The Subjection of Women

by

John Stuart Mill

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John Stuart Mill Character Analysis

John Stuart Mill is the author of The Subjection of Women. Mill was a 19th-century British philosopher, economist, and political theorist. One of the most important figures in the history of classical liberal thought, Mill placed great emphasis on the importance of individual liberty. He denounced all forms of political tyranny, which he claimed posed a serious threat to human flourishing. These views are strongly represented in The Subjection of Women, which holds that the absolute power men hold over women (particularly that of husbands over their wives) should be just as strongly condemned as political despotism. Mill was profoundly influenced by his own wife, Harriet Taylor Mill, with whom he collaborated on many works, including The Subjection of Women and his most famous work, On Liberty. Mill was also inspired by his stepdaughter Helen, who was an avidly campaigned for women’s rights. As a Member of Parliament for City and Westminster, Mill fought for women’s suffrage, a cause that he makes a passionate case for in The Subjection of Women. He also championed various other liberal reforms and, following the abolition of slavery in the U.S., argued that free Black people should be granted full and equal rights under the law.

John Stuart Mill Quotes in The Subjection of Women

The The Subjection of Women quotes below are all either spoken by John Stuart Mill or refer to John Stuart Mill. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Liberalism and Women’s Rights Theme Icon
).
Chapter 1 Quotes

[…] the principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes—the legal subordination of one sex to the other—is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement, and […] it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other.

Related Characters: John Stuart Mill (speaker)
Page Number: 133
Explanation and Analysis:

In the first place, the opinion in favour of the present system, which entirely subordinates the weaker sex to the stronger, rests upon theory only; for there never has been trial made of any other: so that experience, in the sense in which it is vulgarly opposed to theory, cannot be pretended to have pronounced any verdict. And in the second place, the adoption of this system of inequality never was the result of deliberation, or forethought, or any social ideas, or any notion whatever of what conduced to the benefit of humanity or the good order of society. It arose simply from the fact that from the very earliest twilight of human society, every woman (owing to the value attached to her by men, combined with her inferiority in muscular strength) was found in a state of bondage to some man.

Related Characters: John Stuart Mill (speaker)
Page Number: 137
Explanation and Analysis:

But was there ever any domination which did not appear natural to those who possessed it? There was a time when the division of mankind into two classes, a small one of masters and a numerous one of slaves, appeared, even to the most cultivated minds, to be a natural, and the only natural, condition of the human race.

Related Characters: John Stuart Mill (speaker)
Related Symbols: Slavery
Page Number: 144
Explanation and Analysis:

All causes, social and natural, combine to make it unlikely that women should be collectively rebellious to the power of men. They are so far in a position different from all other subject classes, that their masters require something more from them than actual service. Men do not want solely the obedience of women, they want their sentiments. All men, except the most brutish, desire to have, in the woman most nearly connected with them, not a forced slave but a willing one, not a slave merely, but a favourite. They have therefore put everything in practice to enslave their minds.

Related Characters: John Stuart Mill (speaker)
Related Symbols: Slavery
Page Number: 148
Explanation and Analysis:

Many a man thinks he perfectly understands women, because he has had amatory relations with several, perhaps with many of them.

Related Characters: John Stuart Mill (speaker)
Page Number: 157
Explanation and Analysis:

It is but of yesterday that women have either been qualified by literary accomplishments, or permitted by society, to tell anything to the general public. As yet very few of them dare tell anything, which men, on whom their literary success depends, are unwilling to hear.

Related Characters: John Stuart Mill (speaker)
Page Number: 159
Explanation and Analysis:

What women by nature cannot do, it is quite superfluous to forbid them from doing. What they can do, but not so well as the men who are their competitors, competition suffices to exclude them from; since nobody asks for protective duties and bounties in favour of women; it is only asked that the present bounties and protective duties in favour of men should be recalled. If women have a greater natural inclination for some things than for others, there is no need of laws or social incul­cation to make the majority of them do the former in preference to the latter.

Related Characters: John Stuart Mill (speaker)
Page Number: 161
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 2 Quotes

Meanwhile the wife is the actual bondservant of her husband: no less so, as far as legal obligation goes, than slaves commonly so called […] She can do no act whatever but by his permission, at least tacit. She can acquire no property but for him; the instant it becomes hers, even if by inheritance, it becomes ipso facto his. In this respect the wife’s position under the common law of England is worse than that of slaves in the laws of many countries: by the Roman law, for example, a slave might have his peculium, which to a certain extent the law guaranteed to him for his exclusive use.

