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

BECOMING AMERICA
REVOLUTIONARY AND EARLY NATIONAL PERIOD LITERATURE
I, the husband, embark in such an undertaking, and shall we change our place of
residence in order that I may do so? Shall we send our son to college? Shall we send
our daughters to school or have a governess? For what profession shall we train
our sons?” On these and a thousand other such questions the wisest and the most
aectionate people might arrive at opposite conclusions. What is to be done in such
a case? for something must be done. I say the wife ought to give way. She ought
to obey her husband, and carry out the view at which he deliberately arrives, just
as, when the captain gives the word to cut away the masts, the lieutenant carries
out his orders at once, though he may be a better seaman and may disapprove
them. I also say that, to regard this as a humiliation, as a wrong, or as an evil
in itself, is a mark not of spirit and courage, but of a base, unworthy, mutinous
disposition—a disposition utterly subversive of all that is most worth having in
life. The tacit assumption involved in it is that it is a degradation ever to give up
one’s own will to the will of another, and to me this appears the root of all evil,
the negation of that which renders any combined eorts possible. No case can be
specied in which people unite for a common object, from making a pair of shoes
up to governing an empire, in which the power to decide does not rest somewhere;
and what is this but command and obedience? Of course the person who for the
time being is in command is of all fools the greatest if he deprives himself of the
advantage of advice, if he is obstinate in his own opinion, if he does not hear as
well as determine; but it is also practically certain that his inclination to hear will
be proportioned to the degree of importance which he has been led to attach to the
function of determining.
To sum the matter up, it appears to me that all the laws and moral rules by which
the relation between the sexes is regulated should proceed upon the principle that
their object is to provide for the common good of two great divisions of mankind who
are connected together by the closest and most durable of all bonds, and who can no
more have really conicting interests than the dierent members of the same body,
but who are not and never can be equals in any of the dierent forms of strength.
This problem law and morals have solved by monogamy, indissoluble marriage
on the footing of the obedience of the wife to the husband, and a division of labor
with corresponding dierences in the matters of conduct, manners, and dress.
Substantially this solution appears to me to be right and true; but I freely admit
that in many particulars the stronger party has in this, as in other cases, abused
his strength, and made rules for his supposed advantage, which, in fact, are greatly
to the injury of both parties. It is, needless to say any thing in detail of the stupid
coarseness of the laws about the eects of marriage on property—laws which
might easily be replaced by a general statutory marriage settlement analogous to
those which every prudent person makes who has any thing to settle. As to acts of
violence against women, by all means make the law on this head as severe as it can
be made without defeating itself.
As to throwing open to women the one or two employments from which they are
at present excluded, it is rather a matter of sentiment than of practical importance.
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