  John Stuart Mill was a notable exception, arguing in The Subjection of Women, that the inequality of women in the family was incompatible with their equality in the wider social world. Consider, he asks, the consequences of “the self-worship, the unjust self preference” nourished in boys growing up in male dominated households in which “by the mere fact of being born male he is by right the superior of all and every one of an entire half of the human race” (1869, 86–87). How will such boys grow up into men who treat women as equals? Feminist scholarship has continued, extended and deepened this attack on the conception of the family as a private personal realm. Indeed, the idea that “the personal [that is, the family] is political” is the core idea of most contemporary feminism.