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Abstract
Mill proposes an analysis of women’s low wages in a paragraph of Principles of Political Economy. The paper’s purpose is to confront this analysis with his conception of justice, rooted in his utilitarianism. Mill’s attachment to justice arises in a particular context, as the result of various intellectual influences. On the one hand, it underlies his concern for the situation of women on the labour market and his insistence on the role played by custom and laws in wage differences between men and women. On the other hand, the shortcomings of Mill’s analysis appear consistent with his vision of equal justice and freedom for women.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the members of the Institut Emilie du Châtelet, to whom a very first version of the article was presented in 2015. I also thank the participants at the 2018 ESHET conference, in particular the discussant of the paper, Elena Gallengo, for their valuable questions and remarks. Lastly, I thank the anonymous reviewers whose detailed comments helped a lot to improve the article.
Notes
1 Mill does not use himself the terms discrimination, occupational segregation and pay equity. The term discrimination refers in the paper to a situation occurring when people with equal (actual or potential) productivity are treated differently on the basis of personal characteristics such as “sex” or “race” (Havet and Sofer Citation2002; Gazier Citation2010, 1; Becker Citation1957, 17). While Becker’s Citation1957 book The Economics of Discrimination introduced the first economic model of discrimination, Mill seeks already to explain why men and women does not receive equal pay for equal capacities employed in the same jobs. The term occupational segregation refers to a distribution of workers across and within occupations based upon gender. It echoes Mill’s idea of a sexual division of labour characterized by predominantly female occupations and predominantly male occupations. Lastly, the term pay equity refers to the fact that men and women occupying different jobs of equal value – or, in Mill’s terms, which require equal skills and are of equal disagreeableness – are paid equal wages.
2 Bentham, University College Mss., LXXXVII, 80, cited in Bahmueller (Citation1981, 16) and Cot (Citation2003, 172).
3 Great divergences oppose Bentham’s and John Stuart Mill’s conceptions of utilitarianism, human nature, and positions on women’s emancipation. For example, Bentham was at his time more cautious than Mill on the question of women’s right to vote, considering that it was a good thing in theory, but not applicable in practice until society was ready. However, this must not lead to minimizing the influence exerted by Bentham and, more generally, Mill’s affiliation to utilitarianism on his positions on women.
4 Rossi has offered a detailed study of Mill and Taylor relationship, in which she considers in particular the differences characterizing their respective writings about women’s condition (Rossi Citation1970, 19–63).
5 For a more detailed discussion of this subject, see Gouverneur Citation2018, 74–77.
6 This is coherent with Wally Seccombe’s result that the emergence of the male breadwinner norm in England is in part the expression of the interests of skilled male trade unionists who fear competition from women working for a lower wage (Seccombe Citation1986, 55, 67).
7 For an exhaustive analysis of these debates, see Blaug Citation1958.
8 “Employment of children in manufactories”, The Examiner, Jan. 29, 1832 : 67. Cited in Blaug Citation1958, 214.
9 By these remarks, Engels challenges the prevailing conception of family funded upon the concept of family property (Seccombe Citation1986, 71).
10 In the line of Mill, John Elliott Cairnes and Henry Fawcett will be opposed to the laws regulating women’s work. Their great opponents will be William Stanley Jevons and Alfred Marshall, which will advocate the strengthening of the limitation of women’s work (Jevons Citation1882; Marshall Citation1890, 393). The latter’s positions can in part be linked to the reaffirmation of Comte’s views and the growing influence of evolutionist theories in the last quarter of the XIXth century.
11 A discussion on this subject takes place in Gouverneur Citation2018, 7–8.
12 It is only in 1870 that a little step is made with the first Married Women’s Property Act. The Act stipulates that wages and property derived from the wife’s work must be considered as her separate property. Part of the effect of this measure is to protect the wages of working-class women by preventing their husbands, often represented as “good for nothing”, from squandering their money in drink and gambling. The property brought by the wife into the marriage remains at the full disposal of the husband. It is not until the Married Women’s Property Act of 1882 that the equity rules are extended to all married women’s property, regardless of its origin or the time required for its acquisition (Caine Citation1997, 119; Griffin Citation2003, 80–1; Lewis and Rose Citation1995, 102).
