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When Feminism Is “High” and Ignorance Is “Low”: Harriet Taylor Mill on the Progress of the Species

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2020

Penelope Deutscher
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Abstract

This essay considers the important role attributed to education in the writings of nineteenth-century feminist Harriet Taylor Mill. Taylor Mill connected ignorance to inequality between the sexes. She called up the specter of regression into lowness and ignorance when she associated feminism with progress. As she stressed the importance of education, she constructed an‘other’ to feminism, variously associated with lowness, poverty, and the primitive. She made a case for the advantages of civilization (education, enfranchisement, equality) to be opened up to women. Yet Taylor Mill's position that the ignorant poor, like all humans, should be in a position of so-called “perfect equality” drifted intermittently into the view that the elevation of women to perfect equality would refine and elevate the lower classes.

Type
Research Article
Information
Hypatia , Volume 21 , Issue 3: Special Issue: Feminist Epistemologies of Ignorance , Summer 2006 , pp. 136 - 150
Copyright
Copyright © 2006 by Hypatia, Inc.

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