POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY A Punch cartoon of 1867 satirises Mill’s crusade for equality between the sexes uprising against their power: their subjects live under their eyes and in their very hands It is no wonder that the tyranny of males has outlasted all other forms of unjust authority Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer on Women The significance of On the Subjection of Women in the climate of the time can be brought out by comparing it with the treatment of marriage and womanhood in the works of two Continental philosophers, Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer In Kierkegaard’s Either/Or a ninety-page essay is devoted to affirming ‘the aesthetic validity of marriage’—that is, to persuade the reader that entering into matrimony need not diminish, indeed may fortify, the raptures of first love Romantic ballads and novels are quite 276