http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1702882.html

One of those classic political texts which everyone should read, written in the revolutionary moment of 1792, and making the daring argument that women should be educated rather than infantilised, indeed, boys and girls should be educated together. Many of her arguments are unfortunately still valid; her analysis of power and oppression is pretty acute, and must be one of the earliest examples of applying arguments about socieo-economic equality to gender relations. I was interested that she clearly has a great deal of respect for Talleyrand, who I'd always thought of as wily statesman rather than advanced political thinker in his own right, which may just show my ignorance.

I was startled by a line in the introduction by Pamela Frankau, who writes that "with feminism we are surely done. It went out - didn't it? - some twenty-five years ago." This was written in 1954. I'm glad to say that a second reading (not sitting in the warm sunshine) reassured me that she was being ironic.
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http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1703651.html

Mill's argument here is in favour of political equality between the sexes, in particular that woman should be allowed to vote, a proposition to which he gently demolishes all the opposing arguments. He is less passionate than Wollstonecraft but has better one-liners:

"Women who read, much more women who write, are, in the existing constitution of things, a contradiction and a disturbing element... "
"...laws and institutions require to be adapted, not to good men, but to bad."
"If no one could vote for a Member of Parliament who was not [themselves] a fit candidate, the government would be a narrow oligarchy indeed."

I was also struck by his invocation of women rulers throughout history, in particular:

"The Emperor Charles the Fifth, the most politic prince of his time, who had as great a number of able men in his service as a ruler ever had, and was one of the least likely of all sovereigns to sacrifice his interest to personal feelings, made two princesses of his family successively Governors of the Netherlands, and kept one or other of them in that post during his whole life (they were afterwards succeeded by a third). Both ruled very successfully, and one of them, Margaret of Austria, as one of the ablest politicians of the age." ( )