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John Stuart MillThe Subjection of Women
Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | Published in 1869A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Freeing the “Angel in the House”
The Victorian ideal of womanhood was crystallized in an 1854 long narrative poem entitled The Angel in the House by Coventry Palmer. The phrase evoked the ideal Victorian woman: submissive to her husband, with only his and their children’s needs at the forefront of her mind, her thoughts and desires never venturing beyond the home that she imbued with calm and goodness by dint of her own purity. Victorians felt such “angels” must be protected from the harsh, corrupt world outside of domesticity, which was their justification for preventing women from voting, entering politics, or venturing into the workplace.
Palmer’s portrayal of a submissive woman whose sole reason for living is to please her husband came under attack by writers like John Stuart Mill, who understood that this conception of womanhood was based on the extent to which a woman’s husband could control and isolate her: “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” (27). In learning to be docile and passive to attract a husband—a primary avenue for securing financial stability—women come to embrace the very ideologies and institutions designed to oppress them:
And, this great means of influence over the minds of women having been acquired, an instinct of selfishness made men avail themselves of it to the utmost as a means of holding women in subjection, by representing to them meekness, submissiveness, and resignation of all individual will into the hands of a man, as an essential part of sexual attractiveness (28).
The consequences of such indoctrination for women are obvious—the warping of personality and the restriction of opportunities in the world at large. However, Mill suggests that when the only mode of education available to women is one that molds them into what men want them to be, society does a disservice to both genders. Men become egotistical brutes who base their relationships with women on force instead of partnership. Society as a whole suffers as well because women’s talents are either lost entirely or felt only indirectly, dissipated in the domestic sphere:
[T]hese benefits [women’s influence on men or actions at home] are partial; their range is extremely circumscribed; and if they must be admitted, on the one hand, as a deduction from the amount of fresh social power that would be acquired by giving freedom to one-half of the whole sum of human intellect, there must be added, on the other, the benefit of the stimulus that would be given to the intellect of men by the competition (154).
At its core, The Subjection of Women thus argues that the Victorian housewife is a glorified prisoner whose release would benefit not only her but also her husband, her children, and her country.
Nature Versus Society and the Gender Hierarchy
Although the Age of Enlightenment ended nearly half a century prior to the Victorian era, its emphasis on democratic ideals, the pursuit of happiness, and separation of church and state greatly influenced Mill’s liberal utilitarianism. Mill felt Victorian society had backslid because of its failure to follow Enlightenment ideals when it came to gender, which he attributes partially to broader backlash against the Enlightenment emphasis on reason:
It is one of the characteristic prejudices of the reaction of the nineteenth century against the eighteenth, to accord to the unreasoning elements in human nature the infallibility which the eighteenth century is supposed to have ascribed to the reasoning elements (6).
This preference for feeling, Mill suggests, encourages people to unquestioningly accept as “natural” instincts and ideas that are actually the product of environment. For example, Christianity informed all sectors of Victorian society, including the government, and this version of Christianity typically interpreted women’s role as defined by her capacity as a wife and mother—or, more abstractly, the degree to which she sublimated her own needs for others. This relationship between the genders was seen as natural because of the Bible’s portrayal of God creating Eve from Adam’s rib as a helpmate. Likewise, the belief that marriage and motherhood were women’s highest callings so permeated Victorian society that hardly anyone would think to question it, even though doing so would quickly reveal the ideology’s internal contradictions:
The subjection of women to men being a universal custom, any departure from it quite naturally appears unnatural. But how entirely, even in this case, the feeling is dependent on custom, appears by ample experience. Nothing so much astonishes the people of distant parts of the world, when they first learn anything about England, as to be told that it is under a queen: the thing seems to them so unnatural as to be almost incredible. To Englishmen this does not seem in the least degree unnatural, because they are used to it; but they do feel it unnatural that women should be soldiers or members of parliament (23).
What society categorizes as “natural” is often merely habit. The longer habits remain unquestioned, the more solidified the idea of their “naturalness” becomes, but even then, cracks in the façade remain. As Mill notes, society works very hard to maintain what is supposedly a natural state for women, which suggests that it is not natural at all: If women naturally submitted to men or wanted to keep house, they would presumably not need to learn to be deferential or be legally barred from certain occupations.
Ultimately, Mill claims that there is currently no way of knowing what is “natural” for women. All “knowledge” of them is gleaned secondhand under circumstances that are probably deeply unnatural. Women have not been interviewed, studied, or granted the opportunity to share what they feel is natural prior to being told what they can and cannot be in society: “[The nature of women] is a subject on which nothing final can be known, so long as those who alone can really know it, women themselves, have given but little testimony, and that little, mostly suborned” (42). Therefore, proclamations about women’s innate character are, for Mill, a completely irrational exercise and antithetical to a progressive, modern society.
Liberty, Slavery, and Marriage
Mill repeatedly cites the defunct institution of slavery—both the transatlantic slave trade and slavery as practiced in cultures like classical Greece and Rome—as analogous to women’s current oppressed state in society. He does so in part as a rhetorical tactic. Slavery was abolished in England in 1807, almost 60 years before the United States enacted the 13th Amendment, making slavery illegal. The comparison thus facilitates allegations of hypocrisy. England, unlike the classical world, has determined slavery to be morally unjustifiable, yet it relegates women to a position that is arguably worse than their position in Ancient Greece or Rome. In other words, Victorian society cannot even plead ignorance to excuse its oppression of women.
However, Mill also suggests deeper parallels between slavery and women’s oppression, particularly within marriage:
The law of servitude in marriage is a monstrous contradiction to all the principles of the modern world, and to all the experience through which those principles have been slowly and painfully worked out. It is the sole case, now that negro slavery has been abolished, in which a human being in the plenitude of every faculty is delivered up to the tender mercies of another human being, in the hope forsooth that this other will use the power solely for the good of the person subjected to it (147).
Mill here alludes to what he calls the “law of force,” or the wielding of power through violence (or the threat of it) rather than contractual agreement. Though marriage might superficially resemble such an agreement, Mill maintains that the denial of basic rights (e.g., property) to married women creates a power differential closer to that between an absolute monarch and a subject, or an enslaver and an enslaved person. Furthermore, the economic and social pressures that funnel women toward marriage raise doubts about whether they can meaningfully “consent” to the arrangement.
Mill of course does not deny that there are men who treat their wives well and women who profess to enjoy their position in society. Nevertheless, Mill suggests that the conditions of marriage are not only unjust but also antithetical to the democratic project. Even when no actual abuse occurs, Mill argues, a relationship in which one person wields near unilateral power over another will inevitably distort the personalities of both. In fact, he suggests that the most pernicious moral effects are likely to fall on men:
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 (142).
Mill thus implies that women’s “enslavement” constitutes a double obstacle to a truly free and meritocratic society. Besides barring 50% of its population from public life, it corrupts the other 50% in such a way that they are less fit to engage in democracy, accustomed as they are to rule by force rather than by law.
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By John Stuart Mill
