 Chapter 1, Part 1 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 Paradise Camouflage. The Subjection of Women by John Stuart Mill. Chapter 1, Part 1. The object of this essay is to explain as clearly as I am able, grounds of an opinion which I have held from the very earliest period, when I had formed any opinions at all on social political matters, and which, instead of being weakened or modified, has been constantly growing stronger by the progress, reflection and the experience of life. That the principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes, the legal subordination of one sex to the other, is wrong itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement, and that it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on one side, nor disability on the other. The very words necessary to express the task I have undertaken show how arduous it is, but it would be a mistake to suppose that the difficulty of the case must lie in the insufficiency or obscurity of the grounds of reason on which my convictions. The difficulty is that which exists in all cases in which there is a massive feeling to be contended against. So long as opinion is strongly rooted in the feelings, it gains rather than loses in stability by having a preponderating weight of argument against it. For if it were accepted as a result of argument, the refutation of the argument might shake the solidity of the conviction, but when it rests solely on feeling, worse it fares in argumentative contest, the more persuaded adherents are that their feeling must have some deeper ground which the arguments do not reach. And while the feeling remains, it is always throwing up fresh entrenchments of argument to repair any breach made in the old. And there are so many causes tending to make the feelings connected with this subject the most intense and most deeply rooted of those which gather around and protect old institutions and custom. That we need not wonder to find them as yet less undetermined and loosened than any of the rest by the progress the great modern spiritual and social transition, nor suppose that the barbarisms to which men cling longest must be less barbarisms than those which they earlier shake off. In every respect, the burden is hard on those who attack an almost universal opinion. They must be very fortunate, well as unusually capable, if they obtain a hearing at all. They have more difficulty in obtaining a trial than any other litigants have in getting a verdict. If they do extort a hearing, they are subjected to a set of logical requirements totally different from those exacted from other people. In all other cases, burden and proof is supposed to lie with the affirmative. If a person is charged with a murder, it rests with those who accuse him to give proof of his guilt, not with him to prove his innocence. If there is a difference of opinion about the reality of an alleged historical invent in which the feelings of men general are not much interested, as the Siege of Troy example, those who maintain that the event took place expected to produce their proofs, before those who take the other side can be required to say anything, and at no time these required to do more than show that the evidence produced by the others is of no value. Again, in practical matters, the burden and proof is supposed to be with those who are against liberty, who contend for any restriction or prohibition, either any limitation of the general freedom of human action, or any disqualification or disparity of privilege affecting one person or kind of persons as compared with others. The a priori presumption is in favour of freedom and impartiality. It is held that there should be no restraint not required by the general good, and that the law should be no respecter of persons, but should treat all alike, save where the similarity of treatment is required by positive reasons, either of justice or of policy. But if none of these rules of evidence will the benefit be allowed to those who maintain the opinion I profess? It is useless of me to say that those who maintain the doctrine that men have a right to command and women are under an obligation to obey, or that men are fit for government and women unfit on the affirmative side of the question, and that they are bound to show positive evidence for the assertions or submit to their rejection. It is equally unavailing to say that those who deny to women any freedom or privilege rightly allowed to men, having the double presumption against them that they are opposing freedom and recommending partiality, must be held to the strictest proof of their case, and unless their success be such as to exclude all doubt, the judgement ought to be against them. This would be thought good please in any common case, but they will not be thought so in this instance. Before I could hope to make any impression, I should be expected not only to answer all that has ever been said by those who take the other side of the question, but to imagine that could be said by them. Define them in reasons, as I as answer all I find, and besides refuting all arguments for the affirmative, I shall be called upon for invincible positive arguments to prove a negative. And even if I could do all and leave the opposite party with a host of unanswered arguments against them, and not a single unrefuted one on side, I should be thought to have done little. For a cause supported on one hand by universal usage, and on the other by so great a preponderance of popular sentiment, is supposed to have a presumption in its favour, superior to any conviction, which in appeal to reason has power to produce an intellect but those of a high class. I do not mention these difficulties to complain of them. First, use it would be useless. They are inseparable from having to contend through people's misunderstandings against the hostility their feelings and practical tendencies, and truly the understandings of the majority of mankind would need to be much better cultivated than has ever yet been the case. Before they be asked to place such reliance in their own power of estimating arguments, as to give up practical principles in which have been born and bred, and which are the basis of much existing order of the world at the first argumentative attack, which they are not capable of logically resisting. I do not therefore quarrel with them for having too little faith in argument, but for having too much faith in custom and the general feeling. It is one of the characteristic prejudices of the Ion of the 19th century against the 18th to accord to the unreasoning elements in human nature the infallibility, which the 18th century is supposed to have ascribed to the reasoning elements. For the apotheosis of reason we have substituted that of instinct, and we call thing instinct which we find in ourselves and for which we cannot trace any rational foundation. This idolatry, infinitely more degrading than the other, and the most pernicious of the false worships of the present day, all of which it is the main support, will probably hold its ground until it way before a sound psychology laying bare the real root of much that is bowed down to as the intention of nature and ordinance of God. As regards the present question, I am going to accept the unfavourable conditions which the prejudice assigns to me. I consent that established custom and the general feelings should be deemed conclusive against me unless that custom and feeling from age to age can be shown to have owed their existence to other causes than their soundness and to have derived their power from the worse rather than the better parts of human nature. I am willing that judgement should go against me unless I can show that my judge has been tampered with. The concession is not so great as it might appear for to prove this is by far the easiest portion of my task. The generality of a practice is in some cases a strong presumption that it is, or at all events once was, conducive to laudable ends. This is the case when the practice was first adopted or afterwards kept up as a means to such ends and was grounded on experience of the mode in which they could be most effectually attained. If the authority of men over women, when first established, had been the result of a conscientious comparison between different modes of constituting the government of society, if after trying various other modes of social organisation, the government of women over men, equality between the two, and such mixed and divided modes of government might be invented, it had been decided on the testimony of experience that the mode in which women are wholly under the rule of men, having no share at all in perfect concerns and each in private being under the legal obligation of obedience to the man with whom she has associated her destiny, was the arrangement most conducive to the happiness and well-being of both. Its general adoption might then have been fairly thought to be some evidence that at the time when it was adopted it was the best. Though even then the considerations which recommended may, like so many other primeval social facts of the greatest importance, have subsequently in the course of ages ceased to exist. But the state of the case is in every respect the reverse of this. In the first place, the opinion in favour of the present system, which entirely subordinates the weaker sex to the stronger, rests upon theory only, for there never has been trial made of any other, so that experience, in the sense in which it is vulgarly opposed to theory, cannot be pretended to have pronounced any verdict. And in the second place, the adoption of this system of inequality never was the result of deliberation or forethought of any social ideas or any notion whatever of what conduced to the benefit of humanity or the good order of society. It arose simply from the fact that from the very earliest twilight of human society, every woman owing to the value attached to her by men, combined with her inferiority and muscular strength, was found in a state of bondage to some man. Laws and systems of polity always begin by recognising the relations they find already existing between individuals. They convert what was a mere physical fact into a legal right, give it the sanction of society, and principally aim at the substitution of public and organised means of asserting and protecting these rights, instead of the irregular and lawless conflict of physical strength. Those who had already been compelled to obedience became in this manner legally bound to it. Slavery, from being a mere affair of force between the master and the slave, became regularised and a matter of contact among the masters, who, binding themselves to one another for common protection, guaranteed by their collective strength, the private possessions of each, including his slaves. In early times, the great majority of the male sex were slaves, as well as the whole of the female. And many ages elapsed, some of them ages of high cultivation, before any thinker was bold enough to question the rightfulness and the absolute social necessity, either of the one slavery or of the other. By degrees such thinkers did arise, and the general progress of society assisting, the slavery of the male sex has, in all the countries of Christian Europe at least, though in one of them, only within the last few years, been at length abolished. And that of the female sex has been gradually changed into a milder form of dependence. But this dependence, as it exists at present, is not an original