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John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)
Harriet Taylor Mill (1807 – 1858)
Helen Taylor (1831-1907)
On 21 April 1851 Harriet Taylor, widow, married John Stuart Mill, bachelor. They leased a house in Blackheath Park; with them was Taylor's nineteen-year-old daughter, Helen, daughter of Harriet and John Taylor. From this secluded house emanated some of the most powerful and influential writings ever penned to promote women's equality, and it was to this household that the Victorian women's movement in England came to look for leadership, guidance, and money.
Mill was the most prestigious radical writer in England and his the most prestigious name to be associated with the cause of women's social and political advancement. Although the nature of the influence of his wife and stepdaughter may be a matter of controversy both then and now, there is no doubt that in Mill's own mind and for most of their contemporaries all three were contributors to the cause directly through their writing and, in the case of Harriet and Helen Taylor, indirectly (but perhaps more importantly) by stimulating Mill's writings and furthering his work.
Robson and Robson began their book about the writings of John Stuart Mill, Harriet Taylor Mill, and Helen Taylor with those words – words that are hard for any mere mortal to live up to. Yet, John Mill -- an English intellectual, a political philosopher, an early Utilitarian who gradually became a social democrat, and a Unitarian -- wrote cogently about a variety of political topics. Perhaps the best educated man in Western Europe during this time, Mill influenced Western opinion around the world for half of the 19th-century.
His father, James Mill (the same man we met earlier in this series in connection with William Thompson and Anna Wheeler), brought him up according to his utilitarian philosophy – that a child is a tabula rasa and anything can be imprinted on a young mind. John Mill began to learn Greek at age 3, Latin at 8, and mathematics, philosophy, and science in his teens. Mill's formal educated ended at age 14 when he went for one year of study to France where he lived with Jerry Benthan's brother and studied the sciences, French, and music. In 1822 he returned to England and joined the East India Company, his life long employer. Beginning as a clerk under his father, Mill retired in 1858 as the chief of the office of the examiner of India correspondence .
At the same time, John Mill and a group of young radicals, with the encouragement of James Mill, formed the Utilitarian Society, determined to follow in the footsteps of the 18th-century French philosophes and to reform government. By the time John Mill reached adulthood, he was educated in all of the formal things in life, but he knew little to nothing of the arts, popular culture, human beings, or the social skills that make life fun and interesting for his father had given him an emotionally impoverished youth. Perhaps with a bit of youthful rebellion, but definitely from interest in all Utilitarian debates, when William Thompson's Appeal was published, Mill read it. Perhaps because he saw two of his younger sisters endure the same rigorous early education as he had, Mill largely agreed with Thompson; Mill might have been emotionally impoverished and deprived of the youthful companions to help him learn social skills, but he was, at least intellectually, an early feminist.
In 1824 Jeremy Bentham established the Westminster Review which immediately became the organ of the radical Utilitarians. Radical Utilitarianism would lie at the core of Mill's life until about 1840, although he did begin to question the emotional barrenness of Utilitarianism as early as 1826. After a bout with depression and deep introspection, Mill emerged, ready to learn of the arts and poetry, music and culture – and ready to become emotionally attached to the larger world.
By the time Mill drifted away from Utilitarianism toward Unitarian he was an up-and-coming Utilitarian intellectual, a reformer, a feminist, and very much in need of and desirous of emotional sustenance. What Mill wanted was an intellectual and a reformer who would work with him to attain goals that they both shared. Mills wrote in a letter in April 1829 that "There is now no human being (with whom I can associate on terms of equality) who acknowledges a common object with me, or with whom I can co-operate even in any practical undertaking, without the feeling that I am using a man, whose purposes are different, as an instrument for the furtherance of my own." Within a year, Mill would meet Harriet Taylor, and the rest, as they say, is history. Some historians speculate that his feminism was what attracted Harriet Taylor to him.
John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor, married to the successful businessman John Taylor and mother of three children, would have a life long association. Two years after John Taylor's death, they wed and John Stuart Mill would be devoted to Harriet Taylor Mill and the cause of women for the remainder of his life. Because of his position in the East India Company, Mill had to be circumspect about his private life, particularly his public involvement in political matters. For that reason, Mill decided to contribute to the cause by yielding his pen in support of a number of reform movements. Throughout the 1830s and 1840s, Mill wrote copiously on a variety of political topics often in collaboration with Harriet Taylor. Although it is difficult to sort out who contributed what to each work, some historians speculate that Taylor contributed the artistic parts of their work, painting with "broad brush strokes," creating the general outline, adding a woman's perspective to an idea, polishing Mill's writing as well as editing it for content, while Mill contributed the details and the logic.
When the 1848 Revolution broke out, Mill took to reading Niboyet's La Voix des femmes in which she often advocated for woman's suffrage. At one point, he penned Harriet a letter encouraging her to finish with the pamphlet she was working on about woman suffrage. In response to the first American National Woman's Rights Convention in Worcester, Mass (1850), Taylor published the article in the Westminster Review under the title "The Enfranchisement of Women".
By 1851, Mill and Taylor were married. They spent a short seven years together, working feverishly to complete a number of works which they anticipated would be published posthumously because they were both in poor health. In 1858, John Mill retired from his position in the East India Company with the intention of taking Harriet to the south of France for the winter so that she could recover from consumption in the warmer climate. On their journey, Harriet caught a cold in Avignon, France and died. Mill was devastated; he rented a small cottage near her grave and moved to France. For two years, he remained there in solitude with only Harriet's daughter (and his step-daughter), Helen Taylor, as a companion. After that, John and Helen would wander between their English and French homes.
