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John Stuart Mill’s and Harriet Taylor’s Writings on Women
This List Is By:
Liberty Fund Staff
Liberty Fund, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana
The University of Toronto edition of the Collected Works of J.S. Mill did not gather all of Mill’s writings on women into one volume (as they did with his writings on India). On this page we have done so, with links to the online edition. They are in order of publication or writing.
Source: The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. J.M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963-1991), 33 vols. Editorial committee: J.M. Robinson, General Editor, Harold Bohme, J.C. Cairns, J.B. Conacher, D.P. Dryer, Marion Filipiuk, Frances Halpenny, Samuel Hollander, R.F. McRae, Ian Montagnes, Ann P. Robson, F.E. Sparshott.
Copyright information: The online edition of the Collected Works is published under licence from the copyright holder, The University of Toronto Press. ©2006 The University of Toronto Press. All rights reserved. No part of this material may be reproduced in any form or medium without the permission of The University of Toronto Press.
Fair use statement: This material is put online to further the educational goals of Liberty Fund, Inc. Unless otherwise stated in the Copyright Information section above, this material may be used freely for educational and academic purposes. It may not be used in any way for profit.
See also: John Stuart Mill (1803-1873) and Harriet Taylor (1807-1858).
Women Authors on Liberty and the Rights of Women.
1: JSM, THE DEBATE ON THE PETITION OF MARY ANN CARLILE MORNING CHRONICLE, 9 MAY, 1823
John Stuart Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XXII - Newspaper Writings December 1822 - July 1831 Part I, ed. Ann P. Robson and John M. Robson, Introduction by Ann P. Robson and John M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986). Chapter: 9.: THE DEBATE ON THE PETITION OF MARY ANN CARLILE MORNING CHRONICLE, 9 MAY, 1823, P. 3
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The online edition of the Collected Works is published under licence from the copyright holder, The University of Toronto Press. ©2006 The University of Toronto Press. All rights reserved. No part of this material may be reproduced in any form or medium without the permission of The University of Toronto Press.
9.
THE DEBATE ON THE PETITION OF MARY ANN CARLILE
MORNING CHRONICLE, 9 MAY, 1823, P. 3Mill’s article is associated by him in the Autobiography with his letters on Free Discussion (Nos. 5-7): “a paper which I wrote soon after [them] on the same subject, à propos of a debate in the House of Commons, was inserted as a leading article” (CW, Vol. I, p. 91). The occasion was the debate, initiated by Joseph Hume (1777-1855), Radical M.P. and lifelong friend of James Mill, in speeches of 26 Mar., presenting the Petition of Mary Ann Carlile for Release from Imprisonment (PD, n.s., Vol. 8, cols. 709-16), and of 8 May, presenting the Petition of Richard Carlile Complaining of the Seizure of His Property (ibid., Vol. 9, cols. 114-15). Richard Carlile complained that, as a result of the seizure of his goods, he was unable to pay his fine and was subject to perpetual imprisonment. Mary Ann Carlile (b. 1794), his sister, on the instigation of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, had been sentenced to one year’s imprisonment and a fine of £500 for selling, in her brother’s shop, a pamphlet, An Appendix to the Theological Works of Thomas Paine. Mill’s first leading article, unheaded and anonymous as they are in all such journals, is described in his bibliography as “Observations on the debate concerning the petition of Mary Ann Carlile, which appeared as a leading article in the Chronicle of [9th May] 1823”
(MacMinn, p. 2).
we are not of the number of those who have no praise but for the times that are past. We think, on the contrary, the present time, on the whole, better than any former time. There are, for instance, unquestionably a much greater number of intelligent and enlightened men in this country now than it has ever contained at any former period. But while we willingly admit the general superiority of the age, we are not blind to its defects. There is, in particular, one feature belonging to it which we cannot contemplate with satisfaction. We allude to the mental cowardice which prevents men from giving expression to their conviction, and the insincerity which leads them to express what they do not think. A certain assembly has fully its share of this want of singleness of heart and pusillanimity. No man who knows any thing of the world can listen for any length of time to the language used in the assembly in question, without perceiving that the fear of offending in this quarter, and the desire to please in that, rather than conscientious conviction, too often actuates the speakers. There are certainly some distinguished exceptions, who scorn to sacrifice on the altar of timidity or machiavelism, and of these we think Mr. Hume unquestionably one. The unshrinking firmness with which he grapples with the subjects that come before him, without turning to the right hand or the left, has indeed not been lost, either on the country or on the House. We doubt, for instance, whether another Member of any standing in the House could have been found to present and enforce the Petition from Mary Ann Carlile which he brought forward some weeks ago, though the grounds on which he supported that Petition were such as to make a strong impression on the House, and a still stronger on the country. But taking counsel only from his own conscience, being actuated by a sincere desire to rescue that religion of which we deem him a sincere believer and friend, from the odium which false or less judicious friends were throwing on it, and listening to the counsel of the most eminent advocates of Christianity, the most illustrious ornaments of the Church of England, when its higher places were not deemed the almost exclusive portion of the Nobility, he hesitated not to raise his voice in favour of equal law and free discussion, which were wounded in the case of this individual. The result proved, that it was a mere phantom, at which others had taken fright, and the advocates of persecution and of partiality were found unequal to a contest which only exposed them to ridicule.
Last night he presented a Petition from Richard Carlile, an individual whom an injudicious activity has of late brought so much into notice. Alluding to the prejudices against this man, he stated as the result of his inquiries respecting him, that “he was one of the best moral characters in England,” that “his religious opinion might differ from that of some other persons, but that that did not affect his moral character; and he would dare any one to contradict him, when he said that as a husband, as a father, as head of a family, and as a neighbour, Mr. Carlile might challenge calumny itself.”1 This was cheered by the Ministerial Benches, not probably because they who cheered knew whether Carlile was a moral or immoral man, but because they thought Mr. Hume had got on ticklish ground, by allowing the probability of a notorious infidel being moral. But we are not to hold religion in less esteem, when we find that faith does not uniformly produce good works, any more than we are to deem it unnecessary to the support of morality, because we find occasionally moral individuals without a due sense of religion. “An unbeliever [says Bishop Sanderson], awed sometimes by the law of natural conscience, may manifest much simplicity and integrity of heart; and the true child of God, swayed sometimes with the law of sinful concupiscence, may bewray much foul hypocrisie and infidelity.”2 It is only injuring the cause of religion to attribute more either to it, or to the absence of it, than is consistent with the truth; and the most respectable Christian writers, though they justly observe that religion and honesty are most frequently found together, are ready at the same time to allow that they are sometimes found separate. We never for instance heard it questioned that Mr. Owen of New Lanark is a very moral man.3 On the other hand, we have doubts whether M. de Chateaubriand was a much more honest man when he brought water from the River Jordan for the baptism of the King of Rome, or is so even now, than when “shocked at the abuse of some of the Institutions of Christianity and at the vices of some of its professors, he suffered himself to be misled by sophistry and gave way to declamation.”4
It is curious to see what very different notions have prevailed on this subject within a comparatively short period. Addison thought Catholicism worse than infidelity, because the former was incompatible with morality, while the latter was not.5 Bishop Sanderson seemed to think the Atheists, whom he supposed to be more numerous than either Papists or Sectaries, principally dangerous from the possibility of their joining the Catholics.
Neither, [says he,] will the supposed (and I fear truly supposed) greater number of Atheists, than either Papists or Sectaries, be any hinderance to the Papists for finally prevailing. Because it is not for the interest of the Atheist and his religion (pardon the boldness of the catachresis) to engage either for or against any side farther than a jeer, but to let them fight it out, keep himself quiet till they have done, and then clap in with him that getteth the day. He that is of no religion can make a shift to be of any rather than suffer. And the Atheist, though he be in truth and in heart neither Protestant nor Papist, nor any thing else; yet can he be in face and outward comportment either Protestant or Papist, or any thing else (Jew or Turk, if need be) as will best serve his present turn.6
If Catholicism were incompatible with morality, we should be rather in an awkward plight in the present day, for notwithstanding the aid which infidelity has received of late by the publicity given to it at the expence of the Constitutional Association,7 we suspect (so much has Atheism gone down since the worthy Bishop’s time), that the Atheists are now less numerous than even the Priests of the Catholics, leaving out of the account the flocks. We say nothing of the number of the other sectaries, as this is a much sorer point than that of the number of Atheists, from which we believe no Church Establishment will ever be in much danger.
The question of last night, however, was not so much free discussion itself, as the injustice which had been committed under a sentence levelled against it. On the subject of the severity which had been displayed, Mr. Lennard forcibly observed “that the supporters of the Six Acts, having failed in their efforts to procure the punishment of perpetual banishment, as was contemplated, had still continued through the agency of the Judges to supply that deficiency by sentences which amounted to perpetual imprisonment.”8 Mr. Denman, indeed, offered an apology for the Judges that “had they been aware of the inability of Mr. Carlile to pay the fine at the time judgment was passed, he was sure they never would have passed it.”9 But this apology does not, at all events, apply to the case of Mary Ann Carlile, with respect to whose means to pay the fine imposed on her there never could be the smallest doubt.
Religion disclaims those who would advance her cause by the mean expedients to which Mr. Hume alluded last night. Let good ends be promoted by fair and upright means. The equal administration of law is due to the Infidel as well as to the Christian. Give not to the Infidel any advantage from your disgracing a good cause by disreputable means. In the words of Bishop Warburton, “Can any but an enthusiast believe that he may use guile to promote the glory of God—the wisdom from above is without partiality and without hypocrisy. Partiality consists in dispensing an unequal measure in our transactions with others: hypocrisy in attempting to cover that unequal measure by prevarication and false pretences.”10 And in the words of a man less learned, perhaps, but not less upright than Bishop Warburton, we mean the worthy John Wesley, “no man living is authorised to break or dispensed with in breaking any law of morality.”11
The discussions have done, and will do, good, and we trust Mr. Hume will return to the subject. The Courts of Law must profit by them. “Shame, albeit the daughter of sinne, becomes sometimes the mother of conversion; and when all good motions else seem mere strangers, this one is admitted as a profitable, though unwelcome guest.”12
[1 ]Hume, speech of 8 May, 1823, col. 114.
[2 ]Robert Sanderson (1587-1663), Bishop of Lincoln, “The Sixth Sermon ad Populum” (1627), in Fourteen Sermons Heretofore Preached (London: Seile, 1657), p. 342.
[3 ]Robert Owen (1771-1858), an acquaintance of James Mill’s, socialist and free-thinker, whose experiments in improving the environment and providing incentives for his employees at his mills in New Lanark were increasingly favourably publicized.
[4 ]The source of the quotation has not been identified. François René, vicomte de Chateaubriand (1768-1848), writer and statesman, in 1811 provided baptismal water for the christening of François Charles Joseph Bonaparte (Napoleon II), King of Rome (1811-32). As Minister of Foreign Affairs, Chateaubriand had recently been under attack in the English press for his defence of the French intervention in Spain. See The Times, 28 Feb., pp. 2-3, and 16 Apr., p. 4; and Morning Chronicle, 1 Mar., p. 3 (where there is reference to the episode of the Jordan water), and 5 May, p. 3.
[5 ]Joseph Addison (1672-1719), essayist and poet; see The Spectator, No. 459 (16 Aug., 1712), pp. 1-2.
[6 ]Sanderson, Fourteen Sermons, Preface, pp. xxxviii-xxxix.
[7 ]The Constitutional Association for Opposing the Progress of Disloyal and Seditious Principles, founded in January 1821, was supported by many aristocrats, including Henry Pelham Clinton, Duke of Newcastle; Sir John Sewell was its President. Operating virtually as a secret society, it instituted proceedings for libel (against Hone and Carlile, for instance); itself accused of illegality, it dissolved before the end of 1821.
[8 ]Thomas Barrett Lennard (1788-1865), M.P. for Ipswich, Speech on the Petition of Richard Carlile (8 May, 1823), PD, n.s., Vol. 9, col. 116. The “Six Acts” are 60 George III & 1 George IV, cc. 1, 2, 4, 6, 8, and 9 (1819).
[9 ]Thomas Denman (1779-1854), M.P. for Nottingham (later Lord Chief Justice), Speech on the Petition of Richard Carlile, PD, n.s., Vol. 9, col. 116.
[10 ]Adapted from William Warburton, The Doctrine of Grace (1762), in Works, 12 vols. (London: Cadell and Davies, 1811), Vol. VIII, pp. 382, 383.
[11 ]John Wesley (1703-91), founder of Methodism, A Letter to the Right Reverend the Lord Bishop of Gloucester (London: n.p., 1763), p. 38.
[12 ]This quotation has not been located.
2: JSM, ON MARRIAGE 1832–33
John Stuart Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XXI - Essays on Equality, Law, and Education, ed. John M. Robson, Introduction by Stefan Collini (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984). Chapter: ON MARRIAGE 1832–33?
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The online edition of the Collected Works is published under licence from the copyright holder, The University of Toronto Press. ©2006 The University of Toronto Press. All rights reserved. No part of this material may be reproduced in any form or medium without the permission of The University of Toronto Press.
ON MARRIAGE
1832–33?EDITOR’S NOTE
Holograph MS, Mill-Taylor Collection, British Library of Political and Economic Science, London School of Economics. Untitled and unsigned, but in Mill’s hand Dated on physical evidence. Not published (and therefore not in Mill’s bibliography). For a description of the MS, and comment on it, see xxx-xxxi and lviii-lx above.
On Marriage
she to whom my life is devoted has wished for a written exposition of my opinions on the subject which, of all connected with human Institutions, is nearest to her happiness. Such as that exposition can be made without her to suggest and to decide, it is given in these pages: she, herself, has not refused to put into writing for me, what she has thought and felt on the same subject, and there I shall be taught all perhaps which I have, and certainly all which I have not, found out for myself. In the investigation of truth as in all else, “it is not good for man to be alone.”[*] And more than all, in what concerns the relations of Man with Woman, the law which is to be observed by both should surely be made by both; not, as hitherto, by the stronger only.
How easy would it be for either me or you, to resolve this question for ourselves alone! Its difficulties, for difficulties it has, are such as obstruct the avenues of all great questions which are to be decided for mankind at large, and therefore not for natures resembling each other, but for natures or at least characters tending to all the points of the moral compass. All popular morality is as I once said to you a compromise among conflicting natures, each renouncing a certain portion of what its own desires call for, in order to avoid the evils of a perpetual warfare with all the rest. That is the best popular morality, which attains this general pacification with the least sacrifice of the happiness of the higher natures, who are the greatest, indeed the only real, sufferers by the compromise: for they are called upon to give up what would really make them happy; while others are commonly required only to restrain desires the gratification of which would bring no real happiness. In the adjustment, moreover, of the compromise, the higher natures count only in proportion to their number, how small! or to the number of those whom they can influence: while the conditions of the compromise weigh heavily upon them in the ratio of their greater capacity of happiness, and its natural consequence, their keener sense of want and disappointment when the degree of happiness which they know would fall to their lot but for untoward external circumstances, is denied them.
By the higher natures I mean those characters who from the combination of natural and acquired advantages, have the greatest capacity of feeling happiness, and of bestowing it. Of bestowing it in two ways: as being beautiful to contemplate, and therefore the natural objects of admiration and love; and also as being fitted, and induced, by their qualities of mind and heart, to promote by their actions, and by all that depends upon their will, the greatest possible happiness of all who are within the sphere of their influence.
>Folio 1r of “On Marriage”
British Library of Political and Economic Science
If all persons were like these, or even would be guided by these, morality might be very different from what it must now be; or rather it would not exist at all as morality, since morality and inclination would coincide. If all resembled you, my lovely friend, it would be idle to prescribe rules for them. By following their own impulses under the guidance of their own judgment, they would find more happiness, and would confer more, than by obeying any moral principles or maxims whatever; since these cannot possibly be adapted beforehand to every peculiarity of circumstance which can be taken into account by a sound and vigorous intellect worked by a strong will, and guided by what Carlyle calls “an open loving heart.”[*] Where there exists a genuine and strong desire to do that which is most for the happiness of all, general rules are merely aids to prudence, in the choice of means; not peremptory obligations. Let but the desires be right, and the “imagination lofty and refined”:[†] and provided there be disdain of all false seeming, “to the pure all things are pure.”[‡]
It is easy enough to settle the moral bearings of our question upon such characters. The highest natures are of course impassioned natures; to such, marriage is but one continued act of self-sacrifice where strong affection is not, every tie therefore which restrains them from seeking out and uniting themselves with some one whom they can perfectly love, is a yoke to which they cannot be subjected without oppression: and to such a person when found, they would naturally, superstition apart, scorn to be united by any other tie than free and voluntary choice. If such natures have been healthily developed in other respects, they will have all other good and worthy feelings strong enough to prevent them from pursuing this happiness at the expense of greater suffering to others, and that is the limit of the forbearance which morality ought in such a case to enjoin.
But will the morality which suits the highest natures, in this matter, be also best for all inferior natures? My conviction is, that it will, but this can be only a happy accident. All the difficulties of morality in any of its branches, grow out of the conflict which continually arises between the highest morality and even the best popular morality which the degree of developement yet attained by average human nature, will allow to exist.
If all, or even most persons, in the choice of a companion of the other sex, were led by any real aspiration towards, or sense of, the happiness which such companionship in its best shape is capable of giving to the best natures, there would never have been any reason why law or opinion should have set any limits to the most unbounded freedom of uniting and separating: nor is it probable that popular morality would ever, in a civilized or refined people, have imposed any restraint upon that freedom. But, as I once said to you, the law of marriage as it now exists, has been made by sensualists, and for sensualists, and to bind sensualists. The aim and purpose of that law is either to tie up the sense, in the hope by so doing, of tying up the soul also, or else to tie up the sense because the soul is not cared about at all. Such purposes never could have entered into the minds of any to whom nature had given souls capable of the higher degrees of happiness: nor could such a law ever have existed but among persons to whose natures it was in some degree congenial, and therefore more suitable than at first sight may be supposed by those whose natures are widely different.
There can, I think, be no doubt that for a long time the indissolubility of marriage acted powerfully to elevate the social position of women. The state of things to which in almost all countries it succeeded, was one in which the power of repudiation existed on one side but not on both: in which the stronger might cast away the weaker, but the weaker could not fly from the yoke of the stronger. To a woman of an impassioned character, the difference between this and what now exists, is not worth much; for she would wish to be repudiated, rather than to remain united only because she could not be got rid of. But the aspirations of most women are less high. They would wish to retain any bond of union they have ever had with a man to whom they do not prefer any other, and for whom they have that inferior kind of affection which habits of intimacy frequently produce. Now, assuming what may be assumed of the greater number of men, that they are attracted to women solely by sensuality or at best by a transitory taste; it is not deniable, that the irrevocable vow gave to women when the passing gust had blown over, a permanent hold upon the men who would otherwise have cast them off. Something, indeed much, of a community of interest, arose from the mere fact of being indissolubly united: the husband took an interest in the wife as being his wife, if he did not from any better feeling: it became essential to his respectability that his wife also should be respected; and commonly when the first revulsion of feeling produced by satiety, went off, the mere fact of continuing together, if the woman had anything loveable in her and the man was not wholly brutish, could hardly fail to raise up some feeling of regard and attachment. She obtained also, what is often far more precious to her, the certainty of not being separated from her children.
Now if this be all that human life has for women, it is little enough; and any woman who feels herself capable of great happiness, and whose aspirations have not been artificially checked, will claim to be set free from only this, to seek for more. But women in general, as I have already remarked, are more easily contented. And this I believe to be the cause of the general aversion of women to the idea of facilitating divorce. They have a habitual belief that their power over men is chiefly derived from men’s sensuality; and that the same sensuality would go elsewhere in search of gratification, unless restrained by law and opinion. They, on their part, mostly seek in marriage, a home, and the state or condition of a married woman, with the addition or not as it may happen, of a splendid establishment &c. &c. These things once obtained, the indissolubility of marriage renders them sure of keeping. And most women, either because these things really give them all the happiness they are capable of, or from the artificial barriers which curb all spontaneous movements to seek their greatest felicity, are generally more anxious not to peril the good they have than to go in search of a greater. If marriage were dissoluble, they think they could not retain the position once acquired; or not without practising upon the affections of men by those arts, disgusting in the extreme to any woman of simplicity, by which a cunning mistress sometimes establishes and retains her ascendancy.
These considerations are nothing to an impassioned character; but there is something in them, for the characters from which they emanate—is not that so? The only conclusion, however, which can be drawn from them, is one for which there would exist ample grounds even if the law of marriage as it now exists were perfection. This conclusion is, the absurdity and immorality of a state of society and opinion in which a woman is at all dependent for her social position upon the fact of her being or not being married. Surely it is wrong, wrong in every way, and on every view of morality, even the vulgar view,—that there should exist any motives to marriage except the happiness which two persons who love one another feel in associating their existence.
The means by which the condition of a married woman is rendered artificially desirable, are not any superiority of legal rights, for in that respect single women, especially if possessed of property, have the advantage, the civil disabilities are greatest in the case of the married woman. It is not law, but education and custom which make the difference. Women are so brought up, as not to be able to subsist in the mere physical sense, without a man to keep them: they are so brought up as not to be able to protect themselves against injury or insult, without some man on whom they have a special claim, to protect them, they are so brought up, as to have no vocation or useful office to fulfil in the world, remaining single; for all women who are educated for anything except to get married, are educated to be married, and what little they are taught deserving the name useful, is chiefly what in the ordinary course of things will not come into actual use, unless nor until they are married. A single woman therefore is felt both by herself and others as a kind of excrescence on the surface of society, having no use or function or office there. She is not indeed precluded from useful and honorable exertion of various kinds, but a married woman is presumed to be a useful member of society unless there is evidence to the contrary; a single woman must establish, what very few either women or men ever do establish, an individual claim.
All this, though not the less really absurd and immoral even under the law of marriage which now exists, evidently grows out of that law, and fits into the general state of society of which that law forms a part; nor could continue to exist if the law were changed, and marriage were not a contract at all, or were an easily dissoluble one. The indissolubility of marriage is the keystone of woman’s present lot, and the whole comes down and must be reconstructed if that is removed.
And the truth is, that this question of marriage cannot properly be considered by itself alone. The question is not what marriage ought to be, but a far wider question, what woman ought to be. Settle that first, and the other will settle itself. Determine whether marriage is to be a relation between two equal beings, or between a superior and an inferior, between a protector and a dependent; and all other doubts will easily be resolved.
But in this question there is surely no difficulty. There is no natural inequality between the sexes; except perhaps in bodily strength; even that admits of doubt: and if bodily strength is to be the measure of superiority, mankind are no better than savages. Every step in the progress of civilization has tended to diminish the deference paid to bodily strength, until now when that quality confers scarcely any advantages except its natural ones: the strong man has little or no power to employ his strength as a means of acquiring any other advantage over the weaker in body. Every step in the progress of civilization has similarly been marked by a nearer approach to equality in the condition of the sexes; and if they are still far from being equal, the hindrance is not now in the difference of physical strength, but in artificial feelings and prejudices.
If nature has not made men and women unequal, still less ought the law to make them so. It may be assumed, as one of those propositions which would almost be made weaker by anything so ridiculous as attempting to prove them, that men and women ought to be perfectly coequal: that a woman ought not to be dependent on a man, more than a man on a woman, except so far as their affections make them so, by a voluntary surrender, renewed and renewing at each instant by free and spontaneous choice.
But this perfect independence of each other for all save affection, cannot be, if there be dependence in pecuniary circumstances: a dependence which in the immense majority of cases must exist, if the woman be not capable, as well as the man, of gaining her own subsistence.
The first and indispensable step, therefore, towards the enfranchisement of woman, is that she be so educated, as not to be dependent either on her father or her husband for subsistence: a position which in nine cases out of ten, makes her either the plaything or the slave of the man who feeds her; and in the tenth case, only his humble friend. Let it not be said that she has an equivalent and compensating advantage in the exemption from toil: men think it base and servile in men to accept food as the price of dependence, and why do they not deem it so in women? solely because they do not desire that women should be their equals. Where there is strong affection, dependence is its own reward: but it must be voluntary dependence; and the more perfectly voluntary it is,—the more exclusively each owes every thing to the other’s affection and to nothing else,—the greater is the happiness. And where affection is not, the woman who will be dependent for the sake of a maintenance, proves herself as low-minded as a man in the like case—or would prove herself so, if that resource were not too often the only one her education has given her, and if her education had not also taught her not to consider as a degradation, that which is the essence of all prostitution, the act of delivering up her person for bread.
It does not follow that a woman should actually support herself because she should be capable of doing so: in the natural course of events she will not. It is not desirable to burthen the labour market with a double number of competitors. In a healthy state of things, the husband would be able by his single exertions to earn all that is necessary for both; and there would be no need that the wife should take part in the mere providing of what is required to support life: it will be for the happiness of both that her occupation should rather be to adorn and beautify it. Except in the class of actual day-labourers, that will be her natural task, if task it can be called which will in so great a measure, be accomplished rather by being than by doing.
We have all heard the vulgar talk that the proper employments of a wife are household superintendence, and the education of her children. As for household superintendence, if nothing be meant but merely seeing that servants do their duty, that is not an occupation, every woman who is capable of doing it at all can do it without devoting anything like half an hour every day to that purpose peculiarly. It is not like the duty of a head of an office, to whom his subordinates bring their work to be inspected when finished: the defects in the performance of household duties present themselves to inspection: skill in superintendance consists in knowing the right way of noticing a fault when it occurs, and giving reasonable advice and instruction how to avoid it; and more depends upon establishing a good system at first, than upon a perpetual and studious watchfulness. But if it be meant that the mistress of a family shall herself do the work of servants, that is good and will naturally take place in the rank in which there do not exist the means of hiring servants; but nowhere else.
Then as to the education of children; if by that term be meant, instructing them in particular arts or particular branches of knowledge, it is absurd to impose that upon mothers: absurd in two ways: absurd to set one-half of the adult human race to perform each on a small scale, what a much smaller number of teachers could accomplish for all, by devoting themselves exclusively to it; and absurd to set all mothers doing that for which some persons must be fitter than others, and for which average mothers cannot possibly be so fit as persons trained to the profession. Here again, when the means do not exist of hiring teachers, the mother is the natural teacher: but no special provision needs to be made for that case. Whether she is to teach or not, it is desirable that she should know; because knowledge is desirable for its own sake; for its uses, for its pleasures, and for its beautifying influence when not cultivated to the neglect of other gifts. What she knows, she will be able to teach to her children if necessary: but to erect such teaching into her occupation whether she can better employ herself or not, is absurd.
The education which it does belong to mothers to give, and which if not imbibed from them is seldom obtained in any perfection at all, is the training of the affections; and through the affections, of the conscience, and the whole moral being. But this most precious, and most indispensable part of education, does not take up time; it is not a business, an occupation; a mother does not accomplish it by sitting down with her child for one or two or three hours to a task. She effects it by being with the child; by making it happy, and therefore at peace with all things, by checking bad habits in the commencement; by loving the child, and by making the child love her. It is not by particular efforts, but imperceptibly and unconsciously that she makes her own character pass into the child; that she makes the child love what she loves, venerate what she venerates, and imitate as far as a child can, her example. These things cannot be done by a hired teacher; and they are better and greater, than all the rest. But to impose upon mothers what hired teachers can do, is mere squandering of the glorious existence of a woman fit for woman’s highest destiny. With regard to such things, her part is to see that they are rightly done, not to do them.
The great occupation of woman should be to beautify life: to cultivate, for her own sake and that of those who surround her, all her faculties of mind, soul, and body; all her powers of enjoyment, and powers of giving enjoyment; and to diffuse beauty, and elegance, and grace, everywhere. If in addition to this the activity of her nature demands more energetic and definite employment, there is never any lack of it in the world. If she loves, her natural impulse will be to associate her existence with him she loves, and to share his occupations; in which if he loves her (with that affection of equality which alone deserves to be called love) she will naturally take as strong an interest, and be as thoroughly conversant, as the most perfect confidence on his side can make her.
Such will naturally be the occupations of a woman who has fulfilled what seems to be considered as the end of her existence, and attained what is really its happiest state, by uniting herself to a man whom she loves. But whether so united or not, women will never be what they should be, nor their social position what it should be, until women, as universally as men, have the power of gaining their own livelihood: until, therefore, every girl’s parents have either provided her with independent means of subsistence, or given her an education qualifying her to provide those means for herself. The only difference between the employments of women and those of men will be, that those which partake most of the beautiful, or which require delicacy and taste rather than muscular exertion, will naturally fall to the share of women: all branches of the fine arts in particular.
In considering, then, what is the best law of marriage, we are to suppose that women already are, what they would be in the best state of society; no less capable of existing independently and respectably without men, than men without women. Marriage, on whatever footing it might be placed, would be wholly a matter of choice, not, as for a woman it now is, something approaching to a matter of necessity; something, at least, which every woman is under strong artificial motives to desire, and which if she attain not, her life is considered to be a failure.
These suppositions being made; and it being no longer any advantage to a woman to be married; merely for the sake of being married, why should any woman cling to the indissolubility of marriage, as if it could be for the good of one party that it should continue when the other party desires that it should be dissolved?
It is not denied by anyone, that there are numerous cases in which the happiness of both parties would be greatly promoted by a dissolution of marriage. We will add, that when the social position of the two sexes shall be perfectly equal, a divorce if it be for the happiness of either party, will be for the happiness of both. No one but a sensualist would desire to retain a merely animal connexion with a person of the other sex, unless perfectly assured of being preferred by that person, above all other persons in the world. This certainty never can be quite perfect under the law of marriage as it now exists: it would be nearly absolute, if the tie were merely voluntary.
Not only there are, but it is in vain to hope that there will not always be, innumerable cases, in which the first connexion formed will be one the dissolution of which if it could be, certainly would be, and ought to be, effected. It has long ago been remarked that of all the more serious acts of the life of a human being, there is not one which is commonly performed with so little of forethought or consideration, as that which is irrevocable, and which is fuller of evil than any other act of the being’s whole life if it turn out ill. And this is not so astonishing as it seems: The imprudence, while the contract remains indissoluble, consists in marrying at all: If you do marry, there is little wisdom shewn by a very anxious and careful deliberation beforehand. Marriage is really, what it has been sometimes called, a lottery; and whoever is in a state of mind to calculate the chances calmly and value them correctly, is not at all likely to purchase a ticket. Those who marry after taking great pains about the matter, generally do but buy their disappointment dearer. For the failures in marriage are such as are naturally incident to a first trial; the parties are inexperienced, and cannot judge. Nor does this evil seem to be remediable. A woman is allowed to give herself away for life, at an age at which she is not allowed to dispose of the most inconsiderable landed estate what then? if people are not to marry until they have learnt prudence, they will seldom marry before thirty: can this be expected, or is it to be desired? To direct the immature judgment, there is the advice of parents and guardians: a precious security! The only thing which a young girl can do, worse than marrying to please herself, is marrying to please any other person. However paradoxical it may sound to the ears of those who are reputed to have grown wise as wine grows good, by keeping, it is yet true, that A, an average person, can better know what is for his own happiness, than B, an average person, can know what is for A’s happiness. Fathers and mothers as the world is constituted, do not judge more wisely than sons and daughters; they only judge differently: and the judgments of both being of the ordinary strength, or rather of the ordinary weakness, a person’s own self has the advantage of a considerably greater number of data to judge from, and the further one of a stronger interest in the subject. Foolish people will say, that being interested in the subject is a disqualification; strange that they should not distinguish between being interested in a cause as a party before a judge, i.e., interested in deciding one way, right or wrong,—and being interested as a person is in the management of his own property, interested in deciding right. The parties themselves are only interested in doing what is most for their happiness; but their relatives may have all sorts of selfish interests to promote by inducing them to marry or not to marry.
The first choice, therefore, is made under very complicated disadvantages. By the fact of its being the first, the parties are necessarily inexperienced in the particular matter; they are commonly young (especially the party who is in greatest peril from a mistake) and therefore inexperienced in the knowledge and judgment of mankind and of themselves generally: and finally, they have seldom had so much as an opportunity afforded them, of gaining any real knowledge of each other, since in nine cases out of ten they have never been once in each other’s society completely unconstrained, or without consciously or unconsciously acting a part.
The chances therefore are many to one against the supposition that a person who requires, or is capable of, great happiness, will find that happiness in a first choice: and in a very large proportion of cases the first choice is such that if it cannot be recalled, it only embitters existence. The reasons, then, are most potent for allowing a subsequent change.
What there is to be said in favor of the indissolubility, superstition apart, resolves itself into this: that it is highly desirable that changes should not be frequent; and desirable that the first choice should be, even if not compulsorily, yet very generally, persevered in: That consequently we ought to beware lest in giving facilities for retracting a bad choice, we hold out greater encouragement than at present for making such a choice as there will probably be occasion to retract.
It is proper to state as strongly as possible the arguments which may be advanced in support of this view of the question.
Repeated trials for happiness, and repeated failures, have the most mischievous effect on all minds. The finer spirits are broken down, and disgusted with all things: their susceptibilities are deadened, or converted into sources of bitterness, and they lose the power of being ever contented. On the commoner natures the effects produced are not less deplorable. Not only is their capacity of happiness worn out, but their morality is depraved: all refinement and delicacy of character is extinguished; all sense of any peculiar duties or of any peculiar sacredness attaching to the relation between the sexes, is worn away; and such alliances come to be looked upon with the very same kind of feelings which are now connected with a passing intrigue.
Thus much as to the parties themselves, but besides the parties, there are also to be considered their children; beings who are wholly dependent both for happiness and for excellence upon their parents; and who in all but the extreme cases of actual profligacy, or perpetual bickering and disunion, must be better cared for in both points if their parents remain together.
So much importance is due to this last consideration, that I am convinced, if marriage were easily dissoluble, two persons of opposite sexes who unite their destinies would generally, if they were wise, think it their duty to avoid having children until they had lived together for a considerable length of time, and found in each other a happiness adequate to their aspirations. If this principle of morality were observed, how many of the difficulties of the subject we are considering would be smoothed down! To be jointly the parents of a human being, should be the very last pledge of the deepest, holiest, and most durable affection, for that is a tie which independently of convention, is indeed indissoluble: an additional and external tie, most precious where the souls are already indissolubly united, but simply burthensome while it appears possible to either that they should ever desire to separate.
It can hardly be anticipated, however, that such a course will be followed by any but by those who to the greatest loftiness and delicacy of feeling, unite the power of the most deliberate reflexion. If the feelings be obtuse, the force of these considerations will not be felt; and if the judgment be weak or hasty, whether from inherent defect or from inexperience, people will fancy themselves in love for their whole lives with a perfect being, when the case is far otherwise, and will suppose they risk nothing by creating a new relationship with that being, which can no longer be got rid of. It will therefore most commonly happen that when circumstances arise which induce the parents to separate, there will be children to suffer by the separation: nor do I see how this difficulty can be entirely got over, until the habits of society allow of a regulated community of living, among persons intimately acquainted, which would prevent the necessity of a total separation between the parents even when they had ceased to be connected by any nearer tie than mutual good will, and a common interest in their children.
There is yet another argument which may be urged against facility of divorce. It is this. Most persons have but a very moderate capacity of happiness; but no person ever finds this out without experience, very few even with experience: and most persons are constantly wreaking that discontent which has its source internally, upon outward things. Expecting therefore in marriage, a far greater degree of happiness than they commonly find; and knowing not that the fault is in their own scanty capabilities of happiness—they fancy they should have been happier with some one else: or at all events the disappointment becomes associated in their minds with the being in whom they had placed their hopes—and so they dislike one another for a time—and during that time they would feel inclined to separate: but if they remain united, the feeling of disappointment after a time goes off, and they pass their lives together with fully as much of happiness as they could find either singly or in any other union, without having undergone the wearing of repeated and unsuccessful experiments.
Such are the arguments for adhering to the indissolubility of the contract, and for such characters as compose the great majority of the human race, it is not deniable that these arguments have considerable weight.
That weight however is not so great as it appears. In all the above arguments it is tacitly assumed, that the choice lies between the absolute interdiction of divorce, and a state of things in which the parties would separate on the most passing feeling of dissatisfaction. Now this is not really the alternative. Were divorce ever so free, it would be resorted to under the same sense of moral responsibility and under the same restraints from opinion, as any other of the acts of our lives. In no state of society but one in which opinion sanctions almost promiscuous intercourse, (and in which therefore even the indissoluble bond is not practically regarded,) would it be otherwise than disreputable to either party, the woman especially, to change frequently, or on light grounds. My belief is, that in a tolerably moral state of society, the first choice would almost always, especially where it had produced children, be adhered to, unless in case of such uncongeniality of disposition as rendered it positively uncomfortable to one or both of the parties to live together, or in case of a strong passion conceived by one of them for a third person. Now in either of these cases I can conceive no argument strong enough to convince me, that the first connexion ought to be forcibly preserved.
I see not why opinion should not act with as great efficacy, to enforce the true rules of morality in this matter, as the false. Robert Owen’s definitions* of chastity and prostitution, are quite as simple and take as firm a hold of the mind as the vulgar ones which connect the ideas of virtue and vice with the performance or non-performance of an arbitrary ceremonial.
The arguments, therefore, in favour of the indissolubility of marriage, are as nothing in comparison with the far more potent arguments for leaving this like the other relations voluntarily contracted by human beings, to depend for its continuance upon the wishes of the contracting parties. The strongest of all these arguments is that by no other means can the condition and character of women become what it ought to be.
When women were merely slaves, to give them a permanent hold upon their masters was a first step towards their elevation. That step is now complete: and in the progress of civilization, the time has come when women may aspire to something more than merely to find a protector. The condition of a single woman has ceased to be dangerous and precarious: the law, and general opinion, suffice without any more special guardianship, to shield her in ordinary circumstances from insult or injury: woman in short is no longer a mere property, but a person, who is counted not solely on her husband’s or father’s account but on her own. She is now ripe for equality. But it is absurd to talk of equality while marriage is an indissoluble tie. It was a change greatly for the better, from a state in which all the obligation was on the side of the weaker, all the rights on the side of the physically stronger, to even the present condition of an obligation nominally equal on both. But this nominal equality is not real equality. The stronger is always able to relieve himself wholly or in a great measure, from as much of the obligation as he finds burthensome: the weaker cannot. The husband can ill-use his wife, neglect her, and seek other women, not perhaps altogether with impunity, but what are the penalties which opinion imposes on him, compared with those which fall upon the wife who even with that provocation, retaliates upon her husband? It is true perhaps that if divorce were permitted, opinion would with like injustice, try the wife who resorted to that remedy, by a harder measure than the husband. But this would be of less consequence. Once separated she would be comparatively independent of opinion: but so long as she is forcibly united to one of those who make the opinion, she must to a great extent be its slave.
[[*] ]Genesis, 2.18.
[[*] ]Thomas Carlyle, “Biography,” Fraser’s Magazine, V (Apr., 1832), 259.
[[†] ]William Wordsworth, “Weak is the will of Man, his judgment blind,” Miscellaneous Sonnets, Pt. I, xxxi, in The Poetical Works, 5 vols. (London: Longman, et al., 1827), Vol. II, p. 285 (l. 10).
[[‡] ]Titus, l.15.
[* ]Chastity, sexual intercourse with affection. Prostitution, sexual intercourse without affection. [Owen’s views on marriage were promulgated, especially in the United States, in the 1820s. Mill’s wording is closest to that found in Robert Owen and Alexander Campbell, Debate on the Evidences of Christianity, 2 vols. (Bethany, Virginia: Campbell, 1829), Vol. I, p. 120, however, he may be echoing a later version, delivered in London, contained in “The Address of Robert Owen, at the Great Public Meeting, Held at the National Labour Exchange, Charlotte-street, Fitzroy-square, on the 1st of May, 1833, Denouncing the Old System of the World, and Announcing the Commencement of the New,” The Crisis, II (11 May, 1833), 141.]
3: Harriet Taylor, ON MARRIAGE (1832-1833?)
John Stuart Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XXI - Essays on Equality, Law, and Education, ed. John M. Robson, Introduction by Stefan Collini (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984). Chapter: Appendix A: Harriet Taylor, ON MARRIAGE (1832-1833?)
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The online edition of the Collected Works is published under licence from the copyright holder, The University of Toronto Press. ©2006 The University of Toronto Press. All rights reserved. No part of this material may be reproduced in any form or medium without the permission of The University of Toronto Press.
Appendix A
ON MARRIAGE (1832–33?)
Holograph MS, Mill-Taylor Collection, British Library of Political and Economic Science, London School of Economics. Untitled and unsigned, but in Taylor’s hand. Dated on physical evidence. Not published. For a description of the MS, and comment on it, see xxx-xxxi and lviii-lix above.
if i could be providence to the world for a time, for the express purpose of raising the condition of women, I should come to you to know the means—the purpose would be to remove all interference with affection, or with any thing which is, or which even might be supposed to be, demonstrative of affection—In the present state of womens minds, perfectly uneducated, and with whatever of timidity and dependance is natural to them increased a thousand fold by their habits of utter dependance, it would probably be mischievous to remove at once all restraints, they would buy themselves protectors at a dearer cost than even at present—but without raising their natures at all, it seems to me, that once give women the desire to raise their social condition, and they have a power which in the present state of civilization and of mens characters, might be made of tremendous effect. Whether nature made a difference in the nature of men and women or not, it seems now that all men, with the exception of a few lofty minded, are sensualists more or less—Women on the contrary are quite exempt from this trait, however it may appear otherwise in the cases of some—It seems strange that it should be so, unless it was meant to be a source of power in demi-civilized states such as the present—or it may not be so—it may be only that the habits of freedom and low indulgence in which boys grow up and the contrary notion of what is called purity in girls may have produced the appearance of different natures in the two sexes—As certain it is that there is equality in nothing, now—all the pleasures such as there are being mens, and all the disagreables and pains being womens, as that every pleasure would be infinitely heightened both in kind and degree by the perfect equality of the sexes. Women are educated for one single object, to gain their living by marrying—(some poor souls get it without the churchgoing in the same way—they do not seem to me a bit worse than their honoured sisters)—To be married is the object of their existence and that object being gained they do really cease to exist as to anything worth calling life or any useful purpose. One observes very few marriages where there is any real sympathy or enjoyment of companionship between the parties—The woman knows what her power is, and gains by it what she has been taught to consider “proper” to her state—The woman who would gain power by such means is unfit for power, still they do use this power for paltry advantages and I am astonished it has never occurred to them to gain some large purpose: but their minds are degenerated by habits of dependance—I should think that 500 years hence none of the follies of their ancestors will so excite wonder and contempt as the fact of legislative restraint as to matters of feeling—or rather in the expressions of feeling. When once the law undertakes to say which demonstration of feeling shall be given to which, it seems quite inconsistent not to legislate for all, and say how many shall be seen, how many heard, and what kind and degree of feeling allows of shaking hands—The Turks is the only consistent mode—
I have no doubt that when the whole community is really educated, tho’ the present laws of marriage were to continue they would be perfectly disregarded, because no one would marry—The widest and perhaps the quickest means to do away with its evils is to be found in promoting education—as it is the means of all good—but meanwhile it is hard that those who suffer most from its evils and who are always the best people, should be left without remedy. Would not the best plan be divorce which could be attained by any, without any reason assigned, and at small expence, but which could only be finally pronounced after a long period? not less time than two years should elapse between suing for divorce and permission to contract again—but what the decision will be must be certain at the moment of asking for it—unless during that time the suit should be withdrawn—
(I feel like a lawyer in talking of it only! O how absurd and little it all is!)—In the present system of habits and opinions, girls enter into what is called a contract perfectly ignorant of the conditions of it, and that they should be so is considered absolutely essential to their fitness for it!—But after all the one argument of the matter which I think might be said so as to strike both high and low natures is—Who would wish to have the person without the inclination? Whoever would take the benefit of a law of divorce must be those whose inclination is to separate and who on earth would wish another to remain with them against their inclination? I should think no one—people sophisticate about the matter now and will not believe that one “really would wish to go.” Suppose instead of calling it a “law of divorce” it were to be called “Proof of affection”—They would like it better then—
At this present time, in this state of civilization, what evil would be caused by, first placing women on the most entire equality with men, as to all rights and privileges, civil and political, and then doing away with all laws whatever relating to marriage? Then if a woman had children she must take the charge of them, women would not then have children without considering how to maintain them. Women would have no more reason to barter person for bread, or for any thing else, than men have—public offices being open to them alike, all occupations would be divided between the sexes in their natural arrangement. Fathers would provide for their daughters in the same manner as for their sons—
All the difficulties about divorce seem to be in the consideration for the children—but on this plan it would be the women’s interest not to have children—now it is thought to be the womans interest to have children as so many ties to the man who feeds her.
Sex in its true and finest meaning, seems to be the way in which is manifested all that is highest best and beautiful in the nature of human beings—none but poets have approached to the perception of the beauty of the material world—still less of the spiritual—and there never yet existed a poet, except by the inspiration of that feeling which is the perception of beauty in all forms and by all the means which are given us, as well as by sight. Are we not born with the five senses, merely as a foundation for others which we may make by them—and who extends and refines those material senses to the highest—into infinity—best fulfils the end of creation—That is only saying—Who enjoys most, is most virtuous—It is for you—the most worthy to be the apostle of all loftiest virtue—to teach, such as may be taught, that the higher the kind of enjoyment, the greater the degree—perhaps there is but one class to whom this can be taught—the poetic nature struggling with superstition: you are fitted to be the saviour of such—
4: JSM, MARTINEAU’S A TALE OF THE TYNE EXAMINER, 27 OCT., 1833
John Stuart Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XXIII - Newspaper Writings August 1831 - October 1834 Part II, ed. Ann P. Robson and John M. Robson, Introduction by Ann P. Robson and John M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986). Chapter: 222.: MARTINEAU’S A TALE OF THE TYNE EXAMINER, 27 OCT., 1833, PP. 677-8
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The online edition of the Collected Works is published under licence from the copyright holder, The University of Toronto Press. ©2006 The University of Toronto Press. All rights reserved. No part of this material may be reproduced in any form or medium without the permission of The University of Toronto Press.
222.
MARTINEAU’S A TALE OF THE TYNE
EXAMINER, 27 OCT., 1833, PP. 677-8Writing to Carlyle on 25 Nov., 1833, a week after his return from Paris, Mill asks: “did you detect me in the Exr reviewing Miss Martineau, & Col. Napier?” (EL, CW, Vol. XII, p. 197). And, again to Carlyle on 12 Jan., 1834: “The paper on Miss Martineau was really a paper on Impressment” (ibid., p. 209). For earlier reference to her Illustrations, see No. 197. This review, in the “Literary Examiner,” is headed “Illustrations of Political Economy. No. 21. A Tale of the Tyne. By Harriet Martineau. [London:] C. Fox [1833].” Described in Mill’s bibliography as “A review of Miss Martineau’s ‘Tale of the Tyne’ in the Examiner of 27th October 1833” (MacMinn, p. 35), this article is listed in the Somerville College set of the Examiner as “Review of Miss Martineau’s ‘Tale of the Tyne’ ” and enclosed in square brackets. Mill quoted part of this article in his “Notes on the Newspapers” in the Monthly Repository for April 1834 (see CW, Vol. VI, pp. 178-9); in the variant notes “34” indicates Monthly Repository, 1834.
if, as we think must be admitted, some of the more recent tales of this series (though none are deficient in passages of great beauty and power) have not kept up to the high level of the earlier numbers, the illustration of impressment came in time to prove that the inferiority arises from no decline of the author’s talents, nor exhaustion of her vein, but from the more ungrateful nature of some of the topics on which she has recently been engaged. All the truths of her science do not equally admit of being illustrated by a succession of interesting incidents, and she has sometimes, instead of working the principle into the body of her tale, found herself thrown upon the last resource of foisting it in under cover of scientific conversations between her principal characters.
In the present instance, however, her subject was eminently susceptible of striking illustration and powerful enforcement through the medium of a fictitious history. The Tale of the Tyne is a story of impressment; and its appearance could not be better timed, than immediately after our reforming Ministers have not only refused to abolish the odious tyranny, against which the story is directed, but treated those who ventured to express disapprobation of it, as if they had done something vicious and deserving of opprobrium.
Miss Martineau should send a copy of this tale to each of his Majesty’s Ministers. We think it would have lowered the insulting tone of Sir James Graham’s memorable speech on Mr. Buckingham’s motion,1 if he had read, the evening before, in this little narrative, the meeting, after years of absence, between a pressed sailor who had deserted, and his sister. We quote all we can of this most affecting passage, and regret that our limits do not allow of more:
When Cuddie entered from the garden, his first act was to desire his sister to fasten the door at the foot of the stairs, and hang up blinds against both windows, he standing in the shadow till this was done. Effie timidly objected to blinding the front window which looked down upon the ferry; it was not yet too late for the possibility of passengers. This seemed to serve as a new reason; and she was obliged to hang up her shawl.
“If you want to know the reason,” whispered her brother, “I am a deserter. Hush! No noise! or you will be the death of me, as Adam was near being this morning.”
“Won’t you sit down?” said Effie,—as she might have spoken to an intruder from Bedlam.
“Effie, you always used to say what you felt, and all that you felt. Are you changed too? Come; tell me what you are thinking.”
“I think I am in a dream, and do not know whether you be Cuddie, or a fancy of my own. O, Cuddie, I have always loved you next to Walter, and looked upon you as the pride and hope of the family; and as often as I have started from sleep, these four years past, it has been with dreaming over again your being taken at dead of night, and especially your slipping down the cable. The worst moments I have had from the time you rowed away from this ferry, that bright evening, are those between sleeping and waking, when I saw you cold and altered before me, and I could not by any means make you smile. I never,—no I never believed this last would come true. And now,—and now,” she uttered between her sobs, “you know what I am thinking about.”
Cuddie cast himself on the ground, laid his head on her knee, as he had done in many a childish trouble, weeping so that he could not for long be persuaded to look up.
“You are not altogether altered, I see,” said Effie, striving to speak cheerfully. “You are not come back the round-faced, weather-brown seaman I always fancied you would be, but instead, far too much as if you had been famished. Yet your heart is the same.”
“No, no.”
“O, yes. But you have known want lately, and you are discouraged. I much fear you have known want.”
“’Tis not that which has bowed my spirit. Effie, I am altogether heartbroken.”
“Do not dare to say that. We must bear whatever Providence—”
“But it is not Providence that has done it; it is my king and country,” cried Cuddie, starting up, the flush fading from his face, and leaving it of a deadly paleness. “If it had been the will of Providence, Effie, to take a limb from me, I would have made my way home on crutches, with a stout heart, and none of you should have heard a bitter word from me. If lightning from above had scorched out my eyes, I would have taken Tim for an example, and been thankful through the live-long day. If the fever had laid me low on shipboard, I would have been a man to the last, knowing that my corpse would make the plunge before midnight. But to have one’s king and country against one, is what is enough to break any man’s heart that has ever loved either of them.”
“To be sure it is. What have they been doing to you?”
“Things that I do not hold myself bound to bear, as if they were done according to the will of Providence, and not against it. They first turned my very heart within me with carrying me away, as if I had been a black slave; carrying me away from all I cared about, and the occupation I could most willingly follow. Then, when I had little spirit for my work, and many bitter thoughts to distract me in it, and hurt my temper, the next thing they must do is to flog me. What surprises you in that? Don’t you know that impressment brings flogging? Carry away a man as a slave, and next thing you must whip him as a thief, and that brings hanging like a dog. Yes, they flogged me, and my head grew down on my breast from the time that scornful eyes were for ever upon me. This morning I have been hunted by my countrymen,—by many an one that I knew when nobody dared look scornfully on me. It was my own brother’s doing that they were set on. My country has but one thing more to do with me; and that is to make away with me for desertion.”
“Then you do not mean to do it yourself, thank God!” cried Effie.
“No, Effie. I have been tempted many a time, from the night I slipped down the cable, as you mentioned, till this very afternoon, when I hid in an old coal-pit, and was but too near throwing myself below. I shall make a trial of what is to be done by going where there is no king, and where one may forget one’s country. There is not a saint in heaven that could make me forgive them; but there may be ways of forgetting them. I will make the trial in America.”
“Then we shall lose the best brother, and my mother the child she has looked to through every thing, and your king a servant that may ill be spared during this war.”
“Never mind the king. If he knows no better how to get his subjects to serve him—”
“Hush, Cuddie! You a seaman, and talk so of your king!”
“I am not a seaman now. However, say the country, if you will: if she knows no better how to get served than by first making slaves of her free-born men, let her do as well as she can when they leave her to turn against her. As soon as she takes a man’s birthright from him, his duty ceases. Mine was at an end when they carried me off, neck and heels, and turned me, in one hour, from a brave-hearted boy into a mean-souled man.”
“No, no.”
“Yes, yes, I say; but though it was so, they had gained no right to disgrace me. That flogging might possibly have been thought justifiable by some people, if I had entered the service of my own free will: as I did not, they had no more right to flog me than the showman yonder has to goad the lion he enticed into his trap. If that lion should ever get out a paw to revenge himself, it would go hard with me to help the human brute.”
Effie was confounded. In casting about for an argument wherewith to stop this method of discourse, she could find none out of the Bible. Christian forgiveness of injuries was her plea.
“There is the difference, certainly, between the lion and me,” said Cuddie: “the Bible is out of the question in his case. It shall be minded in my own, so far as this:—I will not lift a hand against my country, and I will go where I may possibly learn to forgive her; but I cannot do it here Effie,—even if my life were safe, I could not do it here. My country loses a stout-bodied, willing-hearted member, and I lose all I have ever lived for; but there the mischief shall stop for me.”
“Aye, for you; but how many more are there lost in like manner? I think some devil, in the service of our country’s enemies, has come to blind our eyes, and harden our hearts, and make us a sad wonder for the times that are to come. Will men believe such a story as yours,—such an one as my father’s,—a hundred years hence?”
“Yes, they will easily believe, because they will look back to what the service now is, and how it is regarded, and contrast these things with what, I trust, will be the state of things in their day. They will look back and see that merchant seamen are now paid more than they need be, because naval seamen are paid so much less than they ought to be, and made subject to violence. If, as I hope, in those days, the one service will be as desirable as the other, (or the king’s, perhaps, the most so of the two,) it will be found that our colliers will man a navy at the first call; and then men will believe that when it was otherwise, there was some fearful cause of wrong that came in between the king and his seamen.”
“It does seem, indeed, as if there was no lack of loyalty among our people, when their minds are not turned from their king by some strange act; and we hear few complaints of the service from those who go willingly to it.”
“There is none that would be liked so well, if it had fair play. Besides the honour of keeping off the enemy, and the glory of helping to preserve one’s country, there is so much variety, and so many adventures, and so many hundred thousand eyes looking on, that a sea-life in his Majesty’s service has many charms. But honour is a mockery to one’s heart, unless it is won by the heart; and what are varieties of adventure to him whose body may be roving, but whose spirit sits, like a gloomy, unseen ghost, for ever by his own fire-side?”
“He who goes of his own will has most likely made provision for those he has left behind; and then the thought of them will come only when it can animate him, and never to discourage him.”
“Oh, you should see the difference between the volunteers and certain slaves like me!—how the one are impatient with the captain till he gets boldly out in search of the enemy; and how the other would fain have the vessel creep for ever along the shore, that he might have a chance of stealing out, and forgetting his present disgraces by daring a worse reproach still. You should see the difference of their patience on the watch, and of their courage before a battle.”
[Pp. 104-10.]
Can any one read this and not see that it is a true picture? that, of such causes, such are the natural consequences? The fictitious Cuthbert Eldred is but a type of the countless multitudes of real living men, who have been immolated, body and soul, like him, and died the living death which he so powerfully describes. aIt is not astonishing that in an age of barbarism men should commit barbarities. That Lord Chatham, one of a generation of statesmen among whom common humanity seems to have been almost as rare as common honesty, and in an age in which nothing was esteemed wickedness by which nobody suffered but the common people—that Lord Chatham should have seen no harm in impressment, can surprise no one; but it is equally unexpected and unwelcome to find Lord Chatham’s authority quoted for it now, as conclusive, by a Reform Minister.2 Necessity! so well described by Milton as “bthe tyrant’s pleab :”3 it is also Sir James Graham’s, and no one has yet, in our own day, or in any preceding, carried impudence so far as to pretend that there can be any other. It is difficult not to feel degraded by the very act of replying to so base a pretext. Necessity! yes; to borrow the apt expression of a vigorous writer, “it is exactly the sort of necessity which men are hanged for:” the convenience of taking the property of other people without paying for it; with the aggravation of its being their sole property, and the slight additional circumstance that the entire wealth of the nation is yours to purchase it withal, if you cmustc have it. If the whole matter were laid before a community of ignorant savages; if they could be made to conceive the clamour, the indignant uproar, which rises from all the benches of a certain assembly at the bare suggestion of laying a sacrilegious finger upon anything which borders upon a vested right, upon anything which by the utmost straining can be construed into property, and then could be shown the spectacle of the same men hallooing on their leaders to denounce and insult men for asserting the vested right of the labourer to his own bodily powers, and calling it injustice to knock him down and rob him, not of his purse, seeing that he has none, but of all the property he has,—his labour, in order to save to their own pockets a fractional part of the wages for which he would consent to sell it,—would not the assembly of savages deem the assembly of civilized Christians fit objects for a hurricane to sweep from the earth? What would they think if they were then told that this same assembly had just voted twenty millions for the redemption of negro slaves? These men are not fools, mere absolute fools they cannot be; they cannot think that kidnapping our own countrymen, and keeping them to forced labour for the whole or the better part of their lives, differs from negro slavery; why, every one of the incidents is the same, down to the very cart whip! call it, if you please, the cat. There is identity even in the wretched apologies which are set up; the captains or masters are an ill-used, calumniated race of men, and free labour, forsooth, would be vastly dearer!a We are obliged, therefore, when we find the same men, at the same time, actually crusading against everything which is called slavery in the remote parts of the globe, and battling for it at home as for the most precious of our institutions, to conclude that it is not the thing that they are averse to, but only the name; and that their quarrel with tyranny is not with the tyranny itself, but solely with its unpopularity.
[1 ]Graham, Speech on Impressment (15 Aug., 1833), PD, 3rd ser., Vol. 20, cols. 676-84, in immediate reply to James Silk Buckingham, Speech on Impressment (15 Aug.), ibid., cols. 636-76. Buckingham (1786-1855), traveller, lecturer, and journalist, a social reformer and temperance advocate, was M.P. for Sheffield.
[a-a][quoted by Mill in 34]
[2 ]William Pitt, Lord Chatham, speech of 22 Nov., 1770, in John Almon, Anecdotes of the Life of the Right Hon. William Pitt, 3 vols. (London: Longman, et al., 1810), Vol. II, pp. 197-8, cited by Graham, speech of 15 Aug., col. 684.
[b-b]34[in italics]
[3 ]Milton, Paradise Lost, IV, 393-4; in Poetical Works, p. 97.
[c-c]34[not in italics]
5: JSM, THE SUICIDE OF SARAH BROWN MORNING CHRONICLE, 28 OCT., 1846
John Stuart Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XXIV - Newspaper Writings January 1835 - June 1847 Part III, ed. Ann P. Robson and John M. Robson, Introduction by Ann P. Robson and John M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986). Chapter: 318.: THE SUICIDE OF SARAH BROWN MORNING CHRONICLE, 28 OCT., 1846, P. 4
Accessed from oll.libertyfund.org/title/258/51944 on 2008-05-22
The online edition of the Collected Works is published under licence from the copyright holder, The University of Toronto Press. ©2006 The University of Toronto Press. All rights reserved. No part of this material may be reproduced in any form or medium without the permission of The University of Toronto Press.
318.
THE SUICIDE OF SARAH BROWN
MORNING CHRONICLE, 28 OCT., 1846, P. 4This is the fourth of the leaders on injustice and cruelty by Harriet Taylor and Mill (see No. 303). The unheaded leader (the second) is described in Mill’s bibliography as “A leading article on the suicide of one Sarah Brown, in the Morning Chronicle of 28th Oct. 1846. A joint production.”
(MacMinn, p. 62.)
in a paragraph which has gone the round of the daily papers, it is stated that on Thursday last Mr. Bedford held an inquest, at the Star and Garter, St. Martin’s-lane, on the body of Sarah Brown, aged nineteen, who had drowned herself in the Thames. “Deceased, the daughter of respectable parents, was seduced by a gentleman two years ago, and had a child by him. Her seducer deprived her of her child.” Several witnesses, it is added, “proved that since her child had been taken from her she had over and over again threatened to destroy herself.” The verdict was temporary insanity.1
The sad history of this poor girl might not have had so tragical a dénouement, if there had been any one to inform her that the creature called “a gentleman,” in tearing from her the last consolation and the last human interest which he had left her, acted as much in defiance of law as of the first elements of justice and feelings of humanity; that the father of an illegitimate child has absolutely no legal rights over the child; that he is, in the eye of the law, not related to it; and that its mother is its sole parent.2 But this piece of legal knowledge, though perfectly elementary, appears to be too recondite for some magistrates, judging from a case published in the police reports a short time since.3 In that case, as in this, the father had exerted the law of the strongest, and kept the child to himself. The mother had retaliated by the law of the cleverest, and had stolen it back. The man again seized on it, and the case ultimately came before a magistrate, who, according to the report, awarded that they should possess the child in alternate months. The magistrate, possibly, may have been guided to this adjudication by some indistinct reminiscence of the judgment of Solomon;4 but there was no similarity in the result, which was, that the disputants were no sooner out of court than they renewed their squabble, to determine which of the two should be entitled to the first month, a point which the magistrate, in his anxiety for equal partition, had forgotten to decide. The matter was at last amicably adjusted, and “ended happily”—for the most serious situation of life is equally capable of being the subject of a comedy or of a tragedy. But if the magistrate acted in any other capacity than as an adviser of the parties, and meant anything more than to suggest a compromise to be voluntarily adopted by them, he evidently violated the law. He had no right to compel the woman to give up one-half of her child. She paid dearly enough for it, and it was her’s, and her’s it ought to be—most certainly no one’s else. She had a legal and a moral right to such comfort as it could afford her, and she had a right to any hold over the man, who had deserted her, that might be derived from the interest which it appears he had not ceased to feel in the child. If any limitation of her exclusive parental control could be allowable, it is not by or for the man, but by that which we should be glad to see exercised, not only in cases of this kind, but in many others—the tutelary intervention of a public authority, to see that the children of the miserable are not brought up to be miserable, or a source of misery to others.
In the case of lawful marriage, the law has thought fit to give to one only of the parents—that one being (need it be said?) the one who by himself or by his representatives makes the law—exclusive power over the children. The revolting excess of injustice, palpable even to the obtusest perceptions, which resulted from this provision of the law in certain extreme cases, induced the Legislature a few years back, on the proposition of Mr. Sergeant Talfourd, slightly to relax in those extreme cases the rigour of the exclusive principle.5 How much more remains to be done in the same direction, before the state of the law can commend itself either to the reason or to the feelings of any one who views it not as an interested party, but as an impartial judge, we shall not at present discuss. The law, however, is not guilty of giving this excess of power, without annexing any conditions to it. Whatever the authority with which the law arms the father, it requires of him, as an essential preliminary, not only that he shall stand clear of having acquired his claim by the destruction of the social position, and in all probability the self-respect of a fellow-creature, but that he shall take upon himself all the obligations and responsibilities which, in the estimation of the law, ought to devolve upon one who, for his own purposes, presumes to call a human being into existence. He can claim none of the rights attaching to a position of which he does not fulfil the requirements. He cannot indulge himself in despotism as the patriarch of a family, and give himself a dispensation from extending to either the children or their other parent reciprocal (however unequal) rights over him.
If the father has not chosen to make himself liable legally to the obligations which, from the very nature of the case, belong morally to the parental condition, those obligations and responsibilities devolve undividedly upon the other parent, and along with them, as their inseparable accompaniment, those rights over the child’s person and conduct, which have no legitimate ground of existence save as a means to the fulfilment of those obligations, or a reward and encouragement for fulfilling them conscientiously. And since this not only ought to be the law, but actually is so, it is wrong in any magistrate not to take every appropriate opportunity of making it known; for this end, among others, that one-half of the human species may occasionally have the satisfaction of believing that if the law is appealed to in their behalf it will do them justice.
At present it is very well known that women, in the lower ranks of life, do not expect justice from a bench or a jury of the male sex. They feel the most complete assurance that to the utmost limits of common decency, and often beyond, a tribunal of men will sympathize and take part with the man. And accordingly they die in protracted torture, from incessantly repeated brutality, without ever, except in the fewest and rarest instances, claiming the protection of law. If justice is invoked, it is generally by the outraged feelings of neighbours, and if the unhappy sufferer deviates into making her injuries known in a police court, at the next hearing she usually retracts everything; for who ever heard of a really severe punishment inflicted upon a man for any amount of brutal ill-treatment of his wife? She knows well that if the case is too clear and strong to allow of dismissing the man with a reprimand, and the woman with a piece of kind advice to be gentle and submissive, the utmost he will have to undergo is a month or two months imprisonment, to be followed by a resumption of all his former power, and her imagination can well suggest with what consequences to her.
If such is the justice society deals out to those women, in the humbler classes, whom it calls respectable, what must an unfortunate creature like Sarah Brown expect? And who can wonder, that driven to desperation by the cruellest wrong, though a wrong wholly unsanctioned by law, she seeks relief not from a magistrate but from suicide, without having had even a momentary thought that the law would do anything for her, or that the law was anything but one of the instruments by which society hunts down those who have violated its rules and incurred its displeasure?
[1 ]The inquest on Sarah Brown (ca. 1827-46) is reported in “Suicide at Waterloo-Bridge,” Globe and Traveller, 23 Oct., 1846, p. 4.
[2 ]By Sect. 71 of the Poor Law of 1834 (4 & 5 William IV, c. 76), the mother is specifically said to have a duty to maintain the child.
[3 ]See “Child Stolen by Its Own Father,” The Times, 19 Oct., p. 6, for the account of the Glossop case outlined in the text, “reprinted from a Manchester paper.”
