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 argues that Mill focused on the intellectual capabilities of his wife in his Autobiography in order to challenge prevailing gender ideologies, which defined women exclusively in emotional terms, and to create an androgynous ideal for both men and women.

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).' He attributed...