Editor’s Introduction 7desperate resort to abortion because of poverty or rape,^3 analytically dis-
tinguish between rape (forced sex) and freely chosen sexual relations,^4
counteract the spread of venereal disease,^5 and eliminate the treatment of
women as sexual and reproductive “slaves” within patriarchal marriages
and societies as a whole. She specifi ed women’s urgent need for an array of
positive human rights tailored to address their gender’s complex predica-
ment in both the short and long term: sex education, property ownership
in marriage, employment beyond the family, divorce, and child custody.^6
Negative human rights, such as the right not to be raped, were arguably
even more crucial for women’s transcendence of their insidious form of
gender-based oppression.^7 With a deep irony that made the darkness of
her enlightened century more visible, Wollstonecraft defended these differ-
ent types of human rights for women — shared and equal, gender-specifi c,
positive and negative — so that future generations of females would not be
“born only to procreate and rot” (90).
Studying Wollstonecraft Today
The far-seeing quality of her philosophy has made Wollstonecraft’s Rights
of Woman ripe for rediscovery by contemporary political theorists con-
cerned with universal human rights, democratization, global justice, and
human development. The Nobel laureate economist and human capabili-
ties theorist Amartya Sen led the way with his Development as Freedom
(1999). He upheld the Rights of Woman as a “classic book” which vindi-
cated two vital forms of human rights for women: rights to well-being, and
even more crucially, rights to be agents of their own course in life (Sen
1999, 189). In Modern Social Imaginaries (2004), the philosopher of mo-
dernity and culture Charles Taylor positioned Wollstonecraft as a pioneer
in the “long march” toward democratic inclusion in the West, especially
given her rethinking of the family in a “critical democratic-egalitarian
light” (2004, 147). Sen’s The Idea of Justice (2009) presents the Rights of
Woman as an argumentative model for empowering the marginalized to
participate in democratic deliberation about justice. Following Wollstone-
craft, the marginalized may effectively combine “wrath and reasoning” to
make emotionally, intellectually, and politically compelling claims for hu-
man rights in the public sphere — thereby gaining a voice where they had
been ignored before (Sen 2009, 392).
In the twenty-two years since the bicentennial of the Rights of Woman,
there has been a renaissance of literary, historical, and political readings