Wollstonecraft’s Contributions to Modern Political Philosophy: Intersectionality and the Quest for Egalitarian Social Justice

Botting, Eileen Hunt

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-18118-5_17

Wollstonecraft’s Contributions to Modern Political Philosophy: Intersectionality and the Quest for Egalitarian Social Justice

Eileen Hunt Botting³

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First Online: 27 June 2019

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Abstract

This chapter provides the first analysis of Mary Wollstonecraft as a proto-intersectional political philosopher. Wollstonecraft’s major contributions to modern political philosophy stem from her visionary use of the concept of intersectionality to diagnose the causes, symptoms, and remedies of gender-, race-, and class-based inequality and oppression. Wollstonecraft’s theory of social justice—the most egalitarian of the Enlightenment era—aimed to eliminate such arbitrary inequalities, in part through the legislation and protection of rights for women and other historically oppressed groups. Wollstonecraft should thus be understood as a philosophical forerunner of contemporary third-wave feminists, who use intersectionality as a foundational concept for theorizing social justice.

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Notes

1.
Leslie McCall, ‘The Complexity of Intersectionality,’ Signs 30:3 (Spring, 2005): 1771–1800, 1771.
2.
bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman? (Boston: South End Press, 1981); Elizabeth Spelman, Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought (Boston: Beacon Press, 1988).
3.
McCall, ‘The Complexity of Intersectionality.’
4.
The Future of Gender, ed. Jude Browne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
5.
Nancy Cott, The Grounding of Modern Feminism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987); 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 (May, 2006): 265–78; Karen Offen, European Feminisms, 1700–1950: A Political History (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000).
6.
See also Eileen Hunt Botting, ‘Crossing Borders and Bridging Generations: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Rights of Woman as the Traveling Feminist Classic,’ Women’s Studies Quarterly 35:3&4 (November, 2007): 296–301.
7.
Ange-Marie Hancock, ‘W.E.B. Du Bois: Intellectual Forefather of Intersectionality.’ Conference paper for American Political Science Association Meeting, 2006; Nancy J. Hirschmann, ‘Intersectionality Before Intersectionality was Cool: The Importance of Class to Feminist Interpretations of Locke,’ in Feminist Interpretations of John Locke, ed. Nancy J. Hirschmann and Kirstie McClure (University Park, PA: Penn State Press, 2007); Alvin B. Tillery, ‘Tocqueville, Black Writers, and American Ethnology: Rethinking the Foundations of Whiteness Studies,’ in Feminist Interpretations of Alexis de Tocqueville, ed. Jill Locke and Eileen Hunt Botting (University Park, PA: Penn State Press, 2008).
8.
Moira Ferguson, Colonialism and Gender Relations from Mary Wollstonecraft to Jamaica Kincaid: East Caribbean Connections (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993); Anne K. Mellor, ‘Sex, Violence, and Slavery: Blake and Wollstonecraft,’ Huntington Library Quarterly 58:3 (1995): 345–370; Barbara Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
9.
Eileen Hunt Botting and Christine Carey, ‘Wollstonecraft’s Philosophical Impact on Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Rights Advocates,’ American Journal of Political Science 48:4 (October, 2004): 707–722; Eileen Hunt Botting, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’s Enlightened Legacy: The “Modern Social Imaginary” of the Egalitarian Family,’ American Behavioral Scientist 49:5 (January, 2006): 687–701; Hunt Botting, ‘Crossing Borders and Bridging Generations’; McCall, ‘The Complexity of Intersectionality.’
10.
Zillah Eisenstein, The Radical Future of Liberal Feminism (New York: Longman, 1981); Hamilton, Cynthia, ‘Alice Walker’s Politics or the Politics of the Color Purple,’ Journal of Black Studies 18:3 (March, 1988): 379–91.
11.
