Professor of Political Science
University of Notre Dame
Contact
ehunt@nd.edu
574-631-5051
2171 Jenkins and Nanovic Halls, Notre Dame, IN 46556.
Photo Credit: Robin Weinstein/SUNY New Paltz
Associate Dean, College of Liberal Arts & Sciences
Professor of English
SUNY New Paltz
by Eileen M. Hunt
Wollstonecraft's VRM, 1st edn. (Nov. 1790), bottom of p. 22.
Wollstonecraft's VRM, 1st edn. (Nov. 1790), top of p. 23.
Wollstonecraft's VRM, 2nd edn., (Dec. 1790), top of p. 24.
In his 1790 book Reflections on the Revolution in France (RRF), Burke was surprisingly quiet on the controversial revolutionary-era political issue of the abolition of the slave trade. Wollstonecraft picked up on this pregnant silence on his part and used it against him on two levels. First, she used it to undermine his 'servile' defense of tradition, 'reverence of antiquity', 'custom', and 'property'. In the passage above from VRM, 1st edn., page 22, Wollstonecraft posed a rhetorical question about Burke's seemingly hypocritical defense of the American Revolution. In the second half of her sentence, she provided an anti-slavery political answer to her pointed query about the moral incompatibility of Burke's support of the American Revolution with his silence on the ongoing global slave trade from Africa to the British and European colonies in the West Indies to the U.S. and elsewhere: 'But on what principle Mr. Burke could defend American independence, I cannot conceive; for the whole tenor of his plausible arguments settles slavery on an everlasting foundation.' In the very next sentence, which extends from the bottom of page 22 to the top of page 23, Wollstonecraft stated that Burke's 'servile reverence for antiquity' entailed that 'it ought never to be abolished'. The gender-neutral singular pronoun 'it' referred back to 'slavery' in the previous sentence.
In the 2nd edn. of VRM, at the top of page 24, Wollstonecraft revised this passage on slavery to make it explicit that she thought Burke's 'servile reverence for antiquity' entailed that, in his view, 'the slave trade ought never to be abolished'. By substituting the noun phrase 'the slave trade' for the generic pronoun 'it', Wollstonecraft reinforced and made more explicit and specific her critique of Burke's hypocritical silence on both slavery and the slave trade in RRF.
With this simple switch of the pronoun 'it' for the noun phrase 'the slave trade', Wollstonecraft revised VRM to forcefully attack Burke's moral failure in RRF to condemn not only the historical practice of slavery, but also the ongoing global slave trade. This was the second and deeper level of her rhetorical use of Burke's traditionalism against him. While the first level of her critical analysis of Burke's traditionalism made the provocative suggestion that 'the whole tenor of his plausible arguments settles slavery on an everlasting foundation', she pushed further in the 2nd edn. to point out that the great Whig orator and defender of liberty and 'independence' had failed to condemn the enduring international trade in human flesh and labour from which he and other British elites still profited (Marshall 2019).
With this revision to the 2nd edn. of VRM, Wollstonecraft positioned herself as a public (and woman) advocate of 'the abolition of the slave trade' and affirmed her 'religion and reason'-based view that slavery, no matter where it was practiced, was wrong. In this way, her political vision looked beyond the historic abolishment of the practice of slavery in England via the 1772 Somerset v. Stewart case—in which Chief Justice William Murray (Lord Mansfield) recognised the right of an enslaved African man, James Somerset, to live free in England against the wishes of his enslaver, Charles Stewart)—and instead looked ahead to what would become the British Parliament's eventual ending of its involvement in the international slave trade with the passage of the 1833 Act for the Abolition of Slavery throughout the British Colonies. Although this act passed long after her death in 1797, her most prominent family heir on the issue of the abolition of slavery, the novelist Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, lived to appreciate it.
Intriguingly, in early 1791, Burke would vote in the minority of the House of Commons, with the abolitionist leader Wilberforce, for a bill to end the slave trade, just months before the massive slave uprising of the Haitian Revolution in the French sugar colony of Saint-Domingue. One wonders if the Whig MP and author of RRF felt a twinge of conscience after reading Wollstonecraft's VRM. We do not know for certain if he read VRM, for he made no direct reference to it in his writings, public or private. In an unpublished 1795 letter to his friend Mrs. Crewe, however, Burke gave Wollstonecraft a backhanded compliment that suggested that he had read the VRM. In this letter to his traditionalist female friend, he dismissed the current trend of pro-revolutionary women writers as 'Mrs. Woolstenecrofts' who were 'desperate, wicked, and mischievously ingenious' (Blakemore 1995, 55). In this way, Burke heralded the beginning of anti-Jacobin discourse in Britain and beyond that used Wollstonecraft's name as a signifier of the radical and 'wicked' cause of the rights of historically oppressed groups, including the enslaved, the poor, and women.
