The Subjection of Women..................................................................................................................................1

John Stuart Mill.......................................................................................................................................1

CHAPTER 1............................................................................................................................................1

CHAPTER 2..........................................................................................................................................15

CHAPTER 3..........................................................................................................................................25

CHAPTER 4..........................................................................................................................................40

The object of this Essay is to explain as clearly as I am able grounds of an opinion which I have held from the

very earliest period when I had formed any opinions at all on social political matters, and which, instead of

being weakened or modified, has been constantly growing stronger by the progress reflection and the

experience of life. That the principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes

the legal subordination of one sex to the other is wrong itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to

human improvement; and that it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality, admitting no power or

The very words necessary to express the task I have undertaken, show how arduous it is. But it would be a

mistake to suppose that the difficulty of the case must lie in the insufficiency or obscurity of the grounds of

reason on which my convictions. The difficulty is that which exists in all cases in which there is a mass of

feeling to be contended against. So long as opinion is strongly rooted in the feelings, it gains rather than loses

instability by having a preponderating weight of argument against it. For if it were accepted as a result of

argument, the refutation of the argument might shake the solidity of the conviction; but when it rests solely

on feeling, worse it fares in argumentative contest, the more persuaded adherents are that their feeling must

have some deeper ground, which the arguments do not reach; and while the feeling remains, it is always

throwing up fresh intrenchments of argument to repair any breach made in the old. And there are so many

causes tending to make the feelings connected with this subject the most intense and most deeplyrooted of

those which gather round and protect old institutions and custom, that we need not wonder to find them as yet

less undermined and loosened than any of the rest by the progress the great modern spiritual and social

transition; nor suppose that the barbarisms to which men cling longest must be less barbarisms than those

In every respect the burthen is hard on those who attack an almost universal opinion. They must be very

fortunate well as unusually capable if they obtain a hearing at all. They have more difficulty in obtaining a

trial, than any other litigants have in getting a verdict. If they do extort a hearing, they are subjected to a set of

logical requirements totally different from those exacted from other people. In all other cases, burthen of

proof is supposed to lie with the affirmative. If a person is charged with a murder, it rests with those who

accuse him to give proof of his guilt, not with himself to prove his innocence. If there is a difference of

opinion about the reality of an alleged historical event, in which the feelings of men general are not much

interested, as the Siege of Troy example, those who maintain that the event took place expected to produce

their proofs, before those who take the other side can be required to say anything; and at no time these

required to do more than show that the evidence produced by the others is of no value. Again, in practical

matters, the burthen of proof is supposed to be with those who are against liberty; who contend for any

restriction or prohibition either any limitation of the general freedom of human action or any disqualification

or disparity of privilege affecting one person or kind of persons, as compared with others. The a priori

presumption is in favour of freedom and impartiality. It is held that there should be no restraint not required

by I general good, and that the law should be no respecter of persons but should treat all alike, save where

dissimilarity of treatment is required by positive reasons, either of justice or of policy. But of none of these

rules of evidence will the benefit be allowed to those who maintain the opinion I profess. It is useless me to

say that those who maintain the doctrine that men ha a right to command and women are under an obligation

obey, or that men are fit for government and women unfit, on the affirmative side of the question, and that

they are bound to show positive evidence for the assertions, or submit to their rejection. It is equally

unavailing for me to say that those who deny to women any freedom or privilege rightly allow to men, having

the double presumption against them that they are opposing freedom and recommending partiality, must held

to the strictest proof of their case, and unless their success be such as to exclude all doubt, the judgment ought

to against them. These would be thought good pleas in any common case; but they will not be thought so in

this instance. Before I could hope to make any impression, I should be expected not only to answer all that

has ever been said bye who take the other side of the question, but to imagine that could be said by them

to find them in reasons, as I as answer all I find: and besides refuting all arguments for the affirmative, I shall

be called upon for invincible positive arguments to prove a negative. And even if I could do all and leave the

opposite party with a host of unanswered arguments against them, and not a single unrefuted one on side, I

should be thought to have done little; for a cause supported on the one hand by universal usage, and on the

other by so great a preponderance of popular sentiment, is supposed to have a presumption in its favour,

superior to any conviction which an appeal to reason has power to produce in intellects but those of a high

I do not mention these difficulties to complain of them; first, use it would be useless; they are inseparable

from having to contend through people's understandings against the hostility their feelings and practical

tendencies: and truly the understandings of the majority of mankind would need to be much better cultivated

than has ever yet been the case, before they be asked to place such reliance in their own power of estimating

arguments, as to give up practical principles in which have been born and bred and which are the basis of

much existing order of the world, at the first argumentative attack which they are not capable of logically

resisting. I do not therefore quarrel with them for having too little faith in argument, but for having too much

faith in custom and the general feeling. It is one of the characteristic prejudices of the ion of the nineteenth

century against the eighteenth, to accord to the unreasoning elements in human nature the infallibility which

the eighteenth century is supposed to have ascribed to the reasoning elements. For the apotheosis of Reason

we have substituted that of Instinct; and we call thing instinct which we find in ourselves and for which we

cannot trace any rational foundation. This idolatry, infinitely more degrading than the other, and the most

pernicious of the false worships of the present day, of all of which it is the main support, will probably hold

its ground until it way before a sound psychology laying bare the real root of much that is bowed down to as

the intention of Nature and ordinance of God. As regards the present question, I am going to accept the

unfavourable conditions which the prejudice assigns to me. I consent that established custom, and the general

feelings, should be deemed conclusive against me, unless that custom and feeling from age to age can be

shown to have owed their existence to other causes than their soundness, and to have derived their power

from the worse rather than the better parts of human nature. I am willing that judgment should go against me,

unless I can show that my judge has been tampered with. The concession is not so great as it might appear;

The generality of a practice is in some cases a strong presumption that it is, or at all events once was,

conducive to laudable ends. This is the case, when the practice was first adopted, or afterwards kept up, as a

means to such ends, and was grounded on experience of the mode in which they could be most effectually

attained. If the authority of men over women, when first established, had been the result of a conscientious

comparison between different modes of constituting the government of society; if, after trying various other

modes of social organisation the government of women over men, equality between the two, and such

mixed and divided modes of government as might be invented it had been decided, on the testimony of

experience, that the mode in which women are wholly under the rule of men, having no share at all in public

concerns, and each in private being under the legal obligation of obedience to the man with whom she has

associated her destiny, was the arrangement most conducive to the happiness and wellbeing of both; its

general adoption might then be fairly thought to be some evidence that, at the time when it was adopted, it

was the best: though even then the considerations which recommended it may, like so many other primeval

social facts of the greatest importance, have subsequently, in the course of ages, ceased to exist. But the state

of the case is in every respect the reverse of this. In the first place, the opinion in favour of the present

system, which entirely subordinates the weaker sex to the stronger, rests upon theory only; for there never has

been trial made of any other: so that experience, in the sense in which it is vulgarly opposed to theory, cannot

be pretended to have pronounced any verdict. And in the second place, the adoption of this system of

inequality never was the result of deliberation, or forethought, or any social ideas, or any notion whatever of

what conduced to the benefit of humanity or the good order of society. It arose simply from the fact that from

the very earliest twilight of human society, every woman owing to the value attached to her by men,

combined with her inferiority in muscular strength) was found in a state of bondage to some man. Laws and

systems of polity always begin by recognising the relations they find already existing between individuals.

They convert what was a mere physical fact into a legal right, give it the sanction of society, and principally

aim at the substitution of public and organised means of asserting and protecting these rights, instead of the

irregular and lawless conflict of physical strength. Those who had already been compelled to obedience

became in this manner legally bound to it. Slavery, from be inn a mere affair of force between the master and

the slave, became regularised and a matter of compact among the masters, who, binding themselves to one

another for common protection, guaranteed by their collective strength the private possessions of each,

including his slaves. In early times, the great majority of the male sex were slaves, as well as the whole of the

female. And many ages elapsed, some of them ages of high cultivation, before any thinker was bold enough

to question the rightfulness, and the absolute social necessity, either of the one slavery or of the other. By

degrees such thinkers did arise; and (the general progress of society assisting) the slavery of the male sex has,

in all the countries of Christian Europe at least (though, in one of them, only within the last few years) been at

length abolished, and that of the female sex has been gradually changed into a milder form of dependence.

But this dependence, as it exists at present, is not an original institution, taking a fresh start from

considerations of justice and social expediency it is the primitive state of slavery lasting on, through

successive mitigations and modifications occasioned by the same causes which have softened the general

manners, and brought all human relations more under the control of justice and the influence of humanity. It

has not lost the taint of its brutal origin. No presumption in its favour, therefore, can be drawn from the fact

of its existence. The only such presumption which it could be supposed to have, must be grounded on its

having lasted till now, when so many other things which came down from the same odious source have been

done away with. And this, indeed, is what makes it strange to ordinary ears, to hear it asserted that the

inequality of rights between men and women has no other source than the law of the strongest.

That this statement should have the effect of a paradox, is in some respects creditable to the progress of

civilisation, and the improvement of the moral sentiments of mankind. We now live that is to say, one or

two of the most advanced nations of the world now live in a state in which the law of the strongest seems

to be entirely abandoned as the regulating principle of the world's affairs: nobody professes it, and, as regards

most of the relations between human beings, nobody is permitted to practise it. When anyone succeeds in

doing so, it is under cover of some pretext which gives him the semblance of having some general social

interest on his side. This being the ostensible state of things, people flatter themselves that the rule of mere

force is ended; that the law of the strongest cannot be the reason of existence of anything which has remained

in full operation down to the present time. However any of our present institutions may have begun, it can

only, they think, have been preserved to this period of advanced civilisation by a wellgrounded feeling of its

adaptation to human nature, and conduciveness to the general good. They do not understand the great vitality

and durability of institutions which place right on the side of might; how intensely they are clung to; how the

good as well as the bad propensities and sentiments of those who have power in their hands, become

identified with retaining it; how slowly these bad institutions give way, one at a time, the weakest first,

beginning with those which are least interwoven with the daily habits of life; and how very rarely those who

have obtained legal power because they first had physical, have ever lost their hold of it until the physical

power had passed over to the other side. Such shifting of the physical force not having taken place in the case

of women; this fact, combined with all the peculiar and characteristic features of the particular case, made it

certain from the first that this branch of the system of right founded on might, though softened in its most

atrocious features at an earlier period than several of the others, would be the very last to disappear. It was

inevitable that this one case of a social relation grounded on force, would survive through generations of

institutions grounded on equal justice, an almost solitary exception to the general character of their laws and

customs; but which, so long as it does not proclaim its own origin, and as discussion has not brought out its

true character, is not felt to jar with modern civilisation, any more than domestic slavery among the Greeks

The truth is, that people of the present and the last two or three generations have lost all practical sense of the

primitive condition of humanity; and only the few who have studied history accurately, or have much

frequented the parts of the world occupied by the living representatives of ages long past, are able to form

any mental picture of what society then was. People are not aware how entirely, informer ages, the law of

superior strength was the rule of life; how publicly and openly it was avowed, I do not say cynically or

shamelessly for these words imply a feeling that there was something in it to be ashamed of, and no such

notion could find a place in the faculties of any person in those ages, except a philosopher or a saint. History

gives a cruel experience of human nature, in showing how exactly the regard due to the life, possessions, and

entire earthly happiness of any class of persons, was measured by what they had the power of enforcing; how

all who made any resistance to authorities that had arms in their hands, however dreadful might be the

provocation, had not only the law of force but all other laws, and all the notions of social obligation against

them; and in the eyes of those whom they resisted, were not only guilty of crime, but of the worst of all

crimes, deserving the most cruel chastisement which human beings could inflict. The first small vestige of a

feeling of obligation in a superior to acknowledge any right in inferiors, began when he had been induced, for

convenience, to make some promise to them. Though these promises, even when sanctioned by the most

solemn oaths, were for many ages revoked or violated on the most trifling provocation or temptation, it is

probably that this, except by persons of still worse than the average morality, was seldom done without some

twinges of conscience. The ancient republics, being mostly grounded from the first upon some kind of mutual

compact, or at any rate formed by an union of persons not very unequal in strength, afforded, in consequence,

the first instance of a portion of human relations fenced round, and placed under the dominion of another law

than that of force. And though the original law of force remained in full operation between them and their

slaves, and also (except so far as limited by express compact) between a commonwealth and its subjects, or

other independent commonwealths; the banishment of that primitive law even from so narrow a field,

commenced the regeneration of human nature, by giving birth to sentiments of which experience soon

demonstrated the immense value even for material interests, and which thence forward only required to be

enlarged, not created. Though slaves were no part of the commonwealth, it was in the free states that slaves

were first felt to have rights as human beings. The Stoics were, I believe, the first (except so far as the Jewish

law constitutes an exception) who taught as a part of morality that men were bound by moral obligations to

their slaves. No one, after Christianity became ascendant, could ever again have been a stranger to this belief,

in theory; nor, after the rise of the Catholic Church, was it ever without persons to stand up for it. Yet to

enforce it was the most arduous task which Christianity ever had to perform. For more than a thousand years

the Church kept up the contest, with hardly any perceptible success. It was not for want of power over men's

minds. Its power was prodigious. It could make kings and nobles resign their most valued possessions to

enrich the Church. It could make thousands in the prime of life and the height of worldly advantages, shut

themselves up in convents to work out their salvation by poverty, fasting, and prayer. It could send hundreds

of thousands across land and sea, Europe and Asia, to give their lives for the deliverance of the Holy

Sepulchre. It could make kings relinquish wives who were the object of their passionate attachment, because

the Church declared that they were within the seventh (by our calculation the fourteenth) degree of

relationship. All this it did; but it could not make men fight less with one another, nor tyrannise less cruelly

over the serfs, and when they were able, over burgesses. It could not make them renounce either of the

applications of force; force militant, or force triumphant. This they could never be induced to do until they

were themselves in their turn compelled by superior force. Only by the growing power of kings was an end

put to fighting except between kings, or competitors for kingship; only by the growth of a wealthy and

warlike bourgeoisie in the fortified towns, and of a plebeian infantry which proved more powerful in the field

than the undisciplined chivalry, was the insolent tyranny of the nobles over the bourgeoisie and peasantry

brought within some bounds. It was persisted in not only until, but long after, the oppressed had obtained a

power enabling them often to take conspicuous vengeance; and on the Continent much of it continued to the

time of the French Revolution, though in England the earlier and better organisation of the democratic classes

put an end to it sooner, by establishing equal laws and free national institutions.

If people are mostly so little aware how completely, during the greater part of the duration of our species, the

law of force was the avowed rule of general conduct, any other being only a special and exceptional

consequence of peculiar ties and from how very recent a date it is that the affairs of society in general

have been even pretended to be regulated according to any moral law; as little do people remember or

consider, how institutions and customs which never had any ground but the law of force, last on into ages and

states of general opinion which never would have permitted their first establishment. Less than forty years

ago, Englishmen might still by law hold human beings in bondage as saleable property: within the present

century they might kidnap them and carry them off, and work them literally to death. This absolutely extreme

case of the law of force, condemned by those who can tolerate almost every other form of arbitrary power,

and which, of all others presents features the most revolting to the feelings of all who look at it from an

impartial position, was the law of civilised and Christian England within the memory of persons now living:

and in one half of AngloSaxon America three or four years ago, not only did slavery exist, but the

slavetrade, and the breeding of slaves expressly for it, was a general practice between slave states. Yet not

only was there a greater strength of sentiment against it, but, in England at least, a less amount either of

feeling or of interest in favour of it, than of any other of the customary abuses of force: for its motive was the

love of gain, unmixed and undisguised; and those who profited by it were a very small numerical fraction of

the country, while the natural feeling of all who were not personally interested in it, was unmitigated

abhorrence. So extreme an instance makes it almost superfluous to refer to any other: but consider the long

duration of absolute monarchy. In England at present it is the almost universal conviction that military

despotism is a case of the law of force, having no other origin or justification. Yet in all the great nations of

Europe except England it either still exists, or has only just ceased to exist, and has even now a strong party

favourable to it in all ranks of the people, especially among persons of station and consequence. Such is the

power of an established system, even when far from universal; when not only in almost every period of

history there have been great and wellknown examples of the contrary system, but these have almost

invariably been afforded by the most illustrious and most prosperous communities. In this case, too, the

possessor of the undue power, the person directly interested in it, is only one person, while those who are

subject to it and suffer from it are literally all the rest. The yoke is naturally and necessarily humiliating to all

persons, except the one who is on the throne, together with, at most, the one who expects to succeed to it.

How different are these cases from that of the power of men over women! *I am not now prejudging the

questionof its justifiableness. I am showing how vastly more permanent it could not but be, even if not

justifiable, than these other dominations which have nevertheless lasted down to our own time. Whatever

gratification of pride there is in the possession of power, and whatever personal interest in its exercise, is in

this case not confined to a limited class, but common to the whole male sex. Instead of being, to most of its

supporters) a thing desirable chiefly in the abstract, or, like the political ends usually contended for by

factions, of little private importance to any but the leaders; it comes home to the person and hearth of every

male head of a family, and of everyone who looks forward to being so. The clodhopper exercises, or is to

exercise, his share of the power equally with the highest nobleman. And the case is that in which the desire of

power is the strongest: for everyone who desires power, desires it most over those who are nearest to him,

with whom his life is passed, with whom he has most concerns in common and in whom any independence of

his authority is oftenest likely to interfere with his individual preferences. If, in the other cases specified,

powers manifestly grounded only on force, and having so much less to support them, are so slowly and with

so much difficulty got rid of, much more must it be so with this, even if it rests on no better foundation than

those. We must consider, too, that the possessors of the power have facilities in this case, greater than in any

other, to prevent any uprising against it. Every one of the subjects lives under the very eye, and almost, it may

be said, in the hands, of one of the masters in closer intimacy with him than with any of her fellowsubjects;

with no means of combining against him, no power of even locally over mastering him, and, on the other

hand, with the strongest motives for seeking his favour and avoiding to give him offence. In struggles for

political emancipation, everybody knows how often its champions are bought off by bribes, or daunted by

terrors. In the case of women, each individual of the subjectclass is in a chronic state of bribery and

intimidation combined. In setting up the standard of resistance, a large number of the leaders, and still more

of the followers, must make an almost complete sacrifice of the pleasures or the alleviations of their own

individual lot. If ever any system of privilege and enforced subjection had its yoke tightly riveted on the those

who are kept down by it, this has. I have not yet shown that it is a wrong system: but everyone who is capable

of thinking on the subject must see that even if it is, it was certain to outlast all other forms of unjust

authority. And when some of the grossest of the other forms still exist in many civilised countries, and have

only recently been got rid of in others, it would be strange if that which is so much the deepest rooted had yet

been perceptibly shaken anywhere. There is more reason to wonder that the protests and testimonies against it

Some will object, that a comparison cannot fairly be made between the government of the male sex and the

forms of unjust power which I have adduced in illustration of it, since these are arbitrary, and the effect of

mere usurpation, while it on the contrary is natural. But was there ever any domination which did not appear

natural to those who possessed it? There was a time when the division of mankind into two classes, a small

one of masters and a numerous one of slaves, appeared, even to the most cultivated minds, to be natural, and

the only natural, condition of the human race. No less an intellect, and one which contributed no less to the

progress of human thought, than Aristotle, held this opinion without doubt or misgiving; and rested it on the

same premises on which the same assertion in regard to the dominion of men over women is usually based,

namely that there are different natures among mankind, free natures, and slave natures; that the Greeks were

of a free nature, the barbarian races of Thracians and Asiatics of a slave nature. But why need I go back to

Aristotle? Did not the slaveowners of the Southern United States maintain the same doctrine, with all the

fanaticism with which men ding to the theories that justify their passions and legitimate their personal

interests? Did they not call heaven and earth to witness that the dominion of the white man over the black is

natural, that the black race is by nature incapable of freedom, and marked out for slavery? some even going

so far as to say that the freedom of manual labourers is an unnatural order of things anywhere. Again, the

theorists of absolute monarchy have always affirmed it to be the only natural form of government; issuing

from the patriarchal, which was the primitive and spontaneous form of society, framed on the model of the

paternal, which is anterior to society itself, and, as they contend, the most natural authority of all. Nay, for

that matter, the law of force itself, to those who could not plead any other has always seemed the most natural

of all grounds for the exercise of authority. Conquering races hold it to be Nature's own dictate that the

conquered should obey the conquerors, or as they euphoniously paraphrase it, that the feebler and more

unwarlike races should submit to the braver and manlier. The smallest acquaintance with human life in the

middle ages, shows how supremely natural the dominion of the feudal nobility overmen of low condition

appeared to the nobility themselves, and how unnatural the conception seemed, of a person of the inferior

class claiming equality with them, or exercising authority over them. It hardly seemed less so to the class held

in subjection. The emancipated serfs and burgesses, even in their most vigorous struggles, never made any

pretension to a share of authority; they only demanded more or less of limitation to the power of tyrannising

over them. So true is it that unnatural generally means only uncustomary, and that everything which is usual

appears natural. The subjection of women to men being a universal custom, any departure from it quite

naturally appears unnatural. But how entirely, even in this case, the feeling is dependent on custom, appears

by ample experience. Nothing so much astonishes the people of distant parts of the world, when they first

learn anything about England, as to be told that it is under a queen; the thing seems to them so unnatural as to

be almost incredible. To Englishmen this does not seem in the least degree unnatural, because they are used

to it; but they do feel it unnatural that women should be soldiers or Members of Parliament. In the feudal

ages, on the contrary, war and politics were not thought unnatural to women, because not unusual; it seemed

natural that women of the privileged classes should be of manly character, inferior in nothing but bodily

strength to their husbands and fathers. The independence of women seemed rather less unnatural to the

Greeks than to other ancients, on account of the fabulous Amazons (whom they believed to be historical), and

the partial example afforded by the Spartan women; who, though no less subordinate by law than in other

Greek states, were more free in fact, and being trained to bodily exercises in the same manner with men, gave

ample proof that they were not naturally disqualified for them. There can be little doubt that Spartan

experience suggested to Plato, among many other of his doctrines, that of the social and political equality of

But, it will be said, the rule of men over women differs from all these others in not being a rule a rule of

force: it is accepted voluntarily; women make no complaint, and are consenting parties to it. In the first place,

a great number of women do not accept it. Ever since there have been women able to make their sentiments

known by their writings (the only mode of publicity which society permits to them), an increasing number of

them have recorded protests against their present social condition: and recently many thousands of them,

headed by the most eminent women known to the public, have petitioned Parliament for their admission to

the Parliamentary Suffrage The claim of women to be educated as solidly, and in the same branches of

knowledge, as men, is urged with growing intensity, and with a great prospect of success; while the demand

for their admission into professions and occupations hitherto closed against them, becomes every year more

urgent. Though there are not in this country, as there are in the United States, periodical conventions and an

organised party to agitate for the Rights of Women, there is a numerous and active society organised and

managed by women, for the more limited object of obtaining the political franchise. Nor is it only in our own

country and in America that women are beginning to protest, more or less collectively, against the disabilities

under which they labour. France, and Italy, and Switzerland, and Russia now afford examples of the same

thing. How many more women there are who silently cherish similar aspirations, no one can possibly know;

but there are abundant tokens how many would cherish them, were they not so strenuously taught to repress

them as contrary to the proprieties of their sex. It must be remembered, also, that no enslaved class ever asked

for complete liberty at once. When Simon de Montfort called the deputies of the commons to sit for the first

time in Parliament, did any of them dream of demanding that an assembly, elected by their constituents,

should make and destroy ministries, and dictate to the king in affairs of State? No such thought entered into

the imagination of the most ambitious of them. The nobility had already these pretensions; the commons

pretended to nothing but to be exempt from arbitrary taxation, and from the gross individual oppression of the

king's officers. It is a political law of nature that those who are under any power of ancient origin, never begin

by complaining of the power itself, but only of its oppressive exercise. There is never any want of women

who complain of illusage by their husbands. There would be infinitely more, if complaint were not the

greatest of all provocatives to a repetition and increase of the illusage. It is this which frustrates all attempts

to maintain the power but protect the woman against its abuses. In no other case (except that of a child) is the

person who has been proved judicially to have suffered an injury, replaced under the physical power of the

culprit who inflicted it. Accordingly wives, even in the most extreme and protracted cases of bodily

illusage, hardly ever dare avail themselves of the laws made for their protection: and if, in a moment of

irrepressible indignation, or by the interference of neighbours, they are induced to do so, their whole effort

afterwards is to disclose as little as they can, and to beg off their tyrant from his merited chastisement.

