In 1912, Harriet Taylor Mill's [HTM] granddaughter, Mary Taylor, published a rejoinder to an article in the Edinburgh Review entitled “Famous Autobiographies.” The author of the piece in question had taken it upon himself to evaluate the relationship between her grandmother and step‐grandfather—John Stuart Mill [JSM]—on the basis of the latter's Autobiography and recently published letters. “In these days of feminist agitation,” he professed, “we can scarcely pass over the interesting topic of the influence of women upon men of ability” (Famous Autobiographies 1911, 339). The reviewer concluded that had Mill followed the example of someone like Rousseau in his choice of companion, Mill's literary works would have avoided the “deleterious” effect of his wife's influence (342).

Taylor responded that such admiration for Rousseau's relationship to Thérèse Lavasseur, a “wronged and unfortunate woman… whose deficiencies were made an occasion for jesting between [Rousseau] and his friends,” was premised on the impertinent position that no one, much less a woman, could render anything of value to these “men of ability.” To suggest so, Taylor continued, smacked of an “intellectual arrogance and conceit of which… no man of genius would be guilty” (Reference TaylorTaylor 1912, 357–58). Taylor concluded her reprimand with a simple assertion: “That John Stuart Mill found his inspiration and delight in my grandmother's companionship during twenty‐seven years speaks infinitely more for her mental qualities than these studied yet shallow reflections can detract from either her intellectual or moral reputation” (363).

One would think the story could end there. After all, JSM did on numerous occasions laud his partner's intellect and credited their collaborative engagements with enriching his life and work. In addition to her own short essays and reviews, scholars generally agree that HTM co‐wrote a chapter of Mill's Principles of Political Economy, was influential in the development of On Liberty and Subjection of Women, and was a key editor of his Autobiography (Reference MillMill 1981; Reference Mill1984; Reference MendusMendus 1994; Reference Taylor Mill, Ellen Jacobs and Harms PayneTaylor Mill 1998; Reference ReevesReeves 2007). Still, his statements about her intelligence and influence have not sat comfortably with most Mill scholars. Instead, “the role of Harriet is in fact one of the most contested themes in Mill's life” (Reference ReevesReeves 2007, 228; Reference Miller and ZaltaMiller 2015).

From his death onward, Mill's biographers have been inexorably drawn toward settling the question of Harriet Taylor Mill in some way or other. Was she quite as smart as he thought? How much of a hand did she really have in the “great man's great texts”? Was she “vain and vituperative, proud and petulant”? (Reference RobsonRobson 1966, 170). Or, as Gertrude Himmelfarb blithely remarked, perhaps she was merely a shrewish substitute for the domineering influence of James Mill (Reference HimmelfarbHimmelfarb 1974; see also Reference PappePappe 1956; Reference RobsonRobson 1966; Stillinger's introduction in Reference MillMill 1981). The trend in studies of their relationship has thus been to evaluate the legitimacy of JSM's admiration for his partner by dissecting HTM's mental capacity and personal character. This is because, as one biographer suggests, Mill's “hyperbolic statements about her powers have offended successive generations” of readers (Reference RobsonRobson 1966, 169). One sometimes gets the sense that Mill's very status as a canonical figure must be protected from his insistence that HTM was a key collaborator in his life's work. Contrary then to Mary Taylor's assertion, however clearly Mill noted his wife's intellectual value and contributions, “Mrs. Mill” has been on trial for more than a century. This article offers an alternative approach to the legacy of HTM, first by drawing attention to her experiential politics as a credible source of intellectual scholarship, and second by raising questions about the gendered aspects of how intellectual labor has itself been identified and evaluated in studies of the canon. As I argue, the trial of Harriet Taylor Mill reveals that a particular type of intellectual work—one rooted in critical perceptions of the “everyday”—has too often been rendered invisible in studies of the Western canon.

Recovering “Mrs. Mill”

Over the course of the twentieth century, contemporary feminists began to take up Harriet Taylor Mill's cause by pointing out the gendered biases that conditioned much of HTM's reception by scholars of JSM and of historical political thought more generally. Alice Rossi argues that readers have been split between rejecting her intellect and influence on her husband, or crediting her only with those elements of Mill's thought that “the scholar disapproved of” (Reference RossiRossi 1970, 45). For Rossi, both positions reflect the sexist narratives that have underwritten general study of their relationship. Jo Ellen Jacobs, who has given HTM's life and work extensive attention and credit (Reference Jacobs and Lopez McAlisterJacobs 1996), finds that the unwillingness to believe in JSM's praise of his wife as an intellectual partner reflects an impoverished understanding of the scope and nature of intellectual collaboration more generally: recognition of the “emotional and intellectual work that hides behind the dance called collaborative writing” has consistently been sacrificed to the “glorification of written texts” (Reference Taylor Mill, Ellen Jacobs and Harms PayneIntroduction to Taylor Mill 1998, xxxiv, xvii; see also Reference RoseRose 1994; Reference JacobsJacobs 2002). Working in the frame of recovery, some readers have thus sought to represent HTM as a scholar in her own right by reclaiming the value of HTM's letters and essays for analysis, from her writings on sexual inequality to a variety of other social, legal, and economic questions (Reference MendusMendus 1994; Reference Seiz and PujolSeiz and Pujol 2000; Reference DeutscherDeutscher 2006).

