The Rights of Woman and the Equal Rights of Men

Bibliographic Data

ID6351700
AuthorsK Green (0000-0002-5049-4462, The University of Melbourne, corresponding author)
Year2021
Volume49
Issue3
Pages403-430
Publication date2021-06-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenuePolitical Theory (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0090-5917 • E-ISSN: 1552-7476
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/0090591720946310
OpenAlexW3048304616
LanguageEN
Citations received5

While standard histories of Western political thought represent women’s rights as an offshoot of the earlier movement for the equal rights of men, this essay argues that the eighteenth-century push for democracy and equal rights was grounded in arguments first used to defend women’s right to moral and religious self-determination, based on their rational and spiritual equality with men. In tandem with the rise of critiques of absolute monarchy, ideal marriage, which had previously involved lordship and subjection, was transformed into an equal companionate relationship based on inclination and affection. The essay argues that the transformation, by the time of the American and French revolutions, of neo-Roman republicanism—which had been aristocratic and oligarchic—into egalitarian, democratic republicanism had been mediated by the extension of arguments, widely distributed in the literature criticizing the slavery of marriage, into a general critique of slavery and support for the equal rights of men

Affection · Democracy · Epistemology · Extension (predicate logic · Ideal (ethics · Monarchy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · American Constitutional Law and Politics · European Political History Analysis · Gender Studies · Law · Philosophy · Religion, Gender, and Enlightenment

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