P O L I T ICA L STU D IES: 2002 VO L 50, 794–810

Liberal Feminism: Individuality and

Oppositions in Wollstonecraft and Mill
Gal Gerson
University of Haifa

The essay explores liberal feminism by matching Wollstonecraft’s and J. S. Mill’s works against
radical feminist criticism. Though censured by radicals for perceiving society in binary terms
modeled on the male-female distinction, liberal feminists subscribe to a worldview that is varie-
gated and dynamic. Liberal feminism does not oppose nature to culture or individuality to society,
but rather sees the ability to achieve autonomous personhood as dependent on social conditions.
This insight underpins liberal feminism’s attitude to the status of women: to form as rational agents,
humans have to be provided with social safeguards such as education and the vote. Far from being
starkly individualistic, this agenda is based on liberal feminism’s perception of individual ratio-
nality as a social product.

Liberalism is criticised by feminists for reasons ranging from its theory to the
mundane workings of the society it envisions. While emancipatory by its own
lights, liberalism seems to its feminist critics to be undermined by two structural
elements. The first is its view of the human individual as an isolated unit. The
second is the ubiquity in liberal thought of a binary pattern that corresponds to
the male-female distinction (Okin, 1998).

The two elements are interrelated. Assuming the existence of a core persona,
liberals are interested in defending it, and so distribute rights that are meant to
protect the individual from social pressures. Rights, in their turn, split the world
into a public realm where rights are used as trump cards, and a private realm over
which rights are exercised. The private sphere is identified with emotion and the
body. It is populated by reproductive women and their offspring. The public sphere
is characterised by the symmetrical lines of law and justice. It is populated by mutu-
ally unconcerned, freely moving individuals. It is a male sphere. When liberalism
extends its principles to women, it offers them a public personality devised to con-
trast with the ways in which their identities are constructed. Women are added
into a masculine polity.

However, liberalism is diverse. Some prominent liberal authors who approach

feminism, such as Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill, do not begin their
argument for rights from a monadic individual. Consequently, their worldview is
not as characterised by stark dualisms as the above description suggests. Here, I
argue that Wollstonecraft’s and Mill’s liberal feminism is a distinct stance that values
individual autonomy, but is simultaneously interested in the continuity between
care and autonomy and suspects neat conceptual oppositions. Wollstonecraft and
Mill do not advance a paradigmatic liberalism that extends to accommodate

© Political Studies Association, 2002.

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LIBERAL FEMINISM 795

women: their feminist concerns condition their liberalism no less than the
reverse.
In what follows, I first outline the charges against liberal feminism, and then
examine Wollstonecraft and Mill in two separate sections that focus on each of the
two authors’ approach to individuality and rationality. I argue that both authors
link independence to care, mind to body, and nature to culture. They thus avoid
liberalism’s isolated persona and the strict divisions it generates. A fourth section
then briefly relates Wollstonecraft and Mill to later political theory.

Liberal Weaknesses
Liberal authors like Locke and Kant rest their outlooks on monadic, ideally ratio-
nal individuals. These authors assume a normal course of growth into rational
adulthood. Hatched from the parental capsule, the complete persona is the subject
of political theory. The rationality that characterises this persona is analogous to
teeth: invisible at birth, its later emergence is foretold (Kant, 1960, Locke, 1946,
pp. 29–30). Such theories give little further thought to the relationship between
politics and the maturation process. Being intra-familial, nurture and socialisation
are beyond politics. Thus, the field is divided. One of its parts is the space where
the rational, rights-bearing subjects of liberal theory interact. The other part is an
enclave of nature dominated by kinship, desire and the body. It has no history and
is not accessible to reason.
This world constitutes a binary system. Within such a system, items define each
other by opposition. Without understanding the denotation of ‘life’, one can have
no idea of what ‘death’ is. Between them, the opposites exhaust meaning: organ-
isms are either alive or dead. The pair is hierarchic, with one of its constituents
positive, the other negative: life is the positive pole of death (Prokhovnik, 1999,
pp. 23–30). Jacques Lacan suggests that the first opposites that order children’s per-
ceptions are the male-female poles. Within this distinction, the male is understood
as the positive, substantial pole, the female as the inferior one, identified with lack.
Where male is one, female is zero. All further signification within the logic thus
constructed is anchored to this original distinction (Grosz, 1990). In societies where
the family structure confronts children with two functionally specialised parents,
the entire cognitive system is shot through with dual oppositions. From its legal
instances that conclude trials by either acquittal or conviction, to its capitalist
economy that asks whether commodities pass, or stumble at, the threshold of
profit, Western society is permeated by binaries.
Law matches this by contrasting female domesticity to full legal personality.
Women’s legal personalities are derivative. They depend on the men, whose sur-
names they take, whose permission they have historically needed to acquire or
change citizenship, and under whose tax files their earnings are often subsumed
(Lister, 1997, pp. 66–8).
Liberal theory might redress gender hierarchy in two ways. First, it annuls formal
discrimination, granting women rights to participation and property. Second, lib-
eralism extends its principles into the private sphere so as to protect women from
the forms of oppression specific to it. New sets of rights supplement the traditional
796 GAL GERSON

