Eileen Hunt Botting
Biographic Data
| ID | 1059103 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Eileen Hunt Botting |
| GIVEN NAMES | Eileen Hunt |
| FAMILY NAME | Botting |
| SIGNATURE | BOTTING E H |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Notre Dame |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4519-9733 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 292 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 26 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: A New Manuscript Fragment
In 2016, The New York Public Library (NYPL) acquired four manuscript pages of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) that appeared to be in her hand. This article provides the first annotated transcription, comparative handwriting analysis, and historical contextualization to empirically demonstrate that these are in fact holograph manuscript pages, drafted by Wollstonecraft for the end of Section 3, the entirety of Sec…
At last, the last (wo)man responds to (her) readers and critics
Mary Shelley's The Last Man: Existentialism and IR meet the post-apocalyptic pandemic novel
Mary Shelley mined the ideas of international thought to help develop three new subgenres of modern political science fiction (‘poliscifi’): post-apocalyptic, existential, and dystopian. Her two great works of poliscifi, Frankenstein (1818), and The Last Man (1826) – confront the social problems that arise from humanity's technological and cultural interventions in the wider environment. This article recovers The Last Man not only as the first mo…
The Past, Present, and Future States of Political Theory
Predicting the Patriarchal Politics of Pandemics From Mary Shelley to Covid-19
I examine the predictive powers of the political science fictions of Mary Shelley, Octavia Butler, and Margaret Atwood for understanding the patriarchal-or men-dominant-dynamics of the politics of pandemics in the twenty-first century. Like her literary followers in post-apocalyptic plague literature, Butler and Atwood, Shelley foresaw that the twenty-first century would be the age of lethal pandemics. Their post-apocalyptic fictions also project…
A novel (coronavirus) reading of Hobbes's Leviathan
In the style of Swift and Wollstonecraft, I contribute to the growing pandemic literature on Hobbes by writing a feminist satire of the Leviathan for the age of the novel coronavirus. Hobbes's conceptions of the state of nature and the body politic are eerily relevant to the present political crises, especially in the United States. In a personal narrative that is both arch and absolutely serious, I reveal how a woman-empowering vision of a healt…
Wollstonecraft in Jamaica: The international reception of A Vindication of the Rights of Men in the Kingston Daily Advertiser in 1791
Re-reading Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) in the context of the international politics after the start of the French Revolution in 1789 and before the rise of the Haitian Revolution in 1791 leads to three discoveries in the history of European ideas. First, her reply to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France was advertised, discussed, and rumoured to be the work of a woman in London papers days ear…
The Politics of Epidemics, from Thucydides to Mary Shelley to Covid-19
Nineteenth-century English novelist Mary Shelley wrote a dystopian novel about a global pandemic. From her reading about the connections between wars and plagues, and her personal exposure to wars in Europe and the loss of loved ones to infectious diseases, she came to a conclusion shared by other writers, from the ancient Greek historian Thucydides to analysts of the COVID-19 pandemic: politics is a root cause of deadly contagions
From revolutionary Paris to Nootka Sound to Saint-Domingue: The international politics and prejudice behind Wollstonecraft’s theory of the rights of humanity, 1789–91
Against the background of the international political crises generated by the early phase of the French Revolution at Nootka Sound in 1790 and in Saint-Domingue in 1791, Mary Wollstonecraft developed a capacious political theory of the “rights of humanity.” She pushed beyond narrow post-revolutionary European constructions of “the rights of man” which ignored or excluded “the poor,” “Indians,” “African slaves,” and “women.” While closely followin…
Mary Shelley’s ‘Romantic Spinozism’
Mary Shelley (1797–1851) developed a ‘Romantic Spinozism’ from 1817 to 1848. This was a deterministic worldview that adopted an ethical attitude of love toward the world as it is, must be, and will be. Resisting the psychological despair and political inertia of fatalism, her ‘Romantic Spinozism’ affirmed the forward-looking responsibility of people to love their neighbors and sustain the world, including future generations, even in the face of s…
Religion and women’s rights: Susan Moller Okin, Mary Wollstonecraft, and the multiple feminist liberal traditions
