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equality with such creatures as men now are’, he wrote to her: ‘With you I would equally elevate both sexes.’ The book concentrates on the situation of the married woman, who is reduced to being a piece of ‘movable property and an ever-obedient servant to the bidding of man’. For a married woman, her home becomes a ‘prison-house’. The house itself, as well as everything in it, belongs to the husband, ‘and of all fixtures the most abject is his breeding machine, the wife’. Married women are in fact slaves, their situation no better than that ‘of Negroes in the West Indies’. Mothers are denied rights over their children and over family property, and most are treated like ‘any other upper servant’.
    The Appeal was in part couched as an answer to James Mill’s Essay minism
    on Government , well known at the time, which argued that women Fe
    need no political rights as they are adequately represented by their fathers or husbands. ‘What happens to women who have neither husband nor father?’ Thompson asks. He then goes on to attack, pungently and at length, the unthinking assumption that the interests of husband and wife are always identical, and to criticize, bitterly, the unjust situation. He also looks forward to a time when the children of all classes, both girls and boys, will be equally provided for and educated.
    Anna Wheeler later went on to become an effective writer and lecturer on women’s rights. Sadly, her own daughter strongly disapproved of her radical inclinations, claiming that she was unfortunately deeply imbued with the pernicious fallacies of the French Revolution, which had then more or less seared their trace through Europe, and . . . was besides strongly tainted by the corresponding poison of Mrs Wollstonecraft’s book.
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    Interestingly, William Thompson, too, criticizes Mary Wollstonecraft, but for quite opposite reasons: he attacked her
    ‘narrow views’ and the ‘timidity and impotence of her conclusions’.
    (He was perhaps betraying his own lack of historical awareness.) But he calls on women to make their own demands for education, and for civil and political rights; in the long run, he feels, that must benefit men as well:
    As your bondage has chained down man to the ignorance and vices of despotism, so will your liberation reward him with knowledge, with freedom and happiness.
    In 1869 John Stuart Mill published The Subjection of Women , Th
    which also argued that the subordination of women was both e early 19th centur
    wrong and ‘one of the chief hindrances to human improvement’.
    (Ironically, he was the son of the James Mill whose conservative views on women had so infuriated William Thompson.) Mill was profoundly influenced by Harriet Taylor, whom he had met in 1830. y: She was already married, with two small sons; the pair maintained reformin
    an intense friendship for nearly twenty years, and eventually, two years after her husband died in 1851, they were able to marry.
    g w
    Harriet had published a short article on ‘The Enfranchisement of ome
    Women’ in the Westminster Review in 1851; and she had written, n
    though, interestingly, not published, papers that criticized the marriage laws and claimed a woman’s rights and responsibilities towards her own children. When she and Mill eventually married, he remarked that he felt it his duty to make ‘a formal protest against the existing law of marriage’ on the grounds that it gave the man ‘legal power over the person, property and freedom of action of the other party, independent of her own wishes and will’. Mill admitted that
    the opinion was in my mind little more than an abstract principle
    . . . that perception of the vast practical bearings of women’s disabilities which found expression in the book on The Subjection of Women was acquired mainly through her [Harriet’s] teaching.
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    19th-century American feminism
    In the 19th-century United States, feminism emerged out of the anti-slavery