into the imagination of the most ambitious of them. The nobility had
already these pretensions; the commons pretended to nothing but to be
exempt from arbitrary taxation, and from the gross individual
oppression of the king's officers. It is a political law of nature
that those who are under any power of ancient origin, never begin by
complaining of the power itself, but only of its oppressive exercise.
There is never any want of women who complain of ill usage by their
husbands. There would be infinitely more, if complaint were not the
greatest of all provocatives to a repetition and increase of the ill
usage. It is this which frustrates all attempts to maintain the power
but protect the woman against its abuses. In no other case (except
that of a child) is the person who has been proved judicially to have
suffered an injury, replaced under the physical power of the culprit
who inflicted it. Accordingly wives, even in the most extreme and
protracted cases of bodily ill usage, hardly ever dare avail
themselves of the laws made for their protection: and if, in a moment
of irrepressible indignation, or by the interference of neighbours,
they are induced to do so, their whole effort afterwards is to
disclose as little as they can, and to beg off their tyrant from his
merited chastisement.

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 forced slave 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 sen