I knew about the extraordinary education he received at the hands of his father I knew about the mental breakdown when he lost faith in Benthamite principles of social reform and later regained his sense of direction through poetry but I don’t recall his feminism coming up in any of our discussions. I studied Mill as an undergraduate, but only his essays on Utilitarianism and On Liberty. Reflecting on this can help protect us from the tendency to put things in boxes, give them overly neat labels, a tendency I, for one, have certainly been prone to at different stages in my life. This is not because my successive readings are especially insightful, but because reflecting on the way perceptions of a text change is an important reminder of how situated we all are within the preoccupations of our own moment. With apologies, I plan to do something more limited – arguably more self-indulgent – and focus on my own shifting reading of the text. My title might suggest a sweeping survey of the different ways in which The Subjection of Women was received over the 150 years since it was published. This is a transcript of the JS Mill Lecture 2019, delivered at Somerville on May 24, by Anne Phillips, the Graham Wallas Professor of Political Science in the Department of Government at the London School of Economics.
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