U-


WOLLSTONECRAFT, MILL, AND WOMEN'S HUMAN RIGHTS


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EILEEN HUNT BOTTING

Wollstonecraft,
Mill, and Women's
Human Rights
Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS
NEW HAVEN AND LONDON


Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of
Philip Hamilton McMillan of the Class of 1894, Yale College.
Copyright @ 2016 by Eileen Hunt Botting.
All rights reserved.
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This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992
(Permanence of Paper).
109 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1


CONTENTS

Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Women's Human Rights as
Integral to Universal Human Rights 1
one A Philosophical Genealogy of Women's Human Rights 26
two Foundations of Universal Human Rights: Wollstonecraft's
Rational Theology and Mill's Liberal Utilitarianism 70
three Theories of Human Development: Wollstonecraft and
Mill on Sex, Gender, and Education 116
four The Problem of Cultural Bias: Wollstonecraft, Mill, and
Western Narratives of Women's Progress  155
five Human Stories: Wollstonecraft, Mill, and
the Literature of Human Rights  204
Notes 249
Index 293


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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First, I need to thank Bill Frucht for arranging the thoughtful
readers' reports on the book that have encouraged me to develop it
into its current form. In addition, I have benefited immensely from
the mentoring of Nancy Hirschmann, Virginia Sapiro, Gordon
Schochet, Ian Shapiro, Rogers M. Smith, Steven B. Smith, and Syl-
vana Tomaselli. Chapter 4 is partly based on my research and writing
for an article cowritten with my former undergraduate student Sean
Kronewitter, "Westernization and Women's Rights: Non-Western
European Responses to Mill's Subjection of Women, 1869-1908,"
Political Theory 40:4 (August 2012), 464-94, and an article cowrit-
ten with Dr. Charlotte Hammond Matthews of the University of
Edinburgh, "Overthrowing the Floresta-Wollstonecraft Myth for
Latin American Feminism," Gender and History 26:1 (April 2014),
64-83. Chapter 5 draws on my work for an article cowritten with
my former undergraduate students Christine Carey Wilkerson and
Elizabeth N. Kozlow, "Wollstonecraft as an International Feminist
Meme," Journal of Women's History 26:2 (Summer 2014), 13-38. In
both chapters 4 and 5, I built on some of my arguments originally
written for the essay "The Personal Is Political: Wollstonecraft's
Witty, First-Person, Feminist Voice," in Mary Wollstonecraft, A
Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Eileen Hunt Botting (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 261-79. In 2008 and 2011, the
Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of
Notre Dame provided funding to support the professional transla-
tion of a variety of texts used to chronicle Wollstonecraft's and Mill's
international reception. The Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal
Arts at Notre Dame enabled me to hire a great copy editor, Mary
Copeland, and an excellent research assistant, Cameron O'Bannon.
Finally, this book is for my family-the living, the dead, and those
yet to be born.

vii


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INTRODUCTION
WOMEN'S HUMAN RIGHTS AS INTEGRAL
TO UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS
Wollstonecraft and Mill: Two Watersheds
for the Idea of Women's Human Rights
The idea of women's human rights is the view that women are
entitled to equal rights with men because of the sexes' shared sta-
tus as human beings. Mary Wollstonecraft first and John Stuart Mill
after her were the primary philosophical architects of this view.
Wollstonecraft developed a rational theological justification for the
idea that women held equal rights alongside men, while Mill built a
secular liberal utilitarian foundation for the same argument. Each
of these watershed contributions to theories of women's human
rights-the first religious, the second secular-is best understood
as emerging from a sequential (if often implicit) dialogue. Looking
backward, this dialogue moved significantly beyond past traditions
of thought concerning the rights of persons, which had been biased
toward, and even exclusively focused upon, men. Going forward,
their international reception by both Western and non-Western in-
tellectuals ensured that Wollstonecraft and Mill have shaped debates
about women's human rights on a global scale. There have been
many dozens of thinkers and activists from around the world who
helped to form this powerful political concept, in part through a
dialogue with these two innovative schools of thought.
In order to argue for the human rights of women, Wollstonecraft,
Mill, and their international interlocutors were forced to reconceive
the notion of human rights itself. They realized that the idea of hu-
man rights could not be universal-that is, apply equally to each
and every human being-without the explicit inclusion of women,
or "half the human race." Without such universal coverage for men
and women alike, the idea of human rights would not be coherent,


INTRODUCTION

let alone just. Wollstonecraft's and Mill's joint reconceptualization
of human rights undermined the idea of the patriarchal family and
its traditional rationalizations: for until the family underwent an
egalitarian transformation, human rights would not be available to
women. Their shared understanding of universal human rights also
threatened to destabilize a range of patriarchal institutions and prac-
tices related to marriage, education, law, government, and political
economy. Given its global reach-actual and potential-the idea of
women's human rights should be understood as a central concept for
modern political philosophy. Yet its intellectual history has largely
been untold until now.'
Defining Women's Human Rights
Before we can understand or even trace the intellectual history of
the idea of women's human rights as rooted in Wollstonecraft, Mill,
and their global readership, we need to have a grasp of the concept's
more recent definition in world politics and international law. The
1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognized "the equal
rights of men and women" in its preamble. Yet the declaration's only
other specific mention of women, in article 16, strongly associated
them with their traditional reproductive roles within marriage and
the family: "Men and women of full age, without any limitation due
to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found
a family." Second-wave feminists underscored the moral problems
with the marginalized and domesticated status of women within ap-
peals to universal human rights after World War II. Women's rights
were not typically seen as integral to a general set of human rights to
which women were entitled on the basis of their humanity but rather
were seen as rights that they possessed on the basis of their gender
roles and sexual functions. In her 1966 Statement of Purpose for the
National Organization for Women, Betty Friedan called for a re-
newed attention "to the proposition that women, first and foremost,
are human beings, who, like all other people in our society, must
have the chance to develop their fullest human potential."2

2


INTRODUCTION

After the adoption of the Convention on the Elimination of All
Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) by the General
Assembly of the United Nations in 1979, the idea of women's hu-
man rights became a cornerstone of United Nations development
programs, state constitutions, and democratic social movements
around the globe. Charlotte Bunch contributed to making the idea
into a feminist idiom, through her advisory roles in the United Na-
tions and her founding of a research institute on women and global
leadership at Rutgers University in 1989. The same year, feminist
activists from the Philippines-based GABRIELA women's coalition
had inspired her with the slogan "women's rights are human rights."
In a 1990 article, Bunch proposed that theorists and policy mak-
ers take a more "creative" approach to human rights. The ongoing
"feminist transformation of human rights," if more broadly adopted,
could challenge the "narrow" legal definition of human rights so that
"women's lives" would be recognized as an integral part of the hu-
man experience that international law sought to protect.3
Held in June 1993, the United Nations' World Conference on Hu-
man Rights built on the rising international view that women's rights
are a kind of human rights. Participants in the conference produced
the Vienna Declaration on Human Rights. The Vienna Declaration
represented a milestone for human rights and for feminism because
of its definition of the term "human rights of women" for interna-
tional law. The document 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. As a corollary, it
entailed women's equal access to these human rights, without gender
discrimination. Second, it meant women's rights as human beings to
be free from "gender-specific abuses" such as "murder, systematic
rape, sexual slavery, and forced pregnancy," as was tragically preva-
lent in "situations of armed conflict."4
The first branch of the Vienna Declaration's definition of women's
human rights presented those rights as equally shared with men, on
the basis of their shared and equal status as human beings. As stated
in article 1, "The human rights of women and of the girl-child are an

3


INTRODUCTION

inalienable, integral and indivisible part of universal human rights."
This conception of women's human rights was identical to the con-
ception of universal human rights promulgated by the Universal
Declaration in 1948. Its rhetorical formulation, however, aimed to
remind people that women are human like men and therefore are
entitled to share the same basic human rights as men.5
An offshoot of this first definition of women's human rights
specified a fundamental right to nondiscrimination. Reinforcing
CEDAW, the Vienna Declaration called for the "elimination of gen-
der bias in the administration of justice" as one of the human rights
to which both women and men were entitled. This universalistic le-
gal principle of nondiscrimination, if implemented, would allow for
the practical possibility of equal access to the human rights shared
between the sexes. This principle had to be implemented in a way
that respected the equality of men and women in order to realize
its objective of ensuring their equal access to human rights such as
nourishment and education.6
The second branch of the Vienna Declaration's definition of
women's human rights did not dwell on abstract issues of justice, such
as defining equality of rights and access to them, but concentrated
rather on concrete issues of injustice. In particular, it focused on rem-
edying the gender-specific injustices women had faced because they
had historically been denied both entitlement and access to universal
human rights. To address these gender-specific injustices, the univer-
salistic concept of women's human rights had to be applied in a way
that recognized the fact that women on the whole had typically faced
particular kinds of human rights violations. The Vienna Declaration
specified sexual violence as the main and most troubling example of
a human rights violation that affected women more than men. Inde-
pendent of which sex was the victim, such violations of human rights
were wrong. Yet the differences in how sexual violence affected men
and women were real and thus relevant for future lawmaking. Be-
cause they had been disproportionately subjected to sexual violence,
women around the globe had an urgent need for new laws and poli-
cies that explicitly protected their gender against further violations

4


INTRODUCTION

of their human rights to bodily integrity, sexual choice and expres-
sion, personal security, and, most important, life itself.7
Taken together, the two branches of the Vienna Declaration's def-
inition of women's human rights raise a paradox. How can women's
human rights, such as the right not to be raped, be both universal in
scope and particular to women? Put another way, how can human
rights function as absolute moral standards at the same time as they
are tailored to address contingencies of gender, culture, time, and
place?
A resolution to this paradox is implicit in the Vienna Declaration's
two-branch approach to defining women's human rights. Imagine the
two branches of the definition of women's human rights as springing
from their roots in the Universal Declaration, especially its pream-
ble's statement of "the equal and inalienable rights of all members of
the human family." With this image in mind, the right not to be raped
may be categorized under the branch of shared and equal human rights
for men and women as well as under the branch of gender-specific hu-
man rights for women. Because both kinds of women's human rights
are derivative from universal human rights, the right not to be raped is
ultimately a universal human right even if particular laws and policies
at any given time or place focus on women's special and urgent need
for its assurance. The two-part structure of the legal definition of
women's human rights suits its application to the concrete complexi-
ties of politics and law, including the global problem of discrimina-
tion against women and how it intersects with other dangerous preju-
dices. The internal complexity of the idea also suggests its interest for
abstract debates in moral, political, and feminist philosophy, such as
the relationship between the universal and the particular, the absolute
and the relative, as well as conceptions of equality and difference.8
Tracing a Genealogy of Women's Human Rights:
Wollstonecraft, Mill, and Beyond
The philosophical roots of this international legal definition of
women's human rights can indeed be traced long before the United

5


INTRODUCTION

Nations' human rights declarations of 1993 and 1948. Through this
first book-length comparative study of the political theories of Woll-
stonecraft (759-97) and Mill (1806-73), I argue that they repre-
sent two watershed moments-the former religious and the latter
secular-in the development of this influential modern political
concept. The concept of women's human rights grew not from the
heavily invoked, revolutionary-era idea of the "rights of man" but
rather from the more radical idea of the "rights of woman." The
introduction of the concept of the rights of woman amid the late
eighteenth-century European and American discourses on "natural
rights" and the "rights of man" made the emergent idea of "human
rights" universal in scope, applying to each and every human. As
Wollstonecraft argued in 1792, it was necessary to revise the con-
stitution of the French republic to include "the rights of woman" in
order to realize "JUSTICE for one half of the human race." Without
the rights of woman, the rights of man demanded by the French
revolutionaries could merely be understood as rights for the male
half of the human species.9
Her studied and sympathetic attention to the particular, gender-
based injustices that faced women of her time led Wollstonecraft to
theorize the necessity of including women in any universalistic and
egalitarian definition of what she called "the rights of humanity."
Her friend Thomas Paine had once used the term "human rights"
in his 1792 treatise The Rights of Man, Part the Second, but he did not
dwell on the issue of the rights of woman. Wollstonecraft's signal
contribution to political theory was to systematically explain why
any such concept of the "rights of humanity" or "human rights"
must refer equally and explicitly to both women and men, girls and
boys in order to be universalistic in both its conceptual scope and
its potential applications. Other prominent women's rights advo-
cates from the late eighteenth century-such as French revolution-
aries Nicolas de Condorcet and Olympe de Gouges as well as the
pseudonymous "Sophia" before them in England-had also argued
for the equal rights of men and women. Unlike these shorter es-
says, Wollstonecraft's 1792 book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

6


INTRODUCTION

comprehensively treated the questions of why and how the sexes
should have equal rights in all domains of human life. Translated into
French, Spanish, German, Dutch, Danish, and Czech, and published
in multiple English editions, Wollstonecraft's Rights of Woman also
decisively impacted the terms of the international philosophical and
political debates on women's rights for roughly the first century after
its debut in London.10
Despite Wollstonecraft's significance as a systematic theorist of
why women's rights are integral to universal human rights, philo-
sophical genealogies of the concept of women's human rights have
typically reached only as far back as Mill's 1869 book The Subjec-
tion of Women. As the first major secular philosopher of women's
human rights, Mill exerted an expansive influence in the twentieth
century-especially on liberal political theorists such as John Rawls,
Susan Okin, and Martha Nussbaum-but his influence meant that
the history of the idea was often cut short. I begin with Wollstone-
craft, because her Rights of Woman was the first internationally re-
nowned philosophical treatise to analytically address women's rights
among the radical political questions raised by the French Revolu-
tion. Prior to Mill, Wollstonecraft was the most significant feminist
political philosopher and icon in the Atlantic world and its colonies,
as much for as despite her scandalous reputation as a sexual radical.
Mill's Subjection of Women was published in twenty-six non-English
editions, seventeen countries, twelve European languages, and three
non-European languages between 1869 and 1928. The global popu-
larity of The Subjection of Women gave it even greater power than the
Rights of Woman to inform both Western and non-Western thinkers'
approaches to defending the human rights of women."
By approaching the question of the evolution of women's hu-
man rights through the genre of philosophical genealogy, I follow
Friedrich Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals (1887) in method
and intent. Nietzsche sketched the development of the modern West-
ern ideas of good and evil through their transformations in ancient
Greek, Christian, and modern European culture. He did not aim to
provide a comprehensive, uncritical, or dispassionate narrative of the

7


INTRODUCTION

evolution of Western morality. Rather, he sought to tell a conceptual
story of how these ideas arose and were transformed by larger cul-
tural and political trends such as religion and democracy. Moreover,
he sketched the development of these values into order to spur the
questioning of them. Similarly, my objective is to reveal the major
contours of the philosophical development and reception of women's
human rights. By connecting the intellectual history of the past with
the politics of the present, such a genealogy instigates moral debate
on the idea in question.
In any philosophical genealogy written in the spirit of Nietzsche,
the author ought to acknowledge her own normative philosophical
commitments. This honesty of perspective allows for the story (in
this case, the origins and development of women's human rights) to
unfold in a way that more fully engages the issues it raises, including
those raised by such normative commitments. Some of my commit-
ments lie with the feminist liberal tradition. Feminist liberalism is a
family of philosophical approaches to the problem of women's sub-
jection that prioritize women's and gender issues (including women's
rights to equal educational, employment, and political opportunities
alongside men) among its other liberal democratic political com-
mitments (such as legitimate representative government and social
justice for the poor and marginalized). Feminist liberalism has been
critical of liberalism, because the latter alone does not always fulfill
its own egalitarian principles of justice with respect to women, in
theory or in practice.'2
At the same time as Marxism, psychoanalysis, and existentialism
inspired a variety of feminist philosophical alternatives to the school
of Wollstonecraft and Mill, feminist liberalism came to be widely
critiqued over the course of the twentieth century. Wollstonecraft
and Mill became scapegoats for such criticism, functioning as one-
dimensional caricatures of feminist liberalism for feminists and non-
feminists alike. The stridency on the feminist side was especially
strong. For both radical feminists such as Zillah Eisenstein and con-
servative feminists such as Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, "liberal femi-

8


INTRODUCTION

nism" was a negative yet apt epithet for the tradition, as exemplified
by Wollstonecraft's Rights of Woman. From both the right and the
left, the pejorative use of the term "liberal feminist" neatly captured
the despised individualistic, rationalistic, and bourgeois aspects of
Wollstonecraft's and Mill's political thought.'I
Such critiques have assumed, however, that Wollstonecraft, Mill,
and their followers are primarily liberals and secondarily femi-
nists. Paying attention to their defining contributions to the idea of
women's human rights allows us to develop a counterinterpretation of
their legacies for feminism today. Wollstonecraft and Mill exercised
a critical style of feminist inquiry into the value of liberal ideas for
women, which ultimately put feminism first and liberalism second.
Liberalism had to meet certain feminist standards of justice-such
as the actual guarantee of equal human rights for the sexes-in order
to realize its own basic moral principles. In Nussbaum's formulation,
these liberal principles could be stated most generally as (1) recog-
nizing the "equal dignity of persons," (2) respecting the power of
"moral choice" within each person, and (3) ensuring the consequent
right of each person to fair treatment by society at large. Nussbaum
further argued that feminist criticism had the potential to transform
liberalism in a way that made it "more deeply consistent with its own
most foundational ideas."'4
Fundamentally, I also share Okin's feminist liberal conception of
the integral place of women's rights within a universal and egalitar-
ian conception of human rights. As Okin wrote in 1998, five years
after the Vienna Declaration, "The male bias of human rights think-
ing and its priorities had to change in order for women's rights to
be fully recognized as human rights." By male bias, she meant the
historic tendency for male-dominated societies to perpetuate legal
and cultural norms that discriminate in favor of men against women.
Similarly to Mill in chapter 1 of his Subjection of Women, she acknowl-
edged the practical necessity of confronting the fact of male bias in
public opinion about women's rights. As Mill conceded in the open-
ing pages of his argument, "I am willing to accept the unfavorable

9


INTRODUCTION

conditions which the prejudice assigns to me." He consequently ad-
mitted that the "burthen of proof" was upon him to demonstrate
women's desert of equal rights with men, and that society would be
better off for granting them. More than a century later, Okin fol-
lowed a similar strategy in her women's human rights advocacy. The
male-biased presumption against women's rights had to be exposed,
analyzed, and proven to be logically inconsistent with any concept of
universal human rights, before public opinion could change."
Although male bias posed a serious obstacle to the recognition
of women's rights as human rights, it was hardly the only prejudice
to which human rights discourse was prone. Cultural biases, rooted
in racism, nationalism, and classism, often intersected with sexism.
Together, such prejudices produced even more complex, and of-
ten seemingly insurmountable, barriers to broad understanding of
women's rights as a kind of human rights. For example, Wollstone-
craft and Mill regularly appealed to a Western European standard
of women's progress that presumed the comparatively lesser status
of women in non-Western European cultures, particularly among
Muslim and Hindu peoples. Although Wollstonecraft and Mill ar-
gued for the human rights of women and men in a universal sense,
their Eurocentric prejudices compromised the global scope of their
abstract definitions of women's human rights when applied in rhe-
torical practice.
Looking back at the problem of cultural bias in Wollstonecraft and
Mill, I share the contemporary postcolonial feminist theorist Inder-
pal Grewal's ethical concerns with such Western-biased uses of the
idea of women's human rights. In 1999, Grewal set forth a post-
colonial model for assessing the moral ambiguities of the concept
of women's human rights, particularly as it applies to non-Western
cultures. Grewal contended that the Vienna Declaration masked the
imperial dimension of the idea of women's human rights with its ap-
pealing language of universal human values. Although she supported
the idea that feminism ought to be international in its scope and
goals, she was skeptical of the view that the United Nations' "hu-

Jo


INTRODUCTION

man rights regime" was actually representative of the interests and
needs of women in the developing world. Rather, the United Na-
tions' human rights declarations were a product of complex geopo-
litical systems that reified inequalities of power across national, class,
ethnic, religious, and gender lines. The result was an approach to
women's human rights that privileged the perspectives and interests
of the West against those of the rest of the world, most especially the
postcolonial and developing world. Focusing on India, Grewal as-
sessed how universalistic human rights discourse did not address the
particular-culturally rooted, religiously based, nationally driven,
and economically sustained-problems that faced women of her an-
cestral nation. Instead, universalistic human rights discourse had the
tendency to treat women's problems homogenously, and to use an
implicitly or explicitly Western liberal standard of justice in attempts
to address abuses of them.16
This book brings together Okin's concern with confronting male
bias and Grewal's concern with tackling cultural bias in the defini-
tion of women's human rights. My primary aim is to explain how
a revised and internationalized theory of women's human rights,
grown out of Wollstonecraft and Mill but stripped of their Eurocen-
tric biases, is a valuable contribution to thinking about universal hu-
man rights today. I understand this theory of women's human rights
to be a foundational plank of feminist liberalism.
Indeed, contemporary feminist liberals have connected their egal-
itarian theories of justice to the tradition rooted in Wollstonecraft
and Mill. More important, they have seen the enduring relevance
of this school of thought for addressing grave problems of global
justice today. I follow Amartya Sen, Nussbaum, and their philo-
sophical mentor Rawls in understanding global justice as the quest
for social justice-or the realization of human rights, as well as fair
and nondiscriminatory access to other public goods-at the interna-
tional or transnational level. Sen, for example, has recently treated
the Rights of Woman as a philosophical antecedent for his social jus-
tice theory, especially the idea that women across the world would be

II


INTRODUCTION

empowered by their societies to be "active agents of change" if they
were granted the basic freedom and rights necessary for their own
self-development."
I have written this genealogy in the spirit of Sen's recovery of
Wollstonecraft as a foundation for theorizing global justice in a cos-
mopolitan way. By cosmopolitan, I mean attempts to think globally
that are respectful to both a core set of universal human values and
relational differences within and across cultures. The Wollstonecraft-
ian strand of cosmopolitanism prioritizes universal human rights,
especially the basic right to agency itself, yet subsequently examines
how gender and other cultural differences affect the differential and
unjust treatment of women within and across societies. The inter-
rogation of such injustices paves the way for further allegations, or
aspirational claims, of women's need for human rights in law, policy,
and culture. According to Sen, such allegations derive their creative
force from their imaginative character. By alleging a human right
for women that does not yet exist in practice, an advocate may open
up new vistas of thought on what human rights could and should be
in the future. For Sen as for Bunch before him, such creative, femi-
nist transformations of human rights depend upon far-seeing and
often courageous political demands on behalf of women's "agency
and well-being."'8
Feminist theory has become known for its diversity of approaches
to conceptualizing and understanding the thorny problems of so-
cial justice that face women. Even with the plentiful divisions within
contemporary feminist theory, the widely accepted twentieth-
century social scientific distinction between gender and sex has pro-
duced an important conceptual overlap across many of its schools of
thought. This gender-sex distinction draws a line between socially
constructed gender roles and the biologically based sexual differ-
ences that manifest across individuals in the human species. Gender
roles are assigned, performed, and sometimes subverted within so-
cial contexts, and are often culturally specific. Sexual differences are
understood as rooted in the physiology of the body and its genetics.
In the words of the physical anthropologist Agustin Fuentes, "Sex

12


INTRODUCTION

is a biological state that is measured via chromosomal content and a
variety of physiological and developmental measures. Gender is the
roles, expectations and perceptions that a given society has for the
sexes." The upshot of this distinction is that gender roles are under-
stood as products of human society, its cultures, and its economic
and political systems, and as such, may be distinguished from sex
understood in biological or genetic terms.19
Teasing out the ways that gender roles are symbolically and in-
stitutionally associated with sex within human cultures, yet are not
in fact dependent on sex, has become a core theoretical project of
feminism. One of the most influential examples of this project was
Wollstonecraft's rejection ofJean-Jacques Rousseau's thesis that girls
are by nature inclined to play with dolls and admire their looks in the
mirror. For her, this was a classic case of a male theorist who mistook
the effects of a male-dominated culture for its causes. Breaking a new
path for male feminist philosophers, Mill made the related point that
those who believe "the inequality of rights between men and women
has no other source than the law of the strongest" conveniently
ignored that the rule of law had institutionalized such relations of
domination. He pointedly asked: "But was there ever any domina-
tion which did not appear natural to those who possessed it? "20
This genealogy of women's human rights builds on the gender-sex
distinction, conceptualizing gender alongside race, ethnicity, class,
religion, and nationality as identity traits that are sculpted within
human cultures. Although I interpret Wollstonecraft's and Mill's
feminist theories of human development as approaching remark-
ably close to the contemporary social scientific distinction between
gender and sex, I also examine how Wollstonecraft and Mill were
not entirely thorough in exposing the cultural contingencies that
fashioned religion, class, and nationality. This tendency in their po-
litical theories informed their-sometimes unreflective, sometimes
purposive, but always paradoxical and troubling-perpetuation of
their British culture's prevalent stereotypes of non-Western, non-
Christian peoples, especially Muslims and Hindus, in their argu-
ments for women's human rights. Although Wollstonecraft and Mill

13


INTRODUCTION

technically understood that male bias was a kind of artificial cultural
bias that could be gradually transformed through public criticism,
they did not subject their Eurocentric prejudices to the same rigor-
ous critique. For this reason, I draw a distinction between male bias
and cultural bias in my analysis of their writings, while acknowledg-
ing that they, strictly speaking, categorized the former as a subset of
the latter in their respective political theories.
By looking at an intellectually and culturally diverse array of re-
sponses to Wollstonecraft and Mill, we see how a range of politi-
cal thinkers have responded to their arguments for women's human
rights as well as their rhetorical reliance on negative cultural stereo-
types. Mill's liberal utilitarianism made his arguments easy to adapt
in other cultures and religions, as it did not make metaphysical de-
mands on his readers. On the other hand, it was the resonance of
Wollstonecraft's brand of rational (and radical) Christian dissent that
made her arguments and rhetoric for women's human rights imme-
diately influential in the early feminist abolitionist movement, espe-
cially among Unitarians in Britain and Quakers in the United States.
Her metaphysical and religious orientation did not lend itself to po-
litical and cultural adaptation beyond the transatlantic popularity of
rational dissenting Protestantism in the first half of the nineteenth
century, however.
Mill thus eclipsed Wollstonecraft as a philosophical source for
women's human rights arguments at the turn of the twentieth cen-
tury, as evidenced by his spirited global reception on the woman
question from political magazines in Meiji Japan to parliaments from
New Zealand to the Southern Cone. By the time an international
group of political representatives collaborated to produce the Uni-
versal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, the language of human
rights had been secularized. This genealogy outlines how the creative
and critical adoption of Mill's liberal utilitarianism by a variety of in-
tellectuals from around the globe aided the secularization of the idea
of universal human rights. It also illustrates some of the enduring
ethical problems with this secular trend in human rights discourse

14


INTRODUCTION

including pervasive cultural insensitivity to non-Western European
religious practices and prejudicial Western assumptions about the
backwardness of such religions on gender issues.2'
To better grapple with these ethical issues surrounding the cul-
tural biases of women's human rights advocates, I attend to the social
scientific distinction between "insider" and "outsider" perspectives
on cultures. Following the work of Brooke Ackerly, I take the insider
perspective to be a point of view held by a researcher who studies the
community or culture to which she at least partly affiliates herself.
The outsider perspective is the obverse: a point of view held by a
researcher who studies a community or culture to which she does
not affiliate herself. Affiliation may be internal (holding at least some
beliefs of the group) and/or external (expressing outward signs of
belonging at least to the margins of the group). Building on the femi-
nist standpoint theory of Patricia Hill Collins, Ackerly has advanced
a third category, what she terms the "multi-sited critic," a point of
view that bridges these insider and outsider perspectives. The multi-
sited critic is a researcher who self-identifies as bridging several cul-
tural sites and self-consciously uses a variety of insider and outsider
perspectives in studying the value of the practices of these groups
and their belief systems. The difficulty of achieving this multisited
or multisided perspective in practice does not compromise its value
as a normative ideal to which people may aspire in both their private
lives and their public work.22
Throughout, I often read Wollstonecraft as embodying the in-
sider perspective of a woman of faith who has faced patriarchal in-
justice partly due to her Christian culture, yet enacted an immanent
and personally compelling critique of this oppression from within
her community. I also tend to read Mill as a kind of outsider social
scientist. As a man, he stood outside the direct experience of patriar-
chal oppression by virtue of his gender, but witnessed the suffering
it caused the women in his life and felt the pain it indirectly brought
upon him. Mill sought to comparatively study the global phenom-
enon of patriarchy in order to diagnose its pathologies and prescribe

15


INTRODUCTION

its social remedies, so as to remove it as an obstacle to happiness. On
the other hand, both Wollstonecraft and Mill spoke to the ethical
questions of why, when, and how people should strive to bridge these
insider and outsider perspectives in human rights advocacy. They
advanced reasons for achieving, partly or fully, a multisited point of
view on how different cultures influence the moral formulation and
political dissemination of women's human rights.
One final methodological caveat: this book provides an interna-
tional philosophical genealogy of the concept of women's human
rights, not a definitive causal story about how Wollstonecraft and
Mill drove the development of this idea beyond philosophy and
in its institutionalization in law and politics. The latter cannot be
demonstrated with any certainty, but the former can be sketched
historically and philosophically-in a way that I hope will be pro-
ductive and informative for scholars in humanistic and social scien-
tific disciplines. This genealogy is comparative on two levels: first, it
identifies and analyzes the important similarities and differences be-
tween Wollstonecraft's theory of women's human rights and Mill's;
second, it looks at a range of non-Western European responses to
these watershed theories as a way of illustrating how a robust cross-
cultural and international dialogue has shaped the reception of the
idea of women's human rights since the nineteenth century.
Especially through its international reception, feminist liberal-
ism has been able to shed a crude Eurocentrism in favor of a cos-
mopolitan yet culturally sensitive ethic of humanistic regard for the
welfare of women. Non-Western European feminist thinkers have
revised and internationalized Wollstonecraft's and Mill's theories of
women's human rights, by critically engaging their books as well as
their life stories from the nineteenth century forward. Such cross-
cultural dialogues on women's human rights have contributed to the
ongoing philosophical reconciliation of feminism with liberalism. As
Nussbaum argued, in the conclusion of her Women and Human De-
velopment (2000), the goal of a globally oriented feminist liberalism
is not to strip human communities of their cultural and religious


INTRODUCTION

traditions but rather to find ways of fairly balancing the demands of
cultural affiliation, religion, and universal human rights.23
Overview and Chapter Summary
The first chapter opens with a genealogy of the philosophical idea
of rights and its limited applications to women from the late medi-
eval era through the early nineteenth century. Against this intellec-
tual background, we better understand why Wollstonecraft turned
to a universalistic, rational Christian metaphysics and ethics, and
why Mill turned to a liberal, rule utilitarianism, to justify the integral
place of women in any coherent conception of the rights of humans.
Chapter 2 proceeds to comparatively evaluate Wollstonecraft's re-
ligious and Mill's secular foundations for justifying women's hu-
man rights, displaying each of their real limitations as much as their
strengths. Although contemporary liberals have taken nonfounda-
tionalist, or purely political, approaches to justifying human rights
in response to what Rawls called "the fact of pluralism," I argue that
the respective foundationalist approaches of Wollstonecraft and Mill
remain politically salient in different ways for defending women's
human rights in conditions of cultural pluralism. Chapter 3 explains
why their dramatically different theories of rights fit into their strik-
ingly similar virtue theories of human development, and their resul-
tant backing for state-mandated universal primary education (UPE).
I consider the moral problem that their consequentialist arguments
for the societal benefits of female education may reinforce the gen-
der biases that they seek to undercut. Chapter 4 focuses on the re-
lated problem of cultural bias for women's human rights arguments.
Wollstonecraft and Mill established a contradictory rhetorical model
for making women's human rights claims in the sense that it reduced
particular non-Western women to cultural stereotypes rather than
respecting them as distinct individuals and peoples worthy of human
rights in the first place. However, rhetorical analysis of the arguments
of three early non-Western European respondents to the Rights of

I7


INTRODUCTION

Woman and The Subjection of Women demonstrates how it is possible
for feminist liberals to achieve a partial yet sufficiently ethical tran-
scendence of such cultural biases. Chapter 5 concludes the book by
resolving the paradox evoked by Wollstonecraft's and Mill's uses of
autobiography as a literary mode of women's human rights advocacy.
How can autobiography, as a genre predicated upon the subjective
biases of the author, serve as a vehicle for making nondiscrimina-
tory claims for universal human rights? First, Wollstonecraft, Mill,
and their international readership modeled how autobiography may
provide a stirring emotional and intersubjective basis for women's
human rights advocacy, even inspiring cross-cultural solidarity for
the cause. Second, they represented how writing, reading, and re-
sponding to autobiography may serve as forms of public resistance to
reductive or merely instrumental treatments of the human subject,
due to the genre's basic assumption of the intrinsic value of indi-
vidual human lives.24
Chapter z outlines the place of women in the evolution of rights
discourse in Western political thought prior to Wollstonecraft and
Mill. I begin this brief history of Western ideas of rights with the
late medieval philosophies of the Franciscan theologians John Duns
Scotus and William of Ockham and the Renaissance-era work of the
Spanish Jesuit and Scholastic theologian, Francisco Suirez. I exam-
ine the growth of interest in the moral and political status of women
in early modern theories of rights, freedom, and power, especially in
the social contract tradition of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-
Jacques Rousseau, and Immanuel Kant, but also in the appropria-
tions of Stoicism by Hugo Grotius and Rousseau. After tracing the
gendered development of political discourses on the "rights of man"
and the "rights of woman" in the wake of the French Revolution, I
explain how the deficiencies of past theories of rights-above all,
their male bias and sidelining of women-led Wollstonecraft and
Mill to develop two alternative foundations for a truly inclusive con-
cept of human rights. While Wollstonecraft drew from her mentor
Richard Price's dissenting Christian theology to forge a new meta-
physical and deontological grounding for women's human rights,


INTRODUCTION

Mill revised classical utilitarianism into a liberal utilitarianism that
placed women's human rights on a wholly secular foundation.
Chapter 2 delves further into the question of the moral foundations
for human rights, and the strengths and weaknesses of Wollstone-
craft's and Mill's respective answers to it. Although Wollstonecraft's
capacious metaphysics built a big tent under which all humanity
could find coverage for their rights, its explicitly Christian frame-
work suited it more for persuading people who shared those same or
similar theological beliefs. In short, Wollstonecraft's theory of hu-
man rights fell short of realizing its universalistic ethics in practice.
Mill faced the opposite problem: his liberal theory of human rights
was wholly secular and utilitarian, requiring a comparatively minimal
set of moral beliefs from its adherents. The resultant issue was the
instrumental, and thus insecure, status of rights within his utilitarian
ethics and political theory. Mill's designation of utility as the sole
grounding for morality made his conception of rights instrumental
to its good consequences, especially the free and full development of
individuals. His theory of rights fell short of securing human rights
in any absolute or final sense, because the value of rights was always
determined in relation to the rule that the free and full development
of individuals should be fostered to ensure the greatest happiness
for all. Despite their different flaws, these two accounts of human
rights both fit Charles Beitz's definition of "naturalistic" founda-
tions for human rights: for Wollstonecraft and Mill, all human be-
ings held equal rights "by virtue of their humanity," or what makes
them human. Although Wollstonecraft's theory is grounded on her
rational theology, it is naturalistic in the sense that it depends upon
her conception of the human being as made in God's rational image.
By contrast, Mill's theory is secular (in that it contains no appeal to
theology, religion, or the supernatural) and nonmetaphysical (in that
it rejects the a priori approach of metaphysics in favor of an a poste-
riori, empirical approach to defining a conception of the human be-
ing in relation to a utilitarian conception of happiness). Mill's theory
nonetheless fits Beitz's definition of a naturalistic account of human
rights insofar as it relies upon a conception of the human being as

19


INTRODUCTION

a "progressive being," capable of free and full self-development to-
ward happiness.25
Partly because of their flaws, such foundationalist approaches are
not as prominent as nonfoundationalist approaches to justifying a
universalistic conception of human rights in contemporary liberal
political theory. Most famously represented by the later Rawls and
his philosophical followers such as Beitz, nonfoundationalist liberal
theories take a purely political approach to justifying human rights
by way of a hypothetical or actual international political consensus
or legal practice. Such a purely political approach does not appeal
to comprehensive doctrines, such as metaphysical or religious ideas,
or other robust and morally demanding conceptions of human de-
velopment, happiness, or the good life. In contrast, Wollstonecraft's
rational theology and Mill's liberal utilitarianism justified their re-
spectively metaphysical and nonmetaphysical theories of universal
human rights by way of their robust normative conceptions of the
human being.
Despite their joint reliance on "comprehensive" and thus con-
testable conceptions of humanity, the foundationalist approaches
of Wollstonecraft and Mill nonetheless remain politically relevant.
Their respectively religious and secular justifications of universal
human rights have implications for the practical question of how
to ethically advocate for women's human rights in a way that is re-
spectful to cultural differences yet also enables genuine reform on
behalf of the well-being of women. This is especially the case when
women's human rights are not yet recognized in culture or law but
must be alleged and defended in order to be institutionalized in the
future. The joint reliance by Wollstonecraft and Mill on thick moral
conceptions of the human being endowed their political theories
with strong yet inclusive normative standards by which they could
judge the value of extant or proposed laws, policies, and cultural
practices for women's and human development, as individuals or
in groups. This option of appealing to a strong normative standard
of humanity itself is crucial for debates on women's human rights
that often hinge on supposedly intractable conflicts between state

20


INTRODUCTION

sovereignty, individual freedom, and traditional cultural practices. A
basic and broad "concept of a person" can serve as a principled yet
practical point of moral orientation by which women's human rights
advocates may judge resolutions to these conflicts that are both ethi-
cal and persuasive. To test and compare the moral and practical value
of Wollstonecraft's and Mill's naturalistic accounts of human rights
in matters of political reform, I examine how their theories apply to
the question of reconciling women's human rights with the practice
of religious polygamy in nineteenth-century Mormon Utah and in
contemporary Islam.26
Chapter 3 compares Wollstonecraft's and Mill's theories of hu-
man development, particularly their views on the relevance of sex
and gender to education. I situate Wollstonecraft and Mill within
a modern liberal tradition of virtue ethics, which posits a virtuous
yet varied range of development outcomes as best or most happy for
human beings. Despite the differences in their philosophical founda-
tions for women's human rights, Wollstonecraft and Mill agreed that
girls have the same fundamental right as boys to receive an education
that would nurture the development of their core human capabili-
ties. Both prescribed a state mandate for UPE as a necessary prac-
tical step toward transforming the pernicious, male-biased gender
norms that had stunted women's self-development as well as human
development as a whole.
Given their concern for persuading governments to pay their ob-
ligation to provide girls and boys the same access to an education in
the broadest and most virtuous sense, it is not politically surprising
that Wollstonecraft and Mill dwelled on the extrinsic social benefits
of such an education rather than solely on its intrinsic benefits for
the children. Ethically, however, such consequentialist arguments
for women's right to education had the countervailing rhetorical ef-
fect of construing girls and their education as mere instruments to
broader social and political ends. This rhetorical strategy obscured
the principle of equal respect for human individuals that is the cor-
nerstone of both Wollstonecraft's and Mill's abstract foundations for
universal human rights. By emphasizing how the education of women

21


INTRODUCTION

would make men and society happier, Wollstonecraft and Mill rein-
forced the prevalent gender stereotype of women as passive or self-
less servants of their fathers, husbands, and children. Ironically, their
consequentialist arguments for the public benefits of UPE did not
escape gender bias so much as perpetuate it, despite their philosophi-
cal intentions to the contrary. To avoid such a pernicious feedback
loop, reformers ought to balance or even counteract appeals to the
public utility of UPE with regular reminders of its intrinsic value for
individual girls and women.
Chapter 4 confronts the place of Western prejudices within Woll-
stonecraft's and Mill's narratives of women's progress. Despite their
repeated defenses of a common human nature that united the sexes,
Wollstonecraft and Mill in their adaptations of Enlightenment phi-
losophies of history made their theories of women's human rights
less universalistic because of their Eurocentric biases. Following
philosophers such as Voltaire and Adam Smith, Wollstonecraft
and Mill assumed a Western European model of human economic
and cultural development. Like Lord Kames and Antoine-Leonard
Thomas, they condemned the low status of women in non-Western,
non-Christian cultures and argued for the advancement of women
based on such prejudiced Eurocentric comparisons with supposedly
backward Muslims and Hindus. Although Wollstonecraft and Mill
put strong feminist twists on these Western Eurocentric theories of
human progress, they did not escape their cultural biases.27
The critical examination of the place of cultural bias in their polit-
ical theories leads us to a more general ethical question: May one ad-
vocate a global standard of human rights without an imperial mind-
set that imposes one's own cultural biases upon others? Through an
international genealogy of the reception of Wollstonecraft and Mill
in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I reveal that some
of their earliest interlocutors also faced the problem of cultural bias.
Some replicated an Orientalist idiom for feminism and liberalism,
while others confronted, challenged, and ultimately subverted this
trend. Three nineteenth-century non-Western European feminist
liberals-Maria Tsebrikova of Russia, Martina Barros Borgono of

22


INTRODUCTION

Chile, and Elvira L6pez of Argentina-emerge from this reception
history as examples of the practical possibility of achieving a partial
yet sufficiently ethical transcendence of cultural bias in women's hu-
man rights advocacy. Tsebrikova, Borgono, and L6pez overcame a
tendency toward perpetuation of cultural bias within feminist liber-
alism through their self-reflective adoption of "rooted," or culturally
attuned, cosmopolitan perspectives in crafting universalistic argu-
ments for women's human rights. The comparative study of their re-
ception of Wollstonecraft and Mill suggests that feminist liberalism
may be reformulated in light of their and other non-Western Euro-
pean intellectuals' concern with making culturally sensitive claims
for the rights of women worldwide.28
Chapter 5 returns to the fundamental commitment of Wollstone-
craft and Mill to the universal human right to education, by explor-
ing how it prompted them to affirm the power of literacy and litera-
ture for women's human rights advocacy. In their literary writings,
Wollstonecraft and Mill incorporated the experiences of the women
they loved (such as Mary's friend Fanny Blood and John's wife, Har-
riet Taylor) into their personal narratives, making them function
as biographies as much as autobiographies. Such literary works as
Wollstonecraft's novel Mary, a Fiction (1788) and Mill's Autobiogra-
phy (1873) are thus better understood as (auto)biographies. Woll-
stonecraft and Mill can be read as contributing to the development
of a modern genre: the literature of human rights.
Building on testimony and witness of women's struggles for rec-
ognition of their human status, their (auto)biographical writings de-
veloped two narrative frameworks for advocating the human rights
of women: Wollstonecraft's stories of heroic womanhood and Mill's
stories of spiritual marriage. These narratives proved to have an in-
ternational impact. Wollstonecraft's first-wave feminist, and often
religious, readers from the United States and across Europe hailed
her as a "voice in the wilderness"-a feminist political prophet who
cleared the way for their formal organization of the women's rights
cause. Mill's representation of his spiritual marriage with Harriet
Taylor had an even more global reach, becoming an emotional

23


INTRODUCTION

touchstone for translators of The Subjection of Women from late
nineteenth-century Maharashtra and Prague to twentieth-century
Japan and South Korea.29
Despite their success in inspiring men and women from different
cultures to care about rectifying the social and political inequality
of the sexes, Wollstonecraft's and Mill's (auto)biographical writings
pose a series of philosophical questions for women's human rights
advocates. May one use subjective human stories as evidence to le-
gitimate universal human rights claims? If so, then how can such sto-
ries avoid being exploitative of the individuals whose lives and deaths
originally inspired them? By underscoring the necessary overlap be-
tween biography and autobiography, Wollstonecraft and Mill broke
down the apparent divide between "self" and "other." Not solely
subjective, their (auto)biographies wove their personal experiences
of love and friendship into larger intersubjective stories about the in-
trinsic value of human lives. Hence Wollstonecraft and Mill cleared
the way for writers of the literature of human rights to use testimony
and witness of the real joys and sorrows of human persons, without
reducing their subjects to mere means to a broader political end.
By reading, writing, and speaking about self, other, and their re-
lationships to each other, one gains literacy in the skills necessary
for a narrative practice of human rights advocacy. This narrative
practice produces sensitive and compelling human stories, which
have the emotional power to move people to act on their duty to
respect, provide, or allege the rights of self and others. As suggested
by Wollstonecraft's and Mill's vibrant global reception, such a con-
crete, passionate, and literary approach to advocating for women's
human rights may productively work in tandem with different ab-
stract rational justifications for universal human rights. This practi-
cal and narrative mode of human rights advocacy has been made into
history by ordinary people, whose lives, work, and stories show the
centrality of individuals and other nonstate actors to the sustenance
of the human rights tradition, past and present.30
Contemporary feminist political theorists such as Ackerly have
argued that Third World and non-Western feminisms are not only

24


INTRODUCTION

compatible with but have provided a grounding for international
women's human rights activism. Building on the visionary ideas of
postcolonial feminism, they have demonstrated that the study of
women's activism and work in the developing world was (and is) part
of the process of forging a humane, solidaristic, yet culturally sensi-
tive account of feminist social justice for women in a globalized po-
litical economy. Wollstonecraft, Mill, and Women's Human Rights is one
further contribution to this tradition of feminist thinking in which
liberalism's Western biases are critically assessed, but with the aim of
a cross-cultural dialogue that pushes forward a more rooted cosmo-
politan understanding of the human rights of women worldwide, and
how they play out in particular cultures and religious traditions.3I

25


A PHILOSOPHICAL GENEALOGY
OF WOMEN'S HUMAN RIGHTS
Entering the Labyrinth: The Debate on the Origin of Human Rights
The circuitous quality of intellectual histories of universal human
rights seems to be unavoidable. Entering the debate on the origins
of the modern idea of rights is much like stepping into the fantasti-
cal labyrinthine library imagined by Argentinian author Jorge Luis
Borges: one is forced to retrace one's steps, and the steps of scholars
past, in a futile attempt to find the elusive founding text to which the
apparently infinite collection of books on human rights refers back.
I begin, like most historians of rights, in late Enlightenment-era
Europe, then turn back to the late medieval era and the Renaissance,
traveling through neo-Stoic thought and the social contract tradi-
tion, only to arrive again at the American and French Revolutions
and their legacies for the globalizing political thought of the nine-
teenth century. By focusing on the marginalized place of women in
theories of rights before Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill,
we can better perceive the pivotal philosophical role that the inclu-
sion of women plays in postrevolutionary theories of universal human
rights. When studied against the background of previous theories of
rights and their real deficiencies in relation to women, the innova-
tiveness of Wollstonecraft's religious and Mill's secular approaches
to justifying women's human rights shines in high resolution.'
As Jack Donnelly has argued, the idea of human rights originates in
the West. He begins his history of the idea of universal human rights
amid "the rise of modern markets and modern states and the rise of
political claims of equality and toleration" in Europe. Richard Tuck,
Brian Tierney, and Annabel Brett have pushed further back into the
Western tradition, to the Roman Catholic theologians of the late
medieval era, to find the earliest known theories of subjective rights.
Subjective rights are those rights that belong to an individual human

26


A PHILOSOPHICAL GENEALOGY OF WOMEN'S HUMAN RIGHTS
subject or agent; for the medieval theologians, these primarily in-
cluded individual rights to property and the simple use of nature for
survival. The Protestant and neo-Stoic school of Hugo Grotius has
been identified as another important strain in the development of the
modern concept of the rights of individuals, especially in the inter-
national realm. The English and European social contract tradition,
beginning with Thomas Hobbes and extending through Immanuel
Kant, has also been commonly cited as a source for contemporary
theories of human rights.2
Moral cognates of rights, such as dignity and respect, have been
integral to non-Western cultures and religions, Confucianism, Hin-
duism, and Islam, from the earliest historical records. According to
Micheline Ishay and Paul Gordon Lauren, this ancient overlap in
moral norms across world religions and cultures provides a historical
basis for the international community's more recent institutionaliza-
tion of universal human rights laws. Political theorists as various as
Mary Ann Glendon, George Kateb, Amartya Sen, and Martha Nuss-
baum have used this "overlapping consensus" of intercultural moral
norms as a starting point for arguing that an idea of human dignity
is the historic basis for contemporary theories and laws concerning
universal human rights.3
These vexed philosophical questions of establishing the moral
foundation for rights, and understanding the relationship of rights
to other moral concepts, such as sentience, dignity, respect, or equal-
ity, are the topic of chapter 2. Here, I focus on the equally challeng-
ing question of the historical origins of the modern ethical-political
idea of subjective rights, especially for women. Since the European
Enlightenment, subjective rights have become a dominant politi-
cal concept. In the wake of the social contract tradition, they have
been commonly construed as moral entitlements of human beings,
like nourishment, freedom, education, and citizenship, which en-
able their survival and development. Subjective rights have been
conceptualized as grounded in the will, or agency, of human beings,
whether or not they have been theorized as derivative from an objec-
tive source of moral authority, such as natural law or positive law.4

27


A PHILOSOPHICAL GENEALOGY OF WOMEN'S HUMAN RIGHTS
In a complex adoption of social contract theory, the early
nineteenth-century German idealist philosopher G. W. F. Hegel
built his relational idea of individual rights on a thin conception of
the human subject. This human subject had a will, by which he could
distinguish himself from both internal and external natural forces.
Conscious of his own freedom of will, he could identify himself as
separate from his bodily desires or the physical obstacles to the satis-
faction of his desires. His claims to rights, for Hegel as well as many
rights theorists since, were an expression of his subjective will, the
practical human need for recognition and respect of one's individu-
ality in relation to others, and acknowledgment of his legal status.5
Driven by the desires and needs of individual human beings, sub-
jective rights are meant to be directed toward the legitimate use of
nature, property, freedom, or other forms of personal or political
power. Defining the moral bounds of the individual's use of sub-
jective rights in relationship to others is the ethical-political prob-
lem that has preoccupied liberal and democratic political theories
from their origins in Grotius (1625) and Hobbes (1642) to the pres-
ent. This idea of subjective rights has its roots in the West, after
1200. Whether one begins with late medieval Catholic theology,
Protestant variants of Stoicism, the social contract tradition, or the
democratic revolutions of the late eighteenth century, subjective
rights have their philosophical origins in the religious and political
debates of the British Isles, the Continental European powers, and
their Atlantic colonies.
That said, we should recall Amartya Sen's important distinction
between rights and the cognate moral concepts that support them.
Pointing to the ancient tradition of "conscious theorizing of toler-
ance and freedom" in Asian cultures, Sen argued that the "basic ideas
underlying freedom and rights" are not exclusively Western. Indeed,
the cross-cultural prevalence of these "underlying" moral ideas con-
tributed to the widespread appropriation of the concept of subjective
rights in non-Western European cultures after the French Revolu-
tion. William Theodore de Bary and Tu Weiming have illustrated
this phenomenon with examples of modern Chinese fusions of rights

28


A PHILOSOPHICAL GENEALOGY OF WOMEN'S HUMAN RIGHTS
with Confucianism, such as China's input into the 1948 Universal
Declaration. According to de Bary, such intercultural exchanges and
revisions of ideas mean that "human rights [are] still in the process
of formation."6
Attention to the idea of women's human rights allows us to see how
human rights gradually became an international and intercultural, as
well as a philosophically universalistic, political concept. As David
Armitage and Jennifer Pitts have shown, with their historical stud-
ies of the rise of modern forms of imperialism and internationalism,
there was a global turn-for better and for worse-in British and
European political thought at the turn of the nineteenth century.
Political thought became globalized in its perspectives, as well as in
its reception and influence, as much through as despite the growth of
Western imperialism. Feminist historians have long noted that this
trend was especially salient for the global diffusion of women's rights
discourse. At the turn of the nineteenth century, consideration of the
moral and political status of women and slaves compelled political
theorists to expand their definitions of rights-bearing subjects. The
resultant rise of abolitionist and women's rights discourses paralleled,
if not propelled, the global turn in political thought, as exemplified
in the work of Wollstonecraft and Mill.7
The Rise of the Rights of Woman in the Western Enlightenment
Before the essays of French revolutionaries Nicolas de Condorcet
and Olympe de Gouges on women's rights in 1790-91, philoso-
phers debated the superiority or inferiority of women to men in
the European querelle des femmes, but they did not typically express
their views in the language of rights. This querelle was the lively
intellectual debate on the question of the equality of the sexes that
animated aristocratic courts and salons as well as Roman Catholic
convents in Europe and its Latin American colonies after Venetian-
born Christine de Pizan completed her landmark feminist treatise,
The Book of the City of Ladies, in France in 1405. Most of this que-
relle, however, revolved around the concept of equality and did not

29


A PHILOSOPHICAL GENEALOGY OF WOMEN'S HUMAN RIGHTS
invoke the related idea of rights until the mid-eighteenth century.
In 1739 London, "Sophia, a Person of Quality" published a long es-
say entitled "Woman Not Inferior to Man." Its provocative subtitle
invoked the concept of the "natural right of the fair sex to a perfect
equality of power, dignity, and esteem, with the men." Sophia used
the Enlightenment-era discourse of "natural rights," arising from
seventeenth-century treatises by Frenchman Frangois Poulain de la
Barre and Englishman John Locke, to demand from men "our right
of sharing with them in public action."8
Sophia's essay, thought by some to have been written by the En-
glish bluestocking Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, continued to have
an impressive national and international reception into the 183os,
from Britain to France to Brazil. It may have even influenced Woll-
stonecraft, given the parallel between its subtitle, "Vindication of the
Natural Rights of the Fair-Sex," and the title of her 1792 Vindication
of the Rights of Woman. But by that point, a new public discourse on
the "rights of man" and the "rights of woman" had emerged in the
wake of the American and French Revolutions. It was the discourse
on rights spurred by the French Revolution, and the debate over it in
Britain, that served as the immediate and pressing political backdrop
for Wollstonecraft's extended philosophical argument for the exten-
sion of equal "civil and political rights" to the degraded "half of the
human species."9
Eighteenth-century rights discourse-which became prominent
in Britain, America, and France-promoted the individual and,
more often, the group rights of male political subjects or citizens in
challenge to the prevalence of absolute monarchy in early modern
Europe. On an abstract level, these rights were variously concep-
tualized as basic powers, liberties, wants, needs, and entitlements of
human beings. In particular legal systems, these rights were institu-
tionalized for particular groups, such as land-owning men, so that
they enjoyed protection for their property as well as political oppor-
tunities to participate in government and lawmaking. Philosophers
infrequently dwelled on the question of how rights applied to female
humans, until rights became the most salient political issue in the

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A PHILOSOPHICAL GENEALOGY OF WOMEN'S HUMAN RIGHTS
North Atlantic world in the wake of the American Revolution in the
1770s and the buildup to the French Revolution in the 178os.'0
In eighteenth-century British political thought, rights such as
freedom of conscience were often paired with duties such as religious
tolerance. In such moral pairings, rights were understood as correla-
tive, or reflexive and relational. Such correlative rights served as a
kind of practical shorthand for abstract moral principles that defined
ethical human relationships and obligations to one another within
political communities. As condensed and concretized versions of ab-
stract moral principles that ought to govern human relationships,
rights unsurprisingly came to be summarized in lists and preserved
in public, political documents. The English Bill of Rights, produced
by the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89, illustrates the trend to-
ward a public, itemized, interpersonal, and political understanding
of rights. Rather than focusing on or even significantly expanding
the rights of individuals, the bill set forth a list of rules for legitimate
relationships between the government powers of Parliament and the
king. The related 1689 Act of Toleration made a selective form of
religious toleration (benefiting most religious groups besides Roman
Catholics, nontrinitarians, and atheists) mandatory for England and
its colonies."
Particularly within eighteenth-century Protestant and dissenting
Christian theologies, philosophers conceived rights as rooted in a
rational human nature as designed by the divine Creator. Thinkers
such as Kant and Wollstonecraft understood rights as a product of the
human subjective mental capacity to use reason to construct abstract
principles of ethical conduct. For Wollstonecraft and her theological
mentor, the Reverend Richard Price, these principles derived from
the universal, rational, moral law of God. Humans typically had ac-
cess to God's law via reason once this mental faculty was sufficiently
developed through education. As necessary, adults could teach the
content of the moral law to children or other persons without suf-
ficiently developed rational faculties. For Kant, on the other hand,
the epistemological divide between the noumenal and the phenom-
enal realms meant that the human mind could not know for certain

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A PHILOSOPHICAL GENEALOGY OF WOMEN'S HUMAN RIGHTS
whether these universal moral principles derived from God's moral
laws. Despite their differences over epistemology and the possibility
of knowing the divine basis of rights, both Kant and Wollstonecraft
contributed to the deontological school of thought on human rights.
Deontological conceptions of rights are derived from a set of moral
rules or universally applicable duties (such as the Kantian ethical
principle to respect human beings as ends in themselves), rather than
justified in terms of their actual or expected consequences.'2
Sentience, suffering, and sympathy also emerged as a defining set
of capacities of human beings that grounded late eighteenth-century
arguments for rights. David Hume, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Jer-
emy Bentham began with the human subjective experience of pain
and pleasure as the starting point for enacting ethical relationships,
including rights and duties. The personal experience or sympathetic
witness of pain encouraged human beings to develop an intersub-
jective (or overlapping subjective) consensus on the human right to
relief of suffering and the corresponding duty to provide such relief.
By the late eighteenth century, human subjective (and intersubjec-
tive) constructs of rational or sympathetic regard for self and other(s)
came to be seen as the basis for defining the rights and duties of
individuals in modern political communities.'3
The Philosophical Origins of Subjective Rights for Women
The idea of subjective rights-or rights belonging to and exercised
by the individual human subject or agent-extends further back into
European religion and politics, however. As Richard Tuck's work
on medieval and Renaissance political thought has shown, the con-
cept of subjective rights has a complex historical development within
the Catholic theological tradition of John Duns Scotus, William of
Ockham, and Francisco Suarez, among others. In these theological
debates, subjective rights were conceived as natural rights, or rights
that obtained in the natural condition of humans prior to the Fall
of humanity. In response to the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century
church's heated debate over the radical Franciscan commitment to a

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A PHILOSOPHICAL GENEALOGY OF WOMEN'S HUMAN RIGHTS
life of poverty without private property, Scotus and Ockham devel-
oped arguments for a natural right to "simple use," or a reasonable
consumption of nature's bounty, for purposes of survival. However,
neither theologian applied these arguments for the natural right to
simple use of nature beyond his philosophical ruminations on the life
of prelapsarian man. Moreover, Scotus and Ockham primarily had
Adam in mind. Although Ockham occasionally discussed Adam and
Eve's mutual natural rights to the simple use of nature before the
Fall, it was Eve's marital relationship to Adam that was the context
for such hypotheses. In other words, Eve had rights only insofar as
she was cleaved to Adam as his wife. In addition, Ockham claimed
that, after the Fall, Adam's and other men's "power" rightfully ex-
tended to the personal appropriation of "temporal things," including
"rational beings" such as "women and children." Despite her auspi-
cious beginnings as a free agent in the form of the inquisitive Eve,
postlapsarian woman became a mere thing that man had a right to
own and dominate.'4
According to Tuck, this late medieval debate over the mean-
ing of "jus" (right) and "dominium" (property) contributed to the
Renaissance-era conception of subjective rights. The turn of the
seventeenth-century Spanish Jesuit philosopher Suirez further de-
veloped the idea of rights as belonging to and exercised by the human
subject. The exercise of rights was a robust expression of the individ-
ual will. Suirez even spoke of "human rights" and applied the idea to
women, if only in a limited way. He defended "a maiden's right to her
own freedom" before marriage, paying heed to the Roman Catholic
culture's patriarchal view of female chastity as a precondition for a
woman's entry into marriage. Yet he described it as "her" right and
freedom. By implication, her freedom to be a maiden and to enjoy
bodily integrity was not the right of her father or suitors to give or
take away but rather a right that she possessed and exercised as a fe-
male human, which other human subjects (including men in power)
were morally obligated to respect. Although Suirez said nothing
about women's natural right to abstinence (or other forms of sexual
freedom) in marriage, his defense of a maiden's right to maintain her

33


A PHILOSOPHICAL GENEALOGY OF WOMEN'S HUMAN RIGHTS
chastity is a signal moment for feminist ethics. He at least implied a
natural right for a maiden to be free from sexual coercion or violence
as a girl child. He also implied a natural right to a maiden's control of
the sexual functioning of her body, at least in the negative sense-a
significant power in an age when female mortality via maternity and
venereal disease was high. Suarez's emphasis on rights as an exercise
of human will or power, even in the case of a chaste maiden, was
an important precursor to the seventeenth-century Protestant rights
theories of such thinkers as Grotius, Hobbes, and Locke."
Partly influenced by Roman Stoicism as well as Jesuit Scholastics
such as Suarez, Grotius was a Dutch theorist of natural law and natu-
ral rights who put the freedom of the individual human will at the
center of his ethics and political theory. In his 1625 treatise The Rights
of War and Peace, he argued that both women and men had a right to
use deathly force to defend their chastity against the threat of rape,
on the grounds of the inalienable natural right to self-preservation
that belongs to and may be justly exercised by all human persons. Al-
though suicide was generally prohibited according to his Protestant
moral theology, Grotius made an exception for women to commit
suicide to protect their chastity if it was the only option available
for self-defense against such heinous physical violation. This extreme
example of female self-assertion against male sexual violence high-
lights the importance of the expression of the human will for guar-
anteeing moral outcomes in his Christian ethical system. By freely
choosing to kill herself to protect her chastity, a woman willed what
was moral at great earthly cost to her, but with greater heavenly re-
ward for adhering to God's moral law even unto death. As in the case
of Suarez's defense of the right of a maiden to maintain her chastity
before marriage, Grotius's defense of the right of a woman to kill
herself to maintain her chastity revolves around the idea that women
can and should exercise their God-given wills in order to freely re-
alize Christian virtue. On the other hand, both of these examples
conceive of women's moral agency primarily in terms of preserving
their chastity and only extend a narrow conception of natural rights
to women. Most disturbingly, the Grotian case required a woman to

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A PHILOSOPHICAL GENEALOGY OF WOMEN'S HUMAN RIGHTS
die as a consequence of exercising her natural right to protect her
chastity. The very act of using the right extinguished the possibility
of enacting rights further.16
Grotius drew from Cicero the case of the woman who must kill
herself to preserve her honor. Other Roman and Stoic sources
shaped his ethics and politics, and within them, his theory of natural
rights and its limited applications to women. Although Grotius cited
the early Christian Roman thinker Lactantius to establish that "what
is unlawful for Women is as much unlawful for Men, and one and
the same Obligation is thought to lie equally on both," he also made
moral and social distinctions between the sexes on the grounds of
their different sexual natures and functions. He quoted the fourth-
century Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus to support the view
of women as generally childlike in reason and thus fundamentally
unequal to men in mental capabilities. Therefore women, on the
whole, required adult male guidance in intellectual and ethical mat-
ters. Despite the universality of the natural moral law and its equal
applicability to the sexes, women did not function as equal moral
agents alongside men but rather functioned as dependent creatures
needy of protection and guidance from men in times of war and
peace. Along these lines, Grotius typically construed women's worth
not as intrinsically rooted in their nature as persons but rather as
extrinsically related to their reproductive and sexual functions as
mothers and wives. In war, women had a natural right to be secure
from male violence because of the broader social need to protect
female reproductive powers for a nation's own self-perpetuation.
In peace, the sexes had a common right to monogamous marriage,
the criminalization of polygamy, and the restriction of divorce to
cases of adultery, because such contractual legal arrangements es-
tablished a kind of equilibrium between them despite their sexual
inequality. Such marital laws prevented the sexual exploitation of
women by men at the same time as they established a legitimate
outlet for overpowering male heterosexual desire (which, according
to Grotius, made celibacy unrealistic for most men). He thus based
his handful of arguments for women's rights on the extrinsic value

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A PHILOSOPHICAL GENEALOGY OF WOMEN'S HUMAN RIGHTS
of women's sexual attractiveness and reproductive powers for men
and for maintaining peace in society at large. Because he predicated
his notion of women's rights upon the sexual functioning of women
and its value for others, especially men, these arguments exposed the
limits of Grotian theory for conceptualizing women's rights in any
noninstrumental and nonpatriarchal sense, whether in domestic or
international politics.'I
Like Suirez and Grotius before him, Hobbes in his De Cive (1642)
and Leviathan (1651) gave a striking example of how women could
wield natural rights-but took the concept of women's freedom in
a far more radical direction. Hobbes theorized a right of mothers in
the state of nature prior to the establishment of government, or any
kind of positive law. He posited that infants in the state of nature were
fully dependent on their mothers for nourishment and other aspects
of survival. Given that the children could not defend themselves,
mothers thus had the right to choose to "expose" or to "care for"
their offspring. Hobbes's conception of mother right was tied to his
definition of power as the "present means to obtain some apparent
good" and his definition of freedom as "the absence of Opposition."
Women in the state of nature took "the right of Dominion over the
Child" to its logical extreme when they no longer perceived the care
of the dependent child to be worthwhile, and there was no obstacle
to the act of infanticide. This violent conception of a female natural
right set Hobbes apart from other early theorists of women's natural
rights. But it also opened the door to imagining a more vigorous set
of rights for women, particularly in their natural state.'8
Not until the mid- to late seventeenth century, particularly in
the aftermath of the English Civil Wars over religious freedom, did
a Protestant theory of the rights of human subjects emerge in full
force. Focused on the individual rights to private property and reli-
gious conscience, this Protestant political discourse sought to propel
reform of Catholic absolutist monarchical government. Locke's Sec-
ond Treatise of Government (1690) was the paradigmatic work on the
issue. It reflected many of the political trends embodied in the Glori-

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A PHILOSOPHICAL GENEALOGY OF WOMEN'S HUMAN RIGHTS
ous Revolution of 1688-89, including the English Bill of Rights that
institutionalized the Protestant succession, constitutional monarchy,
and stronger legislative powers of Parliament.
In addition to these political rights, Locke also outlined the natural
rights of individual human agents, inside and outside government.
Locke's theory of natural rights echoed the debates of Scotus and
Ockham, who had puzzled over the questions of individual rights to
consumption and property in a prelapsarian, or natural, state. On the
other hand, Locke's emphasis on personal entitlement to the work
of one's hands-at least in the state of nature before government
paid homage to the late seventeenth-century Protestant equation of
subjective rights with the right to own and build private property.19
Likely inspired by Hobbes, Locke addressed the powers of women
in the family within the context of the state of nature. He assigned
women equal "parental power" to care for the children, so the mother
and father shared authority over their offspring in the state of nature.
The mother and father also had equal freedom to leave each other
once their children were grown. There were no further moral duties
to bind them together in the shared project of child rearing, and
no positive laws or government to legally inscribe them within the
bonds of marriage.20
Although Locke did not use the term "right" in direct relation to
women, his arguments for these equal parental and spousal powers and
freedoms in the state of nature implied that women held some natu-
ral rights alongside men, at least beyond the patriarchal restrictions
of positive law. As with the brief accounts of women's natural rights
by Suarez, Grotius, and Hobbes, Locke's consideration of women's
natural freedoms and powers focused on their sexual roles. As Su-
san Okin demonstrated, this early modern trend of conceptualizing
women's natural rights, freedoms, or powers in terms of their sexual
functions was the latest iteration of the deep patriarchal dimension of
Western political thought, extending back to ancient Greece.21
For the bulk of the eighteenth century, rights-bearing subjects
were typically assumed, in theory and practice, to be adult white

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A PHILOSOPHICAL GENEALOGY OF WOMEN'S HUMAN RIGHTS
male landowners. Even a progressive thinker like Locke, who sought
to restore the rights of the people against tyrannical government,
stopped short of extending the full slate of rights to children, adult
females, or slaves taken in a defensive war. Since he reserved most
of his speculations about women's powers and freedoms to the state
of nature before the institution of government, he avoided the ques-
tion of whether women should be political subjects in his ideal state,
a limited constitutional monarchy. In private correspondence with
Mrs. Mary Clarke in 1684, Locke acknowledged that girls had the
same capability for mental improvement as he would later outline for
boys in his published treatise Some Thoughts on Education (1693).22
Although Wollstonecraft built on Locke's educational principles
to argue for boys' and girls' equal right to free public coeducation,
such an egalitarian conception of the sexes' learning capabilities was
hardly the norm in the late eighteenth century. Even Kant's radical,
a priori, metaphysical view of the absolute moral equality of humans
as rational beings, bound by universal duties from which they derived
their universal rights, did not keep him from espousing a patriarchal
view of women's ethical and mental potential. In his Observations on
the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1764), Kant bluntly stated
that women could not act morally, or according to a rational grasp
of universal principles of duty. In his Metaphysics of Morals (1797), he
elaborated the political implications of this view of sex inequality by
arguing that women could not be "active," self-governing citizens
of a republic, because, like children, they were excluded by nature
from autonomous conduct. Patriarchal prejudice had clearly proven
to be a persistent, though adaptable, feature of modern theories of
rights, including the fundamental rights to education and political
participation.23
Modern Western Patriarchalisms
In his groundbreaking book Patriarchalism in Political Thought
(1975), Gordon Schochet made the influential case that there were
varieties of patriarchalism in early modern British and European

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A PHILOSOPHICAL GENEALOGY OF WOMEN'S HUMAN RIGHTS
political thought. Most famously defended by Robert Filmer, the
seventeenth-century patriarchalism of the divine right of kings posed
absolute monarchs as the legitimate heirs of the power bequeathed
to Adam by God to control and dominate nature, as well as Eve.
What was left sexually ambiguous was the status of queens, or female
monarchs, whose legitimacy as heirs of Adam's power was gener-
ally undisputed. The conflation of paternal power with monarchical
power meant that political patriarchalism, in cases such as Queen
Elizabeth I and Queen Anne, occasionally manifested in history as
political matriarchalism.24
Filmer's brand of patriarchalism, and its legitimation of absolute
monarchies through a genealogy of power rooted in Genesis, gave
way to a new political and philosophical order after the Wars of Re-
ligion in Europe and the British Isles. According to Schochet, the
political conflicts and ideological debates of the Glorious Revolution
led to the transformation of patriarchalism in the eighteenth century.
Eighteenth-century patriarchalism was focused less on the legitima-
tion of monarchical power and more on the inclusion of new classes
of men in powers of governance. The issue of the expansion of the
male political classes, amid the rise of republican discourses in early
eighteenth-century Britain and its Atlantic colonies, precipitated a
more overt concern with the problem of women's relationship to
politics. This concern was often directed toward explicitly patriar-
chal arguments for the formal exclusion of women from otherwise
egalitarian visions of a new republican political order."
The extension of natural rights arguments to other groups, includ-
ing African slaves and women, became more prominent around the
time of the American and French Revolutions and the rise of Brit-
ish abolitionism. As suggested by Wollstonecraft's repeated symbolic
invocations of the 1789 fall of the Bastille in Paris, the liberation of
the masses through political rebellion became a model for the lib-
eration of people oppressed by their social status. Yet the masculine
gender of rights was consolidated and reinforced in the transatlantic
public sphere at precisely the moment when the idea of rights be-
came more than a tool of white male landowners' power. The late

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A PHILOSOPHICAL GENEALOGY OF WOMEN'S HUMAN RIGHTS
medieval, Renaissance, and early Enlightenment "natural rights" of
God's human creatures, which were generally patriarchal in implica-
tion or application, openly became "the rights of man." Philosophi-
cally growing in the seventeenth century but politically dominating
Europe and America in the late eighteenth century, the rights of man
doctrine was for white, middle-class, tax-paying, property-owning
male subjects who wished to enjoy the powers of self-governing re-
publican citizens.26
There is some explicit evidence of white middle-class men's jeal-
ous defense of their growing rights against the prospect of sharing
them with other historically marginalized groups, including women.
In response to his spouse Abigail Adams's March 1776 request for
him to "remember the ladies" in the crafting of the new constitu-
tion for revolutionary America, congressional delegate John Adams
wrote: "As to your extraordinary Code of Laws, I cannot help but
laugh. We have been told that our Struggle has loosened the bands of
Government everywhere. That Children and Apprentices were dis-
obedient-that schools and Colledges were grown turbulent-that
Indians slighted their Guardians and Negroes grew insolent to their
Masters. But your Letter was the first Intimation that another Tribe
more numerous and powerfull than all the rest were grown discon-
tented.... Depend upon it, We know better than to repeal our Mas-
culine systems." With less irony and more anxiety than Adams, the
Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau also had posed elabo-
rate arguments against the inclusion of women in the "masculine
systems" of modern republicanism in his widely read literary and
political writings from the 1750s and 1760s. Rousseau asserted that
the arbitrary sexual domination of women over men in the domes-
tic realm was reason to not permit them formal political power. In
April 1776, Adams likewise concluded, in his reply to his wife, that
he hoped General George Washington would not allow the "Despo-
tism of the Petticoat" to engender a new form of political tyranny on
American soil, so soon after the colonies' rebellion from Britain.27
The confluence of social contract ideas and neo-Stoic ideas in
Rousseau's political thought reinforced the patriarchal biases in his

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A PHILOSOPHICAL GENEALOGY OF WOMEN'S HUMAN RIGHTS
theory of republicanism as the best, or only legitimate, state. Indebted
to Hobbes and Locke, Rousseau's version of social contract theory
was distinctive for giving explicit reasons why women should not be
rights-bearing citizens in his ideal republican regime. His theory of
republicanism required a robust practice of sex-role differentiation,
such that men were formal citizens in the public realm and women
focused on the rearing of future male citizens and female denizens
in the domestic sphere. Any mixing of the sexes in politics would
undermine the stability of society and government. To prevent this
outcome, Rousseau followed the ancient Romans in prescribing the
disenfranchisement of women from republican civil rights. While he
proclaimed that popular sovereignty was the basis for legitimate, or
republican, government, Rousseau narrowly defined the sovereign
lawmakers as the adult men of the community. According to Carole
Pateman, Rousseau rationalized a fraternal social contract in which
men bonded together as autonomous citizens while women stood on
the outside of government, without real access to freedom, power,
or rights.28
Despite his harsh criticisms of Grotius, Rousseau's appropriation
of Stoicism also proved to be discriminatory toward women, when
read in conjunction with his social contract theory. The virtue of
human passivity in the face of misfortune was a theme of Seneca that
ran through Rousseau's literary writings, but in a way that undercut
the place of female agency in his ethics and politics. Stoic acceptance
of one's negative circumstances may be empowering to a man oth-
erwise endowed with civil and political rights, as in the case of the
lowly Swiss tutor St. Preux's choice to live under the watchful eye
of the aristocratic Wolmar in Rousseau's novel Julie (1761). For a
woman without such rights, a Stoic resignation to fate could possibly
extinguish her freedom altogether, as when Julie unhappily obeyed
her father in entering a loveless arranged marriage to the much older
Wolmar, instead of eloping to England with her true love, St. Preux.
In a kind of Stoic epiphany, Julie came to see her choice as not tragic
but actually liberating for its fulfillment of patrimonial duty, despite
her lingering feelings for St. Preux: "Tied to a husband's destiny,

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A PHILOSOPHICAL GENEALOGY OF WOMEN'S HUMAN RIGHTS
or rather to a father's intentions by an indissoluble bond, I enter
upon a new career which is to end only with death." Alongside his
fraternal social contract theory, Rousseau's neo-Stoic storytelling
not only permitted but also encouraged women's passivity under pa-
triarchal rule.29
Indebted to the philosophical ideas of Rousseau and his Social
Contract (1762), which formally excluded women from an otherwise
radical vision of popular sovereignty, the 1789 French Declaration of
the Rights of Man and Citizen embodied the overt masculinization of
rights ideology in the revolutionary era. At the same time, it helped
to trigger an international discourse on the rights of man in which
women played a leading and subversive role. During the early 1790s,
female political theorists such as Wollstonecraft and de Gouges pub-
licly questioned the masculine biases of the rights of man doctrine.
Wollstonecraft's treatise A Vindication of the Rights of Men-the
first published response to Irishman Edmund Burke's Reflections on
the Revolution in France in late 1790-contained the seeds of her
philosophy of women's human rights. Against Burke's conservative
critique of the political dangers of the revolutionary rights of man
doctrine, Wollstonecraft suggested that the real danger lay in not
expanding the concept to include women: "Who will pretend to say,
that there is as much happiness diffused on this globe as it is capable of
affording?" She then strongly implied that the education of women's
rational capacities was part of the "recognition" of the "full force" of
the "native unalienable rights of men." Human happiness and "social
virtue" would be maximized for every person "if she could gain the
strength that she is able to acquire." In a few short sentences, Woll-
stonecraft synthesized the basic principles of her theory of women's
human rights: (1) women must be granted rights because they are
entitled to them on the basis of their humanity; (2) the right to edu-
cation is fundamental because it enables the development of women's
ability to successfully use other civil and political rights; and (3) the
granting of rights without distinction of sex is a precondition for the
well-being and virtue of humanity as a whole.

