ABSTRACT

This chapter analyses John Stuart Mill's The Subjection of Women as a pioneering work in liberal feminism in 1989 article. It shows that Mill's account challenged contemporary thinking in the society that simplistically and emphatically regarded men and women as naturally different. The chapter presents the importance of Mill's empiricist utilitarian epistemology to his liberal feminism, as expressed in the essay The Subjection of Women and in particular to his arguments concerning nature and women. Mill's methodological premises were liberal environmentalism and Associationist psychology, as well as an emphasis on education characteristic of enlightenment feminism. Mill's major argument emerges when he considers the common justification for sexual inequalities: that the nature of the two sexes adapts them to their present positions and functions. Mill's view on women in the second quotation is quite unambiguous. Mill's terminology is at least as felicitous as the formulation: innate differences are those which cannot be fully accounted for by education, socialisation or conditioning.