MILL, John Stuart.
The Subjection of Women.
London: Longmans, Green, 1869.
8vo, pp. [4], 188, with a half-title; an unusually good, fresh copy in the original mustard cloth, slightly darkened as usual, inner hinges cracked (but firm).
First edition of ‘the last of [Mill’s] great political tracts’ (ODNB), one of the most important and controversial treatments of women’s rights in the nineteenth century. Mill was heavily involved in the women’s suffragette movement, and in this work he argued ‘that the principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes – the legal subordination of one sex to the other – is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement; and that it ought to be replaced by a principle of perfect equality, admitting no power or privilege on the one side, nor disability on the other’ (p. 1).