I join the efforts of feminist scholars to recover and revalue HTM's intellectual legacy. With this aim, the article makes two critical contributions to the literature on HTM and JSM and to understandings of intellectual labor more generally. First, I argue that as a result of the narrowed view of intellectual work Jacobs points to, the importance of HTM's experiential politics has been missed in studies of the Mill–Taylor partnership. Because, as Jacobs suggests, studies in the history of political thought are focused on the writers of “great texts,” even feminist efforts to recognize HTM as a valuable scholar and resource for contemporary studies remain framed by that traditional focus. Thus her defenders and critics alike continue to debate which of JSM's philosophical texts HTM might rightly be credited for as an author or coauthor (Reference Robson and RobsonRobson and Robson 1994; Reference Taylor Mill, Ellen Jacobs and Harms PayneTaylor Mill 1998; Reference JacobsJacobs 2002; Reference Miller and ZaltaMiller 2015). Though interventions around the question of authorship are certainly valuable contributions to discussions of their collaborative partnership, the move I make is different: by examining the connections between HTM's life and politics, my aim is to flesh out the emotional and practical labor that HTM contributed to her partnership with JSM. In this way, we can begin to illuminate and revalue the forms of intellectual labor that operate between the constructed dichotomy of authoring great texts and the ostensibly everyday, even “mundane,” acts of care and living that are often unmarked in studies of the canon.

Important to note is that my argument by no means suggests that the identification and study of great texts and their authors ought to be abandoned. Rather, the intervention made here is to suggest that the traditional rubrics that have marked what counts as intellectual work and authorship ought to be expanded to critically consider the lives, experiences, and certainly the labor of wives and intimates in studies of Western thought (Reference GardnerGardner 2003).Footnote ¹ The life of HTM shows how intellectual perspectives and personal experiences combine to produce critical political thought that not only shaped her own politics, but effectively influenced as well as contrasted with JSM's traditionally defined philosophical works. In pursuing this critique, the article takes its normative and interpretive cue from scholars like Rossi and Jacobs, as well as from contemporary feminist scholars who have examined the politics of intellectual gatekeeping within the academy more broadly. Patricia Hill Collins (Reference Collins2008) and bell hooks, for instance, have noted that the racialized dynamics of scholarly gatekeeping has come at a price:

One consequence of this form of gatekeeping is that it too easily sidelines other sources of intellectual work and, just as important, the political experiences and perspectives that give rise to that work. This practice has both scholarly and political implications for how we read, interpret, and evaluate intellectual labor, and to the point of this article, the labor of the wives and partners of men credited with defining the Western political tradition.

Indeed, as the extant writings of Harriet Taylor Mill speak directly to the conditions that shaped her feminism, they give us critical purchase on the importance of those spaces and experiences that later feminists have worked so hard to have counted as political. Though we have no “great texts” authored by her, what we do have are her notes, diaries, letters, and published essays which include pieces coauthored and edited with Mill. Moreover, as I show, HTM's critical perspective as a woman both within yet outside her time contributed to and directly challenged Mill's feminism.

Read in line with the conditions and challenges of her life, these works reveal HTM to be a frank observer of society and a critically self‐aware actor who daily negotiated between (1) commitments to social reform, (2) an unusual relationship that drew reproach from even the most radical around her, and (3) a set of obligations that (though socially imposed by virtue of her gender) she refused wholly to abandon. HTM's writings and letters on marriage, divorce, domestic violence, work, and motherhood thus reflect a merger between experience and theory on matters of gender and justice, which at times anticipate elements of contemporary feminist thought in ways that the work of her famed husband did not.Footnote ² As I argue, the conditions of HTM's life constitute an important basis for thinking about her politics and, by extension, remind us of the ways in which experience can and does shape critical social thought and practice.

