230 Ruth Abbey
What Lies Beneath
The fi rst explanation for Wollstonecraft’s failure to say much explicitly
about rights is contextual. In the early years of the French Revolution, de-
bates about rights were raging (Brody 1985, 7). Because The Declaration
of the Rights of Man and the Citizen forms part of the background to the
Rights of Woman, we can infer that the sort of rights she has in mind are
individual rights to liberty and property, to equality before the law, to po-
litical participation, to equal opportunity, to habeas corpus, and to freedom
of expression and press. And indeed, these civil and political rights do
cover the things mentioned in chapter nine. Financial independence, for
example, would seem to require a right to property. A right to political
participation would allow women to run for offi ce. The principle of equal
opportunity would open studies and professions to women. Equality be-
fore the law would afford married women a civil existence, rather than
subsuming this under their husbands’. Although it usually goes unstated,
the contextual background is manifest in the Rights of Woman’s dedica-
tion to Talleyrand-Périgord, which makes it clear that Wollstonecraft was
trying to infl uence the debate in France about whether “women are to be
excluded, without having a voice, from a participation of the natural rights
of mankind” (23).^3 More specifi cally, Talleyrand was introducing a pro-
posal for public education that included all boys but only orphan girls, and
which had been infl uenced by Rousseau’s philosophy of sexual difference
(Tomaselli 1995, 320; Gunther-Canada 2001, 101–102, 114).
The second reason for Wollstonecraft’s failure to specify the rights
women should be granted derives from the structure of her argument. Con-
trary to appearances,^4 her defense of rights is highly systematic,^5 operating
at several mutually reinforcing levels. Its foundation is theological or meta-
physical. Wollstonecraft builds her defense of rights “on the perfection of
God” (40), “that wise Being who created us and placed us here” (39). A
monotheist, she takes God to be “powerful, wise, and good... all things
were created by him,... all beings are dependent on him” (211; see also
214). From her theology, Wollstonecraft generates an ontology of the hu-
man with two crucial components. First, all have been endowed with an
immortal soul (80), which means that the life humans lead on this earth
is not all there is: there is a beyond, or an afterlife, for which this life is a
preparation. Possession of an immortal soul is not just an interesting fact
about humans but bears a number of moral imperatives for how they should
act and what they should value. Wollstonecraft frequently speculates on
what it would mean were humans in general or women in particular purely