Jones G.S., Claeys G. The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought
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Ross Harrison
already made ahead for us in the almanac. Similarly, by seeing whether an
action is against the liberty principle or not, we can tell ahead whether it
should be proscribed or permitted without any additional examination or
calculation.
Putting this in terms of rules plays naturally into the area of law, which
tends to work by rules, formulating and enforcing generalisations about
behaviour. But it might be thought to ignore Mill’s claim that he is as con-
cerned with moral as with legal force. However, we need here to understand
an unusual aspect of Mill’s thought about morality, which is that he thinks of
it on the analogy of law. One index of this is how he brings punishment into
his understanding of the moral. ‘The truth is’, he says in Utilitarianism,‘that
the idea of a penal sanction, which is the essence of law, enters not only into
the conception of injustice, but into that of any kind of wrong’ (CWM, x,
p. 246). ‘We do not call anything wrong,’ he continues, ‘unless we mean to
imply that aperson oughtto be punished...for doing it.’ Contemporary
political philosophy is often held to be applied ethics, in which indepen-
dently formulated moral principles are applied to the political domain. But
for Mill (as with other earlier thinkers) the direction is rather the reverse.
It is after we understand the processes of law and punishment that we can
understand morality; we start with the legal ought, understood in Benthamic
manner in terms of liability for punishment. Only then, with this in place,
do we reach an understanding of the moral ought.
The section of Utilitarianism from which this comes (chapter 5) i s con-
cerned not just with rendering justice compatible with utility but also in
distinguishing justice from other moral obligations. This Mill does by using
the old distinction between perfect and imperfect obligations. On the way
he delineates what he calls a right. A right is ‘something which society ought
to defend me in the possession of’ (CWM, x,p.250). But all this (perfect
and imperfect obligations; moral and legal oughts) is to be distinguished
from other measures of value. Apart from these, there are other reasons for
action. For Mill (in a doctrine, or classification, that he first proposes in
his Logic), morality is only part of the ‘art of life’. As well as the legal and
moral, there is the aesthetic and the prudential; all are evaluative reasons.
This makes it easier to associate the moral (as distinguished from the other
kinds) with the idea of a rule. And liber ty is a rule, both for law and also
for moral public sanctions. Apart from these areas where liberty should rule
there are other aspects of life about which recommendations can be made.
These further areas covered by the ‘art of life’ may be evaluated, but not by
the rules arising from the public moral or legal principle of liberty.
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John Stuart Mill, mid-Victorian
11 Paternalism
Thinking of Mill’s thought in terms of rules, or generalisations, resolves
some of the puzzle about how Mill, basing his argument on utilitarianism,
nevertheless argues against paternalism. When, in his central statement of his
principle in On Liberty, he says that ‘the only purpose for which power can
be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against
his will, is to prevent harm to others’ he immediately continues, ‘His own
good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant’ (1.9; CWM, xviii,
p. 223). But if, as a utilitarian, Mill’s central aim is to promote, or maximise,
the good, then it would seem that all possible good should be promoted
that does not come with the cost of a greater harm. So if by interfering (and
stopping someone, for example, getting hooked on drink or drugs) we can
do them good, it seems that we should. The aim is to promote the good,
so it would seem that anyone’s good should be promoted.
So why not interfere to do good to others? Here it is worth remembering,
as was pointed out above, that Mill himself said that his doctrine was not
one of selfish indifference and that his aim was very much not the merely
negative one of people leaving each other alone. Victorian law tends to be
critical about the so-called officious bystander, who interferes with others
in matters that are not his concern. But with Mill, rather than being merely
officious this seems instead to be an office; it is a duty to be performed.
He says about advising others that ‘it were well, indeed, if this good office
were much more freely rendered than the common notions of politeness at
present permit’ (4.5; CWM, xviii,p.278). We have muscular interference
for people’s good, which also seems logically to fit with the utilitarian,
evaluative, base. So why not paternalism? How can we allow Mill’s simple
principle? (Unless, of course, as many have suspected, Mill wants liberty for
its own sake, independent of consequences.)
Part of the answer again involves knowledge, which here enters Mill’s
specific argument. He relies on the familiar principle that, as a generalisation,
people have better understanding, or knowledge, of their own interests
than they do of other people’s. They are both better placed and also more
motivated to acquire it. The person himself is ‘the person most interested
in his own well-being’ (4.4; CWM, xviii,p.277). So we can promote a
rule. It is not that people are invariably right about their own good but
just that, as a rule, they do it better. And this is for good, general, reasons,
based on generalisations about people’s knowledge and interests. Given this,
we can formulate the rule not to be paternalistic in the wrong way, which
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would be to submit people we think to be improvident or stupid to moral
or social sanctions. We should instead offer the good office of advice and
education.
