The Subjection of Women / Edition 1

by John Stuart Mill

Overview

Since Old Testament days discrimination against minorities and other groups has been the rule in history rather than the exception. Chief among these repressive attitudes has been the inferior social and political status of women. Mill offers compelling arguments against the disenfranchisement of women, the infringement of their property rights, and the second-class status they experienced within marriage. One of England's most influential social philosophers, Mill sets the keen sights of his critical, analytic eye on the socio-political justifications for gender supremacy in nineteenth-century Britain and, in doing so, he strikes a powerful blow for women's rights, the reverberations of which are still being felt today. A remarkable work, The Subjection of Women uses reason and common sense to take sexual discrimination to task.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780879753351
Publisher:	Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.
Publication date:	03/01/1986
Series:	Great Books in Philosophy
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	106
Product dimensions:	5.58(w) x 8.16(h) x 0.26(d)

About the Author

JOHN STUART MILL was born in London on May 20, 1806, the son of noted Scottish economist and philosopher James Mill, who held an influential post in the powerful East India Company. Mill's natural talent and physical stamina were put to the test at a very young age when he undertook a highly structured and individual-ized upbringing orchestrated by his father, who believed that the mind was a passive receptacle for human experience. His educa-tion and training were so intense that he was reading Greek at the age of three and doing independent writing at six.

Mill's education broadened considerably after 1823 when he entered the East India Company to commence his life's career as his father had done before him. He traveled, became politically involved, and in so doing moved away from the narrower sectar-ian attitudes in which he had been raised. His ideas and imagina-tion were ignited by the views of such diverse personalities as Wordsworth, Saint-Simon, Coleridge, Comte, and de Tocqueville.

During his life, Mill wrote many influential works: System of Logic (1843); Principles of Political Economy (1848); On Liberty (1859); The Subjection of Women (1861); Utilitarianism (1863); Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy (1865); and Autobiography (1873).

As a defender of individual freedom and human rights, John Stuart Mill lives on as a nineteenth-century champion of social reform. He died on May 7, 1873.

Table of Contents

	John Stuart Mill: A Chronology	vii
	Introduction	xi
	A Note on the Text	xxv
	The Subjection of Women	1
Appendix A	Preludes to The Subjection of Women	99
1.	James Mill, Essay on Government (1820)	99
2.	Harriet Taylor, "On Marriage" (1832-33?)	101
Appendix B	Comments by Mill about The Subjection of Women	105
1.	Autobiography, Chapter VII	105
2.	Letters	106
Appendix C	Nineteenth-Century Novelists on the Woman Question	115
1.	Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (1818)	115
2.	Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist (1837-38)	115
3.	Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre (1847)	116
4.	George Eliot, Middlemarch (1871-72)	116
5.	Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (1895)	117
Appendix D	Contemporary Reviews and Critiques	119
1.	W. H. Dixon, Athenaeum	119
2.	Saturday Review	125
3.	Millicent Garrett Fawcett, Fortnightly Review	128
4.	Matthew Browne, Contemporary Review	130
5.	Anne Mozley, Blackwood's Magazine	136
6.	Margaret Oliphant, Edinburgh Review	152
7.	Goldwin Smith, Macmillan's Magazine	163
8.	J.E. Cairnes, Macmillan's Magazine	171
9.	Henry Taylor, Fraser's Magazine	179
10.	Frances Power Cobbe, Theological Review	187
11.	James Fitzjames Stephen, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity	192
Appendix E	Florence Nightingale and Sigmund Freud vs. Mill	205
1.	Cecil Woodham-Smith, Florence Nightingale	205
2.	Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud	207
	Notes	209
	Select Bibliography	215

Editorial Reviews

"An excellent and affordable edition, with a pithy introduction by Okin that that contextualizes and summarizes the argument well. Mill's work affords insight not only into the issue of women's emancipation, but also into the world of 19th century liberalism: its views of history, of class, and of slavery." --Peter C. Caldwell, Rice University

From the Publisher