ABSTRACT
The contributions of Harriet Taylor Mill, Mary Paley Marshall and Beatrice Potter Webb to the development of economic knowledge vary greatly. This is in part linked to the different nature of the marital partnerships that they experienced with prominent male economists. While Taylor and Webb had partners who supported their complete intellectual engagement, Marshall's husband denied her advanced intellectual participation after the initial stage of their relationship. Taylor's work as a researcher took diverse forms after her encounter with J. S. Mill. She is largely recognised as the author of Enfranchisement of Women. A paragraph of The Economics of Industry, which focused on the inequalities between men's and women's wages, disappeared totally in Alfred Marshall's Principles of Economics, although this book was supposed to enrich the previous one. The three women's personal circumstances, including early family environment, individual skills and intellectual stimulation supported their aptitude for economic reasoning.
