(¶18)
The first, the maternity argument, is usually laid most stress upon:
although (it needs hardly be said) this reason, if it be one, can apply
only to mothers. It is neither necessary nor just to make imperative on
women that they shall be either mothers or nothing; or that if they have
been mothers once, they shall be nothing else during he whole remainder of
their lives. Neither women nor men need any law to exclude them from an
occupation, if they have undertaken another which is incompatible with it.
No one proposes to exclude the male sex from Parliament because a man may
be a soldier or sailor in active service, or a merchant whose business
requires all his time and energies. Nine-tenths of the occupations of men
exclude them de facto from Public life, as effectually as if they were
excluded by law; but that is no reason for making laws to exclude even the
nine-tenths, much less the remaining tenth. The reason of the case is the
same for women as for men. There is no need to make provision by law that a
woman shall not carry on the active details of a household, or of the
education of children, and at the same time practise a profession or be
elected to Parliament. Where incompatibility is real, it will take care of
itself- but there is gross injustice in making the incompatibility a
pretence for the exclusion of those in whose case it does not exist. And
these, if they were free to choose, would be a very large proportion. The
maternity argument deserts its supporters in the case of single women, a
large and increasing class of the population; a fact which it is irrelevant
to remark by tending to diminish the excessive competition of numbers, is
calculated to assist greatly the prosperity of all There is no inherent
reason or necessity that all women should voluntarily choose to devote
their lives to one animal function and its consequences. Numbers of women
are wives and mothers only because there is no other career open to them,
no other occupation for their feelings or their activities. Every
improvement in their education, and enlargement of the faculties -
everything which renders them more qualified for any mode of life,
increases the number of those to whom it is an injury and an oppression to
be denied the choice. To say that women must be excluded from active life
because of maternity disqualifies them for it, it in fact to say, that
every other career should be forbidden them in order that maternity may be
their only resource.
(¶19)
But secondly, it is urged, that to give the same freedom of occupation to
women as to men, would be an injurious addition to the crowd of
competitors, by whom the avenues to almost all kinds of employment are
choked up, and its remuneration depressed. This argument, it is to be
observed, does not reach the political question. It gives no excuse for
withholding from women the rights of citizenship. The suffrage, the
jury-box, admission to the legislature and to office, it does not touch. It
bears only on the industrial branch of the subject. Allowing it, then, in
an economical point of view, its full force; assuming that to lay open to
women the employments now monopolized by men, would tend, like the breaking
down of other monopolies, to lower the rate of remuneration in those
employments; let us consider what is the amount of this evil consequence,
and what the compensation for it. The worst ever asserted, much worse than
is at all likely to be realized, is that if women competed with men, a man
and a woman could not together earn more than is now earned by the man
alone. Let us make this supposition, the most unfavourable possible: the
joint income of the two would be the same as before, while the woman would
be raised from the position of a servant to that of a partner. Even if
every woman, as matters now stand, had a claim on some man for support, how
infinitely preferable is it that part of the income should be of the
woman's earning, even if the aggregate sum were but little increased by it,
rather than that she should be compelled to stand aside in order that men
may be the sole earners, and the sole dispensers of what is earned. Even
under the present laws respecting the property of women, a woman who
contributes materially to the support of the family, cannot be treated in
the same contemptuously tyrannical manner as one who, however she may toil
as a domestic drudge, is a dependent on the man for subsistence. As for the
depression of wages by increase of competition, remedies will be found for
it in time. Palliatives might be applied immediately; for instance a more
rigid exclusion of children from industrial employment, during the years in
which they ought to be working only to strengthen their bodies and minds
for after life. Children are necessarily dependent, and under the power of
others; and their labour, being not for themselves but for the gain of
their parents, is a proper subject for legislative regulation. With respect
to the future, we neither believe that improvident multiplication, and the
consequent excessive difficulty of gaining a subsistence, will always
continue, nor that the division of mankind into capitalists and hired
labourers, and the regulation of the reward of labourers mainly by demand
and supply, will be for ever, or even much longer, the rule of the world.
But so long as competition is the general law of human life, it is tyranny
to shut out one half of the competitors. All who have attained the age of
self-government, have an equal claim to be permitted to sell whatever kind
of useful labour they are capable of, for the price which it will bring.