1 Much has been written about John Stuart Mill’s feminism, and it may be thought that little remains to be said. His commitment to female equality has generally been acknowledged as positive, but certain passages have been damned as anti-feminist or myopic regarding the reality of patriarchy, and used as sticks with which to beat both Mill’s theory and liberal feminism in general. [1] In Mill’s defence, revealing work has been done on the foundations and extent of his feminism, his attitude to women’s ‘nature’ and to his concept of an ideal marriage, as well as on the wider question of whether feminists should completely abandon liberalism. [2]

2 It would be both historically unlikely and philosophically untrue to claim that Mill’s feminism was perfectly complete – that nothing in feminist literature, debate and experience in the last century-and-a-half had added to his insights. Yet Mill may not be guilty of all the oversights, misunderstandings, self-contradictions, conservatisms or misogyny of which he has been accused. He was genuinely committed to making women fully equal citizens in a much more equal, diverse, free and harmonious future society, but, as in all things, Mill’s feminism is nuanced and multi-faceted – he wanted to attack the family as the ‘citadel’ of male dominance, and yet acknowledged (as many liberal philosophers do not) that citizens are made in the home; that whatever else happens, domestic labour must be done; that there would be economic as well as moral outcomes of flooding the labour market with those currently banished from it; that intimate relationships are fundamentally important to utility; and that the act of conception entailed social responsibilities. [3] In the course of this paper, I wish to look beyond what Mill says in The Subjection of Women, and particularly at what he says about justice in co-operative associations, in order to present a revisionist account of Mill’s feminism and, specifically, his attitude to the family.

3 As Nadia Urbinati rightly notes, criticisms of Mill tend to focus on the last section of Chapter 2 of Subjection where Mill says that women do more than their fair share if, in addition to bearing and bringing up children and managing their husband’s earnings, they also work; that the negative impact on the health and welfare of children and the management of the household would probably outweigh any positive gains in income from wives and mothers working; and that thus, ‘in an otherwise just state of things, it is not... desirable... that the wife should contribute by her labour to the income of the family’. [4] He says women working is helpful for their ‘protection’ as it gives them some power in contemporary, unjust, marriages, but a more just arrangement would render this unnecessary. [5] In the phrase that most exercises critics, Mill claims that, on marrying, women are choosing the profession of household management, just as men choose other professions, though he also says ‘the utmost latitude’ should be allowed to those whose ‘faculties [are] exceptionally adapted to any other pursuit from obeying their vocation notwithstanding marriage’. [6] Evidently, this is less than ideal feminism. [7]

4 I think criticisms of Mill can rely on a rather partial reading of this passage. [8] This notwithstanding, even if one presents the best possible case for this passage, it would amount to endorsing some (married) women only doing domestic labour, and most others working part-time either from home or outside the home, or working almost full-time, from home, when their children were small, but with a strong possibility, and indeed expectation, that they would return to the workplace, or to fuller hours, when their children were older, and that neither marriage, nor parenthood, should be seen as a barrier to following a vocation if that was what one was suited for. This, too, is hardly perfect feminism: it does nothing to challenge the idea that the first call on a woman should be domestic commitments, and parenthood is apparently equated with motherhood. According to Mill, when women marry they take on domestic responsibilities for a household and family, but he is silent about what responsibilities forming a household and fathering children entail for a man. [9] It is, though, more radical than some feminists have given it credit for. [10]

5 I would like to challenge, however, the idea that Subjection represents the sum-total of Mill’s feminism. After all, Mill’s writing on women, emancipation, and the family is not confined to Subjection – indeed, it pervades a great many of his texts and could justifiably be called one of his over-riding concerns. Moreover, as Urbinati notes, it is important to recall that Subjection is a political pamphlet, and, as with many other texts, Mill saw its publication as a particular political act, waiting eight years for the opportune moment. [11] His goal was to persuade property-owning men, who already had the vote, to go against their natural inclination to hold on to power, and extend the franchise to their wives, daughter and sisters. [12] As such, we ought to bear in mind that Mill did not always reveal his true position if that would be counter-productive to winning the political point at stake. [13]