institution, taking a fresh start from considerations of justice and social expediency. It is the primitive state of slavery lasting on, through successive mitigations and modifications, occasioned by the same causes which have softened the general manus and brought all human relations more under the control of justice and the influence of humanity. It has not lost the taint of its brutal origin. No presumption in its favour, therefore, can be drawn from the fact of its existence. The only such presumption, which it could be supposed to have, must be grounded on its having lasted till now, when so many other things which came down from the same odious source have been done away with. And this indeed is what makes it strange to ordinary ears to hear it asserted that the inequality of rights between men and women has no other source than the law of the strongest. That this statement should have the effect of a paradox is in some respects creditable to the progress of civilisation and the improvement of the moral sentiments of mankind. We now live, that is to say, one or two of the most advanced nations in the world now live, in a state in which the law of the strongest seems to be entirely abandoned as the regulating principle of the world's affairs. Nobody professes it, and as regards most of the relations between human beings, nobody is permitted to practise it. When anyone succeeds in doing so, it is under cover of some pretext which gives him the semblance of having some general social interest on his side. This being the ostensible state of things, people flatter themselves that the rule of mere force is ended, that the law of the strongest cannot be the reason of existence of anything which has remained in full operation down to the present time. However any of our present institutions may have begun, it can only, they think, have been preserved to this period of advanced civilisation by a well-grounded feeling of its adaptation to human nature and conduciveness to the greater good. They do not understand the great vitality and durability of institutions which place right on the side of might. How intensely they are clung to, how the good as well as the bad propensities and sentiments of those who have power in their hands become identified with retaining it. How slowly these bad institutions give way one at a time the weakest first, beginning with those which are leased into woven with the daily habits of life. And how very rarely those who have obtained legal power because they first had physical, have ever lost their hold of it until the physical power had passed over to the other side. Such shifting of the physical force, not having taken place in the case of women, this fact, combined with all the peculiar and characteristic features of the particular case, made it certain from the first that this branch of the system of right founded on might, though softened in its most atrocious features at an earlier period than several of the others, would be the very last to disappear. It was inevitable that this one case of a social relation grounded on force would survive through generations of institutions grounded on equal justice, an almost solitary exception to the general character of their laws and customs, but which, so long as it does not proclaim its own origin and his discussion has not brought out its true character, is not felt to jar with modern civilization any more than domestic slavery amongst the Greeks jarred with their notion of themselves as a free people. The truth is that people of the present and the last two or three generations have lost all practical sense of the primitive condition of humanity and only the few who have studied history accurately or have much frequented the parts of the world occupied by the living representatives of ages long past are able to form any mental picture of what society then was. People are not aware how entirely in former ages the law of superior strength was the rule of life, how publicly and openly it was about, I do not say cynically or shamelessly for these words imply a feeling that there was something in it to be ashamed of and no such notion could have found a place in the faculties of any person of those ages except a philosopher or a saint. History gives a cruel experience of human nature in showing how exactly the regard due to the life, possessions and entire earthly happiness of any class of persons was measured by what they had the power of enforcing. How all who made any resistance to authorities that had arms in their hands, however dreadful might be the provocation, had not only the law of force but all other laws and all the notions of social obligation against them and in the eyes of those whom they resisted were not only guilty of crime but of the worst of all crimes deserving the most cruel chastisement which human beings could inflict. The first small vestige of feeling of obligation in a superior to acknowledge any right in inferior began when he had been induced for convenience to make some promise to them. Through these promises even when sanctioned by the most solemn nooths were for many ages revoked or violated on the most trifling provocation or temptation it is probably that this, except by persons of still worse than the average morality was seldom done without some twinges of conscience. The ancient republics being mostly grounded from the first upon some kind of neutral compact or at any rate formed by a union of persons not very unequal in strength afforded in consequence a first instance of a portion of human relations fenced round and placed under the dominion of another law than that of force and though the original law of force remained in full operation between them and their slaves and also except so far as limited by express compact between a commonwealth and its subject or other independent commonwealths the banishment of that primitive law even from so narrow a field commenced the regeneration of human nature by giving birth to sentiments of which experience soon demonstrated the immense value even for material interests and which then forward only required to be enlarged not created. Those slaves were no part of the commonwealth it was in the free states that slaves were first felt to have rights as human beings the Stoics were, I believe, the first except so far as the Jewish law constitutes an exception who taught as a part of morality that men were bound by moral obligation to their slaves no one after Christianity became ascendant could ever again have been a stranger to this belief in theory even more after the rise of the Catholic Church was it ever without persons to stand up for it yet to enforce it was the most arduous task which Christianity ever had to perform for more than a thousand years the church kept up the contest with hardly any perceptible success it was not for one to power over men's minds its power was prodigious it could make kings and nobles the most valued possessions to enrich the church it could make thousands in the prime of life in the height of worldly advantages shut themselves up in confidence to work out their salvation by poverty, fasting and prayer it could send hundreds of thousands across land and sea, Europe and Asia to give their lives for the deliverance of the Holy Sepulchre it could make kings relinquish wives an object of their passion attachment because the church declared that they were within the seventh by our calculation 14th degree of relationship all this it did but it could not make men fight less with one another nor tyrannize less cruelly over the serfs and when they were able over Burgesses it could not make them renounce either of the applications of force force militant or force triumphant this they could never be induced to do until they were themselves in their turn compelled by superior force only by the growing power of kings was an end put to fighting except between kings or competitors for kingship only by the growth of a wealthy and warlike bourgeoisie in the fortified towns and of a plebium infantry which proved more powerful in the field than the undisciplined chivalry was the insolent tyranny of the nobles over the bourgeoisie and peasantry brought within some bounds it was persisted in not only until but long after the oppressed had attained a power enabling them to take conspicuous vengeance and on the continent much of it continued to the time of the French Revolution though in England the earlier and better organization of the democratic classes put an end to it sooner by establishing equal laws in free national institutions End of Chapter 1 Part 1 read by Andy from Inveranan, Scotland Chapter 1 Part 2 of the Subjection of Women This is a LibraVox recording All LibraVox recordings are in the public domain For more information or to volunteer please visit LibraVox.org The Subjection of Women by John Stuart Mill Chapter 1 Part 2 If people are mostly so little aware how completely during the greater part of the duration of our species the law of force was the avowed rule of general conduct any other being only a special and exceptional consequence of peculiar ties and from how very recent a date it is that the affairs of society in general have been even pretended to be regulated according to any moral law As little do people remember or consider how institutions and customs which never had any ground but the law of force last on into ages and states of general opinion which never would have permitted their first establishment less than 40 years ago Englishmen might still by law hold human beings in bondage as saleable property within the present century they might kidnap them and carry them off and work them literally to death This absolutely extreme case of the law of force condemned by those who can tolerate almost every other form of arbitrary power and which, of all others, presents features the most revolting to the feelings of all who look at it from an impartial position was the law of civilized and Christian England within the memory of persons now living and in one half of Anglo-Saxon America three or four years ago not only did slavery exist but the slave trade and the breeding of slaves expressly for it was a general practice between slave states yet not only was there a greater strength of sentiment against it but in England at least a less amount either of feeling or of interest in favor of it than of any other of the customary abuses of force for its motive was the love of gain unmixed and undisguised and those who profited by it were a very small numerical fraction of the country while the natural feeling of all who were not personally interested in it was unmitigated abhorrence so extreme an instance makes it almost superfluous to refer to any other but consider the long duration of absolute monarchy In England at present it is the almost universal conviction that military despotism is a case of the law of force having no other origin or justification yet in all the great nations of Europe except England it either still exists or has only just ceased to exist and has even now a strong party favorable to it in all ranks of the people especially among persons of station and consequence such is the power of an established system even when far from universal when not only in almost every period of history there have been great and well known examples of the contrary system these have almost invariably been afforded by the most illustrious and most prosperous communities in this case too the possessor of the undue power the person directly interested in it is only