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

BECOMING AMERICA
REVOLUTIONARY AND EARLY NATIONAL PERIOD LITERATURE
the less advanced states of society, people hardly recognize any relation with
their equals. To be an equal is to be an enemy. Society, from its highest place to
its lowest, is one long chain, or rather ladder, where every individual is either
above or below his nearest neighbor, and wherever he does not command he
must obey. Existing moralities, accordingly, are mainly tted to a relation of
command and obedience. Yet command and obedience are but unfortunate
necessities of human life; society in equality is its normal state. Already in
modern life, and more and more as it progressively improves, command and
obedience become exceptional facts in life, equal association its general rule .
. . . “We have had the morality of submission and the morality of chivalry and
generosity; the time is now come for the morality of justice.”
In another part of the book this doctrine is stated more fully in a passage of
which it will be enough for my purpose to quote a very few lines:
“There are many persons for whom it is not enough that the inequality”
(between the sexes) “has no just or legitimate defence; they require to be told
what express advantage would be obtained by abolishing it. To which let me
rst answer, the advantage of having all the most universal and pervading of all
human relations regulated by justice instead of injustice. The vast amount of
this gain to human nature it is hardly possible by any explanation or illustration
to place in a stronger light than it is placed in by the bare statement to any one
who attaches a moral meaning to words.”
These passages show what Mr. Mill’s doctrine of equality is, and how it forms
the very root, the essence, so to speak, of his theory about the subjection of women.
I consider it unsound in every respect. I think that it rests upon an unsound view of
history, an unsound view of morals, and a grotesquely distorted view of facts, and
I believe that its practical application would be as injurious as its theory is false.
The theory may be shortly restated in the following propositions, which I think
are implied in or may be collected from the extracts given above. They are as follows:
1. Justice requires that all people should live in society as equals.
2. History shows that human progress has been a progress from a “law
of force” to a condition in which command and obedience become
exceptional.
3. The “law of the strongest” having in this and one or two other countries
been “entirely abandoned” in all other relations of life, it may be presumed
not to apply to the relation between the sexes.
4. The notorious facts as to the nature of that relation show that in this
particular case the presumption is, in fact, well founded.
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