History of Ideas on Woman / 116
denying any analogy with the state. Men may govern women but not men. Rousseau's rigid apportionment of sex roles was at once reactionary and pacesetting. It was a reaction against women's attempts to expand their prerogatives, especially via the so-called blue-stocking salons springing up throughout Europe; it was also a model for subsequent relations between men and women, particularly after the French Revolution, which, ironically, women vigorously supported. The architects of the Revolution adopted not only his radical egalitarianism, if only in principle, but also his elitist pronouncements on women.
PATERNITY AND THE ORIGIN OF POLITICAL POWER *

\
The word Economy, or Oeconomy, is derived from óíkós, a house, and uó/ias, law, and meant originally only the wise and legitimate government of the house for the common good of the whole family. The meaning of the term was then extended to the government ofthat great family, the State. To distinguish these two senses of the word, the latter is called general or political economy, and the former domestic or particular economy. The first only is '. discussed in the present discourse.
Even if there were as close an analogy as many authors maintain between the State and the family, it would not follow that the rules of conduct proper for one of these societies would be also proper for the other. They differ too much in extent to be regulated in the same manner; and there will always be a great difference between domestic government, in which  a father can see everything for
* From Jean Jacques Rousseau, A Discourse on Political Economy in The Social Contract and Discourses, trans. G.D.H. Cole (London: J.M. Dent and Sons, Ltd., 1913).
117
History of Ideas on Woman / 118
himself, and'civil government, where the chief sees hardly anything   :::;
save through the eyes of others. To put both on an equality in this     v
respect, the talents, strength, and all the faculties of the father     ■
would have to increase in proportion to the size of his family, and     v
the soul of a powerful monarch would have to be, to that of an    ;■
ordinary man, as the extent of his empire is to that of a private
person's estate.                                                                                      :-
But how could the government of the State be like that of the .:X
family, when the basis on which they rest is so different? The father    ;^;
being physically stronger than his children, his paternal authority,   i
as long as they need his protection, may be reasonably said to be   :'
established by nature.'But in the great family, all the members of ,-£
which are naturally  equal,  the  political  authority,  being  purely ■ í
arbitrary as far as its institution is concerned, can be founded only ;/y;
on conventions, and the Magistrate can have no authority over the s'.ý'J
rest, except by virtue of the laws. The duties of a father are ; %
dictated to him by natural feelings, and in a manner that seldom,;;
allows him to neglect them. For rulers there is no such principle, V;
and they  are  really obliged  to  the  people  only  by  what  they  4
themselves have promised to do, and the people have therefore a ■;■
right to require of them. Another more important difference is that ;^
since the children have nothing but what they receive from their y
father, it is plain that all the rights of property belong to him, or i^
emanate from him; but quite the opposite is the case in the great #
family,  where  the  general  administration  is  established  only  to v
secure individual property, which is antecedent to it. The principal;^
object of the work of the whole house is to preserve and increase ■
the patrimony of the father in order that he may be able some day "^
to   distribute   among   his  children   without   impoverishing   them;   :
whereas the wealth of the exchequer is only a means, often ill":
understood, of keeping the individuals in peace and plenty. In a'"'.-}
word, the little family is destined to be extinguished, and to resolve í:
itself some day into several families of a similar nature; but the •;.
great family, being constituted to endure  for ■ ever in the same "£
11,9 I Jean Jacques Rousseau
condition, need not, like the small one, increase for the purpose of multiplying, but need only maintain itself; and it can easily be proved that any increase does it more harm than good.
In the family, it is clear,' for several reasons which lie in its very nature, that the father ought to command. In the first place, the authority  ought  not  to   be  equally  divided  between  father  and :  mother; the government must be single, and in every division of opinion there must be one preponderant voice to decide. Secondly, however   lightly  we   may   regard   the   disadvantages   peculiar   to women, yet, as they necessarily occasion intervals of inaction, this is ': a sufficient reason for excluding them from this supreme authority: for when the balance is perfectly even, a straw is enough to turn the scale. Besides, the husband ought to be able to superintend his ■-■ wife's conduct, because it is of importance for him to be assured : that  the   children,   whom   he   is   obligated   to   acknowledge   and maintain, belong to no one but himself. Thirdly, children should be .obedient to their father, at first of necessity, and afterwards from : .gratitude: after having had their wants satisfied by him during one ^half of their lives,  they ought  to  consecrate  the  other half to ^providing for his.  Fourthly, servants owe  him their services in exchange for the provision he makes for them, though they may break off the bargain as soon as it ceases to suit them. I say nothing :>here of slavery, because it is contrary to nature,  and cannot be authorized by any right or law.
There is nothing of all this in political society, in which the chief ■is so far from having any natural interest in the happiness of the individuals, that it is not uncommon for him to seek his own in their misery. If the magistracy is hereditary, a community of men is often governed by a child. If it be elective, innumerable inconveniences arise from such election; while in both cases all the advantages of paternity are lost. If you have but a single ruler, you "lie at the discretion of a master who has no reason to love you: and if you have several, you must bear at once their tyranny and their divisions. In a word,- abuses are inevitable and their consequences


History of Ideas on Woman / 120
fetal in every society where the public interest and the laws have no natural force, and are perpetually attacked by personal interest and the passions of the ruler and the members.
Although the functions of the father of a family and those of the chief magistrate ought to make for the same object, they must do so in such different ways, and their duty and rights are so essentially distinct, that we cannot confound them without forming very false ideas about the fundamental laws of society, and falling into errors which are fatal to mankind. In fact, if the voice of nature is the best counsellor to which a father can listen in the discharge of his duty, for the Magistrate it is a false guide, which continually prevents him for performing this, and leads sooner or later to the ruin of himself and of the State, if he is not restrained by the most sublime virtue. The only precaution necessary for the father of a family is to guard himself against depravity, and prevent his natural inclinations from being corrupted; whereas it is these themselves which corrupt the Magistrate. In order to act aright, the first has only to consult his heart; the other becomes a traitor the moment he listens to his. Even his own reason should be suspect to him, nor should he follow any rule other than the public reason, which is the law. Thug; nature has made a multitude of good fathers of families; but it is doubtful whether, from the very beginning of the world, human wisdom has made ten men capable of governing their peers.
m
David Hume



:' As part of his criticism of social-contract theories, Hume denied
■ that agreement alone explains why some people obey others. For
;; example, how can we explain the fact, cited by Hobbes, that women
have agreed in the marriage contract to confer patriarchal rights on
men? According to Hume  this  agreement,  like  all conventional
-'■ agreements, must ultimately be explained on grounds of utility. In
■ -his famous Treatise of Human Nature (1740), he agrees with Hobbes
■that men labor under a considerable disadvantage, since the pater-
; nity of a child is  virtually  impossible  to  ascertain.  Given  that
society's interest is served by the propagation and nurture of the
:'■/ species, it is clear that something must be done to assure men that
: their wives' children are their own. Without such assurance, men
v are unlikely to make the sacrifices necessary to assist women in the
care and education of children. Hume recognizes that a marriage
contract in itself could not provide this assurance, that the problem
is ultimately  a psychological  one:  how  to  instill  in women   an
obligation to bear children, but at the same time render everything
History of Ideas on Woman / 224
smaller degree of muscular strength has rendered her subject to the principle of force, which expressed itself in barbaric cultures as "might makes right" and in civilized cultures as paternalism. The latter is subtle and puts the best face on force, since control by the male sex is based on chivalry and generosity, and uses bribery and , intimidation instead of brutality to secure obedience, deference, and gratitude for protection. This bribery and intimidation is effected by rendering women economically and morally dependent on men. The law completes the intimidation by its discriminatory statutes. It is because of this subjection that Mill makes his famous analogy of the position of women with slavery.
1
THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN*
The object of this Essay is to explain as clearly as I am able, the grounds of an opinion which I have held from the very earliest period when I had formed any opinions at all on social or political matters, and which, instead of ^being weakened or modified, has been constantly growing stronger by the progress of reflection and the experience of life. 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 be replaced by a principle of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other.
The very words necessary to express the task I have undertaken, show how arduous it is. But it would be a mistake to suppose that the difficulty of the case must lie in the insufficiency or obscurity of the grounds of reason on which my conviction rests. The difficulty
* From John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women (Bungay, Suffolk: Richard Clay, Ltd., 1869), Chaps. 1, 3.
225
History of Ideas on Woman / 226
is that which exists in all cases in which there is a mass of feeling to be contended against. So long as an opinion is strongly rooted in the feelings, it gains rather than loses in stability by having a preponderating weight of argument against it. For if it were accepted as a result of argument, the refutation of the argument might shake the solidity of the conviction; but when it rests solely on feeling, the worse it fares in argumentative contest, the more persuaded its adherents are that their feeling must have some deeper ground, which the arguments do not reach; and while the feeling remains, it is always throwing up fresh intrenchments of argument to repair any breach made in the old. And there are so many causes tending to. make the feelings connected with this subject the most intense and most deeply-rooted of all those which gather round and protect old institutions and customs, that we need not wonder to find them as yet less undermined and loosened than any of the rest by the progress of the great modern spiritual and social transition; nor suppose that the barbarisms to which men cling longest must be less barbarisms than those which they earlier shake off.
In every respect the burden is hard' on those who attack an almost universal opinion. They must be very fortunate as well as 1 unusually capable if they obtain a hearing at all. They have more difficulty in obtaining a trial, than any other litigants have in getting a verdict. If they do extort a hearing, they are subjected to a set of logical requirements totally different from those exacted from other people. In all other cases, the burthen of proof is supposed to he with the affirmative. If a person is charged with a murder, it rests with those who accuse him to give proof of his guilt, not with himself to prove his innocence. If there is a difference of opinion about the reality of an alleged historical event, in which the feelings of men in general are not much interested, as the Siege of Troy for example, those who maintain that the event took place are expected to produce their proofs, before those who take the other side can be required to say anything; and at no time are these required to do more than show that the evidence produced by the others is of no
227 I John Stuart Mill
value. Again, in practical matters, the burden of proof is supposed to be with those who are against liberty; who contend for any restriction  or  prohibition;   either   any  limitation  of the   general freedom of human action, or any disqualification or disparity of privilege affecting one person or kind of persons, as compared with others.  The a priori presumption  is  in  favour  of freedom  and impartiality. It is held that there should be no restraint not required by the general good, and that the law should be no respecter of persons, .but should  treat  all  alike,   save  where  dissimilarity   of treatment is required by positive reasons, either of justice or of policy. But of none of these rules of evidence will the benefit be allowed to those who maintain the opinion I profess. It is useless for me to say that those who maintain the doctrine that men have a right to command and women are under an obligation to obey, or that men are fit for government and women unfit,  are on the affirmative- side of the question, and that they are bound to show positive evidence for the assertions, or submit to their rejection. It ib equally unavailing for me to say that those who deny to women any freedom or privilege rightly allowed to men, having the double presumption against them that they are  opposing freedom  and recommending partiality, must be held to the strictest proof of their case, and unless their success be^such as to exclude all doubt, the judgment ought to go against them. These would be thought good pleas in any common case; but they will not be thought so in this instance. Before I could hope to make any impression, I should be expected not only to answer all that has ever been said by those who take the other side of the question, but to imagine all that could be said by them—to find them in reasons, as well as answer all I find: and besides refuting all arguments for the affirmative, I shall be called   upon   for   invincible   positive   arguments   to   prove   a negative. And even if I could do all this, and leave the opposite party with a host of unanswered arguments against them, and not a single unrefuted one on their side, I should be thought to have done little; for a cause supported on the one hand by universal usage, and on the other by so great a preponderance of popular
1
History of Ideas on Woman / 228
sentiment, is supposed to have a presumption in its favour, superior to any conviction which any appeal to reason has power to produce in any intellects but those of a high class.
