john stuart mill's on the subjection of women

His proposals to grant extra votes to the well-educated demonstrate a casual elitism, as does his emphasis on higher pleasures: on poetry rather than pushpin. To many, his career in the East India Company reveals not only a thoughtless acceptance of colonialism but also a complacent conviction of the superiority of British society.

Furthermore, aspects of his writings grate on current sensitivities. The campaigns in which he fought have been won, and the ideas he defended - namely, free speech and female suffrage - have become widely embraced, elaborated, refined and transcended. In the eyes of sceptics, Mill has lost his relevance. Monty Python offers an assessment for our age: “John Stuart Mill/ of his own free will/ on half a pint of shandy was particularly ill.” Although William Gladstone once posthumously canonised him as “the saint of rationality”, many contemporary thinkers believe he’s beyond his sell-by date. After a unit on feminist accounts of the place of women’s work and the body in the polis, the course concludes with investigations of feminism’s intersections with racial politics the emergence of queer theory and its impact on feminist politics and how transgender politics expands the scope of feminist thought and action today.A century and a half after the death of John Stuart Mill, it is easy to think that we have had enough of him. Next, we move into the twentieth century by reading key sections of Simone de Beauvoir’s classic The Second Sex and exploring how this text inaugurates more radical feminist accounts of the state and revolution. We then examine foundational texts in the liberal-humanist tradition of feminist thought. We begin by studying ancient representations of women in politics by reading perhaps the oldest and most enduring “feminist” text, Sophocles’s Antigone, alongside Aristophanes’s comedy Lysistrata. The course proceeds through various thematic units. This course offers an introduction to feminist political theory by asking questions like: what is patriarchal political power? how does the modern state conceive of the place of women in social, political, and economic life, and to what extent can the state be utilized to improve the condition of women? what is the relation between feminism and other struggles for social, economic, and racial justice? how does feminist political thought vary across diverse ideologies, cultures, and ethnicities? what is queer feminism, and how does it interpret and engage in contemporary political processes? Students will read, discuss, and write about historical and contemporary texts that address these and other questions. Feminist political thought challenges the absence or subordination of women in the theory and practice of politics.

John stuart mill's on the subjection of women