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

BECOMING AMERICA
REVOLUTIONARY AND EARLY NATIONAL PERIOD LITERATURE
by law as the equals of adults, the result would be something innitely worse than
barbarism. It would involve a degree of cruelty to the young which can hardly
be realized even in imagination. The proceeding, in short, would be so utterly
monstrous and irrational that I suppose it never entered into the head of the
wildest zealot for equality to propose it. Upon the practical question all are agreed;
but consider the consequences which it involves. It involves the consequence that,
so far from being “unfortunate necessities,” command and obedience stand at the
very entrance to life, and preside over the most important part of it. It involves
the consequence that the exertion of power and constraint is so important and so
indispensable in the greatest of all matters that it is a less evil to invest with it every
head of a family indiscriminately, however unt he may be to exercise it, than to fail
to provide for its exercise. It involves the consequence that, by mere lapse of time
and by following the promptings of passion, men acquire over others a position of
superiority and of inequality which all nations and ages, the most cultivated as well
as the rudest, have done their best to surround with every association of awe and
reverence. The title of Father is the one which the best part of the human race have
given to God, as being the least inadequate and inappropriate means of indicating
the union of love, reverence, and submission. Whoever rst gave the command or
uttered the maxim, “Honor thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long
in the land,” had a far better conception of the essential conditions of permanent
national existence and prosperity than the author of the motto “Liberty, Equality,
and Fraternity.”
Now, if society and government ought to recognize the inequality of age as
the foundation of an inequality of rights of this importance, it appears to me at
least equally clear that they ought to recognize the inequality of sex for the same
purpose, if it is a real inequality. Is it one? There are some propositions which it is
dicult to prove, because they are so plain, and this is one of them. The physical
dierences between the two sexes aect every part of the human body, from the
hair of the head to the sole of the feet, from the size and density of the bones to
the texture of the brain and the character of the nervous system. Ingenious people
may argue about any thing, and Mr. Mill does say a great number of things about
women which, as I have already observed, I will not discuss; but all the talk in the
world will never shake the proposition that men are stronger than women in every
shape. They have greater muscular and nervous force, greater intellectual force,
greater vigor of character. This general truth, which has been observed under all
sorts of circumstances and in every age and country, has also in every age and
country led to a division of labor between men and women, the general outline
of which is as familiar and as universal as the general outline of the dierences
between them. These are the facts, and the question is, whether the law and public
opinion ought to recognize this dierence. How it ought to recognize it, what
dierence it ought to make between men and women as such, is quite another
question. The rst point to consider is, whether it ought to treat them as equals,
although, as I have shown, they are not equals, because men are the stronger. I will
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