This is a new release of the original 1951 edition.

For 170 years, Harriet Taylor Mill has been presented as a footnote in John Stuart Mill's life. This volume gives her a separate voice. Readers may assess for themselves the importance and influence of her ideas on "women's" issues such as marriage and divorce, education, domestic violence, and suffrage. And they will note the overlap of her ideas on ethics, religion, arts, and socialism, written in the 1830s, with her more famous husband's works, published 25 years later.

The Voice of Harriet Taylor Mill is a work about collaboration: Harriet's life with her lover, friends, and members of her family; Harriet's joint work with John Stuart Mill; and the author's interaction with the reader. Jo Ellen Jacobs explores and expands the concept of biography using Salman Rushdie's analogy of history as a process of "chutnification." She gives Harriet's life "shape and form -- that is to say, meaning" in a way that will "possess the authentic taste of truth." In the first chapter, the first 30 years of Harriet's life are presented in the format of a first-person diary -- one not actually written by HTM herself. The text is based on letters and historical context, but the style suggests the intimate experience of reading someone's journal. The second chapter continues the chronological account of HTM until her death in 1858. In an interlude between the first and second chapters, Jacobs pauses to explore Harriet's life with John Stuart Mill; and in the final chapter, she argues persuasively that Harriet and John collaborated extensively on many works, including On Liberty.

The story of James and John Stuart Mill is one of the great dramas of the 19thcentury. In the tense yet loving struggle of this extraordinarily influential father and son, we can see the genesis of evolution of Liberal ideas-about love, sex, and women, wealth and work, authority and rebellion-which ushered in the modern age. The result of more than a decade of research and reflection, this is a study of the relationship between James Mill, the self-made utilitarian philosopher who tried (with only partial success) to shape his son in his own image. Mazlish integrates psychology and intellectual history as part of his larger and continuing effort to spur deeper understanding of the character, limitations, and possibilities of the social sciences.John Stuart Mill's rebellion against a joyless, loveless upbringing, one in strict accordance with the principles of Utilitarianism, was rooted ina powerful Oedipal struggle against his father's authority. Mazlish describes this rebellion as playing an important role in the genesis of classical nineteenth century liberalism. Behind this intellectual development were the women in Mills' life: Harriet the mother, never mentioned by her son in his autobiography, and Harriet Taylor, with whom Mill lived in a scandalous, if chaste, ménage a trois. It was this long relationship which informed his famous essay 'The Subjection of Women,' one of the most eloquent feminist statements ever written. A work of brilliant historical research and psychological insights, James and John Stuart Mill shows how the nineteenth-century struggle of fathers and sons shaped the social transformation of society.

Susan Mendus investigates the significance of love in moral and political philosophy. She argues for a re-interpretation of both enlightenment and feminist thinking, and shows how the former often takes love as central, while the latter draws our attention to human vulnerability and neediness. By combining the insights of enlightenment philosophy and feminist theory, the book aims to provide a new understanding of the role of love in moral and political philosophy.