Even great men must choose their battles which can only be won at the expense of others. In the war of words, John Stuart Mill was like John Locke: he was content for women to be second-class citizens for men to get ahead.

John Locke’s greatest achievement was his idea that a government should be ruled by a body of men, not just one monarch. For that belief, he led most of his life in political exile.

John Stuart Mill was a philosopher as well as a member of parliament. One of his greatest contributions to political thought was his explication of the concept of utilitarianism called the “greatest-happiness principle” which dealt with the idea of doing the greatest good for the largest amount of society.

In Locke’s work, paternal power was interwoven with parental power. He implied that men owned their children. Lock was willing to give women more power if he could transform a patriarchal monarchy into a democratic one, but trying to change a monarchical system proved to be enough of a challenge.

So it was with Mill. Mill stated in “The Subjection of Women” that childbearing is “the one vocation in which there is no one to compete with them” (Mill 183), them being women. Before he develops his assertion that educating women is the only fair way to discover how much talent a woman may have, he insists that almost anything a woman does is inferior to what a man can do. Who would offer equal pay for inferior work? There is nothing utilitarian about being a fool.

He then builds on this idea by intimating that paying women less for what he views, could only be inferior work, would be a method to ensure that women would stay home and not neglect hearth and family. He goes so far as to blame the common man for the idea that almost anything a woman does is inferior to what a man can do. He wants the public to think he is more enlightened, only to sneak through the back door later and reveal that the commonly-held beliefs are also his own.

Mill’s wife, Harriet Taylor Mill, begged him to bring to parliament something for the ladies. Like Locke, he did not go far enough on their behalf. Doing the greatest good for the largest amount of society was pointless if it were not men who held the upper hand.

Work Cited:

Mill, John Stuart. “The Subjection of Women.” Mineola (New York): Dover, 1997.