Hostname: page-component-745bb68f8f-s22k5 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-09T03:39:56.499Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor on Women and Marriage

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 January 2009

Susan Mendus
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

This paper focuses on two works of nineteenth-century feminism: Harriet Taylor's essay, Enfranchisement of Women, and John Stuart Mill's The Subjection of Women. My aim is to indicate that these texts are more radical than is usually allowed: far from being merely criticisms of the legal disabilities suffered by women in Victorian Britain, they are important moral texts which anticipate central themes within twentieth-century radical feminism. In particular, The Subjection of Women is not merely a liberal defence of legal equality; it is a positive statement of the inadequacy of ‘male” conceptions of reason and its powers. So understood, I shall argue, it coheres with Mill's other moral and political writings, and draws much of its persuasive power from the doctrines advanced in Harriet Taylor's Enfranchisement of Women.

Type
Research Article
Information
Utilitas , Volume 6 , Issue 2 , November 1994 , pp. 287 - 299
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 References to The Subjection of Women and Enfranchisement of Women are to the Virago edition, London, 1983Google Scholar. References in square brackets are to the Collected Works edition of The Subjection of Women, Essays on Equality, Law, and Education, ed. Robson, John M., Toronto, 1984Google Scholar, Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, xxi. 259–340.Google Scholar

2 Packe, Michael St. J., The Life of John Stuart Mill, London, 1954, p. 492.Google Scholar

3 Robson, Ann ‘No Laughing Matter: John Stuart Mill's Establishment of Women's Suffrage as a Parliamentary Question”, Utilitas, ii (1990), 101.Google Scholar

4 Packe, , p. 495.Google Scholar

5 Stephen, James Fitzjames, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, ed. White, R. J., Cambridge, 1967, pp. 190–1.Google Scholar

6 All quotations as cited in Packe, , p. 495 ff.Google Scholar

7 Stephen, Fitzjames, pp. 196–7.Google Scholar

8 Soper, Kate, Introduction to the Virago edition of The Subjection of Women and Enfranchisement of Women, p. viii.Google Scholar

9 Annas, Julia, ‘Mill and the Subjection of Women”, Philosophy, lii (1977), 191.Google Scholar

10 Pateman, Carole The Sexual Contract, Cambridge, 1988, pp. 160–3.Google Scholar

11 The Subjection of Women, pp. 1–2, [p. 261].Google Scholar

12 Ibid., p. 177, [p. 336].

13 Collini, Stefan, Introduction to Essays on Equality, Law and Education, CW, xxi. p. xv.Google Scholar

14 As quoted in John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor: Essays on Sex Equality, ed. Rossi, Alice S., Chicago, 1970, p. 35.Google Scholar

15 Rose, Phyllis, Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages, Harmondsworth, 1985, p. 15.Google Scholar

16 Himmelfarb, Gertrude, Of Liberty and Liberalism: The Case of John Stuart Mill, New York, 1974.Google Scholar

17 Pateman, , p. 160.Google Scholar

18 As quoted in Soper, , p. xiv, n. 14.Google Scholar

19 Enfranchisement of Women, pp. 26–30, 37.Google Scholar

20 Rossi, , p. 85.Google Scholar

21 Ibid., p. 70.

22 Ibid.

23 Jaggar, Alison, Feminist Politics and Human Nature, Sussex, 1983, p. 264.Google Scholar

24 ‘Early Essay on Marriage and Divorce” in Rossi, , p. 85.Google Scholar

25 The Subjection of Women, p. 27, [p. 271].Google Scholar

26 Ibid., p. 150, [p. 324].

27 Enfranchisement of Women, pp. 38, 24.Google Scholar

28 Jaggar, , p. 97.Google Scholar

29 Ibid., p. 95 ff.

30 Mill on Bentham and Coleridge, ed. Leavis, F. R., Cambridge, 1980, p. 9.Google Scholar

31 Mill, J. S., Autobiography, ed. Stillinger, J., Oxford, 1985, p. 89.Google Scholar

32 Ibid., p. 106.

33 Annas, Julia, p. 184.Google Scholar

34 Firestone, Shulamith, The Dialectic of Sex, London, 1979.Google Scholar

35 Wordsworth, William, The Prelude, 1850, ed. de Selincourt, Ernest, Oxford, 1959, XIII 169–172.Google Scholar