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John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor on Women and Marriage

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 January 2009

Susan Mendus
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Extract

This paper focuses on two works of nineteenth-century feminism: Harriet Taylor's essay, Enfranchisement of Women, and John Stuart Mill's The Subjection of Women. My aim is to indicate that these texts are more radical than is usually allowed: far from being merely criticisms of the legal disabilities suffered by women in Victorian Britain, they are important moral texts which anticipate central themes within twentieth-century radical feminism. In particular, The Subjection of Women is not merely a liberal defence of legal equality; it is a positive statement of the inadequacy of ‘male” conceptions of reason and its powers. So understood, I shall argue, it coheres with Mill's other moral and political writings, and draws much of its persuasive power from the doctrines advanced in Harriet Taylor's Enfranchisement of Women.

Type
Research Article
Information
Utilitas , Volume 6 , Issue 2 , November 1994 , pp. 287 - 299
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1994

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References

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