SOURCE: “Suppressed Speech: The Language of Emotion in Harriet Taylor's The Enfranchisement of Women,” in Women’s Studies, Vol. 20, No. 3-4, 1992, pp. 273-86.

In the following essay, Hackleman explores the impact that Harriet Taylor's “Enfranchisement of Women” had on the feminist movement.

Suppressed speech gathers into a storm …

Eliza Sharples, 1832

Histories of the early English feminist movement often locate its beginning in the middle nineteenth century with the rise of women's reform societies and trace its development to the suffrage movement of the early twentieth century. One textbook claims that “the feminist movement in England truly began in the 1850s”¹ with concerns about women's education, employment and legal status emanating from the ranks of upper middle class women. This was the time in which the Woman Question was drawing the greatest number of respondents from a multiplicity of political positions. Carol Bauer and Laurence Ritt argue in another...