References
Blakemore, Steven. 1988. Burke and the Fall of Language: The French Revolution as Linguistic Event. Providence, RI: Brown University Press.
Marshall, P.J. 2019. Edmund Burke and the British Empire in the West Indies: Wealth, Power, and Slavery. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
by Eileen M. Hunt
In this passage drawn from the bottom of page 7 of the 1st edn. of VRM, Wollstonecraft lays out her initial definition of the 'social compact'.
In the 2nd edn., she revised the passage to clarify two elements of her definition.
First, the compact guarantees the 'birthright of man' to 'every...individual': that is, every individual's enjoyment of the 'degree of liberty', both 'civil and religious', that is compatible with the 'civil and religious' liberty of 'every other individual...united' in said compact.
Second, the 'civil and religious' liberty of 'every' individual united in the social compact must be 'compatible' with the 'continued existence' of said compact.
By comparing the textual variants of VRM, we see that Wollstonecraft initially borrowed some of John Locke's ideas on the 'compact' that undergirds political societies as found in chapter VIII of his Second Treatise of Government (1690), then revised her own definition of the 'social compact' in the 2nd edn. to make clear how her vision of individual liberty differed from Locke and other 'social contract' thinkers after him, including Jean-Jacques Rousseau (indeed, the title of the 1764 English translation of Rousseau's Du contrat social was 'On the social compact', and was a likely inspiration for Wollstonecraft's use of the term 'social compact' alongside some earlier Lockean ideas of the 'compact' that forms 'political societies'. Rousseau was indebted to Locke, of course, in his own theorization of the social contract or compact—a future blog post will explore Wollstonecraft's debt to Rousseau on the 'social compact'.).
In both versions of VRM, Wollstonecraft agreed with Locke that the social-political 'compact' covers everyone who explicitly or tacitly joins it. Elsewhere in VRM, she followed Locke in allowing for tacit consent to the social compact, especially in her remarks on children, women, the enslaved, conscripted soldiers, and the poor, who are all born with a 'birthright' to liberty under a 'social compact', but do not as yet have and hold the full slate of civil and political rights as men in positions of power. Wollstonecraft also agreed with Locke that a 'social compact' that establishes a legitimate government guarantees the liberty of individuals, both civil and religious.
Where she diverged from Locke was in her use of gender-neutral and universalistic language to establish that the 'birthright of man' applied to 'every' 'individual', not solely to men. The abstract noun 'man' thus applied to all humanity, regardless of sex, rank, or economic station, as she argued in each edition of VRM. With the addition of the word 'every' and her shift to the singular of 'individual', she established that every individual held the same rights under the compact, at least in the abstract if not yet in legal and cultural reality. These edits, in turn, changed the meaning of the masculine third-person pronoun in the same sentence, so that 'he' can be read in universalistic terms—as in, applying to 'every...individual', not just men.
By contrast, Locke's vision of the social 'compact' did not expressly guarantee the equal rights and liberties of all people, especially women, the poor, and the enslaved. Like Wollstonecraft, Locke allowed children to be 'born to' a right to liberty that they would be variously raised to enjoy as adults. Unlike Wollstonecraft, Locke focused on the rights of underage male heirs, not all children regardless of sex or economic station (Hunt Botting 2017). Wollstonecraft saw the egalitarian potential of Locke's arguments about children's birthright to liberty, however, and used gender-neutral and universalistic language to express this potential in her own conception of the 'social compact'.
The final way that Wollstonecraft diverged from Locke was with her addition of the qualifying phrase 'and the continued existence of that compact'. With this clause, she made clear to her readers—many of whom would have been sympathetic to Burke—that she was not a defender of revolution either in the sense of Locke's vision of justified majoritarian rebellion against tyranny (in ch. 19 of the Second Treatise) or in the sense of the French revolutionaries whom Burke had attacked as dangerous anarchists. For Wollstonecraft, the social compact is only legitimate insofar as it guarantees an equal share of liberty for every individual that is compatible with the endurance of the compact itself.
In a paradoxical moment of agreement with her opponent Burke, Wollstonecraft upheld the peaceful endurance of society and the state, including religion, as the final political standard by which the justice of the mutual and egalitarian exercise of liberty should be determined. This strikingly conservative and pragmatic point echoes not only Burke but also Hobbes before him, for they both had insisted that the final purpose of the compact or contract that unites people in society and government is the stability, peace, and endurance of that same society and its government. The just exercise of individual liberty, in other words, must always be aimed toward the preservation of peace and the social compact itself. Across her two editions of VRM, Wollstonecraft thus revealed some unexpected synergies with Burke and Hobbes in her implicit critique of Lockean ideas of the social compact.
