This was the ordinary argument of Liberalism, a plea for the substitution of individual opportunity for class regulation. Mill went farther, as every Liberal is bound to go, and claimed for women the same right to control their own government as that { 254} which he claimed for men. During the debates on the Reform Bill of 1867 he actually moved an amendment providing for the enfranchisement of women on the same terms as men. The respect with which the House listened to his speech was accorded to the speaker rather than to his argument, and it is only in very recent years that the opposition to Woman Suffrage has ceased to be largely frivolous and even obscene. In Mill's day the force outside Parliament was very weak, and it was impossible that his proposals should succeed. Even among the middle and upper classes only one woman in ten received a scientific mental training, and many of the best educated were so far removed by circumstances from all personal hardships that their sense of the common grievance was slight. But the movement which Mill thus brought to the surface of politics was essentially part of the great tide of individual emancipation which had been flowing since the French Revolution, and pioneers like Lydia Becker were already struggling with prejudice and prudery with some success. Women were beginning to refuse, as Catholics, Dissenters, and workmen had refused, to be treated in the State as a branded class. If the domination of one class of men over another class of men had led to abuse, did not the domination of one sex over another also lead to abuse? The deliberate stunting of the female mind in education,[299] the exclusion of women from the Universities and the professions, the gross inequalities sanctioned by the new Divorce Act, the barbarity which stripped the wife on marriage of all her property and even of the earnings of her own labour, and reduced her to absolute physical and mental dependence upon her husband, all this was the direct or indirect consequence of the political domination of the male sex. Those who disposed of women in the State, disposed of them also in the schools, in industry, and in the family. With excess of logic, the early Woman Suffragists even opposed the restriction of women's labour by { 255} Factory Acts as if every such interference had been inspired by male jealousy.