The Subjection of Women

I was led to John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women (1869), written with the assistance/inspiration of Harriet Taylor, by on-going commentary at A Year of Feminist Classics. This picture from Wikipedia is dated 1835 and the need at that time for long exposures for photographs makes them look unduly grim. The important message of this picture is that the two are together and that Mill credited Harriet Taylor with full partnership in the development of the ideas put forth in The Subjection of Women.

All too often, when men write about women, they assume the right to define and prescribe. Freud addressed his famous question “what does woman want?” to other men. Wollstonecraft pleaded that women would be “better” if they were only treated differently. Mill knows that what women want and what women are, good or bad, are irrelevant. He writes from a liberal view which assumes the men and women have equal rights, whatever their natures.  He states the proposition clearly:

That the principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes—the legal subordination of one sex to the other—is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement; and that it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other.

He recognizes that the legal position of women in England at that time reflects a codification of long-standing arrangements:

Laws and systems of polity always begin by recognizing the relations they find already existing between individuals. They convert what was a mere physical fact into a legal right, give it the sanction of society, and principally aim at the substitution of public and organized means of asserting and protecting these rights, instead of the irregular and lawless conflict of physical strength.

The structure of his essay is this:

• Chapter 1 – an explanation of liberal principles
• Chapter 2 – the situation of married women
• Chapter 3 – equal opportunities for women, especially in employment
• Chapter 4 – social benefits from recognition of equal rights

I was particularly impressed by Chapter 2, where he describes the social and legal status of married women. Women had no separate legal existence and no rights to property. Not until an act of Parliament in 1882 did a married women in Britain gain the right to the fruits of her own labor.

The situation was the equivalent of chattel slavery (except a man could not sell his wife, only abuse her), a fact that was recognized in the United States, where the abolition movement and the women’s suffrage movement evolved together. Just as in the worst Jim Crow period of segregation, the legal system recognized the worst and least-qualified man as legally superior to every woman. A man who had no other status in the society was at least entitled to control his wife’s property and actions.

Marriage is not an institution designed for a select few. Men are not required, as a preliminary to the marriage ceremony, to prove by testimonials that they are fit to be trusted with the exercise of absolute power.

Inherent conflict was built into every marriage:

Men do not want solely the obedience of women, they want their sentiments. 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 favourite.

Without power and with no rights to assert, women must prevail by the very harem techniques that Wollstonecraft identified in her Vindication of the Rights of Women. It is over 50 years later, but the problem continues.

During the Civil Rights struggle in the United States, many of us became aware that the oppressor was as entrapped in the system as the oppressed. To enforce privilege of one group over another — whether based on race or gender — demeans the humanity of both. Mill sees benefits for both sexes when equal rights are recognized.

And it is true that servitude, except when it actually brutalizes, though corrupting to both, is less so to the slaves than to the slave-masters. It is wholesomer for the moral nature to be restrained, even by arbitrary power, than to be allowed to exercise arbitrary power without restraint.