Since it is only the cumulative, general, effect that counts, we do not have
to be right in every instance. And it helps if it is the case that we are better
able to generalise about kinds of harms than kinds of pleasures. If so, we can
construct general rules about what kinds of action to prohibit and sanction
to prevent harm, but adopt also the rule that we should leave pleasures
as far as possible for people to find in their own individual and eccentric
ways.
12 Feminism and other unpopular causes
Mill was also an important figure in the development of English feminist
thought. This is the subject of another chapter and so does not need to be
examined in detail here. Classified in retrospect, he is part of liberal rather
than radical feminism, seeking to extend the same advantages to women as
are already possessed by men. In par ticular, for Mill, this is the opportunity
to vote for Members of Parliament. Typically, Mill acted as well as wrote.
The first motion in the British Parliament that the vote should be extended
to women was made by Mill in person when he was a Member. (This
was as a proposed amendment, which was defeated, to the 1867 Act
which gave further classes of men the vote.) Mill proposed substituting the
word ‘person’ for ‘man’, making precise that he was arguing for the same
advantages; the same property qualifications limiting the eligibility of men
would also have limited women.
After his defeat in the 1868 election, Mill continued to campaign partic-
ularly for this cause. It was another monument to Harriet. He reprinted a
paper on ‘The enfranchisement of women’ in the Dissertations and Discus-
sions collection of his selected papers that he brought out after her death (in
1859, the same year as On Liberty). This time he prefaced it with a fulsome
dedication saying that the chief work was Harriet’s and that his share was
‘little more than that of an editor and amanuensis’. Ten years later (1869)
he published The Subjection of Women. His chief argument here turns upon
the influence of environment and education; that is, on the malleability of
character. It is too soon to tell, Mill holds, what women are capable of.
Again, the feminism is liberal rather than radical, based on potential gender
similarity rather than gender difference. The central thought is that women
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John Stuart Mill, mid-Victorian
can, and should be entitled to, do what men do; that given the same initial
advantages they can make similar use of them.
It is in the context of Harriet that one of Mill’s thoughts that has come
in for later criticism should be considered. This is his assumption in the
Subjection that women will carry on with the same different and more
domestic roles, even after political liberation. But he himself thought of
Harriet and himself working as partners in thought, their chief work. After
Harriet’s death, her daughter Helen Taylor took up much of her position.
She lived with Mill, and after his death edited his substantial posthumous
publications. He helped Helen run the public campaign for the vote. They
also travelled, camped and took long walks together in some of the wilder
parts of Europe. In his own domestic practice, Mill did not confine females
to the domestic sphere.
Votes for women was only one of the causes Mill took up in his brief par-
liamentary career that made him a butt for satirists (where he was portrayed
in cartoons as ‘Miss Mill’). By taking up unpopular causes, he became
the object of vehement public opposition. He was during this time the
secretary of the Governor Eyre committee, attempting to bring the gov-
ernor of a West Indian colony to justice for mistreatment of the natives.
He wrote a much-hated and greatly denounced pamphlet in defence of
Ireland. Women, blacks, the Irish; all lesser-regarded groups. In each case
Mill was driven by a passion for fairness for people of lesser standing. Given
the prejudice of the period, it was a sufficient combination of unpopular
causes to ensure his defeat at the next general election.
Mill quite consciously made it even worse for himself by subscribing to
the election expenses of Bradlaugh, an over t atheist. So he also had the
church against him. On Liberty had been read as an anti-church tract, and
much of the immediate opposition came from the church. Mill’s particular
practical examples in proposing the liberty of thought and discussion was the
liberty to publish atheist opinion without the threat of imprisonment. It was
only after his death that his Autobiography could be read, with its claim that ‘I
am thus one of the very few examples, in this country, of one who has, not
thrown off religious belief, but never had it’ (CWM, i,p.45). It was in this
very late period of his life that Mill in his Examination of Hamilton (1865)
attacked on moral grounds the opinions of one of Hamilton’s followers,
Mansel, with the ringing (and controversial) credo that ‘I will call no being
good, who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow
creatures; and if such a being can sentence me to hell for not so calling him,
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to hell will I go’ (CWM, ix,p.103). On Liberty is a passionate argument
against the coercive power of public opinion. The chief coercive power
at the time Mill wrote was church opinion. We may wonder, on looking
back at the boldly expressed views of the confident Victorians, at what Mill
could be talking about when he described this suppressive fear of opinion.
