FEMINIST THOUGHT

Nineteenth-Century Thought: Equal Liberty 19
few women who, from having received a masculine education, have acquired
courage and resolution,” 41 Mill used the life stories of exceptional women to
strengthen his claim that male-female differences are not absolute but instead
are differences of average. The average woman’s inability to do something the
average man can do, said Mill, does not justify a law or taboo barring all
women from attempting that thing. 42
Mill also made the point that even if all women are worse than all men at
something, this still does not justify forbidding women from trying to do
that thing, for “what women by nature cannot do, it is quite superfluous to
forbid them from doing. What they can do, but not so well as the men who
are their competitors, competition suffices to exclude them from.” 43
Although Mill believed women would fare quite well in any competitions
with men, he conceded that occasionally a biological sex difference might tip
the scales in favor of male competitors. Like Wollstonecraft, however, he
denied the existence of general intellectual or moral differences between men
and women: “I do not know a more signal instance of the blindness with
which the world, including the herd of studious men, ignore and pass over
all the influences of social circumstances, than their silly depreciation of the
intellectual, and silly panegyrics on the moral, nature of women.” 44
Also like Wollstonecraft earlier, Mill claimed that society’s ethical double
standard hurts women. He thought many of the “virtues” extolled in women
are, in fact, character traits that impede women’s progress toward personhood.
This is as true for an ostensibly negative trait (helplessness) as for an ostensibly
positive trait (unselfishness). Mill suggested that because women’s concerns were
confined to the private realm, women were preoccupied with their own interests
and those of their immediate families. As a result of this state of affairs, women’s
unselfishness tended to take the form of extended egoism. Women’s charity typically
began and ended at home. They spared no effort to further the interests of
their loved ones, but they showed scant regard for the common weal.
As described above, women’s family-oriented unselfishness was not the
humanitarian unselfishness Mill espoused. He treasured the unselfishness
that motivates people to take into account the good of society as well as the
good of the individual person or small family unit. Mill believed that if
women were given the same liberties men enjoy, and if women were taught
to value the good of the whole, then women would develop genuine
unselfishness. This belief explains Mill’s passionate pleas for women’s suffrage.
He thought that when citizens vote, they feel obligated to cast their
ballots in a way that benefits all of society and not just themselves and their
loved ones. 45 Whether Mill was naive to think that citizens are inherently
public-spirited is, of course, debatable.