Sexual Equality

by John Stuart Mill, Harriet Taylor Mill, Helen Taylor

All the significant ideas in nineteenth-century English feminism can be found in the prose and thought of John Stuart Mill and in those of the two women central to his life: Harriet Taylor, who married him in 1851, and her daughter, Helen Taylor. Together they produced some of the most powerful and influential writings ever penned to promote women's equality, and it was to this family that the Victorian women's movement in England came to look for leadership, guidance, and money. In this volume, Ann Robson and John Robson bring together the writings and speeches from these three seminal thinkers on the subject of sexual equality. Some of these pieces have not been available in published form for more than a century. They cover such topics as love, sex, marriage, children, property, domestic relations, divorce, and suffrage. Sexual Equality is a necessary tool for understanding the development of ideas on women's issues in the Mill household. These ideas influenced thinking on sexual equality far beyond England and far past the Victorian period.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Sociology, Feminism, Grad School, Essays, Womens

Hardcover

First published December 15, 1970

About the author

John Stuart Mill, English philosopher, political economist, civil servant and Member of Parliament, was an influential liberal thinker of the 19th century. He was an exponent of utilitarianism, an ethical theory developed by Jeremy Bentham, although his conception of it was very different from Bentham's.

Reviews

[Kris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, I read it. It had some amazingly progressive stuff, and some stuff where you can see how every valid critique of liberal feminism came to be. Classism, racism, heterosexism, benevolent sexism...it’s all there. I’m glad that there were people who began the fight for the rights of women so long ago, but it doesn’t not protect them from ever being criticized for the things they got wrong. This is feminism for white, upper-class women.

[Eni Gajanova · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kao neko ko se bavi izučavanjem istorije osvajanja prava žena u Ugarskoj u 19.veku smatram da je ova knjiga lektira koju morate bar jednom pročitati. Naročito Potčinjenost žena jer je to delo Dž.S. Mila bilo uzor političarima i aktivistima koji se borili za prava žena u Ugarskoj. Ova zbirka eseja je važna i danas jer su na žalost neka pitanja i dalje aktuelna. Od pravne nezaštićenosti žena od nasilja u braku do predrasuda koje vladaju nad ženama koje su na primer neudate... Sjajno istorijisko delo za koje ne možemo biti srećni/e da se i danas može čitati sa istim savremenim žarom...

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

A FINE PUBLICATION OF THE ESSAYS OF BOTH ON SUCH SUBJECTS

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) was a British philosopher (known as a Utilitarian), political economist and member of Parliament. Harriet Taylor (1807-185) married John Stuart Mill two years after the death of her first husband, John Taylor, with whom she had three children.

Alice Rossi notes in her introductory essay to the book, “Mill refers to many of his publications from 1840 onward as ‘joint productions’ of Harriet and himself… Mill.. expressly exempted the ‘Logic’ from Harriet’s collaboration. It is the ‘Principles of Political Economy’ which Mill cited as their first joint effort… ‘On Liberty’ was even more fully a joint effort… It remains a puzzle why, if her contribution was so great, everything appeared under Mill’s name alone… There is some evidence that Harriet was not completely satisfied with such a state of affairs.” (Pg. 39-40)

Rossi also identifies a “basic reason for the continuing relevance of the Mill essay on women is that it is not burdened with the dead weight of any of the social and psychological theories that have emerged in the … years separating us from the Mills: no Darwinism to encourage an unthinking expectation of unilinear progress of mankind through ‘natural selection’ or ‘selective breeding’; no Freudian theory to belittle women's sexuality and encourage their acceptance as the ‘second sex’; no functional anthropology and sociology to justify a conservative acceptance of the status quo; no Marxist theory to encourage a narrow concentration on economic variables.” (Pg. 59)

