John Stuart Mill’s Feminism:

John Stuart Mills Feminism:On Progress, the State,and the Path to Justice*

Hollie Mann and Jeff Spinner-HalevUniversity of North Carolina

The relationship between justice and the family is a difficult and often ignored

issue in liberal theory. John Stuart Mill is one liberal theorist who tackled the issue,

but his arguments about the matter are often misconstrued. Much of the debate

about Mills feminism turns on the role of the state in effecting moral and political

change in society. Mills critics focus on his minimal legal prescriptions, believing

them to be insufficient for achieving justice and equality in any meaningful sense.

His supporters point to how much he expected the rigidity of gender roles to weaken

for the better, which, in their view, suggests Mill envisioned a large role for the state

in bringing about this change. Both views overlook a central tenet in Mills thought,

which is that such shifts in values would come about only when the conditions for

progress were in place. Although the state has an important role in creating the

requisite conditions, it could not itself impose moral progress on its citizens. Progress

is a political notion for Mill, but he did not narrowly conceive of politics as merely the

business of the state. Progress also presupposes changes in the family, which

explains why Mill thought equality and justice ought to be secured in the family and

why he believed the family was instrumental in generating democratic values.

Rawls, too, misconstrues Mills feminism and liberalism by ignoring his conception

of politics and his limited role for the state in ensuring justice. Mill has a more

nuanced view of the boundaries of politics than most liberals, but allows a relatively

narrow role for the state. The gap between these two is filled by his theory of

progress.

Polity (2010) 42, 244 270. doi:10.1057/pol.2009.17;

published online 7 December 2009

Keywords John Stuart Mill; feminism; liberalism; progress; justice;John Rawls

*Thanks to Bruce Baum, Susan Bickford, Maxine Eichner, Sandy Kessler, Mike Lienesch, Jennifer

Pitts, and four anonymous reviewers for Polity for their comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this

article.

Polity . Volume 42, Number 2 . April 2010r 2010 Northeastern Political Science Association 0032-3497/10www.palgrave-journals.com/polity/

Hollie Mann is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Political Science at

the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research interests include the

history of political thought, feminist theory, and contemporary ethics of care. She is

currently writing her dissertation, Caring and the Work of Politics: A Critical Theory

of Embodied Care. She can be reached at [email protected].

Jeff Spinner-Halev is Kenan Eminent Professor of Political Ethics at the

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of The Boundaries of

Citizenship: Race, Ethnicity and Nationality in the Liberal State (1994) and

Surviving Diversity: Religion and Democratic Citizenship (2000) and co-editor of

Minorities within Minorities (2005). Among his most recent articles is From

Historical to Enduring Injustice, Political Theory (2007). He can be reached at

[email protected]

How should we understand John Stuart Mills feminism? The dominant (and

somewhat anticlimactic) answer is that Mill was a liberal and a feminist, invested

primarily in equality of opportunity and the removal of barriers to the public

realm for women, and so he must be a liberal feminist. Many feminists bemoan

the fact that he stopped short of arguing for complete parity and the restructuring

of the public and private realms and of work and family life. Despite a radical

analysis of power and gender inequality in the family in The Subjection of Women,

the stubborn fact remains that Mill said in that text that many wives, after being

granted the right to work outside the home, would choose to stay home and raise

children. This is often seen as a brake on a more radical feminism, which is noted

by Susan Okin: John Stuart Mill tried fervently to apply the principles of

liberalism to women . . . . His refusal to question the traditional family and its

demands on women set the limits of his liberal feminism.1 Mills argument for

gender equality might have been radical for its time, the critics maintain, but it

wasnt that radical. By contrast, other scholars, such as Keith Burgess-Jackson,

argue that Mills views on the social and legal status of women are more closely

aligned with contemporary radical feminists than with those of contemporary

liberal feminists.2 Seeing much more in Mill than a concern for mere formal

equality, Maria Morales believes that Mills commitment to perfect equality

embodies a substantive relational ideal that required a rather drastic social

revolution, even by todays standards.3 Defenders of Mills radicalism point to his

argument that the inequality of power between women and men corrupts both

1. Susan Moller Okin, Women in Western Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press,

1979), 230.

2. Keith Burgess-Jackson, John Stuart Mill, Radical Feminist, in Mills the Subjection of Women, ed.

Maria H. Morales (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), 72.

3. Maria H. Morales, The Corrupting Influence of Power, in Mills the Subjection of Women, ed.

Morales, 100.

Hollie Mann and Jeff Spinner-Halev 245

genders and is the source of a number of social and political ills, and that women

were unfairly burdened and kept subordinated by their traditional gender roles as

wife and mother. Mills commitment to equalizing power relations between men

and women led him to argue that justice was not possible without restructuring

the family and transforming conventional gender roles. Mill even said that sex

inequality was the most fundamental and insidious form of oppression and thus

intricately linked to other forms of injustice and exploitation.

We argue here that most interpretations of Mills feminism are impoverished by

failing to look at Subjection in conjunction with his writings on progress and change,

as well as his related views on politics beyond the state, views that are unconven-

tional for a liberal. Much of the debate about Mills feminism hangs on the role of the

state in effecting change. Mills critics focus on his minimal legal prescriptions to

ensure womens equality, arguing that this shows he had largely indifferent views

regarding social and moral life. Mills supporters, pointing to his strong commitments

to equality and how much he expected gender roles and the family to change,

usually assume the state would play a key part in bringing about this change. Both

sides, however, misunderstand Mills view of the state, the citizenry, and change. Mill

had a vision of great changes in society, but he thought that the state had a limited

(though important) role in bringing about the progress he foresaw. When the

conditions were right, when the right institutions were in place and the populace

had been educated sufficiently, progress would begin to unfold beyond the realm of

the state as a matter of course, particularly within the family and the workplace.

Moreover, while Mill defined a limited role for the state in propelling change, his

view of politics is much more expansive than traditional liberalism. While many of

Mills critics scornfully note his comment that women would choose to run the

household, Mills view did not relegate women to an unimportant private sphere. Mill

wanted to elevate the importance of the family; whoever runs the family has a

central role in sustaining the political virtues of equality and justice.

Mills writings on women and the family are central to contemporary

philosophical and interpretive debates about how liberalism should best

conceptualize and work towards justice. One of the central figures in these

debates is John Rawls, who largely misconstrues Mills understanding of how

justice is realized by failing to understand the relationship between justice and

the state in Mills thought. Rawls says he did not write much about gender in

a Theory of Justice since he thought that Mills landmark The Subjection of

Women . . . made clear that a decent liberal conception of justice (including

what I called justice as fairness) implied equal justice for women as well as men.4

Rawlss comment speaks to Subjections contemporary importance and its status

4. John Rawls, The Idea of Public Reason Revisited, in Rawls, The Law of Peoples with the Idea of

Public Reason Revisited (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 156n58.

246 MILLS FEMINISM

as a founding liberal feminist text, which is all the more reason for it to be well

understood. Yet since Rawls explicitly distances himself from what he calls Mills

comprehensive liberalism, a liberalism that incorporates an expansive notion of

individual autonomy, his unqualified endorsement of Mills feminism is rather

odd. Mills liberalism and feminism are of a piece (and Rawls does not suggest

otherwise), which begs the question: if Rawls wanted to distance himself from

Mills liberalism, why did he embrace Mills feminism? Rawlss misunderstanding

of Mill results from his inability to appreciate Mills guiding belief

that justice would occur as progress, too, occurreda matter in which the state

had a role, but a circumscribed one. By contrast, we show that Rawls is much

more likely to reach for the state to enforce principles of justice than was Mill.

A common view is that if one does not enlist the state to bring about a shift

in values, then one is not seriously invested in the political work necessary

for realizing equality and justice. Contrary to many liberals, though, Mill has

a rich conception of political work and commitments even though he retains

a relatively narrow role for the state in achieving justice. The gap between these

two is filled by his theory of progress.