rights to life, liberty and property. Enacting maternity benefits, criminalising

parental and conjugal abuse, or broadening the definitions of rape and harassment,
are all generative of such rights.
This agenda still appears to be marred by its liberal element. The flaw has two
aspects. First, rights assume an agent who is free to enjoy them, and so disadvan-
tage those who legally hold rights but cannot use them. The public persona envi-
sioned by political theory is masculine. Within the regime of rights, women are
either discriminated against by their inability to fit in with the male mould, or they
are implicitly branded by having to ask for special protection. For liberalism, rights
are meant to preserve the agent’s ability to act without reference to or dependence
on others. Those engaged in care, however, depend on producers and are limited
by their concern for those under their care, and so are not independent in this
sense. The measures taken through maternity and like benefits to enable the in-
clusion of carers in civil society echoes the valorised independence that presents
such beneficiaries as flawed individuals who need legal crutches to stand upright
(Phillips, 1993, p. 46; Young, 1997, pp. 123–7).
The liberal persona is perceived as disembodied. Body, a constituent of the biolo-
gical order, is an object not a subject of rights: Locke mentions man’s ‘liberty to
dispose of his person or possessions’ (Locke, 1946, p. 5). The details of child-bearing
and child-rearing ensure that the body along with its constraints and social capac-
ities is identified with women. Men are rational minds, women unstable bodies,
belonging to a cyclical and fertile nature that may be exploited but cannot trans-
form itself (Gatens, 1996, pp. 50–1; Lister, 1997, pp. 70–2). Expanding rights and
formulating them in more specific terms does not do away with this element. The
right to retain one’s workplace during pregnancy is meant to neutralise biological
hindrances to individual autonomy. In spite of being women, workers keep their
jobs. Reproductive body interferes with productive legal persona, so that the
persona should be treated as if the body does not exist. The prospective employer
might avoid hiring a woman on the first place, thus only concurring with the legal
logic that perceives the (female) body as an impediment to the rational sphere of
economy.
Second, rights have the effect of suspending discussion of whatever is seen as the
‘zero’ side of the political ‘one’. Right implies the idea of unchallenged domination
over something: the property I own by right is not accessible to anyone else; the
opinions I have right to express freely are not vulnerable to governmental coer-
cion. This excluding streak persists regardless of rights’ contents. Liberalism has to
retain an irreducible core persona to whom rights can be handed: rights are there
to protect subjectivity.
Supposedly natural bodily sensations are likely to at least partially constitute this
profound subjectivity. Whatever expresses one’s most intimate sensations should
be outside political power. Such sensations and the notion of intimacy itself invoke
sexuality, the place of which in individuals’ lives is nearly identical with the concept
of privacy. Carole Pateman accounts for this correlation by arguing that the first
right was the father’s exclusive access to the mother’s body. This established his
status as father by preventing all other fatherhood. The mother’s subjugation
defined the father’s authority. Liberalism replicates this patriarchy by distributing
LIBERAL FEMINISM 797

the original exclusion. Each citizen is equal to the others by virtue of holding rights
that seal off his household. The liberal individual is a primal father writ small:
unchallenged sexual access is the basis of his rights (Pateman, 1989, pp. 33–53).

While sexuality defines the limits of governmental and social power over the indi-
vidual, Catharine MacKinnon argues that power defines sexuality. Sex is perceived
in binary terms the hinge of which is domination: from the vulgar to the poetic,
the language of desire contrasts prone to erect, weak to strong. Imbalance is seen
as a natural need, something that defines one’s innermost character. When iden-
tities are constituted this way, reforms that engage with votes, property and social
benefits skim the surface of oppression. Perceived in terms of force and submission
to force, sexual ‘consent’ is what for Marxism is the worker’s right to choose the
employment conditions set by the ‘free’ market which employers dominate. Far
from being an expression of autonomy, ‘consent’ is a sign of the weaker party’s
internalisation and acceptance of its weakness. Liberalism distances women’s
oppression from discussion by calling it private, and then grants women rights as
if they were the independent individuals it envisions (MacKinnon, 1989, pp.
127–54).

It is possible to argue that the extension of liberalism is a learning process that

involves reversible mistakes. The insufficiency of liberal language should not lead
to abandoning it altogether (Kiss, 1995). However, critics reply that exclusion is so
inherent to liberalism that it would cease to be liberalism should this platform be
dropped. Liberalism requires a core individual distinct from other individuals and
a rational mind detached from desire which is itself natural, and so outside poli-
tics. Liberalism may allay some of the difficulties brought about by this structure,
but it cannot dispense with it (Brown, 1995, p. 151; Pateman, 1989, pp. 50–3).

I do not attempt to absolve liberal feminism of the weight of these criticisms. Con-
structing feminist theory by extension from some versions of liberalism may indeed
show the difficulties just noted. However, while all liberals are interested in
protecting individual liberty, their arguments for doing this, the means they sug-
gest for achieving it, and their definitions of liberty all vary considerably. Liberal
theorists may set individuality as an end while rejecting it as a premise. Such
liberals are, it turns out, these most sensitive to gender issues: these are the liberal
feminists that concern me here.

Condensing Wollstonecraft and Mill into the same category involves several diffi-
culties. Both authors precede the notion of political feminism, and Wollstonecraft
had died before self-designated political liberalism materialised. Chronologically,
they are wide apart: Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman appeared
in 1792 and Mill’s The Subjection of Women in 1869. There is little evidence for
historical continuity between them.