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A PHILOSOPHICAL GENEALOGY OF WOMEN'S HUMAN RIGHTS
On a rhetorical level, Wollstonecraft's explicit switch to the femi-
nine pronoun "she" was a telling critique of the male bias of the
rights of man discourse that she sought to supplant with her univer-
salistic philosophy of human rights. By moving from the masculine
language of the "rights of men" to a specifically feminine pronoun,
Wollstonecraft underscored the special and urgent need for civic
recognition of women's human rights, especially to education. Us-
ing a similar rhetorical technique, de Gouges's 1791 Parisian pam-
phlet "Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Citizen" uncovered
the patriarchal bias of the 1789 Declaration, by rewriting the list of
French republican rights with the female sex included.
From the Rights of Man to the Rights of Woman
Some of the earliest extensions of the revolutionary-era rights of
man doctrine to women are found in political essays of the French
republican tradition: Condorcet's 1790 essay "On the Admission of
Women to the Rights of Citizenship" and, a year later, de Gouges's
aforementioned "Declaration" asked for women to be granted the
same civil and political rights as men in the new French republic.
Their arguments began with the premise that republican citizenship
rights ought to extend to all adults, not simply men.
Joan Scott has illuminated how early French feminist activists such
as de Gouges played on the paradoxical character of women's rights
discourse within modern patriarchal republicanism. Through their
robust involvement in the liberal stage of the Revolution from 1789
to 1792, Frenchwomen signaled the disconnection between the idea
of natural, individual rights and the exclusion of half the human spe-
cies from them. As the ex-bishop and French revolutionary Charles
Maurice de Talleyrand-Perigord had observed in his 1791 Rapport
sur l'instruction publique, "To see one half the human race excluded
by the other from all participation of government, was a political
phenomenon that, according to abstract principles, it was impossible
to explain." This paradox, or tension between abstract principles

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A PHILOSOPHICAL GENEALOGY OF WOMEN'S HUMAN RIGHTS
of justice and the patriarchal culture in which women were bound,
was the inspiration for Wollstonecraft's Rights of Woman, which she
pointedly dedicated to Talleyrand-Perigord in the hope that he and
his new republic might push past it."
Wollstonecraft's 1792 Rights of Woman shaped a new, international
political rhetoric and public discourse on rights. It was quickly trans-
lated into French and published in Paris and Lyon in the same year.
In 1793, a Parisian reviewer argued that Wollstonecraft's book put in
theoretical form what had transpired in the early stage of the Revolu-
tion in the form of women's highly visible participation in republican
politics: "So many Frenchwomen have already fulfilled the wishes
of Mrs. W! Did they not work arduously in the excavation of the
Champ de Mars? How many came armed for the defense of their
country?" Seen from the French republican perspective, Wollstone-
craft's treatise illustrated what Hegel would later describe as philoso-
phy's tendency to articulate what recently has passed: "The owl of
Minerva begins its flight only with the onset of dusk."3
Wollstonecraft's book may have captured the political spirit of the
immediate past, but it also directed the trajectory of women's rights
discourse across Britain, Europe, and the United States. Janet Todd's
estimate that fifteen hundred to three thousand copies of the Rights
of Woman were sold between 1792 and 1797 may be low, as Susan
Branson has discovered that fifteen hundred copies of the book were
printed in Philadelphia alone in 1794. At the turn of the nineteenth
century, there were more copies of the Rights of Woman in American
libraries than of Paine's Rights ofMan. In addition to two further edi-
tions in London and several reprintings in Boston and Philadelphia,
the book was published in Dublin in the 1790s.33
The Rights of Woman also spread across Continental Europe. Se-
lections from the French edition were translated for Diario de Madrid
in September 1792, despite the repressive character of the Spanish
monarchy and its censorship policies. This review and translation
may have influenced other Spanish articles on women's education
in the 1790s. In 1793-94, George Salzmann-the Schnepfanthal
educator whose children's stories Wollstonecraft had translated into

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A PHILOSOPHICAL GENEALOGY OF WOMEN'S HUMAN RIGHTS
English in 1790-arranged the publication of the first German edi-
tion of the Rights of Woman. His lengthy introduction to the book
presented many of Wollstonecraft's ideas as friendly to his own pro-
gressive ideas on children's coeducation, especially through outdoor
play. Salzmann distanced himself from Wollstonecraft's stronger
feminist arguments, however, by emphasizing the need for a benevo-
lent paternalism in education and focusing on the instrumental value
of women's education for the well-being of husbands. His German
edition of the Rights of Woman was translated into Dutch in 1796 and
into Danish in 18o1. Accented with a satin binding and pink ribbon,
the Danish edition delicately affirmed Salzmann's conservative read-
ing of the book's compatibility with traditional gender roles.34
It was the popularity of Wollstonecraft's Rights of Woman in 1790s
America that marked a tipping point toward the enthusiastic public
embrace of the idea of equal rights for the sexes. The September
1792 issue of Philadelphia's Lady's Magazine devoted nine pages to
excerpts and analysis of Wollstonecraft's book. The editor's intro-
duction to this piece proudly announced: "This lady is known to the
world, by her answer to Mr. Burke, and we now behold her employ-
ing her pen on behalf of her own sex." In his 1793 Fourth of July ora-
tion, New Jersey congressman Elias Boudinot took note of a striking
shift in political discourse: "The Rights of Woman are now heard as
familiar terms in every part of the United States." Wollstonecraft's
book had an almost immediate impact on the formation and spread
of women's rights discourse in America.35
Prior to 1792, the idea of women's rights had been bandied about
in Anglo-American public discourse in a more satirical than seri-
ous fashion. As with John Adams's 1776 letter to Abigail Adams, a
1791 poem in the United States Chronicle poked fun at the idea that
women would even want the "Rights of Man" that Thomas Paine de-
fended, since they already enjoyed absolute sexual power over their
husbands:
But have not women greater rights than these;
Do they not rule and govern as they please?

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A PHILOSOPHICAL GENEALOGY OF WOMEN'S HUMAN RIGHTS
The servile men of every age and nation,
Are always slaves to female legislation.
Several of the earliest responses to the Rights of Woman, especially in
London, were similarly indisposed to taking the issue of sex equal-
ity seriously. Thomas Taylor, the Cambridge Platonist, penned
a parodic Vindication of the Rights of Brutes in 1792. He used crude
sexual humor to suggest that extending rights to women was as silly
and perverse as attributing rights to elephants, by envisioning a fu-
ture egalitarian society in which women freely chose to breed with
rights-bearing pachyderms. Another satirical pamphlet in London
that year thanked "Mrs. Mary with the hard German name" for her
ideas on "the general rights of girls," and exclaimed "Oh! Mr. Paine,
what do we not owe you" on the matter of "the general rights of
boys." In October 1792, a Philadelphia newspaper published an ar-
ticle entitled "The Rights of Woman," which directly scorned Paine
for ignoring the rights of woman but indirectly derided Wollstone-
craft's egalitarian conception of rights. The pseudonymous Susannah
Staunch instead declared a satirical list of rights of wives-including
retaliatory adultery and an "unquestionable and uncontrollable right
in the kitchen, the laundry, and the dairy." Such humorous gender-
ing of Anglo-American rights discourse, with Paine often associated
with the rights of men and Wollstonecraft often linked to the rights
of women, belied the cultural resistance to a truly egalitarian concep-
tion of human rights.36
Wollstonecraft's Christian Metaphysical
Foundation for the Rights of Women
Even as secularization began to shape the cultures of the North
Atlantic states, philosophical and rhetorical appeals to the God-
given nature of rights were common in the eighteenth century. As
in the natural religion of Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Indepen-
dence (1776), sometimes God and nature were equated or equivo-
cated in Enlightenment thought. In that foundational document of

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A PHILOSOPHICAL GENEALOGY OF WOMEN'S HUMAN RIGHTS
the American Revolution, he appealed to the rights of the American
people over and against the laws of the British Empire, and framed
the former's rights as grounded on "the laws of nature and of Nature's
God." The three dominant schools of thought on natural rights in
the late eighteenth century-Protestant Christianity, social contract
theory, and Enlightenment-era appropriations of Stoicism-to vari-
ous degrees built on this premise, that the natural rights of human
beings were dictates of reason and as such derived from God's natu-
ral law of morality.37
Wollstonecraft dove straight into these debates on the basis of
rights as a young professional writer and translator in London in
the early 179os. Born in 1759, to a middle-class Anglican family in
East London, she was privately tutored and mentored by several
Protestant intellectuals in her youth: John Arden, a dissenter and
scientific lecturer whose daughter Jane befriended Wollstonecraft in
Yorkshire in their mid-teens; Mr. Clare, a clergyman who served as
her informal teacher in north London in her late teens; and the Cal-
vinist turned unitarian Reverend James Burgh and his wife, Hannah
Harding, who assisted her in establishing a coeducational day school
on Newington Green in north London in her mid-twenties. Around
1784, Wollstonecraft met the Reverend Dr. Price, a rational dis-
senter and abolitionist preaching at the Newington Green church.
Although she continued to attend Anglican services, she soon the-
orized the foundation of human rights similarly to this dissenting
minister. Given that she was raised Anglican, found her teachers
among Protestant ministers, and wrote extensively on theology as an
adult, it is not surprising that Wollstonecraft took a broadly Protes-
tant Christian approach to theorizing a theological and metaphysical
foundation for women's human rights.38
Although social contract and neo-Stoic ideas have been identi-
fied in her writings, Wollstonecraft is not typically categorized as
belonging to either of these schools on natural rights. Her exten-
sive critique of Rousseau in her Rights of Woman provides ample evi-
dence of her dislike of his brand of social contract theory. The 1755
Second Discourse's model of the "state of nature" was an "unsound"

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A PHILOSOPHICAL GENEALOGY OF WOMEN'S HUMAN RIGHTS
starting point for political theory, since it was "reared on a false hy-
pothesis." There was no evidence for Rousseau's (or other theorists')
fanciful claims about human beings before society and government.
Perhaps because of her skepticism of the imagined divide between
nature and society proposed by Rousseau, she did not regularly ap-
peal to the concept of "natural rights." Instead, she preferred such
terms as "rights of humanity," "civil and political rights," "sacred
rights," "rights and duties," "rights of men," and "rights of woman."
Her favored terms defined human rights not in relation to what was
supposedly natural but rather to what actually established people as
rights-bearing subjects: their humanity, the laws of their govern-
ments, and morality itself.39
Further distancing herself from the social contract tradition,
Wollstonecraft only mentioned the concept of the "social compact"
four times in her writings-referring to either current forms of con-
stitutional mixed government (Britain and France) or a future "truly
equitable" form of republicanism in which the sexes were equal con-
tributors to civic virtue because "women were educated by the same
pursuits as men." At the beginning of the Rights of Men, her single
abstract description of the "social compact" merely represented
her ideal republican state as one that guaranteed "the birthright of
man": "such a degree of liberty, civil and religious, as is compatible
with the liberty of every other individual with whom he is united
in a social compact." Unlike Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Kant,
Wollstonecraft never employed contract theory to explain the rea-
sons for the formation of societies, governments, or systems of inter-
national law.40
As for Enlightenment-era appropriations of Stoic ideas, Woll-
stonecraft at times seemed to embrace their value for women, espe-
cially those who fared badly in society. In an anonymous 1790 review
of Catherine Macaulay's Letters on Education signed "M" and subse-
quently attributed to Wollstonecraft, the "doctrines of the Stoics"
were praised as deserving of "respect." Beyond this tenuous evidence
of Wollstonecraft's approval of Stoicism, Richard Vernon has cited
the Rights of Woman's dramatic representation of the bereft widow as

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A PHILOSOPHICAL GENEALOGY OF WOMEN'S HUMAN RIGHTS
the best mother as more conclusive proof of her Stoic brand of femi-
nism. Wollstonecraft pictured a young woman of virtue who, in the
wake of her husband's death, chose to focus on her children rather
than pursue the awakening of new sexual love: "She is left a widow,
perhaps, without a sufficient provision; but she is not desolate! The
pang of nature is felt; but after time has softened sorrow into mel-
ancholy resignation, her heart turns to her children with redoubled
fondness, and anxious to provide for them, affection gives a sacred
heroic cast to her maternal duties." At first glance, the Wollstone-
craftian widow's melancholy yet moral state might suggest her Stoic
disposition in the face of personal tragedy. Yet her "heroic" fulfill-
ment of her duties to her children despite her sadness at the loss of
her husband and her competing feelings for another man was also
broadly compatible with Protestant Christian ethics. Even Vernon,
who has made the strongest case for Wollstonecraft's Stoicism, has
conceded that these ideas would have been filtered through her re-
ception of the rational Christian theology of her mentor Price.4'
Wollstonecraft's apparent Stoicism might be better explained in
terms of currents in late eighteenth-century Protestant Christian
ethics, especially the kind that Kant systematized on a purely ratio-
nal plane in his moral philosophy. Like Kant's theory of the dutiful
reasons for ethical conduct in his Groundwork for the Metaphysics of
Morals (1785), Wollstonecraft's story of the widow made it clear that
morality depends not on happiness but rather on the intention to ful-
fill obligations. Despite this basic commonality, Wollstonecraft never
took the stronger Kantian position that the autonomous, or duty-
oriented, performance of moral rules required the outright rejection
of heteronomous, or happiness-producing, motives. On the other
hand, she agreed with Kant that happiness could be a by-product of
making moral choices. The widow ultimately experienced happiness
in her devotion to the care of her children, even given the loss of her
spouse and the opportunity for a second marriage. As Wollstonecraft
imagined, "I see her surrounded by her children, reaping the reward
of her care." The emotional authenticity of Wollstonecraft's widow
can thus be contrasted with Rousseau's Julie, whose Stoic denial of

49


A PHILOSOPHICAL GENEALOGY OF WOMEN'S HUMAN RIGHTS
her unhappiness in her arranged marriage to Wolmar only led to
her death-bed revelation of her eternal love for St. Preux. In a letter
intended for her lover that her husband found after her death, Julie
disclosed the truth that she always loved St. Preux the most: "Nay,
I leave thee not, I go to await thee.... Only too happy to pay with
my life the right to love thee still without crime, and to tell thee so
one more time." The Wollstonecraftian widow, by contrast, partook
of worldly love plus the promise of otherworldly joy: "Her children
have her love, and her brightest hopes are beyond the grave, where
her imagination often strays." Her rational control of her passions al-
lowed her to emotionally flourish in this world as a prelude to eternal
happiness in the next life.42
Indeed, Wollstonecraft presumed neither a Stoic nor a Kantian
tension between reason and the passions in her ethical system. In-
stead, she followed the British empiricist Hobbes in understanding
the passions as "necessary auxiliaries of reason." "Auxiliaries," in
the eighteenth-century English lexicon, were helpers or assistants
(sometimes referring to military assistance but originally referring to
intellectual relationships, such as the productive role of mathemat-
ics for physics). The passions, especially the primary "impulse" to
self-preservation, were thus the helpers or assistants for the proper
development of human reason. For Wollstonecraft, as for Hobbes,
the development of human reason was not open-ended or morally
neutral but rather aimed toward the realization of a circumscribed
set of human goods. The passions assisted reason's development
such that adult humans came to understand the value of their ratio-
nal "struggle" with passion as constitutive of the goods that defined
their lives as ones worth living and preserving. Even if it was difficult
to negotiate the "game" of life-partly because of the impulses of
passion-a person could rationally grasp the most important (and
often unexpected) moral lessons from the process of playing the
game. Reason was not only transformed in this cooperative relation-
ship with the passions but also strengthened in the process. To put
this point into sharp relief, Wollstonecraft offered the hard case of
the widow, whose long-term and genuine happiness depended upon

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A PHILOSOPHICAL GENEALOGY OF WOMEN'S HUMAN RIGHTS
reasonably controlling her grief and finding comfort and pleasure in
enacting her duty to her children.43
Given their male biases and general sidelining of women, Chris-
tian sources for natural rights theories were as problematic for Woll-
stonecraft's philosophical purposes as neo-Stoic and social contract
theories. Just as Wollstonecraft rejected the conceptual divide be-
tween the state of nature and the social contract, she also rejected
scriptural accounts of an original state, such as the story of Adam and
Eve, as productive for ethics or politics. Such origin stories were em-
pirically unverifiable and thus prone to distorting the facts of the hu-
man condition. This was especially true in the case of understanding
the relationship between the sexes, as the story of Adam and Eve had
been repeatedly used to defend women's subordination to men, even
by great minds such as the poet John Milton. According to Woll-
stonecraft's feminist biblical hermeneutics, "Man, from the remotest
antiquity, found it convenient to exert his strength to subjugate his
companion" through "inventions" such as "Moses' poetical story"
about Eve being made from Adam's rib.
Rather than rely on scriptural accounts or conjectural stories about
the origins and progress of humanity, Wollstonecraft established a
few "first principles" by which humans and their rights might be
rationally understood from a metaphysical/ethical perspective. In
the opening chapters of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft defined
rights as "the privilege of moral beings." Moral beings are human
beings, who are designed by God to achieve "pre-eminence over the
brute creation" and to acquire "virtue" and "knowledge" through the
exercise of "reason." She argued that women might "procure" rights
through the "exercise of reason." By using reason to gauge moral
action toward others, women would "obtain the sober pleasures
that arise from equality." She insisted that such "sober pleasures"
were secondary to the primary reason for women's understanding of
themselves as rights-bearing subjects: women's "first duty is to them-
selves as rational creatures." The subjective rights of women were
therefore derivative from their duties, especially the duty to develop
their moral and intellectual potential as rational creatures of God.44

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Responding to the deficiencies of Christian, neo-Stoic, and social
contract theories of natural rights for securing freedom and well-
being for women, Wollstonecraft thus developed an alternative theo-
logical and philosophical foundation for the full inclusion of women
in the rights of humanity. In crafting a universalistic and egalitarian
understanding of human rights, she drew on a variety of schools of
thought within the rational Christian dissenter tradition. Dissenting
Christians were the non-Anglican Protestants in England who had
gained the right to practice their alternative forms of Christianity
under the Toleration Act of 1689.
Wollstonecraft's intellectual exposure to rational Christian dissent
of the sort espoused by Price took place between 1784 and 1786,
when she heard his sermons at the Newington Green church. Her
first publications on issues such as female education, marriage, and
family-Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787), Mary, a Fic-
tion (1788), and Original Stories from Real Life (1788)-show the deep
Augustinian influence of Anglican Christianity on her early politi-
cal thought. Yet these major writings before the French Revolution
also indicate her growing engagement with the alternative school
of religious and political thought represented by rational Christian
dissenters such as Burgh and Price. It was Wollstonecraft's two Vin-
dications, published in 1790 and 1792, that reflected her full adoption
of the Pricean approach to grounding human rights on a rational
theological foundation.45
Price was the son of a Presbyterian minister. His Newington
Green church was founded as a Presbyterian church in 1708. In the
late eighteenth century, this church became more strongly associ-
ated with the broader dissenting Christian movement from trinitar-
ian to unitarian theology. Price's own theological views on the trinity
moved in this direction. He considered himself an Arian: he viewed
Jesus not as cosubstantial with God but rather as a creature made by
God before his physical incarnation. For this reason, he thought Je-
sus should not be worshipped, because worship ought to be reserved
for God.46

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A PHILOSOPHICAL GENEALOGY OF WOMEN'S HUMAN RIGHTS
Wollstonecraft, by the time she wrote the Rights of Men, seems to
have pushed beyond Price's Arianism toward a Socinian, or unitar-
ian, view of God. Rebuffing Burke's hypocritical combination of elit-
ism and Christianity, she implied that the Irish statesman respected
Jesus for his regal "lineage" from David, whereas her devotion to
"the carpenter's son" depended only on his appointment by "Di-
vine authority." Like other late eighteenth-century Socinians such
as Joseph Priestley, Wollstonecraft revered Jesus as a mortal man (a
"carpenter's son") who was chosen by the one God to serve as the
greatest moral exemplar for humanity. Her antitrinitarian theology
did not make her any less devoutly Christian, however. In the Rights
of Men, she proclaimed a deep personal and emotional bond with the
one God of the Old and New Testaments, alongside a piety toward
the moral example of Jesus, in a way that revealed the resilience of
orthodox elements of her Protestant faith.47
On matters of moral theology, Price and Wollstonecraft argued
against voluntarism and empiricism in favor of rationalism. Volunta-
rists, such as Ockham, had argued that the moral law was an expres-
sion of God's will. Empiricists, such as Hobbes, had argued that there
was no stable enforcement of the laws of nature (beyond the constant
right to practice self-defense) until government and positive law
were established by the will of the absolute sovereign. Both schools
presumed that morality was an expression of the will of a sovereign
ruler, divine or mortal. Both Price and Wollstonecraft rejected these
schools of thought on the grounds that they made morality arbitrary.
Wollstonecraft critically read Burke's defense of political institutions
as sources of moral authority along these lines: "Nature and Reason,
according to your system, are all to give place to authority; and the
gods, as Shakespeare makes a frantic wretch exclaim, seem to kill us
for their sport, as men do flies." If moral rules were merely expres-
sions of divine or personal will, then morality could be reduced to
the subjective volitional whims of the Creator or human rulers.48
Instead, Price and Wollstonecraft took a rationalistic approach to
conceptualizing God and humanity's relationships to the moral law.

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For both of them, the moral law is objective, because it is rational
and has this ontological property independently of God's will. If
the moral law was merely an expression of God's will, then morality
could be reduced to the whims of an all-powerful sovereign Creator
who failed to subject himself to the rules of reason. To avoid this pit-
fall of theological voluntarism, Price and Wollstonecraft set forth a
two-part rationalistic account of the basis of morality that pertained
to both God and humankind: (1) the moral law exists independently
of God's will but as part of his nature as the supreme rational being,
and (2) the moral law is universal in its application to all humans,
who may grasp it via reason because they are made in the image of
God. As Wollstonecraft explained in theological terms in the Rights
of Men, "I FEAR God! I bend with awful reverence when I inquire on
what my fear is built-I fear that sublime power, whose motive for
creating me must have been wise and good; and I submit to the moral
laws which my reason deduces from this view of my dependence on
him. It is not his power that I fear-it is not to an arbitrary will,
but to an unerring reason I submit.-Submit-yes ... to the law that
regulates his just resolves." Price's and Wollstonecraft's theological
and metaphysical definition of the moral law as part of God's es-
sence, but independent of his will, had roots in Thomas Aquinas. It
also had Enlightenment Protestant expressions among rights theo-
rists such as Locke.49
This idea of the moral law as grounded on reason, independently
of any being's will, gave the idea of human rights the possibility of
an objective and universal foundation. Following Price, Wollstone-
craft in her Rights of Men posited a theological and metaphysical ac-
count of the grounding of "sacred rights" on the "eternal foundation
of right." This foundation was found in "the immutable attributes
of God": first and foremost, the reason which God and his human
creatures shared. In his 1767 theological Dissertations, Price had de-
fended a conception of God as rational, providential, and caring: "A
God without a Providence is undoubtedly a contradiction. Nothing
is plainer than that a Being of perfect reason will in every instance
take such care of the universe as perfect reason requires." Wollstone-

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craft likewise opened her Rights of Woman with a similar theodicy:
"Firmly persuaded that no evil exists in the world that God did not
design to take place, I build my belief on the perfection of God." For
Wollstonecraft as well as Price, the realization of the "sacred rights"
of humanity was part of God's rational and benevolent providential
plan for the development of human potential within creation.0
For Price and Wollstonecraft, human beings had moral rights and
moral duties-in short, ethical relationships with one another
because they had access, via reason, to understanding the universal
principles of morality. These principles were part of God's nature as
the supreme rational being, but they were principles to which God
voluntarily subjected his will. Humans, too, had a choice: a choice
to direct their freedom of will and rationality to the understanding
and application of these principles in their interactions with each
other. As Wollstonecraft argued in the Rights of Men, "The more
man discovers the nature of his mind and body, the more clearly
he is convinced, that to act according to the dictates of reason is to
conform to the law of God." The human subject's freedom of will,
combined with her rationality, empowered her to enact the moral
duties derived from the objective and universal law of God, and the
rights derived from such duties.5'
Both Price and Wollstonecraft thus reserved a robust place for
freedom of the will in their accounts of moral theology, ethics, and
human rights. Rational Christian dissenters typically emphasized the
freedom of the will's legitimate expression in the civil and political
rights to freedom of conscience and religious toleration. This En-
glish nonconformist tradition grew in power after the Toleration Act
of 1689, which had permitted non-Anglican Protestants to establish
churches such as the one on Newington Green.52
Price had developed a strong human rights theory while preaching
in various capacities at Newington Green since 1758. He supported
the abolition of chattel slavery and backed the American and the
French Revolutions. In 1776, he argued that among the "inalienable
rights of human nature" was the right to exercise free will through
participating in the social compact; through such willful popular

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A PHILOSOPHICAL GENEALOGY OF WOMEN'S HUMAN RIGHTS
participation, governments would finally be rendered legitimate in
their powers. Furthermore, the practice of moral liberty, religious
liberty, and civil liberty raised human beings above the level of "a
poor and abject animal." Price defined moral liberty as the exercise
of free will and reason in order to put God's moral law into action.
Moral liberty, for Price as for Wollstonecraft, was the rational self-
governance of individual human beings according to universal prin-
ciples of morality. This concept of moral liberty undergirded their
ideal conceptions of citizenship as participation in a self-governing
republic with a popular legislative assembly. Although they thought
that moral liberty was an important component of civil and political
liberty, it was not a precondition for one's entitlement to civil and
political rights. The case of chattel slavery illustrated this point: the
slave was not allowed to be either physically or morally free but still
deserved to be granted her liberty so that she could learn to be free
physically, morally, civilly, and politically."
Wollstonecraft's rational theological approach to universal human
rights built on Price but extended the argument explicitly and sys-
tematically to women. While Price repeatedly referenced the "in-
alienable rights of humanity" in his sermons and political writings,
he never seems to have made a public, recorded plea for women's hu-
man rights. His abolitionist arguments against human slavery only
implied women's human right to be free from slavery. Wollstone-
craft, on the other hand, began to specifically and systematically ar-
gue for women's human rights alongside the abolition of slavery in
her earliest political treatise, the 1790 Rights of Men.
Before penning the Rights of Men, Wollstonecraft did not often
use the language of rights in the sense of subjective, or individu-
ally held and exercised, rights. The influence of Price at Newington
Green seems to have triggered a shift in Wollstonecraft's conception
of rights. As a student, teacher, and theorist, she long had an interest
in the issue of female education-but she had not previously framed
education as a right of each and every human individual. In her early
publications, she conceptualized education as a moral duty of adults
to be performed in relation to their children; on the obverse side, it

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A PHILOSOPHICAL GENEALOGY OF WOMEN'S HUMAN RIGHTS
was a moral duty of children to follow their parents' instruction to
ensure their own development toward consistent practice of God's
moral law. By the time she composed the Rights of Men, Wollstone-
craft had begun to theorize an egalitarian view of universal human
rights-beginning with education and leading to republican politi-
cal participation. Her view followed Price in its grounding in the
theology of rational dissent. Her specific application of the concept
of subjective rights to women, however, was a philosophical mile-
stone in the realization of the concept's universalistic and egalitarian
potential.
Mill's Secular Alternative to Religious and
Metaphysical Theories of Rights
It was also in this late eighteenth-century intellectual context that
classical utilitarian thought, as set forth by Jeremy Bentham and
James Mill, began to be developed. Utilitarianism-or the view that
happiness is the only good, and suffering the only bad, and right ac-
tion is that which maximizes this good understood in this way-was
a philosophical expression of the secularization of high culture in the
late Enlightenment. John Stuart Mill, born in 18o6 in the Penton-
ville neighborhood of London, was a product of this secular utilitar-
ian school of thought, beginning with his earliest education by his
father, James. James Mill was raised Presbyterian but wholly rejected
religion as an adult, not only because of his personal lack of faith
but also because of his broader ethical conviction that religion was
the primary cause of suffering. Utilitarianism posed the competing
objective of reducing pain by promoting the greatest pleasure for
the greatest number of people and other sentient beings. Debunking
religion was one step that both Bentham and James Mill adopted as
part of the diffusion of happiness around the globe.54
Bentham had famously declared the idea of natural rights as
"nonsense on stilts." Viewed from his wholly sensory and empirical
utilitarian perspective on happiness, religion was nonsense. Conse-
quently, any religious or other metaphysical justifications of rights

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were doubly absurd: propped up by shoddy arguments, natural rights
were destined to fall down from their lofty heights once subjected
to rigorous scientific scrutiny. Although he agreed with Bentham
that metaphysical foundations for rights were nonsense, John Stu-
art Mill did not abandon the project of justifying rights on alterna-
tive grounds. Rather, his philosophical convictions about the nature
of morality and rights brought him to the conclusion that enslaved
people and women (including enslaved women) have rights. These
rights he called "moral rights" to distinguish them from the "le-
gal" or positive rights that typically had been granted only to men
in power, and often with the purpose of oppressing groups such as
slaves and women. His nearly lifelong political concern for advanc-
ing the rights of women and other historically oppressed groups
such as African slaves encouraged him as a philosopher to move in
this radical direction. Mill accordingly developed an abstract ratio-
nal justification for the moral rights of humans, which rested upon
a secular and nonmetaphysical (meaning a posteriori and empirical)
utilitarian conception of the individual human being as a "progres-
sive being." Such a progressive being was capable of and entitled to
liberty and free and full self-development toward the happiness of
herself and other sentient beings. In order to realize such free devel-
opment toward happiness for each and all, humans needed to have
their moral rights to freedom and self-development enshrined in and
ensured by law. Hence, Mill made a case for the institutionalization
of moral rights as legal rights, so that legal rights could be a force for
the happiness of humanity and sentient life as a whole. Mill's concep-
tion of moral or human rights thus served as a nonmetaphysical and
rationally justified normative standard according to which the law
and other man-made institutions ought to be critically judged and
ultimately reformed."
Attention to Mill's biography (and autobiography) is instructive
for understanding the roots of his nonmetaphysical approach to jus-
tifying human rights. James Mill raised his son John Stuart in a de-
liberately secular way, educating him at home and apart from any
religious schools or universities. Although he was baptized and oc-

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A PHILOSOPHICAL GENEALOGY OF WOMEN'S HUMAN RIGHTS
casionally sent to services at a local Anglican parish as a young child,
John Stuart later recalled, "I have never believed in Christianity as a
religion." In correspondence with his friends and fellow intellectuals
Auguste Comte and Thomas Carlyle, Mill represented himself as
exceptional for his utterly secular upbringing and consistent lack of
faith.56
In contrast to his fellow Londoner Wollstonecraft-who died
about nine years before he was born in 18o6-Mill received a train-
ing in moral philosophy that was entirely secular. Written in several
versions between 1853 and 1870, his Autobiography famously chron-
icled his "unusual and remarkable" education. Most distinctively,
Mill noted, "I was brought up from the first without any religious
belief."57
From 1810 to 1813, Mill's family lived near Newington Green.
Unlike Wollstonecraft's exposure to the abstract metaphysics of ra-
tional dissent at Price's church on the green, Mill's education was
deliberately situated on entirely scientific and empirical grounds.
Between the ages of four and seven, Mill took daily walks with his
father, James, from the green to the countryside. During these earli-
est remembered encounters with nature, he was expected to present
accounts of "what I had read the day before." James Mill focused
his young son's attention on learning from the historical examples
of great "men of energy and resource in unusual circumstances."
Among these great men was James himself, whose views on "civili-
zation, government, morality, [and] mental cultivation" John Stuart
was expected to restate "in his own words." Religion was treated as
a subspecies of history, with a focus on the exemplary history of
Protestant reformers-such as John Knox and the Quakers-who
had challenged clerical and aristocratic power. The remainder of
John Stuart's unusually early and intensive intellectual education
concerned classical languages, mathematics, experimental natural
science, logic, and, most important, the modern empirical "science"
of political economy.58
As foundations for human knowledge,James Mill had rejected both
revealed religion and natural religion, including deism. He taught

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John Stuart that "concerning the origin of things nothing whatever
can be known." The question "'Who made me?' cannot be answered,
because we have no experience or authentic information from which
to answer it"; furthermore, it raises the question "Who made God?"
Faced with such unanswerable questions, arguments about the ori-
gins of the universe failed to provide foundational evidence for either
religious or scientific worldviews. At a very young age, John Stuart
adopted his father James's secular philosophical approach to episte-
mology: if "nothing could be known" about the remote origins of
the universe, then more immediate and material grounds for under-
standing oneself and nature must be sought.59
This alternative empirical grounding for human knowledge, in-
cluding morality, was Bentham's utilitarian philosophy. John Stuart
described his father as "the earliest Englishman of any great mark,
who thoroughly understood, and in the main adopted, Bentham's
general views of ethics, government, and law." James Mill's "stan-
dard of morals" was utilitarian in Bentham's sense, by "taking as the
exclusive test of right and wrong, the tendency of actions to produce
pleasure or pain. "60
John Stuart recalled that as early as the age of seven he also had a
close personal relationship to Bentham. In the winter of his fifteenth
year, John Stuart's worldview was transformed by reading Dumont's
Trait6 de lgislation (1802), a redaction of Bentham's Introduction
to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789). Dumont's treatise,
as guided by Bentham's principles, demystified religion and other
metaphysical views (including the ideas of natural law and right rea-
son) as "dogmatism in disguise."61
John Stuart, from that point onward, understood Bentham's "prin-
ciple of utility" as the only certain and systematic foundation for a
modern, scientific, and thus secular approach to ethics, economics,
and politics: "The 'principle of utility,' understood as Bentham un-
derstood it, and applied in the manner in which he applied it through
these three volumes, fell exactly into its place as the keystone which
held together the detached and fragmentary component parts of my
knowledge and beliefs. It gave unity to my conception of things. I

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A PHILOSOPHICAL GENEALOGY OF WOMEN'S HUMAN RIGHTS
now had opinions; a creed, a doctrine, a philosophy; in one among
the best senses of the word, a religion." Bentham's utilitarianism
gave the young Mill a secular creed or philosophical orientation
that inspired him with a kind of religious zeal to "to be a reformer
of the world." If the happiness of humans and other animals could
be calculated from their experience of pleasure and their avoidance
of pain, the planned realization of broadly beneficial laws and poli-
cies seemed within practical reach. Mill devoted the next five years
to such projects, in writing, debate, and leadership of the Utilitar-
ian Society of young male intellectuals who shared his expectation
that the systematic application of principles of utilitarian political
economy could reform the world. During this time, he identified his
"own happiness" with that of the realization of the greatest good for
all in every sphere of life.62
Then, in the fall of 1826, the twenty-year-old Mill faced what
he later called the "crisis in my mental history." He asked himself:
If "all your objects in life were realized" would you be happy? "An
irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, 'No!"' He de-
scribed this devastating psychological experience in terms of the loss
of all foundations, including the philosophical architecture of utili-
tarianism: "The whole foundation on which my life was constructed
fell down."63
The consequence of this loss was Mill's rebuilding of his sense of
self and his philosophy upon restructured utilitarian foundations. He
began by theorizing the defects in both his own early education and
the Benthamite utilitarian outlook, particularly their lack of personal
affect: "My education, I thought, had failed to create those feelings
in sufficient strength to resist the dissolving influence of analysis."
Without the subjective emotional sympathies and pleasures that
could make his commitment to utilitarianism meaningful for him,
he was like a "well-equipped ship" without a "sail." He had the goal,
the greatest aggregate pleasure for humanity, but not the motive, his
own sense of pleasure in life, or even a sense of the subjective value
of his own life. Mill's mental crisis taught him that defining one's life
by a telos, or ultimate goal, is not enough. One needs a grounding or


A PHILOSOPHICAL GENEALOGY OF WOMEN'S HUMAN RIGHTS
a centering point, which can only be one's subjective sense of self and
its value. From this psychological grounding, one may set sail toward
a goal, without losing a greater sense of purpose upon arrival. The
journey was not over with the accomplishment; rather, the process of
self-development continued with the new set of experiences waiting
on the horizon.64
His fresh connection with his "irrepressible self-consciousness"
motivated John Stuart to develop his own utilitarian moral philoso-
phy, which put the value of the human individual's self-development
at its core. He still believed that happiness was the "test of all rules
of conduct, and the end of life," but that it was "only to be attained
by not making it the direct end." He made an inward turn to con-
templating and valuing "the internal culture of the individual" more
than external and material signs of human well-being. Such contem-
plation of one's self, and human selfhood in general, was the source
of "real, permanent happiness." This inward turn did not require a
"turning away" from "the common feelings and common destiny of
human beings" but rather required a "greatly increased interest in"
such common human experiences. The latter insight came from his
reading of the poetry of William Wordsworth, which Mill felt was
an expression of the poet's own "spontaneous overflow of powerful
feeling" in the face of the natural beauty of everyday human life.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's conception of the best education as
cultivating the complex and many-sided character of individuals was
another inspiration for the young Mill in his time of recovery.65
His discovery of this indirect route to personal happiness al-
lowed Mill to conceive a general view of self-development as the
indirect route to the greatest happiness for the greatest number.
Self-development of individuals was the necessary first step toward
the end of realizing the greatest happiness for all. The aggregate
beneficial effects of a law or policy were not sufficient grounds for
meeting Mill's revised utilitarian test of morality. In his primary test
of the morality of the law or policy, the benefits for individual self-
development had to be articulated. This new formulation of utili-
tarianism was liberal, or oriented toward the reciprocal protection

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of the liberty of individuals in ethical and political relation to others'
liberty. His liberal utilitarianism understood the conditions for in-
dividual liberty and free and full self-development as necessary for
generating an authentic global utility.
Two of Mill's major political writings fleshed out the process by
which this liberal utilitarian approach to promoting happiness could
be put into practice. On Liberty (1859) presented the first step as the
recognition of the "principle" of individuality, or the view that spon-
taneous self-development was "the chief ingredient of individual and
social progress." Once individuality was articulated in "civilization,
instruction, education, [and] culture" as "a necessary part and condi-
tion of all those things," its realization could be understood as the
indirect, though morally correct, path to the greatest happiness of
the whole.66
In On Liberty and The Subjection of Women (1869), Mill identified
education as the primary practical tool by which an aesthetic and
moral appreciation of individuality could be cultivated in people
over time and across generations. Properly understood in the broad-
est sense, education was not merely socialization or social control.
Rather, it was a long-term process of realizing the rich range of
capabilities of human beings, first as individuals, and secondly as a
species. According to Mill's liberal utilitarian principles, it was espe-
cially crucial for education to cultivate the individuality of women in
addition to inculcating men's appreciation for women's virtuous yet
varied self-development. Without nurturing a culture in which indi-
viduality would thrive among women as much as men, society would
miss out on "doubling the mass of mental faculties available for the
higher service of humanity."67
Less difficult than such deep cultural reform in the long run, but
perhaps as complicated in the short term, the next step was to reform
the law. For this task, Mill assigned "one very simple principle": the
view that moral rightness was acting so that the consequences of
one's action maximized happiness (or minimized suffering). In the
domain of law, he advocated that legislators and jurists use this harm
principle as a conceptual device for assigning the appropriate "legal

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A PHILOSOPHICAL GENEALOGY OF WOMEN'S HUMAN RIGHTS
penalties" to those who, whether individually or collectively, enacted
harm upon others. Consequently, only the harmful conduct by the
individual that "concerns others" could be subject to legal scrutiny
and rightful punishment. The liberal political import of the harm
principle was to demarcate a legal space within which the individual
could experience an expansive self-regarding liberty, conducive to
his or her free and full self-development, without "encroaching on
the rights of others." Individual human rights, including women's
rights to education and suffrage, ought to be legislated according to
thoughtful applications of the harm principle, since its aim was to
encourage the flourishing of an other-regarding ethic of individual
freedom under the law. The last, long-term, and most visionary step
of this twofold, educational and lawmaking, process was letting peo-
ple spontaneously self-develop according to established moral and
legal rules of their "rights as human beings" so that a virtuous happi-
ness for all might prevail.68
Around the same time that Mill discovered these indirect routes to
personal and global happiness, he was becoming practically and phil-
osophically engaged with the question of women's rights and related
issues such as sexual education concerning contraception. In 1823,
the young Mill was arrested for distributing pamphlets on birth con-
trol. In the Autobiography, he dated his interest in the issue of women's
rights to his second decade of life, when he critically responded to his
father James Mill's Essay on Government (1820). He dissented from
the elder Mill's claim that "women may consistently with good gov-
ernment, be excluded from the suffrage, because their interest is the
same with that of men." Mill insisted that his father could not escape
the charge that this abstract point about representation-which as-
sumed homogenous interests across a group-had problematic im-
plications for ethics and politics, especially in the age of suffrage re-
form. In his Autobiography, Mill favorably recounted how William
Thompson's 1825 "Appeal in behalf of women" pitted its arguments
against his father's assumption that married women's interests were
identical to their husbands' interests. New England suffragist John
Neal later recalled how he debated John Stuart Mill in London on

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A PHILOSOPHICAL GENEALOGY OF WOMEN'S HUMAN RIGHTS
the issue of women's rights in the late 182os, in the wake of the pub-
lic discussion of James Mill's failure to adequately address women's
rights.69
John Stuart's early pondering of the woman question was also in-
debted to Bentham. In his Autobiography, Mill reported that on the
"important point" of women's suffrage, Bentham was "wholly on our
side." By addressing the woman question as part of their philosophi-
cal calculus of how to maximize happiness for all sentient beings,
James Mill and Bentham set the stage for John Stuart's more robust
philosophical and political engagement of the issue over the course
of his career.70
The young Mill's deepening concern with the woman question
has usually been linked to his profound intellectual relationship with
the female friend who would eventually become his beloved wife,
Harriet Taylor. The pair exchanged their unpublished essays on
marriage in 1831 or early 1832. In these tantalizingly short works of
philosophical prose, Taylor and Mill set forth their distinctive views
on reform of marriage and the social status of women. As Alice Rossi
argued in her edition of the couple's writings on the equality of the
sexes, Taylor was more in the school of the Unitarian Radicals of
183os London, whose keen interest in using rationalistic theology for
advancing women's rights extended from Wollstonecraft to Harriet
Martineau; Mill, on the other hand, was shaped by the Philosophical
Radicals of Britain, in taking a secular, utilitarian, and Romantic ap-
proach to the issue of realizing women's equality with men."
Taylor's essay shows her to be the more radical feminist of the two
at the time. Mill's essay defended a Romantic vision of a more equal
form of marriage, in which the wife inspired the husband intellectu-
ally as well as through the beauty of the domestic environment she
created for them. As he poetically opined, "The great occupation of
woman should be to beautify life: to cultivate, for her own sake and
that of those who surround her, all her faculties of mind, soul, and
body; all her powers of enjoyment, and powers of giving enjoyment;
and to diffuse beauty, elegance, and grace, everywhere." Mill's es-
say concluded with worries about protecting women outside such

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A PHILOSOPHICAL GENEALOGY OF WOMEN'S HUMAN RIGHTS
beautiful and enjoyable marriages, especially against the forces of
public opinion that judged their sex quite harshly for assertions of
independence. To his credit, he endorsed an equal right to divorce
so that women would not be "forcibly united to one of those who
make the opinion.""
Taylor's response delved deeper into an assessment of patriarchal
power relations. She critiqued the gendered divide between public
and private, which placed men in civil and political roles outside the
home and women predominantly within the private space of the fam-
ily. Even liberals with radical leanings like Mill understood women's
roles as focused on caring for others, as when he claimed women's
"great occupation" is to "beautify" life for everyone. Taylor ironically
remarked, as Wollstonecraft had done, on the similarity of the plight
of prostitutes and wives: "Women are educated for one single object,
to gain their living by marrying-(some poor souls get it without the
churchgoing. It's the same way-they do not seem to be a bit worse
than their honoured sisters)." Taylor's essay also defended women's
"most entire equality with men, as to all rights and privileges, civil
and political." She emphasized the rights to divorce, to be single and
childless, and to have careers outside the home, on the grounds that
recognition of such rights would open the door for further social
reforms that would promote the equality of the sexes in society and
law. Poignantly, the friends privately exchanged these manuscripts
on marriage during the early days of their platonic relationship. Both
in their mid-twenties, Mill was single, but Taylor was married to her
first husband, John, and raising their three young children."
Mill's early criticism of his father's assumption of the homogeneity
of spousal interests within marriage led him to publically challenge
the view that male heads of families could adequately represent the
interests of women in politics. The logic of the "indirect route" to
happiness could be applied to this case of justifying women's rights
within utilitarianism. Male heads of household cannot be substituted
for their wives, as though they held equivalent functions in the calcu-
lus of utility; rather, individual wives may differ from their husbands
in the subjective assessment of their own and their family's interests.

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A PHILOSOPHICAL GENEALOGY OF WOMEN'S HUMAN RIGHTS
Harriet Taylor's differences of opinion from her "upright, brave, and
honorable" first husband were a poignant case in point; John Taylor's
interests were not the same as Harriet's, despite his "steady and affec-
tionate" friendship with her. Mill reasoned that all adult individuals,
including women, must be allowed political conditions under which
they can represent their subjective perception of their interests, such
as via the right to vote. The self-development and individual human
rights of women, therefore, were preconditions for the good of the
whole political community.4
Beyond his inspiration by Bentham, his father, and his future wife,
Mill was aware of Wollstonecraft's work on women's rights, too. In
1843, his friend and correspondent Auguste Comte-the French
positivist philosopher-wrote to him about his youthful fascination
with her work in the late 1790s. Comte expressed how she played a
role in his early philosophical engagement of the relationship be-
tween the sexes: "All thinkers who seriously like women as some-
thing more than pretty playthings have nowadays passed through a
similar phase, I believe. In my turn, I well recall the time when the
strange book of Miss Mary Wollstonecraft-written before she mar-
ried Godwin-influenced me strongly." Mill and Comte's ensuing
correspondence on the woman question was later published in 186os
St. Petersburg and 1870s Paris, stirring further feminist debates.75
Despite his early interest in Wollstonecraft's philosophy of sex
equality, Comte later positioned himself against the Wollstonecraft-
ian school of thought on the common humanity and rights of the
sexes. In his 1843 letters to Mill, Comte instead posited a "natu-
ral hierarchy" of men over women that translated into separate and
unequal social roles for the sexes. He went so far as to claim that
women-by virtue of their "organic" sexual inferiority-were in a
"state of radical childhood" and thus incapable of management roles,
inside or outside the household.76
Mill's epistolary response to Comte illustrated the impact of the
past decade of theoretical discussions with Taylor on marriage and
the sources of female subordination. Mill deflated Comte's claim
of a female incapacity for management by pointing out women's

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A PHILOSOPHICAL GENEALOGY OF WOMEN'S HUMAN RIGHTS
comparative strength in running households, and even industries,
in England. Via a comparison of Western European women with
the Russian serfs, Mill argued that women's secondary status to men
was a product of socialization: "The servitude of women, although
milder [than that of the serfs], is a servitude without respite, en-
compassing all of their activities, which discharges them, much more
completely than was ever true for the serfs, from all essential plan-
ning for the future and from all active direction of their own conduct
with respect to society but even in the way of individual interest."
By 1843, Mill was clearly developing a more comprehensive political
theory of how society imposed inequality on the sexes. His reflection
on the moral psychology of women's oppression opened the door to
his deliberation on the necessity of social and economic reforms, es-
pecially educational and workplace opportunities, to unlock women
from their ascribed position of total subordination."
While Mill never cited Wollstoneraft as a source for his work, we
know that his intellectual partner Taylor read the Rights of Woman.
She also shared the book with her adolescent daughter, the future
women's suffragist Helen Taylor, in the early 184os. Harriet Taylor's
brand of feminist liberalism had much in common with Wollstone-
craft's ideas, as well as the growing organized feminist movement
in the 184os United States. Taylor's 1851 essay "The Enfranchise-
ment of Women," published in London's Westminster Review, paid
homage to the recent, path-breaking women's rights conventions in
Seneca Falls, New York, and Worcester, Massachusetts. Taylor made
a strong public demand for women's formal political incorporation
as an essential aspect of social justice, nationally and internation-
ally. Recalling the language of Wollstonecraft's appeal to Talleyrand-
Perigord, Taylor pointedly asked: "For with what truth or rationality
could the suffrage be termed universal, while half the human species
remain excluded from it?" In an undated, cowritten essay from this
period, Taylor and Mill together answered the question with even
more rhetorical and philosophical force: "THE RIGHTS OF WOMEN
are no other than the rights of human beings." This may be the first
direct formulation of the proposition that women's rights are human

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A PHILOSOPHICAL GENEALOGY OF WOMEN'S HUMAN RIGHTS
rights-and it was a joint production, like so much in the couple's
life together. For example, it was Taylor's early advocacy on behalf of
the women's suffrage cause that launched Mill's leadership roles, as
an author and politician, amid the international flourishing of femi-
nist activism in the 186os.78
Both Mill and Taylor were in all likelihood philosophically in-
debted to the ideas of Wollstonecraft, who was the most famous
(and infamous) women's rights advocate in the world in the mid-
nineteenth century. Other feminist authors such as Sophia, Madame
de Sta8l, Frances Wright, Martineau, and Margaret Fuller enjoyed
international receptions, particularly in the Atlantic world, but none
was so strongly associated with the concept of women's rights as
Wollstonecraft. All too transparent in its honest biographical treat-
ment of Wollstonecraft's premarital sexual relationships, her husband
William Godwin's well-meaning Memoirs of the Author of A Vindi-
cation of the Rights of Woman (1798) continued to be scandalous in
Victorian Britain. It may have been Wollstonecraft's special infamy
as a fallen woman in her homeland that made Mill and Taylor reluc-
tant to overtly relate their feminist liberal ideas to their predecessor.
Regardless, Mill quickly eclipsed Wollstonecraft as the best-known
feminist political philosopher around the globe, with the publica-
tion of The Subjection of Women in six languages, eight countries, and
twelve editions or printings in 1869 alone.79
Another reason for Mill's silence with regard to Wollstonecraft
might be the fundamental difference in their approaches to defin-
ing and justifying women's human rights. Wollstonecraft's rational
Christian metaphysics stood in stark contrast to Mill's practical and
secular liberal utilitarianism. Despite their relative proximity in time
and place, they erected two alternative foundations for women's
human rights. Chapter 2 comparatively assesses the strengths and
weaknesses of each of their theories of rights for addressing feminist
questions of justice, then and now.

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FOUNDATIONS OF UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS
WOLLSTONECRAFT'S RATIONAL THEOLOGY
AND MILL'S LIBERAL UTILITARIANISM
The Problem of Foundations, Revisited
Natural rights theories-from the late medieval era to the late eigh-
teenth century-had sidelined women for the most part. As shown in
chapter z, these theories had limited value for understanding women
as rights-bearing subjects. The era of the French Revolution saw the
rise of new theories of rights that conceived of women as moral,
social, and political equals alongside men. Most notably, Mary Woll-
stonecraft revised the rational dissenting Protestant theology of her
mentor Richard Price so that it explicitly justified the inclusion of
women in the "rights of humanity." Moreover, she theorized rights
in deontological terms, like her contemporary Immanuel Kant, to
fortify their status in ethics and politics. As correlates of moral du-
ties prescribed by God's rational and universal moral law, human
rights were moral absolutes for Wollstonecraft. In this respect she
anticipated the liberal philosopher Ronald Dworkin's view of "rights
as trumps," in the sense that she ascribed to rights the power to over-
ride any competing ethical or political demands. In an alternative
approach, John Stuart Mill sought to correct classical utilitarian-
ism's neglect of individual rights while accepting its secular frame
and grounding of utility. Unlike Jeremy Bentham's dismissal of the
idea of justifying rights independently of positive law as "nonsense
on stilts," Mill's liberal utilitarianism aimed to institutionalize in law
the rationally justified moral rights of women and other historically
oppressed groups as an indirect yet necessary step toward realizing
the greatest happiness of all.'
Each of these revisions of earlier philosophies of rights came with
their own problems. Wollstonecraft faced a dilemma born of the fact
of religious pluralism. In its theoretical justification, her capacious
metaphysics staked a big tent under which all members of human-

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FOUNDATIONS OF UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS

ity could be assured coverage for their rights. In rhetorical practice,
however, the Christian elements of her system of thought made it
more persuasive than not to people who shared those same or similar
theological beliefs. Mill confronted a different problem, since the
moral beliefs required for persuading people to accept his secular
utilitarian approach to grounding human rights were minimalistic in
comparison to Wollstonecraft's metaphysics. Mill's main issue was
rather one related to the justification of rights: namely, the insecure
status of rights within his liberal utilitarianism. Because he followed
Bentham in understanding utility as the sole foundation for morality,
Mill conceptualized rights as instruments for promoting the utility
of the whole. Rights could not function as trumps for Mill. Rights
could only serve as tools for realizing the greatest happiness through
the indirect route of encouraging the free and full self-development
of each and every individual. Although he sought to improve upon
the classical utilitarian neglect of individual rights, his liberal utilitar-
ianism nonetheless returned to the same moral problem that plagued
his father, James, and Bentham. Can the good of any given individual
be rightly sacrificed for the greatest happiness of the greatest num-
ber? Wollstonecraft could answer this question with a definitive no,
because of her deontological grounding for human rights and theo-
logical view of the intrinsic worth of human creatures. While the
secular Mill escaped Wollstonecraft's demanding metaphysics and
theological biases, he failed to defend individual human rights in any
absolute sense that would unconditionally protect people from per-
sonal sacrifice for the sake of the happiness of the majority. Whether
such sacrifice was supererogatory-arising from a heroic sense of
duty or forced upon the individual from without, Mill's theory
of rights could not completely rule out the moral validity of such
an extreme utilitarian demand. As John Rawls argued, utility could
potentially trump rights even in Mill's liberal revision of classical
utilitarianism.2
Despite their different flaws and foundations, Wollstonecraft's
and Mill's alternative justifications of human rights are examples of
what Charles Beitz calls "naturalistic" theories of rights, which are

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FOUNDATIONS OF UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS

predicated on conceptions of the nature of the human being. Both
Wollstonecraft's rational theology and Mill's liberal utilitarianism
offer "naturalistic" theories of rights in the sense that they posit that
all human beings hold equal rights "by virtue of their humanity," or
what makes them human. The definition of the human person thus
becomes crucial for both Wollstonecraft's and Mill's theories of uni-
versal human rights. In particular, their explicit inclusion of women
in their respective definitions of the human gave Wollstonecraft
and Mill each a basis for the idea of women's human rights. From
Wollstonecraft's religious and metaphysical perspective, women's
human rights were grounded in women's natures as human creatures
made in the rational image of God. Regardless of sex, humans were
equally subject to their divine Creator's universal, rational moral law.
As moral equals, men and women were obliged to put the rational
moral law of their divine Creator into practice through the dutiful
respect of each other's human rights. From Mill's secular perspec-
tive, women's human rights were based on a conception of utility
that was nonmetaphysical (meaning a posteriori and empirical) yet
abstract and normative (specifically, eudaimonic or virtue oriented).
Mill followed Bentham and Auguste Comte in rejecting the type of
abstractions found in metaphysical and ontological philosophies in
favor of proceeding with phenomenal and experiential data as the
basis for the explanation of facts about the natural world. He thought
that he had abstracted from the empirical study of sentient life a
conception of utility that had strong, though nonmetaphysical, nor-
mative implications. His conception of utility revised classical utili-
tarianism by positing a eudaimonic or virtue-oriented conception of
happiness as the normative end point of its ethical system. In Mill's
liberal utilitarianism, the virtuous happiness of each individual hu-
man being, especially his or her robust sense of personal agency and
self-development, would be maximized if the equality of the sexes
was recognized in culture and law through the institutionalization of
human rights for women and men alike. Although his naturalistic ac-
count of the human being derived from empirical observation rather
than metaphysical speculation, it was a normative ideal in the sense

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FOUNDATIONS OF UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS

that it posited a thick moral conception of virtuous happiness as the
goal of individual human development.3
From a contemporary liberal philosophical perspective, each of
these views of the foundations of universal human rights is problem-
atic for similar and different reasons. Similarly, Wollstonecraft's and
Mill's theories today encounter the problem of foundations itself.
Since Rawls made his turn toward a political liberalism that explicitly
avoids appeals to any comprehensive doctrines (such as metaphysical
or religious views, or other robust normative conceptions of human
development, happiness, or the good life), a number of liberal think-
ers have followed suit with nonfoundationalist approaches to justify-
ing human rights. Such Rawlsian nonfoundationalist theories define
human rights without relying on deep, demanding, or divisive moral
doctrines. The purpose of these "purely political" definitions of hu-
man rights is to establish a broad yet thin consensus upon which a
stable international conception of rights can be built. This consensus
is historically rooted in legal practices of human rights but may also
be projected into the future, as in the case of Rawls's hypothesis of an
international league of liberal and decent peoples bound together by
established human rights norms. Rawlsian approaches tend to pro-
ceed from the analysis of the ongoing public articulation and under-
standing of human rights in politics and law in the wake of the 1789
Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen and especially the 1948
Universal Declaration. For example, Beitz and Jack Donnelly have
based their normative arguments about the appropriate scope and
content of human rights upon the international legal consensus that
has snowballed since 1948, rather than appealing to potentially divi-
sive naturalistic foundations for rights as do Wollstonecraft's rational
theology and Mill's liberal utilitarianism.4
By a nonfoundationalist approach to human rights, Donnelly means
that he takes human rights as socially constructed "givens" from a
particular historical and legal context. He begins his narrative of the
evolution of universal human rights with the 1789 French Declara-
tion, which established equal rights for most men in the revolution-
ary republic. Since then, national and international laws and policies

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FOUNDATIONS OF UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS

concerning the rights of humans have broadened, ever so gradually,
to include blacks, women, and other marginalized groups.5
The problem with Donnelly's nonfoundationalist approach is that
it fails to address the practical need (and historic practice) of ap-
peals to naturalistic foundations for rights in a time prior to the in-
stitutionalization of such rights for marginalized groups. By 1789,
women's human rights had only been barely and murkily concep-
tualized in European political thought. As Olympe de Gouges and
Wollstonecraft demonstrated, the idea of the rights of woman was so
visionary that just to change the gender of a pronoun or a noun in
the dominant rhetoric of the rights of man was a radical move.
Yet de Gouges and Wollstonecraft both had to do more than
change pronouns from masculine to feminine. Confronted with the
fact of their social and political marginalization in even postrevolu-
tionary republicanism, they felt pressed to appeal to a conception
of the common humanity of the sexes in order to persuade men in
power that women were in fact worthy of the same civil and politi-
cal rights as men possessed. De Gouges grounded her arguments on
the idea of human rights that grew out of the Rousseauian tradition
of natural religion, while Wollstonecraft employed the Anglophone
discourse of rational dissenting Christianity to make the case for
women's human rights. Regardless of their belief (or possible nonbe-
lief) in such foundations, their philosophical and rhetorical appeals
to kinds of natural or metaphysical bases for women's human rights
(such as their respective conceptions of the human being) were po-
litically necessary in their contexts.
Rawlsian nonfoundationalist approaches take for granted a cultural
and legal institutionalization of human rights that Wollstonecraft
and even Mill could not presume, especially in the case of women.
Back then, the idea of women's rights was just that-an idea, and a
laughable one even in the wake of the French Revolution. In order
for one to take rights as a "given," those rights need to be recognized
as a "societal given," in culture and law. There is an important dis-
tinction between having rights and having those rights recognized
and respected by other people or protected by state power. Woll-

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FOUNDATIONS OF UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS

stonecraft and Mill understood this distinction and the problems it
raised for human rights advocacy. They were faced with the struggle
of convincing people that women were humans with the same rights
as men, and as such were deserving of popular recognition and legal
protection of their rights like men. It made sense to them that they
had to provide a solid moral foundation for this radical view, to give
it philosophical validity. As masterful rhetoricians poised to fight a
battle for the losing side, Wollstonecraft and Mill also knew that the
coherence of their arguments for the foundations of universal human
rights had implications for their persuasiveness in the public sphere.
Their simple and elegant logic was in many ways their most powerful
weapon in the rhetorical and political battle for the public recogni-
tion and legal institutionalization of women's human rights.
Neither Wollstonecraft nor Mill had the luxury of starting with
the given of universal human rights; rather, each had to construct an
argument for the establishment of rights as legal and cultural givens
for all humans. Pablo Gilabert has defended the ongoing relevance
of such foundationalist (or what he calls "humanist," and what Beitz
calls "naturalistic") arguments as "working in tandem" with con-
temporary Rawlsian nonfoundationalist, or purely political, human
rights approaches. Foundationalist arguments for human rights may
productively work in tandem with such nonfoundationalist argu-
ments in the sense that the former are better equipped to advance
human rights prior to their cultural and legal institutionalization,
while the latter are better suited for the articulation of human rights
within positive law and official public policy. First, foundationalist
arguments establish an abstract yet robust normative standard by
which the deficiencies of current institutions, in culture and law,
may be judged with respect to rights. In the words of Gilabert, a "hu-
manist perspective is crucial to recognize the significance of institu-
tions, frame their shape and impact, and explain why their creation
or transformation is needed." In addition to such critical assessment
of current institutions, foundationalist arguments enable a visionary
perspective from which new or unrealized human rights might be
imagined and demanded for "enjoyment" in the future. Alongside

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FOUNDATIONS OF UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS

Amartya Sen, Gilabert conceives of such foundationalist arguments
for human rights as critical tools for "alleging" or advocating how
new or unrealized rights ought to be prospectively specified and ul-
timately realized in law and policy. The justification of human rights
via humanistic/naturalistic foundations therefore has important
practical implications for persuasive allegation and subsequent dis-
semination of human rights.6
Wollstonecraft and Mill thus began with foundationalist ap-
proaches to the abstract rational justification of universal human
rights. Their respective theological and secular methodologies con-
tinue to be relevant to contemporary politics, particularly because of
their persuasive powers for audiences in different cultural contexts.
Although Wollstonecraft's particular brand of theological argument
for women's human rights is not as salient today, other religious
variants of this type of metaphysical foundationalism have become
important. Non-Western cultures, animated by religions such as
Islam, Confucianism, and Hinduism, seek to incorporate the lan-
guage of women's human rights into their systems of religious and
political beliefs. Some Western religious women have looked back to
Wollstonecraft and other early women's rights advocates as sources
for their own bridging of feminism with Judaism, Christianity, and
other world religions.7
But it is Mill's secular liberal utilitarian foundation for human
rights that continues to wield the most influence today, in both a
negative and a positive sense. Positively, it has helped to produce a
global idiom for arguing for women's human rights in universalistic
terms that do not necessarily privilege any particular religion and are
easily adaptable in a variety of legal and political systems. Mill's hu-
manistic/naturalistic approach derived human rights from a secular
yet normatively rich account of human individuality and its potential
for virtuous yet varied moral development. His abstract definition
of individual rights by way of a secular account of human nature al-
lowed Mill to use rights claims as a critical tool for judging the in-
sufficiency of current schemes of justice. Such political criticism, in
turn, should generate positive claims for specific rights that society

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FOUNDATIONS OF UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS

ought to institutionalize for women in order to realize justice for the
"disqualified half of the human race."8
Negatively, the political influence of the Millian approach has
been matched with its practical failures. First, secular naturalistic
conceptions of human rights do not necessarily address the cultural
preference of many humans for their deeply held religious beliefs
to resonate with their principled political conception of the equal
dignity of human beings. Second, liberal utilitarian foundations for
human rights might also express (often latent) secular biases, espe-
cially for Western models of economic and civilizational progress.
Both of these dimensions of Millian liberal utilitarianism may im-
pede the nuanced and ethical application of universalistic women's
human rights arguments in situations of religious or other forms of
cultural difference.
In what follows, I set forth analyses of Wollstonecraft's theologi-
cal and Mill's secular approaches to justifying women's human rights
arguments, expounding their strengths as much as their weaknesses.
Despite their flaws, Wollstonecraft's and Mill's foundationalist ap-
proaches to justifying human rights remain salient in different ways
for liberal and feminist approaches to advocating for human rights.
In particular, they offer distinct yet often complementary models for
how to ethically and persuasively allege and defend women's human
rights in situations of religious or cultural conflict, by attending to
those religious and other cultural differences in one's approach to
human rights advocacy. To test and compare their value for human
rights advocacy, I assess the advantages and disadvantages of both
approaches in the context of historic and contemporary debates on
religious polygamy considered as a women's human rights issue.
Wollstonecraft's Theological and Deontological
Foundation for Universal Human Rights
Two puzzles confront any reader who wishes to understand Woll-
stonecraft's theory of rights. First, one finds a preponderance of refer-
ences to duties, both general and specific, over references to specific

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FOUNDATIONS OF UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS

conceptions of rights, across Wollstonecraft's corpus of writings. In
the Rights of Woman alone, Wollstonecraft used the term "rights"
thirty-two times but employed the term "duties" about three times as
often. This trend seems curious for a book that declares on its cover
to be a vindication of the rights-not the duties-of woman.9
Second, readers notice Wollstonecraft's tendency to make conse-
quentialist arguments for the benefits of granting rights to women.
Wollstonecraft frequently discussed the extrinsic, social benefits of
granting civil and political rights to women, often for men: "Would
men but generously snap our chains . . . they would find us more
observant daughters, more affectionate sisters, more faithful wives,
more reasonable mothers-in a word, better citizens." As for the in-
trinsic, personal benefits of human rights for individuals, Wollstone-
craft reverently spoke of the "sober pleasures" of thinking and acting
as a rational moral agent and rights bearer. While these consequen-
tialist forms of argument are not in themselves problematic, they
seem to stand in tension with her overall concern with moral duty. If
human beings have God-given duties to respect each other's human
rights, then the performance of duty would matter far more than the
consequences of performance. In other words, the obligation to pro-
vide human rights to others obtains independently of the intrinsic
or extrinsic consequences of the act of provision. Yet Wollstonecraft
often ostensibly argued the reverse: in particular, that the public
benefits of granting rights to women are what justify their provi-
sion. On this reading, she paradoxically appears to defend rights for
women on condition of their generating benefits for society at large,
especially the men who currently run it.'0
A common resolution to these twin puzzles can be found via a
deontological and theological reading of Wollstonecraft's theory
of human rights. Understanding Wollstonecraft's deontological (or
duty-based) justification for human rights better accounts for her
rhetorical and philosophical emphasis on the concept of duty, even
in treatises that aim to vindicate the rights of men and the rights of
women. By deontological, I mean the definition of moral rightness
(what is absolutely right) as logically and ethically prior to the moral

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FOUNDATIONS OF UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS

good (what is contingently beneficial). Deontological conceptions
of human rights are grounded on an idea of their moral rightness,
first and foremost. Human rights are thus seen as derivative from an
abstract, rational, universal, and obligatory moral rule or principle.
In other words, people ought to recognize and respect human rights
because it is their moral duty to do so.
Following Kant, such deontological theories of rights are typically
justified in strict opposition to consequences. Under the Kantian
view, one ought to recognize and respect rights because it is morally
right to do so in an absolute and universal sense, not because they
produce good social outcomes. Furthermore, one is morally obliged
to recognize and respect rights even when the practice of such rights
might produce bad social outcomes. Wollstonecraft shared the Kant-
ian deontological conception of human rights as primarily defined
by their absolute (and rational) moral rightness. Her mentor Price
has been called a Kantian moral philosopher; I also situate Woll-
stonecraft within a family of Kantian approaches to ethics."
Wollstonecraft distinguished herself from Kant and other strict de-
ontological theorists, however, in her regular recourse to consequen-
tialist arguments for the intrinsic and extrinsic benefits of granting
human rights to individuals. At the same time, she agreed with Kant
that rights are justified not in terms of their consequences but rather
in terms of their derivation from universal, rational moral duties.
And yet, both Wollstonecraft and Kant recognized that happiness
and other beneficial consequences may be by-products of perform-
ing duties and respecting the corresponding rights of oneself and
others. Although the performance of duty does not necessarily lead
to happiness, and the expectation of happy consequences does not
morally justify the performance of duty in the first place, the exercise
of duty may be pleasurable (as in Wollstonecraft's aforementioned
"sober pleasures" of thinking and acting as a rational being). Al-
though Kant is often starkly caricatured as rejecting any relationship
between morality and happiness, his Groundwork for the Metaphysics
of Morals (1785) opened with the example of a man with painful gout
who chose to take care of his health rather than indulge his love

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FOUNDATIONS OF UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS

of rich food, not because it relieved pain or increased pleasure, but
because it was the right and rational thing to do. His consequent ex-
perience of health brought him a happiness that was a by-product of
performing this self-regarding duty for the right reasons.'2
Given their broad agreement on the relationship between mo-
rality and happiness, the key difference between their systems of
deontological ethics was that Kant's metaphysical approach to defin-
ing duties and corresponding rights was a priori yet nontheological,
whereas Wollstonecraft's was a priori yet theological. In Kant's epis-
temology, the human mind constructed its rational understanding of
reality and morality without reference to the noumenal realm (which
includes the fundamentally incomprehensible God's-eye point of
view). Because she did not make such an epistemological distinction
between the noumenal and the phenomenological, Wollstonecraft's
metaphysical theory of rights could and did ground itself on theo-
logical principles. Her theologically informed metaphysics also al-
lowed her to define humanity in broader terms than Kant's strictly
a priori, nonempirical, nontheological, metaphysical approach to de-
fining humans as rational and moral beings.'3
Wollstonecraft's rational theology, as set forth in her two Vindica-
tions, provided the grounding for several levels of her theory of hu-
man rights. First, it provided Wollstonecraft with an a priori, meta-
physical conception of the human being: humans are creatures of
God, endowed with reason and the potential to use it to mentally
access and put into practice the divine moral law. Second, this con-
ception of the human being served as the starting point for her
perfectionistic account of human development. Wollstonecraft
understood the ultimate purpose of human life as the learning and
practice of moral virtue in social and political relationships. Third,
and most important for her ethical system, was her theological con-
ception of the rationality and benevolence of God's providential plan
for human development. Wollstonecraft affirmed this view of provi-
dence in chapter 1 of the Rights of Woman: "Firmly persuaded that no
evil exists in the world that God did not design to take place, I build
my belief on the perfection of God. Rousseau exerts himself to prove

