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 favorites, 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 nature 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 favored by their 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 suffer! 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 honor connected with any public duty. Many a man, whom no money or personal flattery would have bought, has bartered his political opinions against a title or invitations for 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 commonplace, 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 the victims, and thinks it his part to be on the side of authority. As to mental progress, except those vulgarer 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 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 honor. 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 laborers 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 favorable 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 good will 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 Shakspeare into the mouths of male victims of kingly caprice and tyranny; 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 of 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 that 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.
FOOTNOTES
[1] An excellent passage on this part of the subject, from one of Sydney Smith’s contributions to the Edinburgh Review, we will 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.”—Sydney Smith’s Works, vol. i., p. 200.
[2] 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 mal-treatment 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.