By developing an account of HTM's experiential politics and its significance, the article's second contribution lies in the questions it raises about the “private sphere” of academic study: that space in which the wives and intimates of canonical men have long been kept. HTM's life and work, as well as JSM's recollections of her, challenge assumptions about what constitutes intellectual labor (Reference Jacobs and Lopez McAlisterJacobs 1996). This is perhaps one of the underlying causes of the “offense” that Mill's praise of her seems to have caused his readers over the years (Reference RobsonRobson 1966). Consider that HTM was not educated in any formal fashion. What she learned came from being an avid reader, a reflective thinker, and an expressive interlocutor within the radical and intellectual circle of friends she and JSM belonged to. As a woman who was not afforded the resources that would have made her a formal intellect on par with Mill (whose own childhood education was both exceptional and extensive), and whose observations and related writings have not been considered scholarly in the traditional sense of constituting “great texts,” HTM does not quite fit within the philosophers’ club. But their intimacy on matters not only personal but also professional has meant that she could not be kept entirely out of it either. Indeed, that she did have something to say, and that her partner made sure to acknowledge it, ought to be viewed as a boon to scholars of gender and to critics of the gendered academy today.

Yet given the traditional association of intellectual labor with great texts and individual authors, it is perhaps not surprising that HTM has been set aside as a figure of “limited philosophical import” whose writings, though sometimes “rhetorically powerful,” lack any “great depth or rigor” (Reference Miller and ZaltaMiller 2015, 9–10). Despite efforts to reclaim her worth over the years, this reclamation has not caught on in the wider scholarly orbit of the history of ideas. Instead, the best we are told of HTM is that she remains an “essentially contested” figure in the realm of canonical studies. However, this standard view of HTM in the history of political thought broadly, and in Mill scholarship in particular, relies upon a decontextualized reading of HTM's writings on gender, which has in turn supported the diminishment, even the dismissal, of her feminist contributions and her role as JSM's intellectual partner.

Drawing these elements together—the experiential aspects of HTM's political thought and the limitations of scholarly understandings of intellectual labor—the article calls attention to the disciplinary norms that have privileged a type of intellectual labor historically grounded in the individuated characterization of male authors and their texts. It is long past time that scholars begin to rethink such norms. Part of that rethinking, as I argue here, ought to involve confronting the troubling treatment of the wives and intimates of those “great men” who constitute the Western political tradition.

Not by Tutelage, but by Circumstance

As the eldest daughter of Thomas and Harriet Hardy, HTM's home environment appears to have been somewhat tense. Letters to her siblings and to her parents suggest that Thomas Hardy could be cold, frugal, and occasionally cruel to his family, and that Harriet Hardy had an equally contentious relationship with her children, particularly with her eldest daughter. In a meticulously presented collection of HTM's writings, editor Jo Ellen Jacobs suggests that HTM's marriage to John Taylor (eleven years her senior) was in part driven by Mr. Hardy's less than stellar financial situation. F. A. Hayek (the unlikely curator of JSM and HTM's correspondence) suggests that HTM's departure from her childhood home was likely a blessing for the then eighteen‐year‐old (Reference HayekHayek 1969).

Whatever the motivations for their marriage, the few letters we have between HTM and her first husband speak of a kind and caring relationship. Yet, although there was no lack of affection between them, HTM was not fully enthralled with the conditions of marital life. Notably, though John Taylor appeared willing to encourage the literary interests of his young wife, his husbandly concern for her may have at times highlighted the unequal nature of marital relationships. Vacationing near the ocean during her second pregnancy, for example, the young Mrs. Taylor received a letter from her husband instructing her that she must not remain in the sea too long, and should limit herself to just one brief dip per day. “Attend to all this,” he assured her, “and you have your husband's permission to bathe” (Reference Taylor Mill, Ellen Jacobs and Harms PayneTaylor Mill 1998, 215–16). However well intended, this display of even the gentle forms of authority exercised by well‐meaning husbands by virtue of their sex is hard to miss. As Jacobs notes, it is particularly striking that on the envelope of her husband's letter of instruction, HTM composed a poem about a young woman wandering the ocean freely, and bending the world to her “own cheerful way” (221). Women, HTM would later write, “are educated for one single object, to gain their living by marrying… and that object being gained they do really cease to exist as to anything worth calling life or any useful purpose” (22).

The themes of education and utility infuse many of HTM's early notes. She herself did not have a formal education, nor did her parents encourage any extensive habits of learning in their children. It is not difficult to surmise that she felt that lack quite keenly: women “are entirely deprived of all those advantages of academical or university instruction emulation & example which are open to all men… the whole rupture of their lives is made to depend on their utter exclusion from any source of knowledge or experience of the world” (Reference Taylor Mill, Ellen Jacobs and Harms PayneTaylor Mill 1998, 5). Perhaps self‐reflectively, she also points out that “girls enter into what is called a [marriage] contract perfectly ignorant of the conditions of it,” and that ignorance, moreover, seems precisely to be what is considered “essential to their fitness for it!” (23). In light of this, HTM found so‐called progressive arguments for expanding learning opportunities for women in order to benefit others to be particularly perverse. She retorts that even the reformers “do not complain of [women's] state being degraded at all—they complain only that it is too much degraded” (emphasis in original). What they really desire is that women be educated to be “better ministrants to the pleasures of men.” We hear nothing, she continues, in “disquisition on mens [sic] education of what sort of instruction will produce the greatest happiness [for] women” (7). These were the reasoned observations of a woman not yet twenty‐six years of age, whose experiences at home, with marriage, and in society had already shaped a critical social and political awareness. Though her politics may not have been polished by years of careful tutelage, it was obtained through the difficult work of reflecting upon the circumstances of her own conditions and having the audacity to question them. As if predicting her future reception, HTM noted, “a woman who has energy sufficient to choose and to act for herself—becomes a mark for the obloquy of the great and little vulgar of both sexes” (5–6). In a sense, that has indeed become her lot in the broader reception history of political thought.

