I am not going to advise women to turn their distaffs into muskets, however sincerely I wish to see the bayonet turned into a pruning hook. I was only refreshing an imagination wearied with contemplating the vices and follies that all flow from a foul stream of wealth which has muddied the pure rills of natural affection — refreshing it by supposing that society may some day be so constituted that a man must fulfil the duties of a citizen or be despised, and that while he was employed in some department of civil life his wife, an active citizen too, would be equally intent on managing her family, educating her children and helping her neighbours.
But to make her really virtuous and useful, if she discharges her civil duties she must not be left without the protection of the civil laws as an individual; she must not depend on her husband's bounty for her subsistence during his life or her support after his death. For how can a being be generous who has nothing of her own, or virtuous who is not free? The wife who in the present state of things is faithful to her husband and neither nurses nor educates her children scarcely deserves the name of a wife, and has no right to the name of citizen. But take away natural rights, and duties are at an end.
Women infallibly become nothing but the wanton solace of men when they are so weak in mind and body that they can exert themselves only to chase some frothy pleasure or invent some frivolous fashion. What can be a more melancholy sight to a thinking mind than to look into the many carriages driving helter-skelter about this city in the morning, full of pale-faced creatures flying from themselves? I have often wished, with Dr. Johnson, to set some of them up in a little shop with half a dozen children looking up to their languid faces for support. I am much mistaken if some latent vigour would not soon give health and spirit to their eyes; and some lines drawn by the exercise of reason on those blank cheeks, which before were only dimpled, might restore lost dignity to the character, or rather let it attain the true dignity of its nature. Virtue is not to be acquired even by speculation, much less by the negative supineness that wealth naturally breeds.
Besides, when poverty is more disgraceful than even vice, is morality not cut to the quick? Still, to avoid being misunderstood: though I consider that women in the common walks of life are called by religion and reason to fulfil the duties of wives and mothers, I cannot help lamenting that women of a superior cast have no road open to them by which they could pursue wider plans of usefulness and independence. I may raise a laugh by dropping a hint I mean to pursue at some future time, for I really think that women ought to have representatives, instead of being arbitrarily governed with no direct share allowed them in the deliberations of government.
But since the whole system of representation in this country is now only a convenient handle for despotism, they need not complain, for they are as well represented as a numerous class of hard-working tradesmen who pay for the support of royalty when they can hardly stop their own children's mouths with bread. How are those people represented whose very sweat supports the splendid stable of an heir apparent, or varnishes the carriage of some female favourite who looks down on shame? Taxes on the very necessities of life enable an endless tribe of idle princes and princesses to pass in stupid pomp before a gaping crowd who almost worship the very parade that costs them so dear. This is mere gothic grandeur, something like the barbarous, useless parade of keeping mounted sentries at Whitehall, which I could never look at without a mixture of contempt and indignation.
How strangely the mind must be sophisticated when this sort of state impresses it! But until these monuments of folly are levelled by virtue, similar follies will leaven the whole mass; for the same character will prevail to some degree throughout society taken as a whole. The refinements of luxury, and the vicious repinings of envious poverty, will equally banish virtue from a society, considered as that society's characteristic, or else allow it to appear only as one of the stripes in the harlequin coat that civilized man wears.
In the higher ranks of life every duty is done by deputy, as if duties could ever be waived; and the vain pleasures that the resulting idleness forces the rich to pursue look so enticing to the rank below that the many scramblers after wealth sacrifice everything to tread on their heels. The most sacred trusts are then treated as sinecures, because they were got by influence and only sought so that a man might keep good company. Women in particular all want to be ladies — which is simply to have nothing to do but drift about, hardly caring where, because they cannot tell what for.
But what have women to do in society, I may be asked, except to loiter with an easy grace? Surely you would not condemn them all to suckle fools and chronicle small beer! No. Women might certainly study the art of healing and be physicians as well as nurses. And decency seems to allot midwifery to them, though I am afraid the word midwife will soon give place in our dictionaries to accoucheur, and one proof of the sex's former delicacy be rubbed out of the language.
They might also study politics and settle their benevolence on the broadest basis; for reading history will be hardly more useful than reading romances if it is read as mere biography, and if the character of the times, the political improvements, the arts and so on are not observed — in short, if it is not considered as the history of humanity, and not of the particular men who filled a niche in the temple of fame and then dropped into the black rolling stream of time that sweeps everything silently before it into the shapeless void called eternity. Though how can it be called a shape, that shape had none?
They might likewise go into various kinds of business if they were educated in a more orderly way, and that might save many of them from common and from legal prostitution. Women would not then marry for a living, as men accept places under government and then neglect the duties implied in them; nor would an attempt to earn their own subsistence — a most praiseworthy attempt — sink them almost to the level of the poor abandoned creatures who live by prostitution. For are milliners and dressmakers not reckoned the next class down? The few employments open to women, so far from being liberal, are menial; and when a superior education lets them take charge of children's education as governesses, they are not treated like the tutors of sons — though even clerical tutors are not always treated in a way calculated to make them respectable in their pupils' eyes, to say nothing of their private comfort. But since women educated as gentlewomen are never intended for the humiliating position necessity sometimes forces them into, such positions are regarded as a degradation; and anyone who has to be told that nothing sharpens the sensibility so painfully as such a fall in life knows very little of the human heart.
Some of these women may have been kept from marrying by a proper spirit or delicacy, and others may have had no chance of escaping in that pitiful way from servitude. Is any government not very defective, then, and very careless of the happiness of one half of its members, if it makes no provision for honest, independent women by encouraging them to fill respectable posts? But if their private virtue is to become a public benefit they must have a civil existence in the state, married or single; or we shall go on seeing some worthy woman, whose sensibility undeserved contempt has made painfully acute, droop like "the lily broken down by a ploughshare".
It is a melancholy truth — yet such are the blessed effects of civilization! — that the most respectable women are the most oppressed; and unless their understandings are far above the common run of understandings in either sex, they must become contemptible from being treated as contemptible beings. How many women waste their lives away as the prey of discontent, who might have practised as physicians, run a farm, managed a shop, and stood upright supported by their own industry, instead of hanging their heads surcharged with the dew of sensibility that consumes the very beauty it first gave lustre to! Indeed I doubt whether pity and love are such close kin as poets pretend, for I have seldom seen much compassion excited by the helplessness of women unless they happened to be beautiful — and then, perhaps, pity was the soft handmaid of love, or the harbinger of lust.
How much more respectable is the woman who earns her own bread by fulfilling some duty than the most accomplished beauty! Beauty, did I say? I am so alive to the beauty of moral loveliness, the harmonious propriety that tunes the passions of a well-regulated mind, that I blush at making the comparison. Yet I sigh to think how few women aim at that respectability by withdrawing from the giddy whirl of pleasure, or from the indolent calm that stupefies the good sort of women it draws in.
Proud of their weakness, however, they must always be protected, guarded from care and from all the rough labours that give the mind dignity. If this is the decree of fate, if they will make themselves insignificant and contemptible so as to waste life away sweetly, then let them not expect to be valued when their beauty fades; for it is the fate of the fairest flowers to be admired and then pulled to pieces by the careless hand that plucked them. In how many ways do I wish, out of the purest benevolence, to impress this truth on my sex! Yet I fear they will not listen to a truth that dear-bought experience has brought home to many an agitated heart, nor willingly give up the privileges of rank and sex for the privileges of humanity, which those who do not discharge its duties have no claim to.
Those writers are particularly useful, in my opinion, who make one human being feel for another, independently of the station he fills or the drapery of artificial sentiment. I would gladly convince reasonable men of the importance of some of my remarks, and persuade them to weigh the whole tenor of my observations dispassionately. I appeal to their understandings; and as a fellow creature I claim, in the name of my sex, some interest in their hearts. I beg them to help emancipate their companion — to make her a helpmate for them.
If men would only generously snap our chains and be content with a rational fellowship instead of slavish obedience, they would find us more observant daughters, more affectionate sisters, more faithful wives, more reasonable mothers — in a word, better citizens. We should then love them with a true affection, because we should have learned to respect ourselves; and a worthy man's peace of mind would not be disturbed by his wife's idle vanity, nor his babies sent to nestle at a stranger's breast because they never found a home at their mother's.
Parental affection is perhaps the blindest form of a perverse self-love; for we do not have, as the French do, two separate terms to distinguish the pursuit of a natural and reasonable desire from the ignorant calculations of weakness. Parents often love their children in the most brutal way and sacrifice every other duty to push them forward in the world — to promote, such is the perversity of unprincipled prejudice, the future welfare of the very beings whose present lives they are embittering by the most despotic stretch of power. Power, in fact, is always true to its own vital principle, for in every shape it wants to reign without check or enquiry. Its throne is built across a dark abyss that no eye must dare to explore, in case the baseless structure should totter under investigation. Obedience, unconditional obedience, is the catchword of tyrants of every description; and, to make assurance doubly sure, one kind of despotism supports another. Tyrants would have cause to tremble if reason ever became the rule of duty in any of the relations of life, for the light might spread until perfect day appeared. And when it did appear, how men would smile at the bogeys they started at during the night of ignorance, or in the twilight of timid enquiry.
Footnote: L'amour propre, l'amour de soi-même.
Parental affection is in many minds nothing but a pretext for tyrannizing where it can be done with impunity; for only good and wise men are content with the kind of respect that will bear discussion. Convinced that they have a right to what they insist on, they do not fear reason, or dread having subjects that come back to natural justice sifted, because they firmly believe that the more enlightened the human mind becomes, the deeper root just and simple principles will take. They do not rest in expedients, or grant that what is metaphysically true can be practically false; disdaining the shifts of the moment, they wait calmly until time sanctions innovation and silences the hiss of selfishness or envy.
If the power of reflecting on the past, and of darting the keen eye of contemplation into the future, is humanity's grand privilege, it must be admitted that some people enjoy that prerogative in a very limited degree. Everything looks wrong to them; and, unable to distinguish the possible from the monstrous, they are afraid where no fear ought to find a place, running from the light of reason as though it were a firebrand. Yet the limits of the possible have never been fixed in a way that could stop a sturdy innovator's hand.
Woman, however, being a slave to prejudice in every situation, seldom exercises an enlightened maternal affection: she either neglects her children or spoils them with improper indulgence. Besides, the affection some women have for their children is, as I have called it before, often quite brutish, for it wipes out every spark of humanity. Justice, truth, everything is sacrificed by these Rebekahs, and for the sake of their own children they violate the most sacred duties, forgetting the common relationship that binds the whole human family together. Yet reason seems to say that anyone who lets one duty or one affection swallow up all the rest has not heart or mind enough to fulfil even that one conscientiously. It then loses the venerable look of a duty and takes on the fantastic shape of a whim.
Since the care of children in infancy is one of the grand duties nature attaches to women, that duty would supply many forcible arguments for strengthening the female understanding, if it were properly considered.
The formation of the mind must begin very early, and the temper in particular needs the most judicious attention — attention that women cannot give if they love their children only because they are their children, and look no further for the foundation of their duty than the feelings of the moment. It is this want of reason in their affections that makes women run so often into extremes, and be either the fondest or the most careless and unnatural of mothers.
