SOURCE: "Mary Wollstonecraft, Feminism, and Humanism: A Spectrum of Reading," in Mary Wollstonecraft and 200 Years of Feminisms, edited by Eileen Janes Yeo, London and New York: Rivers Oram Press, 1997, pp. 222-42.

[In the essay that follows, Bannerji notes the ambivalence of contemporary feminist theorists toward Wollstonecraft and attempts, nonetheless, to claim that A Vindication of the Rights of Woman provides a promising philosophical resource for current feminist discourse.]

Some years have passed since feminism has gained currency and a degree of respectability in the West. No longer inhabiting social, political and intellectual margins, in various adapted forms and effects it has gained a niche for itself even in governments, businesses and public institutions. The generalisation of feminism among women is wide enough to have reached the point of divergent claims and contests regarding the meaning of the concept, its agents and practices. The current atmosphere among Western feminists is ridden with strife not only along class lines but also over orientations of difference based on 'race', sexuality, religion and so on, in any number of combinations. These struggles over difference and representation have made it apparent that we may not have a common feminist vision and that shifting the emphasis from the singularity of the common noun 'woman' into the plurality of 'women' has not really done the trick.¹ In fact, we may even have come to a time when we may routinely need to put a quotation mark around the word 'woman' since some critics have claimed this to be an entity created by discourse rather than a referent for an existing social subject.² Why, then, in this situation should we, non-white women living in the West, marked by our own forms of difference and representation, begin to read Mary Wollstonecraft, an eighteenth-century woman, a writer of the Enlightenment, whom present-day white middle-class feminists have as their 'foremother'? By doing so, are we not increasing our subservience to a white middle-class women's movement and its version of feminism?

This chapter attempts to show why, in spite of many reservations, I consider A Vindication of the Rights of Woman³ a classic text forthe possibilities it offers of understanding Western feminist theory and politics. I will chart different readings of this text at different biographical and political moments of my life, highlighting both its problems and its contributions to developing a more effective feminism in our time. Here, my reading itself becomes a critical methodology, as an act of conscious retrieval, connection and formulation which historicises and socialises the text. This is not a gesture of self-indulgent personal disclosure, but rather an epistemological venture which implies that the social ontology of both the writer and the reader (their social being in historical and personal times) not only shapes their intellectual/political views but also provides the necessary ground for a social and critically active form of reading. This method, which sees writing and reading as contingent social acts and forms, does not, however, advocate arbitrariness and randomness. It simply attempts to situate both the text and the reader in lived time and history, so that the full value of the text, its relevance not only to the past but also to the present, may become apparent. In establishing this reader-writer relationship I offer three possible ways of reading The Rights of Woman. They are: (a) reading as identification; (b) reading as difference; and (c) reading as negotiation.

Reading as Identification

There are certain books to which we return for this or that reason over a long period of time, each return both measures the distance we have covered in our own lives and reveals a hitherto unnoticed dimension of the text. One such book is Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

The very first time that I set my eyes on the Rights of Woman was in my mid teens. It was one of a number of books left for me by our departing headmistress, Miss Kathleen N. Bradley, when she returned to England, completing her assignment for the education of girls in the colonies and ex-colonies of the British Empire. Thus my memory of this book, with its yellowing pages and a pleasant musty smell, is tied up with that of our redoubtable spinster headmistress, who pursued the cause of reason among girls and young women with a formidable zeal. Often she, together with our other similarly inspired local teachers, spoke to us, or exhorted us, to cultivate our faculty for reason. Though careful in their enunciations, they managed to convey to us the view that marriage and a serious life of reason were not mutually compatible, but that a good married life was itself impossible without some cultivation of that noblest of faculties. They suggested to us—the children of the upper classes—that their less affluent and often spinster's lives in pursuit of education were more worthy than the lives of wealthy matrons who did not have an inclination or vocation for reason. It was within the framework of education that they spelled out our rights and duties, citing the development of reason as the difference between an animal and a human being. And they spoke in the language of light, of rationality contrasted with stupefyingsensuality. They advocated reading 'good books', texts by social reformers, both national and international. As a result, Mary Wollstonecraft's Rights of Woman and John Stuart Mill's The Subjection of Women rubbed shoulders with the essays of Rabindranath Tagore⁴ and Sir Sayyid Ahmad.⁵ On the Foundation Day of our school, we heard about the connection of nationalism and independence with women's education. 'No nation', it was announced to the students from the podium of the assembly hall, 'progresses without the advancement of education among its women.' It was in such an environment that I made the acquaintance of Mary Wollstonecraft. Miss Bradley 'hoped', in her note, that I would both learn from and enjoy reading this book: instruction and delight—an old pedagogic maxim!

So the way in which I came across Mary Wollstonecraft, the historic situation in which I first read the Rights of Woman, did not make her an 'other' for me. Not only did the world in which I grew up support and produce thinkers like her, but its social organisation abundantly supported her reasons and impulses for writing it. Pleas for social reform, rationality and women's education had become established discourses in Bengal since the nineteenth century, and their justification continued to exist in my personal environment. There were women at the foundation of my life—my mother, grandmother, aunts and other female relatives of the older generations—who were deprived of education (not through a lack of wealth), of remunerative labour and of public life of any kind. These women generally viewed the lives of their schoolgoing daughters with protective support, and occasionally with envy and suspicion. Just at the time when I was growing up, women's novels and short stories resonated with themes of women's education and independence; stories of mothers and daughters abounded. Thus there was a world of uneven development which contained our mothers, our women teachers, those secular 'nuns of reason', and us, the educated daughters and potential wives of professionals, to be brought up in the lores of intellectual conjugality. Nothing could have been a more ideal environment for a young woman reading the Rights of Woman.

The world of my childhood and youth in an upperclass/caste Hindu family resembled Wollstonecraft's severely gendered world, with its sharp demarcation between the public and the private spheres. These similarities came through in spite of the details specific to the social and economic worlds of upper- and middleclass Europeans—especially of the English. Though patriarchy in my world was less sexual and translated more into male-centred kinship hierarchies, the organisation of everyday life as described in the Rights of Woman was familiar to me. Gender division of labour and morality lay at the bottom of the daily practices and ideologies of both her world and mine. To be a woman or a girl in these worlds were scripted matters. A 'girl' in my class environment, which meant a 'good girl', rarely did anything alone which involved the public sphere and men. Like the well-brought-up girls and women inthe Rights of Woman, we did not go unescorted for visits, except to relatives or in the most immediate neighbourhood. We did not go to markets and shops, nor for solitary long walks, did not take part in energetic play in general, did not stay out, unless specially permitted, after sundown, and often did not work for a living. After a certain age, unlike European women, Bengali women were not encouraged to go to social gatherings attended by non-kin men, except on official or ritual occasions. The university, with its coeducational schooling, was an exception.

