John Stuart Mill was born in London on 20 May 1806.

The date points forward to one of the central arguments of nineteenth-century British politics: who should be free, who should be represented and who had the right to take part in public life. Mill became one of Victorian Britain’s clearest writers on liberty. His influence also reached into arguments about Parliament, reform and the limits placed on people by custom, law and social pressure.

That influence is plainest in his support for women’s equality. Mill rejected women’s exclusion from political life as a legal and social injustice, and carried that argument into Parliament while serving as MP for Westminster.

In 1866, Mill presented a women’s suffrage petition to the House of Commons. During the debate on the 1867 Reform Bill, he tried to amend the wording by replacing ‘man’ with ‘person’. The amendment failed, but the attempt put women’s suffrage into Parliament’s language.

Mill did not create the reform movement. His value lies in the language he helped give it: a sharper British liberal vocabulary for liberty, representation and equality.