To be a good mother, a woman must have sense, and that independence of mind which few women possess who have been taught to depend entirely on their husbands. Meek wives generally make foolish mothers: they want their children to love them best and to take their side in secret against the father, who is held up as a scarecrow. If the children are to be punished, though they have offended the mother, the father must inflict the punishment; he must be judge in every dispute. But I shall discuss this more fully when I come to private education. I only mean to insist here that unless a woman's understanding is enlarged, and her character made firmer by being allowed to govern her own conduct, she will never have sense enough, or command of temper enough, to manage her children properly. Her parental affection hardly deserves the name when it does not lead her to nurse her children herself; for discharging that duty is equally calculated to inspire maternal and filial affection, and it is the indispensable duty of men and women alike to fulfil the duties that give birth to the affections, which are the surest preservatives against vice. Natural affection, so called, I believe to be a very weak tie: affections must grow out of the habitual exercise of a mutual sympathy — and what sympathy does a mother exercise who sends her baby out to a nurse, and only takes it back from the nurse to send it away to school?
In the exercise of their natural feelings, providence has given women a natural substitute for love, for the time when the lover becomes only a friend and mutual confidence takes the place of overstrained admiration. A child then gently twists the slackening cord tight again, and a shared care produces a new shared sympathy. But a child, though it is a pledge of affection, will not enliven that affection if both father and mother are content to hand the charge over to hired help; for those who do their duty by proxy should not complain if they miss the reward of duty. Parental affection produces filial duty.
There seems to be an indolent tendency in us to let long custom always take the place of reason, and to set every duty on an arbitrary foundation. The rights of kings are traced in a direct line from the King of kings, and the rights of parents from our first parent.
Why do we go back like this for principles that ought always to rest on the same base, and that have exactly the weight today they had a thousand years ago, and not a jot more? If parents discharge their duty they have a strong hold and a sacred claim on their children's gratitude; but few parents are willing to receive their children's respectful affection on those terms. They demand blind obedience because they do not deserve a reasonable service; and to make these demands of weakness and ignorance more binding, a mysterious sanctity is spread round the most arbitrary principle in the world — for what else can you call the blind duty of obeying vicious or feeble people merely because they obeyed a powerful instinct?
The reciprocal duty that naturally exists between parent and child can be defined simply, in a few words. The parent who pays proper attention to helpless infancy has a right to require the same attention when the feebleness of age comes on. But to subject a rational being to the mere will of another, once he is old enough to answer to society for his own conduct, is a most cruel and improper stretch of power, and perhaps as damaging to morality as those religious systems which allow right and wrong no existence except in the Divine will.
I have never known a parent who paid more than common attention to his children to be disregarded. On the contrary, the early habit of relying almost implicitly on the opinion of a respected parent is not easily shaken, even when mature reason convinces the child that his father is not the wisest man in the world. This weakness — for a weakness it is, though the epithet amiable is often tacked onto it — a reasonable man must steel himself against. For the absurd duty, too often taught, of obeying a parent merely because he is a parent shackles the mind and prepares it for slavish submission to any power except reason.
Footnote: Dr. Johnson makes the same observation.
I distinguish between the natural duty owed to parents and the accidental one.
The parent who assiduously works to form the heart and enlarge the understanding of his child has given a duty common to the whole animal world the dignity that only reason can give. This is the parental affection of a human being, and it leaves instinctive natural affection far behind. Such a parent acquires all the rights of the most sacred friendship, and his advice, even when his child is well advanced in life, deserves serious consideration.
As for marriage, though after the age of twenty-one a parent seems to have no right to withhold consent on any account, still twenty years of solicitude call for some return; and the son ought at least to promise not to marry for two or three years if the object of his choice does not entirely meet with the approval of his first friend.
But respect for parents is generally a much more debasing principle than that; it is only a selfish respect for property. The father who is blindly obeyed is obeyed out of sheer weakness, or from motives that degrade the human character.
A great proportion of the misery that wanders about the world in hideous shapes is allowed to arise from the negligence of parents; and still these are the very people who cling hardest to what they call a natural right, though it undermines the birthright of every human being, the right of acting by the direction of one's own reason.
I have already had frequent occasion to observe that vicious or indolent people are always eager to profit by enforcing arbitrary privileges, and generally in exactly the proportion in which they neglect the duties that alone make those privileges reasonable. At bottom this is a dictate of common sense, or the instinct of self-defence peculiar to ignorant weakness — like the instinct that makes a fish muddy the water it swims in to escape its enemy, instead of facing him boldly in the clear stream.
From the clear stream of argument the supporters of long custom, of every description, do indeed fly; and, taking refuge in the darkness that sublime poetry has supposed to surround the throne of Omnipotence, they dare to demand the implicit respect that is due only to his unsearchable ways. But let me not be thought presumptuous: the darkness that hides God from us concerns only speculative truths. It never obscures moral ones. Those shine clearly, for God is light, and by the constitution of our nature he never requires the discharge of a duty whose reasonableness does not shine on us the moment we open our eyes.
The indolent parent of high rank may, it is true, extort a show of respect from his child; and on the continent women are particularly subject to the plans of their families, who never think of consulting their inclinations or providing for the comfort of the poor victims of their pride. The consequence is notorious. These dutiful daughters become adulteresses and neglect the education of their own children, from whom they in their turn exact the same kind of obedience.
Women in every country are, it is true, too much under the dominion of their parents; and few parents think of addressing their children in the following way, though this is the reasonable way in which Heaven itself seems to command the whole human race. It is in your interest to obey me until you can judge for yourself; and the Almighty Father of all has planted an affection in me to serve as a guard for you while your reason is unfolding. But when your mind reaches maturity you must obey me, or rather respect my opinions, only so far as they agree with the light that is breaking in on your own mind.
A slavish bondage to parents cramps every faculty of the mind; and Mr. Locke very judiciously observes that "if the mind is curbed and humbled too much in children, if their spirits are abased and broken by too strict a hand over them, they lose all their vigour and industry." This strict hand may to some degree account for the weakness of women; for girls, from various causes, are kept down by their parents more than boys, in every sense of the phrase. The duty expected of them, like all the duties arbitrarily imposed on women, comes more from a sense of propriety, more out of respect for decorum, than from reason; and so, taught to submit slavishly to their parents, they are prepared for the slavery of marriage. I may be told that a great many women are not slaves in the married state. True; but then they become tyrants, for what they get is not rational freedom but a lawless kind of power, resembling the authority wielded by the favourites of absolute monarchs, and obtained by debasing means. Nor do I dream of hinting that boys or girls are always slaves. I only insist that when they are obliged to submit to authority blindly, their faculties are weakened and their tempers made either imperious or abject. I lament too that parents, lazily availing themselves of a supposed privilege, damp the first faint glimmer of reason, and at the same time make the very duty they are so anxious to enforce an empty name, because they will not let it rest on the only basis a duty can rest on securely. For unless it is founded on knowledge it cannot gain strength enough to resist the squalls of passion, or the silent sapping of self-love. But it is not the parents who have given the surest proof of their affection for their children — or, to speak more properly, who by fulfilling their duty have let a natural parental affection take root in their hearts, the child of exercised sympathy and reason and not the overweening offspring of selfish pride — who insist most vehemently on their children submitting to their will merely because it is their will. On the contrary, the parent who sets a good example patiently lets that example work, and it seldom fails to produce its natural effect: filial respect.
Children cannot be taught too early to submit to reason, which is the true definition of that necessity Rousseau insisted on without ever defining it; for to submit to reason is to submit to the nature of things, and to the God who formed them so in order to promote our real interest.
Why should children's minds be warped just as they begin to expand, merely to suit the indolence of parents who insist on a privilege without being willing to pay the price nature has fixed for it? I have observed before that a right always includes a duty, and I think it may fairly be inferred as well that those who do not fulfil the duty forfeit the right.
It is easier, I grant, to command than to reason; but it does not follow that children cannot understand why they are made to do certain things habitually. For from a steady adherence to a few simple principles of conduct flows the wholesome power that a judicious parent gradually gains over a child's mind. And that power becomes strong indeed when it is tempered by a steady display of affection brought home to the child's heart. For I believe it must be allowed as a general rule that the affection we inspire always resembles the affection we cultivate; so that the natural affections, which have been supposed almost separate from reason, may turn out to be more closely connected with judgment than is commonly allowed. Indeed, as another proof of the necessity of cultivating the female understanding, it is only fair to observe that the affections seem to have a kind of animal capriciousness when they live in the heart alone.
It is the irregular exercise of parental authority that first injures the mind, and girls are more subject to these irregularities than boys. The will of people who never allow their will to be disputed, unless they happen to be in a good humour and relax proportionately, is almost always unreasonable. To get round this arbitrary authority, girls learn very early the lessons they afterwards practise on their husbands; for I have often seen a sharp-faced little miss rule a whole family, except when now and then mamma's anger bursts out of some accidental cloud — either her hair was badly dressed, or she had lost more money at cards the night before than she cared to admit to her husband, or some such moral cause of anger.
Footnote: I once heard a little girl say to a servant: "My mamma has been scolding me finely this morning, because her hair was not dressed to please her." The remark was pert, but it was just. And what respect could a girl feel for such a parent, without doing violence to reason?
After watching outbursts of this kind I have been led into a melancholy train of reflection about women, concluding that when their first affection must lead them astray, or set their duties clashing until those duties rest on nothing but whim and custom, little can be expected of them as they advance in life. And how is any instructor to remedy the evil? For to teach them virtue on any solid principle is to teach them to despise their parents. Children cannot, and ought not to, be taught to make allowances for their parents' faults, because every such allowance weakens the force of reason in their minds and makes them more indulgent still to their own. It is one of the most sublime virtues of maturity that leads us to be severe with ourselves and forbearing to others; but children should be taught only the simple virtues, for if they begin too early to make allowances for human passions and manners, they wear the fine edge off the standard by which they ought to regulate their own, and grow unjust in exactly the proportion in which they grow indulgent.
The affections of children, and of weak people, are always selfish: they love others because others love them, and not on account of their virtues. Yet until esteem and love are blended together in the first affection, and reason made the foundation of the first duty, morality will stumble on the threshold. But until society is very differently constituted, parents, I am afraid, will still insist on being obeyed because they will be obeyed, and will keep trying to settle on a Divine right a power that will not bear the investigation of reason.
The good effects of attending to private education will always be very limited, and the parent who really puts his own hand to the plough will always be disappointed to some degree, until education becomes a grand national concern. A man cannot retire into a desert with his child; and if he did, he could not bring himself back to childhood and become the proper friend and playfellow of an infant or a boy. And when children are confined to the society of men and women, they very soon acquire that premature manhood which stops the growth of every vigorous power of mind or body. To open their faculties they must be stirred up to think for themselves, and that can only be done by mixing a number of children together and making them pursue the same objects jointly.
A child very soon contracts a numbing indolence of mind, which he seldom has vigour enough to shake off, when he merely asks a question instead of looking for the information, and then relies implicitly on the answer he gets. With children of his own age this could never happen; and the subjects of enquiry, though they might be influenced, would not be entirely under the direction of men, who frequently damp abilities, if they do not destroy them, by bringing them forward too hastily — and too hastily they will infallibly be brought forward if the child is confined to the company of a man, however sagacious the man may be.
Besides, the seeds of every affection ought to be sown in youth, and the respectful regard felt for a parent is very different from the social affections that are to make the happiness of later life. Those rest on equality, and on an exchange of sentiments unclogged by the watchful seriousness which prevents argument even if it does not compel submission. However great a child's affection for his parent, he will always be longing to play and chatter with other children; and the very respect he feels — for filial esteem always has a dash of fear mixed in — will, if it does not teach him cunning, at least keep him from pouring out the little secrets that first open the heart to friendship and confidence and lead gradually to a wider benevolence. On top of that, he will never acquire the frank openness of manner that young people can only get by being often in company where they dare to say what they think, neither afraid of being reproved for presumption nor laughed at for folly.