All causes, social and natural, combine to make it unlikely that women should be collectively rebellious to

the power of men. They are so far in a position different from all other subject classes, that their masters

require something more from them than actual service. Men do not want solely the obedience of women, they

want their sentiments. All men, except the most brutish, desire to have, in the woman most nearly connected

with them, not a forced slave but a willing one, not a slave merely, but a favourite. They have therefore put

everything in practice to enslave their minds. The masters of all other slaves rely, for maintaining obedience,

on fear; either fear of themselves, or religious fears. The masters of women wanted more than simple

obedience, and they turned the whole force of education to effect their purpose. All women are brought up

from the very earliest years in the belief that their ideal of character is the very opposite to that of men; not

self will, and government by selfcontrol, but submission, and yielding to the control of other. All the

moralities tell them that it is the duty of women, and all the current sentimentalities that it is their nature, to

live for others; to make complete abnegation of themselves, and to have no life but in their affections. And by

their affections are meant the only ones they are allowed to have those to the men with whom they are

connected, or to the children who constitute an additional and indefeasible tie between them and a man.

When we put together three things first, the natural attraction between opposite sexes; secondly, the wife's

entire dependence on the husband, every privilege or pleasure she has being either his gift, or depending

entirely on his will; and lastly, that the principal object of human pursuit, consideration, and all objects of

social ambition, can in general be sought or obtained by her only through him, it would be a miracle if the

object of being attractive to men had not become the polar star of feminine education and formation of

character. And, this great means of influence over the minds of women having been acquired, an instinct of

selfishness made men avail themselves of it to the utmost as a means of holding women in subjection, by

representing to them meekness, submissiveness, and resignation of all individual will into the hands of a man,

as an essential part of sexual attractiveness. Can it be doubted that any of the other yokes which mankind

have succeeded in breaking, would have subsisted till now if the same means had existed, and had been so

sedulously used, to bow down their minds to it? If it had been made the object of the life of every young

plebeian to find personal favour in the eyes of some patrician, of every young serf with some seigneur; if

domestication with him, and a share of his personal affections, had been held out as the prize which they all

should look out for, the most gifted and aspiring being able to reckon on the most desirable prizes; and if,

when this prize had been obtained, they had been shut out by a wall of brass from all interests not centring in

him, all feelings and desires but those which he shared or inculcated; would not serfs and seigneurs, plebeians

and patricians, have been as broadly distinguished at this day as men and women are? and would not all but a

thinker here and there, have believed the distinction to be a fundamental and unalterable fact in human

The preceding considerations are amply sufficient to show that custom, however universal it may be, affords

in this case no presumption, and ought not to create any prejudice, in favour of the arrangements which place

women in social and political subjection to men. But I may go farther, and maintain that the course of history,

and the tendencies of progressive human society, afford not only no presumption in favour of this system of

inequality of rights, but a strong one against it; and that, so far as the whole course of human improvement up

to the time, the whole stream of modern tendencies, warrants any inference on the subject, it is, that this relic

For, what is the peculiar character of the modern world the difference which chiefly distinguishes modern

institutions, modern social ideas, modern life itself, from those of times long past? It is, that human beings are

no longer born to their place in life, and chained down by an inexorable bond to the would be infinitely more,

if complaint were not the greatest of all provocatives to a repetition and increase of the illusage. It is this

which frustrates all attempts to maintain the power but protect the woman against its abuses. In no other case

(except that of a child) is the person who has been proved judicially to have suffered an injury, replaced

under the physical power of the culprit who inflicted it. Accordingly wives, even in the most extreme and

protracted cases of bodily illusage, hardly ever dare avail themselves of the laws made for their protection:

and if, in a moment of irrepressible indignation, or by the interference of neighbours, they are induced to do

so, their whole effort afterwards is to disclose as little as they can, and to beg off their tyrant from his merited

chastisement. All causes, social and natural, combine to make it unlikely that women should be collectively

rebellious to the power of men. They are so far in a position different from all other subject classes, that their

masters require something more from them than actual service Men do not want solely the obedience of

women, they want their sentiments. All men, except the most brutish, desire to have, in the woman most

nearly connected with them, not a forced slave but a willing one, not a slave merely, but a favourite. They

have therefore put everything in practice to enslave their minds. The masters of all other slaves rely, for

maintaining obedience, on fear; either fear of themselves, or religious fears. The masters of women wanted

more than simple obedience, and they turned the whole force of education to effect their purpose. All women

are brought up from the very earliest years in the belief that their ideal of character is the very opposite to that

of men; not selfwill, and government by selfcontrol, but submission, and yielding to the control of others.

All the moralities tell them that it is the duty of women, and all the current sentimentalities that it is their

nature, to live for others; to make complete abnegation of themselves, and to have no life but in their

affections. And by their affections are meant the only ones they are allowed to have those to the men with

whom they are connected, or to the children who constitute an additional and indefeasible tie between them

and a man. When we put together three things first, the natural attraction between opposite sexes;

secondly, the wife's entire dependence on the husband, every privilege or pleasure she has being either his

gift, or depending entirely on his will; and lastly, that the principal object of human pursuit, consideration,

and all objects of social ambition, can in general be sought or obtained by her only through him, it would be a

miracle if the object of being attractive to men had not become the polar star of feminine education and

formation of character. And, this great means of influence over the minds of women having been acquired, an

instinct of selfishness made men avail themselves of it to the utmost as a means of holding women in

subjection, by representing to them meekness, submissiveness, and resignation of all individual will into the

hands of a man, as an essential part of sexual attractiveness. Can it be doubted that any of the other yokes

which mankind have succeeded in breaking, would have subsisted till now if the same means had existed, and

had been so sedulously used, to bow down their minds to it? If it had been made the object of the life of every

young plebeian to find personal favour in the eyes of some patrician, of every young serf with some seigneur;

if domestication with him, and a share of his personal affections, had been held out as the prize which they all

should look out for, the most gifted and aspiring being able to reckon on the most desirable prizes; and if,

when this prize had been obtained, they had been shut out by a wall of brass from all interests not centring in

him, all feelings and desires but those which he shared or inculcated; would not serfs and seigneurs, plebeians

and patricians, have been as broadly distinguished at this day as men and women are? and would not all but a

thinker here and there, have believed the distinction to be a fundamental and unalterable fact in human

nature? The preceding considerations are amply sufficient to show that custom, however universal it may be,

affords in this case no presumption, and ought not to create any prejudice, in favour of the arrangements

which place women in social and political subjection to men. But I may go farther, and maintain that the

course of history, and the tendencies of progressive human society, afford not only no presumption in favour

of this system of inequality of rights, but a strong one against it; and that, so far as the whole course of human

improvement up to the time, the whole stream of modern tendencies, warrants any inference on the subject, it

is, that this relic of the past is discordant with the future, and must necessarily disappear. For, what is the

peculiar character of the modern world the difference which chiefly distinguishes modern institutions,

modern social ideas, modern life itself, from those of times long past? It is, that human beings are no longer

born to their place in life, and chained down by an inexorable bond to the place they are born to, but are free

to employ their faculties, and such favourable chances as offer, to achieve the lot which may appear to them

most desirable. Human society of old was constituted on a very different principle. All were born to a fixed

social position, and were mostly kept in it by law, or interdicted from any means by which they could emerge

from it. As some men are born white and others black, so some were born slaves and others freemen and

citizens; some were born patricians, others plebeians; some were born feudal nobles, others commoners and

roturiers. A slave or serf could never make himself free, nor, except by the will of his master, become so. In

most European countries it was not till towards the close of the middle ages, and as a consequence of the

growth of regal power, that commoners could be ennobled. Even among nobles, the eldest son was born the

exclusive heir to the paternal possessions, and a long time elapsed before it was fully established that the

father could disinherit him. Among the industrious classes, only those who were born members of a guild, or

were admitted into it by its members, could lawfully practise their calling within its local limits; and nobody

could practise any calling deemed important, in any but the legal manner by processes authoritatively

prescribed. Manufacturers have stood in the pillory for presuming to carry on their business by new and

improved methods. In modern Europe, and most in those parts of it which have participated most largely in

all other modern improvements, diametrically opposite doctrines now prevail. Law and government do not

undertake to prescribe by whom any social or industrial operation shall or shall not be conducted, or what

modes of conducting them shall be lawful. These things are left to the unfettered choice of individuals. Even

the laws which required that workmen should serve an apprenticeship, have in this country been repealed:

there being ample assurance that in all cases in which an apprenticeship is necessary, its necessity will suffice

to enforce it. The old theory was, that the least possible should be left to the choice of the individual agent;

that all he had to do should, as far as practicable, be laid down for him by superior wisdom. Left to himself he

was sure to go wrong. The modern conviction, the fruit of a thousand years of experience, is, that things in

which the individual is the person directly interested, never go right but as they are left to his own discretion;

and that any regulation of them by authority, except to protect the rights of others, is sure to be mischievous.

This conclusion slowly arrived at, and not adopted until almost every possible application of the contrary

theory had been made with disastrous result, now (in the industrial department) prevails universally in the

most advanced countries, almost universally in all that have pretensions to any sort of advancement. It is not

that all processes are supposed to be equally good, or all persons to be equally qualified for everything; but

that freedom of individual choice is now known to be the only thing which procures the adoption of the best

processes, and throws each operation into the hands of those who are best qualified for it. Nobody thinks it

necessary to make a law that only a strongarmed man shall be a blacksmith. Freedom and competition

suffice to make blacksmiths strongarmed men, because the weak armed can earn more by engaging in

occupations for which they are more fit. In consonance with this doctrine, it is felt to be an overstepping of

the proper bounds of authority to fix beforehand, on some general presumption, that certain persons are not fit

to do certain things. It is now thoroughly known and admitted that if some such presumptions exist, no such

presumption is infallible. Even if it be well grounded in a majority of cases, which it is very likely not to be,

there will be a minority of exceptional cases in which it does not hold: and in those it is both an injustice to

the individuals, and a detriment to society, to place barriers in the way of their using their faculties for their

own benefit and for that of others. In the cases, on the other hand, in which the unfitness is real, the ordinary

motives of human conduct will on the whole suffice to prevent the incompetent person from making, or from

If this general principle of social and economical science is not true; if individuals, with such help as they can

derive from the opinion of those who know them, are not better judges than the law and the government, of

their own capacities and vocation; the world cannot too soon abandon this principle, and return to the old

system of regulations and disabilities. But if the principle is true, we ought to act as if we believed it, and not

to ordain that to be born a girl instead of a boy, any more than to be born black instead of white, or a

commoner instead of a nobleman, shall decide the person's position through all life shall interdict people

from all the more elevated social positions, and from all, except a few, respectable occupations. Even were

we to admit the utmost that is ever pretended a to the superior fitness of men for all the functions now reserve

to them, the same argument applies which forbids a legal qualification for Members of Parliament. If only

once in a dozen years the conditions of eligibility exclude a fit person, there is a real loss, while the exclusion

of thousands of unfit persons is no gain; for if the constitution of the electoral body disposes them to choose

unfit persons, there are always plenty of such persons to choose from. In all things of any difficulty and

importance, those who can do them well are fewer than the need, even with the most unrestricted latitude of

choice: and any limitation of the field of selection deprives society of some chances of being served by the

At present, in the more improved countries, the disabilities of women are the only case, save one, in which

laws and institutions take persons at their birth, and ordain that they shall never in all their lives be allowed to

compete for certain things. The one exception is that of royalty. Persons still are born to the throne; no one,

not of the reigning family, can ever occupy it, and no one even of that family can, by any means but the

course of hereditary succession, attain it. All other dignities and social advantages are open to the whole male

sex: many indeed are only attainable by wealth, but wealth may be striven for by anyone, and is actually

obtained by many men of the very humblest origin. The difficulties, to the majority, are indeed insuperable

without the aid of fortunate accidents; but no male human being is under any legal ban: neither law nor

opinion superadd artificial obstacles to the natural ones. Royalty, as I have said, is excepted: but in this case

everyone feels it to be an exception an anomaly in the modern world, in marked opposition to its customs

and principles, and to be justified only by extraordinary special expediences, which, though individuals and

nations differ in estimating their weight, unquestionably do in fact exist. But in this exceptional case, in

which a high social function is, for important reasons, bestowed on birth instead of being put up to

competition, all free nations contrive to adhere in substance to the principle from which they nominally

derogate; for they circumscribe this high function by conditions avowedly intended to prevent the person to

whom it ostensibly belongs from really performing it; while the person by whom it is performed, the

responsible minister, does obtain the post by a competition from which no fullgrown citizen of the male sex

is legally excluded. The disabilities, therefore, to which women are subject from the mere fact of their birth,

are the solitary examples of the kind in modern legislation. In no instance except this, which comprehends

half the human race, are the higher social functions closed against anyone by a fatality of birth which no

exertions, and no change of circumstances, can overcome; for even religious disabilities (besides that in

England and in Europe they have practically almost ceased to exist) do not close any career to the

The social subordination of women thus stands out an isolated fact in modern social institutions; a solitary

breach of what has become their fundamental law; a single relic of an old world of thought and practice

exploded in everything else, but retained in the one thing of most universal interest; as if a gigantic dolmen,

or a vast temple of Jupiter Olympius, occupied the site of St. Paul's and received daily worship, while the

surrounding Christian churches were only resorted to on fasts and festivals. This entire discrepancy between

one social fact and all those which accompany it, and the radical opposition between its nature and the

progressive movement which is the boast of the modern world, and which has successively swept away

everything else of an analogous character, surely affords, to a conscientious observer of human tendencies,

serious matter for reflection. It raises a prima facie presumption on the unfavourable side, far outweighing

any which custom and usage could in such circumstances create on the favourable; and should at least suffice

to make this, like the choice between republicanism and royalty, a balanced question.

The least that can be demanded is, that the question should not be considered as prejudged by existing fact

and existing opinion, but open to discussion on its merits, as a question of justice and expediency: the

decision on this, as on any of the other social arrangements of mankind, depending on what an enlightened

estimate of tendencies and consequences may show to be most advantageous to humanity in general, without

distinction of sex. And the discussion must be a real discussion, descending to foundations, and not resting

satisfied with vague and general assertions. It will not do, for instance to assert in general terms, that the

experience of mankind has pronounced in favour of the existing system. Experience cannot possibly have

decided between two courses, so long as there has only been experience of one. If it be said that the doctrine

of the equality of the sexes rests only on theory, it must be remembered that the contrary doctrine also has

only theory to rest upon. All that is proved in its favour by direct experience, is that mankind have been able

to exist under it, and to attain the degree of improvement and prosperity which we now see; but whether that

prosperity has been attained sooner, or is now greater, than it would have been under the other system,

experience does not say. On the other hand, experience does say, that every step in improvement has been so

invariably accompanied by a step made in raising the social position of women, that historians and

philosophers have been led to adopt their elevation or debasement as on the whole the surest test and most

correct measure of the civilisation of a people or an age. Through all the progressive period of human history,

the condition of women has been approaching nearer to equality with men. This does not of itself prove that

the assimilation must go on to complete equality; but it assuredly affords some presumption that such is the

Neither does it avail anything to say that the nature of the two sexes adapts them to their present functions

and position, and renders these appropriate to them. Standing on the ground of common sense and the

constitution of the human mind, I deny that anyone knows, or can know, the nature of the two sexes, as long

as they have only been seen in their present relation to one another. If men had ever been found in society

without women, or women without men, or if there had been a society of men and women in which the

women were not under the control of the men, something might have been positively known about the mental

and moral differences which may be inherent in the nature of each. What is now called the nature of women

is an eminently artificial thing the result of forced repression in some directions, unnatural stimulation in

others. It may be asserted without scruple, that no other class of dependents have had their character so

entirely distorted from its natural proportions by their relation with their masters; for, if conquered and slave

races have been, in some respects, more forcibly repressed, whatever in them has not been crushed down by

an iron heel has generally been let alone, and if left with any liberty of development, it has developed itself

according to its own laws; but in the case of women, a hothouse and stove cultivation has always been

carried on of some of the capabilities of their nature, for the benefit and pleasure of their masters Then,

because certain products of the general vital force sprout luxuriantly and reach a great development in this

heated atmosphere and under this active nurture and watering, while other shoots from the same root, which

are left outside in the wintry air, with ice purposely heaped all round them, have a stunted growth, and some

are burnt off with fire and disappear; men, with that inability to recognise their own work which distinguishes

the unanalytic mind, indolently believe that the tree grows of itself in the way they have made it grow, and

that it would die if one half of it were not kept in a vapour bath and the other half in the snow.

Of all difficulties which impede the progress of thought, and the formation of wellgrounded opinions on life

and social arrangements, the greatest is now the unspeakable ignorance and inattention of mankind in respect

to the influences which form human character. Whatever any portion of the human species now are, or seem

to be, such, it is supposed, they have a natural tendency to be: even when the most elementary knowledge of

the circumstances in which they have been placed, clearly points out the causes that made them what they

are. Because a cottier deeply in arrears to his landlord is not industrious, there are people who think that the

Irish are naturally idle. Because constitutions can be overthrown when the authorities appointed to execute

them turn their arms against them, there are people who think the French incapable of free government.

Because the Greeks cheated the Turks, and the Turks only plundered the Greeks, there are persons who think

that the Turks are naturally more sincere: and because women, as is often said, care nothing about politics

except their personalities, it is supposed that the general good is naturally less interesting to women than to

men. History, which is now so much better understood than formerly, teaches another lesson: if only by

showing the extraordinary susceptibility of human nature to external influences, and the extreme variableness

of those of its manifestations which are supposed to be most universal and uniform. But in history, as in

travelling, men usually see only what they already had in their own minds; and few learn much from history,

Hence, in regard to that most difficult question, what are the natural differences between the two sexes a

subject on which it is impossible in the present state of society to obtain complete and correct knowledge

while almost everybody dogmatises upon it, almost all neglect and make light of the only means by which

any partial insight can be obtained into it. This is, an analytic study of the most important department of

psychology, the laws of the influence of circumstances on character. For, however great and apparently

ineradicable the moral and intellectual differences between men and women might be, the evidence of there

being natural differences could only be negative. Those only could be inferred to be natural which could not

possibly be artificial the residuum, after deducting every characteristic of either sex which can admit of

being explained from education or external circumstances. The profoundest knowledge of the laws of the

formation of character is indispensable to entitle anyone to affirm even that there is any difference, much

more what the difference is, between the two sexes considered as moral and rational beings; and since no one,

as yet, has that knowledge (for there is hardly any subject which, in proportion to its importance, has been so

little studied), no one is thus far entitled to any positive opinion on the subject. Conjectures are all that can at

present be made; conjectures more or less probable, according as more or less authorised by such knowledge

as we yet have of the laws of psychology, as applied to the formation of character.

Even the preliminary knowledge, what the differences between the sexes now are, apart from all question as

to how they are made what they are, is still in the crudest and most' incomplete state. Medical practitioners

and physiologists have ascertained, to some extent, the differences in bodily constitution; and this is an

important element to the psychologist: but hardly any medical practitioner is a psychologist. Respecting the

mental characteristics of women; their observations are of no more worth than those of common men. It is a

subject on which nothing final can be known, so long as those who alone can really know it, women

themselves, have given but little testimony, and that little, mostly suborned. It is easy to know stupid women.