Nonetheless, their arguments are close enough to be read as parts of the same
tradition (Green, 1995, p. 104). Wollstonecraft and Mill are liberals because both
value the individual’s ability to construct a life-plan and have a space secure from
intrusion. They do not, however, rely on a timeless subject bearing universal rights.
For them, humans are malleable and changing. As a result, both authors reject
arguments from inherent characters.
798 GAL GERSON

A corollary of that is a suspicion of society itself. Instead of hallowing the interac-

tions that govern family and commerce as innocently natural, Wollstonecraft and
Mill would have these institutions first prove that they do not mask vested inter-
est. Practices and notions that look timeless may in fact be contextual. Insistence
on their naturalness conceals arbitrary power. To let individuals thrive, the most
broadly accepted notions should be questioned. Accordingly, this ideology empha-
sises the environmental inputs that go into the formation of personalities. Nurture
and socialisation, rather than isolated individuality, serve as its premises: its basic
terms, then, are closer to feminism than to some forms of liberalism. The next two
sections discuss these issues in more detail.

Wollstonecraft: from Infancy to Agency

Wollstonecraft’s work on the rights of woman is preceded by her 1790 A Vindica-
tion of the Rights of Man. Both texts are based on a belief in reason as God’s gift to
humanity, whose mission is to develop this faculty. As reason is exercised by choice
and responsibility, all humans, male and female, should be given conditions for
choosing and assuming responsibility.
The apparent sequence of Wollstonecraft’s argument – from the universal ‘rights
of man’ to the particular ‘rights of woman’ – suggests that she perceives the ratio-
nal and independent male as the model that women should be allowed to
approach. Furthermore, Wollstonecraft casts her radical defence of rights as a
masculine contrast to the effeminacy of conservatives like Edmund Burke, who
advocate political passivity (Brace, 2000; Coniff, 1999; Johnson, 1995, pp. 23–46).
Besides, arguing about actual women, Wollstonecraft perceives them primarily as
mothers (Wollstonecraft, 1995, p. 273). While professing egalitarianism, she seems
to ignore the inequalities arising out of her own construction of the body (Gatens,
1991).
However, Wollstonecraft’s critique of Burke is simultaneously an argument against
gendered dichotomy. Burke’s aesthetics contrasts feminine, love-inspiring charac-
ters such as beauty to masculine, respect-inspiring characters such as strength.
Thinking beyond aesthetics, Wollstonecraft accuses Burke of teaching that ‘Nature
has made an eternal distinction’ between strength and beauty. ‘It follows ... from
your own reasoning’, she tells Burke,
that respect and love are antagonist principles; and that, if we really wish
to render men more virtuous, we must endeavour to banish all ener-
vating modifications of beauty from civil society. We must, to carry your
argument a little further, return to the Spartan regulations ... for any
attempt to civilise the heart, to make it humane by implanting reason-
able principles, is a mere philosophic dream (Wollstonecraft, 1995, p. 48).
Opposed to resilience and strength, Burke’s concept of femininity involves a
similarly overblown virility at the other extreme. As such women as implied in his
scheme are inert, all political action is masculine. As masculinity excludes refine-
ment, politics should consist of what it had consisted of for the Spartans, violence.
Thinking with two complementary opposites, Burke rules out all other options. He
thus excludes reason, which implies passive reflection alongside active change, and
LIBERAL FEMINISM 799

so enfolds both poles. For Wollstonecraft, reason is the attribute of agents who are
not confined within a frozen set of contrasts. In dual systems where poles define
each other by opposition, both higher and lower sides are barred from reason. The
superior party is never contradicted and so remains in solipsist ignorance of its
dependence on the ministrations of others, while the inferior party never exercises
discretion, and so does not acquire a sense of self-direction (Wollstonecraft, 1995,
pp. 83–5). Reason is not a given human character that merits rights. It is condi-
tional upon a social environment where people are not reduced to a hypertrophied
function at either end of a dual hierarchy.
This leads Wollstonecraft to criticise contract theory. Such a theory has to assume,
first, two opposing situations, pre-social and social; and second a modular individ-
ual who moves between these two situations. Wollstonecraft finds Rousseau, who
expresses such ideas, as guilty of dualist thinking as Burke. Rousseau’s world
divides between the isolated innocence of the state of nature and the miserable,
derivative existence of advanced society. He can see no way forward that does not
recapitulate one of the two. Accordingly, Rousseau advocates regaining original
wholeness through the social contract that turns individuals’ attention from their
own lives towards common pursuits.
However, could natural isolation exist to start with? Rousseau, Wollstonecraft
writes, ignores child rearing: he ‘disputes whether man be a gregarious animal,
though the long and helpless state of infancy seems to point him out as particu-
larly impelled to pair, the first step towards herding’ (Wollstonecraft, 1995, p. 82).
Wollstonecraft is as much interested as Rousseau is in recovering the basics of
human existence. However, when peeled off from the layers of custom and con-
vention, the original individual she finds is not Rousseau’s self-sufficient noble
savage, but an infant who cannot exist outside a relationship. Where Rousseau
contrasts original independence to servile society, Wollstonecraft asserts that society
itself, in the shape of the parent, is the state of nature. Separate individuality is
derivative.
A polity based on nature rather than on reified custom should therefore focus on
the formation of autonomous agency, whose existence it cannot take for granted.
Rights secure a space for the exercise of one’s will, and so let individuals experi-
ence choice and responsibility. Unlike the dehumanised products of master-slave
dualisms, agents within equal-rights contexts do not depend on complementary
opposites to define themselves. They act on their desires in an environment where
everybody else is entitled to similar exercise. Such agents become aware of both
their own and others’ wills, and so learn to respect others and to interpose thought
between wish and gratification. They consequently acquire the capacity for ratio-
nal conduct. Reason and separate personhood are not the characters of an already
existing male agent: they are the outcomes of socialisation, which has to precede
any identity, male or female.
The formation of agency out of infantile dependence begins with play, a behaviour
that is not directed towards any other person’s will (Wollstonecraft, 1995, p. 113).
The parents under whose care play takes place must themselves be independent
of the child so as not to impede autonomy by tying it to external demands before
it had time to form. The primary carers’ sense of independence is therefore espe-
800 GAL GERSON

cially important. These are normally women. To acquire their charges with a sense
of individual worth, women should be allowed into education and civic exchange.
The transformation brought about in women’s character through equalisation of
status implies a parallel change in men, who are similarly delivered from their
reduction to a limited function into rational autonomy: as one of its extremes
changes, the gender dichotomy dissolves (Wollstonecraft, 1995, p. 78).

