Said to be a woman strike leader
Dear friends and readers,
A couple of days ago, as a result of thinking about Austen’s lack of power in her letters (she can’t travel anywhere, she can’t say where she’ll live) and because I had been reading some superb papers on liberty in connection with the paper I’m working on for the coming EC/ASECS conference: “‘I have the right to choose my own life:’ Liberty in Winston Graham’s Poldark novels,” I’ve been thinking about the concept of liberty as connected to women.
I noticed most of the literature, older and classic (Benjamin Constant, John Stuart
Mill) and more recent (Isaiah Berlin and Quentin Skinner) treat the concept as if it’s experienced exactly the same for women as for men. This is not quite fair to Mill because he does have a separate treatise On the Subjection of Women where he argues that women are not at all what they might possibly be because they have been so pre-shaped by norms and values hostile to them.
Still when Mill writes of liberty, he writes of “mankind” as if women were to be understood understood under the same rubric in the same terms. What I’ve been thinking about is how one central difference when it comes to liberty is that women have lacked it because they are made directly answerable with their bodies in ways not enforced on men.
Again in Jane Austen’s letters (which I’ve been reading) one repeatedly comes across her inability to travel anywhere beyond where her feet will take her (walking). She is obstructed by her brothers and father who will not permit her to travel alone — without a man or chaperon; she acquiesces in this and agrees it’s necessary that she not travel in conveyances which carry people beneath their gentry class. So she lacks negative freedom to travel. But she writhes as she waits until it suits the convenience of a brother to come pick her up and take her to where she wants to go. She has no area where she can act unobstructed to get onto a carriage to travel. But if they didn’t forbid, could she go where she wanted? No. She lacks the money. She is not free in a positive sense since all the arrangements around her have been set up to prevent her from earning enough; she has no self-mastery, she lacks the wherewithal.
Now both her lack of negative and positive liberty are connected to another aspect of our experience of liberty discussed by Berlin: our status. Just as one might expect he never brings in gender among the things that affect status: religion, race, ethnicity, class, but gender, no. It’s her gender that forbids the traveling alone and her gender that the society has refused to provide a way of earning a real living for. It’s that inflection of negative and positive liberty that totally hems her in and makes it impossible for her to travel. A modern instance is Saudi Arabia where it’s forbidden to women to drive.
To cut to the quick, all of this swirls around the demand a woman be chaste (or a virgin), be pushed into marriage, motherhood. The key problem for women and liberty is they are still answerable with their bodies centrally. It is okay to rape a woman — we’ve seen that this summer and seen how rules of evidence demands work against her, how her reputation is everything; if she’s not an angel, then she wanted rape and the man had a right to (I speak of several women who were raped and whose cases were dismissed; the men did it with impunity and the women were treated with suspicion and derision). This summer we’ve seen hatred of a young woman who did not conform to angel prescriptions for motherhood (I speak of Casey Anthony who a jury acquitted). Women are continually pressured to get pregnant, be mothers, breast-feed. I came across two cases in my research for a book on child murder which shows the suspicion women want to kill their fetuses or babies is still given play by permitting people who represent agencies (institutions, communities) to invade the pregnant girl’s body and if she hides her pregnancy, it’s evidence against her. If she’s pregnant she is to care for this fetus in her more than herself. The demand a woman look a certain way to attract a man — that came up in my use of the term spinsterhood and its negative connotations on my blog.
I know many societies have enforced conscription for military service for men, but this is a limited time frame and not sexual. I know many societies have practiced chattel slavery, which includes men. But few (a very few in Africa) have done so in more than a century. Women are today trafficked in Slavish Europe and Africa with impunity.
I was wondering if there is a book which treats of these issues directly. I
know that indirectly one might say that Carol Pateman’s Sexual Contract
and Susan Bordo’s Unbearable Weight assume this enforced servitude is the
center of women’s problems but they do not treat directly of the issue of liberty, of freedom of action and independence. Catherine MacKinnon’s books that I’ve read are centered on rape. You could say indirectly (way back) Mary Wollstonecraft centers her discussion “The Rights of Woman” when she gets to it to how women are sexualized, but she does not deal with the concept of liberty. I am wondering if someone can direct me to essays or books which treat of women’s liberty in the way say the classic studies treat of men’s.
