Whomens Humans Rights.

Yale University Press
Chapter Title: INTRODUCTION: WOMENS HUMAN RIGHTS AS INTEGRAL TO UNIVERSAL

HUMAN RIGHTS
Book Title: Wollstonecraft, Mill, and Women's Human Rights

Book Author(s): EILEEN HUNT BOTTING
Published by: Yale University Press. (2016)
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INTRODUCTION
WOMENS HUMAN RIGHTS AS INTEGRAL
TO UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS
Wollstonecraft and Mill: Two Watersheds

for the Idea of Womens Human Rights
The idea of womens 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 womens human
rightsthe first religious, the second secularis 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 womens 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 universalthat is, apply equally to each
and every human beingwithout 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. Wollstonecrafts and Mills 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 reachactual and potentialthe idea of
womens human rights should be understood as a central concept for
modern political philosophy. Yet its intellectual history has largely
been untold until now.1
Defining Womens Human Rights

Before we can understand or even trace the intellectual history of
the idea of womens human rights as rooted in Wollstonecraft, Mill,
and their global readership, we need to have a grasp of the concepts
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 declarations 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. Womens 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
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 womens 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 womens coalition
had inspired her with the slogan womens 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
womens 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 womens 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 womens shared rights with
men, such as nourishment, safety, and education. As a corollary, it
entailed womens equal access to these human rights, without gender
discrimination. Second, it meant womens 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 Declarations definition of womens
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
INTRODUCTION
inalienable, integral and indivisible part of universal human rights.

This conception of womens 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 womens 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 Declarations definition of
womens 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 womens 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
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 Declarations def-
inition of womens human rights raise a paradox. How can womens
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 Declarations
two-branch approach to defining womens human rights. Imagine the
two branches of the definition of womens human rights as springing
from their roots in the Universal Declaration, especially its pream-
bles 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 womens 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 womens special and urgent need
for its assurance. The two-part structure of the legal definition of
womens 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 Womens Human Rights:

Wollstonecraft, Mill, and Beyond
The philosophical roots of this international legal definition of
womens human rights can indeed be traced long before the United
INTRODUCTION
Nations human rights declarations of 1993 and 1948. Through this

first book-length comparative study of the political theories of Woll-
stonecraft (175997) and Mill (1806 73), I argue that they repre-
sent two watershed momentsthe former religious and the latter
secularin the development of this influential modern political
concept. The concept of womens 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 j ust i ce 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. Wollstonecrafts 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 womens rights advo-
cates from the late eighteenth centurysuch as French revolution-
aries Nicolas de Condorcet and Olympe de Gouges as well as the
pseudonymous Sophia before them in Englandhad also argued
for the equal rights of men and women. Unlike these shorter es-
says, Wollstonecrafts 1792 book A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
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, Wollstonecrafts Rights of Woman also
decisively impacted the terms of the international philosophical and
political debates on womens rights for roughly the first century after
its debut in London.10
Despite Wollstonecrafts significance as a systematic theorist of
why womens rights are integral to universal human rights, philo-
sophical genealogies of the concept of womens human rights have
typically reached only as far back as Mills 1869 book The Subjec-
tion of Women. As the first major secular philosopher of womens
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 womens 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.
Mills 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.11
By approaching the question of the evolution of womens hu-
man rights through the genre of philosophical genealogy, I follow
Friedrich Nietzsches 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
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 womens
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 womens 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 womens sub-
jection that prioritize womens and gender issues (including womens
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.12
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-
INTRODUCTION
nism was a negative yet apt epithet for the tradition, as exemplified
by Wollstonecrafts 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
Wollstonecrafts and Mills political thought.13
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
womens 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 justicesuch
as the actual guarantee of equal human rights for the sexesin order
to realize its own basic moral principles. In Nussbaums 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.14
Fundamentally, I also share Okins feminist liberal conception of
the integral place of womens 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 womens 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 womens rights. As Mill conceded in the open-
ing pages of his argument, I am willing to accept the unfavorable
INTRODUCTION
conditions which the prejudice assigns to me. He consequently ad-

mitted that the burthen of proof was upon him to demonstrate
womens 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 womens human rights advocacy. The
male-biased presumption against womens rights had to be exposed,
analyzed, and proven to be logically inconsistent with any concept of
universal human rights, before public opinion could change.15
Although male bias posed a serious obstacle to the recognition
of womens 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
womens rights as a kind of human rights. For example, Wollstone-
craft and Mill regularly appealed to a Western European standard
of womens progress that presumed the comparatively lesser status
of women in nonWestern 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 womens 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 Grewals ethical concerns with such Western-biased uses of the
idea of womens human rights. In 1999, Grewal set forth a post-
colonial model for assessing the moral ambiguities of the concept
of womens human rights, particularly as it applies to non-Western
cultures. Grewal contended that the Vienna Declaration masked the
imperial dimension of the idea of womens 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-
10
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
womens 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 sustainedproblems that faced women of her an-
cestral nation. Instead, universalistic human rights discourse had the
tendency to treat womens 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 Okins concern with confronting male
bias and Grewals concern with tackling cultural bias in the defini-
tion of womens human rights. My primary aim is to explain how
a revised and internationalized theory of womens 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 womens 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 goodsat 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
11
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.17
I have written this genealogy in the spirit of Sens 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 womens 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 womens agency
and well-being.18
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 Agustn 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
Wollstonecrafts rejection of Jean-Jacques Rousseaus 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 womens 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 Wollstonecrafts and Mills
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 theirsometimes unreflective, sometimes
purposive, but always paradoxical and troublingperpetuation of
their British cultures prevalent stereotypes of non-Western, non-
Christian peoples, especially Muslims and Hindus, in their argu-
ments for womens 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 womens human
rights as well as their rhetorical reliance on negative cultural stereo-
types. Mills 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
Wollstonecrafts brand of rational (and radical) Christian dissent that
made her arguments and rhetoric for womens 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
womens 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 Mills 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 nonWestern European

