A little feminist inspiration

I tend to go through books quickly since I read on the train on my way to and from work every day, and I've plunged into another good one. I haven't done enough feminist reading since college, when great books were requirements for my sociology degree and my various tangents into other humanities. So in an effort to refresh, I decided to pick up The Essential Feminist Reader, a collection of historical (1405-now!) feminist essays, speeches, and literature from around the world, compiled by Estelle B. Freedman, a women's history professor at Stanford. I'm loving it so far, and I am amazed by how long some of the core ideas of feminism have been around. One excerpt that I particularly enjoy is from Harriet Taylor Mill, an English feminist advocating for education and self-determination for women in the early to mid 19th century. This is from a piece called "The Enfranchisement of Women", written in 1851:

We deny the right of any portion of the species to decide for another portion, or any individual for another individual, what is and what is not their "proper sphere." The proper sphere for all human beings is the largest and highest which they are able to attain to. What this is, cannot be ascertained, without complete liberty of choice. The speakers at the Convention in America have therefore done wisely and right, in refusing to entertain the question of the peculiar aptitudes either of women or of men, or the limits within which this or that occupation may be supposed to be more adapted to the one or to the other. They justly maintain, that these questions can only be satisfactorily answered by perfect freedom. Let every occupation be open to all, without favour or discouragement to any, and employments will fall into the hands of those men or women who are found by experience to be most capable of worthily exercising them. There need be no fear that women will take out of the hands of men any occupation which men perform better than they. Each individual will prove his or her capacities, in the only way in which capacities can be proved— by trial; and the world will have the benefit of the best faculties of all its inhabitants. But to interfere beforehand by an arbitrary limit, and declare that whatever be the genius, talent, energy, or force of mind of an individual of a certain sex or class, those faculties shall not be exerted, or shall be exerted only in some few of the many modes in which others are permitted to use theirs, is not only an injustice to the individual, and a detriment to society, which loses what it can ill spare, but is also the most effectual mode of providing that, in the sex or class so fettered, the qualities which are not permitted to be exercised shall not exist.

It's funny to me that these kinds of beliefs and discussions still exist about what women and men are best adapted to be and do. I like Mills' take on it: How about we give people freedom and resources to pursue what they will, and then we'll see if there is any truth to the supposed differences between men and women?