Marriage as a Trade

by Cicely Hamilton

There must be many attributes and characteristics of the general run of women which are not really the attributes and characteristics of their sex, but of their class—a class persistently set apart for the duties of sexual attraction, house-ordering and the bearing of children. And the particular qualities that, in the eyes of man, fitted them for the fulfilment of these particular duties, generation after generation of women, whatever their natural temperament and inclination, have sought to acquire—or if not the actual qualities themselves, at least an outward semblance of them. Without some semblance of those qualities life would be barred to them.

There are very few women in whom one cannot, now and again, trace the line of cleavage between real and acquired, natural and class, characteristics. The same thing, of course, holds good of men, but in a far less degree since, many vocations being open to them, they tend naturally and on the whole to fall into the class for which temperament and inclinations fit them. A man with a taste for an open air life does not as a rule become a chartered accountant, a student does not take up deep-sea fishing as a suitable profession. But with women the endeavour to approximate to a single type has always been compulsory. It is ridiculous to suppose that nature, who never makes two blades of grass alike, desired to turn out indefinite millions of women all cut to the regulation pattern of wifehood: that is to say, all home-loving, charming, submissive, industrious, unintelligent, tidy, possessed with a desire to please, well-dressed, jealous of their own sex, self-sacrificing, cowardly, filled with a burning desire for maternity, endowed with a talent for cooking, narrowly uninterested in the world outside their own gates, and capable of sinking their own identity and interests in the interests and identity of a husband. I imagine that very few women naturally unite in their single persons these characteristics of the class wife; but, having been relegated from birth upwards to the class wife, they had to set to work, with or against the grain, to acquire some semblance of those that they knew were lacking.

There being no question of a line of least resistance for woman, it is fairly obvious that the necessity (in many instances) of making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear and instilling the qualities of tidiness, love of home, cowardice, unintelligence, etc., etc., into persons who were born with quite other capacities and defects must have resulted in a pitiable waste of good material, sacrificed upon the altar of a domesticity arranged in the interests of the husband. But infinitely worse in its effect upon womanhood in general was the insincerity which, in many cases, was the prime lesson and result of a girl’s education and upbringing. I do not mean, of course, that the generality of girls were consciously, of set purpose, and in so many words taught to be insincere; but it seems fairly certain to me that generations of mothers have tacitly instructed their daughters to assume virtues (or the reverse) which they had not.

It could not be otherwise. Success in the marriage-market demanded certain qualifications; and, as a matter of economic and social necessity, if those qualifications were lacking, their counterfeit presentment was assumed. When helplessness and fragility were the fashion amongst wives, the girl child who was naturally as plucky as her brothers was schooled into an affected and false timidity. Men were understood to admire and reverence the maternal instinct in women; so the girl who had no especial interest in children affected a mechanical delight in, petted, fondled and made much of them. (I myself have seen this done on more than one occasion; of course in the presence of men.) And—worst and most treacherous insincerity of all—since men were understood to dislike clever women, the girl who had brains, capacity, intellect, sought to conceal, denied possession of them, so that her future husband might enjoy, unchallenged, the pleasurable conviction of her mental inferiority to himself.

Of all the wrongs that have been inflicted upon woman there has been none like unto this—the enforced arrest of her mental growth—and none which bears more bitter and eloquent testimony to the complete and essential servility of her position. For her the eleventh commandment was an insult—“Thou shalt not think”; and the most iniquitous condition of her marriage bargain this—that her husband, from the height of his self-satisfaction, should be permitted to esteem her a fool.

It was not only that, from one generation to another, woman was without encouragement to use her higher mental qualities—that her life was lacking in the stimulus of emulation so far as they were concerned, that her own particular trade made very few demands upon them. As if these things in themselves were not discouragement enough, she was directly forbidden to cultivate the small share of intellect she was understood to possess. Science was closed to her and art degraded to a series of “parlor tricks.” It was not enough that she should be debarred from material possessions; from possessions that were not material, from the things of the spirit, she must be debarred as well. Nothing more plainly illustrates the fact that man has always regarded her as existing not for herself and for her own benefit, but for his use and pleasure solely. His use for her was the gratification of his own desire, the menial services she rendered without payment; his pleasure was in her flesh, not in her spirit; therefore the things of the spirit were not for her.

