WOLLSTONECRAFT, MILL, AND WOMEN’S HUMAN RIGHTS Y6872.indb i 1/6/16 10:37:56 AM This page intentionally left blank EILEEN HUNT BOTTING Wollstonecraft, Mill, and Women’s Human Rights NEW HAVEN AND LONDON Y6872.indb iii 1/6/16 10:37:56 AM Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory of Philip Hamilton McMillan of the Class of 1894, Yale College. Copyright © 2016 by Eileen Hunt Botting. All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educational, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail sales.press@yale .edu (U.S. offi ce) or [email protected] (U.K. offi ce). Set in Janson Oldstyle type by Newgen North America. Printed in the United States of America. Library of Congress Control Number: 2015947730 isbn: 978-0-300-18615-4 (cloth : alk. paper) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ansi /niso z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Y6872.indb iv 1/6/16 10:37:56 AM CONTENTS Acknowledgments vii Introduction: Women’s Human Rights as Integral to Universal Human Rights 1 one A Philosophical Genealogy of Women’s Human Rights 26 two Foundations of Universal Human Rights: Wollstonecraft’s Rational Theology and Mill’s Liberal Utilitarianism 70 three Theories of Human Development: Wollstonecraft and Mill on Sex, Gender, and Education 116 four The Problem of Cultural Bias: Wollstonecraft, Mill, and Western Narratives of Women’s Progress 155 fi ve Human Stories: Wollstonecraft, Mill, and the Literature of Human Rights 204 Notes 249 Index 293 Y6872.indb v 1/6/16 10:37:56 AM This page intentionally left blank ACKNOWLEDGMENTS First, I need to thank Bill Frucht for arranging the thoughtful readers’ reports on the book that have encouraged me to develop it into its current form. In addition, I have benefi ted immensely from the mentoring of Nancy Hirschmann, Virginia Sapiro, Gordon Schochet, Ian Shapiro, Rogers M. Smith, Steven B. Smith, and Syl- vana Tomaselli. Chapter 4 is partly based on my research and writing for an article cowritten with my former undergraduate student Sean Kronewitter, “Westernization and Women’s Rights: Non-Western European Responses to Mill’s Subjection of Women, 1869–1908,” Political Theory 40:4 (August 2012), 464 –94, and an article cowrit- ten with Dr. Charlotte Hammond Matthews of the University of Edinburgh, “Overthrowing the Floresta-Wollstonecraft Myth for Latin American Feminism,” Gender and History 26:1 (April 2014), 64 –83. Chapter 5 draws on my work for an article cowritten with my former undergraduate students Christine Carey Wilkerson and Elizabeth N. Kozlow, “Wollstonecraft as an International Feminist Meme,” Journal of Women’s History 26:2 (Summer 2014), 13–38. In both chapters 4 and 5, I built on some of my arguments originally written for the essay “The Personal Is Political: Wollstonecraft’s Witty, First-Person, Feminist Voice,” in Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Eileen Hunt Botting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 261–79. In 2008 and 2011, the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame provided funding to support the professional transla- tion of a variety of texts used to chronicle Wollstonecraft’s and Mill’s international reception. The Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts at Notre Dame enabled me to hire a great copy editor, Mary Copeland, and an excellent research assistant, Cameron O’Bannon. Finally, this book is for my family—the living, the dead, and those yet to be born. vii Y6872.indb vii 1/6/16 10:37:57 AM This page intentionally left blank INTRODUCTION WOMEN’S HUMAN RIGHTS AS INTEGRAL TO UNIVERSAL HUMAN RIGHTS Wollstonecraft and Mill: Two Watersheds for the Idea of Women’s Human Rights The idea of women’s 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 fi rst and John Stuart Mill after her were the primary philosophical architects of this view. Wollstonecraft developed a rational theological justifi cation 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 women’s human rights—the fi rst religious, the second secular—is best understood as emerging from a sequential (if often implicit) dialogue. Looking backward, this dialogue moved signifi cantly 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 women’s 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 universal—that is, apply equally to each and every human being—without 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, 1 Y6872.indb 1 1/6/16 10:37:57 AM INTRODUCTION let alone just. Wollstonecraft’s and Mill’s 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 reach—actual and potential—the idea of women’s human rights should be understood as a central concept for modern political philosophy. Yet its intellectual history has largely been untold until now.1 Defi ning Women’s Human Rights Before we can understand or even trace the intellectual history of the idea of women’s human rights as rooted in Wollstonecraft, Mill, and their global readership, we need to have a grasp of the concept’s more recent defi nition 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 declaration’s only other specifi c 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. Women’s 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, fi rst and foremost, are human beings, who, like all other people in our society, must have the chance to develop their fullest human potential.”2 2 Y6872.indb 2 1/6/16 10:37:57 AM 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 women’s 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 women’s coalition had inspired her with the slogan “women’s 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 defi nition of human rights so that “women’s 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 women’s 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 defi nition 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 women’s shared rights with men, such as nourishment, safety, and education.