Wollstonecraft, therefore, aims at transcending the oppositions that confine

humans to static characters. She views individuality as a social product rather than
as a premise. Rights, for her, are an instrument meant to form individual sepa-
rateness and agency: continuing from the home, politics is education. Similarly,
education is political, as the structure of the family into which infants are born
is critical for the emergence of rational citizens (Wollstonecraft, 1995, pp. 251,
274–5).

It may be justly objected that Wollstonecraft fails to challenge the functionally

divided family’s claim to be natural. For her, women are primarily mothers. Any
other arrangement is a breach of nature. To balance this, I shall point to the
dynamic character Wollstonecraft ascribes to nature. Far from understanding
nature as an unchanging condition inaccessible to reason, Wollstonecraft views it
as a trajectory in which roles shift, with the infant becoming an adult and adults
becoming capable of deliberate change.

In eighteenth century accounts, reason appears as both reflection and trans-

cendence of nature. The state of nature is the measure of the good society, while
civilisation is supposed to progress away from its animal origins. Mirroring these
tensions, Wollstonecraft both defies the society that fosters ‘unnatural crimes and
every vice that degrades our nature’, and refuses Rousseau’s idealisation of nature,
arguing that ‘to assert that a state of nature is preferable to society is ... to arraign
supreme wisdom’ (Wollstonecraft, 1995, pp. 83, 81).

Wollstonecraft attempts to resolve the contradiction by making reason a dynamic

constituent of nature rather than its opposite. Nature implants drives which con-
vention might distort, as when scions of rich families ‘do violence to a natural
impulse’ by marrying for money (Wollstonecraft, 1995, p. 21). Liberty is the ability
to follow profoundly felt attachments and inclinations. Nature, however, is not
fixed. It changes as the rationality endemic to it propels it onward. While the mere
preservation of body ‘is ... the first law of nature’, the body may, when cared for
sufficiently, provide the basis for the emergence of reason, which may then reflect
on nature and transform it (Wollstonecraft, 1995, p. 15). However, far from
remaining relics surpassed by the clarity of the enlightenment, impulse and desire
are always needed to make the individual mind aware of itself through the dis-
tance interposed between wish and gratification. Desires were ‘set in motion to
improve our nature of which they are a part’ (Wollstonecraft, 1995, p. 82).

This concept of nature as motion should take priority over conclusions drawn from
nature when perceived as a condition. When nature is viewed statically, it renders
credibility to conservative projects of leaving things as they are. The extant appears
natural, and so justified. Such ideas have to yield, Wollstonecraft implies, to the
developmental and dynamic capacities that the physical world offers when viewed
LIBERAL FEMINISM 801

as a process. To illustrate the dangers of understanding nature as a static condition,

one may point to Wollstonecraft’s discussion of the excess of female births cited
to justify polygamy. Though demography appears ‘an indication of nature’,
Wollstonecraft rejects the conclusion that ‘to nature ... reasonable speculations
must yield’ (Wollstonecraft, 1995, p. 147). Polygamy generates inequality, which
extinguishes individuals’ rational capacities. Refusing polygamy is not to subdue
stagnant nature through the medium of disembodied reason: it is to concur
with dynamic nature by providing for the emergence of reason.
However, if nature is a dynamic rather than a timeless essence opposed to culture,
who observes its trajectory? An external position from which the observer is
capable of perceiving anything implies a corresponding position of the thing
observed. The field is again split into an unequal symbiotic pair, yet another version
of the gender dualism. Male transcendence of the body is trusted with estimating
female performance.
Wollstonecraft raises some suspicion that she views things that way. Women, it
might be said, are experimented upon in her scheme: the rights Wollstonecraft
urges they should be granted are conditional. To be worthy of them, the female
must grow more perfect when emancipated, or justify the authority that
chains such a weak being to her duty. If the latter, it will be expedient
to open a fresh trade with Russia for whips; a present which a father
should always make to his son-in-law ... that a husband may keep his
whole family in order by the same means (Wollstonecraft, 1995, p. 294).
Women are not treated as independent subjects to start with, and the attempt to
see whether they may be so treated is undermined by its own terms.
For Wollstonecraft, however, inequality breeds irrationality at both ends. Servants
– and daughters and wives – are derationalised by their subjection. At the same
time, monarchs and aristocrats – and fathers and husbands – are equally barred
from exercising their rational faculty. Feared and pandered to, their ‘reflection shut
out by pleasure’, they never develop that distance from their own wishes that is
necessary for rational agency to materialise (Wollstonecraft, 1995, pp. 83, 84–5).
They cannot be the distant observers noting the responses of the female object to
changing laboratory conditions. They are themselves malleable objects who are
liable to be transformed by the enfranchisement of women.
From Wollstonecraft’s point of view, the notion of a detached and rational observer
is self-contradictory. Rational autonomy is acquired by engagement with a reality
that changes the participant. This depends on a measure of liberty outside hierar-
chy (Wollstonecraft, 1995, p. 78). Masters and slaves may read about choice and
responsibility, but none of this will count as deliverance. What will is their living
through conditions that challenge them to make choices, exert their own powers,
and accept responsibility. There can be no such dynamic where people are hin-
dered from full agency by static roles defined by mutual oppositions. Rational
agents do not precede emancipation but are formed by it.
Wollstonecraft is still open to the allegation that, though neither exhaustive nor
mutually exclusive, her concepts are yet hierarchic. She derides political opponents
802 GAL GERSON

as effeminate and valorises rational autonomy as ‘manly’ (Wollstonecraft, 1995, p.

