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Martin Luther King, Jr. was a civil rights activist and leader of the African-American Civil Rights Movement. C. in 1888, when the International Council of Women was formed. [ 44 ] The Woman�s Christian Temperance Union, founded in 1874, sponsored its first international conference in 1876, and, with its endorsement of suffrage in 1881, became the largest pro-suffrage organization in the world. [ 45 ] These large national and international organizations contrast sharply with the movement of individual feminists across national boundaries that began with Mary Wollstonecraft in the 1780s, increased greatly among socialists and utopians between 1820 and 1850, and persisted among writers and intellectuals in the 1860s.� Nevertheless, links between early and late nineteenth-century feminists remain strong.� Perhaps the best example of those ties was John Stuart Mill�s 1869 book, The Subjection of Women (see Document 20 ).� Although Harriet Taylor Mill died in 1859, Mill drew on their joint writings and conversations.� Arguing that the legal, political, and cultural limitations on women were part of a bygone era characterized by "command and obedience," whereas he found the modern era characterized by "equal association."� Mill�s book quickly became a standard reference point for late-nineteenth century feminists in the United States and Europe.� In 1870, when Elizabeth Cady Stanton spoke "On Marriage and Divorce" at a convention that commemorated the twentieth anniversary of first National Woman�s Rights Convention in Worcester, Massachusetts, she praised Mill�s emphasis on the importance of equality in marriage.��� Will man yield what he conceives to be his legitimate authority over woman with less struggle than have Popes and Kings their supposed rights over their subjects, or slave-holders over their slaves?� No, no.� John Stuart Mill says the generality of the male sex cannot yet tolerate the idea of living with an equal at the fireside, and here is the secret of the opposition to woman�s equality in the State and the Church; men are not ready to recognize it in the home. [ 46 ] Stanton�s reference to Mill in 1870 exemplified the international flow of ideas and social movements that carried a tradition of emancipatory writings about women forward from Mary Wollstonecraft in 1792 to John Stuart Mill in 1869.� While the socialist and utopian movements that fueled that tradition in the early decades of the nineteenth century did not persist as the main carriers of women�s rights, in the later decades of the century new movements emerged to take their place--and carried many of those early ideas into the twentieth century.
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