‘It would be an arduous task to trace all the vice and misery that arise in society from the middle class of people apeing the manners of the great’ (Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men [1790] in A Vindication of the Rights of Men and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Sylvana Tomaselli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 23).
12.
Scholars have tended to engage in synoptic readings of Wollstonecraft’s oeuvre while underscoring the two Vindications as the most philosophical of her works. See Eileen Hunt Botting, Family Feuds: Wollstonecraft, Burke, and Rousseau on the Transformation of the Family (Albany, NY: The State University of New York Press, 2006); Lyndall Gordon, Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft (New York: HarperCollins, 2005); Virginia Sapiro, A Vindication of Political Virtue: The Political Theory of Mary Wollstonecraft (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Barbara Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
13.
While Wollstonecraft’s earlier works (such as Mary, a Fiction [1787] and Original Stories from Real Life [1788]) engage the intersection of gender and class, race is not as prominent a vector of analysis as in the two Vindications. On the privileging of class in early modern proto-intersectional political theory, see Nancy J. Hirschmann, Gender and Class in Modern Political Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).
14.
Wollstonecraft [1790], A Vindication of the Rights of Men and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 22.
15.
For historical background on the composition of the Rights of Men, see Wendy Gunther-Canada, Rebel Writer: Mary Wollstonecraft and Enlightenment Politics (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2001).
16.
Wollstonecraft [1790], A Vindication of the Rights of Men and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 9.
17.
While Rousseau imagined the existence of a pre-political ‘state of nature’ to explore the notion of humanity’s good nature prior to its corruption by society and government, Wollstonecraft did not use this trope of the social contract tradition. Instead, Wollstonecraft used the Lockean notion of the mind as a blank slate to draw a distinction between humanity’s original nature at birth and its corrupted nature in aristocratic society (ibid., 31). For an extended study of why Wollstonecraft is not a state of nature theorist like Rousseau, see Natalie Taylor, The Rights of Woman as Chimera: The Political Philosophy of Mary Wollstonecraft (London: Routledge, 2006).
18.
Wollstonecraft [1790], A Vindication of the Rights of Men and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 8.
19.
Ibid., 23.
20.
Ibid., 30.
21.
Ibid., 30.
22.
Ibid., 13.
23.
Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States from the 1960s to the 1990s (London: Routledge, 1994).
24.
Wollstonecraft [1792], A Vindication of the Rights of Men and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 87.
25.
Ibid., 202, 97 and 93.
26.
Ibid., 93.
27.
Ibid., 235.
28.
Ibid., 92.
29.
Ibid., 137.
30.
Ibid., 97.
31.
Ibid., 201.
32.
Ibid., 92.
33.
Ibid., 92.
34.
Ibid., 92.
35.
Pauline Schlosser, The Fair Sex: White Women and Racial Patriarchy in the Early American Republic (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 54–57.
36.
Ibid.
37.
Wollstonecraft [1792], A Vindication of the Rights of Men and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 137, 143, 149 and 153–54.
38.
Just as the adjective “fair” indicated the race and class of the women it described, the term “officer” indicated the race, class, and gender of its referent, and differentiated these white men from the soldiers they outranked. Only white men were officers in the eighteenth-century British military, while freed black male slaves served as soldiers alongside less privileged white men. See Nigel File and Chris Power, Black Settlers in Britain 1555–1958 (London: Heinnemann Educational, 1981).
39.
Wollstonecraft [1792], A Vindication of the Rights of Men and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 92.
40.
Ibid.
41.
James Walvin, Questioning Slavery (London: Routledge, 1996), 84.
42.
Botting and Carey, ‘Wollstonecraft’s Philosophical Impact on Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Rights Advocates.’
43.
Wollstonecraft [1790], A Vindication of the Rights of Men and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 53.
44.
Ibid., 62.
45.
Ibid., 62.
46.