6 Moreover, Mill saw himself as inhabiting a ‘critical’ age, in which the over-riding ideology of the last few hundred years was being swept away. [14] He saw part of his task as a political actor to continue this work. [15] But after this critical age would come a new ‘organic’ age, with its own unifying and stabilising ideology, and Mill also saw his role as being to do his part in developing the best possible institutions for it. [16] It is this task he is engaged in, for instance, when he writes ‘On the Futurity of the Labouring Classes’ in his Principles of Political Economy, in contrast to earlier economic essays such as ‘The Corn Laws’ which are concerned with doing away with what he saw as the last vestiges of feudalism, or when he writes On Liberty in contrast to ‘The Mischievousness of an Oath’, concerned as it is merely with lessening the grip of the Established church on society, one of the key tasks of the critical age. [17]

7 Subjection is a critical work: it is aimed squarely at combating existing evils, and at ending the male privilege that characterised the previous organic age (and, of course, every prior age, organic or critical). [18] The rights Mill argues for in Subjection are necessary for throwing off the last of that most feudal of institutions, slavery; they are not necessarily a complete account of Mill’s feminism.

8 Mill’s attitude to divorce is a good example of both these things. Private correspondence shows him committed to divorce and remarriage: Subjection, with its focused aim of securing support for (a fairly limited) female enfranchisement, speaks only of separation, so as not to distract his audience with something too audacious from the crucially important matter at hand. [19]

9 It is worth, too, thinking about the nature of ideal thinking, which we can think of as having three possibilities: best feasible; best possible; and best simpliciter. [20]Subjection, in the main, engages at a level which is not even quite best feasible, for Mill thinks these changes not only feasible but actively repressed – to really evaluate Mill’s feminism, we ought to look at his best possible, and, if available, best simpliciter, prescriptions for society. Given that Subjection clearly does not contain all Mill believed about divorce, it does not seem implausible to think it does not contain all his feminism, and thus, for the knowledge we need, we should look elsewhere.

10 When it comes to his ideal society, which is aimed at maximising utility for all people (one crucial aspect of which, for both sexes, would be emancipating women), Mill writes of ‘raising the labourer from a receiver of hire – a mere bought instrument in the work of production...– to the position of being... a partner in it’. [21] The same could, I think, be said for women – Mill wanted to bring them from being a ‘mere bought instrument in the work of’ producing children, food, clean clothes and a habitable living space, and make them ‘partners’ in the joint labour not merely of family life (though he evidently thought they had an important – indeed necessary – role to play there), but in society itself.

11 Although Mill evidently believed it was necessary to equalise formal rights, he was also aware of the problems of inequalities of income, respect and power even when people had them. [22] Many things stood in the way of achieving his ‘Utopia’. [23] The most important, however – indeed, the one which was so ‘contradictory to the first principles of social justice’ that all other attempts to change society would be superficial – was marriage and the family, which Mill characterised as ‘the citadel of the enemy’, that is, the heartland of feudalism, paternalism, in-egalitarianism, and all those reactionary powers from whose claws every step of progress had had to be ripped. [24]

12 Current power-relations inside families were not only bad for contemporary men and women, they perpetuated evil by having a noxious effect on children, with ‘self-worship’ and ‘unjust self-preference’ being inculcated in every boy, who was brought up to believe that ‘by the mere fact of being born male he is by right the superior of... an entire half of the human race’, and thus made social progress almost impossible. [25] However, Mill believed a justly-constituted family ‘would be the real school of the virtues of freedom’, one of the most important of which is ‘justice... grounded... on equal... [and] sympathetic association’. [26] The question, then, is what would such a justly-constituted family look like? One answer is that it looks like what Mill sketches in Subjection, and thus is not really just at all. However, this answer does not seem to be the best one we can give.