[4 ]See I Kings, 3:16-28.
[5 ]Thomas Noon Talfourd (1795-1854), lawyer and author, Sergeant-at-Law from 1833, M.P. for Reading 1835-41, in a speech of 25 Apr., 1839 (PD, 3rd ser., Vol. 47, cols. 549-52), introduced “A Bill to Amend the Law Relating to the Custody of Infants,” 2 Victoria (25 Apr., 1839), PP, 1839, II, 559-63, which was enacted as 2 & 3 Victoria, c. 54 (1839).
6: Harriet Taylor Mill & JSM, PAPERS ON WOMEN’S RIGHTS (1847-1850?)
These include:
- Rights of Women—and Especially with Regard to the Elective Franchise—By a Woman—Dedicated to Queen Victoria
- Women—(Rights of)
- The Rights of Women to the Elective Franchise and Its Advantages
- Why Women Are Entitled to the Suffrage
- [Reform: Ends and Means]
John Stuart Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XXI - Essays on Equality, Law, and Education, ed. John M. Robson, Introduction by Stefan Collini (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984). Chapter: Appendix B: Harriet Taylor Mill, PAPERS ON WOMEN’S RIGHTS (1847-1850?)
Accessed from oll.libertyfund.org/title/255/21699 on 2008-05-22
The online edition of the Collected Works is published under licence from the copyright holder, The University of Toronto Press. ©2006 The University of Toronto Press. All rights reserved. No part of this material may be reproduced in any form or medium without the permission of The University of Toronto Press.
Appendix B
PAPERS ON WOMEN’S RIGHTS (1847–50?)
Holograph MSS, Mill-Taylor Collection, British Library of Political and Economic Science, London School of Economics. The title of the first fragment is in Harriet Taylor’s hand at the end; those of the second, third, and fourth fragments are in Mill’s hand, that of the fifth has been supplied. The MSS are in Mill’s hand (except for a few corrections in pencil by Taylor in the first and fourth, indicated in variant notes, and in repeated parts of the second); however, her title for the first, our knowledge of their working habits, and the apparent status of these fragments as preparatory for her “Enfranchisement of Women” suggest that they should be attributed jointly, if not solely to her. For descriptions of the MSS, and comment on them, see lxxii-lxxiv above.
1.
Rights of Women—and Especially with Regard to the Elective Franchise—By a Woman—Dedicated to Queen Victoria
a great number of progressive changes are constantly going forward in human affairs and ideas, which escape the notice of unreflecting people, because of their slowness. As each successive, step requires a whole generation or several generations to effect it, and is then only one step, things in reality very changeable remain a sufficient length of time without perceptible progress, to be, by the majority of cotemporaries, mistaken for things permanent and immovable—and it is only by looking at a long series of generations that they are seen to be, in reality, always moving, and always in the same direction.
This is remarkably the case with respect to Privileges and Exclusions. In every generation, the bulk of mankind imagine that all privileges and all exclusions, then existing by law or usage, are natural, fit and proper, even necessary: aexcepta such as happen to be, just at that time, in the very crisis of the struggle which puts an end to them—which rarely happens to more than one set or class of them at a time. But when we take all history into view we find that its whole course is a getting rid of privileges and exclusions. Anciently all was privilege and exclusion. There was not a person or class of persons who had not a line marked round them which they were in no case permitted to overstep. There was not a function or operation in society, sufficiently desirable to be thought worth guarding, which was not rigidly confined to a circumscribed class or body of persons. Some functions were confined to particular families—some to particular guilds, corporations, or societies. Whoever has any knowledge of ancient times knows that privilege and exclusion was not only the general rule in point of fact, but bthat nothing else was inb accordance with the ideas of mankind. Whenever any action or occupation, private or public, was thought of, it seemed natural to everybody that there should be some persons who were allowed to do the action or follow the occupation, and others who were not. People never thought of inquiring why it should be so, or what there was in the nature of the particular case to require it. People seldom ask reasons for what is in accordance with the whole spirit of what they see round them, but only for what jars with that spirit. Even bodily freedom, the right to use one’s own labour for one’s own benefit, was once a privilege, and the great majority of mankind were excluded from it. This seems to the people of our day something monstrously unnatural, to people of former days it seemed the most natural of all things. It was very gradually that this was got rid of, through many intermediate stages, of serfage, villenage &c. Where this did not exist, the system of castes did: and that appears profoundly unnatural to us, but so profoundly natural to Hindoos that they have not yet given it up. Among the early Romans fathers had the power of putting their sons to death, or selling them into slavery: this seemed perfectly natural to them, most unnatural to us. To hold land, in property, was throughout feudal Europe the privilege of a noble. This was only gradually relaxed and in Germany there is still much land which can only be so held. Up to the Reformation to teach religion was the exclusive privilege of a male separate class, even to read the Bible was a privilege: Those who lived at the time of the Reformation and who adopted it, ceased to recognize this case of privilege and exclusion, but did not therefore call in question any others. Throughout the Continent political office and military rank were exclusive privileges of a hereditary noblesse, till the French revolution destroyed these privileges. Trades and occupations have almost everywhere ceased to be privileges. Thus exclusion after exclusion has disappeared, until privilege has ceased to be the general rule, and tends more and more to become the exception: it now no longer seems a matter of course that there should be an exclusion, but it is conceded that freedom and admissibility ought to prevail, wherever there is not some special reason for limiting them. Whoever considers how immense a change this is from primitive opinions and feelings, will think it nothing less than the very most important advance which has hitherto been made in human society. It is nothing less than the beginning of the reign of justice, or the first dawn of it at least. It is the introduction of the principle that distinctions, and inequalities of rights, are not good things in themselves, and that none ought to exist for which there is not a special justification, grounded on the greatest good of the whole community, privileged and excluded taken together.
Considering how slowly this change has taken place and how very recent is its date, it would be surprising if many exclusions did not still exist, by no means fitted to stand the test which until lately no one ever thought of applying to them. The fact that any particular exclusion exists, and has existed hitherto, is in such a case no presumption whatever that it ought to exist. We may rather surmise that it is probably a remaining relic of that past state of things, in which privilege and exclusion were the general rule. That the opinions of mankind have not yet put an end to it is not even a presumption that they ought not, or that they will not hereafter do so.
We propose to examine how far this may be the case with one of the principal remaining cases of privilege, the privilege of sex: and to consider whether the civil and political disabilities of women have any better foundation in justice or the interest of society than any of the other exclusions which have successively disappeared.[*]
In the first place it must be observed that the disabilities of women are exactly of the class which modern times most pride themselves on getting rid of—disabilities by birth. It is the boast of England that if some persons are privileged by birth, at least none are disqualified by it—that anybody may rise to be a peer, or a member of parliament, or a minister—that the path to distinction is not closed to the humblest. But it is closed irrevocably to women. A woman is born disqualified, and cannot by any exertion get rid of her disabilities. This makes her case an entirely peculiar one in modern Europe. It is like that of the negro in America, and worse than that of the roturier formerly in Europe, for he might receive or perhaps buy a patent of nobility. Women’s disqualifications are the only indelible ones.
It is also a peculiarity in the case, that the persons disqualified are of the same race, the same blood, the same parents, as the privileged, and have even been brought up and educated along with them. There are none of the excuses grounded on their belonging to a different class in society. The excluded, have the same advantages of breeding and social culture, as the admitted, and have or might have the same educational advantages of all sorts.
It is necessary to protest first of all against a mode of thought on the subject of political exclusions which though less common than it once was is still very common, viz. that a prohibition, an exclusion, a disability, is not an evil or a grievance in itself. This is the opinion of many grave, dignified people, who think that by uttering it they are shewing themselves to be sound, sage, and rational, superior to nonsense and sentimentality. Where is the grievance, they say, of not being allowed to be an elector? What good would it do you to be an elector? Why should you wish to be one? They always require you to point out some distinct loss or suffering, some positive inconvenience which befals you from anything you complain of. This class of persons are enemies of all sorts of liberty. They say to those who complain. Have you not liberty enough? What do you want to do more than you do at present? And what is strange is, that they think this is shewing peculiar good sense and sobriety. It is a doctrine however which they are not fond of applying to their own liberties. Suppose that a law were made forbidding them ever to go beyond the British isles, and that when they complained they were answered thus: Is not Great Britain large enough for you? Are not England, Scotland and Ireland fine countries? Is there not variety enough in them for any reasonable taste? Why do you want to go to foreign countries? Your proper place is at home. Your duties are there. You have no duties to perform abroad, you are not a sailor, or a merchant, or an ambassador. Stay at home.—Would they not say—“My good friend, it is possible that I may never wish to go abroad at all; or that if I do wish, it may not be convenient: but that does not give you any right to say I shall not go abroad. It is an injustice and a hardship to be told that even if I do wish to go I shall not be permitted. I shall probably live all my life in this house, but that is a very different thing from being imprisoned in it.”—What these people (who deem their notions wise because they are limited) think there is no harm in cutting off from the life of anybody, except themselves, is precisely what makes the chief value of life. They think you lose nothing as long as you are not prevented from having what you have and doing what you do: now the value of life does not consist in what you have or do, but in what you may have and may do. Freedom, power, and hope, are the charms of existence. If you are outwardly comfortable they think it nothing to cut off hope, to close the region of possibilities, to say that you shall have no carrière, no excitement, that neither chance nor your own exertions shall ever make you anything more or other than you now are. This is essentially the doctrine of people legislating for others. Nobody legislates in this way for himself. When it comes home to them personally all feel that it is precisely the inconnu, the indefinite, to be cut off from which would be unbearable. They know that it is not the thing they please to do, but the power of doing as they please, that makes to them the difference between contentment and dissatisfaction. Everybody, for himself, values his position just in proportion to the freedom of it: yet the same people think that freedom is the very thing which you may subtract from in the case of others, without doing them any wrong. The grievance they think is merely ideal: but they find in their own case that these ideal grievances are among the most real of any.[*]
“The proper sphere of women is domestic life.” Putting aside the word “proper” which begs the question, what does this assertion mean? That no woman is qualified for any other social functions than those of domestic life? This will hardly be asserted, in opposition to the fact not only of the numerous women who have distinguished themselves as writers, but of the great number of eminent sovereigns who have been women—not only in Europe but in the East where they are shut up in zenanas. The assertion therefore can only be supposed to mean that a large proportion of mankind must devote themselves mainly to domestic management, the bringing up of children &c. and that this kind of employment is one particularly suitable for women. Now, taking this for what it is worth, is it in other cases thought necessary to dedicate a multitude of people from their birth to one exclusive employment lest there should not be people enough, or people qualified enough, to fill it? It is necessary that there should be coalheavers, paviours, ploughmen, sailors, shoemakers, clerks and so forth, but is it therefore necessary that people should be born all these things, and not permitted to quit those particular occupations? Still more, is it necessary that because people are clerks or shoemakers they should have no thoughts or opinions beyond clerking or shoemaking? for that is the implication involved in denying them votes.
The occupations of men, however engrossing they may be considered, are not supposed to make them either less interested in the good management of public affairs, or less entitled to exercise their share of influence in those affairs by their votes. It is not supposed that nobody ought to have a vote except idle people. A shoemaker, a carpenter, a farmer have votes. Those who say that a scavenger or a coalheaver should not have a vote, do not say so on account of his occupation but on account of his poverty or want of education. Let this ground of exclusion be admitted for one sex just as far as for the other. Whatever class of men are allowed the franchise, let the same class of women have it.
If a woman’s habitual employment, whether chosen for or by her, is the management of a family, she will be no more withdrawn from that occupation by voting in an election than her neighbour will be withdrawn by it from his shop or his office.[†]
The feeling, however, which expresses itself in such phrases as “The proper sphere of women is private life,” “Women have nothing to do with politics” and the like, is, I believe, not so much any feeling regarding women as women, as a feeling against any new and unexpected claimants of political rights. In England especially there is always a grudging feeling towards all persons who unexpectedly profess an opinion in politics, or indeed in any matter not concerning their own speciality. There is always a disposition to say, What business is that of yours? When people hear that their tradespeople, or their workpeople, concern themselves about politics, there is almost always a feeling of dislike accompanying the remark. It seems as if people were vexed at finding more persons than they expected in a condition to give them trouble on that subject. Men have the same feeling about their sons unless the sons are mere echoes of their own opinions: and if their wives and daughters claimed the same privilege, their feeling would be that of having an additional disagreeable from a quarter they did not expect.
The truth is, everybody feels that whether in classes or individuals, having an opinion of their own makes them more troublesome and difficult to manage: and everybody is aware, in all cases but his own, that the intrinsic value of the opinion is very seldom much of an equivalent. But this is no more than the ministers of despotic monarchs feel with regard to popular opinion altogether. It is an exact picture of the state of mind of Metternich. It is much more consistent in him. He says, or would say, Leave politics to those whose business it is. But these other people say, No; some whose business it is not peculiarly may and ought to have opinions on it, but others, workpeople for instance, and women, ought not. Constitutionalists and Liberals are right against Metternich only on grounds which prove them to be wrong against those whom they would exclude. Metternich is wrong because if none but those who make politics their business, had opinions and could give votes, all the rest would be delivered blindfold into the hands of those professional politicians. This argument is good against excluding anybody, especially any class or kind of persons. It is a very great evil that any portion of the community should be left politically defenceless. To justify it in any case it must be shewn that still greater evils would arise from arming the class with opinions and votes. It may possibly admit of being maintained that this would be the result of giving votes to very ignorant or even in some cases to very poor people. But it is impossible to shew that any evils would arise from admitting women of the same social rank as the men who have votes.
Objection, “You would have perpetual domestic discussion.” If people cannot differ in opinion on any important matter and remain capable of living together without quarrelling, there cannot be a more complete condemnation of marriage: for if so, two people cannot live together at all unless one of them is a mere cipher, abdicating all will and opinion into the hands of the other, and marriage can only be fit for tyrants and nobodies.
But the proposition is false. Do not married people live together in perfect harmony although they differ in opinions and even feelings on things which come much nearer home than politics do to most people? Does it not often happen for instance that they hold different opinions in religion? And have they not continually different opinions or wishes on innumerable private matters without quarrelling? People with whose comfort it is incompatible that the person they live with should think differently from them in politics or religion will if they marry at all generally marry a person who has either no opinions or the same sort of opinions with themselves. Besides, by discouraging political opinions in women, you only prevent independent disinterested opinions. In a woman, to have no political opinions, practically means to have the political opinions which conduce to the pecuniary interest or social vanity of the family. If honest opinions on both sides would make dissension between married people, will there not be dissension between a man who has an opinion and a conscience in politics and a woman who sees what she thinks the interests of the family sacrificed to what seems to her a matter of indifference? except indeed that the man’s public spirit is seldom strong enough to hold out long against the woman’s opposition, especially if he really cares for her. Now when women and men really live together, and are each other’s most intimate associates, (which in the ancient republics they were not) men never can or will be patriotic or public spirited unless women are so too. People cannot long maintain a higher tone of feeling than that of their favourite society. The wife is the incarnate spirit of family selfishness unless she has accustomed herself to cultivate feelings of a larger and more generous kind: while, when she has, her (in general) greater susceptibility of emotion and more delicate conscience makes her the great inspirer of those nobler feelings in the men with whom she habitually associates.
A part of the feeling which makes many men dislike the idea of political women, is, I think, the idea that politics altogether are a necessary evil, a source of quarrelsome and unamiable feelings, and that their sphere of action should be restricted as much as possible, and especially that home, and social intercourse, should be kept free from them, and be retained as much as possible under influences counteractive of those of politics. One would imagine from this manner of looking at the subject, that the danger in modern times was that of too much political earnestness: that people generally felt so strongly about politics as to require a strong curb to prevent them from quarrelling about it when they meet. The fact however we know to be that people in general are quite lukewarm about politics, except where their personal interests or the social position of their class are at stake, and when that is the case women have already as strong political feelings as men have. And this wish to keep the greater interests of mankind from being thought of and dwelt on when people are brought together in private, does not really prevent ill feeling and ill blood in society, but only causes it to exist about things not worth it. Where is the benefit of hindering people from disliking each other on matters involving the liberty or the progress of mankind, only to make them hate each other from petty personal jealousies and piques? Active minds and susceptible feelings will and must interest themselves about something, and if you deny them all subjects of interest except personal ones, you reduce the personal interests to a petty scale, and make personal or social vanities the primum mobile of life: now personal rivalities are a much more fruitful source of hatred and malice than differences of political opinion.
How vain the idea that the way to make mankind amiable is to make them care for nothing except themselves and the individuals immediately surrounding them. Does not all experience shew that when people care only for themselves and their families, then unless they are held down by despotism, every one’s hand is against every one, and that only so far as they care about the public or about some abstract principle is there a basis for real social feeling of any sort? One reason why there is scarcely any social feeling in England, but every man, entrenched within his family, feels a kind of dislike and repugnance to every other, is because there is hardly any concern in England for great ideas and the larger interests of humanity. The moment you kindle any such concern, if it be only about negroes or prisoners in gaols, you not only elevate but soften individual character; because each begins to move in an element of sympathy, having a common ground, even if a narrow one, to sympathize on. And yet you would prevent the sympathetic influence of women from exercising itself on the great interests. Observe, by the way, that almost all the popular movements towards any object of social improvement which have been successful in this country, have been those in which women have taken an active part, and have fraternized thoroughly with the men who were engaged about them: Slavery abolition, establishment of schools, improvement of prisons. In the last we know that a woman[*] was one of the principal leaders, and in all three the victory was chiefly due to the Quakers among whom women are in all points of public exertion as active as men. Probably none of these things would have been effected if women had not taken so strong an interest in them—if the men engaged had not found a constant stimulus in the feelings of the women connected with them, and a necessity for excusing themselves in the eyes of the women in every case of failure or shortcoming. And will any one say that the harmony of domestic life or of social intercourse was rendered less because women took interest in these subjects? It will be said, they were questions peculiarly concerning the sympathies and therefore suitable to women. But they were also subjects which concerned people’s self interest and were therefore sources of antipathy as well as sympathy: and there have been few subjects on which there has been more party spirit and more vehement opposition of political feeling, than on West India slavery and on the Bell and Lancaster schools.[†]
“What is the use of giving women votes?” Before answering this question it may be well to put another: What is the use of votes at all? Whatever use there is in any case, there is in the case of women. Are votes given to protect the particular interests of the voters? Then women need votes, for the state of the law as to their property, their rights with regard to children, their right to their own person, together with the extreme maladministration of the courts of justice in cases of even the most atrocious violence when practised by men to their wives, contributes a mass of grievances greater than exists in the case of any other class or body of persons. Are votes given as a means of fostering the intelligence of the voters, and enlarging their feelings by directing them to a wider class of interests? This would be as beneficial to women as to men. Are votes given as a means of exalting the voters in social position and estimation? and to avoid making an offensive distinction to their disadvantage? This reason is strong in the case of women. And this reason would suffice in the absence of any other. Women should have votes because otherwise they are not the equals but the inferiors of men.
So clear is this, that any one who maintains that it is right in itself to exclude women from votes, can only do it for the express purpose of stamping on them the character of inferiors.
* * * * *
2.
Women—(Rights of)
the rights of women are no other than the rights of human beings. The phrase has come into use, and become necessary, only because law and opinion, having been made chiefly by men, have refused to recognize in women the universal claims of humanity. When opinion on this subject shall be further advanced towards rectification, neither “rights of women” nor even “equality of women” will be terms in use, because neither of them fully expresses the real object to be aimed at, viz. the negation of all distinctions among persons, grounded on the accidental circumstance of sex.
The present legal and moral subjection of women is the principal, and likely to be the latest remaining relic of the primitive condition of society, the tyranny of physical force. Society sets out from the state of lawlessness in which every one’s hand is against every one, and each robs and slays a weaker than himself when he has any object to gain by it: the next stage is that in which the races and tribes which are vanquished in war are made slaves, the absolute property of their conquerors, this by degrees changes into serfdom, or some other limited form of dependence, and in the course of ages mankind pass through various decreasing stages of subjection on one side and privilege on the other, up to complete democracy which the advanced guard of the human species are now just reaching: so that the only arbitrary distinction among human beings, which the one or two most advanced nations do not now, at least in principle, repudiate, is that between women and men. And even this distinction, although still essentially founded on despotism, has assumed a more mitigated form with each step in the general improvement of mankind, whether we compare age with age, people with people or class with class: which was also the case with all the other social tyrannies, in their progress towards extinction.
It deserves particular remark, that at every period in this gradual progress, the prevailing morality of the time (with or without the exception of a few individuals superior to their age) invariably consecrated all existing facts. It assumed every existing unjust power or privilege as right and proper, contenting itself with inculcating a mild and forbearing exercise of them: by which inculcation no doubt it did considerable good, but which it never failed to balance by enjoining on the sufferers an unresisting and uncomplaining submission to the power itself. Morality recommended kind treatment of slaves by their masters, and just rule by despots over their subjects, but it never justified or tolerated either slaves or subjects in throwing off the yoke, and wherever they have done so it has been by a plain violation of the then established morality. It is needless to point out how exactly the parallel holds in the case of women and men.
In the position of women as society has now made it, there are two distinct peculiarities. The first is, the domestic subjection of the larger portion of them. From this, unmarried women who are either in independent or in self-dependent pecuniary circumstances are exempt; so that by the admission of society itself, there is no inherent necessity for it, and the time cannot be far off when to hold any human being, who has past the age which requires to be taken care of and educated by others, in a state of compulsory obedience to any other human being (except as the mere organ and minister of the law) will be acknowledged to be as monstrous an infraction of the rights and dignity of humanity, as slavery is at last, though tardily, among a small, comparatively advanced part of the human race, felt to be. Practically the evil varies, in the case of women, (as it did in the case of slaves) from being slowly murdered by continued bodily torture, to being only subdued in spirit and thwarted of all those higher and finer developements of individual character of which personal liberty has in all ages been felt to be the indispensable condition.
The other point of the question relates to the numberless disabilities imposed on women by law or by custom equivalent to law; their exclusion from most public and from a great number of private occupations, and the direction of all the forces of society towards educating them for, and confining them to, a small number of functions, on the plea that these are the most conformable to their nature and powers. It is impossible here to enter, with any detail, into this part of the subject. Three propositions however may be laid down as certain. First; that the alleged superior adaptation of women to certain occupations, and of men to certain others, does not, even now, exist, to anything like the extent that is pretended. Secondly, that so far as it does exist, a rational analysis of human character and circumstances tends more and more to shew, that the difference is principally if not wholly the effect of differences in education and in social circumstances, or of physical characteristics by no means peculiar to one or the other sex. Lastly; even if the alleged differences of aptitude did exist, it would be a reason why women and men would generally occupy themselves differently but no reason why they should be forced to do so. It is one of the aberrations of early and rude legislation to attempt to convert every supposed natural fitness into an imperative obligation. There was an apparent natural reason why the children should follow the occupation of their parents; they were often familiar with it from childhood, and had always peculiar facilities for being instructed in it: but this natural fitness, converted into a law, became the oppressive and enslaving system of Castes. Good laws, laws which pay any due regard to human liberty, will not class human beings according to mere general presumptions, nor require them to do one thing and to abstain from another on account of any supposed suitableness to their natural or acquired gifts, but will leave them to class themselves under the natural influence of those and of all the other peculiarities of their situation, which if left free they will not fail to do quite as well, not to say much better, than any inflexible laws made for them by pedantic legislators or conceited soi-disant philosophers are ever likely to do.
* * * * *
3.
The Rights of Women to the Elective Franchise and Its Advantages
statement of the principle—perfect equality.
Although this requires no proof, necessary to consider the subject as usually treated and reply categorically to objections either to it as a principle or as a matter of practice.
Prevailing opinion is that some change is needed but not fundamental, only of degree—above all that the change shall not alter the principle of inequality, foundation of present condition.
Present state of opinion divided into the following:
Largest class, both men and women, composed of those who take things for granted because they are so and have always been so—have a natural fear of making any alteration in the relations on which they are accustomed to think the best things in life depend. We would prove to them that tho’ the best things in life did depend on those relations as they are, the relation under its present conditions is worn out and no longer affords to either party a life either well or sufficiently filled for the spirit of the present time which requires more developement of the spiritual and less of the physical instead of the contrary. True, education is the great want of the time, but people have scarce begun to perceive in what sense of education—that which modern developement requires should be the desire, power and habit of using the person’s own mind, instead of (as almost all educationists seem to think) filling the mind with an undigested mass from the minds of others, in consequence of which process the most educated people now are among the most ignorant—witness not only the (absurdly) called educated classes but preeminently the collegiate, legal, clerical, professional men. Placeman, clergyman, barrister, doctor, has each something to say on one subject—in the majority of cases this something is what he has heard from others and therefore comes from him deadborn—if an active minded person, he is found to talk interestingly on his one subject, but let conversation be anything worthy the name of general, and the profound ignorance and inactivity of intellect presented by the educated classes in England is the only thing capable of exciting the mind in intercourse with them.
After all the objections that are made both by men and women have been considered, one may perhaps put it down as a fact that they are all based on the supposition that conceding equal political rights to women would be contrary to the interests of men. Some think it would be contrary to their real interests, some to their selfish interests. We think they would be not only in accordance with, but greatly advantageous to, the interests of men with perhaps the exception of interests if such they can be called, as no man in the present day would venture to &c. It would probably put a stop to the sort of license of indulgence which everybody is now agreed in discountenancing:—
A great part of the feeling which resists the political equality of women is a feeling of the contrast it would make with their domestic servitude.
The evils of women’s present condition all lie in the necessity of dependence, the just cause of complaint lies here and not elsewhere.
Objections made by common place women } to freedom for women — by common place men } Historical parallel between men and women sovereigns.
The expression “Rights of Women,” it is the fashion among women and among a certain vulgar class of men to affect to receive with a sneer and to endeavour to drown with ridicule. In neither case does this appear to be because they really regard it as meaningless, for if the same people are asked why they receive it so, they invariably grow angry and this mode of reception perpetuates itself because the intense constitutional shyness of Englishmen makes them of all things fear ridicule and this phrase as well as the idea it includes has always hitherto been put down by ridicule. Commonplace women’s aversion to it has more meaning—it contains the everlasting dread of the givers of the loaves and fishes[*] —their lively imagination exaggerates the disagreeables of having to work instead of being worked for, which their education having precluded all notions of public spirit or personal dignity, far from being revolted at the idea of dependence, elevates submission into a virtue per se. They enormously exaggerate both the talent and the labour required for the external details of life, unaware that they give as much labour and fritter away as much talent in executing badly those domestic details which they enlarge upon as arguments against women’s emancipation, as would be sufficient to conduct both the public and private affairs of either an individual or a family. Is it not true that half the time of half the women in existence is passed in worthless and trashy work, of no benefit to any human being?
Objection. Well bred people never exercise the power which the law gives them. But all their conduct takes the bent which has been given to the two characters by the relation which the law establishes. The woman’s whole talent goes into the inducing, persuading, coaxing, caressing, in reality the seducing, capacity. In whatever class in life, the woman gains her object by seducing the man. This makes her character quite unconsciously to herself, petty and paltry.
* * * * *
4.
Why Women Are Entitled to the Suffrage
1st. Because it is just.
2nd. Because women have many serious practical grievances from the state of the law as it regards them.
3rd. Because the general condition of women, being one of dependence, is in itself a grievance, which their exclusion from the suffrage stamps and perpetuates.
4th. Reply to objections.
The exclusion of women from the suffrage becomes a greater offence and degradation in proportion as the suffrage is opened widely to all men. When the only privileged class is the aristocracy of sex the slavery of the excluded sex is more marked and complete.
Notion that giving the suffrage does no good; a shallow fallacy. The greatest good that can be done for women and the preparation of all others is to recognize them as citizens—as substantive members of the community instead of mere things belonging to members of the community. One of the narrownesses of modern times, in England, is that the indirect effects produced by the spirit of institutions are not recognized and therefore the immense influence on the whole life of a person produced by the fact of citizenship is not at all felt.
Even according to the most moderate reformers the suffrage should include clerks and other educated persons who are dependent on employers. These are not turned out of their employments for voting against their employers, only because there is a point of honour on the subject. There ought to be the same between married people.—
To suppose that one person’s freedom of opinion must merge in that of the other and that they could not vote differently at an election without quarrelling is a satire on marriage and a reductio ad absurdum of it. All persons, men and women, in the present age, are entitled to mental independence and marriage like other institutions must reconcile itself to this necessity.
The queen professes to live and act perfectly conscientiously, does she ask her husband’s opinion and submit to it in all her acts as queen? is not this a case of married persons exercising their separate freedom of opinion and conduct?
The principle that all who are taxed should be represented, would give votes not only to single women but to married women whose property is settled.
Women should either not be allowed to have property or should have all which follows from the possession of property.
The man acquires the points of character that belong to one who is always having homage paid to the power vested in him, self-important, domineering, with more or less politeness of form according to his breeding, and more or less suavity according to his temper—the difference in the case of a well bred man being mainly this, that as he does not need to assert what never is disputed, so he does not do so, but contents himself with accepting the position which the law assigns and which the woman yields to him, it being a main point in the ways of well bred people that all occasions of bringing wills into active collision, are avoided, sometimes by a tacit compromise in which however the chief part always remains with the strongest, sometimes because that which knows itself to be the weakest makes a graceful retreat in time. In this as in other relations, good breeding does not so much affect the substance of conduct as the manner aof ita . When the man is ill bred the manner is coarse, tyrannical, brutal, either in a greater or in a less degree; there is superfluous self assertion, and of an offensive kind, well bred people’s self assertion is only tacit, until their claims are in some way resisted, but they are not therefore less tenacious of all that bthe lawb gives them, and are often not less really inflated by self-worship caused by the cworshipc they receive from dependents of every description.
* * * * *
5.
[Reform: Ends and Means]
Political
No hereditary privileges whatever.
No exclusion from the suffrage, but an educational qualification (qu. what?)
Complete freedom of speech, printing, public meetings and associations, locomotion, and industry in all its branches.
No church establishment or paid clergy; but national schools and colleges without religion.
Social
All occupations to be alike open to men and women; and all kinds and departments of instruction.
Marriage to be like any other partnership, dissoluble at pleasure, and not merging any of the individual rights of either of the parties to the contract. All the interests arising out of marriage to be provided for by special agreement.
The property of intestates to belong to the state, which then undertakes the education, and setting out in life, of all descendants not otherwise provided for.
No one to acquire by gift or bequest more than a limited amount.
[a-a]unless indeed [first cancelled by HTM]
[b-b][first read] was in entire [altered by JSM to] was alone in [which was cancelled first by HTM and replaced, first by HTM, by interlined final version]
[[*] ]The last paragraph, especially the last line, which concludes f. 2v, is crowded in (the final word is interlined below), as though to conclude, or else to avoid disturbing what was already written on 3r.
[[*] ]The text here stops about nine lines above the bottom of f. 4v.
[[†] ]The text here stops about two lines above the bottom of f. 5v.
[[*] ]Elizabeth Fry.
[[†] ]Similar, but competing, systems, founded by Andrew Bell and Joseph Lancaster. The text here stops about seven lines above the bottom of f. 9v.
[[*] ]See Luke, 9:11-15.
[a-a][marked for deletion in pencil by HTM]
[b-b][altered in pencil by HTM to] law or custom
[c-c][altered in pencil by HTM to] deference
7: JSM, THE CASE OF MARY ANN PARSONS [1] DAILY NEWS, 5 FEB., 1850
John Stuart Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, XXV - Newspaper Writings December 1847 - July 1873 Part IV, ed. Ann P. Robson and John M. Robson, Introduction by Ann P. Robson and John M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986). Chapter: 389.: THE CASE OF MARY ANN PARSONS [1] DAILY NEWS, 5 FEB., 1850, P. 4
Accessed from oll.libertyfund.org/title/259/52089 on 2008-05-22
The online edition of the Collected Works is published under licence from the copyright holder, The University of Toronto Press. ©2006 The University of Toronto Press. All rights reserved. No part of this material may be reproduced in any form or medium without the permission of The University of Toronto Press.
389.
THE CASE OF MARY ANN PARSONS [1]
DAILY NEWS, 5 FEB., 1850, P. 4This article, the eighth on injustice and cruelty by Harriet Taylor and Mill (for the background, see No. 303), responds to “Horrible Cruelty,” The Times, 2 Feb., 1850, beginning on p. 8 and continuing in Supplement, p. 1, which describes the coroner’s inquest and subsequent examination before magistrates resulting from the brutal death of Mary Ann Parsons at the hand of Robert Curtis Bird, a farmer, and Sarah Bird, his wife; Mill’s quotations are all from p. 8. The witnesses mentioned are James Morrish, a shoe-maker, and Richard Hooper; the victim’s mother’s name was Grace Parsons. For further comment on the case, see No. 392. This unheaded third leader is described in Mill’s bibliography as “A leading article on a case of atrocity near Bideford, in the Daily News of 5th Febry 1850. Very little of this article was mine.”
(MacMinn, p. 72.)
we would earnestly call the attention of our readers to one of the most horrible cases of brutality which have ever disgraced the superficial civilisation of our time and country: we were going to call it the most horrible, but cases approaching to it in atrocity are so incessantly recurring in the police reports, that we hesitate to pronounce even this case unrivalled in those disgraceful annals.
Mary Ann Parsons, a girl of fifteen, said by the master of the workhouse1 to have been “strong and healthy, although not particularly bright,” was hired as a servant from the workhouse of the Bideford union, by a man and woman named Bird, in September last. On the 5th of January she died, of such an accumulation of wounds, mutilations, and other horrible injuries, that we will not repeat the sickening list as given in the examinations before the magistrates. On the Friday before Christmas-day, the evidence of a man named Morrish shows that he saw her standing in the middle of the room where the prisoners and their four children were; that she was ordered “to go into the slee house, or back house;” that as she “went across the kitchen” he “saw that her neck and shoulders were covered with blood, which appeared to have flowed just before” he “came in;” that about ten minutes afterwards the man Bird “opened the slee door and ordered her to wash the blood off her neck.” Another man named Hooper saw her the day after Christmas day, when she “appeared to be very ill: she could not stand upright.” He “heard her making a horrid noise after she got up stairs: she was crying, and making a ‘wist’ or ‘moaning’ noise as she was going up.” This creature had seen her repeatedly flogged by both the man and woman, and neither he nor the former witness ever interfered even by a word of remonstrance. During the whole three months that she was in the service of these wretches, she appears to have been utterly friendless, uncared for, unenquired after. Her mother, who was an inhabitant of the same workhouse, never once saw her, and was ignorant of her fate until made aware of it by the ghastly spectacle which the body presented when in the coffin. The only person who seems to have said anything about the girl after she entered their service, was the master of the workhouse; this man, meeting the woman prisoner, who after a month’s trial had told him that she was an “honest, good, industrious girl,” and hearing on this occasion some complaint, gave his advice to “properly chastise” her. The instrument of torture is said in the report to have excited the horror of the spectators; it was “a strong stick of about a foot in length, to which were fastened eighteen stout sharp leather thongs, about two feet long. This formidable cat was capable of inflicting the most cruel laceration, as bad as the army whip, and worse than the cowhide of the American slave owner.” With this it was that the girl was reduced to the state in which her body appeared. The man Sermon, who gave the brutal recommendation to flog this girl of fifteen, and who admitted that he had “punished children in the workhouse,” though he “never served a child anything like that,” declared that in the army, where he had served, and had frequently seen sentences of flogging executed, the manner in which this poor victim had been treated would not have been considered fair flogging. With how much of this evidence before them does not appear, the coroner’s jury, under the direction of the coroner,2 found that the girl died “from congestion of the brain, caused by external injuries, but how or by what means such injuries were caused there was no evidence to shew.” Fortunately for justice, the “means,” though mysterious to this “jury of respectable (!) yeomen,” were apparent enough to others. An application having been made to a magistrate, the culprits have most properly been committed to take their trial for murder; and heartily were it to be wished that the wretch who counselled “chastisement,” and the two base slaves who looked on calmly and saw—one of them the brutality itself—both of them its consequences—could be reached as accessories to the crime. From the report it would appear that justice might have been entirely defeated and the monsters might have escaped punishment, but for the clear, distinct, and manly evidence of the surgeon, Mr. Turner.3 Too many of this gentleman’s profession, in similar cases, give their evidence in softened terms, and profess doubt, from fear of injuring themselves with the lower class of their customers.
Our law, or at least its administration, takes abundant care of property, but the most atrocious personal violence it treats with a lenity amounting to actual license: even when death follows, the offence is generally pronounced to be manslaughter, and the criminal escapes with a year or two’s imprisonment. Yet whether we look to the torments inflicted, or to the depravity indicated in the perpetrators, the crime against Mary Ann Parsons is of far deeper atrocity than that of a Rush, who fires a pistol at a man and kills him.4 Rush intended death, but they intended torture, and inflicted death by torture. What the law is, and what its administrators thought of such crimes as this poor child has been the victim of, was shown in the case of the notorious Mrs. Brownrigg, who was hanged for murder, and has remained the traditional type of the worst and most odious species of murderers.5 Brownrigg flogged two of her apprentices to death—exactly what these people have done to this unfortunate servant girl. The question in law was not whether she had premeditated their death: it was enough in law and justice that she had carried diabolical cruelty to the point which caused it.
[1 ]Thomas Sermon.
[2 ]J.H. Toller, the deputy coroner for the district.
[3 ]Charles Colville Turner.
[4 ]James Blomfield Rush was hanged on 14 Apr., 1849, for the murder on 28 Nov., 1848, of Isaac Jermy (1789-1848), Recorder of Norwich, and his son.
[5 ]Elizabeth Brownrigg, a midwife in London, was hanged on 14 Sept., 1767, for the murder of an apprentice, Mary Clifford. She was known to have beaten her other two apprentices, but was tried for the death of Clifford.
8: JSM, THE CASE OF ANNE BIRD MORNING CHRONICLE, 13 MAR., 1850
John Stuart Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, XXV - Newspaper Writings December 1847 - July 1873 Part IV, ed. Ann P. Robson and John M. Robson, Introduction by Ann P. Robson and John M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986). Chapter: 390.: THE CASE OF ANNE BIRD MORNING CHRONICLE, 13 MAR., 1850, P. 5
Accessed from oll.libertyfund.org/title/259/52091 on 2008-05-22
The online edition of the Collected Works is published under licence from the copyright holder, The University of Toronto Press. ©2006 The University of Toronto Press. All rights reserved. No part of this material may be reproduced in any form or medium without the permission of The University of Toronto Press.
390.
THE CASE OF ANNE BIRD
MORNING CHRONICLE, 13 MAR., 1850, P. 5This article is the ninth on injustice and cruelty by Harriet Taylor and Mill (for the background, see No. 303). It comments on the trial of Anne Bird (b. 1805) for the brutal beating of a two-year-old child, Ellen Welsh, held on 8 Feb. at the Marylebone Police Office, before George Long (1780-1868), magistrate and author. The case had been reported in “Police Intelligence—Friday. Marylebone,” Morning Chronicle, 9 Feb., p. 8. This unheaded third leader is described in Mill’s bibliography as “A leading article on the state of the law respecting assault, in the Morning Chron. of 13th March 1850. Very little of this was mine.”
(MacMinn, p. 73.)
much has been said and written, although as yet to very little purpose, on the effect which the progress of society in wealth, numbers, and education produces on the nature and amount of crime. Among many differences of opinion on this much-debated question, there is on one point a very general agreement. However it may be with offences against property, crimes of violence tend, it is generally believed, to diminution. There is nothing in which we seem to have so much the advantage over our fathers as in mildness of manners; and the delinquencies which prevail in the present generation are, according to common opinion, those which have their source in poverty or cupidity, but not in ferocity.
Though we do not deny the truth of this representation as it affects some classes of society and some offences, yet, as a general fact, we are sorry to say that it is not borne out by that authentic register of the manners and habits of the populace—the Police Reports. Far from exhibiting any decrease in crimes of violence, hardly a day passes in which that record does not bear frightful witness to their unabated prevalence. And the crimes which thus abound are, in point of moral turpitude, the worst order of crimes of violence—not the outbursts of offended irascibility against an equal, but the habitual abuse of brute strength, and the indulgence of wanton cruelty. Women and children, or young persons, are usually the sufferers. Cases succeed one another with hardly any intermission, in which men are proved to have killed their wives by brutal maltreatment; every such death being the termination of a series of sufferings, extending through years, against which the vital principle was at last unable longer to bear up. For every such extreme case, we may be assured there are hundreds which stop just short of the infliction of death, or in which death is inflicted, but not ascribed to its true cause. In another very numerous class of cases, a man or a woman is found to have kept an unhappy child for weeks and months in some disgusting domestic dungeon, until it is nearly dead from cold, hunger, and neglect—or to have scourged it day after day, until it is brought into a state which strikes horror when at last exhibited, and from which in many cases the child never recovers. In other instances a parish apprentice, or a young person hired as a servant from the workhouse, is the miserable victim.
Whoever has sufficiently attended to the proceedings of the Police Courts to have observed the deplorable frequency of these cases, must have been no less forcibly struck with the scandalous impunity of the culprits. Often, even when the victim has died from their maltreatment, they are not sent to trial. If tried, they are, in a majority of cases,acquitted—sometimes in the face of the clearest evidence. Even if found guilty, it is only of manslaughter, and they get off with a year or two of imprisonment. Cases short of death are very seldom tried at all, but are disposed of summarily by the police magistrate. A recent instance at the Marylebone Police-office exemplifies the sort of justice usually administered. The case was one of peculiar enormity, the victim being a child two years old. The culprit, a woman named Anne Bird, was proved to have cruelly maltreated this infant with a whip. The magistrate did what magistrates in such cases usually do; he talked of the extreme atrocity of the case—as if strong words would do away with the effect of weak acts—and then sentenced the woman to the greatest penalty he could summarily inflict—a fine of five pounds, or, in default of payment, two months’ imprisonment. If this woman, under the pressure of poverty, had stolen five shillings, the magistrate would not have failed to commit her for trial, and if found guilty she would probably have been transported. But her offence being brutal cruelty, practised on a creature utterly helpless and unoffending, he did not deem it worth while to try whether a higher court would be of opinion that a case of extraordinary atrocity deserved greater punishment than two months’ imprisonment. At the end of the two months the child, no doubt, will be given back to its torturer; unless before that time, as happened in a similar case not long ago, it dies of the injuries received.
The fault is partly in the administration of the law, but chiefly in the law itself. The whole state of the law on the subject of offences against the person urgently requires revision.1 Towards offenders against property the law until very lately was ferocious, and even now it does not err on the side of gentleness; but in case of personal violence, short of premeditated murder, it is chargeable with confounding together offences the most widely separated, both in kind and degree of criminality, and with the most excessive and unwarrantable lenity towards all but the lightest. Legislators and judges have bestowed little consideration on the amount of guilt and suffering which lie disguised under the mild and euphonious designation of “common assault.” That gentle phrase stands for nearly every sort of bodily maltreatment of which death or maiming is not obviously the result. There is but that one term to denote the whole range of acts of personal violence, from a quarrel between two strong and equally matched men, one of whom knocks the other down in a fair fight, to that habitual and wanton abuse of muscular strength against the weak and defenceless which makes life a martyrdom. Even if this confounding of the gravest moral distinctions were a mere matter of theory and classification, it would be very far from harmless in its effects on the popular mind; but, carried out as it is, to the full, in daily practice—some of the most detestable actions which one human being can perpetrate against another being punished, when punished at all, with about the amount of penalty which would be due to a simple breach of the peace—it would show a profound ignorance of the effect of moral agencies on the character not to perceive how deeply depraving must be the influence of such a lesson given from the seat of justice. It cannot be doubted that to this more than to any other single cause is to be attributed the frightful brutality which marks a very large proportion of the poorest class, and no small portion of a class much above the poorest.
Persons who are not conversant, either by their own knowledge or through the proceedings of courts of justice, with the breadth and depth of popular brutality, have very little idea of what is comprehended in the meaning of the words, “domestic tyranny.” This is now the only kind of tyranny which, in the more improved countries of the world, still exists in full vigour. Even in the worst governed countries, of any tolerable degree of civilization, it is now but rarely that Kings or public functionaries have it in their power personally to maltreat any one. The barbarities of which history is full, and which in barbarous countries flourish as rankly as ever, very few persons in a civilized country now suffer from political authorities—millions are liable to them from domestic ones. The great majority of the inhabitants of this and of every country—including nearly the whole of one sex, and all the young of both—are, either by law or by circumstances stronger than the law, subject to some one man’s arbitrary will. Every now and then the public are revolted by some disclosure of unspeakable atrocities committed against some of these helpless dependents—while, for every such case which excites notice, hundreds, most of them as bad, pass off in the police reports entirely unobserved; and for one that finds its way, even for that brief instant, into light, we may be assured that not hundreds but thousands are constantly going on in the safety of complete obscurity. If, through the accidental presence of some better-hearted person than these poor creatures are usually surrounded by, complaint is made to a magistrate, the neighbours—persons living in the same house—almost invariably testify, without either repentance or shame, that the same brutalities had gone on for years in their sight or hearing, without their stirring a finger to prevent them. The sufferers themselves are either unable to complain, from youth or ignorance, or they dare not. They know too surely the consequences of either failing or succeeding in a complaint, when the law, after inflicting just enough punishment to excite the thirst of vengeance, delivers back the victim to the tyrant.
As a matter either of justice or of humanity, these things speak so plain a language as ought to be in no need of commentary. What it is of more importance to insist upon, is their demoralizing effect. Attention has of late been much directed to the overcrowding of the labouring population as a source of moral evils.2 Let any one consider the degrading moral effect, in the midst of these crowded dwellings, of scenes of physical violence, repeated day after day—the debased, spirit-broken, down-trodden condition of the unfortunate woman, the most constant sufferer from domestic brutality in the poorer classes, unaffectedly believing herself to be out of the protection of the law—the children born and bred in this moral atmosphere—with the unchecked indulgence of the most odious passions, the tyranny of physical force in its coarsest manifestations, constantly exhibited as the most familiar facts of their daily life—can it be wondered if they grow up without any of the ideas and feelings which it is the purpose of moral education to infuse, without any sense of justice or affection, any conception of self-restraint—incapable in their turn of governing their children by any other means than blows? The law, whose utmost exertions would not be more than enough to withstand this mass of depraving influences, makes so little use of its powers and opportunities, measures out its reproofs and punishments by such a scale, that the culprits believe almost the worst of these brutalities to be venial, and all minor ones to be actually permitted—while the victims regard their suffering and debasement as the regular course of things, which the law sanctions and the world allows; and when not crushed entirely, they seek a wretched compensation by tyrannizing in their turn, when any hapless fellow-creature comes within their power.
[1 ]9 George IV, c. 31 (1828), made common assault for the first time a criminal misdemeanour punishable on summary conviction before a magistrate on complaint of the victim (Sect. 27); the punishment was limited to a fine of not more than £5. Only for non-payment of fine could the convicted assailant be jailed for a maximum of two months (Sect. 27). In serious cases, the Crown was permitted to proceed by indictment and a longer punishment could be imposed (Sect. 29). Prosecution resulted in the loss of other criminal or civil remedies by the plaintiff.
[2 ]E.g., “Report of G.A. à Beckett, Esq.,” in “Reports to the Poor Law Board, on the Laws of Settlement, and Removal of the Poor” (24 Oct., 1848), PP, 1850, XXVII, esp. 238, 242-3; Aubrey De Vere (1814-1902), poet and essayist, “Colonization,” Edinburgh Review, XCI (Jan. 1850), 1-62, esp. 4-6; and John Malcolm Ludlow (1821-1911), social reformer, “ ‘Labour and the Poor,’ ” Fraser’s Magazine, XLI (Jan. 1850), 1-18, esp. 3.
9: JSM, THE CASE OF MARY ANN PARSONS [2] MORNING CHRONICLE, 26 MAR., 1850
John Stuart Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, XXV - Newspaper Writings December 1847 - July 1873 Part IV, ed. Ann P. Robson and John M. Robson, Introduction by Ann P. Robson and John M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986). Chapter: 392.: THE CASE OF MARY ANN PARSONS [2] MORNING CHRONICLE, 26 MAR., 1850, PP. 4-5
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392.
THE CASE OF MARY ANN PARSONS [2]
MORNING CHRONICLE, 26 MAR., 1850, PP. 4-5See No. 389 for earlier comment on this case; the subsequent trial of the Birds had been reported in “Assize Intelligence. Western Circuit—Exeter, March 22,” Morning Chronicle, 25 Mar., p. 7, from which the quotations are taken. This is the tenth of the joint articles on injustice and cruelty by Harriet Taylor and Mill (for the background, see No. 303). This unheaded third leader is described in Mill’s bibliography as “A leading article on the Bideford case, in the Morning Chronicle of 26th March 1850. Very little of this was mine.”
(MacMinn, p. 73.)
the case of mary ann parsons, who died a cruel death from maltreatment, at Buckland, near Bideford, in January last, has terminated in a more complete frustration of public justice than, in our worst surmises, we had imagined possible. The criminals, Robert and Sarah Bird, have not been convicted of murder—nor of manslaughter—nor even of a common assault. They have escaped totally unpunished—unpunished, except by public execration, which, it is to be hoped, will cling to them the more closely that they have not expiated their guilt by the retribution which the law appoints for such malefactors, but which in this instance, as in too many others, it has failed to inflict. Let any one who reads the report of the trial which appeared in our paper of yesterday, judge whether there can be the faintest shadow of doubt as to the facts—whether the two prisoners will not carry to their graves the merited designation of acquitted murderers. The worst features of the case, as it appeared against them in the preliminary investigation, were all confirmed, and more than confirmed, by the evidence on the trial. Several witnesses swore to repeated acts of brutal maltreatment. Several others swore to admissions of such acts by the female prisoner, both as respected herself and her husband. The state in which the poor girl’s body was found was sworn to by Mr. Turner, the surgeon who made the post-mortem examination, in these clear and straightforward terms:
On the legs and thighs I saw several wounds, varying in extent, and evidently inflicted by some irregular or rough weapon. It struck me to have been by a birch. There was a bruise on the chest. The face was discoloured, and the forehead, and some abscesses were on the arms and fingers. The skin over the bowels was discoloured. On the left arm there was an abscess, and the skin immediately round it was discoloured, as if it had been bruised some time, perhaps a fortnight. The abscess had burst below the elbow. There was another abscess just forming. The nails of the little and fore finger were gone, apparently some time. The two middle finger nails were also gone, apparently more recently, and in one the bone protruded. On the right arm there was also an abscess that had also burst. On the right hip there was a large slough. On the posterior part of the hips were several wounds, apparently inflicted some time. They were covered with plaster, and appeared to be old sores. Between the shoulders were two trivial bruises. There was also a mark on the face, from the temple down to the cheek. On removing the scalp I found another bruise on the back of the head, with considerable extravasation of blood diffused between the scalp and the skull.
Then, after stating that he observed congestion of the membranes of the brain, and at the base of the brain extravasation of blood, and that he “found the cause of death in the head,” Mr. Turner continued:
In my judgment, death was the result of the external injuries. I could not form a judgment how that violence had been inflicted. I don’t think the injuries I saw in the head were produced from falls. The condition of the girl must have been extremely reduced before death, and the powers of life weakened. The injuries I observed would have produced an effect on the nervous system, which is connected with the brain.
Another medical witness, Mr. Edge, a surgeon to the hospital at Exeter, “conceives that Mr. Turner is correct in the opinion that he formed, as to the time of death, and the cause.”
After such evidence—unless the testimony was disbelieved, which it was not—it seems incredible that the Judge (Mr. Justice Talfourd) should have charged the jury for an acquittal. Every reader must be astonished at such a course, and must be anxious to know how so extraordinary a judgment came to be pronounced on such a state of facts. The explanation, however, is instructive, by the illustration which it affords of the state either of the law, or of the mind of this Judge—certainly not one of the worst of its administrators. Though there were statements and physical facts sufficient to convince the mind most recalcitrant to evidence, that the death of the girl was the work of the two prisoners, there was not, it seems, legal evidence to bring it home to them. “The case,” in the opinion of the judge, “had failed.” But when we see in what points it was considered to have failed, we cease to wonder—or rather, our astonishment changes its object, and we wonder how there should ever be legal evidence of a murder committed in the manner in which these two culprits caused the death of their victim.
The grounds of acquittal were two; and which of them is the strangest it would not be easy to decide. The first was, that although there was superabundant evidence of brutality by the prisoners sufficient to cause the frightful state of the corpse, it was not proved that anybody struck the particular blow on the head to which the congestion of the brain, said to be the immediate cause of death, was thought to be more especially owing. The second reason was, that even if the blow had been struck by one of the prisoners, there was no evidence “to fix it upon one of these parties more than the other.” But it is by no means clear that, in the opinion of the medical witnesses, the blow on the head was exclusively the fatal injury. Mr. Turner, according to our report, “found the cause of death in the head”—meaning the congestion; but he distinctly said, “In my judgment death was the result of the external injuries.” “The injuries I observed”—being those on the body generally—“would have produced an effect on the nervous system, which is connected with the brain.” The other medical witness professed an unqualifed agreement in Mr. Turner’s opinion. It would thus appear that neither of these gentlemen ascribed the cerebral congestion to any local injury to the head, but to general injuries, affecting the brain not directly, but indirectly through “the nervous system.” Even assuming, however (what, it is fair to say, some of the reports of the trial appear to bear out),1 that death was more immediately caused by that particular injury, among the many of which the sufferer bore the hideous marks—that circumstance does not abate one iota from the moral certainty of the prisoners’ guilt. They were proved to have been in the habit of inflicting, up to nearly the time of the girl’s death, cruelties quite equal to the one assumed to have caused it. There was no direct proof that either of them struck that particular blow; but there was not the smallest evidence accounting for it in any other way. It was for them to rebut the presumption raised by their other brutalities. An adequate cause had been shown for any result, however fatal, in their daily treatment of their victim. On them lay the burden of disproving the connection by proving the existence of some other cause for the catastrophe. If a man were found murdered on the highway, his body covered with wounds, some of which only were mortal, the assassins who were proved to have fallen upon him, and to have inflicted some of those wounds, would not be suffered to escape because no one could swear that the particular wounds inflicted by them were the mortal ones. It would be enough that they did wound him, that no other cause of death appeared, and that he died.
With respect to the very nice and scrupulous doubt—as to which of the two prisoners is answerable—it is easily disposed of. Both are answerable. The guilt rests on both, until one of them can get rid of it by throwing it exclusively on the other. If the atrocious acts—some one or all of which destroyed the victim—had been proved only against one of the prisoners, that one would justly have been made responsible for the catastrophe. But those acts were proved against both, and against both equally. Both, therefore, are accountable; just as is the case if a person is found with a gang of robbers at the commission of a crime—it is on himself that the burden rests of proving his non-participation in their guilt.
Under the jurisprudence of Mr. Justice Talfourd, it is virtually proclaimed to such people as Robert and Sarah Bird that there is impunity for murder, on condition of their adopting the commonest precautions. If the person to be murdered is an inmate of their house, and under their power, they must be dull indeed if they cannot effect their purpose without supplying those links of evidence for want of which the death of Mary Ann Parsons goes unpunished. It matters not though the whole neighbourhood testifies to daily cruelties more than adequate to produce death. It matters not that the corpse excites universal horror by its glaring manifestations of those cruelties. They can surely contrive that no one shall be able to swear to the particular wound inflicted on a particular day, or to prove that this wound was given by one of the murderers, that by another—and the victim, who alone knew, is not alive to tell. This is not justice. If it be law, which, in opposition to a judge’s dictum, we do not pretend to decide, it is law which cannot too soon be altered. When the law places any one—and that a person of inferior physical strength—under the power of another, who may be such a creature as these Birds, it exposes the individual to peculiar risks, and ought, therefore, to guard him by peculiar precautions. What is called the ordinary protection of law is not sufficient. The ordinary protection of law is protection to those who can help themselves—who can in general keep themselves out of harm’s way, or, at least, who can tell their own story. The victims of domestic brutality cannot protect themselves; and there is no protection for them, if, when death ensues, and violence is proved sufficient to cause death, the prosecutors are obliged to produce direct evidence connecting the death with the brutality. It is on the accused that the burden of exculpating themselves should in such cases rest. Death, and maltreatment sufficient to cause death, are the sole facts of which positive evidence ought to be required. Those to whom power over others is given, and who brutally misuse that power, should be thus far held responsible for the safety of those over whom they tyrannise. Otherwise there is no security even for the lives of any of those who have the wretched and disgracefully common lot of being in the power of a brute.2
[1 ]See “Spring Assizes. Western Circuit. Exeter, Friday, March 22,” The Times, 25 Mar., p. 6.
[2 ]The Birds were subsequently rearrested and charged with assault. They were convicted on 5 Aug., 1850, in the Crown Court at Exeter. (See “Summer Assizes. Western Circuit. Exeter, Monday, August 5,” The Times, 7 Aug., pp. 7-8.)
10: JSM, THE CASE OF SUSAN MOIR MORNING CHRONICLE, 29 MAR., 1850
John Stuart Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, XXV - Newspaper Writings December 1847 - July 1873 Part IV, ed. Ann P. Robson and John M. Robson, Introduction by Ann P. Robson and John M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986). Chapter: 393.: THE CASE OF SUSAN MOIR MORNING CHRONICLE, 29 MAR., 1850, P. 4
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393.
THE CASE OF SUSAN MOIR
MORNING CHRONICLE, 29 MAR., 1850, P. 4This article, quoting from “The Inquest on Mrs. Moir,” Morning Chronicle, 28 Mar., p. 2, is the eleventh by Harriet Taylor and Mill on injustice and cruelty (for background, see No. 303). This unheaded third leader is described in Mill’s bibliography as “A leading article on the Coroner’s Inquest on Susan Moir, in the Morning Chronicle of 29th March 1850. A joint production.”
(MacMinn, p. 73.)
only three days have elapsed since we held up to public indignation the frightful details of the Bideford abominations, and the scandal of an acquittal, decisive of Mr. Justice Talfourd’s calibre both as a judge and as a man.1 Already another case has presented itself, fully equal in its atrocious features, and in which, unless the public look well to it, similar impunity will probably be the result.
Our yesterday’s paper contained the Coroner’s inquest on Susan Moir, wife of Alexander Moir, carrying on business as a baker at No. 24, Brydges-street, Covent-garden. “When the sheet,” says our report, “with which the remains were covered was thrown aside, an expression of horror escaped all present, the body, from head to foot, being literally covered with bruises and contused wounds of old and recent date.” The surgeon, Mr. Watkins,2 deposed—“The integuments and muscles of the head were contused in a manner I never saw before—in fact they were a perfect jelly.” The following are the statements of the other witnesses:
The first witness, Mary Ann Bryant, a cousin of the deceased, said that she
called upon her on Saturday last, about half-past one o’clock, when deceased complained of having been very much ill-used by her husband. Deceased begged witness to ask him to allow her to go to bed, as she had been up all the previous night. She said to witness, “You might say to him, let Susan go and lie down.” Witness did ask her husband, as requested, but he refused to allow her to go to bed, and said she must mind the shop. Witness remained with deceased until half-past three o’clock, and during that interval her husband frequently boxed her ears as hard as he could with his open hand, and once, when she got up to serve a customer in the shop, he kicked her behind with great force, because, as he said, she did not move quick enough. He requested witness to examine her head, remarking that he knew he had hurt her. Witness did so, and found her left ear and all that part of the head dreadfully bruised. There were also cuts upon the head, and the hair was matted with congealed blood that had issued from them. Witness told deceased’s husband how much she was injured, but he did not appear to take any notice of it.
About six the same afternoon, on returning to the house,
he asked her whether she had supplied certain customers; and she replied that she had not; upon which he swore at her, and boxed her ears as hard as he could. He then directed her to put some bread in the shop-window; and while she was in the act of doing so she fell insensible on the shop-floor. Witness ran towards her, and saw that the blood was spirting from a wound in her temple. Witness then called out, “Oh, good God, uncle; cousin is in a fit—pick her up.” He replied that he would not. Deceased presently revived a little, and walked with witness into the back parlour. While doing so, she said, “I am in a fit, and a very bad fit. Don’t leave me, for God’s sake—don’t leave me, Mary Ann.” These were the last words she ever uttered. Witness wished to put her to bed, but her husband said she should never go into a bed of his again. Deceased was then standing over a sink; and presently her strength appeared to fail, and she sank down upon the floor with her head resting on the kitchen step.
She never rallied, and died on the following Monday morning.
John Johnson, a journeyman baker in this wretch’s employment, said that on Tuesday night, soon after eleven o’clock,
he heard a great noise overhead, as of two persons quarrelling, and a cry of distress from the deceased woman. The noise was similar to that of one person dragging another across the room, and it continued up to three o’clock to such an extent that witness could not get any sleep. Witness did not hear any words distinctly, but he could tell that his master was speaking in a very ferocious manner. On the Saturday afternoon witness saw his master knock deceased about, and shortly afterwards she fell down insensible. Deceased’s cousin asked witness to assist in raising her, but his master would not allow him. He said, “D—n her, let her get up herself.”
Amelia Meredes, who had lodged in the house for the last two months,
had frequently seen deceased with black eyes in that time; and on Saturday, about five o’clock, during a dreadful noise of quarrelling, she came down stairs into the passage, and while there heard deceased scream out and cry, “Oh, oh! you’ll kill me, you’ll kill me!” Her husband replied, “Yes, I will kill you. I’ll murder you before I have done with you.” Witness also heard deceased’s little boy call out at the same time, “You’ll kill my mother, father.”
It was after such evidence as this that the Coroner’s jury brought in a verdict of manslaughter! And were the ruffian to be tried (as he has been committed) on this verdict, and not on a bill of indictment sent before the grand jury, he would be tried for manslaughter only, and not for murder! We have, however, much satisfaction in perceiving, from the result of the examination which took place at Bow-street yesterday,3 that public justice will be spared this indescribably outrageous insult; and that, despite the enormous folly and heartlessness of the fifteen “highly respectable” jurymen, the prisoner will be put on his trial for the capital offence.4
To prevent justice from being foiled in instances like these ought ever to be the primary object of all who have any power in the case. The parish officers, or any other public authority within whose competence it is to see that the most horrible crimes do not escape unpunished, are under a deep responsibility if they do not, when others fail in their duty, indict such culprits for murder. And when the case is not taken up by those who are most bound to do so, a public subscription ought to enable the relatives or friends of the unfortunate victim to take the proper means of invoking condign punishment on the murderer.
It is necessary that it should be, once for all, understood by juries that to beat a human being to death is not manslaughter, but murder. If it were otherwise, the famous Mrs. Brownrigg was hanged contrary to law.5 What she was convicted of was a series of brutalities exactly resembling this, and the Bideford case. And she would most assuredly have been acquitted had she been tried before Mr. Justice Talfourd. He would have said that there had been “chastisement of which he did not approve,” but that there was no proof that the death of the victim was caused by the “chastisement.”6
In the Brydges-street case it is in evidence that the prisoner actually, and at the very time, said to the unhappy victim that he would murder her; and though this, or any other ruffianly speech under such circumstances, does not amount to proof that the speaker meant the full import of his words, experience shows what interpretation would have been put upon them if the case had been reversed, and if the woman had been charged with killing the man. If the husband had died in circumstances similar to the case of Ann Merrett,7 and such a speech could have been proved to have been uttered by the wife—no matter under what circumstances of just exasperation—she would not have had a chance to escape a capital conviction.
Is it because juries are composed of husbands in a low rank of life, that men who kill their wives almost invariably escape—wives who kill their husbands, never? How long will such a state of things be permitted to continue?
[1 ]See No. 392.
[2 ]Joshua Watkins, R.C.S. (d. 1871).
[3 ]“The Murder in Brydges-Street,” Morning Chronicle, 29 Mar., 1850, p. 7.
[4 ]After a postponement on 11 Apr. (The Times, 12 Apr., p. 7), Alexander Moir was tried at the Central Criminal Court on 9 May, 1850, convicted of aggravated manslaughter, and sentenced to transportation for life (The Times, 10 May, p. 7).
[5 ]For Mrs. Brownrigg, see No. 389, n5.
[6 ]His expressions were used in the Bird case (see No. 392), reported in “Assize Intelligence. Western Circuit,” Morning Chronicle, 25 Mar., 1850, p. 7.
[7 ]Anne Merrett (b. 1819) was convicted of poisoning her husband James with arsenic, and condemned to death (see “Central Criminal Court, March 8,” The Times, 9 Mar., 1850, p. 7).
11: JSM, WIFE MURDER MORNING CHRONICLE, 28 AUG., 1851
John Stuart Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, XXV - Newspaper Writings December 1847 - July 1873 Part IV, ed. Ann P. Robson and John M. Robson, Introduction by Ann P. Robson and John M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986). Chapter: 400.: WIFE MURDER MORNING CHRONICLE, 28 AUG., 1851, P. 4
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400.
WIFE MURDER
MORNING CHRONICLE, 28 AUG., 1851, P. 4This is the fifteenth newspaper article on injustice and cruelty by Harriet Taylor Mill and J.S. Mill, who had married in April 1851; for the background, see No. 303. An unheaded second leader, it is described in Mill’s bibliography as “A leading article in the Morning Chronicle of August 28th 1851, on some cases of wife murder. This, like all my newspaper articles on similar subjects, and most of my articles on all subjects, was a joint production with my wife.”