one person while those who are subject to it and suffer from it are literally all the rest the yoke is naturally and necessarily humiliating to all persons except the one who is on the throne together with at most the one who expects to succeed to it how different are these cases from that of the power of men over women I am not now prejudging the question of its justifiableness I am showing how vastly more permanent it could not but be even if not justifiable than these other dominations which have nevertheless lasted down to our own time whatever gratification of pride there is in the possession of power and whatever personal interest in its exercise in this case not confined to a limited class but common to the whole male sex instead of being to most of its supporters a thing desirable chiefly in the abstract or like the political ends usually contended for by factions of little private importance to any but the leaders it comes home to the person and hearth of every male head of a family and of everyone who looks forward to being so the Claude Hopper exercises his share of the power equally with the highest noblemen and the cases that in which the desire of power is the strongest for everyone who desires power desires it most over those who are nearest to him with whom his life is past with whom he has most concerns in common and in whom any independence of his authority is often as likely to interfere with his individual preferences if in the other cases specified powers manifestly grounded only on force and having so much less to support them are so slowly and with so much difficulty got rid of much more must it be so with this even if it rests on no better foundation than those we must consider too that the possessors of the power have facilities in this case greater than in any other to prevent any uprising against it every one of the subjects lives under the very eye it may be said in the hands of one of the masters in closer intimacy with him than with any of her fellow subjects with no means of combining against him no power of even locally over mastering him and on the other hand with the strongest motives for seeking his favor and avoiding to give him offense in struggles for political emancipation everybody knows how often its champions are bought off by bribes or daunted by terrors in the case of women each individual of the subject class is in a chronic state of bribery and intimidation combined in setting up the standard of resistance a large number of the leaders and still more of the followers must make an almost complete sacrifice of the pleasures or the alleviations of their own individual lot if ever any system of privilege and enforced subjection had its yoke tightly riveted on the necks of those who are kept down by it this has I have not yet shown that it is a wrong system but everyone who is capable of thinking on the subject must see that even if it is it was certain to outlast all other forms of unjust authority and when some of the grossest of the other forms still exist in many civilized countries and have only recently been got rid of and others it would be strange if that which is so much the deepest rooted had yet been perceptibly shaken anywhere there is more reason to wonder that the protests and testimonies against it should have been so numerous and so weighty as they are some will object that a comparison cannot fairly be made between the government of the male sex and the forms of unjust power which I have adduced in illustration of it since these are arbitrary and the effect of mere usurpation while it on the contrary is natural was there ever any domination which did not appear natural to those who possessed it there was a time when the division of mankind into two classes a small one of masters and a numerous one of slaves appeared even to the most cultivated minds to be a natural and the only natural condition of the human race no less an intellect and one which contributed no less to the progress of human thought than Aristotle held this opinion without doubt or misgiving and rested it on the same premises on which the same assertion in regard to the dominion of men over women is usually based namely that there are different natures among mankind free natures and slave natures that the Greeks were of a free nature the barbarian races of thracians and asiatics of a slave nature but why need I go back to Aristotle did not the slave owners of the southern united states maintain the same doctrine with all the fanaticism with which men cling to the theories that justify their passions and legitimate their personal interests did they not call heaven and earth to witness that the dominion of white men over the black is natural that the black race is by nature incapable of freedom and marked out for slavery some even going so far as to say that the freedom of manual laborers is an unnatural order of things anywhere again the theorists of absolute monarchy have always affirmed it to be the only natural form of government issuing from the patriarchal which was the primitive and spontaneous form of society framed on the model of the paternal which is anterior to society itself and as they contend the most natural authority of all nay for that matter the law of force itself to those who could not plead any other has always seemed the most natural of all grounds for the exercise of authority conquering races hold it to be nature's own dictate that the conquered should obey the conquerors or as they euphoniously paraphrase it that the feebler and more unwarlike races should submit to the braver and manlier the smallest acquaintance with human life in the middle ages shows how supremely natural the dominion of the feudal nobility over men of low condition appeared to the nobility themselves and how unnatural the conception seemed of a person of the inferior class claiming equality with them or exercising authority over them it hardly seemed less so to the class held in subjection the emancipated serfs and burgesses even in their most vigorous struggles never made any pretension to a share of authority they only demanded more less of limitation to the power of tyrannizing over them so true is it that unnatural generally means only uncustomary and that everything unusual appears natural the subjection of women to men being a universal custom any departure from it quite naturally appears unnatural but how entirely even in this case the feeling is dependent on custom appears by ample experience nothing so much astonishes the people of distant parts of the world when they first learn anything about england as to be told that it is under a queen the thing seems to them so unnatural and almost incredible to Englishmen this does not seem in the least degree unnatural because they are used to it but they do feel it unnatural that women should be soldiers or members of parliament in the feudal ages on the contrary war and politics were not thought unnatural to women because not unusual it seemed natural that women of the privileged classes should be of manly character inferior in nothing but bodily strength the abundance of women seemed rather less unnatural to the Greeks than to other ancients on account of the fabulous Amazons whom they believed to be historical and the partial example afforded by the Spartan women who though no less subordinate by law than in other Greek states were more free in fact and being trained to bodily exercises in the same manner with men gave ample proof that they were not naturally disqualified for them but it will be said men over women differs from all these others in not being a rule of force it is accepted voluntarily women make no complaint and are consenting parties to it in the first place a great number of women do not accept it ever since there have been women able to make their sentiments known by their writings the only mode of publicity which society permits to them an increasing number of them have recorded protests against their present social condition and recently many thousands of them headed by the most imminent women known to the public have petitioned parliament for their admission to the parliamentary suffrage the claim of women to be educated as solidly and in the same branches of knowledge as men is urged with growing intensity and with a great prospect of success while the demand for their admission into professions and occupations hitherto closed against them becomes every year more urgent though there are not in this country as there are in the united states periodical conventions and an organized party to agitate for the rights of women there is a numerous and active society organized and managed by women for the more limited object of obtaining the political franchise nor is it only in our country and in America that women are beginning to protest more or less collectively against the disabilities under which they labor France and Italy and Switzerland now afford examples of the same thing how many more women there are who silently cherish similar aspirations no one can possibly know but there are abundant tokens how many would cherish them were they not so strenuously taught to repress them as contrary to the proprieties of their sex it must be remembered also that no enslaved class ever asked for complete liberty at once when Simon de Montfort called these the commons to sit for the first time in parliament did any of them dream of demanding that an assembly elected by their constituents should make and destroy ministries and dictate to the king in affairs of state no such thought entered into the imagination of the most ambitious of them the nobility had already these pretensions the commons pretended to nothing but to be exempt from arbitrary taxation and from the gross individual oppression of the king's officers it is a political law of nature that those who are under any power of ancient origin never begin by complaining of the power itself but only of its oppressive exercise there is never any want of women who complain of ill usage by their husbands there would be infinitely more if complaint were not the greatest of all provocatives to a repetition and increase of the ill usage it is this which frustrates all attempts to maintain the power but protect the woman against its abuses in no other case except that of a child is the person who has been proved judicially to have suffered an injury replaced under the physical power of the culprit who inflicted it accordingly wives even in the most extreme and protracted cases of bodily ill usage hardly ever dare avail themselves of the laws made for their protection and if in a moment of irrepressible indignation or interference of neighbors they are induced to do so their whole effort afterwards is to disclose as little as they can and to beg off their tyrant from his merited chastisement all cases social and natural combine to make it unlikely that women should be collectively rebellious to the power of men they are so far in a position different from all other subject classes that their masters require for their service men do not want solely the obedience of women they want their sentiments all men except the most brutish desire to have in the woman most nearly connected with them not a forced slave but a willing one not a slave merely but a favorite they have therefore put everything in practice to enslave their minds the masters of all other slaves either fear of themselves or religious fears the masters of women wanted more than simple obedience and they turned the whole force of education to affect