Editor’s Introduction 5an “abominable” bondage: “But is it not consonant with justice, with the
common principles of humanity, not to mention Christianity, to abolish
this abominable mischief?” (Wollstonecraft 1989, 5:50 –51). Like other
British abolitionists such as her theological mentor, the Reverend Richard
Price, Wollstonecraft understood her critique of chattel slavery as a logical
application of the “principles” of Christianity — in particular, the idea that
men and women were created as moral and rational equals in the image of
God. She concluded her fi rst political treatise with a resounding appeal to
“the immutable attributes of God” as the metaphysical foundation for her
conception of human equality and the human rights she derived from it
(Wollstonecraft 1989, 5:60).
In the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft’s use of the species concept to
argue for women’s human rights built on the Rights of Men’s abolition-
ist appeal to “the common principles of humanity.” Citing the slave-based
colonial sugar trade as a severe instance of European racialized patriarchy,
Wollstonecraft lamented how both women and African slaves existed only
to “sweeten the cup of man” as instruments for white men’s power and
pleasure: “Rousseau, and a numerous list of male writers, insist that she
[woman] should all her life be subjected to a severe restraint, that of propri-
ety. Why subject her to propriety —blind propriety, if she be capable of act-
ing from a nobler spring, if she be an heir of immortality? Is sugar always to
be produced by vital blood? Is one half of the human species, like the poor
African slaves, to be subject to prejudices that brutalize them, when prin-
ciples would be a surer guard, only to sweeten the cup of man?” (174).
By citing “prejudices” as the basis for oppression, both patriarchal
and racial, Wollstonecraft underscored their historically contingent, so-
cially constructed character. Akin to the chains of slaves, the “propriety”
expected of women placed a “severe restraint” on their development as
human beings: “They [women] are made slaves to their persons, and must
render them alluring that man may lend them his reason to guide their tot-
tering steps aright” (174). Women were encouraged to make their bodies
weak and their personas demure so that men would keep and protect them
like dependent children. In return, the women served as the metaphoric
“slaves” of men in the biological reproduction of children and the cultural
reproduction of feminine propriety.
Wollstonecraft, with this analogy, included all women in the category
of patriarchal, gender-based oppression, since she described its victims as
“one half of the human species.” This universalistic conception of women’s
gender-based oppression gained its critical power from the severity of
its comparative point of reference: chattel slavery. While chattel slaves