There were double messages in my world. There were simultaneous pleas for women's education and emancipation while actualities of preventive moral regulations textured our lives. But this contradiction settled somewhat if one attended closely to what was being conveyed both with and without words: the message was that education and reason were important matters for women to become better wives and mothers. In other words, they were adjuncts to decent domesticity. That argument underlay some aspects of Mary Wollstonecraft's text, as well. She, like the social reformers of Bengal, spoke in favour of women's cultivation of reason mainly as a source of improvement for the overall quality of domestic life. Thus, women's education was seen both by us and her as a 'motherhood' issue, even while women's economic dependence was a matter of some importance.⁶ Though I resented this belief that 'real work' for women lay in an apprenticeship to some kind of enlightened domesticity, rather than in learning for a profession, Wollstonecraft's thoughts were not alien or opaque to me.

My affinity for the Rights of Woman lay in issues of gender, evoking responses in me which were both experiential and historical. In our daily lives and cultural unconscious lay embedded the longing to know. The intensity of this longing is reflected in letters, memoirs, the rarely published women's autobiographies and hearsay dating all the way back to the nineteenth century. The following passage from Amar Jiban (My Life), the autobiography of Rasasundari Dasi (1806-1900), is similar to the writings of Wollstonecraft in its intense desire for knowledge. It also speaks of the immense obstacles that she faced in this, like most older women who surrounded me. This translated text is intended to serve as a parallel to the Rights of Woman, as a mirror for my reading of it. Rasasundari Dasi's passionate desire to read scriptural texts propelled her into an heroic project of self-instruction. Unable to seek help, since 'no woman learns to read and write', she tried to remember the alphabet which she had overheard from boy pupils in the schoolroom in childhood. She then tried to puzzle out the meaning of the words and lines. She tore a leaf from a book and hid it under the firewood in the kitchen:

I had no time to study that page. At night it got too late by the time the cooking was finished. And no sooner were the chores all done then the children woke up. Is it possible to do anything else then? One would say, Ma, I want to pee; the other, Ma, I am hungry; the other, Ma, hold me; and another would wake and start crying. One had to console and look after them. And as night progressed sleep overcame [me] and there was no time left to study. I saw no way for me to learn… So when I cooked I kept the page in my left hand, and once in a while sneaked it within my veil to look at it. But what could mere glancing accomplish? I could not even recognise the full alphabet… In those days my eldest son used to write on palm leaves. I hid a palm leaf as well. I would look at this palm leaf first and then the page from the book, and refer to my mental image of the alphabet. And then again I would try to compare this with how people talk. Some days passed in this way. I would occasionally take out the book's page, and then hide it under the logs lest anyone should see it!⁷

This text perhaps shows what lay in my background and positively predisposed me to Mary Wollstonecraft. I felt myself to be a part of the history of debates on women and learning since the mid nineteenth century, debates which by the end of the century had precipitated thousands of girls into schools.⁸ This was not simply a colonial formation, but blended into indigenous rationalist traditions which stretched into the precolonial past.⁹

It was not a problem for me in those days that this preoccupation with reason, rationality and reform were essentially the middle-classes' concern, their way of forming a class consciousness by elaborating moral regulations.¹⁰ But I never thought of these issues in terms of class discourse, nor in terms of colonial discourse. In my world, which was organised around the location of women and men in private and public spheres, I echoed longings of other women and girls to be out in the world. And the getting of knowledge seemd to be the way to that public space; in fact it was accomplished in that public space. At this stage of my life, the only contradictions that I felt deeply were ones of gender and patriarchy. The overwhelming proscription of sexuality, the chastity belt of moral regulations pertaining to 'good' Hindu girls from a 'respectable' family, was my immediate and biggest barrier. The only difference and otherness I knew well was from 'man'. I could not see 'class' in Bengal, with its particular colonial inflexion, because I was in it and of it. This form of class was my everyday life, my condition of being, in which I was just beginning to enunciate my own particular personality.

The cry for a gender-neutral, transcendent and yet critical reason that rose from the pages of the Rights of Woman went straight to my heart. I could not think of either knowledge or justice as a sexed matter, since difference led only to inequality. I agreed with Wollstonecraft that morality was a matter not of manners but rather of criticism and conscience. The critical, ethical imperatives of the Rights of Woman gave a different twist to my own individualistic urge for liberty, since freedom as understood by Wollstonecraft was not a simple manifestation of an individualist will. It was a product of ethical self-improvement, and thus not to be confused with hedonistic selfishness. Thinking in terms of a vindication of rights of both women (and men) seemed like a great opening in the social enclosure produced by the iron laws of gender.

Reading as Difference

By the time I took another serious look at A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, I was much older, and more significantly I had been living in the West for many years. The Marxism I brought with me from India had now acquired feminist, anti-racist dimensions. I was earning my living by teaching part-time in women's studies and the social sciences. In this changed context of my life, my reading of the Rights of Woman also changed, as colours and patterns reconfigurate in a kaleidoscope. I then read it from the perspective of difference with which I identified.

What I mean by 'difference' here is not the cultural traits and values that I brought with me from India. Rather it is a difference created outside of me, by a relational and interpretative framework which ascribes 'race' and stereotyped ethnicity, produced in the context of colonial histories and imperialist relations peculiar to the West. This 'difference' has more to do with relations of ruling¹¹ and with a hegemonic racist common sense,¹² than with my own sense of difference as a cultural entity.¹³ This 'raced' or ethnicised otherness is not gender-neutral: it types us, both non-white and white women and men, differently from each other. It provides the modalities, the organising principles, of social and cultural forms through which class comes into being.¹⁴

As I explored this difference it became evident that definitions of 'self' and 'other', even in the context of Enlightenment 'universals', such as the notion of the 'human', are deeply socio-cultural and historical. The concrete content of the notion 'human' turns out to be a bourgeois, white, Christian, European male, who provided the ideal type against which European women and inhabitants of the non-European world were measured and found wanting. Thus the actual historical affiliation of humanism to domination, in spite of the former's metaphysics of equality in reason and political rights, prompts us to make a distinction between the universalism of the idea of the human and its actual articulation and deployment. This pathology of the Englightenment and of rationalism became distinctly visible from my present perspective of difference and distanced both the Rights of Woman and Wollstonecraft from me. She had become an eighteenth-century white European woman, who shared the colonial ideologies of her time. I was now situated in an historical and political relationship of criticism and even antagonism towards her.