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FOUNDATIONS OF UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS

that all was right originally: a crowd of authors that all is now right:
and I, that all will be right." This belief or article of faith, which
Wollstonecraft professed at the time she wrote her two Vindications,
provided a psychological basis or motive for the human pursuit of
rational and virtuous self-development in society.'4
Wollstonecraft's rational theology, especially its premise of a be-
nevolent and rational providential plan for human development,
seamlessly accommodated the beneficial consequences of rights into
her moral and political philosophy. Her broadly metaphysical/ethical
view of human development allowed her to define human rights pri-
marily as morally right and secondarily as personally and socially
beneficial. Her consequentialist arguments for women's human
rights were therefore supplemental to her fundamental deontologi-
cal justification for them. These dual, rank-ordered justifications of
human rights rested on her metaphysical conception of humanity's
purpose within God's creation. As Wollstonecraft wrote in the Rights
of Woman, "The grand end of [human] exertions should be to un-
fold their own faculties, and acquire the dignity of conscious virtue."
This theologically informed ethical framework encouraged her to
articulate how the recognition and respect of human rights generate
benefits for people that are rational, right, and good for the develop-
ment of the human species in both the short and long term."
As with the Kantian view, Wollstonecraft's deontological concep-
tion of human rights was correlative: "Rights and duties are insepara-
ble." Within this correlative account of rights, duty remained foun-
dational. While all rights derived from duties, not all duties entailed
rights. Moreover, for Kant as for Wollstonecraft, only rational be-
ings had duties and therefore held rights. As she wrote to Talleyrand-
Perigord in the dedication to the Rights of Woman, "a duty" cannot
"be binding which is not founded on reason." A rational being would
only recognize a duty as binding if it was rational and universally ap-
plicable to all rational beings; furthermore, any rights derived from
such a duty would belong only to rational beings.16
Moving far beyond Kant, Wollstonecraft pushed this correlative
and rational account of the relationship between duties and rights


FOUNDATIONS OF UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS

in an explicitly feminist direction, by addressing the practical asym-
metry between empowered male rights bearers and disempowered
female rights claimers. Near the end of the Rights of Woman, she ar-
gued that men have no basis for expecting women to perform any
duties without acknowledging their rights. If "women have not any
inherent rights to claim," then "by the same rule, their duties vanish,
for rights and duties are inseparable." For Wollstonecraft, the con-
cept of duty defined what our relational obligations are to others, as
moral and rational equals governed by the same moral rules. These
obligations included our duty to respect other people's rights regard-
less of their social status (a step that Kant, disappointingly, did not
take to its logical conclusion, particularly in the case of women).7
In the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft upheld rights as "the privi-
lege of moral beings" but underscored that holding such privilege
required the exercise of the duty to respect oneself. She particularly
stressed to her female readership, who had often been degraded by
the limited options for self-development afforded by patriarchal so-
ciety, that their "first duty is to themselves as rational creatures." The
fundamental recognition and self-respect of one's ontological status
as a moral, rational, and equal human being, capable of rational as-
sessment of one's moral relationships with other human beings, was a
psychological precondition for three dimensions of Wollstonecraft-
ian ethics. First, it allowed one to understand oneself as a duty-
bearing and rights-bearing subject. Second, it enabled understand-
ing of one's rights and duties as bearing on other people's rights and
duties. Third and ultimately, it promoted the exercise and realization
of human rights and duties on a broader social and political scale.'8
Wollstonecraft's view of humans as "moral beings," whose "first
duty" was to respect themselves as such, parallels Kantian ethics. In
his second formulation of the categorical imperative (or conception
of universal duty), Kant set forth an influential view of humans as
"rational beings," who are moral ends in themselves and not mere
means to other ends. As such moral ends in themselves, humans
hold and are obligated to reciprocally respect "the rights of human
beings." In her reading of Kant's ethics, Onora O'Neill has argued

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FOUNDATIONS OF UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS

that the primary content of his categorical imperative is this abstract
ethical principle that humans ought to respect themselves and others
as moral equals. It is this ethical principle that also stands at the core
of Wollstonecraft's deontological theory of human rights and duties.
In her Rights of Men, we find a negative formulation of this principle
according to her Pricean moral theology: "Every thing looks like a
means, nothing like an end, or point of rest, when we can say, now
let us sit down and enjoy the present moment." Wollstonecraft went
on to argue that if people consider themselves only in terms of their
material needs or means, rather than as rational beings striving to
follow the moral law, then they will exit this life without the "con-
scious dignity" of moral virtue.19
As we have seen, Wollstonecraft's rational theology furnished a
view of human beings on a purely metaphysical level, as moral ends
in themselves. At the same time, her theologically informed meta-
physics opened up a wider perspective on humans, not solely as
rational beings, but also as embodied, affective, yet rational crea-
tures capable of both morality and happiness. Ensconced within her
broader metaperspective on the nature of humanity, her view of the
human-rights-bearing subject as embodied, affective, and rational
was both empirically grounded and normatively rich. It was an ac-
count of sentient human bodies and their moral relationship to other
sentient bodies in the divinely created natural world. For example,
her practical theory of physical education began with empirical ob-
servation of girls as they are embodied, and then proceeded to the
normative question of how they ought to experience embodiment:
"If girls were allowed to take sufficient exercise," then they would
exhibit a bodily and mental self-confidence that would thwart essen-
tialist explanations of their supposed natural "imbecility."20
For Wollstonecraft, the affective capacities of humans, in particu-
lar their sympathy for other creatures' feelings, worked with reason
to produce appropriate moral judgments, including rights claims.
In her first Vindication, Wollstonecraft described her personal expe-
rience of "reverence" of the "rights of men" as a process in which
she drew on both her mind and her body: "Sacred rights! for which

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FOUNDATIONS OF UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS

I acquire a more profound respect, the more I look into my own
mind; and, professing these heterodox opinions, I still preserve my
bowels; my heart is human, beats quick with human sympathies
and I FEAR God!" Abstract contemplation of human rights and their
grounding in God's moral law led her to sense her own embodiment
as a human and capacity for heartfelt sympathy with other human
beings."
With this empirically grounded yet normatively rich approach to
defining the human being in the natural world, Wollstonecraft situ-
ated the fact of human embodiment within her broader metaphysi-
cal/ethical system. Unlike Kant, who has been criticized by feminist
philosophers for positing an "idealized" conception of a rational male
agent at the core of his ethical theory, Wollstonecraft advanced an
approach to ethics that remained abstract yet resisted such a built-in
sex bias. Her philosophical anthropology of human beings and their
rights specifically accounted for biological sex differences across the
species. Girls and women, for example, had a right to education con-
cerning reproduction, pregnancy, childbirth, and infant care. They
might have faced the physical challenge of biological motherhood
and the consequentially "grand" duty to intensively care for their de-
pendent offspring "in their infancy" despite their own vulnerability
while recovering from childbirth. The capacity for biological moth-
erhood entailed women's human right to know what to expect from
such a physical and moral challenge, should it be posed.22
At the most abstract level, Wollstonecraft's view of human rights
bearers was purely metaphysical and theological: it was an account
of human beings as rational and moral beings, subject to following
God's moral law via the faculty of reason. As shown in chapter 1, this
view had its roots in Price's rational theology, especially the univer-
salism of his moral theology. From this religious context, Wollstone-
craft crafted her own metaphysical vision of reality that was, at least
in theory, open to accommodating a variety of theological positions
within it. She made it clear in her two Vindications that the orthodox
Christian ontological claim that Jesus was God was not a necessary
premise for her account of human rights. She alluded to what was

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FOUNDATIONS OF UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS

likely her own Socinian view of Jesus as a man-not God or even
a preincarnational creature of God-who was the greatest human
exemplar of morality.23
The presentation in the Vindications of Jesus as a moral exemplar
is now widely recognized as compatible with a variety of world re-
ligions, including Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism, which
acknowledge him as such. Indeed, Christian denominations since
the nineteenth century, including orthodox sects, have often em-
phasized the "human" or "embodied" Christ alongside other dimen-
sions of his nature. The theological generality of Wollstonecraft's
metaphysical outlook made her argument for universal human rights
potentially appealing to people from a variety of faith perspectives,
especially within monotheistic traditions. Theoretically, her account
of human rights was a big tent under which all people, religious or
not, could find shelter. And yet, its rational dissenting Christian
framework made it in rhetorical practice more persuasive to those
who shared at least some of Wollstonecraft's religious belief system,
as the conclusion of this chapter explores with the example of her
feminist followers in nineteenth-century Mormon Utah.24
Viewed from the vantage of either the empirically grounded or
the most abstract metaphysical level of her thought, her conception
of the human being allowed Wollstonecraft to apply the concept of
subjective rights to each and every human due to his or her poten-
tial for rational agency. Her privileging of rationality as the defining
trait of human beings understood as moral beings made her ethics
vulnerable to several criticisms, however. Like Locke and Kant,
Wollstonecraft appeared to idealize an adult rational human being
as the model for her moral agent who bears rights and duties. Unlike
in Locke and Kant, this agent was not an idealized male, nor was it
an idealized disembodied being. Nevertheless, like Locke and Kant,
Wollstonecraft in her presumption of the human agent's potential
for rational autonomy might lead one to think that her moral theory
cannot accommodate a place for either the cognitively disabled or
the uneducated. Are persons who are not yet capable of exercising
reason-because they lack education-and persons who cannot

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FOUNDATIONS OF UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS

develop those capacities-due to disability-not entitled to rights?
In fact, her distinction between the potential to use reason and the
actual practice of reason enabled her theory of human rights to cover
these cases. For Wollstonecraft, the potential for reason, not the ac-
tual use of reason, strongly but not exclusively defined the nature
of humanity. For example, Wollstonecraft lamented that the mind
of a woman of her time was "scarcely raised by her employments
above the animal kingdom." Despite their irrationality, the women
of her day were nonetheless human because they had the potential to
"acquire the qualities that ennoble a rational being." Even if women
did not develop their reason sufficiently to rise "above the animal
kingdom," they retained their moral status as human creatures made
in the image of their rational God. Her metaphysical perspective
on human beings and their purpose in the universe allowed Woll-
stonecraft to categorize even the most "degraded" people, women
and slaves, as fully human despite society's attempts to dehumanize
them. Her 1798 novel Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman illustrated this
point with the first-person testimony of a female servant, Jemima,
who worked in an asylum where another woman, Maria, had been
imprisoned by her husband. Recalling her destitute teenage years as
a household servant, Jemima explained to Maria how her abusive
family treated her like a "creature of another species." Raped by her
master at the age of sixteen, she was expelled from his home while
pregnant, leaving her only the guilty and desperate choice to drink a
potion for abortion. Nevertheless, such abuse and impoverishment
could not actually strip Jemima of her moral status as a human being.
Indeed, Jemima overcame her feeling of estrangement from the "hu-
man race" by fulfilling her moral duty to aid another woman in need.
Using her powers of reason to strategize a way out of the asylum for
both of them, she not only helped Maria escape but also heroically
reunited her friend with her infant daughter.25
Beyond the potential for reason, Wollstonecraft had an expansive
understanding of the variety of capabilities that define the human
experience, such as sympathy, love, play, and bodily integrity. This
complex view of the physical joys and freedoms of embodied human

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FOUNDATIONS OF UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS

life was captured in her Rousseau-inspired account of child develop-
ment: "Every young creature requires almost continual exercise, and
the infancy of children . . . should be passed in harmless gambols,
that exercise the feet and hands, without requiring very minute di-
rections from the head, or the constant attention of a nurse." Ac-
cording to this wide-ranging conception of human development, a
cognitively disabled child might actualize her love of play and bodily
integrity alongside other human capabilities even if reason never
manifested in her adult self.26
Although Wollstonecraft could find shelter for nonrational and
uneducated people under the big tent of human rights, her insistence
that reason is the basis of human morality made her theory of educa-
tion open to the charge of paternalism. If a girl lacks reason, and yet
reason is necessary for directly accessing the law of God, then the
girl is dependent upon the moral judgment of her rational superiors
to instruct her about right and wrong. In accepting such paternal-
ism as a necessary part of educating a child toward the autonomy of
adulthood, Wollstonecraft ran the risk of reinforcing the very pat-
terns of male domination that her egalitarian theory of rights sought
to undercut. Her answer to this problem was practical: establishing a
free public system of "national education" that treated boys and girls
identically from age five through nine. If children were treated as
equals in primary school, then they would be equally subject to pa-
ternalism. Such equitable paternalism was fully justified only insofar
as it limited itself to developing reason and other human capabilities
such as play during childhood and adolescence, so that the girls and
boys would grow up to become self-governing and mutually respect-
ful adults.27
Wollstonecraft's capacious metaphysical/ethical system enabled
the emergent Enlightenment-era conception of human rights to
become universal. All humans, viewed from Wollstonecraft's broad
metaphysical perspective, have the potential to use reason to grasp
the moral law; therefore all humans have the rights that derive
from the moral law. These rights are universal in another sense:
they are morally universal, insofar as they apply in all times and

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FOUNDATIONS OF UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS

places, regardless of what positive law, culture, or religion says about
particular people's eligibility for claiming them. Humans hold these
rights even if their societies do not recognize and respect them as
holding them.
Wollstonecraft, as a human rights advocate, was faced with the
political predicament that arises from the application of such an
abstract and universalistic moral view. She neatly summarized this
predicament as "asserting the rights which women in common with
men ought to contend for" in the hostile context of a patriarchal
society that educated women to be subordinate to men, and encour-
aged men to treat women as their subordinates. Speaking as a voice
in the wilderness, she had no choice but to cultivate the sympathy
of men in power-"O ye men of understanding!"-in the hope that
they might grant at least some of the rights (such as equality of edu-
cation) to which women had claim as humans. One of her rhetorical
strategies was to supplement her abstract, duty-based demands for
human rights with pragmatic appeals to the beneficial consequences
that men would reap from extending such rights to women.28
Wollstonecraft preceded Sen in treating the "allegation" of rights
as a moral step toward justice, regardless of the "feasibility" of the
"fulfillment" of rights claims. For Sen as for Wollstonecraft, this step
is ethically valuable no matter whether people are actually granted
such rights in law or policy, but it might also prompt the beneficial
consequence of their establishment in the short or long run. The
allegation of women's human rights has moral value independent of
the consequences of asserting such rights. Even if women were never
given the same education as men, it would always be morally right
to provide an argument for their right to education. Conversely, if
women were given the same education as men, the beneficial con-
sequences would indicate to Wollstonecraft the working of divine
providence in the world to direct human development toward its
proper ends of reason, virtue, and knowledge. Despite appearances
to the contrary, Wollstonecraft's rational theology allowed her de-
ontological justification for human rights to be consistently supple-

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mented with consequentialist (as well as pragmatic) reasoning for the
establishment of such rights.29
Mill's Complex Consequentialist Foundation
for Universal Human Rights
Much as in the case of Wollstonecraft, a set of puzzles faces any
interpreter of Mill's theory of rights. First, scholars have noted the
relatively diminished place of rights in Mill's political philosophy
as compared to ideas such as individuality, liberty, and self-control.
Although Mill used the term "rights" or "moral right" twenty-one
times in his Subjection of Women, the concept of individuality more
frequently appeared in this extended defense of the free and full
self-development of women. On the face of it, this is an unexpected
rhetorical pattern for a book that aims to justify women's provision
of "equal rights" with men in order to overcome their historically
subjected status.30
Second, many a reader of Mill's On Liberty (1859) and Utilitarianism
(1861) has reasonably wondered whether the texts have incompatible
objectives. Mill's favorite work, On Liberty sought to establish "one
very simple principle" by which the liberty of the individual is secured
from unjustified interference by law and government. According to
the harm principle, the only reason for placing "legal penalties" upon
the actions of an individual is "to prevent harm to others." Utilitari-
anism, first published as a series of essays in Fraser's Magazine, aimed
to defend utilitarianism against some common criticisms, includ-
ing the charge that its "Greatest Happiness Principle" undermined
justice by prioritizing the utility of the greatest number over individ-
ual rights. Such critics asked how, if utility is taken to be "the founda-
tion of morals," can utilitarianism serve as a basis for securing rights
and liberties for the individual? Rights cannot function as trumps
if their beneficial consequences determine their value, for then the
utility of the greatest number could legitimately override the rights
of the individual. In this light, it seems that utilitarianism-whether

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Bentham's classical formulation or Mill's liberal revision-is at best a
shoddy foundation for either positive rights already enshrined in law
or alleged rights that have yet to be instituted.3'
The solution to these two puzzles lies in understanding how Mill's
liberal revision of classical utilitarianism relied upon the "principle"
of "the free development of individuality" set forth in the opening
paragraphs of chapter 3 of On Liberty. Just as Wollstonecraft's more
frequent references to duties than to rights can be explained by her
deontological conception of morality, Mill's relative lack of "rights
talk" can be explained by the foundational place of individuality in
his moral and political philosophy. As he argued in On Liberty, "It
is only the cultivation of individuality which produces, or can pro-
duce, well-developed human beings." Whereas for Wollstonecraft
we claim rights as moral absolutes, for Mill we claim rights prag-
matically as tools for the realization of individuality. In Mill's liberal
utilitarianism, the "principle" of individuality established a "rule of
conduct" by which the greatest happiness of the greatest number was
best achieved through the indirect route of respecting the liberty,
free and full self-development, and equal rights of individuals. If
Mill can be thus understood as an indirect utilitarian who maximizes
utility via the principle of individuality, then his version of utilitari-
anism succeeds in providing a more secure foundation for human
rights than the classical formulation of Bentham. In addition, Mill's
indirect utilitarianism steered clear of the metaphysical speculations
and theological demands of Wollstonecraft's deontology, rendering
it more useful for human rights advocacy from a secular and em-
pirical perspective. Both Mill's definition of the good as happiness
and his definition of the right as the maximization of the good were
nonmetaphysical claims in the sense that they are grounded on his
secular, a posteriori, empirical conception of utility. In the tradition
of David Hume and other British empiricists, Mill sought to define
morality by way of sensory experience and empirical observation of
the natural world. He abstracted from these experiences and obser-
vations the idea of utility as the maximization of pleasure and the
minimization of pain for all sentient life via the principle of indi-

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FOUNDATIONS OF UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS

viduality. Though abstract and richly normative, Mill's empirically
grounded conception of utility is not metaphysical because it is not
based on supernatural ideas or a priori reasoning."
Unlike Wollstonecraft, who favored deontology, Mill contin-
ued in the utilitarian tradition of justifying morality in terms of the
consequences of actions (making individuals free and happy), not
in terms of intentions (individual attempts to do the right thing).
His Utilitarianism began with a consequentialist critique of Kant's
metaphysical, a priori, and nonempirical ethics. According to Mill,
the Kantian categorical imperative generated universal moral rules
for rational beings (such as "don't lie") that are impractical due to
their abstract, strictly deontological form. In contrast, a utilitarian
would productively judge such rules as right or wrong in terms of
their projected consequences. For example, a Kantian would legis-
late that every rational being, including herself, ought always to tell
the truth. Yet a utilitarian would helpfully evaluate the morality of
this rule by judging its potentially "outrageously immoral" social
consequences. For example, take Kant's own hypothetical case of the
duty to respond truthfully to a murderer at the door who wishes to
confirm that her intended victim is inside your home. Mill would ar-
gue that an "outrageously immoral" consequence could be to enable
the murderer's crime. Contra Kant, Mill held that consequentialist
reasoning is a necessary facet of determining the right thing to do,
and utility is the ultimate standard by which such reasoning is done.
If the consequences of truth telling will cause suffering or enable
wrongdoing, then lying (or at least opaqueness) is in those cases jus-
tified for Mill. Furthermore, any rule of morality against lying ought
to be nuanced in light of these outcomes. Mill was not claiming that
Kant's moral theory indirectly requires consequentialist reasoning
but rather claiming that Kantian ethics fails to generate "actual du-
ties of morality" precisely because it does not engage in moral assess-
ment of outcomes.33
Having rejected Kantian deontology, Mill turned to his refine-
ment of the idea of utility. He followed Bentham in taking utility
to be the "ultimate appeal," or deciding principle, "on all ethical

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FOUNDATIONS OF UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS

questions." From his secular and empirical perspective, there was no
advantage to invoking "the idea of abstract right"-such as a Kant-
ian categorical imperative or a Wollstonecraftian moral law-"as a
thing independent of utility." In addition, Mill shared Bentham's
general hedonistic view of utility as the greatest happiness (or plea-
sure) for the greatest number of sentient beings. Bentham and Mill
held that "the whole sentient creation," including nonhuman ani-
mals, is capable of pain and pleasure. While humans, as rational ani-
mals, gauge the maximization of utility on behalf of all sentient life,
their calculations ought to include nonhuman animals in the effort
to reduce pain and increase pleasure globally, "so far as the nature of
things admits." Because animals, like children, "require being taken
care of by others," they "must be protected against their own actions
as well as against external injury." Putting this inclusive principle of
benevolent paternalism into practice, Mill advocated for the "rights
of animals" to be conferred by humans to prevent "any practice" that
"causes more pain to animals than gives pleasure to man."4
Despite his fundamental hedonistic concern with increasing the
pleasure and decreasing the pain of the whole sentient creation, Mill
privileged the well-being of human individuals in his "theory of life."
Chapter 2 of Utilitarianism sets forth his reasoning for the "elevated"
moral status of human individuals over nonhuman animals: the be-
nevolent calculation of utility for all creatures depends upon the free
and full self-development of people into rational, self-governing, yet
other-regarding adults. To clarify why human individuals held an
elevated place in his liberal utilitarianism, Mill gave the concept of
utility more specific meaning beyond the generic greatest happiness
principle. In chapter z of On Liberty, Mill defined utility "in the larg-
est sense, grounded on the permanent interests of man as a progres-
sive being." In the next sentence, he identified these interests to be
"individual spontaneity" and freedom from unnecessary "external
control" so that spontaneous self-development is possible. His use of
the masculine noun "man" was generic, not gender specific. He later
stated in chapter 3 of On Liberty that the principle of individuality
applied to "all human existence." In fact, until individuals of both

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sexes had an equal opportunity for free and full self-development,
the principle would apply in practice "to man, and still more the
woman," because females historically had been subjected to the ty-
rannical force of custom to a greater degree than males.35
In chapter 2 of Utilitarianism, Mill further refined the definition
of utility with his distinction between the higher and the lower plea-
sures. The higher pleasures were "mental," or "derived from the
higher faculties" of the mind, and thus were "preferable in kind" to
the lower, or merely "sensual" or "bodily," pleasures. He famously
summed up the practical difference between these kinds of pleasure
by saying, "It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig
satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied." Al-
though the higher, Socratic pleasures may not be felt at the same
intensity, duration, or quantity as the lower, swinish pleasures, it
was rational to prefer the former to the latter once one experienced
the qualitative difference. The moral goal of Mill's liberal revision
of utilitarianism was not a crude and brutish hedonism but rather
a process of dignifying humans as progressive beings who are ca-
pable of rational preference of the higher pleasures over the lower
pleasures.36
Mill proceeded to reformulate Bentham's greatest happiness prin-
ciple so that it employed the distinction between the higher and the
lower pleasures: "According to the Greatest Happiness Principle ...
the ultimate end, with reference to and for the sake of which all other
things are desirable (whether we are considering our own good or that
of other people), is an existence exempt as far as possible from pain,
and as rich as possible in enjoyments, both in point of quantity and
quality; the test of quality, and the rule for measuring it against quan-
tity, being the preference felt by those who, in their opportunities of
experience, to which must be added their habits of self-consciousness
and self-observation, are best furnished with the means of compari-
son." This, his second and more precise definition of the governing
principle of his liberal utilitarianism, made it clear that the greatest
happiness was measured not only by how many sentient beings felt
pleasure but also in terms of the quality of the pleasure felt, and the

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quantity of such pleasure felt by individuals. The "test of quality"
ought to be performed by people with the "experience" and "habits"
of mind requisite for comparing, judging, and ranking pleasures in
qualitative terms. The "verdict" of such "competent judges" of the
higher pleasures would contribute to the development of subsidiary
"rules and precepts for human conduct" that, when followed, would
lead people on the indirect path to realizing the greatest quality and
quantity of happiness for the whole sentient creation.37
As Rawls argued in A Theory ofjustice (1971), Mill's refined defini-
tion of utility presumed "circumstances of liberty" for women and
men to choose a way of life befitting a progressive being. According
to Rawls, these Millian circumstances of liberty included an edu-
cation toward individual freedom, legal protection of equal rights,
and living under free institutions of government. In chapter 3 of On
Liberty, Mill gave a trio of reasons why free institutions were neces-
sary for realizing the "permanent interests" of humans as progressive
beings. First, free institutions (such as representative government or
the option of public schools) provided the political and cultural in-
frastructure for the development of human capabilities on the broad-
est scale. Second, the experience of participating in free institutions
gave individuals an opportunity to develop rational preferences for
liberty and self-control and to make good choices accordingly. Third,
people in all times in history have rationally preferred freedom to
subjection. Rawls concluded that Mill believed "a considerable de-
gree of liberty is a precondition of the rational pursuit of value," or
the pursuit of utility properly understood. In this way, Mill's norma-
tive commitment to liberty guided and animated his indirect pursuit
of the permanent interests of progressive beings-namely, sponta-
neity and freedom from unnecessary external control. Rawls went
on to show, however, that Mill's arguments for free institutions did
not "justify an equal liberty for all," although they "might justify
many if not most of the equal liberties." He concluded that the basic
utilitarian requirement to maximize happiness on the greatest scale
meant that "it is liable to find that the denial of liberty for some is
justified in the name of this single end." Although he admired the

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FOUNDATIONS OF UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS

force of Mill's reasoning for the necessity of free institutions in order
to realize utility "in the largest sense," he did not think it sufficient to
justify the equal rights of individuals. Having rejected Mill and other
forms of utilitarianism as viable options for justifying equal rights,
Rawls turned to the social contract tradition as a resource for his
liberal theory of justice.38
Mill understood his indirect and therefore complex form of con-
sequentialism to be the best available approach to reconcile utilitari-
anism with a secular though "sacred," or paramount, commitment
to equal rights. Although in theory utility could trump rights, the
definition of utility in terms of the permanent interests of man as
a progressive being made the freedom of individuals a paramount
moral value. Assuming this value could be inculcated in people and
institutionalized in law, equal rights would eventually prevail in prac-
tice. Although he remained vulnerable to the abstract philosophical
criticism that his liberal revision of utilitarianism failed to justify
equal rights as trumps, Mill thought that his theory of rights-when
pragmatically applied in culture and law-would secure rights suf-
ficiently for guaranteeing norms of justice for individuals. Indeed,
his Utilitarianism went so far as to say that "a right residing in the in-
dividual" was "essential" to "justice," which was "the chief part, and
incomparably the most sacred and binding part, of all morality." By
establishing such rights in culture and law, a society protected "the
most vital of all interests." Competent judges of the higher pleasures,
like Mill himself, had concluded over time and through experience
that reciprocal respect for rights improves both the quality and the
quantity of the happiness of the whole.39
Rawls's critique of Mill raises the question of whether Mill should
be understood as an act utilitarian or a rule utilitarian. These two
versions of utilitarianism are products of twentieth-century moral
philosophy and thus can only be read back upon Mill's thought. This
anachronistic application of rule utilitarianism and act utilitarian-
ism to interpret the case of Mill might explain why there is not yet a
scholarly consensus on which school he best fits. Because of the su-
premacy of utility over other standards of right in his political theory,

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Mill has often been interpreted as an act utilitarian. On this reading,
he followed Bentham in defining the morality of each and every act
in terms of its maximization of pleasure and minimization of pain for
the greatest number of sentient beings. Although Mill appealed to
the principle of individuality as a rule of conduct to establish a place
for equal rights in his utilitarianism, he plainly stated that utility is the
ultimate appeal for deciding right from wrong, including the scope of
rights. The latter view of utility could be described as act utilitarian.
It is famously suspect for its allowance of what Derek Parfit called
the "repugnant conclusion" that the overall quality of life may be
sacrificed for the more equal, yet minimalistic, distribution of utility
across a larger population. If rights are understood as instrumental to
utility, then the minimization of rights could be justified in the name
of a more equal though minimal distribution of utility overall. The
even spread of utility would thereby justify the erosion of the quality
of life for all, including their access to rights.40
To avoid these grave problems, Mill's complex consequentialism
defined utilitarian moral outcomes by way of a variety of intermedi-
ary practical rules for social behavior: first and foremost, the prin-
ciple of individuality, whereby the "person's own character" and not
"the traditions or customs of other people" were the "rule of con-
duct." Mill argued that following this principle or rule of conduct
was "the principal ingredient of human happiness, and quite the
chief ingredient of individual and social progress." Ideally, culture
should be shaped in a way that encouraged people to develop accord-
ing to this principle, such that they grew in diverse and eccentric
ways, displaying a range of talents and capabilities within society. A
related practical rule, more narrowly tailored by Mill for the domain
of law, was the harm principle. This "one very simple principle"
defined wrong in terms of "interfering with the liberty of action" of
any individual except when such interference would "prevent harm
to others." Mill's harm principle strove to draw a bright line between
individual behavior that could be subject to legal penalties versus
individual behavior that would be merely subject to disapprobation
in the court of public opinion or condemnation by one's own con-

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FOUNDATIONS OF UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS

science. If an action unnecessarily interfered with the self-regarding
actions of another individual, then it was both wrong and subject to
legal penalties. If an action refrained from such interference, then it
was not wrong and was not subject to legal penalties, and was at least
right in the thin sense of allowing individuals freedom from direct
harm. For Mill, "tastes and modes of life" that were primarily self-
regarding (such as choosing to drink alcohol at a restaurant) should
be informally regulated by public opinion and/or conscience and not
be subjected to legal penalties. Hence, Mill's harm principle, though
focused on the question of determining fair legal regulation of the
individual by the state, helped to demarcate an alternative cultural
space in which respect for individuality served as the prevailing rule
of conduct. Although one's free and full self-development might be
appropriately reigned in by public opinion or personal conscience,
one's behavior could not rightfully be punished by the state except to
prevent harm to others.4'
Such cultural and legal noninterference in the self-regarding ac-
tions of the individual might also generate right outcomes in the
thick sense, especially if practiced on a broad scale and for the long
run. Nancy Hirschmann has argued that Mill's complex consequen-
tialism posited a thick conception of positive liberty (freedom to be
self-sovereigns) as at least one moral by-product of a thin concep-
tion of negative liberty (freedom from unnecessary interference).
For Bentham as for Mill, the consequences always determined the
morality of the act. Yet Mill's principle of individuality (and its le-
gal cognate, the harm principle) established constraints on the set of
utilitarian outcomes that were both moral and beneficial. Following
these practical rules of social conduct and legal regulation would en-
able us to take the indirect yet individually oriented route to realize
the permanent interests of humans as progressive beings, by asking
us to prioritize the value of the individual's self-development in our
calculations of what is good and bad for sentient life. The moral re-
sult should be the realization of self-sovereignty, or virtuous indi-
vidual self-development across the human species, for the benefit of
all sentient creation.42

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FOUNDATIONS OF UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS

In this light, Mill's indirect utilitarianism looks more like rule
utilitarianism than act utilitarianism. According to J. O. Urmson's
groundbreaking interpretation, Mill understood the moral right-
ness of any given action to be determined by its accordance to a rule
(or what Mill often called a "secondary principle"). Mill provided a
list of such rules in chapter 5 of Utilitarianism, including "the moral
rules which forbid mankind to hurt one another," such as "breach of
friendship" and "breach of promise." These practical rules of con-
duct were correct for Mill insofar as they tended to promote util-
ity. Any conflicts between these practical rules of morality could be
adjudicated only by reference to the ultimate standard of rightness,
the greatest happiness principle. Consequently, Mill allowed for re-
form of rules (such as "the aristocracies of colour, race, and sex") that
failed in practice to maximize the quality and quantity of happiness
for the whole. He furthermore argued that widely accepted rules of
morality (such as "don't break a promise") were the best practical
indicators of what people took to be happiness. A utilitarian could
thus rely on such moral rules, alongside legal rules such as justly in-
stituted rights, as means toward achieving the greatest happiness. In
his Methods of Ethics (1874), Henry Sidgwick criticized the aforesaid
argument for its conflation of moral preferences (such as "promise-
keeping is good") with beliefs about effects on happiness (such as
"promise-keeping produces happiness"). Nevertheless, Sidgwick as-
sumed like Mill that the greatest happiness principle could only be
applied in practice via a "fairly detailed and specific set of directives
or rules." Even if common moral rules were not in themselves ex-
pressions of people's preferences concerning happiness, rules in gen-
eral (both moral and legal) were necessary practical instruments for
the successful application of the greatest happiness principle.43
The use of subsidiary moral rules to determine right from wrong
produces a dilemma for the utilitarian, however. On the one hand, it
becomes unclear how rule utilitarianism is practically different from
act utilitarianism. If moral rules can be revised in light of the de-
mands of utility, then the former would seem to collapse into the lat-
ter, making each and every act subject to evaluation according to the

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FOUNDATIONS OF UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS

greatest happiness principle. Rule utilitarianism would then seem to
be as vulnerable as act utilitarianism to producing Parfit's "repug-
nant conclusion" in practice. On the other side of the dilemma, strict
compliance with rules appears to be inconsistent with the ultimate
goal of utilitarianism. If following a rule is taken to be right, de-
spite generating less utility than another action, then it would seem
to contradict the overriding utilitarian requirement to pursue the
greatest happiness for the greatest number.44
As for the first horn of the dilemma, Mill would respond that
while the best rules aim to apply to all cases, they must be open to
revision on the basis of their consequences in order to be cemented
as general and correct standards of right and wrong. Such revision of
rules would not be arbitrary but rather be guided by people's experi-
ence of pain and pleasure, and gradually regulated by institutions of
culture and law. Furthermore, this experiential revision of rules over
time would indirectly lead to the greatest happiness in the long run.
As Mill argued in different ways across his Autobiography, On Liberty,
and Utilitarianism, a "permanent" happiness for each and all can only
be achieved through the indirect path of the human pursuit of virtue
and, in this pursuit, learning to prefer the higher pleasures over the
lower ones. The subsidiary rules that come to govern this complex
process of consequentialist moral reasoning might be best envisioned
as nested within Mill's ultimate commitment to the greatest hap-
piness principle. Rights are the most "sacred" form of such nested
moral rules because their cultural acceptance and legal enforcement
are paramount for individual liberty and thus offer the opportunity
to make the moral choices necessary for virtuous self-development.
Rights and other rules achieve political inertia over time: while sub-
ject to revision with respect to consequences, rules gain a kind of
stability through the social process of their moral refinement. For
Mill, this stability provided enough security for human rights on the
whole, while allowing for the necessary revision of unjust yet legal
rights (such as a husband's total ownership of his wife's property un-
der the law of coverture) that had been unreflectively accepted for
centuries.45

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FOUNDATIONS OF UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS

To navigate past the second horn of the rule-utilitarian dilemma,
Mill would similarly appeal to his theory of the necessarily indirect
path to utility. The indirect realization of utility through adherence
to rules (such as respect for equal rights) means that one may justifi-
ably sacrifice short-term pleasure for the sake of the permanent in-
terests of humans as progressive beings. For example, if the granting
of women's rights to property ownership in marriage would initially
decrease the freedom and power of husbands yet potentially increase
the liberty of both sexes, the choice of the latter, complex conse-
quence would be better than simply avoiding the former, short-term
outcome. For example, Mill chose the more complex path to hap-
piness in establishing the egalitarian terms of his late-life marriage
to Taylor, by signing a document that promised her equal rights to
the proceeds of the books published under his name. The complex
good of recognizing their collaborative intellectual relationship out-
weighed any short-term benefits he could have derived from merely
keeping the proceeds for himself.46
Thus read as a subtle rule utilitarian, Mill can be understood as
offering a complex consequentialist foundation for universal human
rights. It is complex in the sense that it has several mutually rein-
forcing levels of moral concerns. The beneficial outcome is the far-
reaching concern; the application of the principle of individuality
and its legal cognate, the harm principle, is the more immediate and
practical concern; and the flourishing of individuality remains the
underlying concern at each stage of the process. In this multilevel
moral framework, rights function as moral and legal tools that fa-
cilitate the permanent happiness of human individuals. Mill defined
human (or "moral") rights as fundamental rules of morality that de-
rive from self-regarding and other-regarding duties, requiring that
obligations be paid and justice be done to the individual. Over time,
some conceptions of moral rights become institutionalized as "legal"
rights. The realization of utility through the recognition and respect
of moral rights and the legal rights justly instituted from them is the
only sure path toward a genuine happiness for everyone, not solely a
minority or majority of the whole.

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FOUNDATIONS OF UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS

Mill's overall moral system was secular and empirical, not theo-
logical and metaphysical like Wollstonecraft's. Nonetheless, both
Mill and Wollstonecraft presented normatively rich accounts of the
human being as the basis of their theories of rights. While Woll-
stonecraft's moral view of the embodied human being in nature was
ensconced within her metaphysics, Mill's conception of individuality
began and ended with humans as they were in the natural world but
imagined how they might develop in a moral way if allowed the right
constellation of social conditions in which to grow in "eccentric"
diversity. As Mill poetically expressed it in chapter 3 of On Liberty,
"Different persons also require different conditions for their spiritual
development; and can no more exist healthily in the same moral,
than all the variety of plants can in the same physical, atmosphere
and climate." People, like plants, required diverse environments and
the freedom to thrive in those personally suitable conditions. Mill's
principle of individuality indirectly cultivated a diversity of human
capabilities through the social construction of a broader "moral cli-
mate" in which people learn to abide by each other's equal rights.48
In their respectively secular and theological approaches to ground-
ing human rights on abstract and robust normative conceptions of
the human being, Mill and Wollstonecraft both represent versions of
what Rawls called "comprehensive liberalism." According to Rawls,
Mill's theory of individuality may even be read as "metaphysical,"
in the sense that it makes controversial moral claims about what all
human beings are and should become. Such universalistic norma-
tive claims about human nature look "metaphysical" from Rawls's
strictly "political" perspective, which accepts the "fact of reason-
able pluralism" on morality and religion even among peoples who at
least respect basic international human rights norms. The problem
with this broad use of the term "metaphysical" is that it neither ac-
counts for the differences between a priori and a posteriori approaches
to reasoning nor distinguishes between theological and secular, or
even supernatural and empirically grounded, ideas. It assumes rather
that any abstract normative idea that may be subject to moral debate
is metaphysical. To better capture the similarities and differences

IOI


FOUNDATIONS OF UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS

across Wollstonecraft's theory of rights and Mill's, I describe Mill's
abstract conception of the human being and its free and full self-
development as secular, nonmetaphysical, empirically grounded,
yet normatively rich. Wollstonecraft's metaphysical/ethical system,
on the other hand, affords a multilevel view of the human being:
at the most abstract level of analysis, it is a theological and purely
metaphysical conception of the person as a moral and rational be-
ing made in the image of God; but from an empirically grounded
vantage point, it is a richly normative conception of the embodied
human being as ensconced within the divinely created natural world.
Although Mill also used an abstract and normative conception of
the person as the basis of his theory of rights, he made no appeal to
metaphysical ideas.49
For Mill, the rights held by human beings are either moral or legal.
A "moral right" is derived from a duty, or a widely accepted moral
rule that entails the fulfillment of a "perfect," or mandatory, "obliga-
tion" toward self or others. For example, the duty to keep promises
to others generates the corresponding right not to have one's own
promises breached. With this correlative theory of the basis of moral
rights, Mill coincided with both Wollstonecraft and Kant, without
sharing their metaphysical/deontological foundations for the view.
Rather, in the concluding chapter of Utilitarianism, Mill theorized
duty in complex consequentialist terms as grounded upon utility "in
the largest sense": "I account the justice which is grounded on utility
to be the chief part, and incomparably the most sacred and binding
part, of all morality. Justice is a name for certain classes of moral
rules, which concern the essentials of human well-being more nearly,
and are therefore of more absolute obligation, than any other rules
for the guidance of life; and the notion we have found to be of the
essence of the idea of justice, that of a right residing in an individual,
implies and testifies to this more binding obligation." This passage
provides the best evidence of Mill's rule-utilitarian conception of
justice, since it conceives the following of "certain classes of moral
rules" as producing the "essentials of human well-being" better than
"any other rules." The rights "residing in an individual" are one such

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FOUNDATIONS OF UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS

class of utility-enhancing moral rules. As such, moral rights "testify"
to the "binding obligation" we have to abide by the rules of justice,
because moral rights are derived from duty. Rights are thus "the es-
sence of the idea of justice" because they are correlates of duties or
obligatory moral rules that are justified by way of a conception of
utility in the broadest sense.50
Mill understood moral rights as rationally justified independent of
positive law because they need not have a formal means of enforce-
ment to be justly held and demanded by individuals. Claims of moral
rights may hypothesize how the marginalized or powerless (such as
women) need access to public goods that would enable their individ-
ual self-development, when society has in fact failed to recognize its
duty to provide such rights. Wollstonecraft had predominantly made
such moral arguments (or what Sen calls "allegations") for women's
rights as humans, since women in Britain and beyond had relatively
few socially or legally recognized rights as compared to men in the
late eighteenth century. By the time Mill embarked on his political
career in the 186os, Britain had institutionalized more legal rights
for women (such as divorce in cases of domestic violence as of 1857),
but even then most rights claims for women (such as national-level
suffrage) were moral and thereby alleged.
On the political level, Mill understood legal rights to be just when
they derived from a correlative moral obligation, rather than from a
bad law. In his 1869 treatise The Subjection of Women, he contrasted
the unjust but legal rights of husbands to commit regular "bodily
violence" against their wives with the moral rights of individual
women to be free from "personal violence." Here, he strongly im-
plied that sexual violence against women in marriage was shamelessly
and unjustly treated as an exception to the criminal law against rape.
Through practical applications of the harm principle, legislators
could gradually replace such bad patriarchal laws with egalitarian
laws that prescribed legal penalties for unjustified interference with
the rights of individuals, regardless of color, race, or sex. Examples of
the establishment of such legal rights in Britain were the 183os acts
of Parliament that expanded working men's suffrage and set slaves

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FOUNDATIONS OF UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS

free in most regions of its empire. Allegations for moral rights might
still be made in reference to these legal rights. If some but not all
groups enjoy a legal right, then the excluded groups might make
moral claims for social or legal inclusion in the use of such rights. If
access to legal rights for some groups is more extensive than others,
then the group with less access might make moral claims for legal
inclusion in the full use of such rights. In his early 183os unpublished
correspondence with Harriet Taylor on marriage, Mill had alleged
women's equal right to divorce, at a time when only men, such as his
friend's husband, legally held this right. Dramatizing the gap be-
tween moral rights and legal rights on the political stage, Mill alleged
women's human right to vote by formally representing in Parliament
the 1867 suffrage petition signed by thousands of disenfranchised
women. His Subjection of Women alleged the "equal moral right of
all human beings" to the free choice of occupation, so that women
would no longer be subjugated to the opinion that their proper roles
belonged only in the family. Such public and private, written and
oral, political and personal allegations of women's human rights con-
tributed to the growth of individual, elite, and popular concern with
their institutionalization.5'
Both moral rights and the legal rights that are based on them are
human rights for Wollstonecraft and Mill, because both types of
rights are grounded upon their respective conceptions of the human
being as a moral being. Although Wollstonecraft takes a theological
and metaphysical approach and Mill a secular and nonmetaphysical
one, they both offer robust normative accounts of the human be-
ing's organic and ethical development through freedom and rights.
This is the most important commonality in their theories of univer-
sal human rights: their joint grounding of rights claims on norma-
tively rich accounts of what it means to be human. Their respective
conceptions of humanity gave them strong normative standards by
which they could judge the defects of culture and law with regard
to the rights of humans, and subsequently advocate for reform that
would advance justice for each and all through the equal provision
of rights. We now turn to a comparative assessment of the practical

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FOUNDATIONS OF UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS

value of their two foundationalist schools for advocating the moral
rights of women that are not yet recognized or respected by people
within a culture or protected by the law.
Theological and Secular Approaches to Alleging Women's
Human Rights: The Issue of Religious Polygamy
Rawlsian nonfoundationalist approaches to justifying human
rights assume rights as cultural and legal givens that ought to be
articulated and developed further in law and policy, particularly in
the context of the post-1948 international political landscape of the
Universal Declaration and the other institutions and policies of the
United Nations. From a feminist perspective, the problem with
this assumption is that many human rights of women have not yet
achieved the status of cultural or legal givens. Women's human rights
have not even been fully realized in the domain of international law,
in which the U.N. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of
Discrimination against Women, CEDAW, is taken more seriously
than in nation-states such as the United States and Iran, which are
still among the mere seven countries in the world that have yet to
ratify it. In contrast to Rawlsian nonfoundationalist approaches to
justifying human rights, foundationalist approaches to justifying
women's human rights allow for extralegal and extracultural claims
about women's desert of rights on the basis of their human nature.
Such naturalistic claims about women's shared humanity with men
have been politically instrumental in the allegation and advancement
of women's human rights, especially since the time of de Gouges and
Wollstonecraft.52
Moving beyond an analysis of the role of naturalistic foundations
in Wollstonecraft's and Mill's rational justifications for human rights,
I now respond to a practical moral and political question raised by
each of their systems of feminist thought. When women's human
rights are not yet recognized in law or policy, or are culturally or
religiously controversial even to allege, which of these foundational-
ist approaches works best as a moral basis for advocacy and political

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FOUNDATIONS OF UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS

persuasion? Religious polygamy poses a serious test of both the ethi-
cal and the rhetorical value of these approaches for human rights
advocacy, as it has been morally controversial in a variety of cultures
since Wollstonecraft's time and often has been seen as incompatible
with women's rights. Furthermore, practices of religious polygamy
continue to raise questions of which women's rights (for example,
the right to divorce) ought to be respected in culture and protected
under the law. By applying Wollstonecraft's and Mill's theories to
assess the human rights of women within religious polygamy, I il-
luminate how their respectively theological and secular foundations
may serve as ethical and effective platforms for alleging the rights of
women in distinctive yet complementary ways that are sensitive to
religious and other cultural differences. When I speak of polygamy,
I mean a kind of plural marriage in which a man has more than one
wife. This is technically called polygyny.
Wollstonecraft advanced moral views on polygamy early in her
writing career. When she wrote for the Analytical Review in London
from 1788 to 1792, she acquired a taste for travel memoirs, especially
those concerning North African Muslim peoples. She researched
works by the German explorer Johann Reinhold Forster and the
English theologian James Cookson, who discussed the practice of
polygamy in Africa. Following the French Enlightenment philoso-
pher Montesquieu, Forster even made theoretical claims about why
polygamy seemed to be more prevalent in warm climates. In her
Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft philosophically challenged Forster's
argument that the natural environment determined polygamy. By re-
jecting the natural necessity of polygamy, she sought to discredit the
patriarchal view that woman "must be inferior to man, and made for
him" and his sexual pleasure. This critique of polygamy supported
her general moral argument in favor of monogamous marriages in
which women were respected as ends in themselves, not merely used
as means to other ends."
In her Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft set forth an extended
moral justification of marriage as primarily a relationship between
equal moral beings and secondarily a relationship that concerned

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FOUNDATIONS OF UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS

natural functions such as sexual reproduction. She defended marital
pairs over multiple spouses, for the reason that marriage is ideally a
dyadic, perfectionistic (or virtue-oriented) friendship. Polygamy or
polyandry might be permissible if marriage was meant to be like a
business or corporate contract, in which maximum productivity for
the group was the goal. In a perfectionistic friendship, however, the
goal was the mirroring and mutual inspiration of the higher virtues
in one another.54
Like Aristotle, Wollstonecraft upheld the dyadic form to be the
best, or virtue-oriented, friendship, but she explicitly and unequivo-
cally extended this idea of higher friendship in an egalitarian way
to male-female marital relationships. Beyond the practical consider-
ation that such lofty virtue might prove more difficult to achieve in
plural marriages, her defense of the smaller dyadic form belied her
normative assumption that the process of sexual reproduction itself
produced supplemental reasons for the moral practice of monogamy.
The best evidence of this assumption is found in her 1797 Lessons,
which envisioned and even idealized the active roles of biological
parents in joint childcare of their toddler. More broadly, her meta-
physical perspective allowed for Cookson's view that divine provi-
dence mandated monogamy as a beneficial moral ideal for humanity.
Wollstonecraft disagreed, however, with Forster's culturally biased
and morally relativistic claim that God ordained monogamy for Eu-
rope, while nature dictated polygamy for Africa."
In theory, Wollstonecraft's metaphysics should accommodate a
variety of religious and secular conceptions of monogamous mar-
riage, under the condition that all people are treated as ends not
means within marriage and the broader laws of their societies. Woll-
stonecraft's novel Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman vividly represented
how her deontological theory of human rights would absolutely pro-
hibit any exploitation of women by their husbands, regardless of the
cultural or religious context. When her husband attempted to sell
her into prostitution, Maria finally sought a way out of the bad rela-
tionship. Her escape symbolically alleged for the eighteenth-century
audience a married woman's human right to protect her bodily

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FOUNDATIONS OF UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS

integrity. As illustrated by Maria's response to her predicament,
Wollstonecraft's deontological approach to defending women's hu-
man rights would be an appropriate basis for strong criticism of any
cases of marriage, whether monogamous or polygamous, which are
exploitative of women's bodies.
Wollstonecraft's broader theological approach uncovers a deeper
level from which polygamy could be strongly judged: the immanent
feminist perspective on patriarchal oppression. Such an immanent
feminist perspective speaks against a patriarchal practice from within
a culture for the benefit of women in that culture and potentially
beyond it. For example, when a Muslim woman, such as the Iranian
feminist lawyer Shirin Ebadi, challenges polygamy on metaphysical
grounds-as in, the Koran states I am equal to man, thus I should
be legally treated as a moral equal to man and not as "'half' a hu-
man being"-she is enacting a broadly Wollstonecraftian critique
of the institution from within. Islamic polygamy as it is practiced in
her homeland of Iran requires that polygamous wives be legally sub-
sumed under and subordinate to their husband, thus undercutting
the Koran's theological view of the sexes as moral equals. Interest-
ingly, Wollstonecraft had used a mathematical metaphor similar to
Ebadi's to critique how Rousseau's theory of education perversely
turned woman into a "half-being" who was primarily defined by her
marital relationship to her husband rather than her independent on-
tological status as a moral, rational, and equal human being made in
the image of God.56
As the Indonesian Muslim feminist activist Lily Munir explains,
the Koran supports polygamy only as a "privilege" of widows and
children in times of need, not a general "right" of men. Striving to
return her Muslim culture and Islamic religion to their moral roots,
the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize winner Ebadi continues to criticize Ira-
nian laws as "discriminatory and misogynist" for allowing "a man to
marry four wives . . . and divorce his wife at will," while women do
not have the same access to divorce. In her Muslim feminist view,
these laws are "not Islamic" because they "cannot be found in the
Koran." She advises her fellow Muslim feminist critics of religious

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FOUNDATIONS OF UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS

polygamy: "It is essential for women to master religious discourse
because patriarchal culture is usually protected and strengthened in
the name of Sharia law, and by political forces who exploit Muslims'
ignorance of various interpretations." Such a sacred-text-based ap-
proach may not, however, work as well for religious and other cul-
tural outsiders, who run the risk of seeming imperialistic by making
such arguments from without.57
Mill's secular approach to justifying and subsequently alleging
women's human rights poses its own set of challenges for judging
the issue of religious polygamy. Mill shared Wollstonecraft's philo-
sophical view of marriage as ideally conceptualized and practiced as a
perfectionistic, or virtue-oriented, friendship between moral equals.
On a nonideal and personal level, Mill appeared to be tolerant of
polyamory, if sexual intercourse is not understood as essential to its
practice. Harriet Taylor was married to another man for most of
their platonic and perfectionistic friendship. This was a forced choice
for Mill, as he would have preferred to have an exclusive relationship
with Harriet under ideal circumstances. Harriet and Mill appear to
have refrained from intercourse for the duration of their intellectu-
ally and emotionally passionate affair and late-life marriage. Harriet
ceased to have a sexual relationship with John Taylor once their last
child was born, soon after she met and fell in love with Mill. Mill's
awkward domestic situation with the Taylors compelled his tolera-
tion of a type of sexually restrained, Victorian polyamory even when
he personally considered it morally deficient.
In chapter 4 of On Liberty, Mill's application of the individuality
and harm principles to the issue of Mormon polygamy explained his
tolerance of this particular plural form of religious marriage under
two conditions. First, the practice may be tolerated at "a remote cor-
ner of the earth" where such "barbarism" or cultural backwardness
may be practiced without becoming widely institutionalized. His
use of the culturally biased, liberal imperial language of "barbarism"
was consistent with his Subjection of Women, in which he identified
patriarchal marriage as a "relic of primitive barbarism" that caused
women's oppression worldwide.58

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FOUNDATIONS OF UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS

Apart from his belittling attitude toward Mormonism, Mill's
moral concern with polygamy centered upon the inverse relation-
ship between women's tendency to adapt to their culture and the
heterogeneity of that culture. In other words, the more that women
conformed to their culture, the less varied that culture would be;
conversely, the more uniform a culture, the less diverse women's life
choices would be. It followed that if, generally, patriarchal culture
teaches women "to think marriage the one thing needful," then, in a
polygamous community, women "should prefer being one of several
wives, to not being a wife at all." Consideration of this problem of
adaptation elicited Mill's second condition for the toleration of po-
lygamy: its practitioners must "allow perfect freedom of departure to
those who are dissatisfied with their ways." In these cases, his com-
plex consequentialist justification for human rights provided a strong
ground for alleging women's human right to exit polygamy when
the religious institution harmed their self-development. Education
about exit options, likely provided by outsiders to the polygamous
community, would be one way to combat the problem of women's
adaptation to conditions of patriarchal domination.59
Mill's secular liberal utilitarian approach to advocating for wom-
en's human rights might be most useful to reformers from outside
the polygamous community. On Liberty proposed such reformers
could use educational writings to shape Mormon polygamists' criti-
cal understanding of the ethical implications of their own religious
practice, just as women's rights advocates used education to chal-
lenge their own brands of patriarchal "barbarism" in Britain. Wittily
playing both sides of the argument, Mill inveighed, "Let them send
missionaries, if they please, to preach against it; and let them, by any
fair means (of which silencing the teachers is not one), oppose the
progress of similar doctrines among their own people." If taken, this
secular educational approach would rely not on controversial reli-
gious or metaphysical views to make its moral claims but rather on
a comparatively thinner, nonmetaphysical and nontheological, set of
values such as human individuality and freedom. It would also need

IIO


FOUNDATIONS OF UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS

to be applied to similar problems in the outsider's own culture, in
order to be morally consistent and not hypocritical.60
For societies that do not value individuality or freedom in a liberal
sense, this secular educational approach to women's human rights
advocacy may not work from without or within. In these cases, Mill's
secular liberal utilitarianism theoretically generates a long-term re-
formist approach to human rights advocacy: observation of the issue
from afar, so as to ensure that women's human rights are not sacri-
ficed for the utility of the patriarchs of the commune. This remote
observational model is implicit in Mill's recommendation of tolera-
tion of polygamy on the Utah frontier instead of making it "a scandal
to persons some thousands of miles distant." Although his spatial
appeal to distance had imperial implications (as in, the unconquered
frontier was the nadir of civilization), it also may be read in more ab-
stract psychological terms: maintaining a reasonable sense of cultural
and emotional distance from other people's cultural practices.61
The latter mode of reasonable psychological distance might ani-
mate the work of a Millian reformer who is monitoring a polygamous
religious culture from without. Mill did not assume that polygamy
was inherently incompatible with women's rights, but he remained
concerned with protecting women against potential violations of
their rights in this and other historically oppressive marital arrange-
ments. Consequently, he supported reformers' remote observa-
tion of polygamy in Utah as a moral means of judging whether the
practice was in fact harmful to women. If violations of female self-
sovereignty were tracked and verified, then the monitoring Millian
reformer faced a predicament: alleging women's human rights on
naturalistic grounds that might seem culturally insensitive or impe-
rial to the people she sought to aid. The allegation of women's hu-
man rights, in these cases, is a Millian outsider's last-resort act of
political instigation. Ideally, this instigation would stir the local com-
munity to discussion of the ethics of their practice of polygamy and
provoke critical reflection on similar issues in the reformer's home
culture.

III


FOUNDATIONS OF UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS

Mill's secular liberal utilitarianism produces indirect models of
women's human rights advocacy, such as toleration, education, ob-
servation, and instigation. In contrast, Wollstonecraft's theological
and deontological approach to justifying rights generates strong and
direct moral judgments on the best content and scope for women's
human rights. It also enables the allegation of women's human rights
in universalistic terms that may resonate with a variety of religious
worldviews. Mill's indirect strategies for reform are better suited for
cultural or religious outsiders to a morally controversial issue such
as polygamy, whereas Wollstonecraft's direct approach to rights
advocacy would fare better with cultural and religious insiders who
seek to effectively criticize or defend a morally controversial practice
from within.
From 1872 to 1914, a group of female Latter Day Saints (LDS)
in Utah modeled the latter mode of immanent defense. Their news-
paper, the Woman's Exponent, made pro-polygamy arguments based
on Mormon theology and contemporary women's rights discourse.
Its editor, Emmeline Wells, was a reader of Wollstonecraft, and, in
1874, the paper defended the feminist ethical logic of the Rights of
Woman against charges of its irreligion and immorality: "Eighty years
ago Mary Wollstonecraft published her 'Vindication of the Rights of
Woman.' It was a book laid under ban as irreligious and immoral. Yet
it consists simply of a forcible and logical plea for the higher educa-
tion of women, and an exposure of the false sentimentality of Ros-
seau [sic]." Wells blended Wollstonecraft's rational theological and
deontological style of women's human rights advocacy with her own
Mormon conviction in the sacredness of women's everyday work,
starting in the family. In a relief society handbook, Wells argued that
Mormon women's duty in life was to help restore humanity's origi-
nal, God-given equality: "Woman must be instrumental in bring-
ing about the restoration of that equality which existed when the
world was created. Perfect equality then and so it must be when all
things are restored as they were in the beginning." The slogan of
the Woman's Exponent also fused Mormonism and women's human

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FOUNDATIONS OF UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS

rights: "The Rights of the Women of Zion, The Rights of Women
of All Nations."62
These LDS women's internal support for Mormon polygamy
from a gospel and feminist perspective warranted Mill's caution-
ary approach to judging their community from the outside. Indeed,
the women's rights leaders Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady
Stanton-who opposed polygamy on much the same grounds as
Wollstonecraft-chose such a Millian pragmatic route in working
with LDS women on their common cause of universal suffrage in
Utah. An avid reader of On Liberty, Stanton criticized those femi-
nists who opposed the involvement of Mormons such as Wells in
the national women's suffrage convention of 1878: "I should think
Mormon women might sit on our platform without making us re-
sponsible for their religious faith."63
The Woman's Exponent suggested the rhetorical and political power
of Wollstonecraft's theological approach to defending women's hu-
man rights for cultural insiders who sought to reconcile religious
commitments, such as to polygamy, with other normative commit-
ments, such as women's right to suffrage. Plural marriage and uni-
versal suffrage had coexisted in Utah from 1870 to 1887. In 1887, the
passage of the Edmunds-Tucker Act in the U.S. Congress took away
women's right to vote and the right to polygamy in Utah-partly be-
cause male legislators from other states were angry that LDS women
did not "free themselves" from polygamy through the vote. In re-
sponse to the government's attempt to strip their rights as women
and as religious people, Wells and others argued in the Woman's Ex-
ponent that polygamy and women's suffrage were both morally con-
sistent and socially beneficial in the context of democratic, feminist,
and gospel values.64
The historic and contemporary controversies surrounding reli-
gious polygamy illustrate the ethical complexities of making argu-
ments for the institutionalization of the moral rights of women,
especially in cases where law and culture do not yet provide guides
for reformist action. Because of these complexities, allegations of

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FOUNDATIONS OF UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS

women's human rights must often refer to some kind of moral foun-
dation as a justification for their broader public recognition as a
valid claim for reform. A conception of humanity itself is one such
foundation.
Foundationalist approaches to justifying human rights run into
the problem of the pluralism of values across peoples, cultures, and
nations, however. Not all peoples will agree on what it means to
be human, or wish to dissociate religion or other cultural traditions
from their definitions of humanity. Not all women will agree on
policies that affect them, such as laws concerning marriage, suffrage,
or health care. For example, a liberal pluralistic society such as the
contemporary United States sees significant gaps in public opinion
emerge between women who primarily identify as religious and
women who primarily identify as feminist. When faced with what
Rawls called "the fact of reasonable pluralism," a human rights ad-
vocate must attend to reasonable differences among people's world-
views (or comprehensive doctrines) in adopting an ethical approach
to judging how to respond to the disputed issue at hand. Under-
standing one's own basic relationship to a contested issue is a crucial
first step toward making rationally justified and culturally respectful
claims for human rights.65
To allege women's human rights in cases of strong disagreement
may be a morally courageous act for a cultural insider such as Ebadi,
but it is also a political step toward justice. Since 2009, Ebadi has
been forced to live in exile from Tehran due to her successful yet
controversial feminist activism; worse, the Iranian government has
persecuted her family in order to try to stop her work for women's
rights in her Islamic nation. Such brave and persistent activism by
cultural insiders puts the issue on the national or global agenda for
cultural outsiders. This is Wollstonecraft's gift to human rights ac-
tivism: modeling the value of people speaking up for women's hu-
man rights from the foundations of their own cultural and religious
traditions.66
With a comparatively thinner set of moral foundations than Woll-
stonecraft's approach, Mill's liberal utilitarianism lends itself more

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FOUNDATIONS OF UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS

to the outsider perspective for advocating women's human rights.
Pragmatically akin to Rawlsian nonfoundationalist theorists of hu-
man rights yet philosophically grounded in his foundational value
of individuality, Mill provides another compelling secular model for
judging and alleging women's human rights. This liberal utilitarian
approach to rights-based reform begins with a basic stance of toler-
ance toward other people's cultural practices. If necessary, it educates
people directly and indirectly affected by a women's human rights
issue. It proceeds to monitor violations of those human rights. The
last resort is invoking a thin set of secular yet foundationalist human
rights values in order to instigate reform. This outsider perspective
on contentious women's human rights issues ultimately strives to
resist the strong imposition of one's most contestable moral stan-
dards on different cultures. In the long run, the dynamic interplay
of a variety of insider and outsider perspectives on human rights
may lead to reform of laws and policies concerning controversial
women's human rights issues, such as those on religious polygamy.
This dynamic of insider and outsider reforms might make liberal-
ism more accommodating to practices that at first look incompatible
with its principles of justice, while encouraging people to adapt their
cultural practices such that they resonate with basic human rights
values, both moral and legal.

