Womanhood as Slavery Theme Analysis

The most important symbol in The Subjection of Women is undoubtedly slavery, which Mill uses as a metaphor for the condition of women at the time he is writing. Throughout the book, Mill describes women as existing in a state of “bondage” to men, who act as their “masters.” He emphasizes that women have so few legal rights that they end up effectively enslaved to their husbands, who wield absolute authority and control over them. In using slavery as a metaphor, Mill draws on the momentum of the abolitionist movement. (Importantly, the book was published in 1869, 58 years after slavery was abolished in the British colonies and four years after it was abolished in the U.S.). Mill posits slavery as a phenomenon that is self-evidently wrong, and by comparing womanhood to enslavement, he aims to horrify the reader and convince them to end the injustice of gender oppression.

Understanding Mill’s use of slavery as a metaphor requires some historical context, which shows why he believes that comparing womanhood to slavery will convince readers that gender inequality needs to be ended urgently. Mill works on the assumption that slavery is a wrong, yet it is still a familiar aspect of the world at the time he is writing. Indeed, at this point in time, the abolitionist movement had a lot of momentum, driven by an increasing number of successes across the world. Mill seeks to use this momentum in service of his argument for women’s rights. Mill assumes that his reader will find slavery an abhorrent part of the past that has no place in the modern world. He then suggests that although the reader might not realize it, slavery and gender inequality are closely paralleled—which means that gender inequality should have no place in the modern world either. Mill’s argument that womanhood is a form of slavery rests on the fact that at the time he is writing, women have few legal rights and freedoms. As he claims, “The wife is the actual bondservant of her husband: not less so, as far as legal obligation goes, than slaves commonly so called.” One of the main pieces of evidence he uses to support this is the fact that women could not own property. After mentioning that any property a woman possesses automatically becomes owned by her husband, Mill states: “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.” This is one of several points in the book wherein Mill makes the claim that in some ways womanhood is even worse than slavery.

While Mill maintains that white women have fewer legal rights than enslaved people, he considers the fact that they generally face better social conditions—yet he ultimately refutes even this. He writes: “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 sense of the word, as a wife is.” Here, he admits that women might generally be treated better than enslaved people, but adds that women might still be worse off because their “enslavement” is so totalizing and inescapable. Mill goes on to argue that while slaves shed their enslaved status when they stop working, women face the difficulty of being “wives” 24 hours a day. In this way, he claims that while the condition of white women’s lives are better than those of an enslaved person, white women face a worse problem in that they can never escape their degraded status as wives.

In arguing that the inescapable aspect of women’s status as wives makes womanhood a form of slavery, Mill draws attention to the problem of the intimate and pervasive nature of gender oppression. Foreshadowing the arguments of later feminists in the second half of the 20th century, Mill notes that it is particularly difficult to have to live alongside one’s oppressor and exist in a romantic relationship with them. This can mean that women are especially trapped within their degraded status—a state made even worse by the fact that women are largely confined to the domestic sphere and prohibited from participating in public life. At the same time, Mill’s use of the slavery metaphor is arguably flawed due to the fact that it betrays a misunderstanding of the reality of slavery. It is certainly not true that enslaved people could escape their slave status at the end of the work day. Moreover, his argument that enslaved people had better rights than women because they could own property does not apply to the institution of transatlantic slavery, which held that enslaved people were themselves property. However, perhaps the most serious problem with Mill’s use of the slavery metaphor is the fact that in comparing women and slaves, it ignores the reality that half of enslaved people were women—women who faced a unique burden of oppression, not just as slaves and as women, but as enslaved women in particular.

Mill’s claim that womanhood was a form of slavery may have shocked many of his readers into taking gender inequality more seriously by leveraging the enthusiastic horror people felt at slavery at the time he was writing. Many of his readers would have felt shame and regret that their society so recently participated in the institution of slavery and Mill uses these feelings in order to change people’s minds about gender. In using the metaphor of slavery, he effectively shows how women’s lack of legal rights has a profoundly dehumanizing effect, leaving women at the mercy of men who—like enslavers—have license to be cruel and unjust without consequences. At the same time, the way Mill uses the metaphor is not always historically inaccurate, and it excludes enslaved women from Mill’s vision of women’s rights.