Page:Letters to a friend on votes for women.djvu/35

 does not in reality afford such an instance. It may to many of us seem a harmful survival of a bygone time. It found its justification in the circumstances of the age when it arose, as an institution which prevented the division of property, and in any case it told nearly as much against younger sons as against daughters. In no part of public life is the predominance of a class in general more apparent than in the sphere of taxation. But no woman in modern England is taxed where a man is not taxed. In plain truth, the civil or strictly private rights of an unmarried woman, when not in some way connected with a public function, are, broadly speaking, the same as those of a man. The few exceptions to this rule—e.g., the refusal of degrees to women at Oxford and Cambridge—might be got rid of to-morrow by half the exertion used for obtaining votes for women.

In the second place, the most effective part of the argument under consideration, and that on which Mill placed the greatest reliance, lay in the actual injustice of the law which in his time deprived the married women of England of their own property. It was the