n, 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, if 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 that 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 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 organized 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 regularized 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 nec