2023-05-08 07:13:13
EA photograph taken around 1869 shows 62-year-old John Stuart Mill at the side of his stepdaughter Helen Taylor. He is sitting on an armchair and holding a book in his hands. With a suit, tie, stand-up collar, crown of hair and a stern but gentle gaze, he appears as the incarnation of the learned citizen he really was.
Taylor stands upright next to him, her robe hides her body shape, her center parting is severe, her serious look is similar to Mill’s, from which she turns away slightly. A few years before photography came into being, she had founded the London Society for Women’s Suffrage with other women’s rights activists, from which she soon distanced herself politically. Some of the suffragettes’ forms of protest, such as hunger strikes and occupations of public buildings, were too militant for her. In 1870, when she gave her first campaign speech for the introduction of women’s suffrage, she had drawn closer to the Liberal Party.
John Stuart Mill (1806 to 1873) and his stepdaughter Helen Taylor
Quelle: Getty Images
Anyone looking at the photograph without knowing the biographical background would probably classify Taylor as a wife or daughter, possibly as Mill’s private secretary. In fact, in his letters, Mill referred to himself as the “secretary” of his stepdaughter and his wife Harriet Taylor, Helen’s mother, whom Helen brought into his marriage.
“The Best in My Writings”
In his “Autobiography”, which has not yet been translated into German and was published in 1873, the year Mill died, he recorded with a characteristic mixture of tenderness and determination: “Anyone who thinks of me and my work, now or after my death, must never forget that it is not the product one Intellect and conscience, but that of three.” On several occasions he had endeavored to indicate that Harriet and Helen were co-authors of his writings, such as the 1859 essay “On Liberty” and the pamphlet “Utilitarianism” (1861) on the book titles ; it failed due to the then publishing and copyright.
So he called women’s authorship in a different way. The edition of On Liberty, published a year after Harriet’s death, contains a preface in which Mill writes: “You, to whose stimulating cooperation I owe the best in my writings, the friend and wife whose keen sense of truth and justice is my strongest The appeal and the approval of which was the best reward for me – I dedicate this book to her.”
Such favors had a serious biographical background. Before Mill married Harriet Taylor in 1851, the two had been close friends for 20 years. As a young man he had met Harriet in 1830 in the home of her husband, the businessman and Unitarian John Taylor. Although she remained loyal to her husband until his death in 1849, Harriet, repelled by Taylor’s intellectual narrow-mindedness, formed a spiritual-sensuous comradeship with Mill, as a result of which she became his collaborator, in the years leading up to her husband’s cancer death but also persisted in caring for him and entrusted his daughter Helen, born in 1831, to his upbringing.
The fact that she married two years after Taylor Mill’s death and that he was adopted by Taylor Mill as his daughter was perceived by the British public as a scandalous breach of fidelity. It made Harriet impossible in the eyes of bourgeois society and damaged Mill’s reputation so badly that he retired with Harriet and Helen to his Blackheath estate near London and hardly took part in political life.
The public man
Previously, Mill’s career was like the realization of the ideal of public man published, which combines practical and theoretical skills. Born on May 20, 1806 to the economist James Mill, he received an extensive education in the theoretical and practical sciences, in philosophy, physics, zoology and political economy at the best English schools.
Trained by Adam Smith and David Ricardo, by the age of 17 he was already working in important positions for the East India Company, traveling extensively and frequenting London clubs. He was close to the Liberal Whigs, for whom he did not, however, enter Parliament until 1866, eight years after Harriet’s death; he himself was already in early retirement.
Mill had not supported the women’s rights movement out of abstract conviction, but based on his own experience. For decades, John Taylor had refused to release Harriet in favor of a love marriage to Mill, seeing Mill’s influence on Helen’s upbringing as a taint on his property.
English law at the time did not grant mothers any independent educational powers over their children, which were regarded much more as “private property of the father”. The notion of liberalism that Mill developed in On Liberty arose from an effort to confront the bourgeoisie of his day with the contradiction between their ideals and the illiberal components of their own legal order.
betrayal of the bourgeoisie
Beginning in the 1850s, in a series of articles he wrote with Harriet Taylor, Mill attacked fathers’ legally enforced abuse of their wives and daughters, the impossibility of women earning money and controlling their wealth independently of their husbands’ consent, and the conditions of divorce law, which deprived women of the ability to raise their children in the event of separation.
It was a self-betrayal of the bourgeoisie, wrote Mill, “that the interests of women are included in those of men to the same extent as the interests of subjects are included in those of kings”. A society that has abolished the status of citizens as subjects in the name of freedom and equality must necessarily also abolish the subject status of women to husbands and fathers and give them full voting rights.
Friedrich August von Hayek, who made Mill’s writings known in this country and, like Mill, is regarded as an apologist for inhuman utility thinking, shared this view as late as 1951, when in an essay on Mill and Harriet Taylor he lamented that girls “in the present system of habits and Opinions…enter what is called a contract utterly ignorant of its terms”. More than that, “that they are ignorant is considered essential to their suitability”.
What is specific to Mill’s concept of liberalism is the production of the full ability to contract of women as a prerequisite for the emancipation of the sexes. The fact that there was a positive understanding of calculation and rationality was already seen as the original sin of Mill’s utilitarianism during his lifetime. Even today, leftists disapprove of his non-state individualism, while business liberals are suspicious of his equality-theoretical views on the women’s question.
It is fitting that it was the anarcholibertarian Syndikat-Verlag in Frankfurt that published the writings of Mill, Harriet and Helen Taylor for the first time in German translation in 1976 under the title “Die Hörigkeit der Frau”. The photograph of Mills with his stepdaughter is shown on the cover; he, Harriet Taylor Mill and Helen Taylor are named as the authors. If you want to do justice to him on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of his death, you should read this book.
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