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movement, in which women were very active.
    Anti-slavery societies proliferated from the 1830s onward; ironically, some groups were open only to whites. In London in 1840 a World Convention on slavery was attended by Americans, including Elizabeth Cady Stanton; women were banned from taking part in the debate. That moved Stanton and Lucretia Mott to become feminists. In 1848, they organized a women’s convention in Seneca Falls, New York, and campaigned for rights, including the vote, for women and for blacks. Sarah and Angelina Grimke, from a Southern slave-holding family, but converted Quakers, became ardent and effective abolitionists. In 1863, Angelina published An
    Appeal to the Christian Women of the Southern States , and minism
    Fe
    two years later, Letters on the Equality of the Sexes . She responded angrily to criticism that she had stepped outside woman’s proper sphere. A former slave, Sojourner Truth, mocked clerics who insisted that women needed to be protected by men, and spoke out angrily after the Civil War and the emancipation of slaves, when the vote was given to former slaves – but only males. In 1920, women were enfranchised, but it was only in 1970 that the vote was given to all blacks.
    Mill based his arguments in the Subjection on the belief that the then existing – and blatantly unequal – relationship between the sexes was anything but natural. ‘Was there ever any domination which did not appear natural to those who possessed it?’ he asks, citing the way, until recently, its beneficiaries had defended the slave 46
    trade in America. What we presently call womanliness is something artificial, ‘the result of forced repression in some directions, unnatural stimulations in others’. He seems to have come to this notion only gradually, and probably under Harriet’s influence; in 1832, not long after they met, he had written informing her that ‘the great occupation of woman should be to beautify life . . . to diffuse beauty, elegance, & grace everywhere’.
    But in the Subjection he denies that
    anyone knows, or can know, the nature of the two sexes as long as they have only been seen in their present relation to one another. All the moralities tell them that it is the duty of woman, and all the Th
    current sentimentalities that it is their nature, to live for others.
    e early 19th centur
    It is hardly surprising, given the poverty of their education and the narrowness of their lives, he argues, that women have not yet produced ‘great and luminous ideas’. He also claims, even more y:
    dubiously, that they have not yet created ‘a literature of their own’.
    reformin
    Ann Radcliffe, Fanny Burney, Jane Austen, Susan Ferrier, the Brontë sisters: they all seem to have escaped his notice.
    g w
    ome
    In an ideal world, Mill believed, men and women would resemble n
    each other: men would be more unselfish, and women would be free of the ‘exaggerated self-abnegation’ expected of them. Mill never goes so far as to argue for the possibility of divorce. But he insists that there is no justification for not giving women the vote immediately, and under exactly the same conditions as men; in fact, he remarked, many of them deserve it more than some of the present voters. In 1866, Mill presented the first women’s petition for the vote, and he moved amendments to the 1867 Reform Bill in favour of women.
    Some modern feminists have criticized Mill for concentrating almost exclusively on married women, while ignoring the situation of, say, daughters or single women. But married women – as both 47
    Reid and Thompson had recognized earlier – were indeed, legally at least, particularly vulnerable. The problems wives might face were dramatically illustrated in the notorious case of Caroline Norton.
    Born in 1808, she was the granddaughter of the playwright Richard Sheridan, and she was beautiful, lively, and well educated. She certainly never set out to become a champion of women’s rights,