POL 1201 Lecture : On the Subjection of Women.doc

• School: UMN
• Department: Political Science
• Course: POL 1201
• Professor: Elizabeth Beaumont

Document Summary

Critiques of the status quo of gender inequality. Mill has to acknowledge that women"s subjection has been the norm throughout western civilization. But he insists that we can"t infer from this that we wouldn"t all be better off adopting his principle of equality: we can"t know which approach is better until we experiment and try equality. Types of equality: personal equality and equality of individual liberties. Equal rights over one"s person and equal rights to individual liberty -- one"s ideas and decisions or autonomy Equal rights to divorce/separation: social and political equality. Extending equality in these areas would have extensive legal, political, social, and familial consequences. Because of these forms of inequality and unfreedom, mill (and others) sometimes analogize women"s position to slavery. Nature vs nurture and social construction of gender. Mill insists that women"s traditional roles and limitations are not a matter of an inherent or fixed female nature, as many people insisted.