John Stuart Mill · Politics
Mill’s radical argument, generations ahead of its time, that the inequality of women is a relic of barbarism and that we cannot even know women’s ‘nature’ under oppression.
In The Subjection of Women (1869), written with his collaborator and late wife Harriet Taylor Mill deeply in mind, Mill made an argument almost no respectable Victorian would: that the entire legal and social subordination of women to men was simply wrong, a survival of ancient barbarism into a supposedly enlightened age, and a primary obstacle to human progress. In an era when married women could not own property and could not vote, this was genuinely radical.
Mill makes a devastating epistemological point. Everyone confidently pronounces on what women can and cannot do, what they are and are not suited for - but on what evidence? We have never seen women living in freedom and equality, so we have no data on their unconstrained capacities. Every claim about women’s natural limitations is a conclusion drawn from a situation rigged to produce it. The honest position is that we simply do not know - and the only way to find out is to remove the artificial barriers and let women, like men, develop and choose freely.
The Subjection of Women did not come from Mill alone, and the story of its making is part of its meaning. For more than two decades Mill’s closest intellectual partner was Harriet Taylor - first as a friend during her marriage to another man, then, after her husband’s death, as his wife. Mill insisted, repeatedly and emphatically, that she was a collaborator in his thought and a thinker of greater originality than himself; he credited her deeply with the ideas in On Liberty and on the equality of women, and modern scholars debate just how much of his later work was genuinely joint authorship. Whatever the exact division, the relationship embodied the very thing the book argues for: a marriage of equals, an intellectual partnership between two minds meeting as peers - in deliberate, lived contrast to the legal marriage of his day, which Mill compared to a form of slavery.
That comparison was not rhetorical excess but a precise description of Victorian law. A married woman, under the doctrine of ‘coverture,’ had no independent legal existence: her property became her husband’s, she could not make contracts or sue in her own name, her earnings were his, her children were legally his, and she could not refuse him her body or readily escape an abusive marriage. The husband held, Mill said, a legal power over his wife greater than a master’s over a servant, for the servant could at least leave. This is the concrete reality behind the book’s shocking opening claim that the subordination of women is ‘a relic of barbarism’: Mill is describing a legal order in which one adult human being was, in effect, the property of another, sanctified by custom and disguised as the natural order of the family. And against it he set the ideal his own life with Harriet Taylor was meant to demonstrate - that the relation between the sexes could be one of ‘perfect equality,’ a friendship and partnership between equals, which he believed would not weaken marriage but ennoble it, turning a relation of master and dependent into the deepest of human bonds. The personal and the political were, for Mill, inseparable: the book argues in public for the equality he had tried to live in private.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Mill attacks the appeal to women’s ‘nature.’ Reconstruct his argument that this nature is unknowable under conditions of inequality, in your own words.
Leads to Simone de Beauvoir.
Begin this lesson →epoché — a humanities education that remembers you.