Mary Wollstonecraft at Notre Dame

Description by Eileen M. Hunt

Our 2024-27 NEH Scholarly Editions project is the production of the first standard, integrated, annotated scholarly edition of the British Enlightenment philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft’s two most important works of political and social thought, A Vindication of the Rights of Men (VRM) (1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (VRW) (1792). The significance of her Vindications rests upon the interrelationship of their texts and contexts. As Wollstonecraft (1759-97) composed these sequential political treatises in the wake of the early, liberal phase of the French Revolution, she used VRM and VRW to mount a systematic and cumulative case for the entitlement of all people to hold and exercise “the rights of humanity” regardless of race, sex, economic station, nation, past or present condition of enslavement or oppression, or other social categories. Her view of the “rights of humanity” has been widely cited as a root source for contemporary understandings of universal human rights, ensuring the gradual canonization of her Vindications across curricula in the humanities and social sciences in secondary schools and universities around the world. The next step in guaranteeing Wollstonecraft’s continued, long-range impact in interdisciplinary scholarship is the creation of the standard edition of VRM and VRW that rigorously demonstrates these books’ political, philosophical, theological, and literary interrelationship with each other alongside some of her related published and unpublished works from this pivotal period of her writing career, 1790-1792. We will annotate, fully contextualize, and track variants between first and early editions of VRM and VRW for Volume 4 of Wollstonecraft’s new Collected Works under contract with Oxford University Press (OUP).

It is more than time for a new, global OUP standard edition of Wollstonecraft’s Collected Works, with the VRM and VRW at its core. The significance and impact of Wollstonecraft (1759–97) on the humanities, social sciences, and politics itself has been international in scope since the early 1790s. As an author and a public intellectual, she had a profound influence on abolitionist, democratic, republican, and nascent socialist, liberal, and rights-based political thought of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Britain, continental Europe, North and South America and the Caribbean. Her most prominent works were her twin Vindications, for they propelled her into the heart of political and social debate during a tumultuous period of unrest in Britain and revolution abroad in France and Saint-Domingue in the early 1790s. VRM’s reception in Britain and its slave-driven sugar colony Jamaica transformed Wollstonecraft into an internationally-known pro-revolutionary and anti-slavery political writer and the most celebrated critic of Edmund Burke’s anti-revolutionary Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). Published a little over a year later, VRW solidified Wollstonecraft’s reputation as a pro-revolutionary thinker and progressive advocate of “the rights of humanity” for working men, the poor, the enslaved, women, children, and other historically oppressed and marginalized people. In this expansive text, Wollstonecraft foregrounded the integral relationship of the “rights of woman” to the realization of the “rights of humanity” in general. She exposed the injustice of hierarchical, aristocratic, and patriarchal customs and traditions that had kept women weak and subordinate relative to men, and then proposed egalitarian reforms of education necessary to prepare them for equal citizenship and other “civil and political” rights alongside men in newly formed and future republican societies forged after the French Revolution. Perhaps because she completed VRW in about six weeks in late 1791, driven by a sense of urgency in the aftermath of recent events in the French and Haitian revolutions, Wollstonecraft offered an electrifying contemporary analysis of the problem of the subjugation of women for modern politics that was widely discussed and rapidly published abroad. Wollstonecraft and her Vindications enjoyed steady public and private reception in all the major national and international women’s rights and abolition movements of the nineteenth century, as well as through the main lines of feminist thought, activism, literature, and art in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in North and South America, Africa, Europe, and Asia (Johnson and Keen 2020, Hunt 2023).

Works Cited

Johnson, Nancy E. and Keen, Paul, eds. Mary Wollstonecraft in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.

Hunt, Eileen M., ed. Portraits of Wollstonecraft: The Making of a Feminist Icon, 1785-2020. London: Bloomsbury, [2021] 2023.