Mill, Marx, and Women's Liberation

Abstract

A RECENT SCHOLARLY COMMENT on John Stuart Mill claims his book The Subjection of Women is unquestionably the most ambitious p l e a . . , in the English language for the perfect of the sexes. ''~ Even those who would quarrel with this superlative assessment of the book would nonetheless have to grant Mill deserves his reputation as a sincerely committed feminist. There are allusions to women's in all of his practical works. 2 He was the first major philosopher to write a book-length treatise 3 defending what he called the principle of perfect equality between the sexes? His political career--beginning with his arrest at the age of seventeen for the distribution of birth control pamphlets to working class women 5 and extending through his advocacy, during his tenure as Member of Parliament, of the Married Women's Property Act, women's suffrage, and an end to various legal disabilities afflicting women6--demonstrated a consistent and firm commitment to the cause. Indeed, one generally highly sympathetic biographer characterized his devotion to women's as fanatical, 7 while another referred to Mill's feminism as a disconcerting and eccentric limitation in Mill's philosophy. s Mill himself made statements about the significance of the woman question which sound extreme even by today's standard of inflated rhetoric. For example, in 1850, at a time when the issue of chattel slavery was agitating the American scene, when serfdom still prevailed throughout Russia, and while Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and even Charles Dickens were detailing the miseries of the urban poor in England, John Stuart Mill describes the subject of women's as that of all practical subjects the most important. ''9