(MacMinn, p. 76.)
in his recent charge to the grand jury at the opening of the Central Criminal Court, the Recorder said—
He was sorry that he could not congratulate them on the lightness of the calendar; for, although it did not contain any charge of murder, yet he was sorry to see that there were several charges of manslaughter, and also a great number of cases of personal violence; and it was very much to be regretted that, in a great majority of the cases, the violence was committed by men upon the persons of those whom they were bound to love and protect—namely, upon their wives.1
It is well that Mr. Wortley should have said thus much—little though it was—on this disgraceful subject; and it is to be hoped that the feelings which dictated his brief remarks will still be in operation when, in the course of the next few days, it may become his duty to pass sentence on cases of this description. But he need not have confined his observation to the present sessions; for every sessions, every assizes, afford proof of the lamentable prevalence of this class of crimes, and of the impunity, or next to impunity, with which they are passed by. Within these few days we have recorded, almost simultaneously, four cases of men tried, or committed for trial, on the charge of killing their wives; and among these the case of Edmund Curtis stood conspicuous, both in atrocity and in the flagrant inadequacy of the punishment.2 The wife, an industrious woman, had passed the day in working as a charwoman, to earn money for the husband. In the evening, according to the testimony of the woman for whom she worked, he came to the house, and the wife
spoke to him, desiring him to come home. He refused. She said his place was at home, and he said, “So is yours.” They then both left the room. He was sober. After they left the house—about three minutes after—I heard a violent shriek. I went out, and saw her lying across a low iron railing in my garden. He had hold of her over the left shoulder with his right hand, and was striking her on the head with his clenched fist. When I got out the shriek had ceased. I heard no noise after. I told him he would kill her, if he had not done so, and desired him to loose her. He did not do so. I called out William Kirkland, who pulled him from her, and she fell on her left side on the ground, apparently lifeless. I told him he had killed her. I called assistance. She was lifted up and put in a chair. She fetched three sighs and died.3
These were the facts; and now for Mr. Baron Martin and his judgment. He said that nothing could justify a man in striking a woman; that the prisoner “indulged in a very violent degree of passion,” but that he could “well believe” that he “did not mean to kill her;” that “no doubt, when this result occurred,” he was “sincerely sorry for it;” and that, “considering all the circumstances,” the “justice of the case” would be satisfied by imprisoning him for six months with hard labour!4 Such are the judgments which are to protect all the women of the country against domestic ruffianism; and such is the caprice which presides over the apportionment of penalties in English criminal justice. The day afterwards, in a case not more atrocious, the culprit was sentenced by the same judge to transportation for life.5 If Curtis had killed, in any similar manner, some other man’s wife instead of his own—instead of the woman whom, as Mr. Wortley said, he was bound to protect—there can be little doubt that he would have been indicted for murder, and probably hanged. The vow to protect thus confers a licence to kill.
Two of the cases adverted to in the Recorder’s charge have since come on for trial before Mr. Justice Wightman.6 In one, the prisoner was acquitted on the ground of insanity. In the case of Andrew Maclean also, the culprit was acquitted, to the disgrace both of the jury and of the judge. The report says,
Early in the morning of the 4th of August, the persons lodging in the next room were disturbed by the cries of the prisoner’s children, and their calling out, “Oh, father, let mother down.” They got up in consequence, and went into the prisoner’s room, where they found his wife hanging by the neck from the cupboard, and the prisoner was sitting upon the bed. The body of the unfortunate woman was quite suspended, and she was nearly black in the face. Upon the prisoner being told that he was a good-for-nothing villain for attempting to hang his wife, he replied that he would do it effectually the next time; and one of the witnesses answered that he would have done it effectually this time, if his wife had not been cut down. The prisoner was slightly intoxicated, it appeared, at the time of the occurrence. The prisoner, in his defence, asserted that his wife had hanged herself.7
The wife was not called as a witness, the reason of which appears from the previous examination before the magistrate—on which occasion the unfortunate creature, either from habitual fear or from the expectation that she would be given back into his power, exculpated the man, stating that she had spoken provokingly to him, and also that he had hanged her only in jest. Her dread of appearing against him was not surprising; for what would have been the consequence to her of having given strong evidence against him, in the event of his acquittal? But her testimony was not needed to show the state of the case, after proof of such facts as those contained in the above extract. Yet “Mr. Justice Wightman, in summing up, said that the case was undoubtedly left in some obscurity by the absence of the wife’s testimony. If she had been called, she could have proved distinctly how the matter occurred; and in the face of the prisoner’s declaration that his wife had hung herself, it was for the jury to say whether the other evidence was sufficient to justify them in convicting him of so serious an offence.”8 On this encouragement the jury returned a verdict of not guilty; and consequently the woman is again given in to the power of the man, that he may, as he threatened, “do it effectually the next time.” We scarcely believe that there is an offence in the whole criminal code of which a prisoner would have been acquitted, in the face of such evidence, except that of an attempt at wife-murder.
In default of the judges, it is for the Legislature to apply vigorous measures of repression to this growing evil. The baser part of the populace think that when a legal power is given to them over a living creature—when a person, like a thing, is suffered to be spoken of as their own—as their wife, or their child, or their dog—they are allowed to do what they please with it; and in the eye of the law—if such judgments as the preceding are to be taken as its true interpretation—they are justified in supposing that the worst they can do will be accounted but as a case of slight assault. It is the duty of the Legislature to teach them the contrary. There ought to be severer penalties for killing or ill-treating a wife or child than for killing or ill-treating, in a similar manner, any other person. A greater severity is enjoined by all the motives which ought to regulate the adaptation of punishment to crime. The crime is greater; for it is a violation of more solemn obligations—it is doing the worst injury where there is the most binding duty to cherish and protect. It is also baser—for it is committed upon one who has trusted the culprit, who is in his power, and who is generally without sufficient bodily strength to resist or retaliate. Those who are exposed to these atrocities—the wives and children of the brutal part of the population—have not the means which all other persons possess of guarding themselves against the evil. Other people are but occasionally and rarely liable to ill-treatment; but these are exposed to it at every hour and every moment of their lives. Being thus far more in need than any other persons of the protection of the law, they ought to have it in fuller measure. The domestic tyrant can perpetrate his tyrannies with the utmost facility, and need never wait for an opportunity; and a stronger motive therefore is required, where the brutality exists, to deter from its indulgence. Finally, there is no crime in the whole catalogue of offences in which the single act which incurs the penalty of the law is an index to such an amount of undetected and unpunished wickedness, and to so vast a mass of horrible suffering. Such a spectacle as the final scene of the life of Hester Curtis is unspeakably revolting; but what is the suffering of a few minutes, to the prolonged death which in every such case must have been suffered for years previously, and to the pangs of thousands of women in the power of similar miscreants, who have enough of caution just to stop short of the point which terminates the existence of their victims? There is not to be imagined a position so degraded, or so hopelessly miserable, as that of the women thus at the mercy of ruffians; and it is a deep disgrace to our Government that, in the fifteenth year of the reign of a woman, nothing has yet been done for their relief.
[1 ]James Archibald Stuart-Wortley (1805-81), M.P. 1835-37, 1842-59, and Recorder of London 1850-56. See “Assize Intelligence. Central Criminal Court—Monday,” Morning Chronicle, 19 Aug., 1851, p. 7.
[2 ]See in the Morning Chronicle the cases of Edmund Curtis, charged with the manslaughter of his wife Hester, and sentenced to imprisonment for six months with hard labour (“Assize Intelligence. Crown Court,” 15 Aug., 1851, pp. 7-8); of Charles Halliday, charged with the murder of his wife Elizabeth, found guilty of manslaughter and sentenced to transportation for life (“Assize Intelligence. Crown Court,” 16 Aug., p. 7); of Andrew MacLean (b. ca. 1814), a journeyman tailor, charged with but acquitted of the murder of his common-law wife, Mary Ann Watson (“Central Criminal Court—Friday,” 23 Aug., pp. 7-8); and of Robert Thomas Moore, charged with the attempted murder of his wife, Mary Anne, and found not guilty by reason of insanity (ibid.).
[3 ]Testimony of Jane Anne Wilkes, Morning Chronicle, 15 Aug., p. 8.
[4 ]Samuel Martin (1801-83), Baron of the Court of Exchequer from 1850, ibid.
[5 ]Charles Halliday (see n2).
[6 ]William Wightman (1784-1863), judge at the Court of Queen’s Bench from 1841, heard the cases of Moore and MacLean (see n2).
[7 ]Morning Chronicle, 23 Aug., p. 8. There were two children, aged eight (Lizzy) and three years. The witnesses were Mary Rigg and her husband Thomas, and Ellen Mayhew.
[8 ]Ibid.
12: HARRIET TAYLOR MILL, ENFRANCHISEMENT OF WOMEN (1851)
John Stuart Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XXI - Essays on Equality, Law, and Education, ed. John M. Robson, Introduction by Stefan Collini (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984). Chapter: Appendix C: HARRIET TAYLOR MILL, ENFRANCHISEMENT OF WOMEN (1851)
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Appendix C
ENFRANCHISEMENT OF WOMEN (1851)
Westminster and Foreign Quarterly Review, LV (July, 1851), 289-311. Headed, “Art I.—The New York Tribune for Europe. October 29th, 1850”, running titles, “Enfranchisement of Women”; unsigned. Offprinted with title, repaged 1-23, and identified as “Reprinted from the ‘Westminster and Foreign Quarterly Review,’ for July, 1851,” with the printer’s identification (“London: Waterlow and Sons, Printers, 65 to 66, London Wall, London”) added at the end, but otherwise identical. Reprinted in Dissertations and Discussions, II, 411-49, where the title is footnoted, “Westminster Review, July 1851.” Issued as a pamphlet, London: Trubner, 1868, where the title page reads, “Enfranchisement of Women by Mrs. Stuart Mill. Reprinted from the ‘Westminster Review’ for July, 1851.” London: Trubner and Co., 60, Paternoster Row, 1868. Price One Penny”, paged 1-22, title repeated on 1; no running heads. Not listed in Mill’s bibliography of his writings, where various items are identified as “joint productions” with Harriet Taylor Mill. There are no corrections or emendations in the copies of the offprint and pamphlet in the Somerville College Library. For comment on the essay, see xxxi-xxxii and lxxiv-lxxvii above.
The text below is that of the Westminster, the last in Harriet Taylor Mill’s lifetime (she died in 1858, before the 1st ed. of D&D), which has been collated with the offprint, the 1st and 2nd eds. of D&D, and the pamphlet. In the footnoted variants, “59” indicates D&D, 1st ed., “67”, D&D, 2nd ed., and “68”, the pamphlet.
Though the copy-text is that of 1851, the text below is headed by the introductory note written by Mill for the version in D&D, it is separated from the main text by a row of asterisks.
all the more recent of these papers[*] were joint productions of myself and of one[†] whose loss, even in a merely intellectual point of view, can never be repaired or alleviated. But the following Essay is hers in a peculiar sense, my share in it being little more than that of an editor and amanuensis. Its authorship having been known at the time, and publicly attributed to her, it is proper to state, that she never regarded it as a complete discussion of the subject which it treats of, and, highly as I estimate it, I would rather it remained unacknowledged, than that it should be read with the idea that even the faintest image can be found in it of a mind and heart which in their union of the rarest, and what are deemed the most conflicting aexcellencesa , were unparalleled in any human being that I have known or read of. While she was the light, life, and grace of every society in which she took part, the foundation of her character was a deep seriousness, resulting from the combination of the strongest and most sensitive feelings with the highest principles. All that excites admiration when found separately in others, seemed brought together in her: a conscience at once healthy and tender; a generosity, bounded only by a sense of justice which often forgot its own claims, but never those of others; a heart so large and loving, that whoever was capable of making the smallest return of sympathy, always received tenfold; and in the intellectual department, a vigour and truth of imagination, a delicacy of perception, an accuracy and nicety of observation, only equalled by her profundity of speculative thought, and by a practical judgment and discernment next to infallible. So elevated was the general level of her faculties, that the highest poetry, philosophy, oratory, or art, seemed trivial by the side of her, and equal only to expressing some small part of her mind. And there is no one of those modes of manifestation in which she could not easily have taken the highest rank, had not her inclination led her for the most part to content herself with being the inspirer, prompter, and unavowed coadjutor of others.
The present paper was written to promote a cause which she had deeply at heart, and though appealing only to the severest reason, was meant for the general reader. The question, in her opinion, was in a stage in which no treatment but the most calmly argumentative could be useful, while many of the strongest arguments were necessarily omitted, as being unsuited for popular effect. Had she lived to write out all her thoughts on this great question, she would have produced something as far transcending in profundity the present Essay, as, had she not placed a rigid restraint on her feelings, she would have excelled it in fervid eloquence. Yet nothing which even she could have written on any single subject, would have given an adequate idea of the depth and compass of her mind. As during life she continually detected, before any one else had seemed to perceive them, those changes of times and circumstances which ten or twelve years later became subjects of general remark, so I venture to prophecy that if mankind continue to improve, their spiritual history for ages to come will be the progressive working out of her thoughts, and realization of her conceptions.
* * * * *
most of our readers will probably learn from these pages for the first time, that there has arisen in the United States, and in the most civilized and enlightened portion of them, an organised agitation on a new question—new, not to thinkers, nor to any one by whom the principles of free and popular government are felt as well as acknowledged, but new, and even unheard of, as a subject for public meetings and practical political action. This question is, the enfranchisement of women; their admission, in law and in fact, to equality in all rights, political, civil, and social, with the male citizens of the community.
It will add to the surprise with which many will receive this intelligence, that the agitation which has commenced is not a pleading by male writers and orators for women, those who are professedly to be benefitted remaining either indifferent or ostensibly bhostile: itb is a political movement, practical in its objects, carried on in a form which denotes an intention to persevere. And it is a movement not merely for women, but by them. Its first public manifestation appears to have been a Convention of Women, held in the State of Ohio, in the spring of 1850. Of this meeting we have seen no report. On the 23rd and 24th of October last, a succession of public meetings was held at Worcester, in Massachusetts, under the name of a “Women’s Rights Convention,” of which the president was a woman,[*] and nearly all the chief speakers women; numerously reinforced, however, by men, among whom were some of the most distinguished leaders in the kindred cause of negro emancipation. A general and four special committees were nominated, for the purpose of carrying on the undertaking until the next annual meeting.
According to the report in the New York Tribune, above a thousand persons were present throughout, and “if a larger place could have been had, many thousands more would have attended.” The place was described as “crowded from the beginning with attentive and interested listeners.”[†] In regard to the quality of the speaking, the proceedings bear an advantageous comparison with those of any popular movement with which we are acquainted, either in this country or in America. Very rarely in the oratory of public meetings is the part of verbiage and declamation so small, that of calm good sense and reason so considerable. The result of the Convention was in every respect encouraging to those by whom it was summoned: and it is probably destined to inaugurate one of the most important of the movements towards political and social reform, which are the best characteristic of the present age.
That the promoters of this new agitation take their stand on principles, and do not fear to declare these in their widest extent, without time-serving or compromise, will be seen from the resolutions adopted by the Convention, part of which we transcribe:
Resolved—That every human being, of full age, and resident for a proper length of time on the soil of the nation, who is required to obey the law, is entitled to a voice in its enactment; that every such person, whose property or labour is taxed for the support of the government, is entitled to a direct share in such government, therefore,
Resolved—That women are entitled to the right of suffrage, and to be considered eligible to office, . . . and that every party which claims to represent the humanity, the civilization, and the progress of the age, is bound to inscribe on its banners, equality before the law, without distinction of sex or colour.
Resolved—That civil and political rights acknowledge no sex, and therefore the word “male” should be struck from every State Constitution.[*]
Resolved—That, since the prospect of honourable and useful employment in after life is the best stimulus to the use of educational advantages, and since the best education is that we give ourselves, in the struggles, employments, and discipline of life; therefore it is impossible that women should make full use of the instruction already accorded to them, or that their career should do justice to their faculties, until the avenues to the various civil and professional employments are thrown open to them.
Resolved—That every effort to educate women, without according to them their rights, and arousing their conscience by the weight of their responsibilities, is futile, and a waste of labour.
Resolved—That the laws of property, as affecting married persons, demand a thorough revisal, so that all rights be equal between them, that the wife have, during life, an equal control over the property gained by their mutual toil and sacrifices, and be heir to her husband precisely to that extent that he is heir to her, and entitled at her death to dispose by will of the same share of the joint property as he is.[†]
The following is a brief summary of the principal demands:
1. Education in primary and high schools, universities, medical, legal, and theological institutions.
2. Partnership in the labours and gains, risks and remunerations, of productive industry.
3. A coequal share in the formation and administration of laws—municipal, state, and national—through legislative assemblies, courts, and executive offices.[‡]
It would be difficult to put so much true, just, and reasonable meaning into a style so little calculated to recommend it as cthatc of some of the resolutions. But whatever objection may be made to some of the expressions, none, in our opinion, can be made to the demands themselves. As a question of justice, the case seems to us too clear for dispute. As one of expediency, the more thoroughly it is examined the stronger it will appear.
That women have as good a claim as men have, in point of personal right, to the suffrage, or to a place in the jury-box, it would be difficult for anyone to deny. It cannot certainly be denied by the United States of America, as a people or as a community. Their democratic institutions rest avowedly on the inherent right of everyone to a voice in the government. Their Declaration of Independence, framed by the men who are still their great constitutional authorities—that document which has been from the first, and is now, the acknowledged basis of their polity, commences with this express statement:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.[*]
We do not imagine that any American democrat will evade the force of these expressions by the dishonest or ignorant subterfuge, that “men,” in this memorable document, does not stand for human beings, but for one sex only, that “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” are “inalienable rights” of only one moiety of the human species, and that “the governed,” whose consent is affirmed to be the only source of just power, are meant for that half of mankind only, who, in relation to the other, have hitherto assumed the character of dgovernorsd . The contradiction between principle and practice cannot be explained away. A like dereliction of the fundamental maxims of their political creed has been committed by the Americans in the flagrant instance of the negroes; of this they are learning to recognise the turpitude. After a struggle which, by many of its incidents, deserves the name of heroic, the abolitionists are now so strong in numbers and in influence that they hold the balance of parties in the United States. It was fitting that the men whose names will remain associated with the extirpation, from the democratic soil of America, of the aristocracy of colour, should be among the originators, for America and for the rest of the world, of the first collective protest against the aristocracy of sex, a distinction as accidental as that of colour, and fully as irrelevant to all questions of government.
Not only to the democracy of America, the claim of women to civil and political equality makes an irresistible appeal, but also to those radicals and chartists in the British islands, and democrats on the Continent, who claim what is called universal suffrage as an inherent right, unjustly and oppressively withheld from them. For with what truth or rationality could the suffrage be termed universal, while half the human species eremaine excluded from it? To declare that a voice in the government is the right of all, and demand it only for a part—the part, namely, to which the claimant himself belongs—is to renounce even the appearance of principle. The chartist who denies the suffrage to women, is a chartist only because he is not a lord;[†] he is one of those levellers who would level only down to themselves.
Even those who do not look upon a voice in the government as a matter of personal right, nor profess principles which require that it should be extended to all, have usually traditional maxims of political justice with which it is impossible to reconcile the exclusion of all women from the common rights of citizenship. It is an axiom of English freedom that taxation and representation should be co-extensive. Even under the laws which give the wife’s property to the husband, there are many unmarried women who pay taxes. It is one of the fundamental doctrines of the British constitution, that all persons should be tried by their peers, yet women, whenever tried, are tried by male judges and a male jury. To foreigners the law accords the privilege of claiming that half the jury should be composed of themselves; not so to women. Apart from maxims of detail, which represent local and national rather than universal ideas, it is an acknowledged dictate of justice to make no degrading distinctions without necessity. In all things the presumption ought to be on the side of equality. A reason must be given why anything should be permitted to one person and interdicted to another. But when that which is interdicted includes nearly everything which those to whom it is permitted most prize, and to be deprived of which they feel to be most insulting, when not only political liberty but personal freedom of action is the prerogative of a caste; when even in the exercise of industry, almost all employments which task the higher faculties in an important field, which lead to distinction, riches, or even pecuniary independence, are fenced round as the exclusive domain of the predominant section, scarcely any doors being left open to the dependent class, except such as all who can enter elsewhere disdainfully pass by; the miserable expediencies which are advanced as excuses for so grossly partial a dispensation, would not be sufficient, even if they were real, to render it other than a flagrant injustice. While, far from being expedient, we are firmly convinced that the division of mankind into two castes, one born to rule over the other, is in this case, as in all cases, an unqualified mischief; a source of perversion and demoralization, both to the favoured class and to those at whose expense they are favoured, producing none of the good which it is the custom to ascribe to it, and forming a bar, almost insuperable while it lasts, to any really vital improvement, either in the character or in the social condition of the human race.
These propositions it is now our purpose to maintain. But before entering on them, we would endeavour to dispel the preliminary objections which, in the minds of persons to whom the subject is new, are apt to prevent a real and conscientious examination of it. The chief of these obstacles is that most formidable one, custom. Women never have had equal rights with men. The claim in their behalf, of the common rights of mankind, is looked upon as barred by universal practice. This strongest of prejudices, the prejudice against what is new and unknown, has, indeed, in an age of changes like the present, lost much of its force; if it had not, there would be little hope of prevailing against it. Over three-fourths of the habitable world, even at this day, the answer, “it has always been so,” closes all discussion. But it is the boast of modern Europeans, and of their American kindred, that they know and do many things which their forefathers neither knew nor did; and it is perhaps the most unquestionable point of superiority in the present above former ages, that habit is not now the tyrant it formerly was over opinions and modes of action, and that the worship of custom is a declining idolatry. An uncustomary thought, on a subject which touches the greater interests of life, still startles when first presented; but if it can be kept before the mind until the impression of strangeness wears off, it obtains a hearing, and as rational a consideration as the intellect of the hearer is accustomed to bestow on any other subject.
In the present case, the prejudice of custom is doubtless on the unjust side. Great thinkers, indeed, at different times, from Plato to Condorcet,[*] besides some of the most eminent names of the present age, have made emphatic protests in favour of the equality of women. And there have been voluntary societies, religious or secular, of which the Society of Friends is the most known, by whom that principle was recognised. But there has been no political community or nation in which, by law, and usage, women have not been in a state of political and civil inferiority. In the ancient world the same fact was alleged, with equal truth, in behalf of slavery. It might have been alleged in favour of the mitigated form of slavery, serfdom, all through the middle ages. It was urged against freedom of industry, freedom of conscience, freedom of the press; none of these liberties were thought compatible with a well-ordered state, until they had proved their possibility by actually existing as facts. That an institution or a practice is customary is no presumption of its goodness, when any other sufficient cause can be assigned for its existence. There is no difficulty in understanding why the subjection of women has been a custom. No other explanation is needed than physical force.
That those who were physically weaker should have been made legally inferior, is quite conformable to the mode in which the world has been governed. Until very lately, the rule of physical strength was the general law of human affairs. Throughout history, the nations, races, classes, which found themselves the strongest, either in muscles, in riches, or in military discipline, have conquered and held in subjection the rest. If, even in the most improved nations, the law of the sword is at last discountenanced as unworthy, it is only since the calumniated eighteenth century. Wars of conquest have only ceased since democratic revolutions began. The world is very young, and has but just begun to cast off injustice. It is only now getting rid of negro slavery. It is only now getting rid of monarchical despotism. It is only now getting rid of hereditary feudal nobility. It is only now getting rid of disabilities on the ground of religion. It is only beginning to treat fany menf as citizens, except the rich and a favoured portion of the middle class. Can we wonder that it has not yet done as much for women? As society was constituted until the last few generations, inequality was its very basis; association grounded on equal rights scarcely existed; to be equals was to be enemies; two persons could hardly co-operate in anything, or meet in any amicable relation, without the law’s appointing that one of them should be the superior of the other. Mankind have outgrown this state, and all things now tend to substitute, as the general principle of human relations, a just equality, instead of the dominion of the strongest. But of all relations, that between men and women being the nearest and most intimate, and connected with the greatest number of strong emotions, was sure to be the last to throw off the old rule and receive the new: for in proportion to the strength of a feeling, is the tenacity with which it clings to the forms and circumstances with which it has even accidentally become associated.
When a prejudice, which has any hold on the feelings, finds itself reduced to the unpleasant necessity of assigning reasons, it thinks it has done enough when it has re-asserted the very point in dispute, in phrases which appeal to the pre-existing feeling. Thus, many persons think they have sufficiently justified the restrictions on women’s field of action, when they have said that the pursuits from which women are excluded are unfeminine, and that the proper sphere of women is not politics or publicity, but private and domestic life.
We deny the right of any portion of the species to decide for another portion, or any individual for another individual, what is and what is not their “proper sphere.” The proper sphere for all human beings is the largest and highest which they are able to attain to. What this is, cannot be ascertained, without complete liberty of choice. The speakers at the Convention in America have therefore done wisely and right, in refusing to entertain the question of the peculiar aptitudes either of women or of men, or the limits within which this or that occupation may be supposed to be more adapted to the one or to the other.[*] They justly maintain, that these questions can only be satisfactorily answered by perfect freedom. Let every occupation be open to all, without favour or discouragement to any, and employments will fall into the hands of those men or women who are found by experience to be most capable of worthily exercising them. There need be no fear that women will take out of the hands of men any occupation which men perform better than they. Each individual will prove his or her capacities, in the only way in which capacities can be proved—by trial; and the world will have the benefit of the best faculties of all its inhabitants. But to interfere beforehand by an arbitrary limit, and declare that whatever be the genius, talent, energy, or force of mind of an individual of a certain sex or class, those faculties shall not be exerted, or shall be exerted only in some few of the many modes in which others are permitted to use theirs, is not only an injustice to the individual, and a detriment to society, which loses what it can ill spare, but is also the most effectual mode of providing that, in the sex or class so fettered, the qualities which are not permitted to be exercised shall not exist.
We shall follow the very proper example of the Convention, in not entering into the question of the alleged differences in physical or mental qualities between the sexes; not because we have nothing to say, but because we have too much; to discuss this one point tolerably would need all the space we have to bestow on the entire subject.* But if those who assert that the “proper sphere” for women is the domestic, mean by this that they have not shown themselves qualified for any other, the assertion evinces great ignorance of life and of history. Women have shown fitness for the highest social functions, exactly in proportion as they have been admitted to them. By a curious anomaly, though ineligible to even the lowest offices of state, they are in some countries admitted to the highest of all, the regal, and if there is any one function for which they have shown a decided vocation, it is that of reigning. Not to go back to ancient history, we look in vain for abler or firmer rulers than Elizabeth; than Isabella of Castile, than Maria Teresa; than Catherine of Russia; than Blanche, mother of Louis IX of France; than Jeanne d’Albret, mother of Henri Quatre. There are few kings on record who contended with more difficult circumstances, or overcame them more triumphantly, thanh these. Even in semi-barbarous Asia, princesses who have never been seen by men, other than those of their own family, or ever spoken with them unless from behind a curtain, have as regents, during the minority of their sons, exhibited many of the most brilliant examples of just and vigorous administration. In the middle ages, when the distance between the upper and lower ranks was greater than even between women and men, and the women of the privileged class, however subject to tyranny from the men of the same class, were at a less distance below them than any one else iwasi , and often in their absence represented them in their functions and authority—numbers of heroic chatelaines, like Jeanne de Montfort, or the great Countess of Derby[*] as late even as the time of Charles I, distinguished themselves not only by their political but their military capacity. In the centuries immediately before and after the Reformation, ladies of royal houses, as diplomatists, as governors of provinces, or as the confidential advisers of kings, equalled the first statesmen of their time: and the treaty of Cambray, which gave peace to Europe, was negociated in conferences where no other person was present, by the aunt of the Emperor Charles V, and the mother of Francis I.[†]
Concerning the fitness, then, of women for politics, there can be no question, but the dispute is more likely to turn upon the fitness of politics for women. When the reasons alleged for excluding women from active life in all its higher departments, are stripped of their garb of declamatory phrases, and reduced to the simple expression of a meaning, they seem to be mainly three: j the incompatibility of active life with maternity, and with the cares of a household; secondly, its alleged hardening effect on the character; and thirdly, the inexpediency of making an addition to the already excessive pressure of competition in every kind of professional or lucrative employment.
The first, the maternity argument, is usually laid most stress upon, although (it needs hardly be said) this reason, if it be one, can apply only to mothers. It is neither necessary nor just to make imperative on women that they kshallk be either mothers or nothing; or that if they lhavel been mothers once, they shall be nothing else during the whole remainder of their lives. Neither women nor men need any law to exclude them from an occupation, if they have undertaken another which is incompatible with it. No one proposes to exclude the male sex from Parliament because a man may be a soldier or sailor in active service, or a merchant whose business requires all his time and energies. Nine-tenths of the occupations of men exclude them de facto from public life, as effectually as if they were excluded by law; but that is no reason for making laws to exclude even the nine-tenths, much less the remaining tenth. The reason of the case is the same for women as for men. There is no need to make provision by law that a woman shall not carry on the active details of a household, or of the education of children, and at the same time practise a profession or be elected to Parliament. Where incompatibility is real, it will take care of itself: but there is gross injustice in making the incompatibility a pretence for the exclusion of those in whose case it does not exist. And these, if they were free to choose, would be a very large proportion. The maternity argument deserts its supporters in the case of single women, a large and increasing class of the population, a fact which, it is not irrelevant to remark, by tending to diminish the excessive competition of numbers, is calculated to assist greatly the prosperity of all. There is no inherent reason or necessity that all women should voluntarily choose to devote their lives to one animal function and its consequences. Numbers of women are wives and mothers only because there is no other career open to them, no other occupation for their feelings or their activities. Every improvement in their education, and enlargement of their faculties—everything which renders them more qualified for any other mode of life, increases the number of those to whom it is an injury and an oppression to be denied the choice. To say that women must be excluded from active life because maternity disqualifies them for it, is in fact to say, that every other career should be forbidden them in order that maternity may be their only resource.
But secondly, it is urged, that to give the same freedom of occupation to women as to men, would be an injurious addition to the crowd of competitors, by whom the avenues to almost all kinds of employment are choked up, and its remuneration depressed. This argument, it is to be observed, does not reach the political question. It gives no excuse for withholding from women the rights of citizenship. The suffrage, the jury-box, admission to the legislature and to office, it does not touch. It bears only on the industrial branch of the subject. Allowing it, then, in an economical point of view, its full force; assuming that to lay open to women the employments now monopolized by men, would tend, like the breaking down of other monopolies, to lower the rate of remuneration in those employments, let us consider what is the amount of this evil consequence, and what the compensation for it. The worst ever asserted, much worse than is at all likely to be realized, is that if women competed with men, a man and a woman could not together earn more than is now earned by the man alone. Let us make this supposition, the most unfavourable supposition possible, the joint income of the two would be the same as before, while the woman would be raised from the position of a servant to that of a partner. Even if every woman, as matters now stand, had a claim on some man for support, how infinitely preferable is it that part of the income should be of the woman’s earning, even if the aggregate sum were but little increased by it, rather than that she should be compelled to stand aside in order that men may be the sole earners, and the sole dispensers of what is mearned.m Even under the present laws respecting the property of women,* a woman who contributes materially to the support of the family, cannot be treated in the same contemptuously tyrannical manner as one who, however she may toil as a domestic drudge, is a dependent on the man for subsistence. As for the depression of wages by increase of competition, remedies will be found for it in time. Palliatives might be applied immediately; for instance, a more rigid exclusion of children from industrial employment, during the years in which they ought to be working only to strengthen their bodies and minds for after life. Children are nnecessarilyn dependent, and under the power of others; and their labour, being not for themselves but for the gain of their parents, is a proper subject for legislative regulation. With respect to the future, we neither believe that improvident multiplication, and the consequent excessive difficulty of gaining a subsistence, will oalwayso continue, nor that the division of mankind into capitalists and hired labourers, and the regulation of the reward of labourers mainly by demand and supply, will be for ever, or even much longer, the rule of the world. But so long as competition is the general law of human life, it is tyranny to shut out one half of the competitors. All who have attained the age of self-government, have an equal claim to be permitted to sell whatever kind of useful labour they are capable of, for the price which it will bring.
The third objection to the admission of women to political or professional life, its alleged hardening tendency, belongs to an age now past, and is scarcely to be comprehended by people of the present time. There are still, however, persons who say that the world and its avocations render men selfish and unfeeling; that the struggles, rivalries and collisions of business and of politics make them harsh and unamiable; that if half the species must unavoidably be given up to these things, it is the more necessary that the other half should be kept free from them; that to preserve women from the bad influences of the world, is the only chance of preventing men from being wholly given up to them.
There would have been plausibility in this argument when the world was still in the age of violence, when life was full of physical conflict, and every man had to redress his injuries or those of others, by the sword or by the strength of his arm. Women, like priests, by being exempted from such responsibilities, and from some part of the accompanying dangers, may have been enabled to exercise a beneficial influence. But in the present condition of human life, we do not know where those hardening influences are to be found, to which men are subject and from which women are at present exempt. Individuals now-a-days are seldom called upon to fight hand to hand, even with peaceful weapons; personal enmities and rivalities count for little in worldly transactions, the general pressure of circumstances, not the adverse will of individuals, is the obstacle men now have to make head against. That pressure, when excessive, breaks the spirit, and cramps and sours the feelings, but not less of women than of men, since they suffer certainly not less from its evils. There are still quarrels and dislikes, but the sources of them are changed. The feudal chief once found his bitterest enemy in his powerful neighbour, the minister or courtier in his rival for place: but opposition of interest in active life, as a cause of personal animosity, is out of date, the enmities of the present day arise not from great things but small, from what people say of one another, more than from what they do; and if there are hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness, they are to be found among women fully as much as among men. In the present state of civilization, the notion of guarding women from the hardening influences of the world, could only be realized by secluding them from society altogether. The common duties of common life, as at present constituted, are incompatible with any other softness in women than weakness. Surely weak minds in weak bodies must ere long cease to be even supposed to be either attractive or amiable.
But, in truth, none of these arguments and considerations touch the foundations of the subject. The real question is, whether it is right and expedient that one-half of the human race should pass through life in a state of forced subordination to the other half. If the best state of human society is that of being divided into two parts, one consisting of persons with a will and a substantive existence, the other of humble companions to these persons, attached, each of them to one, for the purpose of bringing up his children, and making his home pleasant to him; if this is the place assigned to women, it is but kindness to educate them for this, to make them believe that the greatest good fortune which can befal them, is to be chosen by some man for this purpose, and that every other career which the world deems happy or honourable, is closed to them by the law, not of social institutions, but of nature and destiny.
When, however, we ask why the existence of one-half the species should be merely ancillary to that of the other—why each woman should be a mere appendage to a man, allowed to have no interests of her own, that there may be nothing to compete in her mind with his interests and his pleasure, the only reason which can be given is, that men like it. It is agreeable to them that men should live for their own sake, women for the sake of men: and the qualities and conduct in subjects which are agreeable to rulers, they succeed for a long time in making the subjects themselves consider as their appropriate virtues. Helvetius has met with much obloquy for asserting, that persons usually mean by virtues the qualities which are useful or convenient to themselves.[*] How truly this is said of mankind in general, and how wonderfully the ideas of virtue set afloat by the powerful, are caught and imbibed by those under their dominion, is exemplified by the manner in which the world were once persuaded that the supreme virtue of subjects was loyalty to kings, and are still persuaded that the paramount virtue of womanhood is loyalty to pmenp . Under a nominal recognition of a moral code common to both, in practice self-will, and self-assertion form the type of what are designated as manly virtues, while abnegation of self, patience, resignation, and submission to power, unless when resistance is commanded by other interests than their own, have been stamped by general consent as pre-eminently the duties and graces required of qwomen. Theq meaning being merely, that power makes itself the centre of moral obligation, and that a man likes to have his own will, but does not like that his domestic companion should have a will different from his.
We are far from pretending that in modern and civilized times, no reciprocity of obligation is acknowleged on the part of the stronger. Such an assertion would be very wide of the truth. But even rthisr reciprocity, which has disarmed tyranny, at least in the higher and middle classes, of its most revolting features, yet when combined with the original evil of the dependent condition of women, has introduced in its turn serious evils.
In the beginning, and samongs tribes which are still in a primitive condition, women were and are the slaves of men for tthet purposes of toil. All the hard bodily labour devolves on them. The Australian savage is idle, while women painfully dig up the roots on which he lives. An American Indian, when he has killed a deer, leaves it, and sends a woman to carry it home. In a state somewhat more advanced, as in Asia, women were and are the slaves of men for utheu purposes of sensuality. In Europe there early succeeded a third and milder dominion, secured not by blows, nor by locks and bars, but by sedulous inculcation on the mind; feelings also of kindness, and ideas of duty, such as a superior owes to inferiors under his protection, became more and more involved in the relation. But it did not for many ages become a relation of companionship, even between vunequals; thev lives of the two persons were apart. The wife was part of the furniture of home, of the resting-place to which the man returned from business or pleasure. His occupations were, as they still are, among men, his pleasures and excitements also were, for the most part, among men—among his equals. He was a patriarch and a despot within four walls, and irresponsible power had its effect, greater or less according to his disposition, in rendering him domineering, exacting, self-worshipping, when not capriciously or brutally tyrannical. But if the moral part of his nature suffered, it was not necessarily so, in the same degree, with the intellectual or the active portion. He might have as much vigour of mind and energy of character as his nature enabled him, and as the circumstances of his times allowed. He might write the Paradise Lost,[*] or win the battle of Marengo.[†] This was the condition of the Greeks and Romans, and of the moderns until a recent date. Their relations with their domestic subordinates occupied a mere corner, though a cherished one, of their lives. Their education as men, the formation of their character and faculties, depended mainly on a different class of influences.
It is otherwise now. The progress of improvement has imposed on all possessors of power, and of domestic power among the rest, an increased and increasing sense of correlative obligation. No man now thinks that his wife has no claim upon his actions but such as he may accord to her. All men of any conscience believe that their duty to their wives is one of the most binding of their obligations. Nor is it supposed to consist solely in protection, which, in the present state of civilization, women have almost ceased to need: it involves care for their happiness and consideration of their wishes, with a not unfrequent sacrifice of their own to them. The power of husbands has reached the stage which the power of kings had arrived at, when opinion did not yet question the rightfulness of arbitrary power, but in theory, and to a certain extent in practice, condemned the selfish use of it. This improvement in the moral sentiments of mankind, and increased sense of the consideration due by every man to those who whavew no one but himself to look to, has tended to make home more and more the centre of interest, and domestic circumstances and society a larger and larger part of life, and of its pursuits and pleasures. The tendency has been strengthened by the changes of tastes and manners which have so remarkably distinguished the last two or three generations. In days not far distant, men found their excitement and filled up their time in violent bodily exercises, noisy merriment, and intemperance. They have now, in all but the very poorest classes, lost their inclination for these things, and for the coarser pleasures generally; they have now scarcely any tastes but those which they have in common with women, and, for the first time in the world, men and women are really companions. A most beneficial change, if the companionship were between equals; but being between unequals, it produces, what good observers have noticed, though without perceiving its cause, a progressive deterioration among men in what had hitherto been considered the masculine excellences. Those who are so careful that women should not become men, do not see that men are becoming, what they have decided that women should be—are falling into the feebleness which they have so long cultivated in their companions. Those who are associated in their lives, tend to become assimilated in character. In the present closeness of association between the sexes, men cannot retain manliness unless women acquire it.
There is hardly any situation more unfavourable to the maintenance of elevation of character or force of intellect, than to live in the society, and seek by preference the sympathy, of inferiors in mental endowments. Why is it that we constantly see in life so much of intellectual and moral promise followed by such inadequate performance, but because the aspirant has compared himself only with those below himself, and has not sought improvement or stimulus from measuring himself with his equals or xsuperiors.x In the present state of social life, this is becoming the general condition of men. They care less and less for any sympathies, and are less and less under any personal influences, but those of the domestic roof. Not to be misunderstood, it is necessary that we should distinctly disclaim the belief, that women are even now inferior in intellect to men. There are women who are the equals in intellect of any men who ever lived: and comparing ordinary women with ordinary men, the varied though petty details which compose the occupation of most women, call forth probably as much of mental ability, as the uniform routine of the pursuits which are the habitual occupation of a large majority of men. It is from nothing in the faculties themselves, but from the petty subjects and interests on which alone they are exercised, that the companionship of women, such as their present circumstances make them, so often exercises a dissolvent influence on high faculties and aspirations in men. If one of the two has no knowledge and no care about the great ideas and purposes which dignify life, or about any of its practical concerns save personal interests and personal vanities, her conscious, and still more her unconscious influence, will, except in rare cases, reduce to a secondary place in his mind, if not entirely extinguish, those interests which she cannot or does not share.
Our argument here brings us into collision with what may be termed the moderate reformers of the education of women; a sort of persons who cross the path of improvement on all great questions; those who would maintain the old bad principles, mitigating their consequences. These say, that women should be, not slaves, nor servants, but companions; and educated for that office, (they do not say that men should be educated to be the companions of women). But since uncultivated women are not suitable companions for cultivated men, and a man who feels interest in things above and beyond the family circle wishes that his companion should sympathize with him in that interest; they therefore say, let women improve their understanding and taste, acquire general knowledge, cultivate poetry, art, even coquet with science, and some stretch their liberality so far as to say, inform themselves on politics; not as pursuits, but sufficiently to feel an interest in the subjects, and to be capable of holding a conversation on them with the husband, or at least of understanding and imbibing his wisdom. Very agreeable to him, no doubt, but unfortunately the reverse of improving. It is from having intellectual communion only with those to whom they can lay down the law, that so few men continue to advance in wisdom beyond the first stages. The most eminent men cease to improve, if they associate only with disciples. When they have overtopped those who immediately surround them, if they wish for further growth, they must seek for others of their own stature to consort with. The mental companionship which is improving, is communion between active minds, not mere contact between an active mind and a passive. This inestimable advantage is even now enjoyed, when a strong-minded man and a strong-minded woman are, by a rare chance, united: and would be had far oftener, if education took the same pains to form strong-minded women which it takes to prevent them from being formed. yThe modern, and what are regarded as the improved and enlightened modes of education of women, abjure, as far as words go, an education of mere show, and profess to aim at solid instruction, but mean by that expression, superficial information on solid subjects. Except accomplishments, which are now generally regarded as to be taught well if taught at all, nothing is taught to women thoroughly. Small portions only of what it is attempted to teach thoroughly to boys, are the whole of what it is intended or desired to teach to women.y What makes intelligent beings is the power of thought: the stimuli which call forth that power are the interest and dignity of thought itself, and a field for its practical application. Both motives are cut off from those who are told from infancy that thought, and all its greater applications, are other people’s business, while theirs is to make themselves agreeable to other people. High mental powers in women will be but an exceptional accident, until every career is open to them, and until they, as well as men, are educated for themselves and for the world—not one sex for the other.
In what we have said on the effect of the inferior position of women, combined with the present constitution of married life, we have thus far had in view only the most favourable cases, those in which there is some real approach to that union and blending of characters and of lives, which the theory of the relation contemplates as its ideal standard. But if we look to the great majority of cases, the effect of women’s legal inferiority on the character both of women and of men must be painted in far darker colours. We do not speak here of the grosser brutalities, nor of the man’s power to seize on the woman’s earnings, or compel her to live with him against her will. We do not address ourselves to any one who requires to have it proved that these things should be remedied. We suppose average cases, in which there is neither complete union nor complete disunion of feelings and zofz character; and we affirm that in such cases the influence of the dependence on the woman’s side, is demoralizing to the character of both.
The common opinion is, that whatever may be the case with the intellectual, the moral influence of women over men is almost always salutary. It is, we are often told, the great counteractive of selfishness. However the case may be as to personal influence, the influence of the position tends eminently to promote selfishness. The most insignificant of men, the man who can obtain influence or consideration nowhere else, finds one place where he is chief and head. There is one person, often greatly his superior in understanding, who is obliged to consult him, and whom he is not obliged to consult. He is judge, magistrate, ruler, over their joint concerns; arbiter of all differences between them. The justice or conscience to which her appeal must be made, is his justice and conscience: it is his to hold the balance and adjust the scales between his own claims or wishes and those of another. His is now the only tribunal, in civilized life, in which the same person is judge and party. A generous mind, in such a situation, makes the balance incline against its own side, and gives the other not less, but more, than a fair equality; and thus the weaker side may be enabled to turn the very fact of dependence into an instrument of power, and in default of justice, take an ungenerous advantage of generosity; rendering the unjust power, to those who make an unselfish use of it, a torment and a burthen. But how is it when average men are invested with this power, without reciprocity and without responsibility? Give such a man the idea that he is first in law and in opinion—that to will is his part, and hers to submit; it is absurd to suppose that this idea merely glides over his mind, without sinking into it, or having any effect on his feelings and practice. The propensity to make himself the first object of consideration, and others at most the second, is not so rare as to be wanting where everything seems purposely arranged for apermittinga its indulgence. If there is any self-will in the man, he becomes either the conscious or unconscious despot of his household. The wife, indeed, often succeeds in gaining her objects, but it is by some of the many various forms of indirectness and management.
Thus the position is corrupting equally to both; in the one it produces the vices of power, in the other those of artifice. Women, in their present physical and moral state, having stronger impulses, would naturally be franker and more direct than men; yet all the old saws and traditions represent them as artful and dissembling. Why? Because their only way to their objects is by indirect paths. In all countries where women have strong wishes and active minds, this consequence is inevitable: and if it is less conspicuous in England than in some other places, it is because Englishwomen, saving occasional exceptions, have ceased to have either strong wishes or active minds.
We are not now speaking of cases in which there is anything deserving the name of strong affection on both sides. That, where it exists, is too powerful a principle not to modify greatly the bad influences of the situation, it seldom, however, destroys them entirely. Much oftener the bad influences are too strong for the affection, and destroy it. The highest order of durable and happy attachments would be a hundred times more frequent than they are, if the affection which the two sexes sought from one another were that genuine friendship, which only exists between equals in privileges as in faculties. But with regard to what is commonly called affection in married life—the habitual and almost mechanical feeling of kindliness, and pleasure in each other’s society, which generally grows up between persons who constantly live together, unless there is actual dislike—there is nothing in this to contradict or qualify the mischievous influence of the unequal relation. Such feelings often exist between a sultan and his favourites, between a master and his servants; they are merely examples of the pliability of human nature, which accommodates itself in some degree even to the worst circumstances, and the commonest natures always the most easily.
With respect to the influence personally exercised by women over men, it, no doubt, renders them less harsh and brutal; in ruder times, it was often the only softening influence to which they were accessible. But the assertion, that the wife’s influence renders the man less selfish, contains, as things now are, fully as much error as truth. Selfishness towards the wife herself, and towards those in whom she is interested, the children, though favoured by btheirb dependence, the wife’s influence, no doubt, tends to counteract. But the general effect on him of her character, so long as her interests are concentrated in the family, tends but to substitute for individual selfishness a family selfishness, wearing an amiable guise, and putting on the mask of duty. How rarely is the wife’s influence on the side of public virtue: how rarely does it do otherwise than discourage any effort of principle by which the private interests or worldly vanities of the family can be expected to csuffer.c Public spirit, sense of duty towards the public good, is of all virtues, as women are now educated and situated, the most rarely to be found among them; they have seldom even, what in men is often a partial substitute for public spirit, a sense of personal honour connected with any public duty. Many a man, whom no money or personal flattery would have bought, has bartered his political opinions against da titled or invitations efore his wife; and a still greater number are made mere hunters after the puerile vanities of society, because their wives value them. As for opinions; in Catholic countries, the wife’s influence is another name for that of the priest: he gives her, in the hopes and emotions connected with a future life, a consolation for the sufferings and disappointments which are her ordinary lot in this. Elsewhere, her weight is thrown into the scale either of the most common-place, or of the most outwardly prosperous opinions: either those by which censure will be escaped, or by which worldly advancement is likeliest to be procured. In England, the wife’s influence is usually on the illiberal and anti-popular side: this is generally the gaining side for personal interest and vanity; and what to her is the democracy or liberalism in which she has no part—which leaves her the Pariah it found her? The man himself, when he marries, usually declines into Conservatism; begins to sympathize with the holders of power, more than with its victims, and thinks it his part to be on the side of authority. As to mental progress, except those fvulgarerf attainments by which vanity or ambition are promoted, there is generally an end to it in a man who marries a woman mentally his inferior; unless, indeed, he is unhappy in marriage, or becomes indifferent. From a man of twenty-five or thirty, after he is married, an experienced observer seldom expects any further progress in mind or feelings. It is rare that the progress already made is maintained. Any spark of the mens divinior[*] which might otherwise have spread and become a flame, seldom survives for any length of time unextinguished. For a mind which learns to be satisfied with what it already is—which does not incessantly look forward to a degree of improvement not yet reached—becomes relaxed, self-indulgent, and loses the spring and the tension which maintain it even at the point already attained. And there is no fact in human nature to which experience bears more invariable testimony than to this—that all social or sympathetic influences which do not raise up, pull down; if they do not tend to stimulate and exalt the mind, they tend to vulgarize it.
For the interest, therefore, not only of women but of men, and of human improvement in the widest sense, the emancipation of women, which the modern world often boasts of having effected, and for which credit is sometimes given to civilization, and sometimes to Christianity, cannot stop where it is. If it were either necessary or just that one portion of mankind should remain mentally and spiritually only half developed, the development of the other portion ought to have been made, as far as possible, independent of their influence. Instead of this, they have become the most intimate, and it may now be said, the only intimate associates of those to whom yet they are sedulously kept inferior; and have been raised just high enough to drag the others down to themselves.
We have left behind a host of vulgar objections, either as not worthy of an answer, or as answered by the general course of our remarks. A few words, however, must be said on one plea, which in England is made much use of for giving an unselfish air to the upholding of selfish privileges, and which, with unobserving, unreflecting people, passes for much more than it is worth. Women, it is said, do not desire—do not seek, what is called their emancipation. On the contrary, they generally disown such claims when made in their behalf, and fall with acharnement upon any one of themselves who identifies herself with their common cause.
Supposing the fact to be true in the fullest extent ever asserted, if it proves that European women ought to remain as they are, it proves exactly the same with respect to Asiatic women; for they too, instead of murmuring at their seclusion, and at the restraint imposed upon them, pride themselves on it, and are astonished at the effrontery of women who receive visits from male acquaintances, and are seen in the streets unveiled. Habits of submission make men as well as women servile-minded. The vast population of Asia do not desire or value, probably would not accept, political liberty, nor the savages of the forest, civilization; which does not prove that either of those things is undesirable for them, or that they will not, at some future time, enjoy it. Custom hardens human beings to any kind of degradation, by deadening the part of their nature which would resist it. And the case of women is, in this respect, even a peculiar one, for no other inferior caste that we have heard of, have been taught to regard their degradation as their honour. The argument, however, implies a secret consciousness that the alleged preference of women for their dependent state is merely apparent, and arises from their being allowed no choice; for if the preference be natural, there can be no necessity for enforcing it by law. To make laws compelling people to follow their inclination, has not hitherto been thought necessary by any legislator. The plea that women do not desire any change, is the same that has been urged, times out of mind, against the proposal of abolishing any social evil—“there is no complaint;” which is generally not true, and when true, only so because there is not that hope of success, without which complaint seldom makes itself audible to unwilling ears. How does the objector know that women do not desire equality and freedom? He never knew a woman who did not, or would not, desire it for herself individually. It would be very simple to suppose, that if they do desire it they will say so. Their position is like that of the tenants or labourers who vote against their own political interests to please their landlords or employers; with the unique addition, that submission is inculcated on them from childhood, as the peculiar attraction and grace of their character. They are taught to think, that to repel actively even an admitted injustice done to themselves, is somewhat unfeminine, and had better be left to some male friend or protector. To be accused of rebelling against anything which admits of being called an ordinance of society, they are taught to regard as an imputation of a serious offence, to say the least, against the proprieties of their sex. It requires unusual moral courage as well as disinterestedness in a woman, to express opinions favourable to women’s enfranchisement, until, at least, there is some prospect of obtaining it. The comfort of her individual life, and her social consideration, usually depend on the goodwill of those who hold the undue power; and to possessors of power any complaint, however bitter, of the misuse of it, is a less flagrant act of insubordination than to protest against the power itself. The professions of women in this matter remind us of the state offenders of old, who, on the point of execution, used to protest their love and devotion to the sovereign by whose unjust mandate they suffered. Griselda herself might be matched from the speeches put by Shakespeare into the mouths of male victims of kingly caprice and tryanny: the Duke of Buckingham, for example, in Henry the Eighth, and even Wolsey.[*] The literary class of women, especially in England, are ostentatious in disclaiming the desire for equality or citizenship, and proclaiming their complete satisfaction with the place which society assigns to them; exercising in this, as in many other respects, a most noxious influence over the feelings and opinions of men, who unsuspectingly accept the servilities of toadyism as concessions to the force of truth, not considering that it is the personal interest of these women to profess whatever opinions they expect will be agreeable to men. It is not among men of talent, sprung from the people, and patronized and flattered by the aristocracy, that we look for the leaders of a democratic movement. Successful literary women are just as unlikely to prefer the cause of women to their own social consideration. They depend on men’s opinion for their literary as well as for their feminine successes; and such is their bad opinion of men, that they believe there is not more than one in ten thousand who does not dislike and fear strength, sincerity, or high spirit in a woman. They are therefore anxious to earn pardon and toleration for whatever of these qualities their writings may exhibit on other subjects, by a studied display of submission on this: that they may give no occasion for vulgar men to say (what nothing will prevent vulgar men from saying), that learning makes women unfeminine, and that literary ladies are likely to be bad wives.
But enough of this; especially as the fact which affords the occasion for this gnoticeg , makes it impossible any longer to assert the universal acquiescence of women (saving individual exceptions) in their dependent condition. In the United States at least, there are women, seemingly numerous, and now organised for action on the public mind, who demand equality in the fullest acceptation of the word, and demand it by a straightforward appeal to men’s sense of justice, not plead for it with a timid deprecation of their displeasure.
Like other popular movements, however, this may be seriously retarded by the blunders of its adherents. Tried by the ordinary standard of public meetings, the speeches at the Convention are remarkable for the preponderance of the rational over the declamatory element; but there are some exceptions; and things to which it is impossible to attach any rational meaning, have found their way into the resolutions. Thus, the resolution which sets forth the claims made in behalf of women, after claiming equality in education, in industrial pursuits, and in political rights, enumerates as a fourth head of demand something under the name of “social and spiritual union,” and “a medium of expressing the highest moral and spiritual views of justice,”[*] with other similar verbiage, serving only to mar the simplicity and rationality of the other demandsh: resembling those who would weakly attempt to combine nominal equality between men and women, with enforced distinctions in their privileges and functionsh . What is wanted for women is equal rights, equal admission to all social privileges; not a position apart, a sort of sentimental priesthood. To this, the only just and rational principle, both the resolutions and the speeches, for the most part, adhere. They contain so little which is akin to the nonsensical paragraph in question, that we suspect it not to be the work of the same hands as most of the other resolutions. The strength of the cause lies in the support of those who are influenced by reason and principle; and to attempt to recommend it by sentimentalities, absurd in reason, and inconsistent with the principle on which the movement is founded, is to place a good cause on a level with a bad one.
There are indications that the example of America will be followed on this side of the Atlantic; and the first step has been taken in that part of England where every serious movement in the direction of political progress has its commencement—the manufacturing districts of the North. On the 13th of February 1851, a petition of women, agreed to by a public meeting at Sheffield, and claiming the elective franchise, was presented to the House of Lords by the Earl of Carlisle.[†]
[[*] ]I.e., of those in Dissertations and Discussions, 2 vols. (London: Parker, 1859).
[[†] ]Harriet Taylor Mill, his wife, who died in 1858.
[a-a]59 excellencies
[b-b]59,67 hostile It
[[*] ]Paulina Kellogg Wright Davis.
[[†] ]Jacob Gilbert Forman, “Women’s Rights Convention at Worcester, Mass.,” New York: Daily Tribune, 26 Oct., 1850, p. 6.
[[*] ]Ibid., 25 Oct., 1850, p. 6.
[[†] ]Ibid., 26 Oct., 1850, p. 6.
[[‡] ]Ibid.
[c-c]68 the style
[[*] ]A Declaration by the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress Assembled (Philadelphia: Dunlap, 1776).
[d-d]67 governors
[e-e]67 remained
[[†] ]For another version of this charge, see Edward Barrington de Fonblanque, The Life and Labours of Albany Fonblanque (London: Bentley, 1874), p. 6, and Mill, Essays on England, Ireland, and the Empire, CW, Vol. VI (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), p. 353n.
[[*] ]Plato, Republic. (Greek and English), trans. Paul Shorey, 2 vols. (London: Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1946), Vol. I, pp. 444-52 (Bk. V); and Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas Caritat, marquis de Condorcet, Esquisse d’un tableau historique des progrès de l’esprit humain (Paris: Agasse, 1795), p. 367.
[f-f]68 men
[[*] ]See Forman. “Women’s Rights Convention,” 25 Oct., 1850, p. 6.
[* ]An excellent passage on this part of the subject, from one of Sydney Smith’s contributions to the Edinburgh Review, we gwillg not refrain from quoting. “A great deal has been said of the original difference of capacity between men and women, as if women were more quick and men more judicious—as if women were more remarkable for delicacy of association, and men for stronger powers of attention. All this, we confess, appears to us very fanciful. That there is a difference in the understandings of the men and the women we every day meet with, everybody, we suppose, must perceive, but there is none surely which may not be accounted for by the difference of circumstances in which they have been placed, without referring to any conjectural difference of original conformation of mind. As long as boys and girls run about in the dirt, and trundle hoops together, they are both precisely alike. If you catch up one-half of these creatures, and train them to a particular set of actions and opinions, and the other half to a perfectly opposite set, of course their understandings will differ, as one or the other sort of occupations has called this or that talent into action. There is surely no occasion to go into any deeper or more abstruse reasoning, in order to explain so very simple a phenomenon.” ([“Female Education” (1810), in] Sydney Smith’s Works, [2nd ed., 3 vols. (London: Longman, et al., 1840).] Vol. I, p. 200.)
[h]68 most of
[i-i]-68
[[*] ]Charlotte de la Tremoille Stanley.
[[†] ]Margaret of Austria and Louise of Savoy, respectively.
[j]59,67 first,
[k-k]68 should
[l-l]68 had
[m-m]68 earned!
[* ]The truly horrible effects of the present state of the law among the lowest of the working population, is exhibited in those cases of hideous maltreatment of their wives by working men, with which every newspaper, every police report, teems. Wretches unfit to have the smallest authority over any living thing, have a helpless woman for their household slave. These excesses could not exist, if women both earned, and had the right to possess, a part of the income of the family. [This note is appended to the end of the sentence in 59, 67, 75.]
[n-n]68 necessarily
[o-o]68 eternally
[[*] ]See, e.g., Claude Adrien Helvétius, De l’esprit (Paris: Durand, 1758), pp. 53-5.
[p-p]68 man
[q-q]68 women,—the
[r-r]68 the
[s-s]68 amongst
[t-t]-59,67,68
[u-u]-59,67
[v-v]59,67 unequals. The
[[*] ]John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667), in The Poetical Works (London: Tonson, 1695), pp. 1-343.
[[†] ]As did Napoleon I.
[w-w]68 had
[x-x]68 superiors?
[y-y]68 But this supposes other than mere dilettante instruction, given as an elegant amusement or agreeable accomplishment, not as a power to be used. Mental cultivation adapted for show and not for use, which makes pigmies of men, is the only kind given or proposed to be given to women by the present reformers of their education.
[z-z]-59,67
[a-a]59,67 encouraging
[b-b]59,67 her
[c-c]68 suffer!
[d-d]68 titles
[e-e]68 to
[f-f]67 vulgar
[[*] ]Horace, Satires, in Satires, Epistles and Ars poetica, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough (London: Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1939), p. 52 (I, iv, 43-4).
[[*] ]Griselda is the heroine of Story 10, Day 10, of Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron (1353), whose loyal patience became proverbial; for the speeches, see William Shakespeare, Henry the Eighth, II, i, 55-78 and 100-36 (Buckingham), and III, ii, 407-21 and 428-57 (Wolsey), in The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston Houghton Mifflin, 1974), pp. 990-1 and 1005, respectively.
[g-g]68 paper
[[*] ]Forman, “Women’s Rights Convention,” 26 Oct., 1850, p. 6.
[h-h]-68
[[†] ]“A Petition of the Female Inhabitants of the Borough of Sheffield in the County of York, in Public Meeting Assembled, Praying Their Lordships ‘to Take into Their Serious Consideration the Propriety of Enacting an Electoral Law. Which Will Include Adult Females within Its Provisions.”’ (13 Feb., 1851), Journals of the House of Lords, 1851, LXXXIII, 23.
[* ]An excellent passage on this part of the subject, from one of Sydney Smith’s contributions to the Edinburgh Review, we gwillg not refrain from quoting. “A great deal has been said of the original difference of capacity between men and women, as if women were more quick and men more judicious—as if women were more remarkable for delicacy of association, and men for stronger powers of attention. All this, we confess, appears to us very fanciful. That there is a difference in the understandings of the men and the women we every day meet with, everybody, we suppose, must perceive, but there is none surely which may not be accounted for by the difference of circumstances in which they have been placed, without referring to any conjectural difference of original conformation of mind. As long as boys and girls run about in the dirt, and trundle hoops together, they are both precisely alike. If you catch up one-half of these creatures, and train them to a particular set of actions and opinions, and the other half to a perfectly opposite set, of course their understandings will differ, as one or the other sort of occupations has called this or that talent into action. There is surely no occasion to go into any deeper or more abstruse reasoning, in order to explain so very simple a phenomenon.” ([“Female Education” (1810), in] Sydney Smith’s Works, [2nd ed., 3 vols. (London: Longman, et al., 1840).] Vol. I, p. 200.)
[gwillg]68 must
13: JSM, STATEMENT ON MARRIAGE 1851
John Stuart Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XXI - Essays on Equality, Law, and Education, ed. John M. Robson, Introduction by Stefan Collini (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984). Chapter: STATEMENT ON MARRIAGE 1851
Accessed from oll.libertyfund.org/title/255/21660 on 2008-05-22
The online edition of the Collected Works is published under licence from the copyright holder, The University of Toronto Press. ©2006 The University of Toronto Press. All rights reserved. No part of this material may be reproduced in any form or medium without the permission of The University of Toronto Press.
STATEMENT ON MARRIAGE
1851EDITOR’S NOTE
MS facsimile reproduced in Hugh S.R. Elliot, The Letters of John Stuart Mill, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, 1910), I, facing 159 and 160. Unheaded. Signed “J.S. Mill” and dated 6 March, 1851. Not published (and therefore not in Mill’s bibliography). In Elliot’s transcription, “pretension” (1.17) is mistakenly given as “pretence”. For comment, see lxii above.
Statement on Marriage
being about, if I am so happy as to obtain her consent, to enter into the marriage relation with the only woman I have ever known, with whom I would have entered into that state; and the whole character of the marriage relation as constituted by law being such as both she and I entirely and conscientiously disapprove, for this among other reasons, that it confers upon one of the parties to the contract, legal power and control over the person, property, and freedom of action of the other party, independent of her own wishes and will; I, having no means of legally divesting myself of these odious powers (as I most assuredly would do if an engagement to that effect could be made legally binding on me), feel it my duty to put on record a formal protest against the existing law of marriage, in so far as conferring such powers; and a solemn promise never in any case or under any circumstances to use them. And in the event of marriage between Mrs. Taylor and me I declare it to be my will and intention, and the condition of the engagement between us, that she retains in all respects whatever the same absolute freedom of action, and freedom of disposal of herself and of all that does or may at any time belong to her, as if no such marriage had taken place, and I absolutely disclaim and repudiate all pretension to have acquired any rights whatever by virtue of such marriage.
14: JSM, REMARKS ON MR. FITZROY’S BILL FOR THE MORE EFFECTUAL PREVENTION OF ASSAULTS ON WOMEN AND CHILDREN 1853
John Stuart Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XXI - Essays on Equality, Law, and Education, ed. John M. Robson, Introduction by Stefan Collini (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984). Chapter: REMARKS ON MR. FITZROY’S BILL FOR THE MORE EFFECTUAL PREVENTION OF ASSAULTS ON WOMEN AND CHILDREN 1853
Accessed from oll.libertyfund.org/title/255/21663 on 2008-05-22
The online edition of the Collected Works is published under licence from the copyright holder, The University of Toronto Press. ©2006 The University of Toronto Press. All rights reserved. No part of this material may be reproduced in any form or medium without the permission of The University of Toronto Press.
REMARKS ON MR. FITZROY’S BILL FOR THE MORE EFFECTUAL PREVENTION OF ASSAULTS ON WOMEN AND CHILDREN
1853EDITOR’S NOTE
London: printed “for private distribution,” 1853. Anonymous; not republished. Identified in Mill’s bibliography as “A pamphlet (a few copies only printed for distribution)—entitled ‘Remarks on Mr. Fitzroy’s Bill for the more effectual prevention of assaults on women and children.’ (In this I acted chiefly as amanuensis to my wife.)” (MacMinn, 79.) Occasioned by Henry Fitzroy’s “A Bill for the Better Prevention and Punishment of Assaults on Women and Children,” 16 Victoria (10 Mar., 1853), PP, 1852-53, I, 9-12, enacted as 16 & 17 Victoria, c.30 (1853). The Somerville College copies have no corrections or emendations. For comment, see lxii above.
Remarks on Mr. Fitzroy’s Bill for the More Effectual Prevention of Assaults on Women and Children
the bill brought into parliament by mr. fitzroy, as the organ of the Home Office, enlarging the powers of magistrates to inflict summary penalties for brutal assaults on women and children, is excellent in design; and if in execution it falls short of what is required to deal adequately with the enormity of the evil, the speech of the Mover indicated that he felt its imperfection, and had done as much as he thought it prudent to attempt without assurance of support.[*] There have since been signs, both in and out of Parliament, that the Minister formed a lower estimate than necessary of what the public would receive at his hands, and that a measure far more likely to be efficacious would have been well received. The following remarks, on what the writer deems the shortcomings of the present Bill, are offered for the consideration of those who interest themselves in its success.
