DALE E. MILLER
Most of my discussion in this chapter will be aimed at answering two related questions. The first, roughly stated, is what J.S. Mill takes to make for a good family. What, in other words, are the virtues of a family? The second, also roughly put, is how much importance Mill attaches to the family. How large of a role does it play in his social philosophy? Before turning to these questions, though, I will first offer a brief biographical note on the role that family, or families, played in Mill’s own life.1
People who know nothing else about Mill’s life know about his early relationship with his father. Or at least they know that James Mill took personal charge of his elder son’s education and that, by working the young boy hard and supervising him closely, he achieved impressive results, at least in certain respects. John famously began to read Greek at age three, among other precocious accomplishments. He was not only educated at home but was intentionally kept apart from children other than his own siblings – of whom there were many, for John was followed by five sisters and three brothers. With them he spent much time, for he was tasked with overseeing their education just as his father was overseeing his.
In his Autobiography, Mill cautions readers against forming a picture of his childhood that too closely resembles a Victorian workhouse. He remarks on the patience with which his father, not a characteristically patient man, tolerated interruptions of his own work whenever John needed help with Greek vocabulary (Autobiography, I: 9). And he points out that “Though no holidays were allowed, lest the habit of work should be broken, … I had ample leisure in every day to amuse myself” (although he adds that “my amusements, which were mostly solitary, were in general of a quiet, if not a bookish turn …”) (Autobiography, I: 39).
Mill’s later relationship with his father was somewhat fraught. He allowed his father to draw him into employment at the East India Company, and he continued to reside with his family well into adulthood, but he did not confide in his father about his melancholic “mental crisis” (Autobiography, I: 137–92) and on more than one occasion he sharply rejected his father’s counsel about with whom he ought to associate – most notably when his father told him to break off his relationship with Harriet Taylor, about which more later (Bain 1882b: 39, 163). Perhaps his own explanation for this is given indirectly in his Autobiography, where he admits that “known liability to punishment” is probably an indispensable element of any successful pedagogy but then cautions that if it predominates too much it may “preclude love and confidence on the part of the child to those who should be the unreservedly trusted advisers of after years” (Autobiography, I: 55).
Remarkably, Mill never mentions his mother in the Autobiography. In an unpublished early draft of the Autobiography, however, his description of her is diminishing:
That rarity in England, a really warm hearted mother, would in the first place have made my father a totally different being, and in the second would have made the children grow up loving and being loved. But my mother, with the very best intentions, only knew how to pass her life in drudging for them.… [T]o make herself loved, looked up to, or even obeyed, required qualities which she unfortunately did not possess.
(Rejected Leaves, I: 612)
Alexander Bain, a psychologist who collaborated closely with John Stuart Mill and who wrote biographies of both him and James Mill, observes that she
became thoroughly obedient to her lord. As an admired beauty, she seems to have been chagrined at the discovery of her position after marriage. There was disappointment on both sides: the union was never happy.
(Bain 1882a: 60)
Mill had the opportunity to experience life with a family somewhat more cheerful than his own when, just before his fifteenth birthday, he embarked on a fourteen‐month sojourn to France. While there he stayed with the family of Sir Samuel Bentham, Jeremy Bentham’s younger brother. In his Autobiography he says that the greatest benefit of this adventure “was that of having breathed for a whole year the free and genial atmosphere of Continental life” (Autobiography, I: 59), but it is not difficult to believe that he could have enjoyed much the same sense of freedom anywhere that put him beyond his father’s watchful gaze. His description of Samuel’s wife Mary contrasts sharply with that of his own mother; he found her to be
a woman of strong will and decided character, much general knowledge, and great practical good sense … she was the ruling spirit of the household, as she deserved, and was well qualified, to be.
(Autobiography, I: 59)
The next family that exerted a major influence on the course of Mill’s life was that of Harriet Taylor and her husband John. Mill’s relationship with Harriet Taylor is probably the second‐best known item of his biography. Mill and Mrs. Taylor fell in love soon after they were introduced, when he was twenty‐four and she twenty‐two. They spent many hours alone in each other’s company, an arrangement that generated considerable gossip. John Taylor demonstrated considerable forbearance, on the whole, although he did eventually insist that he and Harriet maintain separate homes (albeit not on a legal separation). Harriet Taylor returned to her husband’s side in 1849, as he lay dying from cancer. Indeed, so devoted was she to nursing her husband that she castigated Mill for suggesting that she could write to him during an “odd time” when she might find a “change of subject of thought a relief”: “Good God, sh[oul]d you think it a relief to think of something else some acquaintance or what not while I was dying?” (H.T. Mill 1998: 360).