The answer is atheism. Disbelievers kept their views private to avoid public
obloquy and Mill could see this both with his friends and also with himself.
Among these unpopular causes, votes for women was in a relatively
favourable position. It was defeated in t he House of Commons, but the
vote showed a somewhat surprising level of support and it looked as if ten
years of campaigning might be sufficient to gain the prize. Yet it was only in
1928, sixty years after Mill’s initial proposal, that voting equality for women
was obtained in Britain. After the successful parliamentary vote, the women
immediately repaired to Mill’s statue near the Thames to celebrate. Sixty
years on, Mill was still thought of as the initiator and leader. Just as at the
start of his adult life, when he had been imprisoned for campaigning in
an unpopular cause, Mill was an active thinker. The thought was practical
thought, utilitarianism. The ambition was to think utilitarianism with a
difference, with humanity but also with logical precision. And, as a practical
thinker, Mill also engaged in the practices that, as a man of letters, he wrote
to promote.
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10
The ‘woman question’ and the
origins of feminism
lucy delap
This chapter situates the ‘woman question’ as an expansive and flourishing
set of debates within political, literary and social thought in the nineteenth
century. These debates represented an interrogation of the basic components
of liberal and republican political argument – citizenship, property, access
to the public sphere and political virtue. To talk of the ‘woman question’
is perhaps misleading, because there were many such ‘questions’. To name
but a few, there were questions of single (or ‘surplus’) women, of the
status of married women, of authority and the ‘struggle for the breeches’
in plebeian culture, of political rights, of professional status, of rationality,
and of education. This chapter gives a schematic overview of the century,
and cannot possibly do justice to the complex debates unfolding in each
national context. I aim therefore to show the main currents of argument
in Europe and the United States, pointing to national distinctiveness and
divergence as well as shared transnational arguments and emphases. As a
result, the treatment is only loosely chronological; arguments are grouped
together thematically and different dimensions of the ‘woman question’
are discussed in turn. I outline some historiographical trends in examining
‘woman question’ debates, and point to the literature available to those
seeking more concrete information. Specific campaigns that were highly
influential for the women’s movement (concerning property, child custody,
higher education, prostitution or suffrage) can only be mentioned briefly,
for the ‘woman question’ was a broader discourse than the summed activism
of the ‘women’s movement’. It represented a space for political argument
in which the nature, implications and origins of sexual difference might
be debated, and was regarded as intensely significant for both its symbolic
and its practical import. In John Ruskin’s words, ‘There never was a time
when wilder words were spoken, or more vain imagination permitted,
respecting this question – quite vital to all social happiness. The relations of
the womanly to the manly nature, their different capacities of intellect or of
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Lucy Delap
virtue, seem never to have been yet measured with entire consent’ (Ruskin
n.d. [1865], p. 49).
The nineteenth-century elaboration of the woman question (or ques-
tions) allowed women to lay claim to new identities, or think of themselves
in a new way, as, for example, ‘the people’, citoyennes or as members of
‘the Public’. This was aided by women’s ability from the late eighteenth
century onwards to inhabit new spaces – the theatre and the National
Assembly for Olympe de Gouges, the speaker’s platform for Josephine
Butler or Ida B. Wells, the intellectual salon of Margaret Fuller’s Boston
‘Conversations’, the space in print offered by the women’s periodicals and
the novel, and by the end of the century, the new urban spaces of the
department store, the settlement house, mass transit systems or the music
hall (Crossick and Jaumain 1999; Hamilton and Schroeder 2010; Walkowitz
1992,p.42, 46). A key feature of the woman question was to place under
review how women might inhabit the public spheres of formal politics,
political argument or print culture, and what their qualifications were to
do so. The woman question was a broad field, but sometimes gave rise
to identities that might now be read as ‘feminist’, though this term has
been controversial since it must always be applied anachronistically in the
nineteenth century. Historians have been divided over whether to talk
of the activism around questions of gender and equality as ‘feminism’.
While the term was available in France, it did not connote the organised
movement that it implies today.
