The Subjection of Women
The Subjection of Women CHAPTER I.CHAPTER II.CHAPTER III.CHAPTER IV.Copyright
The Subjection of Women
John Stuart Mill
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. Theà prioripresumption 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, if 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.