John Stuart Mill Speech: On the Admission of Women to the Electoral Franchise - Women's Suffrage...

On May 20, 1867, John Stuart Mill proposed women's suffrage in a speech to the House of Commons. He argued their was no philosophical basis for denying women the right to vote. It still amazes me that it has only been a little over a hundred years since women were given the right to vote in the United States. Mill had a small influence on the American suffrage movement. Abigail Adams had urged her husband to " remember the ladies" when the fighting for American independence. It would take nearly 150 years for that to happen. A short excerpt from the article:

"Having set these issues aside, Mill got to the heart of the matter, saying, “There is nothing to distract our attention from the simple question, whether there is any adequate justification for continuing to exclude an entire half of the community, not only from admission, but from the capability of being ever admitted within the pale of the Constitution.”

Women’s exclusion from the voter rolls, he argued, was an outrage against the idea of the British constitution’s universal applicability. It was predicated only on the basis of women’s sex, an immutable factor beyond anyone’s control, and had no equivalent in British law or common sense:

'There is no other example of an exclusion which is absolute. If the law denied a vote to all but the possessors of £5,000 a year, the poorest man in the nation might—and now and then would—acquire the suffrage; but neither birth, nor fortune, nor merit, nor exertion, nor intellect, nor even that great disposer of human affairs, accident, can ever enable any woman to have her voice counted in those national affairs which touch her and hers as nearly as any other person in the nation …

…[J]ustice, though it does not necessarily require that we should confer political functions on every one, does require that we should not, capriciously and without cause, withhold from one what we give to another. As was most truly said by my right hon. Friend the Member for South Lancashire, in the most misunderstood and misrepresented speech I ever remember; to lay a ground for refusing the suffrage to any one, it is necessary to allege either personal unfitness or public danger. Now, can either of these be alleged in the present case? Can it be pretended that women who manage an estate or conduct a business—who pay rates and taxes, often to a large amount, and frequently from their own earnings—many of whom are responsible heads of families, and some of whom, in the capacity of schoolmistresses, teach much more than a great number of the male electors have ever learnt—are not capable of a function of which every male householder is capable? Or is it feared that if they were admitted to the suffrage they would revolutionize the State—would deprive us of any of our valued institutions, or that we should have worse laws, or be in any way whatever worse governed through the effect of their suffrages? No one, Sir, believes anything of the kind.'"