John Stuart Mill's The Subjection Of Women

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My goal in this paper is to discuss the main ideas in John Stuart Mill's “The Subjection of Women” and the then and now relevance of those ideas. The women rights were always debated in the last centuries, including The Victorian Age. During this age women began to gain more legal rights, but they were still lacking in contrast to men’s rights. One of the people that debated on the gender equality was John Stuart Mill, a British writer and philosopher in the Victorian Age. In this book Mill analyzed women's status in Victorian society and advocated for their equality. The most important ideas of Mill’s book are those about marriage and work, those are also the most relevant nowadays as well. According to Mill’s book a woman's primary duty was to please and serve others and to put her own desires on hold, better said women were expected and taught to get a good husband, and then to stay home, raise the children, listen to her husband, and attend to household affairs. I can say that this idea is still relevant in nowadays, many women are still educated in this manner, and even if they are not educated from home to do so, society does expect them to do so. Women…show more content…
John Stuart Mill debates this problem; he says that this dependence creates a slave-master type of relationship. Mill compares the women with the slaves; how a slave is fearful of displeasing his master because he is the one that gives him food and clothes, a wife is also fearful of displeasing her husband because he is her only means of food, shelter, and social status. Mills takes this even further and says that women can never be truly happy in a marriage if this kind of relation is ruling in their families. At the end Mill argues that marriages and families would be healthier if women were not only educated, but also socially

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