Sexual Equality

Margaret Conrad is a history professor at Acadia University and the
editor of Intimate Relations: Family and Community in Planter Nova
Scotia, 1759–1800.

The Robsons have performed a great service in drawing together the
published and unpublished writings of these 19th-century intellectuals
on the topic of women’s rights. While John Stuart Mill’s The
Subjection of Women (1869) is well known as the classic statement of
liberal feminism—and is reproduced here—it is far from the only or,
indeed, the last statement on the matter produced by this industrious
family.

Mill admitted his great intellectual debt both to Harriet Taylor, his
friend for 20 years before her husband’s death permitted them to marry
in 1851, and to her daughter Helen. In this book, it becomes clear how
mutually dependent this remarkable trio was, and how comprehensively
they grasped the socially constructed roadblocks to women’s equality.
Many of their arguments still have relevance, though their preoccupation
with progress and with the special civilization-advancing qualities that
women were thought to have remind the reader that more than a century
has elapsed since these people put pen to paper.

The editors have arranged the letters, essays, and speeches around
themes that focus on marriage and divorce, domestic cruelty and legal
injustice, social inequality (education and prostitution), political
equality, and suffrage. In their useful introduction, the Robsons
describe the Mill–Taylor relationship, discuss the context of their
preoccupation with sexual equality, and grapple with the difficult
question of authorship. The Robsons maintain that Mill was the main
partner in the team, and there is no question that his was the most
public role. Yet this collection also brings the remarkable career of
Helen Taylor sharply into focus. She maintained the two Mill households
after her mother’s death in 1858, collaborated in most of her
stepfather’s prolific output, continued to write on women’s issues
after Mill’s death in 1873, and ran successfully for one of the few
elected offices open to women in the 19th century: the local school
board.

This fine book would have been even better had the publisher agreed to
lengthen an already long book to include a selected bibliography and
photographs of the three people (one of Harriet is mentioned on p. xiv),
whose personalities are so delightfully revealed in their written work.