Forcibly struck by the reflections that the sight of schools as they are presently conducted naturally suggests, I once gave my opinion rather warmly in favour of a private education; but further experience has led me to see the subject in a different light. I still think, however, that schools as they are now run are hotbeds of vice and folly, and that the knowledge of human nature supposed to be gained there is merely a cunning selfishness.
At school boys become gluttons and slovens and, instead of cultivating domestic affections, rush very early into the libertinism that destroys the constitution before it is formed, hardening the heart as it weakens the understanding.
I should in fact be against boarding schools if it were for no other reason than the unsettled state of mind that waiting for the holidays produces. The children's thoughts are fixed on them with eager anticipation for at least half the time, to put it moderately; and when the holidays come they are spent in complete dissipation and beastly indulgence.
But when children are brought up at home, though they may follow a plan of study more orderly than can be managed when nearly a quarter of the year is spent in idleness and as much again in regret and anticipation, they acquire too high an opinion of their own importance from being allowed to tyrannize over the servants, and from the anxiety most mothers show on the score of manners, who, eager to teach a gentleman's accomplishments, stifle a man's virtues in the bud. Brought into company when they ought to be seriously employed, and treated like men while they are still boys, they become vain and effeminate.
The only way to avoid two extremes equally damaging to morality would be to contrive some way of combining a public and a private education. Two natural steps might be taken to make men into citizens, and they seem to lead straight to the point: the domestic affections, which first open the heart to the various modifications of humanity, would be cultivated, while the children were nevertheless allowed to spend a great part of their time on equal terms with other children.
I still remember with pleasure the country day school, where a boy trudged in of a morning, wet or dry, carrying his books and his dinner if the distance was considerable. No servant led master by the hand then; once he had put on coat and breeches he was left to shift for himself and to come home alone in the evening to recount the day's exploits at his father's knee. His father's house was his home, and was fondly remembered ever after. Indeed, I appeal to certain superior men who were educated this way: has the memory of some shady lane where they conned their lesson, or of some stile where they sat making a kite or mending a bat, not endeared their country to them?
But what boy ever remembered with pleasure the years he spent in close confinement at an academy near London — unless he happened to recall the poor scarecrow of an usher he tormented, or the tart-seller he snatched a cake from to devour with the cattish appetite of selfishness? At boarding schools of every description, the recreation of the junior boys is mischief and of the senior boys vice. Besides, in the great schools what can be more damaging to the moral character than the system of tyranny and abject slavery established among the boys — to say nothing of the slavery to forms, which makes religion worse than a farce? For what good can be expected of a boy who takes the sacrament of the Lord's Supper to avoid forfeiting half a guinea, which he probably then spends in some sensual way? Half the boys' energy goes into evading the obligation to attend public worship — and well it may, for such constant repetition of the same thing must be a very irksome restraint on their natural liveliness. Since these ceremonies have the most fatal effect on their morals, and since a ritual performed by the lips while the heart and mind are far away is no longer stored up by our church as a bank to draw on for the fees of poor souls in purgatory, why should they not be abolished?
But the fear of innovation in this country extends to everything. It is only a covert fear, the apprehensive timidity of indolent slugs who guard by sliming it over the snug place they regard as a hereditary estate, and who eat, drink and enjoy themselves instead of fulfilling the duties, a few empty forms excepted, that the place was endowed for. These are the people who insist most strenuously that the founder's will must be observed, crying out against every reform as though it were a violation of justice. I am referring particularly to the relics of popery kept up in our colleges, where the Protestant members seem to be such sticklers for the established church — but their zeal never makes them lose sight of the spoils of ignorance that rapacious priests of superstitious memory scraped together. No: wise in their generation, they venerate the prescriptive right of possession as a stronghold, and still let the sluggish bell tinkle for prayers as it did in the days when the elevation of the host was supposed to atone for the sins of the people, in case one reformation should lead to another and the spirit kill the letter. These Roman customs have the most damaging effect on the morals of our clergy. The idle vermin who two or three times a day perform in the most slovenly fashion a service they think useless but call their duty soon lose any sense of duty at all. At college, forced either to attend public worship or to dodge it, they acquire a habitual contempt for the very service whose performance is to enable them to live in idleness. It is mumbled over as a piece of business, as a stupid boy repeats his lesson; and often the college slang escapes the preacher the moment he has left the pulpit, and even while he is eating the dinner he earned so dishonestly.
Nothing indeed could be more irreverent than the cathedral service as it is now performed in this country, nor does it contain a feebler set of men than the slaves of this childish routine. A disgusting skeleton of the former state is still exhibited, but all the solemnity that engaged the imagination, even if it did not purify the heart, has been stripped away. The performance of high mass on the continent must impress every mind where a spark of fancy glows with that awful melancholy, that sublime tenderness, so near akin to devotion. I do not say that these devotional feelings are of more moral use than any other emotion of taste; but I maintain that theatrical pomp which gratifies the senses is to be preferred to a cold parade that insults the understanding without ever reaching the heart.
Among remarks on national education such observations cannot be out of place, especially as the supporters of these establishments, degenerated into puerilities, claim to be the champions of religion. Religion, pure source of comfort in this vale of tears! How your clear stream has been muddied by the dabblers who have presumptuously tried to confine within one narrow channel the living waters that flow always towards God, the sublime ocean of existence! What would life be without the peace that only the love of God, when it is built on humanity, can give? Every earthly affection turns back at intervals to prey on the heart that feeds it; and the purest outpourings of benevolence, so often rudely damped by other people, must rise as a freewill offering to Him who gave them birth, and whose bright image they faintly reflect.
In public schools, however, religion, confounded with irksome ceremonies and unreasonable restraints, takes on its most ungracious aspect — not the sober austere one that commands respect while it inspires fear, but a ludicrous cast that serves to point a pun. For in fact most of the good stories and smart sayings that enliven spirits concentrated at cards are manufactured out of the very incidents that the men who countenance the abuse in order to live off the spoils are labouring to give a droll turn to.
There is not, perhaps, in the kingdom a more dogmatic or more luxurious set of men than the pedantic tyrants who live in colleges and preside over public schools. The holidays are equally damaging to the morals of masters and pupils; and the intercourse the masters keep up with the nobility introduces into their families the same vanity and extravagance that banish domestic duties and comforts from the lordly mansion whose state is so awkwardly aped on a smaller scale. The boys, who live at great expense with the masters and assistants, are never domesticated, though that is why they were placed there; for after a silent dinner they swallow a hasty glass of wine and retire to plan some mischievous trick, or to ridicule the person or manners of the very people they have just been cringing to, and whom they ought to consider as standing in for their parents.
Can it be surprising, then, that boys shut out from social conversation like this become selfish and vicious? Or that a bishop's mitre often ends up on the brow of one of these diligent pastors?
The desire to live in the same style as the rank just above them infects every individual and every class of people, and meanness is the companion of this ignoble ambition. But the most debasing professions are those whose ladder is patronage — and it is generally out of one of these professions that the tutors of youth are chosen. Can men whose conduct must be regulated by a cautious prudence forever on the watch for preferment be expected to inspire independent sentiments?
So far from thinking about the morals of boys, several schoolmasters have argued in my hearing that they only undertook to teach Latin and Greek, and that they had done their duty by sending some good scholars up to college.
A few good scholars may have been formed by emulation and discipline, I grant; but to bring these clever boys forward, the health and morals of a great many others have been sacrificed.
The sons of our gentry and wealthy commoners are mostly educated at these establishments — and will anyone claim that the majority, making every allowance, come under the description of tolerable scholars?
It is not for the benefit of society that a few brilliant men should be brought forward at the expense of the multitude. It is true that great men seem to spring up as great revolutions occur, at proper intervals, to restore order and blow aside the clouds that thicken over the face of truth; but let more reason and virtue prevail in society and these strong winds would not be needed. Public education of every description should be directed towards forming citizens; but if you wish to make good citizens, you must first exercise the affections of a son and a brother. That is the only way to expand the heart; for public affections, like public virtues, must always grow out of the private character, or they are only meteors shooting across a dark sky and vanishing as they are gazed at and admired.
Few people, I believe, have had much affection for humankind who did not first love their parents, their brothers and sisters, and even the household animals they first played with. The exercise of youthful sympathies forms the moral temperature; and it is the memory of these first affections and pursuits that gives life to the ones that come later under the direction of reason. It is in youth that the fondest friendships are formed, the genial juices rising at the same time and mixing kindly; or rather the heart, tempered to receive friendship, gets into the habit of looking for pleasure in something nobler than the churlish gratification of appetite.
To inspire a love of home and of domestic pleasures, then, children ought to be educated at home; for riotous holidays only make them fond of home for their own sakes. Yet the holidays, which do not foster domestic affections, continually disturb the course of study and make any plan of improvement that involves temperance abortive. Still, if they were abolished, children would be entirely separated from their parents, and I doubt whether they would become better citizens by sacrificing those preparatory affections, and destroying the force of the relationships that make married life as necessary as it is respectable. But if a private education produces self-importance, or isolates a man within his family, the evil is only shifted and not remedied.
This train of reasoning brings me back to a subject I mean to dwell on: the necessity of establishing proper day schools.
But these should be national establishments; for while schoolmasters depend on the caprice of parents, little exertion can be expected of them beyond what is needed to please ignorant people. Indeed, the necessity of a master's giving the parents some sample of a boy's abilities, which is shown to every visitor during the holidays, does more mischief than would at first be supposed. For these samples are seldom done entirely by the child itself, to put it moderately; so the master countenances falsehood, or else winds the poor machine up to some extraordinary exertion that damages the wheels and stops the progress of gradual improvement. The memory is loaded with unintelligible words to make a display with, while the understanding acquires no distinct ideas at all. But only that education deserves emphatically to be called a cultivation of the mind which teaches young people how to begin to think. The imagination should not be allowed to debauch the understanding before it has gained strength, or vanity will become the forerunner of vice; for every way of exhibiting a child's attainments is injurious to its moral character.
How much time is lost in teaching children to recite what they do not understand, while the mammas, seated on benches in their best array, listen with astonishment to the parrot-like prattle uttered in solemn cadences with all the pomp of ignorance and folly! Such exhibitions only serve to drive the spreading fibres of vanity through the whole mind, for they teach children neither to speak fluently nor to behave gracefully. So far from it, that these frivolous pursuits might comprehensively be called the study of affectation. We now rarely see a simple, bashful boy, though few people of taste were ever disgusted by the awkward sheepishness so natural to that age, which schools and an early introduction into society have turned into impudence and apish grimace.
Yet how can any of this be remedied while schoolmasters depend entirely on parents for a living, and while so many rival schools hang out their lures to catch the attention of vain fathers and mothers, whose parental affection only makes them wish their children to outshine the neighbours'?
Without great good luck, a sensible, conscientious man would starve before he could get a school going, if he disdained to fool weak parents by practising the secret tricks of the trade.
Even in the best-regulated schools, where swarms of children are not crammed together, many bad habits must be picked up; but at common schools the body, heart and understanding are equally stunted. For parents are often only in search of the cheapest school, and the master could not live if he did not take many more pupils than he can manage himself, nor will the scanty pittance allowed for each child let him hire enough ushers to help with the mechanical part of the business. Besides, whatever appearance the house and garden may make, the children get no comfort from either, since they are continually reminded by irksome restrictions that they are not at home, and the state rooms and the garden must be kept in order for the recreation of the parents — who visit the school on a Sunday and are impressed by the very parade that makes their children's situation uncomfortable.
