6 Editor’s Introduction
literally spilt their blood in the colonial sugar trade, women lost the chance
to develop their full human potential through their subjection to men and
the culture of feminine propriety. The abolitionist Wollstonecraft was con-
cerned to liberate “one half of the human species” from arbitrary condi-
tions of oppression, not downplay the severity of the oppression of slaves.
While earlier eighteenth-century feminist essays by Sophia, Condorcet,
and de Gouges had also defended equal rights for the sexes, Wollstone-
craft’s 1792 treatise systematically addressed the philosophical question
of why women’s rights were a kind of human rights. Equally important,
the Rights of Woman produced an infl uential rhetorical model for making
such universalistic human rights arguments, which in turn generated an
inter national feminist political idiom. Dedicating to Wollstonecraft’s mem-
ory her 1799 Letter to the Women of England, on the Injustice of Mental
Subordination, Mary Robinson archly queried, “Let me ask this plain and
rational question — is not woman a human being, gifted with all the feel-
ings that inhabit the bosom of man?” (1799, 2). This question would be an-
swered affi rmatively by hundreds of other readers of Wollstonecraft from
around the world, so that by 1901, the historian Elvira Lopez of Argentina
could describe the Rights of Woman as the founding text behind the inter-
nationalization of the modern feminist movement (1901, 168).
Wollstonecraft’s arguments for women’s rights as human rights in many
ways overlap with the defi nitions of these terms in contemporary inter-
national human rights law. In June 1993, the United Nations’ World Con-
ference on Human Rights built on the growing international conception of
women’s rights as a kind of human rights. Produced from this conference,
the Vienna Declaration used the term “human rights of women” in two
interrelated ways. First, it meant women’s shared rights with men — such
as nourishment, safety, and education — and women’s entitlement to equal
access to these human rights, without gender discrimination. Second, it
meant women’s rights as human beings to be free from “gender-specifi c
abuses” such as “murder, systematic rape, sexual slavery, and forced preg-
nancy,” as was tragically prevalent in “situations of armed confl ict” (UN
General Assembly 1993).
The Rights of Woman made a case for women’s entitlement to both
types of human rights. In the category of women’s shared and equal rights
with men, Wollstonecraft advocated universal primary education for chil-
dren and uniform “civil and political rights” for adults (23).^1 In the cat-
egory of women’s human rights to be free from gender-specifi c abuses, she
supported laws, economic policies, and deep cultural reforms that would
prevent the exploitation of poor women as prostitutes,^2 reduce women’s