238 Ruth Abbey
embodied humans in two forms — male and female. But when it comes
to the soul, sex is irrelevant: only the body is sexed (60; see also Botting
2006, 197). Ultimately, however, Wollstonecraft would have to admit, as
Mill did after her, that she doesn’t know what women are like and therefore
how gender should infl uence our understanding of what it means to be hu-
man. Women have been so diminished and stunted by their socialization
that it is impossible to tell what they are, and are not, capable of achieving.
And who knows what men will be capable of when accompanied by free,
independent, and equal women. What it means to be human is yet to be
actualized.
Then and Now
No feminist thinker in the Western tradition would, to my knowledge, gain-
say Wollstonecraft’s basic point that women should enjoy the same rights
as men. However, feminist theorists have expressed reservations about the
adequacy of extending the “rights of man” to women. Many fear that rights
discourse embeds a masculine perspective. Because rights discourse was
developed by, for, and about men, there are doubts about whether it can re-
fl ect women’s experiences and satisfy their needs. According to Catharine
MacKinnon, “to be a person, an abstract individual with abstract rights,
may be a bourgeois concept, but its content is male” (MacKinnon 1989,
229; see also Stetson 1996, 166).
The “ethic of care” school of thinking has forwarded one strand of criti-
cism of the masculine character of rights discourse. The debate about the
ethic of care and the ethic of justice was sparked by Carol Gilligan’s cri-
tique of Lawrence Kohlberg’s theory of moral maturation. Gilligan’s infl u-
ential In a Different Voice (1982) proposes that the sort of moral reasoning
Kohlberg associates with maturity —universalist, abstract, deontological,
impartial— more closely captures masculine styles of thinking. The femi-
nine voice of moral reasoning, by contrast, discloses an ethic of care, fo-
cusing on relationships and their preservation rather than on discrete indi-
viduals. The ethic of care gives more prominence to responsibilities than
rights; it frames ethical dilemmas in terms of compromise and conciliation
rather than applying mathematical formulae, and it is interested in concrete
details and context rather than abstractions.^24
Another strand of feminist analysis to expose the masculine bias of
rights discourse points to its accentuation of civil and political rights. In