Stupidity is much the same all the world over. A stupid person's notions and feelings may confidently be

inferred from those which prevail in the circle by which the person is surrounded. Not so with those whose

opinions and feelings are an emanation from their own nature and faculties. It is only a man here and there

who has any tolerable knowledge of the character even of the women of his own family. I do not mean, of

their capabilities; these nobody knows, not even themselves, because most of them have never been called

out. I mean their actually existing thoughts and feelings. Many a man think she perfectly understands women,

because he has had amatory relations with several, perhaps with many of them. If he is a good observer, and

his experience extends to quality as well as quantity, he may have learnt something of one narrow department

of their nature an important department, no doubt. But of all the rest of it, few persons are generally more

ignorant, because there are few from whom it is so carefully hidden. The most favourable case which a man

can generally have for studying the character of a woman, is that of his own wife: for the opportunities are

greater, and the cases of complete sympathy not so unspeakably rare. And in fact, this is the source from

which any knowledge worth having on the subject has, I believe, generally come. But most men have not had

the opportunity of studying in this way more than a single case: accordingly one can, to an almost laughable

degree, infer what a man's wife is like, from his opinions about women in general. To make even this one

case yield any result, the woman must be worth knowing, and the man not only a competent judge, but of a

character so sympathetic in itself, and so well adapted to hers, that he can either read her mind by sympathetic

intuition, or has nothing in himself which makes her shy of disclosing it, Hardly anything, I believe, can be

more rare than this conjunction. It often happens that there is the most complete unity of feeling and

community of interests as to all external things, yet the one has as little admission into the internal life of the

other as if they were common acquaintance. Even with true affection, authority on the one side and

subordination on the other prevent perfect confidence. Though nothing may be intentionally withheld, much

is not shown. In the analogous relation of parent and child, the corresponding phenomenon must have been in

the observation of everyone. As between father and son, how many are the cases in which the father, in spite

of real affection on both sides, obviously to all the world does not know, nor suspect, parts of the son's

character familiar to his companions and equals. The truth is, that the position of looking up to another is

extremely unpropitious to complete sincerity and openness with him. The fear of losing ground in his opinion

or in his feelings is so strong, that even in an upright character, there is an unconscious tendency to show only

the best side, or the side which, though not the best, is that which he most likes to see: and it may be

confidently said that thorough knowledge of one another hardly ever exists, but between persons who,

besides being intimates, are equals. How much more true, then, must all this be, when the one is not only

under the authority of the other, but has it inculcated on her as a duty to reckon everything else subordinate to

his comfort and pleasure, and to let him neither see nor feel anything coming from her, except what is

agreeable to him. All these difficulties stand in the way of a man's obtaining any thorough knowledge even of

the one woman whom alone, in general, he has sufficient opportunity of studying. When we further consider

that to understand one woman is not necessarily to understand any other woman; that even if he could study

many women of one rank, or of one country, he would not thereby understand women of other ranks or

countries; and even if he did, they are still only the women of a single period of history; we may safely assert

that the knowledge which men can acquire of women, even as they have been and are, without reference to

what they might be, is wretchedly imperfect and superficial, and always will be so, until women themselves

And this time has not come; nor will it come otherwise than gradually. It is but of yesterday that women have

either been qualified by literary accomplishments or permitted by society, to tell anything to the general

public. As yet very few of them dare tell anything, which men, on whom their literary success depends, are

unwilling to hear. Let us remember in what manner, up to a very recent time, the expression, even by a male

author, of uncustomary opinions, or what are deemed eccentric feelings, usually was, and in some degree still

is, received; and we may form some faint conception under what impediments a woman, who is brought up to

think custom and opinion her sovereign rule, attempts to express in books anything drawn from the depths of

her own nature. The greatest woman who has left writings behind her sufficient to give her an eminent rank

in the literature of her country, thought it necessary to prefix as a motto to her boldest work, "Un homme peut

braver l'opinion; une femme doit s'y soumettre."[1] The greater part of what women write about women is

mere sycophancy to men. In the case of unmarried women, much of it seems only intended to increase their

chance of a husband. Many, both married and unmarried, overstep the mark, and inculcate a servility beyond

what is desired or relished by any man, except the very vulgarest. But this is not so often the case as, even at

a quite late period, it still was. Literary women I are becoming more freespoken, and more willing to

express their real sentiments. Unfortunately, in this country especially, they are themselves such artificial

products, that their sentiments are compounded of a small element of individual observation and

consciousness, and a very large one of acquired associations. This will be less and less the case, but it will

remain true to a great extent, as long as social institutions do not admit the same free development of

originality in women which is possible to men. When that time comes, and not before, we shall see, and not

merely hear, as much as it is necessary to know of the nature of women, and the adaptation of other things to

I have dwelt so much on the difficulties which at present obstruct any real knowledge by men of the true

nature of women, because in this as in so many other things "opinio copiae inter maximas causas inopiae est";

and there is little chance of reasonable thinking on the matter while people flatter themselves that they

perfectly understand a subject of which most men know absolutely nothing, and of which it is at present

impossible that any man, or all men taken together, should have knowledge which can qualify them to lay

down the law to women as to what is, or is not, their vocation. Happily, no such knowledge is necessary for

any practical purpose connected with the position of women is relation to society and life. For, according to

all the principles involved in modern society, the question rests with women themselves to be decided by

their own experience, and by the use of their own faculties. There are no means of finding what either one

person or many can do, but by trying and no means by which anyone else can discover for them what it is

One thing we may be certain of that what is contrary to women's nature to do, they never will be made to

do by simply giving their nature free play. The anxiety of mankind to interfere in behalf of nature, for fear

lest nature should not succeed in effecting its purpose, is an altogether unnecessary solicitude. What women

by nature cannot do, it is quite superfluous to forbid them from doing. What they can do, but not so well as

the men who are their competitors, competition suffices to exclude them from; since nobody asks for

protective duties and bounties in favour of women; it is only asked that the present bounties and protective

duties in favour of men should be recalled. If women have a greater natural inclination for some things than

for others, there is no need of laws or social inculcation to make the majority of them do the former in

preference to the latter. Whatever women's services are most wanted for, the free play of competition will

hold out the strongest inducements to them to undertake. And, as the words imply, they are most wanted for

the things for which they are most fit; by the apportionment of which to them, the collective faculties of the

The general opinion of men is supposed to be, that the natural vocation of a woman is that of a wife and

mother. I say, is supposed to be, because, judging from acts from the whole of the present constitution of

society one might infer that their opinion was the direct contrary. They might be supposed to think that the

alleged natural vocation of women was of all things the most repugnant to their nature; insomuch that if they

are free to do anything else if any other means of living or occupation of their time and faculties, is open,

which has any chance of appearing desirable to them there will not be enough of them who will be willing

to accept the condition said to be natural to them. If this is the real opinion of men in general, it would be

well that it should be spoken out. I should like to hear somebody openly enunciating the doctrine (it is already

implied in much that is written on the subject) It is necessary to society that women should marry and

produce children. They will not do so unless they are compelled. Therefore it is necessary to compel them."

The merits of the case would then be clearly defined. It would be exactly that of the slaveholders of South

Carolina and Louisiana. "It is necessary that cotton and sugar should be grown. White men cannot produce

them. Negroes will not, for any wages which we choose to give. Ergo they must be compelled." An

illustration still closer to the point is that of impressment. Sailors must absolutely be had to defend the

country. It often happens that they will not voluntarily enlist. Therefore there must be the power of forcing

them. How often has this logic been used! and, but for one flaw in it, without doubt it would have been

successful up to this day. But it is open to the retort First pay the sailors the honest value of their labour.

When you have made it as well worth their while to serve you, as to work for other employers, you will have

no more difficulty than others have in obtaining their services. To this there is no logical answer except "I

will not": and as people are now not only ashamed, but are not desirous, to rob the labourer of his hire,

impressment is no longer advocated. Those who attempt to force women into marriage by closing all other

doors against them, lay themselves open to a similar retort. If they mean what they say, their opinion must

evidently be, that men do not render the married condition so desirable to women, as to induce them to accept

it for its own recommendations. It is not a sign of one's thinking the boon one offers very attractive, when one

allows only Hobson's choice, "that or none." And here, I believe, is the clue to the feelings of those men, who

have a real antipathy to the equal freedom of women. I believe they are afraid, not lest women should be

unwilling to marry, for I do not think that anyone in reality has that apprehension; but lest they should insist

that marriage should be on equal conditions; lest all women of spirit and capacity should prefer doing almost

anything else, not in their own eyes degrading, rather than marry, when marrying is giving themselves a

master, and a master too of all their earthly possessions. And truly, if this consequence were necessarily

incident to marriage, I think that the apprehension would be very well founded. I agree in thinking it probable

that few women, capable of anything else, would, unless under an irresistible entrainment, rendering them for

the time insensible to anything but itself, choose such a lot, when any other means were open to them of

filling a conventionally honourable place in life: and if men are determined that the law of marriage shall be a

law of despotism, they are quite right, in point of mere policy, in leaving to women only Hobson's choice.

But, in that case, all that has been done in the modern world to relax the chain on the minds of women, has

been a mistake. They never should have been allowed to receive a literary education. Women who read,

much more women who write, are, in the existing constitution of things, a contradiction and a disturbing

element: and it was wrong to bring women up with any acquirements but those of an odalisque, or of a

It will be well to commence the detailed discussion of the subject by the particular branch of it to which the

course of our observations has led us: the conditions which the laws of this and all other countries annex to

the marriage contract. Marriage being the destination appointed by society for women, the prospect they are

brought up to, and the object which it is intended should be sought by all of them, except those who are too

little attractive to be chosen by any man as his companion; one might have supposed that everything would

have been done to make this condition as eligible to them as possible, that they might have no cause to regret

being denied the option of any other. Society, however, both in this, and, at first, in all other cases, has

preferred to attain its object by foul rather than fair means: but this is the only case in which it has

substantially persisted in them even to the present day. Originally women were taken by force, or regularly

sold by their father to the husband. Until a late period in European history, the father had the power to

dispose of his daughter in marriage at his own will and pleasure, without any regard to hers. The Church,

indeed, was so far faithful to a better morality as to require a formal "yes" from the woman at the marriage

ceremony; but there was nothing to show that the consent was other than compulsory; and it was practically

impossible for the girl to refuse compliance if the father persevered, except perhaps when she might obtain

the protection of religion by a determined resolution to take monastic vows. After marriage, the man had

anciently (but this was anterior to Christianity) the power of life and death over his wife. She could invoke no

law against him; he was her sole tribunal and law. For a long time he could repudiate her, but she had no

corresponding power in regard to him. By the old laws of England, the husband was called the lord of the

wife; he was literally regarded as her sovereign, inasmuch that the murder of a man by his wife was called

treason (petty as distinguished from high treason), and was more cruelly avenged than was usually the case

with high treason, for the penalty was burning to death. Because these various enormities have fallen into

disuse (for most of them were never formally abolished, or not until they had long ceased to be practised)

men suppose that all is now as it should be in regard to the marriage contract; and we are continually told that

civilisation and Christianity have restored to the woman her just rights. Meanwhile the wife is the actual bond

servant of her husband: no less so, as far as legal obligation goes, than slaves commonly so called. She vows

a livelong obedience to him at the altar, and is held to it all through her life by law. Casuists may say that the

obligation of obedience stops short of participation in crime, but it certainly extends to everything else. She

can do no act whatever but by his permission, at least tacit. She can acquire no property but for him; the

instant it becomes hers, even if by inheritance, it becomes ipso facto his. In this respect the wife's position

under the common law of England is worse than thatof slaves in the laws of many countries: by the Roman

law, for example, a slave might have his peculium, which to a certain extent the law guaranteed to him for his

exclusive use. The higher classes in this country have given an analogous advantage to their women, through

special contracts setting aside the law, by conditions of pinmoney, etc. : since parental feeling being

stronger with fathers than the class feeling of their own sex, a father generally prefers his own daughter to a

soninlaw who is a stranger to him. By means of settlements, the rich usually contrive to withdraw the

whole or part of the inherited property of the wife from the absolute control of the husband: but they do not

succeed in keeping it under her own control; the utmost they can do only prevents the husband from

squandering it, at the same time debarring the rightful owner from its use. The property itself is out of the

reach of both; and as to the income derived from it, the form of settlement most favourable to the wife (that

called "to her separate use") only precludes the husband from receiving it instead of her: it must pass through

her hands, but if he takes it from her by personal violence as soon as she receives it, he can neither be

punished, nor compelled to restitution. This is the amount of the protection which, under the laws of this

country, the most powerful nobleman can give to his own daughter as respects her husband. In the immense

majority of cases there is no settlement: and the absorption of all rights, all property, as well as all freedom of

action, is complete. The two are called "one person in law," for the purpose of inferring that whatever is hers

is his, but the parallel inference is never drawn that whatever is his is hers; the maxim is not applied against

the man, except to make him responsible to third parties for her acts, as a master is for the acts of his slaves or

of his cattle. I am far from pretending that wives are in general no better treated than slaves; but no slave is a

slave to the same lengths, and in so full a sense of the word, as a wife is. Hardly any slave, except one

immediately attached to the master's person, is a slave at all hours and all minutes; in general he has, like a

soldier, his fixed task, and when it is done, or when he is off duty, he disposes, within certain limits, of his

own time, and has a family life into which the master rarely intrudes. "Uncle Tom" under his first master had

his own life in his "cabin," almost as much as any man whose work takes him away from home, is able to

have in his own family. But it cannot be so with the wife. Above all, a female slave has (in Christian

countries) an admitted right, and is considered under a moral obligation, to refuse to her master the last

familiarity. Not so the wife: however brutal a tyrant she may unfortunately be chained to though she may

know that he hates her, though it may be his daily pleasure to torture her, and though she may feel it

impossible not to loathe him he can claim from her and enforce the lowest degradation of a human being,

that of being made the instrument of an animal function contrary to her inclinations. While she is held in this

worst description of slavery as to her own person, what is her position in regard to the children in whom she

and her master have a joint interest? They are by law his children. He alone has any legal rights over them.

Not one act can she do towards or in relation to them, except by delegation from him. Even after he is dead

she is not their legal guardian, unless he by will has made her so. He could even send them away from her,

and deprive her of the means of seeing or corresponding with them, until this power was in some degree

restricted by Serjeant Talfourd's Act. This is her legal state. And from this state she has no means of

withdrawing herself. If she leaves her husband, she can take nothing with her, neither her children nor

anything which is rightfully her own. If he chooses, he can compel her to return, by law, or by physical force;

or he may content himself with seizing for his own use anything which she may earn, or which may be given

to her by her relations. It is only legal separation by a decree of a court of justice, which entitles her to live

apart, without being forced back into the custody of an exasperated jailer or which empowers her to apply

any earnings to her own use, without fear that a man whom perhaps she has not seen for twenty years will

pounce upon her some day and carry all off. This legal separation, until lately, the courts of justice would

only give at an expense which made it inaccessible to anyone out of the higher ranks. Even now it is only

given in cases of desertion, or of the extreme of cruelty; and yet complaints are made every day that it is

granted too easily. Surely, if a woman is denied any lot in life but that of being the personal bodyservant of

a despot, and is dependent for everything upon the chance of finding one who may be disposed to make a

favourite of her instead of merely a drudge, it is a very cruel aggravation of her fate that she should be

allowed to try this chance only once. The natural sequel and corollary from this state of things would be, that

since her all in life depends upon obtaining a good master, she should be allowed to change again and again

until she finds one. I am not saying that she ought to be allowed this privilege. That is a totally different

consideration. The question of divorce, in the sense involving liberty of remarriage, is one into which it is

foreign to my purpose to enter. All I now say is, that to those to whom nothing but servitude is allowed, the

free choice of servitude is the only, though a most insufficient, alleviation. Its refusal completes the

assimilation of the wife to the slave and the slave under not the mildest form of slavery: for in some slave

codes the slave could, under certain circumstances of ill usage, legally compel the master to sell him. But no

amount of ill usage, without adultery superadded, will in England free a wife from her tormentor.

I have no desire to exaggerate, nor does the case stand in any need of exaggeration. I have described the

wife's legal position, not her actual treatment. The laws of most countries are far worse than the people who

execute them, and many of them are only able to remain laws by being seldom or never carried into effect. If

married life were all that it might be expected to be, looking to the laws alone, society would be a hell upon

earth. Happily there are both feelings and interests which in many men exclude, and in most, greatly temper,

the impulses and propensities which lead to tyranny: and of those feelings, the tie which connects a man with

his wife affords, in a normal state of things, incomparably the strongest example. The only tie which at all

approaches to it, that between him and his children, tends, in all save exceptional cases, to strengthen, instead

of conflicting with, the first. Because this is true; because men in general do not inflict, nor women suffer, all

the misery which could be inflicted and suffered if the full power of tyranny with which the man is legally

invested were acted on; the defenders of the existing form of the institution think that all its iniquity is

justified, and that any complaint is merely quarrelling with the evil which is the price paid for every great

good. But the mitigations in practice, which are compatible with maintaining in full legal force this or any

other kind of tyranny, instead of being any apology for despotism, only serve to prove what power human

nature possesses of reacting against the vilest institutions, and with what vitality the seeds of good as well as

those of evil in human character diffuse and propagate themselves. Not a word can be said for despotism in

the family which cannot be said for political despotism. Every absolute king does not sit at his window to

enjoy the groans of his tortured subjects, nor strips them of their last rag and turns them out to shiver in the

road The despotism of Louis XVI was not the despotism of Philippe le Bel, or of Nadir Shah, or of Caligula;

but it was bad enough to justify the French Revolution, and to palliate even its horrors. If an appeal be made

to the intense attachments which exist between wives and their husbands, exactly as much may be said of

domestic slavery. It was quite an ordinary fact in Greece and Rome for slaves to submit to death by torture

rather than betray their masters. In the proscriptions of the Roman civil wars it was remarked that wives and

slaves were heroically faithful, sons very commonly treacherous. Yet we know how cruelly many Romans

treated their slaves. But in truth these intense individual feelings nowhere rise to such a luxuriant height as

under the most atrocious institutions. It IS part of the irony of life, that the strongest feelings of devoted

gratitude of which human nature seems to be susceptible, are called forth in human beings towards those

who, having the power entirely to crush their earthly existence, voluntarily refrain from using that power.

How great a place in most men this sentiment fills, even in religious devotion, it would be cruel to inquire.

We daily see how much their gratitude to Heaven appears to be stimulated by the contemplation of

Whether the institution to be defended is slavery, political absolutism, or the absolutism of the head of a

family, we are always expected to judge of it from its best instances; and we are presented with pictures of

loving exercise of authority on one side, loving submission to it on the other superior wisdom ordering all

things for the greatest good of the dependents, and surrounded by their smiles and benedictions. All this

would be very much to the purpose if anyone pretended that there are no such things as good men. Who

doubts that there may be great goodness, and great happiness, and great affection, under the absolute

government of a good man? Meanwhile, laws and institutions require to be adapted, not to good men, but to

bad. Marriage is not an institution designed fora select few. Men are not required, as a preliminary to the

marriage ceremony, to prove by testimonials that they are fit to be trusted with the exercise of absolute

power. The tie of affection and obligation to a wife and children is very strong with those whose general

social feelings are strong, and with many who are little sensible to any other social ties; but there are all

degrees of sensibility and insensibility to it, as there are all grades of goodness and wickedness in men, down

to those whom no ties will bind, and on whom society has no action but through its ultima ratio, the penalties

of the law. In every grade of this descending scale are men to whom are committed all the legal powers of a

husband. The vilest malefactor has some wretched woman tied to him, against whom he can commit any

atrocity except killing her, and, if tolerably cautious, can do that without much danger of the legal penalty.

And how many thousands are there among the lowest classes in every country, who, without being in a legal

sense malefactors in any other respect, because in every other quarter their aggressions meet with resistance,

indulge the utmost habitual excesses of bodily violence towards the unhappy wife, who alone, at least of

grown persons, can neither repel nor escape from their brutality; and towards whom the excess of dependence

inspires their mean and savage natures, not with a generous forbearance, and a point of honour to behave well

to one whose lot in life is trusted entirely to their kindness, but on the contrary with a notion that the law has

delivered her to them as their thing, to be used at their pleasure, and that they are not expected to practise the

consideration towards her which is required from them towards everybody else. The law, which till lately left

even these atrocious extremes of domestic oppression practically unpunished, has within these few years

made some feeble attempts to repress them. But its attempts have done little, and cannot be expected to do

much, because it is contrary to reason and experience to suppose that there can be any real check to brutality,

consistent with leaving the victim still in the power of the executioner. Until a conviction for personal

violence, or at all events a repetition of it after a first conviction, entitles the woman ipso facto to a divorce,

or at least to a judicial separation, the attempt to repress these "aggravated assaults" by legal penalties will

When we consider how vast is the number of men, in any great country, who are little higher than brutes, and

that this never prevents them from being able, through the law of marriage, to obtain a victim, the breadth and

depth of human misery caused in this shape alone by the abuse of the institution swells to something

appalling. Yet these are only the extreme cases. They are the lowest abysses, but there is a sad succession of

depth after depth before reaching them. In domestic as in political tyranny, the case of absolute monsters

chiefly illustrates the institution by showing that there is scarcely any horror which may not occur under it if

the despot pleases, and thus setting in a strong light what must be the terrible frequency of things only a little

less atrocious. Absolute fiends are as rare as angels, perhaps rarer: ferocious savages, with occasional touches

of humanity, are however very frequent: and in the wide interval which separates these from any worthy

representatives of the human species, how many are the forms and gradations of animalism and selfishness,

often under an outward varnish of civilisation and even cultivation, living at peace with the law, maintaining

a creditable appearance to all who are not under their power, yet sufficient often to make the lives of all who

are so, a torment and a burthen to them! It would be tiresome to repeat the commonplaces about the unfitness

of men in general for power, which, after the political discussions of centuries, everyone knows by heart,

were it not that hardly anyone thinks of applying these maxims to the case in which above all others they are

applicable, that of power, not placed in the hands of a man here and there, but offered to every adult male,

down to the basest and most ferocious. It is not because a man is not known to have broken any of the Ten

Commandments, or because he maintains a respectable character in his dealings with those whom he cannot

compel to have intercourse with him, or because he does not fly out into violent bursts of illtemper against

those who are not obliged to bear with him, that it is possible to surmise of what sort his conduct will be in

the unrestraint of home. Even the commonest men reserve the violent, the sulky, the undisguisedly selfish

side of their character for those who have no power to withstand it. The relation of superiors to dependents is

the nursery of these vices of character, which, wherever else they exist, are an overflowing from that source.

A man who is morose or violent to his equals, is sure to be one who has lived among inferiors, whom he

could frighten or worry into submission. If the family in its best forms is, as it is often said to be, a school of

sympathy, tenderness, and loving forgetfulness of self, it is still oftener, as respects its chief, a school of

wilfulness, overbearingness, unbounded selfish indulgence, and a doubledyed and idealised selfishness, of

which sacrifice itself is only a particular form: the care for the wife and children being only care for them as

parts of the man's own interests and belongings, and their individual happiness being immolated in every

shape to his smallest preferences. What better is to be looked for under the existing form of the institution?

