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Harriet Taylor Mill
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Harriet Taylor Mill (née Harriet Hardy) (1807 – 1858) was a philosopher and women's rights advocate. Her extant corpus of writing is very small, and she is largely remembered for her influence, which he said was very great, on her second husband, John Stuart Mill, one of the pre-eminent thinkers of the 19th century..
Harriet Taylor Mill married her first husband, John Taylor, in 1826, when she was eighteen. With him, she had three children: Herbert, Algernon, and Helen. She met future husband John Stuart Mill in 1830, when she was introduced to him by the reverend of her Unitarian congregation. The two became very close friends and likely had a romance even while she was still married to John Taylor.
In 1833, she lived in a separate residence from her husband, keeping her daughter with her while Taylor raised the two older boys. After Taylor died in 1849, Harriet and Mill waited two years before marrying in 1851, after 21 years of friendship.
J.S. Mill called her a valuable contributor to much of his work, especially On Liberty. H.T. Mill also authored her own works, including 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.
Harriet Taylor Mill died in Avignon after developing severe lung congestion, a consequence of tuberculosis, on 3 November 1858.
Her husband, who could appreciate her best, wrote:
| “ | Were I but capable of interpreting to the world one half the great thoughts and noble feelings which are buried in her grave, I should be the medium of a greater benefit to it, than is ever likely to arise from anything that I can write, unprompted and unassisted by her all but unrivalled wisdom. | ” |
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry
- Rossi, Alice S. (1970). Sentiment and Intellect: The Story of John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill, in Rossi, Alice S. (Ed), Essays on Sex Equality. The University of Chicago Press.