There remains a question, not of less importance than those already discussed,and which will be asked the most importunately by those opponents whose convictionis somewhat shaken on the main point. What good are we to expect from thechanges proposed in our customs and institutions? Would mankind be at allbetter off if women were free? If not, why disturb their minds, and attemptto make a social revolution in the name of an abstract right?
It is hardly to be expected that this question will be asked in respectto the change proposed in the condition of women in marriage. The sufferings,immoralities, evils of all sorts, produced in innumerable cases by the subjectionof 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 noone 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 muchchecked while the power remains. It is a power given, or offered, not togood 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 menare in general within the reach of no opinion but that of men like themselves.
If such men did not brutally tyrannise over the one human being whom thelaw compels to bear everything from them, society must already have reacheda paradisiacal state. There could be no need any longer of laws to curb men'svicious propensities. Astraea must not only have returned to earth, but theheart of the worst man must have become her temple. The law of servitudein marriage is a monstrous contradiction to all the principles of the modernworld, and to all the experience through which those principles have beenslowly and painfully worked out. It is the sole case, now that negro slaveryhas been abolished, in which a human being in the plenitude of every facultyis delivered up to the tender mercies of another human being, in the hopeforsooth that this other will use the power solely for the good of the personsubjected to it. Marriage is the only actual bondage known to our law. Thereremain no legal slaves, except the mistress of every house.
It is not, therefore, on this part of the subject, that the question islikely to be asked, Cui bono. We may be told that the evil would outweighthe 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 recognitionas the equals of men in all that belongs to citizenship -- the opening tothem of all honourable employments, and of the training and education whichqualifies for those employments -- there are many persons for whom it isnot enough that the inequality has no just or legitimate defence; they requireto be told what express advantage would be obtained by abolishing it.
To which let me first answer, the advantage of having the most universaland 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 anyexplanation or illustration, to place in a stronger light than it is placedby the bare statement, to anyone who attaches a moral meaning to words. Allthe selfish propensities, the self-worship, the unjust self-preference, whichexist among mankind, have their source and root in, and derive their principalnourishment from, the present constitution of the relation between men andwomen. Think what it is to a boy, to grow up to manhood in the belief thatwithout any merit or any exertion of his own, though he may be the most frivolousand empty or the most ignorant and stolid of mankind, by the mere fact ofbeing born a male he is by right the superior of all and every one of anentire half of the human race: including probably some whose real superiorityto himself he has daily or hourly occasion to feel; but even if in his wholeconduct he habitually follows a woman's guidance, still, if he is a fool,she thinks that of course she is not, and cannot be, equal in ability andjudgment to himself; and if he is not a fool, he does worse -- he sees thatshe 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 effecton his character, of this lesson? And men of the cultivated classes are oftennot aware how deeply it sinks into the immense majority of male minds. For,among right-feeling and wellbred people, the inequality is kept as much aspossible out of sight; above all, out of sight of the children. As much obedienceis required from boys to their mother as to their father: they are not permittedto domineer over their sisters, nor are they accustomed to see these postponedto them, but the contrary; the compensations of the chivalrous feeling beingmade 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 influencesof the situation in their early years, and only experience them when, arrivedat manhood, they fall under the dominion of facts as they really exist. Suchpeople are little aware, when a boy is differently brought up, how earlythe notion of his inherent superiority to a girl arises in his mind; howit grows with his growth and strengthens with his strength; how it is inoculatedby one schoolboy upon another; how early the youth thinks himself superiorto his mother, owing her perhaps forbearance, but no-real respect; ana howsublime and sultan-like a sense of superiority he feels, above all, overthe woman whom he honours by admitting her to a partnership of his life.
