The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage | Page 4

my wife?"
To this, the type of man who feels every unfavourable criticism of
woman as a personal affront to himself, John Stuart Mill, had affinities.
We find him writing a letter to the Home Secretary, informing him, in
relation to a Parliamentary Bill restricting the sale of arsenic to male
persons over twenty-one years, that it was a "gross insult to every
woman, all women from highest to lowest being deemed unfit to have
poison in their possession, lest they shall commit murder."
We find him again, in a state of indignation with the English marriage
laws, preluding his nuptials with Mrs. Taylor by presenting that lady
with a formal charter; renouncing all authority over her, and promising
her security against all infringements of her liberty which might
proceed from himself.
To this lady he is always ascribing credit for his eminent intellectual

achievements. And lest his reader should opine that woman stands
somewhat in the shade with respect to her own intellectual triumphs,
Mill undertakes the explanation. "Felicitous thoughts," he tells us,
"occur by hundreds to every woman of intellect. But they are mostly
lost for want of a husband or friend . . . to estimate them properly, and
to bring them before the world; and even when they are brought before
it they generally appear as his ideas."
Not only did Mill see woman and all her works through an optical
medium which gave images like this; but there was upon his retina a
large blind area. By reason of this last it was inapprehensible to him
that there could be an objection to the sexes co-operating
indiscriminately in work. It was beyond his ken that the sex element
would under these conditions invade whole departments of life which
are now free from it. As he saw things, there was in point of fact a risk
of the human race dying out by reason of the inadequate imperativeness
of its sexual instincts.
Mill's unfaithfulness to the facts cannot, however, all be put down to
constitutional defects of vision. When he deals with woman he is no
longer scrupulously conscientious. We begin to have our suspicions of
his uprightness when we find him in his Subjection of Women laying it
down as a fundamental postulate that the subjection of woman to man
is always morally indefensible. For no upright mind can fail to see that
the woman who lives in a condition of financial dependence upon man
has no moral claim to unrestricted liberty. The suspicion of Mill's
honesty which is thus awakened is confirmed by further critical reading
of his treatise. In that skilful tractate one comes across, every here and
there, a suggestio falsi [suggestion of a falsehood], or a suppressio veri
[suppression of the truth], or a fallacious analogy nebulously expressed,
or a mendacious metaphor, or a passage which is contrived to lead off
attention from some weak point in the feminist case.[1] Moreover, Mill
was unmindful of the obligations of intellectual morality when he
allowed his stepdaughter, in connexion with feminist questions, to draft
letters [2] which went forward as his own.
[1] Vide [See] in this connexion the incidental references to Mill on pp.

50, 81 footnote, and 139. [2] Vide Letters of John Stuart Mill, vol. ii,
pp. 51, 79, 80, 100, 141, 157, 238, 239, 247, 288, and 349. There is yet
another factor which must be kept in mind in connexion with the
writings of Mill. It was the special characteristic of the man to set out
to tackle concrete problems and then to spend his strength upon
abstractions.
In his Political Economy, where his proper subject matter was man
with his full equipment of impulses, Mill took as his theme an
abstraction: an economic man who is actuated solely by the desire of
gain. He then worked out in great elaboration the course of conduct
which an aggregate of these puppets of his imagination would pursue.
Having persuaded
himself, after this, that he had in his possession a vade mecum
[handbook] to the comprehension of human societies, he now took it
upon himself to expound the principles which govern and direct these.
Until such time as this procedure was unmasked, Mill's political
economy enjoyed an unquestioned authority.
Exactly the same plan was followed by Mill in handling the question of
woman's suffrage. Instead of dealing with woman as she is, and with
woman placed in a setting of actually subsisting conditions, Mill takes
as his theme a woman who is a creature of his imagination. This
woman is, by assumption, in mental endowments a replica of man. She
lives in a world which is, by tacit assumption, free from complications
of sex. And, if practical considerations had ever come into the purview
of Mill's mind, she would, by tacit assumption,