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SOURCE: “The Feminization of John Stuart Mill,” in Revealing Lives: Autobiography, Biography, and Gender, edited by Susan Groag Bell and Marilyn Yalom, State University of New York Press, 1990, pp. 81-92.
In the following essay, Bell explores critics' refusal to acknowledge Harriet Taylor's contribution to John Stuart Mill's writing, and offers possible reasons for this resistance.
The Autobiography of John Stuart Mill, the most famous male feminist of the nineteenth century, is inspired by a presence that has infuriated many critics—that of his wife Harriet. In Mill's words, she was “the most admirable person I had ever known” (p. 114). He insisted that his published writings were “not the work of one mind, but of the fusion of two” (p. 114), “as much her work as mine” (p. 145).1 He attributed to Harriet “the most valuable ideas and features in these [our] joint productions—those which have been most fruitful of...
This section contains 5,221 words (approx. 18 pages at 300 words per page) |
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