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

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.

Republicans Resurrected: Memories of the English Civil War and Peaceful Transatlantic Resistance in the Beginning Of The American Revolution (1762–1765)

At the inception of the American Revolution a transatlantic network of Real Whig Dissenters worked tirelessly to prevent what they understood to be the resurgence of seventeenth-century tyranny. For this group, religion and politics were so intertwined that a threat to one posed a threat to the other. However, recent scholarship has underestimated the importance of religion as a leading cause of the American Revolution by diminishing the civil significance of the Bishop Controversy and downplaying the religious implications of civil policies such as the Sugar and Stamp Acts. Drawing from a rich collection of manuscripts from this transatlantic network, this paper not only shows that the Bishop Controversy had civil significance, but that Dissenters viewed imperial fiscal policy through a religious lens. This transatlantic group included John Adams, Jonathan Mayhew, and William Allen in the American colonies and Thomas Hollis, Catharine Macaulay, Micaiah Towgood, and William Harris in Great Britain. They mobilized memories of religious oppression in the seventeenth-century to forge a common identity for British subjects, and some even attempted to influence public opinion by writing histories of England. Appropriating memories of the battles Britons fought to secure religious and political rights in the seventeenth-century, Real Whig Dissenters argued that the Bishop Controversy and the Sugar Act marked the beginning of a new age of a transatlantic imperial tyranny that must be resisted at all costs.

Woman and Brute in Feminism

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.