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THEORIES OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT
WOLLSTONECRAFT AND MILL ON SEX,
GENDER, AND EDUCATION
Virtue Ethics and the Human Right to Education
Despite their contrasting religious and secular approaches to the
justification of universal human rights, Wollstonecraft and Mill saw
the purpose of rights in a similar light. To claim any human right,
moral or legal, was to simultaneously claim an even more expansive
right to live, develop, and flourish as a human being. The enjoyment
of some basic human rights-such as sustenance and security-was
a minimal yet necessary condition for the sound growth of people,
as individuals and in groups. However, many persons lacked the
means-individually, socially, or politically-to initiate, let alone
actualize, this process of human development. Wollstonecraft and
Mill were keenly aware that systematic sexual discrimination posed
formidable obstacles to girls' and women's exercise of basic hu-
man rights and thus their free and full self-development as human
beings.
To solve this gender-inflected political problem, Wollstonecraft
and Mill knew that they could not stop at the general justification of
the equal moral rights of the sexes. Beyond this first step, they had
to make a case for why there was a specific human right by which
human beings could best develop their capabilities as individuals, in
groups, and as a whole. Each of them identified education as this
basic right, especially but not exclusively for children, and without
discrimination as to sex. This universal right to education presumed
the enjoyment of other basic human rights (such as sustenance and
security), but it aimed at loftier moral and political goals than these
bare necessities for survival. As Mill powerfully put it in On Liberty,
it was a "moral crime" that women and children were not guaranteed
a "right" to "education" in his supposedly advanced country, because
not only "food" but also "instruction and training for [the] mind"

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THEORIES OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

were necessary for individual well-being. While adequate provision
of food could meaningfully satisfy the right to sustenance in the short
term, the satisfaction of the right to education could be determined
only in light of its long-term process of character development.'
Because of their joint concern with education as the perfection of
moral character, Wollstonecraft and Mill drew from some of the an-
cient wisdom of Aristotelian ethics. For them, the Aristotelian telos,
or final goal, of human life is the realization of eudaimonic, or virtu-
ous, happiness. Wollstonecraft's foundational conception of duty led
her to define "virtue" in universalistic and metaphysical terms: "to
obtain a character as a human being, regardless of the distinction of
sex," by ruling oneself and respecting others through rational adher-
ence to God's moral law. Mill's complex consequentialist distinction
between aggregate human happiness and the "real, permanent" hap-
piness of self-cultivation led him to think of virtue as asserting one's
individuality in a way that was conscientious of the freedom of oth-
ers. This, in On Liberty, he called "a Greek ideal of self-development,
which the Platonic and Christian ideal of self-government blends
with, but does not supersede." In their liberal variants of virtue
ethics, Wollstonecraft and Mill agreed that to experience virtuous
happiness-or the ultimate human good-was to cultivate an inde-
pendent yet caring moral character. Because people must learn how
to be virtuous in their relationships to self and others, education is
the most important human right in their perfectionistic ethics.2
Martha Nussbaum has made the point that Aristotle's theory of
eudaimonia may be read as allowing the perfection of a range of virtu-
ous characters, from the contemplative philosopher to the courageous
warrior. I follow Nussbaum in understanding Mill as continuing this
perfectionistic tradition of ethics even as he opens up the possibility
of an even richer variety of virtuous outcomes for human character
development. Mill's liberal utilitarianism diversifies eudaimonia by
setting down the freedom, eccentricity, and higher pleasures of indi-
viduals as the expansive parameters for human flourishing.3
I further propose that Wollstonecraft should be understood as an
important predecessor to Mill in developing this liberty-centered

II7


THEORIES OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

school of virtue ethics. Although virtue ethics is often understood
as an alternative to both deontology and consequentialism, Woll-
stonecraft and Mill demonstrated how a deep philosophical interest
in character as the primary marker of virtuous happiness was in fact
compatible with their respective duty-based and utilitarian justifica-
tions for human rights. Their resultant liberal school of virtue ethics
is explicitly egalitarian and democratic in its political implications.
Its egalitarianism-meaning, its applicability to each and every hu-
man being, regardless of gender, class, race, or other social status
made it universalistic in scope in contrast to Aristotle's ethics, which
largely confined its attention to the character formation of elite men.
Wollstonecraft and Mill aimed at nothing less than the inclusion of
all people in the experience of eudaimonia through the establish-
ment of a universal human right to education. In her Rights of Men,
Wollstonecraft explicitly contrasted her views on "democracy" with
"Aristotle." Specifically, she rejected Edmund Burke's conservative
interpretation of book 4 of the Politics to mean that democracy in-
evitably produces tyranny. In the spirit of the early, liberal stage of
the French Revolution, she contended that "democracy" leads not
to "tyranny" but rather to the empowerment of the people. In her
Rights of Woman, she argued that representative democracy was the
best political framework for instituting the "rights and duties" of
humanity and the "human virtues (or perfections)" that "naturally
flow" from them.4
In recent scholarship on Wollstonecraft and Mill, each of them
has been independently assessed as a virtue ethicist. Virginia Sapiro's
landmark 1992 bookA Vindication of Political Virtue: The Political The-
ory of Mary Wollstonecraft situated Wollstonecraft's political theory
in eighteenth-century republican discourse on virtue and laid the
groundwork for the more recent turn toward reading Wollstone-
craft in terms of her moral theory of virtue. Philosophical readings
of Mill's Autobiography alongside his Utilitarianism, such as by Nuss-
baum, have underscored the centrality of virtue to his ethics, espe-
cially his theory of happiness. While a consensus has formed around
conceptualizing each of their ethical systems in perfectionistic terms,

I18


THEORIES OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

the status of rights in their moral and political thought continues to
be debated. Scholars have lately emphasized Mill's view of freedom
as nondomination over his theory of rights, and Wollstonecraft's
conceptions of virtue and duty over her theory of rights. I seek to
connect Wollstonecraft's and Mill's well-discussed virtue ethics with
their more contested theories of rights, via a comparative analysis of
their views on the fundamental human right to education.5
Wollstonecraft and Mill ideally conceived education as broader
in scope than a mere process of socialization and higher in pur-
pose than a simple system of discipline or social control. To apply a
distinction made by Alan Ryan (and Mill before him), they perceived
that the "narrower" use of terms such as "education" and "socializa-
tion" discouraged the "wider" human quest for freedom and virtue,
and even obscured the ways that people may be made unfree and
vicious by learning and norms. As do Nussbaum and Amartya Sen,
Wollstonecraft and Mill viewed education as a long-term process of
realizing the abundant variety of capabilities of human beings, first
and foremost as individuals and secondly as a species.6
Wollstonecraft and Mill theorized the process of eudaimonic
human development as having several, mutually reinforcing levels:
(z) the education of children in the habits of body, affect, and mind
to become virtuously self-governing adults; (2) the simultaneous,
reflexive reform of educational practices to better enable such free
and full self-development; (3) the allegation, recognition, and insti-
tutionalization of the basic human right to education undifferenti-
ated by sex; and (4) the simultaneous, reflexive reform of policies and
laws concerning the right to education, in order to promote virtuous
human development. Each accepted that the various levels of human
development would not always take place at the same intensity or
pace, be linear, consistent, or progressive in results, or ever be final.
Yet for both thinkers, the goal of virtue remained the common point
of moral orientation.
Although they were perfectionists in the Aristotelian sense that they
posited virtue as the end of their ethical worldviews, they were not
perfectionists in the contemporary psychological sense of defining

I"9


THEORIES OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

one's purpose in life in terms of an unrealizable excellence. The
latter view was self-defeating and demoralizing, as Mill poignantly
chronicled with his account of his "mental crisis" and subsequent,
life-saving discovery of the "indirect" route to personal happiness.
According to his Autobiography, a "real, permanent" happiness could
only be found via an inward turn, to the culture and habits of the self,
which would precipitate a virtuous shift in the public habits of indi-
viduals. It was education that would spread and solidify this virtuous
shift in personal and public habits. The most important outcome of
this educational process would be citizens' development of the taste
for higher-order utility (above all, the flourishing of individuality)
over lower forms of utility (such as short-term personal pleasures).7
In a similar spirit, Wollstonecraft prescribed education as a political
solution to the deeper moral problem of how to inculcate the virtues
necessary for the practice of equal yet "ennobled" citizenship among
men and women. As a starting point for this educational process, she
consistently advised girls to focus on meaningful practical goals that
enhanced their own sense of self-worth. Women should not define
themselves in terms of superficial markers of their sex's prescribed
social value, such as a passive feminine demeanor. As she surmised
in the Rights of Woman, "If fear in girls, instead of being cherished,
perhaps, created, were treated in the same manner as cowardice in
boys, we should quickly see women with more dignified aspects."
This shift in girls' self-understandings would encourage boys to do
the same, in their views of themselves and their female counterparts.
In the long run, the cultivation of personal virtue would contribute
to the global human good: a shared sense of human entitlement to
reasonable conditions of equal dignity and respect.8
As a philosophical proponent of the capabilities approach, Nuss-
baum has argued that normative theories of human development
must begin with an account of the fundamental capabilities of hu-
man beings and also establish the minimum threshold at which their
actual or potential voluntary realization characterizes a life of human
dignity. Whereas Sen has focused on the capability for freedom as
a gateway to the growth of other human capabilities such as educa-

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THEORIES OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

tion or political participation, Nussbaum has provided a detailed list
of ten basic human capabilities (life; bodily health; bodily integrity;
senses, imagination, and thought; emotions; practical reason; affili-
ation; relationships with other species; play; and control over one's
environment). Despite these differences in their definitions of the
capabilities, both have argued that the Aristotelian ethical distinc-
tion between the actual and the potential-what humans can do,
versus what they could do and should do-is vital for theories of just
human development. If we judge human activity solely on an empiri-
cal basis, rather than also invoking a normative idea of what humans
could and should choose to do, we will never gain a critical perspec-
tive on "what is" versus "what ought to be." This application of the
Aristotelian distinction between actuality and potentiality permits
the derivation of rights from capabilities. For Nussbaum, the right
to education may be derived from a number of human capabilities,
including practical reason, play, bodily integrity, and the emotions.
Because education typically empowers humans with the choice to
potentially or actually exercise their other capabilities, it is a basic
or fundamental right of the human being. Furthermore, the applica-
tion of the Aristotelian distinction between actuality and potentiality
allows humans to allege rights as extralegal or extracultural moral
standards for assessing the limitations of present social and political
norms. For Sen, such criticism of the actual may stir reform toward
the potential.9
Wollstonecraft and Mill applied the actual-potential distinction
in their diagnoses of the moral problem of sex inequality, and their
joint prescription of the universal human right to education as its
political remedy. Males and females were unequal in society and
politics not because of nature but rather because of their socializa-
tion within the patriarchal norms of the family. Almost eighty years
apart, Wollstonecraft and Mill insisted that the potential of females
to contribute to human society and progress would be unknown un-
til they were given a chance to develop without the fetters of patri-
archy. Wollstonecraft hypothesized that women "will change their
character, and correct their vices and follies, when they are allowed

121


THEORIES OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

to be free in a physical, moral, and civil sense." Concerning women's
"capabilities," Mill empirically reasoned that "nobody knows" what
they are or could be, "not even [women] themselves, because most of
them have never been called out."'0
The first step toward realizing the capabilities of girls and women
would be the reform of education-in families, schools, and culture
as a whole-such that it produced more egalitarian norms of charac-
ter development for the sexes. Wollstonecraft's theory of education
was twofold in its innovative treatment of the psychological develop-
ment of the girl child's gender identity. First, Wollstonecraft diag-
nosed how bad educational practices led girls to adapt to conditions
of patriarchal domination by playing the standard, limited gender
roles assigned to them by society. Second, she prescribed a cure for
this problem in the deep coeducational reform of public schools such
that they would train girls and boys to see themselves and each other
as equally entitled to the "birthright" of humankind: "such a degree
of liberty, civil and religious, as is compatible with the liberty of every
other individual." Less focused on the curricular details of educa-
tional reform at the primary or secondary level, Mill offered a prag-
matic model for criticizing the negative effects of patriarchal gender
roles on human development in general. Both theorists envisioned
how the state-level institutionalization of a basic human right to uni-
versal primary education (UPE) would establish national venues for
systematic, virtuous reform of gender and other social roles."
Because Wollstonecraft and Mill wished to convince govern-
ments to provide the fundamental human right to education, they
were faced with a political predicament. On the one hand, their pri-
mary justification for the human right to UPE was the intrinsic
value of equal education for individual girls and boys. On the other
hand, elite men in power had to be persuaded to extend this right
to females. Responding to these unfavorable political circumstances,
Wollstonecraft and Mill made consequentialist arguments that fore-
grounded the extrinsic benefits of reforming female education for
society at large, including the men who ran it. However persuasive,
such consequentialist arguments for women's human rights had the

122


THEORIES OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

countervailing rhetorical effect of portraying girls and their educa-
tion as mere means to larger social and political ends. This chapter
concludes by engaging the questions of whether and how women's
human rights advocates and educational reformers may avoid this
moral contradiction between their deeper philosophical principles
and their rhetorical practices.
Diagnosing Bad Education via the Sex-Gender Distinction
Wollstonecraft began her philosophy of education by assessing the
bitter reality of social inequality in her time. Her "observations" on
women's "state of degradation" led her to argue that such degrada-
tion was predominantly caused by bad educational practices that sys-
tematically disadvantaged girls at the same time that they advantaged
boys. The remedy to such bad, gender-specific educational practices
was the institution of an equal human right to education, especially
formal primary education. Wollstonecraft proceeded to propose the
reform of educational institutions and practices such that they would
guarantee this basic right and generate virtuous characters for indi-
viduals across the sexes and the species as a whole."
Wollstonecraft's treatment of gender-or the socially constructed
aspect of human sex identities-was the most groundbreaking di-
mension of her observational and politically situated approach to
defending the universal human right to education. While she and
other eighteenth-century thinkers did not use the term "gender" in
this way, she came remarkably close to articulating in her philoso-
phy the conceptual distinction between gender as a social construc-
tion and sex as a biological trait that has become fundamental to
social science research since the 1940s. The Rights of Woman pre-
sented her most complete account of the social construction of gen-
der identities, masculine and feminine. Continuing a theme from
the Rights of Men, the first chapter reviewed how unnatural social
hierarchies-such as slavery, the aristocratic class system, the Cath-
olic and Anglican Churches, monarchical government, and standing
armies-provided the context in which people assigned limiting and

123


THEORIES OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

corrupting identities to one another. She then moved, in chapter 2,
to discuss how the same process formed "the prevailing opinion of a
sexual character."'3
What Wollstonecraft meant by "the prevailing opinion of a sexual
character" was the way in which society prescribed unduly sexu-
alized identities for both women and men, but especially women.
"Prevailing opinion" consisted of culturally shared, comparative, and
competitive judgments and beliefs about one another. Such opinions
were the mechanism that created stereotypical gender identities.
The power of "prevailing opinion" to shape people's beliefs meant
that it could impose a set of sexual stereotypes upon people-such
as the male rake, the dandy redcoat, the vain girl, and the despotic
mistress-which they often unreflectively, even happily, accepted as
their own social identities. These gender identities situated men and
women in a sexualized hierarchy of roles and relationships; they also
reflected and intersected with the other artificial hierarchies that de-
fined society, including those inflected by class and race.'4
Wollstonecraft identified education as the means by which cul-
ture reinforces both economic and legal constructions of patriarchal
power. Through education, women come to be seen as "cyphers"
in the eyes of themselves and others. Wollstonecraft pinpointed
"education" as principally responsible for giving an "appearance of
weakness to females." This appearance quickly became reality, as ed-
ucation trained girls to internalize this collective social judgment of
their gender's supposed physical or natural inferiority. The frivolous
character of female education, with its focus on "novels, music, po-
etry, and gallantry," tended to "make women creatures of sensation,
and their character is thus formed in the mould of folly." Such a poor
education had "a more baneful effect on the female than the male
character" because women were denied the economic and political
opportunities that would at least give them a chance to break out of
this culturally imposed mold."
Likewise, Mill was morally troubled by the social construction of
gender to support male power and female powerlessness. In com-
paring husbands to slave owners, he caustically asked: "Was there

124


THEORIES OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

ever any domination which did not appear natural to those who pos-
sessed it?" The first chapter of his Subjection of Women thus opened
with Mill's engagement of this problem as if he were the lawyer for
the defense of women's equality with men. Similar to Wollstonecraft
with her observational and politically situated approach, he pro-
ceeded from the realistic assumption that the "burthen of proof" lay
on his side, because "the subjection of women to men being a uni-
versal custom, any departure from it quite naturally appears unnatu-
ral." Despite the odds against him, Mill pitched his case for human
equality in the hope that the jury of society would change its mind
on the basis of his arguments about the arbitrary and artificial char-
acter of sex inequality. Because humans made gender, gender could
be unmade and remade by them. Mill thus underscored the practical
possibility of rethinking and reforming gender norms such that they
unleashed both women's and men's full human capabilities.16
The beginnings of Mill's relationship with Harriet Taylor, in
the early 183os, inspired some of his first meditations on gender.
In private correspondence in the fall of 1833, Mill challenged his
friend Carlyle's description of Madame Roland as "almost rather a
man than a woman" by way of querying, "Is there any distinction
between the highest masculine and the highest feminine character?"
Over the next three decades, Mill developed a theory of gender as
a social construct independent of biological sex-particularly in his
private musings on marriage and women's rights, and in his public
engagement of the suffrage debate.'7
In his unpublished essay "On Marriage," exchanged with Taylor
sometime around 1832-33, Mill began to theorize the role of "educa-
tion and custom" in the social formation of constricting gender roles
for women. He used the example of a married woman's "artificially
desirable" condition in contrast to the lowly, yet comparatively freer,
single woman of his time. Although the wife lacked "any superiority
of legal rights" due to coverture, her position in life was still prefer-
able to the single woman. To unravel this paradox, Mill argued that
"it is not law, but education and custom which make the difference"
between the lower status of the single woman and the higher status of

125


THEORIES OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

the wife. He concluded that women were particularly subject to the
ill effects of bad education. From girlhood, they "are educated to be
married." The perverse effect of this lifelong push toward marriage
was to deny girls the chance to experience freedom, even "in the mere
physical sense." Instead, girls were "brought up" to depend upon men
for their basic subsistence and security. This deep cultural inculcation
of women's dependency on men made it unlikely that they would seek
"to subsist" independently or "to protect themselves."'8
An undated essay on women's rights, cowriten with Taylor in the
late 1850s, similarly argued that the difference between men's and
women's social roles "is principally if not wholly the effect of differ-
ences in education and in social circumstances, or of physical char-
acteristics by no means peculiar to one or the other sex." Here, Mill
and Taylor perceptively disaggregated physical differences depen-
dent on sex from physical differences independent of sex, suggesting
that the latter were actually more relevant to determining choices in
occupation. Mill's 1861 treatise Considerations on Representative Gov-
ernment cemented this distinction between "physical" and "social"
differences between men and women. In his defense of "universal
yet graduated suffrage," he paid no attention to "sexual difference"
because it was "entirely irrelevant to political rights, as difference in
height, or in the colour of the hair." By the early 186os, Mill drew
a bright line between sexual difference determined by biology and
gender difference produced by socialization. Sexual differences were
nowhere near as significant for society as the gender roles produced
by education and custom. Moreover, sexual differences were less rel-
evant to choice of occupation than species-wide physical differences
like height, and as "irrelevant" to political issues as hair color.19
Mill's 1843 Logic had used the term "gender" in the grammatical
sense, in the context of his definition of universal propositions. Mill
argued that the proposition "man is mortal" is universal, meaning,
its subject's referent logically denoted all "human beings," not only
"man" or male humans. In propositions in which the universality
or particularity of terms such as "man" was not clear, there was no
logical reason to "enumerate the doubtful gender." The meaning of

126


THEORIES OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

the term "man"-whether it was intended to denote "humans" or
"males"-could be construed from the context of the proposition.20
Beyond this point of grammar, Mill never used the term "gender"
in the modern sense of the social construction of human sex identi-
ties. His involvement in the women's rights cause, however, pushed
him to more strongly consider the ethical implications of universal-
istic propositions about "man" that did not "enumerate" women as
part of the general category of humanity. While there was not an
abstractly logical reason to specify women or use a sex-neutral term,
there were plenty of contextual moral and political reasons to foster a
more inclusive discourse on humanity. Mill's Subjection of Women and
his other political arguments on behalf of women's human rights ex-
plored the problematic ethical implications of making universalistic
propositions about "man" without considering women's education
into conditions of arbitrary subordination.2'
In May 1867, Mill's speech before the House of Commons, "The
Admission of Women to the Electoral Franchise," put this gender-
sensitive ethic of universalistic argumentation to political use. Before
the assembly of fellow male legislators, he proposed an amendment
to the Reform Bill concerning the qualifications of voters in British
counties. This amendment stated that the word "person" should be
used instead of "man," in order to legally denote women's right to
vote. Before applause, he argued against the current state of affairs,
in which "neither birth, nor fortune, nor merit, nor exertion, nor
intellect, nor even that great disposer of human affairs, accident, can
ever enable any woman to have her voice counted in those national
affairs which touch her and hers as nearly as any other person in the
nation." His gender-sensitive rhetoric specifically denoted woman in
his universalistic moral argument for every person's right to vote. Al-
though his motion lost, 196 to 73, Mill's case for legal recognition of
women's status as "persons" had already been publicly recognized as
an expression of his "logic," in a recent issue of the satirical London
magazine Punch (figure 1).22
From the earliest responses to their theories of the social con-
struction of gender roles, Wollstonecraft and Mill had been accused

127


THEORIES OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT
MILL'S LOGIC ; OR, FRANCIIISE liOR FEMALES.
1 PUft 0LE1 TE WAY ThERE I( FR THESE-A-PE R~S~
Figure i. "Mill's Logic; or, Franchise for Females," in
Punch (London, 30 March 1867), 129. The subcaption is
"Pray clear the way, there, for these-a-persons."
of professing strange views on the expression or repression of sexual-
ity in human life. She was spoofed as a sexual wanton, while Freud
mocked Mill's Autobiography for its "prudish" ideas on the relation-
ship between men and women. Although they exaggerated some
truths about Wol Istonecraft's revolutionary-era sexual radicalism
and Mill's Victorian reserve, the critics had their moments of in-
sight. Intriguingly, the press caricatured Wolistonecraft and Mill as
manly women or as womanly men for their ideas on how women's
rights ought to transform gender roles in society. Indeed, seventy
years apart, cartoonists presented them as cross-dressing philoso-
phers of women's human rights (figures 2 and 3)2

128


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M''ISS MILL JOINS THE LADIES.

Figure 3. "Miss Mill Joins the Ladies," in Judy (London, 25 November
i868), 46-47, and the National Portrait Gallery, London.


THEORIES OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

Wollstonecraft and Mill both shrugged off such crude satires of
their radical views on the difference between bodily sex and gender
norms. Wollstonecraft deflated such criticisms by anticipating them:
she exploded the notion of "manly virtues" in the opening pages of
the Rights of Woman by invoking the universal human standard of
moral virtue and depicting "masculine" activities such as hunting
and shooting as vicious regardless of which sex performed them.
Mill persisted in making his logical argument for the human right
to be legally recognized as a person. His unsolicited 1867 letter to
Kansas state senator Samuel N. Wood, later printed in Topeka and
New York papers, praised the legislator for proposing a constitu-
tional amendment for universal suffrage that would abolish "the un-
just political privileges of sex at one and at the same stroke with the
kindred privilege of color."24
Contemporary scholarship has carried on the nineteenth-century
tradition of supposing that Mill wished to impose asexual androgyny
on others, and presuming that Wollstonecraft wanted women to
be like men. These interpretations do not, however, make sense of
why Wollstonecraft and Mill made human embodiment the starting
point for their practical ethics. Their philosophical distinction be-
tween gender and sex relied upon their conceptions of the embodied,
sentient, sexed human being."
For Wollstonecraft and Mill, sex mattered because the body mat-
tered  physically and morally-as the vehicle for human life. Woll-
stonecraft argued that both children and adults should study sexual
reproduction as part of natural science, beginning with botany.
Sexuality had important public health ramifications, as she and Mill
acknowledged in relation to prostitution and venereal disease, and so
it needed to be treated as a vital issue in political discourse.26
Like most people of their times, Wollstonecraft and Mill some-
times predicated their arguments about sexual politics on moral pre-
sumptions about how the sexed body generates social preferences.
As discussed in chapter 2, Wollstonecraft assumed that sexual re-
production gave reasons for monogamous marriage and male-female
partnership in early childcare. In a highly contested statement in The

I3I


THEORIES OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

Subjection of Women, Mill assumed that most married women would
(and perhaps even should) choose to focus upon family and mother-
hood, rather than careers outside the home, even once granted full
legal and economic equality with men: "Like a man when he chooses
a profession, so, when a woman marries, it may in general be under-
stood that she makes choice of the management of a household, and
the bringing up of a family, as the first call upon her exertions, during
as many years of her life as may be required for the purpose; and that
she renounces, not all other objects and occupations, but all which
are not consistent with the requirements of this." The meaning of
this passage has been much debated by feminist scholars. Some, like
Nadia Urbinati, have interpreted it as a rhetorical strategy to per-
suade men to enfranchise women at no risk to their current domestic
situations. Others, like Susan Okin, have interrogated it to expose
Mill's inconsistency or limitations as a feminist, particularly on the
sexual division of labor.27
In light of his moral concern with human embodiment, it is inter-
esting to note that Mill cited "the physical suffering of bearing chil-
dren" and the "bodily and mental exertion" of running a household
as reasons why married women focused on work within the family
during their reproductive years. Lending social scientific evidence
to this hypothesis, political economists Torben Iversen and Frances
Rosenbluth have recently explained why women are more likely to
slow down in their work beyond the home when they are in their
childbearing years, whether or not they have children. The embedded
causes of this trend are found in politics, economics, and patriarchal
family structures. In a patriarchal society that allows women at least
some access to the marketplace, women face greater pressure than
men to calculate the costs and benefits of reproduction and other
caregiving roles to them. The possibility of pregnancy, childbirth,
and elder care is a significant determinant of action, including choice
of work, from women's perspectives as economic actors. Whether
because of actual or anticipated caregiving burdens, women focus
less on their careers outside the home during their fertility windows,
which feeds back into patriarchal patterns of employment and salary

132


THEORIES OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

discrimination against women in general. As Mill contended long
ago, female embodiment does matter, but so do patriarchal gender
norms.28
The bulk of Wollstonecraft's and Mill's arguments concerning the
sexes clearly fell on the side of addressing the moral problem of the
social construction of patriarchal gender norms. In response to this
problem, Wollstonecraft called for a "revolution in female man-
ners" by which women could reform themselves as individuals, and
in so doing, "reform the world." Mill likewise envisioned the ho-
listic, egalitarian transformation of education so that it cultivated
self-sovereign individuals who would reform gender and society
along virtuous lines. As Urbinati has shown, Mill embraced the Brit-
ish Romantic ideal of androgyny-or the positive blending of the
"highest" feminine and masculine qualities in human psychology
found in the writings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Percy Bysshe
Shelley. It is clear, however, that Mill understood this androgyne
ideal to be a psychological or moral disposition that one could adopt
to pursue a life of virtuous happiness, not an innate facet of the hu-
man mind or body.29
Wollstonecraft's and Mill's theories of gender identity formation
are strikingly similar to contemporary social scientific accounts of
gender. When psychologists formally introduced the sex-gender dis-
tinction in the 194os, they used it to distinguish between sex (male
and female biological traits) and gender (socially constructed norms
of masculinity and femininity). Wollstonecraft took note of male ho-
mosexual prostitutes, transvestites such as the French diplomat Ma-
dame d'Eon (who now might self-describe as transgendered), and
other "equivocal beings" who broke down a strict gender binary be-
tween masculine and feminine plus the prevailing assumption of the
biological basis of femininity. Although contemporary literary theo-
rists such as Claudia Johnson have criticized her hetero-normative
perspective, Wollstonecraft acknowledged homosexuality and trans-
vestitism as practices in her time and seems to have tolerated them
among adults except in cases of sexual promiscuity, infidelity, and
prostitution (which she judged to be morally wrong in general).

133


THEORIES OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

By contrast, Mill's general moral preference for the pursuit of the
higher, mental pleasures may have led him to focus more on issues
of gender than on issues of sexuality. Unlike his utilitarian mentor
Jeremy Bentham, Mill did not boldly engage controversial sexual
questions such as the morality of homosexual relations (then censo-
riously labeled as sodomy or pederasty). As we saw in chapter 2, even
his consideration of Mormon polygamy in On Liberty hinged on the
social and political question of whether such plural marital arrange-
ments ought to be tolerated from afar, rather than on close moral
evaluation of their sexual practices. Although he and Harriet Taylor
chose to practice a platonic, intellectual love together, free from the
obsession with sex and reproduction that dominated most couples'
relationships, Mill never prescribed asexuality, chastity, or childless-
ness for people in general; in fact, he devoted a large portion of his
life to advocacy for people's access to and education regarding birth
control and family planning, especially for the working classes, who
sadly lacked the means to support the many children they currently
brought into the world.30
What distinguishes Wollstonecraft and Mill from many postmod-
ern invocations of gender is their consistent use of a philosophi-
cal distinction between sex, understood as biological, and gender,
understood as a social construction. In the late twentieth century,
the rise of postmodern theories of gender as a kind of social per-
formance had the effect, in academic and even more in popular dis-
course, of treating gender as a general category under which cognate
yet distinct identity traits, such as sex and sexuality, are subsumed.
Especially in current popular discourse, gender serves as a nebulous
umbrella concept that covers all dimensions of sex and sexual identi-
ties, rather than as a specific concept that distinguishes between what
is biological and what is socialized in these aspects of human identi-
ties. The distinction between biological sex and socially constructed
gender, as applied in contemporary social sciences such as anthro-
pology and sociology, better promotes such rigorous analysis of gen-
der, sex, and sexuality. Wollstonecraft's and Mill's philosophies have
more in common with this social scientific approach to understand-

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THEORIES OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

ing the differences between gender and sex than with the popular,
postmodern usage of the term "gender" to diffusely describe any and
all aspects of sex and sexual identities."
Within their critical theories of gender socialization, Wollstone-
craft and Mill typically distinguished between the sexed body and the
social roles that had become culturally and legally associated with
sex. This distinction served as a point of departure for their common
judgment of patriarchal gender roles as arbitrary, artificial, and dam-
aging to all humans. Their use of the sex-gender distinction grew out
of their perfectionistic ethics. The reference point of biological sex
aided the critical analysis of patriarchal gender roles as vicious yet
culturally contingent, and therefore transformable. According to the
highest standard of moral virtue, gender could be reconceived along
egalitarian lines so that it promoted, rather than inhibited, the free
and full self-development of embodied, sexed human beings.
Vicious Cycles of Bad Education: Women's
Adaptation to Patriarchal Gender Norms
Wollstonecraft and Mill identified education as the vicious means
of women's subjection but also, once holistically reformed, as the
primary means of their exit from patriarchal domination. Mill elo-
quently conveyed the distinction between good and bad education,
as well as their dialectical relationship, in his 1867 inaugural ad-
dress at the University of St. Andrews: "Whatever helps to shape
the human being; to make the individual what he is, or hinder him
from being what he is not-is part of his education. And a very bad
education it often is, requiring all that can be done by cultivated
intelligence and will to counteract its tendencies." A good educa-
tion-which promoted the "virtue" and "self-culture" of the human
being-was the outcome of the "always slow" process of reforming
"bad education."32
The most perplexing problem with the patriarchal system of bad
education was that women did not want to graduate from it. As a
highly observant woman, Wollstonecraft was struck by her sex's

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complacent enjoyment and even willing, malicious perpetuation of
patriarchy: "Women are told from their infancy, and taught by the
example of their mothers, that a little knowledge of human weak-
ness, justly termed cunning, softness of temper, outward obedience,
and a scrupulous attention to a puerile kind of propriety, will obtain
for them the protection of man; and should they be beautiful, every
thing else is needless, for, at least, twenty years of their lives." Mill
also recognized most women's contented acceptance of their subor-
dination. As an extremely conscientious man, Mill blamed his sex for
using "the whole force of education" to make woman "not a forced
slave, but a willing one." Despite different emphases in critiquing
his or her own gender, he and Wollstonecraft agreed that it was the
overarching patriarchal structure of family, society, and the state that
occasioned such vicious choices, concessions, and strategies, and
worst, ignorant acceptance, among human agents."
Sen and Nussbaum's theories of human development have de-
scribed such responses to suboptimal circumstances as adaptive
preferences. Wollstonecraft and Mill understood the phenomenon
of women's adaptation to patriarchy as vicious in three senses. First,
it was morally bad, as in contrary to the realization of the individual's
potential for happy, virtuous self-governance. Second, it was self-
perpetuating, as it spread vice throughout society via the repetitive
processes of socialization within marriage and the family. Third, and
worst of all, it was a mind-set deeply rooted in the agent's subjective
sense of self.34
Building on her personal experiences and observations as a girl, a
woman, a mother, and a teacher of girls, Wollstonecraft made an im-
portant contribution to understanding the subjective psychological
experience of women's adaptation. Wollstonecraft used first-person
narration in her 1798 novel Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman-most
vividly with the destitute character of Jemima-to reveal the bleak
interior psychology of patriarchal oppression. Jemima recounted to
Maria her sad experience as a street prostitute: "Fate dragged me
through the very kennels of society; I was still a slave, a bastard,
a common property. . . . I picked the very pockets of the drunk-

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THEORIES OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

ards who abused me; and proved by my conduct, I deserved the epi-
thets, with which they loaded me at moments when distrust ought
to cease." Her desperate situation drove Jemima to steal from the
"drunkards" who "abused" her; her shame for this crime, even in
light of the sexual abuse she suffered, poignantly showed how female
victims of patriarchal oppression internalize society's estimation of
their worthlessness.35
Mill, as a conscientious man, assessed the problem from the out-
side; his perspective yielded far-reaching insights into the political
psychology of not only women's adaptation to patriarchy but also
their capability to resist it. While he acknowledged the thesis that
women's subjection "is accepted voluntarily; women make no com-
plaint, and are consenting parties to it," he challenged its power to
explain all women's attitudes toward patriarchy. He pointed out that
"a great number of women do not accept it." Women had long used
the pen, and more recently other forms of activism, to record their
"protests against their present social condition." On the other hand,
Mill conceded, "All causes, social and natural, combine to make it
unlikely that women should be collectively rebellious to the power
of men." Because women had been raised to "make complete abne-
gation of themselves," they were unlikely to do more than indepen-
dently complain about bad treatment at the hands of their husbands.
But it was a "political law of nature" that people "under power of
ancient origin"-such as slaves or women-would only gradually
move from complaint of the power's "excessive exercise" to com-
plaint of "the power itself."36
Wollstonecraft's subjective psychological account of adaptation
explained girls' early adherence to socially prescribed gender roles
alongside adult women's rationalization of their limited options.
For example, Wollstonecraft often criticized aristocratic women's
sour designation of early infant care as beneath them so they could
focus on frivolous pastimes. But she was equally, if not more, con-
cerned with how their frivolous lifestyles set up a dangerous model
for their daughters. Raised to play with dolls and admire themselves
in the mirror, these girls were surrounded with an array of gender

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THEORIES OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

"stereotype threats" in their upbringing. As social scientists discuss
today, a "stereotype threat" is the use of powerful stereotype (such as
girls play with dolls) to compel a group to behave in a way that con-
forms to social expectations (such as being conventionally feminine)
and thereby reduces their ability to successfully perform in other
areas (such as doing well in math). Indeed, it has been shown that
if girls are asked to play with pictures of dolls before taking a math
test, they will significantly underperform on the test as a result of
confronting this gender stereotype threat.37
In challenging the Rousseauian assumption that girls by nature en-
joy so-called feminine pastimes, Wollstonecraft diagnosed the deeper
educational problem of the "stunting" of the girl child's preferences
and behavior from the time of her infancy through exposure to vari-
ous gender stereotype threats. She thus isolated the efficient cause
of adaptation as women's lack of knowledge of any other way to live.
Since bad education was the origin of women's stunted development,
deep reform of education could open their psychological horizons
in a way that would at least allow women to choose their lots rather
than simply accept them or unreflectively impose them upon the next
generation. Her response to the problem of women's adaptation to
pernicious gender norms and stereotype threats spurred Wollstone-
craft to conceptualize how education ought to be reformed to ad-
vance women's human rights despite women's ingrained preferences
for oppression. Although she has sometimes been unfairly charged
with misogyny, her sharp criticism of women's vicious behavior in
her time was not antiwoman but rather antipatriarchy and therefore
against women's adaptation to it.38
Mill's theory of adaptation was just as subtle, and thus prone to
misinterpretation as well. Mill has been mistaken for a conspiracy
theorist of why women adapt to subjection. On this reading of The
Subjection of Women, men supposedly gang together to get women to
prefer things the patriarchal way. This view of Mill's theory of adap-
tation fails to account for his broader social scientific explanation for
global patriarchal institutions such as the family. The first chapter
of The Subjection of Women dispensed with the traditional explana-

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THEORIES OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

tion for "patriarchal" power, the natural dominance of fathers, as a
posthoc justification of male authority. Men had power neither be-
cause it was natural nor because they schemed together to get it but
rather because they arbitrarily acquired it through use of "force."39
Mill empirically reasoned that patriarchal institutions grew and
persisted because individual men in power perceived them as eco-
nomically and politically advantageous to them, and protected their
self-interest accordingly. According to chapter z of The Subjection of
Women, these patriarchal institutions emerged from the older, feu-
dal social order, so they could not be interpreted in isolation from
broader patterns in political and economic development. In addition,
Mill argued that women have adapted to the social expectation that
"being attractive to men" should be their "polar star," and thus have
contributed to their own subjection. With a sympathetic regard for
women's predicament, he noted it would have been a "miracle" if
they hadn't taken up this "yoke." For Mill as for many social sci-
entists since, patriarchy is not a collective conspiracy among men
against women but rather a long, cumulative feedback loop through
which all members of society gradually reinforce institutions of male
dominance.40
Wollstonecraft's and Mill's profound accounts of the moral and
political psychology of patriarchal oppression led them to posit a
correspondingly deep form of education as its remedy. This model
of education is a kind of realistic perfectionism, as it aims to take
"women as they are" (oppressed, and largely adapted to such op-
pression) to what they could and should be (individuals empowered
to choose, if they so wish, a life of virtuous self-governance). Using
the capabilities approach as a framework, Mozaffar Qizilbash has in-
sightfully argued that Mill's rich conception of human flourishing is
meant to be a realistic standard and goal for reforming society and
politics. On this reading, Mill's liberal virtue ethics is thus akin to
Sen's capabilities approach in upholding a holistic, liberty-centered,
individual-empowering moral education as one such realistic policy.
In what follows, I argue that this model of eudaimonic education
supported both Wollstonecraft's and Mill's visionary defenses of

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THEORIES OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

UPE as a basic human right that, if institutionalized, could success-
fully undercut the vicious cycle of patriarchal domination.4'
Perfectionism Meets Egalitarianism: Wollstonecraft and Mill
on the Human Right to Universal Primary Education
In her Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft was the first philosopher
to publicly propose and systematically defend a national system of
government-supported primary schools, free for boys and girls of
any social status to attend during the day in their localities. In a chal-
lenge to the "enlightened nation" of France and Charles Maurice de
Talleyrand-Perigord's recent report on public education there, she
argued that they should try an "experiment" in permitting women
"to share the advantages of education and government with man."
Anticipating patriarchal criticism in the guise of masculine chivalry,
she satirically remarked that women "cannot be injured by the ex-
periment; for it is not in the power of man to render them more
insignificant than they are at present." She outlined the experiment
as follows: "Day schools, for particular ages, should be established by
the government, in which boys and girls might be educated together.
The school for the younger children, from five to nine years of age,
ought to be absolutely free and open to all classes." This overlaps
with the twenty-first-century definition of UPE used by the United
Nations in its second and third Millennium Development Goals:
enabling all children, boys and girls, to complete education from
grade z through grade 5-
Wollstonecraft systematically argued for a right to UPE when
the concept had only recently and partially emerged in Western
educational thought and practice. In the context of the eighteenth-
century expansion of primary-level parish and charity schools in his
native Scotland, Adam Smith had defended government-sponsored
primary education for working-class boys in book 5 of The Wealth of
Nations (1776). This schooling was intended to serve as a psychologi-
cal corrective to the narrow, mechanical lines of work that they faced
in the capitalistic division of labor. Smith did not apply this argu-

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THEORIES OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

ment to girls, despite the fact that they dealt with similarly narrow
lines of work in the domestic realm. Given that girls were already
being trained to read and to spin in Scottish charity schools in the
1770s, Smith's patriarchal bias is all the more evident.43
With a similar slant toward the rights of men, Talleyrand-Perigord's
Rapport sur l'instruction publique (179) proposed that orphan girls
ought to receive government-sponsored primary education in the
new French republic, but it defended full access to public education
only for boys. Talleyrand-Perigord's partial inclusion of females had
the instrumental goal of saving these orphans from a projected life of
prostitution, not the empowerment of women in general. Likewise,
the turn-of-the-century Swiss educator Johann Pestalozzi inspired a
progressive, "child-centered" movement in primary education, but
his reliance on Rousseauian ideals of womanhood oriented his fol-
lowers more toward educating girls to be better mothers than toward
equalizing the options of the sexes.44
Across the Atlantic, Boston's tax-supported primary schools had
been coeducational since 1789 and flourished alongside several pri-
vate female academies. Wollstonecraft's Rights of Woman resonated
deeply with Boston's feminist educators at the turn of the nineteenth
century, including Hannah Mather Crocker and Susanna Rowson.
In his 1798 political tract The Key of Liberty, the rural Massachusetts
farmer William Manning argued that mandatory, free, public co-
education was foundational to democracy.45
Six years earlier, the Rights of Woman had culminated with a com-
prehensive moral argument for UPE as a public policy solution to
the vicious cycle of bad, patriarchal education. UPE would provide
a public space in which governments could apply Wollstonecraft's
perfectionistic theory of women's capability to realize moral and po-
litical equality alongside men: "By allowing them to share the advan-
tages of education and government with man, see whether they will
become better, as they grow wiser and become free." UPE ought
to be a "grand national concern" because "private education" in the
family could not be relied upon alone to bring about the "good ef-
fects" of moral and political virtue among all.46

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THEORIES OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

In Wollstonecraft's theory of UPE, her perfectionism met her
egalitarianism: "My observations on national education are obviously
hints; but I principally wish to enforce the necessity of educating the
sexes together to perfect both."4 Wollstonecraft envisioned UPE
as operating according to three core moral principles that would
together undermine harmful social norms by instilling an egalitar-
ian ethic of mutual respect among children: (1) holistic universalism
(general education of body, mind, and character for all); (2) duty-
based individualism (teaching children that their first duty is to gov-
ern themselves); and (3) psychological optimism (educating children
to believe in their human capabilities to develop). Applied in concert
in a primary school, these principles would guide children to avoid
playing out the damaging gender roles that their culture had foisted
on them.
Universalism in primary education, for Wollstonecraft, meant ho-
lism and fairness. Holism entailed the education of the whole per-
son, and fairness required equality of opportunity for such a holistic
education. Fairness arose from national standards for UPE and local
schools' implementation of the government policy of holistic edu-
cation for all. The national standards of equity that Wollstonecraft
imagined were "absolutely free" primary education for "boys and
girls, rich and poor"; uniformity in schoolchildren's clothing, disci-
pline, and curriculum; and a local parish school committee system to
which teachers could be held accountable by parents.48
Holism meant an education that developed, rather than "stunted,"
the potential of the "body, heart, and understanding." By playing to-
gether during hourly recess in the grounds surrounding the school,
girls and boys would learn to see and treat each other as embodied
human equals. Differences in body or sex did not translate into dif-
ferences in moral status or rules. The only rule specified for their co-
educational outdoor play ought to be "national" in scope: the general
prohibition of brutality toward animals. By learning to treat animals
benevolently in their games, children would discern the Rousseauian
idea that all embodied, sentient creatures (including humans) had

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THEORIES OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

natural rights to respect of their bodily integrity. Finally, holism
demanded day schools because children needed their families for a
complete moral education: it is by "making children sleep at home
that they may learn to love home."49
Individualism was about inculcating a sense not of social isolation
but rather of moral responsibility to oneself and others. Children
ought to be treated as moral equals by their teachers. Girls and boys
would learn to see themselves as capable of the same self-respect
if they governed themselves according to the same rules of moral-
ity. Raised to think themselves worthy of equal respect, children
could better resist the threat of external gender stereotypes: "Were
boys and girls permitted to pursue the same studies together, those
graceful decencies might early be inculcated which produce mod-
esty without those sexual distinctions that taint the mind." Integrat-
ing boys and girls of different class backgrounds was the key to the
deeper psychological transformation of their images of themselves
and each other: "They should be sent to school to mix with a number
of equals, for only by the jostlings of equality can be formed a just
opinion of ourselves." Such "jostlings of equality" on the playground
and in the classroom would lead to a general ethic of respect for hu-
man potential, regardless of ascribed social roles.0
Optimism, or a belief in one's capability for positive development,
would be inculcated through a standard yet stimulating curriculum.
Girls and boys would be similarly encouraged to believe in their hu-
man capabilities to better themselves in body, mind, and character.
They would be taught botany, mechanics, astronomy, reading, writ-
ing, arithmetic, natural history, and simple experiments in natural
science, but such intellectual training would "never encroach on
gymnastic plays in the open air." In Socratic conversation with their
teachers, they would learn elements of religion, history, anthropol-
ogy, and politics. In this way, optimistic teaching methods and goals
reinforced the holistic dimension of UPE. Religion and morality were
not dissociated from other elements of instruction in the govern-
ment school system Wollstonecraft desired. Britain's long tradition

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THEORIES OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

of royal-chartered, Anglican, charitable day schools for poor boys
and girls-such as Christ's Hospital, founded in 1552-gave her a
cultural framework for thinking these elements compatible.5'
Mill likewise defended UPE, which had become a mainstream po-
litical issue in his time. It was on the legislative agenda in Britain dur-
ing his service as a member of Parliament from 1865 to 1868. Soon
after his single term in office, the Education Act of 1870 established
the rudiments of modern UPE in England and Wales but also per-
mitted Anglican religious instruction in the government-sponsored
schools. Since the early 183os, Mill had been in favor of "the compul-
sory principle in education" for children in the primary school years,
but against the use of public funds for the support of religious instruc-
tion. Before the National Education League Meeting in London, he
gave a speech against the passage of the 1870 Education Act. If he
had still been an MP, he would have voted against it on the grounds
that it did not separate religious and public instruction. For Mill, the
general division of religious and governmental institutions was nec-
essary to prevent the trampling of the individual conscience.52
Although Mill consistently valued UPE's power to promote vir-
tuous and happy outcomes in human self-development, he differed
from Wollstonecraft in the emphases he placed on the three core
moral principles that drove the policy. The guiding roles of the prin-
ciple of individuality and the harm principle in his practical eth-
ics meant that Mill prioritized duty-based individualism over uni-
versalism and optimism. A case in point was his desire to prevent
harm to the private conscience by excluding religious instruction
from government schools. In contrast, Wollstonecraft's curricular
holism imagined a seamless integration of religion with other ele-
ments of rational, moral learning. From Mill's secular liberal utilitar-
ian perspective, any government control over religious education of
children seriously hampered the freedom and diversity of individual
thought and conscience.
Mill also privileged duty-based individualism above universalism
in upholding the moral responsibility of parents for the education
of their children. While Wollstonecraft made a universalistic case

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THEORIES OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

for "absolutely free" UPE for all children, Mill deployed the prin-
ciple of individualism to defend a scalar fee structure for UPE, based
on parental income, with the poorest families receiving "state aid"
for their children's educations. Even more crucially, Mill considered
"the home, the family" to be the appropriate place for "moral and
religious education," which "consist in training the feelings and the
daily habits." Because "these are, in the main, beyond the sphere and
inaccessible to the control of public education," it was the primary
responsibility of parents to inculcate morals and, if they chose, faith
in their children.53
Although he supported a national mandate for UPE and the sepa-
ration of religion from government schools, Mill entertained "the
strongest objections to any plan which would give a practical mo-
nopoly to schools under government control." He instead defined
compulsory education as requiring parents "to have their children
taught certain things" while being "left free to select the teachers."
Despite his own wariness about faith-based education, Mill's broader
commitment to duty-based individualism supported diverse school-
ing options-secular and religious-for parents to choose within
the national mandate for UPE. He also argued for local autonomy in
school committees' oversight of the government's primary schools,
and for a range of women and working-class people to serve on such
boards to represent the wider public opinion.54
On Liberty's principle of individuality fleshed out how duty-based
individualism was to work within Mill's vision of UPE. In chapter 3,
Mill dramatically situated the free yet responsible cultivation of hu-
man individuality as standing in tension with the potentially crush-
ing influence of cultural uniformity. If facilitated through education,
the diverse and spontaneous development of human beings would
first enrich the well-being of individuals and subsequently the sen-
tient creation as a whole: "In proportion to the development of his
individuality, each person becomes more valuable to himself, and is
therefore capable of being more valuable to others." Children's edu-
cation aimed toward the lofty moral goal of individuality but never-
theless relied upon a certain amount of curricular standardization en

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THEORIES OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

route: "Nobody denies that people should be so taught and trained
in youth, as to know and benefit by the ascertained results of hu-
man experience. But it is the privilege and proper condition of a
human being, arrived at the maturity of his faculties, to use and in-
terpret experience in his own way." Standardization of primary edu-
cation could and should be done in a way that fostered, not stultified,
individuality."
In his 1867 inaugural address at St. Andrews, Mill supported a
broad-ranging curriculum for primary education in "the islands"
of Great Britain, focused on the acquisition of general knowledge,
yet adapted to the needs of particular populations. While classical
schools for university-bound children ought to continue teaching
Greek and Latin, "history and geography" should be taught "in el-
ementary schools for the children of the laboring classes, whose sub-
sequent access to books is limited." Mill offset the class-based biases
of such curricular differentiation with his commitment to guarantee-
ing the right to a quality "general education" for all children, regard-
less of economic status. This general education inculcated virtue as a
consequence of imparting a broad knowledge of a variety of subjects,
from math to literature: "Education makes a man a more intelligent
shoemaker, if that be his occupation, not by teaching him how to
make shoes; it does so by the mental exercise it gives, and the habits
it impresses." Mill thus envisioned UPE as a programmatic yet flexi-
ble public policy for cultivating a variety of virtuous individuals, con-
fident in their abilities to insightfully interpret and ethically interact
with the world around them. Indeed, he saw primary education as
part of a holistic and continuous process of personal growth: "Where
does elementary instruction end, and the higher studies begin?"56
Although Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835) was a major inspi-
ration for On Liberty's theory of individuality, Mill differed from the
Prussian philosopher in defining free and full self-development in a
virtue-oriented direction. Rather than being an open-ended process,
as Humboldt allowed, free and full self-development ought to pro-
duce an active, creative, and virtuously self-governing individual. In
his Utilitarianism, Mill's distinction between the higher and lower

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pleasures led to his moral demarcation of virtuous versus vicious pur-
suits. In On Liberty, he equated the "the most passionate love of vir-
tue" with "the sternest self-control." He mourned that "the majority
of young persons" lose their taste for "keeping that higher capacity"
for virtue "in exercise," if their educations and occupations do not
encourage them to do so.?
Mill's moral egalitarianism generated his pedagogical anxieties
about steering all young persons to appreciate virtue and the other
higher pleasures in life. He acknowledged that "virtue, according to
the utilitarian doctrine, is not naturally and originally part of the
end, but it is capable of becoming so; and in those who love it dis-
interestedly it has become so, and is desired and cherished, not as a
means to happiness, but as a part of their happiness." Mill insisted
that virtues were "besides being means. . . part of the end" of utility.
Young people had to be taught to love virtue in a disinterested way,
so that they loved it for its own sake. Once people loved virtue in
itself, they could experience virtue as integral to their happiness, not
simply an instrument to it. In an 1829 speech, Mill upheld Words-
worth's poem "The Character of the Happy Warrior" as illustrating
"the most important features of the happiest and most virtuous char-
acter." Wordsworth's warrior was happy not because he was pleased
by war but because he had come to cherish above all else the intrinsic
value of a life characterized by personal excellence and self-control.
It was incomparably happier for the warrior to be virtuous though
displeased by his circumstances, like Socrates, than vicious and
pleased, like a pig. Despite its apparently elitist distinction between
higher (especially intellectual and moral) pleasures and lower (espe-
cially physical) pleasures, Mill's conception of happiness sought to
promote democratic political ends. In Considerations on Representative
Government, Mill argued for plural voting as a reward for educational
attainment in order to urge the poor to pursue higher schooling as
well as experience greater powers of personal and democratic self-
governance.58
His substantive account of virtuous yet diverse self-development
led Mill to support a universalistic national policy that mandated,

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THEORIES OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

at minimum, primary education for all children regardless of sex or
class. Neither he nor Wollstonecraft specified the inclusion of all
races in UPE, but this ethical implication could be logically derived
from their strong antislavery politics and general critique of arbi-
trary, artificial inequalities. In his Political Economy (1848), Mill codi-
fied the educational policy that he and Harriet Taylor had discussed
since the 183os. He approved "universal education" for the complex
consequence of empowering the laboring classes to control their fer-
tility and improve their chances at realizing the higher pleasures in
life for themselves and their children.59
According to Ryan's study of his educational philosophy, Mill
spoke more of the cultivation of the individual in the "wider," or
character-forming, sense than in the "narrower," or curricular,
sense. As a political economist, not a teacher, Mill did not approach
UPE from the grassroots perspective of Wollstonecraft. His very
consistent views on UPE largely overlapped with Wollstonecraft's
comparatively more detailed proposal, however. Fundamentally,
both Mill and Wollstonecraft envisioned children's holistic education
of body, mind, and character. As Mill claimed in his Autobiography,
children of average abilities could handle the broad-ranging educa-
tion of his childhood. With his university audience at St. Andrews,
Mill shared his amazement "at the limited conception which many
educational reformers have formed to themselves of a human be-
ing's power of acquisition." For this reason, he might have endorsed
Wollstonecraft's ambitious liberal arts curriculum for her ideal day
school. In a striking parallel to the Rights of Woman, The Subjection
of Women observed that girls benefited from sharing the "healthful
physical education and bodily freedom of their brothers." The physi-
cal education of girls was another core, practical component of Mill's
and Wollstonecraft's theories of UPE.60
For both philosophers, a long-range goal of such a holistic pri-
mary education was to improve the life chances of girls and other
historically disadvantaged groups. While Wollstonecraft's univer-
salism directed her to focus on the value of a national educational
system, Mill's liberal utilitarianism-especially the primacy of in-

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dividuality within it-guided him to support a variety of public and
private schools within UPE. Mill's distrust of uniformity also made
him wary of centralization, bureaucratic inefficiency, and the loss
of parental rights and responsibilities in any national educational
system.
Mill shared Wollstonecraft's optimistic belief in the human capa-
bility for self-development toward virtue. But as a political economist
and a liberal politician, he tended to be optimistic more about the
long-term effects of educational policy than about particular teaching
methods or learning experiences. Mill's theory of progress was hopeful
about the power of free yet responsible choice to eventually produce
beneficial social outcomes. On this account of progress, proponents
of UPE and other optimistic social policies should generally seek to
reinforce individual responsibility for personal choices, and expect a
process of slow, not necessarily linear, but effective reform.61
Effective yet EthicalArgumentation for
Women's Human Right to Education
Despite their differences at the policy level, Wollstonecraft and
Mill judged the goodness of UPE in terms of its beneficial conse-
quences: (1) enabling duty-based individualism and (2) encouraging
other positive outcomes for human society as a whole. Unlike Mill's
liberal utilitarianism, Wollstonecraft's rational theology required her
to address the question of goodness separately from the question of
rightness. While goodness could be defined as relative to beneficial
outcomes, rightness was absolutely based on the rational demands of
God's moral law. In contrast, Mill posited utility as the standard by
which all normative measures-including goodness and rightness
were made.62
Supplementing her foundational duty-based argument for the hu-
man right to education, Wollstonecraft argued that UPE would yield
better citizens, spouses, and parents. Like any effective rhetorician,
she knew her political audience. Men in power, such as Talleyrand-
Perigord, had to be persuaded of the benefits of extending equal civil

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THEORIES OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

and political rights to women. She thus presented an additional se-
ries of consequentialist arguments that focused specifically on the
benefits of women's education for men and children: "I entreat them
to assist to emancipate their companion, to make her a help meet for
them! Would men but generously snap our chains, and be content
with rational fellowship instead of slavish obedience, they would find
us more observant daughters, more affectionate sisters, more faith-
ful wives, more reasonable mothers-in a word, better citizens. We
should then love them with true affection, because we should learn
to respect ourselves; and the peace of mind of a worthy man would
not be interrupted by the idle vanity of his wife, nor the babes sent to
nestle in a strange bosom, having never found a home in their moth-
er's." On a moral level, these consequentialist arguments served as
supplements to Wollstonecraft's core deontological justification for
women's human rights. Human rights derived from human duties,
and such duties were expressions of a rational standard of moral "vir-
tue" that had "no sex" but rather applied universally to all people. On
a metaphysical level, both forms of moral argumentation for women's
human rights-deontological and consequentialist-fitted, rank-
ordered, within Wollstonecraft's belief in the benevolence of God's
overarching plan for humanity. These consequentialist arguments,
however, stressed the extrinsic value of women's human rights for men
and children. Wollstonecraft's direct entreaty to the opposite sex, her
pleading tone, combined with her suggestion that liberated women
would more dutifully care for their fathers, husbands, brothers, and
sons, produced a real tension between her philosophical justification
of women's human rights and her rhetorical presentation of it.63
After her sustained argument for national education in chapter
twelve of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft repeated that UPE
would produce better mothers: "Besides, by the exercise of their
bodies and minds women would acquire that mental activity so nec-
essary in the maternal character." A few lines later, however, she
reminded her readers that this reasoning actually applied to both
sexes. UPE would in fact cultivate good parents and spouses, not
just good mothers and wives. She also indicated that these beneficial

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THEORIES OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

consequences for family life would arise from the sexes' reciprocal
enactment of the duty to show mutual respect to one another: "Make
women rational creatures, and free citizens, and they will quickly
become good wives, and mothers; that is,-if men do not neglect
the duties of husbands and fathers." Like Mill, she did not set edu-
cation as a legal prerequisite for citizenship but rather considered
it a comprehensive basis for the virtuous character development of
future citizens, male and female. If educated together as equals, then
men and women would practice, rather than neglect, the moral and
civic "duties" from which their basic human rights were derived. In
her prioritizing of the right before the good, Wollstonecraft was
more like Kant in his 1795 essay "Perpetual Peace" than like Mill in
On Liberty. Kant envisioned the ultimate beneficial political conse-
quence (world peace) as a by-product of all nations doing the right
thing (following requirements for establishing a pacific international
league of republics). Similarly, Wollstonecraft's supplemental conse-
quentialist arguments predicted that the pursuit of the right path in
politics (for example, human rights to education and political par-
ticipation) would have long-term public benefits (for example, virtu-
ous citizenship and social justice), without establishing utility as the
basis of her ethical system.64
On Mill's side, consequentialist arguments for the personal and
public benefits of rights were basic to his liberal utilitarian enter-
prise. With regard to UPE's public benefits, he argued that it would
decrease the fertility of the working classes, liberate women from the
burden of excessive childbearing, reduce poverty, and thus advance
the development of society as a whole. In the Autobiography, Mill
confided that he and Harriet "only hoped that by universal education,
leading to voluntary restraint on population, the portion of the poor
might be made more tolerable." Most important, UPE would give
women literacy, and the corresponding opportunity for a broader
range of work inside and outside the home. As individuals and as a
sex, women would finally activate their unknown human potential.
In the process of virtuous self-development, girls would undercut the
vicious cycle of socialization into patriarchal gender norms. Finally,

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THEORIES OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

they would gain a better basis of knowledge for voting and other
forms of political participation.65
Mill's liberal approach to utilitarianism generated many power-
ful arguments for women's rights, including the human right to
education, because it emphasized both the public and the personal
utility of such rights. Yet the idea of public utility yielded instru-
mental arguments for women's rights that could rhetorically portray
women's social, economic, and political opportunities as tools for
other development goals, rather than as good outcomes for individ-
ual women. Chapter 4 of The Subjection of Women contained several
examples of instrumental arguments for women's rights: equality of
rights will make men less selfish and more intellectually stimulated
by marriage, plus double "the mass of mental faculties available for
the higher service of humanity." While such instrumental arguments
might be, prima facie, persuasive, they also give the appearance that
the standard utilitarian justification for rights is not sufficient in the
case of women.66
In isolation, Wollstonecraft's and Mill's arguments for the extrin-
sic benefits of women's right to education have the rhetorical effect
of portraying female education as a tool for other, superior develop-
ment outcomes, such as happier families, universal suffrage, democ-
racy, and population control. This rhetorical practice threatened to
derail the orientation of their moral theories away from the end goal
of human life, the virtuous happiness of the individual. By under-
scoring how the education of girls would make men and society hap-
pier and better developed, Wollstonecraft and Mill ran the risk of
perpetuating the dangerous gender stereotype of women as instru-
ments for male pleasure and power. An undesired (yet likely fore-
seen) by-product of pitching their arguments to men in power was
to rhetorically reinforce the gender biases that they originally sought
to uproot with their egalitarian theories of education.
Their predicament can be captured in a question: How can one
defend universal human rights to the very people whose power de-
pends on the current system of inequality? The reformer appears to
face a trade-off between maintaining her principles (by arguing that

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THEORIES OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

women deserve rights simply by virtue of their humanity) and being
effective in practice (by persuading male leaders of the personal and
public benefits of granting rights to women). Because philosophical
argumentation often sounds like futile rationalization when used in
actual politics, the trade-off between holding principles and having
practical effectiveness has been one contemplated by every modern
political theorist seriously concerned with reform, from Wollstone-
craft and Mill, to Marx and Rawls, to Nussbaum and Sen. This di-
lemma is also still a real one for women's human rights advocates
working on a variety of issues, such as domestic violence, sexual dis-
crimination, and family law. Yet the dilemma is perhaps most widely
faced with regard to the issue of state provision of the universal hu-
man right to education, because UPE is a right that literally applies
to all children, and therefore to all humanity, at the most vulnerable
stage in their lives.
In our time, the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) have
drawn attention to the problem of gender inequality in primary edu-
cation by arguing that the education of girls is essential for the reduc-
tion of extreme poverty worldwide. Since the adoption of the MDG
by the United Nations in 2000, there has been significant progress
in achieving some overlapping aims of goals 2 and 3: universal pri-
mary education and gender equity in education. In 2013, the United
Nations documented that the gender gap in literacy is narrowing
in developing countries, especially in Southeast Asia and northern
Africa, where general literacy rates have grown to 8o to 90 percent of
the population. From 2000 to 2011, there was a remarkable drop in
the number of children out of school worldwide-from 102 million
to 57 million. U.N. Women, the agency devoted to gender equity in
global justice, has nuanced this data by tracking the enduring gender
disparities in primary education and literacy rates. It is a sobering
fact that twelve years after the espousal of the MDG, "ten million
more girls than boys" remained out of primary school and "nearly
two-thirds of the world's 780 million people who cannot read are
women." Given these dramatic gender inequalities, women's human
rights advocates face a dilemma similar to that facing Wollstonecraft

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THEORIES OF HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

and Mill. While it is morally necessary and philosophically consis-
tent to defend the equal right of girls and boys to UPE, it may be
ineffective or even counterproductive for correcting the actual gap
in their access to education.67
Wollstonecraft and Mill modeled some ways to navigate past this
dilemma. As we have seen, Wollstonecraft reminded her readers that
women deserved rights because of their human capability for virtue,
not because men would benefit from their more virtuous behavior.
Following her example, reformers might balance any economic or
political arguments for the extrinsic value of UPE with repeated and
clear public appeals to its intrinsic value for children. Near the end of
his career, Mill modeled a morally stronger yet politically riskier rhe-
torical tactic: stressing the intrinsic value of education for all people
over and against its extrinsic advantages for society. In his rector's
address to the students of St. Andrews in 1867, he explained that the
ultimate reward of education "is not a consequence, but is inherent in
the very fact of deserving it." Intrinsic to education was "the deeper
and more varied interest you will feel in life: which will give it ten-
fold its value, and a value which will last to the end." Education was
inherently meaningful in the sense that it inculcated the virtues nec-
essary for a human being to see, and deeply feel, just how interesting
life was to live for its own sake. Given its strong moral and spiritual
appeal, Mill's argument for the intrinsic good of education-and a
happy life-was both ethical and effective in its rhetorical formula-
tion. Although such arguments might not independently persuade
men in power to promote gender parity in schools, they might at
least counteract the cruder patriarchal connotations of arguments
for the extrinsic value of female education for men. Learning from
the examples of Wollstonecraft and Mill, feminist theorists and re-
formers should strive to avoid rhetorical constructions of women's
human rights that overstress their benefits to families, males, societ-
ies, governments, religions, or (often implicitly Western) models of
development. Chapter 4 turns fully to the latter issue: particularly,
the problematic place of Western European cultural biases in Woll-
stonecraft's and Mill's theories of women's progress.68

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THE PROBLEM OF CULTURAL BIAS
WOLLSTONECRAFT, MILL, AND WESTERN
NARRATIVES OF WOMEN'S PROGRESS
Confronting Cultural Bias
Although Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill aspired
to transcend time, place, and personal bias in the development of
universalistic arguments for women's human rights, they fell short
of this noble moral goal. As Michel Foucault, Carol Gilligan, and
Charles Taylor have diversely argued, it is improbable that any hu-
man mind could move wholly beyond the epistemological frames set
by epoch, gender, culture, religion, nation, and politics. But does the
psychological fact of mental rootedness absolutely prevent a person
from thinking more globally than locally?'
This is a particularly important question of practical philosophy
for human rights advocates. Human rights advocacy in the wake of
the 1948 Universal Declaration relies on the universalistic status
of human rights in international law and policy. Human rights are
meant to apply across nations and cultures to each and every hu-
man being-for the grave reason that we wish to prevent atroci-
ties like those of the two world wars. For philosophers from Jurgen
Habermas to John Rawls, the terrifying fact of the mass genocide of
minorities as in the case of the Holocaust has spurred a return to po-
litical conceptions of human rights as a defense against such deadly
treatment of humans as objects and instruments for the cruel ends
of others. Human rights advocates, especially those who cautiously
seek to reform aspects of other people's cultures, are thus faced with
a moral quandary. May one advocate a global standard of human
rights without an imperial mind-set that imposes one's own cultural
values and biases upon others?2
Given their legacies for the idea of universal human rights, Woll-
stonecraft, Mill, and their philosophical followers are crucial histori-
cal cases to study with regard to this fundamental ethical problem

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THE PROBLEM OF CULTURAL BIAS

within global politics. Despite the nearly ethereal perspective of her
metaphysics, Wollstonecraft failed to extend her rational theological
arguments for women's human rights in a perfectly universal way
in rhetorical practice. Although she boldly strove to overcome the
patriarchal biases of Enlightenment political philosophy in defend-
ing women's human rights, she did not rise above this intellectual
tradition's cultural prejudices concerning non-Western European
peoples and religions, especially Turkish Muslims. Similarly, Mill
moved well beyond the cruder cultural biases of his father, James
Mill, and other employees of the East India Company, particularly in
rejecting the imperial supposition of India's incapacity for self-rule.
He nonetheless incorporated negative stereotypes of non-Western
European peoples and religions, especially Muslims and Hindus,
into his liberal utilitarian arguments for human development, lib-
erty, and rights.3
One explanation for these persistent cultural and religious bi-
ases is found in Wollstonecraft's and Mill's joint intellectual debt
to eighteenth-century philosophies of history. Enlightenment-era
theories of the history of human progress, exemplified by Scot-
tish economist Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776), were typi-
cally conjectural and stadial, imagining the growth of human society
from its origins in terms of economic stages of hunting, shepherding,
agriculture, and commercial trade. These philosophical narratives
usually (at least implicitly) assumed a Western European model of
commercial civilization at the pinnacle of the development process.
Worse, they coded modern Western Europe as the antithesis of the
"barbarian" or "savage" peoples beyond it. According to Charles W.
Mills, this opposition contributed to the racist idea that white set-
tlers and colonizers had a right to dominate nonwhites under their
supposedly more "civilized" systems of republican government.4
Even Jean-Jacques Rousseau-whose 1749 Discourse on the Sciences
and the Arts sought to overturn the prevailing consensus that more
civilization, education, and commercial growth was better than
less still employed prejudicial assumptions about non-Western
European cultures in his construction of an alternative conception

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THE PROBLEM OF CULTURAL BIAS

of human development. With irony that exploited and perpetu-
ated Orientalist stereotypes, he cited the "stupid Muslim" (with his
barbaric tendency toward violent conquest, and accidental push of
classical philosophy into medieval Spain) and the ancient Egyptians
(with their superstitious and primitive science) as the progenitors of
the indolent and slavish modern civilization he hated. More obvi-
ously Eurocentric in his relative lack of irony, he specified the island
of Corsica or the mountain villages of the Swiss Valais as the ideal
locations for a truly free society.5
Continuing in this Enlightenment-era tradition of thinking in Eu-
rocentric terms about human development, Wollstonecraft and Mill
upheld Western European women's social status as a cross-cultural
standard for economic, political, and cultural progress. Wollstone-
craft was deeply read in the tradition of the Scottish Enlightenment
that put modern European women on such a pedestal. For example,
she defined her monistic view of the human species as a single group
with diverse potentialities against Scottish philosopher Lord Kames's
essentialist view that the species originated with plural racial groups.
Rejecting Kames's scientific racism, Wollstonecraft nonetheless took
up his Occidental slant on sex and gender. Kames contrasted "matri-
mony among savages, having no object but propagation and slavery,"
with "European education," which enabled women to be raised as
the "virtuous and refined" wives of monogamous men. As we saw in
chapter 2, Wollstonecraft eerily mirrored this Kamesian language in
her ethical objection to polygamy. While such arguments in the ab-
stract were morally universalistic (for example, polygamy is bad for
women), they were rhetorically rooted in symbolic binaries between
the West and the rest of the world.6
Mill, too, was heavily influenced by the Scottish Enlightenment,
for his father's philosophy of history-found in The History of British
India (1817)-was part of the utilitarian tradition of applying prin-
ciples of classical liberal political economy to determine the happiest
direction for humanity. John Stuart Mill's theory of human develop-
ment, with its optimistic orientation toward the realization of in-
dividuality and diversity, was more speculative and forward-looking

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THE PROBLEM OF CULTURAL BIAS

than his father's rigid, linear, historically grounded model of stadial
progress.
The cultural bias and epistemological blinders of James Mill's
approach were apparent in the preface to The History of British In-
dia. Defending his historical method, James Mill brazenly claimed
that "use of his eyes and his ears in India" was unnecessary to jus-
tify his philosophical prescription of imperial domination for it. He
could learn more about India during a year of study in "his closet in
England" than by traveling there or acquiring the languages. From
this standpoint of cultural isolation, he could cherry-pick historical
examples of Indian incompetence at self-government to legitimate
British rule via his employer, the East India Company.7
Given James's intensive private education of John Stuart, perhaps
it is to be expected, though not excused, that there was some spill-
over of his disturbing biases in his son's mature political philosophy.
As with other historians of nineteenth-century liberalism, such as
Jennifer Pitts and Karuna Mantena, I am interested in the problem-
atic intersection of liberal and imperial ideas in John Stuart Mill's
political thought, particularly in relation to India. Mill had worked
for thirty-five years at the London office of the East India Company
before publishing his major political works. He troublingly deployed
many imperial ideas in arguing for a fundamental human right to
self-development in works such as On Liberty and The Subjection of
Women. These liberal imperial ideas included: (z) the conception of
the relative cultural superiority of Western Europe to developing
and colonized nations, (2) the use of Orientalist imagery, or sym-
bolic caricatures of the East in opposition to the West, to support
liberal reforms, (3) a tendency to contrast civilized peoples with so-
called barbaric ones, (4) the assumption of the need for temporary
and nontyrannical despotic government of such barbaric nations in
order for them to ultimately realize republican self-government, and
(5) condescension toward supposedly primitive religions beyond
modern "Christian Europe."8
Scholars have explored how this constellation of ideas aided com-
plex defenses of colonialism and empire in Mill's writings. Oddly, his

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THE PROBLEM OF CULTURAL BIAS

Subjection of Women has been left relatively untouched by such criti-
cism. On the other hand, literary and historical scholarship has long
situated Wollstonecraft's feminism in the context of eighteenth- and
nineteenth-century European imperialism. Further merging the
literatures on feminism, liberalism, and imperialism, this chapter
provides the first extended comparative analysis of the ethics of
Wollstonecraft's and Mill's Eurocentric rhetoric for women's human
rights.9
Although they criticized the bad educations, oppressive marital
arrangements, poor economic opportunities, and political disen-
franchisement of women in general, Wollstonecraft and Mill typi-
cally contrasted the higher status of women in Western Europe and
the United States with the lower status of women in non-Western
European cultures, such as India and Turkey. Although they both
deployed images of Eastern women's oppression to undermine the
perceived legitimacy of patriarchy at home and abroad, such rhetori-
cal moves were predicated on, and thus perpetuated, a slanted cultural
perspective from which the Occident condescendingly looked down
upon the Orient. The most pressing problem with these Eurocentric
and liberal imperial ideas was their cumulative effect: the creation
of a Western-biased rhetorical model for women's human rights ar-
gumentation. Wollstonecraft's Eurocentric arguments for women's
progress through the advancement of their human rights, coupled
with her growing iconic status as the founding philosopher of this
school of thought, enhanced the salience of Orientalist prejudices
within the emergent feminist cause. Published in twenty-six non-
English editions, seventeen countries, twelve European languages,
and three non-European languages between 1869 and 1928, Mill's
Subjection of Women was stunningly popular on a global scale. Its in-
ternational reach made it more influential than the Rights of Woman
among both non-Western and Western first-wave feminists.'0
Building on the work of Edward Said, Chandra Mohanty, Joyce
Zonana, Inderpal Grewal, and other postcolonial theorists, I expose
the power of Wollstonecraft's and Mill's Eurocentric idiom to in-
sidiously shape prejudicial political rhetoric toward non-Western,

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THE PROBLEM OF CULTURAL BIAS

colonized, and developing peoples. To this end, I trace the origins
of an Orientalist rhetoric for women's human rights in Wollstone-
craft's Rights of Woman and the writings of several of its most promi-
nent early American readers: Abigail Adams (1795), Hannah Mather
Crocker (1818), and Sarah Grimk6 (1838). I assess The Subjection of
Women alongside the forewords to four of its earliest non-Western
European editions-by Grigory Blagosvetlov and Maria Tsebrikova
in Russia (1869-70), Martina Barros Borgono in Chile (1872), and
Govind Vasudev Kanitkar in colonial India (1902)-to reveal its syn-
ergies and tensions with other cultures on the woman question. Two
of Wollstonecraft's non-Western European interlocutors, Olive
Schreiner of South Africa (1889) and Elvira L6pez of Argentina
(1901), respectively show the struggle with cultural bias in feminist
thought and the successful crafting of an international and intercul-
tural feminist narrative."
This exercise in comparative political thought makes clear how
Wollstonecraft and Mill established problematic rhetorical models
for women's human rights arguments that would incline toward rep-
resenting non-Western European women and cultures in belittling
and instrumental terms. The internalization and replication of some
of these biases by Blagosvetlov, Schreiner, and Kanitkar show the
insidious power of this rhetoric in colonized and developing coun-
tries. By comparing Wollstonecraft and Mill and their historic non-
Western European interlocutors, I enable a cross-cultural dialogue
on women's rights that underscores the importance of thinking criti-
cally about Western-biased and instrumental arguments for ending
women's subjection around the globe.
This comparative reception history additionally reveals that the
Rights of Woman and The Subjection of Women were used and pre-
sented as resources for thinking through problems of Westernization
and women's human rights by non-Western European intellectuals.
Although their particular views of Westernization varied from time,
place, and ideological perspective, these non-Western European
respondents to Wollstonecraft and Mill help to show how a gen-
eral conception of Westernization emerged in the late nineteenth

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THE PROBLEM OF CULTURAL BIAS

and early twentieth centuries. Whether they interpreted it as good,
bad, or mixed in effects for their societies, they saw Westernization
as a process of exporting or importing Western models of devel-
opment (grounded in the liberal, utilitarian, and capitalist ideas of
the European Enlightenment) beyond the developed nations of the
North Atlantic. Non-Westerners adapt and innovate in the face of
Westernization, but the process is nonetheless predicated on their
dependence on the Occident.'2
Although they sometimes perpetuated prejudice, often unreflec-
tively, these international dialogues on the Rights of Woman and
The Subjection of Women also spurred some profound critical reflec-
tion on the problem of cultural bias for feminism. Organized femi-
nism became a global trend, with national and transnational social
movements, from the early 1870s through the 1910s. Several of
the earliest non-Western European interpreters of Wollstonecraft
and Mill-Tsebrikova of Russia, Borgono of Chile, and L6pez of
Argentina-show us why and how we should avoid the moral traps
set by Wollstonecraft's and Mill's discriminatory language. This
chapter concludes with a hopeful assessment of these non-Western
European feminist thinkers' achievement of a partial yet sufficiently
ethical transcendence of cultural bias, through the self-reflective
adoption of "rooted," or culturally attuned, cosmopolitan perspec-
tives in crafting universalistic, or globally applicable, arguments for
women's human rights. By looking back to their examples, we may
look forward to a contemporary reformulation of feminist liberalism
in light of its historic concern with making culturally sensitive claims
for the rights of women worldwide."
The Problem of Western Prejudice in
Wollstonecraft's Rights of Woman
Wollstonecraft opened the Rights of Woman with a trenchant cri-
tique of the irrational prejudices of European civilization. "Men, in
general," she dryly noted, "seem to employ their reason to justify
prejudices." This attempt at reasoned justification was more apparent


THE PROBLEM OF CULTURAL BIAS

than real. As she scoffed, "They can scarcely trace" how they "im-
bibed" these biases, let alone use reason to "root them out." She later
defined prejudice as any belief held without a reason to support it: "A
prejudice is a fond obstinate persuasion for which we can give no rea-
son; for the moment a reason can be given for an opinion, it ceases to
be a prejudice, though it may be an error in judgment." Prejudices,
or unjustified opinions, were prevalent and persistent because of a
human tendency to think emotionally and circularly about their be-
liefs. People typically assumed the truth of their beliefs "because they
love[d], or believe [d] them."'4
Like Gilligan's recent rejection of the patriarchal biases behind the
idea of girls' inferior moral reasoning skills, Wollstonecraft insight-
fully critiqued how this "mode of arguing" was "vulgarly termed a
woman's reason." From Wollstonecraft's metaphysical standpoint,
even the epistemological process by which prejudice was widely
mistaken for true and justified belief was in itself an example of the
formation of patriarchal bias. Given her universalistic view of the hu-
man mind's capabilities, there was nothing essentially female about
an emotivist claim such as "it is true because I believe it, and I believe
it because I love it." Rather, women were particularly susceptible to
holding such prejudicial beliefs because of early gender socialization.
Girls were not educated to use reason to see through the irrationality
of the opinions inculcated in them by their patriarchal culture.'I
Wollstonecraft's analysis of prejudice grew out of her reinterpreta-
tion of John Locke's and David Hume's empirical epistemologies.
She entitled chapter 6 of the Rights of Woman "The Effect which an
Early Association of Ideas Has upon the Character." Here she built
on Locke and Hume to argue that the mind's "first impressions" were
sense-based reflections of the empirical world. These impressions
bombard our minds and together forge an "association of ideas."16
Whereas Hume's "laws of the association of ideas" were simply
his surmise as to the laws of his science of the mind, Wollstonecraft
thought humans could and should use reason to challenge the preju-
dicial associations of ideas that form in their minds. Hume's "laws"
explained the mental formation of prejudice and nonprejudice alike.

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THE PROBLEM OF CULTURAL BIAS

In contrast, Wollstonecraft thought of the "association of ideas" as
a process we must analytically challenge in the case of prejudice. In
her hands, the epistemological concept of the "association of ideas"
became a tool for critical social theory.'7
While Hume had a more benevolent view of the ethical impli-
cations of the association of ideas, Wollstonecraft saw its insidious
potential for women. Sensory impressions quickly developed into a
chain of "associations that do violence to reason" if children were not
given a good education. A good education would teach them how
to use reason to think through the difference between rational and
irrational beliefs, rather than simply imbibe the prejudices pushed
upon them.'8
Because of their bad educations, girls were more victims of this
problem than boys were. Setting forth a feminist theory of subject
formation, Wollstonecraft argued that girls were shaped from the
crib by a "cruel association of ideas": "Every thing that they see or
hear serves to fix impressions, call forth emotions, and associate ideas,
that give a sexual character to the mind." Anticipating feminist read-
ings of Foucault, Wollstonecraft interpreted the embodied psyche
as a prison for girls and women under patriarchy. Patriarchal power
structures set the bounds of women's meager senses of self, agency,
rationality, and knowledge: "Taught from their infancy that beauty
is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and, roaming
round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison." Because women
were educated only to be attractive mates for men, their mental con-
tents were conflated with the rudimentary sensory experiences of
their bodies. Exacerbating the problem, society valued women's bod-
ies primarily in terms of their sexual functions. Exercising their rea-
son within the constraints set by patriarchy, women perceived their
only route to power as manipulation of men through their sexuality
and fertility.19
Although Wollstonecraft posited a rational education as the solu-
tion to the problem of prejudice, her own education did not prevent
her from slipping into cultural bias-over and over again. Perhaps
it was the haphazard quality of her early education, similar to that

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of other girls of her time, that made her less than systematic in how
she identified and eradicated prejudice in her own worldview. On the
other hand, her education did not prevent her from analyzing the
problem of patriarchal prejudice toward and for women in general.
Proceeding as though she were the exception to the rule, she at least
recognized that it would be difficult for other women to overcome
the tendency to think in prejudicial terms: "Still I know that it will
require a considerable length of time to eradicate the firmly rooted
prejudices which sensualists have planted; it will also require some
time to convince women that they act contrary to their real interest
on an enlarged scale." Yet her enlightened awareness of the problem
of prejudice, especially for women, did not fully extend to her own
case. As she strove to take what Thomas Nagel has called the "view
from nowhere," she was able to see through the problem of prejudice
in others, but was largely blinded to it in herself.20
One likely culprit was the abstraction of her metaphysical frame-
work. The attempt to adopt a universalistic perspective on morality
may mask the fact that the perspective is ineluctably rooted in a par-
ticular historical, cultural, and personal context. As Taylor has noted
in his analysis of Foucault, this tendency to generalize from one's own
perspective colors even the deepest critiques of our psychological
bounds. For example, feminists have widely criticized Foucault for as-
suming a male perspective in his History of Sexuality (976), even as
they praise him for including the male homosexual point of view. The-
orizing general patterns in human consciousness and behavior often
leads us to overlook some prejudices in favor of overturning others.2'
Immanuel Kant, like Wollstonecraft, had employed an abstract
approach to defending rights for humans in the wake of the French
Revolution. Despite his moral universalism on an abstract level, he
denied political rights to women in modern republics because he
prejudicially judged them incapable of rational self-governance.
Wollstonecraft fell prey to the obverse problem: exposing the preju-
dices that harmed women in general but failing to critically assess
a range of cultural biases that compromised the universalism of her
feminist argumentation.

