Westernization and Women’s Rights

The Ethics of Instrumental and Eurocentric Rhetoric in Mill’s Subjection of Women

Mill’s liberal utilitarianism was his philosophical attempt to correct classical utilitarianism’s neglect of individual rights in favor of promoting the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Mill’s answer to Bentham and James Mill was to define individual self-development, in all its rich eccentricity, as the greatest good, or utility, of the human species. ²³ This liberal approach to utilitarianism generated many powerful arguments for women’s rights because it emphasized both the public and individual utility of such rights. Yet the idea of public utility yielded instrumental arguments for women’s rights that could rhetorically portray women’s social, economic, and political opportunities as tools for other development goals, rather than as good outcomes for individual women. ²⁴ Chapter four of the Subjection of Women contains several examples of instrumental arguments for women’s rights: equality of rights will make men less selfish and more intellectually stimulated by marriage, plus double “the mass of mental faculties available for the higher service of humanity.” ²⁵

In the context of debates on Westernization, such instrumental arguments might conceive of women’s rights as a means for advancing Western models of economic growth or education. Perhaps most problematically for feminism, instrumental arguments can imply that the issue of women’s rights is of secondary concern to some other purpose. Conditions of cultural or political imperialism, including colonialism, can exacerbate the ethical problems associated with this form of reasoning. If an argument for women’s rights assumes the superiority of Western culture over another culture, it contributes to the legitimation of the idea of Western domination over other cultures. Women’s rights, ironically, can become a means for justifying cultural imperialism, even though the concept’s aim is to liberate all women from conditions of domination.

The inequalities of power that colonized or developing peoples face in national and international politics make the rhetorical and ethical implications of such instrumental feminist arguments even worse. As Mohanty has argued, feminism can be represented as a tool handed down to colonized or developing peoples for their advancement according to a higher Western standard. ²⁶ The construction of women’s rights as an instrument of Western reform only contributes to the perception that the indigenous culture is inferior and lacking its own resources for enabling women’s empowerment.

Through an analysis of the Western biases and instrumental feminist argumentation of the Subjection of Women, we show how its rhetoric sets up a liberal imperial model for women’s rights arguments. The book opens with Mill’s attack on the customs that keep women subjected to men in nineteenth-century society, even in “all the countries of Christian Europe.” ²⁷ Mill critiqued the endurance of the antiquated practice of the “social subordination of women” in an otherwise civilized Western Europe by confronting his readers with an extended counterfactual: imagine that St. Paul’s cathedral in London—the epicenter of the Church of England—did not exist, but instead a “gigantic” megalithic “dolmen” or a “vast” Roman pagan temple of “Jupiter Olympius” was still used by British Protestants for their daily worship. ²⁸ This complex metaphor suggests that the subjection of women is a “relic” of primitive culture and religion, which Western Europeans ought to entirely transcend. ²⁹

These locutions have the effect of locating Mill’s conception of modern civilization in Western Europe, particularly “a civilized and Christian England.” ³⁰ Granted, this bias is unsurprising for a man of Mill’s culture and status, but it is nonetheless one that contributes to a series of rhetorical oppositions between Western Europe and the rest of the world. ³¹ In chapter two, he stated that Christianity “has been the religion of the progressive portion of mankind, and Islamism, Brahminism, &c., have been those of the stationary portions; or rather . . . the declining portions.” ³² Although Tunick and Mantena have shown that Mill did not designate Muslim and Hindu cultures as permanently stagnant or absolutely incapable of development, the above statement implies their relative—yet likely long-term—cultural inferiority to “Christian Europe.” ³³ Trading on the religious biases of his Western European, and especially English Protestant audience, Mill employs a series of mutually reinforcing rhetorical binaries in the Subjection of Women: women’s rights/women’s subjection; Western Europe/Eastern cultures; European Christianity/Hinduism and Islam.

In chapter two, Mill identified the institution of patriarchal marriage as the effective cause of the enduring subjection of women across modern societies from East to West. Although he identified it as a global source of women’s contemporary subjection to men, he conceptualized patriarchal marriage not in universal and culturally non-specific, but in primitivist and Orientalist, terms. Patriarchal marriage was a “relic of primitive barbarism” and thus existed “under a varnish of civilization and cultivation” in developed countries. ³⁴ In a series of prejudicial rhetorical moves, he associated the barbarism of patriarchal marriage with Eastern cultures and religions.

Mill used familiar Orientalist symbols such as the “odalisque” to develop his critical account of female domestic servitude in patriarchal marriages. ³⁵ In contending that “it was wrong to bring up women with any acquirements but those of an odalisque, or a domestic servant,” Mill likened European wives to female slaves sequestered in the seraglio, or private living quarters of the wives and concubines in a Turkish Muslim household in the Ottoman empire. ³⁶ Capitalizing on his nineteenth-century Occidental male audience’s intrigue with the dark, sensual Arab “other,” he cast a female Muslim servant as a negative yet sexually charged trope in his argument for women’s right to higher education. The odalisque, in this discursive context, represented the basest yet most exotic form of female subordination: enslavement to female slaves and their polygamous sultan. ³⁷ She was a metaphorical object of conflicted, Christian European male desire and judgment, not a human subject in a different religious tradition who was as entitled to education as the European wife. ³⁸