It's in the Details

The link between how HTM lived and the development of her analysis of gender politics has been considerably undercut in studies of her relationship with JSM. Take, for instance, examinations of HTM's influence on Mill's feminism. For some readers, the worth of Mill's Subjection lies in its contribution to his studies of the abuse of power more generally (Reference MillMill 1984, xli). This, we might surmise, is the kind of philosophical breadth that HTM's writings on gender, although “rhetorically powerful,” lack. In fact, Mill scholars never fail to point out that her influence on texts like Subjection was likely minimal, given that Mill himself notes in his Autobiography that his convictions regarding the equality of the sexes long predated his introduction to Harriet Taylor. Therefore, Francis Mineka argues, none of JSM's biographers can convince “us that she [HTM] was the originating mind behind his work” (Reference MinekaMineka 1963, 306). But Mineka forces a dichotomous view of HTM: either she was the originating mind—the true author—behind Mill's work on gender, or her significance was minimal. Rooted in the designation of individual authorship, this view is echoed repeatedly in Mill scholarship. In his biography of JSM, for instance, Richard Reeves suggests that there is little “reason to think that Mill's views would have been substantially different had he ended up with say, Lizzie Flower” (Reference ReevesReeves 2007, 86), as if one thinking woman might be exchanged for another with little impact on the men in their company. That logic seems to underwrite H. O. Pappe's claim that HTM's influence on Mill's feminism was “only one of details, not of general attitude” (Reference PappePappe 1956, 25; emphasis added).

Here, then, we see the costs of ignoring HTM's experiential politics as an intellectual resource in and of itself. Left out of the above assessments of Mill's independent feminism, for instance, is appreciation of how much the details matter to feminist theory and politics.

First, we ought to consider the subtle strategies that may have influenced JSM's careful reminder that his gender politics predated his relationship with HTM: Mill may have wanted to ensure that his critiques of gender inequality could not be so easily dismissed as the product of his wife's “deleterious” influence (an aim we know some of his contemporaries ignored). This is not an unlikely interpretation of what JSM was doing in the Autobiography, given that he also pointed out that he had intentionally delayed publication of Subjection of Women for nearly a decade in order to ensure its release would come at a time when the public was most ready to read it (Reference MillMill 1981, 265). Second and more significant, Mill also insists that although his convictions regarding the necessary equality of women predated HTM, his perception of how significant that equality was in the context of everyday life was considerably shaped by her: “It was through her,” he says, “that I first perceived and understood its practical bearings; her rare knowledge of human nature, and perception and comprehension of moral and social influences, shewed [sic] me… the mode in which the consequences of the inferior position of women intertwine themselves with all the evils of existing society” (252–53). Mill himself locates HTM's perception of the “practical bearings” of gender inequality as a key influence for his own feminist philosophy. HTM might not have created his feminism, but she certainly shaped it.

Yet neither of these considerations has penetrated scholarly dismissals of HTM's influence. Indeed, to draw HTM's experiential politics into focus requires that we reconsider the terms upon which intellectual history—often the history of “great men”—has been grounded in the academy. We have to ask, how has our reliance on traditional standards of intellectual labor and scholarly output rendered invisible the role and value of women's experiential politics in the way we construct and interpret the history of political thought? And by extension, how have our own engagements with the history of ideas and contemporary discourses been similarly affected as a result?

Grounded in the “Everyday’

It is in the details, after all, the specific experiences of exclusion and subordination, that we find the foundations of a politically grounded perspective and a critically aware feminist practice. As Collins argues in relation to Black women's experiences in the US, the “outsider‐within” location of women of color can foster “new angles of vision on oppression” (Reference CollinsCollins 2008, 14). As a woman who both challenged the norms of her time yet remained subject to them, HTM's complicated role as a wife, mother, and partner to JSM produced a similar kind of fraught status. Her experiential politics afforded her a different kind of political vision and practical investment than we see in JSM's works.

