 CHAPTER II 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 their way, yet a decision one way or the other must become to. It is not true that in all voluntary association between two people, one of them must be absolute master, still lest that the law must determine which of them it shall be. The most frequent case of voluntary association next to marriage is partnership and 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 other 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 other should only have 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 made 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 connection. The wife has no such power, and even if she had, it is almost always desirable that she should try all measures before resorting to it. It is quite true that things which have to be decided every day and cannot adjust themselves gradually or wait for a compromise ought to depend on one will. One person must have their soul 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 pre-established by the law, since it must depend on individual capacities and suitabilities. If the two persons chose, they might pre-appointed by the marriage contract, as pecuniary arrangements are now often pre-appointed. There would seldom be any difficulty in deciding such things by mutual consent, 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 person's concerned. 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 connection 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, accepting unfavorable 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 any one else, and never will yield in anything unless they can be compelled by the man's mere authority to yield in everything. This would have been said by many persons some generations ago, when satires on women were in vogue, and men thought it a clever thing to insult women for being what men made them. But it will be said by no one now who is worth replying to. It is not the doctrine of the present day that women are less susceptible of good feeling and 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 Liliput always prefix to his most sanguinary decrees. If women are better than men in anything, it is surely an individual self-sacrifice for those of their own family. But I lay little stress on this, so long as they are universally taught that they are born and created for self-sacrifice. I believe that a quality of rights would abate the exaggerated self-abnegation which is the present artificial ideal of feminine character, and that a good woman would not be more self-sacrificing than the best man. But on the other hand, men would be much more unselfish and self-sacrificing than at 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 self-worship. 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 honorable 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 suborn 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 being over another. There are, no doubt, women as there are men, whom equality of consideration will not satisfy, with whom there is no peace while any will or wish is regarded but their own. Such persons are a proper subject for the law of divorce. They are only fit to live alone, and no human beings ought to be compelled to associate their lives with them. But the legal subordination tends to make such characters among women more rather than less frequent. If the man exerts his whole power, the woman is of course crushed. But if she is treated with indulgence and permitted to assume power, there was 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 she has a right to is what she can contrive to get. The equality of married persons before the law is not only the sole mode in which that particular relation can be made consistent with justice to both sides, and conducive to the happiness of both, but it is the only means of rendering the daily life of mankind in any high sense, the 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 recognize any relation with their equals. To be in 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 neighbor, 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 and 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 age's next following on the right of the weak to the forbearance and protection of the strong. How much longer is one form of society in life to content itself with the morality made for another? We have had the morality of submission, and the morality of chivalry and generosity. The time has now come for the morality of justice. Whenever, in former ages, any approach 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 unfranchised residents were under the law of force. The joint influence of Roman civilization and 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 leveled 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, in no one being now left out, but in 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 the 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 can see 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 inequality, but citizenship fills only a small place in modern life, and does not come near the daily habits or in most 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 and 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 practice 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 its 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 glorification. I readily admit, and it is the very foundation of my hopes, that numbers of married people, even under the present law, in the higher classes of England, probably a great majority, live in the spirit of a just law of equality. Laws never would be improved if there were not numerous persons whose moral sentiments are better than the existing laws. Such persons ought to support the 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 an 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 depraved state of the human mind. 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 defense is always presented to us as an injunction of religion. The Church, it is very true, enjoins it in our 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 Brahmanism. It is precisely because Christianity has not done this, that it has been the religion of the progressive portion of mankind, and Islamism, Brahmanism, 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 musclemen's, with the Bible for a Quran, 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 are, and will yet make us what we are to be. 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 husbands or wives, 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 anyone, though I were myself the person to profit by it. This particular injustice and oppression to women, which is, to common apprehensions, more obvious than all the rest, admits of remedy without interfering with any other mischiefs, and there can be little doubt that it will be one of the earliest remedied. Already, in many of the new and several of the old states of the American 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 super intends the domestic expenditure, seems to me in general the most suitable division of labor 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 in the household nobody else takes. Those of the children who did 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 labor 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 connection 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 is morally entitled to it. And if she would then find all honorable 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 in 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. Do provision being made for supplying otherwise any falling short which might become inevitable, in her full performance of the ordinary functions of mistress of a family. These things, if one's opinion were rightly directed on the subject, might with perfect safety be left to be regulated by opinion, without any