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THE PROBLEM OF CULTURAL BIAS

Another culprit for Wollstonecraft's cultural biases was her reli-
gious standpoint. Given the dissenting Christian theological founda-
tion for her ethics, Wollstonecraft had "imbibed" many Protestant
biases toward non-Western European religions, especially Islam
and Russian Orthodoxy. Wollstonecraft also followed French and
Scottish Enlightenment philosophers such as Montesquieu, Voltaire,
and Smith in casting the Roman Catholic countries of southern Eu-
rope as nests of indolence and other forms of cultural backwardness.
She followed her theological mentor Richard Price in designating
the "blind" slavery of "a Spaniard, a Russian, or a Turk" as the an-
tithesis of free and responsible Western Protestants-particularly
those noble Christians in the abolition movement. What these three
non-Protestant religions-Roman Catholicism, Russian Orthodoxy,
and Islam-had in common were origins and institutional centers
beyond Western Europe.22
Although Wollstonecraft found the "civilization of the bulk of the
people of Europe" to be "very partial" toward men in power, she was
certain it was worse elsewhere for her sex-particularly in the Mus-
lim cultural outpost of Turkey. She was well traveled within Europe,
trekking to Portugal, Ireland, France, Sweden, Norway, Denmark,
and northern Germany. Yet her journeys seemed only to reinforce
her haughty cultural preferences for Paris and London. Despite what
she judged as her culture's condescending view of women's capa-
bilities, Wollstonecraft consistently judged Western Europe and its
North American colonies as superior to virtually every other culture
in the world. "Scarcely human" and "sluggish" peasants of rural Scan-
dinavia, wife-abusing Russians, Chinese foot binders, lazy southern
Europeans, Roman Catholic "vermin," tyrannical Egyptians, over-
sexed Tahitians, and voluptuous Turkish Muslims were all symbolic
targets of her culturally biased arguments in favor of women's human
rights. Ironically, all this disdain came from an endlessly indebted,
middle-class, Anglo-Irish woman from a broken home.23
Wollstonecraft drew her negative caricatures of non-Western cul-
tures, especially the Muslim peoples of Turkey and North Africa,
from books by European explorers. Like the elder Mill, she followed

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THE PROBLEM OF CULTURAL BIAS

the Enlightenment-era approach of studying Eastern cultures in her
"closet." Wollstonecraft's frequent resort to anti-Turkish Muslim
rhetoric probably arose from the politics of the time. Turkey was at
war with both Russia and Austria from 1787 until 1791, the year she
wrote the Rights of Woman. Earlier in the eighteenth century, Lady
Mary Wortley Montagu had written home to Britain with relatively
kind words about her experiences within Turkish culture, includ-
ing the secret female world of the seraglios. By the late eighteenth
century, however, the Ottomans were generally misrepresented to
the Western European public as "barbarians" who viewed women
as soulless creatures, unworthy of the same afterlife as men. In fact,
it was a Western-made myth that Muslims believed women had no
souls and thus no access to paradise.24
The rhetorical power of such Orientalist prejudices was not lost
on Wollstonecraft. She literally began and ended the Rights of Woman
with images of women's servitude in Eastern cultures. In the open-
ing lines of the introduction, she inveighed against "men of genius"
who "in the true style of Mahometanism" conceptualized women
as "subordinate beings," not as "part of the human species." A few
paragraphs later, she bewailed that women were raised to be "weak
beings . . . only fit for a seraglio!" In the final sentence of the book,
she rebuked European men for being "Egyptian task-masters" to un-
derscore the injustice of their enslavement of women even in the age
of "reason" and "rights.""
As Marilyn Butler and Janet Todd argued in their annotations to
the Rights of Woman, each of these symbolic references to the Orient
was likely rooted in contemporary British prejudices toward Turkey.
As early as 1717, Lady Montagu had challenged the British miscon-
ception that the Turkish Muslims were barbaric because they did
not believe women had souls. The Turkish seraglio, or the private
living quarters of the wives and concubines in a Muslim household
in the Ottoman Empire, likewise fascinated the European public.
Such polygamous Muslim households often served as symbols of
Oriental sexual perversity, which buffed the veneer of Occidental
sexual restraint. Since the Ottoman Empire occupied Egypt for most

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THE PROBLEM OF CULTURAL BIAS

of the eighteenth century, Wollstonecraft's "Egyptian task-master"
metaphor obliquely jabbed the Turkish even as it rallied Protestants
around a familiar biblical and abolitionist trope.26
There is a likely unintended irony in Wollstonecraft's use of anti-
Turkish rhetoric to shore up her feminist critique of the master-slave
dynamic. Wollstonecraft denounced the vicious cycle of patriarchal
oppression-with its arbitrary husbands, manipulative wives, des-
potic mothers, and tyrannized children-in morally universal terms.
She nonetheless exploited the view of Turkish Muslims as partic-
ularly prone to the moral vices that civilized Europeans ought to
avoid. Revealing her superficial understanding of Ottoman culture,
she compared European wives to "Turkish bashaws" (sic). Techni-
cally, these pashaws were high-ranking Turkish military officers, but
Wollstonecraft reduced them to an instrumental stereotype. She de-
ployed the "bashaws" as symbols of the master-slave dynamic that
she sought to expose in male-female relations. Women, she wrote,
like the Turkish officers, "cunningly obtain power by playing on the
weakness" of their male superiors but sacrifice "virtue" and "respect-
ability" to the "temporary gratifications" of such "illicit sway.""
Moving beyond metaphor into a kind of Montesquieuian sociol-
ogy, Wollstonecraft claimed that this type of "despotism that kills
virtue and genius in the bud" may "hover over Europe," but it "deso-
lates Turkey." The sexual subtext of her argument surfaced along-
side her Orientalist prejudices: Turkish despotism, especially in the
seraglios, had caused the spread of venereal disease, making "men,
as well as the soil, unfruitful." Her account of Turkey as desolated
by male infertility functioned as a veiled threat to European men
(perhaps especially those who frequented the Turkish baths in Lon-
don) and especially their wives. After all, the women faced the dire
consequences of their husbands' extramarital sexual traffic: venereal
disease was a major contributor to eighteenth-century mothers' and
children's ill health and early deaths.28
Wollstonecraft proposed a solution, which was predicated on a
culturally biased binary: either Western women could ignore the
cyclical problem of despotism and be "shut up" in their homes like

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THE PROBLEM OF CULTURAL BIAS

"eastern princes," or they could be "educated in such a manner as
to be able to think and act for themselves." Both routes negated the
worth of the Muslim wife by transforming the Western wife into
either an "eastern prince" or a bearer of equal rights. This binary, in
turn, presumed that Eastern governments were despotic and there-
fore inferior to emergent Western conceptions of rights-based re-
publicanism as nondomination.29
By framing and interweaving the first major philosophical treatise
on women's human rights with such Orientalist metaphors, Woll-
stonecraft was the author of a double-edged tradition: a feminist
liberalism with both humanist and imperialist sides. Contra the pa-
triarchal apologists, such as Edmund Burke and Rousseau, she upheld
the feminist humanist idea of women as part of the human species
and therefore entitled to the same rights as men. Yet she relied on
demeaning images of Eastern, especially Turkish Muslim, peoples to
signal the moral importance of the liberation of women in general.
She thus implied that Eastern women and men must be Western-
ized in order to be free. The obverse implication was that Western
women and men must resist a "return" to the passions of Eastern
"barbarism" in order to fully realize the rational freedom of their
superior culture. These two sides-humanist and imperial-of the
feminist liberalism born of Wollstonecraft are not necessarily tied
together, for we shall see in the remainder of this chapter how later
feminist liberals have achieved partial yet sufficiently ethical tran-
scendence of such Western imperial biases. Rather, the prejudices
of Wollstonecraft and some of her followers ought to be understood
as historically situated products of a Western European culture that
was, according to Pitts, in the midst of a "turn to empire."30
Wollstonecraft's reproduction of the symbolic binary between
Eastern seraglios and Western morality may be read as an early itera-
tion of a trend in British imperial feminism. According to Grewal's
study of late nineteenth-century British feminist activism concern-
ing India, "the discourse of the woman 'caged' in the harem, in
purdah, becomes the necessary Other for the construction of the
Englishwoman presumably free and happy in the home." Wollstone-

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THE PROBLEM OF CULTURAL BIAS

craft offered an Enlightenment variation on this theme: the women
in the seraglios of Turkey served as the "necessary Other" to con-
struct the greater possibility of women's freedom in Europe, and the
rest of the world's hopeful emulation of it. As Zonana cogently ob-
served, the "feminist orientalist" rhetorical strategy of the Rights of
Woman was to demand that "the West rid itself of its oriental ways,
becoming as a consequence more Western-that is, more rational,
enlightened, reasonable." While Wollstonecraft's primary goal was
to make Western Europe "more Western," she also reinforced the
notion of the subordinate position of the East in relation to Western
advancement.3'
In the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft exposed the hypocrisy of
Rousseau's unduly sexualized prescriptions for female education by
insinuating their affinities with the luxury and decadence of Turkish
Muslim polygamy: "In a seraglio, I grant, that all these arts are nec-
essary; the epicure must have his palate tickled, or he will sink into
apathy; but have women so little ambition as to be satisfied with such
a condition?" When Wollstonecraft summoned "women" in this
highly rhetorical question, she connoted that European wives ought
to have more "ambition" than their counterparts in the seraglio. The
rhetorical dimension of this question, however, does not rebuff its
prejudice. Although she took an ironic, or unexpected, position by
granting the "necessity" of women's sexual "arts" in the seraglio, she
clearly demarcated such Eastern homes as ruled by "necessity" and
thus inhospitable to Western ideas of freedom.32
Wollstonecraft's Orientalist women's human rights discourse
represented a kind of global feminist imperialism. From her late
eighteenth-century standpoint, she presumed women's current op-
pression not only in the East but worldwide. Yet she situated patriar-
chal oppression on a slope-with non-Western European cultures
at the bottom, and Western Europe and its North Atlantic colonies
at the top. As Samara Cahill has shown, there was nothing absolute
or "essential" about this slope: Wollstonecraft thought that Eastern
peoples could, and should, close the gap between themselves and
the West. Like Mill after her, she did not assume that non-Western

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THE PROBLEM OF CULTURAL BIAS

European peoples were absolutely incapable of progress, because of
some essential flaw in their natures or cultures. Her rhetoric, how-
ever, publicly bolstered the idea of Western supremacy in a way that
stood in conflict with her universalistic ethics.33
For Wollstonecraft, Western culture was almost as culpable for
women's oppression as the non-Western cultures it had partly sur-
passed. Western European culture, through reverence for its "men
of genius," continued to profess unenlightened ideas about women.
Even John Milton, the author of the greatest English Protestant epic
poem, wrote in the "true Mahometan strain" with regard to Eve be-
ing "made to please" Adam. Burke likewise had not "steered clear
of the mussulman's creed" when he endorsed women's seclusion in
home and family. Wollstonecraft accused Rousseau of the sensual-
ity of a Turkish sultan for professing that "a girl should be educated
for her husband with the same care as for an eastern haram [sic]."
By mocking these Western "men of genius" with her caricatures of
Islam, Wollstonecraft suggested that Western culture had advanced
to a point where it could and should cast off patriarchal hierarchies
and other "vestiges of barbarism."4
Given the international success of the Rights of Woman, Wollstone-
craft established a morally problematic yet politically influential rhe-
torical model for making women's human rights arguments. Histo-
rians of feminism and imperialism have traced the lingering impact
of this Orientalist idiom on nineteenth-century feminist authors and
activists from Britain-such as Mary Robinson, Emily Bront8, Har-
riet Martineau, and Millicent Fawcett. Grewal has inventively shown
the ideological drift of this discourse among late nineteenth-century
colonized Indian women, who reversed many Western stereotypes
of their "harems" to expose the moral problems with British imperial
ideas of womanhood and family. According to Grewal, such sym-
bolic reversals challenged imperial domination yet reproduced the
binaries between East and West on a different bias."
Both the humanist and the imperialist sides of Wollstonecraft's
feminist liberalism found a welcoming home in the United States.
It was a conflicted young liberal democracy, which had recently

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THE PROBLEM OF CULTURAL BIAS

rewritten its constitution. Between 1787 and 1791, the Americans
had reinforced the legitimacy of chattel slavery at the same time as
they pushed forward a bill of individual rights for white male citi-
zens. In postrevolutionary America, we find further evidence for
Zonana's provocative thesis that "the feminist orientalist strategy
introduced by Wollstonecraft came to pervade nineteenth-century
feminist discourse," whether "through direct influence or simply be-
cause the ideas on which she drew were circulating freely within the
culture."36
From its publication in Boston and Philadelphia in 1792, the
Rights of Woman attracted an enthusiastic audience among American
Protestant women who advocated education reform, abolition, pub-
lic benevolence, temperance, and suffrage. In this book they found
a rhetorical style that resonated with their own modes of argument
for women's human rights. In 1795, soon after reading the Rights of
Woman with Vice President John Adams, First Lady Abigail Adams
complained to her husband about the "more than Egyptian Bondage,
to which the Female Sex, have been subjugated, from the earliest
ages." The Rights of Woman had argued that women were "educated
in worse than Egyptian bondage."37
The "Egyptian bondage" metaphor had multiple meanings in
Wollstonecraft and the Adamses' shared Anglo dissenting Christian
context. When John Adams was an ambassador in London in the
1780s, he and his wife had frequented Price's church at Newington
Green at the same time as Wollstonecraft. Although it is not known
if they met, they certainly heard similar sermons, fraught with al-
lusions to the "darkness and superstition" of the "Mahometans and
Papists." On both sides of the Atlantic, the allegory of the libera-
tion of Moses and the Jews from Egypt was a common framework
for late eighteenth-century Christian abolitionist narratives of
progress-such as by the freed African slave and poet Phillis Wheat-
ley of Boston.38
Like Wollstonecraft, Abigail Adams exploited the salience of these
symbols and their multiple meanings for different audiences. Per-
haps to assuage her conservative husband, she made her critique of

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THE PROBLEM OF CULTURAL BIAS

patriarchy less universal by claiming that the "attention paid to the
Education of Females in America" had raised their nation above the
rest of the world just "within these last 15 years." Framed within this
rising imperial feminist idiom of the North Atlantic, Eastern despo-
tisms appeared more prone to subjecting women to "Egyptian bond-
age" than Western rights-based republics such as the United States
and France. This was certainly an ironic contrast given the consti-
tutional legitimacy of the evil of slavery and the formal exclusion
of women from citizenship in the United States, and the systematic
retrenchment of women's rights in France during the radical stage of
the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era.39
In the early nineteenth century, the two most significant Ameri-
can philosophers of women's human rights were Crocker and
Grimke. Crocker's Observations on the Real Rights of Women (1818)
and Grimke's Letters on the Equality of the Sexes (1838) were both
published in Boston. These book-length treatises reflected the city's
long-standing openness toward issues of abolition, female education
reform, and women's public activism. Crocker and Grimke's books
also contributed to the feminist imperial discourse that the reception
of Wollstonecraft's Rights of Woman had helped to transport around
the Atlantic world.
Crocker favorably cited Wollstonecraft several times in the Obser-
vations and continued her philosophical forerunner's assault on "the
idea of the inferiority of female nature." A liberal Congregational-
ist theologian, Crocker followed Wollstonecraft in her concern with
refuting the religious notion that women have inferior souls to men,
or no souls at all, leaving them incapable of the same (or perhaps
any) salvation. Building on a widespread Western misconception
of Islam at the turn of the nineteenth century, they both associated
this "general view" of a metaphysical sex inequality with the "ma-
hometans both of Asia and Europe." Crocker cited Lady Montagu's
rejection of the Western presumption that Turkish Muslims did not
believe women have souls. But Crocker held on to the view that "ma-
hometans" believed in the natural inferiority of the female soul. She
represented this patriarchal idea as backward and Islamic, and point-

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THE PROBLEM OF CULTURAL BIAS

edly contrasted it with the egalitarian views of "our God," found in
the "religion of the gospel."40
This (often implicit) contrast between our God and your Islamic
barbarism also animated Grimk6's attempt to craft a transnational
feminist abolitionism in her Letters. In an extended section of the
book in which she examined the lowly status of women across the
world's cultures, Grimk6 reported that "pigs, dogs, women, and
other impure animals" are treated as equivalents under the "Mo-
hammedan law." A Quaker preacher who began life on a Southern
plantation, Grimk6 presented her comparative reflections-drawn
from books and personal witness-as sociological fact. Capitalizing
on the stereotype of Muslim women's severe oppression, she noted
the "resemblance between the situation of women in heathen and
Mohammedan countries, and our brethren and sisters of color in
this Christian land." Her use of impersonal language imparted an
emotional distance to her description of the condition of Muslim
women, while her invocation of the "our" sought to foster a sense
of deep sympathy in her American abolitionist audience for their
"sisters of color" in the South. Such rhetorical moves illustrated
what Grewal has identified as the (often latent) imperial and cultural
biases of transnational feminist narratives. Next, we shall see how
Mill's Subjection of Women also fell into this pattern of presenting a
North Atlantic standard for women's (and civilizational) progress, in
a time when British imperialism had reached peak power.4'
The Ethics of Instrumental and Eurocentric
Rhetoric in Mill's Subjection of Women
Mill's liberal utilitarianism was his philosophical attempt to cor-
rect classical utilitarianism's neglect of individual rights in favor of
promoting the greatest good for the greatest number. His answer
to his father and Jeremy Bentham was to define individual self-
development, in all its rich eccentricity, as the indirect path to the
greatest good, or utility, of the human species. His liberal utilitar-
ian emphasis on both the public and the personal utility of human

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THE PROBLEM OF CULTURAL BIAS

rights made his school of thought a rich philosophical and political
resource for feminism. Yet the utilitarian dimension of his liberalism
lent itself to a rhetorical pathology: defending women's human rights
in terms of public utility may make it look as though (or worse, feel
as though) women's freedom was primarily a tool for development
outcomes beyond their individual well-being.
In the context of debates on Westernization, such instrumental
arguments might conceive of women's human rights as a means for
advancing Western models of economic growth or education. Per-
haps most problematically for feminism, instrumental arguments
can imply that the issue of women's human rights is secondary to
some other purpose. Conditions of cultural or political imperialism,
including colonialism, can exacerbate the ethical problems associ-
ated with this form of reasoning. If an argument for women's hu-
man rights assumes the superiority of Western culture over another
culture, then it contributes to the legitimation of the idea of West-
ern domination over other cultures. Women's human rights, ironi-
cally, can become a means for supporting cultural imperialism, even
though the concept's aim is to liberate all women from conditions of
domination.42
The inequalities of power that colonized or developing peoples face
in national and international politics make the rhetorical and ethical
implications of such instrumental feminist arguments even worse. As
Mohanty has argued, feminism can be represented as a tool handed
down to colonized or developing peoples for their advancement ac-
cording to a higher Western standard. The construction of women's
human rights as an instrument of Western reform only contributes
to the misperception that the indigenous culture is inferior and lack-
ing its own resources for enabling women's empowerment.43
Through an analysis of the Western biases and instrumental femi-
nist argumentation of The Subjection of Women, we see how its rheto-
ric sets up a liberal imperial model for women's human rights argu-
ments. The book opens with Mill's attack on the customs that keep
women subjected to men in nineteenth-century society, even in "all
the countries of Christian Europe." Mill critiqued the endurance of

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THE PROBLEM OF CULTURAL BIAS

the antiquated practice of the "social subordination of women" in
an otherwise civilized Western Europe by confronting his readers
with an extended counterfactual: imagine that St. Paul's Cathedral
in London-the epicenter of the Church of England-did not ex-
ist, but instead a "gigantic" megalithic "dolmen" or a "vast" Roman
pagan temple of "Jupiter Olympius" was still used by British Prot-
estants for their daily worship. This complex metaphor suggested
that the subjection of women was a "relic" of primitive culture and
religion, which Western Europeans ought to entirely transcend.44
These locutions had the effect of locating Mill's conception of
modern civilization in Western Europe, particularly a "civilized and
Christian England." Granted, this bias is unsurprising for a man
of Mill's culture and status, but it is nonetheless one that contrib-
utes to a series of rhetorical oppositions between Western Europe
and the rest of the world. In chapter 2, he stated that Christianity
"has been the religion of the progressive portion of mankind, and
Islamism, Brahminism, &c., have been those of the stationary por-
tions; or rather ... the declining portions." Although Mill scholars
have shown that he did not designate Muslim and Hindu cultures as
permanently stagnant or absolutely incapable of development, the
quoted statement implied their relative-yet likely long-term-
cultural inferiority to "Christian Europe." Trading on the religious
biases of his Western European, and especially English Protestant,
audience, Mill employed a series of mutually reinforcing rhetorical
binaries in The Subjection of Women: women's rights/women's sub-
jection; Western Europe/Eastern cultures; European Christianity/
Hinduism and Islam.45
In chapter 2, Mill identified the institution of patriarchal marriage
as the effective cause of the enduring subjection of women across
modern societies from East to West. Although he identified it as a
global source of women's contemporary subjection to men, he con-
ceptualized patriarchal marriage not in universal and culturally non-
specific but in primitivist and Orientalist terms. Patriarchal marriage
was a "relic of primitive barbarism" and thus existed "under a varnish
of civilization and cultivation" in developed countries. In a series of

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THE PROBLEM OF CULTURAL BIAS

prejudicial rhetorical moves, he associated the barbarism of patriar-
chal marriage with Eastern cultures and religions.46
Mill used familiar Orientalist symbols such as the "odalisque" to
develop his critical account of female domestic servitude in patriar-
chal marriages. In contending "it was wrong to bring up women with
any acquirements but those of an odalisque, or a domestic servant,"
he likened European wives to female slaves sequestered in the Turk-
ish seraglio. Capitalizing on his nineteenth-century Occidental male
audience's intrigue with the dark, sensual Middle Eastern "other,"
he cast a female Muslim servant as a negative yet sexually charged
trope in his argument for women's right to higher education. The
odalisque, in this discursive context, represented the basest yet most
exotic form of female subordination: enslavement to female slaves
and their polygamous sultan. She was a metaphorical object of con-
flicted, Christian European male desire and judgment, not a human
subject in a different religious tradition who was as entitled to educa-
tion as the European wife.47
Mill furthermore adopted the alluring yet taboo setting of the se-
raglio as a mirror for exposing to European eyes the perverse effects
of patriarchy on both spouses. He compared a European wife to a
"Sultan's favorite slave," in order to show that "the desirable thing
would be that she should neither have slaves nor be a slave." He
complained of the "sublime and sultan-like" self-image of men in
the patriarchal family. Breaking down the distinction between the
symbolic and the real, he went so far as to speak for "the women in
the harem of an Oriental" by claiming that they "do not complain
of not being allowed the freedom of European women. They think
our women insufferably bold and unfeminine." Like Wollstonecraft
with her Orientalist strategies, Mill took advantage of the European
salience of anti-Muslim stereotypes to make arguments for women's
human rights that treat Muslim culture as contrary to the progres-
sive feminist values of Western Europe.48
Mill's rhetorical strategies on behalf of women's rights also tar-
geted Indian culture. Mill cited the "violent abuse" of women in
"Hindoo writings" as evidence of the "Oriental" view that "women

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are by nature peculiarly voluptuous." By contrasting this sexual and
violent "Oriental" view of women with milder and merely "ridicu-
lous" European chauvinistic attitudes, he reinforced the idea of Eu-
ropean preeminence over Asian cultures on the question of women's
status. He also belied his "latent," or unreflective, Orientalism in
sketching Asian women as what Said has called "creatures of a male
power-fantasy."49
Invoking the authority of his work for the East India Company,
Mill explained how his "long official knowledge of Hindu govern-
ments" gave him insight into the "natural capacity of women for
government." In a backhanded compliment, he noted that Indian
women have been competent and prolonged legal regents of prin-
cipalities during the minorities of male heirs, despite the fact that
"these princesses have never been seen in public, have never con-
versed with any man not of their own family except from behind a
curtain, that they don't read, and if they did, there is no book in their
languages which can give them the smallest instruction in political
affairs." Despite his other writings on the value of indigenous Indian
cultures and languages, Mill here marshaled British presumptions
about the colonized Indians-including illiteracy, cultural bank-
ruptcy, and political ineptitude-for the sake of an argument for
women's "natural" capacity for governmental leadership.0
In chapter 4, Mill laid out his major instrumental argument for the
institutionalization of equal rights between the sexes. The effect of
"giving to women the free use of their faculties," "leaving them the
free choice of their employments," and "opening to them the same
field of occupation and the same prizes and encouragements as to
other human beings" would be "that of doubling the mass of mental
faculties available for the higher service of humanity." By arguing
that women's full development as human beings would double eco-
nomic and civilizational progress, Mill opened the door for women's
rights to be seen and used as a tool for development, rather than for
the well-being of individual women. He concluded the book with a
telling reminder that his own end goal in defending women's rights
was to enhance "all that makes life valuable to the individual human

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being." In light of this, he cannot in all fairness be understood as a
straightforward imperialist on the issue of women's human rights or
any other political issue. While his feminist arguments were some-
times imperial in implication and (as we shall see) in subsequent ap-
plication by other thinkers, his rights-based individualistic liberalism
also endowed his political theory with cosmopolitan potential for
the woman question.5'
The rhetorical advantage of privileging the Western-biased point
of view over the cosmopolitan, or culturally attuned yet universalis-
tic, perspective on justice was not lost on Mill, however. He freely
admitted that he had to persuade British and European men in posi-
tions of political power to adopt the cause of women's human rights
in order for the movement to succeed. In chapter 4, he likened dis-
crimination against women to the discrimination that men in "unen-
lightened societies" face: "What, in unenlightened societies, colour,
race, religion, or in the case of a conquered country, nationality, are
to some men, sex is to all women; a preemptory exclusion from al-
most all honorable occupations." Even as he was issuing a universal
critique of unjust discrimination on the basis of race, religion, and
sex, he wielded the prejudiced binary between "unenlightened" so-
cieties and Western societies to motivate European men to protect
their wives and daughters from such discrimination. Ironically, both
the Western biases and the instrumental feminist arguments of The
Subjection of Women have led it to be engaged on the issues of wom-
en's human rights and development, as illustrated by the comparative
analysis of two of its early non-Western European forewords from
Russia and colonial India."
Reflecting Cultural Bias: The Subjection of Women
in "Westernizing" Russia and British India
James Scanlan and Douglas Howland have provided the most ex-
tensive studies of Mill's translation and reception beyond Western
Europe, in late nineteenth-century Russia, Japan, and China. The
Subjection of Women has been credited as an inspiration for feminists

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THE PROBLEM OF CULTURAL BIAS

in nineteenth-century North and South America, Russia, Japan, and
Continental Europe, as well as Britain and its empire, including In-
dia and New Zealand. By comparing the forewords to The Subjection
of Women by Blagosvetlov (1869) and Kanitkar (1902), we see how
local intellectuals from Russia and colonial India situated the book's
ideas in the context of their own debates on development and West-
ernization. Demonstrating the power of Mill's Orientalist rhetoric
to insidiously shape public discourse, these two non-Western Euro-
pean intellectuals reproduced some of his cultural biases in crafting
their own arguments for women's human rights.53
The Russian feminist movement had gained steam in the late 185os
with a debate over medical careers for women, as some had served as
nurses in the Crimean War. Vera Pavlovna-the heroine of Cherny-
shevsky's influential novel What Is to Be Done? (1863)-expressed the
radical idea that economic independence, not merely sexual or per-
sonal freedom, enabled a woman's realization of her full humanity.
Women's clubs, devoted to charity, education, and business ventures
such as publishing Russian translations of English works, emerged
in St. Petersburg in the early 186os. The "drive to higher education"
for and by women in Russia commenced in 1868. Six printings of
The Subjection of Women in St. Petersburg in 1869-70 was another
milestone for the growing Russian feminist movement.54
Prior to 1869, Mill was already influential in Russian intellectual
and political life. Around the time that he sponsored the women's
suffrage petition in the British Parliament in 1867, he corresponded
with a friend in Russia about the movement to establish a women's
university there. Evident in the letter was the Western bias of Mill's
theory of women's rights, as shown in his supposition that Russia
would "prove that a nation relatively recently civilized grasps the
great ideas of amelioration sooner than the older ones." Blagosvetlov
and the other radical journalists who penned forewords to Russian
editions of Mill's Subjection of Women duly noted the Western bias of
Mill's philosophy of women's rights that led him to situate their na-
tion as "recently civilized" on the scale of European civilization. To
varying degrees, they accepted or disputed this view in using Mill's

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THE PROBLEM OF CULTURAL BIAS

ideas to outline their distinctive accounts of how to advance the
rights of women in the context of political debates on Westerniza-
tion, economic development, and populist reform in Russia."
Blagosvetlov (1824-80) was born in Stavropol. He trekked to
England in 1857 to live and study with the radical expatriate Russian
journalist Alexander Herzen (1812-70). Returning to St. Petersburg
via Paris in 1860, he founded the journal Delo (the Cause) there in
1866. For his commitment to the 1861 emancipation of the serfs,
the rights of women, and individual liberty, Blagosvetlov was de-
scribed in one nineteenth-century Russian biography as an "extreme
radical Westernizer." The Westernizers challenged the philosophy
of the Slavophiles, pitting the idea of "free, autonomous personal-
ity" against the demand to a return "to the old Slavic principles of
'community life."' According to Andrzej Walicki, Russian Western-
ism was not "a homogenous school of thought" but rather a "com-
mon denominator" for intellectuals who "believed Russia might and
should follow the general pattern of European progress." Blagosvet-
lov's foreword to his 1869 edition of The Subjection of Women set forth
his vision of Westernization in Russia by building on the Orientalist
and instrumental feminist arguments, as much as the liberal indi-
vidualism, of Mill.56
Blagosvetlov began his foreword by upholding the "social status of
women" as one of the "main issues of contemporary European phi-
losophy." Yet he situated Russia outside this debate, since it was "two
centuries behind from where, in the sphere of intellectual culture,
the English find themselves in the present time." He called for the
immediate practical implementation of Mill's philosophy of women's
rights in Russia: "The question is not whether it is timely to hold
here a discussion of emancipation of women as it is understood by
people of higher intellectual culture" but rather "to what extent a
Russian society is able to reduce and eliminate those obstacles that
stand in the way of carrying out this great life goal of the contempo-
rary generation."57
Deploying the Orientalist imagery found in Mill's work to rhetor-
ically distance himself from the Slavophiles, Blagosvetlov stated that

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THE PROBLEM OF CULTURAL BIAS

"Russia can no longer go back to its old Asiatic stillness." Against
these nationalists' romanticization of Russia's supposedly republican
past, he upheld "European civilization" as the "role model for her
future prosperity," not "the aged Eastern heritage that our pseudo
patriots are ready to perceive as uniqueness or majestic serenity."
Employing one of Mill's images from the Turkish seraglio, he pro-
posed that Russia should face the question of whether it would "ben-
efit by allowing a woman to obtain an independent status, i.e. if we
make a real mother out of a simple wet nurse, if we make a free
member of the family out of a household maid, a real loving wife out
of a harem odalisque, a lively and active force out of a dead social
material?" While Mill had contrasted his subversive and "disturb-
ing" ideal of the educated woman with the "odalisque" or "domes-
tic servant," Blagosvetlov revealed the limits of his feminism with
his rather conservative opposition of the "harem odalisque" to the
"real loving wife" to be produced by Russian women's liberation.
Following Mill's rhetoric more closely, he demarcated progress and
feminism as Western European values by using Asiatic and Muslim
caricatures to mock the backwardness of the Slavophiles on these
issues. Although these tropes had an ironic sense in the context of
Russia's place between East and West, they still had the rhetorical
effect of casting women's human rights as a Western imperative.58
Building on Mill's liberal utilitarianism, Blagosvetlov applied the
main instrumental feminist argument from chapter 4 of The Sub-
jection of Women to Russia. He predicted that equal rights in Rus-
sia would mean double the economic productivity: "Two hundred
years of people's activity under the same social conditions would be
reduced to one hundred years, and for underdeveloped people that
saves an enormous amount of labor and time." Advancing women's
human rights was not primarily about promoting women's freedom
and personal development but rather a step in the process of giving
Russia "a right to declare itself to be an educated people rather than
a useless one."59
Westernization, development, and women's human rights were
also at the forefront of the minds of turn-of-the-century Indian


THE PROBLEM OF CULTURAL BIAS

intellectuals, who often addressed these issues from the standpoint
of their colonization by Britain. Kanitkar of Maharashtra translated
and introduced the Marathi edition of The Subjection of Women in
1902. Building on the postcolonial theory of Frantz Fanon, Jayanti
Patel, and Said, I argue that Kanitkar's philosophical response to The
Subjection of Women represents the "assimilation" stage of the colonial
intellectual. Kanitkar appropriated a colonial British model of using
Mill's liberal feminism to endorse Westernization for the develop-
ment of India. His treatment of the woman question within his colo-
nial predicament in many ways mirrored the ironies of Blagosvetlov's
liminal position as a Russian Westernizer who challenged his tradi-
tional patriarchal culture.60
An indigenous, prenationalistic feminist movement had grown in
India by the 187os, especially in the region of Maharashtra. Accord-
ing to Rosalind O'Hanlan, a public debate emerged in this decade
in western India on "the ways in which Indian and Hindu women
might develop and transform themselves, whilst preserving what was
best in 'traditional' culture." It was in this context that the Marathi
translator Kanitkar (1854-1918) came to address the women's issue.
Kanitkar was a poet, reformer, and subjudge in the colonial legal
system. In the late 186os, he joined a group of his male, Brahmin
friends in implementing their liberal ideas "by educating their own
child-wives." These women, led by Kanitkar's wife, Kashibai (1861-
1948), organized their own feminist society, Striyancha Sabha, in
188os Maharashtra. The all-female group read Austen, Eliot, and
The Subjection of Women, and promoted the cause of women's educa-
tion in the region. The couple came to embody the model of com-
panionate marriage among intellectual equals that was popular in
late nineteenth-century Brahmin society.61
Kanitkar recalled his own exposure to The Subjection of Women
around 1870, when he married Kashibai and entered university. In
1872, he published Sushikshit Stricharitra, which explored the tra-
ditional ideal of "pativrata," or the chaste and devoted wife, and
its compatibility with education. Contrary to traditionalists who
thought education would make Indian women unfaithful and re-

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THE PROBLEM OF CULTURAL BIAS

bellious, Kanitkar argued that education would make mothers and
daughters more chaste and respectable.62
Kanitkar's foreword recalled how he finally fulfilled his "sacred duty"
to translate the treatise into Marathi after years of contemplating the
project. With a kind of stoicism that belied a deeper sense of loss in
the wake of British cultural imperialism, he supplied his motivation
for translating the book: "The language of Maharashtra may or may
not flourish in the future." His translation also had a reformist agenda:
undermine the "ridicule" of the "topic of the 'subjection of women"'
in local Indian culture. To show that ancient Hinduism shared Mill's
deep respect for women, he cited the Sanskrit epic Mahabharata: "The
wife is a man's half. The wife is the first of friends."63
Recounting how he first translated selections of The Subjection of
Women for the "popular magazines 'Manoranjan' and 'Nibandhchan-
drika' in Pune" around 1890, Kanitkar metaphorically addressed
Mill's book as though it was an Englishwoman he had been court-
ing: "O lady! It has been several years-almost 20 years-since I
chanced upon your liberal and charming character. At the time, I
had just been admitted to university; since the day, I had a deep wish
to acquire you! But you were a foreigner! You were born in the boun-
tiful land of the independent and triumphant English! So, how could
you be acquired by a poor Brahmin like me! My mind would return
to you again and again. Finally, I made the determination to force-
fully clothe you in a Maharashtrian costume and bring you to my
people!" This strikingly sexual and latently violent representation of
Mill's book as a "liberal" English "lady" whom Kanitkar "forcefully"
clothed in the "costume" of his native language illustrated his pre-
dicament as a colonial intellectual. In attempting to assimilate the
Western liberal feminist values of Mill while adapting them to some
of the traditional values of his own culture, Kanitkar reproduced in
his writing the imbalances of power caused by the intersection of
patriarchy and colonialism in India. In imagining the translation of
Mill's book as "forcefully" fitting it into the clothing of his language,
he indulged in a troubling symbolic reversal of British cultural impe-
rialism. He declared his ambivalence to the "lady" with an emotional

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THE PROBLEM OF CULTURAL BIAS

reference to the Mahabharata: "I both want you and do not want you!
Or, like the cursed Dushyant ... wanted to both accept Shakuntala
and reject her, I am in a similarly strange state of mind." Torn by
reverence of the English lady and desire to conquer her, Kanitkar
modestly chose to clothe her-dramatizing what Fanon has called
the colonized male's feeling of emasculation in the face of the politi-
cal rape of imperialism.64
Kanitkar asserted "that the importance of women's rights should
be pointed out and discussed with quiet and serious consideration."
Demonstrating such "quiet" consideration, he did not use his own
words but rather quoted the British colonial Theosophist Annie Be-
sant. Kanitkar implied that he agreed with Besant's views on teach-
ing indigenous Indian women some English alongside their native
tongue: "The main motivation for this is so that she develops com-
munion with her English-knowing husband and children." Again
borrowing words from Besant, he stated: "The Indian woman will
never lose her devotion, but her devotion must be coupled with
knowledge." Kanitkar aimed this colonial instrumental argument
for female education toward the preservation of indigenous women's
"devotion" to, and "communion" with, their more educated, West-
ernized husbands and male children.65
Kanitkar's feminist proposals were muted by design, in order to
rhetorically appease his conservative audience's fears that "all women
will revolt against men" if liberated. He soothed their concerns: "It
is extremely unlikely that conventions and thinking which have been
rooted very deeply for thousands of years in this soil called society,
will be uprooted or eroded through discussions." Kanitkar's gradualist
approach to feminist reform oriented itself toward the advancement
of Westernization in British India. Situating the progressive liberal
values of the West against the traditionalist indigenous culture, Ka-
nitkar began his discussion of women's rights by stating, "'A woman
does not deserve freedom'... is a principle or a theory well-known in
our country. Taking the opposing viewpoint, Mr. Mill wrote a small
excellent treatise with the support of his wife in 1861 and named it
Subjection of Women." Although he acknowledged that cultural differ-

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THE PROBLEM OF CULTURAL BIAS

ences between India and England meant that "Indian ladies" could
not be "given the same type of education as in England," he thought
that training in English would mean that indigenous women would
"get directly acquainted with one of the strongest influences on the
recent progress in India." Kanitkar assumed a British standard of
excellence for reform of female education, and progress in general,
in India. In so doing, he slyly pushed his stubbornly traditionalist
society toward a Westernized conception of "equality of rights."66
Situated between the 1885 establishment of the Indian National
Congress and the post-1917 nationalist independence movement, the
Marathi preface to The Subjection of Women provides a fascinating ex-
ample of the internal conflicts that arise when a colonial society faces
the prospect of radical political change. Caught up in the colonial
assimilationist spirit, Kanitkar attempted to initiate changes within
Indian culture-such as the Westernized education of women-to
bring it into alignment with British culture, while avoiding suspicion
from Indian traditionalists. Separated by decades, languages, and na-
tional politics, Blagosvetlov's and Kanitkar's responses to The Subjec-
tion of Women nonetheless operated within a shared political context:
the unequal international power relations set by Westernization.
Like Mill's, Blagosvetlov's and Kanitkar's intellectual and rhetorical
relationships to Western notions of progress limited the scope of
their otherwise visionary commitments to women's human rights.
Struggling with Cultural Bias: The Rights of
Woman in Colonial South Africa
Olive Schreiner, the white South African writer famous for her
1883 feminist novel The Story of an African Farm, grappled with the
problem of cultural bias in her reflections on the relevance of the
Rights of Woman for relations between black and white women in her
colonial nation. As Carolyn Burdett has recounted, Schreiner trav-
eled to London in 1881 with the manuscript for her novel. There
she was active in Karl Pearson's "Men's and Women's Club" (which
originally was to be named after Wollstonecraft) from 1885 to 1886.

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In Pearson's circle, she was introduced to the publisher Walter Scott.
Learning of her interest in theorizing the late Victorian "sex ques-
tion," Scott encouraged the young feminist to introduce a new cen-
tennial edition of the Rights of Woman.67
Schreiner worked on her Wollstonecraft project for three years but
abandoned it around the time she returned to South Africa in 1889. In
the late 189os, she took the pro-Boer stance in the Second Boer War
between British and Dutch settlers over control of the South African
territories of the Transvaal Republic and the Orange Free State. Ac-
cording to Burdett, Schreiner's aporetic introduction to the Rights
of Woman exemplified her lifelong struggle with the difficult ques-
tions of colonial and patriarchal power relations without adequately
resolving them. Continuing in this vein, I argue that Schreiner's in-
troduction and her feminist treatise Woman and Labor (1911) strove
for a global female solidarity yet reproduced negative stereotypes of
non-Western women in a way similar to Wollstonecraft.68
Although Schreiner's introduction began with rehashing the
standard British Victorian reading of Wollstonecraft as an inconse-
quential thinker and bad writer, it quickly turned toward a positive
reclamation of the book's prescient grasp of the "necessity" of the
"woman's movement." Schreiner underscored how the book's de-
mand for women's rights was rooted in the author's own experiences
as a woman: "Being a woman, perhaps there was no necessity for her
to see it; she knew it." She concluded the essay with her own obser-
vations of black women in South Africa, whom she believed dem-
onstrated the natural, evolutionary roots of a universal female sense
of their sex's oppression. Her colonial upbringing gave her a conde-
scending view of these indigenous women as "uncivilised." Schreiner
simultaneously felt a strong moral obligation to fight racist prejudice
against them. She later resigned from a women's suffrage organiza-
tion that sought to exclude black women from the vote in the buildup
to the formation of the Union of South Africa in 1910.69
Despite her colonial prejudices, Schreiner presented her inter-
action with the local black women as a kind of feminist ethnogra-
phy. She tried to preserve the cultural distinctions between herself

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THE PROBLEM OF CULTURAL BIAS

and the indigenous women, in distinguishing between her and her
interviewees' first-person voices. She recalled, "I have bent over a
woman half flogged to death by her husband, and seen her rise, cut
and bleeding, lay her child against her wounded breast, and go and
kneel down silently before the grind-stone and begin to grind." Yet
Schreiner undercut her poignant sense of solidarity with this abused
African woman by attempting to explain such "savage" women's res-
ignation to patriarchal domination in terms of a Eurocentric model
of historical progress.0
Seeking to understand such "deep" resignation, she interviewed
a black woman and translated her explanation at length. Schreiner
recorded her interviewee's insight into black women's double burden
of sex-based and race-based oppression: "We are dogs, we are dogs.
There may perhaps be a good for the white women; I do not know;
there is no good for the black." Her register of this African wom-
an's voice echoed Wollstonecraft's lament that girls are born into
domination: "We might as well never have been born, unless it were
necessary that we should be created to enable man to acquire the
noble privilege of reason." Pushing the Eurocentric rhetoric of the
Rights of Woman in a robustly imperial political direction, Schreiner
interpreted the black woman's despair as a sign of the "necessity"
of "savage" women's resignation to sexual domination in undevel-
oped, non-Westernized societies. Ending the essay with a disturb-
ing projection of the "necessity" of an African man's murder of his
insubordinate wife, Schreiner coded feminism for the West and the
inevitability of submission for the "savage" rest."
Like her feminist counterparts in nineteenth-century Britain and
America, Schreiner also reproduced one of the central Orientalist
stereotypes of the Rights of Woman. In her unpublished introduction
to the centennial edition of Wollstonecraft's treatise, Schreiner used
the "female in a Turkish harem" to explain her theory of the bio-
logical and social evolution of sex difference. Just as she had reduced
the abused African woman to the savagery of her social conditions,
Schreiner equated the polygamous wives of the Turkish seraglio
to "jelly bag" female wood bugs, with none of the "brain power"

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THE PROBLEM OF CULTURAL BIAS

to escape their domination by the "active, complex" males of their
group. The racist implications of this evolutionary narrative were
grave. Schreiner wished to claim that women in sex-segregated soci-
eties (such as Islamic cultures) became inferior in mind and body to
men. She implied that these women lacked mental and physical re-
sources for their own critical engagement with their Muslim culture
or its Western critics. Her "jelly bag" bugs of the harem were cast as
dispossessed subalterns who could not even talk, let alone speak for
themselves so as to be heard by those in power."
In her feminist treatise Woman and Labor (1911), Schreiner con-
tinued to appeal to this imaginary of the "Turkish harem of to-day"
as if it were sociological fact. Presenting European monogamy as a
benchmark of women's and human progress, she claimed that "the
study of all races in all ages proves that the greater the freedom of
woman, the higher the sexual value put upon her by the males of that
society." For evidence to support this imperial feminist variation on
Enlightenment philosophies of history, she resorted to the Western
stereotype of the "pashaws," also found in the Rights of Woman: "The
hundred wives and concubines purchased by a Turkish pashaw prob-
ably have not even an approximate value in his eyes, when compared
to the value thousands of European males set upon the one compara-
tively free woman, whom they have won, often only after a long and
tedious courtship." Just as she calculated the worth of the insubor-
dinate African wife at zero, Schreiner presumed the negligible value
of polygamous Turkish wives in comparison to their monogamous
Western counterparts. Such attempts to understand women's op-
pression and liberation in terms of a stadial Western conception of
development made her wrestle with the issue of cultural difference
without fully challenging her imperial prejudices."
Challenging Cultural Bias: The Feminist Liberalisms
of Tsebrikova, Borgono, and Lopez
Not all early feminist readers of the Rights of Woman and The Sub-
jection of Women imitated their imperial biases against non-Western

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THE PROBLEM OF CULTURAL BIAS

European peoples and religions. Some focused on the flip side of
feminist liberalism: humanism and cosmopolitanism. Maria Tse-
brikova, a radical Russian journalist from St. Petersburg like Bla-
gosvetlov, penned a cosmopolitan-meaning, culturally attuned yet
universalistic-prologue to The Subjection of Women in 1870. In her
feminist liberal approach to reading Mill, Tsebrikova paralleled her
contemporary, Martina Barros Borgono of Chile. Borgono translated
and introduced the first Spanish-language edition of The Subjection of
Women for the Revista de Santiago in 1872. Borgono subtly adopted
a cosmopolitan standpoint that was rooted, yet not entrenched, in
postcolonial Chile's mounting debates on women's education and
suffrage.74
These women from strikingly different political contexts-a de-
veloping Russia and a postcolonial Chile, independent from Spain
since 1818-illustrate how Mill's book can inspire feminist liber-
als to conceptualize women's human rights in culturally sensitive
and inclusive terms. Likewise, the Argentinian Elvira L6pez's 1901
doctoral dissertation, "El movimiento feminista," traced the in-
ternational feminist cause to "Inglaterra" and its Rights of Woman
yet charted the adaptation and flourishing of the movement across
the global South in the nineteenth century. Taken together, these
non-Western European intellectuals demonstrated the possibility
of challenging cultural bias in the feminist liberalisms inspired by
Wollstonecraft and Mill.
Borgono (1850-1941) was born in Santiago to an upper-class, po-
litically influential Chilean family. Her early education was at a school
in Santiago run by a British Protestant woman. Her uncle-the his-
torian and liberal political figure Diego Barros Arana-educated her
after the age of eleven. Her fiance, Augusto Orrego, edited the liberal
journal Revista de Santiago. With his encouragement and translation
assistance, the twenty-two-year-old boldly published her serialized
edition of Mill's Subjection of Women. Her feminist prologue to the
edition made her a radical figure among the typically conservative
Chilean women of her social class. It was one of the first public
feminist writings in Chilean culture, following the 1865 newspaper

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THE PROBLEM OF CULTURAL BIAS

articles in El eco de las senoras de Santiago by elite Catholic women
who sought the right to vote in order to defend their religion. Active
in the Chilean women's rights movement through the early twenti-
eth century, Borgono eventually joined the Catholic Conservative
Party, which, unlike the anticlerical Liberals, made women's suffrage
a legislative priority. Borgono lived to see the passage of women's
municipal suffrage in her nation's Congress in 1934, just seven years
before her death."
Tsebrikova (1835-1917) was born in Cronstadt to an Orthodox
Russian family with military ties. Her uncle, Nicolai Romanovich
Tsebrikov, educated her. He was a Decembrist whose "revolution-
ary liberalism" of the 182os had resulted in years of Siberian ban-
ishment. Tsebrikova became an editor of the leading leftist Russian
journal of letters, Notes of the Fatherland, in late 186os St. Petersburg.
In 1870, she published her foreword to The Subjection of Women and
organized evening classes for women on the topic of women's rights.
After a prolific writing career, which produced an internationally
known essay on Russian women for Theodore Stanton's The Woman
Question in Europe (1884), she was banished to Smolensk in 1890 by
Alexander III for sending him a letter criticizing his government's
"persecution of free-thought."76
Beyond the intriguing parallels in their upbringings and careers,
Borgono and Tsebrikova shared an interpretive approach to The
Subjection of Women, treating it as a philosophical text that invited
their own critical reflections on how best to advance women's human
rights. Tsebrikova only mentioned Mill to accentuate the political
differences between the commentator and the author. She criticized
Mill for not thoroughly investigating the solutions to the problem of
women's subjection: "Having proven the legitimacy of the woman's
right for equality, Mill proves the necessity to set her free. Here,
however, he stops halfway." She offered her own solution to women's
subjection: the enabling of women's employment outside the home,
regardless of marital status. After pointing out that "Mill has a differ-
ent solution for the problem," she showed that he primarily defended
unmarried or widowed women's work outside the home. Departing

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THE PROBLEM OF CULTURAL BIAS

from Mill, she contended that women were needed to "spread ideas
in remote and stagnated corners of Russia, to fight against preju-
dice by means of words and example, to create societies to enlighten
common people, to reduce prostitution, to invent new sources of
employment for women, create workshops for people." With an op-
timistic sense of the breadth of professional opportunity for women
in the future, she concluded: "There will be plenty of work; we only
need women who will do it. By contributing her time and talent to a
useful activity in the sphere of her choice, a woman will prove by ac-
tion that, as far as she is concerned, the time when she used to be an
odalisque or a slave is in the past." Although she sometimes used the
Orientalist imagery and Eurocentric ideas of progress that animated
both Mill's work and Russian debates on Westernization, Tsebrikova
took a feminist liberal stand in upholding the value of women's hu-
man rights for the enhancement of Russian women's freedom and
self-worth, not economic utility or other development outcomes."
Similarly, Borgono critically described Mill as "a serene and el-
evated thinker who, like all those who search for the truth, may
sometimes lose his way," then cited him only to support her own
distinctive views. She praised the empirical method of The Subjec-
tion of Women but indicated how its theory of civilizational progress
contributed to misrepresentations of women's condition and history.
She noted that Mill's binary between the "barbarity" of women's
subjection and their civilized liberation obscured the fact that some
women had an elevated social status in feudal society. It furthermore
downplayed the fact that feminist argumentation had a history:
"Ever since books have appeared in the world, women have made
their complaints be heard." Borgono also questioned the feminist
import of Mill's utilitarian arguments for civilizational progress:
"Stuart Mill, when describing the advantages society would reap
from the equal education of men and women, pauses to point out
... the stimulus which men would receive upon seeing the need to
justify their supposed superiority over women; and the more ben-
eficial influence the educated women would exercise over boys and
men as their mothers and wives." These consequences were suspect

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THE PROBLEM OF CULTURAL BIAS

to Borgono, as they focused on the utility of women's human rights
for males. She supplied an alternative list of advantages that derived
from women's education, including the development of women's ca-
pacity for deductive reason, the scientific progress of humanity, and
the egalitarian transformation of marriage and the family such that
"respect and mutual confidence will be the patrimony of all homes."
Turning Mill's liberal utilitarian ideas toward more robust feminist
ends, Borgono emphasized the value of women's human rights for
women first, and subsequently for humanity at large.78
Neither feminist liberal sought to mimic Mill's views, or the poli-
tics of the West, in developing her arguments for women's human
rights. While Tsebrikova to some degree assessed the need for wom-
en's rights in Russia in terms of the gap between it and the West,
she generally compared the two cultures in sociological not norma-
tive terms. For example, she adapted her ideas for reform to the fact
that Russia did not have a "society in the sense that Western Europe
understands the meaning of the word, i.e. in the sense of an indepen-
dent force with recognized influence." She also rooted her advocacy
for women's rights in the particular social situations of a variety of
Russian women. In arguing that "pregnancy and giving birth ... can
be an obstacle only to women who are sick and physically weak," she
cited the Russian "peasant women" who "work during the last days
of their pregnancy term," whose "health can't be compared to the
one of idle society ladies." Tsebrikova differentiated women's expe-
riences within her nation as part of her argument for generally im-
proving women's health, education, and employment options.79
Borgono's prologue was silent on Westernization and Spanish
colonialism and their impact on the woman question in Chile. She
claimed, "If one thing has encumbered the resolution of this prob-
lem it has been the tenacious insistence of considering it through the
inflamed prism of politics." She thus treated The Subjection of Women
as a philosophical point of departure, distinct from the prejudices of
any particular culture or political system. She grounded her argu-
ment for women's rights on a universalistic theory of human nature.
Following Mill, she argued that each human had the same right "to

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THE PROBLEM OF CULTURAL BIAS

develop oneself; to freely cultivate one's soul." Biological sex differ-
ences, however, meant that men and women would naturally excel
at different things. Borgono echoed The Subjection of Women's call
to make the human species more "rich" through the activation of
women's capabilities, with the twist that sexual difference would be
enhanced in this process.80
In partly transcending the limits of her political situation in the
name of advancing women's human rights, Borgono avoided direct
engagement of the postcolonial political context of the woman ques-
tion in Chile. Her recently independent nation was embroiled in
debates about the scope and purpose of representative government,
including the issues of men's and women's suffrage, in the 186os and
1870s. Her rebuttals of arguments against women's rights mirrored
the contemporary Chilean debates without directly mentioning
them. Cognizant of the "seditious" import of Mill's book for her con-
servative culture, Borgono made a strategic distinction between ad-
vocating for women's "social rights" to education, employment, and
self-development and women's formal political rights such as voting
and office holding. Although she later became an outspoken women's
suffragist, Borgono argued in her 1872 prologue that "women do not
call for these political rights; what she wants, what she needs, are her
social rights." This gradualist approach to reform made her theory
of women's rights fit the values of the Catholic Conservative Party,
which introduced the first women's suffrage bill in the Chilean Con-
gress in 1917.81
Tsebrikova's universalistic rights arguments, coupled with her at-
tention to the sociological context of Russian women's subjugation,
offered an alternative feminist liberal model of how to advocate for
women's human rights. Tsebrikova's feminist essays, which used rich
descriptions of the life of Russian women to support her arguments for
the rights of women in general, were published in nineteenth-century
Europe, Britain, and America. Tsebrikova's brand of feminist liber-
alism bridged Russia and the nascent international feminist move-
ment, which drew insights about women from a variety of countries
to marshal global support for the cause.82

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THE PROBLEM OF CULTURAL BIAS

The prioritization of women's human rights can direct feminist
liberals to take a more cosmopolitan, or universalistic yet culturally
attuned, perspective on the problem of women's subjection, seeing
it as a matter of global-not just local-justice. As Tsebrikova put
it, "The so-called women's issue is the issue of enjoying rights and
of the liberation of half of humankind, and, thus, it is the issue of
a reasonable organization of life for humankind." The comparison
of Borgono's foreword and Tsebrikova's foreword to The Subjection
of Women demonstrates how the former developed a philosophically
cosmopolitan yet nationally salient feminist liberalism, while the lat-
ter developed a sociologically rich yet internationally salient femi-
nist liberalism. In theorizing women's rights as a vital part of a just
scheme of human development, Borgono and Tsebrikova gravitated
toward the feminist humanist side rather than the liberal imperial
side of The Subjection of Women.83
At the turn of the twentieth century around the globe, the term
"feminism" came to be used to describe the social movements de-
voted to specific women's rights issues, such as suffrage, or to the
general liberation of women from patriarchal oppression. L6pez of
Argentina was one of the first authors from the Americas to use the
term "feminist" to describe the women's movements of her home-
land and other nations. She was also one of the first historians to
focus on the international character of feminism. Submitted to the
faculty of "filosophia y letras" at the University of Buenos Aires,
her 1901 doctoral dissertation, "El movimiento feminista," assessed
contemporary debates on women's issues across Europe, British In-
dia, Australia, Africa, and Latin America, with a chapter devoted to
Argentina. L6pez traced the historical roots of international fin de
siecle feminism, describing "Inglaterra" as the origin of "la idea fem-
inista." She cited St. Thomas More, Mary Astell, and, with greatest
emphasis, Wollstonecraft as the crucial philosophical moments in
the English origins of the now global idea of feminism.84
Though only discussed twice, Wollstonecraft functioned as the
linchpin in the dissertation's development of the English and Ameri-

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THE PROBLEM OF CULTURAL BIAS

can idea of feminism. Representing her work as breaking from the
typically abstract debates about the equality of the sexes that trans-
pired during the querelle des femmes of early modern Europe and
its Latin American colonies, L6pez praised Wollstonecraft's "famous
Vindication" for directly "calling for freedom of sex instruction and
political rights." She described Wollstonecraft as pitting her philo-
sophical views on women's rights to a "complete and solid educa-
tion" and "work and political freedom" against the retrograde views
of Rousseau. L6pez upheld Wollstonecraft as defending women's en-
titlement to the rights that "the [French] Revolution acknowledged
as the heritage of all humanity." She indicated the radical and farsee-
ing quality of Wollstonecraft's theory of women's rights, highlight-
ing her call "for free access to a career in medicine and the right to
vote, all of which makes this work truly remarkable and advanced for
the time it was written."85
L6pez compared Wollstonecraft's conception of the sexes' equal
rights to civil and political liberties to the current "English expres-
sion of feminism," which throughout her dissertation she associated
with Mill. Both Wollstonecraft and the current school of English
feminism-with all their "bold aspirations"-were "not exempt
from good sense." L6pez concluded with an argument about Woll-
stonecraft's substantial philosophical and political legacies in the
United States. Her practical egalitarianism made her views appeal-
ing to the "religious community of Quakers" in early nineteenth-
century America. They appropriated this dissenting Christian strand
of English radicalism for the arguments of the U.S. abolition and
women's rights movements.86
Despite this favorable account of Wollstonecraft's legacies, L6-
pez's dissertation spent more time assessing the influence of Mill
whose women's suffrage advocacy in the British Parliament and in
The Subjection of Women were widely discussed and emulated in late
nineteenth-century Latin America. The popularity of Mill's Sub-
jection of Women had helped to reinvigorate international attention
to Wollstonecraft's Rights of Woman in the 189os. "El movimiento

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THE PROBLEM OF CULTURAL BIAS

feminista" demonstrated that L6pez was certainly familiar with the
arguments of the Rights of Woman, like her fellow Argentinian and
women's rights advocate Ernesto Quesada.87
L6pez's overview of Wollstonecraft's philosophy was short but
symbolically central to the story she told about the international and
intercultural character of feminism and the place of the Argentinian
women's movement within it. She succinctly yet precisely "trans-
lated" Wollstonecraft's philosophy into fin de siecle Argentinian cul-
ture. L6pez crafted a careful account of Wollstonecraft's ideas and
their early influence in the Americas to ground the various national-
level feminist movements, North and South, in a common ancestral
source. Moreover, her symbolic use of Wollstonecraft connected the
contemporary "movimiento feminista" with the intellectual tradi-
tions of Britain and Europe, in a global narrative woven with diverse
cultural threads.
Rooted Cosmopolitan Responses to Global Patriarchal Problems
When we think of roots, we tend to think of our families, our com-
munities, and our prejudices shaped by our upbringings. A case in
point is my own roots in a small town in northern Maine. Preju-
dices abound in this village not more than seven hundred strong.
The well-bred Congregationalists-and a few Baptists who snuck
into their neighborhood-look down on the rest of the town from
the Victorian turrets of "Christian Hill." Farther afield is "French
Flats," the residential area of the despised Acadian Catholics who
could afford to move to the edge of town. For those too poor to es-
cape, there is "Tin Can Alley." Frenchmen are said to squander their
time kicking empty beer cans on the streets near the small Catholic
mission church, instead of working their way into heaven with the re-
spectable (and profitable) New England work ethic. A town as white
as homogenized milk, it attracted the Ku Klux Klan to its parades
in the 1920s-presumably to intimidate anyone who thought the
culture was too plain. It was sometimes called a "one Indian town,"
shoring up the community's sense of togetherness by generously ac-

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THE PROBLEM OF CULTURAL BIAS

knowledging the presence of a single outsider within its limits. The
local Native American tribe, based thirty miles away, was pegged as
incapable of self-government. Locals still made boastful claims of
exotic Native American ancestry, which they safely positioned in the
distant past.
Reading this origin story, you might guess that I identify with
none of the groups I mention but do share some of their faults. De-
scended from a long line of church-hopping Yankees on one side and
recent Irish Catholic immigrants on the other, I was raised to think
of myself as serving the poor and huddled masses, while wistfully ad-
miring the turrets on Christian Hill. My roots have certainly shaped
my prejudices, but they have also endowed me with a strong (though
often misguided) sense of social justice.
Such awareness of the rootedness of prejudice, in our psyches and
our histories, is not an excuse for complacent acceptance of it, or
worse, imposing it upon other people. Wollstonecraft and Mill were
aware of the moral problem of prejudice, especially in its patriarchal
form, yet they persisted in using stereotypes of non-Western Eu-
ropean cultures to fortify their rhetoric for women's human rights.
Their lack of critical ethical concern for the negative effects of their
use of such prejudicial rhetoric on other people and cultures is far
more troubling than the fact of prejudice inhabiting their (or other
human) minds.
Wollstonecraft's and Mill's abstract arguments for women's hu-
man rights are global in scope-they apply to all women, regardless
of social distinctions. Their concrete rhetoric for women's human
rights, however, sometimes excluded or caricatured women from
Eastern cultures, or treated women and their rights as tools for de-
velopment and Western civilizational progress. Given the ethical
problems with this argumentative framework, the ultimate value of
the Rights of Woman and The Subjection of Women may be their ability
to generate a variety of feminist philosophical responses that push us
beyond their liberal imperialism toward their feminist humanism.
Through a genealogy of their early international receptions, we
have seen how Wollstonecraft and Mill contributed to both the

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THE PROBLEM OF CULTURAL BIAS

imperial and the humanist sides of feminist liberalism. The insidious
power of their Western-biased model of women's human rights ar-
gumentation surfaced in its adaptation and reproduction across tem-
poral, cultural, religious, and political contexts. In the postcolonial
United States, we saw Christian women such as Adams, Crocker, and
Grimk6 advocating women's human rights with anti-Muslim stereo-
types. In a developing Russia of the 186os, we witnessed the radical
journalist Blagosvetlov buy into the Orientalist binaries of the West-
ernization debate. In India and South Africa at the turn of the twen-
tieth century, we found colonial intellectuals-both the indigenous
Kanitkar and the second-generation settler Schreiner-wrestling
with prejudiced rhetoric against their local cultures as they struggled
with the woman question within the constraints set by imperialism.
By bringing these thinkers into conversation with each other as
well as Wollstonecraft and Mill, I have sketched a model for how
the history of political thought can foster a cross-cultural dialogue
on women's human rights. Contemporary political theorists have
contended that such cross-cultural dialogues inspire critical yet sen-
sitive reflection on cultural differences and how they shape the ethi-
cal implementation of universalistic feminist arguments. By looking
back to the Western and non-Western respondents to the Rights of
Woman and The Subjection of Women, we have discovered not only the
flaws in Wollstonecraft's and Mill's forms of feminist liberalism but
also the potential of such critical analysis to strip them of pernicious
prejudices and thereby give their arguments a truly global reach.88
Speaking from non-Western European standpoints, the feminist
liberal voices of Tsebrikova, Borgono, and L6pez show the power
of "rooted," or culturally attuned, cosmopolitan approaches to the
global problems of patriarchy and other kinds of social prejudice.
Tsebrikova and Borgono produced two varieties of feminist liberal
readings of The Subjection of Women: the former's sociologically rich
yet internationally salient descriptions of Russian women's experi-
ences of inequality, and the latter's cosmopolitan attempt to univer-
salize arguments for women's human rights without losing touch with
the realities of her postcolonial Chilean political context. Likewise,

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THE PROBLEM OF CULTURAL BIAS

L6pez's history of "el movimiento feminista" situated her Argentin-
ian branch of the movement within a global cause that partly sprung
from, but quickly adapted and diversified, the ideas of Wollstone-
craft and Mill. The comparative study of the three writers' responses
to Wollstonecraft and Mill shows the philosophical fecundity of the
Rights of Woman and The Subjection of Women, as much for, as despite,
their Western biases. Most important of all, it illustrates the rich
diversity of feminist perspectives that emerge from non-Western
European political contexts.
In "going global," contemporary feminists have converged on the
idea that encouraging women's empowerment in the Two-Thirds
World begins with listening to their stories, their struggles, and their
hopes for justice. Like the nineteenth-century abolitionist feminist
tradition of which Mill was a part, twenty-first-century feminists
have highlighted the cross-cultural moral importance of conceptu-
alizing women as subjects with capabilities for self-direction, self-
narration, and other forms of agency. Similarly, Mill wrote in The
Subjection of Women that justice for women and humanity at large
would not commence "until women themselves have told all they
have to tell." Studying the personal narratives of women and other
historically disadvantaged groups is not enough to ground contem-
porary feminist attempts to theorize global justice, however. The
philosophical voices of women, colonized peoples, non-Western
Europeans, and peoples of the global South also have a place in the
resurgence of interest in putting gender front and center in debates
on global justice.89
A like-minded convergence of ideas has occurred within the con-
temporary philosophical debate on cosmopolitanism. Martha Nuss-
baum's early turn toward a Stoic conception of cosmopolitanism
with its almost crystalline rational abstraction-has given way to a
cosmopolitan ethic rooted in those human emotions and local ties
that motivate humans to promote social justice. Kwame Anthony
Appiah pinpointed the origins of his own conception of rooted cos-
mopolitanism in his family's deep personal connections to Ghana
and Britain, the respective homelands of his father and mother.

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THE PROBLEM OF CULTURAL BIAS

These roots gave him a global sense of citizenship, in which "local
partialities and universal morality" do not necessarily conflict. As the
multicultural theorists Will Kymlicka and Kathryn Walker have put
it, "Although cosmopolitanism is usually understood as requiring us
to put aside our more local attachments, a new school of thought ar-
gues that the outward-bound cosmopolitan perspective requires and
involves the very roots it claims to transcend." The emerging con-
sensus is that thinking globally about justice requires and involves
critical recognition of roots while resisting the prejudicial tendency
to reduce people to them.90
Wollstonecraft wrote eloquently about the role of the natural af-
fections that arise from family life and local schooling to inspire a
sense of benevolence toward other creatures, both human and other
animals. Mill disclosed to the world that it was his love and respect
for his wife, Harriet, that inspired him to write his great treatises on
individual liberty and women's human rights. In their abstract phi-
losophies and their personal lives, we find materials for building
from the ground up-a rooted cosmopolitan approach to global
justice.
Some scholars have attempted to explain away the cultural preju-
dices of past philosophers such as Montesquieu and Mill, by refer-
ence to the trends of their times or through allegorical readings of
their symbolic deployments of the Orient. Such backward-looking
attempts to explain and justify their biases ignore the forward-
looking ethical problems concerning how such biases gain traction in
the real world. I hold Wollstonecraft and Mill accountable for their
prejudicial rhetoric toward non-Western European peoples not only
because of its moral conflicts with their universalistic theories of hu-
man rights but also because of the publicity and influence of this con-
tradictory rhetorical model. On the other hand, I resist the righteous
urge to reduce them to their prejudices or dismiss the value of their
philosophies on the basis of such a reductive reading of their work.91
Contextual explanations of prejudicial rhetoric (such as the Ori-
entalist imagery found in the feminist texts of Wollstonecraft and
Mill) do not justify the idiom's use in that context or any other con-

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THE PROBLEM OF CULTURAL BIAS

text. Furthermore, to focus on the contextual explanation without
exploring the ethical implications of the rhetoric is to treat histori-
cal context as though it is static or isolatable in a moment in time.
This interpretative approach proceeds as if contexts do not beget
other contexts or overlap with other contexts. It proceeds as if hu-
man agents are simply reducible to a moment in time, rather than
empirically understanding their agency as shaped and constrained by
a variety of overlapping contexts (historic and current).
Understanding the ethical implications of human rights rhetoric
is not primarily about determining intention and blame in a case
where the bad consequences are known, such as in a mass murder
trial. Theorizing the ethics of human rights rhetoric is rather about
articulating the practical need for more thoughtful use of rhetoric in
light of the moral commitments of the human rights tradition. Yet
special attention must be paid to the negative (and sometimes un-
foreseen or unintended) consequences of previous rhetorical models,
such as the feminist Orientalism of Wollstonecraft and Mill.
Abstractly seen, Wollstonecraft's and Mill's moral contradiction
is found in their manipulation of the salience of negative images of
women in particular cultures even though they had theorized the
damaging consequences of such stereotypes in the case of women in
general. Wollstonecraft and Mill both prioritized the intrinsic value
of persons as part of their abstract justifications for human rights;
and, consistent with this guiding ethical principle, they also made
consequentialist arguments in favor of the good effects of promoting
human rights for each and all. I take a similarly consistent, two-tier
approach in critiquing the ethical implications of their culturally
biased rhetoric for human rights. If one cares for the human per-
son, one ought to create respectful rhetorical models concerning the
human person. One's language ought to reflect one's human rights
values. The beneficial effects of that rhetoric (politically strategic
benefits, for example) are always morally secondary to the primary
obligation to uphold the intrinsic value of the person. The first con-
cern trumps the second in cases where the second in any way com-
promises the first.

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THE PROBLEM OF CULTURAL BIAS

All this goes to show that there is no perfect separation of intention
and consequence in practical ethics, as both Wollstonecraft's capa-
cious metaphysics and Mill's complex consequentialism freely allow.
The intention to create rhetoric that reflects human rights values is
a consequence of having such values in the first place. The problem
of cultural bias means that humans will have their moral blind spots,
even the greatest philosophical minds. Given their human rights com-
mitments and their actions as public advocates, Wollstonecraft and
Mill opened the door to their readers' critical engagement of their
use of rhetoric that compromised the moral integrity of those com-
mitments and actions. Over time, this dialogical process of reader
responses to the original texts moves forward the creation of new
rhetorical models, including those that challenge cultural bias-if
not fully, at least in a partial yet sufficiently ethical way.
The rooted perspectives of Wollstonecraft's and Mill's feminist
liberal readers-from St. Petersburg to Santiago to Buenos Aires
gave the Rights of Woman and The Subjection of Women new, inter-
cultural meanings. Tsebrikova, Borgono, and L6pez were not per-
fectly impartial in their cosmopolitan approaches to feminist global
justice, nor did they strive to be. The goal of their feminist liberal-
isms was to approach issues of global justice from their rooted stand-
points in order to achieve a partial yet sufficiently ethical transcen-
dence of deeply felt and hurtful prejudices toward women and other
oppressed groups. Their status as non-Western European women
made them attuned to how gender could not be treated in isolation
from other forms of socialization, including nationality, race, ethnic-
ity, class, and religion.
Since it is neither possible nor desirable to fully transcend these
intersecting prejudices, we need to find ways of working with them
that respect the integrity of other people and cultures. Wollstone-
craft, Mill, and their international interlocutors identified patriarchy
as a global moral and political problem for humanity. It was not just a
problem for women but rather a human problem. It was not solely
a culturally specific issue but rather a universal moral problem that
took on different cultural forms.

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THE PROBLEM OF CULTURAL BIAS

To best respond to this global yet varied problem of patriarchy,
we need to avoid reducing other people to the cultural differences
that we are raised to see between "us" and "them." A culturally sensi-
tive rhetoric of women's human rights is one such cosmopolitan step
toward a feminist and intercultural theory of global justice. In the
fifth and concluding chapter, we shall see how the personal, human
stories of Wollstonecraft and Mill-especially their autobiographi-
cal writings about love and loss-helped to inspire such a rooted
cosmopolitan ethic in feminist thinkers from around the world dur-
ing the nineteenth, twentieth, and now twenty-first centuries.