15). As a formulator of normative theory, however, Wollstonecraft cannot avoid
favouring some options over others. Autonomy is better than dependence, though
it is related to it by continuity rather than by opposition. Too much can be made
of the overlap between such preferences and gender division. For Wollstonecraft,
if autonomy is virile, then women who choose active motherhood are masculine,
while soldiers, who obey orders, are feminine (Wollstonecraft, 1995, p. 92).
Wollstonecraft does call her preferred values masculine, but explains that ‘the
word masculine is only a bugbear’, a shorthand that does not correspond to
received gender notions (Wollstonecraft, 1995, p. 78).
I have attempted to show that, to a significant extent, Wollstonecraft’s thought
frustrates the anticipation of a simple extension from liberal individualism to the
rights of woman. To construct her supposedly gender-neutral liberalism, Woll-
stonecraft first rejects the poles of respect and love and substitutes for them a notion
of reason that encompasses both ends. She bases autonomy upon prior dependence
on a carer, who must herself be provided with conditions for independence if she
is to educate her charges into agency. Reason is a part of nature and is always
bound to corporeal passions. The possibility of a rational standpoint implies, as
illustrated by Wollstonecraft’s mention of men’s deficiencies under the hierarchic
gender system, prior engagement rather than detached superiority. There is there-
fore no strict distinction between mute object and reflective subject. The reflecting
observer’s identity is formed by engagement, not by conforming to a pre-packaged,
distanced and unchanging model.
In Wollstonecraft’s thought, terms do not define each other by opposition. Nor are
they exhaustive. Original nature and corrupt society are not the only substantial
positions, as Rousseau thought. Wollstonecraft suggests the possibility of a future
strongly different from the present. Instead of contracting its way back to pristine
virtue, humanity may achieve other feats, not envisaged by Rousseau who con-
ceptualises present and past, but not future. ‘Rousseau exerts himself to prove
that all was right originally’, Wollstonecraft writes, ‘... and I, that all will be right’
(Wollstonecraft, 1995, p. 82).

Mill: from Care to Justice

With Mill, again, the argument on the status of women cannot be detached from
the larger worldview. His feminism is implied in the terms of his liberalism. His
1859 On Liberty redefines liberalism in a way that differs considerably from Locke’s
or Kant’s accounts of rights. On Liberty states that individuals should be free to act
in whatever concerns them alone. The heterogeneous choices made in a society
where individuals are allowed to go their separate ways enlarges the pool of ideas,
and so guards against the stagnation that follows on the imposition of a single value
system (Mill, 1977, pp. 223–36). The rights to life, liberty and property are thus
transformed. Instead of protecting the activities carried out in the spheres of family
and commerce, Mill suggests protecting any act that concerns the actor alone,
wherever it is performed. The boundary between home and town square disap-
pears, and with it the distinctions between the agents who occupy these two loca-
LIBERAL FEMINISM 803

tions. A new boundary is drawn between the consequences of acts performed by

the same agent, any agent, anywhere.

Consequently, coercion is legitimate wherever conduct impinges on anyone but

the acting agent. Mill openly calls for intervention in the home in order to enforce
parental responsibility for children’s education: ‘if the parent does not fulfil this
obligation, the State ought to see it fulfilled’ (Mill, 1977, p. 302). On Liberty does
not assume a domestic sphere that is immune to politics. Homes are made acces-
sible to legal power: gone is the specific liberty of the paterfamilias. This is evident,
moreover, in a text that precedes the publication of The Subjection of Women by ten
years.

Mill’s work, however, attracts feminist criticism for what looks like its hostility to
corporeality and emotion, an attitude that might cover a misogynous streak
(Makus, 1996, pp. 93–5). Mill’s essay ‘Nature’, which belongs to the same period
as On Liberty, contrasts the brutality and filth of natural processes to reason and
order: ‘[a]ll which people are accustomed to deprecate as ‘disorder’ ... is precisely
a counterpart of Nature’s ways’ (Mill, 1969, p. 386). The overlap between the dis-
order of nature on the one hand and the female on the other hand is not far below
the surface of Mill’s text, which singles out the particulars of childbirth as evidence
of nature’s meaningless cruelty (Mill, 1969, p. 385). Mind, reason and order are
defined, it seems, by opposition to body and nature. Individuality is opposed to
domestic life, where ties of desire and blood stifle separate personhood (Di Stefano,
1991, pp. 152–9, 181–2; Zerilli, 1994, p. 115).

On Liberty may be interpreted as another manifestation of Mill’s hostility to the

physical world. To perceive individuals as sovereign in whatever concerns them
alone, Mill has to assume the separateness of individuals and their having no inter-
est in each other’s interests. Autonomy and rationality mean making choices
without regard to the body and to the identities and attachments related to it. Such
a model recognises no legitimate actor but the unencumbered and self-interested
middle class male.

