A Philosophy Worth Mill(ions)

In 1807, Harriet Hardy married 39-year-old John Taylor at age 18.  She had three children and eventually passed away from her numerous nervous and respiratory problems, suffering from tuberculosis.

Harriet and John Stuart Mill didn’t meet until 1830.  John Mill would visit her home nightly—a big no-no in Victorian times.  John Taylor was pretty tolerant of this “scandalous” relationship; however, in 1848, John Taylor banned John Mill from dedicating one of his essays to Harriet.  Awkwardly, in 1849 John Taylor asked Harriet to come home and care for him during his final years, but Harriet denied him, saying that she had to care for John Mill instead.  She did eventually go back home to her husband, and berated John Mill (who asked Harriet to write to him to provide some “relief” from her situation) with the following: “Good God, sh[oul]d you think it a relief to think of something else some acquaintance or what not while I was dying?” (H. T. Mill 1998, 360).

It’s pretty hard today to discern what exactly Harriet Taylor Mill wrote, because a lot of her writing is wrapped up with John Stuart Mill’s.  J.S. Mill gave her major credit for the following works: The Principles of Political Economy, On Liberty, and “The Enfranchisement of Women.”  In the dedication of On Liberty, Mill wrote: “Like all that I have written for many years, it belongs as much to her as to me.”

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/harriet-mill/#BioSke
    •    "We deny the right of any portion of the species to decide for another portion what is and what is not their 'proper sphere.' The proper sphere for all human beings is the largest and highest which they are able to attain to." -Harriet Taylor Mill