Progress

Mill did not argue for an ahistorical abstract liberalism, but one that was

historicist in nature. Every age is different from another, Mill said in his System of

Logic, and so the political structures and spirit of every era are different from

others; different institutions translate into different qualities of individuals in

every era.5 Different does not necessarily mean better. Mill said that people and

societies change, and this change need not mean improvement. Yet Mill thought

progress is the norm: It is my belief indeed that the general tendency is, and

will continue to be, saving occasional and temporary exceptions, one of

improvement; a tendency towards a better and happier state.6 Sometimes Mill

was more emphatic: The most important quality of the human intellect is its

progressiveness, its tendency to improvement. That there is such a tendency in

man is certain. It is this which constitutes his superiority among animated

beings.7 Mill particularly thought that nineteenth-century Europe was on an

upward slope.8 We want to highlight Mills view that after a certain level of

development is realized, the states role in progress is important but limited.

5. John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic Ratiocinative and Inductive, in Collected Works of John Stuart

Mill, ed. J.M. Robson, vol. 6 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973), 913.

6. Mill, A System of Logic, 913.

7. Mill, A System of Logic, 91314. John Stuart Mill, Inaugural Address Delivered to the University of

St. Andrews, in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. Robson, vol. 21 (1984), 349.

8. This is the theme of two of Mills early essays, Civilization and Spirit of the Age.


Mill argued that, under the right conditions, ideas are the main engine of

change. Mill did not deny the importance of institutions when it comes to moral

and social change, and he clearly thought that the right kinds of institutions can

help improve people. However, he did not believe that institutions wholly shape

particular beliefs. Rather, Mill believed that the right kind of institutions would

encourage people to think for themselves, particularly in cooperation with

others, which will lead to progress and improvement. The one social element

which is thus predominant, and almost paramount, among the agents of social

progression is the speculative faculties of mankind. It is the successive

transformations of human opinions that spur human progress.9

Part of what it means to be civilized is to live in a society where the cultivation of

the mind is a commonly held value. For Mill, progress occurred within civilized

societies; civilization is a normative category, a state to be achieved, in stark contrast to

less evolved and less fortunate uncivilized societies.10 Mill thought that the institutions

that enable progress were in place in nineteenth-century Britain. The industrial

revolution is what lay most of the groundwork that would enable ideas to lead to more

progress. This change, Mill said, is the greatest ever recorded in human affairs; the

more complete, the most fruitful in consequences, and the most irrevocable.11

Mill saw industrialization and civilization as intertwined. The former

establishes the conditions for progress because of three related changes it

causes: widespread education, the onset of equality, and increased cooperation

among citizens. These changes together lead to moral and intellectual progress.

One of the effects of industrialization is the ability of society to educate large

numbers of people. Education and increased urbanization lead to a more

intelligent populace. Mill argued that people were becoming better educated and

were living ever closer together, which was enabling, even forcing, different kinds

of political institutions.12 He wanted the state to ensure education (though he

granted wide latitude with respect to what education might look like beyond the

most basic standards).13 Yet education does not take place only in schools and

colleges, but every means by which the people can be reached, either through

their intellects or their sensibilities: from preaching and popular writing, to

9. Mill, A System of Logic, 92627.

10. Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 2005), 144.

11. John Stuart Mill, Civilization, in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. Robson, vol. 18 (1977),

126.

12. John Stuart Mill, The Spirit of the Age, in Collected Works of John Stuart, ed. J.M. Robson and

Ann Robson, vol. 22 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), 364. The increase in peoples cultivation

meant that mankind are capable of being better governed than the wealthy classes have ever heretofore

governed them.

13. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (Peterborough, Ontario and Orchard Park, NY: Broadview Press,

1999), 156.

248 MILLS FEMINISM

national galleries, theatres, and public games.14 The cultivation of the mind

should also occur in the context of routine activities of peoples lives, at work and

at home. Education for Mill is not an isolated activity, but rather takes place in

cooperation with others and in a number of different ways. When the conditions

are established that enable and encourage cooperation among citizens, and

when they are granted liberty, then we should expect to see progress.

While Mill famously advocated individual liberty, he argued that the aim of

liberty was neither isolation nor selfish indifference. Rather, Mill argued that both

the principle of liberty and its ongoing exercise would facilitate the cultivation of

better minds; and the cultivated mind would move above selfish indifference and

begin to act from public motives. People would learn to act in the public interest

when they lived and learned with and from others who were different from them,

when they began to live deeply connected lives in the context of plurality: But if

public spirit, generous sentiment, or true justice and equality are desired,

association, not isolation of interests, is the school in which these excellences are

nurtured.15 We cannot expect people to act from public motives if they lead lives

that are not properly connected to others and with whom they may not share

common interests or tastes. For Mill, cooperation was the key to moral progress at

both the individual and societal level: Accordingly, there is no more certain

incident of the progressive change taking place in society, than the continuing

growth of the principle and practice of cooperation.16 The more people

cooperate with one another, the more they come to see both shared capacities

and the value in preserving different ways of living; they will act from public

motives rather than private interest, and society will progress.

Mill believed cooperation with other citizens required equality, but he saw

significant barriers to equality within the current economic and social structures.

In particular, he complained that capitalism meant a struggle for people to live

well, that it meant, trampling, crushing, elbowing and treading on each others

heels. This, Mill said, was one of the disagreeable symptoms of one of the

phases of industrial progress.17

14. John Stuart Mill, Corporation and Church Property, in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed.

Robson, vol. 4 (1967), 214.

15. John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy, with Some of Their Applications to Social

Philosophy, in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. Robson, vol. 3 (1965), 768. An informative

discussion of Mills collectivist individualism is Richard Bellamy, Liberalism and Modern Society: An

Historical Argument (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), 2235. See also Patemans discussion of Mill in

Carole Pateman, Participation and Democratic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970)

and Maria H. Morales, Perfect Equality: John Stuart Mill on Well-Constituted Communities (Lanham, MD:

Rowman & Littlefield, 1996).

16. Mill, Political Economy, 708.



When the conditions do enable education and cooperation, Mill suggested, ideas

would arise among people that would lead to moral progress. Industrialization allows

for cooperation by bringing large numbers of people together in and through a

myriad of institutions. It is under these conditions that it makes sense for people to

have liberty. Liberty is not merely protection against tyranny, as it was for Locke.

Rather, liberty for Mill was bound up with political progress; progress requires a certain

level of civic competence and curiosity among the citizenry. If the conditions were

ripe, liberty would undergird a process of moral progress. If they were not, however,

then the people should not have liberty; if an unready people were to be granted

liberty, then disaster would surely occur. Selfishness would reign; people would use

liberty in ways that would not ultimately benefit individuals or society as a whole.

Mill was a gradualist who thought people would learn over time to be less

selfish, but he was uncertain about exactly how selfless people would become

and how long this process would take. Mill often doubted that people would ever

become completely selfless. One function of Parliament, for example, is to watch

over the government, to ensure that it does not abuse the publics trust.18 He

worried, too, about the ill effects of public opinion in On Liberty, a worry that

seems to be present even as society progresses. Progress for Mill was never certain

and always contingent, even if Mill was quite hopeful about its realization.19

The way progress begins to unfold for Mill is unclear, though he did give some

hints. Mill said that some states were fortunate to have an industrious class who

were energetic enough to lift their community out of savagery and into civili-

zation. Yet most societies, and this includes most European societies, are at some

point uncivilized and their improvement cannot come from themselves, but

must be superinduced from without. What Mill seemed to mean is that a savage

people, one unaccustomed to obeying laws voluntarily and lacking self-restraint,

moderation, wisdom, and at least a sense of what justice might look like, cannot

improve with a democratic government. A people must learn to obey the law

voluntarily before they are given liberty. It also helps if they are subdued to

industry.20 Once the citizenry is subdued to industry and order, then freedom of

thought may very well lead to progress. Mill thought that something like this

was occurring in nineteenth-century Western Europe, which was industrializing,

unlike and at the expense of the colonized countries. He saw industrialization as

a process spreading across the globe: All the nations which we are accustomed

18. John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government, in Collected Works of John

Stuart Mill, ed. Robson, vol. 19 (1977), 432.