With what disgust have I heard sensible women — for girls are more restrained and cowed than boys — speak of the wearisome confinement they endured at school. Not allowed, perhaps, to step off one broad walk in a superb garden, and obliged to pace stupidly up and down it with a steady deportment, heads up, toes turned out and shoulders braced back, instead of bounding about as nature directs in order to complete her own design, in all the various attitudes that are so good for the health. The pure animal spirits that make mind and body shoot up and unfold the tender blossoms of hope are turned sour, and vent themselves in vain wishes or pert complaints that contract the faculties and spoil the temper. Or else they mount to the brain and, sharpening the understanding before it has gained proportionate strength, produce that pitiful cunning which so disgracefully characterizes the female mind — and which will always characterize it, I fear, while women remain the slaves of power.
The little respect the male world pays to chastity is, I am persuaded, the grand source of many of the physical and moral evils that torment humankind, as well as of the vices and follies that degrade and destroy women. And yet at school boys infallibly lose the decent bashfulness that might have ripened into modesty at home.
I have already criticized the bad habits women pick up when they are shut up together; and I think the observation may fairly be extended to the other sex, until we draw the natural inference I have had in view all along — that to improve both sexes they ought to be educated together, not only in private families but in public schools. If marriage is the cement of society, everyone should be educated on the same model, or the intercourse of the sexes will never deserve the name of fellowship; nor will women ever fulfil the duties peculiar to their sex until they become enlightened citizens, until they become free by being enabled to earn their own subsistence independently of men — in the same sense, to prevent misunderstanding, in which one man is independent of another. Indeed, marriage will never be held sacred until women, by being brought up alongside men, are prepared to be their companions rather than their mistresses; for the mean doublings of cunning will always make them contemptible while oppression makes them timid. I am so convinced of this that I will venture to predict that virtue will never prevail in society until the virtues of both sexes are founded on reason, and until the affections common to both are allowed to gain their proper strength by the discharge of mutual duties.
If boys and girls were allowed to pursue the same studies together, those graceful decencies might be instilled early that produce modesty, without the distinctions of sex that taint the mind. Lessons in politeness, and the whole formula of decorum that treads on the heels of falsehood, would be made useless by a habitual propriety of behaviour — not put on for visitors like the courtly robe of politeness, but the sober effect of a cleanliness of mind. Would this simple elegance of sincerity not be a chaste homage paid to domestic affection, far beyond the meretricious compliments that shine with a false lustre in the heartless intercourse of fashionable life? But until more understanding prevails in society there will always be a want of heart and of taste, and the harlot's rouge will take the place of that heavenly glow which only virtuous affections can give a face. Gallantry, and what is called love, may exist without simplicity of character; but the main pillars of friendship are respect and confidence, and esteem is never founded on it-cannot-tell-what.
A taste for the fine arts needs a great deal of cultivation — but not more than a taste for the virtuous affections; and both presuppose that enlargement of mind which opens so many sources of mental pleasure. Why do people hurry off to noisy scenes and crowded parties? I should answer: because they lack activity of mind, because they have not cherished the virtues of the heart. They see and feel only in the gross, and are forever pining after variety, finding everything simple insipid.
This argument can be carried further than philosophers realise. For if nature destined women in particular for the discharge of domestic duties, she made them susceptible to the attached affections in a high degree. Now women are notoriously fond of pleasure, and by my definition they naturally must be, because they cannot enter into the fine detail of domestic taste, lacking the judgment that is the foundation of all taste. For the understanding, in spite of sensual cavillers, reserves to itself the privilege of conveying pure joy to the heart.
With what a languid yawn have I seen an admirable poem thrown down that a man of true taste returns to again and again with rapture; and, while a melody has almost suspended my breathing, a lady has asked me where I bought my gown. I have seen an eye glance coldly over a most exquisite picture and then rest, sparkling with pleasure, on a rudely sketched caricature; and while some terrific feature of nature has spread a sublime stillness through my soul, I have been asked to notice the pretty tricks of a lapdog that my perverse fate obliged me to travel with. Is it surprising that such a tasteless being should caress the dog rather than her children, or prefer the rant of flattery to the simple accents of sincerity?
To illustrate the remark I must be allowed to observe that men of the first genius and the most cultivated minds have appeared to have the highest relish for the simple beauties of nature; and they must have felt forcibly what they have described so well, the charm that natural affections and unsophisticated feelings spread round the human character. It is this power of looking into the heart, and of vibrating in response to every emotion, that lets the poet personify each passion and the painter sketch with a pencil of fire.
True taste is always the work of the understanding employed in observing natural effects; and until women have more understanding it is vain to expect them to have any domestic taste. Their lively senses will always be at work hardening their hearts, and the emotions struck out of them will go on being vivid and transitory, unless a proper education stores their minds with knowledge.
It is the want of domestic taste, and not the acquisition of knowledge, that takes women out of their families and tears the smiling baby from the breast that ought to feed it. Women have been left in ignorance and slavish dependence for many, many years, and still we hear of nothing but their fondness for pleasure and for power, their preference for rakes and soldiers, their childish attachment to toys, and the vanity that makes them value accomplishments above virtues.
History brings forward a fearful catalogue of the crimes their cunning has produced, when the weak slaves have had address enough to overreach their masters. In France, and in how many other countries, have men not been the luxurious despots and women the crafty ministers? Does that prove that ignorance and dependence make women domestic? Is their folly not a byword among the libertines who relax in their company? And do men of sense not constantly lament that an immoderate fondness for dress and dissipation takes the mother of a family away from home forever? Their hearts have not been debauched by knowledge, nor their minds led astray by scientific pursuits; and yet they do not fulfil the duties that as women nature calls on them to fulfil. On the contrary, the state of warfare that exists between the sexes makes them use the wiles that frustrate the more open designs of force.
When, therefore, I call women slaves, I mean it in a political and civil sense; for indirectly they get too much power, and are debased by their efforts to obtain an illicit sway.
Let an enlightened nation try what effect reason would have in bringing them back to nature and to their duty; and, allowing them to share the advantages of education and government with men, let it see whether they will become better as they grow wiser and freer. They cannot be injured by the experiment, for it is not in the power of man to make them more insignificant than they are at present.
To make this practicable, day schools for particular ages should be set up by government, in which boys and girls could be educated together. The school for the younger children, from five to nine years old, ought to be absolutely free and open to every class. A sufficient number of masters should be chosen by a select committee in each parish, to whom any complaint of negligence or the like could be made, if it were signed by six of the children's parents.
Footnote: In treating this part of the subject I have borrowed some hints from a very sensible pamphlet on public education written by the late bishop of Autun.
Ushers would then be unnecessary; for I believe experience will always show that this kind of subordinate authority is particularly harmful to the morals of the young. What can tend to deprave the character more than outward submission and inward contempt? And how can boys be expected to treat an usher with respect when the master seems to regard him as a servant, and almost to countenance the ridicule that becomes the boys' chief amusement during playtime?
But nothing of this kind could happen in an elementary day school where boys and girls, rich and poor, met together. And to prevent any of the distinctions of vanity they should be dressed alike, and all obliged to submit to the same discipline or leave the school. The schoolroom ought to be surrounded by a large piece of ground where the children could take useful exercise, for at this age they should not be confined to any sedentary employment for more than an hour at a time. But these relaxations might all be made part of an elementary education, since many things amuse and improve the senses when they are introduced as a kind of show, though children would turn a deaf ear to their principles dryly laid down — botany, mechanics and astronomy, for instance. Reading, writing, arithmetic, natural history and some simple experiments in natural philosophy might fill up the day; but these pursuits should never encroach on gymnastic games in the open air. The elements of religion, history, the history of humankind, and politics might also be taught by conversation, in the Socratic form.
After the age of nine, girls and boys intended for domestic employment or for a trade ought to be moved to other schools and given instruction suited in some measure to what each is destined for, the two sexes still being together in the morning; but in the afternoon the girls should attend a school where plain sewing, dressmaking, millinery and so on would be their occupation.
Young people of superior ability or fortune might now be taught in another school the dead and living languages, the elements of science, and might continue the study of history and politics on a wider scale, which would not exclude literature. Girls and boys still together, I hear some readers ask? Yes. And I should fear no other consequence than that some early attachment might form — which, while it had the best possible effect on the young people's moral character, might not perfectly suit their parents' plans; for it will be a long time, I am afraid, before the world is so enlightened that parents anxious only to make their children virtuous will let them choose their own companions for life.
Besides, this would be a sure way of promoting early marriages, and from early marriages the most wholesome physical and moral effects naturally flow. What a different character a married citizen takes on from the selfish coxcomb who lives only for himself, and who is often afraid to marry in case he should not be able to live in a certain style. Great emergencies excepted, which would rarely occur in a society founded on equality, a man can only be prepared to discharge the duties of public life by habitually practising the lesser duties that form the man.
Under this plan of education boys' constitutions would not be ruined by the early debaucheries that now make men so selfish, nor would girls be made weak and vain by idleness and frivolous pursuits. But I am presupposing such a degree of equality between the sexes as would shut out gallantry and coquetry, while still allowing friendship and love to temper the heart for the discharge of higher duties.
These would be schools of morality. And with human happiness allowed to flow from the pure springs of duty and affection, what advances might the human mind not make? Society can only be happy and free in proportion as it is virtuous; but the distinctions now established in society corrode all private virtue and blast all public virtue.
I have already inveighed against the custom of tying girls to their needlework and shutting them out of all political and civil employment; for by narrowing their minds in this way we make them unfit to fulfil the very duties nature has assigned them.
Occupied only with the little incidents of the day, they necessarily grow up cunning. My very soul has often sickened at the sly tricks women practise to get some foolish thing their silly hearts are set on. Not allowed to dispose of money or call anything their own, they learn to turn the market penny; or, if a husband gives offence by staying out, or stirs up some feeling of jealousy, a new gown or some pretty trinket smooths Juno's angry brow.
But these littlenesses would not degrade their character if women were led to respect themselves, if political and moral subjects were opened to them. And I will venture to say that this is the only way to make them properly attentive to their domestic duties. An active mind embraces the whole circle of its duties and finds time enough for all of them. It is not, I insist, a bold attempt to emulate masculine virtues that leads women away from duty; it is not the enchantment of literary pursuits or the steady investigation of scientific subjects. No — it is indolence and vanity, the love of pleasure and the love of power, that reign supreme in an empty mind. I say empty emphatically, because the education women now receive hardly deserves the name. The little knowledge they are led to acquire during the important years of youth relates only to accomplishments — and accomplishments with no bottom to them; for unless the understanding is cultivated, every grace is superficial and monotonous. Like the charms of a made-up face, they only strike the senses in a crowd; at home, lacking mind, they lack variety. The consequence is obvious: in the gay scenes of dissipation we meet the artificial mind and the artificial face, for those who fly from solitude dread the domestic circle next after solitude. Having no power to amuse or interest, they feel their own insignificance, or find nothing to amuse or interest themselves with.
Besides, what can be more indelicate than a girl's coming out in the fashionable world — which, in other words, means bringing a marriageable miss to market, her person carried richly caparisoned from one public place to another? And yet, mixing in the giddy circle under restraint, these butterflies long to flutter free; for the first affection of their souls is for their own persons, which their attention has been called to with the most assiduous care while they were being prepared for the season that decides their fate for life. Instead of pursuing this idle routine and sighing after tasteless show and heartless state, with what dignity might young people of both sexes form attachments in the schools I have sketched, where, as they grew older, dancing, music and drawing might be allowed as relaxations — for at these schools young people of fortune ought to stay, more or less, until they came of age. Those intended for particular professions might attend the schools set aside for their special instruction three or four mornings a week.
