The Rights of Woman and the Equal Rights of Men

• DOI: 10.1177/0090591720946310
• Date: 01 June 2021
• Published date: 01 June 2021
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591720946310

Political Theory

2021, Vol. 49(3) 403 –430

© The Author(s) 2020

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DOI: 10.1177/0090591720946310

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Article

The Rights of Woman

and the Equal Rights

of Men

Karen Green1

Abstract

While standard histories of Western political thought represent women’s

rights as an offshoot of the earlier movement for the equal rights of men,

this essay argues that the eighteenth-century push for democracy and

equal rights was grounded in arguments first used to defend women’s

right to moral and religious self-determination, based on their rational

and spiritual equality with men. In tandem with the rise of critiques

of absolute monarchy, ideal marriage, which had previously involved

lordship and subjection, was transformed into an equal companionate

relationship based on inclination and affection. The essay argues that the

transformation, by the time of the American and French revolutions, of

neo-Roman republicanism—which had been aristocratic and oligarchic—

into egalitarian, democratic republicanism had been mediated by the

extension of arguments, widely distributed in the literature criticizing the

slavery of marriage, into a general critique of slavery and support for the

equal rights of men.

Keywords

republicanism, democracy, political liberty, marriage, monarchy

1Associate Professor, School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, University of Melbourne,

Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Corresponding Author:

Karen Green, Associate Professor, School of Historical and Philosophical Studies, University

of Melbourne, 3/51 Robe St, St Kilda 3182, Melbourne, Victoria 3010, Australia.

Email: karen.green@unimelb.edu.au

946310PTXXXX10.1177/0090591720946310Political TheoryGreen

research-article2020

404 Political Theory 49(3)

Introduction

A popular view of the history of political thought represents feminism as a

late eighteenth-century development and an adaptation of the theory of the

equal rights of men. A characteristic statement is found in Anthony C.

Grayling’s Towards the Light in a chapter on “Slaves, Workers, Women,”

The story of the struggle for women’s rights goes back to isolated but

remarkable voices in the seventeenth century and before . . . but the first major

feminist voice belongs to Mary Wollstonecraft, whose A Vindication of the

Rights of Woman marks an epoch in the cause.1

Coming after the French declaration of the rights of man, Wollstonecraft’s

tract, like Olympe de Gouges’s Les droits de la femme, is taken to represent a

decisive turn, extending a tradition of political philosophy, which previously

had nothing to do with them, to include women.2 Influential feminist histori-

ans have also accepted that the doctrine of abstract universal rights was devel-

oped by men and have therefore questioned its validity in the face of bodily

difference.3 Grayling’s history of the rise of liberty charts the defense of reli-

gious toleration through the works of Desiderius Erasmus, Sebastian Castellio,

John Milton, and John Locke. He does mention marriage, and he implies that

it is Milton’s 1644 defense of divorce that stands at the origin of the later trans-

formation of marriage from a contract for reproduction to a bond of compan-

ionship.4 Women only enter the story with Wollstonecraft, so that earlier

women’s literary and political interventions must be presumed to have been as

ineffectual as Simone de Beauvoir assumed, when she dismissed earlier

female defenders of women as “isolated individuals” who had “protested

against the harshness of their destiny” but were unable to achieve anything

without male authorization.5

Women are even more thoroughly absent from Quentin Skinner’s influen-

tial Foundations of Modern Political Thought. He highlights the masculinity

of the early Italian republics and explains how Cicero’s representation of

virtus as the highest kind of excellence, along with his emphasis on the need

for rhetoric to instruct and incite virtue, is extolled by Petrarch and results in

the revival of the vir virtutis. Augustine’s insistence on humanity’s sinful

nature and incapacity to deserve grace, so dominant during the medieval

period, comes to be replaced with a new renaissance optimism that virtue and

excellence can and should be achieved in this world, through the acquisition

of “honour, glory and worldly fame.”6 Skinner’s second volume, like

Grayling’s, traces reformation developments, through Martin Luther and

John Calvin to George Buchanan, focusing on Protestant challenges to the