Part II: 1792-1920

Harriet Taylor’s “Enfranchisement of Women,” John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women and Susan B. Anthony’s Speech after Arrest for Illegal Voting all appeal to reason, or as the introduction to this section says: “The principles of enlightenment and liberal humanism” to advance women’s rights during the 19th century (62).

I found the following statements from each reading particularly thought provoking and think in conjunction with one another they paint a picture of what women’s live must have been like during this time:

Susan B. Anthony asks: “Are women persons?” which might seem like an odd question, but given the social and political schema of the late 18th/early 19th centuries, the answer was a resounding NO.

John Stuart Mill lends insight to this question when he writes:
“By the old laws of England, the husband was called the lord of the wife; he was literally regarded as her sovereign, inasmuch that the murder of a man by his wife was called treason (petty and distinguished from high treason), and was more cruelly avenged than was usually the case with high treason, for the penalty was burning to death” (81).

So, just as nations aren’t recognized as nations unless they’re sovereign, women weren’t recognized as people because they did not command their own sovereignty. And, while control over women was given to either their fathers or husbands, this responsibility required no qualifications. The most repulsive, ignorant man was seen as possessing a divine right to rule over at least his woman: “In every grade of [the] descending scale are men to whom are committed all the legal powers of a husband. The vilest malefactor has some wretched woman tied to him, against whom he can commit any atrocity except killing her, and, if tolerably cautious, can do that without much danger of the legal penalty…” (83)

Harriet Taylor writes:
“For with what truth or rationality could the suffrage be termed universal, while half the human species remained excluded from it?” (75) Taylor also addresses the fact that it is “an axiom of English freedom that taxation and representation should be coextensive” (75). Yet, women were not only denied the vote even though their property and belongings were taxed, they weren’t even considered persons! She asks: [is it] right and expedient that one-half of the human race should pass through life in a state of forced subordination to the other half?” (77)

Not only are parallels drawn during this time period between the condition of women and slavery, but many liberal thinking compared the oppression of women to an aristocracy based on sex (Taylor, 75). Anthony says: “For [women] this government is not a democracy; it is not a republic. It is the most odious aristocracy ever established on the face of the globe. An oligarchy of wealth, where the rich govern the poor; an oligarchy of learning, where the educated govern the ignorant…[an] oligarchy of sex…which ordains all men sovereigns, all women subjects—carries discord and rebellion into every home of the nation” (92).

She concludes with a statement that seems timeless: “there is but one safe principle of government—equal rights to all” (93).