Mill and Harriet Taylor were married in 1851. Afterwards, Mill began severing relations with members of his own family. He became prickly and virtually impossible to satisfy where their conduct toward Harriet was concerned. As one biographer writes,
One by one the links of kinship were deliberately broken, until at last nothing remained but the pitiful figure of Mill’s mother, scurrying helplessly to the India House to plead for reconciliation.
(Packe 1954: 349–55)
Mill’s distancing himself from his mother and siblings was of a piece with a generally anti‐social turn in the Mills’ lives after their marriage. They took a home on the outskirts of London and received few visitors. But Mill now had a family of his own that included, in addition to his wife, three stepchildren. The most significant of these in Mill’s own life was Helen Taylor, Harriet’s only daughter. After Harriet’s death, in 1858, Helen would give up her budding stage career to become his amanuensis; she was also active in the women’s rights movement.2
A useful first step in understanding Mill’s conception of an ideal marriage is seeing what he takes to be defective about the institution in his milieu. Mill criticizes multiple aspects of marriage as it existed in his day. Many of his criticisms are objections to elements of the legal framework surrounding marriage that relegated wives to an inferior position vis‐à‐vis their husbands. I will discuss five specific areas of law in which he advocates reform.
The first of these concerns the laws governing divorce and separation. Early in the nineteenth century, ecclesiastical courts could grant a divorce mensa et thoro, which was more a separation than a true divorce (it did not, for instance, allow for remarriage) in cases of adultery, desertion, or (extreme) cruelty. They could also grant a divorce vincula matrimonii, which amounted to an annulment, but only when the marriage was found to be invalid (e.g., because one party had been underage). A couple whose marriage was valid could completely terminate their marriage only through a “private” act of Parliament specific to that particular marriage. Attaining a Parliamentary divorce was extremely expensive, and with very few exceptions they were granted only in cases of adultery by the wife, so the possibility existed almost exclusively for the benefit of wealthy men (Shanley 1989: 35–7). The 1857 Divorce Act empowered a newly‐created Divorce Court to grant a divorce that fully terminated a marriage and allowed for remarriage. A man could petition the Court for a divorce when his wife was adulterous; a woman seeking divorce, in contrast, was required to show that her husband was guilty of not only adultery but also cruelty, bigamy, desertion, or incest. Since the Court sat only in London and petitioning it was fairly expensive, divorce continued to exist primarily for the benefit of well‐off men (Shanley 1989: 38–9).
Mill is reticent about divorce in The Subjection of Women, which appeared in 1869. After discussing some of the elements of the law that I will canvass next, which he takes to make marriage little more than a state of servitude for women so far as their legal rights are concerned, he does venture to say that fairness would seem to demand that women be given the right to try different masters until they find one a good one. But he hastens to add that “The question of divorce, in the sense involving liberty of remarriage, is one into which it is foreign to my purpose to enter” (Subjection XXI: 285).
In an earlier work, though, one not intended for publication, Mill does argue at some length for the claim that divorce should be a feasible option. In 1831, he and Harriet agreed to write and exchange essays on the topic of marriage, and both devoted a significant portion of their efforts to the question of divorce’s permissibility.3 In his, Mill allows that the indissolubility of marriage is of some benefit to women, since in the status quo few women would be able to support themselves without a husband due to their lack of opportunities and education, and a man’s interest in a woman is usually largely a matter of a physical attraction that fades with time (On Marriage, XXI: 40–2). In these circumstances a woman might justifiably worry that if divorces were easy to come by then she would be discarded and left helpless when her husband’s ardor cooled.
But in a future in which women were treated as men’s equals, possessing the same rights and opportunities and receiving the same education, they would no longer need to see the availability of divorce as a threat to their interests (On Marriage, XXI: 40–6). In such a world, a woman would not choose to marry unless she were convinced that her husband’s interest in her transcended the physical, and she would not want to remain married unless she believed that this conduced to both her and her husband’s happiness. Inevitably, Mill says, there will be marriages whose continuation would only detract from both parties’ happiness. Since someone marrying for the first time will necessarily be inexperienced – co‐habitation before marriage is apparently no part of the future that Mill contemplates – even the best‐meaning people are sometimes certain to contract unsuitable matches.