This, however, accounts only partially for Mill’s notions of liberty. Mill commends
nature and the body as loci of spontaneity and resistance to convention. They are
places where liberty asserts itself rather than the suffocating confinement from
which it escapes. While in ‘Nature’ Mill accuses nature of ‘devouring, burning and
crushing’ people regardless of desert (Mill, 1969, p. 385), his other works castigate
society as distance from nature for hindering individuality. In On Liberty, Mill criti-
cises his society for not allowing its members ‘any inclination, except for what is
customary’ (Mill, 1977, pp. 264–5). The Subjection of Women repeats that ‘the English
are farther from a state of nature from any other people. They are ... a product of
civilisation and discipline’ (Mill, 1984, p. 313). Civilisation and discipline are, occa-
sionally, what Mill wants to liberate individuals from, while ‘inclination’ and
‘nature’ are put up as enabling liberation.

Mill is equipped by his theoretical position as a utilitarian and an evolutionist to

perceive nature as more than the obverse of culture (Skorupski, 1989, pp. 23–8).
Utilitarians reject the idea of humanity’s contracting out of nature and crossing a
804 GAL GERSON

distinct border into civic society. People living without recognised authority cannot
make a contract, a document that requires the existence of prior law. Unless a
notion of divinely willed natural law is brought in, contract has to be preceded by
political society. For Locke, who did believe in a contract based on natural law,
there was a distinct boundary between the state of nature on the one hand, and
political society on the other. Utilitarians, by contrast, refuse to pinpoint the places
where nature ends and politics begins. Refuting the theist argument from first cause
in the third of his Essays on Religion, Mill argues that there is little to distinguish
‘volition’ from physical and chemical sources of energy: no border exists between
religion, culture and politics on the one hand, and nature on the other. Nature and
reason cannot be defined by mutual opposition (Mill, 1969, pp. 438–9).
Utilitarianism determines for Mill that nature is not a static condition in which
humans have existed before entering social life. The idea of evolution, on the other
hand, determines that nature is constant transformation, a ‘development of the
inferior orders of existence into superior’ (Mill, 1969, p. 440). Animal existence
develops into rational mind. The achievements of civilisation are products of
nature. Speech and technology are ‘not ... the less natural’ for being acquired, as
the acquirement is itself a part of an evolving universe (Mill, 1969, p. 230).
Reason, therefore, is not defined by its contrast to nature and the body. It is rather
a product of nature and may be propelled by emotion, as desire and primary attach-
ment underpin the exchange of rational citizens. Justice is likewise an offshoot
from unmediated emotion. A just act is one whose default merits punishment, and
so ‘[t]he sentiment of justice ... is ... the natural feeling of retaliation or vengeance’
(Mill, 1969, pp. 248–9). Rights, put this way, are the institutionalisation of ani-
mosity. This vindictiveness, in its turn, is a result of the impulse that drives every
animal ‘to hurt those who have hurt, or ... are about to hurt, itself or its young’.
Humanity extends this drive from immediate kin to the rest of society (Mill, 1969,
p. 248). Abstract justice, rights, and the notion of the individual protected by these
rights all follow, but their basis is, as it had been for Wollstonecraft, the instinctual
world of parenthood and the family.
Justice does not replace emotion. Even its highest forms defer to primary attach-
ment. Justice demands responsiveness to others’ expectations, formal and infor-
mal: ‘it is confessedly unjust to ... break an engagement, either express or implied,
or disappoint expectations raised by our own conduct’ (Mill, 1969, pp. 242–3). One
such legitimate expectation is the anticipation of preferential treatment, as between
members of the family. This demand overrides the claims of impartiality: people
are regarded as unjust if allowing their ‘family or friends no superiority ... over
strangers’ (Mill, 1969, p. 243). There is no contrast between mutual involvement
and separate personhood.
The agenda elaborated in On Liberty and The Subjection of Women is grounded in
these insights. Like Wollstonecraft, Mill allows for a two-way diffusion between
home and politics. As justice follows on care, there is no legitimate barrier to stop
carers from entering the public sphere. As home invades politics, moreover, poli-
tics invades the home. Early socialisation becomes a public concern. To produce
the rational personality, care within a rational context is needed. Care is best under-
taken, Mill argues, by confident individuals who are not put in an inherently
LIBERAL FEMINISM 805

disadvantaged position that makes them dependent on the family hierarchy they
are supposed to maintain: equalisation of status will transform the family from ‘a
school of despotism’ into ‘a school of sympathy in equality’ (Mill, 1984, pp. 294–5).

Macro-level liberal politics repeats this pattern. Society moulds the independent
personalities it relies upon for its own thriving by deliberately creating the condi-
tions of liberty within which such personalities may form. Hence, while Zillah
Eisenstein argues that Mill’s preference for the ‘atomised and disconnected’ indi-
vidual contradicts his admission that individuality is ‘a part of a social structure’, I
find that the two are interrelated (Eisenstein, 1993, p. 114). For Mill, autonomy
is an end, while the recognition of its social character points to the possible means
of achieving it: the environment, at home and town square, allows its charges a
significant measure of freedom from its own constraints, not because it is not inter-
ested in them, but because it is (Shanley, 1998, pp. 416, 418).