13 Excellent work has been done detailing Mill’s view of marriage as a friendship between equals. [27] It is worth adding that Mill conceived of the best friendships being those in which each partner relied on the other for some quality of character which they admired but did not fully possess, and also emphasising the weight Mill put on mutual respect and self-respect. [28] Thus marriage would be a relationship between two equals with different, but complementary characters, who saw themselves as being of equal worth, respected each other as equals, and who, being in love, were mutually dependent on the other for affection. The virtues usually associated with either gender would be spread more equally between the two – and thus it would not be that husbands commanded and wives obeyed, for instance. [29] As a result, with equal rights for women and more equality in the workplace, power-relations between partners would be equal, leading to an end of domestic violence and tyranny. [30] Importantly, as noted above, this relationship would not only have implications for their own utility, but for the children conceived and raised within it, especially as Mill felt that families were where we could learn about justice. Thus, if social progress was to be made towards justice, families also had to be just. Given that Mill evidently saw the family as somewhere where power exists, and where burdens and benefits are distributed, I think we can apply what Mill has to say about distributive justice to the family. [31]

14 There are four phrases which ought to be taken into account. Firstly, Mill’s ideal co-operative associations would divide both the labour and the surplus according to self-determined principles of justice. [32] Applying this to the family, the division of labour within it ought to be the outcome of a democratic decisionmaking process encapsulating the principles of justice adopted by the parties concerned. [33] Potentially, the position of women who choose to do domestic labour would be raised in social standing and importance – particularly as this would indeed be a choice, and would reflect the beliefs of the women (and men) involved. Moreover, given what Mill writes elsewhere about the importance of abiding by self-determined principles, of exercising choice, of making experiments in living and of not following custom, it seems that these principles would have to be properly self-determined and not merely reliant on tradition. [34] Mill recognises the difficulty of educating people to be reflective about traditions, in particular when it comes to gender roles, but he need not endorse them, and he leaves room open for a wide range of different divisions of labour.

15 This is particularly the case when one bears in mind the second noteworthy point concerning distributive justice, which is that Mill ‘looked forward to’ a society where ‘the division of the produce of labour, instead of being dependent as in so great a degree it is, on the accident of birth, should be made by concert, on an acknowledged principle of justice’. [35] It seems plausible that two of these ‘accidents of birth’ are sex and gender, and that, therefore, neither one’s sex nor ones gender ought to determine what one receives according to distributive justice.

16 The third pertinent fact to note is that Mill says distributive justice ought not to replicate the wrongs of nature, but to remedy them. [36] He recognises child-bearing and rearing and domestic labour as things of which distributive justice should take cognisance, and says whoever does them ought not to have to take on more than their fair share of other burdens. Given that the fact that women are the ones who physically bear children, and it is this which seems to be at the root of much of their oppression, this third principle of justice opens the door for measures taken to combat this inherent inequality through preventing it from being that which defines every woman’s existence to the detriment of other aspects of self-development. [37]

17 Lastly, Mill says that the ‘highest’ form of distributive justice is from each according to their capacity, to each according to their needs. [38] From this, it seems Mill would endorse every family member receiving what they needed, which would also help prevent inequalities of power. In particular, coupled with what he says about everyone having a proven right to help with their subsistence if they cannot earn it, Mill may have aided women’s abilities to separate from their husbands by removing, at least in part, the financial necessity to remain married once they had had children and had, potentially, withdrawn from the labour market to do so – their needs, and those of their children, would be met by society. [39] Moreover, ‘from each according to their capacities, to each according to their needs’ seems rather apt for family life, given that we expect very little contribution from small children, for instance, yet do not deny them their needs merely because they cannot meet them themselves. If this principle was more widely applied, it would allow for specialisations and inequalities in resource-allocation without exploitation – which is quite the opposite of the forced self-sacrifice and exploitation Mill identified in contemporary marriage. [40]

