The Subjection of Women (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading)

By John Stuart Mill and Patricia M. Ulbrich

The Subjection of Women (1869) by John Stuart Mill contributed to liberal political theory by extending and developing the ideology of individualism to women. Mills thesis was that "the legal subordination of one sex to the other is wrong in itself and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement; and it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality." His feminist analysis was radical in nineteenth-century England, but it provided the roots of liberal feminist theory in the twentieth-century United States.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: Sep 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781411430358

John Stuart Mill

John Stuart Mill was an English philosopher, politician and economist most famous for his contributions to the theory of utilitarianism. The author of numerous influential political treatises, Mill’s writings on liberty, freedom of speech, democracy and economics have helped to form the foundation of modern liberal thought. His 1859 work, On Liberty, is particularly noteworthy for helping to address the nature and limits of the power of the state over the individual. Mills has become one of the most influential figures in nineteenth-century philosophy, and his writings are still widely studied and analyzed by scholars. Mills died in 1873 at the age of 66.

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INTRODUCTION

THE Subjection of Women (1869) by John Stuart Mill made a major contribution to liberal political theory by extending and developing the ideology of individualism to women. Mill’s thesis was that the legal subordination of one sex to the other is wrong in itself and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement; and it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality. His feminist analysis was radical in nineteenth-century England, but it provided the roots of liberal feminist theory in the twentieth-century United States.

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) was the most influential British social and political thinker of the mid-Victorian period. He was the oldest son of the philosopher James Mill who personally educated his precocious son, beginning with Greek and Latin at age three. James Mill’s method was designed to develop his son as a first-rate intellect. After having studied the classic philosophers, the young Mill spent the year 1820-1821 in France with the family of Jeremy Bentham to learn directly from one of the leading philosophers of the period. On reading Bentham, Mill felt the principle of utility, providing the greatest happiness to the greatest number of people, gave him the core element for his own philosophy. In order to support himself financially, Mill took a position under his father at the British East India Company in 1823 and worked there continuously until 1858.

Mill began writing articles in 1824 on a wide range of philosophical, political, economic, and social subjects. These were initially published in the Westminster Review and extended to other magazines. His first article concerned the morals of men and women, and it resulted in his being taken into custody by the London police for distributing birth-control information.¹ Mill was already recognized as a leading intellectual in his early twenties when he experienced a mental crisis which he attributed to the severe strain of his father’s tutelage.² The cloud gradually drew off after many months. Then, in 1830, he met Harriet Taylor, a married woman and the mother of two children.

When they met, both John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor moved in radical intellectual circles and were early supporters of women’s rights. In his autobiography, Mill says that it may well have been his strong views on the subject that initially attracted her to him.³ They were attracted to each other emotionally as well as intellectually, and launched a close but platonic relationship that lasted until her husband’s death in 1851. In addition to active correspondence, they frequently had dinner together and spent weekends discussing their ideas. During this period they exchanged essays and co-authored articles and books. Rosemarie Tong reports that John Taylor had agreed to this arrangement in return for the external formality of Harriet Taylor residing as his wife in his house.⁴ Nevertheless, their friends were scandalized and ostracized them from social circles.

From 1834 to 1840, Mill edited the London and Westminster Review, a radical quarterly that published Charles Dickens and other leading Victorian writers.⁵ It is noteworthy that Harriet Taylor’s The Enfranchisement of Women (1840) was published in the London and Westminster Review. According to Susan Moller Okin, the correspondence between Mill and Taylor reveals that Taylor held more radical views regarding women’s issues. Taylor was especially critical of the degrading effect of women’s economic dependence on men and argued for radical reform of all marriage laws. Indeed, she proposed that once women have been given full civil and political rights, all marriage laws could be eliminated, without harmful results. While Mill was in favor of considerable relaxation of the divorce laws, he never suggested that the contractual basis of marriage be abolished.⁶