For a summary of Mill’s argument in Subjection of Women, see comments.
Ellen
Reveries Under the Sign of Austen, Two 
Mill’s Subjection of Women, Chapter 1:
. Mill begins by facing the real problem: no one will listen to his arguments. There is a deep feeling to be contended with, a deep feeling which supports the most intimate of daily relationships, and when a given condition rests on a feeling that arguments cannot reach, the arguments against it get ever hotter. (In Chapter 2 he goes on to delineate how 50% of the human race profits strongly from the arrangement so that also makes for the difficulty of anyone trying to change it, and explains how it is that the present 50% exploited is complicit and coopted.)
A. Then he goes on to argue against feeling as a basis for justification. He says this is really resting a case on instinct, and suggests that the instinct argument has replaced arguments said to be founded on reason (the 18th century mode). He doesn’t say here but later (again Chapter 2 — these chapters links) that the instinct of the generality (or average person) is a false guide for setting up what is just and fair.
B. So where did the arrangements which keep women subordinate to men (and remember in this period women couldn’t own their own income, could be beaten by husbands as husbands pleased) come from? Mill resorts to the kind of myth-making Locke, Hume, Rousseau and others have done: it’s a reductive tale telling that posits a general state of things in synecdoches. From the earliest twilight of society we find women paired with men in a state of bondage, and this gave rise to laws and customs which justified and elaborated this reality. He says the bondage was to make things easy for men who attached value to the woman as a companion (when she served him as he wanted).
Hmmm. If we go back to hunters and gatherers, or study present tribal relationships, that doesn’t seem quite true. There groups of men trade and use women (something like what we find in chimp groups). I’ve read that Mill’s parable describes early neolithic bands (agricultural) arrangements better.
C. He says that a great deal of the original brutality has been lost or modified, but a great deal is still self-evident.
1) the difference between 19th century modes and earlier ones is earlier ones didn’t think it necessary to justify the law of superior strength. They were not ashamed.
2) he insists on how the relationship is still based on law of force. One way in which the situation was justified at the time was to present a very soft view of it. We see this in Trollope’s _Small House_ and _Framley Parsonage_. The problem here I’d suggest is he doesn’t bring home how if it is that many people will not hurt and take advantage of a law or custom which permits them to, many do take such advantage and can hide it. He also does not bring in enough reality: Barbara Bodichon about how men simply leave or don’t support women is needed to undermine the soft view of how happy all are in the present arrangement.
3) then he does make the argument I referred to above: this power arrangement comes “home to the person and hearth of every male head of a family and of everyone who looks forward to being so.” Women are individually in the subject class; as present arrangements go, if she objects, she just gets in trouble with her master and gets nowhere: “each individual of the subject-class is in a chronic state of bribery and intimidation.”
4) he stops to present the rhetoric that’s used about inferior classes (women are weak and emotional is what he refers to but doesn’t make explicit) and how the rationale here is “the feebler and more unwarlike races [groups, “the sex” of women] should submit to the braver and manlier [more capable].
D. It’s not true that women are happy in the present arrangement. No want of women complaining.
1) recently they petitioned parliament for suffrage. This could only happen in recent times when women educated. A great many women do not accept or like the present arrangement.
2) problem here is the person complaining is put under the judgement of the individual inflicting the punishment. Only children endure this.
At this point he denies that women’s character as presently seen is natural or the one they would have if not for education and continual training in submissiveness. I can vouch for this in 18th century memoir and before. It’s overt and shameless. In the 20th century it’s much subtler.
1) women says Mill are taught to be submissive, sacrificing, self-controlled (no fighting, no anger); they made to direct all their efforts in getting the affections of a man as the solution for how to get through life and what they should want out of it
2) given that only through men they are allowed to fulfill ambition and get respect, he says it would be a miracle if the object of being attractive to men had not become all encompassing.
Comment: we can see here the origin of the present obsessive beauty industry, cosmetics, anorexia (in part anorexia comes from continual incessant pressure to look thin and sexy). Movies mock girls who are plump.
II. Central second argument: the modern world works differently than the old (here we have an analogous insight to Carlyle’s). Mill celebrates the change: people are enormously freer to choose how they can spend their existences: “The peculiar character of the modern world … is, that human beings are no longer born to their places in life, and chained down by an inexorable bond to the place they are born to, but are free to employ their faculties, and such favourable chances as offer, to achieve the lot which may appear to them more desirable.”
