Essays on Sex Equality

John Stuart Mill,Harriet Taylor Mill, Alice S. Rossi

• Editorial: University of Chicago Press
• Año: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780226172217
• Categoría: Philosophy
• Categoría: Philosophy History & Theory

This volume brings together for the first time all the writings of John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill on equality between the sexes, including John Stuart Mill's The Subjection of Women, a classic in the history of the women's rights movement since its publication one hundred years ago.Also contained in this volume is a major interpretative essay by Alice S. Rossi on Mill and Harriet Taylor which describes and analyzes their long personal and intellectual relationship.

1

Sentiment and Intellect
The Story of John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill

ALICE S. ROSSI

Sentiment and Intellect
The Story of John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill

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 worked. A white stone building with a tile roof and green blinds, Mill’s home commanded a view of green fields, backed by ranges of mountains. Here Mill wrote during the morning hours, passed the afternoons roaming the surrounding countryside, and spent the evenings with reading and correspondence. Close to this secluded house is the cemetery in which Mill’s wife Harriet was buried two years before (1858), a quiet place John Mill visited daily.¹

This then is the setting in which Mill wrote his major volume on women. When he finished the draft of the essay in 1861, Mill intended to keep it among his other unpublished papers, “improving it from time to time if I was able, and to publish it at the time when it should seem likely to be most useful.”² By “useful” Mill meant politically expedient, and that time did not come for another eight years. The intervening years were very full and active ones: a prodigious amount of writing that brought to fruition a lifetime of intellectual effort, and a culmination of Mill’s active political commitments in the three years (1865–68) he served as a member of the House of Commons. In 1868 Mill retired again to his home near Avignon, where he revised the manuscript of the essay on women for publication in 1869.

One hundred years have passed since The Subjection of Women was published, yet it stands almost alone as an intellectual analysis of the position of women and an appeal for political action to secure equality of the sexes. Nothing quite like it had been published before 1869, and nothing like it was to appear again until the publication in 1898 of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Women and Economics, and another fifty years until the publication in 1951 of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex. These three volumes are landmarks in both the long history of the women’s movement for political and economic rights and the shorter history of intellectual analyses of sex roles and the relations between the sexes. All three share that rare quality of rigorous intellectual analysis combined with passionate commitment to the goal of sex equality. The Subjection of Women is of very special interest as the first and as the only one of the three written by a man.

Many men in the history of western intellectual thought have been deeply committed to the fight against tyranny over the minds and bodies of the powerless in nation after nation. Generations of young people have been stirred by intellectual and political battles against a host of “establishments”: the church, the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, the military-industrial complex. The subjection of peasants, slaves, religious dissenters, and workers to a variety of ruling elites has stirred liberal and radical thinkers and activists for the past two centuries. John Stuart Mill stands as the solitary male intellectual figure who devoted his efforts to tracing the analogous subjection of women. It is a measure of the snail’s pace at which the movement toward sex equality has progressed that The Subjection of Women is typically merely cited by title by scholars of Mill, but hardly ever analyzed, summarized, or included in collections of his essays on liberty and egalitarianism.³

John Stuart Mill was a man of sixty-three when the essay on women was published. A man of towering intellectual importance to his contemporaries, he stands as a significant figure in the history of ideas, one who straddled the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and anticipated the twentieth. How did this man come to write a book on women? Why had this Victorian Englishman withdrawn to a secluded village in France to live and write? When during his lifetime did he develop an interest in the position of women? To answer such questions requires an examination of the development of Mill’s thought and the course of his personal life, for a long period of gestation and a complex personal history preceded the publication of The Subjection of Women.

A scholar need proceed no further than a reading of Mill’s autobiography and the prefaces he wrote for most of his work following the 1848 publication of the Principles of Political Economy to encounter Harriet Taylor as a central figure in Mill’s intellectual and personal life. It is doubtful that The Subjection of Women would ever have been written if it were not for Mill’s twenty-eight-year relationship with Harriet. Hence it is not only Mill’s own development, but the history of his relationship with Harriet Taylor, that must be examined if we are to understand why Mill wrote a book on women and why the book has such remarkable survival power and impact.