The speech of the Mover showed him to be strongly impressed with the horrible amount of domestic brutality which the law at present existing leaves unrepressed; and he made a selection of recent cases, exhibiting the disgraceful contrast which every reader of police reports is accustomed to see, between the flagrancy of the offence and the insignificance of the penalty.[†] If any deficiency could be remarked in the statement, it is, that all the instances cited were cases of outrage against women, to the exclusion of the brutalities inflicted both by men and women on the still more helpless children. Without reckoning the frightful cases of flogging and starving which so often come to light, there have been two cases within the last few weeks in each of which a woman, entrusted with the care of an infant three or four years old, caused its death by burning with fire.[‡] In one of these cases the woman had forced the infant to grasp a red hot coal in its hand, and hold it there for some minutes; and being put on trial before the child had died, but when it was already certain that he would be a cripple for life, was sentenced, not by a police magistrate, but by the Central Criminal Court at the Old Bailey, to—a fortnight’s imprisonment! Such cases prove that there is more amiss than an extension of the powers of the subordinate Courts will remedy; that there is not merely a want of power in the administrators of criminal justice to treat such culprits with a severity sufficient for example, but, in some cases at least, a want of will. Merely to authorize a greater amount of punishment for these offences, at the discretion of a judicial officer, is no guarantee against their continuing to be perpetrated with almost as near an approach to impunity as at present. To increase the penalty is an indication of intention on the part of the Legislature. To see that the intention be fulfilled ought to be the care of those with whom rests the choice of judges and of magistrates.
By the existing law, the utmost punishment which can be inflicted by summary sentence is five pounds fine, or two months’ imprisonment.[*] The Bill raises this limit to a fine of twenty pounds, or imprisonment for six months, with or without hard labour.[†] With regard to the fine, when the prisoner cannot pay it, the power of fining is nugatory. When he can, it is revolting to the commonest sense of justice that any one should be able to buy the privilege of inflicting atrocious cruelty by paying twenty pounds. From the newspaper reports it appears to be the practice of police magistrates, not to pass sentence of imprisonment unless they have first ascertained that the prisoner cannot pay the fine. It is only because these criminals are usually of the most reckless and therefore the most needy portion of the labouring classes, that this power of compounding by payment of blood-money does not operate as an actual licence to the offences intended to be repressed.
Remains the penalty of imprisonment, “with or without” the addition of labour. The remark is applicable to the question of secondary punishment in general, and peculiarly to these offences, that the alternative of imprisonment with or without labour is equivalent to that of conviction with or without punishment. Can it be supposed that any amount of imprisonment without labour (unless in the few jails in which the salutary rule of separation of prisoners has been made universal) has a deterring effect upon criminals of the class who come under the proposed enactment? What is a prison to them? A place where, probably, they are better fed, better clothed, better lodged, than in their own dwellings, with an abundance of society of their own description, while they are exempted from the hard work by which they earned their living until the justice of their country undertook to punish them. In return for this release from all the most disagreeable circumstances of their ordinary condition, they suffer the inconvenience of not being able to get gin and tobacco; that is, they are treated exactly as if they were in the union workhouse, except the hard labour. Even alms are not given to the able-bodied at the expense of the parish, though but for a day, without a day’s work in exchange for it;[*] and surely, now that attention has been awakened to these subjects, it must soon be recognized that when imprisonment is imposed as a punishment, even if only for a day, either solitude or hard labour (for those who are capable of it) ought invariably to be a part of the sentence. In the case of the poor, the addition of labour is not even a punishment. Their life when at large must be one of labour, and generally of a restraint even upon their power of locomotion, almost equal to that of imprisonment. With the addition of labour, imprisonment to the ordinary labourer scarcely amounts to a punishment; without labour it is a holiday.
But neither with labour nor without it, is imprisonment in any form a suitable or a sufficient penalty for crimes of brutality. For these nothing will be effectual but to retaliate upon the culprit some portion of the physical suffering which he has inflicted. The beneficial efficacy of the enactment now in contemplation will, it is safe to prophesy, depend on the adoption or not of Mr. Phinn’s amendment, making corporal punishment a part of the penalty.[†] The Mover himself did not disguise his conviction that nothing less than this would be adequate to the exigency;[‡] and it is earnestly to be hoped that the many adhesions which the suggestion has since received, including that of one of the most intelligent of the London police magistrates,* will induce Mr. Fitzroy to incorporate it in the Bill.
Overwhelming as are the objections to corporal punishment except in cases of personal outrage, it is peculiarly fitted for such cases. The repulsiveness to standers by, and the degradation to the culprit, which make corporal maltreatment so justly odious as a punishment, would cease to adhere to it, if it were exclusively reserved as a retribution to those guilty of personal violence. It is probably the only punishment which they would feel. Those who presume on their consciousness of animal strength to brutally illtreat those who are physically weaker, should be made to know what it is to be in the hands of a physical strength as much greater than their own, as theirs than that of the subjects of their tyranny. It is the moral medicine needed for the domineering arrogance of brute power After one or two cases of flogging for this description of crime, we should hear no more of outrages upon women or children for a long time to come. Probably such outrages would cease altogether, as soon as it became well known that the punishment of flogging would be inflicted for them.
With this penalty in the Act, and a clear understanding on the part of magistrates that it was not intended as a brutum fulmen, nor to be reserved for those horrible cases for which, as a matter of moral retribution, hanging would scarcely be punishment enough; if the administration of the law were such that the ruffianly part of the population would know that they could not give loose to their brutal rage without imminent risk of incurring in fact, and not nominally, the only punishment which they would dread; the enactment would do more for the improvement of morality, and the relief of suffering, than any Act of Parliament passed in this century, not excepting, perhaps, the Act for the abolition of slavery.[*] But this salutary impression can only be made by rendering punishment prompt and certain in infliction, as well as efficacious in kind; by avoiding, therefore, to let in, by the terms of the Act itself, certainty of delay, and probable chances of escape. This would, however, be an inevitable effect of adopting another amendment, of which notice has been given, allowing an appeal to the quarter sessions.[†] An appeal is often a necessary evil, but in such a case as this, a palpably unnecessary one. These are not cases in which a magistrate, or two magistrates, are likely to err on the side of inflicting too severe a sentence; there is abundant experience that the danger of error is all on the contrary side.
A government which should pass an act embodying these provisions, would confer a more immediate and a more certain benefit on the community, than it is often in the power of legislators to ensure by any enactment. The beneficial fruits of such a law are not to be measured by the crime and suffering which it would directly prevent, though these would be sufficient to stamp it as one of the most beneficent acts yet done by Government for the improvement of our institutions. A measure such as this, is of wider scope, and still more extensive beneficence. It is a measure of moral education. All parties now acknowledge that it is the urgent duty of Government to provide that the people be educated, could they but discover how it is to be done; and the present Ministry made it one of their pledges, on coming into office, that they would do something effectual for education.[‡] But even if the measure they contemplate were far more considerable than they probably have it in their power to make it, what chance is there for education, if the schools teach one lesson, and the laws another contradictory to it? The administration of criminal justice is one of the chief instruments of moral education of the people. Its lessons of morality are of the utmost importance for good or for ill; for they take effect upon that part of the population which is unreached by any other moralizing influences, or on which others have been tried, and have failed of their effect. The lessons which the law teaches, it cannot fail of teaching impressively. The man who is brought, or who knows himself liable to be brought, to answer for his conduct at the bar of justice, cannot slight or despise the notions of right and wrong, the opinions and feelings respecting conduct and character, which he there finds prevailing. It is the one channel through which the sentiments of the well-conducted part of the community are made operative perforce on the vilest and worst. Yet, in this day of ragged schools, and model prisons, and plans for the reformation of criminals, the most important instrument which society has for teaching the elements of morality to those who are most in need of such teaching, is scarcely used at all. So potent an engine must necessarily act in one way or another, and when it does not act for good, it acts for evil. Is there any system of moral instruction capable of being devised for the populace, which could stand against the lessons of a diametrically opposite tendency, daily given by the criminal courts? The law and the tribunals are terribly in earnest when they set about the protection of property. But violence to the person is treated as hardly deserving serious notice, unless it endangers life; and even then, unless premeditated intention is proved by such superfluity of evidence that neither ingenuity nor stupidity can escape from admitting it, the criminal generally gets off almost scot free.* It is of little avail to talk of inculcating justice, or kindness, or self-control, while the judicial and police courts teach by actions, so much more efficacious than words, that the most atrocious excesses of ungovernable violence are, in the eyes of the authorities, something quite venial. The law has the forming of the character of the lowest classes in its own hands. A tithe of the exertion and money now spent in attempting to reform criminals, if spent in reforming the minor criminal laws and their administration, would produce a real diminution of crime, instead of an imaginary reformation of criminals. But then, it must be allowed, it would not serve to fill so much of philanthropic gentlemen’s time.
Not only is education by the course of justice the most efficacious, in its own province, of all kinds of popular education, but it is also one on which there needs be no difference of opinion. Churches and political parties may quarrel about the teaching of doctrines, but not about the punishment of crimes. There is diversity of opinion about what is morally good, but there ought to be none about what is atrociously wicked. Whatever else may be included in the education of the people, the very first essential of it is to unbrutalise them; and to this end, all kinds of personal brutality should be seen and felt to be things which the law is determined to put down. The Bill of Mr. Fitzroy is a step in the right direction; but, unless its provisions are strengthened, it will be rather an indication of the wish, than a substantial exercise of the power, to repress one of the most odious forms of human wickedness.
[[*] ]Henry Fitzroy, Speech (10 Mar., 1853, Commons), PD, 3rd ser., Vol. 124, col. 1417.
[[†] ]Ibid., cols. 1414-16.
[[‡] ]See The Times, 3 Jan., 1853, p. 7 (a report of Mary Ann Oldham’s cruelty to John Gaywood, his death is reported ibid., 1 Feb., 1853, p. 8), and 19 Jan., 1853, p. 4 (Elizabeth Baker’s cruelty to Albert Monks). The Oldham case is the one referred to in the next sentence.
[[*] ]9 George IV, c. 31 (1828), Sect. 27.
[[†] ]“A Bill for the Better Prevention and Punishment of Assaults on Women and Children,” p. 10.
[[*] ]See “Report from His Majesty’s Commissioners for Inquiring into the Administration and Practical Operation of the Poor Laws,” PP, 1834, XXVII, 146-7, which refers to the desired continuation of the “intent” and “spirit” of 43 Elizabeth, c. 2 (1601) in the new poor law (enacted as 4 & 5 William IV, c. 76 [1834]).
[[†] ]Thomas Phinn. Speech in Amendment to Mr. Fitzroy’s Bill. (10 Mar., 1853, Commons), PD, 3rd ser., Vol. 124, col. 1419.
[[‡] ]Fitzroy, speech of 10 Mar., 1853, col. 1414.
[* ]Mr. [John] Hammill. “Though he was much gratified at finding that a bill was now under the consideration of the Legislature for more adequately punishing such atrocious offences, he felt satisfied, from the result of his experience, that nothing short of the infliction of corporal punishment would afford an efficient protection to the helpless objects of such brutality.” (The Times, March 25, [1853, p. 7].)
[[*] ]3 & 4 William IV, c. 73 (1833).
[[†] ]See Phinn, speech of 10 Mar., 1853, col. 1420.
[[‡] ]See John Russell, Speech on Public Business (10 Feb., 1853; Commons), PD, 3rd ser., Vol. 124, cols. 18-19.
[* ]Contrast the sentence of eighteen months’ imprisonment, passed a few days ago, at the Norfolk Assizes, on a man [Samuel Horth] who had attempted to murder a woman [Ann Proudfoot] with a pitch plaster, under about as revolting a combination of circumstances as imagination can conceive, with fourteen years’ transportation, awarded on the same day, by the same judge [Jonathan Frederick Pollock], for stealing to the value of a few pence. [See The Times, article on the Norfolk Circuit, 21 Mar., 1853, p. 7. The Morning Chronicle, 21 Mar., 1853, p. 8, agrees with The Times in saying that on the same day, 18 Mar., Pollock sentenced William Jarvis to ten years’ transportation for defrauding an insurance company by burning his own house; neither gives the information Mill cites.]
15: JSM, Electoral Franchise for Women 17 JULY, 1866
John Stuart Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XXVIII - Public and Parliamentary Speeches Part I November 1850 - November 1868, ed. John M. Robson and Bruce L. Kinzer (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1988). Chapter: 25.: Electoral Franchise for Women 17 JULY, 1866
Accessed from oll.libertyfund.org/title/262/52770 on 2008-05-22
The online edition of the Collected Works is published under licence from the copyright holder, The University of Toronto Press. ©2006 The University of Toronto Press. All rights reserved. No part of this material may be reproduced in any form or medium without the permission of The University of Toronto Press.
25.
Electoral Franchise for Women
17 JULY, 1866PD, 3rd ser., Vol. 184, cols. 996–8. Reported in The Times, 18 July, p. 8, from which the variant and responses are taken. Mill spoke in moving “for an Address for ‘Return of the number of Freeholders, Householders, and others in England and Wales who, fulfilling the conditions of property or rental prescribed by Law as the qualification for the Electoral Franchise, are excluded from the Franchise by reason of their sex.’ ”
sir, I rise to make the Motion of which I have given notice.1 After the petition which I had the honour of presenting a few weeks ago, the House would naturally expect that its attention would be called, however briefly, to the claim preferred in that document.2 The petition, and the circumstances attendant on its preparation, have, to say the least, greatly weakened the chief practical argument which we have been accustomed to hear against any proposal to admit women to the electoral franchise—namely, that few, if any, women desire it. Originating as that petition did entirely with ladies, without the instigation, and, to the best of my belief, without the participation of any person of the male sex in any stage of the proceedings, except the final one of its presentation to Parliament, the aamount of response which became manifest, the number of signatures obtained in a very short space of time, not to mention the quality of many of those signatures, may not have been surprising to the ladies who promoted the petition, but was certainly quite unexpected by mea . I recognize in it the accustomed sign that the time has arrived when a proposal of a public nature is ripe for being taken into serious consideration—namely, when a word spoken on the subject is found to have been the expression of a silent wish pervading a great number of minds, and a signal given in the hope of rallying a few supporters is unexpectedly answered by many. It is not necessary to offer any justification for the particular Motion which I am about to make. (Hear, hear.) When the complaint is made that certain citizens of this nation, fulfilling all the conditions and giving all the guarantees which the Constitution and the law require from those who are admitted to a voice in determining who shall be their rulers, are excluded from that privilege for what appears to them, and for what appears to me, an entirely irrelevant consideration, the least we can do is to ascertain what number of persons are affected by the grievance, and how great an addition would be made to the constituency if this disability were removed. I should not have attempted more than this in the present Session, even if the recent discussions in reference to Reform had not been brought to an abrupt close. Even if the late Government had succeeded in its honourable attempt to effect an amicable compromise of the Reform question; any understanding or any wish which might have existed as to the finality, for a certain period, of that compromise, could not have effected such a proposal as this, the adoption of which would not be, in any sense of the term, a lowering of the franchise, and is not intended to disturb in any degree the distribution of political power among the different classes of society. Indeed, honourable Gentlemen opposite seem to think, and I suppose they are the best judges, that this concession, assuming it to be made, if it had any effect on party politics at all, would be favourable to their side (hear); and the right honourable Member for Dublin University, in his humorous manner, advised me on that ground to withdraw this article from my political programme;3 but I cannot, either in jest or in earnest, adopt his suggestion, for I am bound to consider the permanent benefit of the community before the temporary interest of a party; and I entertain the firmest conviction that whatever holds out an inducement to one-half of the community to exercise their minds on the great social and political questions which are discussed in Parliament, and whatever causes the great influence they already possess to be exerted under the guidance of greater knowledge, and under a sense of responsibility, cannot be ultimately advantageous to the Conservative or any other cause, except so far as that cause is a good one. And I rejoice in the knowledge that in the estimation of many honourable Gentlemen of the party opposite, the proposal made in the petition is, like many of the most valuable Reforms, as truly Conservative, as I am sure it is truly Liberal. I listened with pleasure and gratitude to the right honourable Gentleman who is now Chancellor of the Exchequer, when in his speech on the second reading of the Reform Bill,4 he said he saw no reason why women of independent means should not possess the electoral franchise, in a country where they can preside in manorial courts and fill parish offices—to which let me add, and the Throne. (Hear, hear.)
[Spencer Walpole said he would consent to the motion, without pledging himself to any future action, and the motion was agreed to.]
[1 ]See “Parliamentary Intelligence. House of Commons, Friday, June 8,” The Times, 9 June, 1866, p. 6. (The notice of motion is not recorded in PD or the Journals of the House of Commons.)
[2 ]“Petition for Admission of Women to the Electoral Franchise” (7 June, 1866), Reports of the Select Committee of the House of Commons on Public Petitions, Session 1866, p. 697. The petition had 1521 signatures, headed by those of Barbara Bodichon, Clementia Taylor, and Emily Davies.
[a-a]TT ladies themselves who had originated the petition had been surprised at the great number of signatures it had obtained
[3 ]James Whiteside, Speech on the Elective Franchise Bill (30 May, 1866), PD, 3rd ser., Vol. 183, col. 1509.
[4 ]Disraeli, Speech on the Representation of the People Bill (27 Apr., 1866), ibid., col. 99.
16: JSM, The Admission of Women to the Electoral Franchise 20 MAY, 1867
John Stuart Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XXVIII - Public and Parliamentary Speeches Part I November 1850 - November 1868, ed. John M. Robson and Bruce L. Kinzer (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1988). Chapter: 55.: The Admission of Women to the Electoral Franchise 20 MAY, 1867
Accessed from oll.libertyfund.org/title/262/52831 on 2008-05-22
The online edition of the Collected Works is published under licence from the copyright holder, The University of Toronto Press. ©2006 The University of Toronto Press. All rights reserved. No part of this material may be reproduced in any form or medium without the permission of The University of Toronto Press.
55.
The Admission of Women to the Electoral Franchise
20 MAY, 1867Speech of John Stuart Mill, M.P. on the Admission of Women to the Electoral Franchise. Spoken in the House of Commons, May 20th, 1867 (London: Trübner, 1867), and PD, 3rd ser., Vol. 187, cols. 842–3. The text of the pamphlet is reproduced ibid., cols. 817–29, Mill having instructed Trübner to send a copy to Hansard; see CW, Vol. XVI, p. 1277. That Hansard used that text is indicated by the asterisk in PD. (There are no substantive differences except two misprints in PD: “Nor, Sir” for “Now, Sir” at 152.6, and “indirect” for “in direct” at 157.27.) Reported in The Times, 21 May, p. 9, from which variants and responses are taken; the variants are all supported by the report in the St. Stephen’s Chronicle, Vol. III, pp. 475–81. The copies in SC have no corrections or emendations.
i rise, sir, to propose an extension of the suffrage which can excite no party or class feeling in this House; which can give no umbrage to the keenest assertor of the claims either of property or of numbers; an extension which has not the smallest tendency to disturb what we have heard so much about lately, the balance of political power; which cannot afflict the most timid alarmist with revolutionary terrors, or offend the most jealous democrat as an infringement of popular rights (hear, hear), or a privilege granted to one class of society at the expense of another. There is nothing to distract our attention from the simple question, whether there is any adequate justification for continuing to exclude an entire half of the community, not only from admission, but from the capability of being ever admitted within the pale of the Constitution, though they may fulfil all the conditions legally and constitutionally sufficient in every case but theirs. Sir, within the limits of our Constitution this is a solitary case. There is no other example of an exclusion which is absolute. If the law denied a vote to all but the possessors of £5000 a year, the poorest man in the nation might—and now and then would—acquire the suffrage; but neither birth, nor fortune, nor merit, nor exertion, nor intellect, nor even that great disposer of human affairs, accident, can ever enable any woman to have her voice counted in those national affairs which touch her and hers as nearly as any other aperson in the nationa . (Hear, hear.)
Now, Sir, before going any further, allow me to say, that a primâ facie case is already made out. It is not just to make distinctions, in rights and privileges, without a positive reason. I do not mean that the electoral franchise, or any other public function, is an abstract right, and that to withhold it from any one, on sufficient grounds of expediency, is a personal wrong; it is a complete misunderstanding of the principle I maintain, to confound this with it; my argument is entirely one of expediency. But there are different orders of expediency; all expediencies are not exactly on the same level; there is an important branch of expediency called justice; and justice, though it does not necessarily require that we should confer political functions on every one, does require that we should not, capriciously and without cause, withhold from one what we give to another. As was most truly said by my right honourable friend the Member for South Lancashire, in the most misunderstood and misrepresented speech I ever remember;1 to lay a ground for refusing the suffrage to any one, it is necessary to allege either personal unfitness or public danger. Now, can either of these be alleged in the present case? Can it be pretended that women who manage an estate or conduct a business,—who pay rates and taxes, often to a large amount, and frequently from their own earnings,—many of whom are responsible heads of families, and some of whom, in the capacity of schoolmistresses, teach much more than a great number of the male electors have ever learnt,—are not capable of a function of which every male householder is capable? (Hear, hear.) Or is it feared that if they were admitted to the suffrage they would revolutionize the State,—would deprive us of any of our valued institutions, or that we should have worse laws, or be in any way whatever worse governed, through the effect of their suffrages? No one, Sir, believes anything of the kind.
And it is not only the general principles of justice that are infringed, or at least set aside, by the exclusion of women, merely as women, from any share in the representation; that exclusion is also repugnant to the particular principles of the British Constitution. It violates one of the oldest band most cherishedb of our constitutional maxims—a doctrine dear to reformers, and theoretically acknowledged by most Conservatives—that taxation and representation should be co-extensive. Do not women pay taxes? Does not every woman who is sui juris contribute exactly as much to the revenue as a man who has the same electoral qualification? If a stake in the country means anything,2 the owner of freehold or leasehold property has the same stake, whether it is owned by a man or a woman. There is evidence in our constitutional records that women have voted, in counties and in some boroughs, at former, though certainly distant, periods of our history.
The House, however, will doubtless expect that I should not rest my case solely on the general principles either of justice or of the Constitution, but should produce what are called practical arguments. Now, there is one practical argument of great weight, which, I frankly confess, is entirely wanting in the case of women; they do not hold great meetings in the parks, or demonstrations at Islington.3 (Oh!) How far this omission may be considered to invalidate their claim, I will not undertake to decide; but other practical arguments, practical in the most restricted meaning of the term, are not wanting; and I am prepared to state them, if I may be permitted first to ask, what are the practical objections? The difficulty which most people feel on this subject, is not a practical objection; there is nothing practical about it; it is a mere feeling—a feeling of strangeness; the proposal is so new; at least they think so, though this is a mistake; it is a very old proposal. Well, Sir, strangeness is a thing which wears off; some things were strange enough to many of us three months ago which are not at all so now; and many are strange now, which will not be strange to the same persons a few years hence, or even, perhaps, a few months. And as for novelty, we live in a world of novelties; the despotism of custom is on the wane; we are not now satisfied with knowing what a thing is, we ask whether it ought to be; and in this House at least, I am bound to believe that an appeal lies from custom to a higher tribunal, in which reason is judge. Now, the reasons which custom is in the habit of giving for itself on this subject are usually very brief. That, indeed, is one of my difficulties; it is not easy to refute an interjection; interjections, however, are the only arguments among those we usually hear on this subject, which it seems to me at all difficult to refute. The others mostly present themselves in such aphorisms as these: Politics are not women’s business, and would distract them from their proper duties: Women do not desire the suffrage, but would rather be without it: Women are sufficiently represented by the representation of their male relatives and connexions: Women have power enough already. (Laughter.) I shall probably be thought to have done enough in the way of answering, if I answer all this; and it may, perhaps, instigate any honourable gentleman who takes the trouble of replying to me, to produce something more recondite.
Politics, it is said, are not a woman’s business. Well, Sir, I rather think that politics are not a man’s business either; unless he is one of the few who are selected and paid to devote their time to the public service, or is a member of this or of the other House. The vast majority of male electors have each his own business, which absorbs nearly the whole of his time; but I have not heard that the few hours occupied, once in a few years, in attending at a polling booth, even if we throw in the time spent in reading newspapers and political treatises, ever causes them to neglect their shops or their counting-houses. I have never understood that those who have votes are worse merchants, or worse lawyers, or worse physicians, or even worse clergymen than other people. One would almost suppose that the British Constitution denied a vote to every one who could not give the greater part of his time to politics: if this were the case, we should have a very limited constituency. But allow me to ask, what is the meaning of political freedom? Is it anything but the control of those who do make their business of politics, by those who do not? Is it not the very essence of constitutional liberty, that men come from their looms and their forges to decide, and decide well, whether they are properly governed, and whom they will be governed by? And the nations which prize this privilege the most, and exercise it most fully, are invariably those who excel the most in the common concerns of life. The ordinary occupations of most women are, and are likely to remain, principally domestic; but the notion that these occupations are incompatible with the keenest interest in national affairs, and in all the great interests of humanity, is a utterly futile as the apprehension, once sincerely entertained, that artisans would desert their workshops and their factories if they were taught to read. I know there is an obscure feeling—a feeling which is ashamed to express itself openly—as if women had no right to care about anything, except how they may be the most useful and devoted servants of some man. But as I am convinced that there is not a single member of this House, whose conscience accuses him of so mean a feeling, I may say without offence, that this claim to confiscate the whole existence of one half of the species for the supposed convenience of the other, appears to me, independently of its injustice, particularly silly. For who that has had ordinary experience of human affairs, and ordinary capacity of profiting by that experience, fancies that those do their own work best who understand nothing else? A man has lived to little purpose who has not learnt that without general mental cultivation, no particular work that requires understanding is ever done in the best manner. It requires brains to use practical experience; and brains, even without practical experience, go further than any amount of practical experience without brains. But perhaps it is thought that the ordinary occupations of women are more antagonistic than those of men are to the comprehension of public affairs. It is thought, perhaps, that those who are principally charged with the moral education of the future generations of men, cannot be fit to form an opinion about the moral and educational interests of a people: and that those whose chief daily business is the judicious laying-out of money, so as to produce the greatest results with the smallest means, cannot possibly give any lessons to right honourable gentlemen on the other side of the House or on this, who contrive to produce such singularly small results with such vast means. (Ironical cheers.)
I feel a degree of confidence, Sir, on this subject, which I could not feel, if the political change, in itself not great or formidable, which I advocate, were not grounded, as beneficent and salutary political changes almost always are, upon a previous social change. The notion of a hard and fast line of separation between women’s occupations and men’s—of forbidding women to take interest in the things which interest men—belongs to a gone-by state of society, which is receding further and further into the past. We talk of political revolutions, but we do not sufficiently attend to the fact that there has taken place around us a csilentc domestic revolution: women and men are, for the first time in history, really each other’s companions. Our traditions respecting the proper relations between them have descended from a time when their lives were apart—when they were separate in their thoughts, because they were separate equally in their amusements and in their serious occupations. In former days a man passed his life among men; all his friendships, all his real intimacies, were with men; with men alone did he consult on any serious business; the wife was either a plaything, or an upper servant. All this, among the educated classes, is now changed. The man no longer gives his spare hours to violent outdoor exercises and boisterous conviviality with male associates: the two sexes now pass their lives together; the women of a man’s family are his habitual society; the wife is his chief associate, his most confidential friend, and often his most trusted adviser. Now, does a man wish to have for his nearest companion, so closely linked with him, and whose wishes and preferences have so strong a claim on him, one whose thoughts are alien to those which occupy his own mind—one who can neither be a help, a comfort, nor a support, to his noblest feelings and purposes? Is this close and almost exclusive companionship compatible with women’s being warned off all large subjects—being taught that they ought not to care for what it is men’s duty to care for, and that to have any serious interests outside the household is stepping beyond their province? Is it good for a man to live in complete communion of thoughts and feelings with one who is studiously kept inferior to himself, whose earthly interests are forcibly confined within four walls, and who cultivates, as a grace of character, ignorance and indifference about the most inspiring subjects, those among which his highest duties are cast? Does any one suppose that this can happen without detriment to the man’s own character? Sir, the time is now come when, unless women are raised to the level of men, men will be pulled down to theirs. The women of a man’s family are either a stimulus and a support to his highest aspirations, or a drag upon them. You may keep them ignorant of politics, but you cannot prevent them from concerning themselves with the least respectable part of politics—its personalities; if they do not understand and cannot enter into the man’s feelings of public duty, they do care about his personal interest, and that is the scale into which their weight will certainly be thrown. They will be an influence always at hand, co-operating with the man’s selfish promptings, lying in wait for his moments of moral irresolution, and doubling the strength of every temptation. Even if they maintain a modest forbearance, the mere absence of their sympathy will hang a dead-weight on his moral energies, making him unwilling to make sacrifices which they will feel, and to forego social advantages and successes in which they would share, for objects which they cannot appreciate. Supposing him fortunate enough to escape any actual sacrifice of conscience, the indirect effect on the higher parts of his own character is still deplorable. Under an idle notion that the beauties of character of the two sexes are mutually incompatible, men are afraid of manly women; but those who have considered the nature and power of social influences well know, that unless there are manly women, there will not much longer be manly men. When men and women are really companions, if women are frivolous, men will be frivolous; if women care for nothing but personal interest and idle vanities, men in general will care for little else: the two sexes must now rise or sink together. It may be said that women may take interest in great public questions without having votes; they may, certainly; but how many of them will? Education and society have exhausted their power in inculcating on women that their proper rule of conduct is what society expects from them; and the denial of the vote is a proclamation intelligible to every one, that whatever else society may expect, it does not expect that they should concern themselves with public interests. Why, the whole of a girl’s thoughts and feelings are toned down by it from her schooldays; she does not take the interest even in national history which her brothers do, because it is to be no business of hers when she grows up. If there are women—and now happily there are many—who do interest themselves in these subjects, and do study them, it is because the force within is strong enough to bear up against the worst kind of discouragement, that which acts not by interposing obstacles, which may be struggled against, but by deadening the spirit which faces and conquers obstacles.
We are told, Sir, that women do not wish for the suffrage. If the fact were so, it would only prove that all women are still under this deadening influence; that the opiate still benumbs their mind and conscience. But great numbers of women do desire the suffrage, and have asked for it by petitions to this House. How do we know how many more thousands there may be, who have not asked for what they do not hope to get; or for fear of what may be thought of them by men, or by other women; or from the feeling, so sedulously cultivated in them by their education—aversion to make themselves conspicuous? Men must have a rare power of self-delusion, if they suppose that leading questions put to the ladies of their family or of their acquaintance will elicit their real sentiments, or will be answered with complete sincerity by one woman in ten thousand. No one is so well schooled as most women are in making a virtue of necessity; it costs little to disclaim caring for what is not offered; and frankness in the expression of sentiments which may be unpleasing and may be thought uncomplimentary to their nearest connections, is not one of the virtues which a woman’s education tends to cultivate, and is, moreover, a virtue attended with sufficient risk, to induce prudent women usually to reserve its exercise for cases in which there is a nearer and a more personal interest at stake. However this may be, those who do not care for the suffrage will not use it; either they will not register, or if they do, they will vote as their male relatives advise: by which, as the advantage will probably be about equally shared among all classes, no harm will be done. Those, be they few or many, who do value the privilege, will exercise it, and will receive that stimulus to their faculties, and that widening and liberalizing influence over their feelings and sympathies, which the suffrage seldom fails to produce on those who are admitted to it. Meanwhile an unworthy stigma would be removed from the whole sex. The law would cease to declare them incapable of serious things; would cease to proclaim that their opinions and wishes are unworthy of regard, on things which concern them equally with men, and on many things which concern them much more than men. They would no longer be classed with children, idiots, and lunatics, as incapable of taking care of either themselves or others, and needing that everything should be done for them, without asking their consent. If only one woman in twenty thousand used the suffrage, to be declared capable of it would be a boon to all women. Even that theoretical enfranchisement would remove a weight from the expansion of their faculties, the real mischief of which is much greater than the apparent.
Then it is said, that women do not need direct power, having so much indirect, through their influence over their male relatives and connections. I should like to carry this argument a little further. Rich people have a great deal of indirect influence. Is this a reason for refusing them votes? Does any one propose a rating qualification the wrong way, or bring in a Reform Bill to disfranchise all who live in a £500 house, or pay £100 a year in direct taxes? Unless this rule for distributing the franchise is to be reserved for the exclusive benefit of women, it would follow that persons of more than a certain fortune should be allowed to bribe, but should not be allowed to vote. Sir, it is true that women have great power. It is part of my case that they have great power; but they have it under the worst possible conditions, because it is indirect, and therefore irresponsible. I want to make this great power a responsible power. I want to make the woman feel her conscience interested in its honest exercise. I want her to feel that it is not given to her as a mere means of personal ascendency. I want to make her influence work by a manly interchange of opinion, and not by cajolery. I want to awaken in her the political point of honour. Many a woman already influences greatly the political conduct of the men connected with her, and sometimes, by force of will, actually governs it; but she is never supposed to have anything to do with it; the man whom she influences, and perhaps misleads, is alone responsible; her power is like the back-stairs influence of a favourite. Sir, I demand that all who exercise power should have the burthen laid on them of knowing something about the things they have power over. With the acknowledged right to a voice, would come a sense of the corresponding duty. Women are not usually inferior in tenderness of conscience to men. Make the woman a moral agent in these matters: show that you expect from her a political conscience: and when she has learnt to understand the transcendent importance of these things, she will know why it is wrong to sacrifice political convictions to personal interest or vanity; she will understand that political integrity is not a foolish personal crotchet, which a man is bound, for the sake of his family, to give up, but a solemn duty: and the men whom she can influence will be better men in all public matters, and not, as they often are now, worse men by the whole amount of her influence.
But at least, it will be said, women do not suffer any practical inconvenience, as women, by not having a vote. The interests of all women are safe in the hands of their fathers, husbands, and brothers, who have the same interest with them, and not only know, far better than they do, what is good for them, but care much more for them than they care for themselves. Sir, this is exactly what is said of all unrepresented classes. The operatives, for instance: are they not virtually represented by the representation of their employers? Are not the interest of the employers and that of the employed, when properly understood, the same? To insinuate the contrary, is it not the horrible crime of setting class against class? Is not the farmer equally interested with the labourer in the prosperity of agriculture,—the cotton manufacturer equally with his workmen in the high price of calicoes? Are they not both interested alike in taking off taxes? And, generally, have not employers and employed a common interest against all outsiders, just as husband and wife have against all outside the family? And what is more, are not all employers good, kind, benevolent men, who love their workpeople, and always desire to do what is most for their good? All these assertions are as true, and as much to the purpose, as the corresponding assertions respecting men and women. Sir, we do not live in Arcadia, but, as we were lately reminded, in faece Romuli:4 and in that region workmen need other protection than that of their employers, and women other protection than that of their men. I should like to have a return laid before this House of the number of women who are annually beaten to death, kicked to death, or trampled to death by their male protectors: and, in an opposite column, the amount of the sentences passed, in those cases in which the dastardly criminals did not get off altogether. I should also like to have, in a third column, the amount of property, the unlawful taking of which was, at the same sessions or assizes, by the same judge, thought worthy of the same amount of punishment. We should then have an arithmetical estimate of the value set by a male legislature and male tribunals on the murder of a woman, often by torture continued through years, which, if there is any shame in us, would make us hang our heads. Sir, before it is affirmed that women do not suffer in their interests, as women, by the denial of a vote, it should be considered whether women have no grievances; whether the laws, and those practices which laws can reach, are in every way as favourable to women as to men. Now, how stands the fact? In the matter of education, for instance. We continually hear that the most important part of national education is that of mothers, because they educate the future men. Is this importance really attached to it? Are there many fathers who care as much, or are willing to expend as much, for the education of their daughters as of their sons? Where are the Universities, where the High Schools, or the schools of any high description, for them? If it be said that girls are better educated at home, where are the training-schools for governesses? What has become of the endowments which the bounty of our ancestors destined for the education, not of one sex only, but of both indiscriminately? I am told by one of the highest authorities on the subject, that in the majority of the endowments the provision made is not for boys, but for education generally; in one great endowment, Christ’s Hospital, it is expressly for both: that institution now maintains and educates 1100 boys, and exactly 26 girls.5 And when they attain womanhood, how does it fare with that great and increasing portion of the sex, who, sprung from the educated classes, have not inherited a provision, and not having obtained one by marriage, or disdaining to marry merely for a provision, depend on their exertions for subsistence? Hardly any decent educated occupation, save one, is open to them. They are either governesses or nothing. A fact has recently occurred, well worthy of commemoration in connection with this subject. A young lady, Miss Garrett, from no pressure of necessity, but from an honourable desire to employ her activity in alleviating human suffering, studied the medical profession.6 Having duly qualified herself, she, with an energy and perseverance which cannot be too highly praised, knocked successively at all the doors through which, by law, access is obtained into the medical profession. Having found all other doors fast shut, she fortunately discovered one which had accidentally been left ajar. The Society of Apothecaries, it seems, had forgotten to shut out those who they never thought would attempt to come in, and through this narrow entrance this young lady found her way into this profession. But so objectionable did it appear to this learned body that women should be the medical attendants even of women, that the narrow wicket through which Miss Garrett entered has been closed after her, and no second Miss Garrett will be allowed to pass through it.7 And this is instar omnium.8 No sooner do women show themselves capable of competing with men in any career, than that career, if it be lucrative or honourable, is closed to them. A short time ago, women might be Associates of the Royal Academy; but they were so distinguishing themselves, they were assuming so honourable a place in their art, that this privilege also has been withdrawn.9 This is the sort of care taken of women’s interests by the men who so faithfully represent them. This is the way we treat unmarried women. And how is it with the married? They, it may be said, are not interested in this motion; and they are not directly interested; but it interests, even directly, many who have been married, as well as others who will be. Now, by the common law of England, all that a wife has, belongs absolutely to the husband; he may tear it all from her, squander every penny of it in debauchery, leave her to support by her labour herself and her children, and if by heroic exertion and self-sacrifice she is able to put by something for their future wants, unless she is judicially separated from him he can pounce down upon her savings, and leave her penniless. And such cases are of quite common occurrence. Sir, if we were besotted enough to think these things right, there would be more excuse for us; but we know better. The richer classes take care to exempt their own daughters from the consequences of this abominable state of the law. By the contrivance of marriage settlements, they are able in each case to make a private law for themselves, and they invariably do so. Why do we not provide that justice for the daughters of the poor, which we take care to provide for our own daughters? Why is not that which is done in every case that we personally care for, made the law of the land, so that a poor man’s child, whose parents could not afford the expense of a settlement, may retain a right to any little property that may devolve on her, and may have a voice in the disposal of her own earnings, which, in the case of many husbands, are the best and only reliable part of the incomings of the family? I am sometimes asked what practical grievances I propose to remedy by giving women a vote. I propose, for one thing, to remedy this. I give these instances to prove that women are not the petted children of society which many people seem to think they are—that they have not the over-abundance, the superfluity of power that is ascribed to them, and are not sufficiently represented by the representation of the men who have not had the heart to do for them this simple and obvious piece of justice. (Hear, hear.) Sir, grievances of less magnitude than the law of the property of married women, when suffered by parties less inured to passive submission, have provoked revolutions. We ought not to take advantage of the security we feel against any such consequence in the present case, to withhold from a limited number of women that moderate amount of participation in the enactment and improvement of our laws, which this motion solicits for them, and which would enable the general feelings of women to be heard in this House through a few male representatives. We ought not to deny to them, what we are conceding to everybody else—a right to be consulted din the choice of a representatived ; the ordinary chance of placing in the great Council of the nation a few organs of their sentiments—of having, what every petty trade or profession has, a few members who feel specially called on to attend to their interests, and to point out how those interests are affected by the law, or by any proposed changes in it. No more is asked by this motion; and when the time comes, as it certainly will come, when this will be granted, I feel the firmest conviction that you will never repent of the concession.
[At the end of his speech, Mill moved his amendment to substitute the word person for the word man “(hear, hear)” in Clause 4 of the Reform Bill, which dealt with the occupation qualifications for voters in counties. Following seven other speakers, Mill concluded the debate.]
I will merely say, in answer to the noble Lord who requested me to withdraw the Motion,10 that I am a great deal too well pleased with the speeches that have been made against it—his own included—to think of withdrawing it. There is nothing that has pleased me more in those speeches than to find that every one who has attempted to argue at all, has argued against something which is not before the House (hear, hear): they have argued against the admission of married women, which is not in the Motion; or they have argued against the admission of women as Members of this House; or again, as the honourable Member for the Wick boroughs (Mr. Laing) has done, they have argued against allowing women to be generals and officers in the army;11 a question which I need scarcely say is not before the House. I certainly do think that when we come to universal suffrage, as some time or other we probably shall come (oh, oh!)—if we extend the vote to all men, we should extend it to all women also. So long, however, as you maintain a property qualification, I do not propose to extend the suffrage to any women but those who have the qualification. If, as is surmised by one of the speakers,12 young ladies should attach so much value to the suffrage that they should be unwilling to divest themselves of it in order to marry, I can only say that if they will not marry without it, they will probably be allowed to retain it. (Hear, and a laugh.) As to any question that may arise in reference to the removal of any other disabilities of women, it is not before the House. There are evidently many arguments and many considerations that cannot be overlooked in dealing with these larger questions, but which do not arise on the present Motion, and on which, therefore, it is not necessary that I should comment. I will only say that if we should in the progress of experience—especially after experience of the effect of granting the suffrage—come to the decision that married women ought to have the suffrage, or that women should be admitted to any employment or occupation which they are not now admitted to—if it should become the general opinion that they ought to have it, they will have it.
[After Mill’s speech, the question was put, and the amendment lost, 196 to 73, Mill being a teller.]
[a-a]TT,SSC member of the community
[1 ]Gladstone, speech of 11 May, 1864, cols. 312–27, specifically, col. 324.
[b-b]+TT,SSC
[2 ]For the phrase, see William Windham (1750–1810), Speech on Defence of the Country (22 July, 1807; Commons), PD, 1st ser., Vol. 9, col. 897.
[3 ]For the former, see Nos. 27, 29, 31, 32, and 34; for the latter, No. 32.
[c-c]TT,SSC social and
[4 ]Cicero (106–43 ), Letters to Atticus (Latin and English), trans. E.O. Winstedt, 3 vols. (London: Heinemann; New York: Macmillan,1912), Vol. I, p. 108 (II, i): “the dregs of humanity collected by Romulus” rather than the inhabitants of Plato’s Republic (Arcadia).
[5 ]Sarah Emily Davies (1830–1921), On the Application of Funds to the Education of Girls (London: Longman, et al., 1865).(Originally a paper read before the Education Department of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, 3 May, 1865.)
[6 ]Elizabeth Garrett (1836–1917), later Anderson.
[7 ]Three young women had followed Elizabeth Garrett’s path, but they and any further potential candidates were made ineligible for certification by a ruling that public lectures (from which women were barred) were a requirement. See “Female Candidates at Apothecaries’ Hall,” Medical Times and Gazette, 2 Mar., 1867, p. 229, and “Ladies Not Admitted,” British Medical Journal, 9 Mar., 1867, p. 269.
[8 ]Pliny the Elder (ca. 23–79 ), Natural History (Latin and English), trans. H. Rackham, et al., 10 vols. (London: Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1938–62), Vol. IV, p. 64 (XII, 87).
[9 ]The reference to Associates of the Royal Academy is puzzling. When the Academy was founded in 1768, two women, Angelica Kauffmann and Mary Moser, had been made Associates, but no more were elected until the twentieth century. Women had regularly, however, been exhibitors at the annual exhibitions, and since 1861 had been admitted in limited numbers as students, the first, Laura Anne Herford, perhaps being allowed entry because she signed her submission only with her initials. Some of these students, including Louisa Starr, distinguished themselves, and consequently there was an effective limit placed on their numbers.
[d-d]+TT,SSC
[10 ]George Edward Arundell Monckton-Arundell, Viscount Galway (1805–76), M.P. for East Retford, cols. 841–2.
[11 ]Samuel Laing (1812–97), col. 840.
[12 ]John Burgess Karslake (1821–81), M.P. for Andover, cols. 829–30.
17: JSM, Married Women’s Property 10 JUNE, 1868
John Stuart Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XXVIII - Public and Parliamentary Speeches Part I November 1850 - November 1868, ed. John M. Robson and Bruce L. Kinzer (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1988). Chapter: 99.: Married Women’s Property 10 JUNE, 1868
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99.
Married Women’s Property
10 JUNE, 1868Speeches of Mr. Jacob Bright, M.P., Mr. Robert Lowe, M.P., Mr. J.S. Mill, M.P., and Mr. G. Shaw Lefevre, M.P., in the Debate on the Second Reading of “The Bill to Amend the Law with Respect to the Property of Married Women” (Manchester: Ireland, 1868), pp. 9–11. Based on PD, 3rd ser., Vol. 192, cols. 1370–2. Reported in The Times, 11 June, p. 6, from which the responses are taken. Mill presented petitions in favour of the Bill (31 Victoria [21 Apr., 1868], PP, 1867–68, III, 375–8) on 9 and 10 June. On the day he spoke, Mill wrote to a correspondent (possibly Isabella Tod, of Belfast) to say that the Bill had passed its second reading, “(after an interesting debate of which all the honours were on our side) by the casting vote of the Speaker, and is to be referred to a Select Committee”
(CW, Vol. XVI, p. 1413).
aperhaps, sir, thosea who, like myself, bthink that women can never hope that the laws and customs of society will do them full justice unless they are admitted to participate in political rights, ought, perhaps, to wish that the House would rejectb this Bill, because cit is quite certain thatc its rejection would give a most extraordinary impulse to the movement, which has lately made so much progress, for giving the suffrage to women. (Hear, hear.) I wish, however, that my sex should have the credit of giving up unjust dand impolitic privileges before they are brought under the influence of other motives than their own good feelingsd . The debate has produced many gratifying expressions of opinion—the able and persuasive speech of my honourable friend the member for Manchester for example, and the logical and high-principled address of my right honourable friend the member for Calne.1 (Hear, hear.) The honourable and learned member for Colchester2ehas very truly said that his honourable friend the member for Reading3 is not the author of the Bill, but has adopted it from others, who, he seems to think, must be persons strongly prejudiced against the existing institutions of societye. I regret that the learned gentleman has left the House, as I could have told him who some of those persons were. I do not think the learned gentleman can have been aware that among fthe persons whom he was condemningf were those eminent socialists and revolutionists the present Secretaries of State for Foreign Affairs and for War.4 The noble lord (Lord Stanley), along with that eminent judge Sir Lawrence Peel,5 was a member of the committee of the Social Science Association which drew up the Bill, similar to this, formerly introduced by Sir Erskine Perry;6 and the right honourable baronet (Sir J.S. Pakington) took the chair at a public meeting for the same purpose.7 The learned gentleman is aware that ghe has against him the right honourable Recorder of London ,8 but attributes his absence to not being hearty in the cause. I wonder the learned gentleman does not know that the recorder is prevented from being present by the discharge of his judicial duties. His feelings on the subject are very strong, and, had he been present, he would probably have given the House his experience of the manner in which the law affects the women of the humbler classes. That conscientious and feeling judge might also have given the Attorney-General9 an insight into the working of the provisions of the Divorce Act,10 and how unreal and nominal an amount of protection has been given by that Act to the women of the humbler class. It does, indeed, allow married women to apply to the magistrate for protection to their earnings, but only in cases of desertion. Cases are, however, constantly occurringgh, some within my own knowledge,h in which the husband just avoids the amount of desertion which would justify the magistrate in giving protection to the wife. He stays away for a sufficient time to enable her to accumulate a small sum, and then he lives with her just long enough to squander it. As, however, the Attorney-General has expressed a willingness to extend and improve the operation of that Act,11 I trust that he will himself introduce a Bill on the subject. (Hear, hear.) There has been, indeed, on the part of the Legislature a wonderful overlooking of the need of some similar protection. Even in cases where the words “to her separate use”12 are introduced by the Court of Chancery for the wife’s protection, the sole effect of the words is that the trustees cannot pay the income of the settled property except upon the wife’s receipt. That is a perfect protection if the wife be living away from her husband, but if she be living with him the money immediately becomes the husband’s income, and he has a right to take it from her the moment she receives it. (Hear, hear.) iA large portion of the inhabitants of this country are now in the anomalous position of having imposed on them, without their having done anything to deserve it, what we inflict as a penalty on the worst criminals. Like felons they are incapable of holding property. And the class of women who are in that position are married women, whom we profess a desire to surround with marks of honour and dignity.ijMany people seem to think it impossible that two persons can live together in harmonyj unless one of them has absolute power over the other. This kmay have been the case in savage times, but we are advanced beyond the savage state; and I believe it is not found that civilized men or women cannot live with their brothers or with their sisters except on such terms, or that business cannot be successfully carried on unless one partner has the absolute mastery over the other. The family offers a type and a school of the relation of superiors and inferiors, exemplified in parents and children; it should also offer a type and a school of the relation of equality, exemplified in husband and wife. I am not insensible to the evils which husbands suffer from bad and unprincipled wivesk . Happily, the levilsl of slavery m(and I do not use the word in an invidious sense)m extend to the slave-master as well as to the slave. But if we were endeavouring to invent a mode of giving to the wife the strongest possible motive to strain to the utmost her claims nagainst the property of her husband, what step more effectual for this object could be taken than to enact that she should have no rights of her own, and should be entirely dependent upon what she can extract from the husband?n It is only by doing justice to women that we can hope to give them any moral feeling against encroaching on the rights of others. oIt is by remedying the injustice that married women now suffer that real harmony is to be introduced into the married state.opWould the honourable Member for Colchester accept for himself exclusion from all rights of property, on condition that some one else should pay his debts, and make atonement for his wrongs?p The Attorney-General adverted to what is certainly the weakest part of the Bill when he pointed out that, if the rights of husband and wife are to be equal, their obligations ought also to be equal, and if the Bill should go into committee it will be necessary to alter the clauses so as to establish an obligation equally on both parties.13 The Bill will no doubt require a great deal of consideration in committee, not so much with a view to the omission of some clauses as to the addition of others. No doubt it is true that many other qalterations of the law will be necessary; for when the law is founded on a bad principle much re-adjustment is necessitated by the adoption of a good one. But if it should please the House to refer the Bill to a Select Committee, there are honourable and learned Gentlemen on both sides of the House quiteq capable of proposing such radditions as wouldr make the Bill work smoothly. (Hear.)
[The division on second reading was tied, and the Speaker voted “Aye” to allow further discussion (cols. 1376–8).]
[a-a]PD] P Those
[b-b]PD support the extension of political rights to women, should desire the rejection of
[c-c]+PD
[d-d]PD] P privileges voluntarily
[1 ]Jacob Bright, cols. 1360–4, and Robert Lowe, cols. 1364–7.
[2 ]Edward Kent Karslake (1820–92), cols. 1355–8.
[e-e]PD said with great truth that the real authors of the Bill are not present, and he seemed to think they must be persons in whose eyes any change in existing institutions must be an improvement
[3 ]Shaw-Lefevre, who had introduced the Bill, and later (cols. 1373–6) spoke to it.
[f-f]PD] P them
[4 ]Stanley and Pakington.
[5 ]Lawrence Peel (1799–1884) had been Chief Justice of Calcutta (1842–55) and a Director of the East India Company (from 1857) when Mill was Chief Examiner.
[6 ]Thomas Erskine Perry (1806–82), then M.P. for Devonport, Speech on the Married Women’s Property Bill (14 May, 1857), PD, 3rd ser., Vol. 145, cols. 266–74, introducing “A Bill to Amend the Law with Respect to the Property of Married Women,” 20 Victoria (14 May, 1857), PP, 1857, III.ii, 243–8 (not enacted).
[7 ]On 31 May, 1856; see “Property of Married Women,” The Times, 2 June, p. 5.
[g-g]PD the right honourable Recorder of London (Mr. Russell Gurney) is a supporter of the Bill, because his name is on the back of it; but he seems to think that Gentleman’s absence intentional, though, as a lawyer, it is strange he should not have known that the Recorder’s absence is caused by his presiding in his Court. That conscientious and feeling judge was very desirous of being present, and would, from his judicial experience, have put the House in possession of the real effects of the present law, and afforded to the Attorney General and the honourable Member for Colchester some information as to the true working of that power in the Divorce Act to which allusion has been made. It is only in cases of desertion that this power comes into exercise, and that the magistrate has power to make orders of protection; but cases are continually happening,
[8 ]Russell Gurney, like Mill, was a sponsor of the Bill.
[9 ]John Burgess Karslake.
[10 ]20 & 21 Victoria, c. 85 (1857).
[h-h]+PD
[11 ]Karslake, col. 1369.
[12 ]See Sect. 25 of 20 & 21 Victoria, c. 85.
[i-i]+PD
[j-j]PD It seems to be the opinion of those who oppose the measure that it is impossible for society to exist on a harmonious footing between two persons
[k-k]PD] P might be true whilst people were savages; but civilized men are able to live with their brothers, women with their sisters, and men with their sisters, without any such absolute power, and why not men with their wives? I am quite aware that men may suffer from bad wives, as well as women from bad husbands
[l-l]PD sufferings
[m-m]+P
[n-n]PD] P over her husband, it would be by giving her no rights of her own.
[o-o]+P
[p-p]+PD
[13 ]Karslake, col. 1369.
[q-q]PD] P parts of the law, having been adjusted to a bad principle, will require modification, in order to accommodate them to a good one. But a select committee, comprising able lawyers, will be perfectly
[r-r]PD alterations as will
18: JSM, THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN 1869
John Stuart Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XXI - Essays on Equality, Law, and Education, ed. John M. Robson, Introduction by Stefan Collini (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984). Chapter: THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN 1869
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THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN
1869EDITOR’S NOTE
3rd ed. London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1870. Reprinted without variants from 1st and 2nd eds., ibid., both 1869. Not listed in Mill’s bibliography. There are no corrections in the Somerville College copy of the 2nd ed. For comment on the work, see xxix-xxxvii and lxviii-lxxi above.
Chapter I
the object of this essay is to explain as clearly as I am able, the grounds of an opinion which I have held from the very earliest period when I had formed any opinions at all on social or political matters, and which, instead of being weakened or modified, has been constantly growing stronger by the progress of 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 in 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 the 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 conviction rests. The difficulty is that which exists in all cases in which there is a mass of feeling to be contended against. So long as an 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, the worse it fares in argumentative contest, the more persuaded its adherents are that their feeling must have some deeper ground, which the arguments do not reach; and while the feeling remains, it is always throwing up fresh intrenchments of argument to repair any breach made in the old. And there are so many causes tending to make the feelings connected with this subject the most intense and most deeply-rooted of all those which gather round and protect old institutions and customs, that we need not wonder to find them as yet less undermined and loosened than any of the rest by the progress of 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 burthen is hard on those who attack an almost universal opinion. They must be very fortunate as 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, the burthen of proof is supposed to lie with the affirmative. If a person is charged with a murder, it rests with those who accuse him to give proof of his guilt, not with himself to prove his innocence. If there is a difference of opinion about the reality of any alleged historical event, in which the feelings of men in general are not much interested, as the Siege of Troy for example, those who maintain that the event took place are expected to produce their proofs, before those who take the other side can be required to say anything; and at no time are these required to do more than show that the evidence produced by the others is of no value. Again, in practical matters, the burthen of proof is supposed to be with those who are against liberty; who contend for any restriction or prohibition, either any limitation of the general freedom of human action, or any disqualification or disparity of privilege affecting one person or kind of persons, as compared with others. The à 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 dissimilarity of treatment is required by positive reasons, either of justice or of policy. But of none of these rules of evidence will the benefit be allowed to those who maintain the opinion I profess. It is useless for 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, are on the affirmative side of the question, and that they are bound to show positive evidence for the assertions, or submit to their rejection. It is equally unavailing for me to say that those who deny to women any freedom or privilege rightly 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 judgment ought to go against them. These would be thought good pleas in any common case; but they will not be thought so in this instance. Before I could hope to make any impression, I should be expected not only to answer all that has ever been said by those who take the other side of the question, but to imagine all that could be said by them—to find them in reasons, as well 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 this, and leave the opposite party with a host of unanswered arguments against them, and not a single unrefuted one on their side, I should be thought to have done little; for a cause supported on the one hand by universal usage, and on the other by so great a preponderance of popular sentiment, is supposed to have a presumption in its favour, superior to any conviction which an appeal to reason has power to produce in any intellects but those of a high class.
I do not mention these difficulties to complain of them; first, because it would be useless; they are inseparable from having to contend through people’s understandings against the hostility of 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 can be asked to place such reliance in their own power of estimating arguments, as to give up practical principles in which they have been born and bred and which are the basis of much of the 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 reaction of the nineteenth century against the eighteenth, to accord to the unreasoning elements in human nature the infallibility which the eighteenth century is supposed to have ascribed to the reasoning elements. For the apotheosis of Reason we have substituted that of Instinct; and we call everything instinct which we find in ourselves and for which we cannot trace any rational foundation. This idolatry, infinitely more degrading than the other, and the most pernicious of the false worships of the present day, of all of which it is now the main support, will probably hold its ground until it gives way before a sound psychology, laying bare the real root of much that is bowed down to as the intention of Nature and the ordinance of God. As regards the present question, I am willing to accept the unfavourable conditions which the prejudice assigns to me. I consent that established custom, and the general feeling, should be deemed conclusive against me, unless that custom and feeling from age to age can be shown to have owed their existence to other causes than their soundness, and to have derived their power from the worse rather than the better parts of human nature. I am willing that judgment should go against me, unless I can show that my judge has been tampered with. The concession is not so great as it might appear, 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 organization—the government of women over men, equality between the two, and such mixed and divided modes of government as might be invented—it had been decided, on the testimony of experience, that the mode in which women are wholly under the rule of men, having no share at all in public concerns, and each in private being under the legal obligation of obedience to the man with whom she has associated her destiny, was the arrangement most conducive to the happiness and well being of both, its general adoption might then be fairly thought to be some evidence that, at the time when it was adopted, it was the best, though even then the considerations which recommended it may, like so many other primeval social facts of the greatest importance, have subsequently, in the course of ages, ceased to exist. But the state of the case is in every respect the reverse of this. In the first place, the opinion in favour of the present system, which entirely subordinates the weaker sex to the stronger, rests upon theory only; for there never has been trial made of any other: so that experience, in the sense in which it is vulgarly opposed to theory, cannot be pretended to have pronounced any verdict. And in the second place, the adoption of this system of inequality never was the result of deliberation, or forethought, or any social ideas, or any notion whatever of what conduced to the benefit of humanity or the good order of society. It arose simply from the fact that from the very earliest twilight of human society, every woman (owing to the value attached to her by men, combined with her inferiority in muscular strength) was found in a state of bondage to some man. Laws and systems of polity always begin by recognising the relations they find already existing between individuals. They convert what was a mere physical fact into a legal right, give it the sanction of society, and principally aim at the substitution of public and organized 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 regularized and a matter of compact among the masters, who, binding themselves to one another for common protection, guaranteed by their collective strength the private possessions of each, including his slaves. In early times, the great majority of the male sex were slaves, as well as the whole of the female. And many ages elapsed, some of them ages of high cultivation, before any thinker was bold enough to question the rightfulness, and the absolute social necessity, either of the one slavery or of the other. By degrees such thinkers did arise: and (the general progress of society assisting) the slavery of the male sex has, in all the countries of Christian Europe at least (though, in one of them, only within the last few years) been at length abolished, and that of the female sex has been gradually changed into a milder form of dependence. But this dependence, as it exists at present, is not an original institution, taking a fresh start from considerations of justice and social expediency—it is the primitive state of slavery lasting on, through successive mitigations and modifications occasioned by the same causes which have softened the general manners, and brought all human relations more under the control of justice and the influence of humanity. It has not lost the taint of its brutal origin. No presumption in its favour, therefore, can be drawn from the fact of its existence. The only such presumption which it could be supposed to have, must be grounded on its having lasted till now, when so many other things which came down from the same odious source have been done away with. And this, indeed, is what makes it strange to ordinary ears, to hear it asserted that the inequality of rights between men and women has no other source than the law of the strongest.
That this statement should have the effect of a paradox, is in some respects creditable to the progress of civilization, and the improvement of the moral sentiments of mankind. We now live—that is to say, one or two of the most advanced nations of the world now live—in a state in which the law of the strongest seems to be entirely abandoned as the regulating principle of the world’s affairs: nobody professes it, and, as regards most of the relations between human beings, nobody is permitted to practise it. When any one 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 civilization by a well-grounded feeling of its adaptation to human nature, and conduciveness to the general good. They do not understand the great vitality and durability of institutions which place right on the side of might; how intensely they are clung to, how the good as well as the bad propensities and sentiments of those who have power in their hands, become identified with retaining it, how slowly these bad institutions give way, one at a time, the weakest first, beginning with those which are least interwoven with the daily habits of life, and how very rarely those who have obtained legal power because they first had physical, have ever lost their hold of it until the physical power had passed over to the other side. Such shifting of the physical force not having taken place in the case of women; this fact, combined with all the peculiar and characteristic features of the particular case, made it certain from the first that this branch of the system of right founded on might, though softened in its most atrocious features at an earlier period than several of the others, would be the very last to disappear. It was inevitable that this one case of a social relation grounded on force, would survive through generations of institutions grounded on equal justice, an almost solitary exception to the general character of their laws and customs; but which, so long as it does not proclaim its own origin, and as discussion has not brought out its true character, is not felt to jar with modern civilization, any more than domestic slavery among 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 avowed, I do not say cynically or shamelessly—for these words imply a feeling that there was something in it to be ashamed of, and no such notion could find a place in the faculties of any person in those ages, except a philosopher or a saint. History gives a cruel experience of human nature, in shewing how exactly the regard due to the life, possessions, and entire earthly happiness of any class of persons, was measured by what they had the power of enforcing; how all who made any resistance to authorities that had arms in their hands, however dreadful might be the provocation, had not only the law of force but all other laws, and all the notions of social obligation against them; and in the eyes of those whom they resisted, were not only guilty of crime, but of the worst of all crimes, deserving the most cruel chastisement which human beings could inflict. The first small vestige of a feeling of obligation in a superior to acknowledge any right in inferiors, began when he had been induced, for convenience, to make some promise to them. Though these promises, even when sanctioned by the most solemn oaths, were for many ages revoked or violated on the most trifling provocation or temptation, it is probable that this, except by persons of still worse than the average morality, was seldom done without some twinges of conscience. The ancient republics, being mostly grounded from the first upon some kind of mutual compact, or at any rate formed by an union of persons not very unequal in strength, afforded, in consequence, the first instance of a portion of human relations fenced round, and placed under the dominion of another law than that of force. And though the original law of force remained in full operation between them and their slaves, and also (except so far as limited by express compact) between a commonwealth and its subjects, or other independent commonwealths; the banishment of that primitive law even from so narrow a field, commenced the regeneration of human nature, by giving birth to sentiments of which experience soon demonstrated the immense value even for material interests, and which thenceforward only required to be enlarged, not created. Though slaves were no part of the commonwealth, it was in the free states that slaves were first felt to have rights as human beings. The Stoics were, I believe, the first (except so far as the Jewish law constitutes an exception) who taught as a part of morality that men were bound by moral obligations to their slaves. No one, after Christianity became ascendant, could ever again have been a stranger to this belief, in theory; nor, after the rise of the Catholic Church, was it ever without persons to stand up for it. Yet to enforce it was the most arduous task which Christianity ever had to perform. For more than a thousand years the Church kept up the contest, with hardly any perceptible success. It was not for want of power over men’s minds. Its power was prodigious. It could make kings and nobles resign their most valued possessions to enrich the Church. It could make thousands, in the prime of life and the height of worldly advantages, shut themselves up in convents to work out their salvation by poverty, fasting, and prayer. It could send hundreds of thousands across land and sea, Europe and Asia, to give their lives for the deliverance of the Holy Sepulchre. It could make kings relinquish wives who were the object of their passionate attachment, because the Church declared that they were within the seventh (by our calculation the fourteenth) degree of relationship. All this it did; but it could not make men fight less with one another, nor 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 plebeian infantry which proved more powerful in the field than the undisciplined chivalry, was the insolent tyranny of the nobles over the bourgeoisie and peasantry brought within some bounds. It was persisted in not only until, but long after, the oppressed had obtained a power enabling them often to take conspicuous vengeance: and on the Continent much of it continued to the time of the French Revolution, though in England the earlier and better organization of the democratic classes put an end to it sooner, by establishing equal laws and free national institutions.
