The term ‘feminism’ was coined in French (féminisme) by the socialist Charles Fourier, and John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women (1869) gives it one of its best early statements; the book begins with the words, ‘The object of this Essay is to explain as clearly as I am able . . . that the principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes - the legal subordination of one sex to the other - is wrong 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
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