We know that the bad propensities of human nature are only kept within bounds when they are allowed no

scope for their indulgence. We know that from impulse and habit, when not from deliberate purpose, almost

everyone to whom others yield, goes on encroaching upon them, until a point is reached at which they are

compelled to resist. Such being the common tendency of human nature; the almost unlimited power which

present social institutions give to the man over at least one human being the one with whom he resides,

and whom he has always present this power seeks out and evokes the latent germs of selfishness in the

remotest corners of his nature fans its faintest sparks and smouldering embers offers to him a licence

for the indulgence of those points of his original character which in all other relations he would have found it

necessary to repress and conceal, and the repression of which would in time have become a second nature. I

know that there is another side to the question. I grant that the wife, if she cannot effectually resist, can at

least retaliate; she, too, can make the man's life extremely uncomfortable, and by that power is able to carry

many points which she ought, and many which she ought not, to prevail in. But this instrument of

selfprotection which may be called the power of the scold, or the shrewish sanction has the fatal

defect, that it avails most against the least tyrannical superiors, and in favour of the least deserving

dependents. It is the weapon of irritable and selfwilled women; of those who would make the worst use of

power if they themselves had it, and who generally turn this power to a bad use. The amiable cannot use such

an instrument, the high minded disdain it. And on the other hand, the husbands against whom it is used most

effectively are the gentler and more inoffensive; those who cannot be induced, even by provocation, to resort

to any very harsh exercise of authority. The wife's power of being disagreeable generally only establishes a

countertyranny, and makes victims in their turn chiefly of those husbands who are least inclined to be

What is it, then, which really tempers the corrupting effects of the power, and makes it compatible with such

amount of good as we actually see? Mere feminine blandishments, though of great effect in individual

instances, have very little effect in modifying the general tendencies of the situation; for their power only

lasts while the woman is young and attractive, often only while her charm is new, and not dimmed by

familiarity; and on many men they have not much influence at any time. The real mitigating causes are, the

personal affection which is the growth of time in so far as the man's nature is susceptible of it and the

woman's character sufficiently congenial with his to excite it; their common interests as regards the children,

and their general community of interest as concerns third persons (to which however there are very great

limitations); the real importance of the wife to his daily comforts and enjoyments, and the value he

consequently attaches to her on his personal account, which, in a man capable of feeling for others, lays the

foundation of caring for her on her own; and lastly, the influence naturally acquired over almost all human

beings by those near to their persons (if not actually disagreeable to them): who, both by their direct

entreaties, and by the insensible contagion of their feelings and dispositions, are often able, unless

counteracted by some equally strong personal influence, to obtain a degree of command over the conduct of

the superior, altogether excessive and unreasonable. Through these various means, the wife frequently

exercises even too much power over the man; she is able to affect his conduct in things in which she may not

be qualified to influence it for good in which her influence may be not only unenlightened, but employed

on the morally wrong side; and in which he would act better if left to his own prompting. But neither in the

affairs of families nor in those of states is power a compensation for the loss of freedom. Her power often

gives her what she has no right to, but does not enable her to assert her own rights. A Sultan's favourite slave

has slaves under her, over whom she tyrannises; but the desirable thing would be that she should neither have

slaves nor be a slave. By entirely sinking her own existence in her husband; by having no will (or persuading

him that she has no will) but his, in anything which regards their joint relation, and by making it the business

of her life to work upon his sentiments, a wife may gratify herself by influencing, and very probably

perverting, his conduct, in those of his external relations which she has never qualified herself to judge of, or

in which she is herself wholly influenced by some personal or other partiality or prejudice. Accordingly, as

things now are, those who act most kindly to their wives, are quite as often made worse, as better, by the

wife's influence, in respect to all interests extending beyond the family. She is taught that she has no business

with things out of that sphere; and accordingly she seldom has any honest and conscientious opinion on them;

and therefore hardly ever meddles with them for any legitimate purpose, but generally for an interested one.

She neither knows nor cares which is the right side in politics, but she knows what will bring in money or

invitations, give her husband a title, her son a place, or her daughter a good marriage.

But how, it will be asked, can any society exist without government? In a family, as in a state, some one

person must be the ultimate ruler. Who shall decide when married people differ in opinion? Both cannot have

It is not true that in all voluntary association between two people, one of them must be absolute master: still

less that the law must determine which of them it shall be. The most frequent case of voluntary association,

next to marriage, is partnership in business: and it is not found or thought necessary to enact that in every

partnership, one partner shall have entire control over the concern, and the others shall be bound to obey his

orders. No one would enter into partnership on terms which would subject him to the responsibilities of a

principal, with only the powers and privileges of a clerk or agent. If the law dealt with other contracts as it

does with marriage, it would ordain that one partner should administer the common business as if it was his

private concern; that the others should have only delegated powers; and that this one should be designated by

some general presumption of law, for example as being the eldest. The law never does this: nor does

experience show it to be necessary that any theoretical inequality of power should exist between the partners,

or that the partnership should have any other conditions than what they may themselves appoint by their

articles of agreement. Yet it might seem that the exclusive power might be conceded with less danger to the

rights and interests of the inferior, in the case of partnership than in that of marriage, since he is free to cancel

the power by withdrawing from the connexion. The wife has no such power, and even if she had, it is almost

It is quite true that things which have to be decided everyday, and cannot adjust themselves gradually, or wait

for a compromise, ought to depend on one will; one person must have their sole control. But it does not

follow that this should always be the same person. The natural arrangement is a division of powers between

the two; each being absolute in the executive branch of their own department, and any change of system and

principle requiring the consent of both. The division neither can nor should be preestablished by the law,

since it must depend on individual capacities and suitabilities. If the two persons chose, they might

preappoint it by the marriage contract, as pecuniary arrangements are now often preappointed. There

would seldom be any difficulty in deciding such things by mutual consent, unless the marriage was one of

those unhappy ones in which all other things, as well as this, become subjects of bickering and dispute. The

division of rights would naturally follow the division of duties and functions; and that is already made by

consent, or at all events not by law, but by general custom, modified and modifiable at the pleasure of the

The real practical decision of affairs, to whichever may be given the legal authority, will greatly depend, as it

even now does, upon comparative qualifications. The mere fact that he is usually the eldest, will in most

cases give the preponderance to the man; at least until they both attain a time of life at which the difference in

their years is of no importance. There will naturally also be a more potential voice on the side, whichever it

is, that brings the means of support. Inequality from this source does not depend on the law of marriage, but

on the general conditions of human society, as now constituted. The influence of mental superiority, either

general or special, and of superior decision of character, will necessarily tell for much. It always does so at

present. And this fact shows how little foundation there is for the apprehension that the powers and

responsibilities of partners in life (as of partners in business), cannot be satisfactorily apportioned by

agreement between themselves. They always are so apportioned, except in cases in which the marriage

institution is a failure. Things never come to an issue of downright power on one side, and obedience on the

other, except where the connexion altogether has been a mistake, and it would be a blessing to both parties to

be relieved from it. Some may say that the very thing by which an amicable settlement of differences

becomes possible, is the power of legal compulsion known to be in reserve; as people submit to an arbitration

because there is a court of law in the background, which they know that they can be forced to obey. But to

make the cases parallel, we must suppose that the rule of the court of law was, not to try the cause, but to give

judgment always for the same side, suppose the defendant. If so, the amenability to it would be a motive with

the plaintiff to agree to almost any arbitration, but it would be just the reverse with the defendant. The

despotic power which the law gives to the husband may be a reason to make the wife assent to any

compromise by which power is practically shared between the two, but it cannot be the reason why the

husband does. That there is always among decently conducted people a practical compromise, though one of

them at least is under no physical or moral necessity of making it, shows that the natural motives which lead

to a voluntary adjustment of the united life of two persons in a manner acceptable to both, do on the whole,

excepting unfavourable cases, prevail. The matter is certainly not improved by laying down as an ordinance

of law, that the superstructure of free government shall be raised upon a legal basis of despotism on one side

and subjection on the other, and that every concession which the despot makes may, at his mere pleasure, and

without any warning, be recalled. Besides that no freedom is worth much when held on so precarious a

tenure, its conditions are not likely to be the most equitable when the law throws so prodigious a weight into

one scale; when the adjustment rests between two persons one of whom is declared to be entitled to

everything, the other not only entitled to nothing except during the good pleasure of the first, but under the

strongest moral and religious obligation not to rebel under any excess of oppression.

A pertinacious adversary, pushed to extremities, may say, that husbands indeed are willing to be reasonable,

and to make fair concessions to their partners without being compelled to it, but that wives are not: that if

allowed any rights of their own, they will acknowledge no rights at all in anyone else, and never will yield in

anything, unless they can be compelled, by the man's mere authority, to yield in everything. This would have

been said by many persons some generations ago, when satires on women were in vogue, and men thought it

a clever thing to insult women for being what men made them. But it will be said by no one now who is

worth replying to. It is not the doctrine of the present day that women are less susceptible of good feeling,

and consideration for those with whom they are united by the strongest ties, than men are. On the contrary,

we are perpetually told that women are better than men, by those who are totally opposed to treating them as

if they were as good; so that the saying has passed into a piece of tiresome cant, intended to put a

complimentary face upon an injury, and resembling those celebrations of royal clemency which, according to

Gulliver, the king of Lilliput always prefixed to his most sanguinary decrees. If women are better than men in

anything, it surely is in individual selfsacrifice for those of their own family. But I lay little stress on this, so

long as they are universally taught that they are born and created for selfsacrifice. I believe that equality of

rights would abate the exaggerated selfabnegation which is the present artificial ideal of feminine character,

and that a good woman would not be more selfsacrificing than the best man: but on the other hand, men

would be much more unselfish and selfsacrificing than at present, because they would no longer be taught to

worship their own will as such a grand thing that it is actually the law for another rational being. There is

nothing which men so easily learn as this selfworship: all privileged persons, and all privileged classes, have

had it. The more we descend in the scale of humanity, the intenser it is; and most of all in those who are not,

and can never expect to be, raised above anyone except an unfortunate wife and children. The honourable

exceptions are proportionally fewer than in the case of almost any other human infirmity. Philosophy and

religion, instead of keeping it in check, are generally suborned to defend it; and nothing controls it but that

practical feeling of the equality of human beings, which is the theory of Christianity, but which Christianity

will never practically teach, while it sanctions institutions grounded on an arbitrary preference of one human

There are, no doubt, women, as there are men, whom equality of consideration will not satisfy; with whom

there is no peace while any will or wish is regarded but their own. Such persons are a proper subject for the

law of divorce. They are only fit to live alone, and no human beings ought to be compelled to associate their

lives with them. But the legal subordination tends to make such characters among women more, rather than

less, frequent. If the man exerts his whole power, the woman is of course crushed: but if she is treated with

indulgence, and permitted to assume power, there is no rule to set limits to her encroachments. The law, not

determining her rights, but theoretically allowing her none at all, practically declares that the measure of what

The equality of married persons before the law, is not only the sole mode in which that particular relation can

be made consistent with justice to both sides, and conducive to the happiness of both, but it is the only means

of rendering the daily life of mankind, in any high sense, a school of moral cultivation. Though the truth may

not be felt or generally acknowledged for generations to come, the only school of genuine moral sentiment is

society between equals. The moral education of mankind has hitherto emanated chiefly from the law of force,

and is adapted almost solely to the relations which force creates. In the less advanced states of society, people

hardly recognise any relation with their equals. To be an equal is to be an enemy. Society, from its highest

place to its lowest, is one long chain, or rather ladder, where every individual is either above or below his

nearest neighbour, and wherever he does not command he must obey. Existing moralities, accordingly, are

mainly fitted to a relation of command and obedience. Yet command and obedience are but unfortunate

necessities of human life: society in equality is its normal state. Already in modern life, and more and more as

it progressively improves, command and obedience become exceptional facts in life, equal association its

general rule. The morality of the first ages rested on the obligation to submit to power; that of the ages next

following, on the right of the weak to the forbearance and protection of the strong. How much longer is one

form of society and life to content itself with the morality made for another? We have had the morality of

submission, and the morality of chivalry and generosity; the time is now come for the morality of justice.

Whenever, in former ages, any approach has been made to society in equality, Justice has asserted its claims

as the foundation of virtue. It was thus in the free republics of antiquity. But even in the best of these, the

equals were limited to the free male citizens; slaves, women, and the unenfranchised residents were under the

law of force. The joint influence of Roman civilisation and of Christianity obliterated these distinctions, and

in theory (if only partially in practice) declared the claims of the human being, as such, to be paramount to

those of sex, class, or social position. The barriers which had begun to be levelled were raised again by the

northern conquests; and the whole of modern history consists of the slow process by which they have since

been wearing away. We are entering into an order of things in which justice will again be the primary virtue;

grounded as before on equal, but now also on sympathetic association; having its root no longer in the

instinct of equals for self protection, but in a cultivated sympathy between them; and no one being now left

out, but an equal measure being extended to all. It is no novelty that mankind do not distinctly foresee their

own changes, and that their sentiments are adapted to past, not to coming ages. To see the futurity of the

species has always been the privilege of the intellectual elite, or of those who have learnt from them; to have

the feelings of that futurity has been the distinction, and usually the martyrdom, of a still rarer elite.

Institutions, books, education, society, all go on training human beings for the old, long after the new has

come; much more when it is only coming. But the true virtue of human beings is fitness to live together as

equals; claiming nothing for themselves but what they as freely concede to everyone else; regarding

command of any kind as an exceptional necessity, and in all cases a temporary one; and preferring, whenever

possible, the society of those with whom leading and following can be alternate and reciprocal. To these

virtues, nothing in life as at present constituted gives cultivation by exercise. The family is a school of

despotism, in which the virtues of despotism, but also its vices, are largely nourished. Citizenship, in free

countries, is partly a school of society in equality; but citizenship fills only a small place in modern life, and

does not come near the daily habits or inmost sentiments. The family, justly constituted, would be the real

school of the virtues of freedom. It is sure to be a sufficient one of everything else. It will always be a school

of obedience for the children, of command for the parents. What is needed is, that it should be a school of

sympathy in equality, of living together in love, without power on one side or obedience on the other. This it

ought to be between the parents. It would then be an exercise of those virtues which each requires to fit them

for all other association, and a model to the children of the feelings and conduct which their temporary

training by means of obedience is designed to render habitual, and therefore natural, to them. The moral

training of mankind will never be adapted to the conditions of the life for which all other human progress is a

preparation, until they practise in the family the same moral rule which is adapted to the normal constitution

of human society. Any sentiment of freedom which can exist in a man whose nearest and dearest intimacies,

are with those of whom he is absolute master, is not the genuine or Christian love of freedom, but, what the

love of freedom generally was in the ancients and in the middle ages an intense feeling of the dignity and

importance of his own personality; making him disdain a yoke for himself, of which he has no abhorrence

whatever in the abstract, but which he is abundantly ready to impose on others for his own interest or

I readily admit (and it is the very foundation of my hopes) that numbers of married people even under the

present law (in the higher classes of England probably a great majority), live in the spirit of a just law of

equality. Laws never would be improved, if there were not numerous persons whose moral sentiments are

better than the existing laws. Such persons ought to support the principles here advocated; of which the only

object is to make all other married couples similar to what these are now. But persons even of considerable

moral worth, unless they are also thinkers, are very ready to believe that laws or practices, the evils of which

they have not personally experienced, do not produce any evils, but (if seeming to be generally approved of)

probably do good, and that it is wrong to object to them. It would, however, be a great mistake in such

married people to suppose, because the legal conditions of the tie which unites them do not occur to their

thoughts once in a twelve month, and because they live and feel in all respects as if they were legally equals,

that the same is the case with all other married couples, wherever the husband is not a notorious ruffian. To

suppose this, would be to show equal ignorance of human nature and of fact. The less fit a man is for the

possession of power the less likely to be allowed to exercise it over any person with that person's

voluntary consent the more does he hug himself in the consciousness of the power the law gives him,

exact its legal rights to the utmost point which custom (the custom of men like himself) will tolerate, and take

pleasure in using the power, merely to enliven the agreeable sense of possessing it. What is more; in the most

naturally brutal and morally uneducated part of the lower classes, the legal slavery of the woman, and

something in the merely physical subjection to their will as an instrument, causes them to feel a sort of

disrespect and contempt towards their own wife which they do not feel towards any other woman, or any

other human being, with whom they come in contact; and which makes her seem to them an appropriate

subject for any kind of indignity. Let an acute observer of the signs of feeling, who has the requisite

opportunities, judge for himself whether this is not the case: and if he finds that it is, let him not wonder at

any amount of disgust and indignation that can be felt against institutions which lead naturally to this

We shall be told, perhaps, that religion imposes the duty of obedience; as every established fact which is too

bad to admit of any other defence, is always presented to us as an injunction of religion. The Church, it is

very true, enjoins it in her formularies, but it would be difficult to derive any such injunction from

Christianity. We are told that St. Paul said, "Wives, obey your husbands": but he also said, "Slaves, obey your

masters." It was not St. Paul's business, nor was it consistent with his object, the propagation of Christianity,

to incite anyone to rebellion against existing laws. The Apostle's acceptance of all social institutions as he

found them, is no more to be construed as a disapproval of attempts to improve them at the proper time, than

his declaration, "The powers that be are ordained of God," gives his sanction to military despotism, and to

that alone, as the Christian form of political government, or commands passive obedience to it. To pretend

that Christianity was intended to stereotype existing forms of government and society, and protect them

against change, is to reduce it to the level of Islamism or of Brahminism. It is precisely because Christianity

has not done this, that it has been the religion of the progressive portion of mankind, and Islamism,

Brahminism, etc. have been those of the stationary portions; or rather (for there is no such thing as a really

stationary society) of the declining portions. There have been abundance of people, in all ages of Christianity,

who tried to make it something of the same kind; to convert us into a sort of Christian Mussulmans, with the

Bible for a Koran, prohibiting all improvement: and great has been their power, and many have had to

sacrifice their lives in resisting them. But they have been resisted, and the resistance has made us what we

After what has been said respecting the obligation of obedience, it is almost superfluous to say anything

concerning the more special point included in the general one a woman's right to her own property; for I

need not hope that this treatise can make any impression upon those who need anything to convince them that

a woman's inheritance or gains ought to be as much her own after marriage as before. The rule is simple:

whatever would be the husband's or wife's if they were not married, should be under their exclusive control

during marriage; which need not interfere with the power to tie up property by settlement, in order to preserve

it for children. Some people are sentimentally shocked at the idea of a separate interest in money matters as

inconsistent with the ideal fusion of two lives into one. For my own part, I am one of the strongest supporters

of community of goods, when resulting from an entire unity of feeling in the owners, which makes all things

common between them. But I have no relish for a community of goods resting on the doctrine, that what is

mine is yours, but what is yours is not mine; and I should prefer to decline entering into such a compact with

This particular injustice and oppression to women, which is, to common apprehensions, more obvious than

all the rest, admits of remedy without interfering with any other mischiefs: and there can belittle doubt that it

will be one of the earliest remedied. Already, in many of the new and several of the old States of the

American Confederation, provisions have been inserted even in the written Constitutions, securing to women

equality of rights in this respect: and thereby improving materially the position, in the marriage relation, of

those women at least who have property, by leaving them one instrument of power which they have not

signed away; and preventing also the scandalous abuse of the marriage institution, which is perpetrated when

a man entraps a girl into marrying him without a settlement, for the sole purpose of getting possession of her

money. When the support of the family depends, not on property, but on earnings, the common arrangement,

by which the man earns the income and the wife superintends the domestic expenditure, seems to me in

general the most suitable division of labour between the two persons. If, in addition to the physical suffering

of bearing children, and the whole responsibility of their care and education in early years, the wife

undertakes the careful and economical application of the husband's earnings to the general comfort of the

family; she takes not only her fair share, but usually the larger share, of the bodily and mental exertion

required by their joint existence. If she undertakes any additional portion, it seldom relieves her from this, but

only prevents her from performing it properly. The care which she is herself disabled from taking of the

children and the household, nobody else takes; those of the children who do not die, grow up as they best can,

and the management of the household is likely to be so bad, as even in point of economy to be a great

drawback from the value of the wife's earnings. In another wise just state of things, it is not, therefore, I think,

a desirable custom, that the wife should contribute by her labour to the income of the family. In an unjust

state of things, her doing so may be useful to her, by making her of more value in the eyes of the man who is

legally her master; but, on the other hand, it enables him still farther to abuse his power, by forcing her to

work, and leaving the support of the family to her exertions, while he spends most of his time in drinking and

idleness. The power of earning is essential to the dignity of a woman, if she has not independent property.

But if marriage were an equal contract, not implying the obligation of obedience; if the connexion were no

longer enforced to the oppression of those to whom it is purely a mischief, but a separation, on just terms (I

do not now speak of a divorce), could be obtained by any woman who was morally entitled to it; and if she

would then find all honourable employments as freely open to her as to men; it would not be necessary for

her protection, that during marriage she should make this particular use of her faculties. Like a man when he

chooses a profession, so, when a woman marries, it may in general be understood that she makes choice of

the management of a household, and the bringing up of a family, as the first call upon her exertions, during as

many years of her life as may be required for the purpose; and that she renounces, not all other objects and

occupations, but all which are not consistent with the requirements of this. The actual exercise, in a habitual

or systematic manner, of outdoor occupations, or such as cannot be carried on at home, would by this

principle be practically interdicted to the greater number of married women. But the utmost latitude ought to

exist for the adaptation of general rules to individual suitabilities; and there ought to be nothing to prevent

faculties exceptionally adapted to any other pursuit, from obeying their vocation notwithstanding marriage:

due provision being made for supplying otherwise any fallingshort which might become inevitable, in her

full performance of the ordinary functions of mistress of a family. These things, if once opinion were rightly

directed on the subject, might with perfect safety be left to be regulated by opinion, without any interference

On the other point which is involved in the just equality of women, their admissibility to all the functions and

occupations hitherto retained as the monopoly of the stronger sex, I should anticipate no difficulty in

convincing anyone who has gone with me on the subject of the equality of women in the family. I believe that

their disabilities elsewhere are only clung to in order to maintain their subordination in domestic life; because

the generality of the male sex cannot yet tolerate the idea of living with an equal. Were it not for that, I think

that almost everyone, in the existing state of opinion in politics and political economy, would admit the

injustice of excluding half the human race from the greater number of lucrative occupations, and from almost

all high social functions; ordaining from their birth either that they are not, and cannot by any possibility

become, fit for employments which are legally open to the stupidest and basest of the other sex, or else that

however fit they may be, those employments shall be interdicted to them, in order to be preserved for the

exclusive benefit of males. In the last two centuries, when (which was seldom the case) any reason beyond

the mere existence of the fact was thought to be required to justify the disabilities of women, people seldom

assigned as a reason their inferior mental capacity; which, in times when there was a real trial of personal

faculties (from which all women were not excluded) in the struggles of public life, no one really believed in.

The reason given in those days was not women's unfitness, but the interest of society, by which was meant

the interest of men: just as the raison d'etat, meaning the convenience of the government, and the support of

existing authority, was deemed a sufficient explanation and excuse for the most flagitious crimes. In the

present day, power holds a smoother language, and whomsoever it oppresses, always pretends to do so for

their own good: accordingly, when anything is forbidden to women, it is thought necessary to say, and

desirable to believe, that they are incapable of doing it, and that they depart from their real path of success

and happiness when they aspire to it. But to make this reason plausible (I do not say valid), those by whom it

is urged must be prepared to carry it to a much greater length than anyone ventures to do in the face of

present experience. It is not sufficient to maintain that women on the average are less gifted then men on the

average, with certain of the higher mental faculties, or that a smaller number of women than of men are fit for

occupations and functions of the highest intellectual character. It is necessary to maintain that no women at

all are fit for them, and that the most eminent women arc inferior in mental faculties to the most mediocre of

the men on whom those functions at present devolve. For if the performance of the function is decided either

by competition, or by any mode of choice which secures regard to the public interest, there needs be no

apprehension that any important employments will fall into the hands of women inferior to average men, or

to the average of their male competitors. The only result would be that there would be fewer women than

men in such employments; a result certain to happen in any case, if only from the preference always likely to

be felt by the majority of women for the one vocation in which there is nobody to compete with them. Now,

the most determined depreciator of women will not venture to deny, that when we add the experience of

recent times to that of ages past, women, and not a few merely, but many women, have proved themselves

capable of everything, perhaps without a single exception, which is done by men, and of doing it successfully

and creditably. The utmost that can be said is, that there arc many things which none of them have succeeded

in doing as well as they have been done by some men many in which they have not reached the very

highest rank. But there are extremely few, dependent only on mental faculties, in which they have not

attained the rank next to the highest. Is not this enough, and much more than enough, to make it a tyranny to

them, and a detriment to society, that they should not be allowed to compete with men for the exercise of

these functions? Is it not a mere truism to say, that such functions are often filled by men far less fit for them

than numbers of women, and who would be beaten by women in any fair field of competition? What

difference does it make that there may be men somewhere, fully employed about other things, who may be

still better qualified for the things in question than these women? Does not this take place in all competitions?

Is there so great a superfluity of men fit for high duties, that society can afford to reject the service of any

competent person? Are we so certain of always finding a man made to our hands for any duty or function of

social importance which falls vacant, that we lose nothing by putting a ban upon one half of mankind, and

refusing beforehand to make their faculties available, however distinguished they may be? And even if we

could do without them, would it be consistent with justice to refuse to them their fair share of honour and

distinction, or to deny to them the equal moral right of all human beings to choose their occupation (short of

injury to others) according to their own preferences, at their own risk? Nor is the injustice confined to them: it

is shared by those who are in a position to benefit by their services. To ordain that any kind of persons shall

not be physicians, or shall not be advocates, or shall not be Members of Parliament, is to injure not them

only, but all who employ physicians or advocates, or elect Members of Parliament, and who are deprived of

the stimulating effect of greater competition on the exertions of the competitors, as well as restricted to a

It will perhaps be sufficient if I confine myself, in the details of my argument, to functions of a public nature:

since, if I am successful as to those, it probably will be readily granted that women should be admissible to

all other occupations to which it is at all material whether they are admitted or not. And here let me begin by

marking out one function, broadly distinguished from all others, their right to which is entirely independent

of any question which can be raised concerning their faculties. I mean the suffrage, both parliamentary and

municipal. The right to share in the choice of those who are to exercise a public trust, is altogether a distinct

thing from that of competing for the trust itself. If no one could vote for a Member of Parliament who was not

fit to be a candidate, the government would be a narrow oligarchy indeed. To have a voice in choosing those

by whom one is to be governed, is a means of selfprotection due to everyone, though he were to remain for

ever excluded from the function of governing: and that women are considered fit to have such a choice, may

be presumed from the fact, that the law already gives it to women in the most important of all cases to

themselves: for the choice of the man who is to govern a woman to the end of life, is always supposed to be

voluntarily made by herself. In the case of election to public trusts, it is the business of constitutional law to

surround the right of suffrage with all needful securities and limitations; but whatever securities are sufficient

in the case of the male sex, no others need be required in the case of women. Under whatever conditions, and

within whatever limits, men are admitted to the suffrage, there is not a shadow of justification for not

admitting women under the same. The majority of the women of any class are not likely to differ in political

opinion from the majority of the men of the same class, unless the question be one in which the interests of

women, as such, are in some way involved; and if they are so, women require the suffrage, as their guarantee

of just and equal consideration. This ought to be obvious even to those who coincide in no other of the

doctrines for which I contend. Even if every woman were a wife, and if every wife ought to be a slave, all the

more would these slaves stand in need of legal protection: and we know what legal protection the slaves have,

With regard to the fitness of women, not only to participate in elections, but themselves to hold offices or

practise professions involving important public responsibilities; I have already observed that this

consideration is not essential to the practical question in dispute: since any woman, who succeeds in an open

profession, proves by that very fact that she is qualified for it. And in the case of public offices, if the political

system of the country is such as to exclude unfit men, it will equally exclude unfit women: while if it is not,

there is no additional evil in the fact that the unfit persons whom it admits may be either women or men. As

long therefore as it is acknowledged that even a few women may be fit for these duties, the laws which shut

the door on those exceptions cannot be justified by any opinion which can be held respecting the capacities of

women in general. But, though this last consideration is not essential, it is far from being irrelevant. An

unprejudiced view of it gives additional strength to the arguments against the disabilities of women, and

Let us first make entire abstraction of all psychological considerations tending to show, that any of the mental

differences supposed to exist between women and men are but the natural effect of the differences in their

education and circumstances, and indicate no radical difference, far less radical inferiority, of nature. Let us

consider women only as they already are, or as they are known to have been; and the capacities which they

have already practically shown. What they have done, that at least, if nothing else, it is proved that they can

do. When we consider how sedulously they are all trained away from, instead of being trained towards, any

of the occupations or objects reserved for men, it is evident that I am taking a very humble ground for them,

when I rest their case on what they have actually achieved. For, in this case, negative evidence is worth little,

while any positive evidence is conclusive. It cannot be inferred to be impossible that a woman should be a

Homer, or an Aristotle, or a Michael Angelo, or a Beethoven, because no woman has yet actually produced

works comparable to theirs in any of those lines of excellence. This negative fact at most leaves the question

uncertain, and open to psychological discussion. But it is quite certain that a woman can be a Queen

Elizabeth, or a Deborah, or a Joan of Arc, since this is not inference, but fact. Now it is a curious

consideration, that the only things which the existing law excludes women from doing, are the things which

they have proved that they are able to do. There is no law to prevent a woman from having written all the

plays of Shakespeare, or composed all the operas of Mozart. But Queen Elizabeth or Queen Victoria, had

they not inherited the throne, could not have been entrusted with the smallest of the political duties, of which

If anything conclusive could be inferred from experience, without psychological analysis, it would be that the

things which women are not allowed to do are the very ones for which they are peculiarly qualified; since

their vocation for government has made its way, and become conspicuous, through the very few opportunities

which have been given; while in the lines of distinction which apparently were freely open to them, they have

by no means so eminently distinguished themselves. We know how small a number of reigning queens

history presents, in comparison with that of kings. Of this smaller number a far larger proportion have shown

talents for rule; though many of them have occupied the throne in difficult periods. It is remarkable, too, that

they have, in a great number of instances, been distinguished by merits the most opposite to the imaginary

and conventional character of women: they have been as much remarked for the firmness and vigour of their

rule, as for its intelligence. When, to queens and empresses, we add regents, and viceroys of provinces, the

list of women who have been eminent rulers of mankind swells to a great length.[1] This fact is so

undeniable, that someone, long ago, tried to retort the argument, and turned the admitted truth into an

additional insult, by saying that queens are better than kings, because under kings women govern, but under

It may seem a waste of reasoning to argue against a bad joke; but such things do affect people's minds; and I

have heard men quote this saying, with an air as if they thought that there was something in it. At any rate, it

will serve as anything, else for a startingpoint in discussion. I say, then, that it is not true that under kings,

women govern. Such cases are entirely exceptional: and weak kings have quite as often governed ill through

the influence of male favourites, as of female. When a king is governed by a woman merely through his

amatory propensities, good government is not probable, though even then there are exceptions. But French

history counts two kings who have voluntarily given the direction of affairs during many years, the one to his

mother, the other to his sister: one of them, Charles VIII, was a mere boy, but in doing so he followed the

intentions of his father Louis XI, the ablest monarch of his age. The other, Saint Louis, was the best, and one

of the most vigorous rulers, since the time of Charlemagne. Both these princesses ruled in a manner hardly

equalled by any prince among their contemporaries. The Emperor Charles the Fifth, the most politic prince of

his time, who had as great a number of able men in his service as a ruler ever had, and was one of the least

likely of all sovereigns to sacrifice his interest to personal feelings, made two princesses of his family

successively Governors of the Netherlands, and kept one or other of them in that post during his whole life

(they were afterwards succeeded by a third). Both ruled very successfully, and one of them, Margaret of

Austria, as one of the ablest politicians of the age. So much for one side of the question. Now as to the other.

When it is said that under queens men govern, is the same meaning to be understood as when kings are said

to be governed by women? Is it meant that queens choose as their instruments of government, the associates

of their personal pleasures? The case is rare even with those who are as unscrupulous on the latter point as

Catherine II: and it is not in these cases that the good government, alleged to arise from male influence, is to

be found. If it be true, then, that the administration is in the hands of better men under a queen than under an

average king, it must be that queens have a superior capacity for choosing them; and women must be better

qualified than men both for the position of sovereign, and for that of chief minister; for the principal business

of a Prime Minister is not to govern in person, but to find the fittest persons to conduct every department of

public affairs. The more rapid insight into character, which is one of the admitted points of superiority in

women over men, must certainly make them, with anything like parity of qualifications in other respects,

more apt than men in that choice of instruments, which is nearly the most important business of everyone

who has to do with governing mankind. Even the unprincipled Catherine de Medici could feel the value of a

Chancellor de l'Hopital. But it is also true that most great queens have been great by their own talents for

government, and have been well served precisely for that reason. They retained the supreme direction of

affairs in their own hands: and if they listened to good advisers, they gave by that fact the strongest proof that

Is it reasonable to think that those who are fit for the greater functions of politics, are incapable of qualifying

themselves for the less? Is there any reason in the nature of things, that the wives and sisters of princes

should, whenever called on, be found as competent as the princes themselves to their business, but that the

wives and sisters of statesmen, and administrators, and directors of companies, and managers of public

institutions, should be unable to do what is done by their brothers and husbands? The real reason is plain

enough; it is that princesses, being more raised above the generality of men by their rank than placed below

them by their sex, have never been taught that it was improper for them to concern themselves with politics;

but have been allowed to feel the liberal interest natural to any cultivated human being, in the great

transactions which took place around them, and in which they might be called on to take a part. The ladies of

reigning families are the only women who are allowed the same range of interests and freedom of

development as men; and it is precisely in their case that there is not found to be any inferiority. Exactly

where and in proportion as women's capacities for government have been tried, in that proportion have they

This fact is in accordance with the best general conclusions which the world's imperfect experience seems as

yet to suggest, concerning the peculiar tendencies and aptitudes characteristic of women, as women have

hitherto been. I do not say, as they will continue to be; for, as I have already said more than once, I consider it

presumption in anyone to pretend to decide what women are or are not, can or cannot be, by natural

constitution. They have always hitherto been kept, as far as regards spontaneous development, in so unnatural

a state, that their nature cannot but have been greatly distorted and disguised; and no one can safely

pronounce that if women's nature were left to choose its direction as freely as men's, and if no artificial bent

were attempted to be given to it except that required by the conditions of human society, and given to both

sexes alike, there would be any material difference, or perhaps any difference at all, in the character and

capacities which would unfold themselves. I shall presently show, that even the least contestable of the

differences which now exist, are such as may very well have been produced merely by circumstances,

without any difference of natural capacity. But, looking at women as they are known in experience, it may be

said of them, with more truth than belongs to most other generalisations on the subject, that the general bent

of their talents is towards the practical. This statement is conformable to all the public history of women, in

the present and the past. It is no less borne out by common and daily experience. Let us consider the special

nature of the mental capacities most characteristic of a woman of talent. They are all of a kind which fits

them for practice, and makes them tend towards it. What is meant by a woman's capacity of intuitive

perception? It means, a rapid and correct insight into present fact. It has nothing to do with general principles.

Nobody ever perceived a scientific law of nature by intuition, nor arrived at a general rule of duty or

prudence by it. These are results of slow and careful collection and comparison of experience; and neither the

men nor the women. Of intuition usually shine in this department, unless, indeed, the experience necessary is

such as they can acquire by themselves. For what is called their intuitive sagacity makes them peculiarly apt

in gathering such general truths as can be collected from their individual means of observation. When,

consequently, they chance to be as well provided as men are with the results of other people's experience, by

reading and education (I use the word chance advisedly, for, in respect to the knowledge that tends to fit them

for the greater concerns of life, the only educated women are the selfeducated) they are better furnished than

men in general with the essential requisites of skilful and successful practice. Men who have been much

taught, are apt to be deficient in the sense of present fact; they do not see, in the facts which they are called

upon to deal with, what is really there, but what they have been taught to expect. This is seldom the case with

women of any ability. Their capacity of "intuition" preserves them from it. With equality of experience and of

general faculties, a woman usually sees much more than a man of what is immediately before her. Now this

sensibility to the present, is the main quality on which the capacity for practice, as distinguished from theory,

depends. To discover general principles, belongs to the speculative faculty: to discern and discriminate the

particular cases in which they are and are not applicable, constitutes practical talent: and for this, women as

they now are have a peculiar aptitude. I admit that there can be no good practice without principles, and that

the predominant place which quickness of observation holds among a woman's faculties, makes her

particularly apt to build overhasty generalisations upon her own observation; though at the same time no less

ready in rectifying those generalisations, as her observation takes a wider range. But the corrective to this

defect, is access to the experience of the human race; general knowledge exactly the thing which

education can best supply. A woman's mistakes are specifically those of a clever selfeducated man, who

often sees what men trained in routine do not see, but falls into errors for want of knowing things which have

long been known. Of course he has acquired much of the preexisting knowledge, or he could not have got

on at all; but what he knows of it he has picked up in fragments and at random, as women do.

But this gravitation of women's minds to the present, to the real, to actual fact, while in its exclusiveness it is

a source of errors, is also a most useful counteractive of the contrary error. The principal and most

characteristic aberration of speculative minds as such, consists precisely in the deficiency of this lively

perception and everpresent sense of objective fact. For want of this, they often not only overlook the

contradiction which outward facts oppose to their theories, but lose sight of the legitimate purpose of

speculation altogether, and let their speculative faculties go astray into regions not peopled with real beings,

animate or inanimate, even idealised, but with personified shadows created by the illusions of metaphysics or

by the mere entanglement of words, and think these shadows the proper objects of the highest, the most

transcendant, philosophy. Hardly anything can be of greater value to a man of theory and speculation who

employs himself not in collecting materials of knowledge by observation, but in working them up by

processes of thought into comprehensive truths of science and laws of conduct, than to carry on his

speculations in the companionship, and under the criticism, of a really superior woman. There is nothing

comparable to it for keeping his thoughts within the limits of real things, and the actual facts of nature. A

woman seldom runs wild after an abstraction. The habitual direction of her mind to dealing with things as

individuals rather than in groups, and (what is closely connected with it) her more lively interest in the

present feelings of persons, which makes her consider first of all, in anything which claims to be applied to

practice, in what manner persons will be affected by it these two things make her extremely unlikely to

put faith in any speculation which loses sight of individuals, and deals with things as if they existed for the

benefit of some imaginary entity, some mere creation of the mind, not resolvable into the feelings of living

beings. Women's thoughts are thus as useful in giving reality to those of thinking men, as men's thoughts in

giving width and largeness to those of women. In depth, as distinguished from breadth, I greatly doubt if even

If the existing mental characteristics of women are thus valuable even in aid of speculation, they are still

more important, when speculation has done its work, for carrying out the results of speculation into practice.

For the reasons already given, women are comparatively unlikely to fall into the common error of men, that

of sticking to their rules in a case whose specialities either take it out of the class to which the rules are

applicable, or require a special adaptation of them. Let us now consider another of the admitted superiorities

of clever women, greater quickness of apprehension. Is not this preeminently a quality which fits a person

for practice? In action, everything continually depends upon deciding promptly. In speculation, nothing does.

A mere thinker can wait, can take time to consider, can collect additional evidence; he is not obliged to

complete his philosophy at once, lest the opportunity should go by. The power of drawing the best conclusion

possible from insufficient data is not indeed useless in philosophy; the construction of a provisional

hypothesis consistent with all known facts is often the needful basis for further inquiry. But this faculty is

rather serviceable in philosophy, than the main qualification for it: and, for the auxiliary as well as for the

main operation, the philosopher can allow himself any time he pleases. He is in no need of the capacity of

doing rapidly what he does; what he rather needs is patience, to work on slowly until imperfect lights have

become perfect, and a conjecture has ripened into a theorem. For those, on the contrary, whose business is

with the fugitive and perishable with individual facts, not kinds of facts rapidity of thought is a

qualification next only in importance to the power of thought itself. He who has not his faculties under

immediate command, in the contingencies of action, might as well not have them at all. He may be fit to

criticise, but he is not fit to act. Now it is in this that women, and the men who are most like women,

confessedly excel. The other sort of man, however preeminent may be his faculties, arrives slowly at

complete command of them: rapidity of judgment and promptitude of judicious action, even in the things he

knows best, are the gradual and late result of strenuous effort grown into habit.

It will be said, perhaps, that the greater nervous susceptibility of women is a disqualification for practice, in

anything but domestic life, by rendering them mobile, changeable, too vehemently under the influence of the

moment, incapable of dogged perseverance, unequal and uncertain in the power of using their faculties. I

think that these phrases sum up the greater part of the objections commonly made to the fitness of women for

the higher class of serious business. Much of all this is the mere overflow of nervous energy run to waste, and

would cease when the energy was directed to a definite end. Much is also the result of conscious or

unconscious cultivation; as we see by the almost total disappearance of "hysterics" and faintingfits, since

they have gone out of fashion. Moreover, when people are brought up, like many women of the higher classes

(though less so in our own country than any other), a kind of hothouse plants, shielded from the wholesome

vicissitudes of air and temperature, and untrained in any of the occupations and exercises which give stimulus

and development to the circulatory and muscular system, while their nervous system, especially in its

emotional department, is kept in unnaturally active play; it is no wonder if those of them who do not die of

consumption, grow up with constitutions liable to derangement from slight causes, both internal and external,

and without stamina to support any task, physical or mental, requiring continuity of effort. But women

brought up to work for their livelihood show none of these morbid characteristics, unless indeed they are

chained to an excess of sedentary work in confined and unhealthy rooms. Women who in their early years

have shared in the healthful physical education and bodily freedom of their brothers, and who obtain a

sufficiency of pure air and exercise in afterlife, very rarely have any excessive susceptibility of nerves

which can disqualify them for active pursuits. There is indeed a certain proportion of persons, in both sexes,

in whom an unusual degree of nervous sensibility is constitutional, and of so marked a character as to be the

feature of their organisation which exercises the greatest influence over the whole character of the vital

phenomena. This constitution, like other physical conformations, is hereditary, and is transmitted to sons as

well as daughters; but it is possible, and probable, that the nervous temperament (as it is called) is inherited

by a greater number of women than of men. We will assume this as a fact: and let me then ask, are men of

nervous temperament found to be unfit for the duties and pursuits usually followed by men? If not, why

should women of the same temperament be unfit for them? The peculiarities of the temperament are, no

doubt, within certain limits, an obstacle to success in some employments, though an aid to it in others. But

when the occupation is suitable to the temperament, and sometimes even when it is unsuitable, the most

brilliant examples of success are continually given by the men of high nervous sensibility. They are

distinguished in their practical manifestations chiefly by this, that being susceptible of a higher degree of

excitement than those of another physical constitution, their powers when excited differ more than in the case

of other people, from those shown in their ordinary state: they are raised, as it were, above themselves, and do

things with ease which they are wholly incapable of at other times. But this lofty excitement is not, except in

weak bodily constitutions, a mere flash, which passes away immediately, leaving no permanent traces, and

incompatible with persistent and steady pursuit of an object. It is the character of the nervous temperament to

be capable of sustained excitement, holding out through longcontinued efforts. It is what is meant by spirit.

It is what makes the highbred racehorse run without slackening speed till he drops down dead. It is what has

enabled so many delicate women to maintain the most sublime constancy not only at the stake, but through a

long preliminary succession of mental and bodily tortures. It is evident that people of this temperament are

particularly apt for what may be called the executive department of the leadership of mankind. They are the

material of great orators, great preachers, impressive diffusers of moral influences. Their constitution might

be deemed less favourable to the qualities required from a statesman in the cabinet, or from a judge. It would

be so, if the consequence necessarily followed that because people are excitable they must always be in a

state of excitement. But this is wholly a question of training. Strong feeling is the instrument and element of

strong selfcontrol: but it requires to be cultivated in that direction. When it is, it forms not the heroes of

impulse only, but those also of selfconquest. History and experience prove that the most passionate

characters are the most fanatically rigid in their feelings of duty, when their passion has been trained to act in

that direction. The judge who gives a just decision in a case where his feelings are intensely interested on the

other side, derives from that same strength of feeling the determined sense of the obligation of justice, which

enables him to achieve this victory over himself. The capability of that lofty enthusiasm which takes the

human being out of his everyday character, reacts upon the daily character itself. His aspirations and powers

when he is in this exceptional state, become the type with which he compares, and by which he estimates, his

sentiments and proceedings at other times: and his habitual purposes assume a character moulded by and

assimilated to the moments of lofty excitement, although those, from the physical nature of a human being,

can only be transient. Experience of races, as well as of individuals, does not show those of excitable

temperament to be less fit, on the average, either for speculation or practice, than the more unexcitable. The

French, and the Italians, are undoubtedly by nature more nervously excitable than the Teutonic races, and,

compared at least with the English, they have a much greater habitual and daily emotional life: but have they

been less great in science, in public business, in legal and judicial eminence, or in war? There is abundant

evidence that the Greeks were of old, as their descendants and successors still are, one of the most excitable

of the races of mankind. It is superfluous to ask, what among the achievements of men they did not excel in.

The Romans, probably, as an equally southern people, had the same original temperament: but the stern

character of their national discipline, like that of the Spartans, made them an example of the opposite type of

national character; the greater strength of their natural feelings being chiefly apparent in the intensity which

the same original temperament made it possible to give to the artificial. If these cases exemplify what a

naturally excitable people may be made, the Irish Celts afford one of the aptest examples of what they are

when left to themselves; (if those can be said to be left to themselves who have been for centuries under the

indirect influence of bad government, and the direct training of a Catholic hierarchy and of a sincere belief in

the Catholic religion). The Irish character must be considered, therefore, as an unfavourable case: yet,

whenever the circumstances of the individual have been at all favourable, what people have shown greater

capacity for the most varied and multifarious individual eminence? Like the French compared with the

English, the Irish with the Swiss, the Greeks or Italians compared with the German races, so women

compared with men may be found, on the average, to do the same things with some variety in the particular

kind of excellence. But, that they would do them fully as well on the whole, if their education and cultivation

were adapted to correcting instead of aggravating the infirmities incident to their temperament, I see not the

Supposing it, however, to be true that women's minds are by nature more mobile than those of men, less

capable of persisting long in the same continuous effort, more fitted for dividing their faculties among many

things than for travelling in any one path to the highest point which can be reached by it: this may be true of

women as they now are (though not without great and numerous exceptions), and may account for their

having remained behind the highest order of men in precisely the things in which this absorption of the whole

mind in one set of ideas and occupations may seem to be most requisite. Still, this difference is one which can

only affect the kind of excellence, not the excellence itself, or its practical worth: and it remains to be shown

whether this exclusive working of a part of the mind, this absorption of the whole thinking faculty in a single

subject, and concentration of it on a single work, is the normal and healthful condition of the human faculties,

even for speculative uses. I believe that what is gained in special development by this concentration, is lost in

the capacity of the mind for the other purposes of life; and even in abstract thought, it is my decided opinion

that the mind does more by frequently returning to a difficult problem, than by sticking to it without

interruption. For the purposes, at all events, of practice, from its highest to its humblest departments, the

capacity of passing promptly from one subject of consideration to another, without letting the active spring of

the intellect run down between the two, is a power far more valuable; and this power women preeminently

possess, by virtue of the very mobility of which they are accused. They perhaps have it from nature, but they

certainly have it by training and education; for nearly the whole of the occupations of women consist in the

management of small but multitudinous details, on each of which the mind cannot dwell even for a minute,

but must pass on to other things, and if anything requires longer thought, must steal time at odd moments for

thinking of it. The capacity indeed which women show for doing their thinking in circumstances and at times

which almost any man would make an excuse to himself for not attempting it, has often been noticed: and a

woman's mind, though it may be occupied only with small things, can hardly ever permit its elf to be vacant,

as a man's so often is when not engaged in what he chooses to consider the business of his life. The business

of a woman's ordinary life is things in general, and can as little cease to go on as the world to go round.

