The Equality of the Sexes

The subordination of women represents a catastrophic waste of human capacity. By confining the most capable women to domestic roles, society loses the contributions they would otherwise make to science, law, government, art, and commerce. Mill notes that every other limitation on merit-based access to positions of influence has been progressively abolished because societies that relied on birth rather than talent were outcompeted by those that did not. Sex is the last arbitrary barrier — and its abolition would double the effective supply of talent available to civilisation.

Mill observes that women's characters have been systematically formed by their subjection. The qualities attributed to women as natural — submissiveness, indirectness, the preference for sentiment over principle — are the predictable consequences of lifelong dependence and the need to achieve ends through influence rather than right. The actual nature of women, as distinct from their socially produced characters, remains unknown, because the experiment of equal education and equal social conditions has never been tried. Until it is, all claims about natural feminine character are mere speculation.

Beyond the practical benefits of released talent, Mill argues for a moral dimension: equality between the sexes would transform the character of the family, which is the primary school of moral education. A marriage between equals — in law, in practice, and in mutual respect — models the relations of justice and sympathy that liberal society requires in all its members. The existing arrangement, by placing an absolute monarch in every household, reproduces the psychology of domination and servility in each new generation.

The argument from social welfare and moral education is developed in Chapters 1 and 4 of The Subjection of Women. Mill had explored related themes in The Enfranchisement of Women (1851), an essay he co-wrote with Harriet Taylor Mill.