The unexpurgated case against woman suffrage / by Almroth E. Wright.

  • Almroth Wright
Date:
1913
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The unexpurgated case against woman suffrage / by Almroth E. Wright. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    We find him writing a letter to the Home Secretary, informing him, in relation to a Parliamentary Bill restrict- ing the sale of arsenic to male persons over twenty-one years, that it was a ‘ gross insult to every woman, all women from highest to lowest being deemed unfit to have poison in their possession lest they shall commit murder.’ We find him again, in a state of indignation with the English marriage laws, preluding his nuptials with Mrs. Taylor by presenting that lady with a formal charter: renouncing all authority over her, and promising her security against all infringements of her liberty which might proceed from himself. To this lady he is always ascribing credit for his eminent intellectual achievements. And lest his reader should opine that woman stands somewhat in the shade with respect to her own intellectual triumphs. Mill under- takes the explanation. ‘Felicitous thoughts,’ he tells us, ‘ occur by hundreds to every woman of intellect. But ‘ they are mostly lost for want of a husband or friend ‘ to estimate them properly, and to bring them before the ‘ world; and even when they are brought before it they ‘ generally appear as his ideas.’ Not only did Mill see woman and all her works through an optical medium which gave images like this; but there was upon his retina a large blind area. By reason of this last it was inapprehensible to him that there could be an objection to the sexes co-operating indiscriminately in work. It was beyond his ken that the sex element would under these conditions invade whole departments of life which are now free from it. As he saw things, there was in point of fact a risk of the