Synopsis
Writing in an age when the call for the rights of man had brought revolution to America and France, Mary Wollstonecraft produced her own declaration of female independence in 1792. Passionate and forthright, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman attacked the prevailing view of docile, decorative femininity, and instead laid out the principles of emancipation: an equal education for girls and boys, an end to prejudice, and for women to become defined by their profession, not their partner.
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369 Pages · 2014 ·
1.2 MB · 1,868 Downloads· English
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These are some lecture notes for a seminar meeting on the first few sections of Wollstonecraft's 1792 response to Talleyrand, concerning the place for women in an enlightened society.
The study is an attempt to understand Wollstonecraft and her situation in the eighteenth century society and history. References to seminal influences on Wollstonecraft from the areas of education, religion and politics will help to locate the concerns and preoccupations that feature as the poles around which her consciousness and thought have crystallized. It is an attempt to highlight the relation between the influence of the society on Wollstonecraft and the specific stages of her creativity, so as to recognize the significance of her biographical experiences within her texts.
This chapter provides the first analysis of Mary Wollstonecraft as a proto-intersectional political philosopher. Wollstonecraft’s major contributions to modern political philosophy stem from her visionary use of the concept of intersectionality to diagnose the causes, symptoms, and remedies of gender-, race-, and class-based inequality and oppression. Wollstonecraft’s theory of social justice—the most egalitarian of the Enlightenment era—aimed to eliminate such arbitrary inequalities, in part through the legislation and protection of rights for women and other historically oppressed groups. Wollstonecraft should thus be understood as a philosophical forerunner of contemporary third-wave feminists, who use intersectionality as a foundational concept for theorizing social justice.
Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797), attributing a particular importance to " woman "-in the narrow sense-and to all oppressed groups-in the broad sense-, has a peculiar position in the history of political thoughts. Taking a position different from the modern male thinkers in her era, she expanded such ideas as " reason " , " natural rights " , " social contract " towards relations between genders and patriarchal authority of the family. These ideas of Wollstonecraft, who applied basic arguments of Enlightenment to the family, woman and private sphere, have constituted the foundation of modern feminism. Wollstonecraft produced classical writings that integrated political theory with gender roles and private relations. In this sense, relations that she made among freedom, equality, virtue, reason and genders and her criticism towards the societies of her era are important. The present study that has focused on Wollstonecraft's perception about " woman " and her thoughts about the French Revolution will investigate the topic in three basic phases. The first phase will try to present her methodological point of view and her basic thoughts by moving from her book " A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) ". The second phase will investigate the concepts and analysis that cover basic arguments of the modern feminist thought by focusing on her book " A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) ". The third and the final phase will discuss the results of Wollstonecraft's basic concepts on political theory, especially in relation with the French Revolution where these concepts have been expressed.
How can women’s rights be seen as a universal value rather than a Western value imposed upon the rest of the world? Addressing this question, Eileen Hunt Botting offers the first comparative study of writings by Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill. Although Wollstonecraft and Mill were the primary philosophical architects of the view that women’s rights are human rights, Botting shows how non-Western thinkers have revised and internationalized their original theories since the nineteenth century. Botting explains why this revised and internationalized theory of women’s human rights—grown out of Wollstonecraft and Mill but stripped of their Eurocentric biases—is an important contribution to thinking about human rights in truly universal terms.
Independence is a central and recurring theme in Wollstonecraft’s work. This should not be understood as an individualistic ideal that is in tension with the value of community but as an essential ingredient in successful and flourishing social relationships. I examine three aspects of this rich and complex concept that Wollstonecraft draws on as she develops her own notion of independence as a powerful feminist tool. First, independence is an egalitarian ideal that requires that all individuals, regardless of sex, are protected to a comparable extent in all areas of social, political and economic life, no matter whether this is in the public or private sphere. Secondly, so long as this egalitarian condition is not compromised, independence allows for individuals to perform differentiated social roles, including along gendered lines. Finally, the on-going and collective input of both women and men is required to ensure that the conditions necessary for social independence are maintained. In Wollstonecraft’s hands, then, independence is a powerful ideal that allows her to argue that women must be able to act on their own terms as social and political equals, doing so as women whose perspectives and interests may differ from men’s.