In John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women, the discussion turns to the ability of women to write and speak their minds freely, and thus how veritable their written perspectives on being a woman are. Mill seeks to look at how women have been subjugated and oppressed for centuries, and despite their gain of literary movement, they still hesitate to truly write freely. Virginia Woolf, a woman writer who came later than Mill, echoes this sentiment in her lecture “A Room of One’s Own,” when she talks about if Shakespeare had a sister who was as literarily inclined as he, and what may have happened to her then. 

In the excerpt of Mill’s writing, he says, “The greater part of what women write about women is sycophancy to men,” meaning that women did not truly write themselves into their fiction, but that they had to pander to those who would publish them (Mill 1113). From here, what one can glean is that the life of a woman author was still a life dictated by men in society and how men perceived women, and idea that still pervades in Woolf’s writing, hence her belief that women needed a room of their own to write and truly be unencumbered by the ideologies around her (Woolf 1403). These writings are around 60 years apart, and yet they hold echoes of the same sentiment: that women authors are beholden to men and their writing must cater to men to be seen. Mill urges the reader to remember how the expression of an uncommon opinion was taken, even when expressed by a man, and because of this, to apply that unacceptance to a person whose social status is already lowered (Mill 1113). It would create ridicule and the author would no longer be credible. While women had the freedom to write, they did not have the freedom to fully express themselves and their opinions, thus limiting their ability to truly show their perspectives on the world. 

Woolf, in talking of Shakespeare’s theoretical sister, says that she does agree that a woman could never have written the plays that he wrote because she would never have been given the opportunity to do so. She notes that “genius like Shakespeare’s is not born among labouring, uneducated, servile people,” and therefore would not have been born of a woman’s brain (Woolf 1424). She would never have been given the education of Shakespeare, she would have been married at a young age, and she would have been made to be nothing but a mother and a breeder for her husband. Because of this inequality in opportunity, a woman’s perspective is lost, and indeed Woolf understands that when there is talk of “a woman possessed by devils, a wise woman selling herbs, or even a very remarkable man who had a mother,” that there is a woman who had potential and was unable to express it (Woolf 1424). 

In order to fully grasp the difference in perspectives on women in writing, it is important to remember that Mill would have been ahead of his time- his ideas that a woman could write fully well as a man, but had to pander to him instead were uncommon. Thus, one begins to see the difference in women from Mill’s time to Woolf’s. The beginning of Mill’s excerpt reads, “It is of but yesterday that women have either been qualified by literary accomplishments, or permitted by society, to tell anything to the general public,” which, for all his good arguments, I do believe is the perspective of a man (Mill 1113). Women have always been in literature, as Woolf says, “I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman” (Woolf 1424). Here we begin to see the different perspectives on women in writing- the man who believes that only in the late 1800s did women come to the writing community, and the woman who believes that women have always been there, though perhaps anonymously. 

Though their perspectives on when women emerged in writing may differ, they both agree that women have been oppressed through writing and through the literary communities, and therefore have not been given, to the fullest extent, the opportunities afforded to men to write and be heard. Their perspectives are not wholly different, something interesting to me, as they write as different genders 60 years apart. Mill. though a man of his time, did indeed show a surprising amount of belief in women authors, and this perspective likely helped to change the minds of at least a few. Woolf, for her part, showed that her perspective of a woman’s place in writing could inspire other women to be forward with their authorship and with their abilities, and thus proves that perhaps Mill was not entirely wrong in his work.