A review by irenerdguez
The Subjection of Women by John Stuart Mill, John Stuart Mill

5.0

Although Mill's ultimate goal, the establishment of a “complete equality in all legal, political, social and domestic relations” between men and women has not yet been achieved, I think that his contribution in the struggle for women's liberation sowed the seeds for future battles. I especially like his approach to marriage, since in Victorian society the ideal model for women was based on Patmore's poem "The Angel in the House", written just 15 years earlier. In Joan M. Hoffman's words, the women who embodied the ideal Victorian feminine were devoted mothers as well as submissive wives; in fact, Mill describes the relationship between husband and wife in terms of slavery. I think it is quite revolutionary that a man publicly rejected the Cult of Domesticity in the 19th century, especially since at that time the two gendered spheres imposed by Locke's model were still patent. However, Mill asserted that a society cannot be “half patriarchal and half equalitarian, half slave and half free”; thereby, he broke with Locke’s patriarchal division between public and private, and insisted that both spheres were too interconnected to separate them. Moreover, by analyzing marriage as a master-servant relationship, he showed that the legal subordination of one sex to the other is based, mainly, on women’s lack of rights within the marriage, which led to their exclusion from political life. All in all, "The Subjection of Women" seems to me a kind of prelude to later works such as Virginia Woolf's "Professions for Women", in which she states that the "Angel in the House" had to be killed.