SOURCE: “Better Deal for the Better Half: Mill and Harriet Taylor on the Subjection of Women,” in Women’s Writing: Text and Context, edited by Jasbir Jain, Rawat Publications, 1996, pp. 56-63.

In the following essay, Sarojini offers a comparison of the essential views that Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill held concerning men and women, marriage and divorce.

In the English speaking world the feminist movement might be said to have begun with the publication of Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women in 1792. It made very little impact on its contemporaries, partly because it was so obviously a child of the French Revolution, and partly because of its impassioned style. It aroused more derision than sympathy. Moreover a woman crusading for women is less persuasive than a male champion for the women's cause. The male voices, however, were rare and solitary. In 1825 William Thomson in his...