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HUMAN STORIES
WOLLSTONECRAFT, MILL, AND THE LITERATURE
OF HUMAN RIGHTS
(Auto)biography as Human Rights Advocacy
Not solely philosophers of women's human rights, Mary Woll-
stonecraft and John Stuart Mill were also literary innovators. They
creatively appealed to personal narratives as forms of evidence
that made their allegations of women's human rights more legiti-
mate and persuasive in the court of public opinion. Long before
the fact-gathering and testimonial approach of the human rights
literature-which is based on witness, transcripts, reports, and em-
pirical studies of crimes against humanity since the Second World
War Wollstonecraft and Mill used personal witness to shape a new
genre, the literature of human rights.'
Wollstonecraft thinly fictionalized her (and her friend Fanny's
and her sister Bess's) experiences of patriarchal oppression in craft-
ing her novels Mary, a Fiction (1788) and Maria, or the Wrongs of
Woman (1798). In her Letters Written during a Short Residence in Swe-
den, Norway, and Denmark (1796), she turned the drama of her re-
cent breakup with Gilbert Imlay into a psychological subtext for her
philosophical meditations on the possibility of achieving a "single
life with dignity." She also developed a distinctive first-person femi-
nist voice across her oeuvre. Speaking with the "I" and the "We,"
she began to make claims for women's human rights in a solidaristic
fashion, seeking to unite herself with all women ("O my sisters") in
the cause of "JUSTICE" for their sex.2
In his 1873 Autobiography and other memoirs, Mill's Romantic
representation of his unconventional relationship with Harriet Tay-
lor established another literary model for making women's human
rights arguments. By poignantly recalling Taylor's life and impact on
others, including the composition of his own great works of political
philosophy, Mill legitimated his human rights claims on behalf of

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HUMAN STORIES

women. In Western and non-Western cultures, his male and female
readers sympathized with his remembrance of his remarkable wife,
and they upheld the relationship as a standard for egalitarian reform
of women's status inside and outside the institution of marriage. Es-
pecially among male intellectuals and legislators, Mill reinforced his
moral authority as a women's rights advocate by virtue of his partial
adherence to the customs of marriage while seeking to reform the
institution from within.
Mill's disturbing personal experiences of patriarchal conventions,
such as Taylor's enduring sense of obligation to her first husband de-
spite moving out of his home, made his feminism more convincing,
perhaps especially for other men. He confided in his Autobiography
the reasons why he tolerated his extramarital predicament with Tay-
lor for almost two decades: "Ardently as I should have aspired to this
complete union of our lives at any time in the course of my existence
at which it had been practicable, I, as much as my wife, would far
rather have foregone that privilege for ever, than have owed it to the
premature death of one for whom I had the sincerest respect, and
she the strongest affection." Mill's stoic denial of any wishful think-
ing for the early death of the man who stood between him and his
love seems to belie the pain that no doubt characterized the lives of
all three adults involved in this unusual domestic arrangement. Mill,
alongside John Taylor and other men, had been indirectly though
profoundly hurt by the patriarchal system that directly harmed
women. Yet by bravely recognizing men's share of this emotional
burden-not so much through abstract philosophical arguments as
through messy and complex personal disclosures-Mill could make
patriarchal marriage an even more urgent problem for the human
species to confront and solve.3
Wollstonecraft's and Mill's literary writings were as much auto-
biographical as biographical. Because Wollstonecraft and Mill wove
their subjective experiences of their selves and their relationships with
beloved others into intersubjective stories of love and loss, these texts
are best understood as (auto)biographies. Their life writings blurred
the lines between self and other, author and subject, autobiography

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HUMAN STORIES

and biography, hagiography and history, and sometimes even fiction
and fact in order to better convey the social context, interpersonal
ethics, and emotional basis of their human rights claims. By grap-
pling with the complexity of these literary works, readers of their
(auto)biographies were more likely to become engaged with, if not
sympathetic to, their moral goals. The stories of Wollstonecraft and
Mill had the narrative sophistication and emotional power to become
universal human stories, capable of moving people to care about
the neglected cause of women's human rights. Indeed, contempo-
rary psychology has confirmed the value of some of their literary
instincts. In 2013, the journal Science published a study showing that
people who read sophisticated literary fiction, rather than nonfiction
or popular fiction, are more capable of expressing sympathy toward
others and understanding complex social relationships.4
Wollstonecraft's and Mill's contributions to the genre of (auto)
biography indicate the power of literacy and literature for human
rights activism. The spread of literacy enables people to read, write,
and speak about self, other, and their relationships with one another,
on a broader scale than cultures with only oral traditions or an elite
literary class. As Lynn Hunt has argued in her book Inventing Human
Rights (2008), the proliferation of novel writing and reading in late
eighteenth-century Western culture gave traction to the emergent
idea of human rights: "Learning to empathize opened the path to hu-
man rights." Sensitive and compelling novels, such as Samuel Rich-
ardson's Clarissa (1748), Laurence Sterne's series Tristram Shandy
(1759-67) and Sentimental Journey (1768), and Jean-Jacques Rous-
seau's Julie (76 1), stirred the sympathy of people with their tales of
strong yet ill-fated women, and unlucky but stalwart men. Reading,
or just hearing others discuss, these and other novels taught men and
women to feel more empathy for each other as human equals. Sterne
even referred to the "rights of humanity" to which Tristram Shandy
was entitled as a "homunculus" in his mother's womb-albeit with
irony if not sarcasm.5
Eighteenth-century epistolary novels, like the later (auto)bio-
graphical writings of Wollstonecraft and Mill, broke down the di-

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HUMAN STORIES

vide between literature and history in a way that allowed readers to
strongly identify with their heroes and heroines as though they were
real people. A common trope of Richardson and Rousseau was to use
an editorial frame story, by which the author represented the novel as
an (actual) collection of letters by the (supposedly real) protagonists.
Although Wollstonecraft remained skeptical of some of the gender
messages that these eighteenth-century novels directed at women,
she was sufficiently moved by the stories of Julie, Clarissa, Tristram,
and Yorick to allude to them in her private and published letters. Her
epistolary memoir Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden,
Norway, and Denmark referred to Sterne's Sentimental Journey and
shared its lightly fictionalized (or heavily edited) approach to autobi-
ography. Moving beyond the merely "pleasing" female characters of
Rousseau and Richardson, Wollstonecraft was inspired to write two
novels with new "models" of "thinking" women who "wish to speak
for themselves" and "not to be an echo." But it was hard to com-
pletely break ties with her literary mentors. The heroine of Maria is
deluded into believing she is in love as a result of reading Rousseau's
Julie, before she comes to her senses.6
Mill, too, was indebted to late eighteenth-century literature, es-
pecially Rousseau's 1782 Confessions as received by William Words-
worth and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Alongside these authors he
had an interest in autobiography as the genre best suited for relaying
the tough yet vital journey of self-discovery. He even quoted Rous-
seau's Julie in an 1831 letter to the Examiner that defended the Royal
Society of Literature's provision of publically funded stipends for
literary writers such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge. For the state to
renounce this duty would be to establish a dangerous "maxim" that
would in turn produce "ten thousand" bad actions: not just the eco-
nomic deprivation of the nation's best authors but, worst of all, the
cultural deprivation of society. The political import of literature was
clear to the young Mill.7
By modeling (auto)biographical approaches to women's human
rights advocacy, Wollstonecraft's and Mill's literary works raise a
series of epistemological and moral questions for their readers. Is it

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HUMAN STORIES

legitimate to use the human stories-of our families, our friends, and
ourselves-as evidence to support human rights claims? Do appeals
to subjective, or even fictionalized, stories undermine the truth and
universal reach of human rights arguments? Finally, can the use of
human stories be consistent with the practical ethics of human rights
activism-especially the obligation to respect the intrinsic value of
the individual human being? It would appear that using personal sto-
ries to defend human rights could exploit either the emotions of the
audience or, worse, the very lives on which the stories are based.
On the question of whether to use human stories in human rights
advocacy, contemporary feminist theorists have generally affirmed
the legitimacy of this literary and legal strategy. Personal testi-
mony is a necessary form of evidence for documenting violations of
women's human rights. For decades, the radical feminist legal theo-
rist Catharine MacKinnon has chronicled the wide range of women's
personal experiences of sexual violence as a way of raising awareness
of the depth and breadth of women's subjection around the globe.
By recording women's personal testimony of sexual violence, she
has also contributed to the prosecution of rape as a weapon of war,
especially in the Bosnian War. In another documentary approach,
Martha Nussbaum interwove Women and Human Development with
biographical portraits of two lower-caste Indian women whom she
met, interviewed, and befriended as part of her field research for
the book. These two personal stories gave weight to her arguments
for the necessity of listening to local women's self-interpretations
of what is needed for improving human development in a particu-
lar region or nation. There is a growing consensus among feminists
that only by building into theories of justice a plurality of women's
perspectives can we even begin to enhance women's sense of "agency
and well-being" in general. The universality of human rights claims
is partly established by the personal testimonials of women and other
historically oppressed groups who need rights in order to flourish.8
On the question of whether human stories can compromise the
truth of human rights claims, there is some justified suspicion of the
attempts of advocates to closely identify with the people whom they

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are striving to help. Deep empathy-whether purported, attempted,
or actual-can be politically dangerous because of its personal biases.
Unduly sympathetic reformers may fail to demarcate a clear space for
objective reporting of human rights violations. Given the widespread
disregard of the scale of massive crimes against humanity such as the
genocidal rape of women during the Bosnian War, human rights ad-
vocates have a special obligation to improve knowledge of the facts
of these atrocities. Fact-finding may at times require the adoption of
a cooler professional demeanor, or even the sacrifice of an emotional
sense of involvement in the case at hand. Any storytelling, including
(auto)biography and fiction, that blurs the line between author and
subject will not achieve this kind of empirically verifiable objectivity,
but it can foster a kind of intersubjective perspective that inspires
sympathy for the plight of others. Both elements of human rights
advocacy-fact-finding work and sympathy-inspiring literature
can productively work in tandem. If they are sufficiently grounded in
the culture of the local community, activists might achieve the kind
of "multisited" perspective necessary for choosing the right times,
places, and people for gathering hard facts or composing quality lit-
erary reflections on the issues at hand.9
Finally, there is a potential internal conflict between the moral
purpose of the literature of human rights and its reliance on bio-
graphical narratives. By building human rights arguments on another
person's story, the author risks treating the subject of her biography
as a means to an end, rather than as an end in herself. A biography
would not appear to promote human rights if it does not respect its
human subject as such-a person with the capability to tell her own
story.
The most influential exponents of the latter line of argument are
postcolonial feminist critics of Western liberalism, such as Gayatri
Spivak, Chandra Mohanty, and Inderpal Grewal. In their visionary
work from the 198os and 199os, they identified the moral problems
with Western liberal attempts to "speak for," rather than listen to,
the subaltern and oppressed in the developing, democratizing, and
non-Western world. They theorized why the voices of women in the

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HUMAN STORIES

Two-Thirds World had to be heard and incorporated into interna-
tional dialogue on human rights and social justice, in order for such
dialogue to be inclusive and egalitarian in process and outcomes.
With their grassroots and democratic approach to theorizing the
empowerment of women worldwide, they paved the way for femi-
nists in general to frame their human rights approaches to global
justice around the voices, stories, and self-interpretations of women
beyond the West.'0
In response to this postcolonial critique, some feminists have ad-
vocated a qualitative social scientific approach to surveying and in-
terviewing women of the global South. Brooke Ackerly and Jacqui
True, for example, accept ethnographic research (such as formal or
informal personal interviews) within a single case study (such as an
event, city, or country) as a valid moral platform for alleging and
defending women's human rights. The key to good single-case femi-
nist ethnography is sufficient attention to local detail, cultural sen-
sitivity, and transparency about the researcher's outsider standpoint
within the group she is observing. Other feminists, such as Nancy
Hirschmann, have simply been transparent about the inescapable
interpretive dimension of using the stories of other people as a re-
source for theorizing issues of justice. Hirschmann insightfully ex-
plained the rationale behind this hermeneutical approach in her book
The Subject of Liberty (2003): "These stories are not the result of sys-
tematic interviews in the tradition of qualitative empirical political
science. But neither are they fiction, in the hallowed philosopher's
tradition of creating hypothetical examples to illustrate philosophical
points ... I do not offer any of them as systematic 'proof' of women's
experiences, or of their oppression or freedom; but at the same time,
I think it is important to acknowledge that the stories I relate are
'real,' that they are not the fantasies of angry feminists, out to blame
men for all the evils of the world, but rather represent the experi-
ences of real, live women." In sharing the stories of a diverse range
of female humans-whether in ethnographic or anecdotal form
feminists have responded to the postcolonial demand for recognition
of girls' and women's powers of self-representation and self-direction

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in the Two-Thirds World. By incorporating these voices, feminists
have expanded the reach of human rights arguments, making them
worthy of the descriptors "universal" and "international.""
By attending to the epistemological and ethical issues surround-
ing the use of human stories for human rights advocacy, contem-
porary feminist theorists have sketched a philosophical justification
for a genre with a global history. As we shall see, Wollstonecraft's
and Mill's (auto)biographical writings have inspired people since the
nineteenth century to feel sympathy for the cause of women's human
rights and rethink the principles of justice that govern their socie-
ties in light of this feminist commitment. From the United States
to Japan, and from Prague to Maharashtra, people retold and some-
times even relived Wollstonecraft's stories of heroic womanhood and
Mill's stories of spiritual marriage, in new iterations of the old narra-
tives. Wollstonecraft, Mill, and their international followers together
forged a literary approach to women's human rights argumentation
that still resonates in twenty-first-century feminist struggles from
South Korea to Pakistan.
Wollstonecraft's Stories of Heroic Womanhood
Wollstonecraft's novel Mary, a Fiction (1788) initiated the (auto)
biographical and literary trends in her writing career. She partly
based the plot of the novel on her journey to Portugal in 1785. The
twenty-six-year-old Wollstonecraft sailed for Lisbon to care for her
recently married, pregnant best friend Fanny Blood, who tragically
died as a result of childbirth soon after Wollstonecraft's arrival. The
"Heroine of this Fiction," the eponymous Mary, is a composite of
the author Wollstonecraft, her sister Bess, who was recently sepa-
rated from her husband, and Fanny. Wollstonecraft was unmarried
at the time she wrote the novel, yet she imagined her namesake Mary
struggling to realize independence within the conventions of patri-
archal marriage as she strove to aid her dying friend, Ann. Just prior
to her trip to Lisbon, Wollstonecraft had assisted her sister Bess in
leaving a loveless and possibly sexually exploitative marriage. The

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struggle of her "Heroine" Mary to avoid a similar marriage trap, in
which she would be forced to give her body to a man she loathed, was
the dominant narrative thread of the novel."
Although the protagonist Mary was married when she arrived in
Lisbon, she "never had any particular attachment" to her husband.
Tellingly, she had contracted with him to live apart for a year prior to
their living together as husband and wife. The unstated implication
was that the marriage was unconsummated. Mary's feelings of "dis-
gust" for her husband suggested that she would have liked to avoid
this inevitability as long as possible. Mary's father had arranged this
loveless marriage for the sake of preserving the family estate. As the
third-person narrator dryly observed, "While this important mat-
ter was settling, Mary was otherwise employed." The "heroine" was
caring for her ailing friend, Ann, and her impoverished family when
her father chose to broker this marital deal that cost her her youthful
freedom."
While in Lisbon, Mary chastely fell in love with a wan, pious "man
of learning," Henry, with whom she shared passionate conversations
about theology, philosophy, and the meaning of life. When Ann's
health took a turn for the worse, guilt overcame Mary as if she had
committed a "crime" in letting her relationship with Henry divert
even one of her thoughts from Ann's needs. When Ann died while
Mary helped her cross the room, the bereaved friend found herself
overwhelmed with anguish. Her grief "disturbed her reasoning fac-
ulties; she seemed stunned by it; unable to reflect, or even to feel her
misery." After she recovered her reason and senses after the initial
shock of loss, Mary reflected counterfactually: "Had Ann lived, it is
probable she would never have loved Henry so fondly; but if she had,
she could not have talked of her passion to any human creature." Emo-
tionally torn between her love for Ann and her love for Henry, Mary
understood passion and mutual confidence as the bonds she shared
with both. By confiding her passions to each friend, especially her
grief for the loss of Ann to her new love, Henry, Mary learned to talk
her way through an evolving story of her ongoing self-interpretation
as an independent, even rebellious, married woman.'4

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Despite the heroine's deft navigation of her personal tragedies
and charting of "strange conduct" in friendship and love, the novel
ultimately forces us, the readers, to confront the grim realities of
eighteenth-century patriarchal marriage. Three months after Henry's
death, social pressure compelled Mary to reunite with her husband.
Her "disgust" at seeing him again was so strong that she fainted.
She negotiated another year's hiatus from cohabitation, but the time
abroad flew by, and soon they were living together: "She gave him
her hand-the struggle was almost more than she could endure."
Mary sacrificed her sense of bodily integrity to enter into a marriage
that disgusted her. Without the motive of love of a living human
being, Mary lost her wily determination to evade the marriage she
hated. While the laws of entail and coverture set into motion this
tragic, forced choice, the devastation of her double loss of Ann and
Henry propelled it. Mary could only waste away her last years on
earth imagining she was "hastening to that world where there is nei-
ther marrying, nor giving in marriage.""
The radical theological message of Mary, a Fiction was the same as
its feminist message: marriage, as practiced in the eighteenth cen-
tury, was a profoundly bad deal for women. Even the most heroic
and resourceful of them could not escape its insidious spillover ef-
fects into personal health, well-being, and, most important, freedom.
Looking forward to a heaven without sex or marriage thus emerged
as the only complete exit option available to women of her time.
Wollstonecraft's autobiographical Letters Written during a Short
Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark-initially published in
London, Delaware, Hamburg, and Altona in 1796-had as its im-
plicit topic her tragic romance with Gilbert Imlay. Wollstonecraft
had met this American trader in Paris in the spring of 1793, during
the radical stage of the Revolution. They quickly fell in love and en-
tered into a "republican" (or unofficial) marriage later that summer.
Around this time Wollstonecraft became pregnant with her first
child, whom she named after her best friend, Fanny. Imlay's infideli-
ties and other deficiencies as a provider for his family eventually led
Wollstonecraft to leave the relationship in the fall of 1795-

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HUMAN STORIES

Around the time that she ended her first (unofficial) marriage,
Wollstonecraft wrote her Letters. Based on her journey to Scandi-
navia to assist Imlay in a business matter in the summer of 1795, her
Letters reworked her correspondence with her husband into a mas-
terpiece of autobiographical literature. The Letters did not mention
Imlay by name, but readers in Wollstonecraft's tight-knit intellectual
circles in France and Britain would have grasped the domestic prem-
ise for this ostensible travel memoir. The resultant text is what the
smitten William Godwin called "a book calculated to make a man
in love with its author."16 More important than its inspiration of her
second, last, and only official husband to fall in love with her was the
book's role in securing Wollstonecraft's fresh sense of self in the pro-
cess of her unofficial yet brutally painful divorce. Wollstonecraft's
authorship of the letters that became her Letters was bound between
the two bleakest moments in her life: her suicide attempts in May
and October 1795. These attempts took place immediately before
and following her journey to Scandinavia. Both were occasioned by
discoveries of Imlay's ongoing infidelities.
Wollstonecraft's reworking of the letters into the Letters in the
aftermath of her second suicide attempt meant that the autobio-
graphical composition served as a midwife to the rebirthing of her
selfhood. Within the literature of human rights, we might describe
the Letters as a literary exercise in personal agency and its neces-
sary assertion of a basic human right to life itself. Wollstonecraft's
Shakespearean rendering of a meditative experience in a Norwegian
church, as she took in the startling view of mummified corpses, pro-
vided a case in point: "Life, what art thou? Where goes this breath?
this I, so much alive? In what element will it mix, giving or receiving
fresh energy?-What will break the enchantment of animation?
For worlds, I would not see a form I loved-enbalmed in my heart
thus sacrilegiously handled!-Pugh! my stomach turns.-Is this all
the distinction of the rich in the grave?-They had better quietly
allow the scythe of equality to mow them down with the common
mass, than struggle to become a monument of the instability of hu-
man progress." Like her literary alter ego Hamlet speaking to the

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skull of the jester Yorick, Wollstonecraft reflected on human life
and mortality, first reveling in the wonder of the "I, so much alive,"
then recoiling from the mummies before her. The corpses bothered
her not so much because of their exotic appearance but because of
what they symbolized politically: the childish attempts of the rich
and privileged to steal a kind of immortality for themselves at the
expense of other, poorer humans.'I
Just a few lines later, Wollstonecraft assured her correspondent
(the implied Imlay) that "with more than usual tenderness, I there-
fore assure you that I am yours." Ironically, she reworked this let-
ter for publication after she had left her first love. She embedded
this meditation on the fragility of the good of human love within
a larger and more pressing moral and psychological narrative: her
retrospective forging of a new identity out of the crucible of her
near self-destruction. She presented her past affirmation of her devo-
tion to Imlay alongside a melancholic refrain on the passing shadows
of earthly human experience. Akin to Mill in his Autobiography, she
countered this dark observation on impermanence with the asser-
tion of the permanent happiness of discovering the intrinsic value
of one's own self: "God bless you! I feel a conviction that we have
some perfectible principle in our present vestment, which will not
be destroyed just as we begin to be sensible of improvement; and I
care not what habit it next puts on, sure that it will be wisely formed
to suit a higher state of existence." On a metaphysical/ethical level,
the author of the Letters thought of the development of her self (and
other human selves) as a perfectionistic process, guided by the (per-
haps inscrutable) providence of the divine Creator.'8
On a psychological and empirically grounded level, Wollstone-
craft thought of the process of self-development in Humean terms.
As David Hume argued in his 1739 Treatise of Human Nature, per-
sonal identity was not static but dynamic. It was best understood as a
process by which our minds took a set of snapshots of our historically
contingent selves, each shaped in a different way by time and place.
One looked back on the set of snapshots and endowed them with an
overarching sense of selfhood. In this Humean spirit, Wollstonecraft

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cared not "what habit" her self "next puts on." Identity formation
was a process of trying on new clothes that were suited for the time
and place, but also for the ongoing, retrospective struggle of self-
understanding and self-development.'9
The Letters saw a surge of reprinting and translations after God-
win's 1798 Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of
Woman, probably because of the rise of public interest in Wollstone-
craft's unconventional life story. Swedish, Dutch, and Portuguese
translations of the Letters, a new German translation in Leipzig, and
another printing in London were produced between 1798 and 18o6.
No new editions of Wollstonecraft's Rights of Woman appeared be-
tween the Danish translation of 18o1 and a New York printing in
1833; yet Wollstonecraft remained well known among literary elites
in Britain, Europe, and the Americas through the reception of the
Memoirs, Letters, and Maria during this period.20
Making her even more famous as an (auto)biographical author
and subject at the turn of the nineteenth century, her incomplete
novel Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman-initially published by God-
win in London in 1798-was soon translated into French, Swed-
ish, and German and published again in English in Philadelphia.
The novel was widely read as a semiautobiographical defense of
women's right to sexual freedom and divorce. The public salience of
her scandalous life story in the first decades after her death shifted
the wider public's focus from her ideas on women's rights to her
biography.21
Wollstonecraft partly based Maria on her sister Bess's dramatic
exit from what was likely an abusive marriage in 1784. Wollstone-
craft and her sister Everina orchestrated the escape of Bess, because
their recently married sibling had fallen into a terrible depression.
The price of flight was leaving behind Bess's baby, over whom she
had no parental rights under the rules of coverture. The child died of
illness soon thereafter, making the sisters' decision to liberate Bess
even more morally complex in unanticipated consequences.22
Yet Maria was as much political as it was personal. Through the
narration of the life stories of Jemima (a lower-class woman) and

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HUMAN STORIES

Maria (a middle-class woman), the novel illustrated how class dif-
ferentiates and stratifies women's experiences of patriarchal, gender-
based inequality and oppression. Wollstonecraft drew the fictional
characters of Jemima and Maria from the bleak lives of women she
observed in London (even at the Bedlam insane asylum) as part of
the process of writing this work of Gothic realism. Her anthropo-
logical and ethnographic approach, drawing from the real world of
English women's experiences of oppression, let the novel express
contemporary political criticism.23
In one of the narrative frames of this many-layered tale, Jemima
worked as a lowly servant at the Bedlam-like insane asylum in which
Maria's husband had unjustly imprisoned her. Trapped in the asy-
lum a Gothic symbol for the corrupt, arbitrary, hierarchical social
and political order-Jemima and Maria shared their life stories with
one another. Through the comparison and contrast of their stories,
the reader discerns that Jemima's struggles as a woman have been
even more severe than Maria's.
The double burden of being poor and female made Jemima sub-
ject to a devastating array of social prejudices, economic obstacles,
and physical violations. While Maria had a basic but not formal edu-
cation, Jemima had no opportunity to better herself through edu-
cation of any kind. While the middle-class Maria first experienced
economic insecurity as a result of the law of coverture, Jemima faced
extreme poverty from birth. While Maria never worked outside the
home, Jemima spent her entire life working in demeaning, physically
demanding, slave-like jobs, mainly as a servant. While Maria en-
dured a marriage to a repulsive, alcoholic, verbally abusive husband,
Jemima was subject to regular physical and sexual abuse, including
rape, from adolescence onward. While Maria suffered marriage as a
form of legal prostitution when she was married with a dowry of five
thousand pounds to a man she did not love, the young Jemima was
forced into literal prostitution as her only means of economic sur-
vival. While Maria struggled to regain custody of her infant daughter
from her husband, Jemima had to abort a baby because she could not
support it.

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One of the moral objectives of the novel was to show how such
intersectional comparisons of women's experiences across classes
might inspire a kind of sensitive solidarity among them for their dis-
tinct but related struggles. Through the process of telling their life
stories to one another, Jemima and Maria developed a potent sympa-
thy for each other's plights as women precisely because they recog-
nized the salient differences between their experiences of oppression.
Encountering Jemima's "unmerited sufferings" prompted Maria to
promise her jailor "a better fate . . . and I will procure it for you."
While moved by Maria's personal narrative to assist her in escaping
the asylum, Jemima still understood her own oppression as more se-
vere. She felt displaced from humanity altogether, since others had
treated her, from childhood, "like a creature of another species."24
As the more privileged woman, Maria returned the favor of libera-
tion by accepting Jemima's poignant plea to "reconcile me with the
human race." These two women-despite their radically different
backgrounds-became friends, escaped the asylum together, and,
in the only optimistic ending drafted for the unfinished novel, cre-
ated what some scholars have called an all-female family. Jemima re-
united Maria with her infant daughter, who was, unlike Bess's baby,
rescued despite the lack of maternal child custody rights. Although
Wollstonecraft had argued that poor women were among the worst
victims of the patriarchal social and political order, she used the unex-
pected friendship of Jemima and Maria to show that women's mutual
recognition of how class stratified their experiences of gender-based
oppression can spark a common quest for the realization of women's
human rights, such as to care for their own children. As Maria joy-
ously cried before Jemima when reunited with her infant daughter,
"I will live for my child!"25
Well before writing her last novel, Wollstonecraft had developed a
distinctive first-person feminist voice across several genres. As Janet
Todd has argued, the frequency of Wollstonecraft's use of "I" can
seem egocentric even to a twenty-first century reader familiar with
the conceits of postmodernism. But set in its literary context, her

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HUMAN STORIES

pounding, insistent return to the first-person standpoint is reminis-
cent of the repetition found in Biblical poetry. In both cases, re-
petitive word choice drives home the moral teaching of the text. The
assertion, and reassertion, of the value of her or any woman's voice
"this I, so much alive"-is a necessary step toward the development
of a general human morality that recognizes the intrinsic worth of
each person.26
Wollstonecraft also regularly used the first-person plural to locate
herself as part of the broader group of women who face patriarchal
injustice. "We might as well never have been born, unless it were
necessary that we should be created to enable man to acquire the
noble privilege of reason," she pointed out with dark humor in her
Rights of Woman. This first-person plural formulation anticipated
what has been called the "radical feminist" turn of Wollstonecraft's
final novel, in which the middle-class Maria learned to identify with
the suffering of the working-class Jemima by listening to her personal
story of lifelong patriarchal oppression: "Thinking ofJemima's pecu-
liar fate and her own, she was led to consider the oppressed state of
women, and to lament that she had given birth to a daughter." This
sense of solidarity-specifically, the identification of the individual
with group oppression-is a psychological precondition for the for-
mation of any social movement to alleviate collective injustice. For
this reason, we may read Maria as a founding text for modern orga-
nized feminism.27
Wollstonecraft's innovative use of first-person voices, singular and
plural, allowed her to develop a rich personal basis for the litera-
ture of human rights. While her Rights of Woman provided a univer-
salistic metaphysical foundation for human rights claims on behalf
of women, her (auto)biographical works such as Mary, Letters, and
Maria erected another, more practical grounding for human rights
advocacy: testimony and witness of women's heroic struggles to
navigate the tragic choices set by patriarchy. This literary approach
to human rights advocacy built on the personal stories of women,
drawn from Wollstonecraft's life, including her own loves and losses.

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The literature of human rights confronts us with these difficult his-
tories in order to move us, emotionally and physically, to speak up
for a better way for each and all.
Voices in the Wilderness: The "Spiritual Daughters" of Wollstonecraft
In 1891, the U.S. historian Annie Meyer wrote in her book Women's
Work in America that the pioneering women in the field of medicine,
such as Elizabeth Blackwell, were the "spiritual daughters of Mary
Wollstonecraft." Meyer hailed Wollstonecraft as a "voice crying in
the wilderness," who had the courage to speak up for women's rights
to professions, including law, politics, and medicine, long before
governments had even made equal provision for primary education.
In the generous humanistic spirit of Wollstonecraft, Blackwell and
her nineteenth-century American peers "did not seek wider oppor-
tunities in order to study medicine, but they studied medicine in or-
der to secure wider opportunities for all women." Blackwell followed
Wollstonecraft in leaving "the Record of a Heroic Life," which "has
since carried hundreds of women over impossibilities."28
Meyer was neither the first nor the last women's rights advocate to
hail Wollstonecraft as a new kind of political prophet. Many people
read Wollstonecraft as a female Isaiah or a feminist John the Bap-
tist a lone voice crying out for humanity to clear a new way for its
liberation. A "legion of Wollstonecrafts" followed her path-breaking
example, especially among the Quakers and other dissenting Chris-
tians in North America during the nineteenth century. Lucretia
Mott, a Quaker preacher who helped to organize the first women's
rights convention at Seneca Falls, New York, in 1848, was not only
an avid reader of the Rights of Woman but also shared the book among
her friends-including the controversial feminist theologian Eliza-
beth Cady Stanton and the Quaker abolitionist Sarah Grimk6.29
As part of the Anglo-American Quaker tradition of female preach-
ing that dated to the seventeenth century, Mott saw herself as chan-
neling the "indwelling Spirit of God" in feeling moved to speak on
matters of religion and public morality. A 1906 speech at a Quaker

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conference in Maryland equated Mott's legendary talents for public
speaking, on issues ranging from abolition to women's rights, with
"the voice of the prophet, 'crying in the wilderness, Make ye ready
the way of the Lord, make his paths straight."' Within her religion,
Mott was represented as an authentic prophet, who relied only "upon
the Word of God, found not in manuscript or book, but written large
in souls that are in touch with the spirit of Jesus Christ."30
Mott's own preaching recalled Wollstonecraft as a Christ-like
figure who modeled the life of selfless sacrifice necessary for clear-
ing the way for women's rights. Her 1866 speech at the National
Woman's Rights Convention borrowed the conventions of a sermon
in its religious representation of Wollstonecraft: "Young women of
America, I want you to make yourselves acquainted with the history
of the Woman's Rights movement from the days of Mary Wollstone-
craft. All honor to Mary Wollstonecraft. Her name was cast out as
evil, even as that ofJesus was cast out as evil, and those of the apostles
were cast out as evil; but her name shall yet go forth and stand as the
pioneer of this movement." In a kind of feminist eschatology, Mott
resurrected Wollstonecraft, turning her from an Eve-like fallen
woman who was "cast out as evil" into a female Jesus who had come
to lead the American women's rights cause.3'
It was a close friend and political colleague of Mott, Stanton, who
made Wollstonecraft's philosophy of women's human rights into the
basis for an American feminist civil religion. In 1840, she had met
Mott at the World's Anti-Slavery Convention in London. There
they discussed how Wollstonecraft and other dissenting Christian
political thinkers had been "tabooed by orthodox teachers." In the
History of Woman Suffrage, Stanton recalled how she encountered
Quaker families in England who "warned against [Mott's] influence"
because "in a recent speech in London she quoted sentiments from
Mary Wollstonecroft [sic] ."32
Stanton responded pragmatically to the taboo status of Wollstone-
craft even within the dissenting Christian tradition. In her own writ-
ings and speeches, she invoked Wollstonecraft and her ideas not so
much in terms of any particular religious faith as in terms of a new

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civil religion. This American civil religion was based on rational
principles of morality (such as, each person's desert of equal respect
due to each person's dignity as a human being). Around the same
time, during the American Civil War, Abraham Lincoln similarly
resorted to familiar biblical images and phrases to shore up his secu-
lar principles and politics. In defining the secular use of religious
language in Lincoln's antislavery statesmanship, Steven B. Smith has
argued that a "civil religion" is any "non-denominational profession
of faith based upon certain symbols, rituals, and public practices that
bind citizens of a polity by virtue of their common membership.""
Stanton used Wollstonecraft to articulate the feminist principles
latent within postrevolutionary America's civil religion, particularly
its doctrines of popular sovereignty and equal rights. She and Mott
rewrote Jefferson's 1776 Declaration of Independence to include women
in their 1848 Declaration of Sentiments, to show that American civil
and political rights ought to apply to all adult persons, regardless of
sex. Stanton distinguished her reading of Wollstonecraft from Mott's
by making Wollstonecraft a wholly secular icon of women's right
to civic equality and nondiscrimination. In an 1871 letter to Mott,
Stanton turned Wollstonecraft into a feminist martyr: "We have had
women enough sacrificed to this sentimental, hypocritical, prating
about purity. This is one of man's most effective engines, for our divi-
sion, & subjugation. He creates the public sentiment, builds the gal-
lows, & then makes us hangman for our sex. Women have crucified
the Mary Wolsencrafts, the Fanny Wrights, the George Sand's, the
Fanny Kemble's, the Lucretia Mott's of all ages, & now men mock
us with the fact, & say, we are ever cruel to each other. Let us end
this ignoble record, & henceforth stand by womanhood." Stanton's
mastery of rhetorical amplification transformed Wollstonecraft from
a "sacrificed" Christ into a martyr for a wholly secular cause-the
cause of "womanhood" itself. While Wollstonecraft was a righteous
prophet for Mott, for Stanton she was a noble and willing political
victim who embodied a new kind of female heroism. In Stanton's bit-
ing analysis, the tragic history of women persecuting other women
and thereby perpetuating patriarchy would be the "ignoble record"

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of the female sex, if they do not finally band together "& henceforth
stand by womanhood." This personal letter to Mott was thereby a
political demand for women to "stand" against patriarchal domina-
tion, yet for civil not revealed religious reasons.34
Another leading Quaker feminist, Susan B. Anthony, was Stan-
ton's political partner in establishing the first freestanding national
women's rights organization in the United States in 1869. Stanton
and Anthony's formation of the National Woman's Suffrage Asso-
ciation (NWSA) effectively split their more radical branch of the
women's rights movement from both the civil rights movement for
African American men and the mainstream women's suffrage move-
ment. With the founding of NWSA, Stanton and Anthony drew
a firm line between their ultimate commitment to women's rights
such as suffrage, divorce, and voluntary motherhood, and the limited
victory of the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that
activists such as Frederick Douglass and Lucy Stone had embraced
for its extension of suffrage to black men and former male slaves.
The political cleavages of 1869 over the ratification of the Fifteenth
Amendment became the crucible for the consolidation of the Ameri-
can women's rights cause into a freestanding social movement ex-
plicitly focused on feminist issues-sometimes, disappointingly, in
opposition to the rights of blacks and other minority groups. As it
faced forward, toward the realization of Wollstonecraft's abstract vi-
sion of social justice, American feminism ironically distanced itself
from its iconic philosopher's commitment to universal human rights
in the quest to realize the civil and political rights of women.35
Anthony, like Stanton, revered Wollstonecraft as a philosophical
source for the women's rights cause. It was widely reported that they
prominently displayed portraits of Wollstonecraft and Mott in the
offices of their feminist newspaper, the Revolution, around the time
of the founding of NWSA. No longer heard as religious prophets
for women's rights, Wollstonecraft and Mott were instead the secu-
lar and pioneering voices for the "great cause" of full and formal
female citizenship. In 1904, Anthony donated her copy of the Rights
of Woman to the Library of Congress with the symbolic inscription:

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HUMAN STORIES

"To the Library of Congress from a great admirer of this earli-
est work for woman's right to Equality of rights ever penned by a
woman. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, 'A wholesome dissenter is
the first step towards progress.' And here we have the first step." In
the iconography of the late nineteenth-century American women's
rights movement, Wollstonecraft had transmogrified from a female
Jesus, to a feminist martyr, to a "wholesome dissenter," even among
the dissenting Christians who had popularized her views across the
United States. What remained the same across these mimetic itera-
tions of Wollstonecraft was the focus on the clarity, originality, and
urgency of her voice as an advocate of women's rights.36
As organized feminism grew in popularity at the turn of the twen-
tieth century, there was an international shift toward representing
Wollstonecraft as a secular voice of reason and advocate of human
rights. In her 1884 biography of Wollstonecraft, the American ex-
patriate and European intellectual Elizabeth Robins Pennell wrote
of Wollstonecraft as "the voice of one crying in the wilderness, to
prepare the way. What she had to do was awaken mankind to the
knowledge that women are human beings, and then be given the
opportunity to assert themselves as such." In 1899, the Jewish Ger-
man feminist Bertha Pappenheim contended in her introduction to
the second German edition of the Rights of Woman that Wollstone-
craft was "the first woman who with overwhelming clarity awoke the
consciousness in women-and also had the courage to voice-that
women have rights, not assumed through raw force or custom, but
rather human rights whose basis lies in irrefutable duties.""
Anna Holmovi was the Czech translator of Wollstonecraft's Rights
of Woman in 1904. Her introduction to this edition, published in
Prague, captured another trend in the reception of Wollstonecraft at
the turn of the twentieth century. As biographies of Wollstonecraft's
life and editions of her letters became popular across Europe, Brit-
ain, and the United States, the author of the Rights of Woman became
more important than the contents of her groundbreaking treatise.
Wollstonecraft's arguments were now philosophically quaint and po-
litically irrelevant because they fully reflected the "rationalistic reli-

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HUMAN STORIES

gion and rationalistic philosophy of her time." Holmovi concluded
that the lasting power of Wollstonecraft's Rights of Woman lay not
in its "philosophical system" but rather in its emotional sway over
the "sensibility" of its contemporary feminist readers: "With almost
an elementary force stands out the sense that a change, a renewal,
is necessary,-and in this immediacy, in this desire, lies the signifi-
cance of this book, which makes up for its logical and stylistic im-
perfections. It isolates the author from her [female] contemporaries,
but connects her with the striving and longing woman of today,
who disagrees with the old ways and who demands freedom to try
and to look for new ways." Like an electric charge, the fin de siecle
Wollstonecraft jolted the "woman of today" to leave behind the "old
ways" in order to seek "new ways" in the wilderness.38
In 1907, the British conservative Mrs. Humphrey Ward felt com-
pelled to satirize this tendency of modern feminists to see Wollstone-
craft and themselves as secular prophets. In her widely read novel
The Testing of Diana Mallory, an idealistic young feminist advised
the heroine to split up with her fiance in order to commit herself
to the selfless mission of women's rights. Belying her sense of self-
importance, the feminist confided: "I fear I may seem to you a voice
crying in the wilderness." With this confession aside, she proceeded
to matter-of-factly invite her friend to join the "Mary Wollstonecraft
Club," devoted to suffrage and pacifism, once she overcame her mere
"personal grief" over losing her beloved. Showing Mrs. Ward's fear-
ful satire to be prophetic itself, the British militant suffragette news-
paper Votes for Women ran an article in 1912 entitled "The Voice in
the Wilderness." Citing Pennell, the article praised Wollstonecraft
as a "remarkable pioneer" whose views pointed "so unmistakably in
that direction" of the "Woman's Movement of the present day."39
In his influential 1922 book on the international history of female
emancipation, the Dutch historian Jacob Bouten located Wollstone-
craft as the ideological source of the globally successful women's
rights cause. Using words that have been repeated to the present day
in scholarship on Wollstonecraft and feminism, Bouten referred to
her as a "lonely voice in the wilderness of British conventionality"

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HUMAN STORIES

who "heralded the great and successful movement of a later century."
In 1929, Virginia Woolf canonized within literature this first-wave
feminist trend of hearing Wollstonecraft as a secular, rational, yet
emotionally captivating voice. For her Second Common Reader, Woolf
wrote of Wollstonecraft: "One form of immortality is hers undoubt-
edly: she is alive and active, she argues and experiments, we hear her
voice and trace her influence even now among the living."40
After modeling a new style of first-person voice and narration in
her contributions to the literature of human rights, Wollstonecraft
herself came to symbolically represent women's power to speak pro-
phetically, and thus critically, about women's social status. In the rhe-
torical and oratorical works of her early followers within organized
feminism, Wollstonecraft was heard as a "voice in the wilderness,"
whether she was seen as a religious prophet, a political sacrifice, or
a secular suffragist. Even as the mainstream feminist movement lost
touch with its explicitly religious foundations, it retained its spiritual
motivations in secularized form. Driven by a quixotic desire to help
the whole of humanity, the "spiritual daughters of Wollstonecraft"
developed a narrative framework by which they could understand
their work as answering a political prophet's call to action. Like
other forms of politics, nonreligious forms of feminism are still a
kind of secularized theology, with Wollstonecraft and her fellow ra-
tional Christian dissenters situated at their philosophical and literary
base. James Darsey has argued that "Considered as biography, the
prophetic ethos is a kind of legend." The early American and Euro-
pean feminists built such a prophetic ethos on the legend of Woll-
stonecraft's visionary life and ideas.4'
The Wollstonecraft legend and its prophetic ethos were generated
by, and continue to generate, a variety of Wollstonecraft memes.
Memes-or widely recognizable yet variously replicated symbols of
ideas-have become a staple of modern popular culture. Recent fem-
inist theory and scholarship have begun to grapple with the powerful
concept of the meme, with satirical yet intellectual web sites such
as "Feminist Ryan Gosling" spurring a global Internet discourse on
"feminist memes." Richard Dawkins is credited with inventing the

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HUMAN STORIES

term "meme" to describe the nonteleological, evolutionary cultural
process by which social symbols are formed, cross-fertilized, and re-
produced in new and diverse iterations of an original (or "genetic")
idea. Richard Rorty argued in turn, "Memes are things like turns of
speech, terms of aesthetic or moral praise, political slogans, prov-
erbs, musical phrases, stereotypical icons, and the like." Upholding
the political relevance of Dawkins's concept for a pragmatic con-
ception of feminism, Rorty explained that "different batches of ...
memes are carried by different human social groups, and so the
triumph of one such group amounts to the triumph of those ...
memes." Feminist memes can be understood as dominant clusters
of public symbols that embody the political ideas and influence of
the movement for women's liberation as a group from conditions of
patriarchal oppression.42
The comparative analysis of her international reception at the
turn of the twentieth century shows how Wollstonecraft came to
be such a feminist meme. Sidney Tarrow has argued that political
symbols are a vital part of any social movement. I build on his theory
in conceptualizing memes as a highly visible type of political symbol,
around which a social movement such as feminism can be organized.
People latch onto the meme in their responses to the cause at hand,
and thereby associate the cause with the meme. Such a potent sym-
bol becomes shorthand for the movement at large and the ideas that
drive it. Both negative and positive uses of the meme promote the
growth of the movement by instigating debates, attracting attention
to the cause, inspiring recruits to join, and endowing the group with
an overarching sense of history and purpose.43
Wollstonecraft helped to fulfill these roles for the formation of
modern feminism, by serving as a mimetic marker of the movement's
philosophical origins, its social consequences, and its radical politi-
cal aspirations. In their capacity as prominent feminist intellectuals,
thinkers from Mott to Woolf utilized Wollstonecraft and her ideas as
symbols in order to foster the authority, public appeal, and internal
solidarity of their women's movements. The turn of the twentieth
century was the pivotal juncture at which the term "feminism" began

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HUMAN STORIES

to be commonly used to describe women's movements around the
globe. It is also the historical moment at which women's movements
had evolved into highly sophisticated national and international-
level organizations. In the early decades of the twentieth century,
women's movements worldwide gained momentum toward realizing
their reform agendas pertaining to women's rights to education, vol-
untary motherhood, property ownership, divorce, suffrage, and safe
labor conditions.44
In this crucible of the development of what have retrospectively
been labeled "first-wave" feminist movements, many intellectuals
looked back to Wollstonecraft and her ideas to help ignite and unite
each of their causes. There was a pattern of feminist interest in Woll-
stonecraft as a prescient model for independent womanhood, female
sexual freedom, and egalitarian marriage as part of the broader cul-
ture of the women's movement from 19oo to 1930, as shown in fa-
mous essays by the Russian emigre anarchist Emma Goldman, the
American anthropologist Ruth Benedict, and the British modernist
novelist Woolf. Although they made multiple memes of their com-
mon icon to fit their particular national and political contexts, femi-
nist intellectuals deployed their respective images of Wollstonecraft
in similar ways for similar reasons. In using Wollstonecraft's persona
and philosophy to both ground their movements in a historical start-
ing point and orient them toward common political goals, they gave
these movements an overarching structure-a beginning, a middle,
and an end. Just as Wollstonecraft used literature as a sympathetic
mode for human rights advocacy, her first-wave feminist followers
appealed to her as a prophet, martyr, and dissenting voice of reason
to craft an emotionally compelling narrative structure, or practical
grounding and purpose, for their burgeoning reform movements.45
"My strongest incitement": The Millian Marital Model
Mill also wrote a kind of feminist narrative that could serve as a
practical and emotional grounding, or motivation, for women's hu-
man rights advocacy. Like Wollstonecraft's, his feminist narrative

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HUMAN STORIES

was an (auto)biography about his self-development through the ex-
perience of charting a new path in love, outside the bounds of patri-
archal marriage. This (auto)biography was as much about him as it
was about his spiritual marriage with Taylor. She played the role of
Diotima to his Socrates, by guiding him, he professed, to "enlarge
and exalt my conceptions of the highest worth of a human being."
As he put it in the 1859 dedication to On Liberty, his (extra)marital
relationship with Harriet was "my strongest incitement" to write not
only this great work of political philosophy, but to write his own life
down, to make his own life worth reading. She provided the neces-
sary reason for writing at all. As he shared in an early draft of his
Autobiography: "The poetic elements of her character, which were
at the time the most ripened, were naturally those which impressed
me first, and those years were, in respect of my own development,
mainly years of poetic culture." His immersion in her "poetic cul-
ture" gave him the chance to achieve in his later years a "purely liter-
ary life . . . which continued to be occupied in a preeminent degree
with politics." With his posthumously published Autobiography, Mill
fully merged the literary life of the writer with the political life of
the public servant. Most significantly for his women's human rights
advocacy, he used the Autobiography and the dedication to On Liberty
to champion the example of his "friend and wife," who steered him
to see the importance of "giving full freedom to human nature to
expand itself in innumerable and conflicting directions."46
Mill's Autobiography and Taylor's few remaining private letters to
him recalled how they became acquainted, at a dinner party in her
home, in the winter of 1830-31. The two intellectuals faced a moral
crisis soon thereafter. Because they unexpectedly fell in love, the
question arose: What were their obligations to Harriet's husband,
John Taylor, and the three children she had borne in that still youth-
ful marriage? In 1833, Harriet followed John Taylor's advice and
took a retreat from both relationships. During this separation, she
corresponded with Mill, imploring him to share more of his feelings,
and his deeper sense of self, with her. On 6 September 1833, she
sent a letter to him at the India House, where he worked: "The most

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HUMAN STORIES

horrible feeling I ever know is when for moments the fear comes
over me that nothing which you say of yourself [is to be] absolutely
relied on. That you are not sure even of your strongest feelings. Tell
me again this is not." This emotional imperative, for Mill to both
know himself and share himself, found its philosophical parallel in
the Autobiography's portrait of her character at this critical juncture:
"Her unselfishness was not that of a taught system of ethics, but of a
heart which thoroughly identified itself with the feelings of others,
and often went to excess in consideration for them, by imaginatively
investing their feelings with the intensity of its own." In the moral
allegory of the Autobiography, Taylor represented the virtues of love
and sympathy, and their power to inspire "a lovingness ever ready to
pour itself forth upon any or all human beings who were capable of
giving the smallest feeling in return." Mill offered himself as a model
of the latter, emotionally meager, kind of human being, whose capa-
bility for expressing feeling was enriched over time by reflecting on
the virtues of the woman he called, in an early draft of the Autobiog-
raphy, his "main instructor."47
The complex outcome of the twenty-six-year-old Harriet's medi-
tation on the state of her marriage was to choose Mill with her heart
but to remain Taylor's devoted wife, with all the propriety of a mar-
ried woman in Victorian Britain. She established a residence separate
from her husband, where she met privately with Mill on evenings
and weekends. She and Mill also took long vacations together. She
never let her extended family beyond her husband know of the de-
tails of this arrangement. She continued to raise her children with
Taylor at their home. Yet she involved Mill in educating her daughter
Helen, who often resided and traveled with her mother. After her
mother's death in 1858, Helen took on Harriet's role as intellectual
collaborator by substantially assisting Mill with the production of his
Autobiography and Subjection of Women for publication.48
In this highly irregular familial arrangement, Harriet had her
share of difficult choices. But each choice illuminated the moral
primacy of love and sympathy for others within her practical and
caring, not abstract and taught, "system of ethics." In March 1849,

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HUMAN STORIES

Harriet wrote to her husband, John, to say that "nothing but a feel-
ing of right would prevent my returning at once" to care for him
in his terminal cancer. Yet it was precisely such a "feeling of right"
that led her to choose to nurse her partner Mill, who was rendered
blind by illness, for three weeks that winter. In a letter to Mill later
that year, she confided how her hospice care for her husband was a
salve to her conscience. This intensive and giving practice of marital
love allowed Harriet to "set against extreme sadness & the constant
acute sense of being in an utterly false position." The act of loving
both men helped her to interpret her fidelity as both capacious and
unquestionable: she could love Mill enough to nurse him in his time
of need, while choosing to care for John when he and their family
needed her most.49
Harriet Taylor took the time to instruct Mill in the sympathetic
basis for ethics while at John's sickbed. After Mill made the blunt
and thoughtless suggestion that she should think of someone other
than her patient, she wrote back with force: "Good God sh[ould]
you think it a relief to think of somebody else some acquaintance or
what not while I was dying?" A modern and feminist Diotima, Har-
riet sought to teach Mill that real love (including their relationship)
ought not to be selfishly focused on any particular person or set of
people but rather be generously dispersed toward those who needed
it. To cement this moral fact in Mill's mind, she wrote of her dying
husband, John: "There is nothing on earth I would not do for him
& there is nothing in earth which can be done / do not write." This
last imperative-"do not write"-marked the sacredness of her bond
with John alongside her loving commitment to Mill and the learning
process of his self-development as a sympathetic human being.0
Taylor's encouragement of Mill to know, share, and critically in-
terpret himself in the context of his relationships shaped both the
content and the direction of his Autobiography. It became as much the
story of his self-development as a biography of a large and compli-
cated family. In 1854, Harriet wrote to Mill regarding his writing of
"the Life": "Should there not be a summary of our relationship from
its commencement in 1830-I mean given in a dozen lines-so

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HUMAN STORIES

as to preclude other and different versions of our lives." While she
thought this (auto)biographical exercise would be an "edifying pic-
ture for those poor wretches who cannot conceive friendship but in
sex," her ultimate "reason for wishing it done" was their right as a
couple to tell their "own" story. Vindicating a basic human right to
self-interpretation and self-expression, especially in matters of the
heart, she argued that "every ground should be occupied by ourselves
on our own subject." The subject of their own lives was the practi-
cal and emotional "ground" they ought to occupy as authors of "the
Life" they wished to share as a moral example with others."
Paying tribute to his wife's intersubjective methods, Mill wrote in
his Autobiography that he "settled" into a "purely literary," yet none-
theless "practical" and robustly political, life after Harriet died of ill-
ness in 1858. With his 1859 dedication to On Liberty, he represented
his magnum opus to the world as the philosophical product of their
spiritual marriage and intellectual collaboration. In the Autobiogra-
phy he reinforced his interpretation of the book's expected longevity
and value for humanity by describing its origins in his complex and
conflicted marriage: "The conjunction of her mind with mine has
rendered it a kind of philosophic text-book of a single truth, which
the changes progressively taking place in modern society tend to
bring out into ever stronger relief: the importance, to man and so-
ciety, of a large variety in types of character, and of giving full free-
dom to human nature to expand itself in innumerable and conflict-
ing directions." Just as the "conjunction" of their minds led to their
"fusion" into the material form of the book On Liberty, their nearly
thirty-year (extra)marital relationship was the rich ethical site for
the treatise's mandate of free, full, and "conflicting" directions for
human self-development.52
In the Autobiography, Mill connected his grief for the "irreparable
loss" of Harriet with his growing hunger for writing and other kinds
of political action in his remaining years. One of his (or rather, "my")
"earliest cares" in life without Harriet was to "print and publish" On
Liberty, in order to "consecrate it to her memory." He credited Har-
riet with inspiring his "literary life" and, most important, his self-

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HUMAN STORIES

development into a human being who thought himself capable of
independent, creative, caring, yet capaciously ethical thought. Their
relationship(s) had taught him that he was much more than "an inter-
preter of original thinkers, and mediator between them and the pub-
lic." He was in fact an original thinker, in ethical realms well beyond
the comforting certainties of logic and science, whose writings had
tremendous moral import for humanity's present and future. The
posthumously published Autobiography became his literary tribute to
Harriet and their relationships' shaping of his self-understanding as
an author of a political kind of literature. As with Wollstonecraft's,
the influence of Mill's political literature was vast. The Autobiography,
but perhaps even more effectively his world-renowned dedication to
On Liberty, pointed to the deep familial roots of the global problem
of patriarchy. The power of these texts lay in their proposal of a prac-
tical yet imaginative and intensely empathetic solution to patriarchy:
a new model of marriage, based on "the Life" itself.53
Millian Marriage Goes Global
Mill's dedication to On Liberty begins: "To the beloved and de-
plored memory of her who was the inspirer, and in part the author,
of all that is best in my writings." The instant global success of On
Liberty made this tribute matter almost everywhere. By Mill's death
in 1873, the book had appeared in multiple English editions plus
German, Polish, French, Dutch, Russian, and Japanese translations.
The treatise's strikingly personal inscription consequently became
Mill's most important (auto)biographical tribute to Harriet and their
marriage to be published during his lifetime.4
According to the dedication, it was in Harriet's roles as Mill's
"friend and wife" that she modeled to him an "exalted sense of truth."
The author marked the absolute loss of her death alongside the en-
during meaning of her life with a triumphant triple negative: he was
left bereft yet grateful, as he found himself alone, "unprompted and
unassisted" by her "all but unrivalled wisdom." On Liberty thus had
to be the best political work he could have hoped to write, because its

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muse was "buried in her grave." This paratext to On Liberty claimed
Taylor to be its author as much as Mill."
By legitimating Taylor as the true and complete partner of Mill,
the dedication resurrected her and their collaborative marriage as
feminist political symbols for a broad and gender-inclusive audience.
By emphasizing his debt to his "friend and wife," Mill challenged his
fellow male intellectuals to sympathetically reflect on this marital
model as clearing a path in the wilderness for personal and public
liberty and happiness. His female readers, on the other hand, could
find in his depiction of Taylor the promise of a new kind of marriage
in which women would be first moral and intellectual equals along-
side men and secondly wives and mothers.56
Around the same time as writers from New York to Buenos Aires
to Prague made Wollstonecraft into an international feminist meme,
Mill (and his marriage) became a widespread literary model for a
practical kind of feminist political philosophy. He built his 1873 Au-
tobiography around his conception of himself as ethically and intel-
lectually transformed by his relationship with Taylor. His (or their)
"Life" was translated into at least seven languages before 1900. While
the dedication of On Liberty strongly alluded to their marriage, the
Autobiography fleshed out Harriet and John Taylor's "Life" in much
of its messy complexity. The near-global issuing of The Subjection
of Women, often with substantial biographical and philosophical in-
troductions by indigenous intellectuals, also contributed to the in-
ternationalization of the Taylor-Mill marital model. Together, these
three texts provided their readers and commentators further reason
and inspiration to follow Mill in the symbolic appropriation of his
relationship with Taylor for their own feminist philosophical and
political projects.
The non-Western European reception of the Millian marital
model shows how such symbolic representations of human relation-
ships can pass a practical and emotional test of cultural translation.
The rootedness of such ideas in a particular time, place, culture, and
set of personal circumstances is not an intractable obstacle to their
cross-cultural meanings. A comparison of more than a century's

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worth of Indian, Czech, Japanese, and Korean responses to the Mil-
lian marital model illustrates its value as a morally responsible moti-
vation for women's human rights advocacy, then and now.
As we saw in chapter 4, Govind Vasudev Kanitkar was the colonial
subjudge and Brahmin liberal reformer who translated The Subjec-
tion of Women into his native Marathi in 1902. His poorly educated
child bride, Kashibai, was only nine, and he only sixteen, when they
were betrothed according to the customs of their Hindu community
in 1870. Although they were devoted to one another and a joint set
of moral and political values, Kashibai and Govind's marriage was
always clouded and troubled by its origins in the patriarchal power
structures of their families. As one of the first women to publically
advocate for reform of child marriage via the Age of Consent Bill in
1891, Kashibai became one of the most famous indigenous feminists
in Indian history. Her Autobiography and other life writings are in one
sense the mirror image of Mill's: they charted the complicated prac-
tice of a new model of companionate marriage, similarly hindered by
patriarchal traditions, yet spoke from a woman's perspective of irre-
vocable personal loss as a result of such unjust social structures.57
In an undated essay on her early education, Kashibai wrote of how
Govind pushed her to learn English by introducing the recently pub-
lished ideas of Mill's Subjection of Women to her: "As far as English
was concerned 'he' had explained to me John Stuart Mill's On the
Subjection of Women. Although I became acquainted with the book, I
had not studied it systematically. I could not even read it. Sometimes
'he' explained it to me and said, 'You are not destined to read this
book. You will not learn enough English to read it in this lifetime.'
At this time I made a vow that, in this very life, I would translate one
page of this book without help." Kashibai impersonally, even coldly,
used the third person to refer to her husband's role in her attainment
of English literacy. Her even colder use of quotation marks ("he")
belied the emotional difficulties that arose from the practical asym-
metries in their arranged marriage. Yet she still credited him with
teaching her how to write biographies in English, and with provid-
ing editorial and translation assistance as her literary career moved

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HUMAN STORIES

forward: "He is the sole reason I have acquired the ability to write a
book now. Even if I shod him in shoes made of my own skin, and did
so for the next seven lives, this debt would not be repaid." The high
price of her education was dutiful domestic service and childrear-
ing, or, as she gruesomely imagined: making shoes for her husband
out of her own skin. The self-abnegation implicit in this dehumaniz-
ing metaphor suggests that Kashibai felt their relationship, however
progressive by current Brahmin standards, never fully escaped the
patterns of domination and disrespect that characterized patriarchal
marriages of their time.58
Kashibai was painfully aware of her husband's preference for fair-
skinned women, which her darker coloring never fitted. She was
also beset by his projection of (white and British) Taylor as an ideal
spouse. Govind framed his 1902 foreword to The Subjection of Women
with praise of Mill and his collaboration with his "superb" wife. It
promoted a Romantic-liberal vision of Indian women educated in
the style of Taylor to become the intellectual companions of their
husbands. Govind's conciliatory liberal approach to colonial reform
allowed for Indian women to become chaste and domesticated Har-
riet Taylors, but not fully independent women with strong identities
beyond their marital roles.59
Much like Govind, Kashibai perceived the value of life writing for
political reform, especially among those colonized peoples who had
reason to be cautious in their claims for change. Composing a biog-
raphy of the first female Maharashtran medical doctor, Anandibai
Joshee, led her to consider the practical limitations of using histories
of exemplary women to promote the cause of women's human rights.
Kashibai instead pragmatically theorized the value of flattering men
in the process of celebrating great women for the sake of feminist
reform: "Instead of lauding women who have been thus improved we
should praise men who have improved the condition of such women.
Women, just like men, possess capability and rationality. But their
capability finds no outlet." Even as Kashibai insisted "a woman's bi-
ography be written by a woman," she realistically assessed the need
for women to gain favor of the men in power who controlled ac-

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HUMAN STORIES

cess to education, literacy, and the press itself. At stake in this set of
trade-offs was the future realization of women's "capability and ra-
tionality" via the granting and exercise of human rights to education
and political participation. Her feminist utopian fantasy novel, The
Palanquin Tassel (written between 1897 and 1928), envisioned such a
future, in which an Indian female political leader established equal
economic rights for the sexes in quasi-Millian fashion. The novel
moved even further beyond Mill in proposing the justice of equal
descriptive (gender-based) parliamentary representation.60
In the lived reality of their marriage, the practice of the principle
of equal respect remained elusive for Kashibai and Govind. They
were separated during the last few years before he died in 1918. Deep
disputes and disturbing emotions drove them apart: her religious
turn to Theosophy against his wishes, and their mutual yet alienat-
ing grief over the devastating loss of a child. As the surviving spouse,
Kashibai took a Millian path in serving as a leader in postcolonial
Indian feminist-democratic politics. Also like Mill in his later "liter-
ary" and "political" years, Kashibai Kanitkar wrote her own post-
humously published autobiography as a testament to the enduring
meaning of her (and her husband's) own imperfect personal struggles
toward realization of the "capability and rationality" of humankind.
Another prominent pair of married intellectuals, in turn-of-the-
twentieth-century Prague, fared better than the Kanitkars in prac-
ticing the Millian marital model in their personal lives. Charlotte
Garrigue Masaryk was the American wife of the Czech philosophy
professor Tomas Garrigue Masaryk. She translated and also likely
penned the anonymous introduction to the 1890 Czech edition of
Mill's Subjection of Women. The Masaryks had courted by reading The
Subjection of Women together, so the introduction likely represented
a collaborative synthesis of their feminist views, just as Mill's book
was the product of decades of intellectual collaboration with his wife,
Harriet. Tomas became a noted Millian feminist lecturer in turn-of-
the-century Prague. As the first president of Czechoslovakia in 1920,
he proudly oversaw the political incorporation of women as equal
citizens in the new republic.61

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HUMAN STORIES

The Masaryks' appropriation of the Millian marital model appears
to have been both privately happy for them and eventually publicly
beneficial insofar as they led the battle for the enfranchisement of
Czech women. As highly privileged, Western-educated members
of the elite, however, they did not face the same obstacles to these
goals as their contemporaries on another continent, the Kanitkars.
Colonization and patriarchy were forces felt more in theory than in
practice by the Masaryks. The Masaryks' international yet egalitar-
ian marriage combined with Tomis's Eastern European background
likely aided their rooted cosmopolitan appropriation of Mill and
Taylor for themselves and their national politics.
Charlotte's 1890 foreword emphasized the political relevance of
Mill's book on women's rights for "Czech literature" and culture:
"The translation of Subjection of Women is the introduction of Mill
into our literature. With great joy we hope that this man's ideas,
which so greatly influenced his contemporaries, will have the same
beneficial effect also on us." Charlotte thus presented Mill as a
highly salient philosophical source for rethinking and reforming
women's status along egalitarian lines in the contemporary Czech
context. Her foreword alluded to the significance of Mill's Autobiog-
raphy for understanding the impact of his marriage for the writing
of the arguments in The Subjection of Women. Taylor was more than
a wife but rather someone with whom Mill had cultivated a lifelong
"genuine friendship." "Mrs. Taylor" was a "great influence on his
work" but especially "for the conception of the immense practical
implications of the subjection of women." It was on the latter issue
that Mill "drew upon his wife's guidance" in crafting his pivotal trea-
tise on the topic.62
Charlotte Masaryk brought Mill into "Czech literature" via her
translation of and biographical introduction to The Subjection of
Women with the aim of "refreshing, relaxing, and uplifting" the
"spirit" of the Czech people. Of all the texts by Mill she could have
been the first to give to the Czechs, she chose the book that had
most deeply shaped her as an individual and as a married woman.
Mill's feminist liberalism, for the Masaryks, was a kind of practical

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HUMAN STORIES

philosophy to be lived out in love and politics, much as Harriet and
John once had done.63
The 192I Japanese introduction to The Subjection of Women, pub-
lished in Tokyo in 1923, shows the growing non-Western salience of
Wollstonecraft, Mill, and Taylor as personally compelling symbols
for an international feminism. Ouchi Hy6e (1888-1980) was the
German-educated Japanese translator of this edition. Mill's political
philosophy, especially his On Liberty but also his feminist ideas, had
been robustly debated in Japan since the downfall of the Tokugawa
shogunate and the transition to the Meiji regime in 1867. Ouchi pro-
vided the first complete and literal translation of The Subjection of
Women into his native language. His 1921 introduction underscored
the emotional impact of the book on the rise of feminism world-
wide: "Since its publication, it has been widely read in all the West-
ern countries, and for a long time has been called 'the Bible of the
Women's Suffrage Movement,' and it has served as source of spirit
and power for those who have participated in the movement." Ouchi
mentioned Wollstonecraft's Rights of Woman as an important precur-
sor to The Subjection of Women, then drew the conclusion that Mill's
work "cannot hold the honor of being the origin of women's rights
discourse, nor does it hold the special privilege of cornering the mar-
ket on a perfect women's discourse." In 1957, he put the point more
strongly in a new edition of The Subjection of Women: it was "because
of people like Condorcet and Wollstonecraft" that other people,
particularly in France and England, began to advocate "for women's
equality." As important as Mill became for international feminism,
the groundwork for Japanese and other non-Western feminisms had
been laid down by the French revolutionary generation.64
Ouchi's 1921 introduction dwelled on the significance of Mill's re-
lationship with Taylor for cultivating the emotional power and per-
suasiveness of his feminist arguments. Indirectly referencing the Au-
tobiography, Ouchi described how Mill "expressed his sorrow at being
separated from his wife, the object of his great passion; in death, she
became the powerful motivating force that turned his lonely final years
into prolific ones." Although he was skeptical of Mill's hagiographic

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HUMAN STORIES

treatment of his wife, Ouchi conceded the psychological force of this
rhetorical and narrative move. As an intellectual historian, he under-
stood the subsequent intense concern with Taylor's impact on Mill
as integral to the global spread of Millian feminism itself: "Thus, to
return to his wife in the establishment of this work is not unreason-
able, but in fact, is part of Mill's own exaggerated feeling that his wife
was a greater thinker than himself-and at times even greater a poet
than Carlyle or Shelley." The Taylor-Mill relationship was crucial
for the "establishment" of The Subjection of Women as a canonical text
for international feminism. The (auto)biographical depiction of this
unusual marriage gave a Victorian British man's abstract work of
political philosophy a compelling personal history and origin story
that could both cross borders and bridge generations.65
Soon thereafter, Takahashi Hisanori took exactly this personal ap-
proach to writing his (auto)biographical introduction to the selected
political writings of Mill in Japanese. Published in Tokyo in 1928,
this edition contained translations of On Liberty, Utilitarianism, and
The Subjection of Women, alongside some of Jeremy Bentham's works.
Takahashi's translator's introduction to On Liberty was inserted be-
tween Mill's dedication to Taylor and chapter 1 of the book itself.
Takahashi's introduction, like Mill's dedication, functioned as a
paratext that dictated the authority and authorship of On Liberty.
Takahashi understood his authority as a translator as stemming from
his rescuing of Mill's meaning from loose and inaccurate Meiji-era
translations in Japan after 1867. He represented this experience of
literal translation as philosophically meaningful for himself as an em-
pirically oriented and logical thinker: "Mill bestowed on this transla-
tor a manner of inquiry for his everyday life." Takahashi reinforced
the parallel between Mill's conception of himself as the translator of
Taylor's ideas for the world and his own historic role as a literal trans-
lator of Mill's major political writings for modern Japanese culture,
by treating the dedication to On Liberty as strong empirical evidence
of Mill's intellectual debt to his wife: "The extent of her influence
on Mill is evident in his dedication page to her in On Liberty." Taka-
hashi's introduction revealed his attentive reading of Mill's Autobiog-

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HUMAN STORIES

raphy. Much like both Ouchi in his 1921 foreword to The Subjection
of Women and Mill in the Autobiography itself, he portrayed the death
of Taylor as a traumatic yet transformative psychological linchpin in
Mill's development as a political writer and activist: "Mill's despair
need not even be mentioned."66
Forty years after he began his own translation of The Subjection of
Women, Ouchi wrote a new introduction for a corrected version of
his 1921 edition undertaken by his thirty-three-year-old daughter-
in-law, the Tokyo University-educated economist Ouchi Setsuko.
In his 1957 introduction Ouchi Hy6e was at once more biographical
and more autobiographical. On the autobiographical side, he revealed
his intellectual partnership with his daughter-in-law Setsuko-a re-
lationship much like that of Mill and his stepdaughter Helen Taylor,
who together had produced The Subjection of Women in the 186os af-
ter Harriet's death. He also provided a personal context for their re-
issuing of The Subjection of Women in Japanese: the devastating Great
Kanto Earthquake of 1923 had destroyed most of the copies of his
original edition. This national and personal tragedy gave them rea-
son to publish a revised edition several decades later.
Ouchi also discussed the broader intellectual context of his ini-
tial reception of The Subjection of Women into Japanese after World
War I: "At the time, I was a bureaucrat in the Ministry of Finance
and being in such a position I could not but feel the waves of the
democratic movements that were taking place in Japan in response to
shifts in international intellectual circles. Thus, I joined those young
economics students who had gathered under the tutelage of Takano
Iwasabur6 at Tokyo University and discussed such matters with
them." Each member of this group of young male intellectuals de-
cided to "translate a classic work of the West." Preoccupied with the
growth of capitalism, the group focused on economic texts. Ouchi
had been trained in Millian classical economics but chose to translate
The Subjection of Women because of the emergence of a formal Japa-
nese women's movement for suffrage after World War I. Also, he was
interested in Mill as an immanent and progressive critic of "global
capitalist economics," because "he had at times questioned . . . the

241


HUMAN STORIES

limits of capitalism," especially for social justice for women and
the poor.67
On the biographical side, the 1957 introduction placed even greater
emphasis on the nearly mythological story of the Mill-Taylor mar-
riage and its cross-cultural meaning for Japanese feminism: "From
long ago, there are many tales of the meeting of the genius and the
beauty. Even when the women's movement occurred in Japan, a num-
ber of such stories were told. Above all, however, this tale was about
the nineteenth century's greatest economist on the one hand, and on
the other an exceptional woman of London high society. That is why
their romance remains a topic of interest among intellectual histori-
ans." After citing F. A. Hayek's 1951 book on Taylor and Mill, Ouchi
mentioned his own essay on their "romance" that he had published
long ago in the January 1920 issue of the Japanese journal Warera
(Us). He then implored his current readers to go back to neither of
these commentaries but rather to Mill's Autobiography itself, in order
to understand the marriage's literary significance for Mill's political
thought.68
As with his 1921 foreword and Takahashi's 1928 translator's in-
troduction, Ouchi in 1957 foregrounded the emotional impact of
Taylor's death on Mill's later years as a writer: "Needless to say,
Mill's grief was great. He bought a small home in Avignon, in the
south of France, where Mrs. Taylor died while traveling, and spent
most of his remaining life there honoring her memory. The Liber-
ation of Women came to fruition in this place, at such a time, and
was organized into its present form and sent out into the world."
Ouchi's optimistic, forward-looking translation of the title of Mill's
1869 treatise (The Liberation of Women) fitted into his biographical
thesis that the loss of Taylor was not total for Mill but rather a tip-
ping point toward the reconstruction of himself and the emergent
international feminist movement. As Ouchi theorized in the spirit
of chapter 4 of The Subjection of Women, "The liberation of women
is the liberation of humanity. Human beings will be liberated as the
great obstacle that thwarts the character development of half of their
members is removed." Writing eleven years after the formal grant-

242


HUMAN STORIES

ing of equal rights to the sexes in the 1946 Japanese constitution,
Ouchi pushed his recently independent democracy to fully imple-
ment in culture the egalitarian principles implicit in its post-World
War II (and postoccupation) legal and political order.69
In another Asian country shaken by decades of war and Western
occupation, a Korean edition of The Subjection of Women did not ap-
pear until 1986 in Seoul. As with several non-Western European
readings of the text before it, the translator Ye-suk Kim's introduc-
tion used the relationship of Mill and Taylor as a concrete basis for
cultivating cross-cultural understanding of the treatise. Mill not only
philosophically defended but also practiced in his personal life a
"unisex mindset" or "harmonious mind" that incorporated "intellect,
which was viewed as men's virtue, and emotion, which was viewed as
women's virtue." Building on Alice Rossi's classic biography of Mill
and Taylor, Kim judged this androgynous style of thought to "prob-
ably" arise from "his equal and productive relationship with Taylor,
which was ahead of its time."70
Pyong-hun SO's introduction to the 2006 Seoul edition of The
Subjection of Women shored up the translation's relevance for con-
temporary Korean feminist activism by way of a political reading
of Mill's Autobiography. After discussing Mill's life and especially his
relationship with Taylor, So upheld Mill as a model of personal au-
thenticity. This authenticity, moreover, served as an affective basis
for effective social and political reform: "The reader of this book
will easily sympathize with Mill's authenticity. It is impressive how
Mill stood against the society which regarded subjugation of women
natural, and demonstrated his belief bravely and with confidence."
Speaking to contemporary readers in South Korea, the translator
encouraged them to "sympathize" with Mill on the grounds that he
challenged entrenched gender norms in his traditionalistic society.
His late-life activism, propelled by his enduring love of his dead wife,
was all the more courageous for its refusal to accept his society's lim-
iting, patriarchal views of propriety and the public-private distinc-
tion. Writing from within a twenty-first-century South Korean so-
ciety with persistent patriarchal norms, So annotated The Subjection

243


HUMAN STORIES

of Women in order to encourage contemporary Korean feminists to
take inspiration from Mill's "authentic" approach to women's hu-
man rights advocacy as much as to urge a broader Korean reader-
ship to recognize this book as "the authoritative classic of feminism"
worldwide. Perhaps with a silent nod to Mill's collaboration with
his stepdaughter, Helen Taylor, on the composition of The Subjec-
tion of Women, SO's analysis of the treatise concluded with a personal
disclosure: "I am glad that my daughter Ji-Eun, who just started an
undergraduate degree in her university, read this book.""
In the School of Wollstonecraft and Mill
As one of the most prominent intellectuals to face death threats,
persecution, and exile for his writing on human rights issues, the
British Indian novelist and memoirist Salman Rushdie has defended
a political conception of literary traditions. As he puts it in his recent
third-person memoir of his years in hiding under the alias Joseph
Anton: literature "encouraged understanding, sympathy, and identi-
fication with people not like oneself" when "the world was pushing
everyone in the opposite direction." For Rushdie, as for Wollstone-
craft and Mill before him, literature and especially (auto)biographi-
cal writing had the power to elicit a sense of solidarity among people.
This solidarity could serve as an emotional motive for a rooted yet
responsible human rights ethic."
Wollstonecraft's rational theology and Mill's secular liberal utili-
tarianism represent two, if not the two most influential, philosophical
foundations for justifying women's human rights. Yet Wollstonecraft,
Mill, and their international followers saw the practical insufficiency
of such abstract rational justifications for persuading people to join
their moral and political cause. An affective basis for women's human
rights claims was necessary if people were to be moved to carry the
claims forward into their cultures and laws. Rational justifications
for women's human rights may productively work in tandem with
emotional motivations for the same cause. Through their interna-
tional reception, Wollstonecraft's and Mill's (auto)biographical writ-

244


HUMAN STORIES

ings gave diverse readers the right motives to write themselves and
their peoples into the literature of human rights. Learning from this
history, as well as from contemporary feminist theory, philosophers
and other writers may find further ways to reconcile "rational" and
"sentimental" approaches to defending and alleging the rights of
humans."
In his 1993 Oxford Amnesty lectures, Rorty made a plea for "long,
sad, sentimental" stories to be seen as the most effective tools for
teaching the powerful that the powerless also deserve human rights.
His primary example was Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 novel Uncle
Tom's Cabin, which persuaded many white Americans to care about
the antislavery cause in the antebellum United States. I offer two ad-
dendums to this important point, one historical and the other philo-
sophical. First, Wollstonecraft, Mill, and other feminist thinkers to
the present day have successfully used both rational philosophical
justifications and sentimental literary narratives to argue for the rec-
ognition of universal human rights. Second, feminist philosophers
are rightly sensitive to the fact that women have often been denied
status as human beings because of their supposed lack of reason. To
dismiss rational approaches to justifying women's human rights in
favor of purely "sentimental" modes of persuasion may perniciously
reinforce the gender prejudices that feminist philosophy seeks to
undercut in the first place. Finding ways of balancing appeals to rea-
son and emotion in women's human rights advocacy is thus a defin-
ing practical task and tradition of feminist philosophy.4
Feeling passionate deliveries of arguments for human rights, audi-
ences gain the power to use their imaginations to draw, from these
wrongs of the past, a set of reasons for establishing rights for women
and other humans in the present and future. The relationship be-
tween speaker and audience generates a dialogical and narrative
framework for women's human rights advocacy. In the beginning,
there are the wrongs done to women. In the middle, there is the al-
legation of a human right not to suffer such wrongs, and the hearing
of and response to that voice in the wilderness. In the end, there is
the psychological, cultural, and legal realization of a universal human

245


HUMAN STORIES

rights ethic that recognizes the equalities as much as the differences
between the sexes.75
Spivak argued that such a communal rewrite of the conditions for
social justice depends on a "transaction between the speaker and
the listener." Otherwise, the subaltern cannot speak (in voice or any
other action), because they have not yet been heard. Spivak made an
ethical distinction between speaking and talking. Speaking requires
a dialogical relationship in which one is heard; talking may be mere
utterance. Speaking need not be vocal but may be any kind of action
(writing, leadership) that elicits a hearing or response from others.
In her stirring reflection on the ancient religious practice of sati (the
self-immolation of grieving widows) in her native India, Spivak used
the example of these self-sacrificing women to illustrate the complex-
ity of the problem of oppression. She did not aim to speak for these
widows but rather to convey the difficulty of their struggle within
colonial and patriarchal social structures. In so doing she rewrote the
story of her fellow Indian women's suffering in a new postcolonial
frame, which has since inspired others to better hear and respond to
the voices of the subaltern in general.76
To make ethical claims for women's human rights requires a seri-
ous concern with the context for the claims themselves. The feminist
advocate must train her eye like a good novelist, getting a sense of
the social setting for patterns of injustice toward women. With this
setting described in detail, the feminist advocate may endow even the
most radical and risible claims for the rights of women with an in-
ner, and richly literary, logic: as allegations based on the past, made
in the present, and oriented toward the future, they at least can be
understood as having a beginning, a middle, and an end. This narra-
tive structure also endows these claims with the rhetorical potential
to pose what Amartya Sen calls "wrathful" and "rational" arguments.
From Wollstonecraft to MacKinnon, we hear moral outrage that
emotionally reinforces what is rationally graspable as right for all
humans. Wollstonecraft cried out against the sexual exploitation of
women in the patriarchal marriages of her time as destructive to hu-
manity as such. MacKinnon begs us to confront the atrocity of the

246


HUMAN STORIES

genocidal rape of women as a crime against humanity itself. In each
case, their wrathful reasoning pushed others in power, often men like
Mill, to reform domestic and international laws and other cultural
norms as a step toward institutionalizing women's human rights to
not be raped in marriage and to not be raped in war.77
Given that many people do not respect others, and have been so-
cialized not to respect those who are different or less powerful than
them, feminist ethicists such as Nussbaum have hypothesized the
moral preferences that human beings would have if they in lived in
respect-enhancing social conditions. With these ideal moral prefer-
ences in mind-such as appreciation of the equal dignity of human
beings-theorists in the "women's rights are human rights" move-
ment have articulated the ethical conditions for developing the sense
of solidarity necessary to support and grow the cause. This idea of a
global feminist solidarity challenges the binaries and barriers between
North and South, East and West while encouraging attention to the
differences that give rise to internationally recognized women's hu-
man rights. Hirschmann has put it simply and clearly: the differences
between women are the occasion for the theoretical argumentation of
their rights. Listening, narration, questioning, and free discussion are
a set of discursive practices that push people toward mutual respect
of both their moral equality and their bodily/social differences.78
Joining the chorus of those interested in proceeding from the
fact of difference and inequality, social scientists have demonstrated
that there are many practical asymmetries between the sexes that
are verifiably bad for women. Sen's landmark economic studies of
the systematic malnutrition of girls and women and the widespread
practice of female-selective abortion have given grave examples of
objectively bad practices of sexual discrimination. Although eco-
nomics and political science have done much to identify these is-
sues and propose effective strategies for "removing manifest causes
of injustice," part of the task of addressing unjust inequalities is not
scientific but moral.79
The moral virtue of courage is often demanded of those who con-
front, in social and political reality, injustice toward girls and women.