This reading through the lens of difference made me aware of the Rights of Woman as a text not only of reform but of Utopianism, with polarities of the ideal and the debased paralleling the exalted possible and the fallen actual. Her contemporary society, Wollstonecraft felt, lay in a state of degeneration, in sore needof improvement. In this grand narrative movement of morality, the language, images and values she associated with various types of difference became crucial.

I was impressed by the impassioned and figurative richness of Wollstonecraft's prose. Not a page of the Rights of Woman goes by without charged and constellated metaphors, descriptions and anecdotes, which make her sentiments, criticism and advice glow with vividness and conviction. I thought this to be curious for a rationalist text, and it seemed important to explore the role of these figures of speech in Wollstonecraft's social theory and vision, particularly with respect to themes of racialised forms of difference.

From this point of view, the Rights of Woman is marked by the iconic centrality of 'slavery' used in various metaphoric and analogical ways. It is not an exaggeration to say that it serves as an interpretive and organisational device of the text. This theme of slavery, in all its vivid details, variations and political consequences, reveals a binary aspect of liberty or freedom; Wollstonecraft shifts from a metaphoric level to the actual, alluding to economic slavery while accommodating sexual slavery as an analogy of heterosexual familial relations. Thus metaphors, similes and analogies of bondage, ranging from sadism to sadomasochism, deriving from the thematic complex of slavery, provide the point of departure for her reform and Utopian proposals. Without this figurative layer underwriting its philosophical and moral arguments, the Rights of Woman, which is otherwise a rather repetitive and formless text, would not have its internal coherence or sense of urgency. Like many other political and moral texts, it subsists on a connotative level, signalling its wider political concerns through a figurative discourse. It is this rather than a deductive and expositional mode which helps Wollstonecraft to present her social criticism and political theory.

This importance of a figurative, signifying device for a text of Enlightenment political theory might seem exaggerated. But this same claim has been made by Nancy L. Stepan in the context of scientific writing, with its dependence on metaphor, analogies and models in putting across its message.¹⁵ If this is the case with science from at least the eighteenth century onwards, then it seems possible to argue that without this metaphor of slavery in its various interactive and illuminative forms Wollstonecraft would not have been able to accomplish her task in the Rights of Woman.

Wollstonecraft, after all, was neither alone nor the first in using the metaphor of slavery in political theory. Indeed, the political theory of radical democracy rested on this discourse of slavery and other forms of bondage. This metaphor emanated from actual longstanding practices of European feudalism and colonial capitalism. But, ironically, it also thematised and projected the democratic aspirations of the slave-owning classes themselves, relying on unfree labour to provide the emotive, conceptual and figurative signs for their own conditions of domination. In the case of Mary Wollstonecraft, the obvious comparison lies with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, though the metaphor of slavery continues to be effective for later revolutionary writing.¹⁶ This double-edged use of slavery as metaphor or an allegory of bondage and freedom is able to encapsulate a multilayered oppression, while opening a space for imagining resistance. In the political theory of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this constellation of metaphors of 'slavery' thus borders on the notion of class and class struggle.

This importance of slavery as the central discursive figure in the Rights of Woman has not been explored by many. Even as insightful a text as Virginia Sapiro's A Vindication of Virtue does not dwell on it in any significant way.¹⁷ Infrequently, writers such as Moira Ferguson, motivated by an interest in the abolition of slavery, mark out its importance for Wollstonecraft.¹⁸ Yet most interpreters have not seen her as much more than a critic of patriarchy and gender, or at best a 'rights' theorist. But the warp and weft of universality and difference which texture the Rights of Woman extend beyond gender to other relations of domination, and its Utopian vision, composed of the ideal and the fallen, needs the metaphor of slavery to convey these ideas. Figures of African slaves, oriental sultans, women of harems or seraglios and the allegedly tyrannical precepts of 'mahometanism' are all deployed to chart the trajectory of her narrative. These allusions and images blend with Wollstonecraft's descriptions of European upper/middle-class women's lives. This theme of slavery is further augmented with allusions to domestic creatures such as fawning spaniels, canaries in gilded cages, and beasts of burden such as donkeys. There are 'interactive metaphors' of bondage which rebound on other components of the text and create a meaning which is both concrete and subliminal.¹⁹

This pervasive and yet unproblematised use of the concept and metaphors of slavery by both male and female thinkers of the European Enlightenment is somewhat disturbing. Is it possible that, in spite of her support for the abolitionists and of the Haitian revolution, Wollstonecraft may have shared some of the racist and orientalist political unconscious of her time? The answer is a basic 'yes', even though there are qualifications to be made. Wollstonecraft's use of the Haitian revolution to warn the European bourgeoisie of an impending apocalypse of 'mobs' or her condescending review of the African writer Olaudah Equiano²⁰ may be seen as versions of racism. This applies also to stereotypes of ignorance and savagery that she attributes to black slaves. This is not negated by Wollstonecraft's equation of white women with black slaves or by the use of slavery as a source of subversion and resistance.

The word 'slave' is ambivalently developed through this text to imply both an innocent victim and a corrupt and morally degraded human being. Words such as 'slave', 'enslave', 'slavish' perform a judgemental function in the text's moral narrative andare indiscriminately used, Wollstonecraft's abolitionist views notwithstanding.²¹

This use of the image of black slavery to depict the condition of white middle-class women is also questionable in terms of Wollstonecraft's presumptions regarding the morality of black slaves, since here analogy becomes statement. She pronounces judgements upon psychological deformations brought about by patriarchy, and in the same breath imputes the same traits of weakness, cunning, seduction, manipulation and hunger for power to the actually enslaved black population. She can ignore actual slavery and its nonvoluntary nature, together with the violence and irreducible antagonism it generates, because she is distant from black slaves and less interested in them than in white women, and yet she also feels entitled both to construct and to speak 'for' them. Thus it becomes apparent that she is using slavery primarily as an illuminating, persuasive device to project and combat the oppression of middle- or upper-class women of her time. It is this illustrative and heuristic appropriation however, which lends moral and emotional strength to the case of European women's fight for their 'rights'. This idiom of slavery consistently marks Western discourse on 'the subjection of women'.²² Once more the slave serves the cause of the master class.