Related Characters: John Stuart Mill (speaker)
Related Symbols: Slavery
Page Number: 165
Explanation and Analysis:

I am far from pretending that wives are in general no better treated than slaves; but no slave is a slave to the same lengths, and in so full a sense of the word, as a wife is. Hardly any slave, except one immediately attached to the master’s person, is a slave at all hours and all minutes; in general he has, like a soldier, his fixed task, and when it is done, or when he is off duty, he disposes, within certain limits, of his own time, and has a family life into which the master rarely intrudes.

Related Characters: John Stuart Mill (speaker)
Related Symbols: Slavery
Page Number: 166
Explanation and Analysis:

Not a word can be said for despotism in the family which cannot be said for political despotism.

Related Characters: John Stuart Mill (speaker)
Related Symbols: The Family
Page Number: 168
Explanation and Analysis:

It is not true that in all voluntary association between two people, one of them must be absolute master: still less that the law must determine which of them it shall be.

Related Characters: John Stuart Mill (speaker)
Related Symbols: The Family
Page Number: 174
Explanation and Analysis:

The family is a school of despotism, in which the virtues of despotism, but also its vices, are largely nourished […] The family, justly constituted, would be the real school of the virtues of freedom.

Related Characters: John Stuart Mill (speaker)
Related Symbols: The Family
Page Number: 180
Explanation and Analysis:

The less fit a man is for the possession of power—the less likely to be allowed to exercise it over any person with that person’s voluntary consent—the more does he hug himself in the consciousness of the power the law gives him, exact its legal rights to the utmost point which custom (the custom of men like himself) will tolerate, and take pleasure in using the power, merely to enliven the agreeable sense of possessing it.

Related Characters: John Stuart Mill (speaker)
Page Number: 181-182
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3 Quotes

I believe that their disabilities elsewhere are only clung to in order to maintain their subordination in domestic life; because the generality of the male sex cannot yet tolerate the idea of living with an equal.

Related Characters: John Stuart Mill (speaker)
Page Number: 186
Explanation and Analysis:

In the present day, power holds a smoother language, and whomsoever it oppresses, always pretends to do so for their own good: accordingly, when anything is forbidden to women, it is thought necessary to say, and desirable to believe, that they are incapable of doing it, and that they depart from their real path of success and happiness when they aspire to it.

Related Characters: John Stuart Mill (speaker)
Page Number: 187
Explanation and Analysis:

Moreover, when people are brought up, like many women of the higher classes (though less so in our own country than in any other) as kind of hot-house plants, shielded from the wholesome vicissitudes of air and temperature, and untrained in any of the occupations and exercises which give stimulus and development to the circulatory and muscular system […] it is no wonder if those of them who do not die of consumption, grow up with constitutions liable to derangement from slight causes, both internal and external, and without stamina to support any task, physical or mental, requiring continuity of effort. But women brought up to work for their livelihood show none of these morbid characteristics, unless indeed they are chained to an excess of sedentary work in confined and un­healthy rooms.

Related Characters: John Stuart Mill (speaker)
Page Number: 198
Explanation and Analysis:

I have said that it cannot now be known how much of the existing mental differences between men and women is natural, and how much artificial; whether there are any natural differ­ences at all; or, supposing all artificial causes of difference to be withdrawn, what natural character would be revealed […] We cannot isolate a human being from the circumstances of his condition, so as to ascertain experimentally what he would have been by nature; but we can consider what he is, and what his circumstances have been, and whether the one would have been capable of producing the other.

Related Characters: John Stuart Mill (speaker)
Page Number: 206
Explanation and Analysis:

If women lived in a different country form men, and had never read any of their writings, they would have had a literature of their own.

Related Characters: John Stuart Mill (speaker)
Page Number: 210
Explanation and Analysis:

A woman who joins in any movement which her husband disapproves, makes herself a martyr, with­ out even being able to be an apostle, for the husband can legally put a stop to her apostleship. Women cannot be expected to devote themselves to the emancipation of women, until men in considerable number are prepared to join with them in the undertaking.