their purpose all women are brought up from the very earliest years in the belief that their ideal of character is the very opposite to that of men not self-will and government by self-control but submission and yielding to the control of others all the moralities tell them that it is the duty of women and all the current sentimentalities that it is their nature to live for others to make complete abnegation of themselves and to have no life but in their affections and by their affections are meant the only ones they are allowed to have those to the men with whom they are connected or to the children who constitute an additional and indefeasible tie between them and a man when we put together three things first the natural attraction between opposite sexes secondly the wife's entire dependence on the husband every privilege or pleasure she has being either his gift or depending entirely on his will and lastly that the principal object of human pursuit consideration and all objects of social ambition can in general be sought or obtained by her only through him it would be a miracle if the object of being attractive to men had not become the polar star of feminine education and formation of character and this great means of influence over the minds of women having been acquired an instinct of selfishness made men avail themselves of it to the utmost as a means of holding women in subjection by representing to them meekness, submissiveness and resignation of all individual will into the hands of a man as an essential part of sexual attractiveness can it be doubted that any of the other yokes which mankind have succeeded in breaking would have subsisted till now if the same means had existed and had been as sedulously used to bow down their minds to it if it had been made the object of the life of every young plebeian to find personal favor in the eyes of some patrician of every young serf with some senior if domestication with him and a share of his personal affections had been held out as the prize which they all should look out for the most gifted and aspiring being able to reckon on the most desirable prizes and if when this prize had been attained they had been shut out by a wall of brass from all interests not centering in him all feelings and desires but those which he shared or inculcated would not serfs in seniors plebeians and patricians had been as broadly distinguished as this day as men and women are and would not all but a thinker here and there have believed the distinction to be a fundamental and unalterable fact in human nature the preceding considerations are amply sufficient to show that custom however universal it may be affords in this case no presumption and ought not to create any prejudice in favor of the arrangements women in social and political subjection to men but I may go farther and maintain that the course of history and the tendencies of progressive human society afford not only no presumption in favor of this system of inequality of rights but a strong one against it and that so far as the whole course of human improvement up to this time the whole stream of modern tendencies warrants any inference on the subject that this relic of the past is discordant with the future and must necessarily disappear for what is the peculiar character of the modern world the difference which chiefly distinguishes modern institutions modern social ideas modern life itself from those times of long past it is that human beings are no longer born to their place in life and chained down by an inexorable bond to the place they are born to but are free to employ their faculties and such favorable chances as offer to achieve the lot which may appear to them most desirable human society of old was constituted on a very different principle all were born to a fixed social position and were mostly kept in it by law or interdicted from any means by which they could emerge from it as some men are born white and others black so some were born slaves others free men and citizens some were born patricians other plebeians some were born feudal nobles others commoners and roturiers a slave or serf could never make himself free nor except by the will of his master become so in most european countries it was not till towards the close of the middle ages and as a consequence of the growth of regal power that commoners could be ennobled even among nobles the eldest son born the exclusive heir to the paternal possessions and a long time elapsed before it was fully established that the father could disinherit him among the industrious classes only those who were born members of a guild or were admitted into it by its members could lawfully practice their calling within its local limits and nobody could practice any calling deemed important in any but the legal manner by processes authoritatively prescribed manufacturers have stood in the pillory for presuming to carry on their business by new and improved methods in modern europe and most in those parts of it which have participated most largely in all other modern improvements diametrically opposite doctrines now prevail law and government do not undertake to prescribe by whom any social or industrial operation shall or shall not be conducted or at modes of conducting them shall be lawful these things are left to the unfettered choice of individuals even the laws that required that workmen should serve an apprenticeship having this country been repealed there being ample assurance that in all cases in which an apprenticeship is necessary its necessity will suffice to enforce it the old theory was that the least possible should be left the choice of the individual agent that all he had to do should as far as practical be laid down for him by superior wisdom left to himself he was sure to go wrong the modern conviction the fruit of a thousand years of experience is that things in which the individual is the person directly interested never go right but as they are left to his own discretion and that any regulation of them by authority except to protect the rights of others is sure to be mischievous this conclusion slowly arrived at and not adopted until almost every possible application of the contrary theory had been made with disastrous result now in the industrial department prevails universally in the most advanced countries almost universally in all that have pretensions to any sort of advancement it is not that all processes are supposed to be equally good or all persons to be equally qualified for everything but that freedom of individual choice is now known to be the only thing which procures the adoption of the best processes and throws each operation into the hands of those who are best qualified for it nobody thinks it necessary to make a law that only a strong armed man shall be a blacksmith freedom and competition suffice to make blacksmiths strong armed men because the weak armed can earn more by engaging in occupations for which they are more fit in consonance with this doctrine it is felt to be an overstepping of the upper bounds of authority to fix beforehand on some general presumption that certain persons are not fit to do certain things it is now thoroughly known and admitted that if some such presumptions exist no such presumption is infallible even if it be well grounded in a majority of cases which it is very likely not to be there will be a minority of exceptional cases in which it does not hold and in those it is both an injustice to the individuals and a detriment to society to place barriers in the way of their using their faculties for their own benefit and for that of others in the cases on the other hand in which the unfitness is real the ordinary motives of human conduct will on the whole suffice to prevent the incompetent person from making or from persisting in the attempt if this general principle of social and economical science is not true if individuals with such help as they can derive from the opinion of those who know them are not better judges than the law and the government of their own capacities and vocation the world cannot too soon abandon this principle and return to the old system of regulations and disabilities but if the principle is true we ought to act as if we believed it and not to ordain that to be born a girl instead of a boy rather than to be born black instead of white or a commoner instead of a nobleman shall decide the person's position through all life shall interdict people from all the more elevated social positions and from all except a few respectable occupations even were we to admit the utmost that is ever pretended as to the superior fitness of men for all the functions now reserved to them the same argument applies which forbids illegal qualification for members of parliament if only once in a dozen years the conditions of eligibility exclude a fit person there is a real loss while the exclusion of thousands of unfit persons is no gain for if the constitution of the electoral body disposes them to choose unfit persons there are always plenty of such persons to choose from in all things of any difficulty and importance those who can do well are fewer than the need even with the most unrestricted latitude of choice and any limitation of the field of selection deprived society of some chances of being served by the competent without ever saving it from the incompetent end of chapter one part two chapter one 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 mb the subjection of women by John Stuart Mill chapter one part three at present in the more improved countries the disabilities of women are the only case save one in which laws and institutions take persons at their birth ordain that they shall never in all their lives be allowed to compete for certain things the one exception is that of royalty persons still are born to the throne no one not even of the reigning family can ever occupy it and no one even of that family can by any means but the course of hereditary succession attain it all other dignities and social advantages are open to the whole male sex many indeed are only attainable by wealth but wealth may be striven for by anyone and is actually obtained by many men of the very humblest origin the difficulties to the majority are indeed insuperable without the aid of fortunate accidents but no male human being is under any legal ban neither law nor opinion super add artificial articles to the natural ones royalty as I have said is accepted but in this case everyone feels it to be an exception an anomaly in the modern world in marked opposition to its customs and principles and to be justified only by extraordinary special expediences which though individuals and nations differ in estimating their weight unquestionably do in fact exist but in this exceptional case in which a high social function is for important reasons bestowed on birth instead of being put up to competition all free nations contrive in substance to subscribe to the principle form which they nominally derogate for they circumscribe this high function by conditions avowedly intended to prevent the person to whom it ostensibly belongs from really performing it while the person to whom it is performed the responsible minister does obtain the post by a competition from which no full grown citizen of the male sex is legally excluded the disabilities therefore to which women are subject from the mere fact of their birth are the solitary examples of the kind in modern legislation in no instance except this which comprehends half the human race are the higher