Note 153 — Chapter X · The Virtues and Vices of Women

Cp. Sir Almroth E. Wright, who, in speaking of Mill’s hypothetical natural woman, says (Op. cit., p. 5): “Instead of dealing with woman as she is, and with woman placed in a setting of actually subsisting conditions, Mill takes as his theme a woman who is a creature of his imagination. This woman is, by assumption, in mental endowment a replica of man. She lives in a world which is, by tacit assumption, free from the complications of sex.... It is in connexion with this fictitious woman that Mill sets himself to work out the benefit which women would derive from co-partnership with men in the government of the State, and those which such co-partnership would confer on the community.”