The Rhetorics of Slavery and Citizenship: Suffragist Discourse and Canonical Texts in Britain, 1880–1914

This article examines the pivotal role played by two canonical texts in shaping the political subjectivities of suffragists in late nineteenth‐ and early twentieth‐century Britain. Read and discussed by three generations of British feminists, John Stuart Mill's Subjection of Women and Giuseppe Mazzini's Duties of Man shaped suffragist thinking on relationships between family, state, and citizenship and provided impetus for the creation of new kinds of argumentation and organisations for women's political activism.