19. Dana Richard Villa, Socratic Citizenship (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 92. For an

extended discussion of Mills views on progress, see John M. Robson, The Improvement of Mankind: The

Social and Political Thought of John Stuart Mill (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968); see also John

Gibbens, J.S. Mill, Liberalism and Progress, in Victorian Liberalism: Nineteenth-Century Political Thought

and Practice, ed. Richard Bellamy (New York: Routledge, 1990), 91109.

20. Mill, Considerations, 397.

250 MILLS FEMINISM

to call civilized, increase gradually in production and in population: and there is

no reason to doubt, that not only these nations will for some time continue so to

increase, but that most of the other nations of the world . . . will successively

enter upon the same career.21 Writing in nineteenth-century Britain, Mill simply

took industrialization for granted in Western Europe, and assumed that the West

would spearhead its spread across the globe.

Mills theory of civilization presumes that justice is not just a matter of state

institutions, but is also shaped and interpreted by the moral life of citizens. If most

members of a society do not interfere in what does not concern them, are not

willing to testify against criminals, and so on, then they are not ready to be free.22

To be civilized is not just to be able to understand property rights, but is a matter

of the whole society being at least in the beginning stages of intellectual and

moral advancement.

Within a civilized society, Mill saw politics nearly everywhere, including at

home and at work. Mill saw that inequality and exploitation threatened freedom

in many kinds of shared spaces, which led him to look at politics beyond the

preservation of property or the cultivation of autonomous individuals. Mill called

for a transformation of work, as he believed industrial capitalism would gradually

be replaced by industrial worker cooperatives. He imagined that we would

gradually move from a conflict of classes struggling for opposite interests, to a

friendly rivalry in the pursuit of a good common to all . . . and the conversion of

each beings daily occupation into a school of the social sympathies and the

practical intelligence. Mill argued that workers would be more productive if they

worked in cooperatives, rather than for capitalists. Mill had great hopes for worker

cooperatives, since they reinforce equality and are essential if mankind [is] to

continue to improve. Indeed, the benefits of cooperation would also lead small

business people, producers, and consumers to form cooperatives. The great art of

cooperation was spreading, and Mill saw the possibility of cooperative ventures

everywhere.23 In what might be called a virtuous circle, education and equality

would expand the human mind, which would lead to modes of cooperation,

which would lead to even more enlightenment. Mill was certain that family life

would change as well, and that those changes would affect societal improvements.

Contrary to some interpretations that treat Mill as a government interven-

tionist, he did not think that much state interference was needed to ensure these

changes. In fact, Mill thought that public opinion, deliberation and argumenta-

tion could be powerful tools to influence people to alter their behavior for the

21. Mill, Political Economy, 754, 706. While Mill usually writes as if industrialization is important for

progress, when he talks about progress in the context of the ancient Jews and Greeks, he is not thinking

of industrialization.

22. Mill, Considerations, 377.

23. Mill, Considerations, 792; For more on cooperation and community, see Morales, Perfect Equality.


better.24 He did not suggest that the state needed to do much to oversee the

change from individual ownership to worker cooperatives, nor did he argue that

the state needed to enact specific policies to ensure the actual equality of

women, beyond tearing down discriminatory laws and outlawing marital rape.

Still, Mill was not a libertarian; he was emphatically against the night-

watchman state.25 The state was needed to solve collective action problems; it

was also needed to ensure that the conditions were in place that would allow for

progress. Without the right background conditions, moral progress was not

possible. The state could not mandate or impose progressbut it needed to

promote the right conditions in which progress could take place. Mill thought that

Parliamentary debates could be educational, and in particular he believed there

was an important educational role for local governments, since they would afford

a good number of citizens the opportunity of holding office, which would lead

them to think in terms of the public interest.26 A state that inhibited debate and

discussion would certainly undermine progress. The state also had an important

role in ensuring that education was provided; the state needed to safeguard legal

rights, which should be equally applied; Mill believed strongly in anti-inheritance

laws that would make it more difficult for people to amass large amounts of

property at the expense of others; and Mill may have thought the state had a role

in sustaining museums and galleries, all part of a citizens education.27 In sum, the

state should encourage and ensure that the conditions were laid for education

and cooperation among citizens. Progress, and then justice, would follow.

Gender and Justice

Mill saw the family in the mid-nineteenth century as predominantly a place of

compulsory motherhood and marital slavery. Barriers to womens intellectual and

moral development forced women to marry and have children by making it the

only path available to them. Indeed, for Mill, becoming a wife and mother is

precisely what it meant to be a woman in nineteenth-century Britain, despite the

absence of any legal compulsion to marry. Women were made to marry and have

children because they lacked any other real choice:

Marriage being the destination appointed by society for women, the prospect

they are brought up to, and the object which it is intended should be sought

24. Mill, On Liberty, 5556.

25. Mill, Political Economy, book V, chapter 1.

26. Mill, Considerations, chapter 3.

27. Mill, Political Economy, Book II, chapter 2; John Stuart Mill, Corporation and Church Property,

in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. Robson, vol. IV (1967), 214.

252 MILLS FEMINISM

by all of them, except those who are too little attractive to be chosen by

any man as his companion; one might have supposed that everything

would have been done to make this condition as eligible to them as

possible, that they might have no cause to regret being denied the option of

any other.28

What is so remarkable about Mills analysis of gender, where he compares

being a wife to being a slave, is that it is strikingly similar to contemporary radical

feminist arguments made by Adrienne Rich, Catharine MacKinnon, Andrea

Dworkin, and others about the institution of marriage and the practice of

compulsory heterosexuality. This is where Mills feminism is often enlisted in con-

temporary radical arguments for gender equality. Mill wrote: Marriage is the only

actual bondage known to our law. There remain no legal slaves, except the

mistress of every house.29 For Mill, the fact that women had a formal legal choice

about whether or not to marry simply masked the lack of choice that women

actually had with respect to marriage, family life, and virtually all other realms.

Like a slave, a wife had to ask her husband for permission to do anything; she

could acquire no property through her own labor in the household; she lost the

identity and property she had as an individual before marriage when the husband

and wife became one person in law; worst of all, she was subjected to the

horror and degradation of marital rape. Mill pointed to the social construction of

women as obedient wives who were thought to be naturally subservient. The

thrust of Mills argument is this: What is now called the nature of women is an

eminently artificial thingthe result of forced repression in some directions,

unnatural stimulation in others.30 Radical feminist Catharine MacKinnon could

have readily uttered this very remark.

Mill argued that ensuring womens equality would mean having the most

universal and pervading of all human relations regulated by justice instead of

injustice.31 Mill also maintained that gender inequality was the greatest

hindrance to moral, social, and even intellectual improvement.32 Both groups,

28. John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women (Peterborough, Ontario and Orchard Park, NY:

Broadview Press, 2000), 39. See Shanleys analysis in Mary Lyndon Shanley, Marital Slavery and

Friendship: John Stuart Mills the Subjection of Women, Political Theory 9.2 (1981): 22947.

29. Mill, Subjection, 99. Adrienne Cecile Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and

Institution (New York: Bantam Books, 1977); Catharine A. MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the

State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989); Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse (New York: Free Press,

1987).

