John Stuart Mill On Liberty, his first major work, involved an impassioned defense of free speech.

Individuals should be free to do what they wan so long as they do not harm others. Freedom of expression allows for personal growth; a critical component of a representative government. The question of harm became a central point in his theories. In other words, he believed in liberty, but he wasnt a libertarian. Utilitarianismgreatest happiness for the greatest numberwas a major philosophy of the time that Mill adopted. . Mill thinks that intellectual and moral pleasures are superior to physical ones. ON THE SUBJECTION OF WOMEN (1869) Mill begins by arguing that reason is more important than emotion. He thus criticizes ROMANTICISM as a movement and goes back to the basic Enlightenment belief in the primacy of reason. But he doesnt argue from natural law theory (WE HOLD IT TO BE SELF-EVIDENT,) etc He begins his book by taking up the question of why women are considered subordinate to men and what is wrong with the argument. 1. He uses an analogy to slavery. Beginning in the physical superiority of some men in early societies, slavery was regularized in a compact among the masters, who soon came to control society. THE RULE OF MIGHT AND FORCE GOVERNED EARLY SOCIETIES. It is seen in absolute monarchies, which remained the major form of government for many centuries. Added to this is the fact that everything to which we are accustomed appears natural to us. The nobility in the feudal ages thought of themselves as infinitely superior to the serfs. Moreover, people outside of England think it is very unnatural that we have a queen, although they have no problem with the reality that all the members of our government (like theirs) are men. 2. Slowly but surely, absolute monarchies have been ended and slavery has been abolished. Women are the last enslaved group to remain enslaved. 3. Women are now demanding education, access to the professions, and the suffrage. These demands are most advanced in the United States, but they are appearing in England, France, Italy, and Russia. 4. Every man has power in his own household. Each woman is kept separate, unable to combine with other women. And every man wants his wife to accede to her subordinate status. In fact, women are raised to believe that they naturally are subordinate to men.

5. The progressive movement is the boast of modern civilization. We are proud of the special character of the modern world: all humans are now able to access the right to social mobility. The subordination of women is an isolated fact in modern social institutions. 6. The most important questions now is: what are the natural differences between the sexes? Mill doesnt really answer this question in what we have read, but he makes much of the fact that women have not been allowed to write much about their own situation. An extremely important factor behind Mills ideas was his friend of twenty years and wife for eight years: Harriet Taylor. Harriet was married to a businessman in a drug firm. She thought she loved him when she married him, but after a number of years she decided that she didnt. But she had no grounds for divorce and no desire to make herself a social outcast. So she stayed married to him. She had three children with him. Harriet was very beautiful, with mesmeric black eyes, and a mental genius. What she really resented about her marriage was that he demanded sex, and she had to submit to it. When she met Mill at a dinner party, they were very attracted to one another. But most biographers believe they didnt have sex; in fact, Harriet, who was intense and easily dominated over people, talked her husband into remaining celibate. She also talked Mill into remaining celibate. It took them years to work out the arrangement, but finally Harriet and John Stuart Mill spent every evening together except for Wednesday, when Harriet and her husband entertained friends as a married couple. None of them wanted to openly violate social conventions. Mill always stated that he got most of his ideas from Harriet. He was controlled, rarely showed emotion; she was filled with emotion. Both were Victorians, perhaps in every sense of the word. As did Mary Wollstonecraft, they thought that male sexuality had to be controlled, that Harriet being required to submit to sex with her husband was wrong. They argued a variation on the single standard of morality argued by Progressive women in the US. I havent had you read the passages about this, but they are there in Mills writings. One biographer calls him henpecked; another states that he wasnt a very masculine man. When Harriets husband died, they did marry. One final point about JS Mill is very important. Although he was well-known in his own day as a mental genius and his works were read, he didnt make enough money as an author to support himself. Throughout his life he worked as what we would called an executive for the East India Company, receiving and answering reports and questions from agents in the field. The opening wedge in British colonialism were the capitalist enterprises, the socalled companies that were run by private firms, with government participation, that exploited the economic resources of overseas territories.