13 The condition and specific problems of the working-class women will only be fully considered after the 1880s, when the first women’s labour unions are created, their demands being partly on workers’ wages (Corvisy and Molinari Citation2008, 168–172). In 1874, at the initiative of Emma Patterson, borns The Women’s Trade Union League with the ambition of proving that women can improve their economic position by unionizing (Lewis and Rose Citation1995, 105–6). A decade later, in 1883, The Women’s Co-operative Guild, affiliated to the Labour Party, advocates a peaceful transition from autocratic capitalism to democratic co-operation through the reunification of working-class housewives into consumers co-operatives. These labour organizations have their own demands, including reduced hours of labour, higher wages, and maternity priviledges, but also shares the broader ambitions of the middle class women’s movement.
14 Before the third edition (1852), the original text ran “It does not appear that they are in general unequally paid” (Mill Citation1848, 394). The term “sometimes” was also added by Mill in the third edition.
15 In Principles, Mill reveals that he believes in equal efficiency of women and men for factory work in his criticism of the second benefit of the division of labour stated by Adam Smith (Mill Citation1848, 125–8). He then tries to show that specialization in a single type of task is not necessarily source of greater efficiency and, more generally, that efficiency depends less on the work process itself than on the habit, acquired by the worker, to operate according to a certain work process (Pujol Citation1992, 27–8). Thus, although women reveal characteristics, engendered by habit, more adapted to general occupations requiring to perform different tasks simultaneously, than to particularized works, they are not considered less “efficient” than men for “the uniformity of factory work” (Mill Citation1848, 128). They otherwise would not be so widely employed as factory workers. This criticism aims to denounce the fact that economists do not take into account the case of women to build their economic theories. It particularly concerns Adam Smith who offered the first “denaturalization of inequalities”; then followed by Mill, he presented the differences between individuals as the result of custom and education rather than nature, applying the same logic to the differences between men and women (Dimand, Forget and Nyland Citation2004; Chassonnery-Zaïgouche Citation2013, 91).
16 The economic historian Joyce Burnette, in her study of “Gender, Work and Wages in Industrial Revolution Britain”, criticizes eighteenth- and nineteenth-century economists who emphasized custom as a major cause of wage differentials between men and women. According to her, they used this ambiguous term with multiple meanings to explain differences in wages which were in reality mainly due to differences in productivity (Burnette Citation2008, 1, 135). But Mill focuses in his analysis on differences in wages not due to differences in efficiency precisely to present custom as a cause of discrimination. We thus take a position opposite to the one held by Barbara Caine, who totally excludes the “custom” from Mill’s explanations of women’s low wages (Caine Citation1994, 41).
17 The point will be developed in the fourth part of the paper.
18 The excess in question is due to an employers’ practice: “[…] most persons who can afford it, pay to their domestic servants higher wages than would purchase in the market the labour of persons fully as competent to the work required” (Mill Citation1848, 399). However, this practice does not imply that the average wage for paid domestic work is greater than the market value of that work (337). All domestic employees cannot be paid above the market price, that is to say above the cost of a domestic worker of equal skill for the work required. Otherwise, it would limit the possibility of providing employements to the masses (398–9). This may imply that women’s power of bargaining was lower than men’s one.
19 Mill’s position regarding the wages fund doctrine has been analysed in several articles. John Vint proposes an interpretation of Mill’s recantation from the wages fund doctrine in 1869, using a framework which takes account of the development and decline of the wages fund doctrine as a whole, due to theoretical weaknesses and its failure to make theoretical progress (Vint Citation1995). However, Mill will continue to establish a negative link between wages and the labour force until the last edition of Principles, dated from 1871.
20 This sentence was added in the third edition of Principles (1852).
21 The sentence was added in the third edition of Principles (1852).
22 In the editions of 1848 and 1849, Mill uses the term “custom”, which he replaces by the term “usage” in subsequent editions.
