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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



slatternly, coarse, foul-mouthed — sometimes loose 

 in behavior, sometimes madly addicted to drink. 

 There ought to be no idealizing of them, as a class, 

 into refined and suffering angels, if we wish to be 

 just. The home of a Lancashire operative, alas ! 

 is not a garden wherein the plants of refinement 

 or sensitiveness are very likely to spring up or 

 thrive. 



Given this direful milieu, and its population, 

 male and female, we next ask, What are the im- 

 mediate incitements to the men to maltreat the 

 women ? They are of two kinds, I think — gen- 

 eral and particular. 



First, the whole relation between the sexes in 

 the class we are considering is very little better 

 than one of master and slave. I have always ab- 

 jured the use of this familiar comparison in speak- 

 ing generally of English husbands and wives, be- 

 cause as regards the upper orders of society it 

 is ridiculously overstrained and untrue. But in 

 the " kicking districts," among the lowest labor- 

 ing-classes, Legree himself might find a dozen 

 prototypes, and the condition of the women be 

 most accurately matched by that of the negroes 

 on a Southern plantation before the war struck 

 off their fetters. 1 To a certain extent, this mari- 

 tal tyranny among the lower classes is beyond 

 the reach of law, and can only be remedied by 

 the slow elevation and civilization of both sexes. 

 But it is also in an appreciable degree, I am con- 

 vinced, enhanced by the law even as it now stands, 

 and was still more so by the law as it stood be- 

 fore the Married Women's Property Act put a 

 stop to the chartered robbery by husbands of 

 their wives' earnings. At the present time, though 

 things are improving year by year, thanks to the 

 generous and far-seeing statesmen who are con- 

 tending for justice to women inside and out of the 

 House of Commons, the position of a woman be- 

 fore the law as wife, mother, and citizen, remains 

 so much below that of a man as husband, father, 

 and citizen, that it is a matter of course that she 

 must be regarded by him as an inferior, and fail 

 to obtain from him such a modicum of respect 

 as her mental and moral qualities might win did 

 he see her placed by the state on an equal foot- 

 ing. 



I have no intention in this paper to discuss 

 the vexed subject of women's political and civil 



1 Let it be noted that, while they were slaves, these 

 negroes were daily subjected to outrages and cruel- 

 ties of which it thrilled our blood to hear. Since they 

 have been emancipated their white neighbors have 

 learned at least so far to recognize them as human 

 beings that these tortures have become comparative- 

 ly rare. 



rights, but I cannot pass to the consideration of 

 the incidental and minor causes of the outrages 

 upon them, without recording my conviction that 

 the political disabilities under which the whole 

 sex still labors, though apparently a light burden 

 on the higher and happier ranks, presses down 

 more and more heavily through the lower strata 

 of society in growing deconsideration and con- 

 tempt, unrelieved (as it is at higher levels) by 

 other influences on opinion. Finally, at the low- 

 est grade of all it exposes women to an order of 

 insults and wrongs which are never inflicted by 

 equals upon an equal, and can only be paralleled 

 by the oppressions of a dominant caste or race 

 over their helots. In this, as in many other 

 things, the educating influence of law immeas- 

 urably outstrips its direct action ; and such as is 

 the spirit of our laws, such will inevitably be the 

 spirit of our people. Human beings no longer 

 live like animals, in a condition wherein the nat- 

 ural sentiments between the sexes suffice to guard 

 the weak, where the male brute is kind and for- 

 bearing to the female, and where no Court of 

 Chancery interferes with the mother's most dear 

 and sacred charge of her little ones. Man alone 

 claims to hold his mate in subjection, and to have 

 the right while he lives, and even after he dies, 

 to rob a mother of her child ; and man, who has 

 lost the spontaneous chivalry of the lion and the 

 dog, needs to be provided with laws which may 

 do whatever it lies with laws to effect to form a 

 substitute for such chivalry. Alas ! instead of 

 such, he has only made for himself laws which 

 add legal to natural disabilities, and give artificial 

 strength to ready-constituted prepotence. 



I consider that it is a very great misfortune 

 to both sexes that women should be thus depre- 

 ciated in the opinion of that very class of men 

 whom it would be most desirable to impress with 

 respect and tenderness for them ; who are most 

 prone to despise physical infirmity and to under- 

 value the moral qualities wherein women excel. 

 All the softening and refining influences which 

 women exert in happier conditions are thus lost 

 to those who most need them — to their husbands, 

 and still more emphatically to their children ; and 

 the women themselves are degraded and bruti- 

 fied in their own eyes by the contempt of their 

 companions. When I read all the fine-sounding 

 phrases perpetually repeated about the invaluable 

 influence of a good mother over her son ; how 

 the worst criminals are admitted to be reclaim- 

 able if they have ever enjoyed it ; and how the 

 virtues of the best and noblest men are attrib- 

 uted to it, as a commonplace of biography — I 



