Mill uses the symbol of slavery to invoke horror at the status of women as well as to demonstrate all that is harmful about inequality and tyranny. He argues that womanhood is a kind of slavery, at times even going so far as to say that women are more enslaved than actual slaves are. He justifies this by pointing out that women have few human rights and are at the total mercy of their husbands, who can treat them however cruelly they wish. Furthermore, because men don’t want to feel as if they are oppressing women, they “enslave” women’s minds in order to convince them that they actually want to exist in a state of subjugation.
Because so much of Mill’s argument rests on the importance of individual freedom, autonomy, and dignity, slavery comes to represent everything that is the opposite of what Mill values as good. Slavery is defined by extreme inequality; authoritarian control; and, of course, lack of freedom. As a result, it represents everything that Mill abhors and seeks to erase from society. In this sense, it is important to remember that slavery operates more as a symbol in the book than it does a reference to the real historical institution that had only recently been abolished in the U.S. and British Empire at the time Mill was writing. Slavery comes to represent everything that is wrong about the ways in which women are treated and—in a broader sense—everything that is holding society back from flourishing. While treating slavery as a symbol more than a historical reality arguably presents some problems for Mill’s argument, it is nonetheless strongly underlines the point he makes about the importance of individual rights and liberties.
Slavery Quotes in The Subjection of Women
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.
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.
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.
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.
There remain no legal slaves, except the mistress of every house.
Slavery Symbol Timeline in The Subjection of Women