This association between 'race', gender and sexuality became increasingly normalised from Wollstonecraft's time onwards within a discourse on sexuality in European women, and became associated with blackness, with particular reference to African women and the institution of slavery.²³ In both its versions, of meek submissiveness and aggressive or seductive female lust, female sexuality could be fitted, as by Wollstonecraft, within the scope of a European racist understanding of African men and women through the institution of slavery. A self-contradictory perception of Africans and black slaves, of both obsequiousness and aggression, is pervasive in the Rights of Woman, and takes on a sexual quality as she compares white women with black male slaves. This equation of black men with white women continues to this day, and is criticised consistently by black feminists.²⁴

This elision of gender subordination and economic slavery obscures the actuality that, even when both involve inequality of power, the two are composed of different modes or mores. A man and a woman, as lovers or husband and wife or father and daughter, have radically different modalities or practices of power than the ones obtaining between slaves and their masters or mistresses. Familial relations are nominally voluntary in many cases, and contain possibilities of economic and emotional investment and joint privileges. The personal moralities that are enjoined in the patriarchal family are not integral to the master-slave relationship. Thus patronage, in the sense of concubinage or children's protection extended by the master to a female slave, for example, is not comparable to that extended by a husband to a wife. In slavery, neither conjugality nor common parentage nor property can be held together; relationsare not contractual or voluntary. Under such circumstances, the conflation of slavery and gender relations leads to the erasure of the actuality of slavery as a practice, as well as of African experiences and histories in bondage.

The use of slavery in the Rights of Woman has another dimension, drawing on what Edward Said calls 'orientalism'.²⁵ An imagined Orient, reputed in Christian Europe as a domain of sexual slavery and sensual excess, provides Wollstonecraft with her richest images of a degenerate world. Whereas there is ambivalence about black slavery, the Orient is portrayed as wholly static, intrinsically immoral, enervated and inert. This construction of the sensual and despotic Orient, which is extended from the theme of slavery, is played off against the violence of economic slavery, and both forms together supply metaphors and arialogies for Wollstonecraft's moral vision.

Throughout the Rights of Woman, moral degeneration in European families is imagined through the discourse of the Orient as a brothel. The eighteenth-century European imagination projected the Orient as the quintessential space for sexual vices and male domination.²⁶ Images of the seraglio, the odalisque, the lustful sultan and a whole paraphernalia of orientalist construction are present in art, literature and the moral tracts or sermons of the time. The paintings of Ingres, for example, or French preconceptions about Egypt during the Napoleonic invasion and after, are indicative of a perception of the Orient as a hypersexual space; moreover, they come with the proviso of oriental women's complicity in their own degradation. Their subjection is thus seen as an intrinsic aspect of their own immorality and sensuality. In the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft repeatedly speaks of European husbands as sexually insatiable despotic sultans, and of their complying wives as their slaves. In these harem-like familial spaces of gender slavery, although there is no sound of lashes, there are bribes and flatteries, which dull the souls of European women into becoming dolls or spaniels of men. Female power is thus solely that of an 'oriental' seductress and manipulator, who gains her petty privileges through self-degradation.

This orientalist discourse, which provides Wollstonecraft with a theatre of sensuality, deliberately invites the reader's moral contempt. This imagined social enclosure contains no possibility of rupture or liberation. Here, the wills of the female slave and the sultan/master fuse into a relationship of degraded pleasure. In contrast to this, economic slavery, with its brutalities and unconsenting nature, has openings built into the very structure of its violence and the resulting resistance. Thus it functions as the negative pole of the voluntary degradation projected onto the Orient. This schema holds throughout the text, in spite of Wollstonecraft's sporadic negative comments on Africans as 'savages' with their superficial intellect and childish love of ornaments.²⁷ As against the static 'Oriental' world of tradition, the moral dynamism of black slavery could be seen as blending with the Enlightenment's project of 'improvement'. This politico-philosophical rhetoric offered Wollstonecraft a ready set of metaphors of inertia and resistance. Metaphors of 'savagery', including that of the 'noble savage', with their associations of both the pristine and the primitive, allowed Wollstonecraft a redemptive view of nature and helped her and others to connect 'rights' arguments based on nature with their enthusiasm for reason, as reason was seen to be a natural attribute. Moreover, for a pedagogue like Wollstonecraft, 'the savage' could be inserted into the Enlightenment project of 'improvement', whereas the oriental remained a traditionalist 'other'.²⁸ This process was further facilitated by the fact that slavery imposed a burden of guilt, which Orientalism did not.

In this version of reading with difference, my primary emotion towards Wollstonecraft was obviously one of rejection. Her claims of universality and her metaphysical gestures had largely become a legitimation device for condemning societies and peoples whom Europe sought to dominate. What, after all, could be more particularistic than a text constructed through orientalist and racist metaphors and analogies, which in actuality privileged European men and women in the name of all humanity? This critique of the Rights of Woman obviously shares many premises with those of other feminists of colour who have made similar readings of European and North American feminist texts from the perspective of difference, inclusive of anti-colonial critiques. Many of these feminists have put forward critiques of the European Enlightenment and of 'white' feminism as it now exists. Of course, motivated as they were by their sense of difference, they did not call for the building of a broader feminist movement. But, given how I felt after I was ascribed my 'difference', or constructed into an 'other', I was not perturbed by this. At this point, my choices seemed to lie between an erasing and dishonest essentialism and the relative and localised honesty of difference. Understandably, I chose the latter, and closed my copy of the Rights of Woman.

Reading as Negotiation

It may be thought that by now I had come to the end of my reading of the Rights of Woman. But there is still a reading left untried, which negotiates with a text without categorical acceptance or rejection. The purpose of this reading is to uncover aspects of a text which may be useful to a reader's project, mindful of both difference and affinity. From this point of view the value of a text lies in its methodological approach—in its epistemology, for example, or in the ways in which the problematic is framed—rather than in its specific or exact content. This is what I now propose in relation to the Rights of Woman, and my reading, as before, is determined by its time and by my social subjectivity and politics.

