SOURCE: “Sentiment and Intellect: The Story of John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill,” in Essays on Sex Equality: John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill, University of Chicago Press, 1970, pp. 3-63.

In the following excerpt, Rossi examines the Mill/Taylor controversy from a sociological perspective, paying particular attention to the influence of the Unitarian Radicals and the Philosophical Radicals on the early stages of the couple's relationship.

If we could go back to the town of Avignon in the year 1860, we might take a two-mile stroll along the banks of the Rhone, through meadows and groves of mulberries, to the house in which John Stuart Mill wrote the first draft of The Subjection of Women. As we approached the house, we would see an oblong garden with an avenue of sycamores and mulberry trees, and at the end the small square house in which Mill lived and...