John Stuart Mill on Women: When the Argument Outruns the Evidence
Reading Note: The Subjection of Women by John Stuart Mill
A woman has been educated to please, denied alternatives, rewarded for obedience, and then presented to a philosopher as evidence of what women naturally are. In The Subjection of Women (1869), John Stuart Mill subjects this familiar procedure to an unusually patient interrogation, tracing the supposed observer's part in manufacturing the specimen he now offers as proof.
Mill is at his most persuasive while examining the experiment his opponents have arranged. Educate a woman for dependence, make dissent costly, reward her for pleasing the people in command, and her apparent fitness for dependence will hardly be a discovery. In Chapter III, however, the philosopher who has exposed that procedure begins explaining the characteristic workings of male and female minds. The restraint of the earlier argument has become harder for him to maintain.
The book's case for equality can survive these explanations. Reading it closely means deciding where Mill has earned the confidence with which he proceeds, and where an excellent argument has taken him further than its evidence will carry him.
The character that power manufactures
He puts the first difficulty where it belongs: those who restrict liberty must defend the restriction. The beneficiaries of the arrangement have controlled the alternatives as well as the explanation of them. Contentment under these conditions is compromised evidence. A dependent person may have much to lose by objecting, and education can make another person's approval feel like the proper object of a life.
Men want women's sentiments as well as obedience, Mill writes. Affection and admiration reinforce the legal advantage by forming a character disposed to please its possessor. When that character is later produced as proof of a natural need for protection, the argument has forgotten the years spent encouraging it.
The gardening passage makes the causal error visible. Give some capacities artificial heat and nourishment; leave others in the cold or destroy them; then describe the resulting plant as evidence of its unaided nature. Mill's image has its place because we can follow the intervention the observer wants us to overlook. The growth is real. Its conditions disqualify the proposed inference about what would have grown freely.
He needs no complete theory of an emancipated woman's mind to make this objection. The uncertainty itself damages the declaration that the present arrangement is inevitable. That modesty gives the opening chapters a strength some of the later speculations will lack.
The household he leaves in place
In Chapter II, companionship has to answer to the powers left inside marriage. A kind husband cannot justify an arrangement that also equips a cruel one to dominate. Mill makes the security of a wife something more demanding than the fortunate character of the man she happens to marry.
Near the end of the chapter, his own preferred household looks more familiar. The husband earns, the wife manages the home and raises the children. Mill knows that her labor may exceed his in bodily and mental exertion; adding paid employment could mean loading a second job onto an already overburdened person.
That concern is intelligible, as it leaves the first distribution of labor largely where it was. When the wife works outside, the care she cannot provide is assumed to go unprovided; a husband taking it up scarcely develops as a possibility. Mill can see the overwork more readily than a rearrangement of the work that produces it.
He allows exceptions and rejects legal enforcement. Still, choosing marriage becomes like choosing a profession, with a domestic vocation assigned to the wife after the book has shown how thoroughly education can prepare a preference. Equality enters the contract more decisively than it enters the daily work the contract organizes.
The minds he cannot yet know
Chapter III gives women quickness about present facts, practical intelligence, and a capacity to bring speculative men back into contact with people. The two sexes begin to resemble an intellectual partnership with conveniently complementary duties: breadth on one side, corrective attention to particulars on the other.
Mill repeatedly attributes these qualities to existing circumstances and allows that education may change them. Treating every sentence as a doctrine of immutable nature would misread him. The remaining difficulty is evidentiary: even a temporary account of men and women as intellectual types needs more than the observations whose representativeness the book leaves unestablished.
In answering the argument from brain size, he considers greater activity of cerebral circulation in women. A larger male brain might work more slowly and persist longer; a woman's might act quickly, tire, and recover sooner. A neatly complementary physiology has appeared to explain the neatly complementary minds.
He calls it “entirely hypothetical,” explicitly refusing scientific certainty. We should keep the warning attached. Yet the speculation is doing explanatory work even under that label: a behavioral pattern whose reliability has not been established now has a possible bodily mechanism to make it easier to imagine.
A competing possibility can defeat a claim of necessity without proving a rival account. Mill could therefore object to the brain-size argument while remaining agnostic about circulation. By developing the physiology, he asks us to spend confidence on a picture for which the book supplies no measurements. The earlier criticism of the cultivator would have counseled more patience.
Mozart and the hierarchy of originality
The discussion of art divides accomplishment into execution and original conception. Women may possess extraordinary style and detail; the achievements that establish a school or an epoch supposedly remain elsewhere. Before accepting the distribution, we need to know how the two kinds of achievement have been separated.
Madame de Staël supplies his exemplary eloquence; George Sand's prose represents an artistic perfection he compares to Haydn or Mozart. His superlatives concern those qualities of writing, leaving other dimensions of novelistic achievement outside the comparison. Even within that scope, I cannot share his estimate of Staël and Sand: my reading of Gogol and Dostoevsky leaves the superlatives unpersuasive. To make that disagreement persuasive would require a comparison of passages. The difficulty with his division of invention and execution can be examined without settling that literary comparison.