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HUMAN STORIES

In the same year as the 22oth anniversary of the Rights of Woman, the
Taliban shot fourteen-year-old Malala Yousafzai of Pakistan in the
head for her public advocacy of the right of girls to education. Malala
bravely chose to symbolically situate herself, via Internet videos and
blogging, as a living example of the right of girls to primary and
secondary schooling despite the dominant views of a violent and pa-
triarchal religious group. UNESCO has reported that in her home
country "over three million girls" are "out of school" and "nearly half
of all rural females have never attended school." As she has recovered
and recommitted herself to her political activism, Malala is a highly
visible reminder of the fact that girls and women continue to need
the institutionalization of the rights that their arguments seek to al-
lege, defend, and extend. Before the United Nations in July 2013,
she beseeched children around the world, "Let us pick up our books
and our pens, they are our most powerful weapons" in the ongoing
fight for the universal right to "free, mandatory" basic education.
Her heroism in fighting for the right to education for all children
was recognized in 2014, when she became the youngest person ever
to win the Nobel Peace Prize.80
Malala's courage is extraordinary, but she is also just another girl,
with flaws like any other person. Her strong positioning of her pol-
itics against the Taliban introduced a strain of antifundamentalist
rhetoric to her speeches and writings, which angered her enemies.
She risked losing her hard-won image as a peacemaker who seeks to
reconcile her Muslim faith with feminism, especially among funda-
mentalist followers of Islam. Even as it is read around the world, her
autobiography has been banned in private girls' and boys' schools in
Pakistan. Malala's personal yet political predicament shows both the
enduring promise and the real difficulties of women's human rights
advocacy. In the school of Wollstonecraft and Mill, one learns by
personal trial as much as by human error, but ultimately one learns
to better defend the human rights of women.81

248


NOTES

Introduction
1. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in The Works
of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler (New York:
New York University Press, 1989), vol. 5, 69 (hereafter cited as Rights
of Woman and Works); John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women, in The
Collected Works ofJohn Stuart Mill, ed. John M. Robson et al. (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1963-91), vol. 21, 299. Collected Works
hereafter cited as CW All quotes maintain the spelling, punctuation,
and other literary qualities of the original.
2. Mary Ann Glendon, A World Made New: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Uni-
versal Declaration of Human Rights (New York: Random House, 2001),
311-12; Betty Friedan, "The National Organization for Women's 1966
Statement of Purpose" (1966). Accessed 3 July 2013 at http://www.now
.org/history/purpos66.html
3. Charlotte Bunch, "Women's Rights as Human Rights: Toward a Re-
Vision of Human Rights," Human Rights Quarterly 12:4 (November
1990), 486-98, especially 488, 496-97.
4. United Nations General Assembly, Vienna Declaration and Programme
of Action, 20 Years Working for Your Rights, 1993 World Conference on
Human Rights (United Nations, 2013), 37-39. Accessed 27 Septem-
ber 2013 at http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Events/OHCHR20/
VDPA_bookletEnglish.pdf
5. Ibid., 22.
6. Ibid., 37.
7. Thirty-five percent of women worldwide have been the victim of sexual
violence. Department of Reproductive Health and Research, World
Health Organization, "Global and Regional Estimates of Violence
against Women: Prevalence and Health Effects of Intimate Partner Vi-
olence and Non-Partner Sexual Violence" (2013), 2. Accessed 27 Sep-
tember 2013 at http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/i0665/85239/I/
9789241564625_eng.pdf
8. Glendon, A World Made New, 310.

249


NOTES TO PAGES 6-8

9. Jack Donnelly, Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice, second
edition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 7; Charles Beitz, The
Idea of Human Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 14.
10. Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, in Works, vol. 5, 153, 157, 249; Thomas
Paine, Political Writings, ed. Bruce Kuklick (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1997), 176; Joan Wallach Scott, Only Paradoxes to Of-
fer: French Feminists and the Rights of Man (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1996), 8, 20; Barbara Brandon Schnorrenberg, "The
Eighteenth-Century Englishwoman," in The Women of England from
Anglo-Saxon Times to the Present, ed. Barbara Kanner (Hamden, CT:
Archon Books, 1979), 183-228, especially 201-3; Eileen Hunt Botting,
"Wollstonecraft in Europe, 1792-1904: A Revisionist Reception His-
tory," History of European Ideas 39:4 (May 2013), 503-27.
II. John Rawls, The Law of Peoples with "The Idea of Public Reason Revisited"
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, [1999] 2002), 109-II,
156-64; Susan M. Okin, "John Stuart Mill's Feminism: The Subjection
of Women and the Improvement of Mankind," New ZealandJournal of
History 7 (1973), 105-27; Susan M. Okin, Women in Western Political
Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 197-232; Su-
san M. Okin, "Gender Inequality and Cultural Differences," Political
Theory 22:1 (February 1994), 12; Martha C. Nussbaum, Sex and Social
Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 10, 64; Martha C. Nuss-
baum, Women and Human Development (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2000), 67-68, 140-42, 162; Martha C. Nussbaum, "Mill
on Happiness: The Enduring Value of a Complex Critique," in Utili-
tarianism and Empire, ed. Bart Schultz and Georgios Varouxakis (Lan-
ham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005), 107-24, especially 107-8; Martha
C. Nussbaum, Creating Capabilities: The Human Development Approach
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 141-42; Eileen
Hunt Botting, "Making an American Feminist Icon: Mary Wollstone-
craft's Reception in U.S. Newspapers, 1800-1869," History of Political
Thought 34:2 (Spring 2013), 273-95; Botting, "Wollstonecraft in Eu-
rope"; Eileen Hunt Botting and Sean Kronewitter, "Westernization and
Women's Rights: Non-Western European Responses to Mill's Subjection
of Women, 1869-1908," Political Theory 40:4 (August 2012), 464-94.
12. Amy P. Baeher, "Toward a New Feminist Liberalism: Okin, Rawls, and
Habermas," Hypatia 11:1 (Winter 1996), 49-66; Nancy J. Hirschmann,
"Difference as an Occasion for Rights: A Feminist Rethinking of Rights,

250


NOTES TO PAGE 9

Liberalism, and Difference," Critical Review of International Social and
Political Philosophy 2:1 (1999), 27-55, especially 37. By the term "femi-
nism" and its variants, I follow Karen M. Offen in meaning arguments
or forms of activism that criticize patriarchy and male privilege on be-
half of the well-being of women as a group, in any epoch or culture.
By organized feminism, I mean formal, public, and collective women's
movements, often oriented toward political rights such as suffrage in
the nineteenth century but also directed toward other economic or
social goals such as education or work opportunities. These formal
women's movements emerged in the mid- to late nineteenth century,
first in the 1840s in the United States, then in Western Europe and
Britain, and quickly grew in other regions of the world in the mid- to
late nineteenth century. As Offen has shown, the term "feminist" was
not used to describe such movements until 187os France, whence it
spread quickly around the globe. In past scholarship, I distinguished
between Wollstonecraft, Mill, and other proto-feminists, and the self-
identified feminists of the late nineteenth century and beyond. I have
since abandoned this distinction in favor of the general use of the term
"feminist" as a historiographical and hermeneutical concept that can be
fruitfully applied to the analysis of arguments and activism concerning
the betterment of women's social status in different historical contexts.
Within this general category of analysis, I distinguish between the dif-
ferent historical manifestations of feminist arguments and activism that
have developed in past texts and contexts. See Bonnie S. Anderson,
Joyous Greetings: The First International Women's Movement, 183o -1860
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Lori Ginzberg, Untidy Ori-
gins: A Story of Women's Rights in Antebellum New York (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Karen M. Offen, European
Feminisms, 1700 -i95o: A Political History (Stanford: Stanford Univer-
sity Press, 2000), 19-20; Karen M. Offen, ed., Globalizing Feminisms,
1789-1945 (London: Routledge, 2010), xxix-xxxiv.
13. Ruth Abbey, The Return of Feminist Liberalism (Montreal: McGill-
Queens University Press, 2011), 10; Zillah R. Eisenstein, The Radical
Future of Liberal Feminism (New York: Longman, 1981), 104; Elizabeth
Fox-Genovese, Feminism without Illusions: A Critique of Individualism
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 41.
14. Martha C. Nussbaum, Sex and SocialJustice (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1999), 57-

251


NOTES TO PAGES 10-15

15. Susan M. Okin, "Feminism, Women's Human Rights, and Cultural
Differences," Hypatia 13:2 (May 1998), 32-52, especially 34; Mill, Sub-
jection of Women, in CW vol. 21, 261-63-
16. Inderpal Grewal, "'Women's Rights as Human Rights': Feminist Prac-
tices, Global Feminism, and Human Rights Regimes in Transnational-
ity," Citizenship Studies 3:3 (1999), 337-54, especially 337-38.
17. Amartya Sen, The Idea ofJustice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2009), 7, 9, 21, 115-22, 161, 206-7, 392; Martha C. Nussbaum,
Frontiers ofj'ustice: Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 405-7; Rawls, The Law of Peoples,
3-4; Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Anchor Books,
[1999] 2000), 189.
18. Fred Dallmayr, "Cosmopolitanism: Moral and Political," Political The-
ory 31:3 (June 2003), 421-42, especially 433-34; Amartya Sen, "Con-
sequentialist Evaluation and Practical Reason," Journal of Philosophy
97:9 (September 2000), 477-502, especially 497; Bunch, "Women's
Rights as Human Rights," 496-97; Sen, Development as Freedom, 189.
For the use of the term "aspirational" rights, see Onora O'Neill, "The
Dark Side of Human Rights," International Affairs 81:2 (2005), 427-39,
especially 429-30-
19. Agustin Fuentes, "Get Over It: Men and Women Are from the Same
Planet," Scientfic American Blog, 20 January 2012. Accessed 25 January
2012 at http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2 012/01/20/
get-over-it-men-and-women-are-from-the-same-planet!/. In chapter 3,
I engage in greater detail the differences between postmodern theories
of gender inspired by Judith Butler and the social scientific distinction
between sex and gender, and align the latter approach more closely with
the philosophical schools of Wollstonecraft and Mill.
20. Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, in Works, vol. 5, 112-13; Mill, Subjec-
tion of Women, in CW vol. 21, 264, 269.
21. Marnie S. Anderson, A Place in Public: Women's Rights in Met/i Japan
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 10, 51, 60, 65, 156;
Rebecca L. Copeland, Lost Leaves: Women Writers of Metji Japan (Ho-
nolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2000), 163-64; Patricia Grimshaw,
Women's Suffrage in New Zealand (Auckland: Auckland University Press,
[1972] 1987), 15, 26, 33, 38, 41, 109; Asunci6n Lavrin, Women, Femi-
nism, and Social Change in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, 1890 -1940
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 16, 32, 199; Glendon, A
World Made New.

252


NOTES TO PAGES 15-27

22. Brooke Ackerly, Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 152-61.
23. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 167-240.
24. John Rawls, Political Liberalism, expanded edition (New York: Colum-
bia University Press, [1993] 2005), 64-65; Pablo Gilabert, "Humanist
and Political Perspectives on Human Rights," Political Theory 39:4 (May
2011), 439-67.
25. Beitz, The Idea ofHuman Rights, 49; Mill, On Liberty, in CWvol. 18, 224.
26. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 145; Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A
Study in Moral Theory (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press,
[1981] 1984), 217; Beitz, The Idea of Human Rights, 49.
27. Roberto M. Dainotto, Europe (in Theory) (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2007), 52-86.
28. Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, [1979] 1994),
202-10; Thomas Nagel, "Appiah's Rooted Cosmopolitanism," in Secu-
lar Philosophy and the Religious Temperament: Essays 2002-2008 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2010), 101-8.
29. Elizabeth Robins Pennell, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (London:
W. H. Allen, [1884] 1885), 90-
30. Richard Rorty, "Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality," in
The Rorty Reader, ed. Christopher J. Voparil and Richard J. Bernstein
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2010), 351-65-
31. Ackerly, Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism, 2-4; Niamh Reilly,
Women's Human Rights: Seeking GenderJustice in a GlobalizingAge (Cam-
bridge: Polity, 2009), 6-18; Chandra Talpade Mohanty, "Under West-
ern Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses," Feminist Re-
view 30 (Autumn 1988), 61-88; Chandra Talpade Mohanty, "Under
Western Eyes Revisited," Signs 28:2 (Winter 2003), 499-535; Chandra
Talpade Mohanty, Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Prac-
ticing Solidarity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 43-84.
Chapter One. A Philosophical Genealogy of Women's Human Rights
1. Jorge Luis Borges, "The Library of Babel," in Labyrinths: Selected Stories
and Other Writings, tr. William Gibson (New York: New Directions,
1964), 51-58. For example, see Donnelly, Universal Human Rights in
Theory and Practice, 58; Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History
(New York: W. W. Norton, 2008), 1-34-
2. Donnelly, Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice, 58; Richard
Tuck, Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development (Cam-

253


NOTES TO PAGE 27

bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 5-31; Brian Tierney, The
Idea of Natural Rights: Studies on Natural Rights, Natural Law, and Church
Law, 1150-1625 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, [1997] 2001), 43-77;
Annabel Brett, Liberty, Right, and Nature: Individual Rights in Later Scho-
lastic Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1997] 2003),
49-87. John Rawls rooted the rise of liberalism in the debates over
rights and religion in the wars of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
England and Europe; see Rawls, Political Liberalism, xxiii-xxvii. For a
more complex historical look at the evolution of rights discourse in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the British Isles and its rele-
vance for contemporary debates on liberalism, see Gordon J. Schochet,
"Why Should History Matter? Political Theory and the History of Dis-
course," in Varieties of British Political Thought, 15oo-i8oo, ed. J. G. A.
Pocock, with Gordon J. Schochet and Lois G. Schwoerer (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, [1993] 1996), 321-53, especially 321-36.
3. Donnelly, Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice, 75, 81, 84;
Micheline R. Ishay, The History of Human Rights: From Ancient Times to
the Globalization Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, [2004]
2 oo8), 1-61; Paul Gordon Lauren, The Evolution ofInternational Human
Rights: Visions Seen, third edition (Philadelphia: University of Pennsyl-
vania Press, 2011), 5-42; Mary Ann Glendon, "Foundations of Human
Rights: The Unfinished Business," American journal of jurisprudence
44:1 (1999), 1-14, especially 14; George Kateb, Human Dignity (Cam-
bridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011), ix-xiii;
Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 34-11o; Sen, Development
as Freedom, 227-48. For the idea of an overlapping consensus on human
rights that connects liberal and decent peoples, and includes Western
and non-Western religions and cultures, see Rawls, The Law of Peoples.
Kateb's cosmopolitan ethic orients around a defense of the dignity of
the human species, while Sen and Nussbaum elaborate an intercultural
consensus on the universal human values that undergird claims to dig-
nity, capability, and rights. Glendon, on the other hand, appeals to dig-
nity as a background moral concept that might spur "world religions"
to inspire their members to "respect the dignity of fellow members of
the human family."
4. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, 96-100; Sen, Development
as Freedom, 3, 10, 35-53; for the natural law approach to deriving hu-
man rights, see John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights (Oxford:

254


NOTES TO PAGES 28-30

Clarendon Press, 1980). For a recent pragmatic approach to defining
human rights in the context of the practices of international law, see
Beitz, The Idea of Human Rights, 102.
5. Steven B. Smith, "What Is 'Right' in Hegel's Philosophy ofRight?" Amer-
ican Political Science Review 83:1 (March 1989), 3-18, especially 6; ibid.
6. Beitz, The Idea of Human Rights, 59-68; Ian Shapiro, The Evolution
of Rights in Liberal Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1986), 29-69. Samuel Moyn has recently revised this narrative of the
origins of human rights by showing that the term "human rights" did
not come to be strongly associated with international law and an inter-
national social movement until the 1970s. He acknowledges that rights
discourse, activism, and philosophies had long preceded the 1970s, but
he challenges the view that we can historically locate the "origins" of
human rights in early modern Europe. Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human
Rights in History (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 2010), 1-43, plus appendix 1. Amartya Sen, "Human Rights and
Asian Values," New Republic, July 14, 1997, 217:2/3,33-40; William
Theodore de Bary, "Introduction," in Confucianism and Human Rights,
ed. William Theodore de Bary and Tu Weiming (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1998), 6.
7. For two different approaches to tracing the global turn in political
thought of the turn of the nineteenth century, both internationalist
and imperial, see David Armitage, Foundations of Modern International
Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 135-232;
Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain
and France (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005). For interna-
tional histories of feminism, see Ellen Carol DuBois, Woman Suffrage
and Women's Rights (New York: New York University Press, 1998), 20;
Anderson, Joyous Greetings; Offen, European Feminisms; Offen, ed., Glob-
alizing Feminisms; Sen, The Idea ofjustice, 116.
8. See Sarah Gwyneth Ross, The Birth of Feminism: Woman as Intellect in
Renaissance Italy and England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2009); Nancy E. Van Deusen, ed. and tr., The Souls of Purga-
tory: The Spiritual Diary of a Seventeenth-Century Afro-Peruvian Mystic,
Ursula de Jesds (Albuquerque: New Mexico University Press, 2004);
Sophia, a Person of Quality, Woman not inferior to man: or, A short and
modest Vindication of the natural Right of the Fair-Sex to a perfect Equality
of Power, Dignity, and Esteem, with the Men (London, 1739), 37.

255


NOTES TO PAGES 30-33

9. Schnorrenberg, "The Eighteenth-Century Englishwoman," 201-3;
Charlotte Hammond Matthews, "Between 'Founding Text' and 'Liter-
ary Prank': Reasoning the Roots of Nisia Floresta's Direitos das Mul-
heres e Injustifa dos Homens," Ellipsis 8 (2010), 9-36; Marilyn Butler, ed.,
Burke, Paine, Godwin and the Revolution Controversy (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1984), 72-80; Miriam Brody, "Editor's Intro-
duction," in Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
(New York: Penguin, 1985), 7-72; Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, in
Works, vol. 5, 67, 91.
10. For the idea of a fraternal social contract geared toward the protection
of the rights of males in modern republics, see Carole Pateman's The
Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988). For rights
as powers and freedoms, see Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan (1651) and
John Locke's Second Treatise of Government (1690). For rights as wants,
see Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). For
rights as needs or entitlements that ought to be recognized in law, see
Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman (1792) and Thomas Paine, Agrarian
Justice (1797).
1 1. Lois Schwoerer, The Declaration of Rights of 1689 (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1981), 299-300. Locke's A Letter concern-
ing Toleration (1689) set up an influential philosophical model for un-
derstanding religious liberty in terms of a dialectic between individual
rights (to freedom of conscience) and duties (to respect other individu-
als' freedom of conscience).
12. Alan F. P. Snell, Philosophy, Dissent, and Nonconformity, 1689-1920
(Cambridge: James Clark, 2004), 94-97; Immanuel Kant, Toward Per-
petual Peace and Other Writings on Politics, Peace, and History, ed. Pau-
line Kleingeld (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 37-59; Jean
Hampton, The Intrinsic Worth of Persons: Contractarianism in Moral and
Political Philosophy, ed. Daniel Farnham (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2007), 13, 22; Onora O'Neill, "Justice, Capabilities, and
Vulnerabilities," in Women, Culture, and Development: A Study of Human
Capabilities, ed. Martha Nussbaum and Jonathan Glover (Oxford: Ox-
ford University Press, 1995), 140-52.
13. Sharon Krause, Civil Passions: Moral Sentiment and Democratic Delibera-
tion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 77-110.
14. Tuck, Natural Rights Theories; William of Ockham, A Short Discourse on
the Tyrannical Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1992), 87-95, 110-17; John Duns Scotus, "Positive Law and Civil Au-

256


NOTES TO PAGES 34-37

thority," in Duns Scotus on the Will and Morality, ed. Alan B. Wolter and
William A. Frank (Washington: Catholic University of America Press,
1986), 311-17; Ockham, Short Discourse, 88; ibid., 90.
15. Tuck, Natural Rights Theories, 53-58; Francisco Suirez, "The Laws of
God and the Lawgiver, Book III," in From Irenaeus to Grotius: A Source-
book in Christian Political Thought, eds. Oliver O'Donovan and Joan
Lockwood O'Donovan (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999), 723-42;
Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights, 313. Nussbaum conceptualizes the
human right to freedom from sexual coercion as derivative of the hu-
man capability for bodily integrity. See Women and Human Develop-
ment, 78. For background on women's health during the Renaissance,
see Judith C. Brown, "Everyday Life, Longevity, and Nuns in Early
Modern Florence," in Renaissance Culture and the Everyday, ed. Patricia
Fumerton and Simon Hunt (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylva-
nia Press, 1999), 115-38; Nicholas Terpstra, Lost Girls: Sex and Death
in Renaissance Florence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2010).
16. Christopher Brooke, Philosophic Pride: Stoicism and Political Thought from
Lipsius to Rousseau (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 40;
Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights, 326-27; Hugo Grotius, The Rights
of War and Peace, vol. 2 (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005), 402, 947.
17. Grotius, The Rights of War and Peace, vol. 2, 451, 513-20, 709, 961,
1009, 1104.
18. Thomas Hobbes, On the Citizen, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1998), 107-10; Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard
Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 140; Gordon
J. Schochet, Patriarchalism in Political Thought: The Authoritarian Fam-
ily and Political Speculation and Attitudes Especially in Seventeenth-Century
England (New York: Basic Books, 1975), 230; Hobbes, Leviathan, 62,
145; ibid., 140.
19. C. B. MacPherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes
to Locke (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962).
20. John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, in Two Treatises of Gov-
ernment, ed. Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1991), 381.
21. Ruth Grant, "John Locke on Women and the Family," in John Locke,
Two Treatises of Government and A Letter concerning Toleration, ed. Ian
Shapiro (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 286-308; Okin,
Women in Western Political Thought, 73, 233.

257


NOTES TO PAGES 38-44

22. Linda Kerber, "The Republican Mother: Women and the Enlight-
enment-An American Perspective," American Quarterly 28:2 (1976),
187-205; Nathan Tarcov and Ruth Grant, "Introduction," in Some
Thoughts concerning Education, ed. Nathan Tarcov and Ruth Grant (In-
dianapolis: Hackett, 1996), vii-xx, especially xi.
23. Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sub-
lime, tr. John T. Goldthwait (Berkeley: University of California Press,
[1960] 2003), 81; Kant, Toward Perpetual Peace, 114.
24. Schochet, Patriarchalism, 43-47, 151 note 48, 218.
25. Ibid., 276. For variations of this argument, see Kerber, "The Republi-
can Mother"; Okin, Women in Western Political Thought; Pateman, The
Sexual Contract.
26. Boyd Hilton, "1807 and All That: Why Britain Abolished Her Slave
Trade," in Abolitionism and Imperialism in Britain, Africa, and the Atlan-
tic, ed. Derek Peterson (Athens: Ohio State University Press, 2010),
63-83; Virginia Sapiro, "Wollstonecraft, Feminism, and Democracy:
'Being Bastilled,"' in Feminist Interpretations of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed.
Maria J. Falco (University Park: Penn State University Press, 1996),
33-45. Kerber, "The Republican Mother"; Okin, Women in Western
Political Thought, 341; Okin, "Feminism, Women's Human Rights, and
Cultural Differences," 34-
27. Letter from Abigail Adams to John Adams, 31 March-5 April 1776;
Letter from John Adams to Abigail Adams, 14 April 1776 (electronic
edition), Adams Family Papers: An Electronic Archive, Massachusetts
Historical Society. http://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/. One of the
best examples of Rousseau's worries about women's sexual power over
men is found in his demand for social segregation of the sexes in public
events such as the theater in his Letter to d'Alembert (1758). Letter from
John Adams to Abigail Adams, 14 April 1776 (electronic edition), Ad-
ams Family Papers: An Electronic Archive, Massachusetts Historical Soci-
ety. http://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/
28. Pateman, The Sexual Contract, 9, 97-99.
29. Brooke, Philosophic Pride, 189; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Julie, or the New
Heloise, tr. Philip Stewart and Jean Vach6 (Dartmouth: University of
New England Press, 1997), 279.
30. Wollstonecraft, Rights of Men, in Works, vol. 5, 33.
31. Scott, Only Paradoxes to Offer, 4-12; Charles Maurice Talleyrand-
Perigord, Rapport sur l'instruction publique (Paris: de l'imprimerie na-

258


NOTES TO PAGES 44-45

tionale, 1791). As quoted in Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, in Works,
vol. 5, 67.
32. Anonymous, "Defense des droits des femmes, suivie de quelques consid-
erations sur des sujets politiques et moraux, ouvrage traduit de l'anglais,
de Marie Wollstonecraft," Almanach litteraire ou Etrennes d'Apollon
(Paris, 1793), 218-19; G. W  F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right,
ed. Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 23-
33. Janet Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life (Columbia: Colum-
bia University Press, 2000), 185; Susan Branson, These Fiery Frenchified
Dames: Women and Political Culture in Early National Philadelphia (Phila-
delphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 38; David Lundberg
and Henry F May, "The Enlightened Reader in America," American
Quarterly 28 (Spring 1976), 14; Sally Ann Kitts, "Mary Wollstone-
craft's 'A Vindication of the Rights of Woman': A Judicious Response
from Eighteenth-Century Spain," Modern Language Review 89:2 (April
1994), 351-59; John Windle, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, 1759 -1797:
A Bibliography of the First and Early Editions, with Briefer Notes on Later
Editions and Translations (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2000).
34. Kitts, "Wollstonecraft's 'A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,"' 356;
ibid., 358-59; Sally Ann Kitts, The Debate on the Nature, Role, and In-
fluence of Women in Eighteenth-Century Spain (London: Edwin Mellen
Press, 1995), 226; Heikki Lempa, "Patriarchalism and Meritocracy:
Evaluating Students in Late Eighteenth-Century Schnepfanthal,"
Paedagogica Historica 42:6 (December 2006), 742-43; C. G. Salz-
mann, "Vorrede," in Rettung der Rechte des Weibes mit Bermerkungen
iber politische und moralische Gegenstinde (Schnepfenthal, 1793-94),
vol. 1, xviii-xix; C. G. Salzmann, "Anmerkungen," in Rettung der Rechte
des Weibes mit Bermerkungen iber politische und moralische Gegenstinde
(Schnepfenthal, 1793-94), vol. 2, 117; Laura Kirkley, "Feminism in
Translation: Re-Writing the Rights of Woman," in Crossing Cultures:
Nineteenth-Century Anglophone Culture in the Low Countries, ed. Tom
Toremans and Walter Verschueren (Leuven: Leuven University Press,
2009), 190; Carol Gold, Educating Middle-Class Daughters: Private Girls
Schools in Copenhagen, 1790-1820 (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum
Press, 1996), 202 note 19.
3 5. Mary Kelley, Learning to Stand and Speak: Women, Education, and Public
Life in America's Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2006), 47; Marcelle Thiebaux, "Mary Wollstonecraft in Federalist

259


NOTES TO PAGES 46-49

America, 1791-1802," in The Evidence of Imagination: Studies of Interac-
tions between Life and Art in English Romantic Literature, ed. D. H. Rei-
man, M. C. Jaye, and B. T. Bennett (New York, 1978), 195-228, espe-
cially 197; Elias Boudinot, "An Oration Delivered at Elizabeth-Town,
New-Jersey: Agreeably to the Resolution of the State Society of Cin-
cinnati on the Fourth of July" (Elizabethtown, NJ: Shepard Kollock,
1793), 24; Rosemarie Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics
in the Early American Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2007), 42.
36. Anonymous, "To a Young Lady, who sent to the author for 'The Rights
of Man,' written by Mr. Paine," in United States Chronicle 8:412 (Provi-
dence, RI: Bennett Wheeler, 24 November 1791), 4. The heading for
the poem states that it was reprinted "from the New-York Daily Ad-
vertiser." Thomas Taylor, A Vindication of the Rights of Brutes (London,
1792), 77-78; Anonymous, A Sketch of the Rights of Boys and Girls. By
Launcelot Light, of Westminster School; and Laetitia Lookabout of Queen's
Square, Bloomsbury (London: J. Bew, 1792), 5, 14; "Susannah Staunch,"
"The Rights of Woman," Supplement to Dunlap's American Daily Adver-
tiser, No. 4280 (13 October 1792), 4; ibid.
37. Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham: Duke University
Press, 2004), 156-58; Vincent P. Munoz, God and the Founders (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 210; Bernard Bailyn, The
Ideological Origins of the American Revolution [1967] 1992), 43-44.
38. Eileen Hunt Botting, Family Feuds: Wollstonecraft, Burke, and Rousseau
on the Transformation of the Family (Albany: State University of New
York Press, 2006), 158; Lyndall Gordon, Vindication: A Life of Mary
Wollstonecraft (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 12-18, 46.
39. Virginia Sapiro, A Vindication of Political Virtue: The Political Theory
of Mary Wollstonecraft (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992),
171-72; Richard Vernon, Friends, Citizens, Strangers: Essays on Where
We Belong (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 58-80; Woll-
stonecraft, Rights of Men, in Works, vol. 5, 7, 11, 34, 51; Wollstonecraft,
Rights of Woman, in Works, vol. 5, 65, 67, 82, 266.
40. Wollstonecraft, Rights of Men, in Works, vol. 5, 9, 24, 41; Wollstone-
craft, Rights of Woman, in Works, vol. 5, 83, 245-
41. Wollstonecraft as "M.", "Letters on Education: With Observations on Re-
ligious and Metaphysical Subjects. By Catharine Macaulay Graham," in
Works, vol. 7, 320; Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, in Works, vol. 5,
119; Vernon, Friends, Citizens, Strangers, 59-61.

260


NOTES TO PAGES 50-58

42. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, ed. Lara
Denis (Peterborough: Broadview, 2005), 58-66, 83; Rousseau, Julie,
610; Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, in Works, vol. 5, 119-
43. Wollstonecraft, Rights of Men, in Works, vol. 5, 16; "Auxiliary, adj. and
noun," Oxford English Dictionary, online edition, www.oed.com; Woll-
stonecraft, Rights of Woman, in Works, vol. 5, 180; Susan Khin Zaw,
"The Reasonable Heart: Mary Wollstonecraft's View of the Relation
between Reason and Feeling in Morality, Moral Psychology, and Moral
Development," Hypatia 13:1 (Winter 1998), 78-117.
44. Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, in Works, vol. 5, 81-82, 115, 125, 217.
45. Botting, Family Feuds, 136-55; Gordon, Vindication, 40-79; Barbara
Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2003), 103-8; Sarah Hutton, "The Ethi-
cal Background of the Rights of Women," in Philosophical Theory and
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, ed. William Sweet (Ottawa:
University of Ottawa Press, 2003), 27-40.
46. Botting, Family Feuds, 158-59-
47. Wollstonecraft's view of God as unitary remains stable, even as she
moves toward her own creative formulation of a Romantic deism in her
Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark
(1796). See Botting, Family Feuds, 179. Wollstonecraft, Rights of Men, in
Works, vol. 5, 61.
48. Wollstonecraft, Rights of Men, in Works, vol. 5, 61.
49. Ibid., 35-
50. Gordon, Vindication, 48; ibid.; Wollstonecraft, Rights of Men, in Works,
vol. 5, 60; Richard Price, Four Dissertations (London: T. Cadell,
[1767] 1777), 6; Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, in Works, vol. 5,
84, 153-
51. Wollstonecraft, Rights of Men, in Works, vol. 5, 52.
52. Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination, 105.
53. Richard Price, "Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty," in Po-
litical Writings, ed. D. O. Thomas (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1991), 33; Price, "Observations," 23; ibid., 21-23-
54. James E. Crimmins, Secular Utilitarianism: Social Science and the Critique
of Religion in the Thought ofjeremy Bentham (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1990); Mill, Autobiography, in CW4<vol. 1, 6, 41-45-
55. Jeremy Bentham, Rights, Representation, and Reform: Nonsense upon Stilts
and Other Writings on the French Revolution, ed. Philip Schofield and
Catherine Pease-Watkin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), xlvii,

261


NOTES TO PAGES 59-65

317; Mill, Utilitarianism, in CW vol. 10, 242, 247; Mill, On Liberty, in
CWvol. 18, 224.
56. Joseph Hamburger, John Stuart Mill on Liberty and Control (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1999), 45; ibid.
57. Mill, Autobiography, in CWvol. 1, 5; ibid., 41.
58. Ibid., 9; ibid., 11; ibid.; ibid.; ibid., 31.
59. Ibid., 41; ibid.; ibid., 45; ibid.
6o. Ibid., 55; ibid., 49.
61. Ibid., 55; ibid., 67.
62. Ibid., 69; ibid., 137; ibid. Mill accepted Bentham's view that nonhu-
man animals should be included alongside humans in the calculation of
utility because they were likewise sentient beings, capable of pain and
pleasure. For his strongest defense of "the rights of animals" against
those who would deny them any legal protection from suffering, see
Mill, "Whewell on Moral Philosophy [1852]," in CW vol. 10, 187.
Although chapter 2 of Utilitarianism cited Epicurus as a precursor to
modern utilitarianism, Mill focused on the project of revising Bentham
rather than reclaiming ancient or modern Epicureanism. More to the
point of this genealogy, he never appealed to Epicureanism or Stoicism
as sources for his theory of moral rights. See Mill, Utilitarianism, in CW
vol. 10, 209-11.
63. Mill, Autobiography, in CWvol. 1, 137; ibid., 139; ibid.
64. Ibid., 143; ibid.
65. Ibid., 145; ibid., 147; ibid., 153; ibid.; David Bromwich, "A Note on the
Life and Thought of John Stuart Mill," in John Stuart Mill, On Liberty,
ed. David Bromwich and George Kateb (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2003), 1-27, especially 7; William Wordsworth, "Preface," Lyri-
cal Ballads (1801).
66. Mill, On Liberty, in CWvol. 18, 261.
67. Mill, Subjection of Women, in CWvol. 21, 326.
68. Mill, On Liberty, in CWvol. 18, 223-24, 266; Mill, Subjection of Women,
in CW vol. 21, 266; Alan Ryan, John Stuart Mill (New York: Pantheon,
1970), 242-43, 252; Alan Ryan, "J. S. Mill on Education," Oxford Re-
view of Education 37:5 (2011), 653-67.
69. Gregory Claeys, Mill and Paternalism (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2013), 23; Mill, Autobiography, in CWvol. I, 107; ibid., 129;
Windsor Daggett, A Down-East Yankee from the District of Maine (Port-
land, ME: A. J. Huston, 1920), 31-32.

262


NOTES TO PAGES 65-73

70. Mill, Autobiography, in CW vol. 1, 107; Arianne Chernock, Men and
the Making of Modern British Feminism (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2010), 114.
71. E A. Hayek, John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor: Their Correspondence
and Subsequent Marriage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951);
Alice S. Rossi, "Sentiment and Intellect: The Story of John Stuart Mill
and Harriet Taylor Mill," in John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill,
Essays on Sex Equality, ed. Alice S. Rossi (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1970), 3-63, especially 22; ibid., 21.
72. Mill and Taylor, Essays on Sex Equality, 76; ibid., 84.
73. Ibid., 85; Wollstonecraft also referred to patriarchal marriage as a kind
of "legal prostitution"; for example, Rights of Men, in Works, vol. 5, 22.
Mill and Taylor, Essays on Sex Equality, 86.
74. Mill, Autobiography, in CW vol. 1, 193-95-
75. John Stuart Mill and Auguste Comte, The Correspondence ofjohn Stuart
Mill and Auguste Comte, tr. and ed. Oscar A. Haac (New Brunswick, NJ:
Transaction, 1995), 188; James P. Scanlan, "John Stuart Mill in Russia:
A Bibliography," Mill News Letter 4:1 (Fall 1968), 2-11.
76. Mill and Comte, Correspondence, 180.
77. Ibid., 200; ibid., 202.
78. Jo Ellen Jacobs, "Introduction," in The Complete Works of Harriet Taylor
Mill, ed. Jo Ellen Jacobs and Paula Harms Payne (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1998), xxviii (hereafter cited as Complete Works); Har-
riet Taylor Mill, "Enfranchisement of Women," in CW vol. 21, 397;
Harriet Taylor Mill and John Stuart Mill, "Women, Rights of," in CW
vol. 21, 386.
79. Barbara Caine, "Victorian Feminism and the Ghost of Mary Woll-
stonecraft," Women's Writing 4:2 (1997), 261-75-
Chapter Two. Foundations of Universal Human Rights
1. Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, in Works, vol. 5, 153, 157, 249; Ronald
Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (London: Bloomsbury, [1977] 1997),
6; Bentham, Rights, Representation, and Reform, xlvii, 317-
2. John Rawls, A Theory of justice, revised edition (Cambridge, MA:
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, [1971] 1999), 184-85-
3. Beitz, The Idea of Human Rights, 49. The place of virtue in Wollstone-
craft's and Mill's moral and political philosophies is explored at length
in chapter 3. Mill, Auguste Comte and Positivism, in CW vol. 10, 267.

263


NOTES TO PAGES 73-78

4. Rawls, Political Liberalism (1993). For nonfoundationalist approaches
to justifying universal human rights in the tradition of Rawlsian po-
litical liberalism, see Rawls, The Law of Peoples (1999), Donnelly, Uni-
versal Human Rights in Theory and Practice (2003), and Beitz, The Idea
of Human Rights (2009). Other nonfoundationalist schools of thought
on human rights, such as Richard Rorty's, are not my concern in this
chapter. Rorty's sentimentalist alternative to the Rawlsian approach
is treated in chapter 5. See Rorty, "Human Rights, Rationality, and
Sentimentality."
5. Donnelly, Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice, 7-21.
6. Gilabert, "Humanist and Political Perspectives on Human Rights,"
441; ibid.; Brooke Ackerly, "Human Rights Enjoyment in Theory and
Activism," Human Rights Review 12 (2011), 221-39, especially 225; Sen,
"Consequentialist Evaluation and Practical Reason," 497; Sen, The Idea
ofustice, 362-63.
7. Thomas Banchoff and Robert Wuthnow, eds., Religion and the Global
Politics of Human Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Minky
Worden, ed., The Unfinished Revolution: Voices from the Global Fight for
Women's Rights (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2012); Glendon, A
World Made New; Wendy Shalit, A Return to Modesty: Discovering the
Lost Virtue (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), 111, 191.
8. Gilabert, "Humanist and Political Perspectives on Human Rights";
Mill, Subjection of Women, in CT4<vol. 21, 340; Ian Shapiro, Political Crit-
icism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 290-92; Ackerly,
Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism, 11-1 2.
9. Sapiro, A Vindication ofPolitical Virtue, 74-76, 118-19; Lena Halldenius,
"The Primacy of Right: On the Triad of Liberty, Equality and Virtue
in Wollstonecraft's Political Thought," British Journal for the History of
Philosophy 15:1 (2007), 75-99; Elizabeth Frazer, "Mary Wollstonecraft
on Politics and Friendship," Political Studies 56:1 (March 2008), 237-56,
especially 251; Ruth Abbey, "Are Women Human? Wollstonecraft's
Defense of Rights for Women," in Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindica-
tion of the Rights of Woman, ed. Eileen Hunt Botting (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2014), 229-45.
10. Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, in Works, vol. 5, 220, 124; Jane Duran,
Eight Women Philosophers: Theory, Politics, and Feminism (Champaign:
University of Illinois Press, 2006), 114-15; Mary Hawkesworth, Politi-
cal Worlds of Women: Activism, Advocacy, and Governance in the Twenty-
First Century (Boulder: Westview, 2012), 41.

264


NOTES TO PAGES 79-84

I1. For a reading of Price as a Kantian ethicist, see M. B. Smith, "Does Hu-
manity Share a Common Moral Faculty?" journal of Moral Philosophy
7:1 (2010), 37-53-
12. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, ed. and tr.
Allen W. Wood (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 14-15-
13. Ibid., 3-5, 27.
14. Sapiro, A Vindication of Political Virtue, 49-51; Taylor, Mary Woll-
stonecraft and the Feminist Imagination, 12, 226; Botting, Family Feuds,
164-67; Natalie F. Taylor, The Rights of Woman as Chimera: The Politi-
cal Philosophy of Mary Wollstonecraft (New York: Routledge, 2007), 182;
Abbey, "Are Women Human? Wollstonecraft's Defense of Rights for
Women," 235; Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, in Works, vol. 5, 84.
15. Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, in Works, vol. 5, 95; Sapiro, A Vindica-
tion of Political Virtue, 92.
16. Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, in Works, vol. 5, 266, 67.
17. Onora O'Neill, "Kantian Approaches to Some Famine Problems," in
Matters of Life and Death: New Introductory Essays in Moral Philosophy, ed.
Tom Regan (New York: McGraw Hill, 1980), 2 58-70; Onora O'Neill,
Constructions of Reason: Explorations of Kant's Practical Philosophy (Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 75-77, 188; Jean Hamp-
ton, The Intrinsic Worth of Persons: Contractarianism in Moral and Politi-
cal Philosophy, ed. Daniel Farnham (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2007), 13-25; Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, in Works, vol. 5,
266. For a helpful summary of Kant's misogynistic biases, see Lara
Denis, "From Friendship to Marriage: Revising Kant," Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research 63:1 (2001), 1-2 8.
18. Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, in Works, vol. 5, 114; ibid., 216.
19. Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (tr. Wood), 46 -48. One
version of Kant's philosophical anthropology is found in The Critique of
Judgment (1790). Wollstonecraft referenced this book by "Mr. Kant"
in Hints, in Works, vol. 5, 267. See also Kant, selections from "Critique
of Judgment," in Perpetual Peace, 37-43. O'Neill, "Kantian Approaches
to Some Famine Problems"; Wollstonecraft, Rights of Men, in Works,
vol. 5, 16; ibid.
20. Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, in Works, vol. 5, 131.
21. Wollstonecraft, Rights of Men, in Works, vol. 5, 34-
22. Onora O'Neill, "Justice, Gender, and International Boundaries," Brit-
ish journal of Political Science 20:4 (October 1990), 439-59; Wollstone-
craft, Rights of Woman, in Works, vol. 5, 222.

265


NOTES TO PAGES 85-96

23. Botting, Family Feuds, 163-66.
24. Lisa Isherwood, Introducing Feminist Christologies (New York: Contin-
uum, 2001), 52-53-
25. Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, in Works, vol. 5, 101, 121; Wollstone-
craft, Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman, in Works, vol. I, 108, 111, 174.
26. Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, in Works, vol. 5, 110. In this inter-
pretation of Wollstonecraft's conception of human development, I use
some of the terms found in Martha Nussbaum's list of the ten central
human capabilities, such as bodily integrity and play. See Women and
Human Development, 78-80.
27. Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, in Works, vol. 5, 229.
28. Ibid., 266; ibid.
29. Sen, "Consequentialist Evaluation and Practical Reason," 497; Sen, De-
velopment as Freedom, 227-48.
30. Hamburger, John Stuart Mill on Liberty and Control, xiii.
31. Mill, On Liberty, in CW vol. 18, 223; Mill, Utilitarianism, in CW
vol. IO1, 210.
32. Mary Ann Glendon, Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991); Mill, On Liberty, in CWvol. 18,
261; ibid., 267.
33. Mill, Utilitarianism, in CW vol. 10, 207; J. O. Urmson, "The Interpre-
tation of the Moral Philosophy of J. S. Mill," in Mill's Utilitarianism:
Critical Essays, ed. David Lyons (New York: Rowman and Littlefield,
1997), 1-8, especially 7.
34. Mill, On Liberty, in CWvol. 18, 224; Mill, Utilitarianism, in CWvol. Io,
214; Mill, On Liberty, in CW vol. 18, 224; John M. Robson, The Im-
provement of Mankind: The Social and Political Thought ofjohn Stuart Mill
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968), 150; Mill, "Whewell on
Moral Philosophy [1852]," in CWvol. 10, 187.
35. Mill, Utilitarianism, in CW vol. 10, 210; ibid.; ibid.; Mill, On Liberty, in
CWvol. 18, 224; ibid., 270; ibid.
36. Mill, Utilitarianism, in CWvol. 10, 212-13-
37. Ibid., 214; ibid., 213; ibid., 214.
38. Rawls, A Theory of justice, 184-85-
39. Mill, Utilitarianism, in CWvol. 10, 255; ibid., 251-
40. D. G. Brown, "Mill's Act-Utilitarianism," in Mill's Utilitarianism, ed. Ly-
ons, 25-28; Gerald J. Postema, "Bentham's Utilitarianism," in The Black-
well Guide to Mill's Utilitarianism, ed. Henry R. West (Oxford: Blackwell,

266


NOTES TO PAGES 97-105

2006), 26-44, especially 28; L. W. Sumner, "Mill's Theory of Rights," in
The Blackwell Guide to Mill's Utilitarianism, 184-98; Derek Parfit, Reasons
and Persons (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 387.
41. Mill, On Liberty, in CWvol. 18, 261; ibid., 270; ibid., 223-
42. Nancy J. Hirschmann, Gender, Class, and Freedom in Modern Political
Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 216-23, 266.
43. Urmson, "The Moral Philosophy of J. S. Mill," 3; David Lyons, "Hu-
man Rights and the General Welfare," in Mill's Utilitarianism, ed. Ly-
ons, 29-43, especially 36; Mill, Utilitarianism, in CWvol. 10, 256; ibid.,
259; J. B. Schneewind, Sidgwick's Ethics and Victorian Moral Philosophy
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 3 36-37-
44. Lyons, "Human Rights and the General Welfare," 33.
45. Mill, On Liberty, in CWvol. 18, 224; Mill, Utilitarianism, in CWvol. 10,
215; Mill, Autobiography, in CW vol. 1, 153. For Mill's critique of cover-
ture, see Subjection of Women, in CW vol. 21, 283-86.
46. Susan Leigh Anderson, "Mill's Life," in The Blackwell Guide to Mill's
Utilitarianism, 22.
47. Mill, Utilitarianism, in CWvol. 10, 242, 247.
48. Mill, On Liberty, in CWvol. 18, 270; ibid., 269.
49. Rawls, Political Liberalism, xxvii; Rawls, The Law of Peoples, 18.
50. Mill, Utilitarianism, in CWvol. 10, 247; ibid., 255. On the latter passage
in chapter 5 of Utilitarianism, Georgios Varouxakis points out that Mill's
broader distinction between the perfect obligations of justice (providing
rights) and the imperfect obligations of morality (giving charity) means
that Mill is not like some contemporary "cosmopolitan" theorists who
treat these obligations identically. Rather, for Mill, justice is technically
a part of morality but not "coextensive" with it. While agreeing with
Varouxakis that Mill does not conflate perfect and imperfect obligations
of morality, I make a case in chapter 5 for why Mill's literary writings
model a "rooted cosmopolitan" approach to theorizing global justice, in
which the direct or vicarious experience of loving and respectful rela-
tionships motivates people to be moral as well as just toward human be-
ings (and sentient life) in general. Georgios Varouxakis, Liberty Abroad:
5. S. Mill on International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2013), 42-43-
51. Mill, Subjection of Women, in CW vol. 21, 287-88; ibid., 300-
52. "CEDAW 2014." Accessed 15 December 2014 at http://www.women
streaty.org/index.php/about-cedaw/cedaw-by-the-numbers

267


NOTES TO PAGES 106-13

53. Wollstonecraft may have found her way to Forster via Cookson, as she
quoted virtually the same passages on polygamy from Forster's voyage
as Cookson. See Johann Reinhold Forster, Observations Made during a
Voyage round the World (London: G. Robinson, 1778), 428; James Cook-
son, Thoughts on Polygamy, Suggested by the Dictates of Scripture, Nature,
Reason, and Common-Sense (Winchester, England: J. Wilkes, 1782), 333;
Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, in Works, vol. 5, 139. For an extended
study of Enlightenment-era liberal critiques of polygamy, see John
Witte Jr., The Western Case for Monogamy over Polygamy (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2015), chapter 9.
54. Lara Denis has argued that a revised Kantian feminist conception of
marriage would indeed be this kind of higher friendship. Denis, "From
Friendship to Marriage: Revising Kant." See also Ruth Abbey, "Back to
the Future: Marriage as Friendship in the Thought of Mary Wollstone-
craft," Hypatia 14:3 (1999), 78-95-
55. Taylor, The Rights of Woman as Chimera, 180; Frazer, "Mary Wollstone-
craft on Politics and Friendship"; Wollstonecraft, Lessons, in Works,
vol. 4, 270; Botting, Family Feuds, 185-86. In the Rights of Woman,
Wollstonecraft tellingly eliminates one line from her quote of Forster
that Cookson left in, regarding the ordination of monogamy for Eu-
rope by divine particular providence: "Here, no doubt, providence has
enforced the necessity of monogamy." See Forster, Observations Made
during a Voyage round the World, 428; Cookson, Thoughts on Polygamy,
333; Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, in Works, vol. 5, 139.
56. Shirin Ebadi, "Islamic Law and the Revolution against Women," in
The Unfinished Revolution, ed. Worden, 55-56; Wollstonecraft, Rights of
Woman, in Works, vol. 5, 108.
57. Lily Munir as quoted in Katherine Robinson, "Islamic Cosmopolitics,
Human Rights, and Anti-Violence Strategies in Indonesia," in An-
thropology and the New Cosmopolitanism: Rooted, Feminist, and Vernacular
Perspectives, ed. Pnina Werbner (New York: Berg, 2008), 121; Ebadi,
"Islamic Law and the Revolution against Women," 55-56; ibid.; ibid.
58. Mill, On Liberty, in CW vol. 18, 290; Mill, Subjection of Women, in CW
vol. 21, 336.
59. Mill, On Liberty, in CWvol. 18, 290; ibid., 291.
60. Ibid., 291.
61. Ibid.
62. "Encouraging to Women," Woman's Exponent 2:22 (15 April 1874), 175;
Carol Cornwall Madsen, "Emmeline B. Wells: Romantic Rebel," in

268


NOTES TO PAGES 113-18

Supporting Saints: Life Stories of Nineteenth-Century Mormons, ed. Don-
ald Q. Cannon and David J. Whittaker (Provo, UT: Brigham Young
University, Religious Studies Center, 1985), 305-41; ibid.; Bruce
Baum, "Feminism, Liberalism, and Cultural Pluralism: J. S. Mill on
Mormon Polygamy," Journal of Political Philosophy 5:3 (1997), 230-53,
especially 238.
63. Baum, "Feminism, Liberalism and Cultural Pluralism," 230; Madsen,
"Emmeline B. Wells: Romantic Rebel"; Barbara Caine, "Elizabeth
Cady Stanton, John Stuart Mill, and the Nature of Feminist Thought,"
in Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Feminist as Thinker: A Reader in Documents and
Essays, ed. Ellen Carol DuBois and Richard C. Smith (New York: New
York University Press, 2007), 50-65-
64. Madsen, "Emmeline B. Wells: Romantic Rebel."
65. Robert Putnam and David Campbell, American Grace: How Religion Di-
vides and Unites Us (New York: Simon and Schuster, [2010] 2012), 241;
Rawls, Political Liberalism, 36-37.
66. Ebadi, "Islamic Law and the Revolution against Women," 58.
Chapter Three. Theories of Human Development
1. Mill, On Liberty, in CW vol. 18, 302. In addition to basic human rights
to food and education, Mill addressed the right to security, or to be free
from "personal violence" (a right that had special salience for women in
abusive marriages). See Subjection of Women, in CW vol. 21, 284. Woll-
stonecraft, following Rousseau, argued that "self-preservation" is the
"first law of nature" and entails rights to sustenance and security. See
Rights of Men, in Works, vol. 5, 16; Rights of Woman, in Works, vol. 5, 110.
For Wollstonecraft's extended defense of education as a fundamental
human right of girls and boys, see chapter 12 of the Rights of Woman.
2. Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, in Works, vol. 5, 75; Mill, Autobiogra-
phy, in CW vol. 1, 153; Mill, On Liberty, in CW vol. 18, 266. For con-
temporary liberal theories of virtue ethics, see Stephen Macedo, Liberal
Virtues: Citizenship, Virtue, and Community in Liberal Constitutionalism
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1990); Peter Berkowitz, Virtue and the Making of
Modern Liberalism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
3. Nussbaum, "Mill on Happiness," 114-17.
4. Although Nussbaum and others, such as Natalie Taylor, have argued that
Aristotle's ethics may be read as applying to all people, his examples of
virtue typically draw on elite men's roles in his ancient Athenian society.
Taylor has read his views on marriage to mean that he thought women

269


NOTES TO PAGE 119

were capable of the same virtues as men. Even if we grant Aristotle such
a generous egalitarian reading of his ethics, nowhere will a reader find
evidence of his concern with egalitarian political ideas such as universal
human rights or universal primary education that only fully emerged in
the late eighteenth century. Nussbaum, "Mill on Happiness," 114-17;
Taylor, The Rights of Woman as Chimera, 148-70; Wollstonecraft, Rights
of Men, in Works, vol. 5, 20 note 4; Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman,
in Works, vol. 5, 81, 108. For Wollstonecraft's theory of democracy,
see Daniel I. O'Neill, The Burke- Wollstonecraft Debate: Savagery, Civi-
lization, and Democracy (University Park: Pennsylvania State University
Press, 2007), chapter 7. While it is undisputed that Mill had extensively
read Aristotle's corpus, the context for Wollstonecraft's exposure to Ar-
istotelian ideas still remains unknown. Wollstonecraft appears to have
been directly familiar with the Politics and at least indirectly indebted to
the Nicomachean Ethics. See Taylor, The Rights of Woman as Chimera, 8.
Although scholars have yet to establish how Wollstonecraft was at least
indirectly exposed to the ideas of Aristotle's Ethics, the most likely and
immediate historical source (and filter) was her rational Christian moral
theology, which served as the metaphysical basis of her ethical system.
5. Sapiro, A Vindication of Political Virtue. For Wollstonecraft as a virtue
ethicist, see Abbey, "Are Women Human?" (2014); Sandrine Berges,
The Routledge Guidebook to Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of
Woman (London: Routledge, 2013), especially the conclusion; Frazer,
"Mary Wollstonecraft on Politics and Friendship" (2008); and Taylor,
The Rights of Woman as Chimera (2007). For Mill as a virtue ethicist, see
Marcia Baron, "Virtue Ethics in Relation to Kantian Ethics: An Opin-
ionated Overview and Commentary," in Perfecting Virtue: New Essays on
Kantian Ethics and Virtue Ethics, ed. Lawrence Jost and Julian Wuerth
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 8-37; Samuel Clark,
"Love, Poetry, and the Good Life: Mill's Autobiography and Perfection-
ist Ethics," Inquiry 53:6 (December 2010), 565-78; Robert Devigne,
Reforming Liberalism:J. S. Mill's Use of Ancient, Religious, Liberal, and
Romantic Moralities (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 55-56;
Wendy Donner, "John Stuart Mill on Education and Democracy,"
in J. S. Mill's Political Thought: A Bicentennial Reassessment, ed. Nadia
Urbinati and Alex Zakaras (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2007), 250-74; Nussbaum, "Mill on Happiness." Frederick Rosen has
pointed out that the tradition of reading Mill's feminism in light of his

270


NOTES TO PAGES 119-24

concern with "character" or "ethology" dates to Alan Ryan's]J. S. Mill
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), 156. See Frederick Rosen,
Mill: Founders of Modern Social and Political Thought (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2013), 252. For Mill as primarily a theorist of freedom
as nondomination, see Maria Morales, "Rational Freedom in John Stu-
art Mill's Feminism," inJ. S. Mill's Political Thought, ed. Urbinati and
Zakaras, 43-66. For Wollstonecraft as primarily a theorist of virtue, see
Taylor, The Rights of Woman as Chimera.
6. Alan Ryan, "J. S. Mill on Education," Oxford Review of Education 37:5
(2011), 653-67, especially 657; Mill, "Inaugural Address Delivered to
the University of St. Andrews," in CW vol. 21, 217-18; Sen, The Idea of
]ustice, 269-90; Nussbaum, Creating Capabilities, 17-45-
7. Mill, Autobiography, in CW vol. 1, 15 3; Hamburger, John Stuart Mill on
Liberty and Control, 20-21, 135-39, 150-51, 226-29.
8. Alan M. S. J. Coffee, "Mary Wollstonecraft, Freedom, and the Endur-
ing Power of Social Domination," European Journal of Political Theory
12:2 (April 2013), 116-35; Lena Halldenius, "The Political Conditions
of Free Agency: The Case of Mary Wollstonecraft," in Freedom and the
Construction of Europe, ed. Quentin Skinner and Martin van Gelderen
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), vol. 2, 227-46,
especially 234; Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, in Works, vol. 5, 120;
ibid., 131-
9. Martha C. Nussbaum, "Nature, Function, and Capability: Aristotle on
Political Distribution," in Wider Working Papers 31 (Helsinki, Decem-
ber 1987), 1-50; Amartya Sen, Inequality Reexamined (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, [1992] 1995), 90-91. See also MacIntyre,
After Virtue, xv. Nussbaum, Creating Capabilities, 17-45; Sen, "Conse-
quentialist Evaluation and Practical Reason," 477-502, especially 497.
10. Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, in Works, vol. 5, 266; Mill, Subjection of
Women, in CW vol. 21, 278.
i1. Wollstonecraft, Rights of Men, in Works, vol. 5, 9-
12. Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, in Works, vol. 5, 121.
13. Oxford English Dictionary, online edition, "Gender, noun." The Ameri-
can ]ournal of Psychology in 1945 published the first social scientific use
of "gender" to mean the "socialized obverse of sex." Wollstonecraft,
Rights of Woman, in Works, vol. 5, 88.
14. Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, in Works, vol. 5, 88.
15. Ibid., 216; ibid., 93; ibid., 30; ibid., 130, 186.

271


NOTES TO PAGES 125-34

16. Mill, Subjection of Women, in CWvol. 21, 269; ibid., 261, 269.
17. Mill, "Letter to Carlyle, 5 October 1833," in CW vol. 12, 184; Nadia
Urbinati, "John Stuart Mill on Androgyny and Ideal Marriage," in Mill's
The Subjection of Women: Critical Essays, ed. Maria H. Morales (Lanham,
MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), 157-82, especially 157-
18. Mill, "On Marriage," in CWJ vol. 21, 41.
19. Mill and Taylor, "Women, Rights of," in CWJ vol. 21, 387-88; Mill,
Considerations on Representative Government, in CW vol. 19, 479.
20. Mill, Logic, in CWvol. 7, 85-
21. Rosen, Mill, 252-55-
22. Mill, "Speech on the Admission of Women to the Electoral Franchise,
2 oMay 1867," in CWvol. 28, chap. 55, 152.
23. Urbinati, "John Stuart Mill on Androgyny," 175 note 8.
24. Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, in Works, vol. 5, 75; "John Stuart Mill
on Woman Suffrage," New York Times, 21 July 1867. Reprinted from
the Topeka Record.
25. Jean Elshtain, Meditations on Modern Political Thought: Masculine/
Feminine Themes from Luther to Arendt (University Park: Penn State
University Press, [1986] 1992), 40; Susan Mendus, "The Marriage of
True Minds: The Ideal of Marriage in the Philosophy of John Stuart
Mill," in Mill's The Subjection of Women, ed. Morales, 135-56.
26. Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, in Works, vol. 5, 193; ibid., 140; Jer-
emy Waldron, "Mill on Liberty and the Contagious Diseases Acts," in
5. S. Mill's Political Thought, ed. Urbinati and Zakaras, 11-42, especially
30-32.
27. Mill, Subjection of Women, in CW vol. 21, 298; Urbinati, "John Stu-
art Mill on Androgyny"; Okin, Women in Western Political Thought,
226-27.
28. Mill, Subjection of Women, in CW vol. 21, 297; Torben Iversen and
Frances Rosenbluth, Women, Work, and Politics: The Political Economy
of Gender Equality (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), vii-xv,
81-109.
29. Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, in Works, vol. 5, 114; Urbinati, "John
Stuart Mill on Androgyny."
30. Claudia Johnson, Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in
the 179os: Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1995), 11; Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, in Works,
vol. 5, 146, 208; Johnson, Equivocal Beings. Lyndall Gordon has sug-
gested that Wollstonecraft was more than tolerant, indeed protective,

272


NOTES TO PAGES 135-40

of her close friend Joseph Johnson's homosexuality. Gordon, Vindication,
387. Wollstonecraft playfully praised the transvestite Madame d'Eon as
an example of a "woman" with a "masculine" education in the Rights of
Woman (Works, vol. 5, 146). Louis Crompton, "Jeremy Bentham's Essay
on Paederasty," Journal of Homosexuality 3:4 (1978), 389-405; Claeys,
Mill and Paternalism, 204-6.
31. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity
(New York: Routledge, 1990); Martha C. Nussbaum, "The Professor
of Parody," New Republic, 22 February 1999, 37-45-
32. Mill, "Inaugural Address," in CW vol. 21, 217, 222, 253-55-
33. Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, in Works, vol. 5, 89; Mill, Subjection of
Women, in CW vol. 21, 271.
34. Amartya Sen, Commodities and Capabilities (New York: North-Holland,
1985), 21-22; Nussbaum, Women and Human Development, chapter 2.
35. Wendy Gunther-Canada, Rebel Writer: Mary Wollstonecraft and En-
lightenment Politics (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2001),
43-50; Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination, 2 3 8-44;
Wollstonecraft, Wrongs of Woman, in Works, vol. 1, 113.
36. Mill, Subjection of Women, in CW vol. 21, 270; ibid.; ibid.; ibid., 272;
ibid., 271.
37. Sandrine Berges, "Why Women Hug Their Chains: Wollstonecraft and
Adaptive Preferences," Utilitas 23:1 (2011), 72-87; Jennifer Saul, "Im-
plicit Bias, Stereotype Threat, and Women in Philosophy," in Women
in Philosophy: What Needs to Change? ed. Katrina Hutchison and Fiona
Jenkins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 39-60, especially 42.
38. Berges, "Why Women Hug Their Chains," 87; Nussbaum, Women and
Human Development, 111-66; Susan Gubar, "Feminist Misogyny: Mary
Wollstonecraft and the Paradox of 'It Takes One to Know One,"' Femi-
nist Studies 20:3 (Autumn 1994), 452-73-
39. Berges, "Why Women Hug Their Chains," 82-84; Mill, Subjection of
Women, in CW vol. 21, 269; ibid.
40. Mill, Subjection of Women, in CW vol. 21, 272; ibid.; Iversen and Rosen-
bluth, Women, Work, and Politics.
41. Mill, Subjection of Women, in CW vol. 21, 305; Mozaffar Qizilbash, "Ca-
pability, Happiness and Adaptation in Sen and J. S. Mill," Utilitas 18:1
(2006), 20-3 2.
42. Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, in Works, vol. 5, 240; ibid.; ibid.
For the Millennium Development Goals, see http://www.un.org/
millenniumgoals/

273


NOTES TO PAGES 141-45

43. John Mason, "Scottish Charity Schools of the Eighteenth Century,"
Scottish Historical Review 33:115 (April 1954), 1-13, especially 11-13.
44. Sylvana Tomaselli, "Biographical Directory," in Mary Wollstonecraft,
A Vindication of the Rights of Men and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,
ed. Sylvana Tomaselli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995),
320; William J. Reese, "The Origins of Progressive Education," History
of Education Quarterly 41:1 (Spring 2001), 1-24, especially 10-13-
45. Johann N. Neem, Creating a Nation of Joiners: Democracy and Civil So-
ciety in Early National Massachusetts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 2008), 28; Marion Rust, Prodigal Daughters: Susanna
Rowson's Early American Women (Chapel Hill: University of North Car-
olina Press, 2008), 86-91; Eileen Hunt Botting and Sarah L. Houser,
"'Drawing the Line of Equality': Hannah Mather Crocker on Women's
Rights," American Political Science Review 100:2 (2006), 265-78; Rob-
ert W. T. Martin, "Between Consensus and Conflict: Habermas, Post-
Modern Conflict, and the Early American Public Sphere," Polity 37:3
(July 2005), 365-88, especially 385-
46. Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, in Works, vol. 5, 240; ibid., 230-
47. Ibid., 246.
48. Ibid., 241.
49. Ibid., 236; ibid., 245; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin
of Inequality (1755), in The Social Contract and the First and Second Dis-
courses, ed. and tr. Susan Dunn (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2002), 84-85; Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, in Works, vol. 5, 245-
50. Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, in Works, vol. 5, 237; ibid., 246.
51. Ibid., 240; Ryan, "J. S. Mill on Education," 666 note 15-
52. Stephen Broadberry, "Human Capital and Skills," in The Cambridge
Economic History of Modern Britain, vol. 2, ed. Roderick Floud and Paul
Johnson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 56-73, es-
pecially 57; Henry Reeves, John Stuart Mill: Victorian Firebrand (Lon-
don: Atlantic, 2007), 455; Mill, "Sarah Austin's Translation of Cousin,"
in CW vol. 23, 729-30. See also Mill, "Prospects of France," in CW
vol. 22, 641-44; "Reform in Education," in CW vol. 21, 61-74; Reeves,
John Stuart Mill, 45 5; Hamburger, John Stuart Mill on Liberty and Con-
trol, 10.
53. Mill, On Liberty, in CW vol. 18, 303; Mill, "Inaugural Address," in CW
vol. 21, 248.
54. Mill, "Letter to the Rev. Leopold John Bernays, 8 January 1868," in
CWvol. 16, 1347-48.

