In 1825 a book appeared with the title Appeal of One Half the Human Race, Women: Against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men, to Retain Them in Political, and Thence in Civil and Domestic, Slavery: in Reply to a Paragraph of Mr. Mill's Celebrated “Article on Government (hereafter cited as the Appeal). It was a critical rejoinder to James Mill's claim in 1820 that women did not need to be given the right to vote. In so doing it also offered an unabashed feminist critique of the gendered social relations of the time. Its named author was William Thompson, a London‐based Irish socialist. However, in the opening section of the book, entitled “Letter to Mrs Wheeler,” Thompson explicitly acknowledged the active collaboration of Anna Doyle Wheeler in developing the ideas championed in the Appeal. He left no doubt that the book was, root and branch, “[their] joint property” because her ideas were “so amalgamated” with his own that it was impossible to separate his thoughts from hers (Thompson [and Wheeler] Reference Thompson and Wheeler1825, vii). As far as Thompson was concerned, she was author in all but name, at the very least an equal co‐author. Yet despite his efforts to alert readers to the significance of Wheeler's contribution, it is Thompson who is remembered and cited for the ideas advanced therein, and hence for their place within the history of feminist political thought. Re‐evaluating Wheeler's relationship to the Appeal and arguing for both her and the Appeal's original contribution to the history of feminist political theory is the focus of this article.

Anna Doyle Wheeler was an Irish‐born socialist and feminist who lived most of her life in London where, among other activities, she hosted an intellectual salon (Reference DooleyDooley 1996, ch. 2). Extant material directly attributable to her is sparse and includes two published speeches, one appearing in two parts (Wheeler 1830a, 1830b) and the other more or less in its entirety (Reference WheelerWheeler 1833). A dozen or so letters have also survived, some of which discuss the rights of women. Consequently, there has been only sporadic acknowledgment of Wheeler's feminist contribution to the history of political thought. However, Wheeler's reputation has improved over the past few decades as a result of work by feminist‐oriented scholars. Dolores Dooley's path‐breaking Equality in Community in 1996 provided the first book‐length study of her thought. Some scholars discuss her feminist contributions directly (Reference PankhurstPankhurst 1945; Reference Galgano, Baylen and GrossmanGalgano 1979; Reference Groag and OffenGroag and Offen 1983; McFadden Reference McFadden1989; Dooley 1995, 1997; McFadden Reference McFadden1999; Reference Nyland, Heenan, Dimand and NylandNyland and Heenan 2003; Reference CoryCory 2004; Goldsworthy and Mulvey‐Roberts Reference Goldsworthy, Mulvey‐Roberts, Williams, Escott and Duckling2010; Reference Moriarty and BagchiMoriarty 2012; Reference GardnerGardner 2013; Reference JoseJose 2015; Reference KellyKelly 2015; Reference Jose, Bruce and SmitsJose 2016), and others mention her as part of discussions that have other concerns as their focus (Reference KillhamKillham 1958; Reference MalmgreenMalmgreen 1978; Reference BallBall 1980; Reference CooleCoole 1988; Reference PatemanPateman 1988; Reference Waithe and WaitheWaithe 1991; Reference CiolkowskiCiolkowski 1992; Reference TaylorTaylor 1993; Reference FergusonFerguson 1999; Jose 2000, 2004; Reference Kilfeather, Cleary and ConnollyKilfeather 2005; Reference KaswanKaswan 2014; Reference JenkinsJenkins 2015). With the exception of Reference DooleyDooley 1996, Goldsworthy and Mulvey‐Roberts Reference Goldsworthy, Mulvey‐Roberts, Williams, Escott and Duckling2010, and Reference GardnerGardner 2013, when Wheeler's views are noted at all, it is Thompson who is named as the authority. One scholar even states explicitly that Thompson “names [Wheeler] as his co‐author” (Reference KaswanKaswan 2014, 249, n. 119), but does not offer any discussion of her views or likely contribution to the political analysis presented in the Appeal, despite making extensive use of it in his own discussion of Thompson and the cooperative movement. Even in clearly feminist discussions of the Appeal where Wheeler's feminist standing and contribution is explicitly acknowledged (for example, Reference MalmgreenMalmgreen 1978; Reference CooleCoole 1988; Reference PatemanPateman 1988; Reference Moriarty and BagchiMoriarty 2012), the citation is to Thompson.

Therein lies one of the problems in according Wheeler her due. Standard citation practices and conventions of scholarship render Thompson as the authorial voice because it is his name on the title page. Such conventions render her mute, and in turn contribute to her invisibility within the history of political thought. In some ways this issue is akin to the controversies among J. S. Mill scholars concerning Harriet Taylor Mill's intellectual contributions to his ideas and writings. The marginalization (even denigration) of Taylor Mill has been filtered through lenses shaped by gendered scholarly practices concerning what counts as acceptable intellectual labor (Reference PhillipsPhillips 2018). In a similar way, in Wheeler's case, seemingly gender‐neutral scholarly citation practices result in a gendered outcome. Her authorial voice is expunged, Thompson's efforts notwithstanding.

This article thus has three broad aims. The first is to develop an argument that Wheeler's contribution went considerably beyond penning the few pages referred to by Thompson in his prefatory “Letter to Mrs Wheeler” (Appeal, vii). As far as Thompson was concerned, Wheeler was an equal collaborator who was co‐author in all but name. The second aim is to demonstrate that the Appeal presented an acute analysis of the gendered social relations of its time that produced a distinctly feminist understanding of the need for women to have equal social and political rights with men. And third, I aim to demonstrate that the Appeal makes a significant contribution to feminist political thought (and hence to the history of Western political thought). In what follows, I argue that Wheeler played a key role in enabling the Appeal to map a distinctively feminist position, one that remains relevant nearly two hundred years later. Indeed, one could describe it as feminist theory without apology.

