Enfranchisement of women : $b Reprinted from the Westminster and Foreign Quarterly Review, for July 1851 — John Stuart Mill — John Shaqi
Enfranchisement of women : $b Reprinted from the Westminster and Foreign Quarterly Review, for July 1851
John Stuart Mill · en
We deny the right of any portion of the species to decide for another
portion, or any individual for another individual, what is and what is
not their "proper sphere." The proper sphere for all human beings is
the largest and highest which they are able to attain to. What this is,
cannot be ascertained without complete liberty of choice. The speakers
at the convention in America have, therefore, done wisely and right in
refusing to entertain the question of the peculiar aptitudes either of
women or of men, or the limits within which this or that occupation may
be supposed to be more adapted to the one or to the other. They justly
maintain that these questions can only be satisfactorily answered by
perfect freedom. Let every occupation be open to all, without favor
or discouragement to any, and employments will fall into the hands of
those men or women who are found by experience to be most capable of
worthily exercising them. There need be no fear that women will take
out of the hands of men any occupation which men perform better than
they. Each individual will prove his or her capacities, in the only
way in which capacities can be proved, by trial; and the world will
have the benefit of the best faculties of all its inhabitants. But to
interfere beforehand by an arbitrary limit, and declare that whatever
be the genius, talent, energy, or force of mind, of an individual of a
certain sex or class, those faculties shall not be exerted, or shall
be exerted only in some few of the many modes in which others are
permitted to use theirs, is not only an injustice to the individual,
and a detriment to society, which loses what it can ill spare, but is
also the most effectual mode of providing that, in the sex or class so
fettered, the qualities which are not permitted to be exercised shall
not exist.