John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor on Women and Marriage

Abstract

This paper focuses on two works of nineteenth-century feminism: Harriet Taylor’s essay The Enfranchisement of Women, and John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women.¹ My aim is to indicate that these texts are more radical than is usually believed: far from being merely criticisms of the legal disabilities suffered by women in Victorian Britain, they are important moral texts, which anticipate central themes within twentieth-century radical feminism. In particular, The Subjection of Women is not merely a liberal defence of legal equality; it is a positive statement of the inadequacy of ‘male’ conceptions of reason and its powers. So understood, I shall argue, it coheres with Mill’s other moral and political writings, and draws much of its persuasive power from the doctrines advanced in Harriet Taylor’s The Enfranchisement of Women.