Comment: too optimistic. We are really held down by what we learn as children, cannot all that easily move above a station or milieu in life; if education enables us, once we leave school, connections, patronage, manners and the old laws of cunning and strength kick in again; men being in power, women have to sell sell directly or indirectly very often to get ahead.
A. Still he’s right that we are not given a life sentence at birth as once we were.
B. That we can move about leads to his section about how injust and wasteful it is to throw away half the human race simply on providing sex for men and children.
C. Now we are into vexed areas in a way: freedom and free competition. He suggests that women are now “highly artifical creatures,” the result of “forced repression in some areas, and unnatural stimulation in others.” (So here is why in these open areas of free competition they react and don’t do as well as men; he implies this or says it in 19th century words: women remain dependent he says. They’ve been taught to be this way.
D. So these natural differences we see in the present state of society are not necessary, are the result of forced education, how circumstances and all that surround a child growing up influences it.
E. Respecting the mental characteristics of women, he denies men know much about it. This reminds me of Woolf’s _A Room of One’s Own_ and Austen’s _Persuasion_. Men have had the pens in their hands. Men writing about women see them from their own interest: would she make the wife I want or could use?
F. Women learn not to tell the truth (as slaves did): anyone looking up to another in power is not going to be “open” and “completely sincere.” (Actually few are that anyway. Again there is a high idealism and nobility of outlook in Mill.)
G. For writers who want to make money, “very few of them dare anything, which men, on whom their literary succces depends, are unwilling to hear.”
III. So women are not going to do what is contrary to their nature as now formed by society. The anxiety of people to interfere on their behalf or against them is in a way irrelevant for now. Change comes slow.
A. And here he does bring up the issue the 1869 reviewer I put on the list denied. He says that the present arrangemnent boils down to forcing women to marry and produce children. It’s a way of compelling it. No wonder women of spirit don’t want it or aren’t keen.
B. If this is all you want of them and will not allow them to marry and have children in equal conditions (meaning that the way of mothering children would then become very different and also marriage as then practised), then says he all that “has been done in the modern world to relax the chain on the minds of women, has been a mistake. They never should have been allowed to receive a literary education. women in the present arrangement who read, much more women who write, are in the existing constitution of things, a contradiction and disturbing element.
C. So we see why the hatred, fear, cruel mockery and derision against educated women emerges. We see why bluestocking is still a derogatory term. How dare she?
D. Bitter end: better yet to train them up as odalisques and domestic servants. In some cultures that’s just what is done, and when teenagers some girls are into being odalisques. Get on the Net and check the fools out.
E.M.
John Stuart Mill, _The Subjection of Women_, Chapter 2
I. Mill begins with marriage. As he has ended on the thought the way the world is set up is meant to coerce women into marriage and having children, so he begins here.
Digression: the 1869 reviewer objected that Mill discussed sex nowhere. Unless the reviewer means by sex romance and his belief that women are masochistic (want to suffer, are attracted to punishment), Mill does discuss sex. He discusses it throughout: in the original bondage he says we find people paired in, in men wanting to possess women. Agreed he does not discuss sexual attraction as the reason women go in for marriage; his view is sex has nothing to do with marriage, but is what women are forced to do to find safety and respect. He does not discuss all the sex that goes on outside marriage either. Sex is viewed by Mill as a commodity men want and women offer up as part of an exchange. The reviewer’s response is not to explain but to use the word “sex” over and over as an instinct (unexplained) and say it comes first and explains all.
A. He opens by saying that given that marriage is the point of the way women are brought up and educated, you’d think the society would make marriage as attractive as possible. No. Women are in history forced into it; now we see them pushed by circumstances and mores.
1. A section about how the laws are set up to prevent her from owning anything and having any say in her destiny her husband doesn’t want. The two are one person (the husband’s will) under the law. Carol Pateman (a legal philosopher) has a book where she says the society is set up as men contracting with one another, and they allow women to opt in through contracting to a particular family or male — except for those women who achieve the successful independent income and career (not possible in Mill’s time and one of his goals I suppose).