1
Some historians have used ‘feminism’ to
give a sense of the cohesiveness and breadth of vision of the nineteenth-
century campaigns for women’s education, property rights, freedom from
state harassment and right to work (Isenberg 1998;Levine1994; Offen
2000). I have preferred to use the ‘woman question’, to suggest a reading of
the debates that is less laden with present-day assumptions about the nature
of such activism. ‘Feminism’ carries with it a great deal of twentieth-century
connotations concerning the assumed ‘bedrock’ concerns of feminism (such
as equality, public activism, primacy of gender as a personal identity) which
are not attributable to some of the thinkers discussed below.
1 The origin of the term ‘feminism’ is commonly but mistakenly attributed, in its French form of
‘f
´
eminisme’, to the early nineteenth-century utopian socialist, Charles Fourier. Instead, it was first
used in French in 1837 as a pejorative term, to indicate ‘the illness of womanly qualities appearing in
men’ (Wilson 2002,p.9 n.30). Early uses in Britain date from 1895 and onwards, though its meaning
was variable (see Caine 1997,p.xv;Ethelmer1898). American periodicals began to use ‘feminism’,
mostly in discussion of European affairs and often in quotation marks, from around 1904. ‘Feminism’
was included in the Oxford English Dictionary only in 1933, where it was defined as ‘advocacy of
women’s rights’ (Cott 1987,pp.3–6;Evans1977,p.39 n.1).
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The ‘woman question’ and the origins of feminism
Three historiog raphical trends have made the ascription of ‘feminism’
problematic. First, historians have examined nineteenth-century women-
only spaces and cultures – the women’s settlements, colleges, schools, and
the sentimental friendships that flourished within them – that were initially
read as regions of exclusion and confinement, the ultimate enactment of
‘separate spheres’ (Harrison 1978;Welter1966). The work of Carroll Smith-
Rosenberg and Martha Vicinus offered a revised reading of these sites,
arguing that they enabled the solidarity and activism amongst women that
later made organised Edwardian feminism possible (Smith-Rosenberg 1985;
Vicinus 1985). The scope of the ‘pre-history’ of feminism has therefore been
significantly widened from the ‘liberal’ campaigns for property and equality,
and the origins of ‘feminism’ must be recognised as highly diverse. At the
same time, the controversial idea of ‘separate spheres’ has been re-evaluated
as a more complex phenomenon than an ideology of women’s oppression.
2
Second, the divide between ‘feminist’ and ‘anti-feminist’ has been found
to be more complex and less polarised than had been previously thought.
Studies of the work of writers such as the British anti-suffragist and novelist
Mary (Mrs Humphrey) Ward have termed her a ‘social feminist’, despite
her opposition to equal political rights (Sanders 1996; Sutton-Ramspeck
1999). ‘Feminists’ have been found to share key ideological assumptions
with ‘anti-feminists’; a definitive set of ‘feminist’ beliefs has become impos-
sible to find. To this end, suffrage has been decentred as the ‘high point’ of
feminist radicalism, and other kinds of claims have been admitted as equally
‘radical’ (Bush 2007; Delap 2005; Holton 1986,p.5). Suffrage by no means
defined the political terrain of the woman question, and in some European
national contexts it barely registered as a nineteenth-century campaign.
Finally, recent interest in the history of masculinity has brought another
unsettling dimension to studies of gender and ‘feminism’, or attempts to
delineate ‘separate spheres’.
3
As Ben Griffin has argued, it was the attitude
2 The concept of ‘separate spheres’ has been an important heuristic device for historians of gender,
giving a descriptive label to the changes in morality and concepts of space that followed the evangelical
revival of the early nineteenth century (Davidoff and Hall 1987;Poovey1988). Following recent
scholarship, it must be read as a complex phenomenon without a clear political valency. ‘Separate
spheres’ has come under sustained attack for eliding and de-historicising a number of gendered
dualisms. It has also been argued that the idea flourished in didactic literature, but that this tells
us little about actual practices which were less governed by gender separation or a divide between
‘public’ and ‘private’ (Davidoff 1995;Klein1995; Vickery 1993).
3 The work of John Tosh on ‘domestic masculinity’, for example, has challenged anew the idea of
‘separate spheres’, by making it clear that men moved freely between the so-called ‘spheres’, and used
their domestic existence as an important source of self-identity as men (Tosh 1999; Kimmel 1987,
pp. 121–53).
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Lucy Delap
of nineteenth-century writer s to masculinity as much as to femininity that
defined their politics (Chernock 2010; Griffin 2011). ‘Feminism’ does not
adequately convey the scope of the questions raised by issues of ‘women’s
rights’, and the inclusion of men as gendered beings has dramatic impli-
cations for how we study the gender politics of the nineteenth century
(Francis 2002).
