Rights of Women

Frederick Douglass on Women’s Right to Vote

Harriet Taylor wants to see “freedom and admissibility” in all areas of human activity replace the system of “privilege and exclusion” (1847)

J.S. Mill denounced the legal subjection of women as “wrong in itself” and as “one of the chief hindrances to human improvement” (1869)

J.S. Mill in “The Subjection of Women” argued that every form of oppression seems perfectly natural to those who live under it (1869)

J.S. Mill on the wife as the “actual bondservant of her husband” in the 19th century (1869)

J.S. Mill spoke in Parliament in favour of granting women the right to vote, to have “a voice in determining who shall be their rulers” (1866)

J.S. Mill’s great principle was that “over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign” (1859)

James Mill on Women and Representative Government

John Stuart Mill uses an analogy with the removal of protective duties and bounties in trade to urge a similar “Free Trade” between the sexes (1869)

Mary Wollstonecraft believes that women are no more naturally subservient than men and nobody, male or female, values freedom unless they have had to struggle to attain it (1792)

Mary Wollstonecraft likens the situation of soldiers under a tyrant king to women under a tyrant husband (1792)

Mary Wollstonecraft on Women’s Education

Mary Wollstonecraft’s “I have a dream” speech from 1792

The Women of Seneca Falls and William Blackstone