At first Mill published some of the volumes he had worked on with Harriet. In 1860 and 1861 Mill wrote The Subjection of Women then set it aside for a more propitious time. By 1862 he had recovered sufficiently to take a trip to Greece. As time went on, John Mill returned to English social life, a social life orchestrated by Helen in the home managed by Helen.
Helen had her own social interests and activities: she joined Emily Davies' Kensington society which had roots in the Langham Place group originated by Barbara Leigh Smith (eventually Bodichon). In the summer of 1865, the Kensington Society took up the question of woman suffrage and Helen Taylor submitted one of the papers on the issue. Perhaps spurred by Helen's feminist activism, Mill ran for Parliament and won. One of the most prominent planks in his election platform was votes for women and the women of the Langham Place group campaigned for him wildly.
In May 1866 Barbara Bodichon contacted Helen Taylor and requested her advice on soliciting John Stuart Mill support for a woman suffrage petition for Parliament. Taylor replied with an encouraging note, cautioning Bodichon not to get her hopes up too high for making immediate reforms. They exchanged ideas about the content of the proposed petition when Taylor finally remarked that if Bodichon could get 100 signatures (of the right sort of people, that is), Mill would consider that sufficient. Bodichon and the Langham Place group swung into action. Within a fortnight, they had 1499 signatures on a petition for Mill which he submitted to Parliament on June 7, 1866. On July 17, 1866, Mill presented a speech in Parliament regarding his recent petition, a speech in which he advocated suffrage for women. Almost a year later, Mill gave another speech in the House of Commons in which he moved that the word 'man' be replaced by the word 'person' in Clause 4 of the Reform Act, thereby giving woman the suffrage. Not unexpectedly, suffrage was not extended to women. The next year, women tried to acquire suffrage through the courts and failed.
All avenues for quick granting of woman suffrage had now been tried and had failed. The women were now all wrought up and ready to begin a campaign for woman suffrage in earnest. The women created an organization, the London National Women's Suffrage Society, in which women could work together for one purpose only: to press for suffrage for women. Mill lent his stature to the new organization by becoming its honorary president. They needed suffrage literature to distribute. Mill pointed them to both Harriet's and Helen's earlier works on suffrage as well as to his speeches on the topic. Finally, after numerous appeals, and perhaps understanding that now was the propitious time for its publication, Mill polished, then, published The Subjection of Women. Subjection literally traveled around the world, was translated into numerous languages, and remained a staple piece of woman suffrage literature for woman suffrage movements around the world until after World War I. Mill's support was quite a coup for the nascent woman suffrage movement. While other early supporters of woman suffrage could be dismissed as part of the fringe of political society or as youthful idealists who would outgrow their early enthusiasms, Mill was an established and influential political figure, an elder statesman in various reform movements, a successful company man: as they say, a man of substance.
His influence for his chosen cause would resound around the globe, at least in women's minds, until the franchise was won in many European countries after WW I. Between the end of WW I and the beginning of women's Renaissance in the second half of the twentieth century, Mill's writings on sexual equality were largely forgotten, ignored, or commented on only in passing by the same men who held his writing on other topics in high regard. As with so many other men in this series, their contribution to the dignity and emancipation of half of the world's population has been largely unheralded by those of their own sex. In large part it is women, and there are a few exceptional men, who have returned our feminist forefathers to prominence for their activities on behalf of women.
Subjection is about much more than woman suffrage – it is an incisive analysis of women's degraded position in society, describing in great detail the manifold ways in which patriarchy operates and how men's dominance of women corrupts both men and women. Mill spares nothing in his blistering denunciation of the typical marriage, likening men to domestic tyrants, condemning domestic violence, blaming social ills on men's abominable treatment of women, and declaring that without the vote as only the first of many steps required for women's emancipation, women will never be treated with the dignity and respect they deserve as members of the human family. A consciousness-raiser as well as a source for intellectual arguments to rebut anti-suffragists, this small book well deserves its reputation.
For the remainder of Mill's life, Helen Talyor would remain John Stuart Mill's companion, homemaker, secretary, and assistant, often drafting replies to letters for him, writing speeches for him, and editing his work as Harriet had once done. John Mill was unsparing in his praise for Helen, comparing her favorably with her mother. Helen remained single her entire life. After John Stuart Mill died, Helen continued to work in several areas of reform including opening educational opportunity for women and the "moral purity" (ie, anti-trafficking in women, anti-organized prostitution, and anti-Contagious Diseases Act) movement. Together John Stuart Mill, Harriet Taylor Mill, and Helen Taylor influenced the British movement for the emancipation of women for more than ¾ of a century.
Today two documents, both speeches by John Stuart Mill to the House of Commons, will be presented. Mill's first speech was given on July 17, 1866 and was delivered when he submitted the woman suffrage petition. His second speech was given about a year later when he proposed that the word "man" be replaced by the word "person" in Clause 4 of the Reform Bill, thereby giving woman the right of suffrage. Several complete copies of The Subjection of Women can be found on-line. Additional sites give excerpts of the Subjection. Links to such sites can be found below.
Footnotes:
References:
Shiela R. Herstein, A Mid-Victorian Feminist: Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985]
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:
John Stuart Mill at Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women, 1869 (Extracts, annotated with footnotes)
John Stuart Mill, The Subjection Of Women, 1869 (Extracts)
John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women, 1869 (The whole thing)
John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women , 1869 (The whole thing)
John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women, 1869 (The whole thing)
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last updated February 2003