er objects and occupations, but all
which are not consistent with the requirements of this. The actual
exercise, in a habitual or systematic manner, of outdoor occupations,
or such as cannot be carried on at home, would by this principle be
practically interdicted to the greater number of married women. But
the utmost latitude ought to exist for the adaptation of general
rules to individual suitabilities; and there ought to be nothing to
prevent faculties exceptionally adapted to any other pursuit, from
obeying their vocation notwithstanding marriage: due provision being
made for supplying otherwise any falling-short which might become
inevitable, in her full performance of the ordinary functions of
mistress of a family. These things, if once opinion were rightly
directed on the subject, might with perfect safety be left to be
regulated by opinion, without any interference of law.

CHAPTER III.

On the other point which is involved in the just equality of women,
their admissibility to all the functions and occupations hitherto
retained as the monopoly of the stronger sex, I should anticipate no
difficulty in convincing any one who has gone with me on the subject
of the equality of women in the family. I believe that their
disabilities elsewhere are only clung to in order to maintain their
subordination in domestic life; because the generality of the male
sex cannot yet tolerate the idea of living with an equal. Were it not
for that, I think that almost every one, in the existing state of
opinion in politics and political economy, would admit the injustice
of excluding half the human race from the greater number of lucrative
occupations, and from almost all high social functions; ordaining
from their birth either that they are not, and cannot by any
possibility become, fit for employments which are legally open to the
stupidest and basest of the other sex, or else that however fit they
may be, those employments shall be interdicted to them, in order to
be preserved for the exclusive benefit of males. In the last two
centuries, when (which was seldom the case) any reason beyond the
mere existence of the fact was thought to be required to justify the
disabilities of women, people seldom assigned as a reason their
inferior mental capacity; which, in times when there was a real trial
of personal faculties (from which all women were not excluded) in the
struggles of public life, no one really believed in. The reason