religious practices and prejudicial Western assumptions about the
backwardness of such religions on gender issues.21
To better grapple with these ethical issues surrounding the cul-
tural biases of womens 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 womens human rights.
One final methodological caveat: this book provides an interna-
tional philosophical genealogy of the concept of womens 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 philosophicallyin 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 Wollstonecrafts theory of womens human rights and Mills;
second, it looks at a range of nonWestern 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 womens 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. NonWestern European feminist thinkers have
revised and internationalized Wollstonecrafts and Mills theories of
womens human rights, by critically engaging their books as well as
their life stories from the nineteenth century forward. Such cross-
cultural dialogues on womens 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
16
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 Wollstonecrafts re-
ligious and Mills secular foundations for justifying womens 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 womens
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 womens human rights arguments.
Wollstonecraft and Mill established a contradictory rhetorical model
for making womens 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 nonWestern European respondents to the Rights of
17
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 Wollstonecrafts and Mills uses of
autobiography as a literary mode of womens 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 womens
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 genres basic assumption of the intrinsic value of indi-
vidual human lives.24
Chapter 1 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 Surez. 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 rightsabove all,
their male bias and sidelining of womenled Wollstonecraft and
Mill to develop two alternative foundations for a truly inclusive con-
cept of human rights. While Wollstonecraft drew from her mentor
Richard Prices dissenting Christian theology to forge a new meta-
physical and deontological grounding for womens human rights,
18
INTRODUCTION
Mill revised classical utilitarianism into a liberal utilitarianism that

placed womens 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-
crafts and Mills respective answers to it. Although Wollstonecrafts
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, Wollstonecrafts 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. Mills 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 Beitzs 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 Wollstonecrafts 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 Gods rational image.
By contrast, Mills 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). Mills theory
nonetheless fits Beitzs 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, Wollstonecrafts
rational theology and Mills 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 womens 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
womens 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 womens 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 womens 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 womens 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 Wollstonecrafts and Mills naturalistic accounts of human rights
in matters of political reform, I examine how their theories apply to
the question of reconciling womens human rights with the practice
of religious polygamy in nineteenth-century Mormon Utah and in
contemporary Islam.26
Chapter 3 compares Wollstonecrafts and Mills 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 womens 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 womens 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 womens 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 Wollstonecrafts and Mills 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-
stonecrafts and Mills narratives of womens 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 womens 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 ones 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 nonWestern European feminist
liberalsMaria Tsebrikova of Russia, Martina Barros Borgoo of
22
INTRODUCTION
Chile, and Elvira Lpez 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 womens hu-
man rights advocacy. Tsebrikova, Borgoo, and Lpez 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 womens 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 nonWestern 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 womens human rights advocacy. In their literary writings,
Wollstonecraft and Mill incorporated the experiences of the women
they loved (such as Marys friend Fanny Blood and Johns wife, Har-
riet Taylor) into their personal narratives, making them function
as biographies as much as autobiographies. Such literary works as
Wollstonecrafts novel Mary, a Fiction (1788) and Mills 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 womens struggles for rec-
ognition of their human status, their (auto)biographical writings de-
veloped two narrative frameworks for advocating the human rights
of women: Wollstonecrafts stories of heroic womanhood and Mills
stories of spiritual marriage. These narratives proved to have an in-
ternational impact. Wollstonecrafts first-wave feminist, and often
religious, readers from the United States and across Europe hailed
her as a voice in the wildernessa feminist political prophet who
cleared the way for their formal organization of the womens rights
cause. Mills 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, Wollstonecrafts and Mills (auto)biographical writings
pose a series of philosophical questions for womens 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 Wollstonecrafts and Mills vibrant global reception, such a con-
crete, passionate, and literary approach to advocating for womens
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

womens human rights activism. Building on the visionary ideas of
postcolonial feminism, they have demonstrated that the study of
womens 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 Womens Human Rights is one
further contribution to this tradition of feminist thinking in which
liberalisms 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.31
25

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Yale University Press

Chapter Title: INTRODUCTION: WOMENS HUMAN RIGHTS AS INTEGRAL TO UNIVERSAL

Book Title: Wollstonecraft, Mill, and Women's Human Rights

This book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-

Wollstonecraft and Mill: Two Watersheds

let alone just. Wollstonecrafts and Mills joint reconceptualization

Defining Womens Human Rights

After the adoption of the Convention on the Elimination of All

inalienable, integral and indivisible part of universal human rights.

of their human rights to bodily integrity, sexual choice and expres-

Tracing a Genealogy of Womens Human Rights:

Nations human rights declarations of 1993 and 1948. Through this

comprehensively treated the questions of why and how the sexes

evolution of Western morality. Rather, he sought to tell a conceptual

conditions which the prejudice assigns to me. He consequently ad-

man rights regime was actually representative of the interests and

empowered by their societies to be active agents of change if they

is a biological state that is measured via chromosomal content and a

technically understood that male bias was a kind of artificial cultural

including pervasive cultural insensitivity to nonWestern European

its social remedies, so as to remove it as an obstacle to happiness. On

traditions but rather to find ways of fairly balancing the demands of

Overview and Chapter Summary

Woman and The Subjection of Women demonstrates how it is possible

Mill revised classical utilitarianism into a liberal utilitarianism that

a progressive being, capable of free and full self-development to-

sovereignty, individual freedom, and traditional cultural practices. A

Chile, and Elvira Lpez of Argentina emerge from this reception

touchstone for translators of The Subjection of Women from late

compatible with but have provided a grounding for international

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