Rethinking the history of women’s rights: Astell and Macaulay on freedom and virtue

Jacqui Broad (Monash University), Karen Green (The University of Melbourne)

There is a common perception that the language and theory of women’s rights first emerged in the late eighteenth century as an offshoot of the ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man’ (1789). This paper demonstrates that the rhetoric of women’s rights has a much longer history. To support this, we focus on a concept of rights assumed in the arguments of Mary Astell (1666-1731) and Catharine Macaulay (1731-91) concerning freedom and virtue. In the writings of these women, human beings have certain entitlements by virtue of their nature as free and rational beings capable of attaining perfection or excellence of character (‘virtue’). These entitlements consist in the freedom to determine themselves toward perfection, as well as freedom from the kind of domination or dependence that would prevent that self-determination. It is argued that the ideas developed by these women represent a bridge between earlier republican traditions of civic virtue and later feminist traditions that appeal to the notion of rights. This development is not only important for the history of feminism, but also for understanding the emergence of the language of rights more generally. Reading women’s works throws light on a tradition of rights connected to moral and metaphysical notions concerning human agency, and especially the notion that an agent’s freedom is a means toward, or a necessary prerequisite for, the attainment of virtue.

Reading to complete in advance: Lena Halldenius, “Chapter 3: Rights” in Mary Wollstonecraft and Feminist Republicanism (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2015).