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Harriet Taylor Mill
1807 - 1858
The daughter of Thomas Hardy, a London physician, and his wife, Harriet Hurst, Harriet Hardy was raised in a Unitarian household and largely self-educated. Hardy knew French, German, Italian, Greek and Latin well enough to insert quotes and phrases in these languages into informal notes to herself as well as her published works. HTM also quoted philosophers, poets, novelists, essayists, and historians from a dozen centuries and half a dozen countries and had a prodigious knowledge of women's history. At age eighteen, she married twenty-nine-year-old John Taylor, a wealthy pharmaceutical distributor. Harriet Taylor bore three children over the next several years: Herbert, Algeron ('Haji') and Helen ('Lily'). Harriet and John joined William Fox's South Place Chapel Unitarian church, meeting many of the leading utilitarians and Unitarians including Jeremy Bentham's leading disciples, John Bowring and Southwood Smith.
Exactly how Taylor met John Stuart Mill is open to question, but the leading theory is that Fox, editor of the Monthly Repository and a staunch feminist and woman suffrage advocate, introduced them at a dinner party at his home in 1830. By the summer of 1831 when Helen, Harriet's final child, was born, Harriet and John Mill were involved in an emotionally and intellectually passionate and intimate relationship that thrived for the remainder of their lives. Whether or not Taylor and Mill ever engaged in sexual intercourse while John Taylor was alive or while Taylor was a widow is not open to question – they did not. Whether or not they engaged in sexual intercourse after their marriage is open to question. Some scholars believe that they never consummated their relationship. Some claim that Mill was impotent, others that John Taylor had passed syphilis to Harriet Taylor during the early years of their marriage accounting for the rapid cooling of their relationship, Harriet Taylor's later health problems, and John Taylor's high tolerance for their unconventional relationship. For the two years following Helen's birth, Mill would regularly visit the Taylor household for dinner while John Taylor absented himself at his local club.
The Taylor marriage came to a crisis in 1833 and they agreed to a six-month trial separation. Harriet Taylor vacationed in France, often joined by Mill. Married to a man she did not love, in love with a man to whom she was not married in an age when divorce was almost impossible, unwilling to subject her husband to the scandal of a divorce, not wanting to be deprived of her rights to see and raise her children, Harriet sought a way to find a solution that would satisfy all parties. An intellectual in an age when education for women was discouraged, Harriet Taylor was fortunate to find a man who encouraged her intellectual endeavors, who daily challenged her to do better, who welcomed her insights, and who treasured her assistance. Taylor lacked role models to help her constructed a life which enabled her to satisfy the emotional and intellectual needs of her husband, her children, her lover, and herself.
Upon her return to England, she took separate living quarters from her husband but maintained a public image of the faithful wife while John Mill lived at home with his mother, worked at India House, tutored his younger siblings, and wrote numerous articles on political topics of the day. Harriet would spend summer weekends along the English coast and Mill would find a place nearby so that they could be together. This routine lasted until 1851, two years after John Taylor's death, when John Mill and Harriet Taylor wed.
Both John Mill and Harriet Taylor suffered from tuberculosis in the 1830s and 1840s. Harriet took frequent trips to southern France and Italy in search of a warm climate, but because of his job Mill could only take short visits to see her. Mill and Taylor wrote each other daily when they were separated expressing their affection and news of their health, their family, their friends, and their activities. Often they would exchange drafts of articles, each adding, deleting, rephrasing, and editing the words of the other and adding new ideas and insights as the work progressed.
Harriet was interested in several aspects of the woman question, especially the role of domestic violence in woman's subordination. Familiar with the writings of the Radical Unitarians on various aspects of the woman question, it is not surprising that both Harriet Taylor and John Mill were staunch advocates of woman suffrage and followed the fortunes of French feminist organizations. Reading La Voix des Femmes prompted John Stuart Mill to urge Harriet to finish her essay on feminism. Published in 1851 in the Westminster Review in response to the first National Woman's Rights Convention in Worcester, Mass in 1850, the essay, "Enfranchisement of Women," was reprinted in the United States and became an important validation for the early U.S. women's movement . At the same time as Harriet was publishing "Enfranchisement of Women," JS Mill advocated woman suffrage in a letter in the Leader.
When John Taylor began his terminal illness (he had cancer), he called Harriet home and she tended to him for the final months of his life. In his will, he left her the life interest in his fortune with no qualifications as to remarriage. Harriet remained in mourning for John Taylor for a respectable two years before marrying John Stuart Mill.
The first two years of their married life were spent largely in solitude, perhaps because of the residual scandal surrounding their relationship, perhaps because of their opportunity to finally enjoy one another's company, perhaps because of their poor health (they both thought they were dying from comsumption), perhaps because of their rush to finish their intellectual labors before they died. They worked feverishly on a series of works which they wanted to have published posthumously. Mill commuted to work from their home in the then rural Blackhearth Park section of London. In the evenings, Mill would improvise at the piano – but only if asked by Harriet.
