The Patron Saint of Feminism: J. S. Mill on Women with Reference to ‘The Subjection of Women’

Abstract

Despite the recurring feminist onslaught targeting the canon of political philosophy due to the philosophers’ unrelenting refusal to acknowledge women’s rights owing to the former’s unwavering advocacy of the naturalness of gender-based differences, the paper argues that such a uniformly antagonistic attitude is only self-defeating. Thus, this paper has been written with the urgent requisite of reading and re-reading philosophical texts by employing what Jacques Derrida would understand as a double mode of reading, and taking into account Quentin Skinner’s emphasis on the need to take into account the stated intention of the author. With these methodological concerns, the paper undertakes a nuanced textual analysis of John Stuart Mill’s ‘The Subjection of Women’ (1869), providing an understanding of it in a fairly intelligible manner. The paper argues that Mills’s work sets a precedent for feminist foundational thought, not merely in his attempts to deconstruct the assumed inferiority of women as socially constructed—paralleling the concerns voiced by early figures such as Mary Wollstonecraft—but specifically in his incessant emphasis on the work being posthumously authored by his wife, Harriet Taylor.