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Blog entry :

Blog By Truthseeker013

title : Something for Grapost...

dated : 3:14pm Oct 06, 2008

I just finished reading last week's New Yorker, and there was an article on a biography of John Stuart mill, a famous Victorian England philosopher and politician. This is a lengthy excerpt, so please bear with me...

"Harriet {(Taylor)'s own writing of the 1830s and 40s on the oppression of marriage has the urgency of immediate experience. A smart woman who had been obliged to be someone's idea of a wife, she had been at that table with the dumb little dictator: 'The most insignificant of men, the man who can obtain influence or consideration nowhere else, finds one place where he is chief and head. THere is one person, often greatly his superior in understanding, who is obliged to consult him, and whom he is not obliged to consult. He is judge, magistrate, ruler, over their joint concerns.' Mill and Taylor, in their later writing, most famously in the 1869 "The Subjection of Women," aren't content to show that women would be happier if freer; they go right to the ground and ask what reason we have for thinking that *any* restraint on women's freedom is just. The arguments against women's liberty have to do with what is natural for women to do, or what women are capable of doing, or what some men would be offended by. They take each case and show that its only rationale is our slavery to custom. WOmen are naturally passive? Go tell Queen Elizabeth. They are happy in their lot? All slaves say as much to the slave master. They are "designed" to have children? No argument from nature can ever alter an argument from ethics: if women want to raise children, excellent; if they don't, there is no natural reason to think they must any more than there is a reason to think that male philosophers should all put down their pens and go out hunting mammoths.

"Mill makes the point again and again that no one can possibly know what women are or are not 'naturally' good at, since their opportunities have been so vanishingly small compared with the length of their oppression."

- from 'Right Again: The passions of John Stuart Mill' by Adam Gopnik, from the 6 October issue of the New Yorker