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'Family Selfishness' and the Corruption of Public Virtue: Harriet Smits, Katherine. "‘Family Selfishness’ and the Corruption of Public Virtue: Harriet Taylor Mill’s Enfranchisement of Women." Democratic Moments: Reading Democratic Texts. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. 121–128. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 1 Oct. 2021. <http:// dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781350006195.ch-016>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 1 October 2021, 09:37 UTC. Copyright © Xavier Márquez and Contributors 2018. You may share this work for non- commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. CHAPTER FIFTEEN ‘Family Selfishness’ and the Corruption of Public Virtue: Harriet Taylor Mill’s Enfranchisement of Women Katherine Smits With respect to the influence personally exercised by women over men, it, no doubt, renders them less harsh and brutal; in ruder times, it was often the only softening influence to which they were accessible. But the assertion, that the wife’s influence renders the man less selfish, contains, as things now are, fully as much error as truth. Selfishness towards the wife herself, and towards those in whom she is interested, the children, though favoured by their dependence, the wife’s influence, no doubt, tends to counteract. But the general effect on him of her character, so long as her interests are concentrated in the family, tends but to substitute for individual selfishness a family selfishness, wearing an amiable guise, and putting on the mask of duty. How rarely is the wife’s influence on the side of public virtue: how rarely does it do otherwise than discourage any effort of principle by which the private interests or worldly vanities of the family can be expected to suffer. Public spirit, sense of duty 122 DEMOCRATIC MOMENTS towards the public good, is of all virtues, as women are now educated and situated, the most rarely to be found among them; they have seldom even, what in men is often a partial substitute for public spirit, a sense of personal honour connected with any public duty. Many a man, whom no money or personal flattery would have bought, has bartered his political opinions against a title or invitations for his wife; and a still greater number are made mere hunters after the puerile vanities of society, because their wives value them.1 In 1850, before any national organization and activism by supporters of women’s suffrage in Britain, the first National Woman’s Rights Convention met in Worcester, Massachusetts, to discuss women’s rights – encompassing equal pay, better education and access to careers, but focussing centrally on the right to vote. Women’s activism in the United States had been propelled by the Abolition and Temperance movements, both of which had provided opportunities for women to speak in public and organize, and which, in the case of Abolition, rested on arguments for equal civil and political rights that could obviously be extended to women. The Abolitionist leader William Lloyd Garrison had been the first to sign a petition for women’s suffrage sent to the Massachusetts legislature the previous year. Over 1,000 people attended the Worcester Convention, the ideas and goals of which were publicized in a series of tracts which were read widely in the United States and in Britain. They had a powerful effect in driving activism for women’s suffrage in both countries. The first political association supporting votes for women in Britain was formed in Sheffield in 1851 and presented a petition to the House of Lords. Equality for women had enjoyed some support in Radical circles in Britain in the late eighteenth century. Jeremy Bentham advocated women’s suffrage first in 1789, and continued to develop his arguments in his more general essays on parliamentary reform – although in later essays, including his unfinished Constitutional Code, he asserted that the cause was so unpopular that it could not then be pursued.2 In her Vindication of the Rights of Woman published in 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft attacked the ways in which women were socialized and educated under patriarchy, and asserted their rationality and moral equality with men. Wollstonecraft did not demand the right to vote, although she makes a brief reference to the right of women, as well as men, to be represented in government.3 In 1825, socialists William Thompson and Anna Wheeler published their Appeal to One Half of the Human Race, demanding political and civil rights for women,4 but the idea of women’s suffrage was dismissed even by Radical supporters of extending the suffrage for men, on the grounds that women were dependent on men HARRIET TAYLOR MILL’S ENFRANCHISEMENT OF WOMEN 123 who represented their interests, and that they were likely to use their votes as directed by men. As the Chartist movement gathered strength and support amongst progressives in the early nineteenth century, the issue of women’s representation was largely set aside in favour of the more widely supported case for extending manhood suffrage. Interest in women’s education and moral equality continued, however, in Unitarian intellectual circles in which Mary Wollstonecraft had moved. In 1850, this community included Harriet Taylor, then forty-three years old and a passionate advocate of progressive political causes, including women’s rights and socialism. Taylor was at this point an intellectual collaborator with her long-term companion and future husband John Stuart Mill, also well-known for his commitment to the social and political equality of women.5 In 1851, Harriet Taylor Mill published, anonymously, her polemical essay ‘Enfranchisement of Women’. ‘Enfranchisement’ takes the Worcester Convention’s proceedings and platform as its frame, and goes on to make an impassioned argument for women’s political and civil rights, education and access to the professions and to public life, equality in marriage and the right to vote. The impact of this essay on emerging feminist thinking has been largely eclipsed by John Stuart Mill’s better- known The Subjection of Women, published in 1869, after Taylor Mill’s death. The essays make some similar arguments,6 and indeed for some time ‘Enfranchisement’ was assumed to be an early version by Mill himself of his Subjection.7 Critics have more recently concluded that it is most likely that they worked on ‘Enfranchisement’ together.8 As I show here, Taylor Mill’s ‘Enfranchisement’ makes its case for women’s civil, political and economic equality with men, drawing not, as Mill did in The Subjection, on utilitarian reasons of human happiness, but rather upon natural rights and justice, and on republican conceptions of freedom, independence and the value of political participation. Taylor Mill argues that women have an inherent right to political participation and representation, which it is unjust and oppressive to deny (397). But she also ties women’s exclusion from the suffrage to their economic and social dependence, and argues that their lack of political power produces in women the ‘vices of artifice’, and in men the ‘vices of power’ (410). The denial of political rights to women prevents them from developing and enlarging their interests and perspectives, encouraging them instead to press selfish family concerns upon men, thus corrupting the public good. The extract at the beginning of this chapter describes Taylor Mill’s dark vision of the society that is produced by denying women their right to the vote: beset by corruption and hostile to public virtue. Women ought to be entitled to full political rights, Taylor Mill argues, primarily because it is just – both as a matter of principle in treating people equally, and because their exclusion renders a just polity practically unsustainable. Like contemporaneous political claims against slavery and for civil and political equality for black Americans, to which it refers, ‘Enfranchisement’ 124 DEMOCRATIC MOMENTS relates the right to political representation to broader civil and economic rights. But Taylor Mill’s arguments for votes for women go further, challenging the distinction between the public and private spheres central to liberalism, by critically analysing the operation of patriarchal power in both. (Here she presages Second Wave feminism’s central argument that ‘the personal is political’.) Taylor Mill assumes that the subordination of women in the home, as well as in public life, is essentially political – in both its enforcement of tyrannical relations of domination and subordination in the home, and in its corrupting effects upon public life. The power of men over the women in their families is analogous to the power of kings over subjects – it has ‘reached the stage which the power of kings had arrived at, when opinion did not yet question the rightfulness of arbitrary power’ (407) and thus is susceptible to the same critique of aristocratic power that characterized eighteenth and nineteenth century democratic thinking. Wollstonecraft had argued similarly in the Vindication of the Rights of Woman that ‘unconditional obedience, is the catchword of tyrants of every description . and one kind of despotism supports another’.9 Like Wollstonecraft, Taylor Mill sees the effects of women’s subject status as vicious. Because they are denied political participation, they are incapable of perceiving the public good. What is crucial here is the effect that exercising the right to vote has upon the understanding and perspective of voters. Like Mill, Taylor acknowledged the concern that women, like
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