Mill furthermore adopted the alluring yet taboo setting of the seraglio as a mirror for exposing to European eyes the perverse effects of patriarchy on both spouses. ³⁹ He compared a European wife to a “Sultan’s favorite slave,” in order to show that “the desirable thing would be that she should neither have slaves nor be a slave.” ⁴⁰ He complained of the “sublime and sultan-like” self-image of men in the patriarchal family. ⁴¹ Breaking down the distinction between the symbolic and the real, Mill went so far as to speak for “the women in the harem of an Oriental” by claiming that they “do not complain of not being allowed the freedom of European women. They think our women insufferably bold and unfeminine.” ⁴² In this way, Mill followed Enlightenment thinkers such as Wollstonecraft who took advantage of the European salience of anti-Muslim stereotypes to make arguments for women’s rights that treat Muslim culture as contrary to the progressive feminist values of Western Europe. ⁴³

Mill’s rhetorical strategies on behalf of women’s rights also targeted Indian culture. Mill cited the “violent abuse” of women in “Hindoo writings” as evidence of the “Oriental” view that “women are by nature peculiarly voluptuous.” ⁴⁴ By contrasting this sexual and violent “Oriental” view of women with milder and merely “ridiculous” European chauvinistic attitudes, Mill reinforced the idea of European preeminence over Asian cultures on the question of women’s status. ⁴⁵ He also belied his “latent,” or unreflective, Orientalism in sketching Asian women as what Said has called “creatures of a male power-fantasy.” ⁴⁶

Invoking the authority of his work for the EIC, Mill explained how his “long official knowledge of Hindu governments” gave him insight into the “natural capacity of women for government.” ⁴⁷ In a backhanded compliment, he noted that Indian women have been competent and prolonged legal regents of principalities during the minorities of male heirs, despite the fact that “these princesses have never been seen in public, have never conversed with any man not of their own family except from behind a curtain, that they don’t read, and if they did, there is no book in their languages which can give them the smallest instruction in political affairs.” ⁴⁸ Despite his other writings on the value of indigenous Indian cultures and languages, Mill here marshals British presumptions about the colonized Indians—including illiteracy, cultural bankruptcy, and political ineptitude—for the sake of an argument for women’s “natural” capacity for governmental leadership. ⁴⁹

In chapter four, Mill laid out his major instrumental argument for the institutionalization of equal rights between the sexes. The effect of “giving to women the free use of their faculties,” “leaving them the free choice of their employments,” and “opening to them the same field of occupation and the same prizes and encouragements as to other human beings” would be “that of doubling the mass of mental faculties available for the higher service of humanity.” ⁵⁰ By arguing that women’s full development as human beings would double economic and civilizational progress, Mill opened the door for women’s rights to be seen and used as a tool for development, rather than for the well-being of individual women. Mill concluded the book with a telling reminder that his own end-goal in defending women’s rights was to enhance “all that makes life valuable to the individual human being.” ⁵¹ In light of this, he cannot be fairly understood as a straightforward imperialist on the issue of women’s rights or any other political issue. ⁵² While his feminist arguments were sometimes imperial in implication and (as we shall see) in application, his rights-based individualistic liberalism also endowed his political theory with cosmopolitan potential for the woman question.

The rhetorical advantage of privileging the Western over the cosmopolitan perspective was not lost on Mill, however. He freely admitted that he had to persuade British and European men in positions of political power to adopt the cause of women’s rights in order for the movement to succeed. ⁵³ In chapter four, Mill likened discrimination against women to the discrimination that men in “unenlightened societies” face: “What, in unenlightened societies, colour, race, religion, or in the case of a conquered country, nationality, are to some men, sex is to all women; a preemptory exclusion from almost all honorable occupations.” ⁵⁴ Even as he was issuing a universal critique of unjust discrimination on the basis of race, religion, and sex, he wielded the prejudiced binary between “unenlightened” societies and Western societies to motivate European men to protect their wives and daughters from such discrimination. Ironically, both the Western biases and the instrumental feminist arguments of the Subjection of Women have led it to be engaged on the issues of women’s rights and development, as illustrated by the comparative analysis of the following Russian, Chilean, and colonial Indian forewords.

Westernization versus Populism: The Subjection of Women in Russia circa 1869

According to Stites, the Russian feminist movement had gained steam in the late 1850s with a debate over medical careers for women, as some had served as nurses in the Crimean War. Vera Pavlovna—the heroine of Chernyshevsky’s influential novel What Is To Be Done? (1863)—expressed the radical idea that economic independence, not merely sexual or personal freedom, enabled a woman’s realization of her full humanity. Women’s clubs, devoted to charity, education, and business ventures such as publishing Russian translations of English works, emerged in St. Petersburg in the early 1860s. The “drive to higher education” for and by women in Russia commenced in 1868. ⁵⁵ Six printings of the Subjection of Women in St. Petersburg in 1869-1870 was another milestone for the growing feminist movement in Russia. ⁵⁶

Prior to 1869, Mill was already influential in Russian intellectual and political life. ⁵⁷ Around the time that he sponsored the women’s suffrage petition in the British Parliament in 1867, Mill corresponded with a Russian friend about the movement to establish a women’s university there. Evident in the letter was the Western bias of Mill’s theory of women’s rights, as shown in his supposition that Russia would “prove that a nation relatively recently civilized grasps the great ideas of amelioration sooner than the older ones.” ⁵⁸ The three radical journalists who penned forewords to Russian editions of Mill’s Subjection of Women duly noted the Western bias of Mill’s philosophy of women’s rights that led him to situate their nation as “recently civilized” on the scale of European civilization. To varying degrees, they accepted or disputed this view in using Mill’s ideas to outline their distinctive accounts of how to advance the rights of women in the context of political debates on Westernization, economic development, and populist reform in Russia.

