I will also take into consideration Wollstonecraft’s work “A Vindication of the Rights of Men” in order to investigate the main points of Wollstonecraft’s criticism of Burke’s “Reflections on Revolution in France”. In my contribution, I would like to analyse principles, contents and arguments present in Mary Wollstonecraft’s work “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman” – published in 1792 –, which constitutes one of the first texts – probably the first “manifesto” – of the feminist movement. Reason, virtue and knowledge constitute, in Wollstonecraft’s intents, the new values that ought to promote a radical change, in general, in the whole human dimension and, in particular, in the woman’s sphere of life. Abstract In the first chapter of her “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman”, Mary Wollstonecraft defines human degrees of reason, virtue and knowledge as the instruments for measurement of human nature’s perfection. PDF-PowerPoint presentation of the talk I gave on Sunday, 26th August 2018 at the 2018 Societas Ethica Annual Conference, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium, 23th – 26th August 2018. Writing at the very origin of the tradition, she provides a clear and powerful account of how it is possible to conceive of human rights from an ethical perspective, as a device to cultivate and care for one’s own self.

Second, and more broadly, I propose that Wollstonecraft has an important lesson for human rights scholarship. First, I demonstrate that Wollstonecraft has an original theory of human rights that is intimately tied to her views on education, manners, and morals. My thesis is that, for Wollstonecraft, human rights help women to overcome their attachment to a culture that devastates any chance to lead a happy full life. I develop this interpretation in connection with her diagnosis of the condition of women of her time. For her, the main purpose of human rights is to inspire individuals to a new way of life and enable them to take care of themselves. In this article I propose that Mary Wollstonecraft puts forward a unique and timely conception of human rights in Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792).

Wollstonecraft a vindication