When Higgins said the following quote in Pygmalion, what did he mean with these words? I know he is a misogynist, but I can't understand his point in...

Henry Higgins isn't quite the misogynist we
think he is. Neither is , the writer of , even though Higgins seems at
times to be speaking with Shaw's voice.

Shaw was a democratic socialist, and
he wrote his plays as social and political commentary, not for entertainment.
Pygmalion, for example, deals with the rigid class structure of British
society and is only incidentally about womens' rights.

Shaw was pro-women and
supported equal rights and the suffragette movement, although at first glance Higgins's lines
would seem to contradict that.

Shaw believed that women were no less the
unwilling victims of a male capitalist society than the people of Britain as a whole, that
marriage for financial security was simply a legalized form of prostitution, and that the
conventional family was an artificial institution designed to reduce woman to the level of a
possessionwhich is very much how Higgins first perceives and treats Eliza Doolittle.

At the point in the play from which these lines are taken, Higgins has offered to train
Eliza (in her words) "to be a lady in a flower shop 'stead of selling at the corner of
Tottenham Court Road," and the housekeeper, Mrs. Pearce, has taken Eliza off to have a
bathwith "Monkey Brand," says Higgins, "if it won't come off any other way"
(Monkey Brand soap was a highly abrasive soap used for household cleaning, not as a bath soap).
Higgins is treating Eliza as a possession that he can do with as he chooses.

Higgins's views about women change significantly by the end of the play, however, and
Eliza helps him to change, which is one of the themes of the
play.

By teaching Eliza to be "a lady in a shop," Higgins wants to
demonstrate that class distinction is merely a matter of talking and dressing according to
society's standards and that the imposed class structure has nothing to do with the actual
character of the person relegated either to a low or high standing, which he perceives as little
more than a matter of chance. For Higgins, teaching Eliza how to be "a lady in a shop"
is simply an exercise to prove how great he is at teaching people how to speak and act correctly
in society. For Shaw, this same exercise serves to send a message about class distinction and
the inequality of the sexes.

With this in mind, Higgins's little tirade about
women and equally about men, although the underlying sense of equality is lost in the is Shaw's
attempt to show his audience that men and woman ought to be treated equally, and that neither
sex should strive to dominate the othereither in society or in their own private
relationships.