Mary Wollstonecraft · Politics
In 1792 Wollstonecraft turned the Enlightenment’s own logic on the Enlightenment itself: if rights rest on reason, and women are rational beings, then women have the same rights as men.
In the early 1790s the air of Europe was thick with the language of rights. The American Revolution had proclaimed that all men are created equal; the French Revolution had issued its Declaration of the Rights of Man; Thomas Paine had thrilled and scandalized England with the Rights of Man. But amid all this talk of universal human rights, one obvious group was simply left out: half of humanity. The rights of man, it turned out, meant the rights of men. In 1792, a self-educated Englishwoman named Mary Wollstonecraft published the book that demanded the revolution be carried to its logical conclusion: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, the founding text of modern feminism.
Wollstonecraft’s move was as simple as it was devastating. She did not invent a new philosophy; she took the Enlightenment’s own principles - that rights are grounded in reason, that all rational beings possess them, that no one should be subjected to arbitrary authority - and pointed out that these principles, honestly applied, must include women. The thinkers who proclaimed universal rights and then excluded women were not refuting her; they were contradicting themselves. If rights flow from reason, and women reason, then women have rights. The whole burden of her argument was to make the men of the Enlightenment live up to their own logic - to extend to women the very principles they had so recently used to overthrow kings.
Wollstonecraft anticipated the alarm her argument would provoke - the fear that she sought to overturn the natural order, to make women into men, to set the sexes at war. She answered with one of the most quietly radical sentences in the history of political thought: ‘I do not wish them to have power over men; but over themselves.’ She was not demanding that women rule men or seize men’s prerogatives. She was demanding something more fundamental and harder to deny: that women be allowed to become the rational, self-governing masters of their own minds and lives, rather than the dependent, childish, ornamental creatures that their upbringing and their society made them.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that Wollstonecraft grounded women’s rights in their rationality. In your own words, why did she argue that denying women rights contradicted the Enlightenment’s own principles?
Leads to Jean Jacques Rousseau.
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