ABSTRACT
TWO TREATISES OF GOVERNMENT* Chapter V: O f Adam’s Title to Sovereignty by the Subjection of Eve 47 Further, it is to be noted, that these words here of Genesis 3:16, which our author calls ‘the original grant of government’, were not spoken to Adam, neither, indeed, was there any grant in them made to Adam, but a punishm ent laid upon Eve; and if we will take them as they were directed in particular to her, or in her, as a representative, to all other women, they will at most concern the female sex only, and import no more but that subjection they should ordinarily be in to their husbands; but there is here no more law to oblige a woman to such a subjection, if the circumstances either of her condition or contract with her husband should exempt her from it, than there is that she should bring forth her
children in sorrow and pain if there could be found a remedy for it, which is also a part of the same curse upon her, for the whole verse runs thus: ‘Unto the woman He said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children, and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.’ ’Twould, I think, have been a hard matter for anybody but our author to have found out a grant of ‘monarchical government to Adam’ in these words, which were neither spoke to, nor of him. Neither will any one, I suppose, by these words think the weaker sex, as by a law so subjected to the curse contained in them, that ’tis their duty not to endeavour to avoid it. And will any one say that Eve, or any other woman, sinned if she were brought to bed without those multiplied pains God threatens her here with, or that either of our Queens, Mary or Elizabeth, had they m arried any of their subjects, had been by this text put into a political subjection to him, or that he thereby should have had ‘monarchical rule’ over her? God in this text gives not, that I see, any authority to Adam over Eve, or men over their wives, but only foretells what should be the woman’s lot, how by His Providence He would order it so that she should be subject to her husband, as we see that generally the laws of mankind and customs of nations have ordered it so, and there is, I grant, a foundation in Nature for it. 48 Thus when God says of Jacob and Esau that ‘the elder should serve the younger’ (Genesis 25:23), nobody supposes that God hereby made Jacob Esau’s sovereign, but foretold what should, de facto, come to pass.But if these words here spoke to Eve must needs be understood as a law to bind her and all other women to subjection, it can be no other subjection than what every wife owes her husband, and then if this be the ‘original grant of governm ent’ and the ‘foundation of monarchical power’, there will be as many monarchs as there are husbands. If, therefore, these words give any power to Adam, it can be only a conjugal power, not political, the power that every husband hath to order the things of private concernment in his family, as proprietor of the goods and land there, and to have his will take place in all things of their common concernment before that of his wife; but not a political power of life and death over her, much less over anybody else.
