or Members of Parliament. In the feudal ages, on the contrary, war
and politics were not thought unnatural to women, because not
unusual; it seemed natural that women of the privileged classes
should be of manly character, inferior in nothing but bodily
strength to their husbands and fathers. The independence of women
seemed rather less unnatural to the Greeks than to other ancients,
on account of the fabulous Amazons (whom they believed to be
historical), and the partial example afforded by the Spartan women;
who, though no less subordinate by law than in other Greek states,
were more free in fact, and being trained to bodily exercises in
the same manner with men, gave ample proof that they were not
naturally disqualified for them. There can be little doubt that
Spartan experience suggested to Plato, among many other of his
doctrines, t of the social and political equality of the two sexes.

But, it will be said, the rule of men over women differs from all
these others in not being a rule a rule of force: it is accepted
voluntarily; women make no complaint, and are consenting parties to
it. In the first place, a great number of women do not accept it.
Ever since there have been women able to make their sentiments
known by their writings (the only mode of publicity which society
permits to them), an increasing number of them have recorded
protests against their present social condition: and recently many
thousands of them, headed by the most eminent women known to the
public, have petitioned Parliament for their admission to the
Parliamentary Suffrage The claim of women to be educated as
solidly, and in the same branches of knowledge, as men, is urged
with growing intensity, and with a great prospect of success; while
the demand for their admission into professions and occupations
hitherto closed against them, becomes every year more urgent.
Though there are not in this country, as there are in the United
States, periodical conventions and an organised party to agitate
for the Rights of Women, there is a numerous and active society
organised and managed by women, for the more limited object of
obtaining the political franchise. Nor is it only in our own
country and in America that women are beginning to protest, more or
less collectively, against the disabilities under which they
labour. France, and Italy, and Switzerland, and Russia now afford
examples of the same thing. How many more women there are who
silently cherish similar aspirations, no one can possibly know; but
there are abundant tokens how many would cherish them, were they
not so strenuously taught to repress them as contrary to the
proprieties of their sex. It must be remembered, also, that no
enslaved class ever asked for complete liberty at once. When Simon
de Montfort called the deputies of the commons to sit for the first
time in Parliament, did any of them dream of demanding that an
assembly, elected by their constituents)should make and destroy
ministries, and dictate to the king in affairs of State ? No such
thought entered into the imagination of the most ambitious of them.
The nobility had already these pretensions; the commons pretended
to nothing but to be exempt from arbitrary taxation, and from the
gross individual oppression of the king's officers. It is a
political law of nature that those who are under any power of
ancient origin, never begin by complaining of the power itself, but
only of its oppressive exercise. There is never any want of women
who complain of ill-usage by their husbands. There would be
infinitely more, if complaint were not the greatest of all
provocatives to a repetition and increase of the ill-usage. It is
this which frustrates all attempts to maintain the power but
protect the woman against its abuses. In no other case (except that
of a child) is the person who has been proved judicially to have
suffered an injury, replaced under the physical power of the
culprit who inflicted it. Accordingly wives, even in the most
extreme and protracted cases of bodily ill-usage, hardly ever dare
avail themselves of the laws made for their protection: and if, in
a moment of irrepressible indignation, or by the interference of
neighbours, they are induced to do so, their whole effort
afterwards is to disclose as little as they can, and to beg off
their tyrant from his merited chastisement. 

All causes, social and natural, combine to make it unlikely that
women should be collectively rebellious to the power of men. They
are so far in a position different from all other subject classes,
that their masters require something more from them than actual
service. Men do not want solely the obedience of women, they want
their sentiments. All men, except the most brutish, desire to have,
in the woman most nearly connected with them, not a forced slave
but a willing one, not a slave merely, but a favourite. They have
therefore put everything in practice to enslave their minds. The
masters of all other slaves rely, for maintaining obedience, on
fear; either fear of themselves, or religious fears. The masters of
women wanted more than simple obedience, and they turned the whole
force of education to effect their purpose. All women are brought
up from the very earliest years in the belief that their ideal of
character is the very opposite to that of men; not self will, and
government by self-control, but submission, and yielding to the
control of other. All the moralities tell them that it is the duty
of women, and all the current sentimentalities that it is their
nature, to live for others; to make complete abnegation of
themselves, and to have no life but in their affections. And by
their affections are meant the only ones they are allowed to have -
- those to the men with whom they are connected, or to the children
who constitute an additional and indefeasible tie between them and
a man. When we put together three things -- first, the natural
attraction between opposite sexes; secondly, the wife's entire
dependence on the husband, every privilege or pleasure she has
being either his gift, or depending entirely on his will; and
lastly, that the principal object of human pursuit, consideration,
and all objects of social ambition, can in general be sought or
obtained by her only through him, it would be a miracle if the