social functions closed against anyone by a fatality of birth which no exertions and no change of circumstances can overcome for even religious disabilities besides that in England and in Europe they have practically almost ceased to exist do not close any career to the disqualified person in case of conversion the social subordination of women thus stands out an isolated fact in modern social institutions a solitary breach of what has become their fundamental law a single relic of an old world of thought and practice exploded in everything else but retained in the one thing of most universal interest as if a gigantic doleman or a vast temple of Jupiter Olympus occupied the site of St. Paul's and received daily worship while the surrounding Christian churches were only resorted to on fasts and festivals this entire discrepancy between one social fact and all those which accompany it and the radical opposition between its nature and the progressive movement which is the boast of the modern world and which has successively swept away everything else of an analogous nature surely affords to a conscientious observer of human tendencies serious matter for reflection it raises a prima facie presumption on the unfavorable side far outweighing any which custom and usage could in such circumstances create on the favorable and should at least suffice to make this like the choice between republicanism and royalty a balanced question the least that could be too bad it is that the question should not be considered as pre-judged by existing fact and existing opinion but open to discussion on its merits as a question of justice and expediency the decision on this as on any of the other social arrangements of mankind depending on what an enlightened estimate of tendencies and consequences may show to be most advantageous to humanity in general without distinction of sex and the discussion must be a real discussion descending to foundations and not resting satisfied with vague and general assertions it will not do for instance to assert in general terms that the experience of mankind has pronounced in favor of the existing system experience cannot possibly have decided between two courses so long as there has only been experience of one if it be said that the doctrine of equality of the sexes rests only on theory it must be remembered that the contrary doctrine also has only the contrary to rest upon all that is proved in its favor by direct experience is that mankind have been able to exist under it and to attain the degree of improvement and prosperity which we now see but whether that prosperity has been attained sooner or is now greater than it would have been under the other system experience does not say on the other hand experience does say that every step in improvement has been so invariably accompanied by a step made in raising the social position of women that historians and philosophers have been led to adopt their elevation or debasement as on the whole the surest test and most correct measure of the civilization of a people or an age through all the progressive period of human history the condition of women has been approaching nearer to equality with men this does not of itself prove that the assimilation must go on to complete equality but it assuredly affords some presumption that such is the case neither does it avail anything to say that the nature of the two sexes adapts them to their present functions and position and renders these appropriate to them standing on the ground of common sense and the constitution of the human mind I deny that anyone knows or can know the nature of the two sexes as long as they have only been seen in their present relation to one another if men had ever been found in society without women or women without men or if there had been a society of men and women in which the women were not under the control of the men something might have been positively known about the mental and moral differences which may be inherent in the nature of each what is now called the nature of women is an eminently artificial thing the result of forced repression in some directions unnatural stimulation in others it may be asserted without scruple that no other class of dependents have had their character so entirely distorted from its natural proportions by their relation with their masters for if conquered and slave races have been in some respects more forcibly repressed whatever in them has not been crushed down by an iron heal has generally been let alone and in left with any liberty of development it has developed itself according to its own laws but in the case of women a hot house and stove cultivation has always been carried on of some of the capabilities of their nature for the benefit and pleasure of their masters then because certain products of the general vital force sprout luxuriously and reach a great development in this heated atmosphere and under this act of nurture and watering while other shoots from the same root which are left outside in the wintery air with ice purposely heaped all around them have a stunted growth and some are burnt off with fire and disappear men with that inability to recognize their own work which distinguishes the unanalytic mind indolently believe that the tree grows of itself in the way they have made it grow and that it would die if one half of it were not kept in a vapor bath and the other half in the snow of all the difficulties which impede the progressive thought and the formation of well grounded opinions on life and social arrangements the greatest is now the unspeakable ignorance and inattention of mankind in respect to the influences of human character whatever any portion of the human species now are or seem to be such it is supposed they have a natural tendency to be even when the most elementary knowledge of the circumstances in which they have been placed clearly points out the causes that made them what they are because a cottage deeply in arrears to his landlord is not industrious there are people who think that the French are naturally idle because constitutions can be overthrown when the authorities appointed to execute them turn their arms against them there are people who think the French incapable of free government because the Greeks cheated the Turks and the Turks only plundered the Greeks there are persons who think that the Turks are naturally more sincere and because women as is often said care nothing about politics except their personalities it is supposed that the general good is naturally less interesting to women than to men history which is now so much better understood than formerly teaches another lesson if only by showing the extraordinary susceptibility of human nature to external influences and the extreme variable of those of its manifestations which are supposed to be most universal and uniform but in history as in traveling men usually see only what they already had in their own minds and few learn much from history who do not bring much with them to its study heads in regard to that most difficult question what are the natural differences between the two sexes a subject on which it is impossible in the present state of society to obtain complete and correct knowledge while almost everybody dogmatizes upon it almost all neglect and make light of the only means by which any partial insight can be obtained into it this is an analytic study of the most important department of psychology the laws of the influence of circumstances on character for however great and apparently ineradicable the moral and intellectual differences between men and women might be the evidence of their being natural differences could only be negative those only could be inferred to be natural which could not possibly be artificial the residuum after deducting every characteristic of either sex which can admit of being explained from education or external circumstances the profoundest knowledge of the laws of the formation of character is indispensable to entitle anyone even that there is any difference much more what the difference is between the two sexes considered as moral and rational beings and since no one as yet has that knowledge for there is hardly any subject which in proportion to its importance has been so little studied no one is thus far entitled to any positive opinion on the subject conjectures are all that can not be made conjectures more or less probable according as more or less authorized by such knowledge as we yet have of the laws of psychology as applied to the formation of character even the preliminary knowledge what the difference between the sexes now are apart from all question as to how they are made what they are is still in the crudest and most incomplete state medical practitioners and physiologists have ascertained to some extent the differences in bodily constitution and this is an important element to the psychologist but hardly any medical practitioner is a psychologist respecting the mental characteristics of women their observations are of no more worth than those of common men it is a subject on which nothing final can be known so long as those who alone can really know it women themselves have given but little testimony and that little mostly suborned it is easy to know stupid women stupidity is much the same all the world over a stupid person's notions and feelings may confidently be inferred from those which prevail in the circle by which the person is surrounded not so with those whose opinions and feelings are an emanation from their own nature and faculties it is only a man here and there who has any tolerable knowledge of the character even of the women of his own family I do not mean of their capabilities these nobody knows not even themselves because most of them have never been called out I mean there are actually existing thoughts and feelings many a man thinks he perfectly understands women because he has had relationships with several perhaps with many of them if he is a good observer and his experience extends to quality as well as quantity he may have learned something of one narrow department of their nature an important department no doubt but of all the rest of it few persons are generally more ignorant because there are few from whom it is so carefully hidden the most favorable case that a man can generally have for studying the character of a woman is that of his own wife for the opportunities are greater and the cases of complete sympathy not so unspeakably rare and in fact this is the source from which any knowledge worth having on the subject has I believe generally come but most men have not had the opportunity of studying in this way more than a single case accordingly one can in a favorable degree infer what a man's wife is like from his opinions about women in general to make even this one case yield any result the woman must be worth knowing and the man not only a competent judge but of a character so sympathetic in itself and so well adapted to hers that he can either read her mind by sympathetic intuition or has nothing in himself which makes her shy of disclosing it hardly anything I believe can be more rare than this conjunction it often happens that there is the most complete unity of feeling and community of interests as to all external things yet the one has as little admission into the internal life of the other as if they were common acquaintances even with true affection authority on the one side and subordination on the other with great confidence though nothing may be intentionally withheld