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Mill's The Subjection of Women: The Methodological Limits of Liberal Feminism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Jennifer Ring
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Abstract

John Stuart Mill's commitment to empirically based inductive logic shapes the political substance of his theory, limiting his ability effectively to make the argument he wishes to make. The Subjection of Women is presented as a test case in which Mill wishes to argue for the justice and utility of the emancipation of women. His efforts are thwarted by his inability to argue from anything but an empirical basis, grounding his evidence in historical data which serve both to stereotype women's “good” qualities and to judge women's potential by what is observable from an admittedly unjust history.

The essay reviews respected feminist analyses of Mill with an eye to establishing the natures and limitations of the various perspectives. It briefly discusses Mill's System of Logic which provides a detailed example, in pure form, of the methodological problems he faces in the Subjection. The essay then considers the method and content of The Subjection of Women, arguing that the shortcomings of Mill's political analysis are the result of his efforts to cling to an impossibly “pure” empiricist methodology.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 47 , Issue 1 , January 1985 , pp. 27 - 44
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1985

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References

Notes

Author's note: Hanna Pitkin provided invaluable criticism and encouragement with each revision of this essay. I am grateful to her, as well as to Michael Rogin for his comments on the original draft.

1 Eisenstein, Zillah, The Radical Future of Liberal Feminism (New York: Longman, 1981), p. 115.Google Scholar

2 Ibid. p. 134. Indeed, Mill's acceptance of traditional sex roles within the household is the most glaring inconsistency in the work. It is noticed by every feminist theorist considered here, and by others as well. Mary Shanley, for example, argues that Mill's views on friendship between men and women as prerequisite to equality in marriage are potentially radical and usually overlooked because the focus is on his discussion of household patriarchy. See Shanley, Mary, “Marital Slavery and Friendship,” Political Theory, 9, no. 2 (05 1981), esp. 242–43Google Scholar. Also, Krouse, Richard W., “Patriarchal Liberalism and Beyond: From John Stuart Mill to Harriet Taylor,” in The Family in Political Thought, ed. Elshtain, Jean Bethke (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982)Google Scholar, regards the inconsistency between Mill's public and private treatment of women from the standpoint of Marxist epistemology, as an unavoidable result of the abstract formality (i.e., the absence of a materialist analysis) of liberal political theory. The political content of Mill's theoretical vision, argues Krouse, is simply insufficient for the task of freeing women.

3 See, for example, Mazlish, Bruce, James and John Stuart Mill (New York: Basic Books, 1975)Google Scholar: “Harriet was not only John Stuart Mill's mother, both as Oedipal and maternal object; in his unconscious she was also his father. Like his father, Harriet supervised hrs work and helped him revise it. Having started out as his pupil, she dramatically reversed roles … and began to be his teacher … Indeed, Harriet went beyond the real-life James Mill and displaced him as the greatest person John Stuart Mill had ever known” (p. 286). Or, Rose, Phyllis, Parallel Lives, Five Victorian Marriages (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984)Google Scholar: “The blueprint for loving was drawn, and drawn powerfully, by his father, who at one level was teaching his son to think for himself but at another was training him in exactly the opposite behavior, drilling into him with every lesson the feel of domination, the surrender of will to a being stronger than himself. How well Mill understood the experience of subjection would become clear in his sympathy for the subjection of women. His early experience led him to resent subjection but also to experience it as the most intense connection between two people. It seems therefore inevitable that Mill would be drawn to a woman … stronger than himself …” (pp. 134-–35).

4 Okin, Susan Moller, Women in Western Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 226, 227.Google Scholar

5 Annas, Julia, “Mill and the Subjection of Women,” Philosophy, 52 (1977), 188, 186.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 Ibid. pp. 194, 181, 190.

7 Elshtain, Jean Bethke, Public Man, Private Woman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 135.Google Scholar

8 Halévy, Elie, The Growth of Philosophical Radicalism, trans. Morris, Mary (London: Faber & Faber, Ltd., 1928)Google Scholar, traces Bentham's philosophy to the influence of David Hume. He believes Hume's legacy is dualistic: “There was undoubtedly a dualism in Hume's method. From one point of view his method was a rationalistic one. He sought to determine in the moral sphere causes and laws analogous to the principles of universal attraction … But from another point of view, he is universally regarded as a sceptic, who sought to banish the idea of necessity from the world, and who, far from wanting to create new sciences, came to destroy the scientific and rational appearance of those disciplines that had already been set up” (p. 11). Halévy traces this dualism down through Adam Smith and Bentham: “Once the attitude to politics adopted by Hume and Adam Smith is understood, it becomes easier to define the attitude of Bentham, the disciple of Hume and Adam Smith. In matters of constitutional law, Bentham himself was also a sceptic” (p. 143). In economics, Halévy suggests, Bentham was a rationalist.

Mazlish (see n. 3) discusses Bentham's and James Mill's rationalism. Since his book is about John Stuart Mill's efforts to separate himself from the teachings of his father and Bentham, it is not surprising that the younger Mill is considered an empiricist by Mazlish.

Ryan, Alan, J. S. Mill (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974)Google Scholar, does not talk about the rebellion of the son; rather, Bentham is considered an empiricist, and John Stuart Mill's empiricism involves no intellectual revolt. Ryan, in fact, discusses a short-lived rebellion of John Stuart Mill against the empiricism of Bentham. Referring to an unfinished essay, “The Spirit of the Age,” written in Mill's late twenties, Ryan notes, “The very title of the essay is indicative of Mill's new interests, for the concept of the Zeitgeist was much more at home in the German philosophy to which Carlyle and Coleridge subscribed than in the empiricism of Hume, let alone Bentham” (p. 40). But later, in his essay on Bentham (1838), “Mill committed himself … to the empiricist side in logic, epistemology and psychology, though he objects to the idea that this allows us to put philosophers in two camps labelled ‘progress’ and ‘conservatism’” (p. 53). In his discussion of Mill's Logic, Ryan simply states that “Mill wanted to show that all human knowledge was the result of experienced inference” (p. 161).

9 Mill, John Stuart, A System of Logic, 2 vols. (London: John W. Parker, 1851).Google Scholar

10 Mill, John Stuart, The Subjection of Women, intro. Wendell Robert Carr (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1970), p. 5Google Scholar. Page references will hereafter be given in parentheses in the text.

11 Although Annas believes that utilitarianism is the source of Mill's logical difficulties, in the sense of the existence of incompatible arguments within the text of The Subjection of Women, she acknowledges that he is not really making a utilitarian argument where he professes to be in chapter 4. Although Annas does not use these terms, the problem she sees is not Mill's utilitarianism, but his empiricism: “The argument cannot be utilitarian in the present restricted sense of taking into account only people's actual desires and needs; for—what Mill cites as benefits would often only satisfy people already liberated from former attitudes” (p. 190).