274


NOTES TO PAGES 146-55

55. Mill, On Liberty, in CWvol. 18, 266; ibid., 262.
56. Mill, "Inaugural Address," in CW vol. 21, 224; ibid., 218; ibid., 219.
57. Andrew Valls, "Self-Development and the Liberal State: The Cases of
John Stuart Mill and Wilhelm von Humboldt," Review of Politics 61:2
(Spring 1999), 251-74; Mill, On Liberty, in CWvol. 18, 264; Mill, Utili-
tarianism, in CWvol. 10, 213-
58. Mill, Utilitarianism, in CFJ 236-37; Nussbaum, "Mill on Happiness,"
110-17; Mill, "Wordsworth and Byron 30 January, 1829," in CW
vol. 26, 441-42; Ryan, "J. S. Mill on Education," 655-
59. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, in CW vol. 2, 208.
60. Ryan, "J. S. Mill on Education," 657; Mill, "Inaugural Address," in CW
vol. 21, 221; Mill, Subjection of Women, in CW vol. 21, 308.
61. Hollie Mann and Jeff Spinner-Halev, "John Stuart Mill's Feminism: On
Progress, the State, and the Path to Justice," Polity 42:2 (2010), 244-70.
62. Mill, On Liberty, in CWvol. 18, 224.
63. Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, in Works, vol. 5, 220; Wollstonecraft,
Rights of Men, in Works, vol. 5, 46.
64. Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, in Works, vol. 5, 250; ibid.
65. Mill, Principles of Political Economy, in CW vol. 2, 206, 208-9; Mill, Au-
tobiography, in CW vol. 1, 239; Mill, Subjection of Women, in CW vol. 21,
chap. 4.
66. Hirschmann, Gender, Class, and Freedom, 238-39; Mill, Subjection of
Women, in CW vol. 21, 326.
67. United Nations, "We Can End Poverty: Millennium Development
Goals and Beyond 2015 Fact Sheet" (2013). Accessed 24 December
2013 at http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/pdf/Goal_2_fs.pdf; U.N.
Women, "The Unfinished Agenda: Balance Sheet of Progress and Back-
logs on Gender Equality" (2012). Accessed 24 December 2013, at http://
www.unifem.org/attachments/products/MDGsAndGenderEquality
_2_UnfinishedAgenda.pdf
68. Mill, "Inaugural Address," in CW vol. 21, 257.
Chapter Four. The Problem of Cultural Bias
1. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York:
Vintage, [1975] 1995); Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological
Theory and Women's Development (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, [1982] 1993); Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self The Making of
the Modern Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989),
especially 40-42.

275


NOTES TO PAGES 155-58

2. Jurgen Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory,
ed. Ciaran Cronin and Pablo De Greiff (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
1998); Rawls, The Law of Peoples.
3. Anthony Pagden, "Human Rights, Natural Rights, and Europe's Impe-
rial Legacy," Political Theory 31:2 (April 2003), 171-99; Clare Midgley,
Feminism and Empire: Women Activists in Imperial Britain, 1790 -1865
(New York: Routledge, 2007), 13-20; Javed Majeed, "James Mill's The
History of British India," in Utilitarianism and Empire, ed. Schultz and
Varouxakis, 93-106; Pitts, A Turn to Empire, 123-62; Karuna Mantena,
"Mill and the Imperial Predicament," in]j. S. Mill's Political Thought, ed.
Urbinati and Zakaras, 298-318.
4. Jane Rendall, "'The grand causes which combine to carry mankind
forward': Wollstonecraft, History, and Revolution," Women's Writing
4:2 (1997), 155-72; O'Neill, The Burke-Wollstonecraft Debate, 37-41;
Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1997), 13. Thomas McCarthy's Race, Empire, and the Idea of Human
Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) follows
Mills in offering an insightful and critical focus on the problematic ra-
cial and racist dimensions of modern theories of human development.
5. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Discourses and Other Early Political Writ-
ings, ed. Victor Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997), 6, 9; Botting, Family Feuds, 42-43, 62-63-
6. Karen O'Brien, Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Brit-
ain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 78-79; O'Neill,
The Burke-Wollstonecraft Debate, 117-18; Rendall, "'The grand causes
which combine to carry mankind forward"'; Wollstonecraft, "Review
of Samuel Stanhope Smith, An Essay on the Causes of the Variety of
Complexion and Figure in the Human Species. To which are added,
Strictures on Lord Kaims's Discourse on the original Diversity of Man-
kind," in Works, vol. 7, 54; Scott Juengel, "Countenancing History:
Mary Wollstonecraft, Samuel Stanhope Smith, and Enlightenment
Racial Science," ELH 68:4 (Winter 2001), 897-927; Lord Kames,
Sketches of the History of Man, third edition (Dublin: James Williams,
1779), vol. 1,339-
7. James Mill, The History of British India (London: Baldwin, Cradock, and
Joy, 1817), vol. 1, xv.
8. Pitts, A Turn to Empire, 123-62; Mantena, "Imperial Predicament,"
298-318; Alan Ryan, "Bureaucracy, Democracy, Liberty: Some Un-

276


NOTES TO PAGES 159-63

answered Questions in Mill's Politics," inJ. S. Mill's Political Thought,
148; Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, [1979] 1994),
202-10; Margaret Kohn and Keally McBride, Political Theories of De-
colonization: Postcolonialism and the Problem of Foundations (Oxford: Ox-
ford University Press, 2011), 5; Nadia Urbinati, "The Many Heads of
the Hydra: J. S. Mill on Despotism," inJ. S. Mill's Political Thought,
ed. Urbinati and Zakaras, 66-98; Holmes, "Making Sense of Liberal
Imperialism," inJ. S. Mill's Political Thought, ed. Urbinati and Zakaras,
319-46; Mill, Subjection of Women, in CWT4vol. 21, 264.
9. Joyce Zonana, "The Sultan and the Slave: Feminist Orientalism and
the Structure of Jane Eyre," Signs 18:3 (Spring 1993), 592-617; Antoi-
nette M. Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and
Imperial Culture, 1865-1915 (Chapel Hill: University of North Caro-
lina Press, 1994), 39, 75-76, 110; Moira Ferguson, Colonialism and Gen-
der Relations from Mary Wollstonecraft to Jamaica Kincaid: East Caribbean
Connections (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994); Midgley,
Feminism and Empire.
Io. Said, Orientalism, 202-10. Worldcat and interlibrary loan enabled this
survey of the global publication of Mill's Subjection of Women.
S11. Said, Orientalism, 202-10; Mohanty, "Under Western Eyes: Feminist
Scholarship and Colonial Discourses," 61-88; Mohanty, "Under West-
ern Eyes Revisited," 499-535-
12. Bertrand Badie, The Imported State: The Westernization of the Political
Order, tr. Claudia Royal (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 2,
7-9, 11.
13. Offen, European Feminisms, 19-20; Offen, "Introduction," in Globaliz-
ing Feminisms, xxix-xxxiv; Nagel, "Appiah's Rooted Cosmopolitanism."
14. Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, in Works, vol. 5, 82, 183-84.
15. Ibid., 183; Gilligan, "Letter to Readers, 1993," in In a Different Voice,
xxiii.
16. Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, in Works, vol. 5, 186-87.
17. David Hume, "Of the Association of Ideas," in Enquiry concerning Hu-
man Understanding (1748), section 3.
18. Annette C. Baier, Moral Prejudices: Essays on Ethics (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1995), 51-94; Wollstonecraft, Rights of
Woman, in Works, vol. 5, 187.
19. Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, in Works, vol. 5, 187; Moya Lloyd, "A
Feminist Mapping of Foucauldian Politics," in Feminist Interpretations

277


NOTES TO PAGES 164-67

of Michel Foucault, ed. Susan Heckman (University Park: Pennsylvania
State University Press, 1996), 241-64; Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman,
in Works, vol. 5, 113-
20. Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, in Works, vol. 5, 116; Thomas Nagel,
The View from Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 63.
21. Charles Taylor, "Foucault on Freedom and Truth," Political Theory 12:2
(May 1984), 152-83; Susan Heckman, "Editor's Introduction," Femi-
nist Interpretations of Michel Foucault, ed. Susan Heckman (University
Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 2.
22. For example, Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, in Works, vol. 5, 74, 76,
232, 266. For analysis of Montesquieu's and Voltaire's polarization of
northern and southern European cultures, see Dainotto, Europe (in
Theory), 52-86, 94-95. Similarly, Adam Smith referred to the parts of
Europe "south of Cape Finisterre" (in northwest Spain) as nonmanu-
facturing cultures. In Smith's theory of development, the economic
drain of the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy reduced the intellectual
output and other forms of productivity in southern Europe in compari-
son to Protestant Western Europe. See Smith, The Wealth of Nations
(G. Bell, 1908), especially 87-88, 311, 336-37. Price, Discourse on the
Love of Our Country, in Political Writings, 179.
23. In the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft referred to Portugal as one of the
"most uncivilized European states." Works, vol. 5, 167. In Letters Written
during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, she negatively
judged the Swedes against the "well-bred French." Works, vol. 6, 251-
For example, Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, in Works, vol. 5, 109,
III, 113, 187, 266, 232, 271; Letters Written during a Short Residence in
Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, in Works, vol. 6, 244, 2 57-58.
24. Lady Wortley Montagu, Letters of the Right Honourable Lady Mary Wort-
ley Montagu written during her travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa Which
contain, among other curious relations, accounts of the policy and manners of
the Turks drawn from sources that have been inaccessible to other travellers
(London: T. Becket, 1763); Zonana, "The Sultan and the Slave," 600;
Ruth Bernard Yeazell, Harems of the Mind (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2000), 272.
25. Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, in Works, vol. 5, 74, 76, 266.
26. For example, Marilyn Butler and Janet Todd, eds., in Wollstonecraft,
Works, vol. 5, II3tb, 155tb; Eugene F. Provenzo Jr., "Time Expo-
sures," Educational Studies (2010), 145-46.
27. Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, in Works, vol. 5, 109.

278


NOTES TO PAGES 167-74

28. Antje Bernstein, Women of Pleasure: Prostitution in Eighteenth-Century
London (Norderstedt, Germany: GRIN, 2005), 12.
29. Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, in Works, vol. 5, 115-
30. Wollstonecraft, Rights of Men, in Works, vol. 5, 14; Pitts, A Turn to
Empire.
31. Inderpal Grewal, Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire, and the
Cultures of Travel (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 54; Zonana,
"The Sultan and the Slave," 602.
32. Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, in Works, vol. 5, 98; Hirschmann, The
Subject of Liberty, 170-98.
33. Samara Cahill, "Powers of the Soul: Wollstonecraft, Islam, and Histori-
cal Progress," Assuming Gender 1:2 (Autumn 2010), 22-43-
34. Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, in Works, vol. 5, 88; Wollstonecraft,
Rights of Men, in Works, vol. 5, 45; Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, in
Works, vol. 5, 159; ibid., 84.
35. Zonana, "The Sultan and the Slave"; Burton, Burdens of History, 66;
Grewal, Home and Harem, 83; Midgley, Feminism and Empire, 20;
Grewal, Home and Harem, 54-
36. Zonana, "The Sultan and the Slave," 602.
37. Letter from Abigail Adams to John Adams, 4 January 1795 (electronic
edition), Adams Family Papers: An Electronic Archive, Massachusetts
Historical Society. http://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/; Wollstone-
craft, Rights of Woman, in Works, vol. 5, 187.
38. Gordon, Vindication, 53-54; Price, "A Future Period of Improvement,"
in Political Writings, 17o; Helen Thomas, Romanticism and Slave Nar-
ratives: Transatlantic Testimonies (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2000), 221; Peter A. Dorsey, Common Bondage: Slavery as Meta-
phor in Revolutionary America (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press,
2009), 32, 137-
39. Letter from Abigail Adams to John Adams, 4 January 1795 (electronic
edition), Adams Family Papers: An Electronic Archive, Massachusetts His-
torical Society. http://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/
40. Zonana, "The Sultan and the Slave," 600; Hannah Mather Crocker,
Observations on the Real Rights of Women (Boston: John Eliot, 1818), 2 3.
41. Sarah Grimke, Letters on the Equality of the Sexes (Boston: I. Knapp,
1838), 34-3 5; Grewal, "Women's Human Rights," 351.
42. Grewal, "Women's Human Rights."
43. Mohanty, "Under Western Eyes," 61-88; Mohanty, "Under Western
Eyes Revisited," 499-535.

279


NOTES TO PAGES 175-79

44. Mill, Subjection of Women, in CW vol. 21, 264; ibid., 275; ibid. On Mill's
private views on the transcendence of religion, see Hamburger, John
Stuart Mill on Liberty and Control, 65-85.
45. Mill, Subjection of Women, in CW vol. 21, 267; Ryan, "Bureaucracy,"
149-51; Mill, Subjection of Women, in CW vol. 21, 296; see also 275 and
288; Mark Tunick, "Tolerant Imperialism: John Stuart Mill's Defense
of British Rule in India," Review of Politics 68:4 (2006), 586-611; Man-
tena, "Imperial Predicament," 305-6.
46. Mill, Subjection of Women, in CW vol. 21, 336, 288.
47. Ibid., 282; Said, Orientalism, 3; Mill, Subjection of Women, in CW vol. 21,
282; Provenzo, "Time Exposures"; Said, Orientalism, 206-7. See, for
example, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres's painting La grande odalisque
(1814).
48. Said, Orientalism, 209; Mill, Subjection of Women, in CW vol. 21, 290;
ibid., 324; ibid., 321.
49. Mill, Subjection of Women, in CW vol. 21, 310; ibid.; Said, Oriental-
ism, 207.
50. Mill, Subjection of Women, in CW vol. 21, 303 note 1; ibid.; Tu-
nick, "Tolerant Imperialism," 605; Mill, Subjection of Women, in CW
vol. 21, 316.
51. Mill, Subjection of Women, in CW vol. 21, 326; ibid., 340; Lynn Zas-
toupil, John Stuart Mill and India (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1994), 169-207; Margaret Kohn and Daniel I. O'Neill, "A Tale of Two
Indias: Burke and Mill on Empire and Slavery in the West Indies and
America," Political Theory 34:2 (April 2006), 192-228.
52. Mill, Subjection of Women, in CW vol. 21, 261-63; Hirschmann, Gender,
Class, and Freedom, 238; Elizabeth S. Smith, "John Stuart Mill's 'The
Subjection of Women': A Re-examination," Polity 34:2 (Winter 2001),
181-203; Mill, Subjection of Women, in CW vol. 21, 340-
53. James P. Scanlan, "John Stuart Mill in Russia: A Bibliography," Mill
News Letter 4:1 (Fall 1968), 2-11; Douglas Howland, Personal Liberty
and Public Good: The Introduction of John Stuart Mill to Japan and China
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005); Okin, "John Stuart
Mill's Feminism: The Subjection of Women and the Improvement of
Mankind," 105-27; Richard Stites, The Women's Liberation Movement
in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism, 1860 -1930 (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, [1978] 1991), 73-74; Lavrin, Women, Femi-
nism and Social Change, 16, 32, 199; Barbara Caine, English Feminism,
1780-1980 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 107; Offen, Euro-

280


NOTES TO PAGES 179-82

pean Feminisms, 139-41; Smith, "John Stuart Mill's 'The Subjection of
Women,"' 181-203; Caine, "Elizabeth Cady Stanton, John Stuart Mill,
and the Nature of Feminist Thought," 50-65-
54. Stites, Women's Liberation, 30, 68-69, 73-75, 89-92. An 1869 transla-
tion by Mark Vovchak was reprinted in 1870 with a foreword by Ma-
ria Tsebrikova (Marie Zebrikoff). An 1869 edition, reprinted in 1870
and 1896, was translated and introduced by Grigory Blagosvetlov. Plus,
there was an 1869 edition by Nikolai Mikhailovsky, reprinted in 1870
and 1906. Scanlan, "Mill in Russia," 4, 7; Stites, Women's Liberation,
74 note 20. Stites missed Mikhailovsky's edition, and Scanlan missed
Vovchack/Tsebrikova's edition.
55. Isaiah Berlin, Russian Thinkers (New York: Penguin, [1978] 2008), 6;
Andrzej Walicki, A History of Russian Thought from the Enlightenment to
Marxism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 6o, 350-52; Stites, Women's
Liberation, 44; ibid., 73. For a comparative study of the three early Rus-
sian forewords to the Subjection of Women, see Botting and Kronewitter,
"Westernization and Women's Rights."
56. S. A. Vengerov, ed., "Grigory Blagosvetlov," Russian Books with Bio-
graphical Facts about the Authors and Translators (St. Petersburg: A. E.
Bineke, 1898), vol. 2, 415; ibid.; Andrzej Walicki, Russian Social Thought:
An Introduction to the Intellectual History of Nineteenth-Century Russia
(Goleta, CA: Russian Review, 1977), 7, 13, 15-
57. G. E. Blagosvetlov, "Foreword," in John Stuart Mill, O Podchinenii zhen-
shchiny, ed. G. E. Blagosvetlov (St. Petersburg: A. Morigerovsky, 1869),
iii-xv, translation by Elena Rozina; ibid.; ibid.
58. Ibid.; ibid.; Walicki, Russian Social Thought, 6-15; Blagosvetlov, "Fore-
word," iii-xv; Mill, Subjection of Women, in CW  vol. 21, 282; Stites,
Women's Liberation, 74.
59. Blagosvetlov, "Foreword," iii-xv; Mill, Subjection of Women, in CW
vol. 21, 326; Blagosvetlov, "Foreword," iii-xv.
6o. Govind Vasudev Kanitkar, "Preface," in John Stuart Mill, Striydci
paravasata (Mumbainta: Babaji Sakharama aii Kampani, 1902), 1-28,
Epilogue, 1-2, translation by Sarvottam Dhanorkar; Frantz Fanon, The
Wretched of the Earth, tr. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Atlantic
[1963] 2004), 159; Jayanti K. Patel, "Indian Nationalism and Freedom
Struggle: A Conceptual Framework," in Regional Roots of Indian Nation-
alism: Gujarat, Maharashtra, and Rajasthan, ed. Makrand Mehta (New
Delhi: Criterion, 1990), 4; Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (Lon-
don: Chatto and Windus, 1993), 271-72.

281


NOTES TO PAGES 182-88

61. Padma Anagol, The Emergence of Feminism in India, 1850-1920 (Al-
dershot: Ashgate, 2005), 60; Rosalind O'Hanlan, "Introduction," in
A Comparison between Women and Men: Tarabai Shinde and the Critique
of Gender Relations in Colonial India (Madras: Oxford University Press,
1994), 14; Sisir Kumar Das, A History of Indian Literature: 1800-191o.
Western Impact: Indian Response (New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1991),
181; Prachi Deshpande, "Kanitkar, Kashibai," Oxford Encyclope-
dia of Women in World History, ed. Bonnie G. Smith (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2008), vol. 1, 4-5; O'Hanlan, "Introduction," 15;
ibid.; Anagol, Feminism in India, 60; Deshpande, "Kanitkar, Kashibai,"
4-5; ibid.
62. Kanitkar, "Preface," Epilogue, 1; O'Hanlan, "Introduction," 41.
63. Kanitkar, "Preface," 10; ibid.; ibid., 13-
64. Ibid., 13; ibid., Epilogue, 1; ibid.; Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism
(New York: Grove, 1965), 42-46; Radhika Mohanram, Black Body:
Women, Colonialism, and Space (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1999), 72.
65. Kanitkar, "Preface," 13; ibid., 24; ibid., 25-
66. Ibid., 14; ibid.; ibid., 8; ibid., 24; ibid., 9.
67. Carolyn Burdett, "A Difficult Vindication: Olive Schreiner's Woll-
stonecraft Introduction," History Workshop 37 (Spring 1994), 177-87,
especially 177.
68. Elizabeth van Heyningen, "Women and Gender in the South African
War, 1899-1902," in Women in South African History: They Remove Boul-
ders and Cross Rivers, ed. Nomboniso Gasa (Cape Town: Human Sci-
ences Research Council, 2007), 115-
69. Olive Schreiner, "Introduction to the Life of Mary Wollstone-
craft and the Rights of Woman" (1889), History Workshop 37 (Spring
1994), 188-93, especially 190; ibid.; ibid., 193; Carolyn Burdett, Olive
Schreiner and the Progress of Feminism: Evolution, Gender, Empire (Lon-
don: Palgrave, 2001), 175-
70. Schreiner, "Introduction," 193; ibid., 192.
71. Ibid., 193; Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, in Works, vol. 5, 131;
Schreiner, "Introduction," 193-
72. Gayatri C. Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak for Themselves? [Revised
Edition]," in Can the Subaltern Speak for Themselves? Reflections on the
History of an Idea, ed. Rosalind C. Morris (New York: Columbia Uni-
versity Press, 2010), 21-40.

282


NOTES TO PAGES 188-94

73. Olive Schreiner, Woman and Labor (Stokes, 1911), io8; ibid., 242;
ibid., 243-
74. M. Tsebrikova, "Introduction," in John Stuart Mill, Podchinenie zhen-
shchiny, ed. Marko Vovchak (St. Petersburg: S. V. Zvonaryov, 1870),
i-xxxvi, translation by Elena Rozina; Martina Barros Borgono, "Pr6-
logo," La esclavitud de la mujer (estudio critico por Stuart Mill), Revista
de Santiago (1872), 112-24, translation by Bryan Scoular.
75. Lavrin, Women, Feminism and Social Change, 3oo; Javiera Errizuriz Ta-
gle, "Discourses on Women's Suffrage in Chile, 1865-1949," Historia
38:2 (December 2005), 257-86; Erika Maza Valenzuela, "Catholicism,
Anticlericalism, and the Quest for Women's Suffrage in Chile," Work-
ing Paper 214, The Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies
(December 1995), 19-20; Erika Maza Valenzuela, "Liberals, Radicals,
and Women's Citizenship in Chile, 1872-1930," Working Paper 245,
The Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies (November
1997), 9-10.
76. Walicki, Russian Social Thought, 5; P. Bykov, "Maria Tsebrikova," 1911.
Accessed 8 June 2011 at http://az.lib.ru/b/bykowp-w/text-o380
.shtml; Theodore Stanton, ed., The Woman Question in Europe (New
York: G. P. Putnam, 1884), 390-423; Jaakoff Prelooker, Heroes and
Heroines of Russia (London: Simpkin, 1908), 110; Adele Lindemeyer,
"Maternalism and Child Welfare in Late Imperial Russia," Journal of
Women's History 5:2 (Fall 1993), 117-
77. Tsebrikova, "Introduction," i-xxxvi; ibid.; ibid.; ibid.
78. Borgono, "Pr6logo," 112-24; ibid.; ibid.; ibid.; ibid.
79. Tsebrikova, "Introduction," i-xxxvi; ibid.
8o. Borgono, "Pr6logo," 112-24; ibid.; Mill, Subjection of Women, in CW
vol. 21, 340-
81. Valenzuela, "Catholicism," 3; Valenzuela, "Liberals," 1o; Borgono,
"Pr6logo," 112-24; ibid.; Jadwiga E. Pieper Mooney, The Politics of
Motherhood: Maternity and Women's Rights in Twentieth-Century Chile
(Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), 2; Valenzuela, "Ca-
tholicism," 3; Valenzuela, "Liberals," 10-12.
82. Prelooker, Russian Heroes, 99; Stanton, Woman Question, 390-423; Mar-
garet McFadden, Golden Cables of Sympathy: The Transatlantic Sources of
Nineteenth-Century Feminism (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky,
1999), 79, 85-Io6.
83. Tsebrikova, "Introduction," i-xxxvi.

283


NOTES TO PAGES 194-204

84. Offen, European Feminisms, 19-20; Offen, Globalizing Feminisms, xxix-
xxxiv; Nancy Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1987), 14; Lavrin, Women, Feminism, and Social
Change, 34; Elvira L6pez, "El movimiento feminista," doctoral disser-
tation, Universidad de Buenos Aires, 1901, 168, translation by Andrea
Veach.
85. L6pez, "El movimiento feminista," 168.
86. Ibid., 168, 206.
87. Francine Masiello, Between Civilization and Barbarism: Women, Nation,
and Literary Culture in Modern Argentina (Lincoln: University of Ne-
braska Press, 1992), 85-
88. Ackerly, Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism, 2-4; Nussbaum,
Women and Human Development, 301-3; Hirschmann, The Subject ofLib-
erty, 197.
89. Abbey, The Return of Feminist Liberalism, 103. Here and elsewhere
I follow Mohanty's use of the term "Two-Thirds World" to convey
the vast scope of global poverty; a more regionally specific synonym
is the "global South." See Mohanty, Feminism without Borders, 43-84,
226-28. Mill, Subjection of Women, in CW vol. 21, 279. For example,
Beitz, The Idea of Human Rights, 186-96; Sen, The Idea ofJustice, 71-72,
115-17, 162-67, 374-75-
90. Martha C. Nussbaum, "Toward a Globally Sensitive Patriotism,"
Daedalus 137:3 (Summer 2008), 78-93; Kwame Anthony Appiah,
Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (New York: W. W. Nor-
ton, 2007), xviii; Will Kymlicka and Kathryn Walker, "Introduction,"
Rooted Cosmopolitanism: Canada and the World, ed. Will Kymlicka and
Kathryn Walker (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press,
2012), 1.
91. For example, Diana J. Schaub, Erotic Liberalism: Women and Revolution in
Montesquieu's Persian Letters (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 1995),
7; Michael Curtis, Orientalism and Islam: European Thinkers on Oriental
Despotism in the Middle East and India (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2009), 3-4, 8-9, 18-30, 51-52.
Chapter Five. Human Stories
1. A helpful overview of the international trend toward linking the nar-
ration of human stories with human rights advocacy since the Second
World War, and especially in the aftermath of the Holocaust, is found
in Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith, Human Rights and Narrated Lives:

284


NOTES TO PAGES 204-9

The Ethics of Recognition (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 13-34-
I am pushing this history further back in time, showing that (auto)bio-
graphical human rights narratives in fact date to at least the late eigh-
teenth century.
2. Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, in Works, vol. 5, 69, 73-74, 88,
101, 200.
3. Mill, Autobiography, in CWvol. 1, 247.
4. David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano, "Reading Literary Fic-
tion Improves Theory of Mind," Science 342:6156 (8 October 2013),
377-80.
5. Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History, 40-42, 68; Gordon Schochet,
"Toleration, Liberty, and Rights: or What Hobbes Knew, Others
Feared, and Hohfeld Figured Out," in The Liberal-Republican Quandary
in Israel, Europe, and the United States: Early Modern Thought Meets Cur-
rent Affairs, ed. Thomas Maissen and Fania Oz-Salzberger (Boston:
Academic Studies Press, 2012), 115-32, especially 126.
6. Hunt, Inventing Human Rights, 68; Wollstonecraft, Letters on the Man-
agement of Infants, in Works, vol. 4, 460; Wollstonecraft, Letters Writ-
ten during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, in Works,
vol. 6, 2 80; Wollstonecraft, Letters to Imlay, in Works, vol. 6, 370. (Letters
to Imlay was edited and published by Godwin in 1798, but we have no
reason to believe that he made editorial additions to Wollstonecraft's
original letters to her first husband.) Wollstonecraft, Mary, a Fiction, in
Works, vol. 1, Advertisement; Wollstonecraft, Maria, or the Wrongs of
Woman, in Works, vol. 1, 95-
7. Mill, "Attack on Literature," in CW vol. 22, 320.
8. Catharine A. MacKinnon, Are Women Human? And Other International
Dialogues (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
2006), 23-24, 162, 175, 196-208; Nussbaum, Women and Human De-
velopment, 15-24; Abbey, The Return of Feminist Liberalism, 111-16,
139-41, 164-66, 270-71; Sen, Development as Freedom, 189; Brooke
Ackerly, Universal Human Rights in a World of Difference (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2008), 136.
9. For example, see Lee Siegel's critique of the 2006 postmodern novel
by Dave Eggers, What Is the What? Eggers blurred fiction and fact,
autobiography and biography, and author and subject by using first-
person voice to tell the story of how Valentino Achak Deng survived
the exodus from the civil wars in Sudan. Siegel, "The Niceness Racket,"
New Republic, online edition, 19 April 2007. Accessed 27 August 2012

285


NOTES TO PAGES 210-19

at http://www.powells.com/review/2007_04_19.html. Ackerly, Political
Theory and Feminist Social Criticism, 152-61.
1o. Grewal, "'Women's Rights as Human Rights"'; Mohanty, Femi-
nism without Borders, 226-28; Spivak, "Can the Subaltern Speak for
Themselves?"
11. Brooke A. Ackerly and Jacqui True, Doing Feminist Research in Po-
litical and Social Science (New York: Palgrave, 2010), 129, 200-203;
Hirschmann, The Subject of Liberty, 239 note 3.
12. Wollstonecraft, Mary, a Fiction, in Works, vol. 1, 7; Gordon, Vindication,
31-37-
13. Wollstonecraft, Mary, a Fiction, in Works, vol. 1, 18, 25-
14. Ibid., 33, 38, 55-
15. Wollstonecraft, Mary, a Fiction, 72, 73-
16. William Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights
of Woman, ed. Pamela Clemit and Gina Luria Walker (Peterborough:
Broadview, 2001), 95-
17. Wollstonecraft, Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Nor-
way, and Denmark, in Works, vol. 6, 279.
18. Ibid.; Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in
Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
[1986] 2001).
19. David Hume, "Of Personal Identity," in A Treatise of Human Nature
(London: John Noon, 1739), vol. 1, part 4, section 6.
20. Botting, "Wollstonecraft in Europe, 1792-1904: A Revisionist Recep-
tion History."
21. Ibid.; Roxanne Eberle, Chastity and Transgression in Women's Writing,
1792-1897: Interrupting the Harlot's Progress (New York: Palgrave,
2002), 58.
22. Gordon, Vindication, 61.
23. Ibid., 342; Shapiro, Political Criticism, 55, 290-91.
24. Wollstonecraft, Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman, in Works, vol. 1,
III, 120.
25. Ibid., 174, 184; Janet Todd, "Introduction," in Mary Wollstonecraft
and Mary Shelley, Mary, Maria, Matilda (New York: Penguin, 1992),
xxvi.
26. Janet Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life (New York: Co-
lumbia University Press, 2000), ix.
27. Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, 130; Wollstonecraft, Maria, 120; Jen-
nifer Lorch, Mary Wollstonecraft: The Making of a Radical Feminist (Ox-

286


NOTES TO PAGES 220-23

ford: Berg, 1990); Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagina-
tion, 238-39-
28. Annie Nathan Meyer, Women's Work in America (New York: Henry
Holt, 1891), 150-
29. Stanton was the primary author of The Woman's Bible (1895), which
gave a controversial feminist reading of the Judeo-Christian scriptures,
debunking the moral authority of past patriarchal interpretations.
30. Rebecca Larson, Daughters of Light: Quaker Women Preaching and Proph-
esying in the Colonies and Beyond (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1999),
18; William M. Jackson, "Ignorance of the Bible-A Loss to Society,"
Friends Intelligencer Supplement (Philadelphia), 15 September 1906,
12 (a transcript of a speech made at the Friends General Conference,
Maryland, 1906).
31. Lucretia Mott, Lucretia Mott: Her Complete Speeches and Sermons, ed.
Dana Greene (New York: Edwin Mellen Press), 270; Eileen Hunt
Botting and Christine Carey, "Wollstonecraft's Philosophical Im-
pact on Nineteenth-Century American Women's Rights Advocates,"
American journal of Political Science 48:4 (October 2004), 707-22, espe-
cially 712.
32. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Eighty Years and More (1815-1897): Reminis-
cences of Elizabeth Cady Stanton (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1898), 83;
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Matilda Joslyn Gage, His-
tory of Woman Suffrage, Volume I, 1848-1861 (Rochester, NY: Charles
Mann, 1889), 423-24.
33. Steven B. Smith, "How to Read Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address,"
in The Writings of Abraham Lincoln, ed. Steven B. Smith (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2012), 477.
34. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton
and Susan B. Anthony, Volume II: Against an Aristocracy of Sex, ed. Ann D.
Gordon (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 428.
35. Ellen Carol DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence ofan Indepen-
dent Women's Movement in America, 1848-1869 (Ithaca: Cornell Univer-
sity Press, 1999), 188; Sue Davis, The Political Thought of Elizabeth Cady
Stanton: Women's Rights and the American Political Traditions (New York:
New York University Press, 2008), 128-56; Suzanne Marilley, Woman
Suffrage and the Origins of Liberal Feminism in the United States, 1820-
1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 165-69; Bot-
ting, "Making an American Feminist Icon: Mary Wollstonecraft's Re-
ception in U.S. Newspapers, 1800-1869," 292-93-

287


NOTES TO PAGES 224-27

36. "Among the Strong Minded," Weekly Georgia Telegraph, 7 May 1869,
7; Carrie Chapman Catt, "Then ... and Now" (1939), 19, in "Speech
Fragments," Papers of Carrie Chapman Catt Collection at the Library
of Congress, Library of Congress, Washington; Susan B. Anthony, "In-
scription" (1904), in Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of
Woman (Boston: Thomas and Andrews, 1792), the Susan B. Anthony
Special Collection, Rare Book/Special Collections, Library of Con-
gress, Washington.
37. Pennell, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, 90; Bertha Pappenheim (as P. Bert-
hold), "Einleitung," in Mary Wollstonecraft, Die Verteidigung der Rechte
der Frau, tr. P. Berthold (Dresden and Leipzig: E. Pierion's, 1899), Xiii,
translation by Christine Carey Wilkerson.
38. J. S. Pederson, "Mary Wollstonecraft: A Life in Past and Present
Times," Women's History Review 20:3 (2011), 423-36; Anna Holmovi,
"Predmluva," in Mary Wollstonecraft, Obrana prdv zen (Otizky a ni-
zory, XII), tr. Anna Holmovi (Prague, 1904), vi, xvi, translation by
Irena Cajkova.
39. Mrs. Humphrey Ward, The Testing of Diana Mallory, in Harper's Maga-
zine 116 (December 1907), 905; "A Voice in the Wilderness," Votes for
Women 5 (29 March 1912), 212.
40. Jacob Bouten, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Beginnings of Female Eman-
cipation in France and England (Philadelphia: Porcupine Press, [1922]
1975), 8; Raymond Birn, Crisis, Absolutism, Revolution: Europe and the
World, 1648-1789 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005), 389;
Virginia Woolf, The Second Common Reader (New York: Houghton Mif-
flinlHarcourt, [1932] 2003), 163-
41. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sover-
eignty, tr. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1985), 36; James Darsey, The Prophetic Tradition and Radical Rhetoric in
America (New York: New York University Press, 1997), 34-
42. Michelle Kort, "Ryan Gosling, Feminist Scholar," Ms. Magazine Blog,
14 October 2011. Accessed 3 January 2012 at http://msmagazine.com/
blog/blog/2011/10/14/ryan-gosling-feminist-scholar/; Richard Daw-
kins, The Selfish Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [1976] 2006),
192,322; Richard Rorty, "Feminism and Pragmatism," in Feminist Inter-
pretations of Richard Rorty, ed. Marianne Janack (University Park: Penn
State University Press, 2010), 22; Offen, European Feminisms, 19-20;
Offen, ed., Globalizing Feminisms, xxix-xxxiv.

288


NOTES TO PAGES 227-33

43. Sidney Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social Movements, Collective Action,
and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 118-34
44. Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism, 3, 14; Offen, European Femi-
nisms, 19, 144-81.
45. Clare Hemings, Why Stories Matter: The Political Grammar of Feminist
Theory (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 3 3-34; Alice Wexler,
"Emma Goldman on Mary Wollstonecraft," Feminist Studies 7:1 (Spring
1981), 113-33; Gordon, Vindication, 451. Following convention, I use
the term "first-wave" to describe feminist arguments and activism prior
to the post-World War II revival of the women's movement. For the
origin of the term "first-wave feminism," see Marsha Lear, "The Sec-
ond Feminist Wave," New York Times Magazine, io March 1968, 24.
46. Mill, On Liberty, in CW vol. 18, 217; Mill, Autobiography, in CW vol. 1,
198, 259, 264.
47. Taylor Mill, Complete Works, 328; Mill, Autobiography, in CW vol. 1,
195-96.
48. Jo Ellen Jacobs and Paula Harms Payne, "Introduction" and "To John
Stuart Mill," in Taylor Mill, Complete Works, 12-35, 320-23-
49. Taylor Mill, "To John Stuart Mill," in Complete Works, 355, 439-
50. Ibid., 360, 370-
51. Ibid., 375-
52. Mill, Autobiography, in CW vol. 1, 264. For Mill, it would be a cosmic
irony if indeed Harriet died of syphilis contracted from her husband
John Taylor, who, like many middle-class men of his time, probably
used prostitutes before his marriage at thirty to his eighteen-year-old
wife. It would be doubly ironic if indeed the diagnosis of syphilis drove
her away from John toward Mill, yet led her to prohibit sexual inter-
course with either man. Near the end of his life, Mill defended the
rights of prostitutes to bodily integrity against overweening legal and
medical interventions for the sake of preventing the spread of vene-
real disease. For a discussion of the possible reasons for Harriet's illness
and death, and their implications for her relationships, see Jacobs and
Payne, "Introduction," xxxi. See also Jeremy Waldron, "Mill on Liberty
and on the Contagious Diseases Acts," inJ. S. Mill's Political Thought,
ed. Urbinati and Zakaras, 11-42. Mill, Autobiography, in CW  vol. 1,
199, 259-
53. Mill, Autobiography, in CWvol. 1, 252, 261.
54. Mill, On Liberty, in CWvol. 18, 217.

289


NOTES TO PAGES 234-44

55  Ibid.
56. Ibid.
57. Meera Kosambi, ed. and tr., Feminist Vision or "Treason against Men"?
Kashibai Kanitkar and the Engendering of Marathi Literature (Ranikhet:
Permanent Black, 2008), 4; Deshpande, "Kanitkar, Kashibai," 5-
58. Kosambi, Feminist Vision, 57, 61.
59. Deshpande, "Kanitkar, Kashibai," 4-5; Kanitkar, "Preface," 11.
6o. Kosambi, Feminist Vision, 6o, 66, 325-26. As Kashibai Kanitkar sug-
gested, Mill's economic feminism may be read as necessitating equal eco-
nomic opportunities for the sexes despite the fact that he did not always
explicitly push his premises to this logical conclusion. Similarly, Nancy
Hirschmann has made the case that Mill's economic feminism justifies
pay for housewives' productive yet traditionally unpaid domestic labor.
See Nancy J. Hirschmann, "Mill, Political Economy, and Women's
Work," American Political Science Review 102:2 (May 2008), 199-213-
61. Melissa Feinberg, Elusive Equality: Gender, Citizenship, and the Limits
of Democracy in Czechoslovakia, 19 18-195o (Pittsburgh: University of
Pittsburgh Press, 2006), 17.
62. Charlotte Garrigue Masaryk, "John Stuart Mill", in John Stuart Mill,
Poddanstvfien, tr. Charlotte Garrigue Masaryk (Prague, 1890), 171-75,
especially 175, translation by Irena Cajkova.
63. Ibid.
64. Ouchi Hy6e, "Translator's Introduction," in John Stuart Mill, Fujin
kaiho ron (Tokyo: Dojinsha Shoten, 1923), 1-7, translation by Mamiko
Suzuki; Ouchi Hy6e, "Analysis," in John Stuart Mill, Josei no kaiho,
tr. Ouchi Setsuko (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1957), 193-209, translation
by Mamiko Suzuki; Howland, Personal Liberty and Public Good, 115-
65. Ouchi, "Translator's Introduction," 1-7.
66. Takahashi Hisanori, "Translator's Introduction" and "John Stuart Mill
and His Philosophy," in Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, Kdriron
(Tokyo: Shunjnsha, 1928), 3-4, 5-12, translation by Mamiko Suzuki.
67. Ouchi, "Analysis," 193-209.
68. Ibid.
69. Ibid.
70. Ye-suk Kim, "Word from Translator," in John Stuart Mill, Yosong Ui Ye-
sok, tr. Ye-suk Kim (Seoul: Yihwa Y6ja Taehakkyo Ch'ulp'anbu, 1986),
5-8, translation by Min Jung Park.
71. Pyong-hun S6, "Word from Translator" and "The Meaning and Limi-
tation of Subjection of Women," in John Stuart Mill, YTsong Ui Chong-

290


NOTES TO PAGES 244-48

sok, tr. Pyong-hun So (Seoul-si: Ch'aek Sesang, 2006), 5-9, 194-215,
translation by Min Jung Park.
72. Salman Rushdie, Joseph Anton: A Memoir (New York: Random House,
2012), 626 (Kindle edition).
73. Rorty, "Human Rights, Rationality, and Sentimentality," 364-65-
74. Ibid.
75. For a contemporary defense of the derivation of rights from wrongs,
see Alan Dershowitz, Rights from Wrongs: A Secular Theory of the Origin
of Rights (New York: Basic Books, 2004).
76. Gayatri Spivak, "Subaltern Talk: Interview with the Editors," in The
Spivak Reader: Selected Works of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ed. Donna
Landry and Gerald MacLean (New York: Routledge, 1996), 287-308,
especially 291.
77. Sen, The Idea ofJustice, 392.
78. Nussbaum, Creating Capabilities, 82-83; Mohanty, Feminism without
Borders; Reilly, Women's Human Rights, 13; Hirschmann, "Difference as
an Occasion for Rights."
79. Amartya Sen, "India's Women: The Mixed Truth," New York Review of
Books 60:15 (October 10, 2013). Accessed 4January 2014 at http://www
.nybooks.com /articles /archives /2013/oct /10 /indias-women-mixed
-truth/?insrc=toc; Sen, The Idea ofJustice, 70.
8o. Declan Walsh, "Taliban Gun Down Girl Who Spoke Up for Rights,"
New York Times, 9 October 2012. Accessed 26 November 2012 at
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/lo1/world/asia/teen-school-activist
-malala-yousafzai-survives-hit-by-pakistani-taliban.html; Seema Jilani,
"The Forgotten Malala," New York Times, 12 March 2013. Accessed 29
December 2013 at http://kristof.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/12/the
-other-malala/; Adam B. Ellick, "Documenting a Pakistani Girl's Trans-
formation," New York Times, 7 October 2013. Accessed 29 December
2013 at http://www.nytimes.com/2013/io/o8/world/asia/the-making
-of-Malala.html.
81. Malala Yousafzai, with Christina Lamb, I Am Malala: The Girl Who
Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban (New York: Little
Brown, 2013); Zofeen T. Ebrahim, "Pakistan: Debate Rages over Malala
Book Ban," in "Xindex: The Voice of Free Expression," 15 November
2013. Accessed on 29 December 2013 at http://www.indexoncensor
ship.org/2 013/11/malalas-book-banned-in-pakistan /

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INDEX

abolitionism, 14, 29, 56, 195
Ackerly, Brooke, 15, 24-25, 210
Act of Toleration (1689), 31
actual-potential distinction,
121
act utilitarianism, 95-96, 98-99
Adams, Abigail, 40, 16o, 171-72
Adams, John, 40, 171
adaptive preferences, 136
agency, right to, 12
Age of Consent Bill (India; 1891),
235
androgyny, 133
animals, rights of, 92
Anthony, Susan B., 113, 223-24
Appiah, Kwame Anthony,
199-200
Aquinas, Thomas, 54
Argentina, 194, 196, 199
Arianism, 52-53
Aristotelian ethics, 117
Aristotle, 107, 117, 118,
269-7on4
Astell, Mary, 194
autobiographies: human rights
advocacy and, 18; for political
reform, 236-37
(auto)biographies, 23-24, 205-8,
244-45
Autobiography (Mill), 23, 59,
64-65, 99, 118, 120, 148, 151,
204-5, 229, 232-33, 234

Beitz, Charles, 19-20, 71-72, 73,
75
Benedict, Ruth, 228
Bentham, Jeremy, 32, 57, 6o-6i,
65, 70, 71, 72, 96, 240
biographies, human rights promo-
tion and, 209
Blagosvetlov, 16o, 179, 180-81,
182, 185
Blood, Fanny, 23
Borgono, Martina Barros, 22-2 3,
160, 161, 189-90, 191-93,202
Bouten, Jacob, 225-26
Bunch, Charlotte, 3, 12
Burke, Edmund, 42, 53, 118, 168,
170
capabilities approach, 120-21,
139
categorical imperative, 91, 92-83
Catholic Conservative Party
(Chile), 190, 193
CEDAW. See United Nations,
Convention on the Elimination
of All Forms of Discrimination
against Women
celibacy, 35
character development, egalitarian
norms for, 122
chastity, female, 33-35
Chile, women in, 190, 192, 193
Christ, embodied, 85

293


INDEX

Christian dissenters, 52, 55, 74,
195, 220
Cicero, 3 5
civil religion, 222
Clarissa (Richardson), 206
classism, 10
coeducation, 38, 45
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 133,
207
Collins, Patricia Hill, 15
companionate marriage, 182,
235
comprehensive liberalism, 101
Comte, Auguste, 59, 67-68, 72
Condorcet, Nicolas de, 6, 29, 43,
239
Confessions (Rousseau), 207
consequentialist reasoning, 91
Considerations on Representative
Government (Mill), 126, 147
contract theory, 48
Cookson, James, 1o6, 107
correlative rights, 31
cosmopolitanism, 12, 161, 178,
189, 199-200, 254n3
courage, 247-48
Crocker, Hannah Mather, 141,
160, 172-73
cultural bias, 10, II, 14, 15, 17,
22-23, 161, 200, 201
culture: heterogeneity of, and
women's choices, I 10; insider
and outsider perspectives on, 15
Czechoslovakia, Mill's writings in,
237-38
De Cive (Hobbes), 36
Declaration of Independence (Jef-
ferson), 46-47

Declaration of Sentiments (Stanton
and Mott), 222
Declaration of the Rights of Man and
Citizen, 42, 73
"Declaration of the Rights of
Woman and Citizen" (de
Gouges), 43
de Gouges, Olympe, 6, 29, 42,
43,74
de Sta81, Madame, 69
Diario de Madrid, 44
dignity, 27
Discourse on the Sciences and the Arts
(Rousseau), 156-57
Dissertations (Price), 54
divine right of kings, 39
divorce, 66
Donnelly, Jack, 26, 73-74
duty, 78-82
Dworkin, Ronald, 70
East India Company, 156, 158,
177
Ebadi, Shirin, 108-9, 114
Edmunds-Tucker Act, 113
education: advantages for women,
192; broader scope for, 119;
eudaimonic, 139-40; frivolous,
124; gender and, 21; good and
bad, 135; holism in, 142-43;
individuality and, 63; intrinsic
value of, 154; parents' respon-
sibility for, 144-45; patriarchy
and, 124, 135-36; reform of,
122; as right, 23, 116, 117, 118,
121, 248; sex and, 21; stunting
women's development, 138;
transformation of, 133
Education Act of 1870, 144

294


INDEX

el movimiento feminista, 196, 199
embodiment, 83-84, 131
empathy: human rights and, 206;
political danger of, 209
empiricism, 53
English Bill of Rights, 31, 37
epistolary novels, 2o6-7
equal rights, institutionalization
of, 177
Essay on Government (James
Mill), 64
ethics: perfectionist tradition of,
117; separating intention and
consequence in, 201
ethnographic research, 210
eudaimonia, theory of, 1'7-18
Eve, natural rights of, 33
fairness, 142
family, egalitarian transformation
of, 2
Fanon, Frantz, 182, 184
Fawcett, Millicent, 170
feminism, 68, 227-28; English ex-
pression of, 195; going global,
199; imperial, 168-69; in India,
182-85; memes and, 227; orga-
nized, 25in; Orientalism's im-
pact on, 170-71; postcolonial,
25; second-wave, 2; use of term,
194; world religions and, 76
feminist liberalism, 8-9, 11; cos-
mopolitan ethic of, 16; globally
oriented, 16-17
feminist standpoint theory, 15
feminist theory, 12
Filmer, Robert, 39
Forster, Johann Reinhold, 1o6,
107

Foucault, Michel, 155, 163
foundationalism, 17, 76
fraternal social contract theory,
41-42
freedom, 36, 94
freedom of conscience, 31
free institutions, 94-95
French republic, constitution of, 6
French Revolution, 7, 30, 43
Friedan, Betty, 2
friendship, higher forms of, 107
Fuller, Margaret, 69
GABRIELA, 3
gender: human creation of, 125;
as identity trait, 13; social con-
struction of, 123
gender divide, 66
gender identity: development of,
122, 133; social construction of,
124-25; stereotypes and, 124
gender-sex distinction, 12-13
gender-specific abuse, 3
Gilabert, Pablo, 75-76
Gilligan, Carol, 155, 162
girls: psychological development
of, 122; susceptibility of, to
prejudicial beliefs, 162
global justice, 199, 200, 210
Glorious Revolution of 1688-89,
31, 36-37, 39
Godwin, William, 69, 214, 216
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von,
62, 207
Goldman, Emma, 228
government, free institutions of,
94-95
Greatest Happiness Principle, 89,
93,98-99

295


INDEX

Grewal, Inderpal, 10-11, 159,
170, 173, 209
Grimk6, Sarah, 16o, 172, 173, 220
Grotius, Hugo, 18, 27, 28, 34-36
Groundwork for the Metaphysics of
Morals (Kant), 49, 79-80
Habermas, Jurgen, 155
happiness: contemplation and, 62;
duty and, 79-80; free develop-
ment toward, 58; as goal of
individual human development,
73; liberal utilitarian approach
to, 63; maximizing, 63-64;
moral choices and, 49; utilitari-
anism and, 57; virtue-oriented
conception of, 72; virtuous, 117
harm principle, 63-64, 89,
96-97, 97
Hayek, F. A., 242
Hegel, G. W. F., 28, 44
heroic womanhood, 23
Hirschmann, Nancy, 97, 210, 247
History of British India, The (James
Mill), 157-58
Hobbes, Thomas, 18, 27, 28, 34,
36, 37, 50
holism, 142-43
Holmova, Anna, 224-25
Holocaust, 155
human beings: as moral beings,
82; moral status of, 92; as pro-
gressive beings, 58, 93; requir-
ing diversity and freedom, 101;
ultimate purpose of, 8o
human development: eudaimonic,
119; theories of, 17, 136
humanism, 189
humanity, rights of, 6

human rights: advocacy of, 16,
24, 206-9, 219-20; broad-
scale exercise of, 82; concep-
tion of, including women, 17;
deontological conceptions of,
32; deontological justification
for, 78-79, 81; derived from
God's moral law, 31; egalitarian
conception of, 9; foundationalist
approaches to, 20, 75-76, 114;
institutionalization of, 27, 74,
248; intellectual histories of, 26;
international legal consensus
on, 73; as international political
concept, 29; legislation of, 64;
literature of, as genre, 23-24,
204; moral foundations for,
18-19; naturalistic foundations
for, 19-20; nonfoundationalist
approaches to, 20, 73-75; ob-
jective and universal foundation
for, 54; personal stories and,
207-8; political approach to, 73,
75; prejudices of, 1o; purpose of,
116; rational human nature and,
31; rhetorical models of, 201;
secularized language of, 14-15;
universal, 1-2, 12; varying per-
spectives on, interplay of, 115;
violations of, reporting, 209;
Western origins of, 26-27, 28
Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 146
Hume, David, 32, 90, 162, 163,
215
Hunt, Lynn, 206
Imlay, Gilbert, 204, 213-14
India: feminist movement in, 182;
Mill's writings in, 2 35-37;

296


INDEX

Westernization of, 181-82;
women's status in, 11, 176-77,
181-85
individuality: free development
of, 9o; principle of, 63, 90-91,
92-93, 96, 97, 101
injustice, gender-specific, 4-5
insider perspective, 15-16
Introduction to the Principles of
Morals and Legislation (Ben-
tham), 6o
Inventing Human Rights (Hunt),
206
Islamic polygamy, 108-9
Japan, Mill's writings in, 239-43
Jefferson, Thomas, 46-47
Jesus, as moral exemplar, 53, 85
Julie (Rousseau), 41-42, 49-50,
206
justice: administration of, 4; egali-
tarian theories of, 11; global, 11
Kames, Lord (Henry Home), 22,
157
Kanitkar, Govind Vasudev, 16o,
179,182-85, 235-37
Kant, Immanuel, 18, 27, 31-32,
38, 49, 70, 79-80, 84, 85, 151,
164
Kashibai, 182, 235-37
Kim, Ye-suk, 243
Korea, Mill's writings in, 243-44
Lactantius, 35
law, harm principle of, 63-64
legal rights, 58, 102, 103-4
Lessons (Wollstonecraft), 107
Letters on Education (Macaulay), 48

Letters on the Equality of the Sexes
(Grimk6), 172, 173
Letters Written during a Short
Residence in Sweden, Norway, and
Denmark (Wollstonecraft), 204,
207, 213-16
Leviathan (Hobbes), 36
liberal feminists, 8-9
liberalism: comprehensive, 101;
feminism and, 8-9; principles
of, 9
liberal utilitarianism, governing
principle of, 93-94
liberation, 39
Liberation of Women, The (Mill),
242
liberty, circumstances of, 94
literacy, 153-54, 206
Locke, John, 18, 30, 34, 36-37,
38,54,85, 162
Logic (Mill), 126
L6pez, Elvira, 23, 160, 161, 189,
194-96, 202
Macaulay, Catherine, 48
MacKinnon, Catharine, 208,
246-47
Mahabharata, 183, 184
male bias, 9-10, 11, 14, 21
Marcellinus, Ammianus, 35
Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman
(Wollstonecraft), 86, 107-8,
136-37, 204, 207, 216-18, 219
marriage: dyadic form of, 107;
laws regarding, 35; patriarchal,
109, 175-76, 205; reform of,
65; women pushed toward, 125
Martineau, Harriet, 65, 69, 170
Marx, Karl, 153

297


INDEX

Mary, a Fiction (Wollstonecraft),
23, 52, 204, 211-13
Masaryk, Charlotte Garrigue,
237-39
Masaryk, Tomas Garrique, 237-39
matriarchalism, 39
memes, 226-28
Memoirs of the Author ofA Vin-
dication of the Rights of Woman
(Godwin), 69, 216
Metaphysics of Morals (Kant), 38
Methods of Ethics (Sidgwick), 98
Mill, James, 57-60, 64, 65, 156,
157-58
Mill, John Stuart, 1-2, 6; ad-
aptation theory of, 138-39;
Aristotle and, 117; arrested
for distributing birth control
pamphlets, 64; (auto)biographi-
cal writings of, 205-6, 228-33,
244-45; Bentham and, 6o-61,
65; consequentialism of, 95,
96, 97, 122-23, 150-51, 201;
correspondence with Comte,
67-68; critiquing unjust
discrimination, 178; cultural
bias of, 175-78, 2oo; defending
UPE, 144; defining morality by
sensory experience, 9o; defin-
ing utility, 91-94; developing
utilitarian moral philosophy,
62; distrusting uniformity,
149; education of, 57, 58-6o,
158; education theories of,
144-48; Eurocentrism of, 1 o,
14, 22, 159; failing to defend
individual human rights, 71;
as family planning advocate,
134; feminist liberalism and,

8-9; foundationalist approach
of, 75-77; gender theories
of, 124-27, 133-35; global
reception for, 14, 22-24; hu-
man development theories of,
21-22, 157-58; human rights
theory of, 18-20; imperialistic
ideas of, 158-59; on India, 158,
176-77; on individuality, 9o;
on inequal rights between men
and women, 13; influence of, 7,
76-77, 179-83, 189, 203, 233;
Japanese editions of, 239-43;
justifying morality in terms
of consequences, 91; justify-
ing rights on nonmetaphysical
grounds, 58; Korean editions
of, 243-44; leadership roles of,
69; liberal utilitarianism of, 14,
173-74; literary writings of,
23, 204; on marriage, 65-66,
1o9; on married women's
choices, 132; mental crisis of,
61-62; as model for feminist
political philosophy, 233-34;
moral and political philosophy
of, 9o; moral contradiction of,
201; negative stereotyping by,
156; as outsider social scien-
tist, 15; on patriarchy, 138-39,
175-76; perfectionism of,
119-20; perpetuating gender
bias, 22, 152; political responses
to, 14; political thought of,
13, 89, 158; on polygamy,
o9-11; portrayals of, 127-31;
privileging individualism above
universalism, 144-45; promot-
ing indirect models of human

298


INDEX

rights advocacy, 112; promot-
ing women's suffrage, 127,
131; rebuilding his philosophy,
61-62; relationship with Tay-
lor, 23-24, 100, 109, 125, 134,
200, 229-34; rights, theories
of, as naturalistic, 72; on rights,
types of, 102-3; rules of con-
duct by, 98; secular upbringing
of, 58-60; seeking to correct
utilitarianism's neglect of indi-
vidual rights, 70; on sexual and
gender differences, 126; study-
ing patriarchy, 15-16; support-
ing mandatory education for all
children, 147-48; utilitarianism
of, 19, 2o; as virtue ethicist,
118; Western bias of, 179-80;
Wollstonecraft's influence
on, 67, 69; as woman's rights
activist, 64-66, 179, 204-5;
on women's progress, 1o; on
Wordsworth, 62
Millennium Development Goals,
140, 153
Millian marital model, 233-39
Milton, John, 51, 170
Mohanty, Chandra, 159, 174, 209
monarchies, 39
monogamy, 107
Montagu, Mary Wortley, 30, 166
Montesquieu, 1o6, 165, 200
moral beings, 82
moral character, perfection of, 117
morality: happiness and, 79-80;
utilitarian test of, 62-63; utility
and, 19, 71
moral law, 5 3-54, 87-88
moral liberty, 56

moral rights, 58, 102-4
moral rules, universal, 91
moral theology, 53
Mormonism, women's human
rights and, 112-13
Mormon polygamy, 109-10
mothers, right of, 36
Mott, Lucretia, 220-21, 223
multi-sited critic, 15
Muslim culture, bias against,
165-68, 172-73
nationalism, 10
National Organization for Women,
Statement of Purpose, 2
National Woman's Suffrage As-
sociation, 223
natural religion, 74
natural rights, 6, 30, 32; Ben-
tham's criticism of, 57-58;
derived from God's natural law
of morality, 47; Locke's theory
of, 37
natural rights theories: Chris-
tian sources for, 51; sidelining
women, 70
nature, rights to, 27, 33
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 7-8
nondiscrimination, 4
noninterference, 97
Nussbaum, Martha, 7, 9, 11, 16,
27, 117, 118, 119, 120-21, 136,
153, 199, 208, 247
NWSA. See National Woman's
Suffrage Association
Observations on the Feeling of
the Beautiful and the Sublime
(Kant), 38

299


INDEX

Observations on the Real Rights of
Women (Crocker), 172-73
odalisques, 176
Okin, Susan, 7, 9-10, 11, 37, 132
On Liberty (Mill), 63, 89, 90, 92,
94, 99, 101, 109, 110, 116-17,
134, 145, 147, 158, 229, 232,
233-34
"On the Admission of Women
to the Rights of Citizenship"
(Condorcet), 43
optimism, instilling, in children,
142, 143
Orientalism, 22
Original Stories from Real Life
(Wollstonecraft), 52
origin stories, 51
Ouchi Hy6e, 239-40, 241-43
Ouchi Setsuko, 241
outsider perspective, 15-16
pain, ethical relationships and, 32
Paine, Thomas, 6, 44, 46
Pappenheim, Bertha, 224
parental power, 37
Parfit, Derek, 96
pashaws, 167, 188
passions, 50
Pateman, Carole, 41
paternalism, 87, 92
patriarchal marriage, 212, 235-36
patriarchy, 15-16, 103, 136;
education and, 124, 139; ef-
fect on women's psyche, 163;
growth of, 138-39; harming
men, 205; moral problem of,
133; political, 39; respond-
ing to, 203; rights theories
and, 38-43; undermining, 2;

varieties of, 3 8-39; women's
resignation to, 187
Pennell, Elizabeth Robins, 224,
225
personal testimony, 208
philosophical genealogy, 7-8
Philosophical Radicals, 65
Pizan, Christine de, 29
pleasures: quality of, 93-94;
sober, 51, 78, 79; types of, 93,
99, 147
pluralism, 17, 114
plural voting, 147
Political Economy (Mill), 148
political symbols, 227
political thought, globalization
of, 29
Politics (Aristotle), 118
politics, women's relationship
to, 39
polyamory, 109
polyandry, 107
polygamy, 134, 157, 166-67;
cultural distance from, 111;
departure from, 11o; Islamic,
108-9; LDS women's sup-
port of, 112-13; religious, 1o6,
108-9
polygyny, 1o6
postcolonial feminism, 25
Poulain de la Barre, Franeois, 30
poverty, girls' education and, 153
power, 36, 47
prejudices: explaining away, at-
tempts to, 2oo; rootedness of,
196-97; working with, 202
Price, Richard, 18, 31, 49, 52-56,
70, 79, 84, 165
Priestly, Joseph, 53

300


INDEX

property rights, 27, 37
public education, 140-41
Quakers, 220
querelle des femmes, 29-30
racism, 10, 157
Rapport sur l'instruction publique
(Talleyrand-Perigord), 43-44,
141
rationalism, 53
rationality, rights and, 85-86, 87
Rawls, John, 7, 11, 17, 20, 71, 73,
94,95,101, 114,153,155
reason, development of, 50
Reflections on the Revolution in
France (Burke), 42
religious tolerance, 31
republicanism, 40-41, 43, 74
respect, 27
Revista de Santiago, 189
Richardson, Samuel, 206, 207
rights: correlative, 31; derived
from capabilities, 121; God-
given, 46-47; institutionaliza-
tion of, 248; minimization of,
96; moral cognates of, 27, 28;
naturalistic theories of, 71-72;
Protestant theory of, 36-3 7;
respect for, 74-75, 79, 82, 95;
sacred, 54; sharing of, resent-
ment over, 40; summaries of,
31; theories of, 18; will and,
28, 33
rights bearers, sex of, 82
rights discourse: eighteenth-
century, 3O-31; humorous
gendering of, 46
"rights of man," 6, 40

Rights of Man (Paine), 44
Rights of Man, Part the Second, The
(Paine), 6
Rights of War and Peace, The (Gro-
tius), 34
"rights of woman," 6
Rights of Woman. See Vindication of
the Rights of Woman, A
Robinson, Mary, 170
Rorty, Richard, 227, 245
Rossi, Alice, 65, 243
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 13, 18, 32,
40-42, 47-48, 156-57, 168,
169, 170, 206, 207
rules, revision of, 99
rule utilitarianism, 95-96,
98-100, 102
Russia: feminist movement in,
179-80; Westernization of,
18o-81; women in, 188, 191,
192, 193; women's rights in,
180-81
Ryan, Alan, 119, 148
sacred rights, 54
Said, Edward, 159, 177, 182
Salzmann, George, 44-45
Sapiro, Virginia, 118
Schochet, Gordon, 38-39
Schreiner, Olive, 16o, 185-88
Scottish Enlightenment, 157-58
Scotus, John Duns, 18, 32-33, 37
Second Common Reader (Woolf),
226
Second Discourse (Rousseau), 47-48
Second Treatise of Government
(Locke), 36-37
self-development, 62-64, 146-48,
151-52, 173-74, 215

301


INDEX

self-discovery, 207
self-respect, 143
self-sovereignty, 97
Sen, Amartya, 11-12, 27, 28, 76,
88, 103, 119, 120-21, 136, 139,
153, 246, 247
Seneca, 41
sentience, 32
Sentimental Journey (Sterne), 2o6,
207
seraglios, 166-69, 176
sexes: common humanity
of, 74-75; differences be-
tween, 35, 41, 84; equality
of, 29-30, 46, 66; inequal-
ity imposed on, 68; learning
capabilities of, 38; relationship
between, 51
sex-gender distinction, 133,
134-35
sexism, 10
sexual discrimination, 116
sexuality, importance of, 131
sexual violence, 4-5, 208
Sidgwick, Henry, 98
simple use, right to, 33
slavery, 56
slaves, rights of, 39, 58
Smith, Adam, 22, 140-41, 156,
165
Social Contract (Rousseau), 42
social contract theory, 28, 41-42,
47-48
social contract tradition, 18,
27, 95
socialization, 68
social justice, 246
social justice theory, 1 1
Socinianism, 53, 85

Some Thoughts on Education
(Locke), 38
Sophia (pseud.), 6, 69
South Africa, 185-87
spiritual marriage, 2 3-24
Spivak, Gayatri, 209, 246
spontaneity, 92
spousal interests, homogeneity
of, 66
Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 113,
220, 221-23
stereotype threats, 137-38
Sterne, Laurence, 206
Stoicism, 18, 40-42, 48-52
stories, human rights advocacy
and, 207-9
Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 245
Striyancha Sabha, 182
Su, Pying-hun, 243-44
Suarez, Francisco, 18, 32, 33-34
subject formation, feminist theory
of, 163
Subjection of Women (Mill), 7, 9-10,
17-18, 24, 63, 69, 89, 103, 104,
109, 125, 127, 131-32, 138-39,
148, 152, 158-59, 237; Euro-
centric rhetoric in, 173-78;
feminist humanist response to,
190-94; interpretive approach
to, 19o; reaction to, 188-97;
reception of, 16o-61, 178-85;
value of, 197
subjective rights, 26-28, 51-52;
philosophical origins of, 32-38;
rational agency and, 85
suicide, protection of chastity and,
34-35
Sushikshit Stricharitra, 182-84
sympathy, 32, 206

302


INDEX

Takahashi Hisanori, 240-41
Talleyrand-Perigord, Charles
Maurice de, 43-44, 140,
149-50
Taylor, Charles, 155, 164
Taylor, Harriet, 148; 289n52;
projected as ideal spouse,
236; relationship with Mill,
2 3-24, 100, 109, 125, 134, 200,
229-34; writing with Mill,
65-69, 125-26
Taylor, Helen, 68, 241, 244
Taylor, John, 66, 67, 205, 229-30
Taylor, Thomas, 46
Testing of Diana Mallory, The
(Ward), 225
theodicy, 5 5
Theory ofj'ustice, A (Rawls), 94
Thoughts on the Education of
Daughters (Wollstonecraft), 52
Toleration Act of 1689, 52, 55
Traiti de legislation (Dumont), 6o
Treatise of Human Nature (Hume),
215
Tristram Shandy (Sterne), 206
Tsebrikova, Maria, 22-23,
16o, 161, 189, 190-92, 193-
94, 202
Turkey, British prejudices toward,
166-67
unitarianism, 53
Unitarian Radicals, 65
United Nations: Convention on
the Elimination of All Forms of
Discrimination against Women,
3, 105; human rights declara-
tions of, I o- 1; World Confer-
ence on Human Rights, 3. See

also Universal Declaration of
Human Rights
United States: Constitution of,
Fifteenth Amendment, 223;
Wollstonecraft's feminist
orientalist strategy and,
170-71
Universal Declaration of Human
Rights, 2, 4, 5, 29, 73, 155
universal human rights, 73-77, 87
universalism, 142, 143, 192-93
universal primary education, 17,
21, 22, 122, 139-40, 141-42;
beneficial consequences of,
149-51; curriculum for, 143,
146; moral principles for, 142,
144
U.N. Women, 153
UPE. See universal primary
education
Urmson, J. O., 98
us-them dualism, 203
utilitarianism, 57, 6o-6i; criti-
cism of, 89-90; liberal, 19, 63;
moral outcomes in, 96
Utilitarianism (Mill), 89-93, 95,
98,99,102,118,146-47
Utilitarian Society, 61
utility, 91-93, 95-96; higher-
order, 120; Mill's concept of, 72
Vienna Declaration on Human
Rights, 3-5, 10
Vindication of the Rights of Brutes
(Taylor), 46
Vindication of the Rights of Men,
A (Wollstonecraft), 42,
48, 52-56, 80, 81, 83-85,
118, 123

303


INDEX

Vindication of the Rights of Woman,
A (Wollstonecraft), 6-7, 9, 11,
17-18, 30, 44-51, 52, 55, 77,
80-82, 84-85, 106-7, 112,
118, 120, 123-24, 140, 141,
148, 150, 159, 239; audience
for, among American Protes-
tant women, 171; centennial
edition of, 186; demanding
women's rights, 186; increased
international attention to,
195-96; Orientalist rhetoric in,
16o; reaction to, 188, 195-96;
reception of, 16o-61; Schrei-
ner's response to, 185-88; value
of, 197; Western prejudice in,
161-73
virtue, defining, 117
virtue ethics, 21, 117; egalitarian-
ism of, I 18; liberty-centered,
117-18; rights and, 119
Voltaire, 22, 165
voluntarism, 53, 54
Ward, Mrs. Humphry (Mary
Augusta), 225
Wealth of Nations, The (Smith),
140-41, 156
Wells, Emmeline, 112-13
Western culture, women's oppres-
sion and, 170
Westernization, 16o-61, 174,
180-82, 185, 191, 192
Wheatley, Phillis, 171
will, freedom of, 55
William of Ockham, 18, 32-33,
37, 53
Wollstonecraft, Mary, 1-2, 6;
antitrinitarian theology of, 53;

Aristotle and, 1'I7; autobio-
graphical writings of, 205-6;
(auto)biographical writings
of, 211-20, 244-45 (see also
autobiographies); categorizing
all as fully human, 86; on child
development, 87; consequen-
tialist arguments of, 78, 79,
81, 122-23, 150-51; contri-
bution of, to political theory,
6; critique of Rousseau, 47;
cultural bias of, 156, 163-70,
2oo; defense of, by LDS
women, 112; on democracy,
118; deontological justification
of, for human rights, 78-79,
81; on development of rea-
son, 5o; direct approach of, to
rights advocacy, 112; distancing
from social contract tradition,
47-48; on duties and rights,
77-83; educational arguments
of, 38, 120, 123; egalitarian
understanding of human rights,
52, 57; embodying insider
perspective, 15; Eurocentric
bias of, 1o, 14, 22, 159; extend-
ing universal human rights to
women, 56; feminist liberalism
and, 8-9; as feminist meme,
226, 227, 228; fictionalizing her
own life, 204; first principles
of, for human rights discourse,
51; foundationalist approach
of, 75-77; on the French
constitution, revision of, 6; on
gender, 123-24, 133-35; on
girls' upbringing, 137-38, 187;
global reception for, 22-24;

304


INDEX

human development theories
of, 21-22; on the human expe-
rience, 86-87; human rights as
moral absolutes for, 7o; human
rights theory of, 18, 19-20;
imperialistic writings of, 159;
influenced by rational Christian
dissent, 52; influence of, 23,
67, 69, 194-95, 203, 220-24;
interest in, 227-28; invoking
fall of the Bastille, 39; on Jesus,
53; Kamesian approach of, 157;
literary writings of, 23, 204;
metaphysics of, 19, 70-71,
83-87, 107, 156, 201; moral
contradiction of, 201; moral
theory of, 85-86; on national
education, 87; on natural affec-
tions, 200; on the passions, 50;
perfectionism of, 119-20; per-
petuating gender bias, 22, 152;
philosophical anthropology of,
84; physical education theories
of, 83; political responses to, 14;
political theories of, 13, 118; on
polygamy, 1o6-8; portrayals of,
127-31; on prejudice, 162-63;
Price's influence on, 18, 47,
49, 52-57, 83, 165; privileg-
ing rationality, 85; proposing
government-supported primary
schools, 140; Protestant
Christian approach of, 47; on
providence, 8o-81; publish-
ing Rights of Woman, 44-46;
questioning masculine biases of
rights of man doctrine, 42; ra-
tionalistic approach of, 53-54;
reading travel memoirs, 1o6;

rejecting Rousseau's thinking
on girls, 13; rejecting scriptural
origin stories, 51; religious
standpoint of, 14, 165; reputa-
tion of, 7; resisting sex bias, 84;
response to, 220-26; rhetorical
strategy of, 88; rights theories
of, as naturalistic, 72; on sacred
rights, 83-84; on sexual mores
of her time, 133; Socinian views
of Jesus, 85; Stoicism of, 48-49;
suicide attempts of, 214; taboo
status of, 221-22; theodicy of,
55; theology of, 19, 20, 76, 8o,
81, 83, 88-89, 149; on ultimate
purpose of human life, 8o;
uniting herself with all women,
204; UPE theory of, 142-43; as
virtue ethicist, 118; on women's
education, 42-43, 56-57;
women's human rights prin-
ciples of, 42-43; on women's
progress, 1o; on women's
rights, and benefits for men, 78;
writing style of, 218-19
woman, rights of, 6
Woman and Labor (Schreiner), 186,
188
women: adapting to patriarchy,
135-38; benefits of educat-
ing, for men and children, 78,
150-51; careers and, 132-33;
dependence of, 35; deserving
of human rights, 105; disen-
franchisement of, 41; education
linked with societal outcomes,
152; education of, 38, 42-43,
45, 56-57, 88; employment of,
190-91; empowerment of,

305


INDEX

women (continued)
209-10; full citizenship for,
223-24; gender stereotype
of, 21-22; incorporating into
international dialogue, 210;
individuality of, 63; men's
domination of, 33; moral and
political status of, 18; natural
rights for, 39; non-Western,
stereotypes of, 13-14, 17, 156,
187-88, 197; parental pow-
ers of, 37; personal narratives
of, 199; potential of, 121-22;
preaching, 22on21; in the
professions, 220; respecting
themselves as rational creatures,
82; rights of, to education, 21;
self-development of, 11-12;
sexual power of, 45-46; social-
ization of, 68; solidarity among,
218; subjective rights for, 27,
51-52; subordination of, 68;
worth of, sexual function and,
35-36, 37
women's clubs, 179
Women's Exponent, 112-13
women's human rights, 1; allega-
tion of, 88, 113-14; concern
for, 246; cross-cultural dialogue
on, 16; defining, 2-6; founda-

tionalist approaches to, 105;
genealogy of, 13; institution-
alization of, 104; instrumental
arguments for, 174; moral
ambiguities of, 1o; philosophi-
cal genealogy of, 7-8, 16; pre-
senting, in the public sphere,
75; reception for, 16; religious
approach to, 1, 6; secular ap-
proach to, 1, 6, 19, 110; sources
of, 72; universalistic arguments
for, 155
women's movement, 186, 228, 251fn
women's rights: first convention
for, 220; as human rights, 1o,
68-69; instrumental arguments
for, 152; utilitarianism and,
66-67
women's rights movement, 190,
195
women's suffrage, 65, 104, 113,
190
Woolf, Virginia, 226, 228
Wordsworth, William, 62, 147,
207
Wright, Frances, 69
Yousafzai, Malala, 248
Zonana, Joyce, 159, 169, 171

306