much is not shown in the analogous relation of parent and child the corresponding phenomenon must have been in the observation of everyone as between father and son how many are the cases in which the father in spite of real affection on both sides obviously to all the world does not know or suspect parts of the son's character familiar to his companions and equals the truth is that the position of looking up to another is extremely unpropitious to complete sincerity and openness with him the fear of losing ground in his opinion or in his feelings is so strong that even in an upright character there is an unconscious tendency to show only the best side or the side which though not the best is that which looks to see and it may be confidently said that thorough knowledge of one another hardly ever exists but between two persons who besides being intimates are equals how much more true then must all this be when the one is not only under the authority of the other but has it inculcated on her as a duty to reckon everything else subordinate to his comfort and pleasure and to let him neither see nor feel anything coming from her except what is agreeable to him all these difficulties stand in the way of a man's obtaining any thorough knowledge even of the one woman whom alone in general he has sufficient opportunity of studying when we further consider that to understand one woman is not necessarily to understand any other woman that even if he could study many women of one rank or of one country he would not thereby understand women of other ranks or countries and even if he did they are still only the women of a single period of history we may safely assert that the knowledge which men can acquire of women even as they have been and are without reference to what they might be is wretchedly imperfect and superficial and always will be so until women themselves have told all that they have to tell and this time has not come nor will it come otherwise then gradually it is but of yesterday that women have either been qualified by literary accomplishments or permitted by society to tell anything to the general public as yet very few of them dare tell anything which men on whom their literary success depends are unwilling to hear let us remember in what manner up to a very recent time the expression even by a male author of uncustomary opinions or what are deemed eccentric feelings usually was and in some degree still is received and we may form some faint conception under what impediments a woman who is brought up to think custom and opinion her sovereign rule attempts to express in books anything drawn from the depths of her own nature the greatest woman who has left writings behind her is sufficient to give her an eminent rank in the literature of her country thought it necessary to prefix as a motto to her boldest work un homme qui bravait l'opinion une femme doit s'isumerre footnote title page of Madame Distal's Delphine footnote the greater part of what women write about women is mere sycophancy to men in the case of unmarried women much of it seems only intended to increase their chance of a husband many both married and unmarried overstep the mark and inculcate a servility beyond what is desired or relished by any man except the very vulgarist but this is not so often the case as even at a quite late period it still was literary women are becoming more free-spoken and more willing to express their real sentiments unfortunately in this country especially they are themselves such artificial products that their sentiments are compounded of a small element of individual observation and consciousness and a very large one of acquired associations this will be less and less the case but it will remain true to a great extent as long as social institutions do not admit the same free development of originality in women which is possible to men when that time comes and not before we shall see and not merely hear as much as it is necessary to know of the nature of women and the adaptation of other things to it I have dwelt so much on the difficulties which at present obstruct any real knowledge by men of the true nature of women because in this as in so many other things opinion copie intermaximus causus inopia est and there is little chance of reasonable thinking on the matter when people flatter themselves that they perfectly understand the subject of which most men know absolutely nothing and of which it is at present impossible that any man or all men taken together should have knowledge which can qualify them to lay down the law to women as to what is or is not their vocation happily no such knowledge is necessary for any practical purpose connected with the position of women in relation to society and life for according to all the principles involved in modern society the question rests with women themselves to be decided by their own experience and by the use of their own faculties there are no means of finding what either one person or many can do but by trying and no means by which anyone else can discover for them what it is for their happiness to do or leave undone one thing we may be certain of that what is contrary to women's nature to do they never will be made to do by simply giving their nature free play the anxiety of mankind to interfere in behalf of nature for fear less nature should not succeed in affecting its purpose is an altogether unnecessary solicitude what women by nature cannot do it is quite superfluous to forbid them from doing what they can do but not so well as the men who are their competitors competition suffices to exclude from them since nobody asks for protective duties and bounties in favor of women it is only asked that the present bounties and protective duties in favor of men should be recalled if women have a greater natural inclination for some things than for others there is no need of laws or social inculcation to make the majority of them do the former in preference to the latter whatever women's services are most wanted for the free play of competition will hold out the strongest inducements to them to undertake and as the words imply they are most wanted for the things for which they are most fit by the apportionment of which to them the collective faculties of the two sexes can be applied on the whole with the greatest sum of valuable result the general opinion of men is supposed to be that the natural vocation of a woman is that of a wife and mother I say is supposed to be because judging from acts from the whole of the present constitution of society one might infer that their opinion was the direct contrary they might be supposed to think that the alleged natural vocation of women was of all things the most repugnant to their nature it is much that if they are free to do anything else if any other means of living or occupation of their time and faculties is open which has any chance of appearing desirable to them there will not be enough of them who will be willing to accept the conditions said to be natural to them if this is the real opinion of men in general it would be well that it should be spoken out I should like to hear somebody openly about this it is necessary to society that women should marry and produce children they will not do so unless they are compelled therefore it is necessary to compel them the merits of the case would then be clearly defined it would be exactly that of the slave holders of south carolina and louisiana it is necessary that cotton and sugar should be grown white men cannot produce them the wages which we choose to give ergo they must be compelled an illustration still closer to the point is that of impressment sailors must absolutely be had to defend the country it often happens that they will not voluntarily enlist therefore there must be the power of forcing them how often has this logic been used and but for one flying it without doubt would have been successful up to this day but it is open to the retort first pay the sailors the honest value of their labor when you have made it as well worth their while to serve you as to work for other employers you will have no more difficulty than others have in obtaining their services to this there is no logical example except I will not and as people are now not only ashamed but are not desirous of the laborer of his hire impressment is no longer advocated those who attempt to force women into marriage by closing all other doors against them lay themselves open to a similar retort if they mean what they say their opinion must evidently be that men do not render the married condition so desirable to women as to induce them to accept it for its own recommendations it is not a sign of one's thinking that one offers very attractive when one allows only Hobson's choice that or none and here I believe is the clue to the feelings of those men who have a real antipathy to the equal freedom of women I believe they are afraid not lest women should be unwilling to marry for I do not think that anyone in reality has that apprehension but lest they should insist that marriage should be on equal conditions lest all women of spirit and capacity should prefer doing almost anything else not in their own eyes degrading rather than marry when marrying is giving themselves a master and a master too of all their earthly possessions and truly if this consequence were necessarily incident to marriage I think that the apprehension would be very well founded I agree in thinking it probable that few women capable of anything else would unless under an irresistible entrainment rendering them for the time insensible to anything but itself choose such a lot when any other means were open to them of filling a conventionally honourable place in life and if men are determined that the law of marriage shall be a law of despotism they are quite right in point of mere policy in leaving to women only Hobson's choice but in that case all that has been done in the modern world to relax the chains on the minds of women has been a mistake they never should have been allowed to receive a literary education women who read much more women who write are in the existing constitution of things a contradiction and a disturbing element and it was wrong to bring women up with any requirements but those of an autolisk domestic servant end of chapter one part three part one of chapter two of the subjection of women this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer visit LibriVox.org this reading by Carl Manchester 2008 the subjection of women by John Stuart Mill chapter two it will be well to commence the detailed discussion of the subject by the particular branch of it to which the course of our observations has led us the conditions which the laws of this and all other countries are next to the marriage contract marriage being the destination appointed by society for women the prospect they are brought up to and the object which it is intended should be sought by all of them except those who are too little attractive to be chosen by any man as his companion one might have supposed that everything would have been done to make this condition as eligible to them as possible that they might have no cause to regret being denied the option of any other society however both in this and at first in all other cases has preferred to attain its object by fowl rather than fair means but this is the only case in which it has substantially persisted in them even to the present day originally women were taken by force or regularly sold by their father to the husband until