john stuart mill's on the subjection of women

'Whatever women's services are most wanted for,' he writes, 'the free play of competition will hold out the strongest inducements to them to undertake.'īut despite Mill's admission that On the Subjection of Women was co-written with his wife, Harriet, this otherwise commendable edition again omits her name from the cover. Also, Krouse, Richard W., Patriarchal Liberalism and Beyond: From John Stuart Mill to Harriet Taylor, in The Family in Political Thought, ed.

If, as opponents of female emancipation argue, women are not naturally inclined to be political animals, they have nothing to lose by freeing them from legal shackles because nature will dictate what they are capable of becoming.

Mill argues that more people existing alongside one another on an equal footing means increased competition, with an advantageous effect on human moral and intellectual development, both individual and social. He goes on to explain the benefits of female emancipation from the utilitarian standpoint. He states that the opposition to female emancipation is thus driven by prejudice rather than rationality. After a unit on feminist accounts of the place of women’s work and the body in the polis, the course concludes with investigations of feminism’s intersections with racial politics the emergence of queer theory and its impact on feminist politics and how transgender politics expands the scope of feminist thought and action today.Mill's contention is that we cannot know that something will not work unless we try it. Next, we move into the twentieth century by reading key sections of Simone de Beauvoir’s classic The Second Sex and exploring how this text inaugurates more radical feminist accounts of the state and revolution. We then examine foundational texts in the liberal-humanist tradition of feminist thought. We begin by studying ancient representations of women in politics by reading perhaps the oldest and most enduring “feminist” text, Sophocles’s Antigone, alongside Aristophanes’s comedy Lysistrata. The course proceeds through various thematic units.

This course offers an introduction to feminist political theory by asking questions like: what is patriarchal political power? how does the modern state conceive of the place of women in social, political, and economic life, and to what extent can the state be utilized to improve the condition of women? what is the relation between feminism and other struggles for social, economic, and racial justice? how does feminist political thought vary across diverse ideologies, cultures, and ethnicities? what is queer feminism, and how does it interpret and engage in contemporary political processes? Students will read, discuss, and write about historical and contemporary texts that address these and other questions. Feminist political thought challenges the absence or subordination of women in the theory and practice of politics.

John stuart mill's on the subjection of women