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Two THE ETHICALBACKGROUNDOF THE RIGHTS OFWOMEN Sarah Hutton 1. Human Rights and the Modern World Dictionary definitions are often historically revealing. The term "right" as used in the expression "human rights" is usually understood as some kind of entitlement or "privilege." The term has both legal and ethical connotations. According to the Oxford EnglishDictionary', a right is a "justifiable claim, on legal or moral grounds, to have or obtain something, or to act in a certain way" or "a legal, equitable or moral title or claim to the possession of property or authority."1 What is right is also just. The legality and moral value of rights is implied in the definition of "right" as "just or equitable treatment; fairness in decision; justice." My paper is concerned with the moral component of this elision of meanings. 2. Human Rights and History The importance of the eighteenth century in the history of human rights is almost a commonplace. While the terminology of rights has a strong legal component with a history reaching further back than the eighteenth century, the century of the American and French Revolutions, the political vocabulary of the eighteenth century takes over the terminology of rights. Arguments for the basis of rights in this period were naturalistic rather than conventional.Eighteenth-century discussion of such rights invoked not convention, but nature, a fact still registered in the OED definition of "right" as both "that which is morallyjust or due" and that which is "consonant with equity or the law of nature." Also, as with the rights of man, the eighteenth century is significant in the history of women's rights. In the eighteenth century, women began to use the language of rights in political discussion. The most famous book in English to employ this language is Mary Wollstonecraft's wr-text of modern feminism, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). The title aligns Wollstonecraft's discussion of rights firmly with Thomas Paine's Rights of Men (1791) as well as her own .4 Vindication of the Rights of Man (1790). Prior to Wollstonecraft, politically conscious women did not use the term "rights," never mind "women's rights." Yet their writings sound a number of common themes: women's education, marriage, and equality of the sexes. These go hand in hand with women's clear sense of their position as women and their 28 Sarah Hutton dissatisfaction with their social position. A question, therefore, for the historian is why the shift toward the language of rights. An ancillary question for researchers of women's history is whether the common themes reveal consciousness of a school of thought, either in the sense that the authors were aware of one another, or in the sense that parallels occur in the arguments they use.The last part of this question presents areas of philosophical interest. To explore these questions, I will discuss the writings of three women of the English Enlightenment: Damaris Cudworth Masham (1658-1708), Catherine Macaulay (1731-91), and Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-97). The interconnection of these women thinkers on which I focus is less personal than philosophical. As far as I know, neither Macaulay nor Wollstonecraft knew Lady Masham's writings, although Wollstonecraft was an admirer of Macaulay. I will argue that the ethical positions of Masham, Macaulay, and Wollstonecraft have much in common. Further, the only one of the three to discuss women's rights as such, Mary Wollstonecraft, founded her argument on ethics. 3. Damaris Masham (1658-1708) The daughter of the Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth and an intimate friend of John Locke, Lady Masham wrote two small books, A Discourse Concerning the Love of God (1696) and Occasional Thoughts in Reference to the Christian Life (1700), both published anonymously.2 The Lockean tenets of these publications show that she was one of the first writers to adopt the philosophical principles of Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding. In Occasional Thoughts, Lady Masham makes a case for the education of women, based on woman's role as mother, and consequently the first educator of the family. Masham links women's education closely to morality, but not in the sense that women need instruction in the precepts of moral conduct. Quite the contrary. Learning by rote, she argues, is no education and no foundation for moral conduct. True morality requires rational understanding of right and wrong. Women need to be educated so they can understand the principles of virtuous conduct by which they ought to live...

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