Grigory Blagosvetlov (1824-1880) was born in Stavropol. He trekked to England in 1857 to live and study with the radical expatriate Russian journalist Alexander Herzen (1812-1870). Returning to St. Petersburg via Paris in 1860, he founded the journal Delo (The Cause) there in 1866. ⁵⁹ For his commitment to the 1861 emancipation of the serfs, the rights of women, and individual liberty, Blagosvetlov was described in one nineteenth-century Russian biography as an “extreme radical Westernizer.” ⁶⁰ The Westernizers challenged the philosophy of the Slavophiles, pitting the idea of “free, autonomous personality” against the demand to a return “to the old Slavic principles of ‘community life.’” According to Walicki, Russian Westernism was not “a homogenous school of thought” but rather a “common denominator” for intellectuals who “believed Russia might and should follow the general pattern of European progress.” ⁶¹ Blagosvetlov’s foreword to his 1869 edition of the Subjection of Women sets forth his vision of Westernization in Russia by building on the Orientalist and instrumental feminist arguments, as much as the liberal individualism, of Mill.

Blagosvetlov began his foreword by upholding the “social status of women” as one of the “main issues of contemporary European philosophy.” ⁶² Yet he situated Russia outside of this debate, since it was “two centuries behind from where, in the sphere of intellectual culture, the English find themselves in the present time.” ⁶³ He called for the immediate practical implementation of Mill’s philosophy of women’s rights in Russia: “the question is not whether it is timely to hold here a discussion of emancipation of women as it is understood by people of higher intellectual culture,” but rather “to what extent a Russian society is able to reduce and eliminate those obstacles that stand in the way of carrying out this great life goal of the contemporary generation.” ⁶⁴

Deploying the Orientalist imagery found in Mill’s work to rhetorically distance himself from the Slavophiles, Blagosvetlov stated that “Russia can no longer go back to its old Asiatic stillness.” ⁶⁵ Against these nationalists’ romanticization of Russia’s supposedly republican past, he upheld “European civilization” as the “role model for her future prosperity” not “the aged Eastern heritage that our pseudo patriots are ready to perceive as uniqueness or majestic serenity.” ⁶⁶ Employing one of Mill’s images from the Turkish seraglio, he proposed that Russia should face the question of whether it would “benefit by allowing a woman to obtain an independent status, i.e. if we make a real mother out of a simple wet nurse, if we make a free member of the family out of a household maid, a real loving wife out of a harem odalisque, a lively and active force out of a dead social material?” ⁶⁷ While Mill had contrasted his subversive and “disturbing” ideal of the educated woman with the “odalisque” or “domestic servant,” Blagosvetlov revealed the limits of his feminism with his rather conservative opposition of the “harem odalisque” to the “real loving wife” to be produced by Russian women’s liberation. ⁶⁸ Following Mill’s rhetoric more closely, he demarcated progress and feminism as Western European values by using Asiatic and Muslim caricatures to mock the backwardness of the Slavophiles on these issues. Although these tropes had an ironic sense in the context of Russia’s place between East and West, they still have the rhetorical effect of casting women’s rights as a Western imperative. ⁶⁹

Building on Mill’s liberal utilitarianism, Blagosvetlov applied the main instrumental feminist argument from chapter four of the Subjection of Women to Russia. He predicted that equal rights in Russia would mean double the economic productivity: “two hundred years of people’s activity under the same social conditions would be reduced to one hundred years, and for underdeveloped people that saves an enormous amount of labor and time.” ⁷⁰ Advancing women’s rights was not primarily about promoting women’s freedom and personal development, but rather a step in the process of giving Russia “a right to declare itself to be an educated people rather than a useless one.” ⁷¹

Speaking not as a Westernizer but rather as a leftist populist, Nikolai Mikhailovsky (1842-1904) offered an alternative perspective on the relevance of Mill’s theory of women’s rights for social justice in Russia. In 1869, he published both his most famous statement of his populism—”What is Progress?”—and his foreword to his edition of the Subjection of Women. ⁷² As Berlin argued, Mikhailovsky held a variation of the Rousseauian view of civilization: more progress equals less diverse individual development. ⁷³ Mikhailovsky thus challenged On Liberty’s theory that more progress equals more diverse individual development. ⁷⁴ His leftist populism also led him to criticize the capitalist economic assumptions that drove Mill’s liberal conception of civilizational progress. Distrustful of any division of labor that further aggravated the “relations that exist between labor and capital,” he argued that Russia needed an agrarian economy organized upon a socialist system of peasant communes. ⁷⁵ Only in such an agrarian society could Russia avoid the cultural homogeneity and flattening of individual development caused by a specialized division of labor and the advancement of Western industrialism. ⁷⁶

Mikhailovsky’s foreword to the Subjection of Women illustrates how he adapted its liberal argument for equal rights for the sexes to fit his populist economic views. His edition of Mill’s book also included the correspondence of Mill and the French positivist Auguste Comte on the women’s issue in the 1840s. ⁷⁷ He praised Comte’s positivism as the basis of modern empirical research but rejected “Comte’s reference to the great organic law of male sex supremacy in all higher levels of the Animal Kingdom” as “baseless.” ⁷⁸ Dismissing such biological explanations for sex inequality, Mikhailovsky theorized, “the female sex issue, too, boils down to division of labor.” ⁷⁹ A return to a more simple agricultural economy would ameliorate the conditions of social and sex inequality caused by the specialized division of labor within Western industrialism.