Carol Howard, ‘Wollstonecraft’s Thoughts on Slavery and Corruption,’ The Eighteenth Century 45, 1 (2004): 61–86, 61; Anne K. Mellor, ‘Sex, Violence, and Slavery: Blake and Wollstonecraft,’ Huntington Library Quarterly 58:3 (1997): 345–370, 364–65.
47.
Wollstonecraft [1790], A Vindication of the Rights of Men and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 32.
48.
Wollstonecraft [1792], A Vindication of the Rights of Men and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 234.
49.
Wollstonecraft [1790], A Vindication of the Rights of Men and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 13.
50.
Wollstonecraft [1792], A Vindication of the Rights of Men and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 235 and 285.
51.
Scott Juengel, ‘Countenancing History: Mary Wollstonecraft, Samuel Stanhope Smith, and Enlightenment Racial Science,’ English Literary History 68, 4 (2001): 897–927; Colleen Mahoney, ‘A Vindication of her Uses of Slavery: An Analysis of Slavery’s Metaphoric and Literal Presence in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Works,’ Gender Studies Senior Thesis. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame, 2007, 8; Mary Wollstonecraft, The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler, 7 vols. (New York: New York University Press, 1989), vol. 7, 55.
52.
Wollstonecraft [1792], A Vindication of the Rights of Men and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 235.
53.
Ibid., 235.
54.
Gordon, Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft, 342.
55.
Mary Wollstonecraft, The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria [1798] in Mary, Maria, Matilda, ed. Janet Todd (London: Penguin, 2004), 96 and 81.
56.
Ibid., 109 and 80.
57.
Ibid., 80–91 and 94–135.
58.
Ibid., 109 and 83.
59.
Ibid., 104 and 84.
60.
Ibid., 61 and 84.
61.
Ibid., 92.
62.
Ibid., 81.
63.
Ibid., 138. The dehumanizing severity of Jemima’s experience of oppression has led at least one scholar to speculate whether Wollstonecraft intended the character to be read as mixed-race as well as poor and female. This tantalizing interpretation is certainly friendly to my line of argument about Wollstonecraft as a proto-intersectional political theorist, but there is not enough textual evidence, in my view, to warrant the inference. Wollstonecraft briefly yet explicitly acknowledged the unique and extreme form of oppression suffered by black female chattel slaves in her Female Reader (1789), but did not pursue the analysis in her later works. This lack of an extended discussion of black women’s distinct experiences of oppression is perhaps reflective of the political limitations of the reactionary 1790s. Given Wollstonecraft’s other meditations on the social construction and intersection of race, class, and gender, the lack of race as a vector of analysis in the Wrongs of Woman does not seem to preclude her classification as a proto-intersectional political theorist. The first novel to include a mixed-race woman’s first-person narrative of exploitation was Amelia Opie’s Adeline Mowbray (1805)—intriguingly, a work inspired by Wollstonecraft’s life and writings. See Jeanne Perreault, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft and Harriet Jacobs: Self Possessions,’ in Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley: Writing Lives, ed. Helen M. Buss and David Lorne Macdonald (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2001), 105; Mary Wollstonecraft, The Female Reader [1789], in The Works of Mary Wollstonecraft, vol. 4, 89. I thank Essaka Joshua, Neil Delaney, and Barbara Taylor for their assistance with this line of argument.
64.
Mary Wollstonecraft, The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria [1798] in Mary, Maria, Matilda, ed. Janet Todd, 147–48; Janet Todd, ‘Introduction,’ in Mary, Maria, Matilda, xxvi.
65.
Wollstonecraft [1790], A Vindication of the Rights of Men and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 61–62.
66.
Wollstonecraft [1792], A Vindication of the Rights of Men and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 93.
67.
Ibid., 247.
68.
Ibid., 243.
69.
Ibid., 249.
70.
Ibid., 234.
71.
Ibid., 285.
72.
Ibid., 285.
73.
Wollstonecraft, The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria [1798] in Mary, Maria, Matilda, ed. Janet Todd, 85.
74.
Ibid.
75.
