240 Ruth Abbey
inclusive of women’s needs and experiences (Okin 1998a, 34 –35). This
movement illustrates very practically that rights discourse is not irredeem-
ably masculine but can be deployed by women for their own purposes, to
defend things such as the individual’s right to freedom from the fear of do-
mestic and sexual violence. Women across the globe are actively appropri-
ating human rights discourse to render it more fully human. Notwithstand-
ing her earlier criticisms of rights discourse, MacKinnon congratulates this
movement for “beginning to make human rights an honest term” (MacKin-
non 2006, 2), hoping that “human rights can give back the humanity the
rapist takes away” (MacKinnon 2006, 14, see also 105). She declares that
“a worldwide movement of women... is remaking equality... [this] is
not premised on being the same as men, but on ending violation and abuse
and second-class citizenship because one is a woman.... From this work
has come a concept of equality as lack of hierarchy rather than sameness or
difference... a refusal to settle for anything less than a single standard of
human dignity and entitlement” (MacKinnon 2006, 107–108).
From even this brief foray into the idea of women’s rights as human
rights,^25 we can discern some of the ways in which it realizes Wollstone-
craft’s pioneering vision of women as rights-bearers. One crucial require-
ment for portraying women’s rights as human rights is questioning how the
public-private separation has traditionally been drawn. As Nussbaum says,
“recently, feminists have won international recognition of many important
human rights of women. But to do so they have had to challenge the public-
private distinction, which is deeply bound up with traditional liberal rights
thinking” (Nussbaum 2006, 290; see also Okin 2005, 86 – 87; Okin and
Ackerly 1999, 155). As implied above, rights discourse had focused on
protecting rights in the public realm, keeping citizens maximally free from
government intervention. The household was depicted as a private space,
into which government should intrude as little as possible. However, this
version of the public-private distinction conceals the ways in which a per-
son’s rights can be violated in the household.
Wollstonecraft does not adhere to any strict public-private separation
(Abbey 1999, 87, 90; see also Sapiro 1996, 35 –37; Muller 1996, 51;
Stetson 1996, 171–172). On the contrary, she repeatedly acknowledges
their mutual implication, insisting that “public spirit must be nurtured by
private virtue” (169) because “public affections, as well as public virtues,
must ever grow out of the private character” (193). For that reason, the
“truly benevolent legislator... [makes] private virtue... the cement of
public happiness” (174). Women’s “private virtue” should serve the “public
benefi t” (178). She believes, as we have seen, that granting women rights