Maxine Molyneux Women on John Stuart Mill

“Reformers like Mill saw women's oppression as a 'relic of the past...discordant with the future and which must necessarily disappear.'”

“liberals such as Mill, and later socialists and feminists of different political sympathies, likened women's situation within marriage and their deprivation of civil rights to the state of slavery. As Mill expressed it in The Subjection of Women, a text that was first published in 1861, the year of the outbreak of the American Civil War, 'no slave is a slave to the same lengths, and in so full a sense of the word, as a wife is'.”