Still, Mill acknowledges that there are considerations that would count against a couple’s divorcing and that in a well‐constituted society would result in public opinion’s being directed against couples who do so too blithely (On Marriage, XXI: 40–2). One is that couples who split as soon as their relationships hit a rough patch will often deprive themselves of the contentment that they would have found together in the long term. A second is that frequent changes of partner would tend to wear down people’s finer feelings and their sense of “any peculiar sacredness attaching to the relation between the sexes.” (This “ethological” concern with the effects of a social practice on people’s characters is characteristically Millian.) Finally, couples will often have children soon after marrying, Mill’s advice against this practice notwithstanding, and their well‐being becomes an important factor in any decision about the fate of the marriage. Mill does not believe that these considerations, even when taken together, are sufficient to show that couples should never be able to divorce. The misery of someone in an unsalvageable marriage, together with his more general aversion to contracts of unlimited duration, militate too strongly in favor of protecting this option. However, he concludes
That in a tolerably moral state of society, the first choice would almost always, especially where it had produced children, be adhered to, unless in case of such uncongeniality of disposition as rendered it positively uncomfortable to one or both of the parties to live together, or in case of a strong passion conceived by one of them for a third person.
(On Marriage, XXI: 48; see also Liberty, XVIII: 300–1)
(That final clause is noteworthy in the context of his relationship with Harriet.)
Happily, Mill argues, under modern economic conditions it is unlikely that divorce will be common even where it is freely available. “Busy men,” he writes, “have no time” for “sexual profligacy, or prolonged vagaries of imagination on that subject,” and “require that home should be a place of rest.” Hence “there is no probability that marriages would often be contracted without a sincere desire on both sides that they be permanent” (Auguste Comte, X: 311). He would no doubt be quite surprised by contemporary divorce rates.
A second serious flaw that Mill sees in the laws governing marriage is their failure to recognize the agency of married women in the ownership of property and making of contracts. This was one implication of the common‐law principle according to which a married couple is one legal person whose decisions are all made by the husband. Under a doctrine known as coverture, “the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband …” (Blackstone 1765: 430). In 1854, Barbara Leigh‐Smith summarizes the state of the law in this way:
[T]he wife loses all her rights as a single woman, and her existence is entirely absorbed in that of her husband. … What was her personal property before marriage … becomes absolutely her husband’s, and he may assign or dispose of them at his pleasure whether he and his wife live together or not. … Money earned by a married woman belongs absolutely to her husband …. A married woman cannot … enter into contracts except as the agent of her husband; that is to say, her word alone is not binding in law …
(Leigh‐Smith 1983: 301–2)
Mill criticizes these restrictions in The Subjection of Women, arguing that in this respect the common law treated married women worse than Roman law had treated slaves (Subjection, XXI: 284). And although this had no legal force, before he married Mill composed a statement declaring his opposition to this element of marital law and renouncing any claim on Harriet Taylor’s property or any power to restrict her freedom.
… I having no means of legally divesting myself of these odious powers … feel it my duty to put on record a formal protest against the existing law of marriage, in so far as conferring such powers: and a solemn promise never in any case or under any circumstances to use them.
(Statement on Marriage, XXI: 99)
There is a further respect in which coverture results in the legal position of wives being worse than that of slaves, according to Mill: “[A] female slave has (in Christian countries) an admitted right, and is considered under a moral obligation, to refuse to her master the last familiarity.” Yet a wife could not prosecute her husband if he forced himself upon her. In the eyes of the law the power to decide what she had consented to was his alone, which meant that marital rape was virtually a conceptual impossibility (Shanley 1989: 177–8). Mill decries the wretched position into which a wife can thus be placed:
[H]owever brutal a tyrant she may unfortunately be chained to … he can claim from her and enforce the lowest degradation of a human being, that of being made the instrument of an animal function contrary to her inclinations.
(Subjection, XXI: 285)
Fourth, while some forms of domestic violence were recognized as criminal, Mill still regards the law as woefully inadequate at protecting women against them. Convictions were hard to win. Although an exception was made in such cases to the general principle that, because of coverture, husbands and wives could not testify for or against one another, a woman who knew that she would again be under her husband’s absolute power once his sentence was served would frequently be too intimidated to testify (Subjection, XXI: 287–8).
