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WorkJohn Stuart Mill

The Subjection of Women

Written in 1861 and held back for eight years: the argument that the legal subordination of women is a relic of the rule of force.

by John Stuart Mill160 passages held

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First published
(aged 63)
Original language
English

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Overview

The manuscript was finished in 1861 and put away. Mill had written it at the suggestion of his stepdaughter Helen Taylor, so that a full statement of his opinions on the question would exist whatever happened to him, and he meant to print it at the moment it could do most good. Eight years went by. During them he sat in Parliament for Westminster, and on 20 May 1867 he moved to replace the word man with the word person in the Reform Bill, which would have given women the vote on the same terms as men. The amendment was lost by 196 votes to 73. He lost his seat in 1868, and The Subjection of Women was published the following year. It argues that the legal subordination of one sex to the other is wrong in itself and one of the chief obstacles to human improvement, and that it should give way to complete equality. Mill treats it as a survival of the law of the strongest. Other institutions founded on force, slavery among them, had been abandoned in the advanced countries, and this one remained because it was universal and therefore looked natural. To the claim that women are fitted by nature for dependence he replies that nobody can know the nature of either sex while one has been brought up in subjection to the other. Under English common law a wife's earnings and movable property became her husband's unless a settlement kept them apart, and Mill sets her position beside that of a slave. A household ruled by one will, he argues, trains its children in despotism. He credited the leading ideas to Harriet Taylor Mill, his wife, who had died in 1858; Helen Taylor contributed passages of her own. The book was reprinted twice within six months and translated almost at once into French, German, Danish, Italian, Polish and Russian, the Danish version by the critic Georg Brandes. It also aroused more hostility than anything else Mill wrote. In Finland a reading of it in 1883 led a literary circle to found the Finnish Women's Association, and Finnish women received the vote in 1906. British women voted on the same terms as men from 1928.

Key concepts

What does Mill mean by the law of the strongest?

The law of the strongest is the rule that whoever has superior force commands. Mill holds that early society rested on it everywhere, and that progress has consisted in replacing it, one relation after another, with rules of justice: slavery and absolute monarchy have gone or are going. The subordination of women is for him the one case in which a relation founded on force survives in law and is defended as natural.

Why does Mill say nobody knows the nature of the two sexes?

Nobody knows it, he argues, because character is shaped by circumstances, and women have never been observed in any circumstances except subjection. To learn what belongs to either sex by nature one would have to subtract everything that upbringing and position can explain. Men, he adds, know women mostly through their own wives, who have reasons for not showing themselves fully. Claims about what women are fit for are therefore guesses.

Why does Mill call a wife the bond-servant of her husband?

He calls her so because the marriage law he describes gives a husband legal power over his wife's person and property. She vows obedience for life, what she owns or earns becomes his unless a settlement protects it, and the children are by law his. Mill grants that few husbands use the whole of this power. His point is that the law hands it to every man, and that good treatment resting on the holder's forbearance is no security.

What does Mill mean by perfect equality between the sexes?

Perfect equality is the principle Mill would put in place of legal subordination: no power or privilege on one side and no disability on the other. In practice it means equal rights within marriage, the admission of women to every occupation and public office, the same education and the vote. He does not claim that the sexes are alike. He claims that differences, if there are any, should be left to show themselves under free competition.

What principle of modern life does the subjection of women contradict?

It contradicts the principle that people are no longer born to their place in life. In earlier societies, Mill says, birth settled whether a person was slave, serf or noble. The modern world lets individuals use their faculties to reach whatever lot they can, and trusts free choice to put each where he is most useful. The disabilities of women are the one remaining case in which birth alone decides what a person may never do.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

The law of the strongest, taken for nature

How could anyone know what women are by nature, when nobody has seen them grow up free? Mill puts the burden of proof on the defenders of an arrangement that began in force.

The subjection of women, Mill argues, was never adopted after comparing alternatives. It began when the stronger sex took power, and law later turned the fact into a right, as it once did with slavery. That it feels natural proves little, since every domination has seemed natural to those who held it. What is called the nature of women is an eminently artificial thing, the product of hothouse cultivation in some directions and repression in others. Experience cannot have decided between two systems when only one has been tried. Men want a willing slave, so women are brought up to think that yielding is their character.

