A Fundamental Question
Economists have typically regarded Mill’s feminist concerns as social rather than economic, peripheral to his grand systematization of classical political economy. Yet Mill always described the ‘‘woman question’’ as an economic issue.
His most influential writings explained how women’s rights influenced population growth, the labor market, the distribution of income, and the social definition of self-interest. In 1871, he argued that the woman question was more fundamental than the nationalization of land or the relationship between labor and capital. The Married Women’s Property Acts, which he championed, represented ‘‘one of the greatest expropriations and reallocations of property’’ in English history.39 John Stuart Mill died in 1873. He bequeathed almost half of his estate to the cause of women’s education.