30. Mill, Subjection, 29. See Moraless similar comments in Maria H. Morales, Rational Freedom in

John Stuart Mills Feminism, in J.S. Mills Political Thought: A Bicentennial Reassessment, ed. Nadia

Urbinati and Alex Zakaras (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 57.

31. Mill, Subjection, 99.



women and men, were disadvantaged by the current system, even if the latter

could not see this as clearly as the former because of the seductive nature of

power. Power begins to corrupt young boys, Mill observed, and damaged mens

character and caused them to make bad decisions regarding their own well-being

and those around them. Mill was certain that such an unequal, biased

arrangement negatively affected the liberty of men, making it impossible for

them to fully exercise their liberty and to flourish as human beings: Is it imagined

that all this does not pervert the whole manner of existence of the man, both as

an individual and as a social being?33 In the domestic realm, Mill believed

inequality and the act of subordinating ones wife strips men of the virtue of

equality, which is necessary for their individual progress. Under conditions of

inequality, men and women will not be in a cooperative relationship that

challenges each to develop as unique individuals. Instead, hierarchical marriages

within a patriarchal society will undermine the intellectual capacities and moral

virtue of both partners, causing each to atrophy.

At the level of society, Mill made a similar utilitarian argument, suggesting that

the moral and intellectual advancement of society will occur only by doubling

the mass of mental faculties available for the higher service of humanity.34 For

Mill, the subjection of women was both unjust and regressive. Society will only

advance if all are free. Progress means equalizing power, yet progress has wrongly

left women behind: the law of force no longer applies within the advanced

nations of the world except when it comes to women. Mill began The Subjection

of Women by noting that the right of the strongest is fading, at least in some places

in Europe, and that people congratulate themselves on being ruled by a moral

law instead of brute force. That women were an exception to this rule was for

Mill an anachronism that stood without reason.

Mill thought that once women were granted liberty there would be no

intellectual differences between men and women, though he was agnostic on the

question of whether there might be any other natural differences.35 Mill argued

that societal norms and values should retain some stereotypically feminine (and

masculine) traits, but not others. We cannot know which feminine traits are

natural and which are socially constructed and ascribed to women; we cannot

know unless we live under conditions of real equality and liberty. But the

question of natural differences did not seem to interest him all that much,

except insofar as it was clear that we could say very little about the matter. Mill

certainly did not believe that any intellectual or affective differences between



35. Gail Tulloch, Mill and Sexual Equality (Boulder, CO: L. Rienner Publishers, 1989), 13234.

254 MILLS FEMINISM

men and women would hold once equality and liberty were widespread, and

these were the traits that he believed to be most important for progress, certainly

not physiological or biological ones.36

Once gender equity was fully realized, the best intellectual and affective

qualities of each gender as they are now would be integrated in both men

and women, something that raises the question of what, exactly, would become

of gender in Mills ideal society. Mill stated his ideas on the synthesis of

masculine and feminine qualities most clearly in a letter to his friend, Thomas

Carlyle:

But the women, of all I have known, who possessed the highest measure of

what are considered feminine qualities, have combined with them more of the

highest masculine qualities than I have ever seen in any but one or two men, &

those one or two men were also in many respects almost women. I suspect it is

the second-rate people of the two sexes that are unlike . . . the first-rate are

alike in bothexceptno, I do not think I can except anythingbut then, in

this respect, my position has been and is, what you say every human beings is

in many respects a Peculiar one.37

Mill believed there will not prove to be any natural tendencies common to

women, and distinguishing their genius from that of men.38

Mill wanted the private sphere to become more egalitarian, a place where one

gender was never subordinate to the other. In focusing on inequality in the home

and the barriers it throws up to the cultivation of womens minds, he challenged

the traditional liberal idea that there is an impermeable boundary between the

public and the private in ways that echo Susan Moller Okins more recent

criticisms of the liberal public and private division.39 If patriarchy persists in the

family, Mill argued, the attempts through education and civilization to reach

justice will be in vain; justice will only be realized in society if the citadel of the

enemy is attackedthat is, inequality within the home. Mill saw the ideal family

as the real school of the virtues of freedom and as a school of sympathy and


37. John Stuart Mill, Letter to Carlyle, in The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, vol. 12, ed. Francis

E. Mineka (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1963), 18084. Morales argues that Mills worry about the

association of women with their bodies might cause him to advocate their freedom not to be

disembodied like men, but rather to live beyond gender. Morales, Rational Freedom in John Stuart Mills

Feminism. His letter to Carlyle certainly suggests an unhinging of sex from gender.


39. Susan Moller Okin, Feminism and Multiculturalism: Some Tensions, Ethics 108.4 (1998): 66184;

Susan Moller Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family (New York: Basic Books, 1989).


equality, of living together in love, without power on one side or obedience on

the other, which certainly contradicts liberalisms privileging of the public sphere

and, in particular, the state as the primary mechanism for cultural and political

transformation.40

Equality was not possible, Mill argued, unless the family could be transformed

to become more egalitarian. Although Mill clearly wanted to preserve the

protection and freedoms that the domestic realm should afford individuals, he

also made a political argument for the value and necessity of justice and equality

in the family. For Mill, an egalitarian family was a just family: The equality of

married persons before the law, is not only the sole mode in which that particular

relation can be made consistent with justice to both sides, and conducive to the

happiness of both, but it is the only means of rendering the daily life of mankind,

in any high sense, a school of moral cultivation. For Mill, de jure equality was

insufficient; we need to attend to social inequalities, too: Though the truth may

not be felt or generally acknowledged for generations to come, the only school of

genuine moral sentiment is society between equals.41 Widespread equality for

Mill was only possible when it is present in what liberals traditionally consider to

be the private sphere, or spaces that are not to be regulated by the statethe

family and the workplace. To the extent that Mill drew connections between the

unequal distribution of power in the private sphere and womens inequality more

generally, Mill saw marriage, the nuclear family and the workplace as, at least

partly, political institutions;42 he certainly didnt see their current state as natural

or inevitable. Equality in the public sphere, even with the help of legal

protections, was not likely to happen without equality in the private sphere. Mill

privileged the family as the place where children learn and adults develop and

practice civic and moral virtues.

The cooperation and intellectual progress unleashed by industrialization

would work to transform the workplace and the family, which would lead to more

cooperation and progress throughout society. These changes would be

encouraged by the state, but not imposed; progress would take place through

the state, but also through other institutions. The cooperation and advances in

intellectual achievement that Mill predicted would occur in tandem in several

institutions, in a mutually reinforcing way.

40. Mill, Subjection, 102, 56.


42. Burgess-Jackson, John Stuart Mill, Radical Feminist; Richard Krouse, Patriarchal Liberalism

and Beyond: From John Stuart Mill to Harriet Taylor, in The Family in Western Political Thought, ed. Jean

Bethke Elshtain (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982), 14572.

256 MILLS FEMINISM

Achieving Equality, Reaching Justice

There is no question that Mill thought that legal equality was insufficient for

substantive equality, but this part of his argument has been mostly misunderstood.

