The Search for Conflict

In his well-known essay on “The Subjection of Women,” John Stuart Mill (1869) made the following argument about what he regarded as the special character of the unequal relationship between men and women: They [women] are so far in a position different from all other subject classes, that their masters require something more from them than actual service. Men do not want solely the obedience of women, they want their sentiments. All men, except the most brutish, desire to have, in the women most nearly connected with them, not a forced slave but a willing one, not a slave merely,