The article begins with a brief justification for the use of “feminist” and “feminism” to describe the Appeal and its arguments, given that it was to be many decades before such terms came into general use to describe the intellectual and political dynamics that emerged to challenge the prerogatives of masculinist power and modes of thought.Footnote ¹ The discussion then turns to a consideration of the Appeal and its authorship, and in particular to a consideration as to how we might evaluate Wheeler's contribution to its originality. With that in place, the article then considers three key features of the Appeal to demonstrate why it should be accorded greater recognition within the history of Western political thought. The first is the Appeal's twofold refutation of James Mill's argument about excluding women from the franchise (Reference Mill and BallMill 1992). Not only did the Appeal refute Mill's specific argument about women and the franchise, it also refuted the utilitarian principles upon which Mill's argument depended. The second area concerns the radicalness of its advocacy of women's full social and political freedom and hence why it counts as feminist theory without apology. Third, the Appeal prefigured many of the arguments that John Stuart Mill, son of James Mill, would weave into his The Subjection of Women (Reference Mill and RobsonMill 1984). This particular influence has been noted by others (for example, Reference BallBall 1980; Reference CooleCoole 1988; Reference PatemanPateman 1988), what is not fully appreciated is the degree to which Mill's Subjection, despite sharing what would appear to be similar views about the oppression of women, pulled back from the Appeal's more radical political position.

The article is not especially concerned with why the Appeal was marginalized (on which see Reference DooleyDooley 1996, 158–59; and on “vanishing acts” within political theory more generally, see Reference Thiele, Pateman and GrossThiele 1986, 30–43). Although the overall argument here supports the Appeal being accorded a more visible place within whatever is taken to be the canon of Western political thought, the core concern is with demonstrating that at the time of its publication, it presented a distinctly feminist understanding of the need for women to have equal social and political rights with men. The Appeal set out to refute the arguments aimed at denying the inclusion of women in the franchise, and in so doing it also challenged the masculinist mindset that informed those arguments. In itself that would ordinarily be enough to justify its being considered a work of political theory. But the worth of the Appeal goes beyond the circumstances that gave rise to it. Despite the undoubted improvement in the social and political conditions for women in England and the Western world in the twenty‐first century, the masculinist mindset that the Appeal challenged does not seem to have diminished much in the intervening two centuries. Hence the Appeal is as relevant and cogent today as when it was first published: an original formulation of feminist political theory that was more than a hyphenated offspring of the masculinist cross‐currents of political thought in which it arose (Reference JoseJose 2004, 2–3).

Feminist Is as Feminist Does

Before turning to the Appeal in more detail, it is necessary to consider two preliminary terminological concerns. The first is the appropriateness of the use of feminist and feminism to describe thinkers who lived (and indeed died) well before those terms came into general use (Offen 1988, 2000, 19; Reference MosesMoses 2012, 763). Should one avoid the terminology altogether, or perhaps just limit the claim to suggesting that such thinkers prefigured or “anticipated certain modern feminist concepts and arguments” despite having “lived in a time when the term ‘feminist’ was unknown” (Reference Botting and HouserBotting and Houser 2006)? Clearly, there is a potential for anachronism thereby undermining the rest of the discussion of the Appeal. A number of feminist scholars have canvassed this issue (Reference KellyKelly 1984; Reference CottCott 1989; Reference SapiroSapiro 1992; Reference OffenOffen 2000; Reference MosesMoses 2012), and from these discussions it is possible to identify several characteristics that would justify a thinker's political philosophy being described as feminist.

Thus, drawing on Joan Kelly and Virginia Sapiro (Reference KellyKelly 1984, 66–67; Reference SapiroSapiro 1992, 258–59), a number of factors would need to be present in the Appeal: (1) a recognition within the thinker's writings that there was a gender hierarchy; (2) that this hierarchy was socially constructed (not a fact of nature) and that the thinker critiqued this hierarchy; (3) that the authors recognized the misogyny of the dominant intellectuals of their time and wrote in conscious opposition to it; and finally, (4) that they understood women to be a social group whose unequal treatment required collective action to change it. As will be demonstrated, on all of these counts the Appeal could justly be described as a “feminist” work.

The second point concerns how theorists figure the masculine within their work. This is intimately connected with the centrality of the “man‐measure” principle within the canon of Western political thought, which in turn informs a mindset in which men are posited as the standard or norm, the measure of humankind's progress (Reference JoseJose 1995). The figuring of the masculine in this sense is more than a rhetorical or discursive move on the part of political theorists. It is a fundamental, political othering in which women's importance, presence, and being are defined in terms of men and what might be important for men. Women become the “constitutive outsiders” (Reference HawkesworthHawkesworth 2010, 686) because their very otherness, their being outside the sphere in which social worth, value, and humanity are inscribed, is what constitutes the gender hierarchy and hence their exclusion. Recognizing this is an important dimension of evaluating how a past thinker might figure as feminist.

Equally important is the need to recognize the troublesome notion that feminist political theory itself serves, in effect, as political theory's other, the outside to political theory's inside. This makes feminist political theory constantly vulnerable to what Mary Hawkesworth provocatively terms “a politics of extinction.” As she put it, “without actively engaging the substantive arguments of… feminist political theory, the politics of extinction effectively remove… gender from the realm of the political, thereby preserving [its] absence from the concerns deemed central for political theory” (Reference HawkesworthHawkesworth 2010, 686). The preservation of such absences, the creation of “vanishing acts,” to borrow Beverly Thiele's apposite description (Reference Thiele, Pateman and GrossThiele 1986), has served to marginalize works like the Appeal. As Dooley has persuasively argued, the Appeal demonstrated women's invisibility within “the concepts and consequences of utilitarian philosophy” (Reference DooleyDooley 1996, 155–58) and in so doing sought to make women visible, not as mere helpmeets but as individuals in their own right. Although there is room for debate about aspects of the Appeal's philosophical arguments (for example, Reference GardnerGardner 2013), the key point is the Appeal's resounding rejection (and refutation) of the man‐measure principle.

The Appeal and Authorial Recognition

As already noted, the Appeal's prefatory “Letter to Mrs Wheeler,” established unequivocally that the Appeal was their “joint property.” Of some significance is Thompson's clear statement that he regarded his role in producing this “joint property” as one of “being [her] interpreter and the scribe of [her] sentiments” (Appeal, vii). He characterized the “Letter” as a “debt of justice” because he “love[d] not literary… piracy” (vi). Clearly, he left readers in no doubt that he regarded Wheeler as a genuine co‐author in the most appropriate sense of being an equal progenitor of the ideas and arguments presented in the Appeal. Yet, as if to anticipate possible objections or misreadings of his characterization of Wheeler's contributions, he also pointed out why she only managed a few pages of actual writing—specifically that the “leisure and resolution to undertake the drudgery of the task were wanting” (vii). The fact that Wheeler suffered periodic afflictions of neuralgia that affected her hands (Reference DooleyDooley 1996, 90) and that her spelling and grammar were poor (Reference TaylorTaylor 1993, 90) gives further weight to Thompson's remarks about the difficulties for Wheeler to undertake the physical task of writing. This only partly explains why her name did not appear on the title page, a point to be taken up below.