If people are mostly so little aware how completely, during the greater part of the duration of our species, the law of force was the avowed rule of general conduct, any other being only a special and exceptional consequence of peculiar ties—and from how very recent a date it is that the affairs of society in general have been even pretended to be regulated according to any moral law; as little do people remember or consider, how institutions and customs which never had any ground but the law of force, last on into ages and states of general opinion which never would have permitted their first establishment. Less than forty years ago, Englishmen might still by law hold human beings in bondage as saleable property: within the present century they might kidnap them and carry them off, and work them literally to death. This absolutely extreme case of the law of force, condemned by those who can tolerate almost every other form of arbitrary power, and which, of all others, presents features the most revolting to the feelings of all who look at it from an impartial position, was the law of 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 favour of it, than of any other of the customary abuses of force: for its motive was the love of gain, unmixed and undisguised; and those who profited by it were a very small numerical fraction of the country, while the natural feeling of all who were not personally interested in it, was unmitigated abhorrence. So extreme an instance makes it almost superfluous to refer to any other, but consider the long duration of absolute monarchy. In England at present it is the almost universal conviction that military despotism is a case of the law of force, having no other origin or justification. Yet in all the great nations of Europe except England it either still exists, or has only just ceased to exist, and has even now a strong party favourable to it in all ranks of the people, especially among persons of station and consequence. Such is the power of an established system, even when far from universal; when not only in almost every period of history there have been great and well-known examples of the contrary system, but these have almost invariably been afforded by the most illustrious and most prosperous communities. In this case, too, the possessor of the undue power, the person directly interested in it, is only one person, while those who are subject to it and suffer from it are literally all the rest. The yoke is naturally and necessarily humiliating to all persons, except the one who is on the throne, together with, at most, the one who expects to succeed to it. How different are these cases from that of the power of men over women! I am not now prejudging the 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, is in this case not confined to a limited class, but common to the whole male sex. Instead of being, to most of its supporters, a thing desirable chiefly in the abstract, or, like the political ends usually contended for by factions, of little private importance to any but the leaders; it comes home to the person and hearth of every male head of a family, and of every one who looks forward to being so. The clodhopper exercises, or is to exercise, his share of the power equally with the highest nobleman. And the case is that in which the desire of power is the strongest: for every one who desires power, desires it most over those who are nearest to him, with whom his life is passed, with whom he has most concerns in common, and in whom any independence of his authority is oftenest likely to interfere with his individual preferences. If, in the other cases specified, powers manifestly grounded only on force, and having so much less to support them, are so slowly and with so much difficulty got rid of, much more must it be so with this, even if it rests on no better foundation than those. We must consider, too, that the possessors of the power have facilities in this case, greater than in any other, to prevent any uprising against it. Every one of the subjects lives under the very eye, and almost, it may be said, in the hands, of one of the masters—in closer intimacy with him than with any of her fellow-subjects; with no means of combining against him, no power of even locally overmastering him, and, on the other hand, with the strongest motives for seeking his favour and avoiding to give him offence. In struggles for political emancipation, everybody knows how often its champions are bought off by bribes, or daunted by terrors. In the case of women, each individual of the 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 every one 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 in others, it would be strange if that which is so much the deepest-rooted had yet been perceptibly shaken anywhere. There is more reason to wonder that the protests and testimonies against it 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. But was there ever any domination which did not appear natural to those who possessed it? There was a time when the division of mankind into two classes, a small one of masters and a numerous one of slaves, appeared, even to the most cultivated minds, to be 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 slaveowners 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 the white man over the black is natural, that the black race is by nature incapable of freedom, and marked out for slavery? some even going so far as to say that the freedom of manual labourers is an unnatural order of things anywhere. Again, the theorists of absolute monarchy have always affirmed it to be the only natural form of government: issuing from the patriarchal, which was the primitive and spontaneous form of society, framed on the model of the paternal, which is anterior to society itself, and, as they contend, the most natural authority of all. Nay, for that matter, the law of force itself, to those who could not plead any other, has always seemed the most natural of all grounds for the exercise of authority. Conquering races hold it to be Nature’s own dictate that the conquered should obey the conquerors, or, as they euphoniously paraphrase it, that the feebler and more unwarlike races should submit to the braver and manlier. The smallest acquaintance with human life in the middle ages, shows how supremely natural the dominion of the feudal nobility 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 or less of limitation to the power of tyrannizing over them. So true is it that unnatural generally means only uncustomary, and that everything which is usual appears natural. The subjection of women to men being a universal custom, any departure from it quite naturally appears unnatural. But how entirely, even in this case, the feeling is dependent on custom, appears by ample experience. Nothing so much astonishes the people of distant parts of the world, when they first learn anything about England, as to be told that it is under a queen: the thing seems to them so unnatural as to be almost incredible. To Englishmen this does not seem in the least degree unnatural, because they are used to it; but they do feel it unnatural that women should be soldiers or members of Parliament. In the feudal ages, on the contrary, war and politics were not thought unnatural to women, because not unusual; it seemed natural that women of the privileged classes should be of manly character, inferior in nothing but bodily strength to their husbands and fathers. The independence of women seemed rather less unnatural to the Greeks than to other ancients, on account of the fabulous Amazons (whom they believed to be historical), and the partial example afforded by the Spartan women; who, though no less subordinate by law than in other Greek states, were more free in fact, and being trained to bodily exercises in the same manner with men, gave ample proof that they were not naturally disqualified for them. There can be little doubt that Spartan experience suggested to Plato, among many other of his doctrines, that of the social and political equality of the two sexes.[*]
But, it will be said, the rule of men over women differs from all these others in not being a rule of force: it is accepted voluntarily; women make no complaint, and are consenting parties to it. In the first place, a great number of women do not accept it. Ever since there have been women able to make their sentiments known by their writings (the only mode of publicity which society permits to them), an increasing number of them have recorded protests against their present social condition: and recently many thousands of them, headed by the most eminent women known to the public, have petitioned Parliament for their admission to the Parliamentary Suffrage.[†] The claim of women to be educated as solidly, and in the same branches of knowledge, as men, is urged with growing intensity, and with a great prospect of success; while the demand for their admission into professions and occupations hitherto closed against them, becomes every year more urgent. Though there are not in this country, as there are in the United States, periodical Conventions and an 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 own country and in America that women are beginning to protest, more or less collectively, against the disabilities under which they labour. France, and Italy, and Switzerland, and Russia now afford examples of the same thing. How many more women there are who silently cherish similar aspirations, no one can possibly know; but there are abundant tokens how many would cherish them, were they not so strenuously taught to repress them as contrary to the proprieties of their sex. It must be remembered, also, that no enslaved class ever asked for complete liberty at once. When Simon de Montfort called the deputies of the commons to sit for the first time in Parliament, did any of them dream of demanding that an assembly, elected by their constituents, should make and destroy ministries, and dictate to the king in affairs of state? No such thought entered into the imagination of the most ambitious of them. The nobility had already these pretensions; the commons pretended to nothing but to be exempt from arbitrary taxation, and from the gross individual oppression of the king’s officers. It is a political law of nature that those who are under any power of ancient origin, never begin by complaining of the power itself, but only of its oppressive exercise. There is never any want of women who complain of 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 by the interference of neighbours, they are induced to do so, their whole effort afterwards is to disclose as little as they can, and to beg off their tyrant from his merited chastisement.
All causes, social and natural, combine to make it unlikely that women should be collectively rebellious to the power of men. They are so far in a position different from all other subject classes, that their masters require something more from them than actual service. Men do not want solely the obedience of women, they want their sentiments. All men, except the most brutish, desire to have, in the woman most nearly connected with them, not a forced slave but a willing one, not a slave merely, but a favourite. They have therefore put everything in practice to enslave their minds. The masters of all other slaves rely, for maintaining obedience, on fear; either fear of themselves, or religious fears. The masters of women wanted more than simple obedience, and they turned the whole force of education to effect their purpose. All women are brought up from the very earliest years in the belief that their ideal of character is the very opposite to that of men; not self-will, and government by 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 favour in the eyes of some patrician, of every young serf with some seigneur; if domestication with him, and a share of his personal affections, had been held out as the prize which they all should look out for, the most gifted and aspiring being able to reckon on the most desirable prizes; and if, when this prize had been obtained, they had been shut out by a wall of brass from all interests not centering in him, all feelings and desires but those which he shared or inculcated; would not serfs and seigneurs, plebeians and patricians, have been as broadly distinguished at this day as men and women are? and would not all but a thinker here and there, have believed the distinction to be a fundamental and unalterable fact in human nature?
The preceding considerations are amply sufficient to show that custom, however universal it may be, affords in this case no presumption, and ought not to create any prejudice, in favour of the arrangements which place women in social and political subjection to men. But I may go farther, and maintain that the course of history, and the tendencies of progressive human society, afford not only no presumption in favour of this system of inequality of rights, but a strong one against it; and that, so far as the whole course of human improvement up to this time, the whole stream of modern tendencies, warrants any inference on the subject, it is, that this relic of the past is discordant with the future, and must necessarily disappear.
For, what is the peculiar character of the modern world—the difference which chiefly distinguishes modern institutions, modern social ideas, modern life itself, from those of times long past? It is, that human beings are no longer born to their place in life, and chained down by an inexorable bond to the place they are born to, but are free to employ their faculties, and such favourable chances as offer, to achieve the lot which may appear to them most desirable. Human society of old was constituted on a very different principle. All were born to a fixed social position, and were mostly kept in it by law, or interdicted from any means by which they could emerge from it. As some men are born white and others black, so some were born slaves and others freemen and citizens; some were born patricians, others plebeians; some were born feudal nobles, others commoners and roturiers. A slave or serf could never make himself free, nor, except by the will of his master, become so. In most European countries it was not till towards the close of the middle ages, and as a consequence of the growth of regal power, that commoners could be ennobled. Even among nobles, the eldest son was born the exclusive heir to the paternal possessions, and a long time elapsed before it was fully established that the father could disinherit him. Among the industrious classes, only those who were born members of a guild, or were admitted into it by its members, could lawfully practise their calling within its local limits; and nobody could practise any calling deemed important, in any but the legal manner—by processes authoritatively prescribed. Manufacturers have stood in the pillory for presuming to carry on their business by new and improved methods. In modern Europe, and most in those parts of it which have participated most largely in all other modern improvements, diametrically opposite doctrines now prevail. Law and government do not undertake to prescribe by whom any social or industrial operation shall or shall not be conducted, or what modes of conducting them shall be lawful. These things are left to the unfettered choice of individuals. Even the laws which required that workmen should serve an apprenticeship, have in this country been repealed: there being ample assurance that in all cases in which an apprenticeship is necessary, its necessity will suffice to enforce it. The old theory was, that the least possible should be left to the choice of the individual agent, that all he had to do should, as far as practicable, be laid down for him by superior wisdom. Left to himself he was sure to go wrong. The modern conviction, the fruit of a thousand years of experience, is, that things in which the individual is the person directly interested, never go right but as they are left to his own discretion, and that any regulation of them by authority, except to protect the rights of others, is sure to be mischievous. This conclusion, slowly arrived at, and not adopted until almost every possible application of the contrary theory had been made with disastrous result, now (in the industrial department) prevails universally in the most advanced countries, almost universally in all that have pretensions to any sort of advancement. It is not that all processes are supposed to be equally good, or all persons to be equally qualified for everything; but that freedom of individual choice is now known to be the only thing which procures the adoption of the best processes, and throws each operation into the hands of those who are best qualified for it. Nobody thinks it necessary to make a law that only a 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 proper bounds of authority to fix beforehand, on some general presumption, that certain persons are not fit to do certain things. It is now thoroughly known and admitted that if some such presumptions exist, no such presumption is infallible. Even if it be well grounded in a majority of cases, which it is very likely not to be, there will be a minority of exceptional cases in which it does not hold: and in those it is both an injustice to the individuals, and a detriment to society, to place barriers in the way of their using their faculties for their own benefit and for that of others. In the cases, on the other hand, in which the unfitness is real, the ordinary motives of human conduct will on the whole suffice to prevent the incompetent person from making, or from 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, any more than to be born black instead of white, or a commoner instead of a nobleman, shall decide the person’s position through all life—shall interdict people from all the more elevated social positions, and from all, except a few, respectable occupations. Even were we to admit the utmost that is ever pretended as to the superior fitness of men for all the functions now reserved to them, the same argument applies which forbids a legal qualification for members of Parliament. If only once in a dozen years the conditions of eligibility exclude a fit person, there is a real loss, while the exclusion of thousands of unfit persons is no gain; for if the constitution of the electoral body disposes them to choose unfit persons, there are always plenty of such persons to choose from. In all things of any difficulty and importance, those who can do them well are fewer than the need, even with the most unrestricted latitude of choice: and any limitation of the field of selection deprives society of some chances of being served by the competent, without ever saving it from the incompetent.
At present, in the more improved countries, the disabilities of women are the only case, save one, in which laws and institutions take persons at their birth, and ordain that they shall never in all their lives be allowed to compete for certain things. The one exception is that of royalty. Persons still are born to the throne; no one, not of the reigning family, can ever occupy it, and no one even of that family can, by any means but the course of hereditary succession, attain it. All other dignities and social advantages are open to the whole male sex: many indeed are only attainable by wealth, but wealth may be striven for by any one, and is actually obtained by many men of the very humblest origin. The difficulties, to the majority, are indeed insuperable without the aid of fortunate accidents; but no male human being is under any legal ban: neither law nor opinion superadd artificial obstacles to the natural ones. Royalty, as I have said, is excepted: but in this case every one 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 expediencies, which, though individuals and nations differ in estimating their weight, unquestionably do in fact exist. But in this exceptional case, in which a high social function is, for important reasons, bestowed on birth instead of being put up to competition, all free nations contrive to adhere in substance to the principle from which they nominally derogate; for they circumscribe this high function by conditions avowedly intended to prevent the person to whom it ostensibly belongs from really performing it; while the person by whom it is performed, the responsible minister, does obtain the post by a competition from which no 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 any one 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 dolmen, or a vast temple of Jupiter Olympius, occupied the site of St. Paul’s and received daily worship, while the surrounding Christian churches were only resorted to on fasts and festivals. This entire discrepancy between one social fact and all those which accompany it, and the radical opposition between its nature and the progressive movement which is the boast of the modern world, and which has successively swept away everything else of an analogous character, surely affords, to a conscientious observer of human tendencies, serious matter for reflection. It raises a primâ facie presumption on the unfavourable side, far outweighing any which custom and usage could in such circumstances create on the favourable; and should at least suffice to make this, like the choice between republicanism and royalty, a balanced question.
The least that can be demanded is, that the question should not be considered as prejudged by existing fact and existing opinion, but open to discussion on its merits, as a question of justice and expediency: the decision on this, as on any of the other social arrangements of mankind, depending on what an enlightened estimate of tendencies and consequences may show to be most advantageous to humanity in general, without distinction of sex. And the discussion must be a real discussion, descending to foundations, and not resting satisfied with vague and general assertions. It will not do, for instance, to assert in general terms, that the experience of mankind has pronounced in favour of the existing system. Experience cannot possibly have decided between two courses, so long as there has only been experience of one. If it be said that the doctrine of the equality of the sexes rests only on theory, it must be remembered that the contrary doctrine also has only theory to rest upon. All that is proved in its favour by direct experience, is that mankind have been able to exist under it, and to attain the degree of improvement and prosperity which we now see; but whether that prosperity has been attained sooner, or is now greater, than it would have been under the other system, experience does not say. On the other hand, experience does say, that every step in improvement has been so invariably accompanied by a step made in raising the social position of women, that historians and philosophers have been led to adopt their elevation or debasement as on the whole the surest test and most correct measure of the 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 any one knows, or can know, the nature of the two sexes, as long as they have only been seen in their present relation to one another. If men had ever been found in society without women, or women without men, or if there had been a society of men and women in which the women were not under the control of the men, something might have been positively known about the mental and moral differences which may be inherent in the nature of each. What is now called the nature of women is an eminently artificial thing—the result of forced repression in some directions, unnatural stimulation in others. It may be asserted without scruple, that no other class of dependents have had their character so entirely distorted from its natural proportions by their relation with their masters; for, if conquered and slave races have been, in some respects, more forcibly repressed, whatever in them has not been crushed down by an iron heel has generally been let alone, and if left with any liberty of development, it has developed itself according to its own laws; but in the case of women, a 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 luxuriantly and reach a great development in this heated atmosphere and under this active nurture and watering, while other shoots from the same root, which are left outside in the wintry air, with ice purposely heaped all round them, have a stunted growth, and some are burnt off with fire and disappear; men, with that inability to recognise their own work which distinguishes the unanalytic mind, indolently believe that the tree grows of itself in the way they have made it grow, and that it would die if one half of it were not kept in a vapour bath and the other half in the snow.
Of all difficulties which impede the progress of thought, and the formation of well-grounded opinions on life and social arrangements, the greatest is now the unspeakable ignorance and inattention of mankind in respect to the influences which form human character. Whatever any portion of the human species now are, or seem to be, such, it is supposed, they have a natural tendency to be: even when the most elementary knowledge of the circumstances in which they have been placed, clearly points out the causes that made them what they are. Because a cottier deeply in arrears to his landlord is not industrious, there are people who think that the Irish are naturally idle. Because constitutions can be overthrown when the authorities appointed to execute them turn their arms against them, there are people who think the French incapable of free government. Because the Greeks cheated the Turks, and the Turks only plundered the Greeks, there are persons who think that the Turks are naturally more sincere: and because women, as is often said, care nothing about politics except their personalities, it is supposed that the general good is naturally less interesting to women than to men. History, which is now so much better understood than formerly, teaches another lesson, if only by showing the extraordinary susceptibility of human nature to external influences, and the extreme variableness of those of its manifestations which are supposed to be most universal and uniform. But in history, as in travelling, men usually see only what they already had in their own minds; and few learn much from history, who do not bring much with them to its study.
Hence, in regard to that most difficult question, what are the natural differences between the two sexes—a subject on which it is impossible in the present state of society to obtain complete and correct knowledge—while almost everybody 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 any one to affirm even that there is any difference, much more what the difference is, between the two sexes considered as moral and rational beings; and since no one, as yet, has that knowledge, (for there is hardly any subject which, in proportion to its importance, has been so little studied), no one is thus far entitled to any positive opinion on the subject. Conjectures are all that can at present be made; conjectures more or less probable, according as more or less 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 differences between the sexes now are, apart from all question as to how they are made what they are, is still in the crudest and most incomplete state. Medical practitioners and physiologists have ascertained, to some extent, the differences in bodily constitution; and this is an important element to the psychologist: but hardly any medical practitioner is a psychologist. Respecting the mental characteristics of women; their observations are of no more worth than those of common men. It is a subject on which nothing final can be known, so long as those who alone can really know it, women themselves, have given but little testimony, and that little, mostly suborned. It is easy to know stupid women. Stupidity is much the same all the world over. A stupid person’s notions and feelings may confidently be inferred from those which prevail in the circle by which the person is surrounded. Not so with those whose opinions and feelings are an emanation from their own nature and faculties. It is only a man here and there who has any tolerable knowledge of the character even of the women of his own family. I do not mean, of their capabilities; these nobody knows, not even themselves, because most of them have never been called out. I mean their actually existing thoughts and feelings. Many a man thinks he perfectly understands women, because he has had amatory relations with several, perhaps with many of them. If he is a good observer, and his experience extends to quality as well as quantity, he may have learnt something of one narrow department of their nature—an important department, no doubt. But of all the rest of it, few persons are generally more ignorant, because there are few from whom it is so carefully hidden. The most favourable case which a man can generally have for studying the character of a woman, is that of his own wife: for the opportunities are greater, and the cases of complete sympathy not so unspeakably rare. And in fact, this is the source from which any knowledge worth having on the subject has, I believe, generally come. But most men have not had the opportunity of studying in this way more than a single case: accordingly one can, to an almost laughable degree, infer what a man’s wife is like, from his opinions about women in general. To make even this one case yield any result, the woman must be worth knowing, and the man not only a competent judge, but of a character so sympathetic in itself, and so well adapted to hers, that he can either read her mind by sympathetic intuition, or has nothing in himself which makes her shy of disclosing it. Hardly anything, I believe, can be more rare than this conjunction. It often happens that there is the most complete unity of feeling and community of interests as to all external things, yet the one has as little admission into the internal life of the other as if they were common acquaintance. Even with true affection, authority on the one side and subordination on the other prevent perfect confidence. Though nothing may be intentionally withheld, much is not shown. In the analogous relation of parent and child, the corresponding phenomenon must have been in the observation of every one. As between father and son, how many are the cases in which the father, in spite of real affection on both sides, obviously to all the world does not know, nor suspect, parts of the son’s character familiar to his companions and equals. The truth is, that the position of looking up to another is extremely unpropitious to complete sincerity and openness with him. The fear of losing ground in his opinion or in his feelings is so strong, that even in an upright character, there is an unconscious tendency to show only the best side, or the side which, though not the best, is that which he most likes to see: and it may be confidently said that thorough knowledge of one another hardly ever exists, but between persons who, besides being intimates, are equals. How much more true, then, must all this be, when the one is not only under the authority of the other, but has it inculcated on her as a duty to reckon everything else subordinate to his comfort and pleasure, and to let him neither see nor feel anything coming from her, except what is agreeable to him. All these difficulties stand in the way of a man’s obtaining any thorough knowledge even of the one woman whom alone, in general, he has sufficient opportunity of studying. When we further consider that to understand one woman is not necessarily to understand any other woman; that even if he could study many women of one rank, or of one country, he would not thereby understand women of other ranks or countries, and even if he did, they are still only the women of a single period of history; we may safely assert that the knowledge which men can acquire of women, even as they have been and are, without reference to what they might be, is wretchedly imperfect and superficial, and always will be so, until women themselves have told all that they have to tell.
And this time has not come; nor will it come otherwise than gradually. It is but of yesterday that women have either been qualified by literary accomplishments, or permitted by society, to tell anything to the general public. As yet very few of them dare tell anything, which men, on whom their literary success depends, are unwilling to hear. Let us remember in what manner, up to a very recent time, the expression, even by a male author, of uncustomary opinions, or what are deemed eccentric feelings, usually was, and in some degree still is, received: and we may form some faint conception under what impediments a woman, who is brought up to think custom and opinion her sovereign rule, attempts to express in books anything drawn from the depths of her own nature. The greatest woman who has left writings behind her sufficient to give her an eminent rank in the literature of her country, thought it necessary to prefix as a motto to her boldest work, “Un homme peut braver l’opinion; une femme doit s’y soumettre.”* The greater part of what women write about women is mere sycophancy to men. In the case of unmarried women, much of it seems only intended to increase their chance of a husband. Many, both married and unmarried, overstep the mark, and inculcate a servility beyond what is desired or relished by any man, except the very vulgarest. But this is not so often the case as, even at a quite late period, it still was. Literary women are becoming more freespoken, and more willing to express their real sentiments. Unfortunately, in this country especially, they are themselves such artificial products, that their sentiments are compounded of a small element of individual observation and consciousness, and a very large one of acquired associations. This will be less and less the case, but it will remain true to a great extent, as long as social institutions do not admit the same free development of originality in women which is possible to men. When that time comes, and not before, we shall see, and not merely hear, as much as it is necessary to know of the nature of women, and the adaptation of other things to 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 “opinio copiae inter maximas causas inopiae est;”[*] and there is little chance of reasonable thinking on the matter, while people flatter themselves that they perfectly understand a subject of which most men know absolutely nothing, and of which it is at present impossible that any man, or all men taken together, should have knowledge which can qualify them to lay down the law to women as to what is, or is not, their vocation. Happily, no such knowledge is necessary for any practical purpose connected with the position of women 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 any one 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 lest nature should not succeed in effecting its purpose, is an altogether unnecessary solicitude. What women by nature cannot do, it is quite superfluous to forbid them from doing. What they can do, but not so well as the men who are their competitors, competition suffices to exclude them from; since nobody asks for protective duties and bounties in favour of women; it is only asked that the present bounties and protective duties in favour of men should be recalled. If women have a greater natural inclination for some things than for others, there is no need of laws or social inculcation to make the majority of them do the former in preference to the latter. Whatever women’s services are most wanted for, the free play of competition will hold out the strongest inducements to them to undertake. And, as the words imply, they are most wanted for the things for which they are most fit; by the apportionment of which to them, the collective faculties of the 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; insomuch that if they are free to do anything else—if any other means of living, or occupation of their time and faculties, is open, which has any chance of appearing desirable to them—there will not be enough of them who will be willing to accept the condition said to be natural to them. If this is the real opinion of men in general, it would be well that it should be spoken out. I should like to hear somebody openly enunciating the doctrine (it is already implied in much that is written on the subject)—“It is necessary to society that women should marry and produce children. They will not do so unless they are compelled. Therefore it is necessary to compel them.” The merits of the case would then be clearly defined. It would be exactly that of the slaveholders of South Carolina and Louisiana. “It is necessary that cotton and sugar should be grown. White men cannot produce them. Negroes will not, for any wages which we choose to give. Ergo they must be compelled.” An illustration still closer to the point is that of impressment. Sailors must absolutely be had to defend the country. It often happens that they will not voluntarily enlist. Therefore there must be the power of forcing them. How often has this logic been used! and, but for one flaw in it, without doubt it would have been successful up to this day. But it is open to the retort—First pay the sailors the honest value of their labour. When you have made it as well worth their while to serve you, as to work for other employers, you will have no more difficulty than others have in obtaining their services. To this there is no logical answer except “I will not:” and as people are now not only ashamed, but are not desirous, to rob the labourer of his hire,[*] impressment is no longer advocated. Those who attempt to force women into marriage by closing all other doors against them, lay themselves open to a similar retort. If they mean what they say, their opinion must evidently be, that men do not render the married condition so desirable to women, as to induce them to accept it for its own recommendations. It is not a sign of one’s thinking the boon one offers very attractive, when one allows only Hobson’s choice, “that or none.” And here, I believe, is the clue to the feelings of those men, who have a real antipathy to the equal freedom of women. I believe they are afraid, not lest women should be unwilling to marry, for I do not think that any one 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 entrainement, rendering them for the time insensible to anything but itself, choose such a lot, when any other means were open to them of filling a conventionally honourable place in life: and if men are determined that the law of marriage shall be a law of despotism, they are quite right, in point of mere policy, in leaving to women only Hobson’s choice. But, in that case, all that has been done in the modern world to relax the chain on the minds of women, has been a mistake. They never should have been allowed to receive a literary education. Women who read, much more women who write, are, in the existing constitution of things, a contradiction and a disturbing element: and it was wrong to bring women up with any acquirements but those of an odalisque, or of a domestic servant.
Chapter II
it will be well to commence the detailed discussion of the subject by the particular branch of it to which the course of our observations has led us, the conditions which the laws of this and all other countries annex to the marriage contract. Marriage being the destination appointed by society for women, the prospect they are brought up to, and the object which it is intended should be sought by all of them, except those who are too little attractive to be chosen by any man as his companion; one might have supposed that everything would have been done to make this condition as eligible to them as possible, that they might have no cause to regret being denied the option of any other. Society, however, both in this, and, at first, in all other cases, has preferred to attain its object by foul rather than fair means: but this is the only case in which it has substantially persisted in them even to the present day. Originally women were taken by force, or regularly sold by their father to the husband. Until a late period in European history, the father had the power to dispose of his daughter in marriage at his own will and pleasure, without any regard to hers. The Church, indeed, was so far faithful to a better morality as to require a formal “yes” from the woman at the marriage ceremony; but there was nothing to shew that the consent was other than compulsory; and it was practically impossible for the girl to refuse compliance if the father persevered, except perhaps when she might obtain the protection of religion by a determined resolution to take monastic vows. After marriage, the man had anciently (but this was anterior to Christianity) the power of life and death over his wife. She could invoke no law against him; he was her sole tribunal and law. For a long time he could repudiate her, but she had no corresponding power in regard to him. By the old laws of England, the husband was called the lord of the wife; he was literally regarded as her sovereign, inasmuch that the murder of a man by his wife was called treason (petty as distinguished from high treason), and was more cruelly avenged than was usually the case with high treason, for the penalty was burning to death. Because these various enormities have fallen into disuse (for most of them were never formally abolished, or not until they had long ceased to be practised)[*] men suppose that all is now as it should be in regard to the marriage contract; and we are continually told that civilization and Christianity have restored to the woman her just rights. Meanwhile the wife is the actual bondservant of her husband: no less so, as far as legal obligation goes, than slaves commonly so called. She vows a lifelong obedience to him at the altar, and is held to it all through her life by law. Casuists may say that the obligation of obedience stops short of participation in crime, but it certainly extends to everything else. She can do not 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 countries: by the Roman law, for example, a slave might have his peculium, which to a certain extent the law guaranteed to him for his exclusive use. The higher classes in this country have given an analogous advantage to their women, through special contracts setting aside the law, by conditions of pin-money, &c.: since parental feeling being stronger with fathers than the class 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 full a sense of the word, as a wife is. Hardly any slave, except one immediately attached to the master’s person, is a slave at all hours and all minutes; in general he has, like a soldier, his fixed task, and when it is done, or when he is off duty, he disposes, within certain limits, of his own time, and has a family life into which the master rarely intrudes. “Uncle Tom” under his first master had his own life in his “cabin,”[*] almost as much as any man whose work takes him away from home, is able to have in his own family. But it cannot be so with the wife. Above all, a female slave has (in Christian countries) an admitted right, and is considered under a moral obligation, to refuse to her master the last familiarity. Not so the wife: however brutal a tyrant she may unfortunately be chained to—though she may know that he hates her, though it may be his daily pleasure to torture her, and though she may feel it impossible not to loathe him—he can claim from her and enforce the lowest degradation of a human being, that of being made the instrument of an animal function contrary to her inclinations. While she is held in this worst description of slavery as to her own person, what is her position in regard to the children in whom she and her master have a joint interest? They are by law his children. He alone has any legal rights over them. Not one act can she do towards or in relation to them, except by delegation from him. Even after he is dead she is not their legal guardian, unless he by will has made her so. He could even send them away from her, and deprive her of the means of seeing or corresponding with them, until this power was in some degree restricted by Serjeant Talfourd’s Act.[*] This is her legal state. And from this state she has no means of withdrawing herself. If she leaves her husband, she can take nothing with her, neither her children nor anything which is rightfully her own. If he chooses, he can compel her to return, by law, or by physical force; or he may content himself with seizing for his own use anything which she may earn, or which may be given to her by her relations. It is only legal separation by a decree of a court of justice, which entitles her to live apart, without being forced back into the custody of an exasperated jailer—or which empowers her to apply any earnings to her own use, without fear that a man whom perhaps she has not seen for twenty years will pounce upon her some day and carry all off. This legal separation, until lately,[†] the courts of justice would only give at an expense which made it inaccessible to any one 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 to change again and again until she finds one. I am not saying that she ought to be allowed this privilege. That is a totally different consideration. The question of divorce, in the sense involving liberty of remarriage, is one into which it is foreign to my purpose to enter. All I now say is, that to those to whom nothing but servitude is allowed, the free choice of servitude is the only, though a most insufficient, alleviation. Its refusal completes the assimilation of the wife to the slave—and the slave under not the mildest form of slavery: for in some slave codes the slave could, under certain circumstances of ill usage, legally compel the master to sell him. But no amount of ill usage, without adultery superadded, will in England free a wife from her tormentor.
I have no desire to exaggerate, nor does the case stand in any need of exaggeration. I have described the wife’s legal position, not her actual treatment. The laws of most countries are far worse than the people who execute them, and many of them are only able to remain laws by being seldom or never carried into effect. If married life were all that it might be expected to be, looking to the laws alone, society would be a hell upon earth. Happily there are both feelings and interests which in many men exclude, and in most, greatly temper, the impulses and propensities which lead to tyranny; and of those feelings, the tie which connects a man with his wife affords, in a normal state of things, incomparably the strongest example. The only tie which at all approaches to it, that between him and his children, tends, in all save exceptional cases, to strengthen, instead of conflicting with, the first. Because this is true; because men in general do not inflict, nor women suffer, all the misery which could be inflicted and suffered if the full power of tyranny with which the man is legally invested were acted on; the defenders of the existing form of the institution think that all its iniquity is justified, and that any complaint is merely quarrelling with the evil which is the price paid for every great good. But the mitigations in practice, which are compatible with maintaining in full legal force this or any other kind of tyranny, instead of being any apology for despotism, only serve to prove what power human nature possesses of reacting against the vilest institutions, and with what vitality the seeds of good as well as those of evil in human character diffuse and propagate themselves. Not a word can be said for despotism in the family which cannot be said for political despotism. Every absolute king does not sit at his window to enjoy the groans of his tortured subjects, nor strips them of their last rag and turns them out to shiver in the road. The despotism of Louis XVI was not the despotism of Philippe le Bel, or of Nadir Shah, or of Caligula; but it was bad enough to justify the French Revolution, and to palliate even its horrors. If an appeal be made to the intense attachments which exist between wives and their husbands, exactly as much may be said of domestic slavery. It was quite an ordinary fact in Greece and Rome for slaves to submit to death by torture rather than betray their masters. In the proscriptions of the Roman civil wars it was remarked that wives and slaves were heroically faithful, sons very commonly treacherous. Yet we know how cruelly many Romans treated their slaves. But in truth these intense individual feelings nowhere rise to such a luxuriant height as under the most atrocious institutions. It is part of the irony of life, that the strongest feelings of devoted gratitude of which human nature seems to be susceptible, are called forth in human beings towards those who, having the power entirely to crush their earthly existence, voluntarily refrain from using that power. How great a place in most men this sentiment fills, even in religious devotion, it would be cruel to inquire. We daily see how much their gratitude to Heaven appears to be stimulated by the contemplation of 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 any one pretended that there are no such things as good men. Who doubts that there may be great goodness, and great happiness, and great affection, under the absolute government of a good man? Meanwhile, laws and institutions require to be adapted, not to good men, but to bad. Marriage is not an institution designed 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 other social ties; but there are all degrees of sensibility and insensibility to it, as there are all grades of goodness and wickedness in men, down to those whom no ties will bind, and on whom society has no action but through its ultima ratio, the penalties of the law. In every grade of this descending scale are men to whom are committed all the legal powers of a husband. The vilest malefactor has some wretched woman tied to him, against whom he can commit any atrocity except killing her, and, if tolerably cautious, can do that without much danger of the legal penalty. And how many thousands are there among the lowest classes in every country, who, without being in a legal sense malefactors in any other respect, because in every other quarter their aggressions meet with resistance, indulge the utmost habitual excesses of bodily violence towards the unhappy wife, who alone, at least of grown persons, can neither repel nor escape from their brutality; and towards whom the excess of dependence inspires their mean and savage natures, not with a generous forbearance, and a point of honour to behave well to one whose lot in life is trusted entirely to their kindness, but on the contrary with a notion that the law has delivered her to them as their thing, to be used at their pleasure, and that they are not expected to practise the consideration towards her which is required from them towards everybody else. The law, which till lately left even these atrocious extremes of domestic oppression practically unpunished, has within these few years made some feeble attempts to repress them. But its attempts have done little, and cannot be expected to do much, because it is contrary to reason and experience to suppose that there can be any real check to brutality, consistent with leaving the victim still in the power of the executioner. Until a conviction for personal violence, or at all events a repetition of it after a first conviction, entitles the woman ipso facto to a divorce, or at least to a judicial separation, the attempt to repress these “aggravated assaults”[*] by legal penalties will 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 being able, through the law of marriage, to obtain a victim, the breadth and depth of human misery caused in this shape alone by the abuse of the institution swells to something appalling. Yet these are only the extreme cases. They are the lowest abysses, but there is a sad succession of depth after depth before reaching them. In domestic as in political tyranny, the case of absolute monsters chiefly illustrates the institution by showing that there is scarcely any horror which may not occur under it if the despot pleases, and thus setting in a strong light what must be the terrible frequency of things only a little less atrocious. Absolute fiends are as rare as angels, perhaps rarer: ferocious savages, with occasional touches of humanity, are however very frequent: and in the wide interval which separates these from any worthy representatives of the human species, how many are the forms and gradations of animalism and selfishness, often under an outward varnish of civilization and even cultivation, living at peace with the law, maintaining a creditable appearance to all who are not under their power, yet sufficient often to make the lives of all who are so, a torment and a burthen to them! It would be tiresome to repeat the commonplaces about the unfitness of men in general for power, which, after the political discussions of centuries, every one knows by heart, were it not that hardly any one thinks of applying these maxims to the case in which above all others they are applicable, that of power, not placed in the hands of a man here and there, but offered to every adult male, down to the basest and most ferocious. It is not because a man is not known to have broken any of the Ten Commandments,[†] of because he maintains a respectable character in his dealings with those whom he cannot compel to have intercourse with him, or because he does not fly out into violent bursts of 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 in the unrestraint of home. Even the commonest men reserve the violent, the sulky, the undisguisedly selfish side of their character for those who have no power to withstand it. The relation of superiors to dependents is the nursery of these vices of character, which, wherever else they exist, are an overflowing from that source. A man who is morose or violent to his equals, is sure to be one who has lived among inferiors, whom he could frighten or worry into submission. If the family in its best forms is, as it is often said to be, a school of sympathy, tenderness, and loving forgetfulness of self, it is still oftener, as respects its chief, a school of wilfulness, overbearingness, unbounded self-indulgence, and a double-dyed 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 immolated in every shape to his smallest preferences. What better is to be looked for under the existing form of the institution? We know that the bad propensities of human nature are only kept within bounds when they are allowed no scope for their indulgence. We know that from impulse and habit, when not from deliberate purpose, almost every one to whom others yield, goes on encroaching upon them, until a point is reached at which they are compelled to resist. Such being the common tendency of human nature; the almost unlimited power which present social institutions give to the man over at least one human being—the one with whom he resides, and whom he has always present—this power seeks out and evokes the latent germs of selfishness in the remotest corners of his nature—fans its faintest sparks and smouldering embers—offers to him a 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 effectually resist, can at least retaliate, she, too, can make the man’s life extremely uncomfortable, and by that power is able to carry many points which she ought, and many which she ought not, to prevail in. But this instrument of 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, the highminded disdain it. And on the other hand, the husbands against whom it is used most effectively are the gentler and more inoffensive; those who cannot be induced, even by provocation, to resort to any very harsh exercise of authority. The wife’s power of being disagreeable generally only establishes a countertyranny, and makes victims in their turn chiefly of those husbands who are least inclined to be 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 regards the children, and their general community of interest as concerns third persons (to which however there are very great limitations); the real importance of the wife to his daily comforts and enjoyments, and the value he consequently attaches to her on his personal account, which, in a man capable of feeling for others, lays the foundation of caring for her on her own; and lastly, the influence naturally acquired over almost all human beings by those near to their persons (if not actually disagreeable to them): who, both by their direct entreaties, and by the insensible contagion of their feelings and dispositions, are often able, unless counteracted by some equally strong personal influence, to obtain a degree of command over the conduct of the superior, altogether excessive and unreasonable. Through these various means, the wife frequently exercises even too much power over the man; she is able to affect his conduct in things in which she may not be qualified to influence it for good—in which her influence may be not only unenlightened, but employed on the morally wrong side; and in which he would act better if left to his own prompting. But neither in the affairs of families nor in those of states is power a compensation for the loss of freedom. Her power often gives her what she has no right to, but does not enable her to assert her own rights. A Sultan’s favourite slave has slaves under her, over whom she 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 which regards their joint relation, and by making it the business of her life to work upon his sentiments, a wife may gratify herself by influencing, and very probably perverting, his conduct, in those of his external relations which she has never qualified herself to judge of, or in which she is herself wholly influenced by some personal or other partiality or prejudice. Accordingly, as things now are, those who act most kindly to their wives, are quite as often made worse, as better, by the wife’s influence, in respect to all interests extending beyond the family. She is taught that she has no business with things out of that sphere; and accordingly she seldom has any honest and conscientious opinion on them; and therefore hardly ever meddles with them for any legitimate purpose, but generally for an interested one. She neither knows nor cares which is the right side in politics, but she knows what will bring in money or invitations, give her husband a title, her son a place, or her daughter a good marriage.
But how, it will be asked, can any society exist without government? In a family, as in a state, some one person must be the ultimate ruler. Who shall decide when married people differ in opinion? Both cannot have their way, yet a decision one way or the other must be come to.
It is not true that in all voluntary association between two people, one of them must be absolute master: still less that the law must determine which of them it shall be. The most frequent case of voluntary association, next to marriage, is partnership in business: and it is not found or thought necessary to enact that in every partnership, one partner shall have entire control over the concern, and the others shall be bound to obey his orders. No one would enter into partnership on terms which would subject him to the responsibilities of a principal, with only the powers and privileges of a clerk or agent. If the law dealt with other contracts as it does with marriage, it would ordain that one partner should administer the common business as if it was his private concern; that the others should have only delegated powers; and that this one should be designated by some general presumption of law, for example as being the eldest. The law never does this: nor does experience show it to be necessary that any theoretical inequality of power should exist between the partners, or that the partnership should have any other conditions than what they may themselves appoint by their articles of agreement. Yet it might seem that the exclusive power might be conceded with less danger to the rights and interests of the inferior, in the case of partnership than in that of marriage, since he is free to cancel the power by withdrawing from the connexion. The wife has no such power, and even if she had, it is almost always desirable that she should try all measures before resorting to it.
It is quite true that things which have to be decided every day, and cannot adjust themselves gradually, or wait for a compromise, ought to depend on one will: one person must have their sole control. But it does not follow that this should always be the same person. The natural arrangement is a division of powers between the two; each being absolute in the executive branch of their own department, and any change of system and principle requiring the consent of both. The division neither can nor should be pre-established by the law, since it must depend on individual capacities and suitabilities. If the two persons chose, they might pre-appoint it by the marriage contract, as pecuniary arrangements are now often pre-appointed. There would seldom be any difficulty in deciding such things by mutual consent, unless the marriage was one of those unhappy ones in which all other things, as well as this, become subjects of bickering and dispute. The division of rights would naturally follow the division of duties and functions; and that is already made by consent, or at all events not by law, but by general custom, modified and modifiable at the pleasure of the persons concerned.
The real practical decision of affairs, to whichever may be given the legal authority, will greatly depend, as it even now does, upon comparative qualifications. The mere fact that he is usually the eldest, will in most cases give the preponderance to the man; at least until they both attain a time of life at which the difference in their years is of no importance. There will naturally also be a more potential voice on the side, whichever it is, that brings the means of support. Inequality from this source does not depend on the law of marriage, but on the general conditions of human society, as now constituted. The influence of mental superiority, either general or special, and of superior decision of character, will necessarily tell for much. It always does so at present. And this fact shows how little foundation there is for the apprehension that the powers and responsibilities of partners in life (as of partners in business), cannot be satisfactorily apportioned by agreement between themselves. They always are so apportioned, except in cases in which the marriage institution is a failure. Things never come to an issue of downright power on one side, and obedience on the other, except where the connexion altogether has been a mistake, and it would be a blessing to both parties to be relieved from it. Some may say that the very thing by which an amicable settlement of differences becomes possible, is the power of legal compulsion known to be in reserve; as people submit to an arbitration because there is a court of law in the background, which they know that they can be forced to obey. But to make the cases parallel, we must suppose that the rule of the court of law was, not to try the cause, but to give judgment always for the same side, suppose the defendant. If so, the amenability to it would be a motive with the plaintiff to agree to almost any arbitration, but it would be just the reverse with the defendant. The despotic power which the law gives to the husband may be a reason to make the wife assent to any compromise by which power is practically shared between the two, but it cannot be the reason why the husband does. That there is always among decently conducted people a practical compromise, though one of them at least is under no physical or moral necessity of making it, shows that the natural motives which lead to a voluntary adjustment of the united life of two persons in a manner acceptable to both, do on the whole, except in unfavourable cases, prevail. The matter is certainly not improved by laying down as an ordinance of law, that the superstructure of free government shall be raised upon a legal basis of despotism on one side and subjection on the other, and that every concession which the despot makes may, at his mere pleasure, and without any warning, be recalled. Besides that no freedom is worth much when held on so precarious a tenure, its conditions are not likely to be the most equitable when the law throws so prodigious a weight into one scale; when the adjustment rests between two persons one of whom is declared to be entitled to everything, the other not only entitled to nothing except during the good pleasure of the first, but under the strongest moral and religious obligation not to rebel under any excess of oppression.
A pertinacious adversary, pushed to extremities, may say, that husbands indeed are willing to be reasonable, and to make fair concessions to their partners without being compelled to it, but that wives are not: that if allowed any rights of their own, they will acknowledge no rights at all in any one else, and never will yield in anything, unless they can be compelled, by the man’s mere authority, to yield in everything. This would have been said by many persons some generations ago, when satires on women were in vogue, and men thought it a clever thing to insult women for being what men made them. But it will be said by no one now who is worth replying to. It is not the doctrine of the present day that women are less susceptible of good feeling, and consideration for those with whom they are united by the strongest ties, than men are. On the contrary, we are perpetually told that women are better than men, by those who are totally opposed to treating them as if they were as good; so that the saying has passed into a piece of tiresome cant, intended to put a complimentary face upon an injury, and resembling those celebrations of royal clemency which, according to Gulliver, the king of Lilliput always prefixed to his most sanguinary decrees.[*] If women are better than men in anything, it surely is in individual self-sacrifice for those of their own family. But I lay little stress on this, so long as they are universally taught that they are born and created for self-sacrifice. I believe that equality of rights would abate the exaggerated self-abnegation which is the present artificial ideal of feminine character, and that a good woman would not be more self-sacrificing than the best man: but on the other hand, men would be much more unselfish and self-sacrificing than at present, because they would no longer be taught to worship their own will as such a grand thing that it is actually the law for another rational being. There is nothing which men so easily learn as this self-worship: all privileged persons, and all privileged classes, have had it. The more we descend in the scale of humanity, the intenser it is; and most of all in those who are not, and can never expect to be, raised above any one except an unfortunate wife and children. The honourable exceptions are proportionally fewer than in the case of almost any other human infirmity. Philosophy and religion, instead of keeping it in check, are generally suborned to defend it; and nothing controls it but that practical feeling of the equality of human beings, which is the theory of Christianity, but which Christianity will never practically teach, while it sanctions institutions grounded on an arbitrary preference of one human being over another.
There are, no doubt, women, as there are men, whom equality of consideration will not satisfy, with whom there is no peace while any will or wish is regarded but their own. Such persons are a proper subject for the law of divorce. They are only fit to live alone, and no human beings ought to be compelled to associate their lives with them. But the legal subordination tends to make such characters among women more, rather than less, frequent. If the man exerts his whole power, the woman is of course crushed: but if she is treated with indulgence, and permitted to assume power, there is no rule to set limits to her encroachments. The law, not determining her rights, but theoretically allowing her none at all, practically declares that the measure of what she has a right to, is what she can contrive to get.
The equality of married persons before the law, is not only the sole mode in which that particular relation can be made consistent with justice to both sides, and conducive to the happiness of both, but it is the only means of rendering the daily life of mankind, in any high sense, a school of moral cultivation. Though the truth may not be felt or generally acknowledged for generations to come, the only school of genuine moral sentiment is society between equals. The moral education of mankind has hitherto emanated chiefly from the law of force, and is adapted almost solely to the relations which force creates. In the less advanced states of society, people hardly recognise any relation with their equals. To be an equal is to be an enemy. Society, from its highest place to its lowest, is one long chain, or rather ladder, where every individual is either above or below his nearest neighbour, and wherever he does not command he must obey. Existing moralities, accordingly, are mainly fitted to a relation of command and obedience. Yet command and obedience are but unfortunate necessities of human life: society in equality is its normal state. Already in modern life, and more and more as it progressively improves, command and obedience become exceptional facts in life, equal association its general rule. The morality of the first ages rested on the obligation to submit to power; that of the ages next following, on the right of the weak to the forbearance and protection of the strong. How much longer is one form of society and life to content itself with the morality made for another? We have had the morality of submission, and the morality of chivalry and generosity; the time is now come for the morality of justice. Whenever, in former ages, any approach has been made to society in equality, Justice has asserted its claims as the foundation of virtue. It was thus in the free republics of antiquity. But even in the best of these, the equals were limited to the free male citizens; slaves, women, and the unenfranchised residents were under the law of force. The joint influence of Roman civilization and of Christianity obliterated these distinctions, and in theory (if only partially in practice) declared the claims of the human being, as such, to be paramount to those of sex, class, or social position. The barriers which had begun to be levelled were raised again by the northern conquests; and the whole of modern history consists of the slow process by which they have since been wearing away. We are entering into an order of things in which justice will again be the primary virtue; grounded as before on equal, but now also on sympathetic association, having its root no longer in the instinct of equals for self-protection, but in a cultivated sympathy between them; and no one being now left out, but an equal measure being extended to all. It is no novelty that mankind do not distinctly foresee their own changes, and that their sentiments are adapted to past, not to coming ages. To see the futurity of the species has always been the privilege of the intellectual élite, or of those who have learnt from them; to have the feelings of that futurity has been the distinction, and usually the martyrdom, of a still rarer élite. Institutions, books, education, society, all go on training human beings for the old, long after the new has come; much more when it is only coming. But the true virtue of human beings is fitness to live together as equals; claiming nothing for themselves but what they as freely concede to every one else; regarding command of any kind as an exceptional necessity, and in all cases a temporary one; and preferring, whenever possible, the society of those with whom leading and following can be alternate and reciprocal. To these virtues, nothing in life as at present constituted gives cultivation by exercise. The family is a school of despotism, in which the virtues of despotism, but also its vices, are largely nourished. Citizenship, in free countries, is partly a school of society in equality, but citizenship fills only a small place in modern life, and does not come near the daily habits or inmost sentiments. The family, justly constituted, would be the real school of the virtues of freedom. It is sure to be a sufficient one of everything else. It will always be a school of obedience for the children, of command for the parents. What is needed is, that it should be a school of sympathy in equality, of living together in love, without power on one side or obedience on the other. This it ought to be between the parents. It would then be an exercise of those virtues which each requires to fit them for all other association, and a model to the children of the feelings and conduct which their temporary training by means of obedience is designed to render habitual, and therefore natural, to them. The moral training of mankind will never be adapted to the conditions of the life for which all other human progress is a preparation, until they practise in the family the same moral rule which is adapted to the normal constitution of human society. Any sentiment of freedom which can exist in a man whose nearest and dearest intimacies are with those of whom he is absolute master, is not the genuine or Christian love of freedom, but, what the love of freedom generally was in the ancients and in the middle ages—an intense feeling of the dignity and importance of his own personality; making him disdain a yoke for himself, of which he has no abhorrence whatever in the abstract, but which he is abundantly ready to impose on others for his own interest or glorification.
I readily admit (and it is the very foundation of my hopes) that numbers of married people even under the present law, (in the higher classes of England probably a great majority,) live in the spirit of a just law of equality. Laws never would be improved, if there were not numerous persons whose moral sentiments are better than the existing laws. Such persons ought to support the principles here advocated; of which the only object is to make all other married couples similar to what these are now. But persons even of considerable moral worth, unless they are also thinkers, are very ready to believe that laws or practices, the evils of which they have not personally experienced, do not produce any evils, but (if seeming to be generally approved of) probably do good, and that it is wrong to object to them. It would, however, be a great mistake in such married people to suppose, because the legal conditions of the tie which unites them do not occur to their thoughts once in a twelvemonth, and because they live and feel in all respects as if they were legally equals, that the same is the case with all other married couples, wherever the husband is not a notorious ruffian. To suppose this, would be to show equal ignorance of human nature and of fact. The less fit a man is for the possession of power—the less likely to be allowed to exercise it over any person with that person’s voluntary consent—the more does he hug himself in the consciousness of the power the law gives him, exact its legal rights to the utmost point which custom (the custom of men like himself) will tolerate, and take pleasure in using the power, merely to enliven the agreeable sense of possessing it. What is more; in the most naturally brutal and morally uneducated part of the lower classes, the legal slavery of the woman, and something in the merely physical subjection to their will as an instrument, causes them to feel a sort of disrespect and contempt towards their own wife which they do not feel towards any other woman, or any other human being, with whom they come in contact; and which makes her seem to them an appropriate subject for any kind of indignity. Let an acute observer of the signs of feeling, who has the requisite opportunities, judge for himself whether this is not the case: and if he finds that it is, let him not wonder at any amount of disgust and indignation that can be felt against institutions which lead naturally to this depraved state of the human mind.
We shall be told, perhaps, that religion imposes the duty of obedience; as every established fact which is too bad to admit of any other defence, is always presented to us as an injunction of religion. The Church, it is very true, enjoins it in her formularies,[*] but it would be difficult to derive any such injunction from Christianity. We are told that St. Paul said, “Wives, obey your husbands:” but he also said, “Slaves, obey your masters.”[†] It was not St. Paul’s business, nor was it consistent with his object, the propagation of Christianity, to incite any one to rebellion against existing laws. The apostle’s acceptance of all social institutions as he found them, is no more to be construed as a disapproval of attempts to improve them at the proper time, than his declaration, “The powers that be are ordained of God,”[‡] gives his sanction to military despotism, and to that alone, as the Christian form of political government, or commands passive obedience to it. To pretend that Christianity was intended to stereotype existing forms of government and society, and protect them against change, is to reduce it to the level of Islamism or of Brahminism. It is precisely because Christianity has not done this, that it has been the religion of the progressive portion of mankind, and Islamism, Brahminism, &c., have been those of the stationary portions; or rather (for there is no such thing as a really stationary society) of the declining portions. There have been abundance of people, in all ages of Christianity, who tried to make it something of the same kind; to convert us into a sort of Christian Mussulmans, with the Bible for a Koran, prohibiting all improvement: and great has been their power, and many have had to sacrifice their lives in resisting them. But they have been resisted, and the resistance has made us what we are, and will yet make us what we are to be.
After what has been said respecting the obligation of obedience, it is almost superfluous to say anything concerning the more special point included in the general one—a woman’s right to her own property; for I need not hope that this treatise can make any impression upon those who need anything to convince them that a woman’s inheritance or gains ought to be as much her own after marriage as before. The rule is simple: whatever would be the husband’s or wife’s if they were not married, should be under their exclusive control during marriage, which need not interfere with the power to tie up property by settlement, in order to preserve it for children. Some people are sentimentally shocked at the idea of a separate interest in money matters, as inconsistent with the ideal fusion of two lives into one. For my own part, I am one of the strongest supporters of community of goods, when resulting from an entire unity of feeling in the owners, which makes all things common between them. But I have no relish for a community of goods resting on the doctrine, that what is mine is yours but what is yours is not mine; and I should prefer to decline entering into such a compact with any one, though I were myself the person to profit by it.
This particular injustice and oppression to women, which is, to common apprehensions, more obvious than all the rest, admits of remedy without interfering with any other mischiefs: and there can be little doubt that it will be one of the earliest remedied. Already, in many of the new and several of the old States of the American Confederation, provisions have been inserted even in the written Constitutions, securing to women equality of rights in this respect:[*] and thereby improving materially the position, in the marriage relation, of those women at least who have property, by leaving them one instrument of power which they have not signed away; and preventing also the scandalous abuse of the marriage institution, which is perpetrated when a man entraps a girl into marrying him without a settlement, for the sole purpose of getting possession of her money. When the support of the family depends, not on property, but on earnings, the common arrangement, by which the man earns the income and the wife superintends the domestic expenditure, seems to me in general the most suitable division of labour between the two persons. If, in addition to the physical suffering of bearing children, and the whole responsibility of their care and education in early years, the wife undertakes the careful and economical application of the husband’s earnings to the general comfort of the family; she takes not only her fair share, but usually the larger share, of the bodily and mental exertion required by their joint existence. If she undertakes any additional portion, it seldom relieves her from this, but only prevents her from performing it properly. The care which she is herself disabled from taking of the children and the household, nobody else takes; those of the children who do not die, grow up as they best can, and the management of the household is likely to be so bad, as even in point of economy to be a great drawback from the value of the wife’s earnings. In an otherwise just state of things, it is not, therefore, I think, a desirable custom, that the wife should contribute by her labour to the income of the family. In an unjust state of things, her doing so may be useful to her, by making her of more value in the eyes of the man who is legally her master; but, on the other hand, it enables him still farther to abuse his power, by forcing her to work, and leaving the support of the family to her exertions, while he spends most of his time in drinking and idleness. The power of earning is essential to the dignity of a woman, if she has not independent property. But if marriage were an equal contract, not implying the obligation of obedience; if the connexion were no longer enforced to the oppression of those to whom it is purely a mischief, but a separation, on just terms (I do not now speak of a divorce), could be obtained by any woman who was morally entitled to it; and if she would then find all honourable employments as freely open to her as to men; it would not be necessary for her protection, that during marriage she should make this particular use of her faculties. Like a man when he chooses a profession, so, when a woman marries, it may in general be understood that she makes choice of the management of a household, and the bringing up of a family, as the first call upon her exertions, during as many years of her life as may be required for the purpose; and that she renounces, not all other objects and occupations, but all which are not consistent with the requirements of this. The actual exercise, in a habitual or systematic manner, of outdoor occupations, or such as cannot be carried on at home, would by this principle be practically interdicted to the greater number of married women. But the utmost latitude ought to exist for the adaptation of general rules to individual suitabilities; and there ought to be nothing to prevent faculties exceptionally adapted to any other pursuit, from obeying their vocation notwithstanding marriage: due provision being made for supplying otherwise any falling-short which might become inevitable, in her full performance of the ordinary functions of mistress of a family. These things, if once opinion were rightly directed on the subject, might with perfect safety be left to be regulated by opinion, without any interference of law.
Chapter III
on the other point which is involved in the just equality of women, their admissibility to all the functions and occupations hitherto retained as the monopoly of the stronger sex, I should anticipate no difficulty in convincing any one who has gone with me on the subject of the equality of women in the family. I believe that their disabilities elsewhere are only clung to in order to maintain their subordination in domestic life; because the generality of the male sex cannot yet tolerate the idea of living with an equal. Were it not for that, I think that almost every one, in the existing state of opinion in politics and political economy, would admit the injustice of excluding half the human race from the greater number of lucrative occupations, and from almost all high social functions; ordaining from their birth either that they are not, and cannot by any possibility become, fit for employments which are legally open to the stupidest and basest of the other sex, or else that however fit they may be, those employments shall be interdicted to them, in order to be preserved for the exclusive benefit of males. In the last two centuries, when (which was seldom the case) any reason beyond the mere existence of the fact was thought to be required to justify the disabilities of women, people seldom assigned as a reason their inferior mental capacity; which, in times when there was a real trial of personal faculties (from which all women were not excluded) in the struggles of public life, no one really believed in. The reason given in those days was not women’s unfitness, but the interest of society, by which was meant the interest of men: just as the raison d’état, meaning the convenience of the government, and the support of existing authority, was deemed a sufficient explanation and excuse for the most flagitious crimes. In the present day, power holds a smoother language, and whomsoever it oppresses, always pretends to do so for their own good: accordingly, when anything is forbidden to women, it is thought necessary to say, and desirable to believe, that they are incapable of doing it, and that they depart from their real path of success and happiness when they aspire to it. But to make this reason plausible (I do not say valid), those by whom it is urged must be prepared to carry it to a much greater length than any one ventures to do in the face of present experience. It is not sufficient to maintain that women on the average are less gifted than men on the average, with certain of the higher mental faculties, or that a smaller number of women than of men are fit for occupations and functions of the highest intellectual character. It is necessary to maintain that no women at all are fit for them, and that the most eminent women are inferior in mental faculties to the most mediocre of the men on whom those functions at present devolve. For if the performance of the function is decided either by competition, or by any mode of choice which secures regard to the public interest, there needs be no apprehension that any important employments will fall into the hands of women inferior to average men, or to the average of their male competitors. The only result would be that there would be fewer women than men in such employments; a result certain to happen in any case, if only from the preference always likely to be felt by the majority of women for the one vocation in which there is nobody to compete with them. Now, the most determined depreciator of women will not venture to deny, that when we add the experience of recent times to that of ages past, women, and not a few merely, but many women, have proved themselves capable of everything, perhaps without a single exception, which is done by men, and of doing it successfully and creditably. The utmost that can be said is, that there are many things which none of them have succeeded in doing as well as they have been done by some men—many in which they have not reached the very highest rank. But there are extremely few, dependent only on mental faculties, in which they have not attained the rank next to the highest. Is not this enough, and much more than enough, to make it a tyranny to them, and a detriment to society, that they should not be allowed to compete with men for the exercise of these functions? Is it not a mere truism to say, that such functions are often filled by men far less fit for them than numbers of women, and who would be beaten by women in any fair field of competition? What difference does it make that there may be men somewhere, fully employed about other things, who may be still better qualified for the things in question than these women? Does not this take place in all competitions? Is there so great a superfluity of men fit for high duties, that society can afford to reject the service of any competent person? Are we so certain of always finding a man made to our hands for any duty or function of social importance which falls vacant, that we lose nothing by putting a ban upon one-half of mankind, and refusing beforehand to make their faculties available, however distinguished they may be? And even if we could do without them, would it be consistent with justice to refuse to them their fair share of honour and distinction, or to deny to them the equal moral right of all human beings to choose their occupation (short of injury to others) according to their own preferences, at their own risk? Nor is the injustice confined to them, it is shared by those who are in a position to benefit by their services. To ordain that any kind of persons shall not be physicians, or shall not be advocates, or shall not be members of parliament, is to injure not them only, but all who employ physicians or advocates, or elect members of parliament, and who are deprived of the stimulating effect of greater competition on the exertions of the competitors, as well as restricted to a narrower range of individual choice.
It will perhaps be sufficient if I confine myself, in the details of my argument, to functions of a public nature: since, if I am successful as to those, it probably will be readily granted that women should be admissible to all other occupations to which it is at all material whether they are admitted or not. And here let me begin by marking out one function, broadly distinguished from all others, their right to which is entirely independent of any question which can be raised concerning their faculties. I mean the suffrage, both parliamentary and municipal. The right to share in the choice of those who are to exercise a public trust, is altogether a distinct thing from that of competing for the trust itself. If no one could vote for a member of parliament who was not fit to be a candidate, the government would be a narrow oligarchy indeed. To have a voice in choosing those by whom one is to be governed, is a means of self-protection due to every one, though he were to remain for ever excluded from the function of governing: and that women are considered fit to have such a choice, may be presumed from the fact, that the law already gives it to women in the most important of all cases to themselves: for the choice of the man who is to govern a woman to the end of life, is always supposed to be voluntarily made by herself. In the case of election to public trusts, it is the business of constitutional law to surround the right of suffrage with all needful securities and limitations, but whatever securities are sufficient in the case of the male sex, no others need be required in the case of women. Under whatever conditions, and within whatever limits, men are admitted to the suffrage, there is not a shadow of justification for not admitting women under the same. The majority of the women of any class are not likely to differ in political opinion from the majority of the men of the same class, unless the question be one in which the interests of women, as such, are in some way involved; and if they are so, women require the suffrage, as their guarantee of just and equal consideration. This ought to be obvious even to those who coincide in no other of the doctrines for which I contend. Even if every woman were a wife, and if every wife ought to be a slave, all the more would these slaves stand in need of legal protection: and we know what legal protection the slaves have, where the laws are made by their masters.
With regard to the fitness of women, not only to participate in elections, but themselves to hold offices or practise professions involving important public responsibilities; I have already observed that this consideration is not essential to the practical question in dispute: since any woman, who succeeds in an open profession, proves by that very fact that she is qualified for it. And in the case of public offices, if the political system of the country is such as to exclude unfit men, it will equally exclude unfit women: while if it is not, there is no additional evil in the fact that the unfit persons whom it admits may be either women or men. As long therefore as it is acknowledged that even a few women may be fit for these duties, the laws which shut the door on those exceptions cannot be justified by any opinion which can be held respecting the capacities of women in general. But, though this last consideration is not essential, it is far from being irrelevant. An unprejudiced view of it gives additional strength to the arguments against the disabilities of women, and reinforces them by high considerations of practical utility.
Let us at first make entire abstraction of all psychological considerations tending to show, that any of the mental differences supposed to exist between women and men are but the natural effect of the differences in their education and circumstances, and indicate no radical difference, far less radical inferiority, of nature. Let us consider women only as they already are, or as they are known to have been; and the capacities which they have already practically shown. What they have done, that at least, if nothing else, it is proved that they can do. When we consider how sedulously they are all trained away from, instead of being trained towards, any of the occupations or objects reserved for men, it is evident that I am taking a very humble ground for them, when I rest their case on what they have actually achieved. For, in this case, negative evidence is worth little, while any positive evidence is conclusive. It cannot be inferred to be impossible that a woman should be a Homer, or an Aristotle, or a Michael Angelo, or a Beethoven, because no woman has yet actually produced works comparable to theirs in any of those lines of excellence. This negative fact at most leaves the question uncertain, and open to psychological discussion. But it is quite certain that a woman can be a Queen Elizabeth, or a Deborah,[*] or a Joan of Arc, since this is not inference, but fact. Now it is a curious consideration, that the only things which the existing law excludes women from doing, are the things which they have proved that they are able to do. There is no law to prevent a woman from having written all the plays of Shakspeare, or composed all the operas of Mozart. But Queen Elizabeth or Queen Victoria, had they not inherited the throne, could not have been intrusted with the smallest of the political duties, of which the former showed herself equal to the greatest.
If anything conclusive could be inferred from experience, without psychological analysis, it would be that the things which women are not allowed to do are the very ones for which they are peculiarly qualified; since their vocation for government has made its way, and become conspicuous, through the very few opportunities which have been given; while in the lines of distinction which apparently were freely open to them, they have by no means so eminently distinguished themselves. We know how small a number of reigning queens history presents, in comparison with that of kings. Of this smaller number a far larger proportion have shown talents for rule; though many of them have occupied the throne in difficult periods. It is remarkable, too, that they have, in a great number of instances, been distinguished by merits the most opposite to the imaginary and conventional character of women: they have been as much remarked for the firmness and vigour of their rule, as for its intelligence. When, to queens and empresses, we add regents, and viceroys of provinces, the list of women who have been eminent rulers of mankind swells to a great length.* This fact is so undeniable, that some one, long ago, tried to retort the argument, and turned the admitted truth into an additional insult, by saying that queens are better than kings, because under kings women govern, but under queens, men.
It may seem a waste of reasoning to argue against a bad joke; but such things do affect people’s minds; and I have heard men quote this saying, with an air as if they thought that there was something in it. At any rate, it will serve as well as anything else for a starting point in discussion. I say, then, that it is not true that under kings, women govern. Such cases are entirely exceptional: and weak kings have quite as often governed ill through the influence of male favourites, as of female. When a king is governed by a woman merely through his amatory propensities, good government is not probable, though even then there are exceptions. But French history counts two kings who have voluntarily given the direction of affairs during many years, the one to his mother, the other to his sister:[*] one of them, Charles VIII, was a mere boy, but in doing so he followed the intentions of his father Louis XI, the ablest monarch of his age. The other, Saint Louis, was the best, and one of the most vigorous rulers, since the time of Charlemagne. Both these princesses ruled in a manner hardly equalled by any prince among their cotemporaries. The emperor Charles V, the most politic prince of his time, who had as great a number of able men in his service as a ruler ever had, and was one of the least likely of all sovereigns to sacrifice his interest to personal feelings, made two princesses of his family successively Governors of the Netherlands, and kept one or other of them in that post during his whole life, (they were afterwards succeeded by a third).[†] Both ruled very successfully, and one of them, Margaret of Austria, was one of the ablest politicians of the age. So much for one side of the question. Now as to the other. When it is said that under queens men govern, is the same meaning to be understood as when kings are said to be governed by women? Is it meant that queens choose as their instruments of government, the associates of their personal pleasures? The case is rare even with those who are as unscrupulous on the latter point as Catherine II: and it is not in these cases that the good government, alleged to arise from male influence, is to be found. If it be true, then, that the administration is in the hands of better men under a queen than under an average king, it must be that queens have a superior capacity for choosing them; and women must be better qualified than men both for the position of sovereign, and for that of chief minister; for the principal business of a prime minister is not to govern in person, but to find the fittest persons to conduct every department of public affairs. The more rapid insight into character, which is one of the admitted points of superiority in women over men, must certainly make them, with anything like parity of qualifications in other respects, more apt than men in that choice of instruments, which is nearly the most important business of every one who has to do with governing mankind. Even the unprincipled Catherine de’ Medici could feel the value of a Chancellor de l’Hôpital. But it is also true that most great queens have been great by their own talents for government, and have been well served precisely for that reason. They retained the supreme direction of affairs in their own hands: and if they listened to good advisers, they gave by that fact the strongest proof that their judgment fitted them for dealing with the great questions of government.
