The Subjugation of Women

John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women is presented as an influential argument that women’s legal subordination is unjust and obstructs human progress. Simone de Beauvoir places Mill’s advocacy within a history of women’s dependence, comparing that condition with other forms of oppression while emphasizing the laws, economic relations, and divisions of class that sustain it. The work’s significance in this account lies not only in its demand for equality, but in its insistence that subordination is built into social arrangements rather than justified by women’s assigned status.

Argument and Historical Place

Mill appears in Beauvoir’s survey as one of the exceptional eighteenth- and nineteenth-century men who considered women’s position objectively. In 1867 he pleaded before Parliament for women’s vote, the first case of its kind officially pronounced there. His writings, as Beauvoir reports them, demanded equality in both family and society and rejected the legal subordination of one sex to the other as a hindrance to human improvement. The argument therefore reached beyond political participation: it challenged the unequal structure of intimate and civic life.

Beauvoir sets Mill’s appeal against the increasingly forceful opposition that accompanied women’s entry into paid work during the Industrial Revolution. As women’s claims acquired an economic basis, defenders of established family arrangements invoked religion, philosophy, and eventually science to argue for women’s inferiority. Mill’s demand for equality stands in this account against a political language that could concede separate status while preserving unequal power.

Law, Marriage, and the Gap Between Rights and Practice

Beauvoir’s historical analysis repeatedly distinguishes a right on paper from the conditions that make it usable. Her discussion of Roman women, for example, describes how a woman’s legal position varied with marriage and guardianship: marriage with manus placed her person and property under her husband’s authority, while sine manu marriage left her property under guardians’ control and divided authority over her between husband and father. These arrangements illustrate the book’s broader concern with how family law distributes power, not simply how it describes status.

The later French history makes the same problem explicit. The Napoleonic Code restricted married women’s civil capacities, required a wife’s obedience, and gave husbands extensive authority over residence, children, contracts, and property. Divorce, abolished in 1826, did not return until 1884, and remained difficult to obtain. Although the duty of obedience was abrogated in reforms of 1938 and 1942, the father remained head of the family and equality between spouses had not been achieved. In this setting, Mill’s demand for equality in the family addresses the institutional core of women’s subordination, not merely an abstract principle.

Work, Class, and Collective Action

Beauvoir also qualifies any simple identification of women’s interests with those of male workers. Employers welcomed women as a low-paid labor force, while male workers could see them as threatening competition. In France, a survey of 1889–93 found that women received only half the wages men received for a day’s equal work; in the United States in 1918, women likewise earned half men’s salaries. Women’s integration into unions, Beauvoir argues, was necessary for them to defend their interests without being used to weaken workers as a whole.

This account clarifies both the material force and the limits of Mill’s political intervention. Beauvoir describes women as dispersed among men and divided by class and race: bourgeois women could be aligned with bourgeois men rather than proletarian women, and white women with white men rather than Black women. Unlike groups able to organize around a shared history, labor, or space, women often lacked the concrete means to establish themselves collectively as subjects. Equality consequently requires more than an appeal to impartiality; it depends on social and economic conditions that allow women to act together and make formal claims effective.

Equality as a Continuing Problem

Mill’s argument is situated within a longer feminist history that includes campaigns for civil rights and suffrage in France and England. Yet Beauvoir shows that the demand for political equality encountered slow progress and internal divisions. Some revolutionary feminists gave priority to class struggle, while others organized specifically around women’s rights. The disagreement reflects the very difficulty the book identifies: women’s shared subordination does not automatically overcome the economic and social ties that divide them.

The work’s continuing importance in Beauvoir’s account is its challenge to treat an existing hierarchy as natural or permanent. Her analysis compares the mechanisms used to subordinate women with those used against racial and class groups, while also distinguishing their histories and circumstances. Mill’s call for equality thus becomes part of a wider question: whether women can move from rights asserted in principle to the collective and material power needed to exercise them.