Given the above, one would have thought that the question of Wheeler's co‐authorship would have been straightforward. However, in a situation later to be repeated with John Stuart Mill's authorial relationship with Harriet Taylor Mill, Thompson's published affirmation of her authorship has not been sufficient for Wheeler to be formally credited as an author and hence cited by name. Of course, as noted above, accepted scholarly citation conventions have also worked against this, though that need not be an insurmountable obstacle to proper authorial recognition. However, the consequence has been that scholars attempting to give Wheeler her due have had to adduce additional evidence drawn from textual sources. For example, Dooley has pointed out that aspects of Wheeler's style (as exhibited in her other writings) can be found in various passages throughout the Appeal. Of particular importance was Wheeler's habit of being “direct and personal,” contrary to the literary conventions of her time in which authors were expected to avoid references to personal and emotional experiences (Reference DooleyDooley 1996, 90). Wheeler also used various grammatical foils such as “emphases, exclamations and upper case letters” to get her points across as clearly as possible, as well as to amplify the level of her emotional commitment to those ideas (69). Examples of this occur throughout the Appeal, but it is especially evident in the book's final section.

The concluding twenty or so pages were directly addressed to the women readers to take action on their own behalf, not to wait for men to grant them freedom but to take it for themselves. For example,

Wheeler expressed sentiments such as these on numerous occasions (see, for example, Reference WheelerWheeler 1976; Reference Wheeler1831). This passage also affirmed that women constituted a social group whose unequal treatment required collective action to change it. The direct mode of address had Wheeler occupying “the conventionally male role of public speaker” and, consistent with what is known about her practices as a public speaker, using “many of the techniques of oratory” (Reference DooleyDooley 1996; Reference CoryCory 2004, 119).

But what marked out Wheeler's presence as author was the fact that her speaking position was not one of superiority, but rather one that evoked a relationship of mutuality and sympathy with the readers that served to model a way of speaking the future, one in which social relations were nonhierarchical and nonexploitative. Again, this is consistent with what is known about Wheeler's politics from other writings and speeches (Reference DooleyDooley 1996, 90). Although this point might also be applied to Thompson, given that he co‐authored the Appeal, Cory has amply demonstrated otherwise. Even though his “Letter” placed him in the role of scribe, thus subverting the then‐prevailing gendered writing conventions (in particular that of man author/woman scribe), he nevertheless remained in the authorial position (Reference CoryCory 2004, 119). In this respect the Appeal offered a novel engagement with political theory in that its rhetorical style challenged the masculinist standards of authorship even as it appeared to conform to them.

One possible objection to such textual arguments to demonstrate Wheeler's contributions to the Appeal is that Thompson did not really need her ideas about the equality of the sexes because his An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth Most Conducive to Human Happiness Applied to the Newly Proposed System of Voluntary Equality of Wealth had already articulated similar views (Reference ThompsonThompson 1824). It was part of an existing discourse around perfect equality and voluntary distribution circulating within the circles of cooperators, socialists, and utilitarians in which both he and Wheeler moved. However, it is worth noting that Wheeler was so well‐known within these circles, especially among the followers of Henri St. Simon and Charles Fourier, that she was described by her St. Simonian admirers as a “goddess of reason” (Reference PankhurstPankhurst 1945; Reference Galgano, Baylen and GrossmanGalgano 1979, 521; Reference DooleyDooley 1996, 63). Her advocacy of many of these ideas and her standing within those circles would certainly have been important in generating a lasting rapport between them. Of considerable importance for the Appeal was the fact that many of the issues it canvassed, such as domestic violence, marital rape, women's sexual pleasure (or lack of it) within marriage, would have been beyond Thompson's understanding in any but the most abstract of ways because “having been born a man,” he did not have “to suffer from the inequalities of sexual laws” (Appeal, v). Without Wheeler's contributions, Thompson would have had to address James Mill's arguments quite differently and consequently produce a very different book.

There should now be no doubt that Wheeler was a genuine co‐author and hence entitled to equal citation as such, but it still remains to consider why her name was not included on the title page. A likely reason would be that women authors suffered reputational risks not experienced by men authors. The levels of public opprobrium and vitriol directed toward women writers of the period were great—particularly infamous ones like Mary Wollstonecraft who had become synonymous with improper behavior and social disgrace, especially following her husband's publication of her diary and memoirs (Reference Godwin and HolmesGodwin 1987). Wheeler's daughter Rosina regarded “Wollstonecraft's book,” presumably the Vindication of the Rights of Woman, as poisonous (Rosina Bulwer Lytton, cited in Reference DeveyDevey 1887, 8). Ideas about women's oppression and arguments for their emancipation did not disappear entirely from public discourse at the turn of the century (see, for example, Reference WakefieldWakefield 1798/2015; Reference RobinsonRobinson 1799; Reference Hays and JohnsonHays 1974; Reference RadcliffeRadcliffe 1980), but women writers articulating such ideas needed to be circumspect in advancing them within respectable circles. As Andrew McInnes has shown, those women writing immediately in the wake of Wollstonecraft's death had to negotiate a hostile environment. This rendered their relationship to Wollstonecraft's work somewhat “torturous,” and at the same time required them to face the question as to whether there was “an audience ready to respond to and act on feminist ideas” (Reference McInnesMcInnes 2013, 480).