A change of voice or syntax may admit an experience a novel had previously excluded, redirect sympathy, or make an unnoticed relation perceptible. These are changes to what the work conceives as well as to how it executes the conception. Mill's division cannot simply file sentence-making among the subordinate accomplishments and then use that file to explain women's lower place.
His acknowledgment of uncredited invention complicates the record further. Original suggestions by women may appear as the published work of men who develop them; Mill invokes his own experience. Some absences from the list of innovators may thus begin in the allocation of credit. An explanation of the list has to confront how it was made.
Mozart enters as an analogy for apprenticeship. Even his earliest pieces, Mill says, lack powerful originality; generations of women may need the time that a single musician needs in years. An attractive story of development has begun to stand in for a timetable no one has established.
Which “earliest” pieces? The Köchel catalogue dates the little Andante, K. 1a, to 1761 and the First Symphony, K. 16, to 1764. A listener may hear an individual accent in the symphony while readily hearing inherited models too. Mill identifies neither the works nor the degree of originality that could decide his comparison, leaving an important part of the example to the reader's willingness to agree.
Even a sound judgment about Mozart's apprenticeship would leave the transfer unproved. Generations of adults entering literature under different circumstances do not develop by a child's calendar. The individual makes growth vivid; the population still requires its own explanation.
With painting, the explanation changes. The art once attracted superior minds, Mill suggests, partly because its prestige brought access to rulers and the nobility. Social encouragement is already in the account. The question is what kind of effect it has been allowed to have.
Patronage, training, standing, and sustained commissions can cultivate ability as well as attract people who possess it. Mill emphasizes the allegedly superior minds drawn into painting after assuming the superiority of earlier painting. Each judgment helps support the other while both wait for evidence. The old cultivator's error has become possible again inside a more sympathetic argument.
Music is then said to depend more on natural gift and less on general powers of mind, though study and professional devotion remain necessary to creation. The comparison leaves its measure of intelligence obscure. Calling composition a gift has not shown which mental work painting requires that music can do without.
Who gets uninterrupted time?
When Mill returns to training, the case becomes much firmer. Learning to perform as an accomplishment prepares a woman for a different activity from learning to compose. A comparison of achievements that forgets this difference will congratulate itself on finding what the education helped produce.
He is especially attentive to interruption. Household administration and social duties consume affluent women's time, while other people's claims keep that time permanently available. A man's work may entitle him to make someone wait. A woman's work is more readily treated as the thing that can wait instead.
Respect for her occupation would give her hours in which to pursue it. We can follow the missing practice without conjecturing a circulation of blood: a demand interrupts concentration, concentration takes time to recover, and the next demand is already entitled to enter. The available working day gives the argument something concrete to measure.
The record of creation itself still deserves a wider boundary. Slave Songs of the United States appeared in New York two years before Mill's book, compiled by William Francis Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison. It brought into print a musical culture developed under enslavement and sustained through performance and oral transmission.
Collective invention and oral transmission trouble a history organized chiefly around named European composers and acknowledged masterpieces. They do not show that deprivation leaves creativity unharmed. They ask which creative practices have entered the record from which the explanation begins. Mill's account of exclusion may be stronger than the boundaries of the achievement he wants to explain.
The question of women's missing names therefore has a companion: what kinds of invention does the list know how to name? Keeping that question open enlarges the evidence without weakening the case against the restrictions Mill examines.
Equality does not have to prove genius
His defense of eligibility is less vulnerable to these disputes. At the start of Chapter III, even a demonstrated average difference would fail to justify excluding every woman from work open to less capable men. A particular applicant can be judged by the capacity the occupation requires. She need not first win an argument about her whole sex.
Suffrage receives another exact defense. Choosing the people who govern is a means of self-protection; it need not require the qualifications for holding office oneself. Political standing ceases to be a reward for the exceptional person whose genius has impressed those already admitted.
We can dispute Sand's prose, Mozart's juvenilia, the old masters' supposed intellectual superiority, and the explanation of innovation without undoing that right to be judged. Mill's strongest argument has already made room for women whose lives will never furnish a convenient example of genius.
The ordinary woman excluded from a profession need not produce a masterpiece to answer the ordinary man admitted to it. She needs the opportunity to have her qualifications judged by the same standard as his.
Sources and editions
John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1869), especially Chapters I–III. Project Gutenberg text.
Internationale Stiftung Mozarteum, Köchel catalogue: Andante in C, K. 1a and Symphony in E-flat, K. 16.
William Francis Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison, compilers, Slave Songs of the United States (New York: A. Simpson & Co., 1867). Library of Congress catalogue; Smithsonian Libraries description.
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