ABSTRACT
Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman; with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (1792) followed quickly on the heels of A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790). Her goal in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman was to secure the ‘rights of man’ for women and prepare them for citizenship in the evolving social compact. Her treatise is constituted of a critique of existing views on women, advice on how female manners should be reformed, and a plan for a system of national education. Her argument is grounded in natural law theory, which is encoded in inalienable natural rights. Building on natural law theory, Wollstonecraft unifies her analysis of the state of women and her approach for claiming women’s rights around a triumvirate of virtue, reason, and knowledge that is derived from Dissenting theology, specifically that of the Reverend Richard Price. Virtue is what all citizens must achieve because it justifies citizenship and it is necessary to a successful republic; private virtue is required for public virtue. Rational inquiry is the means to attaining virtue. The challenge to women, therefore, is to embrace reason and intellectual pursuits so that they may be worthy of civic duties and active citizenship; this becomes the focus of her instruction to women. However, when Wollstonecraft applies her first principles of virtue, reason, and knowledge to the experiential lives of women, her analysis becomes complicated by the faculties of the passions. She works to enfold ‘affection,’ her term for the emotion most compatible with virtue, into her perspective on political subjectivity, and she offers us an altered view of citizenship for women and men. The result is liberty and its concomitant duties based not on the gendered rights of man or woman but on the sacred rights of humanity.