I do not mention these difficulties to complain of them; first, because it would be useless; they are inseparable from having to contend through people's understandings against the hostility of their feelings and practical tendencies: and truly the understandings of the majority of mankind would need to be much better cultivated than has ever yet been the case, before they can be asked to place such reliance in their own power of estimating arguments, as to give up practical principles in which they have been born and bred and which are the basis of much of the existing order of the world, at the first argumentative attack which they are not capable of logically resisting. I do not therefore quarrel with them for having too little faith in argument, but for having too much faith in custom        ' and the general feeling. It is one of the characteristic prejudices of the reaction of the nineteenth century against the eighteenth, to accord to the unreasoning elements in human nature the infallibility which the eighteenth century is supposed to have ascribed to the reasoning elements. For the apotheosis of Reason we have sub-      J stituted that of Instinct; and we call everything instinct which we      _ find in ourselves  and  for which we  cannot  trace  any  rational foundation. This idolatry, infinitely more degrading than the other, and the most pernicious of the false worships of the present day, of all of which it is now the main support, will probably hold its ground until it gives way before a sound psychology laying bare the real root of much that is bowed down to as the intention of Nature and the ordinance of God. As regards the present question, I am willing to accept the unfavourable conditions which the prejudice      ~ assigns to me. I consent that established custom, and the general feeling, should be deemed conclusive against me, unless that custom and feeling from age to age can be shown to have owed their existence to other causes than their soundness, and to have derived their power from the worse rather than the better parts of human      1 nature. I am willing that judgment should go against me, unless I
229 I John Stuart Mill
can show that my judge has been tampered with. The concession is not so great as it might appear; for to prove this, is by far the easiest portion of my task.
The generality of a practice is in some cases a strong presumption that it is, or at all events once was, conductive to laudable ends. This is the case, when the practice was first adopted, or afterwards kept up, as a means to such ends, and was grounded on experience of the mode in which they could be most effectually attained. If the authority of men over women, when first established, had been the result of a conscientious comparison between different modes of constituting the government of society; if, after trying various other modes of social organisation—the government of women over men, equality between the two, and such mixed and divided modes of government as might be invented—it had been decided, on  the testimony of experience, that the mode in which women are wholly underv_the rule of men, having no share at all in public concerns, and each in private being under the legal obligation of obedience to the  man  with   whom   she  has  associated   her  destiny,   was   the arrangement most conducive to the happiness and well-being of both; its general adoption might then be fairly thought to be some evidence that, at the time when it was adopted, it was the best: though even then the considerations which recommended it may, like so many other primeval social facts of the greatest importance, have subsequently, in the course of ages, ceased to exist. But the state of the case is in every respect the reverse of this. In the first place, the opinion in favour of the present system, which entirely subordinates the weaker sex to the stronger, rests upon theory only; for there never has been trial made of any other: so the experience, in the sense in which it is vulgarly opposed to theory, cannot be pretended to have pronounced any verdict. And in the second place, the adoption of this system of inequality never was the result of deliberation, or forethought,  or any social ideas, or any notion whatever of what conduced to the benefit of humanity or the good order of society. It arose simply from the fact that from the very earliest twilight of human society, every woman (owing to the value
History of Ideas on Woman / 230
attached to her by men, combined with her inferiority in muscular strength) was found in a state of bondage to some man. Laws and systems of polity always begin by recognising the relations they find already existing between individuals. They convert what was a mere physical fact into a legal right, give it the sanction of society, and principally aim at the substitution of public and organised means of asserting and protecting these rights, instead of the irregular and lawless conflict of physical strength. Those who had already been compelled to obedience became in this manner legally bound to it. Slavery, from being a mere affair of force between the master and the slave, became regularised and a matter of compact among the masters,  who,   binding  themselves  to  one   another  for  common protection,   guaranteed   by   their  collective   strength   the   private possessions of each, including his slaves. In early times, the great majority of the male sex were slaves as well as the whole of the female.   And  many   ages   elapsed,   some   of them   ages   of high cultivation, before any thinker was bold enough to question the rightfulness, and the absolute social necessity, either of the one slavery or of the other. By degrees such thinkers did arise i and (the general progress of society assisting) the slavery of the male sex has, in all the countries of Christian Europe at least (though, in one of them, only within the last few years) been at length abolished, and that of the female sex has been gradually changed into a milder form of dependence. But this dependence, as it exists at present, is not an original institution, taking a fresh start from considerations of justice and social expediency—it is the primitive state of slavery lasting on, through successive mitigations and modifications occasioned   by   the   same   causes   which   have   softened   the   general manners, and brought all human relations more under the control of justice and the influence of humanity. It has not lost the taint of its brutal origin. No presumption in its favour, therefore, can be drawn from the fact of its existence. The only such presumption which it could be supposed to have, must be grounded on its having lasted till now, when so many other things which came down from the same odious source have been done away with. And this, indeed, is
231 I John Stuart Mill
what makes it strange to ordinary ears, to hear it asserted that the inequality of rights between men and women has no other source than the law of the strongest.
That this statement should have the effect of a paradox, is in some respects creditable to the progress of civilisation,  and the improvement of the moral sentiments of mankind. 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 affairs: nobody professes it, and, as regards most of the relations between human beings, nobody is permitted to practise it. When anyone succeeds in doing so, it is under cover of some pretext which gives him the semblance of having some general social interest on his side.   This   being  the  ostensible   state   of  things,   people   flatter themselves that the rule of mere force is ended; that the law of the strongest .cannot be the reason of existence of anything which has remained in full operation down to the present time. However, any of our present institutions may have begun, it can only, they think, have been preserved to this period of advanced civilisation by a well-grounded feeling  of its  adapatation   to  human   nature,   and conduciveness to the general good. They do not understand the great vitality and durability of institutions which place right on the side of might; how intensely ^Shey are clung to; how the good as well as the-bad propensities and sentiments of those who have power in their hands,  become  identified  with  retaining  it;  how slowly these bad institutions give way, one at a time, the weakest first,: beginning with those which are least interwoven with the daily habits of life; and how very rarely those who have obtained legal power because they first had physical, have ever lost their hold of it until the physical power has passed over to the other side. Such shifting of the physical force not having taken place in the case of women; this fact, combined with all the peculiar and characteristic features of the particular case, made it certain from the first that this branch  of the  system  of right  founded on  might,   though softened in its most atrocious features at an earlier period than
History of Ideas on Woman / 232
several of the others, would be the very last to disappear. It was inevitable that this one case of a social relation grounded on force, would survive through generations of institutions grounded on equal justice, an almost solitary exception to the general character of their laws and customs; but which, so long as it does not proclaim its own origin, and as discussion has not brought out its true character, is not felt to jar with modern civilisation, any more than domestic slavery among the Greeks jarred with their notion of themselves as a free people. . ..
In this case, too, the possessor of the undue power, the person directly interested in it, is only one person, while those who are subject to it and suffer from it are literally all the rest. The yoke is naturally and necessarily humiliating to all persons, except the one who is on the throne, together with, at most, the one who expects to succeed to it. How different are these cases from that of the power of men over women! I am hot now prejudging the question of its justifiableness. I am showing how vastly more permanent it could not but be, even if not justifiable, than these other dominations which have nevertheless lasted down to our own time. Whatever gratification of pride there is in the possession of power, and whatever personal interest in its exercise, is in this case not ^confined to a limited class, but common to the whole male sex. Instead of being, to most of its supporters a thing desirable chiefly in the abstract, or, like the political ends usually contended for by factions, of little private importance to any but the leaders; it comes home to the person and hearth of every male head of a family, and of everyone who looks forward to being so. The clodhopper exercises, or is to exercise, his share of the power equally with the highest nobleman. And the case is that in which the desire of power is the strongest for everyone who desires power, desires it. most over those who are nearest to him, with whom his life is passed, with whom he has most concerns in common, and in whom any independence of his authority is oftenest likely to interfere with his individual preferences. If, in the other cases specified, powers manifestly grounded only on force and having so much  less to
233 / John Stuart Mill
support them, are so slowly and with so much difficulty got rid of, much more must be so with this, even if it rests on no better foundation than those. We must consider too, that the possessors of the power have facilities in this case, greater than in any other, to prevent any uprising against it. Everyone of the subjects lives under the very eye, and almost, it may be said, in the hands, of one of the masters—in closer intimacy with him than with any of her fellow-subjects; with no means of combining against him, no power of even locally overmastering him, and, on the other hand, with the strongest motives for seeking his favour and avoiding to give him offence. In struggles for political emancipation, everybody knows how often its champions are bought off by bribes, or daunted by terrors. In the case of women, each individual of the subject-class is in a chronic state of bribery and intimidation combined. In setting up the standard of resistance, a large number of the leaders, and still more of the followers, must make an almost complete sacrifice of the pleasures or the alleviations of their own individual lot. If ever any system of privilege and enforced subjection had its yoke tightly riveted on the necks of those who are kept down by it, this has. I have not yet shown that it is a wrong system: but everyone who is capable of thinking on the subject must see that even if it is, it was certain to outlast all other forms of unjust authority. And when some of the grossest of the other forms still exist in many civilised countries, and have only recently been got rid of in others, it would be strange if that which is so much the deepest rooted had yet been perceptibly shaken anywhere. There is more reason to wonder that the protests and testimonies against it should have been so numerous and so weighty as they are... .
