Woman and Brute in Feminism

2020 ◽  
pp. 109-143
Author(s):  
Jane Spencer
Keyword(s):  
Natural History ◽  
Gender Equality ◽  
Mary Wollstonecraft ◽  
Mary Robinson ◽  
Mary Hays ◽  
Nonhuman Animals ◽  
Reproductive Body ◽  
Catharine Macaulay ◽  
Foundational Work ◽  
Human Rationality

This chapter treats 1790s feminist writing by Mary Wollstonecraft, Catharine Macaulay, Mary Hays, and Mary Robinson, tracing conflicts in their thought created by the question of the animal. Faced by the animalization of women based on their identification with the sexual and reproductive body, feminists appealed to a disembodied reason to argue for their equality with men; but their sympathy with nonhuman animals as sharing in their victimization by men encouraged some revaluation of animality. Wollstonecraft’s foundational work on the rights of woman makes an anthropocentric commitment to unique human rationality, and reveals anxieties attributable to her reading of natural history discourses that naturalized the subordination of women. Robinson shows greater confidence in disembodied reason as guarantor of gender equality. The chapter traces the development of sympathetic responses both to human animality and nonhuman animals in Macaulay, Hays, and in Wollstonecraft’s own later work.

Feminism and the Position of Women

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Moore
Keyword(s):  
Social Reform ◽  
Social Economic ◽  
Mary Wollstonecraft ◽  
Mary Robinson ◽  
Romantic Period ◽  
Mary Hays ◽  
The Social ◽  
Political Writing ◽  
Legal Position ◽  
Intellectual Advancement

Feminism in its modern meanings attests to a movement for change in the social, economic and legal position of women. In the Romantic period, no such movement existed. There were, however, individual women whose voices, separately and together, suggest the existence of a commonality of feeling around the intellectual advancement of the female sex. This article examines writing by women on female education and sexual and social reform, focussing on the work of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, Mary Robinson, and Mary Lamb. It connects political writing and educational treatises to the novels and essays written by these women and it reflects on the shared concerns from which modern feminism emerged.

Perambulating Mice and the Confluence of Sympathy and Moral Education

2021 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-40
Author(s):  
Shawna Lichtenwalner
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Animal Welfare ◽  
Moral Education ◽  
Animal Rights ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Mary Wollstonecraft ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Anna Letitia Barbauld ◽  
Nonhuman Animals ◽  
Late Eighteenth

The late eighteenth century was the locus of a burgeoning interest in animal rights. This essay examines the critical role that children’s literature had in the evolution of more consideration for animal welfare. The use of animals in the works of writers such as Sarah Trimmer, Mary Wollstonecraft, Anna Letitia Barbauld, and Dorothy Kilner helped create a form of animal subjectivity as a means of teaching children compassion through the creation of sympathy for nonhuman animals. By fostering compassion for the needs of so-called “dumb creatures” children could also be taught, by extension, to have more consideration for other people. In particular, Dorothy Kilner’s animal autobiography The Life and Perambulations of a Mouse offers a new way of viewing animals who are neither physical nor affectional slaves as worthy of both consideration and compassion.

scholarly journals Revolution and human rights thought in the political philosophy of Catharine Macaulay, Mary Wollstonecraft and Anna Laetitia Barbauld

2020 ◽  
Vol 50 (3) ◽  
pp. 247-266
Author(s):  
Marie-Luisa Frick
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Mary Wollstonecraft ◽  
The Political ◽  
Age Of Reason ◽  
Public Reasoning ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Catharine Macaulay ◽  
Core Issues

The Age of Reason is first and foremost an age of public reasoning. Equipped with a fresh and indeed unprecedented consciousness of feasibility and responsibility, educated citizens start to participate actively – and in many cases by taking personal risks – in discourses on political, religious and philosophical issues. In this article, I will highlight two core issues of the late eighteenth century – the dispute about the legitimacy of the French Revolution as well as its underlying philosophical conceptions and the rising human rights idea – and thereby revisit the interventions of three women who, though rediscovered in various fields of research, still have to gain their due recognition as pre-eminent political philosophers of their time.

Philosophical Fictions and ‘Jacobin’ Novels in the 1790s

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deidre Shauna Lynch
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
Social System ◽  
Mary Wollstonecraft ◽  
William Godwin ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Mary Hays ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Social ◽  
Mind And Body ◽  
Conflicting Goals

This essay on the novel of ideas in the 1790s investigates the sometimes conflicting goals pursue by the ‘Jacobin’ novelists—figures such as Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, and Mary Hays—and also charts their characteristic preoccupations with the proper relations between reason and passion and mind and body. Revamping the Enlightenment tradition of the conte philosophique, these supporters of the Revolution in France and political reform in Britain advocated a newly ambitious species of novel capable of building bridges between the discursive domains of fiction and political theory. These novelists also set out to claim the power over readers’ emotions they found in sentimental fiction’s stories of suffering individuals. At the same time, contrariwise, they aimed to assemble comprehensive accounts of the social system—of ‘things as they are’, in Godwin’s phrase—and touted their commitment to the promulgation of universal, impersonal truth.

Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 249-254
Author(s):  
Jane Spencer
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Animal Rights ◽  
Nonhuman Animals ◽  
Political Tension ◽  
Human Animal ◽  
The Creation ◽  
A Site ◽  
Two Sides

Drawing together the threads of the previous chapters, these pages reflect on the way the entangled development of the concepts of human rights and animal rights made the human–animal border a site of political tension. During the eighteenth century people were exploring the similarities between human and nonhuman animals in new ways, encouraged by developments in natural history and the cultural spread of sympathy. The concept of animal rights was an almost inevitable (if uncertain) extension of the concept of human rights, and made the borderline between human and animal a site of great political tension. That animals are like humans, and that humans are (like) animals, were propositions brought together, two sides of the same coin, but what that might mean for human politics and for human–animal relations was debatable and debated, then as now. As we have seen, both the possibility that human–animal kinship could inspire greater kindness, and the danger that the animalization of human groups could be used to rationalize oppression, were realized during the period. The work concludes with a brief consideration of the legacy of eighteenth-century writing in contemporary animal representation, highlighting the continuing importance of storytelling to the creation of respect for nonhuman animals.

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