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Few men in the 19th century did more to advance women’s rights than British philosopher John Stuart Mill (1806-1873). The product of his famous father’s plan to create a genius, Mill was a child prodigy who was learning Greek at the age of 3 and boasted an estimated IQ of approximately 200. Later he and his wife, Harriet Taylor Mill, worked to promote women’s rights, in 1851 publishing “The Enfranchisement of Women,” which was followed after her death by Mill’s own 1861 “The Subjection of Women.” As befits a work dedicated to advancing the cause of women, Mill later wrote that “All that is most striking and profound in what was written by me belongs to my wife.” Their writings helped lay the intellectual groundwork for the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution 100 years ago.
Since the decline of slavery, asserts Mill, marriage is the only remaining form of bondage, and the mistresses of every house are society’s only lawful slaves. At the time, women were legally subject to the will of their fathers and husbands, unable both to vote and hold property, based on the presumption that they were ill-equipped in body and mind to care for themselves. Buttressing this view was the self-fulfilling prophecy that experience furnished very few examples of truly independent women who could serve for men as counterexamples or for women as role models. Biology was regarded as destiny, and since women were seen as biologically inferior to men in all domains except those of wife, mother, and homemaker, alternatives to this arrangement seemed inconceivable to many.
Mill argues in the “Subjection” that the woman’s lot can be traced to one factor — power. The inequality of rights between men and women arises from the superior strength of men, who have wielded it to confine women to an inferior position. As the subjects of male dominance, women live “under the very eye” and “in the hands” of a master, with “no means of combining against him,” no power of “overmastering him,” and with the “strongest motives for seeking his favor and avoiding to give him offense.” Deprived of a full education and prohibited by law and custom from pursuing most careers outside the home, women existed in a state of dependency that offered no path to an independent existence. Women remained in subjection, in other words, because they had no alternative.
And yet, Mill asserts, men do not want to base their relationships with their wives entirely on power, so they employ more subtle forms of coercion.
All men, except the most brutish, desire to have, in the woman most nearly connected with them, not a forced slave but a willing one, not a slave merely, but a favorite. They have therefore put everything in practice to enslave their minds ... All women are brought up from the very earliest years in the belief that their ideal of character is the very opposite to that of men; not self will and government by self-control, but submission and yielding to the control of others.
They are told, in other words, that their purpose is to serve, a directive reinforced by three things: the attraction between the sexes, the dependence of the woman on the man, and the fact that all objects of social ambition are attainable only through him.
And yet, says Mill, this runs against a fundamental principle grounded in a thousand years of human experience — namely, that when a matter is the concern of an individual, it never goes right unless it is left to individual discretion. “Individual choice is now known to be the only thing which procures the adoption of the best processes,” he writes. Yet this principle is violated when women are made the subjects of men. Such subservience deprives society of the superior contributions women are capable of rendering and forces it to make do with inferior ones. This, writes Mill, is the only instance in which “higher social functions are closed against anyone by a fatality at birth” — a mistake and injustice that afflicts nothing less than half of humanity.
The arrow of history, Mill asserts, points in a very different direction. Every step in the improvement of human circumstances has been accompanied by the social elevation of women, leading both historians and philosophers to conclude that the change in the status of women is “the surest test and most correct measure of the civilization of a people or an age.” Those who have kept women in subjection can have no idea of what their true capabilities may be, and those who argue that women are incapable of anything more should recognize that, by their own logic, there is no need to prevent them from doing otherwise, since no one needs to be prohibited from doing what they are incapable of. Women who marry should do so because it is their choice, not because they have no other options.
Mill regards the subjection of women as a biological and moral perversion. Men and women vary widely in their capabilities, and in every case where a woman is as capable or more capable than a man, justice demands that she be given the opportunity to develop and exercise her abilities. So doing would “double the mass of mental faculties available for the higher service of humanity.” Even should some women choose family over career and public service, “the mere consciousness of being a human being like any other, entitled to choose her pursuits” would, over time, “effect an immense expansion of the faculties of women, as well as enlargement of the range of their moral sentiments,” in turn enriching the characters of their sons and husbands.
Mill argues that even marriage, the mechanism by which subjection is established and enforced, would be enriched by the elevation of women. A man married to a woman of interior intelligence “finds her a perpetual deadweight,” or worse, “a drag upon every aspiration of his to be better than public opinion requires him to be.” Mill calls intimate society between people radically dissimilar to one another “an idle dream,” depriving them of any real “identity of interest.” The man obtains little from such a marriage but “an upper servant, a nurse, and a mistress.” By contrast:
When each of two persons, instead of being a nothing, is a something, when they are attached to one another, and are not too much unlike to begin with ... the constant partaking in the same things, assisted by their sympathy, draws out the latent capacities of each and [permits] a real enriching of the two natures.
In other words, the liberation of women would permit the full exercise of human faculties and promote happiness for both women and men, enriching all of society.
Mill introduced his own women’s suffrage amendment in Parliament in 1867, which he later referred to as “the only really important public service I performed.” The only thing that prevented women from voting, he asserted, was their sex. Moreover, to keep women from the polls was to subject them to taxation without representation. While the amendment was defeated, as was Mill himself in the elections of the following year, his cause would eventually prevail. In 1918, women received the parliamentary vote, and just two years later the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution was ratified. Although Mill himself had long since died, there is every reason to think that he would have delighted in witnessing so great a blow to the “subordination of one sex to another.”
