According to the evolutionary hypothesis, about which Mrs. and Miss Taylor must have known (for they moved in circles where these matters were discussed, and The Subjection of Women appeared eight to ten years after The Origin of Species) it is impossible to say precisely what is and what is not the outcome of external circumstances in women. In fact it is ridiculous to speak of a possible residuum after the influence of external circumstances has been deducted. The evolutionary hypothesis postulates a method according to which it is conceivable that biological transformations have occurred in the past. This method can be summed up in the following words: The survival of the fittest (the best adapted to life’s circumstances) through the operation of natural selection. But this very law presupposes the action of environment on the organism. It may make every allowance possible for an innate power in the organism to evolve along certain lines (Darwin gave some weight to this factor), but it must reckon with the influence of external circumstances notwithstanding. In fact, “adapted to environment” is exactly what is meant by “fit,” and no more. In the light of this theory—and this is the only accepted theory with which they could have been familiar—what becomes of Mesdames Mill and Taylor’s supposed “residuum,” when once the results of external circumstances have been deducted? It may mean nothing at all. It may mean the original protoplasm from which all life is supposed to have sprung. It may mean a remote member of the anthropoid ape class, or an antediluvian squirrel.
It was, however, never intended that it should undergo so severe an inspection. It is simply one example, flagrant but instructive, of a woman’s “natural” duplicity or dishonesty. If accepted, it makes all inquiry into the nature of man and woman, even on the broadest lines, utterly impossible. If taken seriously, it renders every conclusion you can possibly draw concerning that nature utterly invalid. —And this, indeed, is its precise intention. This is exactly the function it was expected to perform. Mrs. Taylor and her daughter could hope to achieve no more by it.
Advance any opinion on woman’s nature, consonant or not with a sane view of the women of to-day, the women of history, the women of myth, and the women of tradition, and immediately Mrs. Taylor would shoot up from behind her neatly framed and quasi-learned sentence, and declare that your opinion was quite incompatible with her alleged and hypothetical “residuum.”[153] All argument was thus stifled for ever, all discussion, all inquiry, all belief! But what did Mrs. Taylor care? With all those who were susceptible of being duped by her verbal conjuring, she had achieved this remarkable success, that she had silenced them on the subject of her sex’s vices and virtues.
These sentences, and many more like them, constitute the burden of the argument in The Subjection of Women, and make it not only valueless, but also dangerously misleading. The pamphlet remains the most unhappy record of Mill’s character as a thinker.
It is impossible here to examine this hermaphrodite pamphlet line by line; but the fact which makes the disingenuousness of these early lines so monstrous is that the remainder of the book depends upon them, evolves necessarily from them, and falls entirely to the ground if it be deprived of them. When, therefore, it is remembered that this book has exercised a potent influence over half a century of English life,[154] and that its principles have formed the basis of many hundreds of books of the same kind, and of a movement which ultimately fixed the coping-stone into the arch of stupidity supporting our political life, we cannot too severely condemn, not only the carelessness of a man who could so imperfectly distinguish senile sentimentality from his duty to the public, but also the unscrupulousness of two full-grown females who could take advantage of an old man’s blind infatuation in order to mar books, written under his own signature, with the dialectical tactics of contentious and indignant housewives.[155]
Even if we examine the historical value of the ostensibly historic basis of Mill’s contention, we find it entirely unsubstantiated by fact. Mill says: “What is now called the nature of women is an entirely artificial thing—the result of forced regression in some directions, unnatural stimulation in others.”
Taken up by a thousand angry female voices, this came to mean at the end of the nineteenth century that, if women were as they were—inferior to man in intellectual power, in honesty, in reliability, in social instincts, in taste, etc.—it was because throughout their history as a sex they had been oppressed and deprived of the opportunities of improvement.
Now, even if the first part of the sentence were true (and we have already shown how false it is), the latter part remains utterly untenable.
The fact that women throughout their history have had to play the part of mothers, and therefore to stay very much at home, cannot be meant as the artificial factor in their evolution. We cannot therefore conceive of Mrs. Taylor’s having been so palpably foolish as to suppose that it was their motherhood that constituted this “forced repression” and “unnatural stimulation.” Have there been “forced repression” and “unnatural stimulation” in other respects—at least in the history of our race?
Men of the J. S. Mill school say that you can trace women’s bondage throughout the ages, that you can see how they have been withheld both from places of responsibility and from opportunities for intellectual development ever since the dawn of history. But is this a fact? Is the evidence in favour of this view? Personally, I am convinced that the evidence is entirely against it.