John Stuart Mill 
The Subjection of Women (Barnes & Noble Digital Library) 

This edition includes a modern introduction and a list of suggested further reading.


 



The Subjection of Women (1869) by John Stuart Mill contributed to liberal political theory by extending and developing the ideology of individualism to women. Mill’s thesis was that ‘the legal subordination of one sex to the other is wrong in itself and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement; and it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality.’ His feminist analysis was radical in nineteenth-century England, but it provided the roots of liberal feminist theory in the twentieth-century United States.

About the author

John Stuart Mill was born in a suburb of London on May 20, 1806. By the age of ten he was reading classical authors in the original Greek and Latin; was proficient in history, algebra, and geometry; and soon after began to study logic, political economy, and law. He was elected to Parliament in 1865 and held the Radical seat at Westminster for the next three years. Mill died in Avignon, France, on May 7, 1873.