2. Since women are so stuck, one justice would be to allow them to get rid of a bad husband. But she is not allowed to leave — punishments are meted out to her on all sides. (This makes me remember how Lord de Courcy’s valet says he’s better off than Lady de Courcy; he can give notice.)
3. This leads to his explanation that of course not all men take such gross advantage of the law and custom, and many are kind and good, and a marriage is a partnership — of sorts. The woman is still subject and subordinate. But says he (and I think this important) “Laws and institutions require to be adapted, not to good men, but to bad. Marriage is not an institution designed for a select few.”
B. It would be tiresome to repeat all the commonplaces about how men as a group are unfit for this kind of power over another human being.
1. He goes on to suggest the sorts of misery that can be inflicted on the powerless in private life.
2. What mitigates the situation: personal affection that the marriage starts with, when it grows up between the two, shared pragmatic interests. People tell the woman she can tyrannize over others beneath her (say children I suppose, servants, those who need her husband), but Mill says (rightly) “A Sultan’s favourite slave has slaves under er, over whom she tyrannized, but the desireable thing would be that she should neither have slaves or be a slave.”
3. It’s true that we can’t renegotiate our relationship every day and power has to be meted out for final decisions, but it is not true that the same person is equally capable in all areas or ought to have final say in all.
C. He goes on to discuss the rhetoric that goes with women’s subordination: men “thought it a clever thing to insult women for being what men made them.”
1. Men are taught to worship their own will. Trollope presents this as a given, sometimes justifying it, sometimes critiquing it, but never ever justifying a woman having a will.
2. “There’s nothing men so easily learn as self-worship.” Men here means humanity individually.
D. Mill puts it forward as a self-evident truth that “the only school of genuine moral sentiment is society between equals.”
1. Earlier ages rested social relationships openly on force and entirely on it. He is arguing the changeover occurring should include women.
2. And he goes farther by implication (includes children) when he argues that decency in life and happiness and practical good for all must come out of adapting the above moral rule to family life.
3. Many people do live today in this just morality, but many do not, and women are not allowed to have any life outside the family.
4. He brings up religion to show it’s a rationale (as in Chapter 1 social norms) for supporting a brute power relationship. Wives must obey husbands &c
E. An important place to begin to move from the situation we are in now is for women to be able to own her property.
1. People profess sentimental shock at this idea, but Mill says while he supports wholehearedly the idea of community of goods, he would not want to be in such a community (of two) where “what is mine is yours, but what is yours is not mine.” Both should profit.
My comment: Two people are not one. The radical truth of life is the limitation of human contact. We live and die in ourselves. Austen has a striking comment on this towards the end of _Emma_.
2. He again (as he has done throughout) brings out the parallel between wifehood and slavery as presently practised and now rejoices slavery has ended in the US, and says (in effect) since women are bodily answerable to men in marriage (and what is this if not a discussion of sex), having to bear the children and bring them up (usually all by herself as he’s gone from the home), it is the most basic justice that she should be secure financially, when she can be permitted to contribute and control her own earnings, be treated in effect as an adult (which she is as when she is thrown out).
a. Reality comes in here as Mill imagines the man drinking and idle — he is thinking of working class ideals but it covers upper class life too.
b. “The power of earning is essential to the dignity of a woman.” Also of course a man.
3. So when the two marry, the woman should be seen as and given the right to choose who she marries, as she would a profession or career.
4. He imagines a much better life for all.
F. And laws must be set up to make this a norm and protect it.
E.M.
Mill’s ON the Subjection of Women, Chapter 3, opens and closes very well.
The chapter does open well. He says that were it just a matter of
getting people to act decently and justly his job would now be
done. He says the “disabilities” (a word Trollope makes cruel fun of
in _Is He Popenjoy?_) of women are there to keep them subordinate
“because the generality of the male sex cannot yet tolerate the idea
of living with an equal.” This is eloquently said:
“Were it not for-that, I think that almost everyone, in the existing
state of opinion in politics and political economy, would admit the
injustice of excluding half the human race from the greater number of
lucrative occupations, and from almost all high social functions;
ordaining from their birth either that they are not, and cannot by
any possibility become, fit for employments which are legally open to
the stupidest and basest of the other sex, or else that however fit
they may be, those employments shall be interdicted to them, in order
to be preserved for the exclusive benefit of males. ”
The reason given is it’s for the good of everyone. Patently it’s for
the good of half of society — to which I’ll add it takes care also
fo the children men want. Today he says such arguments are made more
smoothly than they once were. Propaganda has gotten better.