Related Characters: John Stuart Mill (speaker)
Page Number: 218
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

There remain no legal slaves, except the mistress of every house.

Related Characters: John Stuart Mill (speaker)
Related Symbols: Slavery
Page Number: 220
Explanation and Analysis:

All the selfish propensities, the self-worship, the unjust self-preference, which exist among mankind, have their source and root in, and derive their principal nourishment from, the present constitution of the relation between men and women.

Related Characters: John Stuart Mill (speaker)
Page Number: 220
Explanation and Analysis:
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John Stuart Mill Quotes in The Subjection of Women

The The Subjection of Women quotes below are all either spoken by John Stuart Mill or refer to John Stuart Mill. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Liberalism and Women’s Rights Theme Icon
).
Chapter 1 Quotes

[…] the principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes—the legal subordination of one sex to the other—is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement, and […] it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other.

Related Characters: John Stuart Mill (speaker)
Page Number: 133
Explanation and Analysis:

In the first place, the opinion in favour of the present system, which entirely subordinates the weaker sex to the stronger, rests upon theory only; for there never has been trial made of any other: so that experience, in the sense in which it is vulgarly opposed to theory, cannot be pretended to have pronounced any verdict. And in the second place, the adoption of this system of inequality never was the result of deliberation, or forethought, or any social ideas, or any notion whatever of what conduced to the benefit of humanity or the good order of society. It arose simply from the fact that from the very earliest twilight of human society, every woman (owing to the value attached to her by men, combined with her inferiority in muscular strength) was found in a state of bondage to some man.

Related Characters: John Stuart Mill (speaker)
Page Number: 137
Explanation and Analysis:

But was there ever any domination which did not appear natural to those who possessed it? There was a time when the division of mankind into two classes, a small one of masters and a numerous one of slaves, appeared, even to the most cultivated minds, to be a natural, and the only natural, condition of the human race.

Related Characters: John Stuart Mill (speaker)
Related Symbols: Slavery
Page Number: 144
Explanation and Analysis:

All causes, social and natural, combine to make it unlikely that women should be collectively rebellious to the power of men. They are so far in a position different from all other subject classes, that their masters require something more from them than actual service. Men do not want solely the obedience of women, they want their sentiments. All men, except the most brutish, desire to have, in the woman most nearly connected with them, not a forced slave but a willing one, not a slave merely, but a favourite. They have therefore put everything in practice to enslave their minds.

Related Characters: John Stuart Mill (speaker)
Related Symbols: Slavery
Page Number: 148
Explanation and Analysis:

Many a man thinks he perfectly understands women, because he has had amatory relations with several, perhaps with many of them.

Related Characters: John Stuart Mill (speaker)
Page Number: 157
Explanation and Analysis:

It is but of yesterday that women have either been qualified by literary accomplishments, or permitted by society, to tell anything to the general public. As yet very few of them dare tell anything, which men, on whom their literary success depends, are unwilling to hear.

Related Characters: John Stuart Mill (speaker)
Page Number: 159
Explanation and Analysis:

What women by nature cannot do, it is quite superfluous to forbid them from doing. What they can do, but not so well as the men who are their competitors, competition suffices to exclude them from; since nobody asks for protective duties and bounties in favour of women; it is only asked that the present bounties and protective duties in favour of men should be recalled. If women have a greater natural inclination for some things than for others, there is no need of laws or social incul­cation to make the majority of them do the former in preference to the latter.

Related Characters: John Stuart Mill (speaker)
Page Number: 161
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 2 Quotes

Meanwhile the wife is the actual bondservant of her husband: no less so, as far as legal obligation goes, than slaves commonly so called […] She can do no act whatever but by his permission, at least tacit. She can acquire no property but for him; the instant it becomes hers, even if by inheritance, it becomes ipso facto his. In this respect the wife’s position under the common law of England is worse than that of slaves in the laws of many countries: by the Roman law, for example, a slave might have his peculium, which to a certain extent the law guaranteed to him for his exclusive use.

Related Characters: John Stuart Mill (speaker)
Related Symbols: Slavery
Page Number: 165
Explanation and Analysis:

I am far from pretending that wives are in general no better treated than slaves; but no slave is a slave to the same lengths, and in so full a sense of the word, as a wife is. Hardly any slave, except one immediately attached to the master’s person, is a slave at all hours and all minutes; in general he has, like a soldier, his fixed task, and when it is done, or when he is off duty, he disposes, within certain limits, of his own time, and has a family life into which the master rarely intrudes.