But (it is said) there is anatomical evidence of the superior mental capacity of men compared with women:

they have a larger brain. I reply, that in the first place the fact itself is doubtful. It is by no means established

that the brain of a woman is smaller than that of a man. If it is inferred merely because a woman's bodily

frame generally is of less dimensions than a man's, this criterion would lead to strange consequences. A tall

and largeboned man must on this showing be wonderfully superior in intelligence to a small man, and an

elephant or a whale must prodigiously excel mankind. The size of the brain in human beings, anatomists say,

varies much less than the size of the body, or even of the head, and the one cannot be at all inferred from the

other. It is certain that some women have as large a brain as any man. It is within my knowledge that a man

who had weighed many human brains, said that the heaviest he knew of, heavier even than Cuvier's (the

heaviest previously recorded), was that of a woman. Next, I must observe that the precise relation which

exists between the brain and the intellectual powers is not yet well understood, but is a subject of great

dispute. That there is a very close relation we cannot doubt. The brain is certainly the material organ of

thought and feeling: and (making abstraction of the great unsettled controversy respecting the appropriation

of different parts of the brain to different mental faculties) I admit that it would be an anomaly, and an

exception to all we know of the general laws of life and organisation, if the size of the organ were wholly

indifferent to the function; if no accession of power were derived from the great magnitude of the instrument.

But the exception and the anomaly would be fully as great if the organ exercised influence by its magnitude

only. In all the more delicate operations of nature of which those of the animated creation are the most

delicate, and those of the nervous system by far the most delicate of these differences in the effect depend

as much on differences of quality in the physical agents, as on their quantity: and if the quality of an

instrument is to be tested by the nicety and delicacy of the work it can do, the indications point to a greater

average fineness of quality in the brain and nervous system of women than of men. Dismissing abstract

difference of quality, a thing difficult to verify, the efficiency of an organ is known to depend not solely on its

size but on its activity: and of this we have an approximate measure in the energy with which the blood

circulates through it, both the stimulus and the reparative force being mainly dependent on the circulation. It

would not be surprising it is indeed an hypothesis which accords well with the differences actually

observed between the mental operations of the two sexes if men on the average should have the advantage

in the size of the brain, and women in activity of cerebral circulation. The results which conjecture, founded

on analogy, would lead us to expect from this difference of organisation, would correspond to some of those

which we most commonly see. In the first place, the mental operations of men might be expected to be

slower. They would neither be so prompt as women in thinking, nor so quick to feel. Large bodies take more

time to get into full action. On the other hand, when once got thoroughly into play, men's brain would bear

more work. It would be more persistent in the line first taken; it would have more difficulty in changing from

one mode of action to another, but, in the one thing it was doing, it could go on longer without loss of power

or sense of fatigue. And do we not find that the things in which men most excel women are those which

require most plodding and long hammering at a single thought, while women do best what must be done

rapidly? A woman's brain is sooner fatigued, sooner exhausted; but given the degree of exhaustion, we should

expect to find that it would recover itself sooner. I repeat that this speculation is entirely hypothetical; it

pretends to no more than to suggest a line of inquiry. I have before repudiated the notion of its being yet

certainly known that there is any natural difference at all in the average strength or direction of the mental

capacities of the two sexes, much less what that difference is. Nor is it possible that this should be known, so

long as the psychological laws of the formation of character have been so little studied, even in a general

way, and in the particular case never scientifically applied at all; so long as the most obvious external causes

of difference of character are habitually disregarded left unnoticed by the observer, and looked down upon

with a kind of supercilious contempt by the prevalent schools both of natural history and of mental

philosophy: who, whether they look for the source of what mainly distinguishes human beings from one

another, in the world of matter or in that of spirit, agree in running down those who prefer to explain these

To so ridiculous an extent are the notions formed of the nature of women, mere empirical generalisations,

framed, without philosophy or analysis, upon the first instances which present themselves, that the popular

idea of it is different in different countries, according as the opinions and social circumstances of the country

have given to the women living in it any speciality of development or nondevelopment. An oriental thinks

that women are by nature peculiarly voluptuous; see the violent abuse of them on this ground in Hindoo

writings. An Englishman usually thinks that they are by nature cold. The sayings about women's fickleness

are mostly of French origin; from the famous distich of Francis the First, upward and downward. In England

it is a common remark, how much more constant women are than men. Inconstancy has been longer reckoned

discreditable to a woman, in England than in France; and Englishwomen are besides, in their inmost nature,

much more subdued to opinion. It may be remarked by the way, that Englishmen are in peculiarly

unfavourable circumstances for attempting to judge what is or is not natural, not merely to women, but to

men, or to human beings altogether, at least if they have only English experience to go upon: because there is

no place where human nature shows so little of its original lineaments. Both in a good and a bad sense, the

English are farther from a state of nature than any other modern people. They are, more than any other

people, a product of civilisation and discipline. England is the country in which social discipline has most

succeeded, not so much in conquering, as in suppressing, whatever is liable to conflict with it. The English,

more than any other people, not only act but feel according to rule. In other countries, the taught opinion, or

the requirement of society, may be the stronger power, but the promptings of the individual nature are always

visible under it, and often resisting it: rule may be stronger than nature, but nature is still there. In England,

rule has to a great degree substituted itself for nature. The greater part of life is carried on, not by following

inclination under the control of rule, but by having no inclination but that of following a rule. Now this has its

good side doubtless, though it has also a wretchedly bad one; but it must render an Englishman peculiarly

illqualified to pass a judgment on the original tendencies of human nature from his own experience. The

errors to which observers elsewhere are liable on the subject, are of a different character. An Englishman is

ignorant respecting human nature, a Frenchman is prejudiced. An Englishman's errors are negative, a

Frenchman's positive. An Englishman fancies that things do not exist, because he never sees them; a

Frenchman thinks they must always and necessarily exist, because he does see them. An Englishman does not

know nature, because he has had no opportunity of observing it; a Frenchman generally knows a great deal of

it, but often mistakes it, because he has only seen it sophisticated and distorted. For the artificial state

superinduced by society disguises the natural tendencies of the thing which is the subject of observation, in

two different ways: by extinguishing the nature, or by transforming it. In the one case there is but a starved

residuum of nature remaining to be studied; in the other case there is much, but it may have expanded in any

I have said that it cannot now be known how much of the existing mental differences between men and

women is natural and how much artificial; whether there are any natural differences at all; or, supposing all

artificial causes of difference to be withdrawn, what natural character would be revealed I am not about to

attempt what I have pronounced impossible: but doubt does not forbid conjecture, and where certainty is

unattainable, there may yet be the means of arriving at some degree of probability. The first point, the origin

of the differences actually observed, is the one most accessible to speculation; and I shall attempt to approach

it, by the only path by which it can be reached; by tracing the mental consequences of external influences. We

cannot isolate a human being from the circumstances of his condition, so as to ascertain experimentally what

he would have been by nature; but we can consider what he is, and what his circumstances have been, and

Let us take, then, the only marked case which observation affords, of apparent inferiority of women to men, if

we except the merely physical one of bodily strength. No production in philosophy, science, or art, entitled to

the first rank, has been the work of a woman. Is there any mode of accounting for this, without supposing that

In the first place, we may fairly question whether experience has afforded sufficient grounds for an induction.

It is scarcely three generations since women, saving very rare exceptions have begun to try their capacity in

philosophy, science, or art. It is only in the present generation that their attempts have been at all numerous;

and they are even now extremely few, everywhere but in England and France. It is a relevant question,

whether a mind possessing the requisites of first rate eminence in speculation or creative art could have been

expected, on the mere calculation of chances, to turn up during that lapse of time, among the women whose

tastes and personal position admitted of their devoting themselves to these pursuits In all things which there

has yet been time for in all but the very highest grades in the scale of excellence, especially in the

department in which they have been longest engaged, literature (both prose and poetry) women have done

quite as much, have obtained fully as high prizes and as many of them, as could be expected from the length

of time and the number of competitors. If we go back to the earlier period when very few women made the

attempt, yet some of those few made it with distinguished success. The Greeks always accounted Sappho

among their great poets; and we may well suppose that Myrtis, said to have been the teacher of Pindar, and

Corinna, who five times bore away from him the prize of poetry, must at least have had sufficient merit to

admit of being compared with that great name. Aspasia did not leave any philosophical writings; but it is an

admitted fact that Socrates resorted to her for instruction, and avowed himself to have obtained it.

If we consider the works of women in modern times, and contrast them with those of men, either in the

literary or the artistic department, such inferiority as may be observed resolves itself essentially into one

thing: but that is a most material one; deficiency of originality. Not total deficiency; for every production of

mind which is of any substantive value, has an originality of its own is a conception of the mind itself, not

a copy of something else. Thoughts original, in the sense of being unborrowed of being derived from the

thinker's own observations or intellectual processes are abundant in the writings of women. But they have

not yet produced any of those great and luminous new ideas which form an era in thought, nor those

fundamentally new conceptions in art, which open a vista of possible effects not before thought of, and found

a new school. Their compositions are mostly grounded on the existing fund of thought, and their creations

donot deviate widely from existing types. This is the sort of inferiority which their works manifest: for in

point of execution, in the detailed application of thought, and the perfection of style, there is no inferiority.

Our best novelists in point of composition, and of the management of detail, have mostly been women; and

there is not in all modern literature a more eloquent vehicle of thought than the style of Madame de Stael,

nor, as a specimen of purely artistic excellence, anything superior to the prose of Madame Sand, whose style

acts upon the nervous system like a symphony of Haydn or Mozart. High originality of conception is, as I

have said, what is chiefly wanting. And now to examine if there is any manner in which this deficiency can

Let us remember, then, so far as regards mere thought, that during all that period in the world's existence, and

in the progress of cultivation, in which great and fruitful new truths I could be arrived at by mere force of

genius, with little precious study and accumulation of knowledge during all that time women did not

concern themselves with speculation at all. From the days of Hypatia to those of the Reformation, the

illustrious Heloisa is almost the only woman to whom any such achievement might have been possible; and

we know not how great a capacity of speculation in her may have been lost to mankind by the misfortunes of

her life. Never since any considerable number of women have began to cultivate serious thought, has

originality been possible on easy terms. Nearly all the thoughts which can be reached by mere strength of

original faculties, have long since been arrived at; and originality, in any high sense of the word, is now

scarcely ever attained but by minds which have undergone elaborate discipline, and are deeply versed in the

results of previous thinking. It is Mr. Maurice, I think, who has remarked on the present age, that its most

original thinkers are those who have known most thoroughly what had been thought by their; predecessors:

and this will always henceforth be the case. Every fresh stone in the edifice has now to be placed on the top

of so many others, that a long process of climbing, and of carrying up materials, has to be gone through by

whoever aspires to take a share in the present stage of the work. How many women are there who have gone

through any such process? Mrs. Somerville, alone perhaps of women, knows as much of mathematics as is

now needful for making any considerable mathematical discovery: is it any proof of inferiority in women,

that she has not happened to be one of the two or three persons who in her lifetime have associated their

names with some striking advancement of the science? Two women, since political economy has been made

a science, have known enough of it to write usefully on the subject: of how many of the innumerable men

who have written on it during the same time, is it possible with truth to say more? If no woman has hitherto

been a great historian, what woman has had the necessary erudition? If no woman is a great philologist, what

woman has studied Sanscrit and Slavonic, the Gothic of Ulphila and the Persic of the Zendavesta? Even in

practical matters we all know what is the value of the originality of untaught geniuses. It means, inventing

over again in its rudimentary form something already invented and improved upon by many successive

inventors. When women have had the preparation which all men now require to be eminently original, it will

be time enough to begin judging by experience of their capacity for originality.

It no doubt often happens that a person, who has not widely and accurately studied the thoughts of others on a

subject, has by natural sagacity a happy intuition, which he can suggest, but cannot prove, which yet when

matured may be an important addition to knowledge: but even then, no justice can be done to it until some

other person, who does possess the previous acquirements, takes it in hand, tests it, gives it a scientific or

practical form, and fits it into its place among the existing truths of philosophy or science. Is it supposed that

such felicitous thoughts do not occur to women? They occur by hundreds to every woman of intellect. But

they are mostly lost, for want of a husband or friend who has the other knowledge which can enable him to

estimate them properly and bring them before the world: and even when they are brought before it, they

generally appear as his ideas, not their real author's. Who can tell how many of the most original thoughts put

forth by male writers, belong to a woman by suggestion, to themselves only by verifying and working out? If

If we turn from pure speculation to literature in the narrow sense of the term, and the fine arts, there is a very

obvious reason why women's literature is, in its general conception and in its main features, an imitation of

men's. Why is the Roman literature, as critics proclaim to satiety, not original, but an imitation of the Greek?

Simply because the Greeks came first. If women lived in a different country from men, and had never read

any of their writings, they would have had a literature of their own. As it is, they have not created one,

because they found a highly advanced literature already created. If there had been no suspension of the

knowledge of antiquity, or if the Renaissance had occurred before the Gothic cathedrals were built, they

never would have been built. We see that, in France and Italy, imitation of the ancient literature stopped the

original development even after it had commenced. All women who write are pupils of the great male writers.

A painter's early pictures, even if he be a Raffaello, are undistinguishable in style from those of his master.

Even a Mozart does not display his powerful originality in his earliest pieces. What years are to a gifted

individual, generations are to a mass. If women's literature is destined to have a different collective character

from that of men, depending on any difference of natural tendencies, much longer time is necessary than has

yet elapsed, before it can emancipate itself from the influence of accepted models, and guide itself by its own

impulses. But if, as I believe, there will not prove to be any natural tendencies common to women, and

distinguishing their genius from that of men, yet every individual writer among them has her individual

tendencies, which at present are still subdued by the influence of precedent and example: and it will require

generations more, before their individuality is sufficiently developed to make head against that influence.

It is in the fine arts, properly so called, that the prima facie evidence of inferior original powers in women at

first sight appears the strongest: since opinion (it may be said) does not exclude them from these, but rather

encourages them, and their education, instead of passing over this department, is in the affluent classes

mainly composed of it. Yet in this line of exertion they have fallen still more short than in many others, of the

highest eminence attained by men. This shortcoming, however, needs no other explanation than the familiar

fact, more universally true in the fine arts than in anything else; the vast superiority of professional persons

over amateurs. Women in the educated classes are almost universally taught more or less of some branch or

other of the fine arts, but not that they may gain their living or their social consequence by it. Women artists

are all amateurs. The exceptions are only of the kind which confirm the general truth. Women are taught

music, I but not for the purpose of composing, only of executing it: and accordingly it is only as composers,

that men, in music, are superior to women. The only one of the fine arts which women do follow, to any

extent, as a profession, and an occupation for life, is the histrionic; and in that they are confessedly equal, if

not superior, to men. To make the comparison fair, it should be made between the productions of women in

any branch of art, and those of men not following it as a profession. In musical composition, for example,

women surely have produced fully as good things as have ever been produced by male amateurs. There are

now a few women, a very few, who practise painting as a profession, and these are already beginning to show

quite as much talent as could be expected. Even male painters (pace Mr. Ruskin) have not made any very

remarkable figure these last centuries, and it will be long before they do so. The reason why the old painters

were so greatly superior to the modern, is that a greatly superior class of men applied themselves to the art. In

the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the Italian painters were the most accomplished men of their age. The

greatest of them were men of encyclopaedical acquirements and powers, like the great men of Greece. But in

their times fine art was, to men's feelings and conceptions, among the grandest things in which a human being

could excel; and by it men were made, what only political or military distinction now makes them, the

companions of sovereigns, and the equals of the highest nobility. In the present age, men of anything like

similar calibre find something moreimportant to do, for their own fame and the uses of the modern world,

than painting: and it is only now and then that a Reynolds or a Turner (of whose relative rank among eminent

men I do not pretend to an opinion) applies himself to that art. Music belongs to a different order of things: it

does not require the same general powers of mind, but seems more dependent on a natural gift: and it may be

thought surprising that no one of the great musical composers has been a woman. But even this natural gift,

to be made available for great creations, requires study, and professional devotion to the pursuit. The only

countries which have produced firstrate composers, even of the male sex, are Germany and Italy

countries in which, both in point of special and of general cultivation, women have remained far behind

France and England, being generally (it may be said without exaggeration) very little educated, and having

scarcely cultivated at all any of the higher faculties of mind. And in those countries the men who are

acquainted with the principles of musical composition must be counted by hundreds, or more probably by

thousands, the women barely by scores: so that here again, on the doctrine of averages, we cannot reasonably

expect to see more than one eminent woman to fifty eminent men; and the last three centuries have not

There are other reasons, besides those which we have now given, that help to explain why women remain

behind men, even in the pursuits which are open to both. For one thing, very few women have time for them.

This may seem a paradox; it is an undoubted social fact. The time and thoughts of every woman have to

satisfy great previous demands on them for things practical. There is, first, the superintendence of the family

and the domestic expenditure, which occupies at least one woman in every family, generally the one of

mature years and acquired experience; unless the family is so rich as to admit of delegating that task to hired

agency, and submitting to all the waste and malversation inseparable from that mode of conducting it. The

superintendence of a household, even when not in other respects laborious, is extremely onerous to the

thoughts; it requires incessant vigilance, an eye which no detail escapes, and presents questions for

consideration and solution, foreseen and unforeseen, at every hour of the day, from which the person

responsible for them can hardly ever shake herself free. If a woman is of a rank and circumstances which

relieve her in a measure from these cares, she has still devolving on her the management for the whole family

of its intercourse with others of what is called society, and the less the call made on her by the former

duty, the greater is always the development of the latter: the dinner parties, concerts, evening parties, morning

visits, letterwriting, and all that goes with them. All this is over and above the engrossing duty which

society imposes exclusively on women, of making themselves charming. A clever woman of the higher ranks

finds nearly a sufficient employment of her talents in cultivating the graces of manner and the arts of

conversation. To look only at the outward side of the subject: the great and continual exercise of thought

which all women who attach any value to dressing well (I do not mean expensively, but with taste, and

perception of natural and of artificial convenance) must bestow upon their own dress, perhaps also upon that

of their daughters, would alone go a great way towards achieving respectable results in art, or science, or

literature, and does actually exhaust much of the time and mental power they might have to spare for

either.[2] If it were possible that all this number of little practical interests (which are made great to them)

should leave them either much leisure, or much energy and freedom of mind, to be devoted to art or

speculation, they must have a much greater original supply of active faculty than the vast majority of men.

But this is not all. Independently of the regular offices of life which devolve upon a woman, she is expected

to have her time and faculties always at the disposal of everybody. If a man has not a profession to exempt

him from such demands, still, if he has a pursuit, he offends nobody by devoting his time to it; occupation is

received as a valid excuse for his not answering to every casual demand which may be made on him. Are a

woman's occupations, especially her chosen and voluntary ones, ever regarded as excusing her from any of

what are termed the calls of society? Scarcely are her most necessary and recognised duties allowed as an

exemption. It requires an illness in the family, or something else out of the common way, to entitle her to

give her own business the precedence over other people's amusement. She must always be at the beck and

call of somebody, generally of everybody. If she has a study or a pursuit, she must snatch any short interval

which accidentally occurs to be employed in it. A celebrated woman, in a work which I hope will some day

be published, remarks truly that everything a woman does is done at odd times. Is it wonderful, then, if she

does not attain the highest eminence in things which require consecutive attention, and the concentration on

them of the chief interest of life? Such is philosophy, and such, above all, is art, in which, besides the

devotion of the thoughts and feelings, the hand also must be kept in constant exercises to attain high skill.

There is another consideration to be added to all these. In the various arts and intellectual occupations, there

is a degree of proficiency sufficient for living by it, and there is a higher degree on which depend the great

productions which immortalise a name. To the attainment of the former, there are adequate motives in the

case of all who follow the pursuit professionally: the other is hardly ever attained where there is not, or where

there has not been at some period of life, an ardent desire of celebrity. Nothing less is commonly a sufficient

stimulus to undergo the long and patient drudgery, which, in the case even of the greatest natural gifts, is

absolutely required for great eminence in pursuits in which we already possess so many splendid memorials

of the highest genius. Now, whether the cause be natural or artificial, women seldom have this eagerness for

fame. Their ambition is generally confined within narrower bounds. The influence they seek is over those

who immediately surround them. Their desire is to be liked, loved, or admired, by those whom they see with

their eyes: and the proficiency in knowledge, arts, and accomplishments, which is sufficient for that, almost

always contents them. This is a trait of character which cannot be left out of the account in judging of women

as they are. I do not at all believe that it is inherent in women. It is only the natural result of their

circumstances. The love of fame in men is encouraged by education and opinion: to "scorn delights and live

laborious days" for its sake, is accounted the part of "noble minds," even if spoken of as their "last infirmity,"

and is stimulated by the access which fame gives to all objects of ambition, including even the favour of

women; while to women themselves all these objects are closed, and the desire of fame itself considered

daring and unfeminine. Besides, how could it be that a woman's interests should not be all concentrated upon

the impressions made on those who come into her daily life, when society has ordained that all her duties

should be to them, and has contrived that all her comforts should depend on them? The natural desire of

consideration from our fellowcreatures is as strong in a woman as in a man; but society has so ordered

things that public consideration is, in all ordinary cases, only attainable by her through the consideration of

her husband or of her male relations, while her private consideration is forfeited by making herself

individually prominent, or appearing in any other character than that of an appendage to men. Whoever is in

the least capable of estimating the influence on the mind of the entire domestic and social position and the

whole habit of a life, must easily recognise in that influence a complete explanation of nearly all the apparent

differences between women and men, including the whole of those which imply any inferiority.