Is it reasonable to think that those who are fit for the greater functions of politics, are incapable of qualifying themselves for the less? Is there any reason in the nature of things, that the wives and sisters of princes should, whenever called on, be found as competent as the princes themselves to their business, but that the wives and sisters of statesmen, and administrators, and directors of companies, and managers of public institutions, should be unable to do what is done by their brothers and husbands? The real reason is plain enough; it is that princesses, being more raised above the generality of men by their rank than placed below them by their sex, have never been taught that it was improper for them to concern themselves with politics, but have been allowed to feel the liberal interest natural to any cultivated human being, in the great transactions which took place around them, and in which they might be called on to take a part. The ladies of reigning families are the only women who are allowed the same range of interests and freedom of development as men; and it is precisely in their case that there is not found to be any inferiority. Exactly where and in proportion as women’s capacities for government have been tried, in that proportion have they been found adequate.
This fact is in accordance with the best general conclusions which the world’s imperfect experience seems as yet to suggest, concerning the peculiar tendencies and aptitudes characteristic of women, as women have hitherto been. I do not say, as they will continue to be; for, as I have already said more than once, I consider it presumption in any one to pretend to decide what women are or are not, can or cannot be, by natural constitution. They have always hitherto been kept, as far as regards spontaneous development, in so unnatural a state, that their nature cannot but have been greatly distorted and disguised; and no one can safely pronounce that if women’s nature were left to choose its direction as freely as men’s, and if no artificial bent were attempted to be given to it except that required by the conditions of human society, and given to both sexes alike, there would be any material difference, or perhaps any difference at all, in the character and capacities which would unfold themselves. I shall presently show, that even the least contestable of the differences which now exist, are such as may very well have been produced merely by circumstances, without any difference of natural capacity. But, looking at women as they are known in experience, it may be said of them, with more truth than belongs to most other generalizations on the subject, that the general bent of their talents is towards the practical. This statement is conformable to all the public history of women, in the present and the past. It is no less borne out by common and daily experience. Let us consider the special nature of the mental capacities most characteristic of a woman of talent. They are all of a kind which fits them for practice, and makes them tend towards it. What is meant by a woman’s capacity of intuitive perception? It means, a rapid and correct insight into present fact. It has nothing to do with general principles. Nobody ever perceived a scientific law of nature by intuition, nor arrived at a general rule of duty or prudence by it. These are results of slow and careful collection and comparison of experience; and neither the men nor the women of intuition usually shine in this department, unless, indeed, the experience necessary is such as they can acquire by themselves. For what is called their intuitive sagacity makes them peculiarly apt in gathering such general truths as can be collected from their individual means of observation. When, consequently, they chance to be as well provided as men are with the results of other people’s experience, by reading and education, (I use the word chance advisedly, for, in respect to the knowledge that tends to fit them for the greater concerns of life, the only educated women are the self-educated) they are better furnished than men in general with the essential requisites of skilful and successful practice. Men who have been much taught, are apt to be deficient in the sense of present fact; they do not see, in the facts which they are called upon to deal with, what is really there, but what they have been taught to expect. This is seldom the case with women of any ability. Their capacity of “intuition” preserves them from it. With equality of experience and of general faculties, a woman usually sees much more than a man of what is immediately before her. Now this sensibility to the present, is the main quality on which the capacity for practice, as distinguished from theory, depends. To discover general principles, belongs to the speculative faculty: to discern and discriminate the particular cases in which they are and are not applicable, constitutes practical talent: and for this, women as they now are have a peculiar aptitude. I admit that there can be no good practice without principles, and that the predominant place which quickness of observation holds among a woman’s faculties, makes her particularly apt to build over-hasty generalizations upon her own observation; though at the same time no less ready in rectifying those generalizations, as her observation takes a wider range. But the corrective to this defect, is access to the experience of the human race; general knowledge—exactly the thing which education can best supply. A woman’s mistakes are specifically those of a clever self-educated man, who often sees what men trained in routine do not see, but falls into errors for want of knowing things which have long been known. Of course he has acquired much of the pre-existing knowledge, or he could not have got on at all; but what he knows of it he has picked up in fragments and at random, as women do.
But this gravitation of women’s minds to the present, to the real, to actual fact, while in its exclusiveness it is a source of errors, is also a most useful counteractive of the contrary error. The principal and most characteristic aberration of speculative minds as such, consists precisely in the deficiency of this lively perception and ever-present sense of objective fact. For want of this, they often not only overlook the contradiction which outward facts oppose to their theories, but lose sight of the legitimate purpose of speculation altogether, and let their speculative faculties go astray into regions not peopled with real beings, animate or inanimate, even idealized, but with personified shadows created by the illusions of metaphysics or by the mere entanglement of words, and think these shadows the proper objects of the highest, the most transcendant, philosophy. Hardly anything can be of greater value to a man of theory and speculation who employs himself not in collecting materials of knowledge by observation, but in working them up by processes of thought into comprehensive truths of science and laws of conduct, than to carry on his speculations in the companionship, and under the criticism, of a really superior woman. There is nothing comparable to it for keeping his thoughts within the limits of real things, and the actual facts of nature. A woman seldom runs wild after an abstraction. The habitual direction of her mind to dealing with things as individuals rather than in groups, and (what is closely connected with it) her more lively interest in the present feelings of persons, which makes her consider first of all, in anything which claims to be applied to practice, in what manner persons will be affected by it—these two things make her extremely unlikely to put faith in any speculation which loses sight of individuals, and deals with things as if they existed for the benefit of some imaginary entity, some mere creation of the mind, not resolvable into the feelings of living beings. Women’s thoughts are thus as useful in giving reality to those of thinking men, as men’s thoughts in giving width and largeness to those of women. In depth, as distinguished from breadth, I greatly doubt if even now, women, compared with men, are at any disadvantage.
If the existing mental characteristics of women are thus valuable even in aid of speculation, they are still more important, when speculation has done its work, for carrying out the results of speculation into practice. For the reasons already given, women are comparatively unlikely to fall into the common error of men, that of sticking to their rules in a case whose specialities either take it out of the class to which the rules are applicable, or require a special adaptation of them. Let us now consider another of the admitted superiorities of clever women, greater quickness of apprehension. Is not this pre-eminently a quality which fits a person for practice? In action, everything continually depends upon deciding promptly. In speculation, nothing does. A mere thinker can wait, can take time to consider, can collect additional evidence, he is not obliged to complete his philosophy at once, lest the opportunity should go by. The power of drawing the best conclusion possible from insufficient data is not indeed useless in philosophy; the construction of a provisional hypothesis consistent with all known facts is often the needful basis for further inquiry. But this faculty is rather serviceable in philosophy, than the main qualification for it: and, for the auxiliary as well as for the main operation, the philosopher can allow himself any time he pleases. He is in no need of the capacity of doing rapidly what he does; what he rather needs is patience, to work on slowly until imperfect lights have become perfect, and a conjecture has ripened into a theorem. For those, on the contrary, whose business is with the fugitive and perishable—with individual facts, not kinds of facts—rapidity of thought is a qualification next only in importance to the power of thought itself. He who has not his faculties under immediate command, in the contingencies of action, might as well not have them at all. He may be fit to criticize, but he is not fit to act. Now it is in this that women, and the men who are most like women, confessedly excel. The other sort of man, however pre-eminent may be his faculties, arrives slowly at complete command of them: rapidity of judgment and promptitude of judicious action, even in the things he knows best, are the gradual and late result of strenuous effort grown into habit.
It will be said, perhaps, that the greater nervous susceptibility of women is a disqualification for practice, in anything but domestic life, by rendering them mobile, changeable, too vehemently under the influence of the moment, incapable of dogged perseverance, unequal and uncertain in the power of using their faculties. I think that these phrases sum up the greater part of the objections commonly made to the fitness of women for the higher class of serious business. Much of all this is the mere overflow of nervous energy run to waste, and would cease when the energy was directed to a definite end. Much is also the result of conscious or unconscious cultivation; as we see by the almost total disappearance of “hysterics” and fainting fits, since they have gone out of fashion. Moreover, when people are brought up, like many women of the higher classes (though less so in our own country than in any other) a kind of hot-house plants, shielded from the wholesome vicissitudes of air and temperature, and untrained in any of the occupations and exercises which give stimulus and development to the circulatory and muscular system, while their nervous system, especially in its emotional department, is kept in unnaturally active play; it is no wonder if those of them who do not die of consumption, grow up with constitutions liable to derangement from slight causes, both internal and external, and without stamina to support any task, physical or mental, requiring continuity of effort. But women brought up to work for their livelihood show none of these morbid characteristics, unless indeed they are chained to an excess of sedentary work in confined and unhealthy rooms. Women who in their early years have shared in the healthful physical education and bodily freedom of their brothers, and who obtain a sufficiency of pure air and exercise in after-life, very rarely have any excessive susceptibility of nerves which can disqualify them for active pursuits. There is indeed a certain proportion of persons, in both sexes, in whom an unusual degree of nervous sensibility is constitutional, and of so marked a character as to be the feature of their organization which exercises the greatest influence over the whole character of the vital phenomena. This constitution, like other physical conformations, is hereditary, and is transmitted to sons as well as daughters; but it is possible, and probable, that the nervous temperament (as it is called) is inherited by a greater number of women than of men. We will assume this as a fact: and let me then ask, are men of nervous temperament found to be unfit for the duties and pursuits usually followed by men? If not, why should women of the same temperament be unfit for them? The peculiarities of the temperament are, no doubt, within certain limits, an obstacle to success in some employments, though an aid to it in others. But when the occupation is suitable to the temperament, and sometimes even when it is unsuitable, the most brilliant examples of success are continually given by the men of high nervous sensibility. They are distinguished in their practical manifestations chiefly by this, that being susceptible of a higher degree of excitement than those of another physical constitution, their powers when excited differ more than in the case of other people, from those shown in their ordinary state: they are raised, as it were, above themselves, and do things with ease which they are wholly incapable of at other times. But this lofty excitement is not, except in weak bodily constitutions, a mere flash, which passes away immediately, leaving no permanent traces, and incompatible with persistent and steady pursuit of an object. It is the character of the nervous temperament to be capable of sustained excitement, holding out through long continued efforts. It is what is meant by spirit. It is what makes the high-bred racehorse run without slackening speed till he drops down dead. It is what has enabled so many delicate women to maintain the most sublime constancy not only at the stake, but through a long preliminary succession of mental and bodily tortures. It is evident that people of this temperament are particularly apt for what may be called the executive department of the leadership of mankind. They are the material of great orators, great preachers, impressive diffusers of moral influences. Their constitution might be deemed less favourable to the qualities required from a statesman in the cabinet, or from a judge. It would be so, if the consequence necessarily followed that because people are excitable they must always be in a state of excitement. But this is wholly a question of training. Strong feeling is the instrument and element of strong self-control: but it requires to be cultivated in that direction. When it is, it forms not the heroes of impulse only, but those also of self-conquest. History and experience prove that the most passionate characters are the most fanatically rigid in their feelings of duty, when their passion has been trained to act in that direction. The judge who gives a just decision in a case where his feelings are intensely interested on the other side, derives from that same strength of feeling the determined sense of the obligation of justice, which enables him to achieve this victory over himself. The capability of that lofty enthusiasm which takes the human being out of his every-day character, reacts upon the daily character itself. His aspirations and powers when he is in this exceptional state, become the type with which he compares, and by which he estimates, his sentiments and proceedings at other times: and his habitual purposes assume a character moulded by and assimilated to the moments of lofty excitement, although those, from the physical nature of a human being, can only be transient. Experience of races, as well as of individuals, does not show those of excitable temperament to be less fit, on the average, either for speculation or practice, than the more unexcitable. The French, and the Italians, are undoubtedly by nature more nervously excitable than the Teutonic races, and, compared at least with the English, they have a much greater habitual and daily emotional life: but have they been less great in science, in public business, in legal and judicial eminence, or in war? There is abundant evidence that the Greeks were of old, as their descendants and successors still are, one of the most excitable of the races of mankind. It is superfluous to ask, what among the achievements of men they did not excel in. The Romans, probably, as an equally southern people, had the same original temperament, but the stern character of their national discipline, like that of the Spartans, made them an example of the opposite type of national character, the greater strength of their natural feelings being chiefly apparent in the intensity which the same original temperament made it possible to give to the artificial. If these cases exemplify what a naturally excitable people may be made, the Irish Celts afford one of the aptest examples of what they are when left to themselves (if those can be said to be left to themselves who have been for centuries under the indirect influence of bad government, and the direct training of a Catholic hierarchy and of a sincere belief in the Catholic religion). The Irish character must be considered, therefore, as an unfavourable case: yet, whenever the circumstances of the individual have been at all favourable, what people have shown greater capacity for the most varied and multifarious individual eminence? Like the French compared with the English, the Irish with the Swiss, the Greeks or Italians compared with the German races, so women compared with men may be found, on the average, to do the same things with some variety in the particular kind of excellence. But, that they would do them fully as well on the whole, if their education and cultivation were adapted to correcting instead of aggravating the infirmities incident to their temperament, I see not the smallest reason to doubt.
Supposing it, however, to be true that women’s minds are by nature more mobile than those of men, less capable of persisting long in the same continuous effort, more fitted for dividing their faculties among many things than for travelling in any one path to the highest point which can be reached by it: this may be true of women as they now are (though not without great and numerous exceptions), and may account for their having remained behind the highest order of men in precisely the things in which this absorption of the whole mind in one set of ideas and occupations may seem to be most requisite. Still, this difference is one which can only affect the kind of excellence, not the excellence itself, or its practical worth, and it remains to be shown whether this exclusive working of a part of the mind, this absorption of the whole thinking faculty in a single subject, and concentration of it on a single work, is the normal and healthful condition of the human faculties, even for speculative uses. I believe that what is gained in special development by this concentration, is lost in the capacity of the mind for the other purposes of life; and even in abstract thought, it is my decided opinion that the mind does more by frequently returning to a difficult problem, than by sticking to it without interruption. For the purposes, at all events, of practice, from its highest to its humblest departments, the capacity of passing promptly from one subject of consideration to another, without letting the active spring of the intellect run down between the two, is a power far more valuable; and this power women pre-eminently possess, by virtue of the very mobility of which they are accused. They perhaps have it from nature, but they certainly have it by training and education; for nearly the whole of the occupations of women consist in the management of small but multitudinous details, on each of which the mind cannot dwell even for a minute, but must pass on to other things, and if anything requires longer thought, must steal time at odd moments for thinking of it. The capacity indeed which women show for doing their thinking in circumstances and at times which almost any man would make an excuse to himself for not attempting it, has often been noticed: and a woman’s mind, though it may be occupied only with small things, can hardly ever permit itself to be vacant, as a man’s so often is when not engaged in what he chooses to consider the business of his life. The business of a woman’s ordinary life is things in general, and can as little cease to go on as the world to go round.
But (it is said) there is anatomical evidence of the superior mental capacity of men compared with women: they have a larger brain. I reply, that in the first place the fact itself is doubtful. It is by no means established that the brain of a woman is smaller than that of a man. If it is inferred merely because a woman’s bodily frame generally is of less dimensions than a man’s, this criterion would lead to strange consequences. A tall and large-boned man must on this showing be wonderfully superior in intelligence to a small man, and an elephant or a whale must prodigiously excel mankind. The size of the brain in human beings, anatomists say, varies much less than the size of the body, or even of the head, and the one cannot be at all inferred from the other. It is certain that some women have as large a brain as any man. It is within my knowledge that a man who had weighed many human brains, said that the heaviest he knew of, heavier even than Cuvier’s (the heaviest previously recorded,) was that of a woman.[*] Next, I must observe that the precise relation which exists between the brain and the intellectual powers is not yet well understood, but is a subject of great dispute. That there is a very close relation we cannot doubt. The brain is certainly the material organ of thought and feeling; and (making abstraction of the great unsettled controversy respecting the appropriation of different parts of the brain to different mental faculties) I admit that it would be an anomaly, and an exception to all we know of the general laws of life and organization, if the size of the organ were wholly indifferent to the function; if no accession of power were derived from the greater magnitude of the instrument. But the exception and the anomaly would be fully as great if the organ exercised influence by its magnitude only. In all the more delicate operations of nature—of which those of the animated creation are the most delicate, and those of the nervous system by far the most delicate of these—differences in the effect depend as much on differences of quality in the physical agents, as on their quantity; and if the quality of an instrument is to be tested by the nicety and delicacy of the work it can do, the indications point to a greater average fineness of quality in the brain and nervous system of women than of men. Dismissing abstract difference of quality, a thing difficult to verify, the efficiency of an organ is known to depend not solely on its size but on its activity; and of this we have an approximate measure in the energy with which the blood circulates through it, both the stimulus and the reparative force being mainly dependent on the circulation. It would not be surprising—it is indeed an hypothesis which accords well with the differences actually observed between the mental operations of the two sexes—if men on the average should have the advantage in the size of the brain, and women in activity of cerebral circulation. The results which conjecture, founded on analogy, would lead us to expect from this difference of organization, would correspond to some of those which we most commonly see. In the first place, the mental operations of men might be expected to be slower. They would neither be so prompt as women in thinking, nor so quick to feel. Large bodies take more time to get into full action. On the other hand, when once got thoroughly into play, men’s brain would bear more work. It would be more persistent in the line first taken; it would have more difficulty in changing from one mode of action to another, but, in the one thing it was doing, it could go on longer without loss of power or sense of fatigue. And do we not find that the things in which men most excel women are those which require most plodding and long hammering at a single thought, while women do best what must be done rapidly? A woman’s brain is sooner fatigued, sooner exhausted; but given the degree of exhaustion, we should expect to find that it would recover itself sooner. I repeat that this speculation is entirely hypothetical; it pretends to no more than to suggest a line of enquiry. I have before repudiated the notion of its being yet certainly known that there is any natural difference at all in the average strength or direction of the mental capacities of the two sexes, much less what that difference is. Nor is it possible that this should be known, so long as the psychological laws of the formation of character have been so little studied, even in a general way, and in the particular case never scientifically applied at all; so long as the most obvious external causes of difference of character are habitually disregarded—left unnoticed by the observer, and looked down upon with a kind of supericilious contempt by the prevalent schools both of natural history and of mental philosophy: who, whether they look for the source of what mainly distinguishes human beings from one another, in the world of matter or in that of spirit, agree in running down those who prefer to explain these differences by the different relations of human beings to society and life.
To so ridiculous an extent are the notions formed of the nature of women, mere empirical generalizations, framed, without philosophy or analysis, upon the first instances which present themselves, that the popular idea of it is different in different countries, according as the opinions and social circumstances of the country have given to the women living in it any speciality of development or non-development. An Oriental thinks that women are by nature peculiarly voluptuous; see the violent abuse of them on this ground in Hindoo writings. An Englishman usually thinks that they are by nature cold. The sayings about women’s fickleness are mostly of French origin; from the famous distich of Francis I,[*] upward and downward. In England it is a common remark, how much more constant women are than men. Inconstancy has been longer reckoned discreditable to a woman, in England than in France; and Englishwomen are besides, in their inmost nature, much more subdued to opinion. It may be remarked by the way, that Englishmen are in peculiarly unfavourable circumstances for attempting to judge what is or is not natural, not merely to women, but to men, or to human beings altogether, at least if they have only English experience to go upon: because there is no place where human nature shows so little of its original lineaments. Both in a good and a bad sense, the English are farther from a state of nature than any other modern people. They are, more than any other people, a product of civilization and discipline. England is the country in which social discipline has most succeeded, not so much in conquering, as in suppressing, whatever is liable to conflict with it. The English, more than any other people, not only act but feel according to rule. In other countries, the taught opinion, or the requirement of society, may be the stronger power, but the promptings of the individual nature are always visible under it, and often resisting it: rule may be stronger than nature, but nature is still there. In England, rule has to a great degree substituted itself for nature. The greater part of life is carried on, not by following inclination under the control of rule, but by having no inclination but that of following a rule. Now this has its good side doubtless, though it has also a wretchedly bad one; but it must render an Englishman peculiarly ill-qualified to pass a judgment on the original tendencies of human nature from his own experience. The errors to which observers elsewhere are liable on the subject, are of a different character. An Englishman is ignorant respecting human nature, a Frenchman is prejudiced. An Englishman’s errors are negative, a Frenchman’s positive. An Englishman fancies that things do not exist, because he never sees them; a Frenchman thinks they must always and necessarily exist, because he does see them. An Englishman does not know nature, because he has had no opportunity of observing it; a Frenchman generally knows a great deal of it, but often mistakes it, because he has only seen it sophisticated and distorted. For the artificial state superinduced by society disguises the natural tendencies of the thing which is the subject of observation, in two different ways: by extinguishing the nature, or by transforming it. In the one case there is but a starved residuum of nature remaining to be studied; in the other case there is much, but it may have expanded in any direction rather than that in which it would spontaneously grow.
I have said that it cannot now be known how much of the existing mental differences between men and women is natural, and how much artificial; whether there are any natural differences at all; or, supposing all artificial causes of difference to be withdrawn, what natural character would be revealed. I am not about to attempt what I have pronounced impossible, but doubt does not forbid conjecture, and where certainty is unattainable, there may yet be the means of arriving at some degree of probability. The first point, the origin of the differences actually observed, is the one most accessible to speculation, and I shall attempt to approach it, by the only path by which it can be reached; by tracing the mental consequences of external influences. We cannot isolate a human being from the circumstances of his condition, so as to ascertain experimentally what he would have been by nature; but we can consider what he is, and what his circumstances have been, and whether the one would have been capable of producing the other.
Let us take, then, the only marked case which observation affords, of apparent inferiority of women to men, if we except the merely physical one of bodily strength. No production in philosophy, science, or art, entitled to the first rank, has been the work of a woman. Is there any mode of accounting for this, without supposing that women are naturally incapable of producing them?
In the first place, we may fairly question whether experience has afforded sufficient grounds for an induction. It is scarcely three generations since women, saving very rare exceptions, have begun to try their capacity in philosophy, science, or art. It is only in the present generation that their attempts have been at all numerous; and they are even now extremely few, everywhere but in England and France. It is a relevant question, whether a mind possessing the requisites of first-rate eminence in speculation or creative art could have been expected, on the mere calculation of chances, to turn up during that lapse of time, among the women whose tastes and personal position admitted of their devoting themselves to these pursuits. In all things which there has yet been time for—in all but the very highest grades in the scale of excellence, especially in the department in which they have been longest engaged, literature (both prose and poetry)—women have done quite as much, have obtained fully as high prizes and as many of them, as could be expected from the length of time and the number of competitors. If we go back to the earlier period when very few women made the attempt, yet some of those few made it with distinguished success. The Greeks always accounted Sappho among their great poets, and we may well suppose that Myrtis, said to have been the teacher of Pindar, and Corinna, who five times bore away from him the prize of poetry, must at least have had sufficient merit to admit of being compared with that great name. Aspasia did not leave any philosophical writings; but it is an admitted fact that Socrates resorted to her for instruction, and avowed himself to have obtained it.
If we consider the works of women in modern times, and contrast them with those of men, either in the literary or the artistic department, such inferiority as may be observed resolves itself essentially into one thing: but that is a most material one; deficiency of originality. Not total deficiency; for every production of mind which is of any substantive value, has an originality of its own—is a conception of the mind itself, not a copy of something else. Thoughts original, in the sense of being unborrowed—of being derived from the thinker’s own observations or intellectual processes—are abundant in the writings of women. But they have not yet produced any of those great and luminous new ideas which form an era in thought, nor those fundamentally new conceptions in art, which open a vista of possible effects not before thought of, and found a new school. Their compositions are mostly grounded on the existing fund of thought, and their creations do not deviate widely from existing types. This is the sort of inferiority which their works manifest: for in point of execution, in the detailed application of thought, and the perfection of style, there is no inferiority. Our best novelists in point of composition, and of the management of detail, have mostly been women, and there is not in all modern literature a more eloquent vehicle of thought than the style of Madame de Staël, nor, as a specimen of purely artistic excellence, anything superior to the prose of Madame Sand, whose style acts upon the nervous system like a symphony of Haydn or Mozart. High originality of conception is, as I have said, what is chiefly wanting. And now to examine if there is any manner in which this deficiency can be accounted for.
Let us remember, then, so far as regards mere thought, that during all that period in the world’s existence, and in the progress of cultivation, in which great and fruitful new truths could be arrived at by mere force of genius, with little previous study and accumulation of knowledge—during all that time women did not concern themselves with speculation at all. From the days of Hypatia to those of the Reformation, the illustrious Heloisa is almost the only woman to whom any such achievement might have been possible, and we know not how great a capacity of speculation in her may have been lost to mankind by the misfortunes of her life. Never since any considerable number of women have began to cultivate serious thought, has originality been possible on easy terms. Nearly all the thoughts which can be reached by mere strength of original faculties, have long since been arrived at: and originality, in any high sense of the word, is now scarcely ever attained but by minds which have undergone elaborate discipline, and are deeply versed in the results of previous thinking. It is Mr. Maurice, I think, who has remarked on the present age, that its most original thinkers are those who have known most thoroughly what had been thought by their predecessors,[*] and this will always henceforth be the case. Every fresh stone in the edifice has now to be placed on the top of so many others, that a long process of climbing, and of carrying up materials, has to be gone through by whoever aspires to take a share in the present stage of the work. How many women are there who have gone through any such process? Mrs. Somerville, alone perhaps of women, knows as much of mathematics as is now needful for making any considerable mathematical discovery: is it any proof of inferiority in women, that she has not happened to be one of the two or three persons who in her lifetime have associated their names with some striking advancement of the science? Two women, since political economy has been made a science, have known enough of it to write usefully on the subject:[†] of how many of the innumerable men who have written on it during the same time, is it possible with truth to say more? If no woman has hitherto been a great historian, what woman has had the necessary erudition? If no woman is a great philologist, what woman has studied Sanscrit and Slavonic, the Gothic of Ulphila and the Persic of the Zendavesta? Even in practical matters we all know what is the value of the originality of untaught geniuses. It means, inventing over again in its rudimentary form something already invented and improved upon by many successive inventors. When women have had the preparation which all men now require to be eminently original, it will be time enough to begin judging by experience of their capacity for originality.
It no doubt often happens that a person, who has not widely and accurately studied the thoughts of others on a subject, has by natural sagacity a happy intuition, which he can suggest, but cannot prove, which yet when matured may be an important addition to knowledge: but even then, no justice can be done to it until some other person, who does possess the previous acquirements, takes it in hand, tests it, gives it a scientific or practical form, and fits it into its place among the existing truths of philosophy or science. Is it supposed that such felicitous thoughts do not occur to women? They occur by hundreds to every woman of intellect. But they are mostly lost, for want of a husband or friend who has the other knowledge which can enable him to estimate them properly and bring them before the world: and even when they are brought before it, they generally appear as his ideas, not their real author’s. Who can tell how many of the most original thoughts put forth by male writers, belong to a woman by suggestion, to themselves only by verifying and working out? If I may judge by my own case, a very large proportion indeed.
If we turn from pure speculation to literature in the narrow sense of the term, and the fine arts, there is a very obvious reason why women’s literature is, in its general conception and in its main features, an imitation of men’s. Why is the Roman literature, as critics proclaim to satiety, not original, but an imitation of the Greek? Simply because the Greeks came first. If women lived in a different country from men, and had never read any of their writings, they would have had a literature of their own. As it is, they have not created one, because they found a highly advanced literature already created. If there had been no suspension of the knowledge of antiquity, or if the Renaissance had occurred before the Gothic cathedrals were built, they never would have been built. We see that, in France and Italy, imitation of the ancient literature stopped the original development even after it had commenced. All women who write are pupils of the great male writers. A painter’s early pictures, even if he be a Raffaelle, are undistinguishable in style from those of his master. Even a Mozart does not display his powerful originality in his earliest pieces. What years are to a gifted individual, generations are to a mass. If women’s literature is destined to have a different collective character from that of men, depending on any difference of natural tendencies, much longer time is necessary than has yet elapsed, before it can emancipate itself from the influence of accepted models, and guide itself by its own impulses. But if, as I believe, there will not prove to be any natural tendencies common to women, and distinguishing their genius from that of men, yet every individual writer among them has her individual tendencies, which at present are still subdued by the influence of precedent and example: and it will require generations more, before their individuality is sufficiently developed to make head against that influence.
It is in the fine arts, properly so called, that the primâ facie evidence of inferior original powers in women at first sight appears the strongest: since opinion (it may be said) does not exclude them from these, but rather encourages them, and their education, instead of passing over this department, is in the affluent classes mainly composed of it. Yet in this line of exertion they have fallen still more short than in many others, of the highest eminence attained by men. This shortcoming, however, needs no other explanation than the familiar fact, more universally true in the fine arts than in anything else; the vast superiority of professional persons over amateurs. Women in the educated classes are almost universally taught more or less of some branch or other of the fine arts, but not that they may gain their living or their social consequence by it. Women artists are all amateurs. The exceptions are only of the kind which confirm the general truth. Women are taught music, but not for the purpose of composing, only of executing it, and accordingly it is only as composers, that men, in music, are superior to women. The only one of the fine arts which women do follow, to any extent, as a profession, and an occupation for life, is the histrionic; and in that they are confessedly equal, if not superior, to men. To make the comparison fair, it should be made between the productions of women in any branch of art, and those of men not following it as a profession. In musical composition, for example, women surely have produced fully as good things as have ever been produced by male amateurs. There are now a few women, a very few, who practise painting as a profession, and these are already begining to show quite as much talent as could be expected. Even male painters (pace Mr. Ruskin) have not made any very remarkable figure these last centuries, and it will be long before they do so. The reason why the old painters were so greatly superior to the modern, is that a greatly superior class of men applied themselves to the art. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the Italian painters were the most accomplished men of their age. The greatest of them were men of encyclopaedical acquirements and powers, like the great men of Greece. But in their times fine art was, to men’s feelings and conceptions, among the grandest things in which a human being could excel; and by it men were made, what only political or military distinction now makes them, the companions of sovereigns, and the equals of the highest nobility. In the present age, men of anything like similar calibre find something more important to do, for their own fame and the uses of the modern world, than painting, and it is only now and then that a Reynolds or a Turner (of whose relative rank among eminent men I do not pretend to an opinion) applies himself to that art. Music belongs to a different order of things; it does not require the same general powers of mind, but seems more dependant on a natural gift: and it may be thought surprising that no one of the great musical composers has been a woman. But even this natural gift, to be made available for great creations, requires study, and professional devotion to the pursuit. The only countries which have produced first-rate composers, even of the male sex, are Germany and Italy—countries in which, both in point of special and of general cultivation, women have remained far behind France and England, being generally (it may be said without exaggeration) very little educated, and having scarcely cultivated at all any of the higher faculties of mind. And in those countries the men who are acquainted with the principles of musical composition must be counted by hundreds, or more probably by thousands, the women barely by scores: so that here again, on the doctrine of averages, we cannot reasonably expect to see more than one eminent woman to fifty eminent men; and the last three centuries have not produced fifty eminent male composers either in Germany or in Italy.
There are other reasons, besides those which we have now given, that help to explain why women remain behind men, even in the pursuits which are open to both. For one thing, very few women have time for them. This may seem a paradox; it is an undoubted social fact. The time and thoughts of every woman have to satisfy great previous demands on them for things practical. There is, first, the superintendence of the family and the domestic expenditure, which occupies at least one woman in every family, generally the one of mature years and acquired experience; unless the family is so rich as to admit of delegating that task to hired agency, and submitting to all the waste and malversation inseparable from that mode of conducting it. The superintendence of a household, even when not in other respects laborious, is extremely onerous to the thoughts; it requires incessant vigilance, an eye which no detail escapes, and presents questions for consideration and solution, foreseen and unforeseen, at every hour of the day, from which the person responsible for them can hardly ever shake herself free. If a woman is of a rank and circumstances which relieve her in a measure from these cares, she has still devolving on her the management for the whole family of its intercourse with others—of what is called society, and the less the call made on her by the former duty, the greater is always the development of the latter: the dinner parties, concerts, evening parties, morning visits, letter writing, and all that goes with them. All this is over and above the engrossing duty which society imposes exclusively on women, of making themselves charming. A clever woman of the higher ranks finds nearly a sufficient employment of her talents in cultivating the graces of manner and the arts of conversation. To look only at the outward side of the subject: the great and continual exercise of thought which all women who attach any value to dressing well (I do not mean expensively, but with taste, and perception of natural and of artificial convenance) must bestow upon their own dress, perhaps also upon that of their daughters, would alone go a great way towards achieving respectable results in art, or science, or literature, and does actually exhaust much of the time and mental power they might have to spare for either.* If it were possible that all this number of little practical interests (which are made great to them) should leave them either much leisure, or much energy and freedom of mind, to be devoted to art or speculation, they must have a much greater original supply of active faculty than the vast majority of men. But this is not all. Independently of the regular offices of life which devolve upon a woman, she is expected to have her time and faculties always at the disposal of everybody. If a man has not a profession to exempt him from such demands, still, if he has a pursuit, he offends nobody by devoting his time to it; occupation is received as a valid excuse for his not answering to every casual demand which may be made on him. Are a woman’s occupations, especially her chosen and voluntary ones, ever regarded as excusing her from any of what are termed the calls of society? Scarcely are her most necessary and recognised duties allowed as an exemption. It requires an illness in the family, or something else out of the common way, to entitle her to give her own business the precedence over other people’s amusement. She must always be at the beck and call of somebody, generally of everybody. If she has a study or a pursuit, she must snatch any short interval which accidentally occurs to be employed in it. A celebrated woman, in a work which I hope will some day be published, remarks truly that everything a woman does is done at odd times.[*] Is it wonderful, then, if she does not attain the highest eminence in things which require consecutive attention, and the concentration on them of the chief interest of life? Such is philosophy, and such, above all, is art, in which, besides the devotion of the thoughts and feelings, the hand also must be kept in constant exercise to attain high skill.
There is another consideration to be added to all these. In the various arts and intellectual occupations, there is a degree of proficiency sufficient for living by it, and there is a higher degree on which depend the great productions which immortalize a name. To the attainment of the former, there are adequate motives in the case of all who follow the pursuit professionally: the other is hardly ever attained where there is not, or where there has not been at some period of life, an ardent desire of celebrity. Nothing less is commonly a sufficient stimulus to undergo the long and patient drudgery, which, in the case even of the greatest natural gifts, is absolutely required for great eminence in pursuits in which we already possess so many splendid memorials of the highest genius. Now, whether the cause be natural or artificial, women seldom have this eagerness for fame. Their ambition is generally confined within narrower bounds. The influence they seek is over those who immediately surround them. Their desire is to be liked, loved, or admired, by those whom they see with their eyes: and the proficiency in knowledge, arts, and accomplishments, which is sufficient for that, almost always contents them. This is a trait of character which cannot be left out of the account in judging of women as they are. I do not at all believe that it is inherent in women. It is only the natural result of their circumstances. The love of fame in men is encouraged by education and opinion: to “scorn delights and live laborious days” for its sake, is accounted the part of “noble minds,” even if spoken of as their “last infirmity,”[*] and is stimulated by the access which fame gives to all objects of ambition, including even the favour of women; while to women themselves all these objects are closed, and the desire of fame itself considered daring and unfeminine. Besides, how could it be that a woman’s interests should not be all concentrated upon the impressions made on those who come into her daily life, when society has ordained that all her duties should be to them, and has contrived that all her comforts should depend on them? The natural desire of consideration from our fellow creatures is as strong in a woman as in a man; but society has so ordered things that public consideration is, in all ordinary cases, only attainable by her through the consideration of her husband or of her male relations, while her private consideration is forfeited by making herself individually prominent, or appearing in any other character than that of an appendage to men. Whoever is in the least capable of estimating the influence on the mind of the entire domestic and social position and the whole habit of a life, must easily recognise in that influence a complete explanation of nearly all the apparent differences between women and men, including the whole of those which imply any inferiority.
As for moral differences, considered as distinguished from intellectual, the distinction commonly drawn is to the advantage of women. They are declared to be better than men; an empty compliment, which must provoke a bitter smile from every woman of spirit, since there is no other situation in life in which it is the established order, and considered quite natural and suitable, that the better should obey the worse. If this piece of idle talk is good for anything, it is only as an admission by men, of the corrupting influence of power; for that is certainly the only truth which the fact, if it be a fact, either proves or illustrates. And it is true that servitude, except when it actually brutalizes, though corrupting to both, is less so to the slaves than to the slave-masters. It is wholesomer for the moral nature to be restrained, even by arbitrary power, than to be allowed to exercise arbitrary power without restraint. Women, it is said, seldomer fall under the penal law—contribute a much smaller number of offenders to the criminal calendar, than men. I doubt not that the same thing may be said, with the same truth, of negro slaves. Those who are under the control of others cannot often commit crimes, unless at the command and for the purposes of their masters. I do not know a more signal instance of the blindness with which the world, including the herd of studious men, ignore and pass over all the influences of social circumstances, than their silly depreciation of the intellectual, and silly panegyrics on the moral, nature of women.
The complimentary dictum about women’s superior moral goodness may be allowed to pair off with the disparaging one respecting their greater liability to moral bias. Women, we are told, are not capable of resisting their personal partialities: their judgment in grave affairs is warped by their sympathies and antipathies. Assuming it to be so, it is still to be proved that women are oftener misled by their personal feelings than men by their personal interests. The chief difference would seem in that case to be, that men are led from the course of duty and the public interest by their regard for themselves, women (not being allowed to have private interests of their own) by their regard for somebody else. It is also to be considered, that all the education which women receive from society inculcates on them the feeling that the individuals connected with them are the only ones to whom they owe any duty—the only ones whose interest they are called upon to care for; while, as far as education is concerned, they are left strangers even to the elementary ideas which are presupposed in any intelligent regard for larger interests or higher moral objects. The complaint against them resolves itself merely into this, that they fulfil only too faithfully the sole duty which they are taught, and almost the only one which they are permitted to practise.
The concessions of the privileged to the unprivileged are so seldom brought about by any better motive than the power of the unprivileged to extort them, that any arguments against the prerogative of sex are likely to be little attended to by the generality, as long as they are able to say to themselves that women do not complain of it. That fact certainly enables men to retain the unjust privilege some time longer; but does not render it less unjust. Exactly the same thing may be said of the women in the harem of an Oriental, they do not complain of not being allowed the freedom of European women. They think our women insufferably bold and unfeminine. How rarely it is that even men complain of the general order of society; and how much rarer still would such complaint be, if they did not know of any different order existing anywhere else. Women do not complain of the general lot of women; or rather they do, for plaintive elegies on it are very common in the writings of women, and were still more so as long as the lamentations could not be suspected of having any practical object. Their complaints are like the complaints which men make of the general unsatisfactoriness of human life; they are not meant to imply blame, or to plead for any change. But though women do not complain of the power of husbands, each complains of her own husband, or of the husbands of her friends. It is the same in all other cases of servitude, at least in the commencement of the emancipatory movement. The serfs did not at first complain of the power of their lords, but only of their tyranny. The Commons began by claiming a few municipal privileges; they next asked an exemption for themselves from being taxed without their own consent; but they would at that time have thought it a great presumption to claim any share in the king’s sovereign authority. The case of women is now the only case in which to rebel against established rules is still looked upon with the same eyes as was formerly a subject’s claim to the right of rebelling against his king. A woman who joins in any movement which her husband disapproves, makes herself a martyr, without even being able to be an apostle, for the husband can legally put a stop to her apostleship. Women cannot be expected to devote themselves to the emancipation of women, until men in considerable number are prepared to join with them in the undertaking.
Chapter IV
there remains a question, not of less importance than those already discussed, and which will be asked the most importunately by those opponents whose conviction is somewhat shaken on the main point. What good are we to expect from the changes proposed in our customs and institutions? Would mankind be at all better off if women were free? If not, why disturb their minds, and attempt to make a social revolution in the name of an abstract right?
It is hardly to be expected that this question will be asked in respect to the change proposed in the condition of women in marriage. The sufferings, immoralities, evils of all sorts, produced in innumerable cases by the subjection of individual women to individual men, are far too terrible to be overlooked. Unthinking or uncandid persons, counting those cases alone which are extreme, or which attain publicity, may say that the evils are exceptional; but no one can be blind to their existence, nor, in many cases, to their intensity. And it is perfectly obvious that the abuse of the power cannot be very much checked while the power remains. It is a power given, or offered, not to good men, or to decently respectable men, but to all men; the most brutal, and the most criminal. There is no check but that of opinion, and such men are in general within the reach of no opinion but that of men like themselves. If such men did not brutally tyrannize over the one human being whom the law compels to bear everything from them, society must already have reached a paradisiacal state. There could be no need any longer of laws to curb men’s vicious propensities. Astraea must not only have returned to earth, but the heart of the worst man must have become her temple. The law of servitude in marriage is a monstrous contradiction to all the principles of the modern world, and to all the experience through which those principles have been slowly and painfully worked out. It is the sole case, now that negro slavery has been abolished, in which a human being in the plenitude of every faculty is delivered up to the tender mercies of another human being, in the hope forsooth that this other will use the power solely for the good of the person subjected to it. Marriage is the only actual bondage known to our law. There remain no legal slaves, except the mistress of every house.
It is not, therefore, on this part of the subject, that the question is likely to be asked, Cui bono? We may be told that the evil would outweigh the good, but the reality of the good admits of no dispute. In regard, however, to the larger question, the removal of women’s disabilities—their recognition as the equals of men in all that belongs to citizenship—the opening to them of all honourable employments, and of the training and education which qualifies for those employments—there are many persons for whom it is not enough that the inequality has no just or legitimate defence; they require to be told what express advantage would be obtained by abolishing it.
To which let me first answer, the advantage of having the most universal and pervading of all human relations regulated by justice instead of injustice. The vast amount of this gain to human nature, it is hardly possible, by any explanation or illustration, to place in a stronger light than it is placed by the bare statement, to any one who attaches a moral meaning to words. All the selfish propensities, the self-worship, the unjust self-preference, which exist among mankind, have their source and root in, and derive their principal nourishment from, the present constitution of the relation between men and women. Think what it is to a boy, to grow up to manhood in the belief that without any merit or any exertion of his own, though he may be the most frivolous and empty or the most ignorant and stolid of mankind, by the mere fact of being born a male he is by right the superior of all and every one of an entire half of the human race: including probably some whose real superiority to himself he has daily or hourly occasion to feel; but even if in his whole conduct he habitually follows a woman’s guidance, still, if he is a fool, he thinks that of course she is not, and cannot be, equal in ability and judgment to himself; and if he is not a fool, he does worse—he sees that she is superior to him, and believes that, notwithstanding her superiority, he is entitled to command and she is bound to obey. What must be the effect on his character, of this lesson? And men of the cultivated classes are often not aware how deeply it sinks into the immense majority of male minds. For, among right-feeling and well-bred people, the inequality is kept as much as possible out of sight; above all, out of sight of the children. As much obedience is required from boys to their mother as to their father: they are not permitted to domineer over their sisters, nor are they accustomed to see these postponed to them, but the contrary; the compensations of the chivalrous feeling being made prominent, while the servitude which requires them is kept in the background. Well brought-up youths in the higher classes thus often escape the bad influences of the situation in their early years, and only experience them when, arrived at manhood, they fall under the dominion of facts as they really exist. Such people are little aware, when a boy is differently brought up, how early the notion of his inherent superiority to a girl arises in his mind; how it grows with his growth and strengthens with his strength; how it is inoculated by one schoolboy upon another; how early the youth thinks himself superior to his mother, owing her perhaps forbearance, but no real respect; and how sublime and sultan-like a sense of superiority he feels, above all, over the woman whom he honours by admitting her to a partnership of his life. Is it imagined that all this does not pervert the whole manner of existence of the man, both as an individual and as a social being? It is an exact parallel to the feeling of a hereditary king that he is excellent above others by being born a king, or a noble by being born a noble. The relation between husband and wife is very like that between lord and vassal, except that the wife is held to more unlimited obedience than the vassal was. However the vassal’s character may have been affected, for better and for worse, by his subordination, who can help seeing that the lord’s was affected greatly for the worse? whether he was led to believe that his vassals were really superior to himself, or to feel that he was placed in command over people as good as himself, for no merits or labours of his own, but merely for having, as Figaro says, taken the trouble to be born.[*] The self-worship of the monarch, or of the feudal superior, is matched by the self-worship of the male. Human beings do not grow up from childhood in the possession of unearned distinctions, without pluming themselves upon them. Those whom privileges not acquired by their merit, and which they feel to be disproportioned to it, inspire with additional humility, are always the few, and the best few. The rest are only inspired with pride, and the worst sort of pride, that which values itself upon accidental advantages, not of its own achieving. Above all, when the feeling of being raised above the whole of the other sex is combined with personal authority over one individual among them; the situation, if a school of conscientious and affectionate forbearance to those whose strongest points of character are conscience and affection, is to men of another quality a regularly constituted Academy or Gymnasium for training them in arrogance and overbearingness; which vices, if curbed by the certainty of resistance in their intercourse with other men, their equals, break out towards all who are in a position to be obliged to tolerate them, and often revenge themselves upon the unfortunate wife for the involuntary restraint which they are obliged to submit to elsewhere.
The example afforded, and the education given to the sentiments, by laying the foundation of domestic existence upon a relation contradictory to the first principles of social justice, must, from the very nature of man, have a perverting influence of such magnitude, that it is hardly possible with our present experience to raise our imaginations to the conception of so great a change for the better as would be made by its removal. All that education and civilization are doing to efface the influences on character of the law of force, and replace them by those of justice, remains merely on the surface, as long as the citadel of the enemy is not attacked. The principle of the modern movement in morals and politics, is that conduct, and conduct alone, entitles to respect: that not what men are, but what they do, constitutes their claim to deference; that, above all, merit, and not birth, is the only rightful claim to power and authority. If no authority, not in its nature temporary, were allowed to one human being over another, society would not be employed in building up propensities with one hand which it has to curb with the other. The child would really, for the first time in man’s existence on earth, be trained in the way he should go, and when he was old there would be a chance that he would not depart from it. But so long as the right of the strong to power over the weak rules in the very heart of society, the attempt to make the equal right of the weak the principle of its outward actions will always be an uphill struggle; for the law of justice, which is also that of Christianity, will never get possession of men’s inmost sentiments; they will be working against it, even when bending to it.
The second benefit to be expected from giving to women the free use of their faculties, by leaving them the free choice of their employments, and opening to them the same field of occupation and the same prizes and encouragements as to other human beings, would be that of doubling the mass of mental faculties available for the higher service of humanity. Where there is now one person qualified to benefit mankind and promote the general improvement, as a public teacher, or an administrator of some branch of public or social affairs, there would then be a chance of two. Mental superiority of any kind is at present everywhere so much below the demand; there is such a deficiency of persons competent to do excellently anything which it requires any considerable amount of ability to do; that the loss to the world, by refusing to make use of one-half of the whole quantity of talent it possesses, is extremely serious. It is true that this amount of mental power is not totally lost. Much of it is employed, and would in any case be employed, in domestic management, and in the few other occupations open to women; and from the remainder indirect benefit is in many individual cases obtained, through the personal influence of individual women over individual men. But these benefits are partial; their range is extremely circumscribed; and if they must be admitted, on the one hand, as a deduction from the amount of fresh social power that would be acquired by giving freedom to one-half of the whole sum of human intellect, there must be added, on the other, the benefit of the stimulus that would be given to the intellect of men by the competition; or (to use a more true expression) by the necessity that would be imposed on them of deserving precedency before they could expect to obtain it.
This great accession to the intellectual power of the species, and to the amount of intellect available for the good management of its affairs, would be obtained, partly, through the better and more complete intellectual education of women, which would then improve pari passu with that of men. Women in general would be brought up equally capable of understanding business, public affairs, and the higher matters of speculation, with men in the same class of society; and the select few of the one as well as of the other sex, who were qualified not only to comprehend what is done or thought by others, but to think or do something considerable themselves, would meet with the same facilities for improving and training their capacities in the one sex as in the other. In this way, the widening of the sphere of action for women would operate for good, by raising their education to the level of that of men, and making the one participate in all improvements made in the other. But independently of this, the mere breaking down of the barrier would of itself have an educational virtue of the highest worth. The mere getting rid of the idea that all the wider subjects of thought and action, all the things which are of general and not solely of private interest, are men’s business, from which women are to be warned off—positively interdicted from most of it, coldly tolerated in the little which is allowed them—the mere consciousness a woman would then have of being a human being like any other, entitled to choose her pursuits, urged or invited by the same inducements as any one else to interest herself in whatever is interesting to human beings, entitled to exert the share of influence on all human concerns which belongs to an individual opinion, whether she attempted actual participation in them or not—this alone would effect an immense expansion of the faculties of women, as well as enlargement of the range of their moral sentiments.
Besides the addition to the amount of individual talent available for the conduct of human affairs, which certainly are not at present so abundantly provided in that respect that they can afford to dispense with one-half of what nature proffers; the opinion of women would then possess a more beneficial, rather than a greater, influence upon the general mass of human belief and sentiment. I say a more beneficial, rather than a greater influence; for the influence of women over the general tone of opinion has always, or at least from the earliest known period, been very considerable. The influence of mothers on the early character of their sons, and the desire of young men to recommend themselves to young women, have in all recorded times been important agencies in the formation of character, and have determined some of the chief steps in the progress of civilization. Even in the Homeric age, αἰδώς towards the Τρωάδας έλκεσιπεπλους is an acknowledged and powerful motive of action in the great Hector.[*] The moral influence of women has had two modes of operation. First, it has been a softening influence. Those who were most liable to be the victims of violence, have naturally tended as much as they could towards limiting its sphere and mitigating its excesses. Those who were not taught to fight, have naturally inclined in favour of any other mode of settling differences rather than that of fighting. In general, those who have been the greatest sufferers by the indulgence of selfish passion, have been the most earnest supporters of any moral law which offered a means of bridling passion. Women were powerfully instrumental in inducing the northern conquerors to adopt the creed of Christianity, a creed so much more favourable to women than any that preceded it. The conversion of the Anglo-Saxons and of the Franks may be said to have been begun by the wives of Ethelbert and Clovis.[†] The other mode in which the effect of women’s opinion has been conspicuous, is by giving a powerful stimulus to those qualities in men, which, not being themselves trained in, it was necessary for them that they should find in their protectors. Courage, and the military virtues generally, have at all times been greatly indebted to the desire which men felt of being admired by women: and the stimulus reaches far beyond this one class of eminent qualities, since, by a very natural effect of their position, the best passport to the admiration and favour of women has always been to be thought highly of by men. From the combination of the two kinds of moral influence thus exercised by women, arose the spirit of chivalry: the peculiarity of which is, to aim at combining the highest standard of the warlike qualities with the cultivation of a totally different class of virtues—those of gentleness, generosity, and self-abnegation, towards the non-military and defenceless classes generally, and a special submission and worship directed towards women; who were distinguished from the other defenceless classes by the high rewards which they had it in their power voluntarily to bestow on those who endeavoured to earn their favour, instead of extorting their subjection. Though the practice of chivalry fell even more sadly short of its theoretic standard than practice generally falls below theory, it remains one of the most precious monuments of the moral history of our race; as a remarkable instance of a concerted and organized attempt by a most disorganized and distracted society, to raise up and carry into practice a moral ideal greatly in advance of its social conditions and institutions; so much so as to have been completely frustrated in the main object, yet never entirely inefficacious, and which has left a most sensible, and for the most part a highly valuable impress on the ideas and feelings of all subsequent times.
The chivalrous ideal is the acme of the influence of women’s sentiments on the moral cultivation of mankind: and if women are to remain in their subordinate situation, it were greatly to be lamented that the chivalrous standard should have passed away, for it is the only one at all capable of mitigating the demoralizing influences of that position. But the changes in the general state of the species rendered inevitable the substitution of a totally different ideal of morality for the chivalrous one. Chivalry was the attempt to infuse moral elements into a state of society in which everything depended for good or evil on individual prowess, under the softening influences of individual delicacy and generosity. In modern societies, all things, even in the military department of affairs, are decided, not by individual effort, but by the combined operations of numbers; while the main occupation of society has changed from fighting to business, from military to industrial life. The exigencies of the new life are no more exclusive of the virtues of generosity than those of the old, but it no longer entirely depends on them. The main foundations of the moral life of modern times must be justice and prudence, the respect of each for the rights of every other, and the ability of each to take care of himself. Chivalry left without legal check all forms of wrong which reigned unpunished throughout society; it only encouraged a few to do right in preference to wrong, by the direction it gave to the instruments of praise and admiration. But the real dependence of morality must always be upon its penal sanctions—its power to deter from evil. The security of society cannot rest on merely rendering honour to right, a motive so comparatively weak in all but a few, and which on very many does not operate at all. Modern society is able to repress wrong through all departments of life, by a fit exertion of the superior strength which civilization has given it, and thus to render the existence of the weaker members of society (no longer defenceless but protected by law) tolerable to them, without reliance on the chivalrous feelings of those who are in a position to tyrannize. The beauties and graces of the chivalrous character are still what they were, but the rights of the weak, and the general comfort of human life, now rest on a far surer and steadier support; or rather, they do so in every relation of life except the conjugal.
At present the moral influence of women is no less real, but it is no longer of so marked and definite a character, it has more nearly merged in the general influence of public opinion. Both through the contagion of sympathy, and through the desire of men to shine in the eyes of women, their feelings have great effect in keeping alive what remains of the chivalrous ideal—in fostering the sentiments and continuing the traditions of spirit and generosity. In these points of character, their standard is higher than that of men, in the quality of justice, somewhat lower. As regards the relations of private life it may be said generally, that their influence is, on the whole, encouraging to the softer virtues, discouraging to the sterner: though the statement must be taken with all the modifications dependent on individual character. In the chief of the greater trials to which virtue is subject in the concerns of life—the conflict between interest and principle—the tendency of women’s influence is of a very mixed character. When the principle involved happens to be one of the very few which the course of their religious or moral education has strongly impressed upon themselves, they are potent auxiliaries to virtue: and their husbands and sons are often prompted by them to acts of abnegation which they never would have been capable of without that stimulus. But, with the present education and position of women, the moral principles which have been impressed on them cover but a comparatively small part of the field of virtue, and are, moreover, principally negative; forbidding particular acts, but having little to do with the general direction of the thoughts and purposes. I am afraid it must be said, that disinterestedness in the general conduct of life—the devotion of the energies to purposes which hold out no promise of private advantages to the family—is very seldom encouraged or supported by women’s influence. It is small blame to them that they discourage objects of which they have not learnt to see the advantage, and which withdraw their men from them, and from the interests of the family. But the consequence is that women’s influence is often anything but favourable to public virtue.
Women have, however, some share of influence in giving the tone to public moralities since their sphere of action has been a little widened, and since a considerable number of them have occupied themselves practically in the promotion of objects reaching beyond their own family and household. The influence of women counts for a great deal in two of the most marked features of modern European life—its aversion to war, and its addiction to philanthropy. Excellent characteristics both; but unhappily, if the influence of women is valuable in the encouragement it gives to these feelings in general, in the particular applications the direction it gives to them is at least as often mischievous as useful. In the philanthropic department more particularly, the two provinces chiefly cultivated by women are religious proselytism and charity. Religious proselytism at home, is but another word for embittering of religious animosities: abroad, it is usually a blind running at an object, without either knowing or heeding the fatal mischiefs—fatal to the religious object itself as well as to all other desirable objects—which may be produced by the means employed. As for charity, it is a matter in which the immediate effect on the persons directly concerned, and the ultimate consequence to the general good, are apt to be at complete war with one another: while the education given to women—an education of the sentiments rather than of the understanding—and the habit inculcated by their whole life, of looking to immediate effects on persons, and not to remote effects on classes of persons—make them both unable to see, and unwilling to admit, the ultimate evil tendency of any form of charity or philanthropy which commends itself to their sympathetic feelings. The great and continually increasing mass of unenlightened and shortsighted benevolence, which, taking the care of people’s lives out of their own hands, and relieving them from the disagreeable consequences of their own acts, saps the very foundations of the self-respect, self-help, and self-control which are the essential conditions both of individual prosperity and of social virtue—this waste of resources and of benevolent feelings in doing harm instead of good, is immensely swelled by women’s contributions, and stimulated by their influence. Not that this is a mistake likely to be made by women, where they have actually the practical management of schemes of beneficence. It sometimes happens that women who administer public charities—with that insight into present fact, and especially into the minds and feelings of those with whom they are in immediate contact, in which women generally excel men—recognise in the clearest manner the demoralizing influence of the alms given or the help afforded, and could give lessons on the subject to many a male political economist. But women who only give their money, and are not brought face to face with the effects it produces, how can they be expected to foresee them? A woman born to the present lot of women, and content with it, how should she appreciate the value of self-dependence? She is not self-dependent; she is not taught self-dependence; her destiny is to receive everything from others, and why should what is good enough for her be bad for the poor? Her familiar notions of good are of blessings descending from a superior. She forgets that she is not free, and that the poor are; that if what they need is given to them unearned, they cannot be compelled to earn it: that everybody cannot be taken care of by everybody, but there must be some motive to induce people to take care of themselves; and that to be helped to help themselves, if they are physically capable of it, is the only charity which proves to be charity in the end.
These considerations shew how usefully the part which women take in the formation of general opinion, would be modified for the better by that more enlarged instruction, and practical conversancy with the things which their opinions influence, that would necessarily arise from their social and political emancipation. But the improvement it would work through the influence they exercise, each in her own family, would be still more remarkable.
It is often said that in the classes most exposed to temptation, a man’s wife and children tend to keep him honest and respectable, both by the wife’s direct influence, and by the concern he feels for their future welfare. This may be so, and no doubt often is so, with those who are more weak than wicked; and this beneficial influence would be preserved and strengthened under equal laws; it does not depend on the woman’s servitude, but is, on the contrary, diminished by the disrespect which the inferior class of men always at heart feel towards those who are subject to their power. But when we ascend higher in the scale, we come among a totally different set of moving forces. The wife’s influence tends, as far as it goes, to prevent the husband from falling below the common standard of approbation of the country. It tends quite as strongly to hinder him from rising above it. The wife is the auxiliary of the common public opinion. A man who is married to a woman his inferior in intelligence, finds her a perpetual dead weight, or, worse than a dead weight, a drag, upon every aspiration of his to be better than public opinion requires him to be. It is hardly possible for one who is in these bonds, to attain exalted virtue. If he differs in his opinion from the mass—if he sees truths which have not yet dawned upon them, or if, feeling in his heart truths which they nominally recognise, he would like to act up to those truths more conscientiously than the generality of mankind—to all such thoughts and desires, marriage is the heaviest of drawbacks, unless he be so fortunate as to have a wife as much above the common level as he himself is.
For, in the first place, there is always some sacrifice of personal interest required; either of social consequence, or of pecuniary means; perhaps the risk of even the means of subsistence. These sacrifices and risks he may be willing to encounter for himself; but he will pause before he imposes them on his family. And his family in this case means his wife and daughters; for he always hopes that his sons will feel as he feels himself, and that what he can do without, they will do without, willingly, in the same cause. But his daughters—their marriage may depend upon it: and his wife, who is unable to enter into or understand the objects for which these sacrifices are made—who, if she thought them worth any sacrifice, would think so on trust, and solely for his sake—who can participate in none of the enthusiasm or the self-approbation he himself may feel, while the things which he is disposed to sacrifice are all in all to her; will not the best and most unselfish man hesitate the longest before bringing on her this consequence? If it be not the comforts of life, but only social consideration, that is at stake, the burthen upon his conscience and feelings is still very severe. Whoever has a wife and children has given hostages to Mrs. Grundy.[*] The approbation of that potentate may be a matter of indifference to him, but it is of great importance to his wife. The man himself may be above opinion, or may find sufficient compensation in the opinion of those of his own way of thinking. But to the women connected with him, he can offer no compensation. The almost invariable tendency of the wife to place her influence in the same scale with social consideration, is sometimes made a reproach to women, and represented as a peculiar trait of feebleness and childishness of character in them: surely with great injustice. Society makes the whole life of a woman, in the easy classes, a continued self-sacrifice; it exacts from her an unremitting restraint of the whole of her natural inclinations, and the sole return it makes to her for what often deserves the name of a martyrdom, is consideration. Her consideration is inseparably connected with that of her husband, and after paying the full price for it, she finds that she is to lose it, for no reason of which she can feel the cogency. She has sacrificed her whole life to it, and her husband will not sacrifice to it a whim, a freak, an eccentricity; something not recognised or allowed for by the world, and which the world will agree with her in thinking a folly, if it thinks no worse! The dilemma is hardest upon that very meritorious class of men, who, without possessing talents which qualify them to make a figure among those with whom they agree in opinion, hold their opinion from conviction, and feel bound in honour and conscience to serve it, by making profession of their belief, and giving their time, labour, and means, to anything undertaken in its behalf. The worst case of all is when such men happen to be of a rank and position which of itself neither gives them, nor excludes them from, what is considered the best society; when their admission to it depends mainly on what is thought of them personally—and however unexceptionable their breeding and habits, their being identified with opinions and public conduct unacceptable to those who give the tone to society would operate as an effectual exclusion. Many a woman flatters herself (nine times out of ten quite erroneously) that nothing prevents her and her husband from moving in the highest society of her neighbourhood—society in which others well known to her, and in the same class of life, mix freely—except that her husband is unfortunately a Dissenter, or has the reputation of mingling in low radical politics. That it is, she thinks, which hinders George from getting a commission or a place, Caroline from making an advantageous match, and prevents her and her husband from obtaining invitations, perhaps honours, which, for aught she sees, they are as well entitled to as some folks. With such an influence in every house, either exerted actively, or operating all the more powerfully for not being asserted, is it any wonder that people in general are kept down in that mediocrity of respectability which is becoming a marked characteristic of modern times?
There is another very injurious aspect in which the effect, not of women’s disabilities directly, but of the broad line of difference which those disabilities create between the education and character of a woman and that of a man, requires to be considered. Nothing can be more unfavourable to that union of thoughts and inclinations which is the ideal of married life. Intimate society between people radically dissimilar to one another, is an idle dream. Unlikeness may attract, but it is likeness which retains; and in proportion to the likeness is the suitability of the individuals to give each other a happy life. While women are so unlike men, it is not wonderful that selfish men should feel the need of arbitrary power in their own hands, to arrest in limine the life-long conflict of inclinations, by deciding every question on the side of their own preference. When people are extremely unlike, there can be no real identity of interest. Very often there is conscientious difference of opinion between married people, on the highest points of duty. Is there any reality in the marriage union where this takes place? Yet it is not uncommon anywhere, when the woman has any earnestness of character; and it is a very general case indeed in Catholic countries, when she is supported in her dissent by the only other authority to which she is taught to bow, the priest. With the usual barefacedness of power not accustomed to find itself disputed, the influence of priests over women is attacked by Protestant and Liberal writers, less for being bad in itself, than because it is a rival authority to the husband, and raises up a revolt against his infallibility. In England, similar differences occasionally exist when an Evangelical wife has allied herself with a husband of a different quality, but in general this source at least of dissension is got rid of, by reducing the minds of women to such a nullity, that they have no opinions but those of Mrs. Grundy or those which the husband tells them to have. When there is no difference of opinion, differences merely of taste may be sufficient to detract greatly from the happiness of married life. And though it may stimulate the amatory propensities of men, it does not conduce to married happiness, to exaggerate by differences of education whatever may be the native differences of the sexes. If the married pair are well-bred and well-behaved people, they tolerate each other’s tastes; but is mutual toleration what people look forward to, when they enter into marriage? These differences of inclination will naturally make their wishes different, if not restrained by affection or duty, as to almost all domestic questions which arise. What a difference there must be in the society which the two persons will wish to frequent, or be frequented by! Each will desire associates who share their own tastes: the persons agreeable to one, will be indifferent or positively disagreeable to the other; yet there can be none who are not common to both, for married people do not now live in different parts of the house and have totally different visiting lists, as in the reign of Louis XV. They cannot help having different wishes as to the bringing up of the children: each will wish to see reproduced in them their own tastes and sentiments: and there is either a compromise, and only a half-satisfaction to either, or the wife has to yield—often with bitter suffering; and, with or without intention, her occult influence continues to counterwork the husband’s purposes.