Critics complain that Mill had no plan to actually implement gender equality and

that the advances that women might make in the public sphere were undercut by

Mills adherence to a sexual division of labor and traditional gender roles in the

private sphere. Carole Pateman argues that Mills apparent acceptance of the

sexual division of labor undermines his argument for an equal public status for

women and leaves women largely in the private sphere.43 She contends that,

despite his claims about womens equality, his vision of citizenship for women

only consisted of the act of voting since they were likely to spend most of their

time in the home, even after suffrage was attained. Jean Bethke Elshtain

acknowledges that progress does a fair amount of work in Mills argument but

maintains that any gains to be made from a virtuous circle of education and

individuality are ultimately subverted by his relegation of women to the domestic

realm, where neither can really take hold so long as the sexual division of labor

remains intact. She argues that Mill wanted to have his cake and eat it too by

calling for legal reforms in the hope of expelling domination and injustice from

the family, while doing very little to alter the private social arrangements

between women and men.44 These feminist scholars conclude that Mill did not go

far enough since he granted the right of political power to women but failed to

adequately theorize other important changes (mainly economic, but also psycho-

social) necessary for the implementation of that right. The infamous quotation

from Mill that the critics seize upon is his remark that the most common

arrangement, by which the man earns the income and the wife superintends the

domestic expenditure, seems to me in general the most suitable division of labor

between the two persons.45

Defenders of Mill argue that his guess about the division of household labor is

not a theoretical argument, but a non sequitur that is inconsistent and even

contradictory with much of his writings.46 Nancy Hirschmann takes this line of

reasoning an important step further by arguing that Mill gives us the theoretical

43. Carole Pateman, The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism and Political Theory (Stanford:

Stanford University Press, 1989), 130.

44. Jean Bethke Elshtain, Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 145. See too Zillah Eisensteins criticisms of Mill in her The

Radical Future of Liberal Feminism (New York: Longman, 1981) and Julia Annas, Mill and the Subjection

of Women, in Mills the Subjection of Women, ed. Morales, 5270.


46. Tulloch, Mill and Sexual Equality, 63; Baum, Rereading Power and Freedom in J.S. Mill, 180. See

too Moraless sympathetic reading in Morales, Perfect Equality and Shanley, Marital Slavery and

Friendship, 24142.


tools to see household labor as productive, even if he does not make the

argument explicitly.47 Mill did not see womens labor in the home as valuable in

the same way that similar work performed outside of the home is counted as

productive. This leaves women in the lurch when it comes to acquiring property,

something Hirschmann argues that Mill believed was crucial for attaining

equality. Since Mill, according to Hirschmann, saw the ability to acquire property

as a prerequisite for equality, he should have seen womens household labor as

paid productive labor, which would enable them to own property.

We want to take a different tack than Hirschmanns political economic

reconstruction of Mill, and suggest a more strictly political reconstruction and

partial explanation of his comment that many women will choose to run the

household. That comment is not the only one he makes about women and work,

and so we want to use Mills other writings to help explain the conditions in

which women could stay at home, given Mills theoretical commitments. Our

argument emphasizes the political nature of Mills conception of the family. Mills

critics overlook his view that the family is a kind of public institution that is

crucial for both producing good citizens and providing one context in which

civic virtue can be practiced; in other words, the family is central to citizenship

not just in terms of inculcating norms and values but as a site where those values

must be taught and upheld. Mill hoped and expected that whatever family

relationships existed in the 1860s would improve and become more egalitarian

over time.

Mill believed that the choice of women to run the household was not

a problem if it was made under conditions of equality, if marriage were an equal

contract . . . on just terms, and if women find all honorable employments as

freely open to her as to men.48 If a women lived in an unjust situation, if her

husband exerted power over her and exploited her labor, then Mill believed the

choice to stay at home was not a meaningful one. Meaningful choices require

a level playing field in all areas of social and political life, not just in the legal

sphere. Mill thought that women might still choose to run the household, but only

if the household and the world beyond are egalitarian. If women who run the

household are not well-educated and well-versed in political and social affairs, if

they are not their husbands equal, then Mill thought that an egalitarian and just

family was impossible.

Part of what Mill wanted to do was elevate the importance of running the

household and spending time within it. If the state is not to be in the business of

raising children, or hiring people to do so, yet still has a strong interest in ensuring

47. Nancy J. Hirschmann, Mill, Political Economy and Womens Work, American Political Science

Review 102.2 (2008), 199213.


258 MILLS FEMINISM

the production of competent and moral citizens, then someone within the family

must do the all-important job of child rearing. Mill did not envision children

spending time at day care centers or with nannies (we leave aside the issue of

whether these are good alternatives). It may be because Mill had a circumscribed

role for the state that he, rather conventionally, looks to women, at least some of

the time, to run the household. Yet when Mills critics use his comment about

women running the household as proof of his conservatism, they ignore the way

he wants to radically transform the meaning of the household, from a patriarchal

institution to an egalitarian one and from a private one to an important site of and

school for citizenship. They understand Mill through the lens of the very tradi-

tional conception of public and private that Mill rejected. They overlook Mills

view that progress would change much of society, including the relationships

between wives and husbands and, perhaps, the jobs that each typically performs.

Once legal equality was established, Mill was confident that marital relations

would change just as many other kinds of relationships were changing. As

Shanley argues, Mill put friendship at the center of marriage, which rested on the

normative assumption that human relationships between equals were of a higher,

more enriching order than those between unequals.49 Since equality in the home

is crucial for citizenship, running the household is not strictly a private matter,

and to say that women should have a leading role in it is not to suggest that they

are second-class citizens. Rather, it is to say that those who run the household

have to be well educated and politically engaged to play an important role in

ensuring justice in the family, and in society at large, since the two are

interdependent.

Mill also said that raising children should always be a choice for women:

The same reasons which make it no longer necessary that the poor should

depend on the rich, make it equally unnecessary that women should depend

on men; and the least which justice requires is that law and custom should not

enforce dependence (when the correlative protection has become super-

fluous) by ordaining that a woman, who does not happen to have a provision

by inheritance, shall have scarcely any means open to her of gaining a

livelihood, except as a wife and mother. Let women who prefer that

occupation, adopt it; but that there should be no option, no other carrier

possible for the great majority of women, except in the humbler departments

of life, is a flagrant social injustice.50

The choice to stay home, then, should be a real choice, which is not the case

when there are few other options available. (Also, his tone here suggests that the

49. Shanley, Marital Slavery and Friendship, 241.



overwhelming majority of women will not choose this occupation if it makes

them dependent, which it does under the current economic and political

arrangements.) Cooperative workplaces may usher in an era of social justice,

assuming that both sexes participate equally in the rights and in the government

of the [work] association.51

Mills project was to elevate the importance of the household from a mere

private institution where the man ruled, to a central institution key to the social

and political project of instituting equality and justice. The puzzle for Mill was

how to accomplish this without much state intervention; the state should institute

legal equality and insist on children being educated, but the state itself could not

ensure that equality be taught or practiced at home. Yet once women have legal

equality, Mill assumed that the upward progression of society that was sure to

transform the workplace into a more cooperative setting able to reinforce justice

would also change the household in a similar way.

Still, Mill was not blithely unconcerned about the rigidity of power dynamics

in the family, and he insisted that women needed the power to earn money

outside the home in order to have equality within it, thus creating a strong exit

option that would alter mens behavior.52 He also contended that the great

majority of women would want to pursue something other than being a wife and

mother and that there will not prove to be any natural tendencies common to

women.53 The issue that Mill left us with is how wives could have the power to

earn if so few actually chose to do so.

The power to earn money outside the home almost assuredly means that

enough women must actually do so in order to make the choice a feasible and

attractive one. Mill did not share this view, probably because of an overly

optimistic view of how equality would workhe did not see that some

women must work outside the home for these jobs to readily be an option for

all women. Perhaps Mill thought that once women and men were seen as equal,

nothing needed to be done institutionally to ensure this equality. Mills

confidence that ideas could propel change may have blinded him to the

importance of practice. Mill thought that once society reached a certain level

of development, ideas would then become the engine of change. As powerful

as ideas are, however, if they are not put into practice, they will often become

hollow over time. The idea that women should have the freedom to choose


52. Hirschmann, Mill, Political Economy and Womens Work, 203; Okin, Justice, Gender, and the

Family, 228. Or, as Urbinati has argued, it may be the case that Mill was simply making a political

economic argument based on efficiency and wealth maximization; a sexual division of labor, so long as

women had the power to earn and thus to leave the marriage if they desired, may not be harmful to

women and may actually be in the best interest of the family unit. Nadia Urbinati, John Stuart Mill on

Androgyny and Ideal Marriage, Political Theory 19.4 (1991): 641.