It is likely that the difficult circumstances of Mill and Taylor’s long relationship and eventual marriage in 1853 increased the strength of his convictions about women’s rights. In his autobiography, Mill suggests that Taylor had stimulated the transformation of what had been little more than an abstract principle into a real appreciation of the practical, day-to-day effects of women’s lack of rights and opportunities.⁷ Mill also revealed that he had planned to include details of the role that Taylor played in the production of his book Principles of Political Economy (1848), but when John Taylor heard about it, he objected, and references to his wife were removed. However, Mill gave Harriet Taylor her due in his autobiography where he claimed that all his books, including Principles of Political Economy, were a joint production with my wife. He believed that when two persons have their thoughts and speculations completely in common it is of little consequence in respect of the question of originality, which of them holds the pen.⁸ Harriet Taylor died in 1858 while being treated for tuberculosis. Her daughter, Helen Taylor, assisted Mill in his writing for the next fifteen years.

Mill’s philosophy was derived from liberal political philosophy, which emerged from the Enlightenment. Liberal political philosophy developed in the nineteenth century largely from the theories of John Locke and was reinforced by the radical individualism of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the utilitarian theories of Bentham. Classic liberalism views the individual as a rational being and emphasizes individual freedom, private property, and representative government, all under the rule of law. The social contract enables individuals to voluntarily subject themselves to the state and civil law in exchange for freedom and protection in the public sphere. The ideal state should protect civil liberties such as the right to property, to vote, and to litigate and, instead of interfering with the free market, simply provide all individuals with an equal opportunity to accumulate wealth within the market economy and thereby provide the greatest happiness to the greatest number of people. However, for classic liberalism the individual is not the adult human being, but the male-headed family. Women are defined by their procreative and child-rearing functions in the family. They are excluded from the social contract by the assumption that, as the head of the family, the father alone can represent its interests in the wider society. This differentiation of the private and public spheres and the relegation of women to the private sphere meant that women were denied personhood. John Stuart Mill reacted against this view of the social contract. He valued liberty and justice and intended to use these principles to make the case for equality between women and men. At the root of his whole philosophy was the conviction that the utilitarian goal of the greatest happiness for the greatest number required the greatest possible moral and intellectual advancement of the human race.

Mill was the only major liberal political philosopher to explicitly apply the principles of liberalism to women.⁹ The Subjection of Women represents the culmination of thirty years of Mill’s collaboration with Harriet Taylor. He uses principles of liberty and justice to make the case for equality between men and women. In calling for equality of men and women, Mill advocates for the independence and personhood of women.

Mill uses the metaphor of slavery to characterize the relation of women in marriage. If women are to become equal to men, they will have to gain recognition as persons before the law and gain citizen rights including the rights to own property, to vote, and to litigate. The problem is defined as a legal one, but Mill acknowledges it is also a cultural one. While the obedience of slaves is generally obtained by use of fear, he argues that women’s education from an early age is designed to enslave their minds so as to maintain the system of marital slavery.

Mill rejects the prevailing ideology that defines women’s subordination as reflecting their nature. He contends that what is called women’s nature is the result of artificial cultivation for the benefit and pleasure of their master. He describes women of higher classes as cultivated like hot house plants.¹⁰ While acknowledging moral and intellectual differences between men and women, Mill does not believe they are natural differences. He believes we would only know the true nature of women when social institutions provide the same free development of talents in women that is possible in men. Then, "If women have greater natural inclination for some things than for others, there is no need of laws or social inculcation to make the majority of them do the former in preference to the latter.¹¹

Mill extends the principle of equality of opportunity to women and argues that one’s birth should not determine one’s station in life.

. . . if the principle is true, we ought to act as if we believed it, and not to ordain that to be born a girl instead of a boy, any more than to be born black instead of white or a commoner instead of a nobleman, shall decide the person’s position through all life.¹²

In his view, equal opportunity requires full citizenship. It also requires changing the way women are educated. According to Mill, women must be educated to think they should not be economically dependent on her father or on her husband.¹³

Nevertheless, when Mill defines the desirable division of labor between husband and wife, it is the existing division of labor with the man as the income earner and the wife caring for the home.