All causes, social and natural, combine to make it unlikely that women should be collectively rebellious to the power of men. They are so far in a position different from all other subject classes, that their masters require something more from them than actual service. Men do not want solely the obedience of women, they want their sentiments. All men, except the most brutish, desire to have, in the woman most nearly connected with them, not a fprced slave
History of Ideas on Woman / 234
but a willing one, not a slave merely, but a favourite. They have     -.•;--■ therefore put everything in practice to enslave their minds. The masters of all other slaves rely, for maintaining obedience, on fear; either fear of themselves, or religious fears. The masters of women wanted more than simple obedience, and they turned the whole force of education to effect their purpose. All women are brought up from the very earliest years in the belief that their ideal of character is the very opposite to that of men; not self-will, and   '•■?_' government by self-control, but submission, and yielding to the ' control of others. All the moralities tell them that it is the duty of - ■-women, and all the current sentimentalities that it is their nature, to live for others; to make complete abnegation of themselves, and to have no life but in their affections. And by their affections are    4y meant the only ones they are allowed to have—those to the men   ::>: with whom they are connected, or to the children who constitute an    ť additional and indefeasible tie between them and a man. When we   ;;-:) put together   three  things—first,  the  natural  attraction  between;^ opposite   sexes;  secondly,   the   wife's   entire   dependence   on   the ■;■"■'-■% husband, every privilege or pleasure she has being either his gift, or ^;| depending entirely on his will; aňdlastly, that the principal object:v^S of human pursuit, consideration, and,.,all objects of social ambition,\.Sží can jn general be sought or obtained by her only through him, it ^ would be a miracle if the object of being attractive to men had not' ^ become  the  polar star  of feminine   education  and  formation of ^| character. And, this great means of influence over the minds of\ľ^l women having been acquired, an instinct of selfishness made men ;fV| avail themselves of it to the utmost as a means of holding women in ;v5| subjection, by representing to them meekness, submissiveness, and ■£§ resignation of all individual will into the hands of a man, as an; ^S essential part of sexual attractivenss. Can it be doubted that any 'of7;:;f! the other yokes which mankind have succeeded in breaking, would :^M have subsisted till now if the same means had existed, and had been ^ so sedulously used, to bow down their minds to it? If it had been^l! made the object of the life of every young plebeian to find personal S|i favour in the eyes of some patrician, of every young serf with someS?|
235 / John Stuart Mill
seigneur; if domestication with him, and a share of his personal affections, had been held out as the prize which they all should look out for, the most gifted and aspiring being able to reckon on the most desirable prizes; and if, when this prize had been obtained, they had been shut out by a wall of brass from all interests not centring in him, all feelings and desires but those which he shared or inculcated; would not serfs and seigneurs, plebeians and patricians, have been as broadly distinguished at this day as men and women are? and would not all but a thinker here and there, have believed the distinction to be a fundamental and unalterable fact in human nature?
The preceding considerations are amply sufficient to show that custom, however universal it may be, affords in this case no presumption, and ought not to create any prejudice, in favour of the arrangements which place women in social and political subjec-: tion to men. But I may go farther, and maintain that the course of history, and the tendencies of progressive human society, afford not only no presumption in favour of this system of inequality of rights, but a strong one against it; and that so far as the whole course of human improvement up to the time, the whole stream of modern tendencies, warrants any inference on the subject, it is, that this relic of the past is discordant <®rith the future, and must necessarily disappear.
For, what is the peculiar character of the modern world—the .difference which chiefly distinguishes modern institutions, modern social ideas, modern life itself, from those of times long past? It is, that human beings are no longer born to their place in life, and chained down by an inexorable bond to the place they are born to, ■but are free to employ their faculties, and such favourable chances :as' offer, to achieve the lot which may appear to them most desirable. ...
; If this general principle of social and economical science is not
true; if individuals, with such help as they can derive from the
'. opinion of those who know them, are not better judges than the law
and the government, of their own capacities and vocation; the world
»19
'Ü
H
History of Ideas on Woman / 236
cannot too soon abandon this principle, and return to the old system of regulations and disabilities. But if the principle is true, we ought          j
to act as if we believed it, and not to ordain that to be born a girl instead of a boy, any more than to be born black instead of white, or a commoner instead of a nobleman, shall decide the person's position through all life—shall interdict people from all the more elevated social positions, and from all, except á few respectable occupations.   Even  were  we  to  admit  the  utmost  that   is   ever pretended as to the superior fitness of men for all the functions now reserved to them, the same argument applies which forbids a legal qualification for Members of Parliament. If only once in a dozen years the conditions of eligibility exclude a fit person, there is a real loss, while the exclusion of thousands of unfit persons is no gain; for if the constitution of the electoral body disposes them to choose unfit persons, there are always plenty öf such persons to choose from. In all things of any difficulty and importance, those who can        ". do  them  well  are  fewer  than  the'need,   even  with  the   most       -. unrestricted latitude of choice: and any limitation of the field of      _; selection deprives society of some chances of being served by the        ? competent, without ever saying it from the incompetent.
At present, in the more improved countries, the disabilities of women are the only case, save one, in which laws and institutions        . take persons at their birth, and ordain that they shall never in all      :* their lives be allowed to compete for certain things. The one exception is that of royalty. Persons still are born to the throne; no one, not of the reigning family, can ever occupy it, and no one even of that family can, by any means but the course of hereditary     > succession, attain it. All other dignities and social advantages are   _ open to the whole male sex: many indeed are only attainable by      ^ wealth, but wealth may be striven for by anyone, and is actually    "Z obtained by many men of the very humblest origin. The difficulties,     4 to the majority, are indeed insuperable without the aid of fortunate     ^ accidents; but no male human being is under any legal ban: neither law nor opinion superadd artificial obstacles to the natural ones. Royalty, as I have said, is excepted: but in this case everyone feels
237 I John Stuart Mill
it to be an exception—an anomaly in the modern world, in marked opposition to its customs and principles, and to be justified only by extraordinary special expediences, which,  though individuals and nations differ in estimating their weight, unquestionably do in fact exist. But in this exceptional case, in which a high social function is, for important reasons, bestowed on birth instead of being put up to competition, all free nations contrive to adhere in substance to the principle from which they nominally derogate; for they circumscribe   this  high   function   by   conditions   avowedly   intended   to prevent  the  person  to  whom  it ostensibly  belongs  from  really performing it; while the person by whom  it is performed,  the responsible minister, does obtain the post by a competition from which no full-grown citizen of the male sex is legally excluded. The disabilities, therefore, to which women are subject from the mere fact of their Jturth, are the solitary examples of the kind in modern legislation. In no instance except this, which comprehends half the human race, are the higher social functions closed against anyone by a fatality of birth which no exertions, and no change of circumstances, can overcome; for even religious disabilities (besides that in England and Europe they have practically almost ceased to exist) do not close any career to the disqualified person in case of conversion. The social subordination of women thus stands out an isolated fact in modern social institutions; a solitary breach of what has become their fundamental law; a single relic of an old world of thought and practice exploded in everything else, but retained in the one thing of most universal interest; as if a gigantic dolmen or a vast temple of Jupiter Olympius, occupied the site of St. Paul's and received daily worship, while the surrounding Christian churches were only resorted to on fasts and festivals. This entire discrepancy between one social fact and all those which accompany it, and the radical opposition between its nature and the progressive movement which is the boast of the modern world, and, which has successively swept  away everything  else  of an  analogous   character,   surely affords, to a conscientious observer of human tendencies, serious matter for reflection. It raises a prima facie presumption on the
History of Ideas on Woman / 238
unfavourable side, far outweighing any which custom and usage could in such circumstances create on the favourable; and should at least suffice to make this, like the choice between republicanism and royalty, a balanced question.
The least that can be demanded is, that the question should not be considered as prejudged by existing fact and existing opinion, but open to discussion on its merits, as a question of justice and expediency: the decision on this, as on any of the other social arrangements   of mankind,   depending   on   what   an   enlightened estimate of tendencies  and consequences may show to be most avantageous to humanity in general, without distinction of sex. And the discussion must be a real discussion, descending to foundations, and not resting satisfied with vague and general assertions. It will not do, for instance, to assert in general terms, that the experience of mankind  has  pronounced   in  favour   of the  existing  system. Experience cannot possibly have decided between two courses, so long as there has only been experience of one. If it be said that the doctrine of the equality of the sexes reäts only on theory, it must be remembered that the contrary doctrine also has only theory to rest upon. All that is proved in its favour by direct experience, is that mankind have been able to exist under it, and to attain the degree of improvement and prosperity which we now see; but whether that prosperity has been attained sooner, or is now greater,  than it would have been under the other system, experience does not say. On   the   other  hand,   experience   does   say,   that   every   step   in improvement has been so invariably accompanied by a step made in raising the social position of. women, that historians and philosophers have been led to adopt their elevation or debasement as on the   whole   the   surest   test   and   most   correct   measure   of  the civilisation of people or an age. Through all the progressive period of human history, the condition of women has been approaching nearer to equality with men. This does not of itself prove that the assimilation  must  go  on  to  complete  equality;  but  it  assuredly affords some presumption that such is the case.
Neither does it avail anything to say that the nature of the two
239 / John Stuart Mill
sexes adapts them to their present functions and position, and renders these appropriate to them. Standing on the ground of common sense and the constitution of the human mind, I deny that anyone knows, or can know, the nature of the two sexes, as long as they have only been seen in their present relation to one another. If men had ever been found in society without women, or women without men, or if there had been a society of men and women in which the women were not under the control of the men, something might have been positively known about the mental and moral difference which may be inherent in the nature of each. What is now called the nature of women is an eminently artificial thing—the result of forced repression in some directions, unnatural stimulation in others. It may be asserted without scruple, that no other class of dependents have had their character so entirely distorted from its natural proportions by their relation with their masters; for, if conquered and slave races have been, in some respects, more forcibly repressed, whatever in them has not been crushed down by an iron heel has generally been let alone, and if left with any liberty of development, it has developed itself according to its own laws; but in the case of women, a hot-house and stove cultivation has always been carried on of some of the capabilities of their nature, for the benefit and pleasure of their masters. Then, because certain products of the general vital force sprout luxuriandy and reach a great development in this heated atmosphere and under this active nurture and watering, while other shoots from the same root, which are left outside in the wintry air, with ice purposely heaped all round them, have stunted growth, and some are burnt off with fire and disappear; men, with that inability to recognise their own work which distinguishes the unanalytic mind, indolently believe that the tree grows of itself in the way they have made it grow, and that it would die if one half of it were not kept in a vapour bath and the other half in the snow.
Of all difficulties which impede the progress of thought, and the formation of well-grounded opinions on life, and social arrangements, the greatest is now the unspeakable ignorance and inatten-
History of Ideas on Woman / 240
tion of mankind in respect to the influences which form human character. Whatever any portion of the human species now are, or seem to be, such, it is supposed, they have a natural tendency to be: even when the most elementary knowledge of the circumstances in which they have been placed, clearly points out the causes that made them what they are. Because a cottier deeply in arrears to his landlord is not industrious, there are people who think that the Irish are naturally idle. Because constitutions can be overthrown when the authorities appointed to execute them turn their arms against them, there are people who think the French incapable of free government. Because the Greeks cheated the Turks, and the Turks only plundered the Greeks, there are persons who think that the Turks are naturally more sincere: and because women, as is often said, care nothing about politics except their personalities, it is supposed that the general good is naturally less interesting to women than to men. History, which is now so much better understood than formerly, teaches another lesson: if only by showing the extraordinary susceptibility of human nature to external influences, and the extreme variableness of those of its manifestations which are supposed to be most universal and uniform. But in history, as in travelling, men usually see only what they already had in their own minds; and few learn much from history, who do not bring much with them' to its study.