As for moral differences, considered as distinguished from intellectual, the distinction commonly drawn is to

the advantage of women. They are declared to be better than men; an empty compliment, which must

provoke a bitter smile from every woman of spirit, since there is no other situation in life in which it is the

established order, and considered quite natural and suitable, that the better should obey the worse. If this

piece of idle talk is good for anything, it is only as an admission by men, of the corrupting influence of

power; for that is certainly the only truth which the fact, if it be a fact, either proves or illustrates. And it is

true that servitude, except when it actually brutalises, though corrupting to both, is less so to the slaves than

to the slavemasters. It is wholesomer for the moral nature to be restrained, even by arbitrary power, than to

be allowed to exercise arbitrary power without restraint. Women, it is said, seldomer fall under the penal law

contribute a much smaller number of offenders to the criminal calendar, than men. I doubt not that the

same thing may be said, with the same truth, of negro slaves. Those who are under the control of others

cannot often commit crimes, unless at the command and for the purposes of their masters. I do not know a

more signal instance of the blindness with which the world, including the herd of studious men, ignore and

pass over all the influences of social circumstances, than their silly depreciation of the intellectual, and silly

The complimentary dictum about women's superior moral goodness may be allowed to pair off with the

disparaging one respecting their greater liability to moral bias. Women, we are told, are not capable of

resisting their personal partialities: their judgment in grave affairs is warped by their sympathies and

antipathies. Assuming it to be so, it is still to be proved that women are oftener misled by their personal

feelings than men by their personal interests. The chief difference would seem in that case to be, that men are

led from the course of duty and the public interest by their regard for themselves, women (not being allowed

to have private interests of their own) by their regard for somebody else. It is also to be considered, that all

the education which women receive from society inculcates on them the feeling that the individuals

connected with them are the only ones to whom they owe any duty the only ones whose interest they are

called upon to care for; while, as far as education is concerned, they are left strangers even to the elementary

ideas which are presupposed in any intelligent regard for larger interests or higher moral objects. The

complaint against them resolves itself merely into this, that they fulfil only too faithfully the sole duty which

The concessions of the privileged to the unprivileged are so seldom brought about by any better motive than

the power of the unprivileged to extort them, that any arguments against the prerogative of sex are likely to

be little attended to by the generality, as long as they are able to say to themselves that women do not

complain of it. That fact certainly enables men to retain the unjust privilege some time longer; but does not

render it less unjust. Exactly the same thing may be said of the women in the harem of an oriental: they do

not complain of not being allowed the freedom of European women. They think our women insufferably bold

and unfeminine. How rarely it is that even men complain of the general order of society; and how much rarer

still would such complaint be, if they did not know of any different order existing anywhere else. Women do

not complain of the general lot of women; or rather they do, for plaintive elegies on it are very common in the

writings of women, and were still more so as long as the lamentations could not be suspected of having any

practical object. Their complaints are like the complaints which men make of the general unsatisfactoriness

of human life; they are not meant to imply blame, or to plead for any change. But though women do not

complain of the power of husbands, each complains of her own husband, or of the husbands of her friends. It

is the same in all other cases of servitude, at least in the commencement of the emancipatory movement. The

serfs did not at first complain of the power of their lords, but only of their tyranny. The commons began by

claiming a few municipal privileges; they next asked an exemption for themselves from being taxed without

their own consent; but they would at that time have thought it a great presumption to claim any share in the

king's sovereign authority. The case of women is now the only case in which to rebel against established rules

is still looked upon with the same eyes as was formerly a subject's claim to the I right of rebelling against his

king. A woman who joins in any movement which her husband disapproves, makes herself a martyr, without

even being able to be an apostle, for the husband can legally put a stop to her apostleship. Women cannot be

expected to devote themselves to the emancipation of women, until men in considerable number are prepared

1. Especially is this true if we take into consideration Asia as well as Europe. If a Hindoo principality is

strongly, vigilantly, and economically governed; if order is preserved without oppression; if cultivation is

extending, and the people prosperous, in three cases out of four that principality is under a woman's rule. This

fact, to me an entirely unexpected one, I have collected from a long knowledge of Hindoo governments.

There are many such instances: for though, by Hindoo institutions, a woman cannot reign, she is the legal

regent of a kingdom during the minority of the heir; and minorities are frequent, the lives of the male rulers

being so often prematurely terminated through the effect of inactivity and sensual excesses. When we

consider that these princesses have never been seen in public, have never conversed with any man not of their

own family except from behind a curtain, that they do not read, and if they did there is no book in their

languages which can give them the smallest instruction on political affairs; the example they afford of the

2. "It appears to be the same right turn of mind which enables a man to acquire the truth, or just idea of what

is right, in the ornaments, as in the more stable principles of art. It has still the same centre of perfection,

though it is the centre of a smaller circle. To illustrate this by fashion of dress, in which there is allowed to

be a good or bad taste. The component parts of dress are continually changing from great to little, from short

to long; but the general form still remains; it is still the same general dress which is comparatively fixed ,

though on a very slender foundation; but it is on this which fashion must rest. He who invents with the most

success, or dresses in the best taste, would probably, from the same sagacity employed to greater purposes,

have discovered equal skill, or have formed the same correct taste, in the highest labours of art." Sir

There remains a question, not of less importance than those already discussed, and which will be asked the

most importunately by those opponents whose conviction is somewhat shaken on the main point. What good

are we to expect from the changes proposed in our customs and institutions? Would mankind be at all better

off if women were free? If not, why disturb their minds, and attempt to make a social revolution in the name

It is hardly to be expected that this question will be asked in respect to the change proposed in the condition

of women in marriage. The sufferings, immoralities, evils of all sorts, produced in innumerable cases by the

subjection of individual women to individual men, are far too terrible to be overlooked. Unthinking or

uncandid persons, counting those cases alone which are extreme, or which attain publicity, may say that the

evils are exceptional; but no one can be blind to their existence, nor, in many cases, to their intensity. And it

is perfectly obvious that the abuse of the power cannot be very much checked while the power remains. It is a

power given, or offered, not to good men, or to decently respectable men, but to all men; the most brutal, and

the most criminal. There is no check but that of opinion, and such men are in general within the reach of no

opinion but that of men like themselves. If such men did not brutally tyrannise over the one human being

whom the law compels to bear everything from them, society must already have reached a paradisiacal state.

There could be no need any longer of laws to curb men's vicious propensities. Astraea must not only have

returned to earth, but the heart of the worst man must have become her temple. The law of servitude in

marriage is a monstrous contradiction to all the principles of the modern world, and to all the experience

through which those principles have been slowly and painfully worked out. It is the sole case, now that negro

slavery has been abolished, in which a human being in the plenitude of every faculty is delivered up to the

tender mercies of another human being, in the hope forsooth that this other will use the power solely for the

good of the person subjected to it. Marriage is the only actual bondage known to our law. There remain no

It is not, therefore, on this part of the subject, that the question is likely to be asked, Cui bono. We may be

told that the evil would outweigh the good, but the reality of the good admits of no dispute. In regard,

however, to the larger question, the removal of women's disabilities their recognition as the equals of men

in all that belongs to citizenship the opening to them of all honourable employments, and of the training

and education which qualifies for those employments there are many persons for whom it is not enough

that the inequality has no just or legitimate defence; they require to be told what express advantage would be

To which let me first answer, the advantage of having the most universal and pervading of all human

relations regulated by justice instead of injustice. The vast amount of this gain to human nature, it is hardly

possible, by any explanation or illustration, to place in a stronger light than it is placed by the bare statement,

to anyone who attaches a moral meaning to words. All the selfish propensities, the selfworship, the unjust

selfpreference, which exist among mankind, have their source and root in, and derive their principal

nourishment from, the present constitution of the relation between men and women. Think what it is to a boy,

to grow up to manhood in the belief that without any merit or any exertion of his own, though he may be the

most frivolous and empty or the most ignorant and stolid of mankind, by the mere fact of being born a male

he is by right the superior of all and every one of an entire half of the human race: including probably some

whose real superiority to himself he has daily or hourly occasion to feel; but even if in his whole conduct he

habitually follows a woman's guidance, still, if he is a fool, she thinks that of course she is not, and cannot be,

equal in ability and judgment to himself; and if he is not a fool, he does worse he sees that she is superior

to him, and believes that, notwithstanding her superiority, he is entitled to command and she is bound to

obey. What must be the effect on his character, of this lesson? And men of the cultivated classes are often not

aware how deeply it sinks into the immense majority of male minds. For, among rightfeeling and wellbred

people, the inequality is kept as much as possible out of sight; above all, out of sight of the children. As much

obedience is required from boys to their mother as to their father: they are not permitted to domineer over

their sisters, nor are they accustomed to see these postponed to them, but the contrary; the compensations of

the chivalrous feeling being made prominent, while the servitude which requires them is kept in the

background. Well broughtup youths in the higher classes thus often escape the bad influences of the

situation in their early years, and only experience them when, arrived at manhood, they fall under the

dominion of facts as they really exist. Such people are little aware, when a boy is differently brought up, how

early the notion of his inherent superiority to a girl arises in his mind; how it grows with his growth and

strengthens with his strength; how it is inoculated by one schoolboy upon another; how early the youth thinks

himself superior to his mother, owing her perhaps forbearance, but noreal respect; ana how sublime and

sultanlike a sense of superiority he feels, above all, over the woman whom he honours by admitting her to a

partnership of his life. Is it imagined that all this does not pervert the whole manner of existence of the man,

both as an individual and as a social being? It is an exact parallel to the feeling of a hereditary king that he is

excellent above others by being born a king, or a noble by being born a noble. The relation between husband

and wife is very like that between lord and vassal, except that the wife is held to more unlimited obedience

than the vassal was. However the vassal's character may have been affected, for better and for worse, by his

subordination, who can help seeing that the lord's was affected greatly for the worse? whether he was led to

believe that his vassals were really superior to himself, or to feel that he was placed in command over people

as good as himself, for no merits or labours of his own, but merely for having, as Figaro says, taken the

trouble to be born. The selfworship of the monarch, or of the feudal superior, is matched by the

selfworship of the male. Human beings do not grow up from childhood in the possession of unearned

distinctions, without pluming themselves upon them. Those whom privileges not acquired by their merit, and

which they feel to be disproportioned to it, inspire with additional humility, are always the few, and the best

few. The rest are only inspired with pride, and the worst sort of pride, that which values itself upon accidental

advantages, not of its own achieving. Above all, when the feeling of being raised above the whole of the

other sex is combined with personal authority over one individual among them; the situation, if a school of

conscientious and affectionate forbearance to those whose strongest points of character are conscience and

affection, is to men of another quality a regularly constituted academy or gymnasium for training them in

arrogance and overbearingness; which vices, if curbed by the certainty of resistance in their intercourse with

other men, their equals, break out towards all who are in a position to be obliged to tolerate them, and often

revenge themselves upon the unfortunate wife for the involuntary restraint which they are obliged to submit

The example afforded, and the education given to the sentiments, by laying the foundation of domestic

existence upon a relation contradictory to the first principles of social justice must, from the very nature of

man, have a perverting influence of such magnitude, that it is hardly possible with our present experience to

raise our imaginations to the conception of so great a change for the better as would be made by its removal.

All that education and civilisation are doing to efface the influences on character of the law of force, and

replace them by those of justice, remains merely on the surface, as long as the citadel of the enemy is not

attacked. The principle of the modern movement in morals and politics, is that conduct, and conduct alone,

entitles to respect: that not what men are, but what they do, constitutes their claim to deference; that, above

all, merit, and not birth, is the only rightful claim to power and authority. If no authority, not in its nature

temporary, were allowed to one human being over another, society would not be employed in building up

propensities with one hand which it has to curb with the other. The child would really, for the first time in

man's existence on earth, be trained in the way he should go, and when he was old there would be a chance

that he would not depart from it. But so long as the right of the strong to power over the weak rules in the

very heart of society, the attempt to make the equal right of the weak the principle of its outward actions will

always be an uphill struggle; for the law of justice, which is also that of Christianity, will never get

possession of men's inmost sentiments; they will be working against it, even when bending to it.

The second benefit to be expected from giving to women the free use of their faculties, by leaving them the

free choice of their employments, and opening to them the same field of occupation and the same prizes and

encouragements as to other human beings, would be that of doubling the mass of mental faculties available

for the higher service of humanity. Where there is now one person qualified to benefit mankind and promote

the general improvement, as a public teacher, or an administrator of some branch of public or social affairs,

there would then be a chance of two. Mental superiority of any kind is at present everywhere so much below

the demand; there is such a deficiency of persons competent to do excellently anything which it requires any

considerable amount of ability to do; that the loss to the world, by refusing to make use of one half of the

whole quantity of talent it possesses, is extremely serious. It is true that this amount of mental power is not

totally lost. Much of it is employed, and would in any case be employed, in domestic management, and in the

few other occupations open to women; and from the remainder indirect benefit is in many individual cases

obtained, through the personal influence of individual women over individual men. But these benefits are

partial; their range is extremely circumscribed; and if they must be admitted, on the one hand, as a deduction

from the amount of fresh social power that would be acquired by giving freedom to onehalf of the whole

sum of human intellect, there must be added, on the other, the benefit of the stimulus that would be given to

the intellect of men by the competition; or (to use a more true expression) by the necessity that would be

This great accession to the intellectual power of the species, and to the amount of intellect available for the

good management of its affairs, would be obtained, partly, through the better and more complete intellectual

education of women, which would then improve pari passu with that of men. Women in general would be

brought up equally capable of understanding business, public affairs, and the higher matters of speculation,

with men In the same class of society; and the select few of the one as well as of the other sex, who were

qualified not only to comprehend what is done or thought by others, but to think or do something

considerable themselves, would meet with the same facilities for improving and training their capacities in

the one sex as in the other. In this way, the widening of the sphere of action for women would operate for

good, by raising their education to the level of that of men, and making the one participate in all

improvements made in the other. But independently of this, the mere breaking down of the barrier would of

itself have an educational virtue of the highest worth. The mere getting rid of the idea that all the wider

subjects of thought and action, all the things which are of general and not solely of private interest, are men's

business, from which women are to be warned off positively interdicted from most of it, coldly tolerated

in the little which is allowed them the mere consciousness a woman would then have of being a human

being like any other, entitled to choose her pursuits, urged or invited by the same inducements as anyone else

to interest herself in whatever is interesting to human beings, entitled to exert the share of influence on all

human concerns which belongs to an individual opinion, whether she attempted actual participation in them

or not this alone would effect an immense expansion of the faculties of women, as well as enlargement of

Besides the addition to the amount of individual talent available for the conduct of human affairs, which

certainly are not at present so abundantly provided in that respect that they can afford to dispense with

onehalf of what nature proffers; the opinion of women would then possess a more beneficial, rather than a

greater, influence upon the general mass of human belief and sentiment. I say a more beneficial, rather than a

greater influence; for the influence of women over the general tone of opinion has always, or at least from the

earliest known period, been very considerable. The influence of mothers on the early character of their sons,

and the desire of young men to recommend themselves to young women, have in all recorded times been

important agencies in the formation of character, and have determined some of the chief steps in the progress

of civilisation. Even in the Homeric age, {alpha iota delta omega sigma} towards the {TAU rho omega alpha

delta alpha sigma} {epsilon lambda chi epsilon sigma iota pi epsilon pi lambda omega upsilson sigma} is an

acknowledged and powerful motive of action in the great Hector. The moral influence of women has had two

modes of operation. First, it has been a softening influence. Those who were most liable to be the victims of

violence, have naturally tended as much as they could towards limiting its sphere and mitigating its excesses.

Those who were not taught to fight, have naturally inclined in favour of any other mode of settling

differences rather than that of fighting. In general, those who have been the greatest sufferers by the

indulgence of selfish passion, have been the most earnest supporters of any moral law which offered a means

of bridling passion. Women were powerfully instrumental in inducing the northern conquerors to adopt the

creed of Christianity, a creed so much more favourable to women than any that preceded it. The conversion

of the AngloSaxons and of the Franks may be said to have been begun by the wives of Ethelbert and Clovis.

The other mode in which the effect of women's opinion has been conspicuous, is by giving, a powerful

stimulus to those qualities in men, which, not being themselves trained in, it was necessary for them that they

should find in their protectors. Courage, and the military virtues generally, have at all times been greatly

indebted to the desire which men felt of being admired by women: and the stimulus reaches far beyond this

one class of eminent qualities, since, by a very natural effect of their position, the best passport to the

admiration and favour of women has always been to be thought highly of by men. From the combination of

the two kinds of moral influence thus exercised by women, arose the spirit of chivalry: the peculiarity of

which is, to aim at combining the highest standard of the warlike qualities with the cultivation of a totally

different class of virtues those of gentleness, generosity, and selfabnegation, towards the nonmilitary

and defenseless classes generally, and a special submission and worship directed towards women; who were

distinguished from the other defenceless classes by the high rewards which they had it in their power

voluntarily to bestow on those who endeavoured to earn their favour, instead of extorting their subjection.

Though the practice of chivalry fell even more sadly short of its theoretic standard than practice generally

falls below theory, it remains one of the most precious monuments of the moral history of our race; as a

remarkable instance of a concerted and organised attempt by a most disorganised and distracted society, to

raise up and carry into practice a moral ideal greatly in advance of its social condition and institutions; so

much so as to have been completely frustrated in the main object, yet never entirely inefficacious, and which

has left a most sensible, and for the most part a highly valuable impress on the ideas and feelings of all

The chivalrous ideal is the acme of the influence of women's sentiments on the moral cultivation of mankind:

and if women are to remain in their subordinate situation, it were greatly to be lamented that the chivalrous

standard should have passed away, for it is the only one at all capable of mitigating the demoralising

influences of that position. But the changes in the general state of the species rendered inevitable the

substitution of a totally different ideal of morality for the chivalrous one. Chivalry was the attempt to infuse

moral elements into a state of society in which everything depended for good or evil on individual prowess,

under the softening influences of individual delicacy and generosity. In modern societies, all things, even in

the military department of affairs, are decided, not by individual effort, but by the combined operations of

numbers; while the main occupation of society has changed from fighting to business, from military to

industrial life. The exigencies of the new life are no more exclusive of the virtues of generosity than those of

the old, but it no longer entirely depends on them. The main foundations of the moral life of modern times

must be justice and prudence; the respect of each for the rights of every other, and the ability of each to take

care of himself. Chivalry left without legal check all forms of wrong which reigned unpunished throughout

society; it only encouraged a few to do right in preference to wrong, by the direction it gave to the

instruments of praise and admiration. But the real dependence of morality must always be upon its penal

sanctions its power to deter from evil. The security of society cannot rest on merely rendering honour to

right, a motive so comparatively weak in all but a few, and which on very many does not operate at all.

Modern society is able to repress wrong through all departments of life, by a fit exertion of the superior

strength which civilisation has given it, and thus to render the existence of the weaker members of society (no

longer defenseless but protected by law) tolerable to them, without reliance on the chivalrous feelings of

those who are in a position to tyrannise. The beauties and graces of the chivalrous character are still what

they were, but the rights of the weak, and the general comfort of human life, now rest on a far surer and

steadier support; or rather, they do so in every relation of life except the conjugal.

At present the moral influence of women is no less real, but it is no longer of so marked and definite a

character: it has more nearly merged in the general influence of public opinion. Both through the contagion of

sympathy, and through the desire of men to shine in the eyes of women, their feelings have great effect in

keeping alive what remains of the chivalrous ideal in fostering the sentiments and continuing the

traditions of spirit and generosity. In these points of character, their standard is higher than that of men; in the

quality of justice, somewhat lower. As regards the relations of private life it may be said generally, that their

influence is, on the whole, encouraging to the softer virtues, discouraging to the sterner: though the statement

must be taken with all the modifications dependent on individual character. In the chief of the greater trials to

which virtue is subject in the concerns of life the conflict between interest and principle the tendency

of women's influence is of a very mixed character. When the principle involved happens to be one of the

very few which the course of their religious or moral education has strongly impressed upon themselves, they

are potent auxiliaries to virtue: and their husbands and sons are often prompted by them to acts of abnegation

which they never would have been capable of without that stimulus. But, with the present education and

position of women, the moral principles which have been impressed on them cover but a comparatively small

part of the field of virtue, and are, moreover, principally negative; forbidding particular acts, but having little

to do with the general direction of the thoughts and purposes. I am afraid it must be said, that

disinterestedness in the general conduct of life the devotion of the energies to purposes which hold out no

promise of private advantages to the family is very seldom encouraged or supported by women's

influence. It is small blame to them that they discourage objects of which they have not learnt to see the

advantage, and which withdraw their men from them, and from the interests of the family. But the

consequence is that women's influence is often anything but favourable to public virtue.

Women have, however, some share of influence in giving the tone to public moralities since their sphere of

action has been a little widened, and since a considerable number of them have occupied themselves

practically in the promotion of objects reaching beyond their own family and household. The influence of

women counts for a great deal in two of the most marked features of modern European life its aversion to

war, and its addiction to philanthropy. Excellent characteristics both; but unhappily, if the influence of

women is valuable in the encouragement it gives to these feelings in general, in the particular applications the

direction it gives to them is at least as often mischievous as useful. In the philanthropic department more

particularly, the two provinces chiefly cultivated by women are religious proselytism and charity. Religious

proselytism at home, is but another word for embittering of religious animosities: abroad, it is usually a blind

running at an object, without either knowing or heeding the fatal mischiefs fatal to the religious object

itself as well as to all other desirable objects which may be produced by the means employed. As for

charity, it is a matter in which the immediate effect on the persons directly concerned, and the ultimate

consequence to the general good, are apt to be at complete war with one another: while the education given to

women an education of the sentiments rather than of the understanding and the habit inculcated by

their whole life, of looking to immediate effects on persons, and not to remote effects on classes of persons

make them both unable to see, and unwilling to admit, the ultimate evil tendency of any form of charity or

philanthropy which commends itself to their sympathetic feelings. The great and continually increasing mass

of unenlightened and shortsighted benevolence, which, taking the care of people's lives out of their own

hands, and relieving them from the disagreeable consequences of their own acts, saps the very foundations of

the selfrespect, selfhelp, and selfcontrol which are the essential conditions both of individual prosperity

and of social virtue this waste of resources and of benevolent feelings in doing harm instead of good, is

immensely swelled by women's contributions, and stimulated by their influence. Not that this is a mistake

likely to be made by women, where they have actually the practical management of schemes of beneficence.

