To the reader This digitized version reproduces the full version of the Essay. Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. Bold are denoted by equals signs Please note that two pages of advertising have not been reproduced. ENFRANCHISEMENT OF WOMEN. AN ESSAY BY MRS. JOHN STUART MILL. REPRINTED FROM THE WESTMINSTER AND FOREIGN QUARTERLY REVIEW, FOR JULY, 1851. NEW YORK: Office of “THE REVOLUTION” NO. 37 PARK ROW (ROOM 17) 1868 ENFRANCHISEMENT OF WOMEN: BY MRS. JOHN STUART MILL. REPRINTED FROM THE "WESTMINSTER AND FOREIGN QUARTERLY REVIEW," FOR JULY, 1851. 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,--new, not to thinkers, nor to any one by whom the principles of free and popular government are felt, as well as acknowledged, but new, and even unheard of, as a subject for public meetings and practical political action. This question is, 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. It will add to the surprise with which many will receive this intelligence, that the agitation which has commenced is not a pleading by male writers and orators _for_ women, those who are professedly to be benefited remaining either indifferent or ostensibly hostile; it is a political movement, practical in its objects, carried on in a form which denotes an intention to persevere. And it is a movement not merely _for_ women, but _by_ them. Its first public manifestation appears to have been a convention of women, held in the State of New York, July, 1848. Of this meeting we have seen no report. On the 23d and 24th of October last, a succession of public meetings was held at Worcester, in Massachusetts, under the name of a "Women's Rights Convention," of which the president was a woman, and nearly all the chief speakers women; numerously reinforced, however, by men, among whom were some of the most distinguished leaders in the kindred cause of negro emancipation. A general and four special committees were nominated, for the purpose of carrying on the undertaking until the next annual meeting.