‘Coverture’ was the legal condition of a married woman, who was under her husband’s authority. The right of ‘primogeniture’ gave succession or inheritance to the firstborn son. ‘Entail’ was the establishment of the rule of descent for a landed estate, so that no single inheritor could divide the land at will. ‘Chattel slavery’ was the term primarily used by abolitionists to describe the practice of slavery, in which humans were treated as goods and property.
76.
Wollstonecraft [1792], A Vindication of the Rights of Men and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 237.
77.
Ibid., 263–65.
78.
Ibid., 240.
79.
Ibid., 81.
80.
Ibid., 86.
81.
Ibid., 156–173.
82.
Linda Kerber, ‘The Republican Mother: Women and the Enlightenment-An American Perspective,’ American Quarterly 28:2 (Summer, 1976): 187–205; Carol Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1988).
83.
Wollstonecraft [1792], A Vindication of the Rights of Men and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 79.
84.
Wollstonecraft [1790], A Vindication of the Rights of Men and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 61.
85.
Wollstonecraft [1792], A Vindication of the Rights of Men and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 108.
86.
Botting and Carey, ‘Wollstonecraft’s Philosophical Impact on Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Rights Advocates,’ 712–715; Sarah Grimké, Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and Other Essays, ed. Elizabeth Ann Bartlett (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988);
Lucretia Mott, Lucretia Mott: Her Complete Speeches and Sermons, ed. Dana Greene (New York: The Edwin and Mellen Press, 1980), 270; Lucretia Mott, Selected Letters of Lucretia Coffin Mott, ed. Beverly Wilson Palmer (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 234, 272, 392.
87.
Lily Braun [1901], Die Frauenfrage: Ihre geschichtliche Entwicklung und ihre wirtschaftliche Seite (Berlin: Verlag J.H.W. Dietz Nachf. GmbH, 1979), 94; Lyndall Gordon, Vindication: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft, 422–23, 447; Flora Tristan [1840] Flora Tristan’s London Journal: A Survey of London Life in the 1830s, trans. Dennis Palmer and Giselle Pincetl (London: G. Prior, 1980), 199–200.
88.
Susan B. Anthony [1906] ‘Speech at National American Convention of 1906,’ in History of Woman Suffrage, Vol. 5, ed. Ida Harper (Salem, NH: Ayers, 1985), 185; Millicent Fawcett, “Introduction,” in Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Millicent Fawcett (New York: Humboldt Publishing Company, 1891), 9–27; Bertha Pappenheim (as P. Berthold) [1899] ‘Gemässigte und Radikale Frauenbewegung,’ in Bertha Pappenheim (Anna O.): Literarische und Publizistische Texte, eds. Lena Kugler und Albrecht Koschorke (Vienna: Verlag Turia und Kant, 2002), 55–58.
89.
Marsha Lear, ‘The Second Feminist Wave,’ in New York Times Magazine, 10 March 1968, 24.
90.
Rebecca Walker, ‘Becoming the Third Wave,’ in Ms. (January/February, 1992), 39–41.
91.
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex [1949] (New York: Vintage, 1989), 121 and 128.
92.
Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique [1962] (New York: Laurel, 1983), 82, 85, and 93.
93.
Eisenstein, The Radical Future of Liberal Feminism.
94.
bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman?; Elizabeth Spelman, Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought.

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Professor of Political Science, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN, USA
Eileen Hunt Botting

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Philosophy, University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA, USA
Eileen O’Neill
Department of Philosophy, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, USA
Marcy P. Lascano

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Botting, E.H. (2019). Wollstonecraft’s Contributions to Modern Political Philosophy: Intersectionality and the Quest for Egalitarian Social Justice. In: O’Neill, E., Lascano, M.P. (eds) Feminist History of Philosophy: The Recovery and Evaluation of Women’s Philosophical Thought. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18118-5_17

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18118-5_17
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