Hence, in regard to that most difficult question, what are the natural differences between the two sexes—a subject on which it is impossible in the present state of society to obtain complete and correct knowledge—while almost everybody dogmatises upon it, almost all neglect and make light of the only means by which, any partial insight can be obtained into it. This is, an analytic study of the most important department of psychology, the laws of the influence of circumstances on character. For, however great and apparently ineradicable the moral and intellectual differences between men and women might be, the evidence of there being natural differences could only be negative. Those only could be inferred to be natural which could not possibly be artificial—the
241 I John Stuart Mill
residuum, after deducting every characteristic of either sex which can admit of being explained from education or external circumstances. The profoundest knowledge of the laws of the formation of character is indispensable to entitle anyone to affirm even that there is any difference, much more what the difference is, between the two sexes considered as moral and rational beings; and since no one, as yet, has that knowledge (for there is hardly any subject which, in proportion to its importance, has been so little studied), no one is thus far entitled to any positive opinion on the subject. Conjectures are all that can at present be made; conjectures more or less probable, according as more or less authorised by such knowledge as we yet have of the laws of psychology, as applied to the formation of character. . . .
The general opinion of men is supposed to be, that the natural vocationvof a woman is that of a wife and mother. I say, is supposed to be, because, judging from acts—from the whole of the present constitution of society—one might infer that their opinion was the direct contrary. They might be supposed to think that the alleged natural vocation of women was of all things the most repugnant to their nature; insomuch that if they are free to do anything else—if any other means of living or occupation of their time and faculties, is open, which has any chance of appearing desirable to them—there will not be enough of them who will be willing to  accept the condition, said to be natural to them. If this is the real opinion of men in general, it would be well that it should be spoken out. I should like to hear somebody openly enunciating the doctrine (it is already implied in much that is written  on  the  subject)—"It is necessary to society that women should marry and produce children. They will not do so unless they are compelled. Therefore it is necessary to compel them." The merits of the case would then be clearly defined. It would be exactly that of the slave-holders of South Carolina and Louisiana. "It is necessary that cotton and sugar should be grown. White men cannot produce them. Negroes will not, for any wages which we choose to give. Ergo they must be compelled."  An  illustration  still  closer  to  the  point  is  that  of
History of Ideas on Woman / 242
impressment. Sailors must absolutely be had to defend the country. It often happens that they will not voluntarily enlist. Therefore there must be the power of forcing them. How often has this logic been used! and, but for one flaw in it, without doubt it would have been successful up to this day. But it is open to the retort—First pay the sailors the honest value of the labour. When you have made it as well worth their while to serve you, as to work for other employers, you will have no more difficulty than others have in obtaining their services. To this there is no logical answer except "I will not": and as people are now not only ashamed, but are not desirous, to rob the labourer of his hire, impressment is nö longer advocated. Those who attempt to force women into marriage by closing all other doors against them, lay themselves open to a similar retort. If they mean what they say, their opinion must evidently be, that men do not render the married condition so desirable to women, as to induce them to accept it for its own recommendations. It is not a sign of one's thinking the boon one offers very attractive, when one allows only Hobson's choice, "that or none." And here, I believe, is the clue to the feelings of those men, who have a real antipathy to the equal freedom of women. I believe they are afraid, not lest women should be unwilling to marry, for I do not think that anyone in reality has that apprehension; but lest they should insist that marriage should be on equal conditions; lest all women of spirit and capacity should prefer doing almost anything else, not in their own eyes degrading, rather than marry, when marrying is giving themselves a master, and a master too of all their earthly possessions. And truly, if this conseqence were necessarily incident to marriage, I think that the apprehension would be very well founded. I agree in thinking it probable that few women, capable of anything else, would, unless under an irresistible entraimment, rendering them for the time insensible to anything but itself, choose such a lot, when any other means were open to them of rilling a conventionally honourable place in life and if men are determined that the law of marriage shall be a law of despotism, they are quite right, in point of mere policy, in leaving
243 I John Stuart Mill
to women only Hobson's choice. But, in that case, all that has been done in the modern world to relax the chain on the minds of women has been a mistake. They never should have been allowed to receive a literary education. Women who read, much more women who write, are, in the existing constitution of things, a contradiction and a disturbing element: and it was wrong to bring . women up with any acquirements but those of an odalisque, or of a domestic servant. . ..
As ,for moral differences, considered as distinguished from intellectual, the distinction commonly drawn  is to  the  advantage  of women.  They  are  declared  to   be   better  than  men;  an   empty compliment, which must provoke a bitter smile from every woman of spirit, since there is no other situation in life in which it is the established order and considered quite natural and suitable, that the better should obey the worse. If this piece of idle talk is good for anything,1 it is only as an admission by men,  of the corrupting influence of power; for that is certainly the only truth which the fact, if it be a fact, either proves or illustrates. And it is true that servitude, except when it actually brutahses, though corrupting to both,  is less  so  to  the  slaves  than   to  the   slave-masters.   It  is wholesomer for the moral nature to be restrained, even by arbitrary power, than to be allowed to exercise arbitrary power without restraint. Women, lit is said,' seldomer fall under the penal law-contribute a much smaller number of offenders to the  criminal calendar, than men. I doubt not that the same thing may be said, with the same truth, of Negro slaves. Those who are under the control   of others   cannot   often   commit   crimes,   unless   at   the command and for the purposes of their masters. I do not know a more signal instance of the blindness with which the world, including the herd of studious men, ignore and pass over all the influences of social circumstances, than their silly depreciation of the intellectual, and silly panegyrics on the moral nature of women.. . .
There remains a question, not of less importance than those already discussed, and which will be asked the most importunately by those opponents whose conviction is somewhat shaken on the
History of Ideas on Woman / 244

3*5

main point. What good are we to expect from the changes proposed in our customs and institutions? Would mankind be at all better off if women were free? If not, why disturb their minds, and attempt to make a social revolution in the name of an abstract right?
it is hardly to be expected that this question will be asked in respect to the change proposed in the condition of women in marriage. The sufferings, immoralities, evils of all sorts, produced' in innumerable cases by the subjection of individual women to individual men, are far too terrible to be overlooked. Unthinking or uncandid persons, counting those cases alone which are extreme, or which attain publicity, may say that the evils are exceptional; but no one can be blind to their existence, nor, in many cases, to their intensity. And it is perfectly obvious that the abuse of the power cannot be very much checked while the power remains. It is a power given, or offered, not to good men, or to decently respectable men, but to all men; the most brutal, and the most criminal. There is no check but that of opinion, and such men are in general within the reach of no opinion but that of men like themselves. If such men did not brutally/ tyrannise over the one human being whom the law compels to bear everything from them, society must already have reached a paradisiacal state. There could be no need any longer of laws to curb men's vicious propensities. Astraea must not^only have returned to earth, but the heart of the worst man must have become her temple. The law of servitude in marriage is a monstrous contradiction to all the principles of the modern world, and to all the experience through which those principles have been slowly and painfully worked out. It is the sole case, now that Negro slavery has been abolished, in which a human being in the plenitude of every faculty is delivered up to the tender mercies of another human being, in the hope forsooth that this other will use the power solely for the good of the person subjected to it. Marriage is the only actual bondage known to our law. There remain no legal slaves, except the mistress of every house.
It is not, therefore, on this part of the subject, that the question is likely to be asked, Cut bono? We may be told that the evil would
245 / John Stuart Mill
outweigh the good, but the reality of the good admits no dispute. In
regard, however, to the larger question, the removal of women's
disabilities—their  recognition   as   the   equals   of men   in   all   that
belongs  to  citizenship—the  opening  to   them  of all  honourable
employments, and of the training and education which qualifies for
: --     those employments—there are many persons for whom it is not
. z     enough that the inequality has no just or legitimate defence; they
■.     require to be told what express advantage would be obtained by
: t     abolishing it.
-  - To which let me first answer, the advantage of having the most i '_ universal and pervading of all human relations regulated by justice t c instead of injustice. The vast amount of this gain to human nature, i'     it is hardly possible, by any explanation or illustration, to place in a
stronger light than it is placed by the bare statement, to anyone % . - who attaches a moral meaning to words. All the selfish propensities, % - the self-worship, the unjust self-preference, which exist among -r mankind, have their source and root in, and derive their principal 1.'-     nourishment from, the present constitution of the relation between
-       men and women. Think what it is to a boy, to grow up to manhood in the belief that without any merit or any exertion of his own, though he may be the most  frivolous and empty  or  the most
i ~    ignorant and stolid of mankind, by the mere fact of being born a
male he is by right ine superior of all and every one of an entire
_ half of the..human   race;   including  probably   some   whose   real
superiority to himself he has daily or hourly occasion to feel; but
- even  if in his whole  conduct  he  habitually  follows  a  woman's
" -   guidance, still, if he is a fool, she thinks that of course she is not,
and cannot be, equal in ability and judgment to himself; and if he is
*' :r   not a fool, he does worse—he sees that she is superior to him, and
- _    believes that, notwithstanding her  superiority,  he  is  entitled  to
I:    command and she is bound to obey. What must be the effect on his
\ "r   character, of this lesson? And men of the cultivated classes are often
J   not aware how deeply it sinks into the immense majority of male
I r    minds. For, among right-feeling and well-bred people, the inequality
; -'   is kept as much as possible out of sight; above all, out of sight of
>
History of Ideas on Woman / 246
the children. As much obedience is required from boys to their mother as to their father: they are not permitted to domineer over their sisters, nor are they accustomed to see these postponed to them, but the contrary; the compensations of the chivalrous feeling being made prominent, while the servitude which requires them is kept in the background. Well brought-up youths in the higher classes thus often escape the bad influences of the situation in their early years, and only experience them when, arrived at manhood^ they fall under the dominion of facts as they really exist.  Such people are little aware, when a boy is differently brought up, how: early the notion of his inherent superiority to a girl arises in his mind; how it  grows with his  growth  and strengthens with his : strength; how it is inoculated by one schoolboy upon another; how : early the youth thinks himself superior to his mother, owing her ; perhaps forbearance, but no real respect; and how sublime and sultan-like a sense of superiority he feels, above all, over the woman whom he honours by admitting her to a partnership of his life. Is it imagined  that  all  this  does  not   pervert   the  whole  manner  of existence of the man, both as an individual and as a social being? It : is an exact parallel to the feeling of a hereditary king that he is: excellent above others by being born a king, or a noble by being-born a noble. The relation between husband and wife is very like,; that' between lord and .vassal, except that the wife is held to more; unlimited obedience than the vassal was.  However, the vassaľs. character may have been affected, for better and for worse, by his. subordination, who can help seeing that the  lord's was affected-greatly for the worse? whether he was led to believe that his vassals were really superior to himself, or to feel that he was placed ;in-command over people as good as himself, for no merits or labours of his own, but merely for having, as Figaro says, taken the trouble' to be born. The self-worship of the monarch, or of the feudal superior, is matched by the self-worship of the male. Human beings do not grow up from childhood in  the  possession of unearned distinctions, without pluming themselves upon them. Those whom; privileges not acquired by their merit, and which they feel to be
247 í John Stuart Mill
disproportioned to it, inspire with additional humility, are always ,   the few, and the best few. The rest are only inspired with pride, and the worst sort of pride, that which values itself upon accidental advantages, not of its own achieving. Above all, when the feeling of ..  being raised above the whole of the other sex is combined with ;   personal authority over one individual among them; the situation, if ':■■ a school of conscientious  and affectionate  forbearance   to  those •   whose strongest points of character are conscience and affection, is s to  men, of another  quality  a  regularly  constituted  academy  or gymnasium for training them in arrogance and overbearingness; ;   which  vices,  if curbed  by  the  certainty  of resistance   in  their intercourse with other men, their equals, break out towards all who ■■are in a position to be obliged to tolerate them, and often revenge ;.;-' themselves upon the unfortunate wife for the involuntary restraint ]':. which they are obliged to submit to elsewhere.