I only drop these observations as hints at present — an outline of my plan rather than a digested version of it. But I must add that I strongly approve of one regulation mentioned in the pamphlet I referred to earlier: making children and young people independent of their masters with respect to punishment. They should be tried by their peers, which would be an admirable way of fixing sound principles of justice in the mind, and might have the happiest effect on the temper, which is soured or irritated very early by tyranny, until it becomes peevishly cunning or ferociously overbearing.
Footnote: The Bishop of Autun.
My imagination darts forward with benevolent fervour to greet these amiable and respectable groups, in spite of the sneers of cold hearts, who are at liberty to utter with frigid self-importance the damning epithet: romantic. I shall try to blunt its force by repeating the words of an eloquent moralist: "I do not know whether the illusions of a truly humane heart, whose zeal makes everything easy, are not preferable to that rough and repelling reason which always finds its first obstacle to whatever would promote the public good in its own indifference to it."
I know that libertines will also exclaim that a woman would be unsexed by acquiring strength of body and mind, and that beauty, soft bewitching beauty, would no longer adorn the daughters of men. I am of a very different opinion, for I think we should then see dignified beauty and true grace, produced by the concurrence of many powerful physical and moral causes. Not a relaxed beauty, it is true, nor the graces of helplessness, but the kind we see in the relics of antiquity, which makes us respect the human body as a majestic building fit to receive a noble inhabitant.
I do not forget the popular opinion that the Greek statues were not modelled from nature — that is, not from the proportions of a particular man, but that beautiful limbs and features were selected from various bodies to make a harmonious whole. This may be true in some degree. The fine ideal picture in an exalted imagination might be superior to the materials the sculptor found in nature, and so it might properly be called a model of humanity rather than of a man. But it was not the mechanical selection of limbs and features; it was the ebullition of a heated fancy bursting out, and the fine senses and enlarged understanding of the artist selected the solid matter he drew into that glowing focus.
I said it was not mechanical, because a whole was produced: a model of that grand simplicity, those concurring energies, which arrest our attention and command our reverence. For a servile copy even of beautiful nature produces nothing but an insipid lifeless beauty. Yet, quite apart from these observations, I believe the human form must have been far more beautiful once than it is now, because extreme indolence, barbarous bandaging and the many other causes that act forcibly on it in our luxurious state of society did not then retard its expansion or deform it. Exercise and cleanliness appear to be not only the surest means of preserving health but of promoting beauty, considering the physical causes alone. Yet that is not sufficient; moral causes must work with them, or beauty will be merely the rustic kind that blooms on the innocent, wholesome faces of some country people whose minds have never been exercised. To make the person perfect, physical and moral beauty ought to be attained at the same time, each lending and receiving force from the combination. Judgment must sit on the brow, affection and fancy beam in the eye, and humanity curve the cheek, or the sparkle of the finest eye and the elegant finish of the fairest features are vain; while in every movement that displays the active limbs and well-knit joints, grace and modesty should appear. But this fair assemblage is not brought together by chance. It is the reward of exertions that support one another; for judgment can only be acquired by reflection, affection by the discharge of duties, and humanity by the exercise of compassion towards every living creature.
Humanity to animals should be particularly instilled as part of a national education, for it is not at present one of our national virtues. Among the lower classes, tenderness towards their humble dumb servants is more often found in a savage state than a civilized one. For civilization prevents the kind of contact that creates affection in the rude hut or the mud cabin, and leads uncultivated minds, depraved only by the refinements prevailing in the society where they are trodden underfoot by the rich, to domineer over animals in revenge for the insults they must bear from their own superiors.
This habitual cruelty is first caught at school, where it is one of the boys' rare sports to torment the miserable creatures that come their way. The transition, as they grow up, from barbarity towards animals to domestic tyranny over wives, children and servants is very easy. Justice, and even benevolence, will not be a powerful spring of action unless it extends to the whole of creation. Indeed I believe it may be laid down as an axiom that those who can watch pain unmoved will soon learn to inflict it.
The vulgar are swayed by present feelings and by habits they have picked up by accident; but not much dependence can be placed on partial feelings, however just they are, for when they are not invigorated by reflection, custom weakens them until they are hardly felt at all. The sympathies of our nature are strengthened by pondering and deadened by thoughtless use. Macbeth's heart smote him more for one murder, the first, than for the hundred that followed to back it up. But when I used the word vulgar, I did not mean to confine the remark to the poor; a partial humanity founded on present sensations or on whim is quite as conspicuous among the rich, if not more so.
The lady who sheds tears over a bird starved in a snare, and curses the devils in human shape who goad a poor ox to madness or whip a patient donkey tottering under a load beyond its strength, will nevertheless keep her coachman and horses waiting whole hours for her while the sharp frost bites, or the rain beats against the well-closed windows that do not let in a breath of air to tell her how roughly the wind is blowing outside. And the woman who takes her dogs to bed and nurses them with a parade of sensibility when they are sick will let her babies grow up crooked in a nursery. This illustration is drawn from fact. The woman I am referring to was handsome, reckoned very handsome by people who do not miss the mind when the face is plump and fair; but her understanding had not been drawn away from female duties by literature, nor her innocence debauched by knowledge. No: she was quite feminine, in the masculine sense of the word. And so far from loving the spoiled brutes that filled the place her children ought to have occupied, she only lisped out a pretty mixture of French and English nonsense to please the men who flocked round her. The wife, the mother and the human creature were all swallowed up in the artificial character that an improper education and the selfish vanity of beauty had produced.
I do not like to make a distinction without a difference, and I confess I have been as much disgusted by the fine lady who took her lapdog to her bosom instead of her child as by the ferocity of a man who, beating his horse, declared that the animal knew when it was doing wrong as well as any Christian.
This brood of folly shows how mistaken those people are who, if they allow women to leave their harems, do not cultivate their understandings in order to plant virtues in their hearts. For if they had sense they might acquire the domestic taste that would lead them to love their whole family in reasonable order, from the husband down to the house dog; nor would they ever insult humanity in the person of the meanest servant by paying more attention to an animal's comfort than to a fellow creature's.
My observations on national education are obviously only hints; but what I chiefly want to press is the necessity of educating the sexes together in order to perfect both, and of making children sleep at home so that they may learn to love home — yet, so that private affections support the public ones instead of smothering them, of sending them to school to mix with a number of equals, since it is only by the jostlings of equality that we can form a just opinion of ourselves.
To make humankind more virtuous, and consequently happier, both sexes must act on the same principle. But how can that be expected when only one of them is allowed to see the reasonableness of it? To make the social compact truly equitable, and to spread the enlightening principles that alone can better the fate of humanity, women must be allowed to found their virtue on knowledge, which is scarcely possible unless they are educated in the same pursuits as men. For they are now made so inferior by ignorance and low desires that they do not deserve to be ranked with men; or else, by the serpentine wrigglings of cunning, they climb the tree of knowledge and gather just enough to lead men astray.
It is plain from the history of every nation that women cannot be confined to merely domestic pursuits, for they will not fulfil their family duties unless their minds take a wider range; and while they are kept in ignorance, they become slaves to pleasure in exactly the proportion in which they are slaves to men. Nor can they be shut out of great enterprises, though the narrowness of their minds often makes them spoil what they cannot understand.
The libertinism, and even the virtues, of superior men will always give women of a certain description great power over them; and these weak women, under the influence of childish passions and selfish vanity, will throw a false light over the very objects that the men who ought to be enlightening their judgment look at through their eyes. Men of fancy, and those sanguine characters who mostly hold the helm of human affairs, generally relax in the society of women; and surely I need not cite for even the most superficial reader of history the many examples of vice and oppression that the private intrigues of female favourites have produced, not to dwell on the mischief that naturally arises from the blundering interference of well-meaning folly. For in the transaction of business it is much better to deal with a knave than a fool, because a knave sticks to some plan, and any plan of reason can be seen through much sooner than a sudden flight of folly. The power that vile and foolish women have had over wise men who possessed sensibility is notorious. I shall mention only one instance.
Who ever drew a more exalted female character than Rousseau, though on the whole he was constantly labouring to degrade the sex? And why was he so anxious to do it? Truly, to justify to himself the affection that weakness and virtue had made him cherish for that fool Theresa. He could not raise her to the common level of her sex, and so he laboured to bring women down to hers. He found her a convenient humble companion, and pride made him determined to find some superior virtue in the being he had chosen to live with. But did her conduct during his life, and after his death, not show plainly how grossly mistaken he was when he called her a celestial innocent? Indeed, in the bitterness of his heart he laments himself that once his bodily infirmities kept him from treating her as a woman, she ceased to have any affection for him. And that was very natural, for, having so few sentiments in common, what was there to hold her once the tie of sex was broken? To hold the affection of a woman whose sensibility is confined to one sex, indeed to one man, requires sense enough to turn sensibility into the broad channel of humanity. Many women have not mind enough to feel affection for a woman, or friendship for a man. But the weakness of sex that makes a woman depend on a man for her subsistence produces a kind of cattish affection, which leads a wife to purr about her husband as she would about any man who fed and caressed her.
Men are, however, often gratified by this kind of fondness, which is confined in a beastly way to themselves; but should they ever become more virtuous, they will want to converse at their fireside with a friend, once they have stopped playing with a mistress.
Besides, understanding is necessary to give variety and interest even to sensual enjoyments; for low indeed in the intellectual scale is the mind that can go on loving when neither virtue nor sense gives an animal appetite any human appearance. But sense will always preponderate; and if women in general are not brought more onto a level with men, some superior women, like the Greek courtesans, will gather men of ability round them and draw many citizens away from families they would have stayed at home in, if their wives had had more sense, or the graces that come from exercising the understanding and the fancy, which are the lawful parents of taste. A woman of talent, unless she is absolutely ugly, will always obtain great power, raised by the weakness of her sex; and as men acquire virtue and delicacy by exercising their reason, they will look for both in women — but women can only acquire them in the same way men do.
Have the women of France or Italy confined themselves to domestic life? Though they have had no political existence so far, have they not had great illicit sway, corrupting themselves and the men whose passions they played on? In short, in whatever light I look at the subject, reason and experience convince me that the only way of leading women to fulfil their peculiar duties is to free them from all restraint by allowing them to share in the inherent rights of humankind.
Make them free, and they will quickly become wise and virtuous, as men become more so; for the improvement must be mutual, or else the injustice that one half of the human race is obliged to submit to will recoil on their oppressors, and the virtue of man will be worm-eaten by the insect he keeps under his feet.
Let men take their choice. Man and woman were made for each other, though not to become one being; and if men will not improve women, they will deprave them.
I am speaking of the improvement and emancipation of the whole sex; for I know that the behaviour of a few women who by accident, or by following a strong natural bent, have acquired a share of knowledge beyond the rest of their sex has often been overbearing. But there have been instances of women who attained knowledge without discarding modesty, and who did not always appear pedantically to despise the ignorance they were labouring to disperse in their own minds. The outcry that any advice about female learning commonly produces, especially from pretty women, often arises from envy. When they happen to see that even the lustre of their eyes and the flippant sportiveness of a refined coquetry will not always secure them attention through a whole evening, if a woman of more cultivated understanding tries to give the conversation a rational turn, the common consolation is that such women seldom get husbands. What arts have I not seen silly women use to interrupt by flirtation — a very significant word for such a manoeuvre — a rational conversation that had made the men forget they were pretty women.
