Justice & Law Quote by William Cobbett

Cobbett flatters women with the warm glow of “sisterhood,” then yanks the rug out: their solidarity, he implies, isn’t lofty principle but a practical response to domination. The line works because it performs, in miniature, the very power imbalance it names. He gets to define the terms of women’s unity from the safe side of the fence, granting it legitimacy only after reminding readers who built the fence.

The pivot phrase “natural enough” is doing heavy lifting. It turns female collective action into something almost zoological: an instinctive reaction to male legal supremacy. That’s not a compliment; it’s a containment strategy. If women organize, it’s because they’re pressured to, not because they have political agency. Cobbett acknowledges “vast power” with a candor that can read bracingly modern, but the candor is also a flex. He says the quiet part out loud and expects that frankness to pass as reasonableness.

Context matters: late Georgian and Regency Britain was a world of coverture, limited property rights, and marriage laws that effectively merged a wife’s legal identity into her husband’s. Even as reformist energies rose (Cobbett himself was a radical critic of establishment corruption), women’s formal political power remained thin. The quote betrays that contradiction: a populist who can rail against elites while taking patriarchy as the background condition of civic life. The subtext isn’t “women are united”; it’s “their unity is a symptom, and we are the cause.”