The example afforded, and the education given to the sentiments, >J by laying the  foundation of domestic  existence upon a relation .-contradictory to the first principles of social justice, must, from the ^ very nature of man, have a perverting influence of such magnitude, that it is hardly possible with our present experience to raise our - imaginations to the conception of so great a change for the better \as would be made by its removal. AH that education and civilisation -are doing to efface^the influences on character of the law of force, ■and replace them by those of justice, remains merely on the surface, ;;,as long as the citadel of the enemy is not attacked. The principle of ;r:the modern movement in morals and politics, is that conduct, and ^conduct alone, entitles to respect: that not what men are, but what ■ they do, constitutes their claim to deference; that, above all, merit, and not birth, is the only rightful claim to power and authority. ... ;    When we consider the positive evil caused to the disqualified half /of the human race by their disqualification—first in the loss of the most inspiriting and elevating kind of personal enjoyment, and next ijffř;ín the weariness, disappointment, and profound dissatisfaction with ^gUife, which are so often the substitute for it; one feels that among all ;:5;the lessons which men require for carrying on the struggle against


History of Ideas on Woman / 248
the inevitable imperfections of their lot on earth, there is no lesson which they more need, than not to add to the evils which nature inflicts, by their jealous and prejudiced restrictions on one another. Their vain fears only substitute other and worse evils for those which they are idly apprehensive of: while every restraint on the freedom of conduct of any of their human fellow-creatures (otherwise than by making them responsible for any evil actually caused by it), dries up pro tanto the principal fountain of human happiness, and leaves the species less rich, to an inappreciable degree, in all that makes life valuable to the individual human being.
"t
Charles Darwin
■--)
Darwin's theory of evolution (Origin of the Species, 1859) exploded upon the intellectual commmunity of the mid-nineteenth century, supported as it was by a mass of evidence. In 1871 he published the companion piece to Origin, The Descent of Man. Together these two pieces describe the mechanisms whereby evolution is effected—natural selection, sexual selection, and inheritance of acquired characteristics. By natural selection, variations in plants and animals that are advantageous in the struggle to survive are passed on to offspring, while disadvantageous variations do not last. Natural selection has produced new varieties and new species. By sexual selection, which is more directly relevant to the Woman Question, when either male or female possesses a characteristic that increases the ability to produce offspring, that characteristic will be passed on to descendants even though it has no other use (for example, the bright colored plumage of birds). Darwin's theory of evolution had one salutary effect for women. It undermined the biblical tradition by which man's existence is due to  a special
History of Ideas on Woman / 298
to a masculinity complex, in which case she rebels against castration and continues to identify herself as male, to behave as though she were a man (for example, by pursuing intellectual and professional goals). The following piece, "Femininity," was published in 1933 and brings together Freud's previous papers on the subject.
WOMAN AS CASTRATED MAN *
To-day's lecture, too, should have no place in an introduction; but it may serve to give you an example of a detailed piece of analytic work, and I can say two things to recommend it. It brings forward nothing but observed facts, almost without any speculative additions, and it deals with a subject which has a claim on your interest -second almost* to no other. Throughout history people have knocked their heads against the riddle of the nature of femininity—
Häupter in Hieroglyphenmützen, Häupter in Turban und schwarzem Barett, Perückenhäupter und tausend andre Arme, schwitzende Menschenhäupter. .. .*
.    * From Sigmund Freud, New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1965), Lecture 33.
1 Heads in hieroglyphic bonnets, Heads in turbans and black birettas, Heads in wigs and thousand other Wretched, sweating heads of humans....
(Heine, Nordsee [Second Cycle, VII, "Fragen"].)
299
History of Ideas on Woman / 300
Nor will you have escaped worrying over this problem—those of you who are men; to those of you who are women this will not apply_you are yourselves the problem. When you meet a human being, the first distinction you make is "male or female?" and you are accustomed to make the distinction with unhesitating certainty. Anatomical science shares your certainty at one point and not much further. The male sexual product, the spermatozoon, and its vehicle are male; the ovum and the organism that harbours it are female. In both sexes organs have been formed which serve exclusively for the. sexual functions; they were probably developed from the same [innate] disposition into two different "forms. Besides this, in both sexes the other organs, the bodily shapes and tissues, show the influence of the individual's sex, but this is inconstant and its amount variable; these are what are known as the secondary sexual characters. Science next tells you something that runs counter to your expectations and is probably calculated to confuse your feelings. It draws your attention to the fact that portions of the male sexual apparatus also appear in women's bodies, though in an atrophied state, and vice versa in the alternative case. It regards their occurrence as indications of bisexuality, as though an individual is not a man or a woman but always, both—merely a certain amount more the one than the other. You will then be asked to make yourselves familiar with the idea that the proportion in which rnasculine and feminine are mixed in an individual is subject to quite considerable fluctuations. Since, however, apart from the very rarest cases, only one kind of sexual product—ova or semen—is neverthe- ; less present in one person, you are bound to have doubts as to the decisive significance of those elements and must conclude that what constitutes masculinity or femininity is an unknown characteristic which anatomy cannot lay hold of.
Can psychology do so perhaps? We are accustomed to employ "masculine" and "feminine" as mental qualities as well, and have in the same way transferred the notion of bisexuality to mental life.■■ Thus we speak of a person, whether male or female, as behaving in;
■-ÍÍ4
301 / Sigmund Freud
a masculine  way  in  one  connection  and  in a feminine  way in another. But you will soon perceive that this is only giving way to anatomy  or   to  convention.   You   cannot   give   the   concepts   of "masculine" and "feminine" any new connotation. The distinction is not a psychological one; when you say "masculine," you usually mean "active," and when you say "feminine," you usually mean "passive." Now it is true that a relation of the kind exists. The male sex-céll is actively mobile and searches out the female one, and the latter, the ovum, is immobile and waits passively.  This  behaviour of the elementary sexual organisms is indeed a model for the conduct of sexual individuals during intercourse.  The male pursues the female for the purpose of sexual union, seizes hold of her and penetrates into her. But by this you have precisely reduced the characteristic of masculinity to the factor of aggressiveness so far as psychology is concerned. You may well doubt whether you have gained any real advantage from this when you reflect that in some classes of animals the females are the stronger and more aggressive and the male is active only in the single act of sexual union. This is so, for instance, with the spiders. Even the functions of rearing and caring for the young, which strike us as feminine par excellence, are not invariably attached to the female sex in animals. In quite high species we find that the sexes share the task of caring for the.iyoung between them or even that the male alone devotes himself to it. Even irPthe sphere of human sexual life you soon see how inadequate it is to make masculine behaviour coincide with activity and feminine with passivity. A mother is active in every sense towards her child; the act of lactation itself may equally be described as the mother suckling the baby or as her being sucked by it. The further you go from the narrow sexual sphere the more obvious will the "error of superimposition" become. Women can display great activity in various directions, men are not able to live in company with their own kind unless they develop a large amount of passive adaptability. If you now tell me that these facts go to prove precisely that both  men  and  women  are  bisexual in  the psychological sense, I shall conclude that you have decided in your
History of Ideas on Woman / 302
own minds to make "active" coincide with "masculine" and "passive" with "feminine." But I advise you against it. It seems to me to serve.no useful purpose and adds nothing to our knowledge.
One might consider characterizing femininity psychologically as giving preference to passive aims. This is not, of course, the same thing as passivity; to achieve a passive aim may call for a large amount of activity. It is perhaps the case that in a woman, on the basis of her share in the sexual function, a preference for passive behaviour and passive aims is carried over into her life to a greater or lesser extent, in proportion to the limits, restricted or far-reaching, within which her sexual-life-thus serves as a model. But we must beware in this of underestimating the influence of social customs, which similarly force women into passive situations. All this is still far from being cleared up. There is one particularly constant relation between femininity and instinctual life which we do not want to overlook. The suppression of women's aggressiveness which is prescribed for them constitutionally and imposed on them socially favours the development of powerful masochistic impulses, which succeed, as we know, in binding erotically the destructive trends which have been diverted inwards. Thus masochism, as people say, is truly feminine. But if, as happens so often, you meet with masochism in men, what is left to you but to say that these men exhibit very plain feminine traits?
And now you are already prepared to hear that psychology too is unable to solve the riddle of femininity. The explanation must no doubt come from elsewhere, and cannot come till we have learnt how in general the differentiation of living organisms into two sexes came about. We know nothing about it, yet the existence of two sexes is a most striking characteristic of organic life which distinguishes it sharply from inanimate nature. However, we find enough to study in those human individuals who, through the possession of female genitals, are characterized as manifestly or predominantly feminine. In conformity with its peculiar nature, psycho-analysis does not try to describe what a woman is—that would be a task it could scarcely perform—but sets about enquiring
I
303 i Sigmund Freud
how she comes into being, how a woman develops out of a child with a bisexual disposition. In recent times we have begun to learn a little about this, thanks to the circumstance that several of our excellent women colleagues in analysis have begun to work at the question. The discussion of this has gained special attractiveness from the distinction between the sexes. For the ladies, whenever some comparison seemed to turn out unfavourable to their sex, were able to utter a suspicion that we, the male analysts, had been unable to overcome certain deeply-rooted prejudices against what was feminine, and that this was being paid for in the partiality of our researches. We, on the other hand, standing on the ground of bisexuality, had no difficulty in avoiding impoliteness. We had only to say: "This doesn't apply to you. You're the exception; on this point you're more masculine than feminine."