Works cited
Botting, Eileen Hunt. Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child: Political Philosophy in 'Frankenstein' (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017), ch. 1.
by Eileen M. Hunt
January 15, 2025
This is my first blog post about the process of editing Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Men (hereafter, VRM) for Oxford University Press's 6-volume standard edition of her works (editor-in-chief, Emma Clery, Uppsala; volume editor and NEH Scholarly Editions collaborator, Nancy Johnson, SUNY-New Paltz).
________
As I was preparing a sample text for Nancy and our NEH-funded graduate RA, Rachel Lentz (Notre Dame) to review, I noticed a philosophically significant textual variant between Wollstonecraft's anonymous 1st edn. of VRM (published by 25-27 Nov. 1790) and her heavily revised 2nd edn. (published by 14-16 Dec. 1790) which featured her name on the title page. As the political theorist Wendy Gunther-Canada noted (2001), the revelation of the author's name was significant because it also revealed her gender. In the London newspapers, around the time of the publication of the 1st edn. of VRM, rumors had quickly circulated that "the ladies" were rising up to write defenses of the "rights of man" against Edmund Burke's anti-revolutionary Reflections on the Revolution in France (published on 1 November 1790) (see Hunt Botting, 2021). By revealing her name in the 2nd edn., Wollstonecraft claimed her right to be known as the first author of a book-length response to the Reflections. Catharine Macaulay's Observations on Burke's Reflections had appeared a few days after the 1st edn. of VRM.
On page 4 of the 1st edn. (see screenshot above), the anonymous Wollstonecraft represented "Reason" with a capital "R" to signify its importance and used the pronoun "she" to assign a feminine gender to this godlike faculty of the human mind. Wollstonecraft wryly observed that Burke, as a man and a Member of Parliament, was overpowered by "unrestrained feelings" rather than allowing the feminine power of "Reason" to govern his analysis of the revolutionary political events unfolding in France.
To see how she changed the argument by changing her pronouns, turn to the next screenshot from the 2nd edn.
In the 2nd. edition of VRM, at the top of the same page (4), the no longer anonymous woman author Wollstonecraft changed the word "reason" to lower case and the gender of the pronouns referring to it. The rhetorical effect was to render more subtle the gendered wordplay of her critique of Burke's over-emotional response to the French Revolution, while enhancing its philosophical consistency with the overall argument of her book.
First, she demoted the status of "reason" in the sentence by using a lower case "r" and assigning it a masculine pronoun to make it refer "only" to Burke's limited use of the power of "reason"—as in, "his reason".
Second, she replaced the feminine pronoun "she" with the gender-neutral pronoun "it" to clarify that "reason" was a universal human mental capacity, not a special feminine capacity of the mind, which women somehow had more capability to exercise than men. In other words, Burke—as a man—had as much capability as her—as a woman—to use reason to soberly judge the circumstances in France, but he had elected to follow his "feelings" instead.
Why did Wollstonecraft make these linguistic changes in her representation of the relationship of reason and gender in her reply to Burke? It would seem that she was keenly aware of how the revelation of her gender on the title page of VRM would change the way that readers responded to the book. Indeed, a number of readers commented that they had not suspected that a woman had written VRM, but found themselves impressed by Wollstonecraft's force of intellect and witty deconstruction of Burke's prejudicial arguments on rights, manners, women, manliness, and chivalry. One of these readers was Catharine Macaulay, one of the leading English political historians of the era.
By making her arguments about gender and reason more subtle and consistent with her philosophical view—stated later in VRM—that the "cold arguments of reason...give no sex to virtue", Wollstonecraft elevated her claim to fame as the first writer (and, coincidentally, "lady") to systematically challenge Burke's Reflections in a published book, while reinforcing her (and other women's) growing authority in the men-dominated field of English political prose.
This is just one example of why tracking textual variants across the two VRM editions published in the author's lifetime matters for understanding the evolution of Wollstonecraft's critique of Burke and her self-representation as a woman political thinker. This OUP edition will be the first to offer a comprehensive account of the VRM's textual variants and their significance.
References
Botting, Eileen Hunt (2021). "Wollstonecraft in Jamaica: the international reception of A Vindication of the Rights of Men in the Kingston Daily Advertiser in 1791." History of European Ideas, 47 (8), 1304–1314. https://doi.org/10.1080/01916599.2021.1898434
Gunther-Canada, Wendy (2001), Rebel Writer: Mary Wollstonecraft and Enlightenment Politics (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press).