18 As noted above, it is not clear that Mill thought all women would work outside the home, once they had married, which may not be ideal feminism. However, he did want their work inside the home to be recognised as hard, necessary and socially important. Moreover, this had to be the product of women’s choice – and Mill did his best through prescriptions for education, access to the professions, political, social and economic rights, and changes to what would be thought natural, honourable or admirable for women to do to make that choice a truly free one. Evidently, this might be difficult to ensure – perhaps any family structure, given women’s biological role in child-bearing, will always be exploitative, but the very fact that the division of labour (both domestic and non-domestic) would have to be openly discussed and defended, makes it looks less exploitative than many contemporary marriages, where women do the domestic labour because it is custom, and the fairness of this is never discussed or even conceptualised. Thus, without abandoning the importance of intimate relationships, the family could be made just, and the contemporary citadel of male dominance be razed to the ground, whilst the children could be given an education in justice in the home, leading to social progress as their generation became citizens.

19 Obviously, there are questions about how such families are to be enforced, especially given liberals’ attachment to the public/private dichotomy. On the other hand, Mill was an advocate for much greater state and social activity to prevent domestic abuse, even when this happened behind closed doors, and we ought to remember that his prescription for where society can interfere is the line at which harm is caused (that is, where one’s ‘permanent interests... as a progressive being’ are negatively impacted upon), not where the front door closes. [41] Thus it is not impossible to think that Mill would encourage friends, families and neighbours to be vigilant about domestic exploitation as well as violence, and for economic as well as physical tyranny to be prosecuted against, especially given the essentially other-regarding nature of bearing and raising children.

20 One final word. It is worth noting that even this re-conceptualisation of the family might not be what Mill thought was best simpliciter: he also talks, very briefly, of a future where ‘society allow [s] of a regulated community of living, among persons intimately acquainted’. [42] Mill is, in particular, speaking of melded households where the ‘parents... had ceased to be connected by any nearer tie than mutual good will and a common interest in their children’, and thus all live in some shared space with their new partners and a mixed family. [43]

21 This is not a truly radical concept of communal living, but it is beyond the bounds of what we usually think of as the traditional ‘bourgeois’ family. Evidently, it reveals a perhaps overly-optimistic hope that separating couples will retain good will for each other, and will want to inhabit shared space, but setting this aside, it also represents a radical position, and one which might well be embraced by feminists (so long as it did not merely mean a woman doing the domestic labour for two men and her children with both, for no remuneration and with little power and respect).

22 In short, then, some of the criticisms levelled at Mill are well-placed, though some are too harsh or based on too partial an account of his thought. Mill was committed to women being fully equal members of a society of equal citizens. He saw that marriage, as contemporaneously constructed, was one of the last bastions of all the evils he associated with the preceding ‘organic’ age – a space of tyranny, exploitation and violence – and was, indeed, the ‘citadel’ of those powers preventing society from progressing. [44] However, he did not completely reject the concept of marriage (though he did embrace separation and divorce). Moreover, he saw the importance of family life for children’s utility and their education as equal citizens.

23 Mill evidently believed that principles of justice pertained within marriage, and when we consider his writings on distributive justice, it seems clear that he thought women ought to have an equal part in determining what principles of justice would apply to their marital relations, and that, though they might well choose to stay at home, bear children and do domestic labour, this ought to be a properly free choice; that not all women would chose that role; and, at least potentially, that it would not always be the woman who chose that role. Furthermore, Mill was concerned that women, however they worked, must be seen as equally valuable and important members of society. The re-imagined family which we can draw from Mill’s writings – one based on the free partnering of loving people, who take their responsibilities as parents seriously and who divide the benefits and burdens of family life according to principles on which they both agree – is very different to the conception of marriage and the family which he saw around him, and also to the one which he has been accused of endorsing.