Related Characters: John Stuart Mill (speaker)
Related Symbols: Slavery
Page Number: 166
Explanation and Analysis:

Not a word can be said for despotism in the family which cannot be said for political despotism.

Related Characters: John Stuart Mill (speaker)
Related Symbols: The Family
Page Number: 168
Explanation and Analysis:

It is not true that in all voluntary association between two people, one of them must be absolute master: still less that the law must determine which of them it shall be.

Related Characters: John Stuart Mill (speaker)
Related Symbols: The Family
Page Number: 174
Explanation and Analysis:

The family is a school of despotism, in which the virtues of despotism, but also its vices, are largely nourished […] The family, justly constituted, would be the real school of the virtues of freedom.

Related Characters: John Stuart Mill (speaker)
Related Symbols: The Family
Page Number: 180
Explanation and Analysis:

The less fit a man is for the possession of power—the less likely to be allowed to exercise it over any person with that person’s voluntary consent—the more does he hug himself in the consciousness of the power the law gives him, exact its legal rights to the utmost point which custom (the custom of men like himself) will tolerate, and take pleasure in using the power, merely to enliven the agreeable sense of possessing it.

Related Characters: John Stuart Mill (speaker)
Page Number: 181-182
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3 Quotes

I believe that their disabilities elsewhere are only clung to in order to maintain their subordination in domestic life; because the generality of the male sex cannot yet tolerate the idea of living with an equal.

Related Characters: John Stuart Mill (speaker)
Page Number: 186
Explanation and Analysis:

In the present day, power holds a smoother language, and whomsoever it oppresses, always pretends to do so for their own good: accordingly, when anything is forbidden to women, it is thought necessary to say, and desirable to believe, that they are incapable of doing it, and that they depart from their real path of success and happiness when they aspire to it.

Related Characters: John Stuart Mill (speaker)
Page Number: 187
Explanation and Analysis:

Moreover, when people are brought up, like many women of the higher classes (though less so in our own country than in any other) as kind of hot-house plants, shielded from the wholesome vicissitudes of air and temperature, and untrained in any of the occupations and exercises which give stimulus and development to the circulatory and muscular system […] it is no wonder if those of them who do not die of consumption, grow up with constitutions liable to derangement from slight causes, both internal and external, and without stamina to support any task, physical or mental, requiring continuity of effort. But women brought up to work for their livelihood show none of these morbid characteristics, unless indeed they are chained to an excess of sedentary work in confined and un­healthy rooms.

Related Characters: John Stuart Mill (speaker)
Page Number: 198
Explanation and Analysis:

I have said that it cannot now be known how much of the existing mental differences between men and women is natural, and how much artificial; whether there are any natural differ­ences at all; or, supposing all artificial causes of difference to be withdrawn, what natural character would be revealed […] We cannot isolate a human being from the circumstances of his condition, so as to ascertain experimentally what he would have been by nature; but we can consider what he is, and what his circumstances have been, and whether the one would have been capable of producing the other.

Related Characters: John Stuart Mill (speaker)
Page Number: 206
Explanation and Analysis:

If women lived in a different country form men, and had never read any of their writings, they would have had a literature of their own.

Related Characters: John Stuart Mill (speaker)
Page Number: 210
Explanation and Analysis:

A woman who joins in any movement which her husband disapproves, makes herself a martyr, with­ out even being able to be an apostle, for the husband can legally put a stop to her apostleship. Women cannot be expected to devote themselves to the emancipation of women, until men in considerable number are prepared to join with them in the undertaking.

Related Characters: John Stuart Mill (speaker)
Page Number: 218
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

There remain no legal slaves, except the mistress of every house.

Related Characters: John Stuart Mill (speaker)
Related Symbols: Slavery
Page Number: 220
Explanation and Analysis:

All the selfish propensities, the self-worship, the unjust self-preference, which exist among mankind, have their source and root in, and derive their principal nourishment from, the present constitution of the relation between men and women.

Related Characters: John Stuart Mill (speaker)
Page Number: 220
Explanation and Analysis: