4 Editor’s Introduction
century, Wollstonecraft has arguably remained the only thinker to be glob-
ally recognized as its philosophical founder. It is her groundbreaking book,
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which made her so.
Wollstonecraft’s Philosophy of Universal Human Rights
Wollstonecraft’s Rights of Woman is one of the few political or philosophi-
cal texts by a woman that is generally recognized as a classic of Western
civilization. Her recent canonization in the fi elds of English literature and
political theory —however liminal— is partly due to her own deep read-
ing in these traditions. The Rights of Woman engaged the dramatic poetry
of William Shakespeare and John Milton alongside the novels of Samuel
Richardson and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It built on the Dissenting Chris-
tian moral theology of Richard Price, the empirical epistemologies of John
Locke and David Hume, the educational philosophies of Locke, Rousseau,
Talleyrand-Périgord, and Catharine Macaulay, as well as Scottish Enlight-
enment theories of economic and political development. Fusing together
these varied intellectual infl uences in her Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft
imbued the debates on the French Revolution with a visionary universalis-
tic perspective on the rights of humans.
Wollstonecraft’s grounding in Enlightenment-era debates about rights
led her to develop one of the most original contributions to political theory
in her time: the idea that women’s rights are a kind of human rights. What
we often take for granted — the idea of universal human rights undifferen-
tiated by sex —was truly a radical idea in 1792. The most radical and in-
fl uential aspect of Wollstonecraft’s arguments for the rights of woman was
their appeal to the humanity of women. Women’s status as human beings
was the grounding, or justifi cation, for their entitlement to equal civil and
political rights alongside men in modern republican governments. Woll-
stonecraft often referred to women as the degraded, oppressed, and politi-
cally marginalized “half of the human species” (48). With such rhetorical
locutions, she reminded her audience of the artifi cial and arbitrary quality
of women’s social inequality with men. She also underscored the sexes’
commonalities as members of the same species, and the moral desert of
women to be recognized and respected as humans.
Wollstonecraft’s appeal to human nature as a common ground for hu-
man rights claims was a theme of late eighteenth-century abolitionist dis-
course. Her 1790 treatise A Vindication of the Rights of Men had made
such an argument for the right of chattel slaves to their liberation from