“The legal subordination of one sex to another is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human development.” (J. S. Mill). Comment. (2023, 15 Marks)
The words open John Stuart Mill‘s The Subjection of Women, written in 1861 and published in 1869. Mill’s own phrase is human improvement, and the sentence goes on to demand a principle of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other. He credited the argument to Harriet Taylor Mill and her daughter Helen Taylor. It is the founding text of liberal feminism, and its claim has two parts: subordination is unjust in principle (“wrong in itself”) and harmful in effect (“hindrance”).
Wrong in Itself
- The law of the strongest. Women’s subordination was never chosen after trying alternatives; it is primitive force surviving an age that abolished slavery and serfdom.
- Custom mistaken for nature. Every ruling group thinks its dominance natural; unnatural generally means only uncustomary.
- Coverture. A wife could not own property, keep her earnings or claim her children. No slave is a slave to the same lengths… as a wife is.
- The argument from ignorance. What passes for women’s nature is an eminently artificial thing, produced by repression and training. Speculative physiology cannot prove inferiority; the only test is to remove the disabilities and see.
A Hindrance to Human Improvement
- Waste. Society forfeits half its talent. Equality would double the mass of mental faculties available for the higher service of humanity.
- Corruption of men. The family as it stands is a school of despotism, teaching every boy that he is superior by birth to half the human race. A just family would be a school of sympathy in equality.
- Liberty and utility joined. Mill applies individuality and experiments in living to half the species. Exclusion stunts both sexes.
Critique
- Liberal limits. Mill expected most married women to choose household management as a man chooses a profession. Susan Moller Okin (Justice, Gender and the Family, 1989) faults him for exempting the family’s division of labour from justice.
- Socialist feminists, following Friedrich Engels (1884), tie subordination to property and unpaid domestic labour. Radical feminists such as Kate Millett (Sexual Politics, 1970) treat patriarchy as a system that legal reform cannot reach.
- Intersectional. Sharmila Rege shows caste reshaping gender, which Mill’s universal “woman” misses.
- In his defence, the charge that legal equality is insufficient presupposes the equality he demanded.
Indian Illustration
B. R. Ambedkar resigned from the cabinet in 1951 when the Hindu Code Bill stalled, a very Millian cause. Joseph Shine (2018) struck down the adultery law as treating the wife as her husband’s property. Vineeta Sharma (2020) confirmed daughters as coparceners by birth. Yet India ranked 131 of 148 in the Global Gender Gap Report 2025, which is Okin’s point: legal equality does not ensure equal outcomes.
Conclusion
Mill’s two claims have fared differently. His principle is now constitutional common sense. His diagnosis of the hindrance was too narrow, since subordination works through households, labour markets and caste as well as through statute. Legal equality was the necessary first step, not the end of the struggle.