But allowing what is very natural in us, that the possession of rare abilities really is calculated to excite an overweening pride, disgusting in men and women alike — in what a state of inferiority must the female faculties have been rusting when so small a portion of knowledge as those women attained who have been sneeringly called learned could be considered singular? Singular enough to puff up its possessor and excite envy in her contemporaries, and in some of the other sex. Indeed, has a little rationality not exposed many women to the severest censure? I am referring to well-known facts, for I have often heard women ridiculed, and every little weakness of theirs exposed, merely because they took the advice of some medical man and departed from the beaten track in the way they treated their infants. I have heard this barbarous hatred of innovation carried further still, and a sensible woman stigmatized as an unnatural mother who had been wisely solicitous to preserve her children's health, when in the midst of all her care she lost one of them to some accident of infancy that no prudence could have warded off. Her acquaintances observed that this was the consequence of newfangled notions — the newfangled notions of ease and cleanliness. And those who pretend to experience, though they have long clung to prejudices that in the opinion of the most sagacious physicians have thinned the human race, almost rejoiced at a disaster that gave a kind of sanction to established practice.
Indeed, if it were only on this account, the national education of women is of the utmost consequence; for what a number of human sacrifices are made to that Moloch, prejudice! And in how many ways are children destroyed by the lasciviousness of men? The want of natural affection in many women, drawn away from their duty by the admiration of men, and the ignorance of others, make human infancy a far more perilous state than that of animals; and yet men are unwilling to put women in a position to acquire understanding enough even to know how to nurse their own babies.
This truth strikes me so forcibly that I would rest the whole tendency of my reasoning on it; for whatever tends to incapacitate a woman as a mother takes her out of her sphere.
But it is vain to expect the present race of weak mothers either to take the reasonable care of a child's body that is needed to lay the foundation of a good constitution — supposing it does not suffer for the sins of its father — or to manage its temper so judiciously that as it grows up the child will not have to throw off everything its mother, its first instructor, taught it directly or indirectly. And unless the mind has uncommon vigour, womanish follies will stick to the character all through life. The weakness of the mother will be visited on the children. And while women are educated to rely on their husbands' judgment, this must always be the consequence; for there is no improving an understanding by halves, nor can any being act wisely by imitation, because in every circumstance of life there is a kind of individuality that requires an exertion of judgment to modify the general rule. The being who can think justly along one track will soon extend its intellectual empire; and the woman who has judgment enough to manage her children will not submit, right or wrong, to her husband, or patiently to social laws that make a nonentity of a wife.
In public schools, women should be taught the elements of anatomy and medicine as a guard against the errors of ignorance, not only so that they can take proper care of their own health but so that they can be rational nurses to their infants, their parents and their husbands; for the bills of mortality are swollen by the blunders of self-willed old women who administer remedies of their own without knowing anything of the human frame. It is proper too, even from a purely domestic point of view, to make women acquainted with the anatomy of the mind, by letting the sexes associate together in every pursuit, and by leading them to observe the progress of the human understanding in the improvement of the sciences and arts — never forgetting the science of morality, nor the study of the political history of humankind.
A man has been called a microcosm, and every family might likewise be called a state. States, it is true, have mostly been governed by arts that disgrace human character; and the want of a just constitution and of equal laws has so confused the notions of the worldly wise that they more than question the reasonableness of contending for the rights of humanity. So morality, polluted in the national reservoir, sends off streams of vice to corrupt the constituent parts of the body politic. But if nobler, or rather juster, principles regulated the laws — which ought to be the government of society, rather than the men who execute them — duty might become the rule of private conduct.
Besides, by exercising their bodies and their minds, women would acquire that mental activity so necessary in a mother, together with the fortitude that distinguishes steadiness of conduct from the obstinate perverseness of weakness. For it is dangerous to advise the indolent to be steady, because they instantly become rigorous, and to save themselves trouble punish with severity the faults that a patient fortitude of reason would have prevented. But fortitude presupposes strength of mind — and is strength of mind to be acquired by indolent acquiescence? By asking for advice instead of exerting the judgment? By obeying out of fear instead of practising the forbearance we all need to have shown us? The conclusion I wish to draw is obvious. Make women rational creatures and free citizens, and they will quickly become good wives and mothers — that is, if men do not neglect the duties of husbands and fathers.
In discussing the advantages that a combined public and private education, of the kind I have sketched, might reasonably be expected to produce, I have dwelt most on those that particularly concern the female world, because I think the female world is oppressed. Yet the gangrene produced by the vices that oppression breeds is not confined to the diseased part; it pervades society at large. So that when I wish to see my sex become more like moral agents, my heart leaps at the prospect of the general spread of that sublime contentment which only morality can spread.
There are many follies more or less peculiar to women: sins against reason, of commission as well as omission, though all of them flow from ignorance or prejudice. I shall point out only those that seem damaging to their moral character. And in criticizing them I particularly want to prove that the weakness of mind and body which men have tried by various motives to perpetuate prevents women from discharging the very duty peculiar to their sex. For when weakness of body will not let them nurse their children, and weakness of mind makes them spoil their tempers — is woman then in a natural state?
One glaring instance of the weakness that comes from ignorance claims attention first, and calls for severe reproof.
In this city a number of lurking leeches make a living, infamously, by working on the credulity of women, pretending to cast nativities, to use the technical phrase. And many women who, proud of their rank and fortune, look down on ordinary people with sovereign contempt show by this credulity that the distinction is arbitrary, and that they have not cultivated their minds enough to rise above vulgar prejudices. Women, never having been led to consider the knowledge of their duty as the one thing needful to know, or to live in the present moment by discharging it, are very anxious to peep into the future, to learn what they have to expect that might make life interesting, and to fill up the vacuum of ignorance.
I must be allowed to remonstrate seriously with the ladies who follow these idle inventions; for ladies, mistresses of families, are not ashamed to drive in their own carriages to the fortune-teller's door. And if any of them should read this book, I beg them to answer the following questions in their own hearts, remembering that they are in the presence of God.
Do you believe that there is only one God, and that he is powerful, wise and good?
Do you believe that all things were created by him, and that every being depends on him?
Do you rely on his wisdom, so conspicuous in his works and in your own frame; and are you convinced that he has ordered everything outside the reach of your senses in the same perfect harmony, to fulfil his designs?
Do you acknowledge that the power of looking into the future, and of seeing things that are not as though they were, is an attribute of the Creator? And if he thought fit to impart to his creatures, by an impression on their minds, some event still hidden in the shades of time and unborn, to whom would the secret be revealed by direct inspiration? The opinion of the ages will answer that question: to reverend old men, and to people distinguished for eminent piety.
The oracles of antiquity were delivered in that way, by priests dedicated to the service of the god who was supposed to inspire them. The glare of worldly pomp surrounding these impostors, and the respect paid them by artful politicians who knew how to use so convenient an engine for bending the necks of the strong under the dominion of the cunning, spread a sacred, mysterious veil of sanctity over their lies and abominations.
Impressed by such solemn devotional parade, a Greek or Roman lady might be excused for enquiring of the oracle when she was anxious to pry into the future or to ask about some doubtful event; and her enquiries, however contrary to reason, could not be called impious. But can professing Christians ward off that charge? Can a Christian suppose that the favourites of the Most High would be obliged to lurk in disguise and practise the most dishonest tricks to cheat silly women out of the money that the poor cry for in vain?
Do not say such questions are an insult to common sense; for it is your own conduct, you foolish women, that brings odium on your sex. And these reflections ought to make you shudder at your own thoughtlessness and irrational devotion, for I do not suppose that all of you laid your religion aside, such as it is, when you entered those mysterious dwellings. Yet, since I have been supposing throughout that I am talking to ignorant women — and ignorant you are, in the most emphatic sense of the word — it would be absurd to reason with you about the egregious folly of wanting to know what Supreme Wisdom has concealed.
Probably you would not understand me if I tried to show you that it would be absolutely inconsistent with the grand purpose of life, which is to make human creatures wise and virtuous; and that if it were sanctioned by God it would disturb the order established in creation — while if it is not sanctioned by God, do you expect to hear the truth? Can events be foretold, events that have not yet taken on a body and become subject to mortal inspection? Can they be foreseen by a vicious worldling who pampers his appetites by preying on the foolish?
Perhaps, however, you devoutly believe in the devil, and imagine, to shift the question, that he may assist his votaries. But if you really believe in the power of such a being, an enemy to goodness and to God, can you go to church after being under an obligation to him?
From these delusions to the still more fashionable deceptions practised by the whole tribe of magnetizers, the transition is very natural. And with regard to them, it is equally proper to ask women a few questions.
Do you know anything about the construction of the human frame? If not, it is proper you should be told what every child ought to know: that when its admirable economy has been disturbed by intemperance or idleness — I am not speaking of violent disorders but of chronic diseases — it must be brought back to a healthy state by slow degrees. And that if the functions of life have not been materially injured, regimen, which is another word for temperance, along with air, exercise and a few medicines prescribed by people who have studied the human body, are the only human means yet discovered of recovering that priceless blessing, health, which will bear investigation.
Do you then believe that these magnetizers who pretend, by hocus-pocus tricks, to work a miracle are delegated by God, or assisted by the solver of all difficulties of this kind, the devil?
When they put to flight, as it is said, disorders that have baffled the powers of medicine, do they work in conformity with the light of reason? Or do they perform these wonderful cures by supernatural aid?
By communication, an adept may answer, with the world of spirits. A noble privilege, it must be allowed. Some of the ancients mention familiar spirits who guarded them from danger by kindly intimating — we cannot guess in what manner — when danger was near, or by pointing out what they ought to undertake. Yet the men who claimed this privilege outside the order of nature insisted that it was the reward or the consequence of superior temperance and piety. But the present workers of wonders are not raised above their fellows by any superior temperance or sanctity. They do not cure for the love of God but for money. These are the priests of quackery, though it is true they do not have the convenient expedient of selling masses for souls in purgatory, nor churches where they can display crutches and models of limbs made whole by a touch or a word.
I am not familiar with the technical terms, nor initiated into the mysteries, so I may speak improperly; but it is clear that men who will not conform to the law of reason and earn a living honestly, by degrees, are very fortunate to have become acquainted with such obliging spirits. We cannot give the spirits credit for much sagacity or goodness, at any rate, or they would have chosen nobler instruments when they wished to show themselves the benevolent friends of humankind.
It is, however, little short of blasphemy to claim such a power.
From the whole tenor of the dispensations of Providence it appears evident to sober reason that certain vices produce certain effects. And can anyone so grossly insult the wisdom of God as to suppose that a miracle will be permitted to disturb his general laws, and restore the intemperate and vicious to health merely so that they can go on in the same course with impunity? Be whole, and sin no more, said Jesus. And are greater miracles to be performed by people who do not follow in his footsteps — who healed the body in order to reach the mind?
Mentioning the name of Christ after such vile impostors may displease some of my readers. I respect their warmth; but let them not forget that the followers of these delusions bear his name and profess to be the disciples of him who said that by their works we should know who were the children of God and who the servants of sin. I allow that it is easier to touch the body of a saint, or to be magnetized, than to restrain our appetites or govern our passions; but health of body or of mind can only be recovered by those means, or else we make the Supreme Judge partial and vengeful.
Is he a man, that he should change, or punish out of resentment? He, the common father, wounds only to heal, says reason; and since our irregularities produce certain consequences, we are forcibly shown the nature of vice, so that, learning by experience to tell good from evil, we may hate the one and love the other in proportion to the wisdom we attain. The poison contains its own antidote; and either we reform our evil habits and stop sinning against our own bodies, to use the forcible language of scripture, or a premature death, the punishment of sin, snaps the thread of life.