Having lived through a time when the politics of difference has produced results which are as disappointing as those ofessentialism, I have, decided to re-examine classic feminist texts such as the Rights of Woman. My purpose is to explore the possibilities of developing a feminist analysis and politics which are cognisant of difference as well as of the general concern for social justice. This means getting beyond single-issue formulations of 'race', gender and class, and segmented politics based on a reduced understanding of these issues. Such an expanded analysis translates into understanding capital (national and international) and class through a lens of difference, where difference is understood as being inherent not to individuals, but rather to identities created by social relations of domination. Not that the Rights of Woman exactly performs this task; but, in the way in which it is textured, through an interplay between the wrongs of women and those of society in general, it allows for an insight into the construction of difference in a general social context. Simultaneously critical of forms of power as disclosed through the inverse relationship between 'woman' and 'human', the Rights of Woman creates a complex problematic whose horizon can extend to revolutionary humanism. Wollstonecraft's critical formulations, peculiar to her Enlightenment roots, raise the possibility that universalist categories such as 'human', 'justice' and 'rights', with their strong ethical tone, may not, when in full articulation with a concrete or materialist social analysis, be as politically exhausted as we have recently thought.

The importance of social theorists such as Wollstonecraft, who can think both abstractly and concretely and signal to a collective politics, is particularly evident now. Neither the politics of representation and identity nor that of the formal equality of liberal humanism, both subsisting on the ground of the market and of international capitalist expansion, have provided acceptable options for a politics of social well-being. We are constantly confronted with political and economic crises in which capital and capitalist states show increasing violence, implicating the local and the global. Nation states and international finance come to comfortable agreements with each other, and huge capital accumulation rests on the dispossession, vagrancy and degradation of an overwhelming number of people all across the globe. All around the world, socialist and anti-imperialist forces are in retreat, and yet it is precisely now, when we need to think more comprehensively and act collectively, that our inclination and ability to do so have declined. Even feminists have not risen to this task. On the contrary, the militancy of women's movements, as of labour movements, has declined. In spite of their interest in women's agency, post-modernist feminist theorists have not effectively articulated women's wrongs with those of others. On the level of politics, the options have been either sectarian or open to cooption by the corporate sector or the state. Many feminists, as bureaucrats of international finance or aid consortiums, have become managers of structural adjustment and capitalist expansion. Others, concentrating on their difference, in the name of 'race' and representation, have ended up in the multicultural margins of the capitalist state or have entered into sealed politicalenclosures of identity politics.

This crisis of feminism is obviously a part of the overall retreat of the left, which has intensified since the dismantling of the Soviet Union and the unification of Germany. The rumour about the death of socialism and Marxism that these events generated has acted in the manner of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Intellectuals of the right, such as Francis Fukuyama, hastened to put forward the 'end of history' thesis,²⁹ while 'radical' cultural critics influenced by theories of deconstruction kept pace by advancing the 'end of the subject' thesis. Fear of collectivities, carefully nurtured throughout the Cold War and after in the name of the individual, freedom and democracy, achieved its end by producing radical theorists who, even when they spoke of agents and selves, emptied these selves of social subjectivities.³⁰ All this created not only ineffectual or sectarian politics but also an ethos of, if not a commitment to, the anti-political.

For these reasons, I feel the need to re-examine texts that spoke of larger social projects, such as those of humanism or class, and to reconsider feminism in that light. Otherwise feminism, practised as a politics of gender alone, has a built-in tendency to move to a position which serves vested group interests. It requires a conscious effort, therefore, to explore gender in ways which unravel the social relations and ideological fields within which the gendering occurs. This is a must for feminism if it is to become a genuinely social politics.

Mary Wollstonecraft's Rights of Woman is an important text from this epistemological and political position, in spite of her essentialism and Eurocentrism. This is because of the unusual use she makes of the Enlightenment's rationalist/humanist discourse in the cause of women and the kind of problematic she frames to situate the wrongs of women within the wider social relations of her time. The Rights of Woman poses the question of women in terms not only of English society and history, but also of Europe. It poses the particular issue of women's rights in the context of human or universal rights, in a continuum with the rights of unfree labour, including those of slaves. But this interest in humanism or universal rights is not derived from any commitment to an a priori principle, but rather from her empirical knowledge and personal experience of the injustice peculiar to the lives of women. Thus she approaches the universal from the standpoint of difference, of a critique of patriarchy, while grounding it in the social and the historical. From these epistemological elements she propounds an early thesis of women's standpoint, which she considers a valid stance for promulgating social morality and politics. On this premise, unorthodox for a universalist thinker, Wollstonecraft attempts to base a social and political theorisation—a fact that is perhaps not emphasised enough, except, rarely, in books such as Sapiro's A Vindication of Virtue.

The conventional reading of Wollstonecraft underestimates this methodological innovation and reduces her to either a romantic libertarian or a 'typical' Enlightenment thinker—a practitioner of abstraction or an advocate of disembodied reason. But her deployment of tenets of Enlightenment which accommodate the subjective, the experiential and the empirical opens up the possibility that the Enlightenment may not be a monolithic body of ideas and politics, thereby allowing for a connection between, for example, certain aspects of Enlightenment thought and the Haitian revolution. Though the debacles and defeats of principles of reason in the colonial and patriarchal context are only too obvious, it is perhaps also important to note the revolutionary potential of humanism or universal rights when articulated in historicised projects of political justice. The works of Rousseau, Diderot, Condorcet and Wollstonecraft, for example, all show some of these emancipatory possibilities, while the French Revolution, through its composite and convoluted history, holds the Enlightenment's contradictory articulations and possibilities in suspension.³¹

Mary Wollstonecraft's distinctive and emancipatory use of the concept of reason, therefore, lies in her non-Cartesian approach, in a non-dualist relationship between reason and experience or subjectivity. Embodiment and location in society and history, and not any commitment to abstraction, are the necessary conditions for her interest in reason. This becomes clear when we consider her use of the concept of 'the human' as a measure of the oppression of women. The word 'human' here acquires a concreteness, since it implies a negation of the actual degrading conditions of being a woman in a given society. Socialisation to 'femininity' or womanhood becomes a process of dehumanisation, primarily through depriving 'woman' of the exercise of 'reason', which is simultaneously a moral, creative and critical faculty. Thus social transformation, from domination to equality, necessarily involves 'reason'. The demanding of 'human rights' or the 'rights of individuals', therefore becomes a mode of exercise of this 'reason' as a condition of being fully 'human'. This way of approaching or arriving at the universal, from the standpoint of women and experience, renders it difficult to place Wollstonecraft unproblematically among male 'rights' theorists.³² The concrete awareness of difference and power which underpins her project of reason makes Wollstonecraft a rationalist/humanist with a difference.

