author
Harriet Hardy Taylor Mill
1807–1858
A sharp, early voice for women’s rights, she wrote about liberty, equality, and marriage in ways that still feel strikingly modern. Her partnership with John Stuart Mill has long drawn attention, but her own essays and political thought stand on their own.
1 Audiobook
Enfranchisement of women : Reprinted from the Westminster and Foreign Quarterly Review, for July 1851
by Harriet Hardy Taylor Mill
About the author
Born Harriet Hardy in London in 1807, she became known as Harriet Taylor Mill after marriages to John Taylor and later to philosopher John Stuart Mill. Sources agree that she was an English philosopher and women’s rights advocate, and that questions about her collaboration with Mill have often overshadowed her own work.
Her writing focused on social and political philosophy, especially the status of women. She is best known for The Enfranchisement of Women (1851), a major argument for women’s equality and political rights. Modern reference works also describe her as an important influence on nineteenth-century debates about liberty, individuality, and reform.
She died in Avignon, France, in 1858. Today she is increasingly read not just as a figure in John Stuart Mill’s life, but as a serious thinker in her own right whose work helped shape early feminist philosophy.