After exposing Comte’s patriarchal biases, Mikhailovsky praised Mill’s application of Comtian positivism for empirically studying and logically solving the problem of sex inequality. Mill’s Subjection of Women was useful for Russia because its theory was moderate, logical, fact-based, and attentive to the particularities of “time and place.” ⁸⁰ Critically situating himself as a native intellectual in a developing country, Mikhailovsky upheld Mill as a logical, empirical model for how to think through the woman question in Russia. Like Blagosvetlov, he sought to import Mill’s theory of women’s rights into Russia because of its instrumental value for his own theory of how Russia ought to develop. Unlike Blagosvetlov, he valued Mill’s method for analyzing sex inequality more than the liberal values and goals of the Subjection of Women.

Mikhailovsky’s application of Mill’s method to the problem of sex inequality in Russia revealed the priority of populism to feminism in his political theory. When he claimed that the “women’s issue, being the issue of labor and knowledge as such, isn’t just a specifically women’s issue but rather a simple human one,” he meant that the women’s issue was an epiphenomenon of deeper economic problems. Mikhailovsky limited women’s economic opportunities more severely than Mill in the name of populist economics. Distrustful of any division of labor that “escalates competition in the job market,” he warned against women taking away men’s traditional jobs for the pittance of “several hundred rubles a year.” ⁸¹ Instead, he supported women’s movement into the new economic realm of “science” because it is a “vast sphere” where “there is no danger of competition.” ⁸² Contradicting his repeated criticisms of the negative impact of the specialized division of labor on human individuality and society as a whole, he argued for educated Russian women’s economic segregation in scientific work. Although he built on Mill’s ideal of the educated woman, he diverged from Mill’s commitment to the sexless “equal moral right of all human beings” to self-develop through work of one’s choice. ⁸³

Like Blagosvetlov, Mikhailovsky privileged his conception of just economic development in Russia over the women’s issue. In their adaptations of Mill’s theory and rhetoric, they both succumbed to a problem endemic to the Subjection of Women. Each thinker’s prior commitment to a view of economic development (whether liberal imperial, Westernizer, or populist) compromised, to varying degrees, the generality and egalitarianism of the resulting feminist arguments.

From St. Petersburg to Santiago: Feminist Liberal Responses to the Subjection of Women, 1870-1872

Another radical Russian journalist, Maria Tsebrikova, penned a stronger feminist prologue to Mill’s Subjection of Women in 1870. ⁸⁴ In her feminist liberal approach to Mill, Tsebrikova paralleled her contemporary, Martina Barros Borgono of Chile. Borgono translated and introduced the first Spanish-language edition of the Subjection of Women for the Revista de Santiago in 1872. ⁸⁵ These women from strikingly different political contexts—a developing Russia and a post-colonial Chile, independent from Spain since 1818—illustrate how Mill’s book can inspire feminist liberals to conceptualize women’s rights as a valuable goal unto itself within liberalism. As with Baehr and Abbey, feminist liberal means philosophical approaches to the problem of women’s subjection that prioritize commitments to women’s rights amidst other liberal political views. ⁸⁶

Borgono (1850-1941) was born in Santiago to an upper-class, politically influential Chilean family. Her early education was at a school in Santiago run by a British Protestant woman. Her uncle—the historian and liberal political figure Diego Barros Arana—educated her after age eleven. Her fiancé Augusto Orrego edited the liberal journal Revista de Santiago. With his encouragement and translation assistance, the twenty-two-year-old boldly published her serialized edition of Mill’s Subjection of Women. Her feminist prologue to the edition made her a radical figure among the typically conservative Chilean women of her social class. It was one of the first public feminist writings in Chilean culture, following the 1865 newspaper articles in the El Eco de las Señoras de Santiago by elite Catholic women who sought the right to vote in order to defend their religion. Active in the Chilean women’s rights movement through the early twentieth century, Borgono eventually joined the Catholic Conservative party, which, unlike the anticlerical Liberals, made women’s suffrage a legislative priority. Borgono lived to see the passage of women’s municipal suffrage in her nation’s Congress in 1934, just seven years before her death. ⁸⁷

Tsebrikova (1835-1917) was born in Cronstadt to an orthodox Russian family with military ties. She was educated by her uncle, Nicolai Romanovich Tsebrikov, a Decembrist whose “revolutionary liberalism” of the 1820s had resulted in years of Siberian banishment. ⁸⁸ Tsebrikova became an editor of the leading leftist Russian journal of letters, Notes of the Fatherland, in late-1860s St. Petersburg. In 1870, she published her foreword to the Subjection of Women and organized evening classes for women on the topic of women’s rights. ⁸⁹ After a prolific writing career, which produced an internationally known essay on Russian women for Theodore Stanton’s The Woman Question in Europe (1884), she was banished to Smolensk in 1890 by Alexander III for sending him a letter criticizing his government’s “persecution of free-thought.” ⁹⁰

