Woman Suffrage and Women’s Rights

14. A Vindication of Women's Rights (1997)

A Vindication of Women’s Rights Of all the terms associated with what we now call feminism, the one that has been used for the longest time is women’s rights. It dates back to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when it signi fied a revolutionary approach to women’s nature and prospects, advocated by a tiny group of Anglo-American radicals and tainted by its association first with the French Revolution and then with socialism. Two hundred years later, the term women’s rights is used much more widely than in earlier centuries and its contemporary associations are far less terrifying.The current meaning of women’s rights leans to the more conventional and legalistic aspects of modern women’s struggle for freedom and equality and is sometimes invoked, in contrast to feminism, as a temperate call to change.1 I suggest a more precise meaning for women’s rights, which retains some of its original pointedness and militancy, yet reflects two hundred years of changing contexts, meanings, and goals for women’s advancement . When the term women’s rights first began to be used, especially in the United States, it had a very specific content: it was understood to be a critique of women’s dependence within marriage and a call for full individuality (or personality or autonomy) for women, regardless of marital status. The initial target of women’s rights protest was the legal doctrine of “coverture,” which determined that marriage removed from women the right to own and contract for property, transforming them instead into property. A classically liberal ideal that focused on the emancipation of the individual more than on the reorganization of society , the women’s rights perspective nonetheless opened up dramatic new aspects for human freedom, especially with respect to sexuality and reproduction , precisely because the individuals it sought to liberate were 14 283 women and the oppressive structures it targeted were so literally close to home. Traditionally, it has been assumed that coverture was a remnant of feudalism and was dismantled in the nineteenth century, but feminist legal scholars are beginning to rewrite this story. They have traced what Reva Siegel calls the modernization of coverture into the twentieth century and explored the continuing power of marital subordination to function as a framework for modern family life and the fundamental inequality of gender relations.2 I am interested in a similar project, although from a less singularly legal perspective and with more of a focus on women’s organized protests against their subordination. I treat marriage here not solely as a legal category but also not merely as a personal relationship, varying widely in character and satisfaction for its many participants; rather, I address marriage as an institution and a social structure, created and enforced not only by law but by economic forces, culture and other means as well and responsible for the creation and recreation of the relations between the sexes that we call gender.3 Within the history of feminism, then, the battle against coverture was also modernized and can be traced into the twentieth century and through to our own contemporary concerns. I suggest that protests against women’s subordination in and through marriage, first raised in the nineteenth century by those who gathered under the mantle of women’s rights to attack the laws and social conventions of coverture, can be linked to such twentieth-century feminist concerns as equality for women in the labor force, regardless of marital status, and sexual and reproductive freedom. Since the 1970s, the term women’s rights has become so identified with the campaign for the Equal Rights Amendment that it has lost its distinctive and still disruptive emphasis on the conflict between the institution of marriage and women’s personhood. I here trace the continuing radical possibilities to be found in protesting the institution of marriage as the root of women’s subordination and seek to reidentify these with the term women’s rights. Mary Wollstonecraft is generally recognized as the first major figure in the women’s rights tradition. Previous female polemicists had argued for 284 | A Vindication of Women’s Rights the necessity of transforming and elevating women’s status, but Wollstonecraft was the first to frame her arguments in terms of women’s rights, a term that reflected her identification with the French Revolution . Her program, a liberal...