(¶4.21)
But it is not only through the sentiment of personal dignity, that the free
direction and disposal of their own faculties is a source of individual
happiness, and to be fettered and restricted in it, a source of
unhappiness, to human beings, and not least to women.
There is nothing,
after disease, indigence, and guilt, so fatal to the pleasurable enjoyment
of life as the want of a worthy outlet for the active faculties.
Women who have the cares of a family, and while they have the cares of a
family, have
this outlet, and it generally suffices for them: but what of the greatly
increasing number of women, who have had no opportunity of exercising the
vocation which they are mocked by telling them is their proper one? What of
the women whose children have been lost to them by death or distance, or
have grown up, married, and formed homes of their own?
There are abundant
examples of men who, after a life engrossed by business, retire with a
competency to the enjoyment, as they hope, of rest, but to whom, as they
are unable to acquire new interests and excitements that can replace the
old, the change to a life of inactivity brings ennui, melancholy, and
premature death. Yet no one thinks of the parallel case of so many worthy
and devoted women, who, having paid what they are told is their debt to
society -- having brought up a family blamelessly to manhood and
womanhood -- having kept a house as long as they had a house needing to be
kept -- are deserted by the sole occupation for which they have fitted
themselves; and remain with undiminished activity but with no employment
for it, unless perhaps a daughter or daughter-in-law is willing to abdicate
in their favour the discharge of the same functions in her younger
household. Surely a hard lot for the old age of those who have worthily
discharged, as long as it was given to them to discharge, what the world
accounts their only social duty. Of such women, and of those others to whom
this duty has not been committed at all -- many of whom pine through life
with the consciousness of thwarted vocations, and activities which are not
suffered to expand -- the only resources, speaking generally, are religion
and charity. But their religion, though it may be one of feeling, and of
ceremonial observance, cannot be a religion of action, unless in the form
of charity. For charity many of them are by nature admirably fitted; but to
practise it usefully, or even without doing mischief, requires the
education, the manifold preparation, the knowledge and the thinking powers,
of a skilful administrator. There are few of the administrative functions
of government for which a person would not be fit, who is fit to bestow
charity usefully. In this as in other cases (pre-eminently in that of the
education of children), the duties permitted to women cannot be performed
properly, without their being trained for duties which, to the great loss
of society, are not permitted to them. And here let me notice the singular
way in which the question of women's disabilities is frequently presented
to view, by those who find it easier to draw a ludicrous picture of what
they do not like, than to answer the arguments for it. When it is suggested
that women's executive capacities and prudent counsels might sometimes be
found valuable in affairs of State, these lovers of fun hold up to the
ridicule of the world, as sitting in Parliament or in the Cabinet, girls in
their teens, or young wives of two or three and twenty, transported bodily,
exactly as they are, from the drawing-room to the House of Commons. They
forget that males are not usually selected at this early age for a seat in
Parliament, or for responsible political functions. Common sense would tell
them that if such trusts were confided to women, it would be to such as
having no special vocation for married life, or preferring another
employment of their faculties (as many women even now prefer to marriage
some of the few honourable occupations within their reach), have spent the
best years of their youth in attempting to qualify themselves for the
pursuits in which they desire to engage; or still more frequently perhaps,
widows or wives of forty or fifty, by whom the know- ledge of life and
faculty of government which they have acquired in their families, could by
the aid of appropriate studies be made available on a less contracted
scale. There is no country of Europe in which the ablest men have not
frequently experienced, and keenly appreciated, the value of the advice and
help of clever and experienced women of the world, in the attainment both
of private and of public objects; and there are important matters of public
administration to which few men are equally competent with such women;
among others, the detailed control of expenditure. But what we are now
discussing is not the need which society has of the services of women in
public business, but the dull and hopeless life to which it so often
condemns them, by forbidding them to exercise the practical abilities which
many of them are conscious of, in any wider field than one which to some of
them never was, and to others is no longer, open. If there is anything
vitally important to the happiness of human beings, it is that they should
relish their habitual pursuit. This requisite of an enjoyable life is very
imperfectly granted, or altogether denied, to a large part of mankind; and
by its absence many a life is a failure, which is provided, in appearance,
with every requisite of success. But if circumstances which society is not
yet skilful enough to overcome, render such failures often for the present
inevitable, society need not itself inflict them. The injudiciousness of
parents, a youth's own inexperience, or the absence of external
opportunities for the congenial vocation, and their presence for an
uncongenial, condemn numbers of men to pass their lives in doing one thing
reluctantly and ill, when there are other things which they could have done
well and happily. But on women this sentence is imposed by actual law, and
by customs equivalent to law. What, in unenlightened societies, colour,
race, religion, or in the case of a conquered country, nationality, are to
some men, sex is to all women; a peremptory exclusion from almost all
honourable occupations, but either such as cannot be fulfilled by others,
or such as those others do not think worthy of their acceptance. Sufferings
arising from causes of this nature usually meet with so little sympathy,
that few persons are aware of the great amount of unhappiness even now
produced by the feeling of a wasted life. The case will be even more
frequent, as increased cultivation creates a greater and greater
disproportion between the ideas and faculties- of women, and the scope
which society allows to their activity.
(¶4.22)
When we consider the positive evil caused to the disqualified half of the
human race by their disqualification -- first in the loss of the most
inspiriting and elevating kind of personal enjoyment, and next in the
weariness, disappointment, and profound dissatisfaction with life, which
are so often the substitute for it; one feels that among all the lessons
which men require for carrying on the struggle against the inevitable
imperfections of their lot on earth, there is no lesson which they more
need, than not to add to the evils which nature inflicts, by their jealous
and prejudiced restrictions on one another. Their vain fears only
substitute other and worse evils for those which they are idly apprehensive
of: while every restraint on the freedom of conduct of any of their human
fellow-creatures (otherwise than by making them responsible for any evil
actually caused by it), dries up pro tanto the principal fountain of human
happiness, and leaves the species less rich, to an inappreciable degree, in
all that makes life valuable to the individual human being.
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