53. Mill, Political Economy, 765; Mill, Subjection, 89.

260 MILLS FEMINISM

to work outside the home is surely important, but it is also the case that a critical

mass of women must actually do so for such a choice to be on par with a mans

choice to work outside the home. Just the idea of equality is insufficient for its

realization.

Mill claimed that the reason women were unable to achieve the greatness men

had achieved in the finer arts was because they lacked the time and energy

necessary to engage in artistic, poetic, or musical pursuits. Women spent much of

their time on the superintendence of the family and the domestic expenditure,

which is extremely onerous to the thoughts; it requires incessant vigilance.

Many women are at the beck and call of somebody, generally of everybody. Mill

noted that if a women is to have some time for herself, she must snatch any short

interval which accidentally arises.54 Obviously, if women are to realize their full

potential as individuals and as a gender in the many different spheres of life, not

just the domestic, they will not be able to spend most of their time running the

household, as Mill explicitly said. Moreover, marital friendship, which was crucial

to Mill, takes places not just between those who are formally equal, but between

two people with lively intellectual interests.55 Mills worry about how tedious it can

be to run a household leads to another condition for equality: the challenges of

housework and child-rearing should not be so onerous as to preclude the

household manager from having time to pursue other interests. If a woman runs the

household, she still needs the benefits of leisure time that are enjoyed by those not

constantly toiling in the home.

What happens to women who do stay at home but get divorced is not an issue

that Mill confronts, perhaps because the laws in Victorian England ensured that

divorce was exceedingly rare (until 1858, a legal divorce had to be sanctioned

by Parliament; Ecclesiastical Courts could grant separations, but remarriage

remained impossible). Given the divorce rate today and the persistent gendered

division of care and labor in the home, however, there is good reason to

politically guarantee a reasonable income for women after divorce and certainly

the restructuring of work/family policies. Hirschmann suggests that Mill would

advocate marriage contracts that bind husbands to support their wives

economically, even in the case of divorce, in exchange for their household

labor during the marriage.56 Similarly, Okin argues that women who are made

vulnerable in the labor market through marriage in a society largely structured by

gender inequality need to be protected by equal legal entitlements to whatever

earnings accrue to the household. She believes that the clearest and simplest

way of doing this would be to have employers make out wage checks equally


55. Mary Lyndon Shanley, The Subjection of Women, in The Cambridge Companion to Mill, ed.

John Skorupski (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 416.

56. Hirschmann, Mill, Political Economy and Womens Work, 211.


divided between the earner and the partner who provides all or most of his or her

unpaid domestic services.57 Its hard to know if Mill would endorse such an idea,

but we think as long as the contracts were not imposed by the state the idea

might appeal to him. Of course, Okin and others may be right that not many of

these agreements will be made without the power of the state. We stress, in

contrast to Hirschmann and Mills critics, that equality and justice are achieved at

home, and that the family is a site of both citizenship and friendship for Mill,

where the roles of citizen and friend, or marital partner, are supposed to mutually

shape and strengthen one another.58

None of this fully explains Mills statement about the woman of the family

running the household and not the man. Perhaps Mill was simply limited by

his imagination and by his own historical moment, when it was hard, even for

a progressive like Mill, to imagine men helping to raise children. Perhaps because

women give birth and breastfeed he could not imagine a different household

arrangement or one that provided a place for both the man and woman to be

partners in caring for their children. He did suggest the need for women to

become less self-sacrificing and men to become more other-regarding. The point

we make, though, is that we can read Mill to understand the conditions in which

the choice to run the household and raise children does not undermine equality;

indeed, this job is crucial to ensuring equality and justice in society. When

womenand we can say men as welltake on this job they are taking on a role

that is both crucial in the shaping of democratic citizens and, importantly,

partially constitutive of ones duty as a citizen. From Mills account, we can see

that taking on the job of running the household must be a real choice, and

cannot be so onerous that it is intellectually enfeebling. What Mill wanted was for

the family to evolve into a school for equality; that women would have a large

role in it hardly diminishes their standing as citizens, but rather strengthens it; and

Mills call for equality and justice may lead to a transformation of the family in

ways that he did not envision.

One could argue that Mill was wrong about the dynamics of de jure equality,

progress, and change, but that is an altogether different criticism than one which

positions Mill as a conservative liberal who is not seriously invested in gender

equality. Such an argument is readily made through a contemporary lens that is

shorn of Mills vision of progress and of what he thought constitutes sites of

political action. This idea of progress was fairly common in the eighteenth and

nineteenth centuries, the belief in the movement over time of some aspect or

aspects of human existence, within a social setting, toward a better condition,

though Mills view that progress would mean a change in gender roles, and

57. Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family, 18081

58. Shanley, Marital Slavery and Friendship.

262 MILLS FEMINISM

equality between men and women, was certainly unusual.59 Mills views on

progress and change need to be taken into account when looking at his

feminism, and so while one can be critical of Mills views on progress, one should

be careful of not doing so in an anachronistic manner.

While Mills critics misunderstand his theory of progress and change, those

who read Mill as a radical overlook his belief that the state should play a minimal

role in bringing about social changes. Keith Burgess-Jackson calls Mill a radical

feminist in large part because Mill sees sexist socialization as the main cause of

womens oppression. Burgess-Jackson highlights Mills views on marriage and the

family as public institutions, the power imbalance between men and women, and

the interplay between public and private. This is correct enough, but Burgess-

Jackson says little about how Mill wants to change the power relations between

men and women. Burgess-Jackson does say that Mill wanted more than reform

and superficial changes in the law, although he advocated at least that.60 Our

point is that, where the state is concerned, he advocated at most the legal

removal of barriers to womens advancement, and Mill believed such legal

changes to be more than superficial in any case. Similarly, Maria Morales finds

an inspiring ideal of democratic citizenship within Mill, and argues that Mill was

not a timid reformer, but a social reformer who paid special attention to the law

and other public institutions affecting womens lives.61 Like Burgess-Jackson,

however, Morales says little beyond this, since Mill offers little advice about how

the state ought to change institutions to ensure equality, beyond instituting legal

59. Rawls notes that Mills views on gender equality and limiting the population was seen as a

fanatical. John Rawls and Samuel Richard Freeman, Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy

(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 298. Mills view that economic growth might end one day

without disastrous consequences was also unusual.

60. Burgess-Jackson, John Stuart Mill, Radical Feminist, 79.

61. Morales, Rational Freedom in John Stuart Mills Feminism, 61. David Dyzenhaus, who also sees

Mill as a radical, teases out what he calls a plausible Millian case for outlawing pornography through a

reading of the Subjection buttressed by On Liberty. Dyzenhaus contends that what brings Mills views into

line with the procensorship feminist understanding of the harm of pornography, is his view of false

consciousness; that under conditions of unequal power, what is seen as a choice is often a matter of

coercion. Dyzenhaus then offers the reader a quotation from Mills Subjection, which he says, if we are to

take it seriously, requires considerable interference in family life. In the quotation, Mill says that state

should both respect individual liberty, and ensure that peoples power over others is limited. Mill then

complains: The almost despotic power of husbands over wives needs not be enlarged upon here,

because nothing more is needed for the complete removal of the evil, than that wives should have the

same rights, and should receive the protection of law in the same manner, as all other persons and

because, on this subject, the defenders of established injustice do not avail themselves of the plea of

liberty, but stand forth openly as the champions of power. This quotation argues that wives should

receive the same legal protection as men, nothing more, because that encapsulates Mills views on the

states role in effecting sex equality. After this brief mention of women, Mill next discusses children. Mill

never suggests the state should interfere with family life, beyond ensuring legal equality between men

and women, because Mill sees an important but limited role for the state in ensuring justice. David

Dyzenhaus, John Stuart Mill and the Harm of Pornography, Ethics 102.3 (1992): 53451.


equality. Mills supporters may be right to find his view of citizenship inspiring, but

their eagerness to support Mill may mask the character of his views on change

and progress which ought to give his supporters pause.