‘In the present day, power holds a smoother language, and whomsoever it oppresses, always pretends to do so for their own good:
accordingly, when anything is forbidden to women, it is thought
necessary to say, and desirable to believe, that they are incapable
of doing it, and that they depart from their real path of success and
happiness when they aspire to it.
[This reminds of how Larry Summers, the ex-President of Yale, said
women are no good at math or science. That’s where money is made and
real power is had in our society. I’ll mention a chancellor of
the University of California at Santa Cruz committed suicide the
other day; she jumped off a building. She was a premier engineer, a
rare woman of achievement. I read she was hounded for doing what many
academics do: she got a job for her partner and used money given her
for housing and trips to make her life more comfortable. I believe
in _A Man for All Seasons_ there’s a dialogue on how this works.]
The real loss says Mill is half of humanity. There is so little
talent among human beings for all sorts of higher or more difficult
things, to prevent half of humanity from doing it, is a loss to
everyone. It’s here he points out that when women have inherited
central positions in governments (queens and the like) how well they
have done. (Soon after this he has more of the semi-twaddle of what
comes naturally to women.)
He writes:
“Are we so certain of always finding a man made to our hands for any
duty or function of social importance which falls vacant, that we
lose nothing by putting a ban upon one half of mankind, and refusing
beforehand to make their faculties available, however distinguished
they may be?
I very much liked this last principle put forward before he launched
into his disquisition on women’s qualities:
“To have a voice in choosing those by whom one is to be governed, is
a means of self-protection due to everyone, though he were to remain
for ever excluded from the function of governing …”
Obviously women ought clearly also to chose who they shall marry
[This is what Squire Dale in _Small House_ has no conception of.]
And the chapter ends well. He comes back to the idea that if these
are the characteristics of women (some of which he’s denied, but
others he’s allowed, and others qualified), and the response that
women want society this way. How do you know? When you ask them,
they don’t complain. Well a lot of them don’t. To which he replies,
they don’t because it’s useless and what would they get for it. I’ve
had on Trollope-l the response (when we were reading _HKHWR_) well,
my spouse is happy the way it is, and she says so. That what the
core of the argument on behalf of marriage. Full-stop. Mill:
“That fact certainly enables men to retain the unjust privilege some
time longer; but does not render it less unjust. Exactly the same
thing may be said of the women in the harem of an oriental: they do
not complain of not being allowed the freedom of European women ..
Women do not complain of the general lot of women; or rather they
do, for plaintive elegies on it are very common in the writings of
women, and were still more so as long as the lamentations could not
be suspected of having any practical object.
He says rightly at the close:
“Women cannot be expected to devote themselves to the emancipation
of women, until men in considerable number are prepared to join with
them in the undertaking.”
And that’s what has not begun to happen in many areas of life. In the
area of jobs and income to a much larger extent than Mill dreamed of
men have allowed or seen that it’s in their interest to let women
make money and do good work. Beyond that, well …
the record is very spotty to say the least.
We should read Eleanor Rathbone’s _The Disinherited Family_ now. She
was an important labor politician for many years.
Ellen
Mill, _The Subjection of Women_, Chapter 4: “all that makes life valuable to the individual human being”
As I remarked on WWTTA, the two lists (this and that one) are reading twin-essays at the same time. Woolf’s _A Room of One’s Own_ is dealing with the same issue and problems — from a different angle, inwardly and through literature. However, both are at times aiming their thoughts at the same mass of feeling, seeing and feeling the many sympathetic readers (this is not so obvious in Mil), and seeing what they have to contend against too in the same light.
Both end on a peroration of what we must do to alleviate and change the situation. And also how hard it is. The problem with both is they end on an appeal to ethics and idealism.
I. Mill begins “. What good are we to expect from the changes proposed in our customs and institutions? Would mankind be at all better off if women were free?”
