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. Such doubts reflect a narrow standard for adjudicating Taylor Mill’s intellectual worth, and what counts as intellectual labor more broadly. This chapter argues that Taylor Mill’s own writings illuminates and challenges the gendering practices that have sustained scholarly interrogations of Taylor Mill, and of her relationship to J.S. 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.
