625) and campaigned demanding not only equal education, but also equal civil and political rights of women with men. Mill considered that “the principle which regulates the existing social relations between the two sexes – the legal subordination of one sex to the other – is wrong in itself, and now one of the chief hindrances to human improvement” (p. In the development of liberal feminism, a crucial role was played by John Stuart Mill, implicitly through On Liberty, but especially by writing On The Subjection of Women (1869). As women’s roles have been (and are) prescribed and more predetermined than men’s, their path to autonomy and self-assertion is even harder, and longer. A society evolves towards a liberal democracy when it creates the norms, institutions and practices that give its people the chance to develop and manifest themselves as fully and freely as possible. More, “the true virtue of human beings is fitness to live together as equals claiming nothing for themselves but what they as freely concede to every one else” (p. The autonomy of the human being is a common central value in ethics and political theory and a political theory is devoid of moral purpose unless it seeks to increase a person’s autonomy.
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