rests of
their own) by their regard for somebody else. It is also to be
considered, that all the education which women receive from society
inculcates on them the feeling that the individuals connected with
them are the only ones to whom they owe any duty--the only ones whose
interest they are called upon to care for; while, as far as education
is concerned, they are left strangers even to the elementary ideas
which are presupposed in any intelligent regard for larger interests
or higher moral objects. The complaint against them resolves itself
merely into this, that they fulfil only too faithfully the sole duty
which they are taught, and almost the only one which they are
permitted to practise.

The concessions of the privileged to the unprivileged are so seldom
brought about by any better motive than the power of the unprivileged
to extort them, that any arguments against the prerogative of sex are
likely to be little attended to by the generality, as long as they
are able to say to themselves that women do not complain of it. That
fact certainly enables men to retain the unjust privilege some time
longer; but does not render it less unjust. Exactly the same thing
may be said of the women in the harem of an Oriental: they do not
complain of not being allowed the freedom of European women. They
think our women insufferably bold and unfeminine. How rarely it is
that even men complain of the general order of society; and how much
rarer still would such complaint be, if they did not know of any
different order existing anywhere else. Women do not complain of the
general lot of women; or rather they do, for plaintive elegies on it
are very common in the writings of women, and were still more so as
long as the lamentations could not be suspected of having any
practical object. Their complaints are like the complaints which men
make of the general unsatisfactoriness of human life; they are not
meant to imply blame, or to plead for any change. But though women do
not complain of the power of husbands, each complains of her own
husband, or of the husbands of her friends. It is the same in all
other cases of servitude, at least in the commencement of the
emancipatory movement. The serfs did not at first complain of the
power of their lords, but only of their tyranny. The Commons began by
claiming a few municipal privileges; they next asked an exemption for
themselves from being taxed without their own consent; but they would