Unsung Hero: Harriet Taylor Mill, Radical Feminist

I first heard about Harriet Taylor Mill when reading about her much more famous collaborator and future husband, the British philosopher and politician John Stuart Mill .

Appropriately for someone who remains in the margins of history despite her enormous contribution - including to her husband's status - Taylor Mill was deeply angered by injustice . Throughout her life, she railed against the way society made it impossible for women to freely develop their individuality, arguing this was important for everybody - not just men.

In Enfranchisement of Women (1851), Taylor Mill's only solo-authored essay published during her lifetime, she asked why women were still regarded as "mere appendages" to men without interests of their own. Her answer was characteristically blunt: "The only reason which can be given is that men like it."

More than 20 years before her husband's best-known work, On Liberty (1859) was published without any credit for her contribution, she had outlined what would become famous in that book as the "harm principle": "Every human being has the right to all personal freedom which does not interfere with the happiness of some other."

Her arguments were always on the side of independence, her sympathies with the powerless and oppressed. She astutely diagnosed the key political and economic question posed by the industrial revolution as being whether "the lot of the poor should be regulated for them, or by them".

Taylor Mill was also a ferocious defender of "the pleasure of self-dependence" and the right to free speech. Her views were summarised in a programme of reform she outlined in the late 1840s that would be radical if instituted today, never mind two centuries ago.

She called for the establishment of secular educational schools and universities, complete freedom of speech, all occupations to be equally open to men and women, radical limits to the amount people could inherit - and for marriage "to be like any other partnership: dissoluble at pleasure".

With words that were often witty and pithy, Taylor Mill cut to the heart of issues in political thought such as patriarchy, socio-economic justice and freedom. In my view, she is long overdue a more significant place in the canon of western social philosophy.

Vulnerable to abuse and exploitation

In the 1830s, while tending to three young children from her first marriage, Taylor Mill wrote for the Westminster Review on a variety of political and philosophical subjects , from colonialism in Australia to Plato via political biographies. Her critiques were always pro-democratic and anti-aristocratic.

She also wrote many unpublished articles on the social, political and economic structures which rendered women vulnerable to abuse and exploitation by their spouses - and on the ethics of love, marriage and divorce . Her invocation of the principle that "the higher the kind of enjoyment, the greater the degree" foreshadowed Mill's distinction between higher and lower pleasures in his book Utilitarianism , three decades later.

In the 1840s and '50s, the Mills co-authored a series of excoriating newspaper articles on violence, especially domestic abuse . They railed at the unwillingness of the judicial system and police to tackle this issue, and the power inequalities which rendered people - especially women and those in subordinate positions - so vulnerable to brutality. Many of these arguments still resonate today.

Perfect equality was Taylor Mill's ideal - in politics, the workplace and the home. But by this she did not mean equality of outcome. In their writings, the Mills endorsed a merit-based system of reward based on people's efforts and talents, rather than what they had inherited.

They called for a "higher standard of justice" which would enable everyone to "work according to their capacity, and receive according to their wants".

Ignored and even denied

Despite her lifelong commitment to fighting injustice and inequality, Taylor Mill's immense contribution to her own husband's work has largely been ignored - and even denied .

To be fair, Mill often sought to give authorial credit where it was due. But his earliest attempts were stymied by Harriet's first husband, who felt it would draw too much attention to the Mills' unconventional relationship.

When they eventually married in 1851, Mill tried to divest himself of the "power and control" over his wife which their marriage would legally grant him. He wrote: "I put on record a formal protest against the existing law of marriage … [and] repudiate all pretension to have acquired any rights whatever by virtue of [it]."

Later, Mill carefully catalogued in his autobiography how many of the works published as "his" were, in fact, his efforts as "a mediator" between Taylor Mill and the public. He highlighted his "interpretations" of her ideas - often combined with inputs from the many fields in which he was a scholar.

Mill also re-published the celebrated essay Enfranchisement of Women, which had originally been published anonymously, under Taylor Mill's name - and set correspondents straight about its authorship when they wrote to congratulate him, thinking it was his work.

But curiously, Mill's desire to sing her praises for her work was used as an excuse to ignore her . According to one 1874 essay , published shortly after Mill's death: "Men have been blinded by affection and bewitched by womankind … [but] John Stuart Mill out-Herods them all."

In the view of this and many other critics, Mill's love for his friend and eventual wife completely clouded his judgment of her intellectual capacities, about which he had been entirely deceived - or, at the very least, been "myopic" .

A hundred years after this "Harriet Taylor Mill myth" emerged, it was given a Freudian twist. Mill was said to have chosen her as a partner because she had the same first name as his mother, but the personality of his father .

This view was echoed as recently as 2022 when a biography argued that Mill - brought up in a "totalitarian micro-state" by his father - needed someone else from whom to take "orders" after his death. Other academics such as Jo Ellen Jacobs have refuted such perspectives as misogynistic.

Taylor Mill may well have expected such shoddy treatment in the years after her death in Avignon, France in 1858. But in the 21st century, it is high time she were recognised as an incisive, influential thinker in her own right.

Helen McCabe has, or has previously, received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council; the Economic and Social Research Council, the Leverhulme Trust and the British Academy.