a late period in European history the father had the power to dispose of his daughter in marriage at his own will and pleasure without any regard to hers the church indeed was so far faithful to a better morality as to require a formal yes from the woman at the marriage ceremony but there was nothing to show that the consent was other than compulsory and it was practically impossible for the girl to refuse compliance if the father persevered except perhaps when she might obtain the protection of religion by a determined resolution to take monastic vows after marriage the man had anciently but this was anterior to Christianity the man had a life and death over his wife she could invoke no law against him he was her sole tribunal and law for a long time he could repudiate her but she had no corresponding power in regard to him by the old laws of England the husband was called the lord of the wife he was literally regarded as her sovereign in as much that the murder of a man by his wife was called treason as distinguished from high treason and was more cruelly avenged than was usually the case with high treason for the penalty was burning to death because these various enormities have fallen into disuse for most of them were never formally abolished or not until they had long ceased to be practised men suppose that all is now as it should be in regard to the marriage contract and we are continually told that civilization and Christianity have restored to the woman her just rights meanwhile the wife is the actual bond servant of her husband no less so as far as legal obligation goes than slaves commonly so called she vows a life long obedience to him at the altar and is held to it all through her life by law casuists may say that the obligation of obedience stops short of participation in crime it certainly extends to everything else she can do no act whatever but by his permission at least tacit she can acquire no property but for him the instant it becomes hers even if by inheritance it becomes ipso facto his in this respect the wife's position under the common law of England is worse than that of slaves in the laws of many other countries by the Roman law for example a slave might have his peculiar which to a certain extent the law guaranteed to him for his exclusive use the higher classes in this country have given an analogous advantage to their women through special contracts setting aside the law by conditions of pin money etc since parental feeling being stronger with fathers than the class of feeling of their own sex a father generally prefers his own daughter to a son-in-law who is a stranger to him by means of settlements the rich usually contrive to withdraw the whole or part of the inherited property of the wife from the absolute control of the husband but they do not succeed in keeping it under her own control the utmost they can do only prevents the husband from squandering it at the same time debarring the rightful owner from its use the property itself is out of the reach of both and as to the income derived from it the form of settlement most favourable to the wife that called to her separate use only precludes the husband from receiving it instead of her it must pass through her hands but if he takes it from her by personal violence as soon as she receives it he can neither be punished nor compelled to restitution this is the amount of the protection which under the laws of this country the most powerful nobleman can give to his own daughter as respects her husband in the immense majority of cases there is no settlement and the absorption of all rights all property as well as all freedom of action is complete the two are called one person in law for the purpose of inferring that whatever is hers is his but the parallel inference is never drawn that whatever is his is hers the maxim is not applied against the man except to make him responsible to third parties for her acts as a master is for the acts of his slaves or of his cattle I am far from pretending that wives are in general no better treated than slaves but no slave is a slave to the same lengths and in so fuller sense of the word as a wife is hardly any slave except one immediately attached to the master's person is a slave at all hours and all minutes in general he has like a soldier his fixed task and when it is done or when he is off duty he disposes within certain limits of his own time and has a family life into which the master rarely intrudes Uncle Tom under his first master takes his own life in his cabin almost as much as any man whose work takes him away from his home is able to have in his own family but it cannot be so with the wife above all a female slave has in Christian countries and admitted right and is considered under a moral obligation to refuse her master the last familiarity not so the wife however brutal a tyrant she may unfortunately be chained to though she may know that he hates her though it may be his daily pleasure to torture her and though she may feel it impossible not to loathe him he can claim from her and enforce the lowest degradation of a human being that of being made the instrument of an animal function contrary to her inclinations while she is held in the worst description of slavery as to her own person what is her position in regard to the children in whom she and her master have a joint interest they are by law his children he alone has any legal rights over them not one act can she do towards or in relation to them except by delegation from him even after he is dead she is not their legal guardian unless he by will has made her so he could even send them away from her and deprive her of the means of seeing or corresponding with them until this power was in some degree restricted by sergeant Talford's act this is her legal state and from this state she has no means of withdrawing herself if she leaves her husband she can take nothing with her neither her children nor anything which is rightfully her own if he chooses he can compel her to return by law or by physical force or he may content himself with seizing for his own use anything which she may earn or which may be given to her by her relations it is only legal separation by a decree of a court of justice which entitles her to live apart without being forced back into the custody of an exasperated jailer or which empowers her to apply any earnings to her own use without fear that a man whom perhaps she has not seen for twenty years will pounce upon her someday and carry it all off this legal separation until lately the courts of justice would only give at an expense which made it inaccessible to anyone out of the higher ranks even now it is only given in cases of desertion or of the extreme of cruelty and yet complaints are made every day that it is granted too easily surely if a woman is denied any lot in life but that of being the personal body servant of a despot and is dependent for everything upon the chance of finding one who may be disposed to make a favourite of her instead of merely a drudge it is a very cruel aggravation of her fate that she should be allowed to try this chance only once the natural sequel and corollary from this state of things would be that since her all in life depends upon obtaining a good master she should be allowed she should be allowed to change again and again until she finds one I am not saying that she ought to be allowed this privilege that is a totally different consideration the question of divorce in the sense involving liberty of remarriage is one into which it is foreign to my purpose to enter all I now say is that to those whom nothing but servitude is allowed the free choice of servitude is the only though a most insufficient alleviation its refusal completes the assimilation of the wife to the slave and the slave under not the mildest form of slavery for in some slave codes the slave could under certain circumstances of ill usage legally compel the master to sell him but no amount of ill usage without adultery super added will in England free a wife from her tormentor I have no desire to exaggerate nor does the case stand in any need of exaggeration I have described the wife's legal position not her actual treatment the laws of most countries are far worse than the people who execute them and many of them are only able to remain laws by being seldom or never carried into effect if married life were all that it might be expected to be looking to the laws alone society would be a hell upon earth happily there are both feelings and interests which in many men exclude and in most greatly temper the impulses and propensities which lead to tyranny and of those feelings the tie which connects a man with his wife affords in a normal state of things in comparably the strongest example the only tie which at all approaches to it that between him and his children tends in all save exceptional cases to strengthen instead of conflicting with the first because this is true because men in general do not inflict nor women suffer all the misery which could be inflicted and suffered if the full power of tyranny with which the man is legally invested were acted on the defenders of the existing form of the institution think that all its authority is justified and that any complaint is merely quarreling with the evil which is the price paid for every great good but the mitigations in practice which are compatible with maintaining in full legal force this or any other kind of tyranny instead of being an apology for despotism only serve to prove what power human nature possesses of reacting against the vilest institutions and with what vitality the seeds of good as well as those of evil in human character diffuse and propagate themselves not a word can be said for despotism in the family which cannot be said for political despotism every absolute king does not sit at his window to enjoy the groans of his tortured subjects nor strips them of their last rag and turns them out to shiver in the road the despotism of Louis the 16th was not the despotism of Philippe Lebel or of Nadia Char or of Caligula but it was bad enough to justify the French Revolution and to palliate even its horrors if an appeal be made to the intense attachments which exist between wives and their husbands exactly as much may be said of domestic slavery it was quite an ordinary fact in Greece and Rome for slaves to submit to death rather than betray their masters in the prescriptions of the Roman Civil Wars it was remarked that wives and slaves were heroically faithful sons very commonly treacherous yet we know how cruelly many Romans treated their slaves but in truth these intense individual feelings nowhere rise to such a luxuriant height as under the most atrocious institutions it is part of the irony of life that the strongest feelings of devoted gratitude of which human nature seems to be susceptible are called forth in human beings towards those who having the power entirely to crush their earthly existence voluntarily refrain from using that power how great a place in most men this sentiment fills even in religious devotion it would be cruel to inquire we daily see how much their gratitude to heaven appears to be stimulated by the contemplation of fellow creatures to whom God has not been so merciful as he has to themselves whether the institution to be defended is slavery political absolutism or the absolutism of the head of a family we are always expected to judge of it from its best instances and we are presented with pictures of loving exercise of authority on one