John Stuart wrote in an ‘early essay’ on marriage, “A single woman is felt both by herself and others as a kind of excrescence on the surface of society, having no use or function or office there… but a married woman is PRESUMED to be a useful member of society unless there is evidence to the contrary; a single woman must establish what very few other women or men ever do establish, an INDIVIDUAL claim.” (Pg. 72-73) He adds, “If nature has not made men and women unequal, still less ought the law to make them so... It may be assumed … that men and women ought to be perfectly coequal; that a woman ought not to be dependent on a man, more than a man on a woman, except so far as their affections make them so, by a voluntary surrender, renewed… by free and spontaneous choice. But this perfect independence of each other … cannot be, if there be dependence in pecuniary circumstances; a dependence which … must exist, if the woman be not capable, as well as the man, of gaining her own subsistence.” (Pg. 73-74)

Harriet Taylor’s early essay suggests, “Would not the best plan be divorce which would be attained by any WITHOUT any reason assigned, and at small expense, but which could only be finally pronounced after a long period? Not LESS time than two years should elapse between suing for divorce and permission to contract again…” (Pg. 85-86)

Harriet Taylor’s essay on the Enfranchisement of Women points out, “It is one of the fundamental doctrines of the British Constitution, that all persons should be tried by their peers: yet women, whenever tried, are tried by male judges and a male jury. To foreigners the law accords the privilege of claiming that half the jury should be composed of themselves; not so to women.” (Pg. 97)

She continues, “If the best state of human society is that of being divided into two parts, one consisting of persons with a will and a substantive existence, the other of humble companions to these persons…for the purpose of bringing up HIS children, and making HIS home pleasant to him; if this is the place assigned to women, it is but kindness to educate them for this; to make them believe that the greatest good fortune which can befall them, is to be chosen by some man for this purpose; and that every other career which the world deems happy or honorable, is closed to them by the law, not of social institutions, but of nature and destiny.” (Pg. 107)

She adds, “The inestimable advantage is even now enjoyed, when a strong-minded man and a strong-minded woman are, by a rare chance, united: and would be had far oftener, if education took the same pains to form strong-minded women which it takes to prevent them from being formed.” (Pg. 112)

She points out, “The plea that women do not desire any change, is the same that has been urged, times out of mind, against the proposal of abolishing any social evil---"there is no complaint’; which is generally not true, only so because there is not that hope of success, without which complaint seldom makes itself audible to unwilling ears.” (Pg. 118)

She acknowledges that “Successful literary women are just as unlikely to prefer the cause of women to their own social consideration. They depend on men’s opinion for their literary as well as for their feminine successes; and such is their bad opinion of men, that they believe there is not more than one in ten thousand who does not dislike and fear strength, sincerity, or high spirit in a woman. There are therefore anxious to earn pardon and toleration for whatever of these qualities their writings may exhibit on other subjects, by a studied display of submission on this: that they may give no occasion for vulgar men to say… that learning makes women unfeminine, and that literary ladies are likely to be bad wives.” (Pg. 119)

In his Autobiography, John Stuart Mill said movingly of Harriet Taylor, “It was at the period of my mental progress which I have now reached that I formed the friendship which has been the honour and chief blessing of my existence, as well as the source of a great part of all that I have attempted to do, or hope to effect thereafter, for human improvement. My first introduction to the lady who, after a friendship of twenty years, consented to become my wife, was … when I was in my twenty-fifth and she in her twenty-third year.”

Harriet Taylor’s importance has only been rediscovered in modern times by the women’s movement. This book is an excellent presentation of both of their ideas (of course, it needs to be supplemented with John Stuart Mill’s ‘On the Subjection of Women’).

[Kevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

An amazingly fresh set of essays in spite of the 140+ years elapsed after they were first penned. Given that some of the inequality arguments (in slightly modified forms) are still being advanced today by the right wing, a read reminds one in some way how little has changed.

[Georgia Spicer-Manning · Rating 4 out of 5]

Naturally an amazing and very interesting read. However, I think it’s very important to remember that this is feminism written for the upper class white woman