Here an awful stop is put to our enquiries. But why should I conceal what I think? Considering the attributes of God, I believe that whatever punishment follows will tend, like the anguish of disease, to show the malignity of vice for the purpose of reformation. Positive punishment appears so contrary to the nature of God, discoverable in all his works and in our own reason, that I could sooner believe the Deity paid no attention to human conduct at all than that he punished without the benevolent design of reforming.
Merely to suppose that an all-wise and powerful Being, as good as he is great, should create a being while foreseeing that after fifty or sixty years of feverish existence it would be plunged into never-ending woe is blasphemy. What will the worm feed on that is never to die? On folly, on ignorance, you say. I should blush with indignation to draw the natural conclusion, if I could set it down, and should wish to withdraw myself from the wing of my God. On such a supposition, I speak with reverence, he would be a consuming fire. We should wish, though vainly, to fly from his presence, when fear had absorbed love and darkness enveloped all his counsels.
I know that many devout people boast of submitting blindly to the will of God, as to an arbitrary sceptre or rod, on the same principle as the Indians worship the devil. In other words, like people in the common concerns of life, they do homage to power and cringe under the foot that can crush them. Rational religion, on the contrary, is submission to the will of a being so perfectly wise that everything he wills must be directed by the proper motive, and must be reasonable.
And if that is how we respect God, can we give credit to the mysterious insinuations that insult his laws? Can we believe, though it stared us in the face, that he would work a miracle to authorize confusion by sanctioning an error? We must either accept these impious conclusions, or treat with contempt every promise to restore a diseased body to health by supernatural means, or to foretell incidents that only God can foresee.
Another instance of that feminine weakness of character so often produced by a confined education is a romantic twist of the mind, which has very properly been called sentimental.
Women, subjected by ignorance to their own sensations and taught to look for happiness only in love, refine on sensual feelings and adopt metaphysical notions about that passion which lead them shamefully to neglect the duties of life — and often, in the middle of these sublime refinements, they plunge into actual vice.
These are the women who are amused by the reveries of stupid novelists, who, knowing little of human nature, work up stale tales and describe meretricious scenes, all retailed in a sentimental jargon that equally corrupts the taste and draws the heart aside from its daily duties. I do not mention the understanding, because, never having been exercised, its slumbering energies lie inactive, like the lurking particles of fire that are supposed to pervade all matter.
Women, in fact, denied all political privileges and allowed no civil existence once married, except in criminal cases, naturally have their attention drawn away from the interest of the whole community to that of its minute parts — though any member of society must perform their private duty very imperfectly when it is not connected with the general good. The mighty business of a woman's life is to please; and, kept out of more important concerns by political and civil oppression, sentiments become events, and reflection deepens what it should and would have effaced, if the understanding had been allowed a wider range.
But, confined to trifling employments, women naturally absorb the opinions inspired by the only kind of reading calculated to interest an innocent, frivolous mind. Unable to grasp anything great, is it surprising that they find the reading of history a very dry business, and discussions addressed to the understanding intolerably tedious and almost unintelligible? So they are necessarily dependent on the novelist for amusement. Yet when I exclaim against novels, I mean by contrast with works that exercise the understanding and regulate the imagination. Any kind of reading I think better than leaving a blank a blank, because the mind must be enlarged a little, and gain a little strength, by any slight exertion of its thinking powers; and besides, even productions addressed only to the imagination raise a reader a little above the gross gratification of appetites that the mind has given no shade of delicacy to.
This observation is the result of experience. I have known several capable women, and one in particular who was a very good woman — as good as such a narrow mind would let her be — who took care that her daughters, three in number, should never see a novel. Being a woman of fortune and fashion, she provided them with various masters, and a sort of menial governess to watch their steps. From their masters they learned what tables and chairs and so on are called in French and Italian; but as the few books that came their way were either far above their capacities or devotional, they acquired neither ideas nor sentiments, and passed their time, when they were not compelled to repeat words, in dressing, quarrelling with one another, or talking to the maids in secret, until they were brought out as marriageable.
Their mother, a widow, was busy meanwhile keeping up her connections, as she called a numerous acquaintance, in case her girls should lack a proper introduction into the great world. And these young ladies, with minds vulgar in every sense of the word and with spoiled tempers, entered life puffed up with notions of their own consequence, looking down with contempt on anyone who could not match them in dress and display.
As for love, nature, or their nurses, had taken care to teach them the physical meaning of the word; and as they had few subjects of conversation and fewer refinements of sentiment, they expressed their gross wishes in no very delicate phrases when they spoke freely and talked about matrimony.
Could these girls have been harmed by reading novels? I had almost forgotten one shade in the character of one of them: she affected a simplicity bordering on folly, and would utter, with a simper, the most immodest remarks and questions, the full meaning of which she had picked up while she was shut away from the world, afraid to speak in the presence of her mother, who governed with a high hand. They were all educated, as their mother prided herself, in the most exemplary manner, and read their chapters and psalms before breakfast, never touching a silly novel.
That is only one instance; but I remember many other women who, never led by degrees to proper studies and never allowed to choose for themselves, have indeed been overgrown children — or else have picked up, from mixing in the world, a little of what is called common sense, meaning a distinct way of seeing common occurrences as they stand detached. But what deserves the name of intellect, the power of forming general or abstract ideas, or even intermediate ones, was out of the question. Their minds were quiescent, and when they were not roused by tangible objects and employments of that sort, they were low-spirited, and would cry, or go to sleep.
When, therefore, I advise my sex not to read such flimsy works, it is to induce them to read something better; for I agree with a sagacious man who, having a daughter and a niece in his care, followed a very different plan with each.
The niece, who had considerable ability, had been indulged in desultory reading before she was left to his guardianship. Her he tried to lead, and did lead, to history and moral essays. But his daughter, whom a fond weak mother had indulged and who consequently hated anything resembling application, he allowed to read novels, justifying himself by saying that if she ever acquired a relish for reading them he would have some foundation to work on, and that mistaken opinions were better than none at all.
In fact the female mind has been so totally neglected that knowledge could only be got from this muddy source, until some women of superior talent learned from reading novels to despise them.
The best method for correcting a fondness for novels, I believe, is to ridicule them — not indiscriminately, for then it would have little effect, but by having a judicious person with some turn for humour read several aloud to a young girl, pointing out by tone and by apt comparison with pathetic incidents and heroic characters in history how foolishly and ridiculously they caricature human nature. Just opinions might then be put in the place of romantic sentiments.
In one respect, however, the majority of both sexes are alike, and show an equal want of taste and modesty. Ignorant women, forced to be chaste to preserve their reputations, let their imaginations revel in the unnatural and meretricious scenes sketched by the novel-writers of the day, dismissing as insipid the sober dignity and matronly grace of history; while men carry the same vitiated taste into life, and fly for amusement to the wanton, away from the unsophisticated charms of virtue and the grave respectability of sense.
Footnote: I am not now referring to that superiority of mind which leads to the creation of ideal beauty, when life, surveyed with a penetrating eye, appears a tragicomedy in which little can be found to satisfy the heart without the help of fancy.
Besides, reading novels makes women, and ladies of fashion particularly, very fond of using strong expressions and superlatives in conversation; and though the dissipated, artificial life they lead prevents them from cherishing any strong legitimate passion, the language of passion in affected tones slips forever off their glib tongues, and every trifle produces those phosphoric flashes that only mimic the flame of passion in the dark.
Ignorance, and the mistaken cunning that nature sharpens in weak heads as a principle of self-preservation, make women very fond of dress, and produce all the vanity such a fondness may naturally be expected to breed, to the exclusion of emulation and magnanimity.
I agree with Rousseau that the physical part of the art of pleasing consists in ornament; and for that very reason I would guard girls against the contagious fondness for dress so common among weak women, so that they may not stop at the physical part. Yet weak indeed are the women who imagine they can please for long without the aid of the mind — in other words, without the moral art of pleasing. And the moral art, if it is not a profanation to use the word art of a grace that is the effect of virtue rather than the motive for action, is never found together with ignorance. The sportiveness of innocence, so pleasing to refined libertines of both sexes, is quite different in essence from this superior gracefulness.
A strong inclination for outward ornament always appears in barbarous states — only there it is the men and not the women who adorn themselves; for wherever women are allowed to be so far on a level with men, society has advanced at least one step in civilization.
The attention to dress, then, which has been thought a propensity of one sex, I think natural to humankind. But I ought to put it more precisely. When the mind is not sufficiently opened to take pleasure in reflection, the body will be adorned with assiduous care, and ambition will show itself in tattooing or painting it.
The first inclination is carried so far that even the hellish yoke of slavery cannot stifle the savage craving for admiration that enslaved people inherit from both their parents alike, for the hard-earned savings of a slave are commonly spent on a little tawdry finery. And I have seldom known a good servant, male or female, who was not particularly fond of dress. Their clothes were their riches. And I argue by analogy that the fondness for dress, so extravagant in women, arises from the same cause: a want of cultivation of mind. When men meet they talk about business, politics or literature; but, says Swift, "how naturally do women apply their hands to each other's lappets and ruffles." And it is very natural, for they have no business to interest them, no taste for literature, and they find politics dry, because they have not acquired a love of humankind by turning their thoughts to the grand pursuits that exalt the human race and promote general happiness.
Besides, the paths to power and fame that men pursue by accident or choice are various; and though they jostle each other — for men of the same profession are seldom friends — there are a great many more of their fellow creatures they never clash with at all. But women are very differently situated with regard to each other, for they are all rivals.
Before marriage their business is to please men, and afterwards, with a few exceptions, they follow the same scent with all the persevering pertinacity of instinct. Even virtuous women never forget their sex in company, for they are forever trying to make themselves agreeable. A female beauty and a male wit appear to be equally anxious to draw the company's attention to themselves — and the animosity of rival wits is proverbial.
Is it surprising, then, that when a woman's whole ambition centres on beauty, and self-interest gives vanity additional force, perpetual rivalries should follow? They are all running the same race, and would be more than mortally virtuous if they did not look at each other with a suspicious and even envious eye.
An immoderate fondness for dress, for pleasure and for power are the passions of savages: the passions that occupy uncivilized beings who have not yet extended the dominion of the mind, or even learned to think with the energy needed to link up the abstract train of thought that produces principles. And that women, from their education and the present state of civilized life, are in the same condition cannot, I think, be disputed. To laugh at them, then, or satirize the follies of a being who is never to be allowed to act freely by the light of her own reason, is as absurd as it is cruel; for it is entirely natural and certain that those who are taught to obey authority blindly will try to elude it cunningly.
Yet let it be proved that they ought to obey men implicitly, and I shall agree at once that it is a woman's duty to cultivate a fondness for dress in order to please, and a propensity to cunning for her own preservation.
But virtues supported by ignorance must always be unsteady — the house built on sand could not stand a storm. It is hardly necessary to draw the inference. If women are to be made virtuous by authority, which is a contradiction in terms, then let them be shut up in harems and watched with a jealous eye. Have no fear that the iron will enter into their souls; for the souls that can bear such treatment are made of yielding stuff, just animated enough to give the body life.
"Matter too soft a lasting mark to bear, And best distinguish'd by black, brown, or fair."
The cruellest wounds will soon heal, of course, and they may still people the world and dress to please men — all the purposes that certain celebrated writers have allowed they were created to fill.
Women are supposed to have more sensibility, and even more humanity, than men, and their strong attachments and instantaneous emotions of compassion are offered as proof. But the clinging affection of ignorance has seldom anything noble in it, and can mostly be resolved into selfishness, like the affection of children and of animals. I have known many weak women whose sensibility was entirely engrossed by their husbands; and as for their humanity, it was very faint indeed, or rather it was only a passing emotion of compassion. "Humanity does not consist in a squeamish ear," says an eminent orator. "It belongs to the mind as well as the nerves."