As a modestly well‐to‐do, upper‐class woman living independently, her activities as a salonnière notwithstanding, Wheeler would have been very mindful of protecting her reputation. The fact that she used a pseudonym, “Vlasta,” to publish writing involving “very personal or highly sensitive issues” would seem to support a view interpreting her awareness and concern to protect her reputation (Reference DooleyDooley 1996, 71; Reference Nyland, Heenan, Dimand and NylandNyland and Heenan 2003, 253). She was conscious of her status of being “a woman and without a master, two causes of disgrace in England,” as she revealed some years after the Appeal was published (Reference WheelerWheeler 1976). With two daughters of marriageable age at the time the Appeal was being written, she would have been even more concerned to protect her reputation. Even so, Wheeler's caution did not spare her from being caricatured by her son‐in‐law, Edward Bulwer Lytton, as the eponymous character in his antifeminist 1846 novel, Lucretia: or, the Children of Night (Reference CiolkowskiCiolkowski 1992). It is therefore not surprising that in such a climate Wheeler may have preferred to remain in the shadows of Thompson's authorship. Nonetheless, scholarly citation practices notwithstanding, Wheeler merits formal authorial recognition along with Thompson.

Refuting James Mill

James Mill's justification for excluding women from the franchise appeared in his specially commissioned essay, “Essay on Government,” for the Supplement to the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1820. His wrote that “an interest identical with that of the whole community is to be found in the aggregate males… who may be regarded as the natural Representatives of the whole population” (Reference Mill and BallMill 1992, 27). Hence women (and children) did not need political rights as they were subsumed under those of their men. Throughout the subsequent reprinting of the “Essay on Government,” Mill never altered his view, despite the fact that a good number of his supporters and friends (including his son) thought that he was mistaken and argued against him (Reference Mill, Robson and StillingerMill 1981, 106). Thompson and Wheeler noted in the course of their argument that if Mill had made no reference to women in his article, then readers might have assumed that the expression, “the political rights of man,” also included women (Appeal, vii–viii, 16–17). But Mill did not omit his reference to women. He was clear about the enfranchisement of women: it was not necessary; women (and children) needed no political rights as their interests were taken care of by others.

The Appeal took issue with this position, but went much further. It canvassed the need for women to be free of every type of domination across the broad spectrum of social relations. Wheeler and Thompson posed three interrelated questions that captured the core of their political critique. The first question was whether women's interests, either as daughters or as wives, could be included within their men's interests. Second, even if they conceded that an identity of interests existed between men and women, was this a sufficient reason for denying women civil or political rights? Third, they asked whether any guarantee of equality could be given without at the same time granting civil and political rights. To all three questions they answered “no.”

Like James Mill, Thompson and Wheeler embraced a general utilitarian approach (Appeal, ix), but unlike Mill's, theirs was informed by a cooperative socialist perspective. They accepted in broad measure Jeremy Bentham's principle of utility that “the greatest happiness of the greatest number… is the measure of right and wrong” (Reference Bentham and MontaguBentham 1980, 93), but they did not accept that this meant that being pleasure‐seeking and pain‐avoiding entailed being selfish by definition, nor did it follow that human beings were by nature aggressive. However, the view of human beings as pleasure‐seeking, selfish individuals who pursued power to further their own selfish ends was central to Mill's argument. Each individual (that is, man) would pursue what was in his own best interests at the expense of all others if need be. Mill regarded this as a “grand governing law of human nature” (Reference Mill and BallMill 1992, 11). It applied to each and every human being, and it brooked no exceptions. It underpinned the argument that he and others following him in the liberal tradition used to justify the need for some degree of democratic representative government. The argument took the following form. Since each man had interests that were specific to him, he would pursue these as he saw fit. No other man could act for him, or at least judge on his behalf what his best interests were. Thus, men had to have political and civil rights to enable them to pursue their own best interests. In this way they would achieve what was best for themselves as individuals, and consequently the sum total would be to the betterment of the wider society.

Thompson and Wheeler used Mill's premise of the “grand governing law of human nature,” the very foundation of Mill's argument for men's political and civil rights, to show that this was precisely why women needed these same rights. They pointed out that this “grand governing law” was supposed to include all humans, yet women and children were not covered by it. Two points can be noted here, as they both relate to the challenge that Thompson and Wheeler's arguments posed to liberal utilitarianism. First, if “the grand governing law” covered all humans but excluded women and children, then it must mean that to be human meant to be a man (or conversely to be a woman or child meant that one was not fully human). The terms human and man must therefore be sex‐specific, not generic. Second, if it was the case that men were such selfish, power‐seeking individuals as assumed by Mill, then how was it, in their relations with women and children, they suddenly became benevolent and caring? For Thompson and Wheeler, it was a modern miracle; a “wonderful alchemy of modern philosophy in the hands of such a magician” (Appeal, 11).

On Mill's own premise there were no grounds for assuming that individual men would look after anyone's interests but their own. There were consequently no grounds for assuming that, despite this, men would look after women's interests. This alleged identity of interest was grounded then not in principle, but in custom or habit. Without the identity of interest argument, Mill's justification for denying women the vote could not be sustained. Hence Wheeler and Thompson could answer “no” to the second question. Similarly, their answer to the third question was also “no”: political equality for women could not be guaranteed without women also having full social and political rights. Their answer to this question occupied most of the book, some aspects of which will be discussed in the next section.

However, here it can be noted that their definitive refutation of Mill's argument barely rates a mention within the history of political thought. One will search in vain to find any serious discussion of their critique of the then‐ascendant ideas of liberal utilitarianism, especially their refutation of James Mill's fundamental philosophical assumptions. Two brief examples illustrate the point. The first concerns a book devoted entirely to Mill's “Essay on Government” and the debate it generated. In Utilitarian logic and politics: James Mill's “Essay on Government”, Macaulay's critique and the ensuing debate, the editors positioned a lengthy rejoinder by Thomas Macaulay (first published in 1829) as the centerpiece of the debate (Reference Lively, Rees, Lively and ReesLively and Rees 1978, 3–52). Macaulay's essay appeared nine years after Mill's essay. The book‐length response to Mill, that is, the Appeal, published four years before Macaulay's essay, received no mention. In their lengthy introduction, the editors mentioned Thompson only in connection with his espousal of socialism and the threat it posed to liberal (and utilitarian) justifications for property and the distribution of wealth (Reference Lively, Rees, Lively and ReesLively and Rees 1978, 46–47). The Appeal's critique of Mill's central proposition did not rate a mention.

