236 Ruth Abbey
wives and mothers but also poor candidates for rights. Ignorant, weak, de-
pendent, and frivolous, they are also cunning, manipulative, and artful (45,
60, 143 –146, 220 –221). “The conduct and manners of women... evi-
dently prove that their minds are not in a healthy state” (29). They occupy
the paradoxical position of being simultaneously slaves and tyrants: while
their political, social, legal, and economic conditions enslave them to men,
their appetite for and exercise of arbitrary sexual power gives them a taste
of the power of tyrants (33, 62, 66, 70 –71, 94, 198).^18 But women strive to
please and manipulate men because this is the only way in which they can
exercise power: their “exertion of cunning is only an instinct of nature to
enable them to obtain indirectly a little of that power of which they are un-
justly denied a share: for, if women are not permitted to enjoy legitimate
rights, they will render both men and themselves vicious, to obtain illicit
privileges” (24; see also 54, 144, 167). The best way to expunge this perni-
cious form of arbitrary power is to accord women rights and permit them
to pursue power openly and via the same avenues as men.
It is for this reason that Wollstonecraft vindicates rights for “woman”
rather than “women”: it is the abstraction, rather than women as currently
constituted, that warrants rights. Unlike Harriet Taylor and John Stuart
Mill in the mid-nineteenth century, Wollstonecraft could take no inspira-
tion from any early women’s rights movement. Her vindication could only
operate at the level of potential: being endowed with reason, women should
be capable of many of the same pursuits and possibly the same achieve-
ments as men. Deprived of empirical evidence, Wollstonecraft has to make
an abstract argument in defense of rights for an ideal of woman.^19 But she
would also insist that only by being granted rights will women show them-
selves to be worthy of rights, for only then will they be able to develop their
talents as independent rational and moral beings. As the Rights of Woman’s
closing page prophesies, “it is reasonable to suppose that they will change
their character, and correct their vices and follies, when they are allowed to
be free in a physical, moral, and civil sense... Let woman share the rights,
and she will emulate the virtues of man; for she must grow more perfect
when emancipated, or justify the authority that chains such a weak being
to her duty” (226).
That the rights women should be granted are generic human rights is
evident in Wollstonecraft’s complaint that “the rights of humanity have
been... confi ned to the male line from Adam downwards” (115, emphasis
original). As this suggests, she does not outline any special category of
rights for women. What she “sturdily maintains” of duties seems appli-
cable to rights too: “women... may have different duties [from men] to