Women:
(¶25)
Among those members of the community whose freedom of
contract ought to be controlled by the legislature for their own
protection, on account (it is said) of their dependent position, it is
frequently proposed to include women: and in the
recent Factory
Act, their
labour, in common with that of young persons, has been placed under
peculiar restrictions. But the classing together, for this and other
purposes, of women and children, appears to me both indefensible in
principle and mischievous in practice. Children below a certain age cannot
judge or act for themselves; up to a considerably greater age they are
inevitably more or less disqualified for doing so; but women are as capable
as men of appreciating and managing their own concerns, and the only
hindrance to their doing so arises from the injustice of their present
social position. So long as the law makes everything which the wife
acquires, the property of the husband
[see law],
while by compelling her to live with
him it forces her to submit to almost any amount of moral and even physical
tyranny which he may choose to inflict, there is some ground for regarding
every act done by her as done under coercion: but it is the great error of
reformers and philanthropists in our time, to nibble at the consequences of
unjust power instead of redressing the injustice itself. If women had as
absolute a control as men have, over their own persons and their own
patrimony or acquisitions, there would be no plea for limiting their hours
of labouring for themselves, in order that they might have time to labour
for the husband, in what is called, by the advocates of restriction, his
home. Women employed in factories are the only women in the labouring rank
of life whose position is not that of slaves and drudges; precisely because
they cannot easily be compelled to work and earn wages in factories against
their will. For improving the condition of women, it should, on the
contrary, be an object to give them the readiest access to independent
industrial employment, instead of closing, either entirely or partially,
that which is already open to them.