The Choice to Marry :: Essays Papers

The Choice to Marry John Stuart Mill, an ardent and foundational liberal theorist, aims for apparently thorough womens 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 pick out 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 wages 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. Mills basic goal is for women to ca-ca 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 arrange and determine herself (in ways, he later clarifies, that 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 municipal 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 non conflict with her interior(prenominal) duties. In this step, Mill retreats from profession as an entirely determined term, to one with some allowance for variations on the theme, wherein freely chosen side activities can be added to the married womans role.For Okin, Mills premise of liberal feminism may be acceptable, but his neglect for the economic and daily realities of domestic duties discre dits his conclusions. Economically, Okin accepts Mills 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). Mills assumption of the immutability of the family structure (Okin 228) also reinforces the conditions which initially gave rise to womens torment into the beings who men consider inferior and more simply forces upon women the drudgery of homemaking.