Men with reputations as thinkers rarely acknowledge dependence on the women in their lives, let alone collaboration with them. Or if they do acknowledge it, it’s often a reference at the end of the acknowledgements page as to how grateful they are that xx looked after the kids/cooked the meals/checked the punctuation etc.
John Stuart Mill was different. Not only did he acknowledge Harriet Taylor Mill’s collaboration with him, he credited her as the joint author of many of the publications which convention required to be publicly authored either anonymously or solely by him. For that, both he and Harriet were villified.
As one might expect, much of the vilification was directed at Harriet, and it took a fairly standard sexist form. But much was directed at John too. Understanding why this should be offers an insight into how patriarchy operates in personal relationships between the sexes - not just within a relationship, but in reactions to a relationship that, if they were in the public eye, can continue long after the partners die. And it illustrates how patriarchal custom may manage differences between the sexes, not in the benevolent way that Mary Harrington has claimed, but as a barrier that must be overcome if greater equality between the sexes is to be achieved.
The relationship
In 1830, Harriet Taylor, aged 23, met John Stuart Mill, aged 24. Harriet, stifled by domestic life, sought intellectual stimulation that her husband, John Taylor, could not provide. John Mill was recovering from a nervous breakdown, brought about by realising how empty his life was, having been subjected by his father, James Mill, to an educational experiment that excluded any emotional development, and forbade interaction with peers.
Within a year, around the time Harriet’s third child, Helen, was born, Harriet and John had developed a close relationship. The following year they chose to exchange essays on marriage and divorce (not published until 1951, by Friedrich Hayek, who, though determined to blame Harriet for instigating John’s favourable references to socialism, was fascinated by their romance.)
Harriet’s short essay denounced the lack of equality in marriage , which she saw as not only a direct harm to women, but as a barrier to the expression of genuine love - “all the pleasures such as they are being men’s, and all the disagreeables and pains being women’s, as that every pleasure would be infinitely heightened both in kind and degree by perfect equality of the sexes.”
John’s essay was more long winded, and less radical, but he shared Harriet’s conviction that marriage should be based on equality -“The question is not what marriage ought to be, but what woman ought to be. Settle that first, and the other will settle itself. Determine whether marriage is to be a relation between two equal beings, or between a superior and an inferior, between a protector and a dependent; and all other doubts will easily be resolved.”
Harriet’s first husband died in 1849, and Harriet and John married two years later. John described in his Autobiography how their marriage added “to the partnership of thought, feeling, and writing which had long existed, a partnership of our entire existence.” Significantly, John chose to build on the criticisms of marriage that he and Harriet had expressed in their 1831 essays, and write a commitment to Harriet eschewing the privileges which marriage law bestowed on him as a man, which I quoted at the end of my last post, here.
The intellectual partnership
“Who can tell how many of the most original thoughts put forth by male writers, belong to a woman by suggestion, to themselves only by verifying and working out? If I may judge by my own case, a very large proportion indeed.”
(J.S. Mill, The Subjection of Women , 1869)
Although most of their writings were published either in John’s name or anonymously, he went to great lengths to acknowledge Harriet’s contribution, particularly in his Autobiography (1873). There, he described their method of working together in relation to On Liberty - “After it had been written as usual twice over, we kept it by us, bringing it out from time to time, and going through it de novo, reading, weighing, and criticising every sentence.” He went on to describe the general principles of joint production that they adopted;
“When two persons have their thoughts and speculations completely in common… when they set out from the same principles, and arrive at their conclusions by processes pursued jointly, it is of little consequence in respect to the question of originality, which of them holds the pen; the one who contributes least to the composition may contribute most to the thought; the writings which result are the joint product of both, and it must often be impossible to disentangle their respective parts, and affirm that this belongs to one and that to the other. In this wider sense, not only during the years of our married life, but during the many years of confidential friendship which preceded it, all my published works were as much my wife’s work as mine; her share in them constantly increasing as the years advanced.”
He then identified works in which Harriet’s contribution was particularly significant - The Principles of Political Economy (particularly the chapter on The Probable Future of the Labouring Classes, and the whole emphasis on Distribution of Wealth as determined by political choice - “What was abstract and purely scientific was generally mine; the properly human element came from her.”), and On Liberty (“more directly and literally our joint production than anything else that bears my name.”).
Friedrich Hayek famously tried to blame Harriet for the favourable references to socialism in the Principles of Political Economy, which he saw as compromising John’s liberalism, but he failed to understand the collaborative process that John described in his Autobiography. Harriet may have instigated discussions about how to combine the advantages of co-operation with those of competition, but the end result, as is clear from letters they exchanged, was agreed between the two of them.