Moreover, Mill asserts that the sentences for husbands convicted of assaulting their wives tended to be far too light. This was a topic on which he more than once deployed his most powerful rhetoric. From 1846 to 1851, he and Harriet Taylor co‐authored a series of newspaper articles concerned with criminal cases of the day that they took to epitomize larger social injustices. Toward the end of this series they turned their attention turn to cases of violence by men against their wives, and in the Morning Chronicle they opine that
There ought to be severer penalties for killing or ill‐treating a wife or child than for killing or ill‐treating, in a similar manner, any other person. … The crime is greater; for it is a violation of more solemn obligations…. It is also baser – for it is committed upon one who has trusted the culprit, who is in his power, and who is generally without sufficient bodily strength to resist or retaliate. … Finally, there is no crime in the whole catalogue of offences in which the single act which incurs the penalty of the law is an index to such an amount of undetected and unpunished wickedness.
(Wife Murder, XXV: 1186)
In the course of introducing an amendment to the Reform Bill of 1867 that would have extended the right to vote to women on the same terms as men, Mill points to the lax sentences given to men found guilty of domestic violence as an illustration of the respects in which the interests of women were being inadequately represented:
I should like to have a return laid before this House of the number of women who are annually beaten to death, kicked to death, or trampled to death by their male protectors: and, in an opposite column, the amount of the sentences passed, in those cases in which the dastardly criminals did not get off altogether. I should also like to have, in a third column, the amount of property, the unlawful taking of which was, at the same sessions or assizes, by the same judge, thought worthy of the same amount of punishment. We should then have an arithmetical estimate of the value set by a male legislature and male tribunals on the murder of a woman, often by torture continued through years, which, if there is any shame in us, would make us hang our heads.
(The Admission of Women to the Electoral Franchise, XXVIII: 158–9)
Finally, fifth, the law also favored husbands over their wives where the custody of children was concerned. Her children, Mill writes,
are by law his children. He alone has any legal rights over them. Not one act can she do towards or in relation to them, except by delegation from him. Even after he is dead she is not their legal guardian, unless he by will has made her so.
(Subjection XXI: 285)4
And that was when the couple remained together. When they separated or divorced, the law continued to favor the father in many respects. Prior to 1839, when a couple legally separated custody of all children automatically passed to the father, leaving the mother with no rights whatsoever where they were concerned. The Infant Custody Act, passed in this year, made it possible for women to petition the courts for custody of children younger than seven and some right to visit children below the age of sixteen.5 Only women of some means, however, could afford to turn to the courts (Shanley 1989: 137). The 1857 Divorce Act did give judges some discretion to decide which parent ought to have custody, but the principle that mothers and fathers are co‐equal parents would not be legally recognized until well after Mill’s death (Shanley 1989: 137–8, 148–9).
Mill takes the inequalities imposed on married women under this sort of legal regime to seriously diminish the prospects for happiness of all married people. That women’s prospects for happiness are greatly diminished is clear enough. For them, to be married is to have a master, against whose predations the law offered virtually no protection. Of course, it is no part of Mill’s purpose to deny that many men will use the power that the law gives them gently and lovingly, or even refuse to use it at all (even if not many went to the length, as he did, of setting out in writing their intention not to use it). But as he points out,
Marriage is not an institution designed for a select few. Men are not required, as a preliminary to the marriage ceremony, to prove by testimonials that they are fit to be trusted with the exercise of absolute power.
(Subjection, XXI: 287)
Moreover, the harmful consequences of the legal subjection of wives to their husbands are neither limited to the more immediate effects on women’s welfare nor suffered only by women. I have already mentioned in passing that Mill’s utilitarianism is deeply ethological, insofar as he frequently takes the most significant consequences of a given institution or practice to be those that are mediated by its effects on people’s characters or habits of thought, feeling, and volition. This is a case in point.
In writing about slavery, Mill observes that slavery deprives slaves of the opportunity to develop their intellects and capacity for self‐direction (see, e.g., Principles II, 247; Civilization, XVIII: 122; Considerations, XIX: 395). Similarly, he says that the patriarchal structure of society, of which the laws surrounding marriage are a primary element, prevents their characters from developing as fully as they would in an environment of equality. Indeed, it so transforms women’s characters that we cannot really say which differences between the sexes are natural and which the product of social conditioning (Subjection, XXI: 276–7; see also Morales 1996: 122–3).
In addition to noting the effects of slavery on the characters of the enslaved, Mill asserts that slavery is
so corrupting to the master‐class when they have once come under civilized influences, that its adoption under any circumstances whatever in modern society is a relapse into worse than barbarism.
