Harriet Taylor
For most of the nineteenth century an Englishwoman was, in law, very close to her husband's property: on marriage her earnings, her possessions, and her legal personality folded into his, and the standard defense of the arrangement held that she needed no vote and no career because her interests were already represented by the man of the house. Harriet Taylor Mill refused every part of that. In *The Enfranchisement of Women*, published anonymously in 1851, she argued for the full thing at once: the vote, eligibility for office, and admission to the trades and professions so a woman could earn her own bread, and she argued it more bluntly than the more famous book her husband would publish eighteen years later. Her case had a sharp logical core. The claim that women are by nature unfit for public life cannot be tested, she held, until the bar is removed, because a capacity forbidden to be used is the surest way to guarantee it never develops. What looks like women's nature is mostly the residue of what women have been forbidden to do. She made this case as a thinker, not a muse, and the difficulty the canon never resolved is exactly how much else is hers: John Stuart Mill said again and again that his work was as much her work as his, that *On Liberty* was their joint production, that the best of his writing belonged to her. Whether that was the truth, or a grieving widower's overstatement, is a real question with no clean answer. What is not in doubt is the 1851 essay, signed by no one and now firmly hers, which can be read on its own and judged on its own.