When the support of the family depends, not on property, but on earnings, the common arrangement, by which the man earns the income and the wife super-intends the domestic expenditure, seems to me in general the most suitable division of labor between the two persons.¹⁴

In spite of the doctrine of equal opportunity, Mill consistently argues that a woman understands that when she marries, she makes choice of the management of a household, and the bringing up of a family, as the first call upon her exertions . . . it does not follow that a woman should actually support herself because she should be capable of doing it.¹⁵ Mill anticipates the possibility that employed, married women will work a second shift at home, and he believes that women already do more than their fair share in the existing division of labor. Moreover, he regards the public and private spheres as being equally important. Consequently, when he relegates women to the position of economic dependence, he does not recognize the inequality of that position.

Mill was convinced that the moral and intellectual advancement of mankind would result in greater happiness for everybody. His case for including women in the social contract to a level of equality with men is aimed at the increased happiness of women themselves, but he also views it as the prerequisite for the improvement of the human race. The problem is that women cannot simply be added to liberal philosophy because it is based on the assumption of inequality of the sexes. Indeed, philosopher Carol Pateman suggests that contract theorists such as Mill do not recognize the sexual contract, the political right of men to exercise power over women¹⁶ that will undermine women’s happiness. By contrast, Fredrich Engels uses a Marxist analysis in The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884) to locate the cause of women’s subordination in both the private ownership of property and the exclusion of women from production. Unlike that of Mill, Engel’s feminist analysis requires the abolition of women’s economic dependence in marriage to gain equality between the sexes.¹⁷ Thus, while Mill’s feminism was radical in his day, the focus on liberal individualism and the attendant rights while accepting the sexual division of labor means that he must be viewed as a reformer not a revolutionary.

In 1865, Mill was elected to Parliament, where he became the political voice of the women’s suffrage movement. Zillah Eisenstein reminds us that he also fought unsuccessfully to amend the laws that gave husbands control over their wives’ money and property, and supported the campaign of Charles Bradlaugh, the well-known birth-control advocate. These unpopular stands contributed to his defeat in the next election.¹⁸ Mill retired to France where he spent six months of every year until his death 1873.

Mill’s great intellectual work was his System of Logic (1843), which ran for many editions. The third (1850) and eighth (1872) editions, especially, were thoroughly revised and supplemented with new and controversial material. Logic is Mill’s only systematic philosophical treatise and provides a valuable discussion of the epistemological principles underlying empiricism. ¹⁹ The first edition of Logic was followed by his Essays on some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy (1844) and Principles of Political Economy (1848), which became the leading textbook on political economy for a generation. Other books include Thoughts on Parliamentary Reform (1859), Considerations on Representative Government (1860), Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy (1865), his rectorial Inaugural Address at St. Andrews University (1865) on the value of culture, a pamphlet on England and Ireland (1868), and his edition of his father’s Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind (1869).

While Mill considered System of Logic (1843) one of his most significant works, he is mainly remembered today for his contributions to ethical and social theory, in which his writings continue to exert an important influence—On Liberty (1859), Utilitarianism (1863), and The Subjection of Women (1869). On Liberty was his statement of the principle that self-protection was the only justification for any individual or the state interfering with another’s freedom. Utilitarianism refined the principle of utility that the greatest happiness of the greatest number should be the aim of personal and legislative conduct.²⁰ The Subjection of Women is the classic essay on all aspects of women’s emancipation. It provides the roots of liberal feminist theory in the twentieth century. While women were granted suffrage in the early twentieth century, social justice issues such as equal opportunity in education and employment in the public sphere and women’s continued responsibility for childcare and housework in the private sphere continue to be relevant in the twenty-first century.

Patricia M. Ulbrich, Ph.D., is an independent scholar and feminist activist. She co-authored Introduction to Women’s Studies Database