Mill and Taylor on the Subjection of Women

John Stuart Mill published The Subjection of Women in 1869, though he had drafted much of it as early as 1861, immediately after the death of his wife, Harriet Taylor Mill, in 1858. Mill stated openly, in the essay's dedication and again in his Autobiography (1873), that the ideas long predated their formal publication and had been developed jointly with Taylor over more than two decades, from their first friendship in 1830 through their eventual marriage in 1851, two years after the death of her first husband, John Taylor. Taylor had already set out closely related arguments under her own name in "The Enfranchisement of Women," published anonymously in the Westminster Review in July 1851, which went further than Mill's later book in openly demanding full political and economic equality rather than merely improved legal status within marriage. The precise division of intellectual labor between the two remains debated by historians of ideas: Mill's own tributes have sometimes been read as an act of grief-stricken over-attribution, while other scholars, following the biographical work of Alice Rossi in her edition Essays on Sex Equality (1970), argue that Taylor's substantive contribution, particularly on the economic independence of women, was real and specific rather than merely inspirational.