loyment of their faculties (as many women even
now prefer to marriage some of the few honourable occupations within
their reach), have spent the best years of their youth in attempting
to qualify themselves for the pursuits in which they desire to
engage; or still more frequently perhaps, widows or wives of forty or
fifty, by whom the knowledge of life and faculty of government which
they have acquired in their families, could by the aid of appropriate
studies be made available on a less contracted scale. There is no
country of Europe in which the ablest men have not frequently
experienced, and keenly appreciated, the value of the advice and help
of clever and experienced women of the world, in the attainment both
of private and of public objects; and there are important matters of
public administration to which few men are equally competent with
such women; among others, the detailed control of expenditure. But
what we are now discussing is not the need which society has of the
services of women in public business, but the dull and hopeless life
to which it so often condemns them, by forbidding them to exercise
the practical abilities which many of them are conscious of, in any
wider field than one which to some of them never was, and to others
is no longer, open. If there is anything vitally important to the
happiness of human beings, it is that they should relish their
habitual pursuit. This requisite of an enjoyable life is very
imperfectly granted, or altogether denied, to a large part of
mankind; and by its absence many a life is a failure, which is
provided, in appearance, with every requisite of success. But if
circumstances which society is not yet skilful enough to overcome,
render such failures often for the present inevitable, society need
not itself inflict them. The injudiciousness of parents, a youth's
own inexperience, or the absence of external opportunities for the
congenial vocation, and their presence for an uncongenial, condemn
numbers of men to pass their lives in doing one thing reluctantly and
ill, when there are other things which they could have done well and
happily. But on women this sentence is imposed by actual law, and by
customs equivalent to law. What, in unenlightened societies, colour,
race, religion, or in the case of a conquered country, nationality,
are to some men, sex is to all women; a peremptory exclusion from
almost all honourable occupations, but either such as cannot be
fulfi