John Stuart Mill gave Harriet Taylor significant credit for many of his publications, often referring to them as joint works. Mill wanted to dedicate his Principles of Political Economy to Harriet, but John Taylor, concerned that the scandal surrounding their relationship would flare up again, forbid it.
In 1858, Harriet's consumption flared up again and they decided to take a trip to the warm south of France and Italy. On the way, Harriet caught a cold in Avignon, died, and was buried there. John Mill was devastated by his wife's death. He brought a home in Avignon, was joined by his step-daughter Helen, and remained there for the next two years, reworking and finishing a book that would not be published for several years because Mill did not think the time was ripe. The book was entitled The Subjection of Women. Until he died, Mill would spend part of the year in England and part in Avignon, daily visiting his wife's grave.
Harriet Taylor Mill's influence on John Stuart Mill's work and philosophy did not end with her death. Mill writes of his intellectual state after Harriet's death:
Since then I have sought for such alleviation as my state admitted of, by the mode of life which most enables me to feel her still near me. I bought a cottage as close as possible to the place where she is buried, and there her daughter (my fellow-sufferer and now my chief comfort) and I, live constantly during a great portion of the year. My objects in life are solely those which were hers; my pursuits and occupations those in which she shared, or sympathized, and which are indissolubly associated with her. "
Today's entry is the work for which Harriet Taylor is best known, the influential treatise The Enfranchisement of Women which was published on both sides of the Atlantic. Written shortly after the petition for woman suffrage by Anne Knight's Sheffield Female Political Association was presented to the House of Lords by the Earl of Carlisle, Enfranchisement builds on a quarter-century of British writing on and advocacy of woman suffrage. In Enfranchisement Taylor discusses the fundamental injustice to women of not having several forms of political power, connects male dominance in the home with male political dominance, and investigates the relationship between male dominance in the home with social decay.
According to Taylor, the existing political system with its lack of political power for women is fundamentally unjust to women. British constitutional law is founded on the principle of no taxation without representation. Yet, women pay taxes and are not represented. No man would be expected to be tried in a court of law by any but his peers. Yet, no woman is ever tried by her peers, always be subject to the judgment of male lawyers, male judges, and male jurors.
Unchecked physical, emotional, religious, civil, legal, and social power of men over women leads to tyranny. Male tyranny in the home leads to women's servility and manipulation which in turn leads to social decay and the downfall of civilization. Again and again Taylor repeats the idea that the inequality of women in the home which is both a cause of and a consequence of women's lack of political power leads to moral corruption in the home which in turn leads to social decay. To stop social decay requires the political empowerment of women. Suffrage for women, then, is a social necessity to inhibit social decay and civic immorality.
The unfettered power of men over the women in their lives leads both men and women to intellectual laziness. In such a case, women have no motivation for learning and every motivation for not learning. Men can dictate an opinion instead of debating an opinion and arriving at a conclusion by an intellectual examination of the issue. This intellectual laziness corrupts men, and this corruption spreads throughout society, eventually corrupting all men and women.
Remember how I told you in the introduction how I bought a new computer with a scanner this year and that a couple of my "excerpts" got a bit out of control? Well, here is one example. You can read the entire Enfranchisement of Women at SfW or some excerpts at these locations
Harriet Taylor, "Enfranchisement of Women," reprinted from the Westminster and Foreign Quarterly Review for July 1851, Woman's Rights Tracts, . . . . No. 4 (Syracuse, 1852 or 1853) as excerpted at Assumption or
Harriet Taylor Mill, "Enfranchisement of Women", Westminster Review, more excerpts at Rutgers.
Helen Taylor: The Claim of Englishwomen to the Suffrage Constitutionally Considered (1867)
Footnotes:
References:
Bonnie S. Anderson, 'The Lid Comes Off: International Radical Feminism and the Revolutions of 1848', NWSA Journal Volume 10, Number 2
Jo Ellen Jacobs (ed.) and Paula Harms Payne (asst. ed.), The Complete Works of Harriet Taylor Mill [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998]
Lynn McDonald, Women Founders of the Social Sciences [Ottawa, Carleton University Press, 1994]
Ann P. Robson and John M. Robson (eds.), Sexual Equality: Writings by John Stuart Mill, Harriet Taylor Mill, and Helen Taylor [Toronto: University of Toronto, 1994]
Alice S. Rossi (ed. and introducer), John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill: Essays on Sex Equality [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970]
On-Line Resources:
"Harriet Taylor Mill" at Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
"Harriet Taylor Mill" biography at Spartacus
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last updated February 2003