(Considerations, XIX: 395)
He regards this as a specific instance of the more general principle that “It is wholesomer for the moral nature to be restrained, even by arbitrary power, than to be allowed to exercise arbitrary power without restraint” (Subjection, XXI: 321). And he believes that this principle also holds in the case of the legal subordination of married women:
[T]he almost unlimited power which present social institutions give to the man over at least one human being … seeks out and evokes the latent germs of selfishness in the remotest corners of his nature – [and in so doing it] offers to him a license for the indulgence of those points of his original character which in all other relations he would have found it necessary to repress and conceal, and the repression of which would in time have become a second nature.
(Subjection, XXI: 289; see Morales 1996: 124–6)
Of course, not every man’s character would be perverted by marriage in this way. But those who are so affected not only become a source of positive unhappiness to those around them but are also made less capable of enjoying happiness themselves, even if they cannot appreciate the point.
It would be vain to attempt to persuade a man who beats his wife and ill‐treats his children that he would be happier if he lived in love and kindness with them. He would be happier if he were the kind of person who could so live; but he is not, and it is probably too late for him to become, that kind of person.
(Considerations, XIX: 44)
While the laws that governed marriage in his lifetime accorded husbands considerable power over their wives, Mill strenuously maintains that ideally marriage is a partnership of equals. More than one sense of equality is in play here. Equality of power is one of these, and I have already outlined some of the harms that Mill takes to flow from the disparity in marital power that the legal regime of his day constructed.
But Mill has another sense of equality in mind as well, which is equality of ability, and mental ability in particular. A marriage between people who are unlike in mental ability, he claims, can never offer lasting satisfaction to the superior party and can only tend to his degeneration as a thinker (Subjection, XXI: 335). Or her degeneration, should the wife be the mental superior, but while Mill would never forget this possibility – he would have placed Harriet far above John Taylor in these terms – he assumes that among his contemporaries, wives will usually be intellectually inferior to their husbands in many respects in virtue of having had fewer opportunities for mental cultivation. In the Subjection of Women, Mill makes very broad criticisms of the myriad ways in which nineteenth‐century society confined women’s attention to the home and domestic sphere, which he took to be responsible for stunting their mental development. The poor formal education offered for women is the chief culprit in this regard. Mill is very critical of the sorts of education that most men received, both in terms of what they were meant to learn and how they were meant to learn it (see, e.g., On Genius, I: 337–8). But he regards the education usually afforded to women as far worse than this in both the quantity of instruction and the subjects taught (Subjection, XXI: 305, 326–7, 330; On Marriage, XXI: 41–3). Other offenders, which might be regarded as forms of education in a broader sense, included the exclusions of women from many occupations and from the franchise (Subjection, XXI: 300–5; Considerations, XIX: 480–1; Principles, III: 955n1).
The best marriages, according to Mill, involve two people who are not only approximately equal in abilities but also similar in interests, beliefs, and tastes. He has little patience with the old saw that “opposites attract”: “Unlikeness may attract, but it is likeness which retains; and in proportion to the likeness is the suitability of the individuals to give each other a happy life” (Subjection, XXI: 333). When two equals have largely similar interests as well, Mill concludes, it is possible for them to share an especially intense and lasting friendship, and it is this sort of friendship that he takes to constitute the best sort of marriage.
When the two persons both care for great objects, and are a help and encouragement to each other in whatever regards these, … there is a foundation for solid friendship, of an enduring character, more likely than anything else to make it, through the whole of life, a greater pleasure to each to give pleasure to the other, than to receive it.
(Subjection, XXI: 334)
In this sort of marriage, Mill writes, one between “two persons of cultivated faculties, identical in opinions and purposes, between whom there exists that best kind of equality,” husband and wife will each “enjoy the luxury of looking up to the other” (Subjection, XXI: 336). More than that, though, each will contribute to the other’s improvement, experiencing “alternately the pleasure of leading and of being led in the path of development.” Thus Mill’s conception of the ideal marriage looks very much like Aristotle’s account of the highest form of friendship, a “friendship of virtue” (Aristotle 2000, see also Urbinati 1991: 637–9). In a friendship of virtue, the friends love each other without ulterior motive, which precludes vicious people from participating in this form of friendship. These friendships can only exist between equals. And through belonging to a friendship of virtue, good people become better still, “[f]or each molds the other in what they approve of” (Aristotle 2000: 153 [1172a13]).
