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Janet Smith was awarded her PhD in 2014 in women's and gender history by London Metropolitan University. Her thesis was entitled The Feminism and Political Radicalism of Helen Taylor in Victorian Britain and Ireland. In March 2016, her article "Helen Taylor's Imperialist Feminism: Ireland and the Land League Question" was published in the journal of the Women's History Network, Women's History, vol. 2, issue 4. Janet is contributing a chapter to a book on Legal Firsts for Women to be published in 2019, the year of the centenary of women's admittance to the legal profession in Britain.
Claire Morris Stern (d. 2016) always maintained a passion for learning, for advocacy for women's issues and for the environment. Unable to go to college after finishing high school at 16, she earned her Bachelors in Women's Studies from New York University when she was 65 and her Masters when she was 75.
As part of her Master's programme, she wrote her thesis on John Stuart Mill and became fascinated by the world of his step-daughter, Helen Taylor, whose own life involved feminist activism of various kinds. Claire travelled to England to visit the Taylor-Mill archives at the London School of Economics, spent time at the Folger Shakespeare Library where she discovered Helen Taylor's early diaries and joined a group of women biographers of women in New York City. She found great joy and sustenance in this adventure in scholarship. "Helen keeps me going", she used to say. Claire died on 3 May 2016 at the age of 94.
Helen Taylor was born in Shoreditch, London on 27 July 1831, the third child and only daughter of Harriet and John Taylor, a wholesale druggist. Her mother was a member of William Fox's Unitarian political and social reforming circle, where she had met and fallen in love with the economic philosopher John Stuart Mill in 1830. Mill and Harriet Taylor shared an interest in feminism and reform politics and Harriet left her husband for Mill, though the relationship remained discreet. John Taylor sanctioned an arrangement where Helen and her mother lived alone in Walton, Surrey, with Mill a regular visitor. Harriet and Mill withdrew socially and thus, to avoid the constant interest of acquaintances in their living arrangements, often...