Note, for instance, the focus given to the “everyday” in HTM and JSM's coauthored publications. In their drafts on the rights of women, attention is consistently drawn to abolitionist activity, the improvement of schools, and amelioration of prison conditions as evidence that “almost all the popular movements towards any object of social improvement which have been successful in this country, have been those in which women have taken an active part” (Reference Taylor Mill, Ellen Jacobs and Harms PayneTaylor Mill 1998, 42). Such examples are notably absent from Mill's own writings on the issue, which frequently turn to the figures of queens and great female artists for evidence of women's potential capacity. We do not find in Mill's Subjection of Women the same references to the day‐to‐day labor that women already take up on behalf of social and political causes as we do in their coauthored publications. Where HTM was directly collaborating, then, it seems that a more concrete picture of feminist practice took hold of their feminist writings.

Similarly, a number of their co‐written newspaper articles (which JSM often credits HTM with conceptualizing) show particular concern for cases of domestic violence against women and children, especially in the working and poor classes. Ten of these pieces, written between 1846 and 1851, focused on cases before the court and were precise in outlining not only the conditions of abuse, but also the failure of the police and legal apparatus to offer victims any measurable protection. These women, they write, feel “that to the utmost limits of common decency, and often beyond, a tribunal of men will sympathize and take part with the man. And accordingly they die in protracted torture, from incessantly repeated brutality, without ever, except in the fewest and rarest instances, claiming the protection of law” Reference Taylor Mill, Ellen Jacobs and Harms Payne(Taylor Mill 1998, 87). In her Enfranchisement of Women, HTM drew attention again to the conditions of poor women, noting that men in poorer classes who have little authority over anything else “have a helpless woman for their household slave. These excesses could not exist if women both earned, and had a right to possess, a part of the income of the family” (61).

Although his readers have been quick to point out that JSM's writings illustrated the so‐called philosophical breadth of the problem of gender inequality in ways HTM did not, what they miss is the fact that HTM's contributions hammered home the depth of its impact on women's lives. Though Mill's Subjection (and his earlier piece “On Marriage”) certainly touch upon the brutality women's dependency can lead to, they do not carry the gritty context found in the pieces HTM wrote and co‐wrote, as well as in her private letters on the issue. It is those gritty realities that offer us a sense of political vitality and urgency, and that operate simultaneously as intellectual critique and political action.

Thus, when her critics diminish the rigor of HTM's writings in comparison to JSM's discussions of political equality and human development, they ignore the fact that HTM's defense of women's rights was enriched by her own experiences of exclusion from the advantages of society, and deeply grounded in her refusal to acquiesce in the limits imposed upon her sex. Given her reception, it is all the more striking that Mill had no such qualms in acknowledging HTM's perspective as a factor in what made her influence on his understanding of inequality so profound. He at least did not reduce his partner's experiential politics or set it aside from the ostensibly grander pursuits of philosophical inquiry. Yet the dictates of what constitutes intellectual work in the academy has occluded these realities and thus foreclosed a richer appreciation of the different experiences, and joint labors, that shaped HTM's and JSM's views on gender politics.

Her Radical Vision

In his biography of JSM, Reeves notes that because critics have been focused on HTM's influence on Mill, her own “contribution has been too easily devalued” (Reference ReevesReeves 2007, 217). Yet Reeves tempers this observation by assuring us that this devaluation is in large part driven by JSM's exaggerated praise of her. Had JSM not offended his readers by insisting on his wife's intellectual significance, we might, presumably, have seen more respect for her work. Again, however, presumptions about what constitutes legitimate intellectual work come into play. Not only did HTM's experiential politics generate a “practical” bearing from which Mill himself benefited, it also necessitated a differentiated view from Mill. Critics of HTM often gloss over the fact that her feminism did not just align with or supplement Mill's views; it also departed from his in comparatively radical ways.Footnote ³

Contemporary feminists have noted that on the subject of divorce, HTM showed herself to be more willing to break with the status quo than was her partner (Reference OkinOkin 1979; Reference MendusMendus 1994; Reference Taylor Mill, Ellen Jacobs and Harms PayneTaylor Mill 1998; Reference DeutscherDeutscher 2006). Where Mill had a more cautious approach to divorce (and avoided making too definitive a statement on the issue), HTM eschewed any notion that divorce should be difficult to obtain once the parties are certain. She wonders who would wish someone to remain with a person against their inclination: “Suppose instead of calling it a ‘law of divorce’ it was called ‘Proof of affection.’” And where long experience shows that proof to be lacking, “Would not the best plan be divorce which could be attained by any, without any reason assigned, and at small expence [sic]…?” (Reference Taylor Mill, Ellen Jacobs and Harms PayneTaylor Mill 1998, 22–23; emphasis in original). It is notable that where both HTM and JSM would have benefited from more flexible divorce laws, only she—who felt the brunt of social censure, and the stress of managing her unusual relationship with Mill alongside her ongoing marriage to John Taylor—made an effort to explicitly challenge it. Divorce, as she argued, should not only be an option in the face of brutality, but also in the face of dwindling affection and substantive dissatisfaction.