interference of law. End of Chapter 2, Part 2 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 would anticipate no difficulty in convincing anyone who has gone with me on the subject of the equality of women in the family. I believe 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 should 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 reason they taught, meaning the convenience of the government and the support of existing authority, was deemed a sufficient explanation and excuse for the most logistic crimes. In the present day power holds a smoother language, and whomesoever 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 any one ventures to do in the face of present experience. It is not sufficient to maintain that women on the average are less gifted than men on the average, with certain of the higher mental 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 are inferior in mental faculties to the most mediocre of the men on whom those functions at present devolve. For if the performance of the function is decided either by competition or by any mode of choice which secures regard to the public interest, there needs be no apprehension that any important 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 credibly. The utmost that can be said is that there are many things which none of them have succeeded in doing as well as they have been done by some men, many in which they have not reached the very highest rank, but there are extremely few dependent only on mental faculties in which they have not attained the rank next to the highest. It's 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 them fair share of honor and distinction, or to deny 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 our gain that any kind of person 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 narrower range of individual choice. It will perhaps be sufficient if I can find 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. 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 self-protection due to everyone, though he were to remain forever 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. It is always supposed to be voluntarily made by herself. In the case of election to public trust, 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 to 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 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, where the laws are made by their masters. With regard to the fitness of women, not only to participate in elections, but themselves to hold offices or practice 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 reinforces them by high considerations of practical utility. Let us first make entire abstraction of all psychological considerations tending to show that any of the mental differences supposed to exist between men and women 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 Michelangelo 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 the former showed herself equal to the greatest. 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 fully 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 the 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 vigor 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. Footnote 1 Especially is this true if we take into consideration Asia as well as Europe. If a Hindu 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 mean an entirely unexpected one, I have collected from a long knowledge of Hindu governments. There are many such instances. For though, by Hindu institutions, a woman cannot reign, she is the legal region of a kingdom during the minority of the air, and minorities are frequent, the lives of the male rulers being so often prematurely terminated through the effect of inactivity in central 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 natural capacity of women for government is very striking. And, footnote. This fact is so undeniable that someone long ago tried to retort the argument and turn the admitted truth into an additional insult by saying that queens are better than kings, because under kings women govern, but under queens men. It may seem a waste of reasoning to argue against a bad joke, but such things do affect people's minds. And I have heard men quote this saying with an air as if they thought that there was something in it. At any rate it will serve as anything else for a starting point in discussion. I say then that it is not true that under kings women govern. Such cases are entirely exceptional, and we kings have quite as often governed ill through the influence of male favorites as a 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 VII, was a mere boy, but in doing so he followed the intentions of his father, Louis XI, the ableist monarch of his age. The other, St. Louis, was the best and one of the most vigorous rulers since the time of Charlemagne. Both these princesses ruled in a manner hardly equaled by any prince among their contemporaries. The Emperor Charles V, 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 the other of them in that post during his whole life. They were afterward succeeded by a third. Both ruled very successfully and one of them, Margaret of Austria, as one of the ableist 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 for 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 parody 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 had 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 their judgment fitted them for dealing with the great questions of government. Is it reasonable to think that those who are fit for the greater functions of politics are incapable of qualifying themselves for the less? Is there any reason in the nature of things that the wives and sisters of princes should, whenever called upon, 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 upon to take a part. The ladies of reigning families are the only women who are allowed the same range of interest 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 been found adequate? This fact is in accordance with the best general conclusions with the world 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 estate 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 generalizations on the subject that the general bent of their talents is toward 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 in 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 suggestivity 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 in 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 self educated they are better furnished than men in general with the essential requisites of skillful and successful practice Men who are 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 a quality 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 where quickness of observation holds among a woman's faculties makes her particularly apt to build over hasty generalizations upon her own observation though at the same time no less ready in rectifying those generalizations as her observation takes a wider range But the corrective to this defect is access to the experience of the human race general knowledge exactly the thing which education can best supply A woman's mistakes are specifically those of a clever self-educated man who often sees what men trained in routine do not see but falls into errors of want of knowing things which have long been known Of course he has acquired much of the pre-existing knowledge or he could not have got on at all but what he knows of it he has picked up in fragments and at random as women do But this gravitation of women's minds to the present to the real to actual fact while in its exclusiveness is a source of errors is also a much useful counteractive of the contrary error The principle and most characteristic aberration of speculative minds as such consists precisely in the deficiency of this lively perception an ever-present sense of objective fact For want of this