This concreteness or grounded epistemology is conducted through the stylistics of Wollstonecraft's writing. The Rights of Woman is a surprisingly social and communicative text, full of images, metaphors, similes, analogies and anecdotes. It has the subjective quality of personal communication. Addressed by her to Talleyrand (by implication, to the revolutionary male elite of France) as her contribution to the educational philosophy of a revolutionary country, this text is charged with a sense of immediacy. Through this device she not only addresses the members of the French government, but also projects her ideal reader as politicallyengaged, as a social critic. This strategy substantiates the anti- or non-Cartesian character of the Rights of Woman, and thus redeems the book from being an 'in principle' argument.

This critical-political strategy makes Wollstonecraft an important author for those of us who wish to integrate identity and experience within an overall socio-historical analysis. Thus the positionality, the particularity of 'who' a knower or a political agent is becomes integral to what the knower seeks to know, or what can be known by her. By making social subjectivity material to knowledge, by connecting the personal and the rational, Wollstonecraft emerges as an Enlightenment thinker who can be called anti-dualist, in violation of the mind-body or experience-reason split conventional among male thinkers of the time.³³ The Rights of Woman is then the voice of a woman who has herself suffered the tyranny of gender and class. If she is a child of the Enlightenment, she is not of the right sex for a political thinker. By being a woman and writing political theory and social criticism from a woman's standpoint, she violates the conventional gender attribution of knowledge and political discourse of her time. The gendered private-public divide is challenged both by her own presence in a public, intellectual space, and by her claims in the domains of pedagogy and political theory. This transgression and her attempts at integration are equally present in her rearrangement of the relationship between the political and the personal, and in her anchoring of the public into the realm of the private.

That Wollstonecraft takes recourse to adapting a humanist discourse of reason rather than inventing a fullfledged discourse of her own is not surprising. This was, after all, the main language of social criticism and political theory of her time. Anti-clerical, dissenting and radical political traditions questioned time-honoured practices of hierarchy and servitude in this language of 'reason'. As such, 'reason' becomes a code word for a critical apparatus which is used to criticise, explain and interpret prevailing social and political conditions, and thus it ceases to be only a name for a faculty which transcends the social. Such an adaptation of reason makes it an entry point to intellectual democracy, since it is said to represent an ability equally present in every human being. The social character of reason, in this version, is evident, in that it needs cultivation to be equal to its own definition. It is this social character of reason, including its susceptibility to deformation, which is explored in the Rights of Woman, in terms both of general education and familial socialisation of the processes which construct, both practically and ideologically, the feminine and the masculine. Classroom education, child-rearing and children's play, parental and marital violence, seduction, and the inertia of aristocratic, bourgeois and petty-bourgeois lives, are all scrutinised through and in relation to this interpretation of 'reason'. Thus for Wollstonecraft 'reason' is not only a sign of abstract transcendence; it is also the critical instrument of theorisationand the point of entry into the social.

In rejecting dualism, Wollstonecraft also brings other antithetical concepts into formative relations. Thus passion and reason, the public and the private, and difference and similarity become constitutively related. This prevents us from characterising her as either a romantic or a rationalist, or from positing any direct correlation between romanticism or classicism and any particular brand of politics. Possibilities proliferate: we see that Edmund Burke's romanticism leads him finally to counter-revolution, whereas that of Rousseau leads to certain revolutionary stances, (which, however, encode the subordination of women). Wollstonecraft shares with Rousseau his determination to reconcile passion and reason, the use of metaphors and analogies from slavery, and his interest in a humanised form of 'reason'. In fact, it is by expanding this humanist core of Rousseau's philosophy that she questions his own discriminatory treatment of women and their absence from his proposal for democracy. Wollstonecraft takes up the Enlightenment's romantic passion for reason and adapts it to an argument against sexual, social and economic forms of slavery. This is consistent with her interest in the validation of emotive and experiential subjectivity and her argument for morality in the constitution of freedom.

In keeping with this approach, and confounding any attempts to label her as a rationalist, Wollstonecraft allows a place for feelings in her theorisation. In this she is helped by her use of the metaphors and analogies of slavery and resistance. This metaphoric textualisation exceeds the limits of her adapted rationalist discourse and expands the ideological space into the domains of personal and social life, experience and history. Unlike classicists, who demonise feelings, particularly those of women, common people or black slaves, Wollstonecraft does not see revolutions in terms of irrational excesses of mob violence. Through her legitimisation of emotions and experience she revolutionises the conventional cast of political drama. As such the elite of her society—kings and the aristocracy, masters of slaves and serfs, domineering husbands and fathers—are not her protagonists or heirs of 'reason', that is, upholders of justice and morality. Rather, it is the demonised and the dominated, women and slaves, admittedly under the leadership of the exceptionally few 'reasonable' men, who play key roles in her drama of social change. That this is so is particular to her project of reason and not due to any blindness on her part as to the corruptive powers of domination, or to any idealisation of the dominated. She is perfectly aware of moral and psychological deformities, such as practices of manipulation and blackmail, which, she claims, are resorted to by both European and oriental women and black slaves.³⁴