We approach the; investigation of the sexual development of women with two expectations. The first is that here once more the constitution will not adapt itself to its function without a struggle. The second is that the decisive turning-points will already have been prepared for or completed before puberty. Both expectations are promptly confirmed. Furthermore, a comparison with what happens with boys tells us that the development of a little girl into a normal woman is more difficult and more complicated, since it includes two extra tasks, to which there is nothing corresponding in the development of a man. Let us follow the parallel lines from their beginning. Undoubtedly the material is different to start with in boys and girls: it did not need psycho-analysis to establish that. The difference in the structure of the genitals is accompanied by other bodily differences which are too well known to call for mention. Differences emerge too in the instinctual disposition which give a glimpse of the later nature of women. A little girl is as a rule less aggressive, defiant and self-sufficient; she seems to have a greater need for being shown affection and on that, account to be more dependent and pliant. It is probably only as a result of this pliancy that she can be taught more easily and quicker to control
History of Ideas on Woman / 304
her excretions: urine and faeces are the first gifts that children make to those who look after them, and controlling them is the first concession to which the instinctual life of children can be induced. One gets an impression, too, that little girls are more intelligent and livelier than boys of the same age; they go out more to meet the external world and at the same time form stronger object-cathexes. I cannot say whether this lead in development has been confirmed by exact observations, but in any case there is no question that girls cannot be described as intellectually backward. These sexual differences are not, however, of great consequence: they can be outweighed by individual variations. For our immediate purposes they can be disregarded.
Both sexes seem to pass through the early phases of libidinal development in the same manner. It might have been expected that in girls there would already have been some lag in aggressiveness in the sadistic-anal phase, but such is not the case. Analysis of children's play has shown our women analysts that the aggressive impulses of little girls leave nothing to be desired in the way of abundance and violence. With their entry into the phallic phase the differences between the sexes are completely eclipsed by their agreements. We are now obliged to recognize that the little girl is a Htde man. In boys, as we know, this phase is marked by the fact that they have learnt how to derive pleasurable sensations from their small penis and connect its excited state with their ideas of sexual intercourse. Little girls do the same thing with their still smaller clitoris. It seems that with them all their masturbatory acts are carried out on this penis-equivalent, and that the truly feminine vagina is still undiscovered by both sexes. It is true that there are a few isolated reports of early vaginal sensations as well, but it could not be easy to distinguish these from sensations in the anus or vestibulum; in any case they cannot play a great part. We are entitled to keep our view that in the phallic phase of girls the clitoris is the leading erotogenic zone. But it is not, of course, going to remain so. With the change to femininity the clitoris should. wholly or in part hand over its sensitivity, and at the same time its
305 I Sigmund Freud
importance, to the vagina. This would be one of the two tasks which a woman has to perform in the course of her development, whereas the more fortunate man has only to continue at the time of his sexual maturity the activity that he has previously carried out at the period of the early efflorescence of his sexuality.
We shall return to the part played by the clitoris; let us now turn to the second task with which a girl's development is burdened. A boy's mother is the first object of his love, and she remains so too during the formation of his Oedipus complex and, in essence, all through his life. For a girl too her first object must be her mother (and the figures of wet-nurses and foster-mothers that merge into her). The first object-cathexes occur in attachment to the satisfaction of the major and simple vital needs, and the circumstances of the care of children are the same for both sexes. But in the Oedipus situation the girl's father hasi become her love-object, and we expect that in the normal course; of development she will find her way from this paternal object ,to her final choice of an object. In the course of time, therefore, a girl has to change her erotogenic zone and her object—both of which a boy retains. The question then arises of how this happens: in particular, how does a girl pass from her mother to an attachment to>Jier father? or, in other words, how does she pass from her masculine phase to the feminine one to which she is biologically destined?
It would, be a solution of ideal simplicity if we could suppose that from a particular age onwards the elementary influence of the mutual attraction between the sexes makes itself felt and impels the small woman towards men, while the same law allows the boy to continue with his mother. We might suppose in addition that in this the children are following the pointer given them by the sexual preference of their parents. But we are not going to find things so easy; we scarcely know whether we are to believe seriously in the power of which poets talk so much and with such enthusiasm but which cannot be further dissected analytically. We have found an answer of quite another sort by means of laborious investigations, the material for which at least was easy to arrive at. For you must
History of Ideas on Woman / 306
know that the number of women who remain till a late age tenderly dependent on a paternal object, or indeed on their real father, is very great. We have established some surprising facts about these women with an intense attachment of long duration to their father. We knew, of course, that there had been a preliminary stage of attachment to the mother, but we did not know that it could be so rich in content and so long-lasting, and could leave behind so many opportunities for fixations and dispositions. During this time the girl's father is only a troublesome rival; in some cases the attachment to her mother lasts beyond the fourth year of life. Almost everything that we find later in her relation to her father was already present in this earlier attachment and has been transferred subsequently on to her father. In short, we get an impression that we cannot understand women unless we appreciate this- phase of their pre-Oedipus attachment to their mother.
We shall be glad, then, to know the nature of the girl's libidinal relations to her mother. The answer is that they are of very many different  kinds.   Since  they  persist  through   all  three  phases   of infantile  sexuality,   they  also  take  on  the  characteristics  of the different phases and express themselves by oral, sadistic-anal and phallic wishes.  These wishes represent active as well as passive impulses; if we relate them to the differentiation of the sexes which is t& appear later—though we should avoid doing so as far as possible—we may call them masculine and feminine. Besides this, they are completely ambivalent, both affectionate and of a hostile and aggressive nature. The later often only come to light after being changed into anxiety ideas. It is not always easy to point to a formulation  of these  early  sexual  wishes;  what  is  most  clearly expressed is a wish to get the mother with child and the corresponding wish to bear her child—both belonging to the phallic period and sufficiently surprising, but established beyond doubt by analytic observation. The attractiveness of these investigations lies in the surprising detailed findings which they bring us. Thus, for instance, we discover the fear of being murdered or poisoned, which may later form the core of a paranoic illness, already present in this
307 i Sigmund Freud
pre-Oedipus period, in relation to the mother. Or another case: you will recall an interesting episode in the history of analytic research which caused me many distressing hours. In the period in which the main interest was directed to discovering infantile sexual traumas, almost all my women patients told me that they had been seduced by their father. I was driven to recognize in the end that these reports were untrue and so came to understand that hysterical symptoms^ are derived from phantasies and not from real occurrences. It was only later that I ' was able to recognize in this phantasy of being seduced by the father the expression of the typical Oedipus complex in women. And now we find the phantasy of seduction once more in the pre-Oedipus prehistory of girls; but the seducer is regularly the mother. Here, however, the phantasy touches the ground of reality, for it was really the mother who by her activities over the,child's bodily hygiene inevitably stimulated, and perhaps even roused for the first time, pleasurable sensations in her genitals.
I have no doubt you are ready to suspect that this portrayal of the abundance and strength of a little girl's sexual relations with her mother is very much overdrawn. After all, one has opportunities of seeing little girls and notices nothing of the sort. But the objection is not to the point. Enough can be seen in the children if one knows how to look. And besides, you should consider how little of its sexual wishes a child can bring to preconscious expression or communicate at all. Accordingly we are only within our rights if we study the residues and consequences of this emotional world in retrospect, in people in whom theseiprocesses of development had attained a specially clear and even excessive degree of expansion. Pathology has always done us the service of making discernible by isolation and exaggeration conditions which would remain concealed in a normal state. And since our investigations have been carried out on people who were by no means seriously abnormal, I think we should regard their outcome as deserving belief.
We will now turn our interest on to the single question of what it is that brings this powerful attachment of the girl to her mother


History of Ideas on Woman / 308
to an end. This, as we know, is its usual fate: it is destined to make room for an attachment to her father. Here we come upon a fact which is a pointer to our further advance. This step in development does not involve only a simple change of object. The turning away from the mother is accompanied by hostility; the attachment to the mother ends in hate. A hate of that kind may become very striking and last all through life; it may be carefully overcompensated later on; as a rule one part of it is overcome while another part persists. Events of later years naturally influence this greatly. We will restrict ourselves, however, to studying it at the time at which the girl turns to her father and to enquiring into the motives for it. We are then given a long, list of accusations and grievances against the mother which are supposed to justify the child's hostile feelings; they are of varying validity which we shall not fail to examine. Ä number of them are obvious rationalizations and the true sources of enmity remain to be found. I hope you will be interested if oh this occasion I take you through all the details of a psycho-analytic investigation.
The reproach against the mother which goes back furthest is that she gave the child too little milk—which is construed against her as lack of love. Now there is some justification for this reproach in our families. Mothers often have insufficient nourishment to give their children and are content to suckle them for a few months, for half or three-quarters of a year. Among primitive peoples children are fed at their mother's breast for two or three years. The figure of the wet-nurse who suckles the child is as a rule merged into the mother; when this has not happened, the reproach is turned into another one—that the nurse, who fed the child so willingly, was sent away by the mother too early. But whatever the true state of affairs may have been, it is impossible that the child's reproach can be justified as often as it is met with. It seems, rather, that the child's avidity for its earliest nourishment is altogether insatiable, that it never gets over the pain of losing its mother's breast. I should not, be surprised if the analysis of a primitive child, who could still suck at its mother's breast when it was already able to run about and -
309 / Sigmund Freud
talk, were to bring the same reproach to light. The fear of being poisoned is also probably connected with the withdrawal of the breast. Poison is nourishment that makes one ill. Perhaps children trace back their early illnesses too to this frustration. A fair amount of intellectual education is a prerequisite for believing in chance; primitive people and uneducated ones, and no doubt children as well, are able to assign a ground for everything that happens. Perhaps originally it was a reason on animistic lines. Even to-day in some strata of our population no one can die without having been lolled by someone else—preferably by the doctor. And the regular reaction of a neurotic to the death of someone closely connected with him is to put the blame on himself for having caused the death.
The next accusation against the child's mother flares up when the next baby appears in the nursery. If possible the connection with oral frustration is preserved: the mother could not or would not give the child any more milk because she needed the nourishment for the new arrival. In cases in which the two children are so close in age that lactation is prejudiced by the second pregnancy, this reproach acquires a real basis, and it is a remarkable fact that a child, even with an age difference of only 11 months, is not too young to take notice of what is happening. But what the child grudges the unwanted intruder, and rival is not only the suckling but all the other signs of maternal care. It feels that it has been dethroned, despoiled, prejudiced in its rights; it casts a jealous hatred upon the new , baby and develops a grievance against the faithless mother which often finds'" expression in a disagreeable change in its behaviour. It becomes "naughty," perhaps, irritable and disobedient and goes back on the advances it has made towards controlling its excretions. All öf this has been very long familiar and is accepted as self-evident; but we rarely form a correct idea of the strength of these jealous impulses, of the tenacity with which they persist and of the magnitude of their influence on later development. Especially as this jealousy is constantly receiving fresh nourishment in the later years of childhood and the whole shock is
History of Ideas on Woman / 310
repeated with the birth of each new brother or sister. Nor does it make much difference if the child happens to remain the mother's preferred favourite. A child's demands for love are immoderate, they make exclusive claims and tolerate no sharing.