But this kind of exclusive affection, though it degrades the individual, should not be brought forward as proof of the inferiority of the sex, because it is the natural consequence of confined views. Even women of superior sense, having their attention turned to little employments and private plans, rarely rise to heroism unless they are spurred on by love; and love as a heroic passion, like genius, appears only once in an age. So I agree with the moralist who asserts "that women have seldom so much generosity as men", and that their narrow affections, to which justice and humanity are often sacrificed, make the sex apparently inferior — especially as those affections are commonly inspired by men. But I maintain that the heart would expand as the understanding gained strength, if women were not kept down from their cradles.
I know that a little sensibility and a great deal of weakness will produce a strong attachment between the sexes, and that reason must cement friendship; so I allow that more friendship is to be found in the male world than the female, and that men have a higher sense of justice. The exclusive affections of women do indeed resemble Cato's most unjust love for his country. He wished to crush Carthage not to save Rome but to promote its vainglory; and it is generally to principles like these that humanity is sacrificed, for genuine duties support each other.
Besides, how can women be just or generous when they are the slaves of injustice?
Since the rearing of children — that is, laying a foundation of sound health of body and mind in the rising generation — has justly been insisted on as woman's peculiar destination, the ignorance that unfits her for it must be contrary to the order of things. And I maintain that women's minds can take in much more than they are given, and ought to, or they will never become sensible mothers. Many men attend to the breeding of horses and oversee the running of the stable who would think themselves degraded — strange want of sense and feeling! — by paying any attention to the nursery. Yet how many children are absolutely murdered by the ignorance of women! And when they escape, and are destroyed neither by unnatural negligence nor by blind fondness, how few are properly managed as far as the infant mind goes! So that a child which has been allowed to grow vicious at home is sent to school to have its spirit broken; and the methods used there, which must be used to keep a number of children in order, scatter the seeds of nearly every vice in soil that has just been forcibly torn up.
I have sometimes compared the struggles of these poor children, who ought never to have felt restraint and would not have needed to if they had always been held with an even hand, to the despairing plunges of a spirited filly I once watched being broken on a beach: its feet sinking deeper into the sand every time it tried to throw its rider, until at last it sullenly submitted.
I have always found horses, an animal I am attached to, very tractable when they are treated with humanity and steadiness; so I doubt whether the violent methods used to break them do not do them real harm. I am certain, at any rate, that a child should never be forcibly tamed like that after being injudiciously allowed to run wild; for every violation of justice and reason in the treatment of children weakens their reason. And children take on a character so early that the base of the moral character is fixed, experience leads me to infer, before their seventh year — the very period during which women are allowed the sole management of them. Afterwards it too often happens that half the business of education is correcting, and very imperfectly if it is done in a hurry, the faults they would never have acquired if their mothers had had more understanding.
One striking instance of women's folly must not be left out: the way they treat servants in front of children, letting them suppose that servants ought to wait on them and put up with their moods. A child should always be made to accept help from a man or a woman as a favour; and as the first lesson in independence, children should be taught by their mother's practical example not to demand the personal attendance that it is an insult to humanity to demand when one is in health. Instead of being led to assume airs of consequence, a sense of their own weakness should first make them feel the natural equality of all people. Yet how often have I heard with indignation servants imperiously called to put children to bed, and sent away again and again because master or miss was hanging about mamma to stay a little longer. Made to dance slavish attendance on the little idol in this way, they were treated to all the disgusting moods that characterize a spoiled child.
In short, speaking of most mothers, they either leave their children entirely to the care of servants, or else treat them, because they are their children, as if they were little demigods — though I have always observed that the women who idolize their children in this way seldom show common humanity to a servant, or feel the least tenderness for any children but their own.
It is these exclusive affections, and this individual way of seeing things produced by ignorance, that keep women forever at a standstill as far as improvement goes, and make so many of them dedicate their lives to their children only to weaken their bodies and spoil their tempers — frustrating besides any plan of education a more rational father may adopt; for unless the mother agrees with him, the father who restrains will always be considered a tyrant.
But a woman with a sound constitution may fulfil the duties of a mother and still keep her person scrupulously neat, and help to support her family if that is necessary, or improve her mind by reading and by conversation with both sexes indiscriminately. For nature has ordered things so wisely that if women nursed their own children they would preserve their own health, and there would be such an interval between the birth of each child that we should seldom see a house full of babies. And if they followed a plan of conduct and did not waste their time following the fashionable vagaries of dress, the management of household and children need not shut them out of literature, nor prevent them from attaching themselves to a science with the steady eye that strengthens the mind, or practising one of the fine arts that cultivate the taste.
But visiting to display finery, card-playing and balls, not to mention the idle bustle of a morning's trifling, draw women away from their duty and make them insignificant — make them pleasing, in the present sense of the word, to every man except their husband. For a round of pleasures in which the affections are never exercised cannot be said to improve the understanding, though it is mistakenly called seeing the world; and such senseless intercourse, which becomes a habitual necessity even after it has stopped amusing anyone, makes the heart cold and averse to duty.
But until there is more equality in society, until ranks are confounded and women freed, we shall not see that dignified domestic happiness whose simple grandeur ignorant or vitiated minds cannot relish; nor will the important task of education ever be properly begun until a woman's person is no longer preferred to her mind. For it would be as sensible to expect corn from weeds, or figs from thistles, as to expect a foolish, ignorant woman to be a good mother.
It is not necessary to tell the sagacious reader, now that I come to my concluding reflections, that the discussion of this subject consists merely in laying open a few simple principles and clearing away the rubbish that obscured them. But not all readers are sagacious, so I must be allowed to add some explanatory remarks to bring the subject home to reason — to that sluggish reason which supinely takes opinions on trust and then obstinately defends them to spare itself the labour of thinking.
Moralists have unanimously agreed that unless virtue is nursed by liberty it will never gain its proper strength; and what they say of man I extend to humankind, insisting that in every case morals must be fixed on unchanging principles, and that no being can be called rational or virtuous who obeys any authority but that of reason.
To make women truly useful members of society, I argue that they should be led, by having their understandings cultivated on a large scale, to acquire a rational love of their country founded on knowledge; for it is obvious that we take little interest in what we do not understand. And to show why this general knowledge matters so much, I have tried to show that private duties are never properly fulfilled unless the understanding enlarges the heart, and that public virtue is only an aggregate of private virtue. But the distinctions established in society undermine both, by beating out the solid gold of virtue until it is nothing but the tinsel covering of vice. For while wealth makes a man more respectable than virtue does, wealth will be sought before virtue; and while women's persons are caressed when a childish simper shows an absence of mind, the mind will lie fallow. Yet true voluptuousness must come from the mind. For what can equal the sensations produced by mutual affection supported by mutual respect? What are the cold or feverish caresses of appetite but sin embracing death, compared with the modest overflowings of a pure heart and an exalted imagination? Yes, let me tell the libertine of fancy, when he despises understanding in a woman, that the mind he disregards is what gives life to the enthusiastic affection from which rapture, short-lived as it is, can alone flow — and that without virtue an attachment between the sexes must gutter out like a tallow candle in the socket, leaving an intolerable disgust behind. To prove it I need only observe that men who have wasted a great part of their lives among women, seeking pleasure with them in eager thirst, hold the meanest opinion of the sex. Virtue, true refiner of joy! If foolish men were to frighten you off the earth in order to give free rein to all their appetites unchecked, some sensual fellow of taste would scale the heavens to invite you back, to give their pleasure a zest.
That women at present are made foolish or vicious by ignorance is not, I think, to be disputed; and that the most wholesome effects, tending to improve humankind, might be expected from a revolution in the manners of women appears at least probable from that observation. For since marriage has been called the parent of the endearing charities that draw us out of the brutal herd, the corrupting intercourse that wealth, idleness and folly produce between the sexes is more universally damaging to morality than all the other vices of humankind put together. The most sacred duties are sacrificed to adulterous lust, because before marriage men, by a promiscuous intimacy with women, have learned to think of love as a selfish gratification — learned to separate it not only from esteem but even from the affection merely built on habit, which at least mixes a little humanity into it. Justice and friendship are set at defiance too, and that purity of taste is spoiled which would naturally lead a man to relish an artless display of affection rather than affected airs. But that noble simplicity of affection which dares to appear unadorned has few attractions for the libertine, though it is the charm which, in cementing the marriage tie, secures the necessary parental attention for the pledges of a warmer passion; for children will never be properly educated until there is friendship between their parents. Virtue flies from a house divided against itself, and a whole legion of devils takes up residence there.
The affection of husbands and wives cannot be pure when they have so few sentiments in common, and when so little confidence is established at home, as must be the case when their pursuits are so different. The intimacy from which tenderness ought to flow will not, and cannot, exist between the vicious.
Maintaining, then, that the distinction between the sexes on which men have insisted so warmly is arbitrary, I have dwelt on an observation that several sensible men I have discussed the subject with allowed to be well founded. It is simply this: that the little chastity to be found among men, and their consequent disregard of modesty, tend to degrade both sexes; and further, that the modesty of women, described as belonging to their sex, will often be only the artful veil of wantonness instead of the natural reflection of purity, until modesty is universally respected.
From the tyranny of man, I firmly believe, the greater number of female follies proceed; and the cunning which I admit forms part of women's character at present is, as I have repeatedly tried to prove, produced by oppression.
Were dissenters, for instance, not a class of people who could with strict truth be described as cunning? And may I not lay some weight on that fact to prove that when any power but reason curbs the free spirit of a human being, dissimulation is practised and all the various shifts of artifice are naturally called out? A great attention to decorum, carried to the point of scrupulosity, and all that puerile bustle about trifles and consequential solemnity that Butler's caricature of a dissenter brings to mind, shaped their persons as well as their minds in a mould of prim littleness. I speak collectively, for I know how many ornaments to human nature have been enrolled among the sects. Yet I assert that the same narrow prejudice in favour of their sect that women have in favour of their families prevailed in the dissenting part of the community, however worthy in other respects; and that the same timid prudence, or headstrong effort, often disgraced the exertions of both. Oppression thus formed many features of their character that coincide perfectly with those of the oppressed half of humankind. For is it not notorious that dissenters were, like women, fond of deliberating together and asking one another's advice, until by a complication of little contrivances some little end was brought about? A similar attention to preserving their reputation was conspicuous in the dissenting world and in the female one, and was produced by a similar cause.
In asserting the rights that women, in common with men, ought to contend for, I have not tried to extenuate their faults, but to prove them the natural consequence of their education and their station in society. And if that is so, it is reasonable to suppose that they will change their character, and correct their vices and follies, when they are allowed to be free in a physical, moral and civil sense.
Let woman share the rights, and she will emulate the virtues of man; for she must grow more perfect once emancipated, or else justify the authority that chains so weak a being to her duty. If the latter, it will be expedient to open a fresh trade with Russia for whips — a present a father should always make his son-in-law on the wedding day, so that a husband may keep his whole family in order by the same means, and reign without any violation of justice, wielding this sceptre as sole master of his house because he is the only being in it who has reason; the divine, indefeasible, earthly sovereignty breathed into man by the Master of the universe. Granting that position, women have no inherent rights to claim; and by the same rule their duties vanish too, for rights and duties are inseparable.
Be just, then, you men of understanding! Do not mark what women do amiss more severely than you mark the vicious tricks of the horse or the donkey you provide fodder for; and allow her the privileges of ignorance, if you deny her the rights of reason — or you will be worse than Egyptian taskmasters, expecting virtue where nature has given no understanding.