1851: Enfranchisement of Women

“Enfranchisement of Women”

by Harriet Hardy Taylor Mill

Curio 324.3 M36451e            Read the full text online.

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The struggle to gain women’s voting rights was not limited to the United States. Harriet Hardy Taylor Mill (aka Mrs. John Stuart Mill), the author of this essay, was born in London in 1807 and died in France in 1858. Her July 1851 Westminster and Foreign Quarterly Review article “Enfranchisement of Women” was widely reprinted. In this work Mill introduced British readers to the budding suffrage movement in North America.

"Most of our readers will probably learn from these pages, for the first time, that there has arisen in the United States, and in the most civilized and enlightened portion of them, an organized agitation on a new question… the enfranchisement of women; their admission, in law, and in fact, to equality in all rights, political, civil and social, with the male citizens of the community."