We trace Susan Moller Okin’s reception of Mary Wollstonecraft with respect to the relationship between religion and feminist liberalism, by way of manuscripts housed at Somerville College, Oxford and Harvard University. These unpublished documents – dated from 1967 to 1998 – include her Somerville advising file, with papers dated from 1967 to 1979; her 1970 Oxford B.Phil. thesis on the feminist political theory of Wollstonecraft, William Thompson…
The early Rousseau’s egalitarian feminism: A philosophical convergence with Madame Dupin and ‘The Critique of the Spirit of the Laws’
Feminists have long criticized Rousseau for his patriarchal political theory. But when his lesser-known writings on women from the 1740s are taken into account, including a nearly 900-page manuscript critiquing Montesquieu from a feminist perspective, we see how the early Rousseau robustly converged in feminist ideas with his employer Madame Louise Dupin, before he gradually diverged from this egalitarian school of thought over the course of the …
Women’s human rights may be unicorns, but they can fight wicked witches
This essay responds to Alasdair MacIntyre’s skeptical claim that human rights are like “witches” and “unicorns”—as in, they don’t exist, and thus cannot be subject to abstract rational justification. Putting aside the issue of the abstract rational justification of human rights, I focus on the more urgent practical question of how human rights might be meaningfully alleged when they do not yet exist within society, culture, law, or policy. Borrow…
New directions in theorizing human rights
Overthrowing the Floresta–Wollstonecraft Myth for Latin American Feminism
Symposium: Edited by Richard Avramenko and Melissa Schwartzberg
Wollstonecraft in Europe, 1792–1904: A Revisionist Reception History
It has often been repeated that Wollstonecraft was not read for a century after her death in 1797 due to the negative impact of her husband William Godwin's Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798) on her posthumous reputation. By providing the first full-scale reception history of Wollstonecraft in continental Europe in the long nineteenth century—drawing on rare book research, translations of understudied primary sou…
Observations on the real rights of women and other writings
Ascending the Rostrum: Hannah Mather Crocker and Women’s Political Oratory
Although Hannah Mather Crocker (1752–1829) apparently presented a prescription against women’s political oratory in her Observations on the Real Rights of Women (1818), she provided philosophical and historical challenges to this conventional rule of early nineteenth-century feminine propriety elsewhere in the first American treatise on women’s rights. By analyzing new archival findings of two of her oratorical works from the early 1810s—her 1813…
Westernization and Women’s Rights: Non-Western European Responses to Mill’s Subjection of Women, 1869-1908
The publication in 1869 of Mill’s Subjection of Women gave rise to philosophical and political responses beyond Western Europe on the relationship between Westernization and women’s rights in developing, colonial, and post-colonial countries. Through the first comparative study of the Subjection of Women alongside the forewords to six of its earliest non–Western European editions, we explore how this book provoked local intellectuals in Russia, C…
Edmund Burke, and the art of rhetoric
Edmund Burke ranks among the most accomplished orators ever to debate in the British Parliament. But often his eloquence has been seen to compromise his achievements as a political thinker. In the first full-length account of Burke's rhetoric, Bullard argues that Burke's ideas about civil society, and particularly about the process of political deliberation, are, for better or worse, shaped by the expressiveness of his language. Above all, Burke'…
Family Feuds: Wollstonecraft, Burke, and Rousseau on the Transformation of the Family
Mary Wollstonecraft's Enlightened Legacy: The “Modern Social Imaginary” of the Egalitarian Family
Charles Taylor recently used the term modern social imaginary to describe dominant sets of norms, practices, and expectations-such as the market economy or the public sphere-that are rooted in the philosophies of the European Enlightenment and have since permeated the common experience of life in the contemporary Western world. Building on Taylor's argument, this article charts how Mary Wollstonecraft became one of the major philosophical sources…
Drawing the Line of Equality: Hannah Mather Crocker on Women's Rights
Hannah Mather Crocker was the leading American political theorist between 1800 and 1820 to engage the controversial question of sex equality. In the wake of the postrevolutionary backlash against political radicalism, she became a subtle rhetorician of women's rights. She accepted how her cultural context placed limits on the realization of women's rights, yet she did not analytically conflate these temporal limits with women's capacities to cont…
Wollstonecraft's Philosophical Impact on Nineteenth-Century American Women's Rights Advocates