In HTM's view, marriage itself stemmed from the poverty of education and opportunities that made women dependents and men masters: “I have no doubt that when the whole community is really educated tho’ the present laws of marriage were to continue, they would be perfectly disregarded, because no one would marry” (Reference Taylor Mill, Ellen Jacobs and Harms PayneTaylor Mill 1998, 23). She wrote of a future in which women would not have to barter “person for bread” or bear children for the purpose of securing the support of husbands, and where instead “fathers would provide for their daughters as they did their sons.” Like feminist scholars after her, she hoped for a future where intimacy would not be governed by contracts, but by affection between equals.

These more progressive ideas about marriage and divorce are not the only departures she makes from Mill's more cautious views. Her reflections on gendered forms of work and motherhood are equally striking in comparison. Commenting on an exchange between Mill and Comte on the subject of women in the 1840s, she argues that Mill concedes too much to Comte by allowing that there is some “natural fitness” of the sexes for different occupations. “You propose,” she writes to Mill, that the same original differences that make one mind unsuitable for both “work of active life & for work of reflection & combination” might also be “sufficient to account for the differences in the characters & apparent capacities of men & women.” Yet “neither you nor Comte seem to settle the other analogous question, whether original differences of character & capacities in men are to determine to which class of workers they are to belong… & there is also to be taken into account the unknown extent of action on the physical & mental powers, of hereditary servitude” (Reference Taylor Mill, Ellen Jacobs and Harms PayneTaylor Mill 1998, 31).

For HTM, if Mill could accept that men and women could be reasonably separated into distinct occupations on the basis of their “original differences,” he ought also to accept that male workers could be separated into distinct classes of workers according to their “original differences.” More important, she reminds him that any assertions about differential capacities must account for the conditions in which persons develop—a prominent theme of JSM's On Liberty and Subjection, published years later. The critique seems to have had an effect. Mill confessed to his friend Alexander Bain that he regretted having made such concessions to Comte, and even decided to never show the exchange to anyone again (Reference HayekHayek 1969, 114). Recalling Pappe's remarks, one wonders how the details pointed out by HTM might have influenced Mill's general attitude regarding claims of natural capacity.

HTM also reveals more radical views on women and gendered labor in Enfranchisement of Women. Here she argues (as Mill later does), “The proper sphere of all human beings… cannot be ascertained, without complete liberty of choice” (Reference Taylor Mill, Ellen Jacobs and Harms PayneTaylor Mill 1998, 57). But, as feminists have been quick to point out, Mill imposes a caveat on this position when he also asserts that women who choose to marry will have effectively chosen to occupy themselves with the obligations of domestic life and will thus not negatively affect the labor market or the rearing of children (Reference OkinOkin 1979; Reference MillMill 1984; Reference Pateman, Bock and JamesPateman 1995). Though feminists have rightly challenged his acceptance of traditional roles in this account, Mill scholars have paid little attention to the fact that his wife disagreed with him.Footnote ⁴ For HTM, though a concern over the influx of women laborers into labor markets might be real, it “does not reach the political question. It gives no excuse for withholding from women the right of citizenship” (Reference Taylor Mill, Ellen Jacobs and Harms PayneTaylor Mill 1998, 60).

Noting also that maternity and motherhood are usually forwarded in arguments against women's rights, HTM responds in Enfranchisement that “It is neither necessary nor just to make imperative on women that they shall be either mothers or nothing; or that if they have been mothers once, they shall be nothing else during the whole remainder of their lives.” She points out further (and delightfully) that “No one proposes to exclude the male sex from Parliament because a man may be a soldier or sailor in active service, or a merchant whose business requires all his time and energies” (59). Once again, we have to consider her own situation as a mother and as a woman struggling against the confines of her sex in examining these views. Unlike her partner, HTM was not content to accept the notion that marriage or motherhood should conclude a woman's occupational opportunities. In her tripartite role as a social critic, wife, and mother of three in nineteenth‐century England, HTM struggled against some of the gendered expectations that Mill casually accepts in his Subjection of Women. HTM's politics thus deserves attention for the ways in which it influenced and departed from aspects of JSM's own feminist views—but also for its critical contribution to thinking about the terms and resources of feminist theorizing itself.

Both in and out of Her Time

Yet even as she struggled against them, Harriet Taylor Mill refused wholly to abandon the expectations or duties visited upon her sex. Her correspondence with Mill is especially enlightening on this score for the vivid picture it paints of a woman who thinks and hopes beyond the confines of her time while remaining subject to it. HTM (not unlike many today) lived in a negotiated position between her feminism and her social reality—a negotiation that continued even after the death of John Taylor and her subsequent marriage to JSM. A most interesting exchange in 1835 (and frankly comical for what it reveals of JSM) highlights HTM's awareness of the balancing act their relationship required of her—a balance JSM seemed not to fully appreciate. It appears that the young Mr. Mill confessed his frustrations over the unusual arrangement that allowed them to maintain a relationship though she remained married to John Taylor. Based on what HTM quotes of Mill's letter (which is lost), Mill complained about the effect this situation might have on his career, being distracted as he was by the suspended quality of their connection.

