John Stuart Mill

The Subjection of Women

MILL,John Stuart. The Subjection of Women. Second edition. London, Longmans, Greem, Reader, and Dyer 1869

Octavo, original publishers orange cloth, a little soiled, spine lettered gilt, pp. (4), 188

Second edition

£200

ref:043

THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN

Referring to his wife Harriet’s contribution he wrote in his Autobiography “It might be supposed, for instance, that my strong convictions on the complete equality in all legal, political, social and domestic relations, which ought to exist between men and women, may have been learnt from her. This was far from being the fact, that those convictions were among the earliest results of the application of my mind to a political subject, and the strength with which I held them, was, as I believe, more than anything else, the originating cause of the interest she felt in me. What is true is, that until I knew her, the opinion was in my mind, little more than an abstract principle. I saw no more reason why women should be held in legal subjection to their people, than why men should. I was certain that their interests required fully as much protection as those of men, and were quite as little likely to obtain it without an equal voice in making the laws by which they were bound. But that perception of the vast practical bearings of women’s disabilities which found expression in the book on the Subjection of Women was acquired mainly through her teaching…I am painfully conscious of how much of her best thoughts on the subject I have failed to reproduce, and how greatly that little treatise falls short of what would have been if she had put on paper her entire mind on this question, or had lived to revise and improve, as she certainly would have done, my imperfect statement of the case”. J S Mill Autobiography, p.244.