No Better to Give than to Receive: Charity and Women's Subjection in J.S. Mill

John Stuart Mill is more critical of Victorian charity than we might expect, given his enthusiasm for participation, voluntarism, and limited government. Thus far, scholarly analyses of Mill’s concern about charity’s effects on recipients have failed to explain his preference for public poor relief. This article interprets Mill’s misgivings about private charity in the context of his feminism. Mill links women’s subjection and charity in two ways. First, he contends that the effects of subjection make women injudicious and ineffective as philanthropists. Second, he argues that the charity ethic reinforces women’s acceptance of relationships of inequality and dependence: charity is bad for the women who practice it as well as for the poor who rely on it. Mill’s critique of charity is part of a more sweeping critique of relations of domination and subordination.