The Subjection of Women

Summary

The Subjection of Women is John Stuart Mill's extended argument that the legal subordination of women to men in mid-Victorian Britain was wrong in principle and an obstacle to human improvement, and that it should give way to perfect equality before the law. Mill drafted it in 1860–1861, after the death of his wife Harriet Taylor Mill, and published it with Longmans in 1869. In his Autobiography he credited its ideas largely to Harriet and some passages to her daughter Helen Taylor. The library text is the complete first edition from Project Gutenberg, in four untitled chapters. Chapter I faces the difficulty of arguing against a deep-rooted feeling. Mill argues that the authority of husbands over wives began in physical force, the law of the strongest, and survived when other forms of rule by force, such as slavery and absolute monarchy, had been given up. Every form of dominion, he notes, has seemed natural to those who held it. Modern society has adopted the principle that birth should not fix a person's station, so the one exception for women needs justification. What is called the nature of women, he argues, cannot be known while women are educated and placed as they are; and if women cannot by nature do something, there is no need to forbid it. Chapter II examines marriage law. Under the common-law rule of coverture, a wife's property, earnings and legal person were merged in her husband's; she had no rights over her children against him and could rarely leave him. Mill compares her legal position with that of a slave, while granting that most husbands are better than the law allows them to be. Laws, he says, must be judged by what they permit the worst to do. He rejects the claim that every association needs one master and pictures marriage as a partnership of equals, a school of sympathy in equality. He also answers the argument from St. Paul's counsel to wives. Chapter III turns to the vote and to professions and public offices. The suffrage, Mill argues, is a right to share in choosing those who hold public trust and belongs to women as much as to men. He cites Elizabeth I, Deborah, Joan of Arc and the women rulers of Indian states as evidence of capacity for government, discusses women's practical intuition and nervous temperament, questions arguments from brain size, and explains the small number of women of genius in art and science by their education and domestic burdens. Chapter IV lists the benefits of equality: justice at the heart of family life, the doubling of talent available to society, a better moral influence of women on opinion, and the private happiness of women spared a wasted life. Critics, notably James Fitzjames Stephen in Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (1873), defended the authority of the husband as natural and necessary; the book was quickly translated and read across Europe and America.

Top Lessons

• Custom is not the same as nature

  Mill's first argument is that long habit makes any arrangement feel natural to those who live with it. He asks readers to separate what women are now, after centuries of a particular education and law, from what they might be, and argues that only freedom can show what their nature really is.

• Judge a law by what it permits the worst to do

  Mill grants that most English husbands treat their wives far better than the law requires. But laws exist for the bad as well as the good, and a law that gives one person unchecked power over another must be judged by its effects in the worst cases.

• Marriage as a school of equality

  Mill believed the family forms character. A household ruled by command trains children in command and obedience; a marriage of equals, he argued, would teach sympathy, justice and the virtues needed by free citizens. His critics answered that a family, like a ship, needs one final authority.

• Wasted talents are a loss to everyone

  Mill argues that opening education and professions to women would double the mental power available to society and spare many women a life of frustration. His case is utilitarian: equality is right because it increases the general good and the happiness of individuals.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

Mill engages directly with the medical arguments of his day about women's minds and bodies. In Chapter I he observes that physicians and physiologists had learned something of bodily differences between the sexes but that hardly any medical practitioner was a psychologist, so their opinions on women's mental character carried little weight. In Chapter III he answers the argument from women's nervous susceptibility, treating much of it as unused energy and the product of a sheltered upbringing, and points to the decline of hysterics and fainting fits once they went out of fashion as evidence that such symptoms were shaped by custom. He also takes up the anatomical claim, current among Victorian craniologists, that women's smaller brains proved inferior capacity, arguing that brain size relative to body was unsettled and that the quality and activity of the brain mattered as much as its bulk. Chapter IV's description of the weariness and dissatisfaction of a wasted life reads, for a modern clinician, as a period account of low mood bound up with lack of purposeful work; any such reading is interpretive.

• Chapter I

  Medical practitioners and physiologists know something of bodily differences, but few are psychologists and their views of women's minds are no better than common opinion.

• Chapter III

  Nervous susceptibility as an objection to women's fitness for business; hysterics and fainting fits disappearing with fashion; the hot-house upbringing of upper-class girls.

• Chapter III

  The anatomical argument from the size of women's brains, and Mill's reply on proportion, quality and the circulation of blood through the brain.

• Chapter IV, closing pages

  The weariness, disappointment and dissatisfaction with life of women whose faculties have no outlet: the feeling of a wasted life.