Disbelief in the possibility of sex equality
Almost as interesting as the equality that was at the root of the relationship between Harriet and John is the disbelief of critics that such equality between a woman and a man was possible. Many critics rubbished John’s claims about joint production.
“Harriet stands revealed as just a partisan, Mill emerges as the distinguished enquirer of truth.”
(Hector Pappe. 1960)
“Mill wrote a draft, and then went through it with Harriet… eventually the final manuscript emerged, again composed in full by Mill… the common experience of the way the husband and wife collaborate.”
(John Robson, 1961)
“Harriet was no originator of ideas, however much she may have aided Mill in ordinary wifely discussion and debate…It is unfortunate that Mill did not simply thank his wife for encouragement, perhaps also for transcribing a manuscript or making an index, and let it go at that.”
(Jack Stillinger, 1969)
Jo Ellen Jacobs has noted how such criticisms fail to understand the process of intellectual collaboration - the interchange of ideas that results in an end product which cannot be reduced to a single person’s authorship. But the antagonism to claims of joint authorship by John and Harriet goes much deeper, as revealed in how they were perceived as individuals, particularly in relation to each other.
One of the consequences of the educational experiment that James Mill had inflicted on his son was that John was socially awkward, and challenged by practical arrangements. Dependence on Harriet when practical decisions were needed was interpreted by many as John allowing Harriet to dominate him. Essentially, critics doubted John’s masculinity.
“That man, who up to that time, had never looked a female creature, not even a cow, in the face, found himself opposite those great eyes, that were flashing unutterable things.”
(Thomas Carlyle, (1873)
“In so called sensual feelings, he was below average”
(Alexander Bain, 1882)
“One simply cannot find him human”
(Sigmund Freud, 1883)
“A recluse too little able to appreciate the animal nature of mankind.”
(Leslie Stephen, 1900)
”He was dominated by women unreconciled by their fate as females”
(Anthony Ludovici, 1967)
“There seems no doubt at all that Mill was a mental masochist. Harriet was in every sense his master.”
(Josephine Kamm, 1977)
Sexist (and ableist) stereotypes abounded in criticism of Harriet, too;
“A dangerous looking woman and engrossed with a dangerous passion”
(Jane Carlyle, 1834)
“One of the meanest and dullest ladies in literary history, a monument of nasty self regard, as lacking in charm as in grandeur.. with no touch of true femininity, no taint of decent female concerns which support our confidence in the intelligence of someone like Jane Carlyle.”
(Diana Trilling, 1952)
“In all probability a frigid woman”
(Max Lerner, 1961)
“A clever, domineering, in some ways perverse and selfish invalid woman.”
(Jack Stillinger, 1961)
The advent of second wave feminism led some critics to view Harriet more positively, and to recognise how her denigration followed a familiar pattern - the silencing of women’s voices.
“One must be cautious in assessing the views held of Harriet by either her male contemporaries or the scholars who read the scattered fragments of evidence from those contemporaries. Assertive women were undoubtedly an even greater irritation to Victorian men than they are to men today.”
(Alice Rossi, 1970)
“If the image of John Stuart Mill was to be preserved, then the image he presented of Harriet Taylor had to be discredited, but this had to be accomplished without trashing his reputation. It was therefore productive - and plausible in a patriarchal society - to tarnish hers.”
(Dale Spender, 1982)
Intimacy
John and Harriet’s relationship was intimate, but not necessarily sexual. Their probable celibacy is a source of continued misunderstanding. Sexist critics saw it as a problem of John’s ‘lack of virility’, or Harriet’s ‘frigidity’, or both. Alice Rossi, in her otherwise sympathetic introduction to the 1970 edition of John and Harriet’s Essays on Sex Equality, remarked that “in the area of human sexuality, they were very much the products of their Victorian era.”
Rossi was perhaps viewing the fragmentary evidence through a late 1960s lens that conflated women’s liberation with ‘sexual revolution’, and all too often linked sexual pleasure with dominance and submission. As a result, though, she underestimated the radicalism of Harriet and John’s conviction that intimacy should be valued over sensuality, and that the imbalance between men and women (and the numbers of children that result from it ) would be much reduced if women were no longer economically and socially dependent on men. And Rossi’s characterisation of the ‘Victorian era’ accepted the prim stereotype rather than the brutal reality of men’s widespread abuse of women, children, and animals that plagued nineteenth century England.
Men’s abuse of women, children, and animals was a prime concern of both Harriet and John, and their writings about it are a powerful indictment of inequality, and the encouragement that this gives to male violence against women. I’ll explore some of those writings, and their contemporary relevance, in my next post.