they often not only overlook the contradiction which outward facts opposed 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 idealized but with personified shadows created by the illusions of metaphysics or by the mere entanglement of words and think these shadows the proper objects of the highest the most transcendent philosophy Hardly anything can be of greater value to a man of theory in 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 then 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 and giving width and largeness to those of women in depth as distinguished from breath I greatly doubt if even now women compared with men are at any disadvantage End of Chapter 3, Part 1 Chapter 3, Part 2 of The Subjection of Women This is a LibriVox recording All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Anna Simon The Subjection of Women by John Stuart Mill Chapter 3, Part 2 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 are sticking to their rules in a case whose specialties 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 superiors of clever women greater quickness of apprehension It's 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 a 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 the 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 continuencies of action might as well not have them at all He may be fit to criticise but he's 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 maybe 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 nerve's 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 as also the result of conscious or unconscious cultivation as we see by the almost total disappearance of hysterics and fainting fits since they have gone out of fashion Moreover, when people are brought up like many women of the higher classes though less so in our own country than any other a kind of hot house plants shielded from the wholesome vicissitudes of air and temperature and untrained in any of the occupations at exercises which give stimulus and development to the circulatory and muscular system while their nervous system especially in its emotional department is kept in unnatural active play It is no wonder if those of them who do not die of consumption grow up with constitutions liable to the arrangement 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 and 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 organization which exercises the greatest influence over the whole character of the vital phenomena This constitution, like other physical conformations is hereditary and is transmitted to sons as well as daughters But it is possible and probable that their 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 flesh 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 long continued efforts It is what is meant by spirit It is what makes the high-bred 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 torches 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 favorable to the qualities required from a statement 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 self-control but it requires to be cultivated in that direction When it is, it forms not the heroes of impulse only but those also of self-conquest History and experience prove that the most passionate characters are the most phonetically 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 whereas feelings are intensely interested on the other side derives from that same strength of feeling that determines 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 molded 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 unfavorable case yet whenever the circumstances of the individual have been at all favorable 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 infirmity's incident to their temperament I see not the smallest reason to doubt supposing it however to be true that women's minds are by nature more mobile than those of men less capable of persisting long in the same continuous effort more fitted for dividing their faculties among many things than for travelling in any one path to the highest point which can be reached by it this may be true of women as they now are though not without great and numerous exceptions and may account for their having 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 a 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 is 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 consists in the management of small but multitudinous details on each of which the mind cannot dwell even for a minute but must pass on to other things and if anything requires longer thought must steal time at odd moments for thinking of it the capacity indeed which women show for doing their thinking in circumstances and at times which almost any man would make an excuse to himself for not attempting it has often been noticed and a woman's mind though it may be occupied only with small things can hardly ever permit itself to be vacant as a man 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 large-boned man must on this showing be wonderfully superior in intelligence to a small man and an elephant or a whale must prodigiously excel 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 larger 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 cuviers 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 suddenly 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 organization 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 will 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 a hypothesis which accords well with the differences actually observed between the mental operations of the two sexes if men on the average should have the advantage in the size of the brain and women in activity of cerebral circulation the results which conjecture founded on analogy would lead us to expect from this difference of organization would correspond to some of those which we most commonly see in the first place the mental operations of men might 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 plotting 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 know 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 with 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 differences by the different relations of human beings to society and life to so ridiculous an extent are the notions formed of the nature of women mere empirical generalizations 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 specialty of development or non-development an oriental things that women are by nature peculiarly voluptuous see the violent abuse of them on this ground in hindu 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 district of france is the first upward and downward in england it is a common remark how much more constant women are than men in constancy has been longer reckoned discreditable to a woman in england than in france and english women are besides in their inmost nature much more subdued to opinion it may be remarked by the way that englishmen are in peculiarly unfavorable circumstances for attempting to judge what is or is not natural not made it 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 civilization 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 their 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 ill qualified to pass a judgment on the original tendencies of the 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 super induced by society disguises the natural tendencies of the thing which is the subject of observation in two different ways by extinguishing the nature or by transforming it in the one case there is but a starved residuum of nature remaining to be studied in the other case there is much but it may have expanded in any direction rather than that in which it would spontaneously grow 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 differences to be withdrawn what natural character would be revealed i am not about to attempt what i've pronounced impossible but