Family Feuds: Wollstonecraft, Burke, and Rousseau on the Transformation of the Family
Wollstonecraft's Philosophical Impact on Nineteenth-Century American Women's Rights Advocates
This article challenges the thesis that the publication of William Godwin's scandalous Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1798 minimized the philosophical impact of Mary Wollstonecraft's 1792 work the Rights of Woman in nineteenth-century American political thought. Instead, we demonstrate that leading nineteenth-century American women's rights advocates-Hannah Mather Crocker, Lucretia Mott, Sarah Grimké, Margaret Fu…
Drawing the Line of Equality: Hannah Mather Crocker on Women's Rights
Hannah Mather Crocker was the leading American political theorist between 1800 and 1820 to engage the controversial question of sex equality. In the wake of the postrevolutionary backlash against political radicalism, she became a subtle rhetorician of women's rights. She accepted how her cultural context placed limits on the realization of women's rights, yet she did not analytically conflate these temporal limits with women's capacities to cont…
Symposium: Edited by Richard Avramenko and Melissa Schwartzberg
Overthrowing the Floresta–Wollstonecraft Myth for Latin American Feminism
Wollstonecraft in Europe, 1792–1904: A Revisionist Reception History
It has often been repeated that Wollstonecraft was not read for a century after her death in 1797 due to the negative impact of her husband William Godwin's Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798) on her posthumous reputation. By providing the first full-scale reception history of Wollstonecraft in continental Europe in the long nineteenth century—drawing on rare book research, translations of understudied primary sou…
Westernization and Women’s Rights: Non-Western European Responses to Mill’s Subjection of Women, 1869-1908
The publication in 1869 of Mill’s Subjection of Women gave rise to philosophical and political responses beyond Western Europe on the relationship between Westernization and women’s rights in developing, colonial, and post-colonial countries. Through the first comparative study of the Subjection of Women alongside the forewords to six of its earliest non–Western European editions, we explore how this book provoked local intellectuals in Russia, C…
Mary Shelley's The Last Man: Existentialism and IR meet the post-apocalyptic pandemic novel
Mary Shelley mined the ideas of international thought to help develop three new subgenres of modern political science fiction (‘poliscifi’): post-apocalyptic, existential, and dystopian. Her two great works of poliscifi, Frankenstein (1818), and The Last Man (1826) – confront the social problems that arise from humanity's technological and cultural interventions in the wider environment. This article recovers The Last Man not only as the first mo…
Predicting the Patriarchal Politics of Pandemics From Mary Shelley to Covid-19
I examine the predictive powers of the political science fictions of Mary Shelley, Octavia Butler, and Margaret Atwood for understanding the patriarchal-or men-dominant-dynamics of the politics of pandemics in the twenty-first century. Like her literary followers in post-apocalyptic plague literature, Butler and Atwood, Shelley foresaw that the twenty-first century would be the age of lethal pandemics. Their post-apocalyptic fictions also project…
Religion and women’s rights: Susan Moller Okin, Mary Wollstonecraft, and the multiple feminist liberal traditions
We trace Susan Moller Okin’s reception of Mary Wollstonecraft with respect to the relationship between religion and feminist liberalism, by way of manuscripts housed at Somerville College, Oxford and Harvard University. These unpublished documents – dated from 1967 to 1998 – include her Somerville advising file, with papers dated from 1967 to 1979; her 1970 Oxford B.Phil. thesis on the feminist political theory of Wollstonecraft, William Thompson…
The early Rousseau’s egalitarian feminism: A philosophical convergence with Madame Dupin and ‘The Critique of the Spirit of the Laws’
Feminists have long criticized Rousseau for his patriarchal political theory. But when his lesser-known writings on women from the 1740s are taken into account, including a nearly 900-page manuscript critiquing Montesquieu from a feminist perspective, we see how the early Rousseau robustly converged in feminist ideas with his employer Madame Louise Dupin, before he gradually diverged from this egalitarian school of thought over the course of the …
Mary Wollstonecraft's Enlightened Legacy: The “Modern Social Imaginary” of the Egalitarian Family
Charles Taylor recently used the term modern social imaginary to describe dominant sets of norms, practices, and expectations-such as the market economy or the public sphere-that are rooted in the philosophies of the European Enlightenment and have since permeated the common experience of life in the contemporary Western world. Building on Taylor's argument, this article charts how Mary Wollstonecraft became one of the major philosophical sources…
