Mary Wollstonecraft and the Right to Air

Abstract

Air flows through all Mary Wollstonecraft's writings, from her first novel Mary, through her treatises and letters, and to her last novel Maria. She was attuned to the medical importance of a change of air, but also developed a more philosophical notion of a right to air. Her attention to everyday air and smell unavoidably reaffirmed her key intellectual questions of commonality, individuality, equality and freedom. For Wollstonecraft, air was both a metaphor for freedom and also a literal condition for its development. This article situates her numerous remarks on air alongside medical sources, racialized climatological theory, slavery cases, and the pneumatic chemistry of the 1790s. Such a reading of Wollstonecraft's aerial philosophy, and comparisons with Burke, Rousseau, Godwin and Kant, contributes to an ecological reading of her work and to a forgotten history of air rights, with relevance to current debates on air quality and inequality.