Mill declines to describe how fulfilling being part of such a marriage can be, saying that “To those who can conceive it, there is no need; to those who cannot, it would appear the dream of an enthusiast” (Subjection, XXI: 336). His paean notwithstanding, however, this may seem a somewhat pallid conception of the ideal marriage. Even if one accepts it as far as it goes – as one surely should – one might be struck by Mill’s lack of attention to romance, not to mention sexual attraction. Mill may well have undervalued the contribution that these factors can make to a good marriage. Recall, for instance, his description of rape as forced participation in an “animal function.” We can share his abhorrence of rape while wondering whether his description precisely captures what is horrific about it and whether it suggests an excessively denigrating attitude toward sexual pleasure as such. There is other evidence that suggests that both he and Harriet attached little importance to sexual activity, ranging from Mill’s discussion of the higher pleasures in Utilitarianism (which on one reading suggests that the best conceivable life would not involve any physical pleasures at all), to Bain’s testimony that Mill “made light of the difficulty of controlling the sexual appetite” (1882b: 149), to Harriet’s denial that “the non‐exercise of [the sexual functions] is necessarily a deprivation” (H.T. Mill 1998: 226). Susan Mendus comments instructively that in setting his “faith on a great day when there will be no more sensualism” and behaving “as though that day might be tomorrow,” Mill displays “a view of human nature just as impoverished as Bentham’s and much less realistic” (Mendus 1989: 190).
One might naturally assume that if Mill believes that the partners in an ideal marriage will be similar in their abilities, interests, and beliefs, so too will they spend their time on similar activities. Rather notoriously, however, Mill endorses a familiar gendered division of responsibilities which has women overseeing the home while men earn an income.
[T]he common arrangement, by which the man earns the income and the wife superintends the domestic expenditure, seems to me in general the most suitable division of labour between the two persons. If, in addition to the physical suffering of bearing children, and the whole responsibility of their care and education in early years, the wife undertakes the careful and economical application of the husband’s earnings to the general comfort of the family; she takes not only her fair share, but usually the larger share, of the bodily and mental exertion required by their joint existence.
(Subjection, XXI: 297; see also On Marriage: 43–5; cf. The Enfranchisement of Women, H.T. Mill 1998: 60–1)
While what lies behind this remark is Mill’s appreciation of a genuine and on‐going problem – the so‐called “second shift” problem, whereby women do both an equal share of work outside the home and a disproportionate share of work in it – he has been taken to task for his failure to realize that alternative arrangements are possible. His feminist credentials have consequently been tarnished. Julia Annas, for instance, writes that Mill
argues that to have self‐respect a woman must be able to earn her own living, but that in fact few women will, and he seems to envisage jobs being held only by the unmarried, or by middle‐aged women whose children have grown up. This is clearly most unsatisfactory. How can women’s education be a serious affair if it is known that most will not use it? (1977: 190)
Feminists who are sympathetic readers of Mill have responded to this line of criticism by arguing that Mill is far more committed to the ideal of equality between spouses than he is to the desirability of the “common arrangement” of responsibilities between them, so that if the two turned out to be incompatible, he would unquestionably retain the former and repudiate the latter. Mary Lyndon Shanley, for instance, says that while the “belief that equality was a precondition to marital friendship was a profound theoretical tenet” for Mill and Victorian feminists of his ilk, “their belief that friendship could be attained and sustained while women bore nearly exclusive responsibility for the home might be modified or even abandoned if experience showed it wrong” (1989: 66). Maria Morales, despite criticizing Shanley’s specific formulation of this point, makes a similar move. She distinguishes between Mill’s “ideal of perfect equality” and his “hypothetical prediction of what form the family would take under conditions of perfect equality”, and argues that while it might falsify Mill’s prediction if most families actually departed from the “common arrangement” after conditions of perfect equality were established, it would not weaken his case for the ideal (1996: 168–74). Of course, defending Mill in this way does not preclude us from judging his prediction or hypothesis about how work would be divided within an ideal marriage to be implausible. Shanley accuses Mill of “ignoring the profound effect of the sexual division of labor both inside and outside the home on men’s and women’s occupations and resources” (1989: 67), while Morales says that “Mill’s faux pas was to assume that the functions of child bearing and child rearing must go hand in hand” (1996: 172).
Mill’s description of the ideal marriage presupposes that marriage is a relation between a man and a woman. Given the context in which he was writing, we cannot expect him to have discussed a possibility such as same‐sex marriage. Still, it is worth noting that there is nothing in Mill’s account of the best sort of marriage that would preclude a homosexual couple from sharing one. We do not find in Mill, for instance, the suggestion that a marriage achieves its true purpose only if it results in procreation.