The second example involves a collection of Mill's political writings, including the “Essay on Government,” published by Cambridge University Press in 1992. Macaulay's essay was included as an appendix. The only reference to the Appeal was in the introductory essay where it was noted that the Appeal established that Mill's premises “pointed to the widest possible extension of the franchise and not to the exclusion of one half of the human race” (Reference Ball and BallBall 1992, xxii). The Appeal provided a diametrically opposed view to Mill's position, demonstrating that Mill's logic was flawed, but apparently the Appeal did not warrant its relevant sections being included as an appendix to this collection of Mill's political writings. Given the relatively important status attached to such collections published by Cambridge University Press, this omission ensures the ongoing marginalization of both the Appeal and its significance.Footnote ²

The Radicalism of the Appeal

The full title of the Appeal made clear that Wheeler and Thompson regarded the situation of women as akin to slavery. This was no metaphorical or rhetorical flourish on their part. Literally, they understood a slave to be

In the early nineteenth century, a woman's freedom was totally circumscribed by the authority of a man. She was deemed to have no mind of her own, nor was her body hers to command. At birth she was the property of her father (or guardian), and on marriage her body became the property of her husband, who was empowered to use it and command it at will (Reference ClintonClinton 1975; Reference SiegelSiegel 1998; Reference HasdayHasday 2000). Granted there were class differences that meant that, in practice, working‐class women were sometimes less constrained than their wealthier counterparts, but this did not affect their legal status (Reference TaylorTaylor 1993, 79–80). Hence “a domestic, a civil, a political slave… is every married woman”; marriage was little more than an institutionalized “white slave code” (Appeal, 66–67).

Wheeler and Thompson were not the first to invoke the terminology of slavery to describe the condition of women (see Reference Wollstonecraft and KramnickWollstonecraft 1792/1978; Reference ShelleyShelley 1818; Reference Astell and SpringborgAstell 1996), but they insisted on its literal application and extended it to the private domain of the most personal aspects of women's experience. In their view, the condition of women was even worse than that of slaves because slaves did not volunteer to become slaves. No matter how badly slaves were treated, they were not obliged to “swear to be slaves.” In contradistinction to slaves, women entered into an apparently voluntary contract, namely marriage, a state that rendered them the property of another and for which they were expected to be thankful. To underscore the difference, Wheeler and Thompson invoked a vivid sexual metaphor, namely “kissing the rod of domestic despotism” (Appeal, 66), a double entendre that would have been well understood by their readers. This was an act they described as “gratuitous degradation” (Appeal, 65). Slaves may have had to endure degrading conditions by virtue of being slaves, but they did not have to kiss the gun or the whip. Women, on the other hand, were expected to acknowledge their status by paying homage to that which symbolized their enforced obedience.

The Appeal framed women's social and political position in terms of deeply embedded sexual subordination. In this the Appeal foreshadowed by nearly one hundred and sixty years what Carole Pateman termed “the sexual contract” (Reference PatemanPateman 1988). However, the view presented in the Appeal differed from Pateman's in two important respects. First, they regarded this subordination as a literal fact, whereas this is downplayed in Pateman's account. For Pateman, the idea of the sexual contract was a heuristic device similar to the idea of the “social contract” developed in the works of thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), John Locke (1632–1704), and Jean‐Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), with the main point being that the sexual contract underpinned and informed the social contract. For Wheeler and Thompson, if the language of contract be accepted, then the sexual contract was the social contract. But the language of contract was not accepted by Wheeler and Thompson. And this is the second point. The idea and language of a contract were misapplied because women were required to surrender their control, to hand it over to the power of others. There could be no contractual agreement of any sort—social, political, or sexual—between a free and an unfree being. The crucial political point of their invocation of the language of slavery was to expose the hypocrisy of the language of contract, in effect transforming Mary Astell's ironic comment that “if all men are born free, then how is it that all women are born slaves?” (Reference Astell and SpringborgAstell 1996, 18).

Any doubt about their views of the sexual basis for women's subordination was clearly dispelled by the sexual metaphor noted above. This obvious double entendre was a bold rhetorical move considering the then‐prevailing valorization of sensibility and propriety (Barker‐Benfield Reference Barker‐Benfield1992). Yet it was far more than a double entendre. The Appeal made explicit the symbolic place of the phallus in ordering social relations between women and men, the essentially patriarchal nature of their society. But just as important, and far more radically, they pointed directly to the reality of women's sexual experiences, not as occasions for their pleasure as women, but rather as occasions where their pleasure could be legitimized only in terms of pleasing their men. This was a recurring theme throughout the Appeal.

Echoing but amplifying the position pioneered by Wollstonecraft (1792) that women were trained to ignore their feelings and desires and educated to be the “obedient instrument of man's sensual gratification” (Appeal 64), Wheeler and Thompson pushed the boundaries of the argument even further to argue that a woman “is not even permitted to wish any gratification for herself” and must conceal “her natural desires.” Rather, women “must have no desires, [they] must always yield” and “must blush to own that she joys in his generous caresses, were such by chance ever given,” must conceal “these natural desires” and “repress the gentlest, the humblest, the most kindly overflowings of them” (Appeal, 64). A woman's sexuality and existence were subordinated to that of the man to whom she was officially attached. For “women it has always been deemed their highest merit to have no feeling of any kind” but that of subservience to their “masters” (Reference WheelerWheeler 1831). Education, upbringing, and law all ensured the “trained obsequiousness” of women through which “the semblance of [women's] voluntary obedience” and “devotedness to [their] degradation” was reproduced and enforced (Appeal, 66).

Just as radical as their sexual critique was their analysis of the need for social changes to accommodate the fact that women became pregnant and gave birth. They identified and sought to counter the argument that women should not be granted the same political and civil rights as men because they were periodically involved with pregnancy and childbirth. Since this would occasionally leave them indisposed and unable to participate in various activities to the same extent as men, they should not have the same rights and privileges. In their view, what we might describe as the argument from debilitation was of diminishing relevance in the modern era. They regarded the allegedly debilitating effects of pregnancy and childbearing as greatly exaggerated by opponents of women's rights. They noted that men also suffered from sickness and various forms of debilitation, often as a result of self‐indulgent behavior, but no liberal thinker suggested that this should be grounds for denying them political and civil rights. More substantially, Thompson and Wheeler took issue with claims that time devoted to childbearing would prevent women from discharging their civic duties properly (Appeal, 143–45). Their discussion of the childbearing issue highlighted two things that were often implicit in men's arguments about women's capacity to engage in civic duties. First, men's arguments were no more than special pleading to justify their noninvolvement in such work. Second, men's arguments were really about retaining their privilege of not having what they regarded as their normal routines interrupted.