Beyond the intriguing parallels in their upbringings and careers, Borgono and Tsebrikova shared an interpretive approach to the Subjection of Women, treating it as a philosophical text that invited their own critical reflections on how to best advance women’s rights. Tsebrikova only mentioned Mill to accentuate the political differences between the commentator and the author. She criticized Mill for not thoroughly investigating the solutions to the problem of women’s subjection: “Having proven the legitimacy of the woman’s right for equality, Mill proves the necessity to set her free. Here, however, he stops halfway.” ⁹¹ She offered her own solution to women’s subjection: the enabling of women’s employment outside the home, regardless of marital status. After pointing out that “Mill has a different solution for the problem,” she showed that he primarily defended unmarried or widowed women’s work outside the home. ⁹² Departing from Mill, Tsebrikova contended that women were needed to “spread ideas in remote and stagnated corners of Russia, to fight against prejudice by means of words and example, to create societies to enlighten common people, to reduce prostitution, to invent new sources of employment for women, create workshops for people.” ⁹³ With an optimistic sense of the breadth of professional opportunity for women in the future, she concluded: “There will be plenty of work; we only need women who will do it. By contributing her time and talent to a useful activity in the sphere of her choice, a woman will prove by action that, as far as she is concerned, the time when she used to be an odalisque or a slave is in the past.” ⁹⁴ Although she sometimes used the Orientalist imagery and Eurocentric ideas of progress that animated both Mill’s work and Russian debates on Westernization, Tsebrikova took a feminist liberal stand in upholding the value of women’s rights for the enhancement of Russian women’s freedom and self-worth, not economic utility.

Similarly, Borgono critically described Mill as “a serene and elevated thinker who, like all those who search for the truth, may sometimes lose his way,” then cited him only to support the development of her own views. ⁹⁵ She praised the empirical method of the Subjection of Women but indicated how its theory of civilizational progress contributed to misrepresentations of women’s condition and history. She noted that Mill’s binary between the “barbarity” of women’s subjection and their civilized liberation obscured the fact that some women had an elevated social status in feudal society. ⁹⁶ It furthermore ignored the fact that feminist argumentation had a history: “Ever since books have appeared in the world, women have made their complaints be heard.” ⁹⁷ Borgono also questioned the feminist import of Mill’s utilitarian arguments for civilizational progress: “Stuart Mill, when describing the advantages society would reap from the equal education of men and women, pauses to point out . . . the stimulus which men would receive upon seeing the need to justify their supposed superiority over women; and the more beneficial influence the educated women would exercise over boys and men as their mothers and wives.” ⁹⁸ These consequences were suspect to Borgono, as they focused on the utility of women’s rights for males. She supplied an alternative list of advantages that derive from women’s education, including the development of women’s capacity for deductive reason, the scientific progress of humanity, and the egalitarian transformation of marriage and the family such that “respect and mutual confidence will be the patrimony of all homes.” ⁹⁹ Turning Mill’s liberal utilitarian ideas toward more robust feminist ends, Borgono emphasized the value of women’s rights for women first, and subsequently for humanity at large.

Neither feminist liberal sought to mimic Mill’s views, or the politics of the West, in developing their arguments for women’s rights. While Tsebrikova to some degree assessed the need for women’s rights in Russia in terms of the gap between it and the West, she generally compared the two cultures in sociological not normative terms. For example, she adapted her ideas for reform to the fact that Russia did not have a “society in the sense that Western Europe understands the meaning of the word, i.e. in the sense of an independent force with recognized influence.” ¹⁰⁰ She also rooted her advocacy for women’s rights in the particular social situations of a variety of Russian women. In arguing that “pregnancy and giving birth . . . can be an obstacle only to women who are sick and physically weak,” she cited the Russian “Peasant women” who “work during the last days of their pregnancy term” whose “health can’t be compared to the one of idle society ladies.” ¹⁰¹ Tsebrikova differentiated women’s experiences within her nation as part of her argument for generally improving women’s health, education, and employment options.

Borgono’s prologue was silent on Westernization and Spanish colonialism and their impact on the woman question in Chile. She claimed, “If one thing has encumbered the resolution of this problem it has been the tenacious insistence of considering it through the inflamed prism of politics.” ¹⁰² She thus treated the Subjection of Women as a philosophical point of departure, distinct from the prejudices of any particular culture or political system. She grounded her argument for women’s rights on a universalistic theory of human nature. Following Mill, she argued that each human had the same natural right “to develop oneself; to freely cultivate one’s soul.” ¹⁰³ Biological sex differences, however, meant that men and women would naturally excel at different things. Borgono echoed the Subjection of Women’s call to make the human species more “rich” through the activation of women’s capabilities, with the twist that sexual difference would be enhanced in this process. ¹⁰⁴

In attempting to transcend the limits of her political situation in the name of advancing women’s rights, Borgono avoided direct engagement of the post-colonial political context of the woman question in Chile. Her recently independent nation was embroiled in debates about the scope and purpose of representative government, including the issues of men’s and women’s suffrage, in the 1860s and 1870s. ¹⁰⁵ Her rebuttals of arguments against women’s rights mirrored the contemporary Chilean debates without directly mentioning them. ¹⁰⁶ Cognizant of the “seditious” import of Mill’s book for her conservative culture, Borgono made a strategic distinction between advocating for women’s “social rights” of education, employment, and self-development and women’s formal political rights such as voting or office-holding. ¹⁰⁷ Although she later became an outspoken women’s suffragist, Borgono argued in her 1872 prologue that “women do not call for these political rights; what she wants, what she needs, are her social rights.” ¹⁰⁸ This gradualist approach to reform made her theory of women’s rights fit the values of the Catholic Conservative party, which introduced the first women’s suffrage bill in the Chilean Congress in 1917. ¹⁰⁹