Rawls and Mill on the Family

Both supporters and critics of Mill misunderstand his feminismand his

liberalismbecause they fail to recognize the relationship in his thought

between progressive change, his conception of politics, and the state. John

Rawlss interpretation of Mill represents just such a mistake, and examining it

highlights some important differences between much of mainstream contempor-

ary liberalism and Mill. Susan Okin pressed Rawls on the role of the family

in a just society, and after the publication of Political Liberalism Rawls came close

to agreeing that just families are necessary for a just society.62 Rawls explicitly

borrows the idea from John Stuart Mill: if inequality and patriarchy are taught and

practiced at home, it hardly seems possible to think that patriarchy will not

dominate in public as well, which means that society will remain unjust. Rawlss

enlistment of Mill is striking, since in Political Liberalism he explicitly contrasts his

argument with what he calls Mills (and Kants) comprehensive liberalism.63

Unsurprisingly, Rawlss endorsement of Mills view is fraught with difficulties.

Since the family is so important for justice in society to be achieved, Rawls

says that it is part of the basic structure of society. The family has a central role in

the raising and caring for children. It is in the family where citizens learn

a sense of justice and the political virtues that support political and social

institutions. Rawls argues that it is a misconception to think that the principles

of justice do not apply to the family.64 The principles of justice require that the

basic structure establish certain equal basic liberties for all and make sure that

social and economic inequalities work for the greatest benefit of the least

advantaged against a background of fair opportunity. While some institutions,

like universities and religions, are often considered to be private associations by

liberals, Rawls says they are part of the basic structure, and so subject to state

coercion: because churches and universities are associations within the basic

structure, they must adjust to the requirement that this structure imposes in order

to establish background justice. Voluntary cooperation will not suffice, either.

[C]hurches and universities may be restricted in various ways, for example, by

what is necessary to maintain the basic equal liberties . . . and fair equality of

62. Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family, Susan M. Okin, Political Liberalism, Justice and Gender,

Ethics 105.1 (1994): 2343; see too Corey Brettschneider, The Politics of the Personal: A Liberal

Approach, American Political Science Review 101.1 (2007): 1932.

63. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 199.

64. Rawls, Public Reason, 15758.

264 MILLS FEMINISM

opportunity.65 Rawls says that regulation of the basic structure is needed on an

ongoing basis, since the background conditions for justice can erode even when

people act fairly. The basic structure must be appropriately regulated and

adjusted, [since] an initially just social process will eventually cease to be just,

however free and fair particular transactions may look when viewed by

themselves.66 For Rawls, the state should use its coercive power to secure the

adherence of political principles. The family is important to ensure equality of

opportunity, and so it is placed within the basic structure. The conclusion, then,

should be that the family is subject to the coercive power of the state to ensure

that it adheres to the principles of justice.

Yet Rawls also argues that the principles of justice do not apply directly to

the internal life of the family.67 Rawls wants to protect what he calls

associational life, the family, from the principles of justice so people can order

their affairs according to their comprehensive views. At one point he says that

the political is distinct from the associational, which is voluntary in ways that

the political is not; it [the political] is also distinct from the personal and the

familial, which are affectional, again in ways the political is not.68 Here, Rawls

advances the standard liberal (but not Millian) view of the family: It is a private

matter, like a private association, where the dictates of justice are inapplicable.

This also seems to makes sense from Rawlss perspective, since he wants to

leave room for people to order their lives according to their own comprehensive

views. Part of the point of Political Liberalism is to construct a relatively

narrow theory of justice that carves out space for people to construct their

life plans.

Rawls never faces the issue of what happens when peoples private actions

obstruct justice. The family is part of the basic structure and so is subject to state

coercion and the principles of justice; yet the family is also affectional, which, for

Rawls, means not political. Rawls sees that justice in the family is necessary for

a just society, yet does not want the state to interfere too much with the family.

At one point Rawls cites Mills worry that the family can be a school for male

despotism. If that is the case, Rawls says, then the principles of justice enjoining

a reasonable constitutional democratic society can plainly be invoked to reform

the family.69 But thats the end of the paragraph; how a democracy can reform the

family is left dangling. How Rawlss view that the family life is beyond the purview

65. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 261.


67. Rawls, Public Reason, 159.


69. Rawls, Public Reason, 160; John Rawls, The Law of Peoples (Cambridge: Harvard University

Press, 1999), 160.


of the state coheres with his argument that the family plays an important part in

constructing a just society is simply a confused matter.70

Rawls says that Mill is a comprehensive liberal. Comprehensive liberals

advocate state policies that are designed to foster the values of autonomy and

individuality as ideals to govern much if not all of life (a charge echoed by

Martha Nussbaum, who goes further, saying that Mill sees the fostering of

personal autonomy in all areas of life as an appropriate goal for the state).71

Several commentators argue that Rawlss liberalism is actually quite comprehen-

sive, since he argues that citizens need to have certain kinds of civic knowledge,

should be taught the importance of equality, and be able to stand in a relation-

ship of cooperation and reciprocity with one another.72 Mill would agree with

much of this; he wants citizens to cooperate, to be equal, and he would surely

laud reciprocity as a virtue. It is indeed sometimes hard to see the difference

between Rawlss and Mills moral ideal of the person.73 Yet one important

difference is that Rawls wanted the state to ensure an education that one might call

robust, where Mill had little to say about primary and secondary education, beyond

insisting that the state require that children be educated, though not necessarily in

state-run schools. Mill wanted students to be tested periodically to ensure that

minimal education standards were being met, but this is hardly a method to ensure

the flourishing of individuality. Rawls sees a larger role for the state than does Mill

in achieving what is a similar moral conception of the person.

We think that the key difference between Rawls and Mill is not the distinction

between political and comprehensive liberalism, but in their different views on

the relationship between the state and justice. Rawls suggests that coercion

would be needed to maintain comprehensive liberalism.74 Mill himself never

suggested that the state must always use force to ensure justice, and Rawls never

asks why this is the case. The state, Mill argued, should not and could not enforce

all of justice; justice is applicable to many things which neither are, nor is it

desired that they should be, regulated by law. Some of justice is enforced through

70. A good analysis of the tensions in Rawlss argument is Ruth Abbey, Back Toward a

Comprehensive Liberalism? Justice as Fairness, Gender and Families, Political Theory 35.1 (2007): 528.

71. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 199; Martha C. Nussbaum, A Plea for Difficulty, in Is Multiculturalism

Bad for Women? ed. Joshua Cohen, Matthew Howard, and Martha C. Nussbaum (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 1999), 108.

72. See for example, Eamonn Callan, Creating Citizens: Political Education and Liberal Democracy

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).

73. Gerald Gaus notes many similarities between Mill and Rawlss moral ideal of a person in a

Theory of Justice. Gerald F. Gaus, The Convergence of Rights and Utility: The Case of Rawls and Mill,

Ethics 92 (1981): 5772. Also see the debate between Amy Gutmann, Civic Education and Social

Diversity, Ethics 105 (1995): 55779 and Stephen Macedo, Liberal Civic Education: The Case of God v.

John Rawls? Ethics 105 (1995): 46896. Abbey argues that Rawlss liberalism is at least partly

comprehensive. See Abbey, Back toward a Comprehensive Liberalism?

74. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 37n39.