There was, nonetheless, a breadth to the ‘woman question’ debates in this
period that allows us to trace the intellectual trends that made the inven-
tion of ‘feminism’ possible in a range of countries in the first decades of
the twentieth century. Recent scholar ship has therefore stressed the organ-
ised, transnational nature of the debates and activism around women’s rights
(Bolt 1995, 2004;Harrison2000; McFadden 1999; Offen 2000, 2010).
Karen Offen has also pointed to other major developments surrounding the
nineteenth-century woman question. These include the increasing literacy
of women, the growth of nation-state formations and their concerns over
population, the entry of women to the urbanised workforce, and the grow-
ing divergence between feminism and socialism, which became especially
marked after the founding of the 1889 Second International. Drawing on
her work and others, this chapter surveys a pre-history of feminism, without
claiming that the individuals described were themselves ‘feminists’. I aim
to show the way in which thinkers within different political perspectives –
liberals, republicans, radicals, idealists, socialists and Marxists, all engaged
with the ‘woman question’ and grappled with how women might be rep-
resented within their different political orders.
Eighteenth-century writings on women tended to stress the failings of
women in the realm of manners, and to prescribe their traditional duties
as a solution to their frivolity and hedonism (Taylor 2003). Responses to
the French Revolution in the 1790s, however, marked a relatively new turn
in the ‘woman question’, a point at which concerns with gender became
more central to modern politics. Women came to be newly identified as
an ‘oppressed group’ in the 1790s, as well as a group with political agency
(Coole 1993). In France, women’s clubs and soci
´
et
´
es fraternelles briefly pro-
vided new spaces for the popular discussion of women’s rights, and speakers
such as Pauline L
´
eon, Etta Palm d’Aelders and Th
´
eroigne de M
´
ericourt
became prominent in interrogating revolutionary politics on the question
of sexual difference and citizenship. The playwright and ‘active citizen’
Olympe de Gouges (1745–93) had responded to the Declaration of the Rights
of Man and Citizen with her own Declaration of the Rights of Woman and
Citizens (1791). Influenced by the Marquis de Condorcet’s support for
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The ‘woman question’ and the origins of feminism
women’s civic rights (Condorcet 1912), de Gouges recognised that under
revolutionary law, women had an anomalous status. While recognised as
civic individuals in some aspects (marriage, divorce), they were still excluded
from full political rights. She claimed that women were individuals, and that
by the universalist logic of the Revolution, they should therefore be equal
citizens. She proposed a new ‘social contract’ to regulate the union of men
and women in marriage, as well as full voting rights. As Joan Scott has
argued, de Gouges based her claims about women, and her claim to be an
author (which was not a status open to women under revolutionary law), on
the basis of her active and creative imagination, her ability to dream, in the
style of the philosophes, Diderot, Voltaire and Rousseau (Scott 1996,pp.22–
30). These thinkers had stressed that women had no active imagination – de
Gouges’ adoption of this mode of thinking represented a resistance to the
conventional bounds of sexual difference, and a contrast to the more preva-
lent ‘feminist’ mode of claiming women’s powers of rationality and reason.
De Gouges was comfortable with sexual difference between citizens –
she did not claim that equality had to rest on sameness, though she did
think that women could be active citizens as defined within the republican
tradition. Nonetheless, the attributes of republican ‘activism’ – military ser-
vice, political deliberation, honour and independence – had been coded as
masculine, and it was not easy to argue that women could also be ‘active’.
In her own person, de Gouges attempted to enact the activism of citi-
zenship, as a patriotic and public figure. But her arrest and execution in
1793 revealed the way in which this could be mistaken as a treasonous
and transgressive imitation of men. In this same year, women’s clubs were
outlawed. Republicanism, in its different constructions in France and the
United States, became explicitly constructed as underpinned by a sexual
division of labour, whereby women’s role was to act as good mothers and
wives without an autonomous presence in the public sphere.
4
The fear of
lawlessness and the Terror which fuelled the counter-revolution in Britain
and other countries was deeply formative for the development of political
thought, and gender figured prominently in this. After their high-profile
revolutionary involvement, women could be figured as politically danger-
ous, socially volatile forces, and writers of the nineteenth-century woman
question were divided between perceptions of women as morally elevated
or politically threatening.
4 On ‘republican motherhood’ see Kerber 1980. Offen (2000,pp.46–8, 91–2) discusses the uses
European feminists made of motherhood.
323