Tsebrikova’s universalistic rights arguments, coupled with her attention to the sociological context of Russian women’s subjugation, offered an alternative feminist liberal model of how to advocate for women’s rights. Her feminist essays, which used rich descriptions of the life of Russian women to support her arguments for the rights of women in general, were published in nineteenth-century Europe, Britain, and America. ¹¹⁰ Tsebrikova’s brand of feminist liberalism bridged Russia and the nascent international feminist movement that sought to draw insights about women from a variety of countries to marshal global support for the cause. ¹¹¹

The prioritization of women’s rights can lead feminist liberals to take a more universalistic or cosmopolitan perspective on the problem of women’s subjection, seeing it as a matter of global—not just local—justice. As Tsebrikova put it, “The so-called women’s issue is the issue of enjoying rights and of the liberation of half of humankind, and, thus, it is the issue of a reasonable organization of life for humankind.” ¹¹² The comparison of Borgono’s and Tsebrikova’s forewords to the Subjection of Women demonstrates how the former developed a philosophically cosmopolitan yet nationally salient feminist liberalism, while the latter developed a sociologically rich yet internationally salient feminist liberalism. In theorizing women’s rights as a vital part of a just scheme of human development, Borgono and Tsebrikova gravitated toward the feminist and liberal individualist rather than the liberal imperial aspects of the Subjection of Women.

Colonialism and Feminism: The Subjection of Women in British India, 1902-1908

While Borgono and Tsebrikova used the Subjection of Women as a platform for launching their universalistic feminist liberal philosophies, two early twentieth-century Indian intellectuals addressed Mill’s book from the standpoint of their colonization by Britain. Govind Vasudev Kanitkar of Maharashtra translated and introduced the Marathi edition of the Subjection of Women in 1902, and Jivabhai Revabhai Patel of Gujarat translated and introduced the Gujarati edition in 1908. ¹¹³ Building on the post-colonial theory of Fanon, Jayanti Patel, and Said, we argue that Kanitkar’s and Patel’s philosophical responses to the Subjection of Women respectively represent the “assimilation” and “self-discovery” stages of the colonial intellectual. ¹¹⁴ While Kanitkar appropriated a colonial British model of using Mill’s liberal feminism to promote Westernization for the development of India, Patel defined his culturally specific conception of women’s rights against the pressure to Westernize in the colonial political predicament. Their differing treatments of women’s rights and Westernization reflect the political tensions within early twentieth-century India’s shift from imperial rule under the British to a growing indigenous, nationalist, independence movement. In examining these indigenous colonial Indian responses to the Subjection of Women, we add a new, post-colonial perspective to Mill scholars’ traditional emphases on his views on India and the “East” in his political thought and his work for the East India Company. ¹¹⁵

Anagol has chronicled the growth of an indigenous, pre-nationalistic feminist movement in India by the 1870s, especially in the region of Maharashtra. ¹¹⁶ According to O’Hanlan, a public debate emerged in this decade in western India on “the ways in which Indian and Hindu women might develop and transform themselves, whilst preserving what was best in ‘traditional’ culture.” ¹¹⁷ It is in this context that the Marathi translator Kanitkar (1854-1918) came to address the women’s issue. ¹¹⁸ Kanitkar was a poet, reformer, and sub-judge in the colonial legal system. ¹¹⁹ In the late 1860s, he joined a group of his male, Brahmin friends in implementing their liberal ideas “by educating their own child-wives.” ¹²⁰ These women, led by Kanitkar’s wife, Kashibai (1861-1948), organized their own feminist society, Striyancha Sabha, in 1880s Maharashtra. The all-female group read Austen, Eliot, and the Subjection of Women, and promoted the cause of women’s education in the region. ¹²¹ The couple came to embody the model of companionate marriage among intellectual equals that was popular in late nineteenth-century Brahmin society. ¹²²

Kanitkar recalled his own exposure to the Subjection of Women around 1870, when he married Kashibai and entered university. ¹²³ In 1872, Kanitkar published Sushikshit Stricharitra, which explored the traditional ideal of “pativrata,” or the chaste and devoted wife, and its compatibility with education. Contrary to traditionalists who thought education would make Indian women unfaithful and rebellious, Kanitkar argued that education would make mothers and daughters more chaste and respectable. ¹²⁴

Kanitkar’s foreword recalled how he finally fulfilled his “sacred duty” to translate the treatise into Marathi after years of contemplating the project. ¹²⁵ With a kind of stoicism that belied a deeper sense of loss in the wake of British cultural imperialism, he supplied his motivation for translating the book: “The language of Maharashtra may or may not flourish in the future.” ¹²⁶ His translation also had a reformist agenda: undermine the “ridicule” of the “topic of the ‘subjection of women’” in local Indian culture. To show that ancient Hindu culture shared Mill’s deep respect for women, he cited the Sanskrit epic Mahabharata: “The wife is a man’s half. The wife is the first of friends.” ¹²⁷

Recounting how he first translated selections of the Subjection of Women for the “popular magazines ‘Manoranjan’ and ‘Nibandh Chandrika’ in Pune” around 1890, ¹²⁸ he metaphorically addressed Mill’s book as though it was an Englishwoman he had been courting:

O lady! It has been several years—almost 20 years—since I chanced upon your liberal and charming character. At the time, I had just been admitted to university; since the day, I had a deep wish to acquire you! But you were a foreigner! You were born in the bountiful land of the independent and triumphant English! So, how could you be acquired by a poor Brahmin like me! My mind would return to you again and again. Finally, I made the determination to forcefully clothe you in a Maharashtrian costume and bring you to my people!” ¹²⁹

