Harriet Taylor Mill: The Unitarian Background

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Notes

¹ Gifted with an “extraordinary oratorical ability” (Mineka 178), Fox was famous well beyond the Unitarian denomination. A dedicated social reformer and renowned journalist, he was one of the strongest assets of the Anti-Corn Law League and eventually became an MP in 1847.

² This, however, is not meant to imply that Locke himself held particularly progressive views on women and women’s education; see Nacol, Okin and Pateman for details.

³ Queen Victoria, mother of nine, considered childbearing “the yoke of a married woman” and referred to it as “the shadow side of marriage.” In a letter to her daughter, she remarks on the “aches and sufferings and miseries and plagues” of childbearing and states, “therefore I think of our sex as a most unenviable one.” Quoted in Perkin (41f.).

⁴ J.S. Mill bases his reservations about married women’s employment outside the home in both his essay on divorce (1833) and his Subjection (1869) on precisely this argument. For a very nuanced discussion of this, see McCabe; Smith.

⁵ Michèle A.Pujol remarks in this context that “[t]he irony of [this] argument, given the orthodox liberal extolling of the virtues and necessities of a free competitive market, should not have been missed by [Taylor’s] readers” (89).