John Mill and Harriet Taylor were in their early twenties when they first met. Harriet was at that time a young married woman with two young children, but within a year the relationship between Mill and Mrs. Taylor was one of intellectual and spiritual intimacy. For the next twenty years, Mill continued to live at home with his mother and younger siblings, while Mrs. Taylor remained in her husband’s household, yet it is clear that the unconventional relationship they enjoyed with each other was the very core of their lives. It was not until 1851, two years after her husband’s death, when they were in their forties and suffering very poor health, that they married. Just seven years later, Harriet died at Avignon, and Mill bought a home near the cemetery in which she was buried. The nature of their relationship, and the exact contribution of Harriet Taylor to Mill’s thought and writing, has been the subject of controversy for over a hundred years.

In an era in which sociology has confined itself to the here-and-now, and to a methodology that focuses on the quantitative analysis of survey and experimental data, it may seem strange that a sociologist like me should attempt an essentially biographic investigation into nineteenth-century historical materials. There is, however, a sociological tradition with which this is fully consistent. C. Wright Mills argued, to that minority of sociology graduate students who listened to him, that social science was basically the study of human variety, which consists of “all the social worlds in which men have lived, are living and might live.”⁴ Mills argued that a proper sociological perspective involves the study of biography and of history, and the intersection of the two in particular social structures. It is in keeping with this sociological tradition that I attempt a selective review of the personal lives and the work of John and Harriet Mill, with particular attention to the two distinct, though overlapping social and intellectual circles—the Philosophic Radicals and the Unitarian Radicals—in which they moved during the critical early years of their relationship.

This analysis has a further relevance to contemporary concerns about sex equality. In 1970 there are two quite distinct levels to the new renascence of concern for the position of women. One concentrates on the reformist, liberal pursuit of widening and consolidating the legal rights of women in the political and economic spheres. This activity builds on the long tradition of the women’s rights movement throughout American history of the past 120 years, symbolically initiated by the Declaration of Sentiments at the Seneca Falls convention in 1848. The second, more radical approach focuses attention on the private as well as the public sector and pushes both for an analysis of human sexuality in general and for a critical examination of marriage and the family as social institutions. This approach has involved a search, romantic as well as radical, for a new vision of relations between the sexes, based on the hope that it is possible to blend physical sex, sentiment, and intellect in the husband-wife relationship. As yet few notable examples of such marriages have appeared, and so a contemporary sociologist is strongly inclined to widen the sample of such relationships by turning backward in time to earlier, prominent examples in history. A cross-sex relationship, inside or outside marriage, in which sex and intellect, family and work, are blended, is a dream in the heart of many young women searching for liberation in 1970.

Any scholar who attempts to examine Mill’s personal history faces two special difficulties, and it will be well if we confront these at the outset. One difficulty is rooted in the image Mill both wittingly and unwittingly projected of himself. For his contemporaries, as for those who read his famous autobiography, the major features of this image are Mill’s high moral tone, deep commitment to intellectual effort, and rigorous rational analysis. The image is aptly caught in Gladstone’s characterization of Mill as the “Saint of Rationalism.” This is nowhere more apparent than in the autobiography itself, which is remarkable for its impersonality. It is so nearly a pure intellectual recital of Mill’s development that John Jacob Coss could say: “In many ways it is primarily an account of the social history of England in the first three quarters of the Nineteenth Century.”⁵ It was because of this quality of the autobiography that Coss used the book in his philosophy courses at Columbia University, along with Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s Ethics, and Bacon’s Advancement of Learning. In a more recent commentary, Hayek made a similar observation: “Of what in the ordinary sense of the word we should call his life, of his human interests and personal relations, we learn practically nothing.”⁶

Hayek’s contribution to our understanding of the personal side of Mill’s life was the publication of the John Mill-Harriet Taylor correspondence in 1951. Even this volume of correspondence is far from complete, for many of Mill’s personal letters were destroyed during World War II while Hayek was attempting to gather them in London; others appear to have been destroyed by Helen Taylor after her stepfather’s death, and a good number remain unpublished in private collections in England and America. When the first full collection of Mill’s work began to issue from the University of Toronto Press in the 1950s, Hayek wrote that no other major figure of the nineteenth century has had to wait almost one hundred years before his collected works were published. In 1970 several volumes remain to be published by the Toronto press.

