Thus, due to women's continued dependence on men in order to survive in society, women inadvertently helped create the thinking that they cannot survive and live within their own means, not without the help of society, most particularly, men. Mill's discussion of male-female relations may be blatantly honest in acknowledging women oppression, but his arguments were strong in that he was able to specifically determine the factor which made women suppressed by men (that is, socio-economical dependence).
Elizabeth Browning had been aware of the plight of the women sector in her society. While Mill's analysis showed that women were subjugated by men because they are dependent on males socio-economically, Browning's explication in the poem "Aurora Leigh" illustrated how oppression had been able to penetrate and affect the mindset of women,...
This was reflected in her assertion that "I felt a mother-want about the world, and still went seeking...I, Aurora Leigh, was born to make my father sadder...Women know...stringing pretty words that make no sense..." Indeed, this condition of women had been the focus of Mary Wollstonecraft's radical discussion in "A vindication of the rights of woman," wherein she argued for the social liberation or emancipation of women from the prejudice that they are a weak, if not weaker, sex in the society. For Wollstonecraft, what made women inferior to men was not because she is inherently so, but simply because she had been subjugated throughout human history, given inferior social statuses in her society, and was treated as such (i.e., inferior or weaker sex) in her own society.
