exercise, is in this case not confined to a limited class, but
common to the whole male sex. Instead of being, to most of its
supporters) a thing desirable chiefly in the abstract, or, like the
political ends usually contended for by factions, of little private
importance to any but the leaders; it comes home to the person and
hearth of every male head of a family, and of everyone who looks
forward to being so. The clodhopper exercises, oris to exercise,
his share of the power equally with the highest nobleman. And the
case is that in which the desire of power is the strongest: for
everyone who desires power, desires it most over those who are
nearest to him, with whom his life is passed, with whom he has most
concerns in common and in whom any independence of his authority is
oftenest likely to interfere with his individual preferences. If,
in the other cases specified, powers manifestly grounded only on
force, and having so much less to support them, are so slowly and
with so much difficulty got rid of, much more must it be so with
this, even if it rests on no better foundation than those. We must
consider, too, that the possessors of the power have facilities in
this case, greater than in any other, to prevent any uprising
against it. Every one of the subjects lives under the very eye, and
almost, it may be said, in the hands, of one of the masters in
closer intimacy with him than with any of her fellow-subjects; with
no means of combining against him, no power of even locally over
mastering him, and, on the other hand, with the strongest motives
for seeking his favour and avoiding to give him offence. In
struggles for political emancipation, everybody knows how often its
champions are bought off by bribes, or daunted by terrors. In the
case of women, each individual of the subject-class is in a chronic
state of bribery and intimidation combined. In setting up the
standard of resistance, a large number of the leaders, and still
more of the followers, must make an almost complete sacrifice of
the pleasures or the alleviations of their own individual lot. If
ever any system of privilege and enforced subjection had its yoke
tightly riveted on the those who are kept down by it, this has. I
have not yet shown that it is a wrong system: but everyone who is
capable of thinking on the subject must see that even if it is, it
was certain to outlast all other forms of unjust authority. And
when some of the grossest of the other forms still exist in many
civilised countries, and have only recently been got rid of in
others, it would be strange if that which is so much the deepest
rooted had yet been perceptibly shaken anywhere. There is more
reason to wonder that the protests and testimonies against it
should have been so numerous and so weighty as they are. 

Some will object, that a comparison cannot fairly be made between
the government of the male sex and the forms of unjust power which
I have adduced in illustration of it, since these are arbitrary,
and the effect of mere usurpation, while it on the contrary is
natural. But was there ever any domination which did not appear
natural to those who possessed it? There was a time when the
division of mankind into two classes, a small one of masters and a
numerous one of slaves, appeared, even to the most cultivated
minds, to be natural, and the only natural, condition of the human
race. No less an intellect, and one which contributed no less to
the progress of human thought, than Aristotle, held this opinion
without doubt or misgiving; and rested it on the same premises on
which the same assertion in regard to the dominion of men over
women is usually based, namely that there are different natures
among mankind, free natures, and slave natures; that the Greeks
were of a free nature, the barbarian races of Thracians and
Asiatics of a slave nature. But why need I go back to Aristotle?
Did not the slave-owners of the Southern United States maintain the
same doctrine, with all the fanaticism with which men ding to the
theories that justify their passions and legitimate their personal
interests? Did they not call heaven and earth to witness that the
dominion of the white man over the black is natural, that the black
race is by nature incapable of freedom, and marked out for slavery?
some even going so far as to say that the freedom of manual
labourers is an unnatural order of things anywhere. Again, the
theorists of absolute monarchy have always affirmed it to be the
only natural form of government; issuing from the patriarchal,
which was the primitive and spontaneous form of society, framed on
the model of the paternal, which is anterior to society itself,
and, as they contend, the most natural authority of all. Nay, for
that matter, the law of force itself, to those who could not plead
any other has always seemed the most natural of all grounds for the
exercise of authority. Conquering races hold it to be Nature's own
dictate that the conquered should obey the conquerors, or as they
euphoniously paraphrase it, that the feebler and more unwarlike
races should submit to the braver and manlier. The smallest
acquaintance with human life in the middle ages, shows how
supremely natural the dominion of the feudal nobility overmen of
low condition appeared to the nobility themselves, and how
unnatural the conception seemed, of a person of the inferior class
claiming equality with them, or exercising authority over them. It
hardly seemed less so to the class held in subjection. The
emancipated serfs and burgesses, even in their most vigorous
struggles, never made any pretension to a share of authority; they
only demanded more or less of limitation to the power of
tyrannising over them. So true is it that unnatural generally means
only uncustomary, and that everything which is usual appears
natural. The subjection of women to men being a universal custom,
any departure from it quite naturally appears unnatural. But how
entirely, even in this case, the feeling is dependent on custom,
appears by ample experience. Nothing so much astonishes the people
of distant parts of the world, when they first learn anything about
England, as to be told that it is under a queen; the thing seems to
them so unnatural as to be almost incredible. To Englishmen this
does not seem in the least degree unnatural, because they are used
to it; but they do feel it unnatural that women should be soldiers