The Subjection of Women

John Stuart Mill - A renowned English philosopher, logician and economist, John Stuart Mill (20 May 1806 - 8 May 1873) was the eldest son of British historian and economist, James Stuart Mill. At a very early age, John came in contact with Jeremy Bentham and, at the age of 16, he helped found the Utilitarian Society. From 1830 onward, he wrote prolifically on a wide variety of subjects, with his major works including A System of Logic (1843), Essays on Some Unsettled Questions of Political Economy (1844) and Principles of Political Economy (1848), among others. For 20 years from 1836 to 1856, Mill was in charge of the British East India Company's relations with the Indian states. In 1865, he was elected to Parliament for Westminster and took an active part in the passage of the 1867 Reform Bill and the reform of land tenure in Ireland, representation of women, reduction of the national debt and reform of London government. In 1867 he founded with his wife Harriet Taylor and others the first women's suffrage society, which developed into the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies, and in 1869 he published the present work. However, he was honest enough to acknowledge that the main idea of this work, and also a substantial part of the hard copy, came from Harriet Taylor (October 1807 November 1858, who contributed to many of Mill's works in one way or another), and that their daughter, Helen, too had made a major contribution to the present work.