10 Editor’s Introduction
to the problems of human estrangement and neglect as found in Maria’s
tragic story of Jemima (Todd 1991). Frankenstein follows Maria in its pro-
vocative advocacy of fundamental human rights to recognition, respect,
and parental care.
In current scholarship, there has been a shift from reading Wollstone-
craft in the historical context of eighteenth-century republicanism and
its discourse on civic virtue toward interpreting her philosophical contri-
butions to virtue ethics (Taylor 2007, Berges 2011), theories of human
rights and democracy (Halldenius 2007, O’Neill 2007), and conceptions of
gender, sexuality, and the family (Abbey 1999, Tauchert 2002, Wingrove
2005). There has also been a turn toward reading Wollstonecraft in light
of her religious foundations in the English Protestant theological tradi-
tion of rational Dissent, as in Ruth Abbey’s essay for this volume (Hutton
2003, Taylor 2003). Wollstonecraft has been profi tably compared with her
esteemed philosophical predecessor and fellow English republican Cath-
arine Macaulay on their egalitarian theories of moral virtue and education
(Gunther-Canada 2003, Frazer 2008). Historians have situated the Rights
of Woman against the backdrop of the longstanding querelle des femmes—
or intellectual debate on the equality of the sexes — that took place in the
aristocratic circles, Roman Catholic convents, and intellectual salons in
modern Europe and its Latin American colonies (Mendoza 2007, O’Brien
2009, Ross 2009). The four new scholarly essays in this edition build on
these trends by reading the Rights of Woman in terms of its contributions to
human rights, women’s writing, and feminist philosophy and activism.
Four New Readings of Wollstonecraft
Ruth Abbey’s essay starts with the metaphysical foundations of Wollstone-
craft’s political theory. By assessing the theological arguments that under-
gird her universalistic account of human rights, Abbey reads Wollstonecraft
as inaugurating the tradition of theorizing women’s rights as a kind of human
rights. Abbey examines the extent to which contemporary feminists from a
variety of schools of thought, such as the radical Catharine Mac Kinnon and
the liberal Martha Nussbaum, draw on Wollstonecraftian ideas.
Despite the fact that its Dissenting Christian metaphysics seems an-
tiquated to most contemporary feminists and philosophers, the Rights of
Woman continues to echo in contemporary ethics and political theory. Sim-
ilarly to how Wollstonecraft derives human rights and duties from universal