side loving submission to it on the other superior wisdom ordering all things for the greatest good of the dependents and surrounded by their smiles and benedictions all this would be very much to the purpose if anyone pretended that there are no such things as good men who doubts that there may be a great goodness and great happiness and great affection under the absolute government of a good man meanwhile laws and institutions require to be adapted not to good men but to bad marriage is not an institution designed for a select few men are not required as a preliminary to the marriage ceremony to prove by testimonials that they are fit to be trusted with the exercise of absolute power the tie of affection and obligation to a wife and children is very strong with those whose general social feelings are strong and with many who are little sensible to any of the social ties but there are all degrees of sensibility and insensibility to it as there are all grades of goodness and wickedness in men down to those whom no ties will bind and on whom society has no action but through its ultimate ratio the penalties of the law in every grade of this descending scale are men to whom are committed to the legal powers of a husband the vilest malefactor has some wretched woman tied to him against whom he can commit any atrocity except killing her and if tolerably cautious can do that without much danger of the legal penalty and how many thousands are there within the lowest classes in every country who without being in a legal sense malefactors in any other respect because in every other quarter their aggressions meet with resistance indulge the utmost habitual excesses of bodily violence towards the unhappy wife who alone, at least of grown persons can neither repel nor escape from their brutality and towards whom the excess of dependence inspires their mean and savage natures not with a generous forbearance and a point of honor to behave well to the one whose lot in life is trusted entirely to their kindness but on the contrary with the notion that the law has delivered her to them as their thing to be used at their pleasure and that they are not expected to practice the consideration towards her which is required from them towards everybody else the law which till lately left even these atrocious extremes of domestic oppression practically unpunished as within these few years made some feeble attempt to repress them but its attempts have done little and cannot be expected to do much because it is contrary to reason and experience to suppose that there can be any real check to brutality consistent with leaving the victim still in the power of the executioner until a conviction for personal violence or at all events a repetition of it after a first conviction the attempt to repress the woman ipso facto to a divorce or at least to a judicial separation the attempt to repress these quote aggravated assaults end quote by legal penalties will break down for want of a prosecutor or for want of a witness when we consider how vast is the number of men in any great country who are little higher than brutes and that this never prevents them from going through the law of marriage to obtain a victim the breadth and depth of human misery caused in this shape alone by the abuse of the institution swells to something appalling yet these are only the extreme cases they are the lowest but there is a sad succession of depth after depth before reaching them in domestic as in political tyranny absolute monsters chiefly illustrates the institution by showing that there is scarcely any horror which may not occur under it if the despot pleases and thus setting in a strong light what must be the terrible frequency of things only a little less atrocious absolute fiends are as rare as angels perhaps rarer ferocious savages with occasional touches of humanity are however very frequent and in the wide interval which separates these from any worthy representatives of the human species how many are the forms and gradations of animalism and selfishness often under an outward varnish of civilization and even cultivation living at peace with the law maintaining a credible appearance to all who are not under their power yet sufficient often to make the lives of all who are so atorment and a burden to them it would be tiresome to repeat the common places about the unfitness of men in general for power which after the political discussions of centuries everyone knows by heart were it not that hardly anyone thinks of applying these maxims to the case in which above all others they are applicable that of power not placed in the hands of a man here and there but offered to every adult male down to the sexist and most ferocious it is not because a man is not known to have broken any of the ten commandments or because he maintains a respectable character in his dealings with those whom he cannot compel to have intercourse with him or because he does not fly out into violent burst of ill temper against those who are not obliged to bear with him that it is possible to surmise of what sort his conduct will be of home even the commonest men reserve the violent the sulky the undisguisedly selfish side of their character for those who have no power to withstand it the relation of superiors to dependence is the nursery of these vices of character which wherever else they exist are an overflowing from that source a man who is morose or violent to his equals is surely one who has lived among inferiors whom he could frighten or worry into submission if the family in its best forms is as it is often said to be a school of sympathy tenderness and loving forgetfulness of self it is still often as respects its chief a school of willfulness overbearingness unbounded selfish indulgence and a double died and idealized selfishness of which sacrifice itself is only a particular form the care for the wife and children being only care for them as parts of the man's own interests and belongings and their individual happiness being emoliated in every shape to his smallest preferences what better is to be looked for under the existing form of the institution we know that the bad propensities of human nature are only kept within bounds when they are allowed to scope for their indulgence we know that from impulse and habit when not from deliberate purpose almost everyone to whom others yield goes on encroaching upon them until a point is reached at which they are compelled to resist such being the common tendency of human nature the almost unlimited power which presents social institutions give to the man over at least one human being the one with whom he resides and whom he has always present this power seeks out and evokes the latent germs of selfishness in the remotest corners of his nature fans its faintest sparks and smouldering embers offers to him a license for the indulgence of those points of his original character which in all other relations he would have found it necessary to repress and conceal and the repression of which would in time have become a second nature I know that there is another side to the question I grant that the wife if she cannot effectively resist can at least retaliate she too can make the man's life extremely uncomfortable and by that power is able to carry many points which he ought and many which he ought not to prevail in but this instrument of self-protection which may be called the power of the scold or the shrewish sanction has the fatal defect that it avails most against the least tyrannical superiors and in favour of the least deserving dependents it is the weapon of irritable and self-willed women of those who would make the worst use of power if they themselves had it and who generally turn this power to a bad use the amiable cannot use such an instrument intended disdain it and on the other hand the husbands against whom it is used most effectively are the gentler and more inoffensive those who cannot be induced even by provocation to resort to any very harsh exercise of authority the wife's power of being disagreeable generally only establishes a counter tyranny and makes victims in their turn chiefly of those husbands who are least inclined to be tyrants what is it then which really tempers the corrupting effects of the power and makes it compatible with such amount of good as we actually see mere feminine blandishments though of great effect in individual instances have very little effect in modifying the general tendencies of the situation for their power only lasts while the woman is young and attractive often only while her charm is new and not dimmed by familiarity and on many men they have not much influence at any time the real mitigating causes are the personal affection which is the growth of time in so far as the man's nature is susceptible of it and the woman's character sufficiently congenial with his to excite it their common interests as regard the children and their general community of interest as concerns third persons which however there are very great limitations the real importance of the wife to his daily comforts and enjoyments and the value he consequently attaches to her on his personal account which in a man capable of feeling for others lays the foundations of caring for her on her own and lastly the influence naturally acquired over almost all human beings by those near to their persons if not actually disagreeable to them who both by their direct entreaties and by the inseparable contagion of their feelings and dispositions are often able and less counteracted by some equally strong personal influence to obtain a degree of command over the conduct of the superior altogether excessive and unreasonable through these various means the wife frequently exercises even too much power over the man she is able to affect his conduct in things in which she may not be qualified to influence it for good in which her influence may be not only unenlightened but employed on the morally wrong side and in which he would act better if left to his own prompting but neither in the affairs of families nor in those of states is power a compensation for the loss of freedom her power often gives her what she has no right to but does not enable her to assert her own rights a sultan's favorite slave has slaves under her over whom she tyrannizes but the desirable thing would be that she should neither have slaves nor be a slave by entirely sinking her own existence in her husband by having no will or persuading him that she has no will but his in anything at which regards their joint relation and by making it the business of her life to work upon his sentiments a wife may gratify herself by influencing and very probably perverting his conduct in those of his external relations which she has never qualified herself to judge of or in which she is herself wholly influenced by some personal or other partiality or prejudice accordingly as things are now those who act most kindly to their wives are quite often made worse as better by the wife's influence in respect to all interests extending beyond the family she is taught that she has no business with things out of that sphere and accordingly she seldom has any honest and conscientious opinion on them and therefore hardly ever meddles with them for any legitimate purpose but generally for an interested one she neither knows nor cares which is the right side in politics but she knows what will bring in money or invitations give her husband a title her son a place or her daughter a good marriage End of Part 1 of Chapter 2