This strikingly sexual and latently violent representation of Mill’s book as a “liberal” English “lady” whom Kanitkar “forcefully” clothed in the “costume” of his native language illustrates his predicament as a colonial intellectual. In attempting to assimilate the Western liberal feminist values of Mill while adapting them to some of the traditional values of his own culture, Kanitkar reproduced in his writing the imbalances of power caused by the intersection of patriarchy and colonialism in India. In imagining the translation of Mill’s book as “forcefully” fitting it into the clothing of his language, he indulges in a troubling symbolic reversal of British cultural imperialism. He declares his ambivalence to the “lady” with an emotional reference to the Mahabharata: “I both want you and do not want you! Or, like the cursed Dushyant . . . wanted to both accept Shakuntala and reject her, I am in a similarly strange state of mind.” ¹³⁰ Torn by reverence of the English lady and desire to conquer her, Kanitkar modestly chooses to clothe her—dramatizing what Fanon and Mohanram have called the colonized male’s feeling of emasculation in the face of the political rape of imperialism. ¹³¹

Patel (b. 1876), the Gujarati translator of the Subjection of Women, was also a lawyer and social reformer, whose career as a translator extended into the 1920s. ¹³² The Gujarat region was likewise engaging the woman question at the turn of the twentieth century. According to Mehta, “the social reformers of Gujarat had initiated programmes of women’s upliftment in the second half of the nineteenth century. This was reflected in the girls’ schools and the publication of books such as striyoni paradhinta [Subjection of Women].” ¹³³ In fact, these two reformist causes—female education and women’s rights—were bound together in Patel’s edition. It was produced for a series of books—directed at Gujarati girls and women—that were “useful for ensuring that the education of females increases.” ¹³⁴ While both Patel and Kanitkar identified themselves as reformers through their actions, their forewords to the Subjection of Women show the former’s deeper awareness of the problematic political intersections between colonialism and patriarchy. Patel philosophically questioned the assumptions behind the liberal imperial belief that women’s rights was “a natural and necessary result of Western reform,” and proposed an alternative, culturally rooted approach to women’s rights in India. ¹³⁵

While Kanitkar framed his foreword with praise of Mill and his intellectual collaboration with his “superb” wife Harriet Taylor, Patel introduced his edition with a sense of historical and cultural distance: “In England many years ago, there was a famous philosopher and author named John Stuart Mill, whose book entitled Subjection of Women, is translated here. The subject of this book is that women too should receive the same rights as men.” ¹³⁶ Mill was not mentioned by name again in Patel’s introduction.

Kanitkar asserted “that the importance of women’s rights should be pointed out and discussed with quiet and serious consideration.” ¹³⁷ Demonstrating such “quiet” consideration, he did not use his own words but rather quoted the British colonial Theosophist Annie Besant. Kanitkar implied that he agreed with Besant’s views on teaching indigenous Indian women some English alongside their native tongue: “The main motivation for this is so that she develops communion with her English-knowing husband and children.” ¹³⁸ Again borrowing words from Besant, he stated, “The Indian woman will never lose her devotion, but her devotion must be coupled with knowledge.” ¹³⁹ Kanitkar aimed this colonial instrumental argument for female education toward the preservation of indigenous women’s “devotion” to, and “communion” with, their more educated, Westernized husbands and male children.

Kanitkar’s feminist proposals were muted by design, in order to rhetorically appease his conservative audience’s fears that “all women will revolt against men” if liberated. ¹⁴⁰ He soothed their concerns: “It is extremely unlikely that conventions and thinking which have been rooted very deeply for thousands of years in this soil called society, will be uprooted or eroded through discussions.” ¹⁴¹ Kanitkar’s gradualist approach to feminist reform was oriented toward the advancement of Westernization in British India. Situating the progressive liberal values of the West against the traditionalist indigenous culture, Kanitkar began his discussion of women’s rights by stating, “‘A woman does not deserve freedom’ . . . is a principle or a theory well-known in our country. Taking the opposing viewpoint, Mr. Mill wrote a small excellent treatise with the support of his wife in 1861 and named it Subjection of Women.” ¹⁴² Although he acknowledged that cultural differences between India and England meant that “Indian ladies” could not be “given the same type of education as in England,” he thought that training in English would mean that indigenous women would “get directly acquainted with one of the strongest influences on the recent progress in India.” ¹⁴³ Kanitkar assumed a British standard of excellence for reform of female education, and progress in general, in India.

Patel treated comparisons between England and India in less normative, more sociological terms. He gave a culturally specific reason for women’s comparatively greater freedom in England: “In England, women receive the same type and amount of education as men; due to women’s freedom to remain unmarried.” ¹⁴⁴ He highlighted the differences between the social roles of women in the English and Indian cultures: “The societal and social state of our country is, in part, of a different type than this. Women, as housewives, have a duty to fulfill, and men have to endeavor to earn money for the maintenance of the family.” ¹⁴⁵ After establishing the sociological contrast between the two cultures, he argued that Westernization was not the appropriate model for advancing women’s rights in India: “it is not the case that due to the difference between the societal system in the west and the societal system here, women here should receive the same type of education as women there, or that they should be given the same amount of rights as there.” ¹⁴⁶ Avoiding the colonial tendency to copy English culture, Patel made a notable effort to break away from the belief in the British standard as the best model for feminist reform in India.

