第7章 CHAPTER 1(7)

But, it will be said, the rule of men over women differs from all theseothers in not being a rule a rule of force: it is accepted voluntarily; womenmake 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 womenable to make their sentiments known by their writings (the only mode of publicitywhich society permits to them), an increasing number of them have recordedprotests against their present social condition: and recently many thousandsof them, headed by the most eminent women known to the public, have petitionedParliament for their admission to the Parliamentary Suffrage The claim ofwomen to be educated as solidly, and in the same branches of knowledge, asmen, is urged with growing intensity, and with a great prospect of success;while the demand for their admission into professions and occupations hithertoclosed against them, becomes every year more urgent. Though there are notin this country, as there are in the United States, periodical conventionsand an organised party to agitate for the Rights of Women, there is a numerousand active society organised and managed by women, for the more limited objectof obtaining the political franchise. Nor is it only in our own country andin America that women are beginning to protest, more or less collectively,against the disabilities under which they labour. France, and Italy, andSwitzerland, and Russia now afford examples of the same thing. How many morewomen there are who silently cherish similar aspirations, no one can possiblyknow; but there are abundant tokens how many would cherish them, were theynot so strenuously taught to repress them as contrary to the proprietiesof their sex. It must be remembered, also, that no enslaved class ever askedfor complete liberty at once. When Simon de Montfort called the deputiesof the commons to sit for the first time in Parliament, did any of them dreamof demanding that an assembly, elected by their constituents, should makeand destroy ministries, and dictate to the king in affairs of State? No suchthought entered into the imagination of the most ambitious of them. The nobilityhad already these pretensions; the commons pretended to nothing but to beexempt from arbitrary taxation, and from the gross individual oppressionof the king's officers. It is a political law of nature that those who areunder any power of ancient origin, never begin by complaining of the poweritself, but only of its oppressive exercise. There is never any want of womenwho complain of ill-usage by their husbands. There would be infinitely more,if complaint were not the greatest of all provocatives to a repetition andincrease of the ill-usage. It is this which frustrates all attempts to maintainthe power but protect the woman against its abuses. In no other case (exceptthat of a child) is the person who has been proved judicially to have sufferedan injury, replaced under the physical power of the culprit who inflictedit. Accordingly wives, even in the most extreme and protracted cases of bodilyill-usage, hardly ever dare avail themselves of the laws made for their protection: and if, in a moment of irrepressible indignation, or by the interferenceof neighbours, they are induced to do so, their whole effort afterwards isto disclose as little as they can, and to beg off their tyrant from his meritedchastisement.