It would of course be extreme folly to suppose that these differences of feeling and inclination only exist because women are brought up differently from men, and that there would not be differences of taste under any imaginable circumstances. But there is nothing beyond the mark in saying that the distinction in bringing-up immensely aggravates those differences, and renders them wholly inevitable. While women are brought up as they are, a man and a woman will but rarely find in one another real agreement of tastes and wishes as to daily life. They will generally have to give it up as hopeless, and renounce the attempt to have, in the intimate associate of their daily life, that idem velle, idem nolle, which is the recognised bond of any society that is really such: or if the man succeeds in obtaining it, he does so by choosing a woman who is so complete a nullity that she has no velle or nolle at all, and is as ready to comply with one thing as another if anybody tells her to do so. Even this calculation is apt to fail; dulness and want of spirit are not always a guarantee of the submission which is so confidently expected from them. But if they were, is this the ideal of marriage? What, in this case, does the man obtain by it, except an upper servant, a nurse, or a mistress? On the contrary, when each of two persons, instead of being a nothing, is a something; when they are attached to one another, and are not too much unlike to begin with; the constant partaking in the same things, assisted by their sympathy, draws out the latent capacities of each for being interested in the things which were at first interesting only to the other; and works a gradual assimilation of the tastes and characters to one another, partly by the insensible modification of each, but more by a real enriching of the two natures, each acquiring the tastes and capacities of the other in addition to its own. This often happens between two friends of the same sex, who are much associated in their daily life: and it would be a common, if not the commonest, case in marriage, did not the totally different bringing-up of the two sexes make it next to an impossibility to form a really well-assorted union. Were this remedied, whatever differences there might still be in individual tastes, there would at least be, as a general rule, complete unity and unanimity as to the great objects of life. When the two persons both care for great objects, and are a help and encouragement to each other in whatever regards these, the minor matters on which their tastes may differ are not all-important to them; and there is a foundation for solid friendship, of an enduring character, more likely than anything else to make it, through the whole of life, a greater pleasure to each to give pleasure to the other, than to receive it.
I have considered, thus far, the effects on the pleasures and benefits of the marriage union which depend on the mere unlikeness between the wife and the husband: but the evil tendency is prodigiously aggravated when the unlikeness is inferiority. Mere unlikeness, when it only means difference of good qualities, may be more a benefit in the way of mutual improvement, than a drawback from comfort. When each emulates, and desires and endeavours to acquire, the other’s peculiar qualities, the difference does not produce diversity of interest, but increased identity of it, and makes each still more valuable to the other. But when one is much the inferior of the two in mental ability and cultivation, and is not actively attempting by the other’s aid to rise to the other’s level, the whole influence of the connexion upon the development of the superior of the two is deteriorating: and still more so in a tolerably happy marriage than in an unhappy one. It is not with impunity that the superior in intellect shuts himself up with an inferior, and elects that inferior for his chosen, and sole completely intimate, associate. Any society which is not improving, is deteriorating: and the more so, the closer and more familiar it is. Even a really superior man almost always begins to deteriorate when he is habitually (as the phrase is) king of his company, and in his most habitual company the husband who has a wife inferior to him is always so. While his self-satisfaction is incessantly ministered to on the one hand, on the other he insensibly imbibes the modes of feeling, and of looking at things, which belong to a more vulgar or a more limited mind than his own. This evil differs from many of those which have hitherto been dwelt on, by being an increasing one. The association of men with women in daily life is much closer and more complete than it ever was before. Men’s life is more domestic. Formerly, their pleasures and chosen occupations were among men, and in men’s company: their wives had but a fragment of their lives. At the present time, the progress of civilization, and the turn of opinion against the rough amusements and convivial excesses which formerly occupied most men in their hours of relaxation—together with (it must be said) the improved tone of modern feeling as to the reciprocity of duty which binds the husband towards the wife—have thrown the man very much more upon home and its inmates, for his personal and social pleasures: while the kind and degree of improvement which has been made in women’s education, has made them in some degree capable of being his companions in ideas and mental tastes, while leaving them, in most cases, still hopelessly inferior to him. His desire of mental communion is thus in general satisfied by a communion from which he learns nothing. An unimproving and unstimulating companionship is substituted for (what he might otherwise have been obliged to seek) the society of his equals in powers and his fellow in the higher pursuits. We see, accordingly, that young men of the greatest promise generally cease to improve as soon as they marry, and, not improving, inevitably degenerate. If the wife does not push the husband forward, she always holds him back. He ceases to care for what she does not care for; he no longer desires, and ends by disliking and shunning, society congenial to his former aspirations, and which would now shame his falling-off from them; his higher faculties both of mind and heart cease to be called into activity. And this change coinciding with the new and selfish interests which are created by the family, after a few years he differs in no material respect from those who have never had wishes for anything but the common vanities and the common pecuniary objects.
What marriage may be in the case of two persons of cultivated faculties, identical in opinions and purposes, between whom there exists that best kind of equality, similarity of powers and capacities with reciprocal superiority in them—so that each can enjoy the luxury of looking up to the other, and can have alternately the pleasure of leading and of being led in the path of development—I will not attempt to describe. To those who can conceive it, there is no need; to those who cannot, it would appear the dream of an enthusiast. But I maintain, with the profoundest conviction, that this, and this only, is the ideal of marriage; and that all opinions, customs, and institutions which favour any other notion of it, or turn the conceptions and aspirations connected with it into any other direction, by whatever pretences they may be coloured, are relics of primitive barbarism. The moral regeneration of mankind will only really commence, when the most fundamental of the social relations is placed under the rule of equal justice, and when human beings learn to cultivate their strongest sympathy with an equal in rights and in cultivation.
Thus far, the benefits which it has appeared that the world would gain by ceasing to make sex a disqualification for privileges and a badge of subjection, are social rather than individual; consisting in an increase of the general fund of thinking and acting power, and an improvement in the general conditions of the association of men with women. But it would be a grievous understatement of the case to omit the most direct benefit of all, the unspeakable gain in private happiness to the liberated half of the species; the difference to them between a life of subjection to the will of others, and a life of rational freedom. After the primary necessities of food and raiment, freedom is the first and strongest want of human nature. While mankind are lawless, their desire is for lawless freedom. When they have learnt to understand the meaning of duty and the value of reason, they incline more and more to be guided and restrained by these in the exercise of their freedom; but they do not therefore desire freedom less; they do not become disposed to accept the will of other people as the representative and interpreter of those guiding principles. On the contrary, the communities in which the reason has been most cultivated, and in which the idea of social duty has been most powerful, are those which have most strongly asserted the freedom of action of the individual—the liberty of each to govern his conduct by his own feelings of duty, and by such laws and social restraints as his own conscience can subscribe to.
He who would rightly appreciate the worth of personal independence as an element of happiness, should consider the value he himself puts upon it as an ingredient of his own. There is no subject on which there is a greater habitual difference of judgment between a man judging for himself, and the same man judging for other people. When he hears others complaining that they are not allowed freedom of action—that their own will has not sufficient influence in the regulation of their affairs—his inclination is, to ask, what are their grievances? what positive damage they sustain? and in what respect they consider their affairs to be mismanaged? and if they fail to make out, in answer to these questions, what appears to him a sufficient case, he turns a deaf ear, and regards their complaint as the fanciful querulousness of people whom nothing reasonable will satisfy. But he has a quite different standard of judgment when he is deciding for himself. Then, the most unexceptionable administration of his interests by a tutor set over him, does not satisfy his feelings: his personal exclusion from the deciding authority appears itself the greatest grievance of all, rendering it superfluous even to enter into the question of mismanagement. It is the same with nations. What citizen of a free country would listen to any offers of good and skilful administration, in return for the abdication of freedom? Even if he could believe that good and skilful administration can exist among a people ruled by a will not their own, would not the consciousness of working out their own destiny under their own moral responsibility be a compensation to his feelings for great rudeness and imperfection in the details of public affairs? Let him rest assured that whatever he feels on this point, women feel in a fully equal degree. Whatever has been said or written, from the time of Herodotus to the present, of the ennobling influence of free government[*] —the nerve and spring which it gives to all the faculties, the larger and higher objects which it presents to the intellect and feelings, the more unselfish public spirit, and calmer and broader views of duty, that it engenders, and the generally loftier platform on which it elevates the individual as a moral, spiritual, and social being—is every particle as true of women as of men. Are these things no important part of individual happiness? Let any man call to mind what he himself felt on emerging from boyhood—from the tutelage and control of even loved and affectionate elders—and entering upon the responsibilities of manhood. Was it not like the physical effect of taking off a heavy weight, or releasing him from obstructive, even if not otherwise painful, bonds? Did he not feel twice as much alive, twice as much a human being, as before? And does he imagine that women have none of these feelings? But it is a striking fact, that the satisfactions and mortifications of personal pride, though all in all to most men when the case is their own, have less allowance made for them in the case of other people, and are less listened to as a ground or a justification of conduct, than any other natural human feelings; perhaps because men compliment them in their own case with the names of so many other qualities, that they are seldom conscious how mighty an influence these feelings exercise in their own lives. No less large and powerful is their part, we may assure ourselves, in the lives and feelings of women. Women are schooled into suppressing them in their most natural and most healthy direction, but the internal principle remains, in a different outward form. An active and energetic mind, if denied liberty, will seek for power: refused the command of itself, it will assert its personality by attempting to control others. To allow to any human beings no existence of their own but what depends on others, is giving far too high a premium on bending others to their purposes. Where liberty cannot be hoped for, and power can, power becomes the grand object of human desire; those to whom others will not leave the undisturbed management of their own affairs, will compensate themselves, if they can, by meddling for their own purposes with the affairs of others. Hence also women’s passion for personal beauty, and dress and display; and all the evils that flow from it, in the way of mischievous luxury and social immorality. The love of power and the love of liberty are in eternal antagonism. Where there is least liberty, the passion for power is the most ardent and unscrupulous. The desire of power over others can only cease to be a depraving agency among mankind, when each of them individually is able to do without it: which can only be where respect for liberty in the personal concerns of each is an established principle.
But it is not only through the sentiment of personal dignity, that the free direction and disposal of their own faculties is a source of individual happiness, and to be fettered and restricted in it, a source of unhappiness, to human beings, and not least to women. There is nothing, after disease, indigence, and guilt, so fatal to the pleasurable enjoyment of life as the want of a worthy outlet for the active faculties. Women who have the cares of a family, and while they have the cares of a family, have this outlet, and it generally suffices for them: but what of the greatly increasing number of women, who have had no opportunity of exercising the vocation which they are mocked by telling them is their proper one? What of the women whose children have been lost to them by death or distance, or have grown up, married, and formed homes of their own? There are abundant examples of men who, after a life engrossed by business, retire with a competency to the enjoyment, as they hope, of rest, but to whom, as they are unable to acquire new interests and excitements that can replace the old, the change to a life of inactivity brings ennui, melancholy, and premature death. Yet no one thinks of the parallel case of so many worthy and devoted women, who, having paid what they are told is their debt to society—having brought up a family blamelessly to manhood and womanhood—having kept a house as long as they had a house needing to be kept—are deserted by the sole occupation for which they have fitted themselves; and remain with undiminished activity but with no employment for it, unless perhaps a daughter or daughter-in-law is willing to abdicate in their favour the discharge of the same functions in her younger household. Surely a hard lot for the old age of those who have worthily discharged, as long as it was given to them to discharge, what the world accounts their only social duty. Of such women, and of those others to whom this duty has not been committed at all—many of whom pine through life with the consciousness of thwarted vocations, and activities which are not suffered to expand—the only resources, speaking generally, are religion and charity. But their religion, though it may be one of feeling, and of ceremonial observance, cannot be a religion of action, unless in the form of charity. For charity many of them are by nature admirably fitted; but to practise it usefully, or even without doing mischief, requires the education, the manifold preparation, the knowledge and the thinking powers, of a skilful administrator. There are few of the administrative functions of government for which a person would not be fit, who is fit to bestow charity usefully. In this as in other cases (pre-eminently in that of the education of children), the duties permitted to women cannot be performed properly, without their being trained for duties which, to the great loss of society, are not permitted to them. And here let me notice the singular way in which the question of women’s disabilities is frequently presented to view, by those who find it easier to draw a ludicrous picture of what they do not like, than to answer the arguments for it. When it is suggested that women’s executive capacities and prudent counsels might sometimes be found valuable in affairs of state, these lovers of fun hold up to the ridicule of the world, as sitting in parliament or in the cabinet, girls in their teens, or young wives of two or three and twenty, transported bodily, exactly as they are, from the drawing-room to the House of Commons. They forget that males are not usually selected at this early age for a seat in Parliament, or for responsible political functions. Common sense would tell them that if such trusts were confided to women, it would be to such as having no special vocation for married life, or preferring another employment of their faculties (as many women even now prefer to marriage some of the few honourable occupations within their reach), have spent the best years of their youth in attempting to qualify themselves for the pursuits in which they desire to engage; or still more frequently perhaps, widows or wives of forty or fifty, by whom the knowledge of life and faculty of government which they have acquired in their families, could by the aid of appropriate studies be made available on a less contracted scale. There is no country of Europe in which the ablest men have not frequently experienced, and keenly appreciated, the value of the advice and help of clever and experienced women of the world, in the attainment both of private and of public objects; and there are important matters of public administration to which few men are equally competent with such women, among others, the detailed control of expenditure. But what we are now discussing is not the need which society has of the services of women in public business, but the dull and hopeless life to which it so often condemns them, by forbidding them to exercise the practical abilities which many of them are conscious of, in any wider field than one which to some of them never was, and to others is no longer, open. If there is anything vitally important to the happiness of human beings, it is that they should relish their habitual pursuit. This requisite of an enjoyable life is very imperfectly granted, or altogether denied, to a large part of mankind; and by its absence many a life is a failure, which is provided, in appearance, with every requisite of success. But if circumstances which society is not yet skilful enough to overcome, render such failures often for the present inevitable, society need not itself inflict them. The injudiciousness of parents, a youth’s own inexperience, or the absence of external opportunities for the congenial vocation, and their presence for an uncongenial, condemn numbers of men to pass their lives in doing one thing reluctantly and ill, when there are other things which they could have done well and happily. But on women this sentence is imposed by actual law, and by customs equivalent to law. What, in unenlightened societies, colour, race, religion, or in the case of a conquered country, nationality, are to some men, sex is to all women; a peremptory exclusion from almost all honourable occupations, but either such as cannot be fulfilled by others, or such as those others do not think worthy of their acceptance. Sufferings arising from causes of this nature usually meet with so little sympathy, that few persons are aware of the great amount of unhappiness even now produced by the feeling of a wasted life. The case will be even more frequent, as increased cultivation creates a greater and greater disproportion between the ideas and faculties of women, and the scope which society allows to their activity.
When we consider the positive evil caused to the disqualified half of the human race by their disqualification—first in the loss of the most inspiriting and elevating kind of personal enjoyment, and next in the weariness, disappointment, and profound dissatisfaction with life, which are so often the substitute for it; one feels that among all the lessons which men require for carrying on the struggle against the inevitable imperfections of their lot on earth, there is no lesson which they more need, than not to add to the evils which nature inflicts, by their jealous and prejudiced restrictions on one another. Their vain fears only substitute other and worse evils for those which they are idly apprehensive of: while every restraint on the freedom of conduct of any of their human fellow creatures, (otherwise than by making them responsible for any evil actually caused by it), dries up pro tanto the principal fountain of human happiness, and leaves the species less rich, to an inappreciable degree, in all that makes life valuable to the individual human being.
[[*] ]See Politics (Greek and English), trans. H. Rackham (London: Heinemann, New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1932), pp. 565-6 (VII, vii, 1; 1327b).
[[*] ]See Republic (Greek and English), trans. Paul Shorey, 2 vols. (London: Heinemann; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1946), Vol. I, pp. 444-52 (V).
[[†] ]Petition for Extension (of the Elective Franchise) to All Householders without Distinction of Sex (Public Petition no. 8501, Presented 7 June, 1866), Reports of Select Committee on Public Petitions, 1866, p. 697, and Appendix, p. 305. Presented by Mill to the House of Commons.
[* ]Title-page of Mme. de Staël’s Delphine, [4 vols. (Geneva, Paschoud, 1802).]
[[*] ]Francis Bacon, Novum Organum (1620), in Works, ed. James Spedding, et al., 14 vols. (London: Longman, et al., 1857-74), Vol. I, p. 125.
[[*] ]Luke, 10:7.
[[*] ]See 26 George II, c. 33 (1753); 20 & 21 Victoria, c. 85 (1857); and 24 & 25 Victoria, c. 100 (1861).
[[*] ]In Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 2 vols. (Boston: Jewett, 1852).
[[*] ]2 & 3 Victoria, c. 54 (1839), Sect. 1.
[[†] ]20 & 21 Victoria, c. 85 (1857).
[[*] ]See 24 & 25 Victoria, c. 100 (1861), Sect. 43.
[[†] ]Exodus, 20.3-17.
[[*] ]See Jonathan Swift, Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World By Lemuel Gulliver (1726), in Works, ed. Walter Scott, 19 vols. (Edinburgh: Constable, London: White, Cochrane, et al.; Dublin Cumming, 1814), Vol. XII, pp. 95-6 (Voyage I, Chap. vii).
[[*] ]See “The Form of Solemnization of Matrimony,” in The Annotated Book of Common Prayer, ed. John Henry Blunt, 7th ed. (London, Oxford, and Cambridge: Rivingtons, 1876), pp. 261-74.
[[†] ]Colossians, 3:18, 22.
[[‡] ]Romans, 13:1.
[[*] ]See, e.g., Constitution of Texas 1845, Art. VII, Sect. 19, in The Constitutions of the State of Texas, annotated by John Sayles, 4th ed. (St. Louis, Mo.: Gilbert, 1893), p. 209, Constitution of the State of California 1849 (San Francisco, printed at the office of the Alta California, 1849), Art. XI, Sect. 14, p. 13, Constitution of the State of Nevada 1864, Art. IV, Sect. 31, in Statutes of the State of Nevada Passed at the First Session of the Legislature, 1864-65 (Carson City, New: Church, 1865), p. 48, and Constitution of the State of Georgia 1868, Art. VII, Sect. 2 (Augusta, Ga.: Pughe, 1868), p. 11.
[[*] ]See Judges, 4-5.
[* ]Especially is this true if we take into consideration Asia as well as Europe. If a Hindoo principality is strongly, vigilantly, and economically governed, if order is preserved without oppression; if cultivation is extending, and the people prosperous, in three cases out of four that principality is under a woman’s rule. This fact, to me an entirely unexpected one, I have collected from a long official knowledge of Hindoo governments. There are many such instances: for though, by Hindoo institutions, a woman cannot reign, she is the legal regent of a kingdom during the minority of the heir; and minorities are frequent, the lives of the male rulers being so often prematurely terminated through the effect of inactivity and sensual excesses. When we consider that these princesses have never been seen in public, have never conversed with any man not of their own family except from behind a curtain, that they do not read, and if they did, there is no book in their languages which can give them the smallest instruction on political affairs, the example they afford of the natural capacity of women for government is very striking.
[[*] ]Blanche of Castile, mother of Louis IX, was regent for several periods during his reign, Anne, duchesse de Beaujeu, sister of Charles VIII, was regent during part of his reign, as designated by Louis XI.
[[†] ]Margaret of Austria, aunt of Charles V, was regent 1507-30, Mary of Hungary, sister of Charles V (and widow of Louis II of Hungary), was regent 1531-52; Margaret. Duchess of Parma, natural daughter of Charles V, was regent 1559-67.
[[*] ]See Rudolph Virchow, Untersuchungen uber die Entwickelung des Schadelgrundes (Berlin: Reimer, 1857), p. 101.
[[*] ]“Toute femme varie,” the comment of Francis I, carved in stone in his room at Chambord, is recorded in Pierre de Bourdeille, seigneur de Brantôme, Les vies des dames galantes (1666), in Mémoires de Messire Pierre de Bourdeille, seigneur de Brantôme, 10 vols. (Leyden: Sambix le jeune, 1665-1722), Vol. III, p. 233. However, Mill in referring to a “distich” is probably thinking of the version given to Francis I in Victor Hugo’s Le roi s’amuse (Paris: Renduel, 1832), p. 129 (IV, ii): “Souvent femme varie, / Bien fol est qui s’y fie!”
[[*] ]See Frederick Denison Maurice, Review of James Montgomery’s Pelican Island Westminster Review, VIII (Oct., 1827), 309-15.
[[†] ]Probably Mill intends Jane Marcet, Conversations on Political Economy (London: Longman, et al., 1816); and Harriet Martineau, Illustrations of Political Economy, 9 vols. (London: Fox, 1832-34).
[* ]“It appears to be the same right turn of mind which enables a man to acquire the truth, or the just idea of what is right, in the ornaments, as in the more stable principles of art. It has still the same centre of perfection, though it is the centre of a smaller circle.—To illustrate this by the fashion of dress, in which there is allowed to be a good or bad taste. The component parts of dress are continually changing from great to little, from short to long, but the general form still remains it is still the same general dress which is comparatively fixed, though on a very slender foundation; but it is on this which fashion must rest. He who invents with the most success, or dresses in the best taste, would probably, from the same sagacity employed to greater purposes, have discovered equal skill, or have formed the same correct taste, in the highest labours of art.” (Sir Joshua Reynolds’ Discourses [1776]. Discourse VII [in Works, ed. Edmond Malone, 4th ed., 3 vols. (London: Cadell and Davies, 1809), Vol. I, pp. 230-1].)
[[*] ]Florence Nightingale, Suggestions for Thought to the Searchers after Truth among the Artizans of England, 3 vols. (London: printed Eyre and Spottiswoode [not published], 1860), Vol. II, p. 392.
[[*] ]John Milton, Lycidas (1638), in Poems upon Several Occasions, included in The Poetical Works (London: Tonson, 1695), p. 2 (ll. 70-2).
[[*] ]See Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais. La folle journee, ou Le mariage de Figaro (1785), in Oeuvres complètes, 7 vols. (Paris: Collin, 1809), Vol. II, p. 274 (V, iii, 13-15).
[[*] ]Homer, The Ihad (Greek and English), trans. A.T. Murray, 2 vols. (London: Heinemann: Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1946), Vol. I, p. 294 (VI, 441-2).
[[†] ]Bertha of Kent and Clotilda of the Franks.
[[*] ]Mill is combining a maxim from Francis Bacon’s “Of Marriage and Single Life” (1612), in Works, Vol. VI, p. 391, with the name, become proverbial, of a character in Thomas Morton’s play, Speed the Plough (London: Longman and Rees, 1800).
[[*] ]See Herodotus (Greek and English), trans. A.D. Godley, 4 vols. (London: Heinemann; New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1926-30), Vol. II, pp. 105-7 (III, 80).
19: JSM, Manuscript Draft of Women’s Suffrage [1] (1869)
John Stuart Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XXIX - Public and Parliamentary Speeches Part II July 1869 - March 1873, ed. John M. Robson and Bruce L. Kinzer (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1988). Chapter: III.: Manuscript Draft of Women’s Suffrage [1] (1869)
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The online edition of the Collected Works is published under licence from the copyright holder, The University of Toronto Press. ©2006 The University of Toronto Press. All rights reserved. No part of this material may be reproduced in any form or medium without the permission of The University of Toronto Press.
III.
Manuscript Draft of Women’s Suffrage [1] (1869)
MS, Mill-Taylor Collection, Vol. XLI, full draft of No. 144.
the first thing which presents itself for us men who have joined this Society—a Society instituted by ladies to procure the protection of the suffrage for women—is to congratulate them on the success of this their first effort in political organisation. The admission of women to the suffrage is now a practical question. What was, not very long ago, a mere protest in behalf of abstract right, has grown into a definite practical aim, seriously pursued by many thousands of active adherents. No sooner did a few ladies of talent and influence, fostered in those principles of justice and believing in those elements of progress which are now renewing the life of every country in the world—no sooner, I say, did a few of these ladies give the signal that the time was come to claim for women a share in those blessings of freedom which are the passion and the glory of every noble nation—than there rallied round them unexpected thousands of women, eager to find expression for aspirations and wishes which we now learn that multitudes of our country women had long cherished in silence. The thousands who have signed the petitions for women’s suffrage, year after year, are evidence that I do not exaggerate when I say this. For my own part, I have all my life held the opinion that women have the same right to the suffrage which men have; and it has been my good fortune to know many ladies much better fitted to exercise it than the majority of the men of my acquaintance. I may say too, to the credit of my own perspicacity, that I have long been of opinion that the disclaimers of all wish for political or any other equality with men, which until quite lately have been almost universal among women, were but a form of that graceful and amiable way of making a virtue of necessity, which always distinguishes women. Nevertheless, I must acknowledge, I did not expect the amount of sympathy, and of more than sympathy—of ardent and zealous support—which this movement has called forth among women and among men also of all opinions and parties. We have had a success, quite out of proportion to our apparent means, and which would be unaccountable were it not for certain potent allies that have been working for us.
The first of these precious auxiliaries is the sense of justice. When not stifled by custom or prejudice, the natural feeling of justice is on our side. We are fighting against privilege on one side, disabilities and disqualifications on the other. We are protesting against arbitrary preferences; against making favorites of some, and shutting the door against others. We are claiming equal chances, equal opportunities, equal means of self-protection, for both halves of mankind. That political suffrage which men are everywhere demanding for themselves as the sole means by which their other rights can be secured to them, we, for the same reason, and in the name of the same principles, demand for women too. We therefore take our stand on natural justice; and to appeal to that, is to invoke a mighty power.
The other auxiliary which is working for us, with ever increasing strength, is the progress of the age; what may be called the modern spirit. All the tendencies which are the boast of the time; all those which are the characteristic features and animating principles of modern improvement—are on our side. There is, first, the growing ascendancy of moral force over physical; of social influences over brute strength; of the idea of right over the law of might. Then, there is the philanthropic spirit; that which seeks to raise the weak, the lowly, the oppressed. There is the democratic spirit; the disposition to extend political rights, and to consider any portion of the community as insufficiently cared for unless it has a voice in choosing those by whom the laws are made and administered. There is the free trade spirit; the desire to take off restrictions; to break down barriers; to set people free to make their own circumstances, instead of chaining them down by law or custom to circumstances made for them. Then there is the force of that which, to the shame of past history, I am obliged to call the new conception of human improvement and happiness; that they do not consist in being passively ministered to, but in active self-development. And over and above these specific practical forces at work in society, we have on our side one of the strongest and best modern characteristics—not pointing, as those do, to a particular course of outward action, but consisting in a general disposition of our own minds: the habit of estimating human beings by their intrinsic worth; by what they are, and by what they do; not by what they are born to, or by the place in which accident or the law has classed them. Those who are fully penetrated with this spirit, cannot help feeling rich and poor, women and men, to be equals before the State, as, from the time of the Christian era they have been proclaimed equal in the sight of God. And this feeling is giving us powerful aid in our attempt to convert that Christian ideal into a human reality.
To shew how unequivocally and emphatically the spirit of the age is on our side, we need only consider the various social improvements which are in course of being attempted, or which the age has fully made up its mind to attempt. There is not one of those improvements which would not help the enfranchisement of women; and there is not one of them which the enfranchisement of women would not help. There is not one of them which can be even tolerably realized unless women, with their moral and intellectual capabilities properly developed, are associated in the work. From the time when society takes upon itself the duties required of it by the present state of civilization, it cannot do without the intelligent cooperation of women: and the pedantic nonsense we now hear about the sphere of women will be felt to be merely ridiculous when pleaded as an excuse for excluding women from the minor matters of politics, when their assistance cannot be dispensed with in the most arduous.
Look at education, for instance: that is almost the one great cry of the day. Statesmen, scholars, public writers, all join in it: great and small, rich and poor, Tories, Whigs, and Radicals, the higher, the middle, and the working classes with one voice declare that the country cannot do without a good system of national education—descending to the very bottom of society, and, allow me to add, ascending also to the top. The best people have been saying this for generations; but the political changes recently made, and the prospect we have of more, have made the necessity manifest to all. Now, then, we ask of rich and poor, Tories, Whigs and Radicals: Are you going to educate a nation without women? Let alone the equal right of women to a share in the benefit; I ask, can it be given to the rest of us without their active help? When once we set about really teaching the children of all classes of the community—it will not be like the merely nominal teaching they mostly now receive—we shall need a vastly greater number of schoolmasters than we can afford to pay if we reject the assistance of half, indeed of much more than half, the available strength. Women are the acknowledged best teachers of young children; and numbers of them are eager both as volunteers and as professionals, to put their hand to the work. The only hindrance to their being equally capable instructors of more advanced pupils, is that they cannot teach what they have not been allowed to learn. They will have to be taught all the more valuable branches of knowledge if only that they may teach them to others. In the country in which there is the widest diffusion of popular instruction, the Northern States of America, a large majority of the teachers are already women; and that, by no means exclusively in the elementary schools: and they are found to be particularly efficient teachers of male pupils. Is it likely, then, that when women find themselves, side by side with the men of the present, teaching and training the men of the future, they will believe in any right of their pupils to political superiority over them? Will they feel themselves less worthy of a vote, think you, or less entitled to it, than the men whom they themselves have taught how to use their votes? And I should like to see the face of the man, so taught, who would stand up and refuse it to them.
Let us turn next to the management of the poor: and by the poor, I mean the recipients of public relief; the pauper population. That formidable difficulty weighs on the spirits of all our thinkers, and of all conscientious public administrators: and the more they think, the more they seem overwhelmed with its arduousness. I venture to predict that this great national, and more than national, this human concern will never be successfully treated until women take their share, and perhaps the leading share in the management of it. A wide experience has taught to thoughtful men, that the only true principle of a poor law is to give relief (unless of a very temporary nature) to adults, nowhere but in public establishments—in workhouses, and, for those who need them, hospitals: and this method has been tried: but the workhouses and the workhouse hospitals have been so execrably managed; the pillage has been so profligate, and the unhappy inmates have been so brutally neglected and ill-used; that the system has broken down, and public feeling shrinks from enforcing it. If this is ever remedied, it will be when pauper establishments are looked after by capable women. As mere visitors, it is to them we in great part owe the discovery of the enormities by which the public have been sickened, and which has escaped the watchfulness of men expressly selected for their fitness to be inspectors of poorhouses. The fittest person to manage a workhouse is the person who knows best how to manage a house. A woman who has learnt to govern her own servants, will know how to do the same thing with workhouse servants. Very few are the male guardians and inspectors sufficiently conversant with details, to be competent to check the dishonesty, to stimulate the zeal, and to overcome the indolence of all those concerned in administering to the wants of any large agglomeration of human beings. Every experienced traveller knows that there are few comfortable inns when there is no hostess. And the gigantic peculations of the commissariats of armies, joined to the dreadful sufferings of the wounded soldiers from the insufficiency of the medical and nursing staffs, all bear testimony to the fact that men do not possess the heaven-born faculty which they arrogate to themselves for doing well on a large scale what they disdain to serve an apprenticeship to doing on a small scale. If home is the natural sphere of women—and I am by no means called upon to contest the assertion—those branches of politics which require faculties that can only be learnt at home, are the natural sphere of women too. But there are great spheres, and little spheres: and some people want women to be always content with the little spheres. I don’t.
In the same manner, in all that concerns the details of the public expenditure: what superintendence and control is comparable to that of an experienced mother of a family, who knows, or has learnt to find out, what things ought to cost, and whose daily business it has been to discover and check malversation and waste in every department of a large household? Few men have had much of this kind of practice; multitudes of women have had it. If we are to meet the demand of the age for a government at once cheap and efficient, which shall cost little, but shall give us all that we ought to have for the money, the most vigilant and capable agents for making the money go as far as it can, would generally be found among women.
One important public function, at least, has devolved on women from the commencement: the nursing of the sick is a privilege which men have seldom denied to women. The nursing of the sick in most public establishments is from the necessity of the case, mainly performed by women: and it is now understood, that they ought to be educated women. No ignorant person can be a good nurse: a nurse requires to know enough of the laws of health and the treatment of disease, to be at least able to observe sanitary rules, and to understand the meaning of symptoms: and much more than this will be required when the prevention and cure of disease become a branch of public administration; a result towards which things are rapidly tending. There are many difficulties in dealing with the poor: many hindrances, both moral and economical, to doing for them all that most of us would wish to do. One thing, however, the nation appears to have fully made up its mind that it will not grudge them: and that is, the use of their health. In this one respect it is felt that the poor law instead of doing too much, does not do nearly enough: the medical staff of our Unions is wretchedly underpaid, and nothing near so numerous as it ought to be. And how is it to be made efficient; how are the localities to afford the expense of providing a sufficient number of persons with the requisite qualifications—if we persist in shutting the door upon those women who are claiming from us medical education in order that they may be fit for such duties as these? Until the medical profession is opened to women there never will be an adequate supply of educated medical practitioners for any but the rich. And, independently of regular practitioners, there are numbers of women who from their domestic occupations, cannot give their whole time, but who would willingly give part of it, either as volunteers or at a small remuneration, for work which would be too costly if paid for at the value of the time of a medical man in good private practice. But when women are entrusted with functions like these, and educated for them, will they be content to be excluded from the common privileges of citizenship? and how long will it be possible to exclude them?
Society is feeling every day more and more, that the services of women are needed for other uses than “to suckle fools and chronicle small beer.” Many are now saying that they ought to be better educated, in order that they may be able to educate men: and truly, if they are to educate men, the education of a well educated man cannot well be denied to them. But these very moderate reformers are falling into the same mistake about women, which was committed about the working classes. People were willing to educate the working men, but expected them, after being educated, to be content with the same treatment which they met with before. They would be quite happy, it was thought, when their improved faculties qualified them to be more useful servants, and would never think of claiming their share of mastership, nor a voice in the choosing of masters. It has not so turned out with the working classes; nor will it so turn out with women. Those who are fit to train men for their work, will think themselves fit to take a share in the work, or, at the lowest, in choosing those who are to direct it. The higher education of women, and their political emancipation, are sure to go forward together.
We are safe, then, in affirming that our cause has a powerful backing; since it has for its allies the great forces which are at work everywhere striving to improve the world. Our success would greatly strengthen all those forces: and they, by their increasing strength, tend to accelerate our success: illustrating the truth, that improvements aid one another; that all good causes are allied; that whoever helps forward one great public object proves in the end to have promoted many more. In the full assurance that it will be so with us, our business is to go on doing what, as a Society, we have hitherto done; to strive for the suffrage, and for the suffrage only. The suffrage, while it is the road to other progress, commits no one as to what other things progress consists in. Let us gain that, and whatever is desirable for women will ultimately follow, without its being necessary at present to define, or even possibly to foresee, all that is desirable. The mere fact of claiming the suffrage has given an impulse such as had never been given before, to all proposals for doing away with any injustice to women. Since the suffrage has been claimed, a bill for allowing married women to be the owners of their own property, which had been laid on the shelf for ten years with other uninteresting trifles, has been reintroduced into Parliament with a good prospect of success: and the movement for the higher education of women is spreading in all directions, with a considerable diversity of means insomuch that women have now a chance of obtaining a really good education almost as soon as men. We of this Society shall best promote these important movements by taking no part in them as a Society, whatever any of us may think it ought to do as individuals; but pressing forward with all our strength what virtually includes them all, the suffrage. With that, we shall in time obtain what is needed, whatever that may be; but until the suffrage is obtained, we have gained nothing which may not be resumed any day at the caprice of our rulers. In these times, the great practical distinction—the line of demarcation between those who can protect themselves and those who are at the mercy of others—is the political franchise: all who have rights to protect now look to that as the only effectual means for their protection. Even in America it was found that to abolish Slavery was not enough: the negroes were not really free until they had the suffrage: representative assemblies in the election of which they had no voice, inflicted or tolerated treatment which would speedily have brought them back to a servitude almost worse than their previous state. In a political age, such as this is, women will never be of equal account with men, will never be felt to be entitled to equal consideration, so long as men have votes and women have not. The wider extension of the suffrage to others, so long as women are excluded from it, is a positive injury to them, for it is rapidly making them the only excluded class—the only people whom the law does not deem worthy of a voice in choosing their rulers, or whom it does not sufficiently care for to extend to them that protection. The suffrage is the turning point of women’s cause; that alone would ensure them an equal hearing and fair play. With it they cannot long be refused any just right, or excluded from any fair advantage: without it, their interests and feelings will always be a minor consideration, and it will be thought of little consequence how much their sphere is circumscribed, or how many modes of using their faculties are denied to them. Let us, then, continue to concentrate all our efforts on the suffrage; inviting all who wish for the higher education of women, all who desire justice to them, in the matter of property and earnings, all who wish for their admission to professions and careers now closed to them, to aid us in our enterprise as the surest means of accelerating the particular improvement in which they feel a special interest.
20: JSM, NEW ENGLAND WOMAN’S SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION NEW YORK TRIBUNE, 27 MAY, 1869
John Stuart Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, XXV - Newspaper Writings December 1847 - July 1873 Part IV, ed. Ann P. Robson and John M. Robson, Introduction by Ann P. Robson and John M. Robson (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986). Chapter: 418.: NEW ENGLAND WOMAN’S SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION NEW YORK TRIBUNE, 27 MAY, 1869, P. 1
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The online edition of the Collected Works is published under licence from the copyright holder, The University of Toronto Press. ©2006 The University of Toronto Press. All rights reserved. No part of this material may be reproduced in any form or medium without the permission of The University of Toronto Press.
418.
NEW ENGLAND WOMAN’S SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION
NEW YORK TRIBUNE, 27 MAY, 1869, P. 1This letter was addressed to Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910), reformer and author, the President of the New England Woman’s Suffrage Association, founded in Boston in 1868 chiefly by Lucy Stone (1818-93) and including prominent reformers such as Wendell Phillips. The association, having been unsuccessful in enfranchising women along with negroes in the 15th amendment to the Constitution, was now working for a 16th. The letter, dated “Avignon, April 18, 1869,” is not listed in Mill’s bibliography. It appeared, under the heading “Woman Suffrage / Letter from J. Stuart Mill—the XVIth Constitutional Amendment,” as part of an account beginning, “Boston, May 26. A Public meeting, which was largely attended, was held by the New-England Woman’s Suffrage Association, in Horticultural Hall, today, Julia Ward Howe presiding. Prayer was offered by the Rev. Mrs. P.N. Hannaford. Letters, sympathizing with the movement, were received from Robert Collyer, Anna Dickinson, J. Stuart Mill, George William Curtis, Mrs. E.D. Cheeny, and the Hon. George T. Hoar. The following is the letter of Mr. Mill:”.
dear madame,—
I am very much honored by the wish of the New-England Woman’s Suffrage Association that I should be present at their annual meeting, but they have been misinformed as to my having any present intention of visiting America. Should I ever contemplate such a visit, there are no persons on your side of the Atlantic with whom it would give me more pleasure to exchange marks of sympathy than with those who are working so energetically for a cause so dear to me as that of the equal claim of all human beings, independent of sex, to the full rights of citizenship, and freedom of competition, on equal terms, for all social advantages.
I am, etc., very sincerely yours,
J.S. Mill
21: JSM, Women’s Suffrage [1] 18 JULY, 1869
John Stuart Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XXIX - Public and Parliamentary Speeches Part II July 1869 - March 1873, ed. John M. Robson and Bruce L. Kinzer (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1988). Chapter: 144.: Women’s Suffrage [1] 18 JULY, 1869
Accessed from oll.libertyfund.org/title/263/53350 on 2008-05-22
The online edition of the Collected Works is published under licence from the copyright holder, The University of Toronto Press. ©2006 The University of Toronto Press. All rights reserved. No part of this material may be reproduced in any form or medium without the permission of The University of Toronto Press.
144.
Women’s Suffrage [1]
18 JULY, 1869Report of a Meeting of the London National Society for Women’s Suffrage, Held at the Gallery of the Architectural Society, in Conduit Street, Saturday, July 17th, 1869 (London: [National Society for Women’s Suffrage,] 1869), pp. 7-14, 34. Reported on 19 July in the Morning Star, from which the responses are taken, and the Daily Telegraph. Collation indicates that Mill was following closely his untitled holograph manuscript (Mill-Taylor Collection), reproduced in full in Appendix D. The afternoon meeting, largely attended by both men and women, was, on Mill’s motion, chaired by Clementia Taylor. In her opening remarks, she indicated that the Society’s growth and success in the past two years had been in large measure the result of Mill’s “fearless and eloquent advocacy”; she alluded to his amendment to the Reform Bill (see No. 55 above), and said “every woman in Great Britain” owed him “a deep debt of gratitude. (Cheers.)” The Secretary, Caroline Biggs, read a brief report, which was accepted. Mill then rose to loud and continued applause.
the first thing that presents itself for us men who have joined this Society—a Society instituted by ladies to procure the protection of the franchise for women—is to congratulate them on the success of this, their first effort in political organisation. The admission of women to the suffrage is now a practical question. What was, not very long ago, a mere protest in behalf of abstract right, has grown into a definite apoliticala aim, seriously pursued by many thousands of active adherents. No sooner did a few ladies of talent and influence, fostered in those principles of justice, and believing in those elements of progress, which are now renewing the life of every country of the world—no sooner b did a few of these ladies give the signal that the time was come to claim for women ctheirc share in those blessings of freedom, which are the passion and the glory of every noble nation, than there rallied round them unexpected thousands of women, eager to find expression for aspirations and wishes which we now learn that multitudes of our countrywomen have long cherished in silence. The thousands who have signed the petitions for women’s suffrage, year after year, are evidence that I am not exaggerating when I say this. For my part, I have all my life held the opinion, that women have the same right to the suffrage as men; and it has been my good fortune to know many ladies very much fitter to exercise it than the majority of the men of my acquaintance. (Laughter and cheers.) I may say, too, to the credit of my own perspicacity, that I have long been of opinion that dmost ofd the disclaimers of all wish for political or any other equality with men, which, until quite lately, have been almost universal among women, are merely a form of that graceful and amiable way of making a virtue of necessity, which always distinguishes women. Nevertheless, I must acknowledge, I did not expect the amount of sympathy, enaye of more than sympathy, of ardent and zealous support, which this movement has called forth among women, and men also, of all franksf and all parties. We have had a success quite out of proportion to our apparent means, and which would be unaccountable, were it not for gsome potentg allies that have been working for us.
First of these precious auxiliaries is the sense of justice. When not stifled by custom or prejudice, the natural feeling of justice is on our side. We are fighting against privilege on one side, disabilities and disqualifications on the other. We are protesting against arbitrary preferences; against making favourites of some, and shutting the door against others. We are claiming equal chances, equal opportunities, equal means of self-protection for both halves of mankind. The political suffrage, which men are everywhere demanding h as the sole means by which their other rights can be secured to them, we, for the same reason, and in the name of the same principles, demand for women too. We take our stand, therefore, on natural justice; and to appeal to that, is to invoke a mighty power.
The other auxiliary which is working for us, with ever increasing force, is the progress of the age; what we may call the modern spirit. All the tendencies which are the boast of the time—all those which are the characteristic features and animating principles of modern improvement, are on our side. There is, first, the growing ascendancy of moral force over physical—of social influences over brute strength—of the idea of right over the law of might. Then there is the philanthropic spirit; that which seeks to raise the weak, the lowly, the oppressed. There is the democratic spirit; the disposition to extend political rights, and to deem any iclassi insufficiently jprotectedj unless it has a voice in choosing the persons by whom the laws are made and administered. There is the free trade spirit; the desire to take off restrictions—to break down barriers—to kleavek people free to make their own circumstances, instead of chaining them down by law or custom to circumstances made for them. Then there is the force of what, to the shame of past history, I am obliged to call the new conception of human improvement and happiness—that they do not consist in being passively ministered to, but in active self-development. And, over and above these specific practical forces, actively at work in society, we have with us one of the strongest and best modern characteristics—not pointing, as those do, to a particular line of outward action, but consisting in a general disposition of our own minds: the habit of estimating human beings by their intrinsic worth—by what they are, and by what they do: not by what they are born to, nor by the place in which accident or the law has classed them. Those who are fully penetrated with this spirit cannot help feeling rich and poor, women and men, to be equals before the State, as from the time of the Christian era they have been proclaimed equal in the sight of God. And this feeling is giving us powerful aid in our attempt to convert that Christian ideal into a human reality.
lTo show how unequivocally and emphatically the spirit of the age is on our side, we need only think of the different social improvements which are in course of being attempted, or which the age has fully made up its mind to attempt.l There is not one of those improvements which would not help the enfranchisement of women; and there is not one of them which the enfranchisement of women would not help. mNot one of them can be literallym realised unless women, with their moral and intellectual capabilities properly developed, are associated in the work. From the moment when society takes upon itself the duties required of it by the present state of civilisation, it cannot do without the intelligent co-operation of women; and the pedantic nonsense now talked about the sphere of women, will appear thoroughly ridiculous when pleaded as an excuse for excluding women from the minor matters of politics, when their assistance cannot be dispensed with in the most arduous. (Cheers.)
Look at education, for example. That is almost the one great cry of the day. Statesmen, scholars, public writers, all join in it: great and small, rich and poor, Tories, Whigs, and Radicals, the higher, the middle, and the working classes, with one voice declare, that the country cannot get on without a good national education, descending to the very bottom of society, and (give me leave to add) ascending also to the top. The best people have said this for generations; but after the political changes recently made, and with the prospect we have of more, the necessity has become evident to all. We say, then, to rich and poor, Tories, Whigs, and Radicals,—Are you going to educate a nation without women? Let alone the equal right of women to ntheir share ofn the benefit; I ask—Can it be given to the rest of us without women’s direct help? When we set about really teaching the children of all oranks of the peopleo —it will not be like the nominal teaching they mostly receive now—we shall need a vastly greater number of schoolmasters than we can afford to pay, if we reject the assistance of half, porp much more than half, the available force. Women are the acknowledged best teachers of young children; and numbers of them are eager, both as professionals and as volunteers, to put their hand to the work. The only hindrance to their being equally capable instructors of more advanced pupils, is that they cannot teach what they have not been allowed to learn. (Hear, hear.) They will have to be taught all the more valuable branches of knowledge, if only that they may teach them to others. In the country where there is the widest diffusion of popular qeducationq , the Northern States of America, a large majority of the teachers are already women, and that not exclusively in the elementary schools; and they are found to be particularly efficient teachers of male pupils. Is it likely, then, that when women find themselves, side by side with the men of the present, teaching and training the men of the future, they will believe in any right of their pupils to political rsupremacyr over them? (Hear, hear.) Will they feel themselves less worthy of a vote, think you, or less entitled to it, than the men who have been taught by them how to use their svotes ? And I should like to see the face of the man, so taught, who would stand up and refuse it to them. (Cheers.)
Let us turn next to the management of the poor: and by the poor I mean those in receipt of public relief—the pauper population. That formidable difficulty is weighing upon the spirits of all our thinkers, and of all conscientious public administrators; and the more they think, the more they seem to be overwhelmed with its arduousness. I venture to predict that this great national, and more than national, this human concern, will never be successfully treated until women take their share, perhaps the principal share, in the management of it. A wide experience has taught to thoughtful men that the right principle of a poor-law, is to give relief, except of a very temporary kind, to adults, nowhere but in public establishments—workhouses, and, for those who need them, hospitals. And this method has been tried: but the workhouses and the workhouse hospitals have been so execrably managed, the pillage has been so profligate, and the unhappy inmates so brutally neglected and ill-used, that the system has broken down, and public feeling shrinks from enforcing it. If this is ever remedied, it will be when pauper establishments are looked after by capable women. As mere visitors, it is to them we in great part owe the discovery of the enormities by which the public have been sickened, and which has escaped the watchfulness of men specially selected as fit to be inspectors of poorhouses. The fittest person to manage a workhouse is the person who best knows how to manage a house. The woman who has learnt to govern her own servants, will know how to do the same with workhouse servants. Few are the male guardians and inspectors sufficiently conversant with details, to be competent to check the dishonesty, to stimulate the zeal, or to overcome the indolence, of all the people concerned in administering to the wants of any large agglomeration of human beings. Every experienced traveller knows that there are few comfortable inns where there is no hostess. And the gigantic peculation of the commissariats of armies, as well as the dreadful sufferings of the wounded soldiers from the insufficiency of the medical and nursing staff, all bear testimony to the fact that men do not possess the heaven-born faculty they arrogate to themselves for doing well on a large scale what they disdain to serve an apprenticeship to doing on a small scale. If home is ta woman’s natural spheret (and I am not at all called upon to ucontradictu the assertion) those departments of politics which need the faculties that can only be acquired at home, are va woman’s natural spherev too. But there are great spheres and little spheres; and some people want women to be always content with the little spheres. I don’t.
In the same manner, in all that concerns the details of public expenditure: what superintendence and control would be equal to that of an experienced mother of a family, who knows, or has learnt to find out, what things ought to cost, and whose daily business it has been to discover and check malversation or waste in every department of a large household? Very few men have had much of this sort of practice; multitudes of women have had it. If we are to meet the demand of the age for a government at once cheap and efficient, which shall cost little, but shall give us all we ought to have for the money, the most vigilant and capable agents for making the money go as far as it can will generally be found among women. (Applause.)
One important public function, at least, has devolved on women from the commencement. Nursing the sick is a privilege which men have seldom denied to women. (Laughter.) The nursing of the sick in most public establishments is, from the necessity of the case, mainly carried on by women; and it is now understood that they ought to be educated women. No ignorant person can be a good nurse. A nurse requires to know enough of the laws of health and the treatment of disease, to be at least able to observe sanitary rules, and to understand the meaning of symptoms. But much more than this will be required when the prevention and cure of disease become a branch of public administration; and to this things are rapidly tending. There are many difficulties in dealing with the poor—many hindrances, both moral and economical, to our doing for them what most of us would like to do: but one thing the nation wis, I think, makingw up its mind that it will not grudge them, and that is, the xcarex of their health. In this one respect it is felt that our poor-law, instead of doing too much, does not do nearly enough. The medical staff of our unions is wretchedly underpaid, and nothing like so numerous as it ought to be. And how is it to be made efficient—how can the localities afford the expense necessary for providing a sufficient number of persons with the required qualifications, if we persist in shutting the door upon those women who claim from us medical education, to fit them for such duties as these? Until the medical profession is opened to women, there will never be an adequate supply of educated medical practitioners for any but the rich. And independently of regular practitioners, there are numbers of women who, from their domestic occupations, cannot give all their time, but would willingly give part of it, either as volunteers or at a small remuneration, for work which would be too costly if paid for at the value of the time of medical men in good private practice. But when women are entrusted with public functions like these, and educated for them, will they be content to be excluded from the common privileges of citizenship? and how long will it be possible to exclude them?
Society is feeling every day more and more, that the services of women are wanted for other uses than “to suckle fools and chronicle small beer.”1 (Laughter.) Many are now saying that women should be better educated, in order that they may be able to educate men; and truly if they are to educate men, the education of a well-educated man can hardly be denied to them. (Hear, hear.) But these very moderate reformers fall into the mistake about women that was made about the working classes. People were willing to educate the working men, but expected them, after being educated, to content themselves with the same treatment which they had met with before. They would be quite happy, it was thought, when their improved faculties qualified them to be more useful servants, and would not think of claiming their share of mastership, or a voice in the choosing of masters. It has not so turned out with the working classes, neither will it so turn out with women. Those who are fit to train men for their work will think themselves fit to share in the work; or, at the lowest, in the choice of those who are to direct it. The higher education of women, and their political emancipation, are sure to go forward together. (Applause.)
We may safely affirm, then, that our cause has a powerful backing; since it has for its allies the great forces which are at work everywhere, striving to improve the world. Our success would greatly strengthen all these forces: and they, by their increasing strength, help to accelerate our success; illustrating the truth, that improvements aid one another. All good causes are allied; whoever helps forward one ybeneficialy object, proves in the end to have promoted many more. (Hear, hear.) In the assurance that it will be so with us, our business is to go on doing what, as a Society, we have hitherto done—to strive for the suffrage, and for the suffrage only. The suffrage, while it is the road to other progress, commits no one as to what other things progress consists of. Let us but gain the suffrage, and whatever is desirable for women zmustz ultimately follow, without its being necessary at present to adecidea , or indeed possible to foresee, all that bisb desirable. The mere fact of claiming the suffrage cis giving an impulse, such as never hasc been given before, to all proposals for doing away with d injustice to women. Since the suffrage has been claimed, a bill for allowing married women to be the owners of their own property, which had been laid on the shelf for ten years with other uninteresting trifles, has been reintroduced into Parliament with good prospect of success;2 and the movement for the higher education of women is spreading in all directions, with a considerable diversity of means, insomuch that women have a chance of obtaining a really good education almost as soon as men. We of this Society shall best promote these important movements by taking no part in them as a Society, whatever any of us may think it erighte to do as individuals; but pressing forward with all our efforts what virtually includes them all, the suffrage. With it, we shall in time obtain what is needed, whatever that may be; but till the suffrage is gained, we have obtained nothing that may not be resumed any day at the caprice of our rulers. In these days, the great practical distinction, the line of fseparationf between those who can protect themselves and those who are at the mercy of others, is the political franchise. All who have rights to protect now look to that as the only effectual means of protecting them. (Hear, hear.) Even in America it was found that to abolish slavery was not enough; the negroes gcould not beg really free until they had the suffrage. Representative assemblies, in the election of which they had no voice, inflicted or hpermittedh treatment which would i have brought them back to a servitude almost worse than their previous state. In a political age, such as the present is, jlet the laws in other respects be what they may,j women will never be of equal account with men, will never be felt to be entitled to equal consideration, so long as men have votes and women have not. The kgreatk extension of the suffrage to others, so long as women are excluded from it, is a positive injury to them, since it is rapidly making them the only excluded class; the only persons whom the law either deems unworthy of a voice in choosing their rulers, or does not sufficiently care for to lgivel them that protection. The suffrage is the turning point of women’s cause; mit alone will ensure them an equal hearing and fair play. With itm , they cannot long be denied any just right, or excluded from any fair advantage: without it, their interests and feelings will always be a secondary consideration, and it will be thought of little consequence how much their sphere is circumscribed, or how many modes of using their faculties are denied to them. Let us, then, continue to concentrate our exertions on the suffrage; inviting all who wish for the nbettern education of women, all who desire justice to them in respect of property and earnings, all who desire their admission to any profession or career now closed to them, to aid our enterprise, as the surest means of accelerating the particular improvement in which they feel a special interest. (Loud cheers.)
oMr. Mill then moved the 1st Resolution:
“That this Society declares its strong conviction that it is in the highest degree unjust and impolitic to make sex the ground of exclusion from the exercise of political rights.”
[Charles Kingsley seconded the resolution, which was supported by Henry Fawcett and approved. Millicent Fawcett moved a resolution pledging the Society to work by all lawful means to obtain the franchise for women; in seconding, Houghton referred to a passage from Mill “to the effect that laws would never be improved unless there were numerous persons whose moral sentiments were better than the existing laws,” and Morley, supporting the motion, mentioned that he had been converted to sexual equality by reading Mill’s Dissertations and Discussions while at Oxford. After the resolution passed, a third was successfully moved, congratulating the society on the progress already made. The meeting concluded after a motion thanking the Chair, moved by Stansfeld, who was followed by Mill.]
I beg to second the motion. It is quite unnecessary that I should make any remarks, or add anything to what has been said. I am sure the whole meeting feels the grace, the dignity, as well as the business-like spirit in which the proceedings have been conducted by Mrs. Taylor, and all will join most heartily in voting thanks to her.o
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22: JSM, Women’s Suffrage [2] 26 MARCH, 1870
John Stuart Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XXIX - Public and Parliamentary Speeches Part II July 1869 - March 1873, ed. John M. Robson and Bruce L. Kinzer (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1988). Chapter: 146.: Women’s Suffrage [2] 26 MARCH, 1870
Accessed from oll.libertyfund.org/title/263/53354 on 2008-05-22
The online edition of the Collected Works is published under licence from the copyright holder, The University of Toronto Press. ©2006 The University of Toronto Press. All rights reserved. No part of this material may be reproduced in any form or medium without the permission of The University of Toronto Press.
146.
Women’s Suffrage [2]
26 MARCH, 1870Report of a Meeting of the London National Society for Women’s Suffrage Held at the Hanover Square Rooms, on Saturday, March 26th, 1870 (London: London National Society for Women’s Suffrage, 1870), pp. 4-9. Reported on 28 March, 1870, much abbreviated and in the third person, in the Daily News, the Daily Telegraph, and The Times; though the reports differ in length (apart from their coverage of Mill’s speech), they are so similar in wording as to suggest a single source. The responses are taken from the newspaper accounts. For Mill’s plans for the meeting, see CW, Vol. XVII, pp. 1697-8, 1701. At the well attended Saturday meeting Clementia Taylor took the Chair; her remarks were followed by Mill’s. On rising, he was greeted with repeated cheers.
since the first general meeting of this Society in July of last year, we have had ample reason to be satisfied with the progress that has been made by our cause. That progress has manifested itself not only by the increased number of our friends, but, still more, by the altered tone of our opponents. During the year which has just elapsed, much has been written in various publications against the equality of the sexes, but it is remarkable how few of the writers have expressed any great disapprobation of that which is the direct object of this Society, the admission of women to the suffrage. Many of them have even said in express terms that to thus much of concession they, perhaps, might not object. A vote at elections is now, with many of them, a small thing, which they can afford to concede; if women wish for it, they may as well have it as not; but what shocks and scandalises them is, that a claim should be made for women to equality of rights in civil life, and especially in marriage. This is of good augury, and I begin to hope that I may live to see the whole discussion transferred to this point. Those of us who claim for women complete equality of rights have always said that this is a totally different question from the suffrage. The suffrage is a thing apart; no woman, by claiming it, is in the smallest degree committed to the larger demand; if women were, by an inherent and inevitable necessity, subject to the authority of men, they would need the protection of the suffrage all the more. Every plea, either of justice or policy, which speaks for granting the suffrage to any man, applies equally to women.
But there is a side of the question on which I should like to say something: the particular manner in which the addition of women to the electoral body is likely to affect the character of Parliament, and to modify the mode in which public affairs are carried on. I think that the most marked effect, in the immediate future, would be to infuse into the legislature a stronger determination to grapple with the great aphysical and morala evils of society. (Hear, hear.) Women electors, I think, will be more difficult to persuade than men that those evils must be accepted—cannot be cured, cannot even be much mitigated—and that we may, with an untroubled conscience, avert our eyes from them, with an occasional grumble at what they cost us in rates, taxes, and charities. Women, I think, will find it hard to believe that legislation and administration are powerless to make any impression on these frightful evils, and that the acme of statesmanlike wisdom is to let them alone. I should consequently expect, from the political influence of women, a considerable increase of activity in dealing with the causes of these evils. I know there are many men who regard any increased activity in that direction with alarm, thinking that it means inconsiderate benevolence, injudicious legal regulation, and general increase of meddling. But there is wise as well as unwise meddling; well-directed as well as ill-directed benevolence; and there is a tendency in the present day to confound the two. It is my conviction that, if the State employed all the means it possesses of raising the standard of morality, and even, in some respects, of physical well-being, in the community, it would find that it has much more in its power than it is now the fashion to believe; and that Governments in these days are quite as blameable in neglecting the right means of promoting those objects, as in days yet recent they were in pursuing the wrong. The time has passed away when Governments, speaking generally, were actively tyrannical; their favourite sins in the present time are indolence and indifference. Whatever scruples they have about doing ill, they have, in general, none at all about leaving ill alone, but allow mountains of mischief to be piled up from age to age, without any serious attempt to check the accumulation. (Hear.) There is something in the nature of government by men alone, which encourages this easy self-satisfaction. Men are more mentally indolent than women, and are far too ready to believe that they have done everything, or that there is nothing to be done. Their consciences and feelings need rousing, and the stronger active impulses of women are wanted to do it. If I am now asked whether, in my opinion, those active impulses can be depended on for prompting the most judicious line of conduct—whether women will discriminate well between good and bad modes of combating evils, and will not be apt to mistake the most direct mode for the most efficacious; I freely confess that the political education of women must be greatly improved, before as much as this can be affirmed with any confidence. But this would only be a real objection, if we were going to disfranchise the men, and turn over the whole power to women. All we want is, that the two should be obliged to take counsel together. We want the ship of the State to have both sail and ballast, and not, as is too often the case now when the navigation is troublesome, all ballast and no sail. (Laughter.) There is little danger that the over-zeal of women will not be quite sufficiently tempered by the over-caution of men. In these days we do not fail, in matters of government, for want of a curb, but of a spur; and women, even with the present defects of their education, are well qualified for that office. (Laughter.) As their education improves, they will do more; they will not only be a stimulus to others, but will themselves be capable of doing their full share of the work. Women, on the average, have more contriving minds than men; in things they are really interested in, they are readier in finding means for the attainment of an end; especially in undertakings the success of which greatly depends on the details of the execution. Now this is emphatically the case with attempts to correct the great physical and moral evils of society. These are works of detail. Men form great projects, sound in principle perhaps, and rational in their general conception, but which, when applied to practice, break down, from unforeseen failure of efficiency in the execution. Many more of these projects would succeed if women had a share in planning them.
These, I think, are the most marked effects on the general course of government and legislation, which would flow from the admission of women to a share in the functions of citizenship. To this we must add, that the wrongs and grievances which specially affect women would no longer be considered too unimportant to be worth any serious attempt to put an end to them. To take one example among many: if women had votes, there would be a much sterner repression of those outrages on women, which bmake the necessity working women are under of going out alone a serious danger to themb ; outrages which have only reached their present height through the inexcusable leniency with which they are treated by the courts of justice. (Hear, hear.) If women had had votes, we should not have had the “Contagious Diseases Acts”;1 under which the wives and daughters of the poor are exposed to insufferable indignities on the suspicion of a police-officer; and must be so, if the Acts are to be so enforced as to have any chance of being effectual for their object. If those Acts are repealed—if they are not extended to the whole country—it will be owing to the public spirit and courage of those ladies, some of them of distinguished eminence, who have associated themselves to obtain the repeal of the Acts;2 a courage and public spirit which can only be duly appreciated by those who have noticed the impudent and shameless character of some of the attacks which have been made on them in print by anonymous writers. To those worthier and more honourable opponents, who think these ladies mistaken, and the course they have adopted an unfavourable indication of the use they are likely to make of increased political influence, I would say—Suppose the Acts to be as beneficent as I hold them to be pernicious; suppose that the ladies who disapprove of them are not actuated by any reasonable view of their nature and consequences, but by an excess or a misapplication of the particular moral sentiment which men have inculcated on them as their especial and principal virtue. What then? Is it no evil that the laws of a country should be repugnant to the moral feelings of confessedly the most moral half of the population? If the repugnance is grounded on mistake, ought not time to have been given, and explanation and discussion used, to rectify the mistake; instead of leaving them to find out, years afterwards, that laws had been passed, almost in secret, revolting to their strongest feelings? That women’s suffrage would put a check upon such proceedings as this; that it would compel legislators to take into account the moral feelings of those in whom such feelings are the strongest, and to carry those moral feelings with them, instead of contemptuously setting them aside—must be counted among the benefits that would result from the grant of the suffrage.
There are men—not a few—liberal and enlightened on general topics, whose own feelings would incline them to be just to women, but who dread the immediate effect of admitting them to the suffrage, because they think it would greatly increase the power of the clergy. I have never denied that if the suffrage were given them to-day or to-morrow, something like this might possibly, for a time, be the result. And, differing as I do in opinion and feeling on many important topics from the great majority of the clergy, I am not a likely person to undervalue this objection. But it is to me obvious that if the clergy have now too great an ascendancy over the minds of many women, especially in the middle class, it is because the other influences by which the human intelligence is acted on, and opinions formed, have not been allowed to reach them. They have had no encouragement to read the books, or take part in the conversations, which would have shown them that any of the opinions they hear from the clergy are disputed, and disputable. Even if there were no direct discouragement, they have not been so brought up as to take interest in such readings or conversations: while they have been trained in the belief that it is women’s part to accept the opinions they find prevalent, and that the thoughtful consideration of great subjects, and the formation of well-considered opinions by hearing both sides, is none of their business. How then is it possible that they should not fall under the influence of those who address them through the only feelings and principles they have been taught to cultivate? And consider another thing. What is it that makes clergymen in general, even where professional prejudices do not directly interfere, such unsafe advisers in politics and the affairs of life? It is because they are too much in the position of women; they are treated too much as women are: under a show of deference, they are shut out from the free and equal discussion of great practical questions, and are taught to think themselves concerned with only one aspect of any subject—the moral and religious aspect, in the narrow sense in which they use those terms; for, in a larger sense, all questions in which there is a right and a wrong are moral and religious. Is not this very like the condition of women? To those who dread the influence of the clergy on women’s minds, I would say this: If the clergy have more of such influence than belongs to their character and to the degree of their cultivation, let us be just, and admit that they have fairly earned it. The clergy are the only persons who, as a class, have taken any pains with women’s minds; the only persons who have appealed directly to their own principles and convictions; who have addressed them as if they had themselves a moral responsibility—as if their souls and consciences were their own. The clergy are the only men who have seemed to think it of any consequence what women think or feel, on any subject outside the domestic sphere. Those who show this respect to women, deserve to have influence with them: and will continue to have more than enough, until other men employ the same means of acquiring such influence which they have done. If the fathers, brothers, and husbands of these women took equal pains with their minds—if they invited them to interest themselves in the subjects in which the fathers, brothers, and husbands are interested, as the clergy do in those which interest them; and if they were taught, by the responsibility of a vote, that the formation of an intelligent opinion on public questions is as much their right and duty as it is the right and duty of men—they would soon find themselves more competent and better judges of those subjects than the clergy are; and there would be no danger whatever of their surrendering their own judgment into the hands of their clerical instructors. Whatever is excessive or hurtful in the clerical influence over them would be weakened, exactly in proportion as they took part in the affairs of life; and only that which is salutary would remain. Instead, then, of regarding the clerical influence as a hindrance to giving women votes, I look upon the vote as the most effectual means of emancipating them from the too exclusive influence of the clergy. But if this danger were far greater than it is, it would be an unworthy thing, on account of such an apprehension, to refuse to one half of the species that necessary means of self-protection, so highly prized by the other half. Every portion of mankind has its own special liabilities to error; and he who would refuse the suffrage to others because he is afraid of their making mistakes, would find good reasons for disfranchising everybody but himself. Safety does not lie in excluding some, but in admitting all, that contrary errors and excesses may neutralise one another. And of all who ever claimed the suffrage, or for whom it was ever claimed, there are none in whose case there is so little reason for apprehending any evil consequences whatever from their obtaining it—none for whose continued exclusion the excuses are so insignificant, so fanciful, as in the case of women.
