Mill also wondered why this supremacy of men over women had not been removed throughout human existence (as slavery was abolished for example). In a relationship between a man and a woman, the woman must be submissive to the man since they are believed to be the family’s leaders and head. John Stuart Mill tried to compare women’s subjection to men with how the government treats its people and forcing them to do the thing that disrupts happiness. Subjection is a word used in leadership whereby people are forced or made to do something beyond their control.
There is no reason other than the artificial obstacles created by traditional society for women to access professions and politics.Īfter Mill, male domination of women began with the development of forms of social organization in patriarchal societies, which implemented the women subjection “was the arrangement most conducive to the happiness and well-being of both” (p. Women, like men, are able to pursue their own interests, to govern themselves, are autonomous beings. The main assumptions of John Stuart Mill’s work are consistent with his utilitarianism, with the idea of a liberalism in which people have a moral duty to pursue their own happiness.įor Mill, the faculty of reason is the same in both sexes, there is no intellectual superiority other than that given by women’s lack of access to education. 625) and campaigned demanding not only equal education, but also equal civil and political rights of women with men. Mill considered that “the principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes – the legal subordination of one sex to the other – is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement” (p. In the development of liberal feminism, a crucial role was played by John Stuart Mill, implicitly through On Liberty, but especially by writing On The Subjection of Women (1869). As women’s roles have been (and are) prescribed and more predetermined than men’s, their path to autonomy and self-assertion is even harder, and longer. A society evolves towards a liberal democracy when it creates the norms, institutions and practices that give its people the chance to develop and manifest themselves as fully and freely as possible. More, “the true virtue of human beings is fitness to live together as equals claiming nothing for themselves but what they as freely concede to every one else” (p. The autonomy of the human being is a common central value in ethics and political theory and a political theory is devoid of moral purpose unless it seeks to increase a person’s autonomy.
0 kommentar(er)