A. He has answered the second question: untold millions of women would be better off. And he has suggested many men once they were persuaded to give over some power would find themselves better off and happier too. But in case that “mass of feeling” has forgotten this or doesn’t care he says it again:
1. “The sufferings, immoralities, evils of all sorts, produced in innumerable cases by the subjection of individual women to individual men, are far too terrible to be overlooked. Unthinking or uncandid persons, counting those cases alone which are extreme, or which attain publicity, may say that the evils are exceptional; but no one can be blind to their existence, nor, in many cases, to their intensity.”
Comment: here I disagree. The evils are not exceptional if you look to daily ones, and not the horrific. We see them everywhere in Trollope’s novels. I see them in what I read and what I’ve seen across my life and I don’t have a lot of experience of a lot of people and live in a sheltered world mostly.
2. Mill says the world is changing and the laws of “servitude” and the way people treated one another according to them (in western society) are changing. Chattel slavery has been abolished; it’s time to change the laws and then customs making for women’s servitude.
B. So to the advantages, to men first:
1. I’m afriad the first is the moral one. The lifting of daily decency and improvement of 50% of mankind as men will no longer be able to live quite the way they have. Both of these (Mill knows) will not appeal to many men.
Comment: one of the things I love about this treatise is how he really doesn’t worry about the people not reading his book. He’s not going to reach them anyway, and he knows it. He’s trying to reach those who have power to change law and by prestige and position power to influence the behavior of others. This makes his book so much stronger. So many authors nowadays seem to write apologizing and flattering those who will never pick up their book. (They are soothing those aware of the power of these others.)
2. Much of many paragraphs is taken up by elaborating on the high service to humanity of improving daily life by founding it on a central fair relationship. He’s right. This is radical, subtle, highly ethical. Inferences include (to give concrete examples), if men were led to behave justly and not egoistically and based on strength in daily life they would not (he hopes) see war in the same light. Daily habit and attitudes towards what counts in the self and what is admirable would change slowly.
Comment: the latter has not happened in the west, for we do now have just laws in many ways (if not acted upon justly or backed by the courts on behalf of women at all), and we see the horrors of war carried on just as much. Mill forgets how a small clique with military power can move enough people and cow the rest. Life is short, power works through cliques, and death is so easy to inflict. The groups who never read Mill’s books are represented by those in power in the US.
3. He goes on to talk of chivalry as a noble feeling but says the new morality he proposes is infinitely superior — and I think proves that. To rely on chivalry is hopeless in many or most cases, and it is just a license to tyrannize. It may be wondered why he brings “chivalry” up. Apparently it was a “buzz’ word for men wanting to show how kind and decent they are to women who were arguing against the women’s movement. Trollope uses the concept of the great growth of chivalric feeling in men towards women in his chapter on women in _North America_. He seems to feel that this chivalry though demands reciprocation and if women don’t obey or reciprocate in the way wanted, a man can with draw it and then she’ll get what she deserves. In other words, in _North America_ Trollope makes visible the force argument behind chivalry and its limitations but also why Mill bothers to discuss this.
4. He slides into women by talking of boys brought up by their mothers. He feels more respect for women and they themselves being more respectable in every way would improve boys growing up.
B. Then women: He recognizes the problem of persuading women — there needs persuasion for women because the changes in laws he envisions will mean she will end up self-dependent. Or independent.
1. Women have not been taught to be this way at all, to the contrary. So they will be fearful.
Comment: again very insightful. Women in the US voted against ERA. Why? probably not out of fear of independence but rather a fear that they would lose what they got of protective legislation (such as a woman has the right a percentage of her husband’s pension and social security if he dies first, something women who have not worked or made little money desperately would need). But fear of independence does come from going “out there” in a man’s world and finding how little money you can make, how you are pressured into allowing yourself to be exploited sexually. It’s like women are between a rock and a hard place. Home and work are both places she’s abused.
2. They can’t imagine the future or how it will be. Right now they are so dependent on status and holding onto Mrs Grundy kinds of values. He says this is natural. What else have women to cling to for self-respect? What else has somewhat protected them (he means sexually — he talks of sexuality throughout indirectly). She has sacrificed herself repeatedly and so these Mrs Grundy kind of values are the sops she was given.
3. Right now too women seem and are very unlike men. He does acknowledge (as he did in Chapter 3), some innate differences, but says education has exaggerated these enormously.
