Essay Questions

Explicate John Stuart Mill’s obvious ideology.

Mill’s prime ideology is to sanction gender equivalence. In the inaugural paragraph he writes, “The object of this Essay is to explain as clearly as I am able, the grounds of an opinion which I have held from the very earliest period when I had formed any opinions at all on social or political matters, and which, instead of being weakened or modified, has been constantly growing stronger by the progress of reflection and the experience of life: That the principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes—the legal subordination of one sex to the other—is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement; and that it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other.” The foremost paragraph renders Mill’s essay a feminist script that censures the legal sponsorship of gender inequity. Mill’s concession regarding the ‘chief hindrances’ linked with gender disparity deduces that he is an impartial critic who would not ratify the dominance of males because he is a male.

How have women somehow promoted their own subjection? How have they subverted male dominion?

Mill writes, “But, it will be said, the rule of men over women differs from all these others in not being a rule of force: it is accepted voluntarily; women make no complaint, and are consenting parties to it.” The women’s deliberate reception of male dominion has been injurious in endorsing gender equivalence. The women’s overt harmony gathers that they are gratified with the dominant eminence of gender dissimilarity.

Comparatively, Mill observes, “In the first place, a great number of women do not accept it. Ever since there have been women able to make their sentiments known by their writings (the only mode of publicity which society permits to them), an increasing number of them have recorded protests against their present social condition: and recently many thousands of them, headed by the most eminent women known to the public, have petitioned Parliament for their admission to the Parliamentary Suffrage. The claim of women to be educated as solidly, and in the same branches of knowledge, as men, is urged with growing intensity, and with a great prospect of success; while the demand for their admission into professions and occupations hitherto closed against them, becomes every year more urgent.”

Here, Mill authenticates that not all womenfolk are unconscious of gender equivalence. The female writers have engaged writing to relay their sentimentalities relating to the impairments of gender unfairness. Protests for ‘Parliamentary Suffrage’ surmise that not all women are content with being politically dormant. Furthermore, clamours for identical educational chances are signals of the females’ longing for knowledge and enlightenment. For gender equality to prevail womenfolk must be the front runners in activism for changes that would nurture parity among all genders. Approval of inequality status quo will fortify adverse gender differences.