 Mill argued that seriously unequal societies, by preventing individuals from developing their deliberative powers, mold individuals’ character in unhealthy ways and impede their ability to live virtuous lives. For example, Mill argued, in deep disagreement with the views of his own time, that societies that have systematically subordinated women have harmed both men and women, making it almost impossible for men and women to form relationships of genuine intimacy and understanding. In The Subjection of Women, Mill wrote that the family, as constituted at his time, was a “school of despotism,” which taught those who benefited from it the vices of selfishness, self-indulgence, and injustice. Among working class men, the fact that wives were excessively dependent on their husbands inspired meanness and savagery. In chapter IV of The Subjection of Women, Mill goes so far as to claim that “[a]ll the selfish propensities, the self-worship, the unjust self-preference, which exist among mankind, have their source and root in, and derive their principal nourishment from, the present constitution of the relation between men and women” (Mill 1988, 86). Women who have been legally and socially subordinated to men become meek, submissive, self-sacrificing, and manipulative. In brief, men evidence the vices of the slave master, while women evidence the vices of the slave. For moral lives and psychologically healthy relationships to be possible, Mill called for altered marital arrangements, supported by changes in law, that would promote the development and exercise of women’s deliberative powers along with men’s. Only under such conditions could women and men acquire feelings of real self-esteem rather than feelings of false inferiority and superiority.