C. Advantages to both.
1. An interesting section here is how men’s life has become much more domestic and finds his pleasure in the home as once (in feudalism) he never did — or in traditional societies.
2. Marriage in the case of two people really educated alike, ahving tghe same cultivated faculties, opinions, purposes, he suggests may be transformed for many. This kind of thing probably did exist among the upper classes by Mill’s time. He is saying it will be extended.
D. He ends on individual advantages rather than social.
1. What a crime, how cruel to deprive a human being of her faculties and gifts and ability to fulfill her life — as well as serve the community. I summarize this final section that way.
2. He appeals to men to remember how they felt when boys emerging from boyhood and looked about themselves to fulfill themselves. “Are these things no important part of individual happiness.” This reminds me of Johnson’s famous passage in retort to people who say don’t overeducate the lower classes since they can’t “use” their education, will probably not end up with a better position or prestige (or money we’d say) necessarily:
“I am always afraid of determining on the side of envy or cruelty. The privileges of education may, sometimes, be improperly bestowed, but I shall always fear to withhold them, lest I should be yielding to the suggestions of pride, while I persuade myself that I am following the maxims of policy; and, under the appearance of salutary restraints, should be indulging the lust of dominion, and that malevolence which delights in seeing others depressed.”
Comment: in fact being educated usually does help you end up much higher. No educaiton and you are a cleaning woman, laborer, waitress. An educated woman can be a nurse — the money, respect, self-satisfaction are incomparable. Yes you won’t be using your education in an elite way, but most people don’t want this at all.
Mill’s way of putting Johnson’s comment is less satiric:
“Sufferings arising from causes of this nature usually meet with so little sympathy, that few persons are aware of the great amount of unhappiness even now produced by the feeling of a wasted life.” He ends with the idea that such oppression in principle and acted out against a huge class or group of people “dries up their fountain of happiness” and makes impossible “all that makes life valuable to the individual human being.” This made me remember Seierdstadt’s _The Bookseller of Kabul_. What a horror is life to women in tribal and such unmitigated traditional families. How they prey on one another too. Terrible. Grim.
Comment: all this comes home to my heart as I am the child of working and lower middle class people. I really think I would long ago have committed suicide had I not by chance and luck been able to go to college and develop what nowadays makes my life worth living: books, reading, writing, art, the imaginative life, something I hand on to my daughters.
II. So finally it’s not a case of materialism with Mill at all, and he joins hands with Virginia Woolf at the close of her treatise:
We must not repeat the story of Judith Shakespeare who if she didn’t die young literally died another way.
“if we look past Milton’s bogey [this stands for all the misogyny and false things about women’s lives we are confronted with daily], for no human being should shut out the view [you can see beyond the bad art pushed at you]; if we face the fact,for it is a fact, that there is no arm to cling to, but that we go alone and that our relation to the world of reality and not only to the world of men and women, then the opportunity will come and the dead poet who was
Shakespeare’s sister will put on the body which she has so often laid down. Drawing her life from the lives of the unkinown who were her
forerunners, as her brother did before her, she will be born (Chapter 6, last paragraph).
Woolf maintains that a real women’s literature will come and a better life for women if we will only ground ourselves on ourselves, see clearly the life we really do lead, and through imitating and revivifying real women’s works and writing new ones genuinely out of their paradigms, and face working
in obscurity and for little money, it will be a life worth living.
**********
I won’t be posting this way on Ruskin but go back to the more usual mode of comments and replies and what “hits” me as I read. I thought I would learn something by studying Mill’s line of argument and I have.
I did see lines and passages in Chapters 3 and 4 which seemed to me Mill talking about his relationship with Harriet Taylor, his love and respect for her, and how the relationship taught him much about women. I didn’t underline these as I went and they are secondary to the line of argument so I’ve not included them. They are there. And touching.
Ellen
Ellen,
Two books that discuss gender equality and justice in terms that you use “liberty” that might be useful are —
Susan Moller Okin, Justice, Gender and the Family, Basic Books, 1989.
Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference, Princeton, 1990.
Judith
Ellen,
While I cannot think of a book that does what you ask (though I tried to recognize something of the sort in my book *Rethinking Ethics in the Midst of Violence*), I am intrigued that the historical examples I can think of that recognize women’s embodiment (and the circumscribing of women and others, often through their bodies) as affecting the notion of liberty particularly as applied to women are at least partially written by women.
