
Contents
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1. Introduction 1. Introduction
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2. Gendered Boundaries: The Sexual Contract and the Canon 2. Gendered Boundaries: The Sexual Contract and the Canon
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3. The Bonds of Marriage 3. The Bonds of Marriage
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4. The Bonds of Motherhood 4. The Bonds of Motherhood
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5. The Motherhood Economy 5. The Motherhood Economy
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6. Citizens, Shrews, and Wolves 6. Citizens, Shrews, and Wolves
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7. A Problem of Method 7. A Problem of Method
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8. More Than Bodies: Recovering Experiential Politics 8. More Than Bodies: Recovering Experiential Politics
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References References
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Notes Notes
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Women under Contract: Harriet Taylor Mill and the Value of Experiential Politics
Get accessMenaka Philips is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto Mississauga and in the Graduate Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. She works on a range of issues concerning contemporary democratic theory, feminist and postcolonial politics, and American political thought, and has published in journals like the European Journal of Political Theory, Contemporary Political Theory, and the American Political Science Review. Her book, The Liberalism Trap (forthcoming, Oxford University Press), examines how attention to liberalism shapes interpretive practices in political theory.
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Published:16 August 2023
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Abstract
Though the story of the sexual contract emerged through studies of canonical male writers, that approach risks erasing women’s agency from view. It also detaches our understanding of the sexual contract and its regulatory institutions from the lived experiences and political insights of its subjected class. Reading through the perspectives of the contract’s male architects, in other words, renders women silent in a story about their own subordination. This chapter proposes an alternative: working with the extant writings of Harriet Taylor Mill (HTM), it recovers women as complex agents in the story of the sexual contract. Drawing on what I call HTM’s “experiential politics”—a politics derived through critical examinations of the everyday—the argument follows her study of marriage and motherhood in nineteenth-century England. Her observations outline how these institutions constructed women as subjects of the sexual contract, as well as the ways in which women consciously worked against and alongside their regulations. Recovering HTM’s experiential politics as a lens through which to understand the sexual contract can thus recenter women as political actors in the story. In so doing, the argument raises important questions about how the intellectual borders of the history of political thought are defined, and about the diverse range of resources that lies beyond them.
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