Wollstonecraft's Philosophical Impact on Nineteenth-Century American Women's Rights Advocates
Wollstonecraft's Philosophical Impact on Nineteenth-Century American Women's Rights Advocates
This article challenges the thesis that the publication of William Godwin's scandalous Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1798 minimized the philosophical impact of Mary Wollstonecraft's 1792 work the Rights of Woman in nineteenth-century American political thought. Instead, we demonstrate that leading nineteenth-century American women's rights advocates-Hannah Mather Crocker, Lucretia Mott, Sarah Grimké, Margaret Fu…
Family Feuds: Wollstonecraft, Burke, and Rousseau on the Transformation of the Family
Mary Wollstonecraft's Enlightened Legacy: The “Modern Social Imaginary” of the Egalitarian Family
Charles Taylor recently used the term modern social imaginary to describe dominant sets of norms, practices, and expectations-such as the market economy or the public sphere-that are rooted in the philosophies of the European Enlightenment and have since permeated the common experience of life in the contemporary Western world. Building on Taylor's argument, this article charts how Mary Wollstonecraft became one of the major philosophical sources…
Drawing the Line of Equality: Hannah Mather Crocker on Women's Rights
Hannah Mather Crocker was the leading American political theorist between 1800 and 1820 to engage the controversial question of sex equality. In the wake of the postrevolutionary backlash against political radicalism, she became a subtle rhetorician of women's rights. She accepted how her cultural context placed limits on the realization of women's rights, yet she did not analytically conflate these temporal limits with women's capacities to cont…
Edmund Burke, and the art of rhetoric
Edmund Burke ranks among the most accomplished orators ever to debate in the British Parliament. But often his eloquence has been seen to compromise his achievements as a political thinker. In the first full-length account of Burke's rhetoric, Bullard argues that Burke's ideas about civil society, and particularly about the process of political deliberation, are, for better or worse, shaped by the expressiveness of his language. Above all, Burke'…
Observations on the real rights of women and other writings
Ascending the Rostrum: Hannah Mather Crocker and Women’s Political Oratory
Although Hannah Mather Crocker (1752–1829) apparently presented a prescription against women’s political oratory in her Observations on the Real Rights of Women (1818), she provided philosophical and historical challenges to this conventional rule of early nineteenth-century feminine propriety elsewhere in the first American treatise on women’s rights. By analyzing new archival findings of two of her oratorical works from the early 1810s—her 1813…
Westernization and Women’s Rights: Non-Western European Responses to Mill’s Subjection of Women, 1869-1908
The publication in 1869 of Mill’s Subjection of Women gave rise to philosophical and political responses beyond Western Europe on the relationship between Westernization and women’s rights in developing, colonial, and post-colonial countries. Through the first comparative study of the Subjection of Women alongside the forewords to six of its earliest non–Western European editions, we explore how this book provoked local intellectuals in Russia, C…
Wollstonecraft in Europe, 1792–1904: A Revisionist Reception History
It has often been repeated that Wollstonecraft was not read for a century after her death in 1797 due to the negative impact of her husband William Godwin's Memoirs of the Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798) on her posthumous reputation. By providing the first full-scale reception history of Wollstonecraft in continental Europe in the long nineteenth century—drawing on rare book research, translations of understudied primary sou…
Overthrowing the Floresta–Wollstonecraft Myth for Latin American Feminism
Symposium: Edited by Richard Avramenko and Melissa Schwartzberg
Women’s human rights may be unicorns, but they can fight wicked witches
This essay responds to Alasdair MacIntyre’s skeptical claim that human rights are like “witches” and “unicorns”—as in, they don’t exist, and thus cannot be subject to abstract rational justification. Putting aside the issue of the abstract rational justification of human rights, I focus on the more urgent practical question of how human rights might be meaningfully alleged when they do not yet exist within society, culture, law, or policy. Borrow…
New directions in theorizing human rights
The early Rousseau’s egalitarian feminism: A philosophical convergence with Madame Dupin and ‘The Critique of the Spirit of the Laws’