An abundant source of a child's hostility to its mother is provided by its multifarious sexual wishes, which alter according to the phase of the libido and which cannot for the most part be satisfied. The strongest of these frustrations occur at the phallic period, if the mother forbids pleasurable activity with the genitals—often with severe threats and every sign of displeasure—activity to which, after all, she herself had introduced the child. One would think these were reasons enough to account for a girl's turning away from her mother. One would judge, ifLJso, that the estrangement follows inevitably from the nature of children's sexuality, from the immoderate character of their demand for love and the impossibility of fullfilling their sexual wishes. It might be thought indeed that this first love-relation of the child's is doomed to dissolution for the very reason that it is the first, for these early object-cathexes are regularly ambivalent to a high degree. A powerful tendency to aggressiveness is always present beside a powerful love, and the more passionately a child loves its object the more sensitive does it become to disappointments and frustrations from that object; and in the end the love must succumb to the accumulated hostility. Or the idea that there is an original ambivalence such as this in erotic cathexes may be rejected, and it may be pointed out that it is the special nature of the mother-child relation that leads, with equal inevitability, to the destruction of the child's love; for even the mildest upbringing cannot avoid using compulsion and introducing restrictions, and any such intervention in the child's liberty must provoke as a reaction an inclinationl to rebelliousness and aggressiveness. A discussion of these possibilities might, I think, be most interesting; but an objection suddenly emerges which forces our interest in another direction. All these factors—the slights, the disappointments in love, the jealousy/ the seduction followed by prohibition—are, after all, also in operation in the relation of a boy,
311 / Sigmund Freud
to his mother and are yet unable to alienate him from the maternal object. Unless we can find something that is specific for girls and is not present or not in the same way present in boys, we shall not have explained the termination of the attachment of girls to their mother.                                        -^
I believe we have found this specific factor, and indeed where we expected to find it, even though in a surprising form. Where we expected to find it, I say, for it lies in the castration complex. After all, the anatomical distinction [between the sexes] must express itself in psychical consequences. It was, however, a surprise to learn from analyses that girls hold their mother responsible for their lack of a penis and do not forgive her for their being thus put at a disadvantage.
As you hear, then, we ascribe a castration complex to women as well. And for,good reasons, though its content cannot be the same as with boys.1 In the latter the castration complex arises after they have learnt from the sight of the female genitals that the organ which they value so highly need not necessarily accompany the body. At this the boy recalls to mind the threats he brought on himself by his doings .w^th that organ, he begins to give credence to them and falls under the influence of fear of castration, which will be the most powerful motive force in his subsequent development. The castration complex of girls is also started by the sight of the genitals of the other sex. They at once notice the difference and, it must be admitted, its significance too. They feel seriously wronged, often declare that they want to "have something like it too," and fall a victim to "envy for.the penis," which will leave ineradicable traces on their development, and the formation of their character and which will not be surmounted in even the most favourable cases without  a  severe   expenditure   of psychical   energy.   The   girl's recognition of the fact of her being without a penis does not by any means imply that she submits to the fact easily. On the contrary, she continues to hold on for a long time to the wish to  get something like it herself and she believes in that possibility for improbably long years; and analysis can show that, at a period when
History of Ideas on Woman / 312
knowledge of reality has long since rejected the fulfillment of the wish as unattainable, it persists in the unconscious and retains a considerable cathexis of energy. The wish to get the longed-for penis eventually in spite of everything may contribute to the motives that drive a mature woman to analysis, and what she may reasonably expect from analysis—a capacity, for instance, to carry on an intellectual profession—may often be recognized as a sublimated modification of this repressed wish.
One cannot very well doubt the importance of envy for the penis. You may take it as an instance of male injustice if I assert that envy and jealousy play an even greater part in the mental life of women than of men. It is not that I think these characteristics are absent in men or that I think they have no other roots in women than envy for the penis; but I am inclined to attribute their greater amount in women to this latter influence. Some analysts, however, have shown an inclination to depreciate the importance of this first instalment of penis-envy in the phallic phase. They are of opinion that what we find of this attitude in women is in the main a secondary structure which has come about on the occasion of later conflicts by regression to this early infantile impulse. This, however, is a general problem of depth psychology. In many pathological—or even unusual—instinctual attitudes (for instance, in all sexual perversions) the question arises of how much of their strength is to be attributed to early infantile fixations and how much to the influence of later experiences and developments. In such cases it is almost always a matter of complemental series such as we put forward in our discussion of the aetiology of the neuroses, Both factors play a part in varying amounts in the causation; a less on the one side is balanced by a more on the other. The infantile factor sets the pattern in all cases, but does not always determine the issue, though it often does. Precisely in the case of penis-envy I should argue decidedly in favour of the preponderance of the infantile factor.
The discovery that she is castrated is a turning-point in a girl's growth. Three possible lines of development start from it: one leads
313 / Sigmund Freud
to sexual inhibition or to neurosis, the second to change of character in the sense of a masculinity complex, the third, finally, to normal femininity. We have learnt a fair amount, though not everything, about all three.
The essential content of the first is as follows: the little girl has hitherto lived in a masculine way, has been able to get pleasure by the excitation of her clitoris and has brought this activity into relation with her sexual wishes directed towards her mother, which are often active ones; now, owing to the influence of her penis-envy, she loses her enjoyment in her phallic sexuality. Her self-love is mortified by the comparison with the boy's far superior equipment and in consequence she renounces her masturbatory satisfaction from her clitoris, repudiates her love for her mother and at the same time not infrequently represses a good part of her sexual trends in general'. No doubt her turning away from her mother does not occur all at once, for to begin with the girl regards her castration as an individual misfortune, and only gradually extends it to other females and finally to her mother as well. Her love was directed to her phallic mother; with the discovery that her mother is castrated it becomes pqsjible to drop her as an object, so that the motives for hostility, which have long been accumulating, gain the upper hand. This means, therefore, thaf: as a result of the discovery of women's lack of a penis they are debased in value for girls just as they are for boys and later perhaps for men.
You all know the immense aetiological importance attributed by our neurotic patients to their masturbation. They make it responsible for all their troubles and we1 have the greatest difficulty in persuading them that they are mistaken. In fact, however, we ought to admit to them that they are right, for masturbation is the executive agent of infantile sexuality, from the faulty development of which they are indeed suffering. But what neurotics mostly blame is the masturbation of the period of puberty; they have mostly forgotten that of early infancy, which is what is really in question. I wish I might have an opportunity some time of explaining to you at length how important all the factual details of
History of Ideas on Woman / 314
early masturbation become for the individual's subsequent neurosis or character: whether or not it was discovered, how the parents struggled against it or permitted it, or whether he succeeded in suppressing it himself. All of this leaves permanent traces on his development. But I am on the whole glad that I need not do this. It would be a hard and tedious task and at the end of it you would put ; .7 me in an embarrassing situation by quite certainly asking me to give you some practical advice as to how a parent or educator should deal with the masturbation of small children. From the development of girls, which is what my present lecture is concerned with, I can give you the example of a child herself trying to get free from masturbating.. She does not always succeed in this. If envy for the penis has provoked a powerful impulse against clitoridal masturbation but this nevertheless refuses to give way, a violent struggle for liberation ensues in which the girl, as it were, herself takes over the role of her deposed mother and gives expression to -.^ her entire dissatisfaction with her inferior clitoris in her efforts' against obtaining satisfaction from it. Many years later, when her masturbatory activity has long since been suppressed, an interest still persists which we must interpret as a defence against a temptation that is still dreaded. It manifests itself in the emergence of sympathy for those to whom similar difficulties are attributed, it plays a part as a motive in contracting a marriage and, indeed, it ■:. may determine the choice of a husband or lover. Disposing of early infantile masturbation is truly no easy or indifferent business.
Along with the abandonment of clitoridal masturbation a certain amount of activity is renounced. Passivity now has the upper hand, and the girl's turning to her father is accomplished principally with the help of passive instinctual impulses. You can see that a wave of development like this, which clears the phallic activity out of the way, smooths the ground for femininity. If too much is not lost in the course of it through repression, this femininity may turn out to be normal. The wish with which the girl turns to her father is no \ :); doubt originally the wish for the penis which her mother has ;-i refused her and  which she now expects from  her  father.  The     it
315 / Sigmund Freud
feminine situation is only established, however, if the wish for a
penis is replaced by one for a baby, if, that is, a baby takes the
place of a penis in accordance with an ancient symbolic equivalence.
It has not escaped us that the girl has wished for a baby earlier, in
the undisturbed phallic phase^,that, of course, was the meaning of
her playing with dolls. But that plaý was not in fact an expression
of her femininity; it served as an identification with her mother with
the intention of substituting activity for passivity. She was playing
the part of .her mother and the doll was herself: now she could do
with the baby everything that her mother used to do with her. Not
until the emergence of the wish for a penis does the doll-baby
become a baby from the girl's father, and thereafter the aim of the
, most powerful feminine wish. Her happiness is great if later on this
wish for a baby finds fulfillment in reality, and quite especially so if
the baby is a little boy who brings the longed-for penis with him.
Often enough in her combined picture of "a baby from her father"
the emphasis is laid on the baby and her father left unstressed. In
this way the ancient masculine wish for the possession of a penis is
still   faintly   visible   through ^ the   femininity   now   achieved.   But
perhaps we ought rather to recognize this wish for a penis as being
par excellence a feminine one.
With the transference of the wish for a penis-baby on her father, the girl has entered the situation of the Oedipus complex. Her hostility to.her mother, which did not need to be freshly created, is now greatly intensified, for she becomes the girl's rival, who receives from her father everything that she desires from him. For a long time the girl's Oedipus complex concealed her pre-Oedipus attachment to her mother from our view, though it is nevertheless so important and leaves such lasting fixations behind it. For girls the Oedipus situation is the outcome of a long and difficult development; it is a kind of preliminary solution, a position of rest which is not soon abandoned, especially as the beginning of the latency period is not far distant. And we are now struck by a difference between the two sexes, which is probably momentous, in regard to the relation of the Oedipus complex to the castration
li'
History of Ideas on Woman / 316
complex. In a boy the Oedipus complex, in which he desires his mother and would like to get rid of his father as being a rival, develops naturally from the phase of his phallic sexuality. The threat of castration compels him, however, to give up that attitude. Under the impression of the danger of losing his penis, the Oedipus complex is abandoned, repressed and, in the most normal cases, entirely destroyed, and a severe super-ego is set up as its heir. What happens with a girl is almost the opposite. The castration complex prepares for the Oedipus complex instead of destroying it; the girl is driven out of her attachment to her mother through the influence of her envy, for the penis and she enters the Oedipus situation as though into a haven of refuge. In the absence of fear of castration the chief motive is lacking which leads boys to surmount the Oedipus complex. Girls remain in it for an indeterminate length of time; they demolish it late and, even so, incompletely. In these circumstances the formation of the super-ego must suffer; it cannot attain the strength and independence which gives it its cultural significance, and feminists are not pleased when we point out to them the effects of this factor upon the average feminine character. To go back a little. We mentioned as the second possible reaction to the discovery of female castration the development of a powerful masculinity complex. By this we mean that the girl refuses, as it were, to recognize the unwelcome fact and, defiantly rebellious, even exaggerates her previous masculinity, clings to her clitoridal activity and takes refuge in an identification with her phallic mother or her father. What can it be that decides in favour of this outcome? We can only suppose that it is a constitutional factor, a greater amount of activity, such as is ordinarily characteris-r tic of a male. However that may be, the essence of this process is that at this point in the development „ the wave of passivity is avoided which opens the way to the turn towards femininity. The: extreme achievement of such a masculinity complex would appear to be the influencing of the choice of an object in the sense of manifest homosexuality. Analytic experience teaches us, to be sure, f that female homosexuality is seldom or never a direct continuation

f|ff                                      317 / Sigmund Freud
&'■.}':■ of infantile masculinity.  Even for a girl  of this  kind  it  seems |       necessary that she should take her father as an object for some time "ß, j    and enter the Oedipus situation. But afterwards, as a result of her :;rf'   inevitable disappointments from her father, she is driven to regress É lý. into  her  early  masculinity  complex.   The   significance   of these -i; :■   : disappointments must not be exaggerated; a girl who is destined to :| |í   become feminine is not spared them, though they do not have the fly   same effect. The predominance of the constitutional factor seems jí:;'X indisputable;  but the  two phases in the development of female ;f */■■'■' homosexuality are well mirrored in the practices of homosexuals, ^f ^   who play the parts of mother and baby with each other as often and Sj f / as clearly as those of «husband and wife.
