The Choice to Marry :: Essays Papers

The Choice to Marry John Stuart Mill, an ardent and foundational liberal theorist, aims for apparently thorough women’s liberation through freedom and equality. To the extent that he succeeds and fails, it is largely because of his liberal understanding of humans as partially constituted by their social situation and yet partially autonomous sources of reason. Mill, following Wollstonecraft, argues that women have been systematically undereducated and neglected by society, thus channeled into a marginalized status. This condition is then used as evidence of the inferiority of women in justification and reinforcement of the very structures that constitute women (Mill 23). For this problem, Mill offers a solution of institutional change that alters the mindsets of individuals in society, and structurally transforms the laws and norms that marginalize women. Mill’s basic goal is for women to gain formal equality, from which substance will follow. He also calls for liberty, partly as an extension of equality and partly as ability for a woman to define and determine herself (in ways, he later clarifies, that â€Å"mankind be †¦ better off† (Mill 85)). Therefore, just as men, with whom women ought to be made equal, can decide what career they would pursue, so too should women be allowed to select if they become a chemist, shopkeeper, or wife. However, in the case that a woman chooses to be married, she should take on domestic duties, as he suggests this is what it means to become married. She may still keep whatever extraneous pursuits she chooses, so long as they do not conflict with her domestic duties. In this step, Mill retreats from â€Å"profession† as an entirely determined term, to one with some allowance for variations on the theme, wherein â€Å"freely chosen† side activities can be added to the married woman’s role. For Okin, Mill’s premise of liberal feminism may be acceptable, but his neglect for the economic and daily realities of domestic duties discredits his conclusions. Economically, Okin accepts Mill’s advocacy of independent property for husband and wife, but complains that this formal equality of parallel property entitlements forgets that women in domestic roles will not create the property men do, because their work is unpaid (Okin 228-299). Mill’s â€Å"assumption of the immutability of the family structure† (Okin 228) also reinforces the conditions which initially gave rise to women’s distortion into the beings who men consider inferior and more simply forces upon women the drudgery of homemaking.