Harriet Taylor
English philosopher and social writer (1807–1858), later known as Harriet Taylor Mill, she developed her intellectual work in a personal and social context especially restrictive for a Victorian woman, first as the wife of John Taylor, whom she married very young, and for almost two decades as the intimate intellectual companion —a relationship that generated considerable social scandal owing to its moral ambiguity— of John Stuart Mill, whom she finally married in 1851, two years after her first husband's death, and with whom she maintained, until her own death, a philosophical collaboration so close that her actual authorship of several of Mill's most important works remains a matter of historiographical debate. Mill himself explicitly and repeatedly acknowledged, both in his Autobiography and in dedications to his books, that Taylor had been an essential co-author of texts such as On Liberty (1859) and that her influence had been decisive in the writing of the Principles of Political Economy, even attributing to her most of the most original and socially progressive ideas in these works, particularly regarding questions of social justice, marriage reform and cooperative economics. Taylor's own, most clearly documented intellectual contribution is the essay The Enfranchisement of Women (1851), published under her own name, in which she argued with rigorous reasoning for the complete equality of civil, political and educational rights for women, including the right to vote and unrestricted access to all professions, anticipating in many respects the arguments Mill would more extensively develop in The Subjection of Women (1869), a work now considered by critics to be deeply influenced by Taylor's thought, though published after her death. Taylor's figure has been reclaimed by contemporary feminist historiography as a paradigmatic example of an intellectual woman whose contribution was historically overshadowed and minimised by the public fame of her male companion, raising broader questions about the attribution of authorship and the intellectual recognition of women in nineteenth-century philosophy.