One might wonder whether Mill would think that non‐traditional marriages of other sorts could fulfill his ideal, for example, polygamous or polyandrous ones. We actually do find some discussion of polygamy in On Liberty, although perhaps not enough to let us entirely answer this question. There Mill criticizes the practice by Mormons in what is today the American state of Utah but was then a remote part of the frontier. He argues that it would be wrong for outsiders to intervene in this practice, at least as long as no one was forced to participate in polygamy and individuals who rejected the practice were free to leave. Still, Mill characterizes polygamy as “a mere riveting of the chains of one half of the community, and an emancipation of the other from reciprocity of obligation towards them” and “a retrograde step in civilization” (Liberty, XVIII: 290–1). What is not entirely clear, however, is whether Mill thinks that polygamous marriages are inherently bad for women or only that the same sorts of circumstances which tend to make traditional marriages bad for women in societies like his own – the difficulties faced by single women, the disparity of power between husband and wife, and so on – are exacerbated by polygamy. If he thinks the latter, then he might believe that in an improved society in which these circumstances have changed a marriage with more than two spouses might be as good as any other. As long as the interests of children and other third parties could be protected, the doctrine of On Liberty at least appears to license experimentation with such marriages.
Mill describes the having children as “one of the most responsible actions in the range of human life.” People who take this course of action have a weighty obligation to safeguard the well‐being of people whom they bring into being.
To undertake this responsibility – to bestow a life which may be either a curse or a blessing – unless the being on whom it is to be bestowed will have at least the ordinary chances of a desirable existence, is a crime against that being.
(Liberty XVIII: 304).
Prospective parents must also consider the impact of their decision on the rest of society. They have, first, a responsibility not to have children that will have to be supported at public expense: “no one has a right to bring creatures into life, to be supported by other people” (Principles, II: 358). They even have a responsibility to take into account the desirability of avoiding an oversupply of workers, since
in a country either overpeopled, or threatened with being so, to produce children, beyond a very small number, with the effect of reducing the reward of labour by their competition, is a serious offence against all who live by the remuneration of their labour.
(Liberty, XVIII: 304)
Both of these responsibilities to society, needless to say, really weigh only on members of the working class.
Of course, I have already noted that Mill believes that it is easier than most people realize to resist the sexual impulse. Given the empirical fact that many people are not in fact willing to delay sexual activity too long, however, he believes that the pressure of public opinion can justifiably be used to encourage people to keep the size of their family in check (Principles, II: 367–79). He is even willing to contemplate the use of the law to this end, in the form of a refusal to allow couples to marry unless they have sufficient means to support children (Principles, II: 158, 346–8; Liberty, XVIII: 304). He suggests that a misplaced delicacy about discussing sexual matters is responsible for a state of affairs in which – while considerable energy is devoted to keeping in place the taboo against sex outside of marriage – people are not encouraged to curb their procreative activities once they are married, with the result that they choose to have more children than they ought (Principles, II: 367–74). (He observes that husbands, more than wives, are responsible for this.)
Mill would no doubt find much to celebrate in the development of safe and effective birth control technologies, which allow people to engage in sexual activity with very little risk of unwanted pregnancies. In fact, there is evidence to suggest that as a young man he was arrested for distributing literature describing primitive methods of birth control in working class neighborhoods (Packe 1954: 57–9). What he would think about the contribution that the development of birth control has made to the willingness of people to engage in “casual sex” outside of committed relationships is an interesting question. From a utilitarian perspective, of course, every experience of pleasure in and of itself makes the world a better place. Given the low value that Mill sets on physical pleasure, however, if there is reason to think that the weakening of the cultural taboos against pre‐marital sex has resulted in people pursuing sexual gratification at the expense of the higher pleasures – which might include the emotional pleasure that can be found in sexual activity with a partner whom one loves – then he would see this consequence of the birth control revolution as a cost rather than a benefit.
