Harriet Taylor

(1807-58) Feminist writer. Married 1826 to a wholesale trader, John Taylor, through whom she soon met J. S. Mill and became his companion. She married Mill 1851 after her husband's death. They lived a lonely and ascetic life, having quarrelled with all their friends, but devoted themselves to providing ‘mental pemmican’ (preserved dried meat) for ‘thinkers, when there are any after us’. This gloomy picture should be set against Mill's wholehearted praise for ‘her who was the inspirer, and in part the author, of all that is best in my writings’. He stated that she was responsible for the chapter ‘The Probable Future of the Labouring Class’ in his Principles of Political Economy (1848). Her ‘The Enfranchisement of Women’ was published 1851 under Mill's name. The intellectual partnership of the Mills is very like that of the Condorcets, and has the common feature that contemporaries blamed the husband's commitment to feminism on the wife.

Taylor, Harriet (1807-58) Married to a businessman John Taylor at the age of eighteen, Harriet nevertheless became the guiding muse of John Stuart Mill after they met in 1830. Mill eventually married her two years after John Taylor died in 1849. Mill was adamant that many of his works were their joint production, and Taylor was the principal author of ‘The Enfranchisement of Women’, which appeared in the Westminster Review in 1851. After Harriet died her daughter Helen took over her role, becoming an active campaigner for women's emancipation.