The Subjection Of Women By John Stuart Mill

The essay titled “The Subjection of Women” is co-authored by John Stuart Mill and his wife Harriet Taylor Mill in 1869. The main argument in the essay is advocating for equality between the male and female genders. During the publication of this essay, it was regarded as an affront to the traditional European traditional values and norms that dictated the status of both men and women in the society (Mill 30). In the first chapter, Mill starts by enumerating the challenges he faced in pursuing such an argument, especially due to the subordination of the interests of women, which was regarded as a universal custom. In this regard, mill espouses that the foundation of this custom is founded on theory and not experiences (Mill 5-9). The only source of law with regard to the matter is the laws of the strongest, which are regulations that the modern society has relatively repudiated in other instances such as slavery. Moreover, the contemporary society argues that an individual’s place of birth should not influence his station in life. Additionally, Mill argues against the position that it is natural for women to be satisfied with the station of wife/mother because it is difficult in the contemporary era for men to recognize the distinct differences between the male and female genders. This is because women are
The inability to control the fate of their property, children, and lack of the capacity to own resources meant that they had no legal rights (Mill 53-57). Nonetheless, even though relations between men and women tend to mitigate the impacts of subordination, women married to abusive men often suffer from the absolute domination of their husbands. Mills concludes the chapter by arguing that cultivated sympathy and equality in marriage can be advantageous to both parties and the progress of the human