The Subjection of WomenJohn Stuart Mill
About The Subjection of Women
Mill published in 1869, though he had drafted it years earlier with substantial input from Harriet Taylor. The argument is direct: the legal subordination of women to men is wrong in principle and harmful in practice, and ought to be replaced by perfect equality.
Mill proceeds by dismantling the claim that women's subordination is natural. What passes for women's "nature," he argues, is the product of forced repression and artificial cultivation. No one can know what women are naturally capable of because no society has yet allowed them to develop freely. The appeal to nature is circular: it points to the results of subjection as evidence that subjection is justified. Mill compares the position of married women under English law to slavery, noting that a wife had less legal recourse against her husband than a slave against a master in some jurisdictions.
The positive case rests on utilitarian and liberal grounds. Equality would double the available talent for every field of human endeavor. It would improve marriage by making it a partnership between equals rather than a relation of command and obedience. And it would satisfy the principle, central to , that no one's freedom should be restricted without demonstrable harm to others. The book was received with hostility by most of Mill's contemporaries. Its arguments have since become so widely accepted that it is easy to forget how isolated Mill was in making them.