One wonders what it has meant for the race—this persistent desire of the man to despise his wife, this economic need of countless women to arrest their mental growth? It has amounted to this—that one of the principal qualifications for motherhood has been a low standard of intelligence. We hear a very great deal about the beauty and sanctity of motherhood; we might, for a change, hear something about the degradation thereof—which has been very real. To stunt one’s brain in order that one may bear a son does not seem to me a process essentially sacred or noble in itself; yet millions of mothers have instructed their daughters in foolishness so that they, in their turn, might please, marry and bear children. Most of those daughters, no doubt—humanity being in the main slothful and indifferent—endured the process with equanimity; but there must always have been some, and those not the least worthy, who suffered piteously under the systematic thwarting of definite instincts and vague ambitions. In every generation there must have been women who desired life at first hand, and in whom the crushing of initiative and inquiry and the substitution of servile for independent qualities, must have caused infinite misery. In every generation there must have been women who had something to give to those who lived outside the narrowing walls of their home; and who were not permitted to give it. They soured and stifled; but they were not permitted to give it.

But, after all, the suffering of individual women under the law of imposed stupidity is a very small thing compared with the effect of that law upon humanity as a whole. The sex which reserved to itself the luxury of thinking appears to have been somewhat neglectful of its advantages in that respect, since it failed to draw the obvious conclusion that sons were the sons of their mothers as well as of their fathers. Yet it is a commonplace that exceptional men are born of exceptional women—that is to say, of women in whom the natural instinct towards self-expansion and self-expression is too strong to be crushed and thwarted out of existence by the law of imposed stupidity.

That law has reacted inevitably upon those who framed and imposed it; since it is truth and not a jest that the mission in life of many women has been to suckle fools—of both sexes. Women have been trained to be unintelligent breeding-machines until they have become unintelligent breeding-machines—how unintelligent witness the infant death-rate from improper feeding. Judging by that and other things, the process of transforming the natural woman into flesh without informing spirit would appear, in a good many instance, to have been attended by a fair amount of success. In some classes she still breeds brainlessly. That is what she is there for, not to think of the consequences. Has she not been expressly forbidden to think? If she is a failure as a wife and mother, it is because she is nothing else. And those of us who are now alive might be better men and women, seeing more light where now we strive and slip in darkness, if our fathers had not insisted so strongly and so steadfastly upon their right to despise the women they made their wives—who were our mothers.

I have said that this condemnation to intellectual barrenness is the strongest proof of the essential servility of woman’s position in the eyes of man, and I repeat that statement. It cannot be repeated too often. So long as you deprive a human being of the right to make use of its own mental property, so long do you keep that human being in a state of serfdom. You may disguise the fact even from yourself by an outward show of deference and respect, the lifting of a hat or the ceding of a pathway; but the fact remains. Wherever and whenever man has desired to degrade his fellow and tread him under foot, he has denied him, first of all, the right to think, the means of education and inquiry. Every despotism since the world began has recognized that it can only work in secret—that its ways must not be known. No material tyranny can hope to establish itself firmly and for long unless it has at its disposal the means to establish also a tyranny that is spiritual and intellectual. When you hold a man’s mind in thrall you can do what you will with his body; you possess it and not he. Always those who desired power over their fellows have found it a sheer necessity to possess their bodies through their souls; and for this reason, when you have stripped a man of everything except his soul, you have to go on and strip him of that too, lest, having it left to him, he ask questions, ponder the answers and revolt. In all ages the aim of despotism, small or great, material or intellectual, has been to keep its subjects in ignorance and darkness; since, in all ages, discontent and rebellion have come with the spread of knowledge, light and understanding. So soon as a human being is intelligent enough to doubt, and frame the question, “Why is this?” he can no longer be satisfied with the answer, “Because I wish it.” That is an answer which inevitably provokes the rejoinder, “But I do not”—which is the essence and foundation of heresy and high treason.