On a different front, Mill’s outlook seems to be weakened by the distinction it

makes between subjects and objects. The Subjection of Women contends that women’s
capacities cannot be known until they enjoy equal access to education and the vote
(Mill, 1984, pp. 276-278). However, once this is achieved, who will assess the
result? While Wollstonecraft’s Russian whip is absent, Jennifer Ring argues that an
implicit threat still lurks in Mill’s empiricism. Mill perceives knowledge as an accu-
mulation of observations. This presumes an observer distinct from what is being
observed. When no concrete object is found to support an abstract branch of
knowledge such as mathematics, Mill removes the subject to internal recesses of
the mind, to observe from that secluded position the object imagined by that mind
itself (Ring, 1991, pp. 89–97). Even at this high intellectual price, Mill has to have
clear oppositions. He ‘divides the world into subjects and objects and doesn’t con-
sider the possibility that objects themselves may have subjective existence’ (Ring,
1991, p. 66). The distinction of subject from object structures Mill’s advocacy of
female enfranchisement. Mill appears to relegate each of the sexes to each of the
equation’s two sides, and women are cast as the manipulated object. Enfranchise-
ment seems to be proposed only ‘in order to provide a sufficient data base by which
men may arrive at a ... decision about whether or not women are ... their equals’
(Ring, 1991, p. 64).

However, both The Subjection of Women and On Liberty maintain that plural ways of
thought are required for formulating solutions to social problems. Such solutions
are arrived at by direct experience, not by observation. Progress is driven by chal-
lenges posed to the obvious. Each particular standpoint serves as a corrective to its
opponents and arouses further antagonism in its turn. Advance is gained where
manifold perspectives stimulate and modify each other (Mill, 1977, pp. 229–30,
273–4). Actors in such an environment develop a critical distance from their own
sense of infallibility. Thus, no subject is ever ‘The Subject’: everyone is subject and
object simultaneously, observing the surrounding world while being open to analy-
sis and refutation by that world. The very ability to develop as a viable subject
depends on the agent’s readiness to be criticised, to be an object of others’ scrutiny
(Mill, 1977, p. 232). The mutual refutation of contestants brings out in the open
aspects of the controversy that would have remained hidden had any of them been
alone in the field (Mill, 1977, pp. 253–7).
806 GAL GERSON

Issues are not decided by a detached arbitrator. People deliberate by staking their
whole world: Mill’s well-known phrase is ‘experiments of living’ (Mill, 1977, p.
261). There is no external observer who takes notes and draws conclusions from
that experiment (Ryan, 1998, pp. 530–7). As no distanced observation post exists,
it cannot conform to any gendered role: as in Wollstonecraft, men, too, are
expected to be transformed by the change in the political status of gender. As the
experiment is a reform of an entire society not a manipulation of one of its parts
by the other, the object herself is the subject. Mill calls for experiment by women
no less than on them.
An experiment it nonetheless remains, as its outcome and value cannot be pre-
dicted in advance. These outcomes are not points on a matrix that the present holds
and may recognise: no such system of knowledge is ever given in its entirety. A
provisional result of complex development, truth does not spring armed and hel-
meted from the father’s head. The call in On Liberty for protecting thought and dis-
cussion is a plea against pre-packaged knowledge as it is a refutation of the monadic
persona and its timeless rights (Mill, 1977, p. 227; Ryan, 1998, pp. 498–9).
This may also be related to the disapproving register of the essay ‘Nature’. The text
maintains that, given nature’s random violence, its supposed creator is either cruel
or of limited capacities. Any other combination of God’s attributes would not
account for the character of the physical world (Hamburger, 1991). By elaborating
on nature’s cruelty, Mill discredited the monotheists’ God. It is paternal benevo-
lence that is questioned: the aim is not nature, but nature’s creator; not chaos, but
the logos behind it. ‘Nature’ doubts claims for a once-and-for-all creation by a dis-
tanced agent who manifests a coherent and morally feasible set of attitudes. It is a
critique of the first, masculine subject. Mill’s point is not so much to devalue nature
and the body as to criticise the essentialist pattern of thought that constructs nature
as pervaded by a single and timeless will.
Like Wollstonecraft’s thought, Mill’s is characterised by a preoccupation with the
historicity of nature, the plasticity of identities, the dependence of autonomy on
social provision, and the refutation of essential contrasts. Body and mind, nature
and culture, impartial justice and preferential familiarity are not sets of oppositions.
The persona is not created complete with its rights. It is produced by care and
education, which are therefore political.

Late Modern Challenges

Do Wollstonecraft and Mill successfully meet the challenges that liberal feminism
faces because of its relation to liberalism? Wollstonecraft’s and Mill’s liberal femi-
nism avoids the notion of an isolated human individual who precedes social
context. It thus emphasises dependence and socialisation. Rational agency has to
be produced and deliberately shored up. Rights are thus meant to generate, rather
than to preserve, the free and separate persona. Women are no more branded by
legal protection than men: all humans need these artificial supports if they are to
be independent. Moreover, as there is no autonomy outside a context, men are as
likely to be influenced by changes in women’s legal status as women. Instead
of adding women in, liberal feminism is more about redesigning politics to make
possible the as-yet undefined, ungendered, open-ended human person.
LIBERAL FEMINISM 807