266 MILLS FEMINISM

legal measures; sometimes it must be secured via public opinion; and still other

times, it is brought about by individuals commitments to their own conscience.75

Mill did not want to give the state too much power, even when it comes to

enforcing justice. But this did not worry him unduly much since he did not wholly

divest individuals, associations, and society in general of the power to affect

political change. The question of how to achieve equality in the home accordingly

did not go unanswered by Mill (though the answer may not be satisfactory to us

today). By contrast, it ultimately remains unanswered by Rawls, who drops the

question altogether once he rules out the possibility of the state stepping into the

marital relationship. For Mill, individuals, civil associations, worker cooperatives,

educational institutions, certain forms of religion and family life all have the

capacity to shift the balance of power in society. They can do so in large part

through the spread of ideas, deliberation, and the practice of subjecting ones own

views to criticism and contestation. The state cannot ensure deliberation and

cooperation, but it can encourage these kinds of activities, and sometimes be a site

for them. This kind of political activity is also constitutive of the good life for Mill,

which is why Rawls calls him a comprehensive liberal.

Mill thought people are better off if they are autonomous and embedded in

cooperative relationships from the family to work-life, and he thought that

progress with respect to gender equality would help secure autonomy for more

people, especially women. But he does not think or advocate that the state ought

to force this autonomy beyond ensuring education and dismantling the legal

prohibitions of equality between the sexes. It is not just that Mill thought people

would progress in the normal course of things if the conditions are ripe for

that. It is that this progress must come in substantive part through voluntary

cooperation, through all kinds of voluntary interactions among citizens. Mill

thought that ideas and experiments in living are the prime movers of

progressive change; the state cannot force citizens to think for themselves or in

a progressive manner. A just society is the sum of many parts, most (though not

all) of which are voluntary. Mills progressive liberalism has a role for the state, but

is not state-centered. Rawls, in contrast, is more likely to look to the state to affect

change where he thinks such change is needed.

Both Rawls and Mill want reciprocity and equality among citizensand

presumably among family members as well. This is where we see Rawlss

ambiguity, since he does not want to impose these values on family members, yet

he argues that the family is an important site of justice and so subject to coercion.

Mill never faced the same ambiguity as Rawls, since he never split institutions

into basic political structures and something else, nor did he adhere to a stark

division between public and private. Mill did not ponder how the state might

75. John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism, in Collected Works, vol. 10, ed. Robson (1969), 24546.


enforce all the principles of justice; he thought the state did not need to ensure

justice on its own and was suspicious of granting too much power to the state.

The Future of Progress

Both supporters and critics of a radical Mill overlook his cautious optimism for

the future and his hope and expectation that human character will improve over

time. When we read Subjection in concert with Mills other writings, we gain a

deeper understanding of Mills view on change and avoid an anachronistic

understanding of his feminism. Mill lacked faith that human nature can be

changed quickly and profoundly, although he does share Marxs belief that a

radical change in human behavior will follow from a radical change in

institutions. Mill also believed that good intellectual and moral education of

individuals can alter institutions for the better. Mill was doubtful that many people

will ever be utterly devoid of self-interest. Assuming that people will be wholly

selfless under the right conditions could be disastrous; predicting that people

would become less selfish over time was more on the mark. Mills cautious

optimism stands in stark contrast, then, to both Marxs more bracing militant

radicalism that looks to engage and transform the state and other kinds of

radicalism that call for drastic changes in human behaviors and practices in the

social sphere. Yet Mill shared with Marx the idea that people would be more

devoted to the common good over time, though Mill was clear that no one can

say for certain how much stronger this devotion would be.

Mills thoughts about progress are aligned with a certain version of nineteenth-

century liberalism, but this Whiggish view of progress is no longer a prominent

part of liberalism. It can be hard today to share Mills optimism. He wrote during

a time of great transformation and one can see how he (and Marx) thought

that technological progress would be the catalyst for moral progress. Mills vision

of worker cooperatives sprouting up everywhere was mistaken, though some

cooperatives do exist;76 his view that more educated people are less selfish than

others (and so as education increases, selfishness decreases) is suspect; it is

unclear whether his view that industrialization would lead to more cooperation

is correct, though the advent of the welfare stateshaky as it seems right nowis

certainly an improvement over the more laissez-faire system of the nineteenth

century. One could say that the status of women is better today than in Mills

timemany women in many parts of the world certainly have more power than

in 1869, and are not as subordinate to men as they once wereand so Mills

76. J. K. Gibson-Graham, The End of Capitalism (as We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political

Economy (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1996); J. K. Gibson-Graham, A Postcapitalist Politics

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).

268 MILLS FEMINISM

optimism was not fully misplaced. Yet subjection and subordination in a variety

of forms are still common, in the West and elsewhere, and while Mills vision of

combining community and individuality may be inspiring, it does not seem

around the corner to many, despite the recent shift in the political climate in the

United States.

We do not want to deny the possibility of progress. Perhaps more importantly,

Mills argument that progress is not always dependent on the state is an idea we

wish to embrace. Mills reluctance to invest the state with too much power is

rarely invoked by Rawls and by Mills feminist supporters, perhaps because they

wrongly assume that since he is a comprehensive liberal, at least according to

Rawls, he must believe in using the state to pursue justice (and individual

autonomy). One clear advantage of Mills approach over Rawlss and Okins is that

Mill can readily call something public and a matter of justice without thinking

such matters must be a concern for state action. Liberals like Mill believe in the

state as a progressive force, but also worry about the state having too much

power. It is also the case that the state cannot mandate progressive change by

legal fiat alone. If people are to be treated fairly by others, for example, laws will

help but will not be sufficient; attitudes matter and while attitudes can be

influenced by the state they cannot be mandated without great intrusions on

individual liberty.

The liberal state is not all-powerful; it can influence ideas and shape certain

practices, but it cannot ensure that people believe in and practice gender

equality in every way, despite the dangers gender inequality pose to all of us. In

other words, it remains quite possible to have a radical analysis of power and

gender today, and yet not think the state should be solely responsible for

implementing justice. While some criticize Mill for not having a more robust

method of implementing change, we think he is right to be skeptical of investing

too much power in the state. We agree with Mill that ideas matter, and that ideas

are a better way to move people in a progressive direction than state coercion. In

that spirit then, and with the promise of liberty and equality not yet realized, we

might want to think about the political work that optimism performs in Mills

political theory, and the possibilities for harnessing that optimism today. Instead

of talking about Mills conception of truly free and equal citizenship as if its

realization will follow on the heels of state mandates for social reform, we might

want to think about how the striving towards an ideal of progress might itself be

evidence of the enacting of a certain kind of freedom and part of the process of

liberty, and that liberty need not be contingent on the comprehensive realization

of a desired ideal. For Mill, the ability of people to imagine the possibility of

a different and better world and to contest the oppressive conditions of society is

a prerequisite for progress, even if their vision seems unworkable in the moment.

In addition to the utility of equality, Mill believed the subjection of women to be


wrong in itself when the overwhelming majority certainly did notthat is what

made his arguments so controversial.77 Perhaps his optimism about equality

between women and men is related to his understanding of how truth operates:

The real advantage which truth has, consists in this, that when an opinion is

true, it may be extinguished once, twice, or many times, but in the course of

ages there will generally be found persons to rediscover it, until some one of

its reappearances falls on a time when from favorable circumstances it

escapes persecution until it has made such head to withstand subsequent

attempts to suppress it.78

Mills optimism and his theory of progress supported his belief that major

social transformations would occur, many of which have yet to come to fruition.

He might have been wrong about the necessary conditions for those

transformations, about what people might continue to desire despite efforts to

reform preferences, and about what is actually possible. But Mill also knew that

liberty properly conceived was not something to be achieved overnight or

imposed through fiat by the state. Liberty was a constantly unfolding, ever-

expanding process that often entailed a sincere belief in that which seemed

improbable.


78. Mill, On Liberty, 73.

270 MILLS FEMINISM

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