However, Thompson and Wheeler also took their critique a step further. It was not enough for there to be changes merely within the existing sociopolitical framework. Not just aspects of its political shell, reforms to particular entitlements and rights, but society's central organizational features had to change. The way in which work was being organized and the emerging system of modern wage labor were incompatible with a society of free and equal individuals. So long as the system of “individual competition” (what later generations would call early industrial capitalism) prevailed, equal political rights were never going to be enough. The socioeconomic system had to change to enable labor to be organized and performed in a cooperative fashion, which would also dissolve the emerging public/private divide then becoming entrenched within liberal political thought.

The Appeal advocated a “system of voluntary associated labor and exertion and equal distribution” (Appeal, 150), by which Wheeler and Thompson meant a cooperative form of socialism with equality at its center. As noted above, Thompson had also published in the previous year a separate treatise in which many of these ideas were spelled out (Reference ThompsonThompson 1824). Men and women would work together in smallish communities, pooling their resources such that they would be equally available to all. All would contribute according to their talents and capabilities. Women would not necessarily have to labor as much as men. Their contribution would depend on their physical capacities at the time. However, the same would also be true for men. The whole community would be responsible for the care and education of the children. For Wheeler and Thompson, relations between the sexes would become truly free and equal, and therefore form a proper basis for the realization of human happiness, only when the socioeconomic system was changed. This was necessary to ensure that “all useful talents and efforts for the common good [would] be equally appreciated and rewarded” and hence provide a “true haven for the happiness of both sexes, particularly of women” that would remove the motivation for “men to practise injustice” and concomitantly the need for “women to submit to injustice” (Appeal, 202–03). This would remove the “means of persecution” from men; a woman's love and respect then would have to be earned, not bought.

These views fed into a further, equally radical argument that recognized that the “creatures that are now called men” were themselves the products of these oppressive social relations. Marriage was an “all‐corrupting, and mutually degrading code” (Appeal, 62). Although men, as a sex, might benefit from women's oppression, they also suffered as their own characters were demeaned and stunted as a result. Thompson and Wheeler invoked their own version of a “universal law” when they stated unequivocally that “[u]ncontrolled power necessarily hardens the heart and destroys sympathy for those subjected to it,” a law from which husbands were not exempt (106–07). The solution was to ensure that proper relationships between the sexes required “put[ting] the rights of women, political and civil, on a perfect equality with those of men”; yet more than that, it also required the abolition of “the present marriage code” and the creation of a cooperative society “founded on human benevolence… comprehending equally the interests of all existing human beings” to regulate them (xiii–xiv). This would enable the “creatures that are now called men” to regenerate themselves and to enable men and women to become true equals. Wheeler and Thompson recognized that neither women nor men were by nature inferior or superior, respectively. Rather, it was in the organization of the society and its institutions, especially marriage, that produced women, and men, steeped in “engrafted duplicity,” with natures, psychologies, sexualities, and behaviors that lent themselves to particular relations of domination and subordination (55–67, 76–81; Reference WheelerWheeler 1831).

Central to their understanding was a view that “social happiness cannot breathe but in the air of equality” (Appeal, 81), an equality impossible to achieve within any society whose most fundamental social relations were shaped and sustained by “the continued practice of domestic caprice and despotism” (70). However, the issue was not just about gaining equal rights, of being included in an already existing “rights of man,” per Wollstonecraft (Wollstonecraft 1792); it was about liberation. In this respect their political vision was truly radical. Indeed, despite recognizing and having strong sympathies with Wollstonecraft's bold efforts to raise “that neglected banner” on behalf of women in the “face of the prejudices of thousands of years” and the “closed ears of unreasoning men,” they nevertheless regarded her position as being “too often marred” by “narrow views” that in turn “narrowed their usefulness” (Appeal, vii). Thompson and Wheeler clearly saw themselves carrying on in the tradition pioneered by Wollstonecraft and others at the end of the eighteenth century, but they were determined to pursue a much more radical tack (vii). Forty‐four years later, in 1869, significant aspects of their radical analysis found echoes within John Stuart Mill's The Subjection of Women.

Prefiguring John Stuart Mill's Feminist Arguments

In an essay aiming to identify the sources of Mill's feminism, Terence Ball noted that “the arguments in Thompson's Appeal prefigure those advanced nearly half a century later in The Subjection of Women” (Reference BallBall 1980, 111). Ball's objective was to demonstrate that the key sources of Mill's feminism were not the writings of Jeremy Bentham or Thomas Macaulay, or even the younger Mill's wife, Harriet Taylor (though he did concede some influence on her part), but with two “heretofore unsuspected sources,” one of whom was Thompson, and the other J. S. Mill's father, James Mill. For Ball, the real source was James Mill's History of British India (the infamy of the “Essay on Government” notwithstanding). He granted that Thompson probably “quickened” the younger Mill's “interest in feminism,” but the ingredients had already been supplied by the elder Mill (111). Ball was well off the mark about the supposed feminism of James Mill (Reference JoseJose 2000), and, as I will demonstrate below, the influence of Thompson went beyond “quickening.”

But before taking up that point, I should note that Ball's lukewarm acknowledgment of Thompson's (and Wheeler's) influence subsequently came to be cited as endorsing the view “that Mill had ‘unconsciously’ taken over Thompson's argument ‘almost word for word’” (Reference PatemanPateman 1988, 160). The words inside the single quote marks in this passage from Pateman were represented as Ball's own words since the citation was to his 1980 essay. Although Mill's arguments certainly echoed various lines of argument developed in the Appeal, it is overstating the case to suggest they did so “almost word for word.” However, how this came about highlights why the Appeal needs to be more adequately acknowledged within both the history of political thought and the history of feminist theory.

The line of transmission from Ball to Pateman begins with one of J. S. Mill's biographers, Michael St. John Packe, who argued that Thomas Macaulay's critique of James Mill's “Essay on Government” was especially significant for the younger Mill because of its criticism of James Mill's position on the exclusion of women from the franchise. Packe interpreted this as having “struck [J. S. Mill] particularly hard” with the consequence that the issue of women's rights remained a touchstone of “his acceptance or rejection of a philosophic system” for the rest of his life (Reference PackePacke 1954, 90). Packe then noted that although the younger Mill did not accept Macaulay's overall philosophical position, he did take from Macauley's critique:

Ball then used this passage to shape the conclusion of his essay as follows:

This was the conclusion that became the source for Pateman's apparent endorsement of Ball's view concerning Mill's indebtedness to the Appeal.