The social basis of personal identity for Wollstonecraft is expressed by the connection she makes between property and propriety or personal morality. Had she not so often been viewed as solely concerned with gender, this would have been apparent. Her disagreement with Edmund Burke is partially on grounds ofproperty.³⁵ Her support of radical democracy—of the Haitian revolution, for example—reflects more than romanticism; it makes a serious criticism of hierarchy and ownership in moral and political terms, even though she has some presumptions of a class organised society. In fact, her analogy between slaves and European women rests on this particular understanding of property. She questions the illegitimacy of such an appropriation of people, wealth and social privilege, of the laws and social institutions which allow this, and of the morality which governs such a social order. This approach may be construed as a modified form of subscription to the ideas of 'liberty', 'equality', and 'fraternity' that inspired the French revolution. Thus, since her criticism of patriarchy is connected to that of propriety and property, she may be more than a forerunner of bourgeois feminism. And, though her criticism of property is mainly ideological, she is not negligent in paying attention to poverty and its dehumanising effects. This bitingly critical dimension of her humanism has a revolutionary cast to it, although, like contemporary revolutionary humanist thinkers, she did not think in terms of class and class struggle. There is in her work a determined criticism of wealth and patriarchal power, and of the profoundly unethical imperatives they exert over society as a whole. It is here that she brings the category 'human' to a critical purpose. Through an infusion of a Utopian desire, it becomes the very ground and the ultimate validation of all political 'rights'. It is this meaning of the word 'human' to which she turns sometimes in the name of nature and sometimes in the name of God. In both cases, it implies creativity and perfectibility.³⁶ The role of reason in this enterprise is that of a critical and creative faculty which provides the ground for envisioning a practical, ethical knowledge. What one may know and how this knowledge might help to build a reasonable, that is a 'humanised' and 'enlightened' life, were her basic preoccupations. Thus her critical and political project went far beyond the confines of gender and partial good, toward the creation of a 'humanity' even for womankind.

Conclusion

If I were asked which of these three readings of the Rights of Woman is most accurate, I would be hard put to answer. Shifting the ground somewhat, I would suggest that they have all captured certain aspects of this text, which coexist simultaneously. Any active reading, we must remind ourselves, is an ability to see that a text is a middle space, a sort of social relationship between on the one hand a writer and her writing and on the other a reader and her context and form of reading. As such, neither writing nor reading is a private individual activity, independent of the time and space within which it occurs. Intentional, formal and contextual constraints continue to press both the writer and the reader. As such, my readings are very specific to different stages of my life, and yet in some form all respond to Wollstonecraft's preoccupations—for example with sameness and difference, with patriarchal and other modalities of power, with humanisation and-degradation. Elements of my first reading and those of the second are subsumed in my third, which has come to terms with the previous ones. It is this complexity, rather than one 'true' reading, which must be kept in mind. The point is that Wollstonecraft's text is full of loops and fissures, her orientation to hegemonic forms of racism and orientalism coexists with her understanding of difference and inequality, and these propel her to a radical humanism—whose contours are contradictory. But there is also an overall integrity to her text, where a stance based on the universal presence of reason motivates her commitment to justice, not only for women but for other oppressed groups.

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is not a monolithic text. It contains both the shortcomings and the emancipatory moments of Enlightenment thought. But its universalist/humanist stance, when qualified by the recognition of the construction of difference, is a useful one in current feminist theory and politics. In order to go beyond segmented politics, we may rely on notions such as 'justice', 'human' or 'woman', as long as we inform these generic notions with an awareness of social relations of power and lived history. Mary Wollstonecraft presents us with an example of this type of social and political theorisation, whereby the concept of universal justice is no longer a philosopher's category but can have arisen only from the experience of lived 'differences' created by inequalities of power. Situated thus, notions of democracy or human rights can address centuries of struggles by women and men against tyranny, brutality and various forms of exclusion. This is a conclusion I can reach without imposing a linearity on her thought, or papering over her contradictions, while, in the same process, saving the paradoxical integrity of my own reading.

Notes

¹ For a critique of feminist essentialism from the standpoint of difference, see Bell Hooks, Ain't I a Woman? Black Women and Feminism, Boston, South End Press, 1981, introduction, chapter 4; Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment, New York and London, Routledge, 1991. See also Elizabeth Spelman, Inessential Women: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought, Boston, Beacon, 1988, preface and introduction; Dorothy E. Smith, 'Feminist Reflections on Political Economy', Studies in Political Economy, no.30, Autumn 1989, pp.37-59.

² For a critique of 'woman' as a foundationalist category and a criticism of feminism based on this critique, see Judith Butler, Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, London, Routledge, 1990. See also Denise Riley, 'Am I that Name?': Feminism and the Category of 'Women' in History, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1988.

³ Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), New York, Norton, 1967.

⁴ Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1942), the most influential cultural figure of India in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Tagore functioned as a major figure in moral regulation and reform in Bengal.

⁵ See Sumit Sarkar, Modern India, New Delhi, Macmillan India, 1983.

⁶ See Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid (eds), Recasting Women: Essays in Indian Colonial History, New Delhi, Kali for Women, 1989; Sumanta Bannerji, The Parlour and the Streets: Elite and Popular Culture in Nineteenth-Century Calcutta, Calcutta, Seagull, 1989; Joanna Liddle and Rama Joshi, Daughters of Independence: Gender, Caste and Class in India, New Delhi and London, Kali for Women and Zed Books, 1986. See also Himani Bannerji, 'Fashioning a Self: Educational Proposals for and by Women in Popular Magazines in Colonial Bengal', Economic and Political Weekly of India, 26 October 1991, Women's Studies, pp.50-62; Jasodhara Bagchi (ed.), Indian Women: Myth and Reality, Calcutta, Sangam, 1995.

⁷ Rasasundari Dasi, Amar Jiban, Calcutta, Dey's Publishers, 1987, pp.43-4, my translation.

⁸ See Meredith Borthwick, The Changing Role of Women in Bengal, 1849-1905, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1984, pp.60-108; Gulam Murshid, The Reluctant Debutante: Response of Bengali Women to Modernisation, 1849-1905, Rajshaji, Rajshaji University Press, 1983.

⁹ See Sumit Sarkar, 'Rammohan Roy and the Break with the Past', in A Critique of Colonial India, Calcutta, Papyrus, 1985.

¹⁰ See Sangari and Vaid, 'Recasting Women: An Introduction' in Recasting Women, op. cit. See also Tanika Sarkar, 'Hindu Conjugality and Nationalism', in Bagchi, Indian Women, op. cit.

¹¹ For this notion, see Dorothy E. Smith, The Conceptual Practices of Power, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1990.

¹² See Erol Lawrence, 'Just Plain Common Sense: the "Roots" of Racism', in Centre for Contemporary Studies, University of Birmingham, The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in 70s Britain, London, Hutchinson, 1982.

¹³ For further elucidation of 'difference', see Himani Bannerji, 'But Who Speaks for Us? Experience and Agency in Conventional Feminist Paradigms', in Himani Bannerji, Linda Carty, Susan Heald,Kari Dehli and Kate McKenna (eds), Unsettling Relations: the University as a Site of Feminist Struggles, Toronto, Women's Press, 1991.

¹⁴ See Pratibha Parmar, 'Gender, Race and Class: Asian Women in Resistance', in The Empire Strikes Back, op. cit.

