Date: October 21st, 2017 8:51 AM
Author: arousing heaven really tough guy
Re: design, your supposition is correct. Anti-suffragist writings are fun reading; I could find the pull-quote I was looking for re motives but here's Mills getting GAPED:
Exactly the same plan was followed by Mill
in handling the question of woman's suffrage.
Instead of dealing with woman as she is, and
with woman placed in a setting of actually sub-
sisting conditions, Mill takes as his theme a
woman who is a creature of his imagination.
This woman is, by assumption, in mental en-
dowments a replica of man. She lives in a
world which is, by tacit assumption, free from
complications of sex. And, if practical con-
siderations had ever come into the purview of
Mill's mind, she would, by tacit assumption, be
paying her own way, and be making full per-
sonal and financial contributions to the State.
It is in connexion with this fictitious woman
that Mill sets himself to work out the benefits 28
which women would derive from co-partner-
ship with men in the government of the State,
and those which such co-partnership would
confer on the community. Finally, practis-
ing again upon himself the same imposition as
in his Political Economy, this unpractical
trafficker in abstractions sets out to persuade
his reader that he has, by dealing with fictions
of the mind, effectively grappled with the
concrete problem of woman's suffrage.
This, then, is the philosopher who gives in-
tellectual prestige to the Woman's Suffrage
cause.
***
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/5183/5183-h/5183-h.htm
(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=3770366&forum_id=2#34493365)