Cutting to the Bone: The Radical Challenge of Anna Doyle Wheeler and William Thompson

Abstract

In 1825 a significant feminist book was published under the title Appeal of One Half the Human Race, Women: Against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men, to Retain Them in Political, and Thence in Civil and Domestic, Slavery; in Reply to a Paragraph of Mr. Mill's Celebrated “Article on Government. It was a direct political response to claims made by liberal philosopher James Mill that women did not need to be enfranchised. The argument of this paper is that the Appeal’s response to Mill represents one of the most challenging political statements of early nineteenth century political thought. First, it definitively refuted Mill’s argument and threw down the gauntlet to the fundamental liberal utilitarian premises upon which Mill’s argument rested. Second, it produced one of the most radical statements ever published in favour of women’s full social and political freedom, even more so than Mary Wollstonecraft’s influential treatise published 30 years earlier. In its structure and the manner of presentation of its arguments the Appeal challenged the masculinist standards of authorship even as it appeared to conform to them. And third, the Appeal provided James Mill’s son, John Stuart Mill, with the arguments upon which the younger Mill’s reputation as a nineteenth-century feminist now rests. Consequently, the Appeal represents an original formulation of feminist political theory that is more than a hyphenated offspring of the masculinist tradition of political thought in which it arose. It is feminist political theory without apology.