[The motion (supported by Harriet Grote) was carried. A resolution (supported by Helen Taylor) expressing satisfaction at the introduction into the House of Commons by Jacob Bright and Charles Dilke of a bill for removing the electoral disqualifications of women3was also passed. A final resolution, expressing the view that the general extension of the suffrage, while women were excluded, was a positive injury to them, was approved, and then a vote of thanks to the Chair brought to a close the meeting, “which throughout was of a very enthusiastic character” (Daily News).]
[a-a]DN,DT,TT] P practical
[b-b]DN,DT,TT at present disgrace the country [DN,TT in past tense]
[1 ]27 & 28 Victoria, c. 85 (1864), which was superseded by 29 Victoria, c. 35 (1866), and the Act that amended the latter, 32 & 33 Victoria, c. 96 (1869).
[2 ]The Ladies’ National Association for the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts was headed by Josephine Butler (1828-1906). Harriet Martineau (1802-76) was a vigorous contributor to the campaign, her articles in the Daily News leading at the end of 1869 to the formal Women’s Protest signed by 2000 women published in the Daily News. Among the signatories were Florence Nightingale, Mary Carpenter, Priscilla McLaren (sister of John and Jacob Bright), and their sister Margaret Lucas. The last was on the platform at this meeting, as were Ursula Bright (Jacob’s wife), and Frances Bailey Martineau (married to Harriet Martineau’s nephew, Russell).
[c-c]+DN,DT,TT
[3 ]“A Bill to Remove the Electoral Disabilities of Women,” 33 Victoria (16 Feb., 1870), PP, 1870, IV, 799 (not enacted).
23: JSM, THE CONTAGIOUS DISEASES ACTS 1871
John Stuart Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XXI - Essays on Equality, Law, and Education, ed. John M. Robson, Introduction by Stefan Collini (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984). Chapter: THE CONTAGIOUS DISEASES ACTS 1871
Accessed from oll.libertyfund.org/title/255/21693 on 2008-05-22
The online edition of the Collected Works is published under licence from the copyright holder, The University of Toronto Press. ©2006 The University of Toronto Press. All rights reserved. No part of this material may be reproduced in any form or medium without the permission of The University of Toronto Press.
THE CONTAGIOUS DISEASES ACTS
1871EDITOR’S NOTE
The Evidence of John Stuart Mill, Taken before the Royal Commission of 1870, on the Administration and Operation of the Contagious Diseases Acts of 1866 and 1869. Reprinted Verbatim from the Blue Book (London: Association for the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts, [1871]). Reprinted from “Minutes of Evidence Taken before the Commission upon the Administration and Operation of the Contagious Diseases Acts,” Parliamentary Papers, 1871, XIX, 1818-25. The Acts are 29 Victoria, c. 35 (1866), and 32 & 33 Victoria, c. 96 (1869). Not listed in Mill’s bibliography. No copy in the Somerville College Library. Mill’s evidence was taken on 13 May, 1871 (in the House of Lords), with William Nathaniel Massey in the Chair, and the following members of the Committee present: Robert Applegarth, John Henry Bridges, Richard Collinson, Holmes Coote, Robert Gregory, John Hannah, Timothy Holmes, Walter Charles James, Frederick Denison Maurice (whose name is omitted from the list in the pamphlet and in PP), Anthony John Mundella, John Somerset Pakington, and Peter Rylands. The text is headed: “Mr. John Stuart Mill gave evidence as follows.”. Mill’s examination included questions 19,990 to 20,101 of the evidence before the Committee. For comment on the evidence, see xxxvii-xxxviii and lxxi-lxxii above.
The text below is taken from the pamphlet reprint of the evidence. It has been collated with the version in PP, which is signified in the variant notes by “711”.
The Contagious Diseases Acts
william nathaniel massey:Are you acquainted with the Acts of Parliament which are the subject of inquiry by this Commission? I have a general acquaintance with them.
Have you any practical knowledge of the working of them? No practical knowledge.
Then any opinion you express with regard to these Acts, refers to the principles on which they are founded? Yes; the general principles of legislation. I have not studied the details.
The principal Act now in force is entitled “An Act for the better prevention of contagious diseases at certain naval and military stations.”[*]And are you aware that the policy which dictated this legislation in the first instance, was a desire to maintain the health of soldiers and sailors, whose physical efficiency was reported to be very seriously affected by the disease which they contracted at garrison and seaport towns, those towns and garrisons being the resort, in a peculiar manner, of common prostitutes? Yes; I am aware of that.
Do you consider that such legislation as that is justifiable on principle? I do not consider it justifiable on principle, because it appears to me to be opposed to one of the greatest principles of legislation, the security of personal liberty. It appears to me that legislation of this sort takes away that security, almost entirely from a particular class of women intentionally, but incidentally and unintentionally, one may say, from all women whatever, inasmuch as it enables a woman to be apprehended by the police on suspicion and taken before a magistrate, and then by that magistrate she is liable to be confined for a term of imprisonment which may amount, I believe, to six months, for refusing to sign a declaration consenting to be examined.
The Act of Parliament in express terms applies only to common prostitutes, plying their trade as prostitutes within the protected districts. The police have express instructions to confine their action to the women specified in the Act. We have it in evidence before us that those orders have been most carefully obeyed by a select body of police detached upon this particular duty.aIn point of fact,aI donot know whether that would make any difference in your opinion. The Commission, I may say, are satisfied that no practical abuse of the Act has taken place by the police; that in fact, women who are not intended by the Legislature to be subjected to these provisions have not been molested by it. We so far qualify that by saying it is possible that in some particular instances the suspicion of the police may have rested upon women who are not within the description of common prostitutes, but practically the Act has been carried out with great care. Is your objection confined to the possibility of a modest woman being brought up under these Acts? That is a very great part of my objection. Although I am quite aware that the Act only authorises the apprehension of prostitutes, still a discretion must necessarily be left in the police to prevent the entire evasion of the Act: and I have understood that it is held by its supporters, medical men and others, that the powers must be very considerable if the Acts are not to be very seriously evaded. What number of cases there have been in which modest women, or women at any rate not prostitutes, have been apprehended by the police on suspicion, I do not know, but it appears to me that the police have that power, and that they must have the power, it is impossible to enforce the Acts unless they have the power, the Acts cannot be made really effectual unless those powers are strengthened. But in any case it seems to me that we ought not to assume, even supposing bthatb no case of abuse has been found out as yet, that abuses will not occur. When power is given which may be easily abused, we ought always to presume that it will be abused, and although it is possible that great precautions will be taken at first, those precautions are likely to be relaxed in time. We ought not to give powers liable to very great abuse, and easily abused, and then presume that those powers will not be abused.
What power do you refer to? The power of apprehending women on suspicion, and then requiring them to enter into engagements subjecting themselves to examination.
Then setting aside the tendency to which these Acts are liable in their execution of invading the liberty of modest women, do you consider it objectionable in itself that the Legislature should make provision for the periodical examination of common prostitutes who let out their bodies for hire? I think that it is objectionable. If any penalty is to be imposed, and this must be considered a penalty, for being a common prostitute, she ought to have power to defend herself in the same manner as before any ordinary tribunal, and of being heard by counsel, in order to prove that she is not a prostitute if she can. There are great numbers of prostitutes, I believe in this country, certainly in foreign countries, who are not registered, and the effect of the examination which the Act requires, and similar examinations which are required in foreign countries, is said to be, and I believe with a great deal of truth, to lead to a great amount of clandestine prostitution, and the Acts therefore are not effectual unless clandestine prostitution is touched also
The provision of the Act is this, that a woman shall be permitted, if shecthinkscfit, to acknowledge herself to be a common prostitute upon paper, that is called in the Act a voluntary submission, and she may deposit that in the hands of the police or the authorities of the hospital, and in pursuance of that submission she is examined and subjected to the same examination with regard to periodical attendance as if ordered to attend before the magistrate; the alternative being that if she declines to sign a voluntary submission, she may be taken before a magistrate, and the question whether she is a common prostitute, will be a question for the magistrate to try. She may be heard by counsel, and the only difference between that mode of trial and the ordinary mode of trial is the absence of a jury. She is tried, in fact, by a tribunal analogous to that which has been created by recent legislation in an Act called the “Criminal Justice Act,”[*]which in fact merely extends summary jurisdiction which already obtained in this country. Do I understand you to say that you think the protection of a jury is necessary in such a case? I have not considered that subject, but I think all the protection, which is necessary in other cases of judicial investigation would be necessary in this. There can be hardly any more serious case to the person concerned than that of being charged with being a prostitute, if she is not really so. With regard to the first part of your question, supposing that her declaration of her being a prostitute is voluntary, and that her submission to examination is strictly spontaneous on her part, I have nothing to say against it then, but I do not think it is the business of Government to provide the means of such examinations.
To follow up that, supposing a woman had voluntarily submitted her person to examination, and her person was found to be diseased, would you consider it an unjustifiable violation of herdlibertydif she was sent to hospital, and detained in the hospital against her will until she was cured? I should think the objection less strong than in the other case, but I still think it objectionable because I do not think it is part of the business of the Government to provide securities beforehand against the consequences of immoralities of any kind. That is a totally different thing from remedying the consequences after they occur. That I see no objection to at all. I see no objection to having hospitals for the cure of patients, but I see considerable objection to consigning them to hospitals against their will.
The condition which I took the liberty of putting to you was the voluntary submission of the women? Yes.
Upon that voluntary submission the woman is found diseased. Now the woman being found diseased and being a common prostitute, upon her voluntary submission the law assumes the right of sending her to a hospital, and detaining her in that hospital, until she is no longer in a condition to communicate contagion Do you think that a warrantable violation of the woman’s liberty, which is the first question? Do you consider that a proper course for legislation to take? I do not consider it a violation of the woman’s liberty in that case, because she would know beforehand to what she would subject herself. If she voluntarily underwent this examination, she might well be made to undertake that if she was examined and found diseased, she should consent beforehand to go to the hospital, and be there detained until cured; therefore, on the score of personal liberty, I have no objection to it. But I have a still remaining objection to the Government undertaking, even on the solicitation of the parties concerned, to provide beforehand the means of practising certain indulgences with safety. Of course the objection on the ground of personal liberty does not occur in that case, but the other objection does. It applies to this case as much as the other, I think if a woman comes and asks to be examined and asks it to be ascertained that she is in a healthy condition, and to be submitted to treatment until she is healthy in order that she may be fitter to follow a certain profession, the State is in fact going out of its way to provide facilities for the practice of that profession, which I do not think the State is called upon, or can without considerable disadvantage undertake, to do.
Would your objection be modified by this consideration. It is in evidence before this Commission, and we will assume for the purpose of your answer that it is proved to your satisfaction that the contagious disease extends far beyond the guilty persons, and may be communicated to innocent wives, and be transmitted to innocent children? That opens another point on which I should like to express an opinion. Of course I understand it is not the object of the Act of Parliament to afford facilities for indulgence. The object of the Act is not to protect those who voluntarily seek indulgence, but to protect the innocent from having these diseases communicated to them; that I understand to be the object. Now a woman cannot communicate the disease but to a person who seeks it, and who knowingly places himself in the way of it. A woman can only communicate it through a man; it must be the man who communicates it to innocent women and children afterwards. It seems to me, therefore, if the object is to protect those who are not unchaste, the way to do that is to bring motives to bear on the man and not on the woman, who cannot have anything to do directly with the communication of it to persons entirely innocent, whereas the man can and does. If you ask whether I think it possible to bring motives to bear on the man, I think there are various ways in which it may be done. In the first place, the same degree of espionage which is necessary to detect women would detect also the men who go with them, because very often they are detected only by the circumstance of being seen to go into certain houses with men. In that case, if the women can be laid hold of, the men can also, and be obliged to give an account why they are there. But without the exercise of espionage on either men or women, there are other means which can be had recourse to; very severe damages in case a man is proved to have communicated this disease to a modest woman, and in the case of his wife, divorce as a matter of right; I think that a stronger case in which to apply the remedy of divorce can hardly be conceived.
Supposing for a moment that the enactment in law making it penal to communicate the disease to another person was objectionable on the ground that it would lead to extortion, and that a wife so affected would not be able to overcome all those influences which her own affections have over her to induce her not to take the extreme step of seeking divorce, what remedy would you provide for the innocent children? The evil could only reach the children through the wife. The unborn children could only be infected by the mother being first infected. If it was proved that a man had been the means of communicating to his wife, she being a modest woman, or to his children, any of these diseases, the law should grant the woman a divorce, and compel the man in proportion to his means to pay very heavy damages to them for their support apart from himself. That, in my opinion, is what the law ought to do in the case. I quite see there would be often great difficulty in enforcing it; probably it would only be enforced in a certain proportion of cases, and very likely not in the majority of cases, but still the knowledge that it could be enforced would operate as a considerable check on the evil; and even the fact that the law declared this a very great crime, not only rendering the person who committed it subject to heavy penalties, but deemed so serious as to warrant the dissolving of the marriage tie, the mere effect of placing its mark on the conduct in this way would have very great influence, and would make this crime be considered, as in truth it is, one of the gravest a man could possibly commit.
rev. john hannah:Would you think it worth while to make an effort to stop it, viewed simply as a plague? That is, of course, a question to be considered, but I have heard and read that many medical men, and other strong supporters of the Act, think it cannot be made effectual enough to stamp out these diseases unless it is made much more strict than it is, consequently much more oppressive to women, and still more liable to abuse, besides which I have understood that several medical men who were warm supporters of the Acts nevertheless think it impossible for the Acts to be made to that degree effectual, or any degree approaching that, unless men are subject to it as well as women, and the reason they do not propose this is because they do not think that men would consent to it.
Confining you to the one point of detention, I think I gather your objections to it arise from collateral considerations which admit of removal. I mean the consideration that the detention is simply to facilitate an immoral purpose, an objection which you dwelt upon, did you not? It seems to me always liable to that objection, even if it is not liable to others.
Still, is not the policy of detention separable from what is clearly a bad reason, viz., to make sin safe? I do not see how it can be separated. I do not see how that which makes illicit indulgence of that sort safe, or is supposed to do so, can be prevented from giving some degree of encouragement to it, though far, I know, from the intention of the Act.
The point, I apprehend, is really this; in case it is really a plague, differing only from other plagues by the intermixture of the moral element, then is not the Legislature justified in the interests of the innocent in endeavouring, so far as it can, to stamp it out, even if there is no hope of complete success? I should say this question is very much affected by the degree of hope there is of complete success. It seems to me there ought to be a very good prospect of complete extirpation to justify anything of that kind, and I do not understand that such hope is entertained by those who are now most in favour of the Acts.
sir walter james:You mentioned that personal examination of men and women was a degrading thing, and in itself illegal? I did. I think it is exceedingly degrading to the women subjected to it, not in the same degree to men; therefore there is more reason that if it is applied at all it should be applied to men as well ase women, or if not to both, rather to men than to women. Men are not lowered in their own eyes as much by exposure of their persons, besides which it is not a painful operation in the case of a man, which I believe in the case of a woman it often is, and they very much detest it.
With regard to the cost of these Acts, I understand on the continent these Acts are self-supporting, are you aware of that? are you aware that such is the case? I am not aware whether it is so.
Is it your opinion that it would be right and just that those persons for whose safety these Acts were passed should pay for them? It depends on who those are who are affected by the Acts.
Should you consider it more just that they should pay for it by licenses as on the continent, or that the British taxpayer, the poor man should pay for it? It seems to me that all the objections which exist against the Acts, exist in an extreme degree against licenses, because they have still more the character of toleration of that kind of vicious indulgence, than exists under the Acts at present, or can exist in any other way.
I think on this point you will agree with me that licenses should be paid for byfprostitutes themselves, and the brothel-keepers, rather than as in the present case by the English people? If the thing was really justifiable on the ground on which it is defended, namely, as a great sanitary measure for the protection of all classes, I think it would be very fair that the English people should pay: but it is not professed, and could not be with truth asserted to be the object of these Acts, to protect persons in vicious indulgence or to protect the class of prostitutes. The strongest argument for the Acts has been the protection of those who are liable to take the disease without any voluntary exposure to it on their own part.
But supposing the opposite to be the case, would not the hardship of the case be greater, that is, that the innocent should pay the cost of these Acts rather than the guilty? I should think such considerations of such extremely small importance compared with the general bearing of the Acts, that I should think them hardly worth regarding. The very expense in any case would not be great.
But the expense would be very considerable if extended to other classes? If applied to the whole population the expense no doubt would be very much greater.
Would you consider, if applied to the whole population, it would be a justifiable subject to tax the people for? I think it would; I do not think it belongs to the class of measures which, if justifiable at all, it would be unjust to make a charge on the whole community. The health of the community is a subject now considered, I think with reason, to be within the province of Government. But I do not think this consideration material in comparison with the inconvenience that I see in the fact, that the expense could not be charged on the prostitutes themselves without in a manner licensing their profession. Moreover it is not the prostitutes themselves mainly who are protected, but their customers, and I do not see how you can get at them especially to make them pay. You can make prostitutes pay, but you cannot make those who frequent them pay.
Undoubtedly you can according to the principles of political economy, by making a prostitute recoup by charging a larger sum to customers, because we have heard in evidence that these registered women charge a higher price than the others. A gentleman said the officers gave a higher price to those licensed women than the others, so that you see in that case the cost would not fall upon the woman but upon her customers? In that case this particular objection fails, but the objection is still unanswered that it involves special licensing of persons to practise that profession.
Do you think that evil is at all avoided by the present Acts? By no means. I think one of the objections to the present Acts is that they do not avoid that evil, but still they are not attended with so much of it as the licensing system would be.
You are aware that a woman has an order to attend the next examination? I am.
And that it is their custom to show their tickets? Yes; that comes very near to the licensing.
Can you draw a distinction between it and licensing? There is hardly any distinction. It makes some difference that it is not called a license. That makes a considerable difference in the feeling about it, not by the public, but by the women themselves.
We have strong evidence that they are considered equivalent to it? That may very possibly be the case.
Do you see a substantial difference between medicalgexaminationsgunder these Acts, and the continental system? I do not see any substantial difference. It seems to me that the same objections apply to both.
Except that it is applied to a smaller population here, and that on the continent it is applied to all? More extensively.
rev. frederick denison maurice:Supposing the whole of these Acts were repealed so far as regards the military and naval population, so that the whole purpose to supply prostitutes for them was taken away, would you then think that there might be hospitals for this purpose established by Government; would you see any objection to such hospitals being under Government control? I do not see any reason. I by no means wish that there should not be hospital accommodation for those cases to the utmost extent for which it may be required. But I think the objection that applies to the Acts would apply in some degree to having hospitals for this express purpose. The great defect now is that these patients are not admitted into most hospitals. It would be desirable that the restrictive regulations which exclude them from all except a few hospitals should be removed in some way or other, and hospital accommodation provided for this disease in the same way as for others, but not by Government taking that charge on itself, which would be liable to the same objection as licensing prostitutes.
Do you not think the Government ought to exert itself for the purpose of putting down this disease? I think the Government ought, so far as it can, to exert itself in putting down all diseases—this among the rest, but I certainly do see some degree of objection to anything special being done by the Government distinguishing between this and other diseases in that respect.
Then if the Act really fulfilled its purpose, and was for all contagious diseases, by there being one department in each hospital, you would not think that objectionable? No. Supposing the opinion of Parliament was that contagious diseases generally, all sorts of infectious and contagious diseases, were proper subjects for the Government to take in hand administratively, and to provide proper means for curing, I should say there was no objection in including this among the others.
You would not think it bad legislation? No, because it would not single out diseases of this kind to meet with particular favour.
dr. john henry bridges:I understood one of your objections to the Act was that the State thereby gave security for the consequences of committing an immoral act? It facilitates the act beforehand; which is a totally different thing and always recognized in legislation as a different thing from correcting the evils which are the consequences of vices and faults. If we were never to interfere with the evil consequences which persons have brought upon themselves, or are likely to have brought upon themselves, we should help one another very little. Undoubtedly it is quite true that interfering to remedy evils which we have brought on ourselves has in some degree the same bad consequences, since it does in the same degree diminish the motive we have to guard against bringing evils on ourselves. Still a line must be drawn somewhere, and a marked line can be drawn there. You may draw a line between attacking evils when they occur, in order to remedy them as far as we are able, and making arrangements beforehand which will enable the objectionable practices to be carried on without incurring the danger of the evil. hTheseh two things I take to be distinct, and capable of being kept distinct in practice. As long as hospitals are not peculiarly for that class of diseases, and do not give that class of disease any favour as compared with others, they are not liable to objection, because their operation consists in remedying the effects of past evils: they do not hold out a special facility beforehand to practising illicit indulgence with a security which it would not otherwise enjoy. The interference is not preventive but remedial.
By attacking the evil after it has occurred, you would, I presume, prefer dealing with a woman after she is diseased? Yes; I mean having hospitals, and taking means of curing people of diseases either of this kind or other kinds, which they have brought upon themselves by their own fault.
You are probably aware speaking of the country generally that there are not a very large number of hospitals, for the treatment of these diseases? I believe there are not.
And that it is excluded to a very large extent from our provincial hospitals? Yes.
Now would not the effect of having wards for the admission of venereal disease in all our hospitals scattered about the country have the effect which you deprecate, that is, of making fornication more secure from the chance of disease than it is at present? No doubt it would. No doubt everything you do to relieve people from what may be the iconsequencei of their own fault, does in some degree diminish the motives to refrain from that fault. Still if we are to help one another at all, we must not stretch this argument to its full extent. Relieving people who are in danger of starvation is liable to the same objection. All poor laws, all relief whatever to the indigences or distresses of our fellow creatures are liable to it, since the people themselves are often very much to blame for bringing themselves into a position in which they require relief, and no doubt the relief does in some not inconsiderable degree diminish the prudential motives for abstaining. But still all our experience, and the consideration given to the question by thinkers and legislators, have ended in the recognition of this, that we ought not to abstain from helping one another through the evils of life, provided we do it in such a way as that it shall not provide facilities beforehand, but only deal with the evil when it has been incurred.
Apart from the existence of venereal disease, will you be prepared to lay down as a principle that the State should not take cognizance of the existence of prostitution? Of course a good deal will depend on the sort of cognizance, but I do not think that prostitution should be classed and recognised as such by the State. It seems to me there are inconveniences of many kinds in that.
You do not see your way to any improved legislation, for instance, with reference to brothels? That is a different question and a very difficult one. The question of the regulation of brothels, whether they should be systematically put down, or let alone to a certain degree, enters into very wide reaching considerations as to the degree in which the law should interfere in questions of simple morality, and also how far it should attack one portion of the persons who conspire to do a particular act, while it tolerates the others. I have always felt it very difficult to lay down a general rule on the subject, and I am not prepared to do so now, but I do not think it material to the consideration of these Acts.
sir john somerset pakington:Am I right in inferring from the evidence you have been so good as to give us, that you would not consider the fact of a very large proportion of the crews of our men-of-war and the soldiers of our army, being incapacitated for rendering service to the State by this terrible disease, an adequate reason for legislation of this kind? Not for legislation of this kind; but it might be for legislation of other kinds. I cannot say that I have considered the subject much, but I do not see why the State should not subject its own soldiers and sailors to medical examination, and impose penalties on them in case they are found diseased. I would not undertake to say that it might not, by measures directly acting on soldiers and sailors, in a very considerable degree discourage that kind of indulgence. It is certain, at least I have understood so, that the impression on the minds of soldiers and sailors, is that it is not discouraged, that it is considered by Parliament a necessity which may be regulated, but which must be accepted, and that Parliament does not entertain any serious disapprobation of immoral conduct of that kind. Now the State might exercise an influence opposite to that, by making the being found diseased a ground for military penalties in the case of soldiers and sailors. I do not pretend to have made up my mind on the subject, or to have anything definite to propose. I only throw that out as a possibility.
Are you aware that in the case of soldiers, the very thing you recommend has been now in practice for many years, and is still in practice? I have understood that soldiers are examined.
Under those circumstances the remedy you suggest can hardly be regarded as a fresh security? Not an entirely fresh security, certainly. I have mentioned that I have not considered or studied that part of the subject.
I infer from your answer that the fact to which I have adverted of the known suffering in the way I have described must be regarded as a great public evil? No doubt it is a great public evil.
Do you think it is an evil which the State would not be justified in endeavouring to avert? If the State endeavours to avert it by any means which are not objectionable in a greater degree than the evil itself.
Do you think that the State had better rather continue to suffer from the evil than to pass such Acts as these for its prevention? I think the State had better continue to suffer as much of that evil as it cannot prevent in other ways, by the application of military discipline and the correction of these practices among the soldiers.
Can you suggest any way other than that already adverted to, and which I have told you is already in exercise? You mentioned that the soldiers are liable to examination, but you have not mentioned, and I am not aware, to what degree, if the result of that examination proves them to be diseased, they are liable to penalties.
I cannot describe the exact penalty, but the principle has been in action. I do not say with regard to the whole army, but can you suggest any other description? I have not considered that part of the subject, but certainly I am not prepared to suggest any other.
And I understand you to be of opinion that in no case should the State resort to such a remedy as is found in these Acts? Exactly. I do not think that the State should resort to any remedy which operates by taking means beforehand to make the indulgence safe.
I think you told us that you have only a general knowledge ofjthesejActs, and no practical experience of their working? That is so.
You spoke of the violation of personal liberty, and I think you also, if I took down your words correctly, objected to the power of apprehending women on suspicion.[*]Do you think, as far as you know the Act, that the expression “apprehend the woman on suspicion” is an expression taken in its ordinary sense, which is applicable to the powers which these Acts give? It seems to me that it is applicable as far as I understand the subject; inasmuch as when women have not voluntarily declared themselves to be prostitutes, they may be, as I understand, watched by policemen, and if the policeman thinks a woman is practising prostitution, although not registered, he has it in his power, on any grounds of suspicion which appear to him to be adequate, to require the woman to enter into an undertaking to submit herself to examination, or to take her before a magistrate, who will make her do so.
I am glad I asked you the question, because it is very clear you are under a misapprehension. There is no such power calling on a woman to make a declaration compelling her to be examined. The only power of the police in this case is where they have good reason to suppose a woman to be practising common prostitution, if she does not voluntarily sign a paper stating she is willing to be examined, to lay an information before a magistrate, and proceed in the ordinary course before that magistrate. You would hardly call that apprehension on suspicion, would you? Certainly, I should call that apprehending a woman on suspicion. It is apprehending a woman on grounds which, in the opinion of the policeman, place her under suspicion of practising prostitution without acknowledgment. I am aware that policemen have no power of using any compulsion for making a woman enter into an engagement subjecting herself to examination. I am aware that that can only be done before a magistrate, and after such inquiries as he might hold; but the policeman has it in his power, whether he uses the power or not, to use threats to induce the woman to enter into this engagement.
I have no wish to raise any question on the narrow meaning of the word “apprehend,” but as you have said it is a violation of personal liberty, I will ask you whether you are aware that the liberty of such women, as of all other persons, is protected by law, until interrupted under the authority of law? Yes, I did not make that distinction as I ought to have done. I admit its relevancy.
When you said that a prostitute ought to have the power of defending herself before the ordinary tribunals, I think you would admit that she has that power, because she is brought before the magistrate, and that magistrate is not only free but bound in duty to hear everything that a woman has got to say, and judge of the evidence before deciding her case as he would in any other? That depends on whether it is explained to her that she may be defended by counsel.
The attack on personal liberty is subject to those usual grounds of protection which the law gives to all parties? It may be so.
In the case, which is not only a possible case but I fear from the evidence we have had the not very uncommon one of disease being communicated to innocent wives and innocent children, would you really trust to the power of divorce as the only remedy in such akcase? shouldkyou not endeavour at least to resort to prevention as being better than trusting to so uncertain a cure? I think that if prevention is to be applied at all, it should be applied to the man, who alone has the power of committing this offence in a direct way. When a woman infects anyone the man must always be a consenting party to running the risk: it is only a man who having been infected himself can communicate infection to an innocent person, and therefore if there is any argument for prevention, it should be for preventive measures applied to men who infect these women, and not to the women themselves.
Do you know or have you ever thought of any process by which prevention could be applied to men? I think that it could. No doubt it would fail very often; but inasmuch as it certainly does happen frequently that women are brought under the operation of these Acts through being watched by the police, and its being ascertained that they frequent certain houses along with men, the police can equally ascertain who the men are who go l with them; and when they find that men have been seen to frequent along with prostitutes houses of this description, those men might be compelled to undergo examination for a certain period afterwards.
Am I to understand you seriously to propose that in this country we should adopt a system of espionage over every man seen going into a brothel, and that men seen to go into a brothel should be subject all alike to personal examination? I am not suggesting espionage; but if it is already in practice on women who go to brothels, with a view of ascertaining whether a woman is a prostitute by her being seen there, I think the woman should not be singled out to be subject to examination, but the men should be subjected to it also, or even if the women were not subjected the men might be, but if the one is, certainly I should say both.
Therefore you do, as I understand, recommend such a system of espionage as I have described? I do not recommend it, because I do not recommend the Acts at all; I do not recommend that there be any espionage practised upon women, and therefore not on men either.
Domyou notmrecommend it to this extent, if any remedy is attempted for the evils complained of, it should be done in that shape? If any preventive measures are to be taken I should say it should be in that shape. But penal measures, or remedial measures by means of hospitals, could be adopted independently of that, increasing the hospitals, and increasing the facilities for admission of those who are diseased, and laying severe penalties on the man who communicates this disease to an innocent woman.
If the Legislature did enact with a view to preventing such cases as this, that the woman affected should have the remedy of divorce, would your knowledge of human nature lead you to the conclusion that that remedy would be resorted to in one case in a hundred, or one case in a thousand? A good many more than that, though probably not the majority.
william nathaniel massey:Are you aware that for a man to give his wife a disease of that description would be adjudged cruelty by the Court of Divorce, and would be a ground for a divorce, at all events a mensa? Yes, but not complete dissolution of the matrimonial tie.
sir john pakington:Would you make it so? Yes.
william nathaniel massey:You would make it a vinculo? Yes, a vinculo, accompanied with heavy pecuniary damages for the benefit of the sufferers, the wife or children.
sir john pakington:We have received very strong evidence before this Commission, that at one, at least, I think more, but at one of the most populous places to which these Acts apply, one result has been that whereas there were previously hundreds of children—when I say children, girls under 13, 14, and 15 years of age—practising habitual prostitution, that since these Acts have passed that class has almost, if not quite, disappeared; now, assuming that evidence to be correct, would it reconcile your mind to the operation of the Acts producing so blessed an effect as that? It would not remove the objections by any means. I have not examined into the statistics of the question, which I have no doubt are very contradictory, because very opposite results are stated at different places, with the effect of creating very great distrust in statistics altogether on that subject. In the experience of those countries where Acts similar to these have been very much longer in operation, it is certainly found that a vast quantity of prostitutes escape the operation of them altogether; that the process to which women are subjected by it is so extremely offensive and odious, that there is a great quantity of clandestine prostitution; and therefore it may well happen—I do not pretend knowledge on the subject—that the introduction of these Acts in places where they have not prevailed before, may be attended with a considerable diminution of avowed prostitution, without any diminution of real prostitution. I may now say, as I did not say it before, that another reason which appears to me very strong against the system of these Acts is, that they have a decided tendency to increase the class of prostitutes. Even if it is only by the fact that a considerable number of them are withdrawn from their profession periodically, the vacancy or gap that is thus made, as the demand calls forth a supply, has a natural tendency to be filled up by additional prostitutes being brought into the profession. That is independent of another argument, which may also be urged, that in so far as the Acts are supposed to afford increased security to the men who frequent these women, it is liable to produce an increased demand for prostitutes, and therefore bring forth in that way an increased supply. But independently of that, which is an argument I have no doubt the Commission are perfectly familiar with—the mere taking away forcibly from the competition of a certain per-centage of the prostitutes for a certain time, naturally tends to have that vacancy filled up by healthy persons from other quarters.
I think I may ask you whether that is not rather a fear than any fact established by proof? As I have already mentioned, I have not studied the details, and cannot say that I know as a matter of fact that it is so, though accounts I have read, and which appear to me reliable, as to what takes place on the Continent, appear to me very strong evidence that that is actually the case there. Whether it is the case here may be matter of dispute. It may perhaps not be the case yet—it may be the case hereafter, though not the case already, or it may be the case without being detected. I know nothing practically about the matter, but it appears to me that there is the tendency, and that the law which produces it is as strong as any law in political economy.
Excuse me saying that I think your answer to my question about children did not quite meet the question. I asked you whether, assuming such to be the case, having first told you the strong evidence we had, whether that fact would reconcile you in any degree to the operation of the Acts, and your answer was that you distrusted such statistics. I did not ask you that, but assuming those to be accurate, whether such an important fact would reconcile you in any degree to the operation of the Acts? If we are to enter into one part of the question only, the degree of efficacy of the Acts for their professed purpose, of course any increased efficacy furnishes an additional argument for the Acts. But no argument that can be produced of that kind, or I believe ever has been produced, would seem to me to overbear the very strong arguments of other kinds against the operation of such Acts, therefore my opinion would not be favourable to the Acts, supposing the circumstances you mention to be finally confirmed.
If the existence of such a fact would not reconcile you to thenprinciplesnof the Acts, would it not at least make you thankful that such a result had ensued? Of course anybody must be thankful for such a result, from whatever cause.
In following up the same part of the subject, may I ask you whether you think it would be inconsistent with due regard to the liberty of the subject, if such young creatures as I have referred to, and you must be aware that such must be the case in all our crowded populations, if the law authorised the detention of such young creatures as I have described, when once convicted of prostitution, in homes or refuges for their subsequent reclamation? I am not prepared to say that might not be a good measure. I perhaps would go further for the protection of extremely young persons than most people would. I should not be adverse to strengthening and extending the laws which at present exist against intercourse of any kind with girls below a certain age. I should not be at all adverse to raising considerably the age below which it should be prohibited.
We have had strong evidence with regard to the moral effects of these Acts, and a number of cases in which through the agency of these Acts, by first being taken into a hospital, where moral effects are produced as well as physical, and then being sent to a refuge, numbers of young women have been reclaimed from vice and restored to a virtuous life, and in many instances married. Would such a fact as that reconcile you to the operation of these Acts? I think otheseo effects might just as well be produced by the mere existence of hospitals, by receiving them into hospitals, having proper hospital accommodation for them, and when there having them attended by those benevolent and excellent people who undertake their reclamation.
Are you now contemplating voluntary hospitals or hospitals supported by the State? Either. I have already stated I should object to hospitals supported by the State for this particular disease exclusively, but if contagious diseases generally were considered a proper subject for the State to take under its charge, I should not object to those being included.
Supposing these abandoned women did not go into them, what would you do then? Suppose they did not go in, I do not see how anything could be done.
Then your remedy would fail? Yes; but the women who would not go in would be those on whom the remedy would be the least likely to be effectual.
Supposing they did go in and would not stay when they were there, what would you do? I should not be prepared to give any compulsory power to detain them.
You would let them come out and spread disease right and left, rather than do good? I do not think it is the business of legislation of this kind to take special care either of the women who practise this profession, or of the men who frequent them. I apprehend that the real object for which these Acts are most defensible, if defensible at all, is the protection of the innocent, and as long as people are not liable to be infected without exposing themselves to it, I should say you do enough for them if you offer them the means of cure provided they accept it.
We have very strong evidence before us to this effect, that the Acts in certain localities have greatly diminished the number of common prostitutes, and have had the effect of raising the lowest and most demoralised portion of that class to a comparatively more decent and more respectable state of life—would not you acknowledge that to be a good effect? Stated as you have stated it, any such effect, however produced, is good pro tanto.
I am only putting to you that which we have before us in evidence. Precisely so, but I should consider, if any effect of that sort is produced, it is produced by a process, not applicable specially to prostitution, but to the criminal and vicious classes, the dangerous classes altogether, all of whom may have some amount of good done them if attention is paid to them by benevolent persons, or, it may be by persons employed by the Government. It would not be beyond the proper function of the State to take means of making these persons understand that they are not considered as totally unworthy of any kind of regard or consideration by the rest of their fellow-creatures, but that it is the object to reclaim them, and do them as much good as their condition makes them susceptible of. Such measures, at all events, might be applied to the dangerous classes generally, much more than ever has been done yet. I should not see the least objection to applying such measures to prostitutes also, but that would not require Acts of this description.
We have before us evidence of such a nature as I think hardly you or anybody else whose attention has not been called to it can imagine, with regard to the state not only of degradation but of physical disease, amounting to absolute rottenness, that the women have been found in in the neighbourhood of our camps, I think if I remember right such a state as almost to lead to the idea of falling to pieces; now looking at the fact of a human being in such a horrible state as this, would you leave those women to rot and die under the hedges, rather than pass such Acts as these to save them? I do not think it is quite fair to put the question exactly in that manner, because I am inclined to think that I should approve very much more decided measures of that sort with regard to the destitute classes generally than are now in practice. I should say, if you found a person in this last stage of consumption, or any other very wretched disease, it might be advisable and right to lay hold of that person and give him or her relief or proper medical treatment, and under proper medical regulation, and whatever relief of that sort I gave to others I would give to these women. What I object to is having special legislation for those women, which would have the effect of singling them out for a special cure, to which persons with other equally bad diseases are not subject.
I apprehend that I may take your answer as being in effect in the affirmative. You would rather leave these women to die and rot under hedges than pass these Acts and save them? I do not think that a fair way of putting the question, because I think they could be just as well saved without these Acts. I would do a great deal for the purpose of affording relief to persons who were found in an extremely bad state of disease, and in a state of destitution. I would not do more for those than others; and certainly the fact that there are such persons would not reconcile me to these Acts, because I think these Acts do a great deal of mischief in other ways, which is not at all necessary to be done for the sake of affording relief to those people, without giving it in common to all others who have an equal claim to it.
I apprehend that I can take that as an affirmative answer. My inference is that you would trust in such a case to the ordinary operation of the poor law?[*] I have not such a very high opinion of the administration of the poor laws as not to think it admits of great improvement in that respect as in others, and such improvement I should be glad to see, though I am not prepared to say exactly what it should be.
But the poor law has long been in operation and has not had the effect of rescuing these poor creatures from suffering, therefore is it not a fair inference that they are insufficient to meet that case? That is a defect in the poor law, but some other means should be in practice for the relief of disease Disease is a proper subject for a special branch of administration.
You would suggest that some remedy should be afforded for so horrible an evil, but you would rather it should not be the remedy we are now trusting to? Precisely.
Though that remedy has been proved signally successful? Yes, but if it has been signally successful, I think it has been by means and in a manner which ought equally to be applied to other diseases, if applied at all, and it would be equally effectual without the Acts.
We have before us evidence to the effect that from the fear of coming under the cognizance of the police, these Acts have had the effect of deterring young women from practising that clandestine prostitution which they previously did. Now assuming this evidence to be consistent with the facts. I would ask you whether you do not consider, that whatever your objections to thepprinciplespof these Acts are, they have produced good results? Undoubtedly that result taken by itself, must be considered a good result by every one. It is, however, to be weighed against the probability that in other cases an opposite result might be produced, for which also strong presumption can be shown.
You stated an opinion, and it is an opinion which other witnesses also strongly stated, that the examination of the persons which is authorised by the Acts is very degrading to those women, that is your opinion? I dare say there are some of them to whom nothing is degrading, they are so degraded already, but there is reason to believe that there are many of them who have a considerable quantity of modesty left, and to whom therefore it is degrading.
Your answer rather anticipates the next question I was going to put to you, which is whether taking the case of a woman who submits herself daily to prostitution in three or four instances, and lives that miserable life, which do you think is the real degradation to that woman; is it the life that she leads, or the fact that she subsequently undergoes examination in order to cure the evils which have arisen from that disgraceful life? I think both are degrading, but degradation for degradation, that which is compulsory seems to me always more degrading in its effects on the character than what is done voluntarily.
Am I to understand from that answer that you think the fact of such an examination is more degrading to such a woman than the debauched life she leads? I think it adds considerably to the degradation already caused by the debauched life.
sir walter james:It is an additional degradation? An additional degradation.
anthony john mundella:If we have evidence before us that many young people have been removed from prostitution in the streets by the operation of the Acts, are you not of opinion that we might also remove those young persons from the streets without subjecting them to this examination and making them healthy for prostitution? Certainly I think so. I think that what removes them from the streets is the moral effect which is produced in their minds, and the chance of producing this effect is likely to be lessened by subjecting them to an offensive and what must be considered a tyrannical operation by the force of law. I should think that must tend in some degree to counteract the good effect which no doubt was produced by the moral influences that were brought to bear on them during their detention, which are no doubt the real cause of reclaiming them so far as they are reclaimed, and therefore they might be applied more effectually without the machinery of the Acts.
You are familiar with the compulsory education which exists on the continent and elsewhere, and have written a good deal on the duties of the State towards young children. Should you think it any interference with personal liberty, if girls under a certain age found practising prostitution were taken up and put into some industrial home? I certainly do not think there would be any objection to that. I think the objection to the interference with personal liberty begins when the age of education, properly so called, ceases. Where a person is under age, and in a position which must counteract very much all the good influences of education, and substitute bad ones, it is always open to the consideration of the State whether they cannot withdraw young persons from those bad influences. I have already mentioned that I would go still further, and be inclined to extend very much the operation of the penal laws which now exist against intercourse with girls under age. I would raise the age below which that is an offence by law, very considerably, though I have not considered up to what point.
I was going to ask you up to what age you would think the State would be justified in interfering to prevent prostitution? I should think certainly up to 17 or 18, up to the age when what is commonly called education ordinarily finishes. Possibly it might be extended with propriety until the girl was legally of age, but on that I would not undertake to give an opinion.
Do you think it any interference with the liberty of the subject to prevent solicitation in the streets? No; I think that is the duty of the police, in order to preserve the order of the streets.
Sir John Pakington has referred to the wretched women who haunt the camps.[*]Do you see any means of clearing the camps from those wretched women, without subjecting them to these examinations and healing them for the purpose of prostitution with soldiers? That is a matter of police and the military discipline of camps, which I am not conversant with. I should think much stronger things than that are justified by military discipline.
As I have understood your evidence, from what I heard in cross-examination, I gather that you would attack this evil of prostitution rather in its cause than deal with its consequences? I would deal with the consequences by means of hospitals, and combat the disease after it has been contracted, only taking care not to do this in such a way as would seem to take the persons who have that disease under the special protection of the State in a degree in which others persons equally diseased were not taken.
If we have evidence before us that brothel-keepers are constantly communicated with by the police, and that beer-houses and public-houses are used as brothels in large numbers, and are well known to the local authorities, do not you think the State would be justified in interfering with that class of persons? Clearly it ought to be a forfeiture of the license of a public-house or beer-house to use it as a brothel.
But suppose it is not a beer-house, would you prosecute brothel-keepers? That is an extremely difficult question, and I would rather not give a positive opinion about it, because so many pros and cons have occurred to me when I have thought about it that I have found it very difficult to make up my mind.
robert applegarth:You conceive it to be the duty of the State to deal with girls and boys up to the age of 16; may I ask you whether you consider it to be the duty of the State to insist that children should be sent to school up to that age? I cannot pretend to say exactly up to what age. I do think the State has a right, and is bound whenever circumstances admit, to insist on all children who are born into the community receiving education up to a certain point, and also to give facilities for educating them still higher.
And I suppose you consider that if the State did its duty in that respect, we should have in addition to better educated people, a higher standard of morality amongst the people? That is one of the greatest reasons for desiring it.
And therefore we should probably have less prostitution? I should think so.
Is it your opinion that sending children to work at a young age instead of to school leads to immoral practices, and ultimately prostitution? I should think it extremely probable from what I have heard and read. I have no knowledge on the subject.
In your opinion, if the laws in existence against seduction and bastardy and in other respects were strengthened and made of real practical use, would it have a tendency to diminish prostitution? I do not know whether it would have a tendency to reduce prostitution, but that is not the only thing to be considered, because it might have a tendency to increase other kinds of illicit intercourse. When the laws relating to bastardy made a greater attempt to enforce the obligation upon the seducer than is the case now, they did produce very demoralizing effects upon many women.[*] I do not mean to give an express opinion as to how far the law might properly go on that subject. At present my feeling is against any attempt, however much it may be agreeable to one’s moral feelings, to restrain illicit intercourse in that way.
Whilst you are opposed to the Acts, I understand you are not opposed to an attempt being made by the State to diminish the amount of disease by providing hospitals? Yes, providing always it is not done with special favour to this class of diseases, but forms part of a general system, such a system as it may be thought advisable by the State to adopt, with a view of getting rid of serious and especially contagious diseases, as far as possible, throughout the community.
And would you advise that there should be provided special Lock Hospitals, or that people suffering from this disease should be treated in lock wards in general hospitals? I should prefer lock wards; because lock hospitals are a special provision for this particular class of disease, and that appears to me to be undesirable.
Do you think providing Lock Hospitals for the treatment of this disease would have a tendency to induce inquiries on the part of young children which parents would be ashamed to answer, and thus produce a bad moral effect? That might be one objection; but the grand objection I have to it is to any measure taken specially with reference to this class of disease. The general impression it would make, however contrary to the intention of those who support it, would be that the State patronises the class of practices by which these diseases are engendered, since it considers those who contract qtheseq diseases as worthy of more attention, and takes more pains to remedy the consequences, than those who have other diseases equally serious.
Is it your opinion that these Acts have done any physical good at all? I have really no means of judging. I am not acquainted with the details. No doubt the evidence taken before this Commission will be expected to throw light on this subject.
Is it your opinion that morally they have done harm? I cannot tell whether they have actually done harm, but it seems to me their natural effect is to do harm.
You think that the tendency of them is to do moral injury? I do think so, because I hardly think it possible for thoughtless people not to infer, when special precautions are taken to make a course which is generally considered worthy of disapprobation safer than it would naturally be, that it cannot be considered very bad by the law, and possibly may be considered as either not bad at all, or at any rate a necessary evil.
APPENDICES
Folio 1r of “On Marriage” by Harriet Taylor.
[[*] ]29 Victoria, c. 35 (1866).
[a-a]711 , in point of fact [transcriber’s error?]
[b-b]+712
[c-c]711think
[[*] ]27 & 28 Victoria, c. 80 (1864), which extended 18 & 19 Victoria, c. 126 (1855).
[d-d]711liability [transcriber’s error?]
[e]711 to
[f]711the
[g-g]711examination
[h-h]711 Those
[i-i]711 consequences
[j-j]711those
[[*] ]See pp. 351 and 352 above.
[k-k]711case, should
[l]711 there
[m-m]711not you
[n-n]711principle
[o-o]711 those
[[*] ]4 & 5 William IV, c. 76 (1834).
[p-p]711principle
[[*] ]See p. 366 above.
[[*] ]The former laws include 18 Elizabeth, c. 3 (1576), 6 George II, c. 31 (1733), and 49 George III, c. 68 (1809), laws in effect include 4 & 5 William IV, c. 76 (1834), Sects 69-72, and 7 & 8 Victoria, c. 101 (1844).
[q-q]711 those [transcriber’s error?]
24: JSM, Women’s Suffrage [3] 12 JANUARY, 1871
John Stuart Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XXIX - Public and Parliamentary Speeches Part II July 1869 - March 1873, ed. John M. Robson and Bruce L. Kinzer (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1988). Chapter: 150.: Women’s Suffrage [3] 12 JANUARY, 1871
Accessed from oll.libertyfund.org/title/263/53362 on 2008-05-22
The online edition of the Collected Works is published under licence from the copyright holder, The University of Toronto Press. ©2006 The University of Toronto Press. All rights reserved. No part of this material may be reproduced in any form or medium without the permission of The University of Toronto Press.
150.
Women’s Suffrage [3]
12 JANUARY, 1871Speech of the Late John Stuart Mill at the Great Meeting in Favour of Women’s Suffrage, Held in the Music Hall, Edinburgh, January 12, 1871 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh National Society for Women’s Suffrage, 1873). A full report of the meeting, including the text of Mill’s speech, is also found in Women’s Suffrage. Great Meeting in Edinburgh in the Music Hall, on 12th January 1871, under the Auspices of the Edinburgh Branch of the National Society for Women’s Suffrage (Edinburgh: printed Greig, 1871), pp. 7-12, and 22 (which supplies the text for Mill’s response to the vote of thanks); also reported fully on 13 January in The Scotsman, and in abbreviated form in The Times. The public meeting was held in the evening, with a large audience of both sexes. Duncan McLaren was called to the Chair. After the reading of letters of regret and the annual report (in which mention of Mill brought applause), McLaren indicated that the next and leading motion would be moved by Mill, saying “the audience owed a greater debt of gratitude” to Mill than “they were perhaps aware of, because he had come down from London in this inclement weather for the sole purpose of being present on this occasion, and his engagements were such that he was obliged to be off again in the morning. (Applause.)” (Scotsman.) Mill was received with prolonged cheering, the audience rising and waving their hats and handkerchiefs.
if there is a truth in politics which is fundamental—which is the basis of all free government—it is that when a part of the nation are the sole possessors of power, the interest of that part gets all the serious attention. This does not necessarily imply any active oppression. All that it implies is the natural tendency of the average man to feel what touches self of vastly greater importance than what directly touches only other people. This is the deep-seated and ineradicable reason why women will never be justly treated until they obtain the franchise. They suffer, assuredly, much injustice by the operation of law. But suppose this changed; even then—even if there were no ground of complaint against the laws, there would be a break-down in their execution as long as men alone have a voice in choosing and in removing the officers of Government.
All our recent constitutional reforms, and the whole creed of reformers, are grounded on the fact that the suffrage is needed for self-protection. All experience proves that if one part of the community is held in subjection by another part, it is not trusted with the ordinary means of self-defence, but is left dependent on the good-will and pleasure of those who are more privileged, the most vital interests of the subject-portion are certain to be, if not recklessly trampled upon, at least postponed to almost anything else.
The treatment of women is certainly no exception to the rule. They have neither equal laws nor an equal administration of them. The laws treat them as they could not long be treated if they had the suffrage; and even if the laws were equal, the administration of the laws is not. Police magistrates and criminal judges cannot be exceptionally bad men; they are not chosen for their bad qualities; they must be thought, by those who appoint them, to represent fairly, or better than fairly, the moral feelings of average men. Yet, what do we see? For an atrocious assault by a man upon a woman, especially if she has the misfortune to be his wife, he is either let off with an admonition, or he is solemnly told that he has committed a grave offence, for which he must be severely punished, and then he gets as many weeks or months of imprisonment as a man who has taken five pounds’ worth of property gets years.
We are told that the good feelings of men are a sufficient protection to women. Those who say so can never, one would suppose, look into the police and law reports. If good feeling aof mena does not protect women against being beaten and kicked to death’s door every day of their lives, and at last beaten and kicked to actual death, by their special guardians and protectors, can we expect that it will secure them against injuries less revolting to humanity? Most men, it will be said, are incapable of committing such horrible brutality. Perhaps so; but it seems they are quite capable of letting it be committed. If women who are maltreated by their husbands found a defender in every other man who knew of it, they might have some chance of protection without the weapon of the suffrage. But it is never so; slaves did not find it so; serfs did not find it so; conquered nations do not find it so; and neither do women. There are many men who would not consciously do them any wrong; but there must be a great moral improvement in human nature before most men will exert themselves to prevent or to redress wrongs committed by others under the sanction of law. And of these two things—the suffrage for women, and a grand moral improvement in human nature—the suffrage, to my thinking, is likely to be the soonest obtained. (Cheers.) I could afford to stop here. I have made out an ample case. There is a portion of the population, amounting in number to somewhat more than half, to whom the law and its administration do not fulfil their duty, do not afford even the bodily protection due to all—this half happening to be that which is not admitted to the suffrage. Their most important interests are neglected—I do not say from deliberate intention, but simply because their interest is not so near to the feelings of the ruling half as the ruling half’s own interest. bThe remedy is plain: putb women in the position which will make their interest the rulers’ own interest. Make it as important to politicians to redress the grievances of women as it is to redress those of any class which is largely represented in Parliament.
If nothing more than this could be said in support of their claim to the suffrage, no claim could be more fully made out. (Cheers.) And if the claim is just, so also is it strictly constitutional. One of the recognised doctrines of the British Constitution is that representation is co-extensive with direct taxation. The practice of the Constitution, it is true, for a long time did not correspond with the theory; but it has been made to conform to it at last, in cities and boroughs, provided the tax-payer is of the male sex; but if a woman, she may be the largest tax-payer in the place, and the person of greatest practical ability besides; no matter, she has no vote. This is something very like punishing her for being a woman. The conditions which in the eye of the law and of the Constitution confer a title to a voice in public affairs are all fulfilled by her, with the single exception of having been born a male. This one deficiency, which I humbly submit she cannot help—(laughter)—is visited on her by the privation of a right as important to her as to any man, and even more important, since those who are physically weakest require protection the most. This is not an injury only, but an indignity. I grant that those who uphold it are in general quite unconscious of its being so; but this comes from the inveterate habit of having one rule and measure for all that concerns women, and another for everything else.
Men are so much accustomed to think of women only as women, that they forget to think of them as human. (Hear, hear.) It is not only for their own sake that women ought to have the suffrage, but also for the sake of the public. It is for the interest of us all, both men and women, and of those who are to come after us. The reasons that may be given for this are many, but I may content myself with two. One, and the strongest, is what we sometimes hear unthinkingly urged as an argument on the other side—because women have so much power already. (Laughter.) It is true they have much power. They have the power which depends on personal influence over men. They have the power of cajolery—(laughter)—and often that of a petted favourite; power sadly inadequate to their own just and necessary protection against wrong, but sufficient at times to produce only too much effect upon the public conduct of the men with whom they are connected. But as this power, instead of being open and avowed, is indirect and unrecognised, no provision is made for its being rightly used. As it is conventionally assumed that women possess no power outside the domestic department, the power which they do and always will possess is exercised without the necessary knowledge, and without the proper responsibility.
It having been decreed that public matters are not a woman’s business, her mind is carefully turned away from whatsoever would give her a knowledge of them, and she is taught to care nothing about them—that is, until some private interest or private likings or dislikings come in, when of course these private feelings have it all their own way, there being no public principles or convictions to control them. The power, therefore, which women now have in public affairs is power without knowledge. It is also power without responsibility. A man’s wife is very often the real prompter either of what he does well and nobly, or of what he does foolishly or selfishly; but as she gets no credit for the one, so she is not held accountable for the other; if she is selfish, a very little art suffices to exempt her from censure though she succeeds in compassing her ends; if she is simple and well meaning, she does not feel bound to inform herself, so as to have a creasonable opinion on what is solely thec man’s business, though all the while her ignorant prepossessions or her natural partialities may be acting as a most pernicious bias on what is supposed to be his better judgment. From this combination of absence of instruction and absence of responsibility, it comes to pass that, though women are acknowledged to have, as a rule, stronger conscientious feelings than men, it is but a very small minority of women who have anything that deserves the name of a public conscience. How great an evil this isd , there needs no argument to show. What is the greatest obstacle which the friends of political and social improvement have to struggle with—the drag which is constantly obstructing their efforts and disappointing their hopes? Is it not the weakness of the average citizen’s political conscience? Is not this the special danger and failure to which epopular institutionse are exposed—that the elector does not sufficiently feel his obligations to the public, and either stays away from the poll, or goes there and votes on the prompting of some private interest? And how can we hope that he will learn to postpone private interests to public, while he has beside him, in the person of his closest intimate, one who has been trained to have no feeling whatever of his duties to the public, but who has the keenest feeling of his duties to his family, and who, even without intending it, cannot but sway his mind strongly in the direction of the only interests which she understands and appreciates? (Applause.) It must be remembered, too, that this is a growing evil. Time was when the wife was very little a companion of her husband—their lives were apart; the associates of his leisure and of his recreations were other men. But now the home and its inhabitants are so much to a man, that no other influence can, as a rule, compete with theirs. The time, therefore, is come when, if we would have public virtue in our men, we must have it in our women. (Hear, hear, and applause.) And how can a woman have a conscience about the public good, if she is told, and believes, that it is no business whatever of hers? Give women the same rights as men, and the same obligations will follow. Instead of hanging a dead weight on men’s public conscience, their greater general susceptibility of moral feeling will make their habitual influence a most valuable support to the honest performance of public duty. (Loud applause.) This, then, is one of the reasons why it is for the good of all that women should have an admitted right to take part in public affairs. Another is the vast amount of brain power and practical business talent which now runs to waste for want of an outlet into those great fields of public usefulness, in which no one, I suppose, will pretend that such qualities are not very much wanted. Few men, I suspect, are sufficiently aware of the great amount of administrative ability possessed by women; for want of considering that the essential qualities which lead to practical success are the same in what are called small things as in great.
It is my belief that, in all those parts of the business of life which depend on the vigilant superintendence and accurate estimation of details, women, when they have the necessary special knowledge, are better administrators than men. And I am now speaking, not of women as they might be—not as some improved mode of education would make them—but of women as they now are, and of the capacities which they have already displayed. If an example is wanted of what women’s powers of organisation can accomplish in public life, I appeal to one of the most striking facts of modern times, the Sanitary Commission in the late American War. The history of that Commission ought to be as well known all over the world as it is in America. From the beginning, and throughout, it was women’s work. It was planned, organised, and worked by women. The Government was jealous of them at first, but the hopeless inferiority of its own arrangements made it soon glad to make over the first place to them. Not only had such work never been so well done, but nobody had ever supposed it possible that it could be so well done. I am aware that this argument would carry us much further than the suffrage; but I suppose it will be acknowledged that those who are themselves eminently capable of practical business, must be fit to take a share in the choosing of those to whom practical business is to be entrusted. The ability which is specially required for the exercise of the suffrage—that of selecting the persons most capable for the work that is to be done—is one of the qualifications for business in which women have always excelled. Great queens have in nothing shown themselves greater than in their choice of Ministers. When the ladies of the Sanitary Commission wanted men to help them, they knew the right men and how to use them; and they distinguished themselves not less by the work which they caused to be done, than by that which they did in their own persons. (Applause.) These are some of the reasons which make it equally just and expedient that the suffrage should be extended to women. It must, at the same time, be borne in mind that, by admitting them to the suffrage, no other question is in the smallest degree prejudged.
Supposing it true, what some people are so fond of affirming, that women have nothing to complain of, and that the vast majority of them do not desire any change; if so, giving them the suffrage can do nobody harm, and would afford them an opportunity of showing their perfect contentment with their present lot, in a manner beyond the reach of dispute. (Applause.)
If what we are told is true, that women ought to be, and always must and will be, in a state of domestic and social subordination to men, why, then, they require the suffrage so much the more, in order that the sovereignty of men over them may be exercised under the fitting responsibility. None need political protection so much as those who are in domestic dependence, since none are so much exposed to wrong. On every possible supposition, therefore, they have a claim to the suffrage. And we live at a period of human development, when the just claims of large numbers cannot be permanently resisted.
The whole movement of modern society, from the middle ages until now, greatly accelerated in the present century, points in the direction of the political enfranchisement of women. Their exclusion is a last remnant of the old bad state of society—the regimen of privileges and disabilities. All other monopolies are going or gone. The whole spirit of the times is against predetermining by law that one set of people shall be allowed by right of birth to have or to do what another set shall not, by any amount of exertion or superiority of ability, be allowed to attain. (Applause.)
If nature has established an ineradicable and insuperable difference in the capacities and qualifications of the two sexes, nature can take care of itself. What nature has decided may safely be left to nature. But when we find people making themselves uneasy for fear that nature’s purposes should be frustrated unless law comes to her assistance, we may be pretty certain that it is not nature they are so careful about, but law pretending to be nature. To all such pretences the growing improvement of mankind is making them more and more adverse.
I do not know how long a time it may require to get rid of women’s disabilities. Great changes in the habits and opinions of mankind are always slow. But of one thing I am certain—that when once they have been got rid of—when their true aspect is no longer disguised by the varnish of custom and habit—they will appear in the retrospect so devoid of any rational foundation, and so contradictory to the principles by which society now professes to guide itself, that the difficulty which will be felt will be to conceive how they can ever have been defended, and by what possible arguments they can ever have been made to appear plausible. (Loud cheers.) fThe resolution I have to propose is—“That the ownership or occupation of lands or house being the basis of representation in this country, it is unjust in principle to make sex a ground of disqualification, thereby excluding a large number of intelligent persons well qualified to exercise the electoral franchise; and the recent school board elections in England have proved not only that women are desirous to exercise this right, but that they can do so without the slightest inconvenience.”f (Loud and prolonged cheering.)
[The resolution was adopted unanimously, and then Professor Masson,1in a long speech that obtained a mixed reception, moved that the meeting thank Jacob Bright for his efforts in Parliament, and petition Parliament in favour of his bill, authorizing the Chair to sign the petition in the name of the meeting. The resolution was approved but not unanimously. Professor Kelland2moved the vote of thanks to Mill, commenting that he “was known wherever the English language was spoken as one of our greatest philosophical thinkers—a thinker who had set his mind to knock down what was opposed to the progress of right and liberty.” The motionwas seconded by the Rev. Dr. Wallace,3who referred to Mill as one “to whose mind every one who had the slightest pretension to culture and intelligence must gladly acknowledge himself under obligations of gratitude which could not well be expressed; a great and original philosopher, who had not speculated for his own amusement, but who had earnestly directed all his great gifts to questions and to enterprises bearing directly upon the highest welfare of mankind—a man who all his lifetime had set before himself the noblest objects, and who had striven to promote these, not by appeal to passion or to prejudice, but by a fairness and an honesty of reasoning that was equalled only by the transcendent ability which he had exercised in that direction. (Applause.) Sure he was that, whatever difference of opinion there might be—and difference of opinion might be expected in so large an assemblage as the present—with regard to the conclusions Mr. Mill had advocated before them, there could be but one sentiment of admiration and of gratification at having seen Mr. Mill amongst them, and having listened to an example of the fair, and close, and honest reasoning which he had made popular in this country, and by so doing, had contributed very largely to the development of an intellectual veracity among us which was not one of the least important virtues in these days, when there were so many temptations to sophistry and to the sinking down of the human intellect into ways that were not worthy of its dignity. (Applause.)” The motion was “warmly received, the bulk of the assemblage rising to their feet and cheering heartily.”]
gMr. Stuart Mill said—I feel most strongly the kind manner in which my name has been received by the meeting, not that I think for an instant that I deserve a tenth part of the kind things said of me by the proposer and seconder of the motion; but I cannot refrain from saying that even much greater trouble than I have been put to in coming from London here would have been much more than requited by the sight of so grand a meeting as this. I know that the cause owes an immense debt to Scotland, and in Scotland to Edinburgh, and I cannot close these few words without moving the thanks of the meeting to a gentleman to whom, more perhaps than to any one in Edinburgh, the cause owes the most—Mr. Duncan McLaren. (Applausehand hissesh .) No one who has exerted himself in this cause has done more to promote it than that gentleman, and I may add, the ladies of his family.4 (Hear, hear.) To their exertions may be ascribed the rapid success which has attended this movement, not only in Edinburgh but throughout Scotland. In moving a vote of thanks to Mr. McLaren for his conduct in the chair, I may also add, for his past services in this cause.g (Applause.)
[This vote of thanks having been passed and acknowledged, another was given to the Ladies’ Committee, who had organized the meeting, and the proceedings ended “with loud cheers for Mr. Mill.”]
[a-a]+TT
[b-b]Scot But how is this to be remedied? Put
[c-c]Scot rational opinion upon what she is told is
[d]Scot to man
[e-e]Scot public movements
[f-f]+W] Scot Mr. Mill concluded, amid great applause, by proposing the following resolution: . . . as W . . . land or houses . . . exercise the franchise . . . England prove . . . that right . . . as W
[1 ]David Masson (1822-1907), Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature at Edinburgh since 1865.
[2 ]Philip Kelland (1808-79), Professor of Mathematics at Edinburgh since 1838.
[3 ]Robert Wallace (1831-99), rector of Old Greyfriars, Edinburgh, since 1868, and examiner in philosophy at St. Andrews since 1866.
[g-g]+W,Scot [Scot in summary]
[h-h]+Scot
[4 ]In addition to Priscilla McLaren, Duncan’s wife (see No. 146, n2), Mill is referring specially to his daughter (by a previous marriage) Agnes (1837-1913); both of them were on the platform, Priscilla McLaren as President and Agnes McLaren as Secretary of the Edinburgh Branch of the National Society for Women’s Suffrage.
25: JSM, Discussion of the Contagious Diseases Acts 23 FEBRUARY, 1871
John Stuart Mill, The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, Volume XXIX - Public and Parliamentary Speeches Part II July 1869 - March 1873, ed. John M. Robson and Bruce L. Kinzer (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1988). Chapter: 152.: Discussion of the Contagious Diseases Acts 23 FEBRUARY, 1871
Accessed from oll.libertyfund.org/title/263/53366 on 2008-05-22
The online edition of the Collected Works is published under licence from the copyright holder, The University of Toronto Press. ©2006 The University of Toronto Press. All rights reserved. No part of this material may be reproduced in any form or medium without the permission of The University of Toronto Press.
152.
Discussion of the Contagious Diseases Acts
23 FEBRUARY, 1871Sessional Proceedings of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, IV (1870-71), 269-70. Mill, a representative on the Council from the Economy and Trade Department, spoke on a motion in Council to postpone consideration of a resolution, passed at the Newcastle Congress, on the Contagious Diseases Acts until the Royal Commission had reported. He was preceded by Frederic Hill (1803-96), an Inspector of Prisons, who, strongly opposed to the policy of the Acts, spoke in favour of the postponement.
mr. john stuart millalso acquiesced, at the same time stating that his conviction as to the moral aspect of the question and the general policy of the Acts could not be influenced by any collection of facts or inquiry made by the Commission.1
[1 ]“Report of the Royal Commission upon the Administration and Operation of the Contagious Diseases Acts,” PP, 1871, XIX, 3-20. For the Acts, See No. 146, n1.