Marriage Quote by John Stuart Mill

Mill goes for the throat by choosing a word Victorian liberals liked to reserve for other people. "Slave" isn’t a metaphor here so much as a moral tripwire: if you believe coercion is wrong in the colonies, you have to explain why it’s acceptable in the parlor. The line’s sting comes from its comparative structure. He doesn’t merely claim wives are oppressed; he claims the institution of marriage can be a deeper captivity than chattel slavery in one particular respect: totalizing control.

The subtext is legal before it’s emotional. In Mill’s Britain, marriage folded a woman’s civil identity into her husband’s under coverture. Property, wages, custody, residence, even bodily autonomy were structured around male prerogative. Enslavement is usually imagined as public violence; Mill spotlights a quieter mechanism: domination made intimate and normalized, enforced by custom, religion, and the state’s refusal to intervene in the home. That "so full a sense" phrase does heavy lifting, insisting the domination isn’t incidental abuse but built into the contract.

It’s also strategic provocation. Mill knows the comparison will offend. He uses that friction to expose liberalism’s hypocrisy: a society congratulating itself on progress while preserving a domestic regime of dependency. The intent isn’t to flatten racial slavery into marital inequality; it’s to indict a culture that treats women’s subordination as natural rather than political. Written in the orbit of The Subjection of Women and his collaboration with Harriet Taylor, the line works like a scalpel: precise, unsettling, designed to make respectable injustice impossible to ignore.