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Harriet Taylor Mill


Harriet Taylor Mill (née Hardy; London, 8 October 1807 – Avignon, 3 November 1858) was a British philosopher and women's rights advocate. Her extant corpus of writing can be found in The Complete Works of Harriet Taylor Mill. She is largely remembered for her influence upon her second husband, John Stuart Mill, one of the pre-eminent thinkers of the 19th century.

Taylor was attracted to Mill, who treated her as an intellectual equal and collaborated with her on many of the texts published under his name. Mill was impressed with Taylor, asking her to read and comment on the latest book he was working on. The two became close friends.

In 1833 she lived in a separate residence from her husband, keeping her daughter with her while John Taylor raised the two older boys. John Taylor agreed to Harriet's friendship with Mill in exchange for the "external formality" of her residing "as his wife in his house". Over the next few years Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill exchanged essays on issues such as marriage and women's rights. The surviving essays reveal that Taylor held more radical views than Mill on these matters. Taylor was attracted to the socialist philosophy promoted by Robert Owen in books such as The Formation of Character (1813) and A New View of Society (1814). In her essays Taylor especially criticised the degrading effect of women's economic dependence upon men.

After John Taylor died in 1849, Taylor and Mill waited two years before marrying in 1851. Taylor was hesitant to create greater scandal than the pair already had. Mill's marriage proposal is a model of equality. She wrote a number of essays, including several on domestic violence and The Enfranchisement of Women, published in 1851. Many of her arguments in this piece would be developed in J. S. Mill's The Subjection of Women, published eleven years after her death, although The Subjection is much more conservative than Taylor's Enfranchisement.

Except for a few articles in the Unitarian journal Monthly Repository, Taylor published little of her own work during her lifetime. She did, however, read and comment on all the material produced by John Stuart Mill. In his autobiography, Mill claimed Harriet as the joint author of most of the books and articles published under his name. He added, "when two persons have their thoughts and speculations completely in common it is of little consequence, in respect of the question of originality, which of them holds the pen." Together, they wrote "Early Essays on Marriage and Divorce", published in 1832. The debate about the nature and extent of her collaboration is ongoing.


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