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The “Beloved and Deplored” Memory of Harriet Taylor Mill: Rethinking Gender and Intellectual Labor in the Canon

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Menaka Philips
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Abstract

In his Autobiography, John Stuart Mill tells us that though his conviction regarding the equality of the sexes was a result of his earliest engagements with political subjects, it remained an abstract idea before his relationship with Harriet Taylor (later Taylor Mill) began. Crediting her as the author of “all that was best” in his writings, Mill's praise of his wife has not been well received by many of his readers, and scholars have long questioned her capacities as an intellectual and as a political thinker. I argue that such doubts reflect a narrow standard for adjudicating Taylor Mill's intellectual worth, and what counts as intellectual labor more broadly. Examining Taylor Mill's own writings in fact illuminates and challenges the gendering practices that have sustained scholarly interrogations of Taylor Mill and of her relationship to JS Mill. I make this case first by drawing attention to her “experiential politics” as a credible source of intellectual scholarship, and second by raising questions about the gendered aspects of how intellectual labor has been defined and evaluated in studies of the canon.

Type
Cluster on Gender and the “Great Man”: Recovering Philosophy's “Wives of the Canon”
Information
Hypatia , Volume 33 , Issue 4 , Fall 2018 , pp. 626 - 642
Copyright
Copyright © 2018 by Hypatia, Inc.

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