  • gender equality
  • gender inequality
  • power
  • slavery
  • custom
  • social conditioning
  • gender roles
  • gender stereotypes
  • gender
  • epistemology
  • knowledge
  • historical change
  • patriarchy
  • social hierarchy

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Marriage as the law made it

What happens to two people, and to their children, when the law makes one of them master of the other? Mill reads the English law of marriage as it stood and asks what it teaches.

By the law Mill describes, a wife vows obedience for life, owns nothing that is not her husband's and has no legal right over her children. He calls her the bond-servant of her husband, in some respects worse placed than a slave, who has hours of his own. That most husbands are kinder than the law allows is no defence, since laws must be made for bad men. Such power is given to every man, the clodhopper with the nobleman. A family so constituted is a school of despotism. He would put marriage on the footing of a business partnership, where no law decrees that one partner must rule.

  • marriage
  • marriage law
  • legal inequality
  • coercion
  • consent
  • freedom
  • justice
  • social institutions

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What the world gains by setting women free

If women were admitted to every occupation and office, who would be better off? Mill answers with a gain for society, a gain for marriage and a gain for women themselves.

Mill would open all employments and the suffrage to women and let competition show who is fit. No law says that only a strong-armed man may be a blacksmith. The objection that women cannot govern is met by fact: a woman can be a Queen Elizabeth or a Joan of Arc, and the law excludes women from the very things they have proved they can do. Admitting them would double the mental faculties at the service of humanity. Marriage would become a companionship of equals. And half the human race would have the freedom he calls the first want of human nature after food and clothing.

  • education
  • women's rights
  • competition
  • political power
  • art
  • happiness
  • social progress
  • equality

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Within this work

passages held
160
distinct concepts
275
by passages held, corpus-wide
#396

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “gender roles” and “marriage”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 17 pairings. 86 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
gender rolesmarriage8
marriagewomen's rights8
educationgender equality7
educationmarriage5
educationgender roles4
gender equalitymarriage4
marriagepower4
justicemarriage3
educationgender inequality2
gender equalitypower2
gender inequalityjustice2
gender inequalitymarriage2
gender inequalitypower2
gender rolespower2
educationwomen's rights1
gender equalityjustice1
gender roleswomen's rights1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1843 A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive

    It was the first book of his own, and it made his name in 1843. Its claim that every belief must answer to experience is the ground on which the later books on morals and politics stand.

     EN
  2. 1844 Essays on Some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy (Essays on some unsettled Questions of Political Economy)

    Written at twenty-three and twenty-four, these five essays waited until the System of Logic had found him readers. Their argument on trade returns, four years later, in the Principles of Political Economy.

     EN
  3. 1848 Principles of Political Economy

    Seven editions carried this treatise from 1848 to 1871, revised as his view of socialism moved. It is read here in the text of the seventh, the last Mill revised himself.

     EN
  4. 1859 On Liberty

    One of the two books Mill expected to outlast the rest, the other being the System of Logic. Its defence of individuality against majority opinion runs on into Considerations on Representative Government and The Subjection of Women.

     EN
  5. 1861 Considerations on Representative Government

    Written two years after On Liberty, it faces the same danger, a majority that overrides everyone else, and meets it with electoral machinery. It is his fullest statement on how a free people should be governed.

     EN
  6. 1861 Utilitarianism

    A defence of the ethics he inherited from Bentham and from his father, assembled from papers of the 1850s. Short as it is, it supplies the standard of right and wrong that his political books take for granted.

     EN
  7. 1862 The Contest in America

    Occasional journalism from Fraser's Magazine, written in haste before a journey to Greece. It shows Mill as a polemicist, arguing against the prevailing opinion of his own class.

     EN
  8. 1865 Auguste Comte and Positivism

    Two essays from the Westminster Review of 1865, written eight years after Comte's death. They close a relationship that began with admiring letters in 1841 and left its mark on the System of Logic.

     EN
  9. 1869 The Subjection of Women you are here EN
  10. 1879 Socialism

    Left unfinished at his death, these are the posthumous "Chapters on Socialism", first drafts for a book planned in 1869. They return to a question that the Principles of Political Economy had reopened from one edition to the next.

     EN
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