Feminists have long criticized Rousseau for his patriarchal political theory. But when his lesser-known writings on women from the 1740s are taken into account, including a nearly 900-page manuscript critiquing Montesquieu from a feminist perspective, we see how the early Rousseau robustly converged in feminist ideas with his employer Madame Louise Dupin, before he gradually diverged from this egalitarian school of thought over the course of the …
Religion and women’s rights: Susan Moller Okin, Mary Wollstonecraft, and the multiple feminist liberal traditions
We trace Susan Moller Okin’s reception of Mary Wollstonecraft with respect to the relationship between religion and feminist liberalism, by way of manuscripts housed at Somerville College, Oxford and Harvard University. These unpublished documents – dated from 1967 to 1998 – include her Somerville advising file, with papers dated from 1967 to 1979; her 1970 Oxford B.Phil. thesis on the feminist political theory of Wollstonecraft, William Thompson…
Mary Shelley’s ‘Romantic Spinozism’
Mary Shelley (1797–1851) developed a ‘Romantic Spinozism’ from 1817 to 1848. This was a deterministic worldview that adopted an ethical attitude of love toward the world as it is, must be, and will be. Resisting the psychological despair and political inertia of fatalism, her ‘Romantic Spinozism’ affirmed the forward-looking responsibility of people to love their neighbors and sustain the world, including future generations, even in the face of s…
The Politics of Epidemics, from Thucydides to Mary Shelley to Covid-19
Nineteenth-century English novelist Mary Shelley wrote a dystopian novel about a global pandemic. From her reading about the connections between wars and plagues, and her personal exposure to wars in Europe and the loss of loved ones to infectious diseases, she came to a conclusion shared by other writers, from the ancient Greek historian Thucydides to analysts of the COVID-19 pandemic: politics is a root cause of deadly contagions
From revolutionary Paris to Nootka Sound to Saint-Domingue: The international politics and prejudice behind Wollstonecraft’s theory of the rights of humanity, 1789–91
Against the background of the international political crises generated by the early phase of the French Revolution at Nootka Sound in 1790 and in Saint-Domingue in 1791, Mary Wollstonecraft developed a capacious political theory of the “rights of humanity.” She pushed beyond narrow post-revolutionary European constructions of “the rights of man” which ignored or excluded “the poor,” “Indians,” “African slaves,” and “women.” While closely followin…
Predicting the Patriarchal Politics of Pandemics From Mary Shelley to Covid-19
I examine the predictive powers of the political science fictions of Mary Shelley, Octavia Butler, and Margaret Atwood for understanding the patriarchal-or men-dominant-dynamics of the politics of pandemics in the twenty-first century. Like her literary followers in post-apocalyptic plague literature, Butler and Atwood, Shelley foresaw that the twenty-first century would be the age of lethal pandemics. Their post-apocalyptic fictions also project…
A novel (coronavirus) reading of Hobbes's Leviathan
In the style of Swift and Wollstonecraft, I contribute to the growing pandemic literature on Hobbes by writing a feminist satire of the Leviathan for the age of the novel coronavirus. Hobbes's conceptions of the state of nature and the body politic are eerily relevant to the present political crises, especially in the United States. In a personal narrative that is both arch and absolutely serious, I reveal how a woman-empowering vision of a healt…
Wollstonecraft in Jamaica: The international reception of A Vindication of the Rights of Men in the Kingston Daily Advertiser in 1791
Re-reading Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) in the context of the international politics after the start of the French Revolution in 1789 and before the rise of the Haitian Revolution in 1791 leads to three discoveries in the history of European ideas. First, her reply to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France was advertised, discussed, and rumoured to be the work of a woman in London papers days ear…
The Past, Present, and Future States of Political Theory
Mary Shelley's The Last Man: Existentialism and IR meet the post-apocalyptic pandemic novel
Mary Shelley mined the ideas of international thought to help develop three new subgenres of modern political science fiction (‘poliscifi’): post-apocalyptic, existential, and dystopian. Her two great works of poliscifi, Frankenstein (1818), and The Last Man (1826) – confront the social problems that arise from humanity's technological and cultural interventions in the wider environment. This article recovers The Last Man not only as the first mo…
At last, the last (wo)man responds to (her) readers and critics
Political science (20 works) · Law (19 works) · Politics (17 works) · Law (16 works) · Philosophy (16 works) · Sociology (15 works) · History (13 works) · Philosophy (13 works) · Religion, Gender, and Enlightenment (13 works) · History (11 works)