Mill of course believes that parents have obligations toward their children, although he does not believe that these obligations are as expansive as they are sometimes made out to be. I have already quoted a passage in which he says that it is criminal for someone to bring a new life into existence unless there is reason to expect that it will have “at least the ordinary chances of a desirable existence,” and it is the responsibility of parents to see to it that their children have such prospects. Obviously parents have a responsibility to ensure that their children are fed, clothed, and so on, as long as they are in their care. And obviously they are obligated not to abuse their children. Mill is no less exercised by brutality toward children than he is by brutality toward women, and in the newspaper articles that he wrote with Harriet he does not fail to criticize the law’s handling of cases of child abuse (e.g., The Case of Ann Bird, XXV: 1153–7). But the obligation on which Mill places the most emphasis and which he describes as “one of the most sacred duties of the parents (or, as law and usage now stand, the father),” is the obligation “after summoning a human being into the world, to give to that being an education fitting him to perform his part well in life towards others and towards himself” (Liberty, XVIII: 301–2; see also Principles, III: 948–9). He calls for the law to ensure that parents fulfill this obligation. And while Mill might think that it is irresponsible for parents to have children for whose education they are unable to pay themselves, he does concede that public funding should be available in these cases.
Mill, though, denies that parents are obligated to do everything in their power for their children. This emerges in his discussion of inheritance, when he writes that:
Whatever fortune a parent may have inherited, or still more, may have acquired, I cannot admit that he owes to his children, merely because they are his children, to leave them rich, without the necessity of any exertion.
(Principles, II: 221)
What children have a claim to, Mill asserts, is a sufficient start to have a “fair chance of achieving by their own exertions a successful life.” While individual children may be due more than this, as a result perhaps of having been promised it, no child has a right to more simply in virtue of being born to parents who could afford to more if they chose. Mill, it should be noted, is critical of both the English system of primogeniture, in which the eldest male heir was entitled to inherit the lion’s share of a family’s assets (including the estate and title, were they aristocrats, as fans of Downton Abbey well know) and the French system that mandated a more equal division with similar inflexibility (Principles, III: 889–95).
I have focused here on what parents owe their children. There is much that it is desirable that parents give their children but that they are not obligated to give, and Mill could hardly be blind to this. Perhaps parents cannot be obligated to be warm, for instance, but it is desirable, and it is clear from Mill’s Autobiography (including especially the rejected lines about his mother) that he is keenly aware of the fact.
Heretofore, I have shown that Mill believes that couples united in marriage should be equals and that he considers the obligation of parents to see to it that their children are educated to be of paramount importance. These two themes come together in Mill’s discussion of the contribution that growing up in a household in which their parents treat each other as equals makes to children’s moral education.
While Mill believes that Western society has many moral shortcomings and is progressing far too slowly, he is still optimistic that each generation is somewhat better, morally speaking, than the one before it. It is increasingly true that people find “the good of others” to be “a thing naturally and necessarily to be attended to, like any of the physical conditions of our existence” (Utilitarianism, X: 232). This instinctive regard for the interests of others is both encouraged by and encourages a sense that the people by whom we are surrounded are our equals. A family is a microcosm of society, and it is the first and most powerful influence on children’s habitual sentiments. So nothing can do more to promote our collective moral progress, in Mill’s view, than for children to be given a clear sense of the equality of their parents (see Urbinati 1991: 635–7). The family
should be a school of sympathy in equality, of living together in love, without power on one side or obedience on the other. This it ought to be between the parents. It would then be … a model to the children of the feelings and conduct which their temporary training by means of obedience is designed to render habitual, and therefore natural, to them.
(Subjection, XXI: 295; see also Married Women’s Property, XXVIII: 286, from which the quotation in the title heading of this section is drawn)
Mill credits society’s ability to make such moral progress as it does to the fact that many husbands treat their wives as equals, or at least near equals: there are “numerous persons whose moral sentiments are better than the existing laws” (Subjection, XXI: 295). But improving families in this regard will be the driver of moral progress in other areas of social life, since
The moral training of mankind will never be adapted to the conditions of the life for which all other human progress is a preparation, until they practice in the family the same moral rule which is adapted to the normal constitution of human society.
And this will require legal reform.
Two questions naturally arise. First, how would Mill account for our apparent lack of moral progress today, given that legal equality between men and women – as he understood it, at least – has been much more fully realized? Second, how did Mill think that his own moral development had been affected by growing up in a home that was anything but “a school of sympathy in equality, of living together in love”?
I cannot answer these questions here; indeed, I doubt that the second can be answered by anyone. But at least the answer to the second question with which I began this chapter is clear. Despite the fact that the family is not discussed systematically in any of Mill’s major philosophical works outside of the Subjection of Women, it occupies a pivotal role in his social philosophy. It is the primary engine of moral improvement and increasing civilization.6