Nonetheless, these two authors may occasionally be incompatible with the sensi-
tivities of a later age. They back away from refuting the sex division itself and expect
most women to realise their autonomy as enlightened mothers. This means that,
even when this liberal feminism advocates a more egalitarian family structure, this
is still done with the functionally divided home in mind. Furthermore, the home
itself is discussed mainly as a breeding ground. A measure of equality is needed,
not because of the parents’ subjective desires, needs, or even dignity, but as a con-
dition for the socialisation of future citizens. Nor, as Judith Evans points out with
regard to later versions of liberal feminism, does its premises take into account the
position of those who are not parents: equality, and hence liberty, are to be secured
as parts of an ongoing process of education which may occasionally benefit those
who take no direct part in it, but is otherwise not particularly concerned about
them (Evans, 1995, pp. 54–5).
Much of the difficulty does not stem from the markedly liberal premises of indi-
viduality and strict separations. On the contrary: liberal feminism’s partial blind-
ness to the needs of non-parents follows on its rejection of the irreducible,
state-of-nature persona. Moreover, Wollstonecraft’s and Mill’s concept of nature as
an open-ended process may anticipate a future family whose structure, functions
and distribution of power exceed whatever is at any point in time perceived as
biologically determined.
This refusal of static essences, and the matching reluctance to allow strict opposi-
tions between nature and culture, home and town square, also provides the
opening to liberal feminism’s approach towards the more radical forms of feminist
theory. If nature is not a timeless entity that sets inescapable roles and inalienable
functions, then hierarchy cannot justify itself by appealing to biological necessity.
Sexuality may be perceived from a liberal feminist standpoint as pervaded by
power: the most privately subjective constituents of people’s identities are social
constructs that may hinder their development.
I would like to illustrate this by juxtaposing liberal feminism with Catharine
MacKinnon’s critical point that liberalism furthers inequality by subsuming
pornography under the right of free speech. For MacKinnon, liberal feminism, of
which she perceives Mill as a central early exponent, is guilty of an essentialist
approach to nature, body, desire and individuality (MacKinnon, 1989, pp. 45–6).
Such an outlook, according to her, precludes the more radical perception of
subjectivity as structured by social pressures down to the somatic level – which
liberals and liberal feminists would declare private and surround with rights.
Liberals ignore the ways in which speech creates identities rather than expresses
pre-existing ones. Pornography, understood in radical terms, does not express sex-
uality but constitutes it as a power differential. Liberal feminists would leave it
alone because of their preoccupation with protecting thought and discussion
(MacKinnon, 1989, pp. 195–214).
However, it is possible to formulate MacKinnon’s own position in liberal feminist
terms. Mill is anxious about the liberty of thought and discussion. However, speech
is not hallowed ground immune to politics. Like any other activity, expression is
tested by consequences: one may say anything as long as it does not harm others.
What constitutes harm, in its turn, depends on what is there to be hurt. For Locke,
808 GAL GERSON

there is an enclosed package of capacities that define the human persona. Imping-
ing on this constitutes harm. For Mill, by contrast, there is no such persona and
hence no sacred boundary to trespass. Harm is contextual.
But then, how analyse context? One possibility is using Wollstonecraft’s insights.
People are harmed when put in master and slave situations, where one party’s
ascendance is defined by the other’s subjugation. Harm does not necessarily reside
in suppressing an already-formed individuality: it rather rests in not letting iden-
tities emerge but through others’ command or slavery. Wherever dual hierarchies
persist there is no dialogue that might render free expression meaningful. The
master’s word is a command the slave must comply with, the slave’s mere vocali-
sation that has no consequences or else it would not have been uttered. These two
words may be the same word, but they carry different weights according to speaker.
Within this context, speech might reinforce hierarchy rather than challenge it.
Both Wollstonecraft and Mill maintain that agents’ subjectivities are formed by
their social relations: what others expect them to do constitutes their identity.
Hence Mill’s complaint that the English have no inclinations but that of conform-
ing. Desire is social. If it is constructed as a power differential, then the identities
it generates at both its ends depend on inequality. Under such conditions, one
would find it difficult to conceive oneself as sexual without attaching degradation
– one’s own or another’s – to the idea. Such identities leave little opening for ratio-
nal agency, as they narrow the horizon of choice and development. Distributing
images that feed such relationships falls within Mill’s definition of harm: this
consideration would override free speech when understood Mill’s way – or
Wollstonecraft’s.

Conclusion
I have attempted to show that Wollstonecraft’s and Mill’s feminism is not an
appendage to a liberalism that is otherwise independent of it. Wollstonecraft’s dis-
cussion of gender does not begin with the Rights of Woman: her earlier critique of
Burke emphasises the neat separation Burke makes between strength and beauty.
For Wollstonecraft, such separation not only enslaves women, but brutalises poli-
tics. The politics of radical enlightenment, that ‘philosophic dream’ for the rebut-
tal of which she scolds Burke, is a politics that, for her, should always already
include the possibility of women’s participation, or else disintegrate into Rousseau’s
worship of Spartan coarseness. For Mill, similarly, liberalism and gender issues are
interrelated. Once the old public-private distinction is given up, both previously
opposed spheres are transformed, as government enters the home and women
enter politics. Mill’s concept of liberty begins rather than ends by declaring the
home political. Had Mill kept Locke’s reverence for the sanctity of the family, his
entire scheme would have been undermined, as there are a few other locations
where acts have more direct consequences for others than the home.
Both authors view independent personhood as related, rather than opposed, to
care and dependence. The primary emotions associated with kinship are support-
ive of reason and enable rational agency. Emotion and desire may serve as loci of
liberty. Wollstonecraft’s and Mill’s notions of individuality entail rights to early care,
LIBERAL FEMINISM 809

primary relationships, and emotional expectations that cannot be legitimately dis-

owned by others. Their idea of liberty withstands radical critiques, as it does not
ignore inequality by protecting a pre-social biological condition: instead, it involves
self-determination and agency that exceed the social construction of nature.
(Accepted: 21 December 2001)

About the Author

Gal Gerson, Department of Political Science, University of Haifa, Mount Carmel, Haifa 31905,
Israel; email: gerson@poli.haifa.ac.il

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