Harriet Taylor Mill

Harriet Taylor Mill was an English philosopher and women's rights advocate, and the close intellectual partner and later wife of John Stuart Mill. Her essay The Enfranchisement of Women (1851), published anonymously in the Westminster Review, argued that women should have equal rights to vote, hold office, enter every profession and be educated as men are. Mill described On Liberty and much of his other work as a joint production with her. How much she contributed remains debated, but scholars increasingly treat her as a philosopher in her own right.

Key ideas

• Women should have the same political, legal and civil rights as men, including the vote.
• No one can know what women are capable of while they are denied a free choice of occupation.
• Women's economic dependence within marriage keeps them subordinate, so marriage and property law must change.
• Equality between the sexes would improve both women's lives and the moral quality of society.

Major works

• The Enfranchisement of Women (1851)
• On Marriage (1833)

In the Book corner

• The Enfranchisement of Women 1851 · Beginner
  An essay published in the Westminster Review in July 1851, prompted by the women's rights convention held at Worcester, Massachusetts, in October…

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