doubt does not forbid conjecture and where certainty is unattainable there may yet be the means of arriving at some degree of probability the first point the origin of the differences actually observed is the one most accessible to speculation and i shall attempt to approach it by the only path by which it can be reached by tracing the mental consequences of external influences we cannot isolate a human being from the circumstances of his condition so as to ascertain experimentally what he would have been by nature but we can consider what he is and what his circumstances have been and whether the one would have been capable of producing the other let us take then the only marked case which observation affords of apparent inferiority of women to men if we accept 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 women are naturally incapable of producing them in the first place we may fairly question whether experience has afforded sufficient grounds for an induction it is scarcely three generations since women saving very rare exceptions have begun to try their capacity in philosophy science or art it is only 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 skill 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 supple among the great poets and we may well suppose that meretus said to have been the teacher of pindar and carina 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 as paesia 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 thinkers 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 do not deviate widely from existing types this is a sort of inferiority which their works manifest for a 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 madam the stale nor as a specimen of purely artistic excellence anything superior to the prose of madam sand whose style acts upon the nervous system like a symphony of Haydn or Mozart high originality of conception is as I've said what is chiefly wanting and now to examine if there is any manner in which this deficiency can be accounted for let us remember then so far as regards mere thought that during all that period in the world's existence and in the progress of cultivation in which great and fruitful new truths could be arrived at by mere force of genius with little 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 hello 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 world 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 man who've 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 Sanskrit and Slavonic the Gothic of Elphila and the Persic of the Sendevesta even in practical matters we all know what is the value of the originality of untold 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 requirements takes it in hand tests it gives it a scientific or practical form and fits it into its place among the existing truth 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 orders 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 i may judge by my own case a very large proportion indeed end of chapter three part two chapter three part three of the subjection of women this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org recording by Corrie Samuel the subjection of women by John Stuart Mill chapter three part three 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 proclaimed a 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 the 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 they 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 the 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 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 practice painting as a profession and these are already beginning to show quite as much talent as could be expected even male painters Pecce 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 14th and 15th centuries the Italian painters were the most accomplished men of their age the greatest of them were men of encyclopaedical achievements 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 caliber find something more important to do for their own fame and the uses of the modern world than painting and it is only now and then that a Reynolds or a Turner 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 first rate composers even if 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 50 eminent men and the last three centuries have not produced 50 eminent male composers either in Germany or in Italy there are other reasons besides those which we have now given but 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 superintendents 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 superintendents 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 letter writing 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 address any value to dressing well i do not mean expensively but with taste and perception of natural and of artificial convenience must bestow upon their own dress perhaps also upon that of their daughters would alone go a great way towards achieving respectable results in art or science or literature and does actually exhaust much of the time and mental power they might have to spare for either if it were possible that all this number 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 other 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 recognized 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 someday 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 as philosophy and such above all is art in which besides the devotion of the thoughts and feelings the hand must also 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 immortalize 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 narrow abounds 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 and 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 spoke of as their last infirmity and is stimulated by the access which fame gives to all objects of ambition including even the favor 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 all be 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 fellow creatures is as strong in a woman as in a man but society has so ordered things that public consideration is in all ordinary cases only attainable by her through the consideration of her husband or of her male relations while her private consideration is forfeited by making herself individually prominent or appearing in any other character than that of an appendage to men whoever is in the least capable of estimating the influencer on the mind of the entire domestic and social position and the whole habit of a life must easily recognize 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 brutalizes though corrupting to both is less so to the slaves than to the slave masters it is wholesome for the moral nature to be restrained even by arbitrary power than to be allowed to exercise arbitrary power without restraint women it is said seldom a 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 of 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 panagyrics on the moral nature of women the complimentary dictum about women's superior moral goodness may be allowed to pair off with a 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 often misled by their personal feelings than men by their personal interests the chief difference would seem in that case to be that men are led 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 concerned 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 fulfill only too faithfully the sole duty which they are taught and almost the only one which they are permitted to practice 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 un-feminine 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 allergies 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 at 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 formally a subject's claim to the 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 to join with them in the undertaking end of chapter three part three