Although the impact of the Appeal went beyond a mere “quickening” of Mill's inchoate ideas, the influence of his wife and confidante, Harriet Taylor Mill, should also be noted (Reference Rossi and RossiRossi 1970; Reference Jacobs and JacobsJacobs 1998; Reference PhillipsPhillips 2018; and contra Reference BallBall 1980, and others). In his Autobiography, Mill explained that “not only during the years of our married life, but during many of the years of confidential friendship which preceded, all my published writings were as much her work as mine” (Reference Mill, Robson and StillingerMill 1981, 251). In words eerily echoing those of Thompson (Appeal, vi), Mill wrote that it was “impossible to disentangle their respective parts and affirm that this belongs to one and that to the other” (Reference Mill, Robson and StillingerMill 1981, 251), pointing to three of his well‐known books as examples: Principles of Political Economy (1848), On Liberty (1859), and The Subjection of Women (1984). At the same time, Mill explicitly denied that Taylor Mill was responsible for his “strong convictions on the complete equality of all legal, political, social and domestic relations, and which ought to exist between men and women” (Reference Mill, Robson and StillingerMill 1981, 253, asterisked footnote). What he claimed he owed to Taylor Mill was her ability to get him to go beyond his abstract philosophical principles to grasp how “the consequences of the inferior position of women intertwine themselves with all the evils of existing society and with all the difficulties of human improvement” (253, asterisked footnote). This is another striking parallel between Mill and Thompson with respect to what they both claimed they owed to each of their respective women collaborators.

However, despite Mill's characterization of Taylor Mill's influences on his thinking, her ideas were often less conciliatory than Mill's. In some respects, her views were closer to the ideas in the Appeal than to what Mill himself eventually presented in The Subjection. For example, in her Enfranchisement of Women, she argued that “neither women nor men need any law to exclude them from an occupation,” and that “[t]here is no inherent reason or necessity that all women should voluntarily choose to devote their lives” to motherhood (Reference Mill and JacobsMill 1998a, 59–60). Mill agreed that all occupations should be equally available to women and men alike, but by the time he finalized the text of The Subjection, he held the view that

This example illustrates two things. First, that Taylor Mill's influence was not always as Mill represented it. And second, and perhaps more important, Mill's Subjection was perhaps less radical that what Taylor Mill might have approved had she lived to help him finalize the text for publication.

Mill's opening gambit in The Subjection was framed by the idea of “perfect equality,” specifically that the principle “which regulates the existing social relations between the sexes” was wrong “in itself” and that “it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality admitting no power or privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other” (Reference Mill and RobsonMill 1984, 261). For Mill, “perfect equality [was] a central element of the human good” and it was perhaps the “strongest argument in The Subjection of Women” (Reference Morales and MoralesMorales 2005, 109). The idea of “perfect equality” was “a substantive ideal in nineteenth century socialist discourse” (Reference MoralesMorales 1996, 42). Taylor Mill also used the phrase “perfect equality of the sexes” in her essay “On Marriage” (Reference Mill and JacobsMill 1998b, 22). There is no doubt that Mill would have known of her use of it given that this essay and others from this time were the outcomes of their mutual discussions and among their first collaborative efforts. Mill could even have passed it on to her from his familiarity with the cooperative writings. However, it is no coincidence that The Subjection began with the idea of perfect equality.

As has already been noted, the idea of perfect equality was at the heart of Thompson and Wheeler's politics and was central to their critique of James Mill's “Essay on Government,” a critique with which the younger Mill was certainly familiar given that he referred to it by its title in his autobiography (Reference Mill, Robson and StillingerMill 1981, 129). He also knew Thompson well and had debated with him at meetings of the Cooperative Society (129). He also acknowledged his debt to the socialist discourse of equality of “the St. Simonians… [and]… Owen and Fourier,” writing that it “proclaim[ed] the perfect equality of men and women, and an entirely new order of things in regard to their relations with one another” (175). However, connecting Thompson, Owen and Fourier and their followers, the St. Simonians and other Cooperators, was Anna Wheeler. The idea of an “entirely new order of things” can be traced back to Wheeler and her influence on the evolving thought of both Owen and Fourier (and the St. Simonians) as she was personally acquainted with Owen, Fourier, the St. Simonians, and the movements growing around their ideas. She did much to bring these worldviews together as well as to popularize the key ideas to a wider audience (Pankhurst 1945, 1954; McFadden Reference McFadden1999; Reference DooleyDooley 1996, 74–76, 92–96; Reference Moriarty and BagchiMoriarty 2012), especially in London and the circles within which Mill moved.

Mill also shared Thompson and Wheeler's view that women were slaves in all but name: “the wife is the actual bondservant of her husband: no less so, as far as legal obligation goes, than slaves commonly so‐called,” and when it comes to property rights “the wife's position… is worse than that of slaves in the laws of many countries” (Reference Mill and RobsonMill 1984, 284). He devoted considerable space to a wide‐ranging discussion of slavery in order to make the case that women were in a state of subjection akin to that of slaves. The Subjection was written at a time when slavery had been abolished within the British Empire and hence could not presuppose, as could Wheeler and Thompson, an energized antislavery discourse. Moreover, he was writing for an audience oriented, for the most part, toward modestly liberal and conservative values. Hence, he had to proceed with more circumspection, as is also evident from his careful discussion in the opening chapter of The Subjection where he justified his project and likely general objections to it. However, there is no doubt that he shared Wheeler and Thompson's view that women were slaves in a literal and not just metaphorical sense: “Marriage is the only actual bondage known to our law. There remain no legal slaves, except the mistress of every house” (323).

Like Wheeler and Thompson, Mill did not accept that women were by nature inferior and men superior. Women's subservient condition came about through custom and law, especially marriage, and involved being subjected to a power common to the whole male sex. He noted that there were three things that in combination ensured that even “the most frivolous and empty or the most ignorant and stolid of mankind” could think and act on the idea that “by the mere fact of being born a male he is by right the superior of all and every one of an entire half of the human race” (324). These three things were:

The problem was not so much nature but society. For Mill, as for Wheeler and Thompson, no‐one could say what might be the true nature of women (or men for that matter) because of the way in which these three conditions combined to privilege men's authority and status over women's to create petty tyrants (potentially if not always in fact) and obedient “bond‐servants” respectively.

