The divine creature and the female citizen: manners, religion, and the two rights strategies in Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindications

Abstract

This paper challenges the common view that Wollstonecraft extends her conception of rights from men to women in her evolution from the Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) to the Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Instead, it argues, Wollstonecraft is primarily concerned in both texts not with rights but with manners, and it is this concern which permits her most compelling accomplishment: the effective demolition of any fixed boundary between a male ‘public’ and a female ‘private’ or domestic sphere. Wollstonecraft's concept of rights, in fact, takes two forms in the second ‘Vindication’, and her most radical rights argument is not elaborated in relation to her account of manners, but in the context of her much-neglected religious beliefs. Few any longer read Mary Wollstonecraft's so-called first ‘Vindication’, the Vindication of the Rights of Men . Produced hastily in a few short weeks at the end of 1790, it glimpsed fleeting fame as the first response to Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France , and sufficient critical acclaim to offer a useful fillip to its author's literary career. With few internal divisions or pauses, the tract was sent to the printers sheet by sheet with the ink barely dry, but its forceful, occasionally beautiful style succeeded in scoring a few points off Burke.