Becoming America - An Exploration of American Literature from Precolonial to Post-Revolution, 2018a

BECOMING AMERICA
REVOLUTIONARY AND EARLY NATIONAL PERIOD LITERATURE
3.12.1 “On the Equality of the Sexes”
(1790)
SIR: In the foregoing letter I have examined the theory of the connection
between equality and justice, with the view of showing that the only real connection
between the two ideas is to be found in the fact that, as justice implies general
rules, it also implies an impartial application of those rules to all the particular
cases to which they may apply. I also showed that when equality is spoken of as
being just or unjust in any more general sense than this, the expression can mean
nothing else than that it is or is not generally expedient. The doctrine upon this
subject which I deny, and which I am disposed to think Mr. Mill arms—though,
if he does, it is with somewhat less than his usual transparent vigor and decision
is that equality is in itself always expedient, or, to say the very least, presumably
expedient, and that in every case of inequality the burden of proof lies on those
who justify its maintenance.
If I had time to do so, I might give in proof or illustration of this the whole of
his essay on the “Subjection of Women,” a work from which I dissent from the rst
sentence to the last, but which I will consider on the present occasion only with
reference to the particular topic of equality, and as the strongest distinct illustration
known to me of what is perhaps one of the strongest, and what appears to me to be
by far the most ignoble, contemptible, and mischievous of all the popular feelings
of the age.
The object of Mr. Mill’s essay is to explain the grounds of the opinion that “the
principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes, the
legal subordination of one sex to the other, is wrong in itself, and now one of the
chief hindrances to human improvement; and that it ought to he replaced by a
principle of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on the one side, nor
disability on the other.”
Mr. Mill is fully aware of the diculty of his task. He admits that he is arguing
against “an almost universal opinion,” but he urges that it and the practice founded
on it is a relic of a by-gone state of things. “We now live—that is to say, one or two
of the most advanced nations of the world now live—in a state in which the law
of the strongest seems to be entirely abandoned as the regulating principle of the
world’s aairs. Nobody professes it, and, as regards most of the relations between
human beings, nobody is permitted to practise it.... This being the ostensible state
of things, people atter themselves that the rule of mere force is ended.” Still they
do not know how hard it dies, and in particular they are unaware of the fact that
it still regulates the relations between men and women. It is true that the actually
existing generation of women do not dislike their position. The consciousness of
this haunts Mr. Mill throughout the whole of his argument, and embarrasses him at
every turn. He is driven to account for it by such assertions as that “each individual
of the subject class is in a chronic state of bribery and intimidation combined,”
by reference to the aection which slaves in classical times felt for their masters
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