That complaint, notably, was shared by his contemporaries: Thomas Carlyle wrote to their mutual friend John Sterling, “Is it not strange, this pining away into dessication [sic] and nonentity of our poor Mill, if it be so, as his friends all say, that this charmer [Harriet] is the cause of it.” However poor he appeared to be, HTM rightly rejected Mill's appeal for sympathy: “Good heaven have you at last arrived at fearing to be ‘obscure & insignificant’! What can I say to that but ‘by all means pursue your brilliant and important career’” (Reference Taylor Mill, Ellen Jacobs and Harms PayneTaylor Mill 1998, 332; emphasis in original). Imagine for a moment the reaction of this woman to reading such a complaint from this man. How can the pupil of Bentham, already renowned in intellectual circles and directly engaged with the famous minds of his generation, complain at last of fearing obscurity and insignificance to a woman who had never possessed his privileges, and who wrote frequently about the inequity of women having little usefulness beyond the task of getting married and playing “ministrants to the pleasures of men”?

Mill failed to realize how much more HTM risked by maintaining their special relationship. Responding again to JSM's complaints about their arrangement—and, it seems, some suggestion on his part that they seek a situation more amenable to their needs—she writes, “I have always seen & balanced in my mind all these considerations that you write about… but I know too what you do not… that once having accepted that life I should make the very best of it” (332). Her reasons for accepting the compromises JSM complains of are significant: “I do not hesitate about the certainty of happiness—but I do hesitate about the rightfulness of, for my own pleasure, giving up my only earthly opportunity of ‘usefulness.’ You hesitate about your own usefulness & however greater in amount it may be, is certainly not like mine marked as duty. I should spoil four lives & injure others. This is my only hesitation” (332; emphasis in original). Here we have evidence of how critically aware HTM was of her precarious position vis‐à‐vis her family, Mill, and society. The passage is remarkable not only because it shows how little JSM seemed to appreciate her situation as a woman in these early years, but also because it provides a brutally personal context for HTM's political writings. As she aptly points out to the man whose feminism we are told was “independent” of hers, whereas his usefulness as a public intellectual might be “greater,” hers as a wife and mother is required—marked out by her gender. The only earthly usefulness she is granted by society is in those roles, roles that JSM, for his own interests, wanted her to abandon.Footnote ⁵ In these letters, HTM reminds him, and us, that she herself lived the consequences of gender inequity that he is so famously credited with theorizing about.

HTM's difficult position surely shaped her reluctance to leave their relationship open to interpretation—a fact that critics have interpreted less generously as a sign of shrewd meddling on her part. But again, the circumstances of her position might warrant some consideration. Before their marriage, for example, she became furious with JSM for giving his blessing in 1849 to a publication of John Sterling's letters, which included Sterling's correspondence with Carlyle regarding the propriety of Mill's relationship with her. HTM had at this time been caring around the clock for a dying John Taylor. After having reviewed the series of letters concerning Mill's questionable relation to a married woman, she became incensed. Is it any wonder why? Mill was willing to “put his own hand and seal” to the praise of his name by men who had determined to judge his relations “with some unknown woman in unknown circumstances.” HTM points out, “Of course the old bugbear words ‘married woman’ were at the bottom of this unanimity of fear & sorrow which these men honoured (or disgraced selon moi) you with” (Reference Taylor Mill, Ellen Jacobs and Harms PayneTaylor Mill 1998, 367; see also Reference HayekHayek 2015, 157–58). In these letters, Mill's name was praised, but pitied only for its connection to this married “charmer,” as Carlyle had called her.

For over a month, HTM had been nursing John Taylor as he lay dying, all the while responding diligently to Mill's requests for editorial advice and contributing ideas for joint articles on women's rights and current events. Yet in the midst of this, she finds him willing to bless the publication of gossip that effectively maligned her by way of commiserating with the difficult position of this “man of ability.” “That you c^d be willing to have these things printed hurts me more deeply than any thing else I think c^d do” (Reference Taylor Mill, Ellen Jacobs and Harms PayneTaylor Mill 1998, 367). The letters were never published, and notably, when Mill began to compose his Autobiography, the question of how their relationship should be presented became central to him as well as to HTM. As Mill wrote to her in 1854 (perhaps now with the Sterling letters in mind), “we have to consider, which we can only do together, how much of our story it is advisable to tell, in order to make head against the representations of enemies when we shall not be alive to add anything to it” (Reference HayekHayek 1969, 194)—a fair concern in light of how HTM and their relationship generally have been evaluated over the years.

