MILL, John Stuart.

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The Subjection of Women. First edition of "the last of his great political tracts" (ODNB), an extension of his landmark philosophy of freedom to women. Mill's relationship with the philosopher Harriet Taylor Mill contributed directly to the work, which he acknowledged as "more directly and literally our joint production than anything else which bears my name" (Autobiography, p. 251).The freedom of women represents a microcosm of Mill's tenets of liberty, in which "the 'greatest good' of the community is inseparable from the liberty of the individual", and in which the definition of tyranny includes the domination of minorities by a democratically elected majority (PMM 345). Mill had long been a women's rights advocate, influenced by the thinking of his father, the Utilitarian philosopher James Mill, and by his long friendship with, and then marriage to Harriet Taylor Mill (1807-1858), a passionate advocate for equality. The Subjection of Women was the only one of Mill's works on which he made a financial loss, "even though pirated popular editions soon began to circulate widely in Europe and America. Among campaigners for women's suffrage, however, it rapidly became a sacred text and gave him a position of heroic, almost apostolic, authority within the nascent women's movement" (ODNB).

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