23 John Elliot Cairnes will offer a first occurrence of the theory of the segmentation of the labour market by conceptualizing the idea of “non-competing groups”; but it does not include any application to male monopolies (Cairnes Citation1874; Chassonnery-Zaïgouche Citation2013, 6). This application would have to wait for Millicent Garrett Fawcett (Citation1892, 175; see for a review of her analysis Pujol Citation1992, 57–60).
24 This remark could be seen as the expression of Mill’s belief that maternity is not necessarily desired by women, particularly as he insists in The Subjection of Women, much more than in On Marriage, on the influence of circumstances on the formation of women’s character. As he explains, “all women are brought up from the very earliest years in the belief that their ideal of character is the very opposite to that of men … that it is their nature, to live for others” (Mill Citation1869, 27, 77). That said, some ambiguity appears when he asks: “what of the greatly increasing number of women, who have had no opportunity of exercising the vocation which they are mocked by telling them is their propre one?” (183). Taylor was maybe less ambiguous on the subject in Enfranchisement of Women: “The maternity argument deserts its supporters in the case of single women, a large and increasing class of the population … Numbers of women are wives and mothers only because there is no other career open to them, no other occupation for their feelings or their activities” (Taylor 1851, 104).
25 Pujol affirms that Mill’s argument “seems more rhetorical than practical” (Pujol Citation1992, 28). If we agree that Taylor’s argument was indeed more practical, it seems to us that Mill’s one is more than simply rhetorical, since it is rooted in his conceptions of justice and utility.
26 The tension which appears between Mill’s feminism and his position on married women’s employment has been the subject of several contemporary studies. Sigot and Beaurain show in their article that Mill’s positions on justice and equality and on the employment of married women are reconcilable in a “globally coherent position”, by evaluating Mill’s feminism in terms of his utilitarian philosophy (2009, 282). In particular, they link his position on married women’s employment to his conception of the role of women in the moral progress through the education of children. If some elements of their study will be integrated or discussed in the following section, the purpose is not to re-examine the global consistency of Mill’s position on women. It is to understand how the limits of Mill’s conception of justice spill over into his analysis of women’s low wages.
27 Mill, without going into the issue of divorce, advocates access to judicial separation for women: “It is only legal separation by a decree of a court of justice, which entitles her to live apart, without being forced back into the custody of an exasperated jailer—or which empowers her to apply any earnings to her own use, without fear that a man whom perhaps she has not seen for twenty years will pounce upon her some day and carry all off” (Mill Citation1869, 58).
28 These elements leads to qualify the idea defended by Ball that “efficiency was not Mill’s primary concern” in his adhesion to the traditional sexual division of labour. According to her, this adhesion rather reflects his belief that “women were naturally better suited for domestic work and childrearing than men were” (Ball Citation2001, 522). However, the two are not necessarily incompatible. Greater efficiency of the traditional sexual division of labour can be linked to women’s greater, because natural, capacities for domestic work and the education of children.
29 As we have already mentioned, Mill is aware of men’s reluctance to the opening of all occupations to women, both because of a characteristic shared by all individuals, the fear of competition, and because of men’s fear of equality in marriage. It is then probably partly by pragmatism that he makes the following predictions.
30 Mill however mentions the possibility to make it definitive by adding that “if the two persons choose, they might pre-appoint it by the mariage contract” (Mill Citation1869, 73).
31 It is interesting to compare Mill’s model to the Beckerian theory of the traditional sexual division of labour in the household justified by the comparative advantages of men and women. According to this theory, biological differences between the sexes imply that women are more efficient than men in maternal, educational and domestic tasks. In addition, the inferiority of women’s wages to those of men, partly due to the fact that women invest primarily in family life, explains that married women leave the labour market and that it is the father who earns the family income. That being said, at least one fundamental difference opposes Mill and Becker. Mill does not present the traditional division of roles as being justified by natural differences between the sexes.