Abstract
John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill were very much aware of the problem of domestic violence. In the years between 1849 and 1853, they wrote a series of newspaper articles and pamphlets on domestic violence. These works are notable for their passion, insight and the way they prefigure contemporary discussions of this topic. Their thoughtful and detailed discussion is thus important not just for its historical interest, but for the light that it sheds on a complex problem that is every bit as pressing in the twenty first century as it was in the nineteenth.
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Notes
- 1.
Shanley seems to come down on the side of the communitarians when she reads The Subjection of Women as “valuable. both for its devastating critique of the corruption of marital inequality, and for its argument, however incomplete, that one of the aims of a liberal polity should be to promote the conditions which will allow friendship, in marriage and elsewhere, to take root and flourish” (Mill, 1970, 243–44).
- 2.
Wendy Donner argues that Mill’s liberalism is sufficiently sensitive to communitarian concerns. See “John Stuart Mill’s Liberal Feminism,” Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition, Vol. 69, No. 2/3, Papers Presented at the American Philosophical Association Pacific Division Meeting 1992 (Mar., 1993), 155–166.
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Manning, R. (2019). The Tyranny of Bodily Strength: Harriet Taylor Mill and John Stuart Mill on Domestic Violence. In: Teays, W. (eds) Analyzing Violence Against Women. Library of Public Policy and Public Administration, vol 12. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-05989-7_11
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