A Feminist Partnership

One might marvel at the fact that HTM's attachment to JSM—both emotional and intellectual—could be so strong as to make her willing to endure the censure of society, and to juggle the duties various parties demanded of her. Rather than having “succeeded in holding both her husband and her lover at arm's length” as one reader suggests (Reference MinekaMineka 1963, 304), we might say that her success came in surviving this triangle. That she actively tried to manage the expectations of all without relinquishing her agency to any is no small feat and recommends a more considerate view of her emotional and intellectual labor in the context of her life. Perhaps then we might understand why, after her death, Mill knew her to be the most regretted loss of his life. Readers, however, have not been receptive to this view: “One can understand a woman's acceptance of even extravagant flattery in a lover's or even a husband's letters; one finds it difficult to comprehend a wife's coolly approving for publication as her due such extraordinary tributes as Mill paid Harriet in the Autobiography” (Reference MinekaMineka 1963, 306).

This statement by Mineka reflects the fairly widespread opinion that Harriet Taylor Mill did not deserve Mill's high estimate of her intellectual ability and contributions. With a few nods to her minor editorial skills and her limited influence on Mill's feminism, most Mill scholars conclude that HTM's primary worth is to be found in the “inner” support she provided him. Michael Packe thus claims that HTM's influence was appropriately “womanly”: “she soothed him in anxiety; she worried about his health. She afforded him emotional release. In this respect she was completely adequate” (Reference PackePacke 1954, 237).

Robson agrees, noting that HTM's importance was primarily that she “gave him confidence and inspiration, coupled with an admiring affection he found nowhere else.” But, Robson assures us, “she was not in any meaningful sense, the ‘joint author’ of his works” (Reference RobsonRobson 1966, 186). Even Susan Okin, who appreciates HTM's more radical moments, still reasons “it is only Mill's distorted impression of her abilities that suggests that she was endowed with any qualities of genius” (Reference OkinOkin 1979, 206). Pappe ventures that those distortions were probably spurred on by the fact that because their relationship was of a peculiar nature for so long, Mill never endured the normal male “disenchantment from the image he has projected into his beloved” (Reference PappePappe 1956, 28). In the scholarly view, HTM seems to have succeeded at least in being a ministrant to Mill's needs, though not qualifying as his intellectual equal and collaborator. She has in effect fallen prey to the very “feminine” occupation she spent much of her life protesting against.

But if scholars have it right, what possessed John Stuart Mill to exaggerate his wife's abilities? Would her reputation not have benefited (and likely more so) from a simple declaration of affection and respect? Had the dedication in On Liberty read: “to the beloved and deplored memory of she who supported me in all my endeavors and contributed some very fine thoughts,” HTM might have become the most respected wife of the canon. And perhaps that is precisely the problem. If the wives of great men are valued within the confines of their role as wives, that Mill considered HTM to be a partner in the fullest sense would constitute a breach of the wall between the public and private worlds of canonical figures. This, I submit, is what has triggered her repeated trials over the years. Teresa Brennan and Carole Pateman convincingly argue, “married women constitute a permanent embarrassment and problem for liberal political theory” (Reference Brennan and PatemanBrennan and Pateman 1979, 183), and HTM has constituted a similar embarrassment and problem for political theorists more generally.

Scholars have succeeded in minimizing HTM's worth in large part because the intellectual work she produced, and which Mill so valued, runs afoul of what is normally considered to be scholarly. Within the confines of the “great text,” and expectations about what intellectual work should look like, the political labor of “wives” like HTM becomes background matter. The tragedy, then, is that Harriet and John went further in trying to realize their partnership than later generations of readers have been willing to accept. One of her few defenders, Jo Ellen Jacobs, has rightly asked: “John was convinced that Harriet's ways of understanding complemented and furthered his own. Why doesn't anyone believe him?” (Reference Jacobs and Lopez McAlisterJacobs 1996, 240). It is an excellent question, and I propose that how we answer it will reveal much about the gendered boundaries and exclusions that we continue to enforce.

What has upset successive generations of Mill scholars is that HTM refused those boundaries and would not remain a mere auxiliary to the great man; even more shocking, JSM ultimately refused to treat her as one. To understand why requires that contemporary readers of HTM, JSM, and the canon more broadly take seriously alternative modes of expression and sites of intellectual reasoning, especially when they involve those figures who operate on the margins of academia, those figures who stand both outside and within. In the context of the Western tradition, this scholarly reckoning with the private sphere of academic study would have to come to terms with the fact that there is a palpable “connection between what one does and how one thinks” (Reference CollinsCollins 2008, 27), and it is a connection that will sometimes require us to move beyond our own definitional boundaries of what constitutes intellectual labor and great texts in order to recover the experiences and political insights of those wives and intimates who have been left outside the purview of scholarly interest.