However, the problem went much deeper, as Mill realized, though he did not push the implications as radically and as fully as Wheeler and Thompson did. Nevertheless, he did recognize that the first of these three situations, the presumed “natural attraction between opposite sexes,” manifested itself in the sexual subordination of women, namely marriage, which he understood to be central to women's subjection.

Given his sensibilities, this was as close as Mill could get to the more explicit view of sexual subordination explored in the Appeal. Nonetheless, Mill understood that the socially structured relation of inequality between men and women was the core of the problem of women's subjection.

As has already been argued above, Wheeler and Thompson made explicit the view that sexual subordination of women corrupted men's capacity for full development as human beings, just as it more obviously did for women. Mill was clearly following the contours already laid out in the Appeal half a century earlier, belying Mary Shanley's interpretation that “no philosopher prior to Mill had developed such a sustained argument about the corrupting effects on men of their social superiority over and separation from women” (Reference Shanley, Shanley and PatemanShanley 1991, 172).

Then there is the general argument put forth by Mill about the diminishing importance for modern society of force and physical strength. Mill made it clear, as did Thompson and Wheeler (Appeal, 155), that physical force might have been the basis for political rule at some earlier time in human history and hence might have justified men's authority (Reference Mill and RobsonMill 1984, 265). Thus, men by virtue of their generally superior physical strength could lay claim to greater entitlements and hence shaped relations between men and women to suit themselves. However, in the newly emerging industrializing economy, physical strength was increasingly unimportant as new production processes changed the physical nature of work. Nor was it the basis any longer for political rule. In the political arena it was persuasion and consent that now formed the basis for political rule as a “sympathetic association, having its root no longer in the instinct of equals for self‐protection, but in a cultivated sympathy between them” (294). Like the intellect, physical strength was merely a means to an end and did not justify entitlements beyond what each person merited.

One further example of the influence of the Appeal and that of Thompson and Wheeler concerns the idea that the nature of the personal relationship between Wheeler and Thompson possibly served as a model for Mill's relationship with Harriet Taylor (Reference BallBall 1980, 111; Reference DooleyDooley 1996, 81), both before and after they were married. The idea of marriage as a “sympathetic association” was a view shared by all four thinkers. However, whereas Mill (and Taylor) emphasized the companionship basis for marriage and downplayed the sensual or physical aspects of marital relations, Wheeler and Thompson recognized that mutual and respectful shared sensual gratification was an important, indeed necessary, part of egalitarian, loving relationships between women and men. Where sex and sensuality were concerned, Mill's (and Taylor's) views remained much more closely in tune with the sexual stereotypes of Victorian era. The above examples give some indication of the close parallels between Mill's Subjection and Thompson and Wheeler's Appeal. There are others, but these suffice to indicate that the feminism of The Subjection clearly bore the stamp of the Appeal.

Feminist Theory without Apology

The central argument of this article has been concerned with establishing the significant place of the Appeal within early nineteenth‐century political thought, and in particular with Anna Wheeler's contribution to its radical arguments. In making that argument, I looked at Wheeler's contribution to the Appeal and the latter's contribution to the history of political thought. I argued that the Appeal's critique of the prevailing ideas about women, men, and society within early nineteenth‐century political thought undermined the philosophical credibility of liberal utilitarianism, in particular that of James Mill. On those grounds alone, the Appeal warrants due recognition as a major contribution to the history of political thought. Even though the issue that triggered its writing, women's entitlement to full civil and political rights, would seem to be long settled, I have suggested that its radical challenge still stands. Its arguments are still relevant.

A second, but no less important, argument was that Anna Wheeler's contribution was central to the Appeal. Her contribution to the history of political thought remains underappreciated. Wheeler's influence during her lifetime has been described by one feminist historian as “perhaps the most important single builder of cross‐national women's connections during the early period” of the development of self‐conscious political movements to achieve women's full political and civil rights in the first three decades of the nineteenth century (Reference McFaddenMcFadden 1999, 135). Granted, the reality of a women's movement in the early nineteenth century in a formally organized sense might be overstating the case. However, there is no doubting the fully fledged feminism of Wheeler and Thompson's ideas.

Their discussion in the Appeal easily meets the criteria for being feminist as set out at the beginning of this article. They recognized and critiqued the prevailing gender hierarchy (including the misogyny of the dominant intellectuals of their time), and most important of all, they understood women to be a social group whose unequal treatment required collective action to change it. This was clearly brought out in the final pages of the Appeal where they addressed their readers, especially women, in a number of places to rise up and seize their freedom. Moreover, their figuring of the masculine, in the sense noted also at the beginning of the article, was ahead of its time. They did not accept the man‐measure principle as a means of defining women's worth, even if at times their rhetorical flourishes sometimes appeared to valorize women's qualities in ways that might be seen as essentializing. Nonetheless, for the most part they saw women's natures (and their supposedly feminine qualities) as products of the prevailing gender order. As important, they argued that if women could achieve true liberation, then this would transform men as well. Men's characters could be regenerated. In fact, the final sentence of the book foreshadows just this outcome: “As your bondage has chained down man to the ignorance and vices of despotism, so will your liberation reward him with knowledge, with freedom, and with happiness” (Appeal, 213).

This is an important point. They were not arguing that women had to be free in order for men to be free. Rather, they were leaving the reader with two quite radical thoughts. The first was to remind men that, appearances to the contrary, it was in fact in their own best interests for women to be liberated. The second was a reminder of one of the key threads of their argument as a whole, namely that what passed for freedom at that time was in fact predicated on the unfreedom of women, and this unfreedom arose from, was justified by, and was reproduced by women's sexual subjugation. That is precisely the import of Wheeler and Thompson's contribution. They made an original contribution to the political thought of their time. Equally important, they created an original formulation of feminist political theory that went beyond being a hyphenated offspring of the masculinist tradition of the political thought in which it arose. This is the significance of Anna Wheeler's (and the Appeal's) place in the history of political thought.