Enfranchisement Of Women

Enfranchisement of Women is an essay by Harriet Taylor Mill. It delves into the suffragette movements roots and advocates women's rights to vote as equals to men.

The object of this essay is to explain as clearly as I am able, the grounds of an opinion which I have held from the very earliest period when I had formed any opinions at all on social or political matters, and which, instead of being weakened or modified, has been constantly growing stronger by the progress of reflection and the experience of life: That the principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes- the legal subordination of one sex to the other- is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement ; and that is ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other.

All the significant ideas in nineteenth-century English feminism can be found in the prose and thought of John Stuart Mill and in those of the two women central to his life: Harriet Taylor, who married him in 1851, and her daughter, Helen Taylor. Together they produced some of the most powerful and influential writings ever penned to promote women's equality, and it was to this family that the Victorian women's movement in England came to look for leadership, guidance, and money.In this volume, Ann Robson and John Robson bring together the writings and speeches from these three seminal thinkers on the subject of sexual equality. Some of these pieces have not been available in published form for more than a century. They cover such topics as love, sex, marriage, children, property, domestic relations, divorce, and suffrage.Sexual Equality is a necessary tool for understanding the development of ideas on women's issues in the Mill household. These ideas influenced thinking on sexual equality far beyond England and far past the Victorian period.