¹⁵ Nancy Stepan, 'Race and Gender: The Role of Analogy in Science' in David T. Goldberg (ed.), The Anatomy of Racism, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1990, p.39. See also her statements on 'race', science and the construction of difference (pp.41-2).

¹⁶ See Jean-Jacques Rousseau's The Social Contract, or Principles of Political Right, 1762, and also Marx and Engels' The Communist Manifesto, 1848.

¹⁷ Virginia Sapiro, A Vindication of Political Virtue: The Political Theory of Mary Wollstonecraft, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1992.

¹⁸ See chapter 5.

¹⁹ Nancy Stepan, 'Race and Gender', op. cit., p.44.

²⁰ See above, pp.97-8, 255n30.

²¹ Ferguson remarks on the association between slavery and corruption, when Wollstonecraft calls women 'slaves' in a political and civil sense; see above pp. 95.

²² See Angela Davis, Women, Race and Class, New York, Vintage, 1981, chapters 1-3, and Hooks, 'Ain't Ia Woman?', op. cit.

²³ See Sander Gilman, 'Black Bodies, White Bodies', in Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (ed.), 'Race', Writing and Difference, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1985; also his '"I am Down on Whores": Race and Gender in Victorian London' in Goldberg, Anatomy of Racism, op. cit. See also Stephen Gould, The Mismeasure of Man, New York, Norton, 1981.

²⁴ See the works of Angela Davis, Bell Hooks, Patricia Hill Collins and Michel Wallace. Also, Gloria T. Hull et al have directly addressed this problem in the very title of their book, All the Women are White, All the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us are Brave, New York, Feminist Press, 1982. For the mysterious appearances and disappearances of women of colour in white feminist literature, see Gloria Anzaldua (ed.), Making Faces, Making Soul/Haciendo Caras: Creative and Critical Perspectives by Women of Colour, San Francisco, Aunt Lute Foundation, 1990.

²⁵ For a detailed presentation of Edward Said's concept of 'orientalism', see his Orientalism, New York, Vintage Books, 1979, introduction, chapter 1, and Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the World, New York, Pantheon Books, 1981.

²⁶ Said in Orientalism, op. cit. explores works of European, especially French, late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century poets and fiction writers. Speaking of Flaubert and Nerval, he says, 'both were thoroughly steeped in aspects of European culture that encouraged … [a] perverse vision of the Orient. Nerval and Flaubert belonged to that community of thought and feeling described by Mario Praz in The Romantic Agony, a community for which the imagery of exotic places, the cultivation of sadomasochistic tastes,… a fascination with the macabre, with the notion of a Fatal Woman, with secrecy and occultism, all combined to enable literary work of the sort produced by Gaultier (himself fascinated by the Orient), Swinburne, Baudelaire and Huysmans' (p. 180). See also Malek Alloula, The Colonial Harem, translated by Myrna and Wlad Godzich, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1986.

²⁷ Moira Ferguson in 'Mary Wollstonecraft and the Problematic of Slavery', Feminist Review, no.42, Autumn 1992, pp.90-1, speaks about this in terms of Wollstonecraft's view of Africans: 'Furthermore, the blame that Wollstonecraft attaches to white women for their vanity is complicated by her assessment of the relationship between African women and dress.' She quotes a telling passage from Wollstonecraft: 'The attention to dress, therefore, which has been thought a sexual propensity, I think natural to mankind. But I ought to express myself with more precision, when the mind is not sufficiently open to take pleasure in reflection, the body will be adorned with sedulous care; and ambition will appear in tattooing or painting it. So far is this first inclination carried, that even the hellish yoke of slavery cannot stifle this savage desire of admiration which the black heroes inherit from both their parents, for all the hardly earned savings of a slave are expended in a little tawdry finery'.

²⁸ Wollstonecraft's negative views of tradition and feudal hierarchy are best revealed, as Sapiro thinks, in her debate with Edmund Burke. See Sapiro, A Vindication of Political Virtue, op. cit., chapters 5, 6. See also Wollstonecraft, Rights of Woman, op. cit., p. 50, on Milton as a 'Mahometan' traditionalist and misogynist, and her orientalist comparison of Rousseau in chapter 5, 'Animadversions on some of the Writers who have Rendered Women Objects of Pity, Bordering on Contempt'.

²⁹ See Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, London, Hamish Hamilton, 1992.

³⁰ On postmodernism and its intellectual and ethical premises see Christopher Norris, The Truth About Postmodernism, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1993.

³¹ See Peter Gay, The Enlightenment, an Interpretation, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1967; Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, 1852; and Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, New York, New American Library, 1962.

³² See Jane Moore, 'Sex, Slavery and Rights', in Carl Plasa and Betty Ring (eds), The Discourse of Slavery: Aphra Behn to Toni Morrison, New York, Routledge, 1994. Her article reduces Wollstonecraft to a minor footnote among male 'rights' theorists.

³³ About Wollstonecraft's own presence in her theorising, see Moira Gatens, 'The Oppressed State of My Sex: Wollstonecraft on Reason, Feeling and Equality', in Mary Lyndon Shanley and Carole Pateman (eds), Feminist Interpretations and Political Theory, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991. Also see Sapiro's chapter 2, entitled 'The Reasoned, Passionate Self in Vindication of Political Virtue, op. cit.

³⁴ Wollstonecraft's Rights of Woman is occasioned by deformities among women produced through domination. The text as a whole is an attempt to indicate the direction of their correction. An example of Wollstonecraft's view is in the following lines: 'It is vain to expect virtue from women till they are in some degree independent of men; nay, it is vain to expect that strength of natural affection which would make them good wives and mothers. Whilst they are absolutely dependent on their husbands they will be cunning, mean and selfish', Rights of Woman op. cit., p.213; also pp. 35 and 133 on mobs and slaves.

³⁵ Wollstonecraft's opinion of property and its connection with morality comes out in chapter 9 of Rights of Woman, 'Of the Pernicious Effects which Arise from the Unnatural Distinctions Established in Society'; see also p. 213. Sapiro's Vindication of Political Virtue grasps fully Wollstonecraft's critical position towards property in moral/social terms.

³⁶ Moore's criticism in 'Sex, Slavery and Rights', op. cit., misses this Utopian dimension of Wollstonecraft's work, and thus tries to systematise her work within only one governing metaphor, or even a fully articulated theology.