The Subjection of Women
Its title boldly announced its theme. In The Subjection of Women Mill explored the links between greed, lust and gender, developing a theory of male domination and male/female differences that drew heavily from his socialist feminist predecessors.
He also drew heavily from classical political economy. In a logical extension of Ricardian class analysis, Mill explained both patriarchy and slavery as expressions of the collective self-interest of a powerful group. The motive in these cases was the ‘‘love of gain, unmixed and undisguised’’ combined with physical and military superiority.18 The most insidious aspect of this strategic collective action, he observed, was that oppressors used the state to institutionalize inequality, then exercised their196 GREED, LUST & GENDER cultural influence to justify it. ‘‘Was there ever any domination,” he asked, ‘‘that did not appear natural to those who possessed it?”19
His theory of patriarchy as a system analogous to slavery gave substance to his claim that social institutions could pervert the natural pursuit of self-interest into repugnant selfishness: He elaborated further on the arguments outlined earlier in the Principles:
Such being the common tendency of human nature; the almost unlimited power which present social institutions give to the man over at least one human being—the one with whom he resides, and whom he has always present—this power seeks out and evokes the latent germs of selfishness in the remotest corners of his nature—fans its faintest sparks and smouldering embers—offers to him a licence for the indulgence of those points of his original character which in all other relations he would have found it necessary to repress and conceal, and the repression of which would in time have become a second
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nature.
The fanning of the flames, turning selfishness into greed and lust, evokes the image of hell.
The word ‘‘repression’’ (and the notion that it could become a second nature) reappears prominently in the later writings of Sigmund Freud, who not only admired Mill, but also translated many of his essays into German. Mill appealed to his Christian audience by describing selfishness as a form of idolatry: self-worship. This term, which also appears in the epigraph to this chapter, has a more negative inflection than the term that Malthus had made famous, self-love.Mill’s account suggested that the oppression of women was in some historical sense the original sin, the form of inequality that enabled and promoted others. It followed that gender equality was an absolute prerequisite for progress on other fronts, including socialism. Owen’s emphasis on socialization echoes through Mill’s arguments. ‘‘All the moralities,’’ he wrote, ‘‘tell them women]that it is the duty of women, and all the current sentimentalities that it is their nature, to live for others; to make complete abnegation of themselves, and to have no life but in their affections.’’21 The tendency to describe femininity as essentially submissive was, he argued, a form of enslavement.22
Mill’s approach allowed him to explain the moral double standard of his day without agreeing that it was either inevitable or desirable. He went so
far as to argue that the ideals of human character should be degendered; women should become more self-interested and men less so:
If women are better than men in anything, it surely is in individual self-sacrifice for those of their own family. But I lay little stress on this, so long as they are universally taught that they are born and created for self-sacrifice. I believe that equality of rights would abate the exaggerated self-abnegation which is the present artificial ideal of feminine character, and that a good woman would not be more selfsacrificing than the best man: but on the other hand, men would be much more unselfish and self-sacrificing than at present, because they would no longer be taught to worship their own will as such a grand thing that it is actually the law for another rational being.23
In short, women should become more masculine, men more feminine.
Some of Mill's literary contemporaries leaned in a similar direction. Charles Dickens's heroes were often nurturing, mother-like men; Alfred Tennyson romanticized androgyny.24 But Mill put the argument in explicit terms that elicited enormous opposition. An article in the highly respected Edinburgh Review accused him of hypothesizing that women were simply men in petticoats.25This was a simplistic criticism. Mill's argument built carefully on the previous discourse of self-interest. Many of the thinkers described in preceding chapters worried about the balance between individual rights and social obligation: Smith had optimistically argued that innate moral sentiments, combined with competitive markets, would solve the problem. Mill, like his socialist feminist predecessors, insisted that the issue was more complicated and more directly linked to gender roles. But he never argued that women and men were identical or that economic reform could or should eradicate all differences between them.
His conviction that women would naturally choose to specialize in family labor was expressed both in the Subjection of Women and in 1865 revisions to the Principles2 In each case he explained that it was not actually desirable that a wife contribute to family income. The impersonal processes of competition would likely sort men and women into different types of jobs. In fact, Mill chided those who assumed that women would not choose to become mothers unless forced to do so.27 He was not terribly worried that the emancipation of women might, as one twentieth-century commentator put it, ‘‘simply universalize the competitive and acquisitive ethos, the unbridled envy and egoism, of bourgeois civil society.”28
Mill was, however, concerned that freedom to divorce would encourage selfish calculation at the expense of family obligation. He cautiously detailed the terms under which marriages might be gracefully terminated.29 He believed that parents should set a good example for their children and discourage selfishness.
This paternalism infused his vision of social reform. The state, like parents, should establish clear rules and implement them with tough love.In the end, Mill remained remarkably confident of women's moral sentiments. On the one hand, he argued that women who commit themselves to family care would sacrifice their economic independence and along with it their potential for equality. On the other hand, he argued that even once they gained equality they would freely make this sacrifice.30 Mill could have returned to the proposals offered by Owen, Thompson, and others regarding the collectivization of housework. He could have proposed ways of increasing paternal responsibility for the support and care of children. But such changes would have required rather forceful social policies. It was easier to hope that women would naturally choose to devote themselves to family care.