It sometimes happens that women who administer public charities with that insight into present fact, and

especially into the minds and feelings of those with whom they are in immediate contact, in which women

generally excel men recognise in the clearest manner the demoralising influence of the alms given or the

help afforded, and could give lessons on the subject to many a male political economist. But women who

only give their money, and are not brought face to face with the effects it produces, how can they be expected

to foresee them? A woman born to the present lot of women, and content with it, how should she appreciate

the value of selfdependence? She is not selfdependent; she is not taught selfdependence; her destiny is to

receive everything from others, and why should what is good enough for her be bad for the poor? Her

familiar notions of good are of blessings descending from a superior. She forgets that she is not free, and that

the poor are; that if what they need is given to them unearned, they cannot be compelled to earn it: that

everybody cannot be taken care of by everybody, but there must be some motive to induce people to take care

of themselves; and that to be helpedto help themselves, if they are physically capable of it, is the only

These considerations show how usefully the part which women take in the formation of general opinion,

would be modified for the better by that more enlarged instruction, and practical conversancy with the things

which their opinions influence, that would necessarily arise from their social and political emancipation. But

the improvement it would work through the influence they exercise, each in her own family, would be still

It is often said that in the classes most exposed to temptation, a man's wife and children tend to keep him

honest and respectable, both by the wife's direct influence, and by the concern he feels for their future

welfare. This may be so, and no doubt often is so, with those who are more weak than wicked; and this

beneficial influence would be preserved and strengthened under equal laws; it does not depend on the

woman's servitude, but is, on the contrary, diminished by the disrespect which the inferior class of men

always at heart feel towards those who are subject to their power. But when we ascend higher in the scale, we

come among a totally different set of moving forces. The wife's influence tends, as far as it goes, to prevent

the husband from falling below the common standard of approbation of the country. It tends quite as strongly

to hinder him from rising above it. The wife is the auxiliary of the common public opinion. A man who is

married to a woman his inferior in intelligence, finds her a perpetual dead weight, or, worse than a dead

weight, a drag, upon every aspiration of his to be better than public opinion requires him to be. It is hardly

possible for one who is in these bonds, to attain exalted virtue. If he differs in his opinion from the mass if

he sees truths which have not yet dawned upon them, or if, feeling in his heart truths which they nominally

recognise, he would like to act up to those truths more conscientiously than the generality of mankind to

all such thoughts and desires, marriage is the heaviest of drawbacks, unless he be so fortunate as to have a

For, in the first place, there is always some sacrifice of personal interest required; either of social

consequence, or of pecuniary means; perhaps the risk of even the means of subsistence. These sacrifices and

risks he may be willing to encounter for himself; but he will pause before he imposes them on his family.

And his family in this case means his wife and daughters; for he always hopes that his sons will feel as he

feels himself, and that what he can do without, they will do without, willingly, is the same cause. But his

daughters their marriage may depend upon it: and his wife, who is unable to enter into or understand the

objects for which these sacrifices are made who, if she thought them worth any sacrifice, would think so

on trust, and solely for his sake who could participate in none of the enthusiasm or the selfapprobation

he himself may feel, while the things which he is disposed to sacrifice are all in all to her; will not the best

and most unselfish man hesitate the longest before bringing on her this consequence? If it be not the comforts

of life, but only social consideration, that is at stake, the burthen upon his conscience and feelings is still very

severe. Whoever has a wife and children has given hostages to Mrs Grundy. The approbation of that potentate

may be a matter of indifference to him, but it is of great importance to his wife. The man himself may be

above opinion, or may find sufficient compensation in the opinion of those of his own way of thinking. But to

the women connected with him, he can offer no compensation. The almost invariable tendency of the wife to

place her influence in the same scale with social consideration, is sometimes made a reproach to women, and

represented as a peculiar trait of feebleness and childishness of character in them: surely with great injustice.

Society makes the whole life of a woman, in the easy classes, a continued self sacrifice; it exacts from her an

unremitting restraint of the whole of her natural inclinations, and the sole return it makes to her for what often

deserves the name of a martyrdom, is consideration. Her consideration is inseparably connected with that of

her husband, and after paying the full price for it, she finds that she is to lose it, for no reason of which she

can feel the cogency. She has sacrificed her whole life to it, and her husband will not sacrifice to it a whim, a

freak, an eccentricity; something not recognised or allowed for by the world, and which the world will agree

with her in thinking a folly, if it thinks no worse! The dilemma is hardest upon that very meritorious class of

men, who, without possessing talents which qualify them to make a figure among those with whom they

agree in opinion, hold their opinion from conviction, and feel bound in honour and conscience to serve it, by

making profession of their belief, and giving their time, labour, and means, to anything undertaken in its

behalf. The worst case of all is when such men happen to be of a rank and position which of itself neither

gives them, nor excludes them from, what is considered the best society; when their admission to it depends

mainly on what is thought of them personally and however unexceptionable their breeding and habits,

their being identified with opinions and public conduct unacceptable to those who give the tone to society

would operate as an effectual exclusion. Many a woman flatters herself (nine times out of ten quite

erroneously) that nothing prevents her and her husband from moving in the highest society of her

neighbourhood society in which others well known to her, and in the same class of life, mix freely

except that her husband is unfortunately a Dissenter, or has the reputation of mingling in low radical politics.

That it is, she thinks, which hinders George from getting a commission or a place, Caroline from making an

advantageous match, and prevents her and her husband from obtaining invitations, perhaps honours, which,

for aught she sees, they are as well entitled to as some folks. With such an influence in every house, either

exerted actively, or operating all the more powerfully for not being asserted, is it any wonder that people in

general are kept down in that mediocrity of respectability which is becoming a marked characteristic of

There is another very injurious aspect in which the effect, not of women's disabilities directly, but of the

broad line of difference which those disabilities create between the education and character of a woman and

that of a man, requires to be considered. Nothing can be more unfavourable to that union of thoughts and

inclinations which is the ideal of married life. Intimate society between people radically dissimilar to one

another, is an idle dream. Unlikeness may attract, but it is likeness which retains; and in proportion to the

likeness is the suitability of the individuals to give each other a happy life. While women are so unlike men, it

is not wonderful that selfish men should feel the need of arbitrary power in their own hands, to arrest in

limine the lifelong conflict of inclinations, by deciding every question on the side of their own preference.

When people are extremely unlike, there can be no real identity of interest. Very often there is conscientious

difference of opinion between married people, on the highest points of duty. Is there any reality in the

marriage union where this takes place? Yet it is not uncommon anywhere, when the woman has any

earnestness of character; and it is a very general case indeed in Catholic countries, when she is supported in

her dissent by the only other authority to which she is taught to bow, the priest. With the usual barefacedness

of power not accustomed to find itself disputed, the influence of priests over women is attacked by Protestant

and Liberal writers, less for being bad in itself, than because it is a rival authority to the husband, and raises

up a revolt against his infallibility. In England, similar differences occasionally exist when an Evangelical

wife has allied herself with a husband of a different quality; but in general this source at least of dissension is

got rid of, by reducing the minds of women to such a nullity, that they have no opinions but those of Mrs.

Grundy, or those which the husband tells them to have. When there is no difference of opinion, differences

merely of taste may be sufficient to detract greatly from the happiness of married life. And though it may

stimulate the amatory propensities of men, it does not conduce to married happiness, to exaggerate by

differences of education whatever may be the native differences of the sexes. If the married pair are

wellbred and wellbehaved people, they tolerate each other's tastes; but is mutual toleration what people

look forward to, when they enter into marriage? These differences of inclination will naturally make their

wishes different, if not restrained by affection or duty, as to almost all domestic questions which arise. What a

difference there must be in the society which the two persons will wish to frequent, or be frequented by! Each

will desire associates who share their own tastes: the persons agreeable to one, will be indifferent or

positively disagreeable to the other; yet there can be none who are not common to both, for married people do

not now live in different parts of the house and have totally different visiting lists, as in the reign of Louis

XV. They cannot help having different wishes as to the bringing up of the children: each will wish to see

reproduced in them their own tastes and sentiments: and there is either a compromise, and only a half

satisfaction to either, or the wife has to yield often with bitter suffering; and, with or without intention, her

It would of course be extreme folly to suppose that these differences of feeling and inclination only exist

because women are brought up differently from men, and that there would not be differences of taste under

any imaginable circumstances. But there is nothing beyond the mark in saying that the distinction in bringing

up immensely aggravates those differences, and renders them wholly inevitable. While women are brought

up as they are, a man and a woman will but rarely find in one another real agreement of tastes and wishes as

to daily life. They will generally have to give it up as hopeless, and renounce the attempt to have, in the

intimate associate of their daily life, that idem velle, idem nolle, which is the recognised bond of any society

that is really such: or if the man succeeds in obtaining it, he does so by choosing a woman who is so complete

a nullity that she has no velle or nolle at all, and is as ready to comply with one thing as another if anybody

tells her to do so. Even this calculation is apt to fail; dullness and want of spirit are not always a guarantee of

the submission which is so confidently expected from them. But if they were, is this the ideal of marriage?

What, in this case, does the man obtain by it, except an upper servant, a nurse, or a mistress? on the contrary,

when each of two persons, instead of being a nothing, is a something; when they are attached to one another,

and are not too much unlike to begin with; the constant partaking in the same things, assisted by their

sympathy, draws out the latent capacities of each for being interested in the things which were at first

interesting only to the other; and works a gradual assimilation of the tastes and characters to one another,

partly by the insensible modification of each, but more by a real enriching of the two natures, each acquiring

the tastes and capacities of the other in addition to its own. This often happens between two friends of the

same sex, who are much associated in their daily life: and it would be a common, if not the commonest, case

in marriage, did not the totally different bringing up of the two sexes make it next to an impossibility to form

a really wellassorted union. Were this remedied, whatever differences there might still be in individual

tastes, there would at least be, as a general rule, complete unity and unanimity as to the great objects of life.

When the two persons both care for great objects, and are a help and encouragement to each other in

whatever regards these, the minor matters on which their tastes may differ are not allimportant to them; and

there is a foundation for solid friendship, of an enduring character, more likely than anything else to make it,

through the whole of life, a greater pleasure to each to give pleasure to the other, than to receive it.

I have considered, thus far, the effects on the pleasures and benefits of the marriage union which depend on

the mere unlikeness between the wife and the husband: but the evil tendency is prodigiously aggravated when

the unlikeness is inferiority. Mere unlikeness, when it only means difference of good qualities, may be more a

benefit in the way of mutual improvement, than a drawback from comfort. When each emulates, and desires

and endeavours to acquire, the other's peculiar qualities the difference does not produce diversity of interest,

but increased identity of it, and makes each still more valuable to the other. But when one is much the inferior

of the to in mental ability and cultivation, and is not actively attempting by the other's aid to rise to the other's

level, the whole influence of the connexion upon the development of the superior of the two is deteriorating:

and still more so in a tolerably happy marriage than in an unhappy one. It is not with impunity that the

superior in intellect shuts himself up with an inferior, and elects that inferior for his chosen, and sole

completely intimate, associate. Any society which is not improving is deteriorating: and the more so, the

closer and more familiar it is. Even a really superior man almost always begins to deteriorate when he is

habitually (as the phrase is) king of his company: and in his most habitual company the husband who has a

wife inferior to him is always so. While his selfsatisfaction is incessantly ministered to on the one hand, on

the other he insensibly imbibes the modes of feeling, and of looking at things, which belong to a more vulgar

or a more limited mind than his own. This evil differs from many of those which have hitherto been dwelt on,

by being an increasing one. The association of men with women in daily life is much closer and more

complete than it ever was before. Men's life is more domestic. Formerly, their pleasures and chosen

occupations were among men, and in men's company: their wives had but a fragment of their lives. At the

present time, the progress of civilisation, and the turn of opinion against the rough amusements and convivial

excesses which formerly occupied most men in their hours of relaxation together with (it must be said) the

improved tone of modern feeling as to the reciprocity of duty which binds the husband towards the wife

have thrown the man very much more upon home and its inmates, for his personal and social pleasures: while

the kind and degree of improvement which has been made in women's education, has made them in some

degree capable of being his companions in ideas and mental taste, while leaving them, in most cases, still

hopelessly inferior to him. His desire of mental communion is thus in general satisfied by a communion from

which he learns nothing. An unimproving and unstimulating companionship is substituted for (what he might

otherwise have been obliged to seek) the society of his equals in powers and his fellows in the higher

pursuits. We see, accordingly, that young men of the greatest promise generally cease to improve as soon as

they marry, and, not improving, inevitably degenerate. If the wife does not push the husband forward, she

always holds him back. He ceases to care for what she does not care for; he no longer desires, and ends by

disliking and shunning, society congenial to his former aspirations, and which would now shame his

fallingoff from them; his higher faculties both of mind and heart cease to be called into activity. And this

change coinciding with the new and selfish interests which are created by the family, after a few years he

differs in no material respect from those who have never had wishes for anything but the common vanities

What marriage may be in the case of two persons of cultivated faculties, identical in opinions and purposes,

between whom there exists that best kind of equality, similarity of powers and capacities with reciprocal

superiority in them so that each can enjoy the luxury of looking up to the other, and can have alternately

the pleasure of leading and of being led in the path of development I will not attempt to describe. To those

who can conceive it, there is no need; to those who cannot, it would appear the dream of an enthusiast. But I

maintain, with the profoundest conviction, that this, and this only, is the ideal of marriage; and that all

opinions, customs, and institutions which favour any other notion of it, or turn the conceptions and

aspirations connected with it into any other direction, by whatever pretences they may be coloured, are relics

of primitive barbarism. The moral regeneration of mankind will only really commence, when the most

fundamental of the social relations is placed under the rule of equal justice, and when human beings learn to

Thus far, the benefits which it has appeared that the world would gain by ceasing to make sex a

disqualification for privileges and a badge of subjection, are social rather than individual; consisting in an

increase of the general fund of thinking and acting power, and an improvement in the general conditions of

the association of men with women. But it would be a grievous understatement of the case to omit the most

direct benefit of all, the unspeakable gain in private happiness to the liberated half of the species; the

difference to them between a life of subjection to the will of others, and a life of rational freedom. After the

primary necessities of food and raiment, freedom is the first and strongest want of human nature. While

mankind are lawless, their desire is for lawless freedom. When they have learnt to understand the meaning of

duty and the value of reason, they incline more and more to be guided and restrained by these in the exercise

of their freedom; but they do not therefore desire freedom less; they do not become disposed to accept the

will of other people as the representative and interpreter of those guiding principles. On the contrary, the

communities in which the reason has been most cultivated, and in which the idea of social duty has been most

powerful, are those which have most strongly asserted the freedom of action of the individual the liberty

of each to govern his conduct by his own feelings of duty, and by such laws and social restraints as his own

He who would rightly appreciate the worth of personal independence as an element of happiness, should

consider the value he himself puts upon it as an ingredient of his own. There is no subject on which there is a

greater habitual difference of judgment between a man judging for himself, and the same man judging for

other people. When he hears others complaining that they are not allowed freedom of action that their

own will has not sufficient influence in the regulation of their affairs his inclination is, to ask, what are

their grievances? what positive damage they sustain? and in what respect they consider their affairs to be

mismanaged? and if they fail to make out, in answer to these questions, what appears to him a sufficient case,

he turns a deaf ear, and regards their complaint as the fanciful querulousness of people whom nothing

reasonable will satisfy. But he has a quite different standard of judgment when he is deciding for himself.

Then, the most unexceptionable administration of his interests by a tutor set over him, does not satisfy his

feelings: his personal exclusion from the deciding authority appears itself the greatest grievance of all,

rendering it superfluous even to enter into the question of mismanagement. It is the same with nations. What

citizen of a free country would listen to any offers of good and skilful administration, in return for the

abdication of freedom? Even if he could believe that good and skilful administration can exist among a

people ruled by a will not their own, would not the consciousness of working out their own destiny under

their own moral responsibility be a compensation to his feelings for great rudeness and imperfection in the

details of public affairs? Let him rest assured that whatever he feels on this point, women feel in a fully equal

degree. Whatever has been said or written, from the time of Herodotus to the present, of the ennobling

influence of free government the nerve and spring which it gives to all the faculties, the larger and higher

objects which it presents to the intellect and feelings, the more unselfish public spirit, and calmer and broader

views of duty, that it engenders, and the generally loftier platform on which it elevates the individual as a

moral, spiritual, and social being is every particle as true of women as of men. Are these things no

important part of individual happiness? Let any man call to mind what he himself felt on emerging from

boyhood from the tutelage and control of even loved and affectionate elders and entering upon the

responsibilities of manhood. Was it not like the physical effect of taking off a heavy weight, or releasing him

from obstructive, even if not otherwise painful, bonds? Did he not feel twice as much alive, twice as much a

human being, as before? And does he imagine that women have none of these feelings? But it is a striking

fact, that the satisfactions and mortifications of personal pride, though all in all to most men when the case is

their own, have less allowance made for them in the case of other people, and are less listened to as a ground

or a justification of conduct, than any other natural human feelings; perhaps because men compliment them in

their own case with the names of so many other qualities, that they are seldom conscious how mighty an

influence these feelings exercise in their own lives. No less large and powerful is their part, we may assure

ourselves, in the lives and feelings of women. Women are schooled into suppressing them in their most

natural and most healthy direction, but the internal principle remains, in a different outward form. An active

and energetic mind, if denied liberty, will seek for power: refused the command of itself, it will assert its

personality by attempting to control others. To allow to any human beings no existence of their own but what

depends on others, is giving far too high a premium on bending others to their purposes. Where liberty cannot

be hoped for, and power can, power becomes the grand object of human desire; those to whom others will not

leave the undisturbed management of their own affairs, will compensate themselves, if they can, by meddling

for their own purposes with the affairs of others. Hence also women's passion for personal beauty, and dress

and display; and all the evils that flow from it, in the way of mischievous luxury and social immorality. The

love of power and the love of liberty are in eternal antagonism. Where there is least liberty, the passion for

power is the most ardent and unscrupulous. The desire of power over others can only cease to be a depraving

agency among mankind, when each of them individually is able to do without it: which can only be where

respect for liberty in the personal concerns of each is an established principle.

But it is not only through the sentiment of personal dignity, that the free direction and disposal of their own

faculties is a source of individual happiness, and to be fettered and restricted in it, a source of unhappiness, to

human beings, and not least to women. There is nothing, after disease, indigence, and guilt, so fatal to the

pleasurable enjoyment of life as the want of a worthy outlet for the active faculties. Women who have the

cares of a family, and while they have the cares of a family, have this outlet, and it generally suffices for

them: but what of the greatly increasing number of women, who have had no opportunity of exercising the

vocation which they are mocked by telling them is their proper one? What of the women whose children have

been lost to them by death or distance, or have grown up, married, and formed homes of their own? There are

abundant examples of men who, after a life engrossed by business, retire with a competency to the

enjoyment, as they hope, of rest, but to whom, as they are unable to acquire new interests and excitements

that can replace the old, the change to a life of inactivity brings ennui, melancholy, and premature death. Yet

no one thinks of the parallel case of so many worthy and devoted women, who, having paid what they are

told is their debt to society having brought up a family blamelessly to manhood and womanhood

having kept a house as long as they had a house needing to be kept are deserted by the sole occupation for

which they have fitted themselves; and remain with undiminished activity but with no employment for it,

unless perhaps a daughter or daughterinlaw is willing to abdicate in their favour the discharge of the same

functions in her younger household. Surely a hard lot for the old age of those who have worthily discharged,

as long as it was given to them to discharge, what the world accounts their only social duty. Of such women,

and of those others to whom this duty has not been committed at all many of whom pine through life with

the consciousness of thwarted vocations, and activities which are not suffered to expand the only

resources, speaking generally, are religion and charity. But their religion, though it may be one of feeling, and

of ceremonial observance, cannot be a religion of action, unless in the form of charity. For charity many of

them are by nature admirably fitted; but to practise it usefully, or even without doing mischief, requires the

education, the manifold preparation, the knowledge and the thinking powers, of a skilful administrator. There

are few of the administrative functions of government for which a person would not be fit, who is fit to

bestow charity usefully. In this as in other cases (preeminently in that of the education of children), the

duties permitted to women cannot be performed properly, without their being trained for duties which, to the

great loss of society, are not permitted to them. And here let me notice the singular way in which the question

of women's disabilities is frequently presented to view, by those who find it easier to draw a ludicrous picture

of what they do not like, than to answer the arguments for it. When it is suggested that women's executive

capacities and prudent counsels might sometimes be found valuable in affairs of State, these lovers of fun

hold up to the ridicule of the world, as sitting in Parliament or in the Cabinet, girls in their teens, or young

wives of two or three and twenty, transported bodily, exactly as they are, from the drawingroom to the

House of Commons. They forget that males are not usually selected at this early age for a seat in Parliament,

or for responsible political functions. Common sense would tell them that if such trusts were confided to

women, it would be to such as having no special vocation for married life, or preferring another employment

of their faculties (as many women even now prefer to marriage some of the few honourable occupations

within their reach), have spent the best years of their youth in attempting to qualify themselves for the

pursuits in which they desire to engage; or still more frequently perhaps, widows or wives of forty or fifty, by

whom the know ledge of life and faculty of government which they have acquired in their families, could by

the aid of appropriate studies be made available on a less contracted scale. There is no country of Europe in

which the ablest men have not frequently experienced, and keenly appreciated, the value of the advice and

help of clever and experienced women of the world, in the attainment both of private and of public objects;

and there are important matters of public administration to which few men are equally competent with such

women; among others, the detailed control of expenditure. But what we are now discussing is not the need

which society has of the services of women in public business, but the dull and hopeless life to which it so

often condemns them, by forbidding them to exercise the practical abilities which many of them are

conscious of, in any wider field than one which to some of them never was, and to others is no longer, open.

If there is anything vitally important to the happiness of human beings, it is that they should relish their

habitual pursuit. This requisite of an enjoyable life is very imperfectly granted, or altogether denied, to a large

part of mankind; and by its absence many a life is a failure, which is provided, in appearance, with every

requisite of success. But if circumstances which society is not yet skilful enough to overcome, render such

failures often for the present inevitable, society need not itself inflict them. The injudiciousness of parents, a

youth's own inexperience, or the absence of external opportunities for the congenial vocation, and their

presence for an uncongenial, condemn numbers of men to pass their lives in doing one thing reluctantly and

ill, when there are other things which they could have done well and happily. But on women this sentence is

imposed by actual law, and by customs equivalent to law. What, in unenlightened societies, colour, race,

religion, or in the case of a conquered country, nationality, are to some men, sex is to all women; a

peremptory exclusion from almost all honourable occupations, but either such as cannot be fulfilled by

others, or such as those others do not think worthy of their acceptance. Sufferings arising from causes of this

nature usually meet with so little sympathy, that few persons are aware of the great amount of unhappiness

even now produced by the feeling of a wasted life. The case will be even more frequent, as increased

cultivation creates a greater and greater disproportion between the ideas and faculties of women, and the

When we consider the positive evil caused to the disqualified half of the human race by their disqualification

first in the loss of the most inspiriting and elevating kind of personal enjoyment, and next in the

weariness, disappointment, and profound dissatisfaction with life, which are so often the substitute for it; one

feels that among all the lessons which men require for carrying on the struggle against the inevitable

imperfections of their lot on earth, there is no lesson which they more need, than not to add to the evils which

nature inflicts, by their jealous and prejudiced restrictions on one another. Their vain fears only substitute

other and worse evils for those which they are idly apprehensive of: while every restraint on the freedom of

conduct of any of their human fellowcreatures (otherwise than by making them responsible for any evil

actually caused by it), dries up pro tanto the principal fountain of human happiness, and leaves the species

less rich, to an inappreciable degree, in all that makes life valuable to the individual human being.