§y;   ■  What I have been telling you here may be described as the :| 5v; prehistory of women. It is a product of the very last few years and | ff/ may have been ..of interest to you as an example of detailed analytic I f;  work. Since its subject is woman, I will venture on this occasion to £ ľfmention by name a few of the women who have made valuable § If-   contributions  to  this  investigation.   Dr.   Ruth   Mack  Brunswick Í :Q} [1928] was the first to describe a case of neurosis which went back Jffto a fixation in the pre7Oedípus stage and had never reached the | -;.' Oedipus situation at all. The case took the form of jealous paranoia | |f-. and proved accessible to therapy. Dr. Jeanne Lample-de  Groot | f>f[1927] has established the incredible phallic activity of girls towards I! .their  mother   by   some   assured   observations,   and   Dr.   Helene 11-Deutsch [1932] has shown that the erotic actions of homosexual | l,f women reproduce the relations between mother and baby, |§£:   It. is not my intention   to  pursue  the  further  behaviour  of í 'i-,f; femininity through puberty to the period of maturity. Our knowl-\ g;: edge, moreover, would be insufficient for the purpose. But I will iJ ; bring a few features together in what follows. Taking its prehistory fff: as a starting-point, I will only emphasize here that the development Š£fof feminity remains exposed to disturbance by the residual phe-ígŕnomena of the early masculine period. Regressions to the fixations Iff: of the pre-Oedipus phases very frequently occur; in the course of
History of Ideas on Woman / 318
some women's lives there is a repeated alternation between periods      ^
in which masculinity or femininity gains the  upper hand.  Some       |
portion of what we men call "the enigma of women" may perhaps     -ý~M
be derived from this expression of bisexuality in women's lives. But      ;|
another question seems to have become ripe for judgement in the     ;';|
course of these researches. We have called the motive force of     ,./§
sexual life "the libido." Sexual life is dominated by the polarity of    ; ;1
masculine-feminine; thus the notion suggests itself of considering      ;J§
the  relation  of the  libido  to  this  antithesis.   It  would  not  be       J|
surprising if it were to turn out that each sexuality had its own      ; |
special libido appropriated to it, so that one sort of libido would      ;|
pursue the aims of a masculine sexual liře and another sort those of     3|
a feminine one. But nothing of the kind is true. There is only one    : v|
libido, which serves both the masculine and the feminine sexual     ;g|
functions. To it itself we cannot assign any sex; if, following the       v|
conventional equation of activity and masculinity, we are inclined to   'I:-£|
describe it as masculine, we must not forget that it also covers    -:ř|
trends with a passive aim. Nevertheless the juxtaposition "feminine     ;V|
libido" is without any justification. Furthermore, it is our impres-    -M
sion that more constraint has been applied to the libido when it is     ^
pressed into the service of the feminine function, and that—to speak      >|
teleologically—Nature takes less careful account of its [that func-     ;■!
tion's] demands than in the case of masculinity. And the reason for    (M
this may lie—thinking once again teleologically—in the fact that the    ;;É
accomplishment of the aim of biology has been entrusted to the   ; \^
aggressiveness of men and has been made to some extent indepen-   -';vX|
dent of women's consent.                                                                              ; ^|
The sexual frigidity of women, the frequency of which appears to     '■ |
confirm this disregard, is a phenomenon that is still insufficiently   ; :-|
understood. Sometimes it is psychogenic and in that case accessible     á;
to influence; but in other cases it suggests the hypothesis of its     i|
being   constitutionally   determined   and   even   of  there   being   a     v|
contributory anatomical factor.                                                                     : J
I have promised to tell you of a few more psychical peculiarities   ; ;;-l
of mature feminity, as we come across them in analytic observation.    kI
319 I Sigmund Freud
We do not lay claim to more than an average validity for these assertions; nor is it always easy to distinguish what should be ascribed to the influence of the sexual function and what to social breeding. Thus, we attribute a larger amount of narcissism to femininity, which also affects women's choice of object, so that to be loved is a stronger need for them than to love. The effect of penis-envy has a share, further, in the physical vanity of women, since they are bound to value their charms more highly as a late compensation for their original sexual inferiority. Shame, which is considered to be a feminine characteristic par excellence but is far more a matter of convention than might be supposed, has as its purpose, we believe, concealment of genital deficiency. We are not forgetting that at a later time shame takes on other functions. It seems that women have made few contributions to the discoveries and inventions in the history of civilization; there is, however, one technique which they may have invented—that of plaiting and weaving. If that lis so, we should be tempted to guess the unconscious motive for the achievement. Nature herself would seem to have given the model which \this achievement imitates by causing the growth at maturity of the pubic hair that conceals the genitals. The step that remained to be taken lay in making the threads adhere to one another, while on the body they stick into the skin and are only matted together. If you reject this idea as fantastic and regard my: .belief in the influence of lack of a penis on the configuration of femininity as an idee fixe, I am of course defenceless.
The determinants of women's choice of an object are often made unrecognizable by social conditions. Where the choice is able to show itself freely, it is often made in accordance with the narcissistic ideal of the man whom the girl had wished to become. If the girl has remained in her attachment to her father—that is, in the Oedipus complex—her choice is made according to the paternal type. Since, when she turned from her mother to her father, the hostility of her ambivalent relation remained with her mother, a choice of this kind should guarantee a happy marriage. But very
History of Ideas on Woman / 320
often the outcome is of a kind that presents a general threat to such a settlement of the conflict due to ambivalence. The hostility that has been left behind follows in the train of the positive attachment and spreads over on the new object. The woman's husband, who to begin with inherited from her father, becomes after a time her mother's heir as well. So it may easily happen that the second half of a woman's life may be filled by the struggle against her husband, just as the shorter first half was filled by her rebellion against her mother. When this reaction has been lived through, a second marriage may easily turn out very much more satisfying. Another alteration in a woman's nature, for which lovers are unprepared, may occur in a marriage after the first child is born. Under the influence of a woman's becoming a mother herself, an identification with her own mother may be revived, against which she had striven up till the time of her marriage^ and this may attract all the available libido to itself, so that the compulsion to repeat reproduces an unhappy marriage between her parents. The difference in< a mother's reaction to the birth of a son or a daughter shows that the old factor of lack of a penis has even now not lost its strength. A mother is only brought unlimited satisfaction by her relation to a son; this is altogether the most perfect, the most free from ambivalence of all human relationships. A mother can transfer to her1- son the ambition which she has been obliged to suppress in herself, and she can expect from him the satisfaction of all that has been left over in her of her masculinity complex. Even a marriage is not made secure until the wife has succeeded in making her husband her child as well and in acting as a mother to him.
A woman's identification with her mother allows us to distinguish two strata: the pre-Oedipus one which rests on her affectionate attachment to her mother and takes her as a model, and the later one from the Oedipus complex which seeks to get rid of her mother and take her place with her father. We are no doubt justified in saying that much of both of them is left over for the future and that neither of them is adequately surmounted in the course of development. But the phase of the affectionate pre-Oedipus  attachment  is  the  decisive  one  for  a  woman's  future:;
321 I Sigmund Freud
during it preparations are made for the acquisition of the characteristics with which she will later fulfil her role in the sexual function and perform her invaluable social tasks. It is in this identification too that she acquires her attractiveness to a man, whose Oedipus attachment to his mother it kindles into passion. How often it happens, however, that it is only his son who obtains what he himself aspired to! One gets an impression that a man's love and a woman's are a phase apart psychologically.
The fact that women must be regarded as having little sense of justice is no doubt related to the predominance of envy in their mental life; for the demand for justice is a modification of envy and lays down the condition subject to which one can put envy aside. We also regard women as weaker in their social interests and as having less capacity for sublimating their instincts than men. The former   is  no   doubt  derived   from   the   dissocial   quality   which unquestionably characterizes all sexual relations. Lovers find sufficiency in each other, and families too resist inclusion in more comprehensive associations^The aptitude for sublimation is subject to the greatest individual variations. On the other hand I cannot help mentioning an? impression that we are constantly receiving during analytic practice. A man of about thirty strikes us as a youthful, somewhat unformed individual, whom we expect to make powerful use of the possibilities for development opened up to him by analysis. A woman of the same age, however, often frightens us by her psychical rigidity and unchangeability. Her libido has taken up final positions and seems incapable of exchanging them for others. There are no paths open to further development; it is as though the whole process had already run its course and remains thenceforward insusceptible to influence—as  though, indeed,  the difficult development to femininity had exhausted the possibilities of the person concerned. As therapists we lament this state of things, even if we succeed in putting an end to our patient's ailment by doing away with her neurotic conflict.
That is all I had to say to you about femininity. It is certainly incomplete and fragmentary and does not always sound friendly.
History of Ideas on Woman / 322
But do not forget that I have only been describing women in so far as their nature is determined by their sexual function. It is true that that influence extends very far; but we do not overlook the fact that an individual woman may be a human being in other respects as well. If you want to know more about femininity, enquire from your own experiences of life, or turn to the poets, or wait until science can give you deeper and more coherent information.
:<m
1
Karen Homey
•v
Herself a  psychoanalyst,   Homey   challenged   many   Freudian assumptions, ^including the assumption that anatomy is ultimately responsible  for  the  psychological  differences  between  male  and female. She rejected Freud's contention that adult attitudes are simply modified versions of childhood attitudes. Instead of Freud's emphasis on heredity and constitutional elements, Horney sought to understand psychology in terms of human relationships and cultural factors. She  argued,  for example,   that  the  Oedipus  complex  is neither universal nor innate, but is the result of environmental factors. As for Freud's concept of "penis envy," which is supposed to be rooted in anatomy, Horney argues in New IVays in Psychoanalysis (1939) that in fact it contradicts biology. It requires us to accept that though woman is built for female functions, nature has psychically determined her to reject them and desire male functions instead. To Horney it is simplistic to reduce the complex problems of all humans to a single source, the castration complex (men, too, are subject to this, according to Freud, though as a fear rather than