You point to one, Mill’s *Subjection of Women,* which was written, to some extent, maybe largely, by Harriet Taylor, I think after she became his wife. I believe you can easily find documentation for this.
The second important example is Simone de Beauvoir. Not only was she important in her assistance with Sartre’s writings and for the most part agreed with his existentialist claims (some, who knows how many, may have actually been contributed by her, given the collaborative nature of their relationship), but also she apparently spent a lot of energy trying to make him realize that, for many, their embodiment and the circumscribing of their behavior by others often set far greater constrictions to and limits on freedom than he seemed generally to acknowledge. Her *Ethics of Ambiguity* makes this apparent, though, as I remember, she never specifically addresses her disagreements with him on this point. She simply acknowledges that some human beings, maybe not many, can be kept in such circumstances by the actions of others that they never develop the awareness necessary for freedom. She discusses her own struggle with embodiment in her autobiographical works, specifically t!
he emotional upheavals and crying jags to which she was subject and which apparently Sartre regarded as being in her control.
Linda A. Bell
Ellen,
I was motivated by exactly this concern to focus my scholarship on a feminist theory of liberty. You may find helpful sections of my book: REAL CHOICES: Feminism, Freedom, and the Limits of Law (Penn State University Press, 2001).
I’m working on a new project now also related to liberty, and welcome your reactions and suggestions.
All best,
(Beth Kiyoko) Kiki Jamieson
Have you tried the works of Mary Robinson? Jenny
Today I began to read Biancamaria Fontana’s edition and translation of Benjamin Constant’s Political writings and discovered that I didn’t fully understand Berlin’s idea of positive liberty. I did know that there was something puzzling here as I couldn’t figure out why Berlin’s idea that liberty to be real must be positive as well as negative was attacked. It’s not enough to be unobstructed from doing something; one needs the wherewithal from circumstances to act, so why were modern philosophers attacking the idea and saying it could not stand up and was even dangerous. Indeed Berlin seemed to concede that positive liberty was manipulable and exploited by modern state propaganda.
So, positive liberty also includes liberty men’s active efforts to realize political, social, religious ideals in communities or environments. The problem is immediately apparent. What can happen is one small group or particular man claims his ideal or interest (positive liberty) is that of many other people wehn it’s not at all and we are in danger of an imposition of some norm under the aegis of the “general will” or nationalistic goals. We see this all the time today
Ellen
Hi, Ellen,
I can’t answer your question about a book that deals directly with liberty and women’s bodies.
However, if I may hop on my hobby horse, your query did make me think of
Margaret Coghlan’s Memoirs, which are very much about liberty and the body. The memoir is full of incidents in which she is physically restrained-by soldiers
(during the American Revolution); by her husband, whom she was forced to marry; and by the British legal system, which imprisoned her for debt. She talks
movingly about pregnant women in prison.
All of these incidents are woven into a narrative about her life and her decision to leave her husband and take control of her body. She had affairs with Charles James Fox and other elite men. Moreover, all of this is set explicitly in the context of two wars (American and French Revolutions) in the name of liberty. The memoir is very political, with Coghlan consistently championing common people who rise against their oppressors.
Coghlan’s Memoirs aren’t exactly what you’re looking for, but they seem a wonderful example of a woman very aware of the political implications of her position. I think you might find them interesting.
Caroline
Jane Austen escaping from being answerable with her body:
I’ve been given several titles of good books relative to women, liberty and their bodies. After reading a bit in them, I’ve thought that the hatred of spinsters, bluestockings, and refusal to recognize that lesbians don’t want men, comes from their refusal to be answerable with their bodies, apparent assertion they prefer to read, longings that just ignore men.
It also reminded me of the older school of essays (with many adherents today too) who wrote of “why there is no [overt] sex [or sex at all in the genital sense I’d say) in Austen.
Austen belonged to all three (in effect — or could be so interpreted), and this makes me remember how Twain loathed her (or what she stood for in his
mind), so too Lawrence, how she’s a kind of audience who disdains her and her cult (say Nabokov in truth) as she does idolators.
And she knew she was paying the price, as she has her Emma says, single women have this dreadful propensity to be very poor indeed, and Harriet chimes in despised too.
Ellen