John Stuart Mill

John Stuart Mill is presented as an exceptional male defender of women’s equality whose arguments helped frame the nineteenth-century feminist campaign. In Simone de Beauvoir’s account, his importance lies both in his public advocacy and in the distinction his example illuminates: proclaiming equality matters, but women’s freedom also depends on the material conditions that allow them to act as subjects.

Advocacy and public intervention

Beauvoir places Mill among the rare eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thinkers who considered women’s condition impartially. She describes him as an ardent defender of women and records that in 1867 he made the first case officially pronounced before Parliament in favor of women’s suffrage. His intervention brought the demand for political participation into a formal legislative setting rather than leaving it only to private argument or general principle.

Mill’s case extended beyond the vote. In his writing, he demanded equality between women and men in both family and society, and called for legal subordination between the sexes to be replaced by perfect equality. Beauvoir cites this position as a direct challenge to the institutions that made women subordinate, not as a claim that women should simply be praised within their prescribed social role. The citation is identified in the book’s note as coming from “The Subjection of Women.”

Equality and the feminist movement

Mill’s advocacy appears within a broader history of organizing. After his parliamentary intervention, English women organized politically under Mrs. Fawcett’s leadership. In France, Maria Deraismes addressed women’s issues in a series of public lectures between 1868 and 1871; Léon Richer launched Le Droit des Femmes in 1869 and organized the International Congress of Women’s Rights in 1878. For a time, however, the movement’s demands in France and England remained focused on civil rights, and the suffrage question was not yet taken up in the same way by its principal organizations.

Beauvoir’s placement of Mill among these developments makes him a prominent advocate, but not a stand-in for the movement as a whole. She stresses that feminist organizing was weakened by divisions of class: women often found their interests bound first to their class, so bourgeois and proletarian women did not automatically act in solidarity. Mill’s demand for equality is thus situated alongside collective campaigns whose reach depended on social organization and political opportunity.

Rights and material conditions

A central distinction in Beauvoir’s argument is between rights recognized in principle and freedom made real in daily life. Women’s subordination, she writes, cannot be explained by a single historical event or by numerical minority: women are as numerous as men, yet they have lacked the shared institutions and independent social space that would enable them to organize as a group. Their ties to fathers and husbands, and divisions among women by class and race, further complicate collective action. Mill’s defense of equality confronts this unequal order at the level of principle, while Beauvoir’s wider account asks what would make such equality effective.

That question becomes especially concrete in the history of work. In France, a survey covering 1889–93 found that a woman worker received only half a man’s wages for a day’s equal work; in 1918, women in America also earned half men’s salaries. Employers welcomed women’s low wages, while male workers could view women as cheap competition. Beauvoir argues that women’s integration into unions enabled them to defend their own interests without being positioned against the working class as a whole. The contrast clarifies why legal and political equality alone could not resolve economic dependence.

Historical significance

Beauvoir’s wider history shows the legal structures Mill’s arguments opposed. In ancient Rome, women’s position was shaped by family authority and guardianship; later, the Napoleonic Code restored a stringent marital hierarchy in France. During the nineteenth century, divorce was abolished in 1826, rejected again in 1848, and restored only in 1884 under difficult conditions. The married woman’s status changed in 1938 and 1942, when the duty of obedience was abrogated, but equality between spouses remained incomplete. These shifts show the slow, uneven distance between a claim of equality and its legal realization.

Mill’s significance in the account is therefore twofold: he gave a clear public and philosophical voice to the demand for equality, and his example belongs to a history in which advocacy had to contend with entrenched law, economic inequality, and divisions that limited women’s solidarity. Beauvoir also notes that women had never been given their chances across the fields of public life; the rare success of individual women did not compensate for the collective conditions that restricted them. Equality, on this measure, requires both abstract rights and concrete possibilities.