While Kanitkar slyly pushed his stubbornly traditionalist society towards a Westernized conception of “equality of rights,” ¹⁴⁷ Patel argued for a more limited set of women’s rights rooted in the indigenous cultural context. Patel characterized women’s subjection in terms of the indigenous culture, not in comparison to the Western standard. He noted that Indian women “do not receive independence or respect in accordance with their rank; in their every stage, there are improper restrictions placed upon them, no one takes into consideration their feelings. Their wishes are not respected at all. Many times, they are compared to a ‘child-bearing machine,’ and are considered things to buy and sell!” ¹⁴⁸ With this vivid depiction of the inequality of women in Indian society, Patel called upon the empathy of his audience: “Everyone will concede that this condition is not desirable.” ¹⁴⁹ His culturally situated standpoint enabled this radical and comprehensive critique of women’s inferior status within Indian society.

Although Patel offered a strong, systematic sociological critique of the patriarchal oppression of women in India, he argued for a culturally circumscribed set of rights for Indian women. He proposed that in order for women of any society to “become competent for whatever duties they are to carry out, you should give them that type of education and then let them carry out their duties independently. If this occurs, there will be no harm caused to society, but rather, there will only be benefit.” ¹⁵⁰ Unlike Kanitkar’s Romantic-liberal vision of Indian women educated in the style of Harriet Taylor to be the intellectual companions of their husbands, Patel proposed a more utilitarian, vocational-style education that gave Indian women only the necessary skills for the social or economic tasks that they are assigned in the context of their culture. Patel’s functionalist approach to women’s rights succumbed to the moral problem of treating women as instruments for a broader economic or political purpose. ¹⁵¹ Whether women were educated to fulfill functions dictated by their indigenous society or their colonial regime, they effectively served as tools for the cultural perpetuation of a male-dominated society. Patel’s logic allowed for Indian women to become well-educated “child-bearing machines,” just as Kanitkar’s logic allowed for Indian women to become chaste and domesticated Harriet Taylors.

Situated between the 1885 establishment of the Indian National Congress and the post-1917 nationalist independence movement, Kanitkar’s and Patel’s prefaces to the Subjection of Women provide fascinating examples of the internal conflicts that arise when a colonial society faces the prospect of radical political change. Caught up in the colonial assimilationist spirit, Kanitkar attempted to initiate changes within Indian culture—such as the Westernized education of women—to bring it into alignment with British culture, while avoiding suspicion from Indian traditionalists. Patel assessed Mill from a self-aware colonial mindset, openly questioning the idea of mimicking England’s model of female liberation, yet prioritizing Indian social functionality over feminist values. Like Mill, their intellectual relationships to colonialism limited the scope of their commitments to women’s rights, despite their visionary arguments for women’s education in Maharashtra and Gujarat.

Cross-Cultural Dialogues on the Subjection of Women

Mill’s abstract argument for women’s rights is global in scope—it ought to apply to all women, regardless of social distinctions. His concrete rhetoric for women’s rights, however, sometimes excludes or caricatures women from Eastern cultures, or treats women and their rights as tools for development and Western civilizational progress. Given the ethical problems with this argumentative framework, the ultimate value of Mill’s Subjection of Women may be its ability to generate a variety of feminist philosophical responses that push us beyond its liberal imperialism toward its feminist humanism. ¹⁵²

By bringing Blagosvetlov, Mikhailovsky, Tsebrikova, Borgono, Kanitkar, and Patel into conversation with each other and Mill, we provide a model for how the history of political thought can enable a cross-cultural dialogue on women’s rights. Contemporary political theorists have contended that such cross-cultural dialogues inspire critical yet sensitive reflection on cultural differences and how they shape the ethical implementation of universalistic feminist arguments. ¹⁵³ By looking back to the early non–Western European forewords to the Subjection of Women, we discover not only the flaws in Mill’s feminism but also the potential of such critical analysis to give his arguments a global reach.

Responding to Mill’s Western biases and conception of progress, Blagosvetlov and Mikhailovsky respectively offered Westernizer and populist approaches to feminism that theorized women’s rights as a means for economic reform for Russia. Tsebrikova and Borgono produced two varieties of feminist liberal readings of the Subjection of Women: the former’s sociologically rich descriptions of women’s experiences of inequality and the latter’s cosmopolitan attempt to universalize arguments for women’s rights beyond the constraints of nationality. Kanitkar’s and Patel’s responses show how the indigenous experience of colonialism can be both an obstacle to, and a crucible for, critical feminist analysis of liberal imperial structures of power. The comparative study of their responses to Mill shows the philosophical fecundity of the Subjection of Women as much for, as despite, its Western biases. Most importantly, it illustrates the rich diversity of feminist perspectives that emerge from non–Western European political contexts.

In “going global,” contemporary liberal and post-colonial feminists have converged on the idea that enabling women’s empowerment in the Two-Thirds World begins with listening to their stories, their struggles, and their hopes for justice. ¹⁵⁴ Like the nineteenth-century abolitionist feminist tradition of which Mill was a part, twenty-first-century feminists have highlighted the cross-cultural moral importance of conceptualizing women as subjects with capabilities for self-direction, self-narration, and other forms of agency. Similarly, Mill wrote in the Subjection of Women that justice for women and humanity at large would not commence “until women themselves have told all they have to tell.” ¹⁵⁵ Studying the personal narratives of women and other historically disadvantaged groups is not enough to ground contemporary feminist attempts to theorize global justice, however. The philosophical voices of women, colonized peoples, non–Western Europeans, and peoples of the global South also have a place in the resurgence of interest in putting gender front and center in debates on global justice. ¹⁵⁶ This article is one step in the direction of including these distinctive voices in Mill’s reception history and the history of feminist political thought.