It is interesting that an earlier draft of the Autobiography has come to light only in recent years. This document has had a curious history. It was bought in London in 1922 by Jacob Harry Hollander, a professor of political economy at Johns Hopkins University, and at the time of his death in 1940 the manuscript had apparently been read by only one other person—A. W. Levi, who subsequently wrote two essays based on a psychoanalytic study of it.⁷ With the rest of Hollander’s library the draft was stored in a Baltimore warehouse after his death and remained there until 1958, when the University of Illinois purchased the collection. Finally, in 1961, the early draft, edited by Jack Stillinger, was published by the University of Illinois Press.⁸ This earlier version is less exclusively an intellectual document than the later one. The basic draft was written by John Mill, and Harriet penciled in suggested revisions and comments. When Mill accepted her suggestions, he penned over her penciled emendations, thus permitting Stillinger to examine the written evidence of Harriet’s contributions to the “life,” as they referred to it in their correspondence. Stillinger’s examination of the manuscript led him to comment that Mill and his wife (and to an even greater degree, Mill alone, in his subsequent rewriting in the early 1860s) had made it progressively more “public” and less “human” than it had been at the start. As a result of the long unavailability of both the early draft of the autobiography and so much of the correspondence, it is clear that a great deal of the scholarship on Mill’s personal life is still to be done.

Where Harriet Taylor is concerned, the scholar’s task is even more difficult. Mill himself rejected the idea that an adequate memoir could be written on her life. When the American suffragist Paulina Wright Davies asked Mill about such a possibility in 1870, he responded:

Were it possible in a memoir to have the formation and growth of a mind like hers portrayed, to do so would be as valuable a benefit to mankind as was ever conferred by a biography. But such a psychological history is seldom possible, and in her case the materials for it do not exist. All that could be furnished is her birth-place, parentage and a few dates.⁹

A good deal more than a “few dates” remain to the scholar interested in forming a profile of Harriet Taylor Mill. It is clear that paucity of historical evidence has not prevented, and may even have stimulated, the long series of very opinionated views about her. I shall review some of these contradictory assessments and suggest my own at a later point in this essay.

A second problem for a late twentieth-century scholar is the difficulty of emphatically penetrating the mystique of Victorian morality where “passionate” relations between the sexes are concerned. Unwittingly, the reader falls in line with the Victorian writers and early twentieth-century commentators in drawing up a balance sheet of evidence of the “did they or didn’t they sleep together” variety, until one impatiently calls oneself back to the perspective of our own time and place. We are dealing neither with a casual sex encounter nor with a conventional marital relationship, but with a complex and subtle mutuality of intellect and sentiment beween a man and a woman. It may be that in nineteenth-century Victorian England avoidance of the physical act of adultery and adherence to the formal obligations of the marital relationship were more significant than the existence of intellectual and personal intimacy between an unmarried man and a married woman. In the mid-twentieth century the ordering of these priorities would be reversed: intimacy of sentiment and intellect in a cross-sex relationship outside the marriage is a greater threat to the marriage than adultery per se. In any event one surmises that “passion” in the lives of both John Mill and Harriet Taylor was a sublimated and highly intellectualized emotion, and that Harriet made an apt characterization when she told Gumperz that from 1831 on, her relationship both to her husband John Taylor and to John Mill was that of “Seelenfreundin.”¹⁰ What remains of central significance to us today is the subtle and pervasive transformation that their love for each other brought about in the personal lives and in the ideas and intellectual efforts of John Mill and Harriet Taylor.

What follows is an account of Mill’s life and development with special attention to the ideas on marriage, divorce, and the position of women that were current in the social and intellectual circles in which Mill and Harriet Taylor moved. At appropriate points in the unfolding chronology, I shall summarize and highlight the essays they wrote on women in 1832, 1851, and 1869.

Early Family Life and Education of John S. Mill (1806–21)

John Stuart Mill has described so fully the remarkable education he...