Mary Wollstonecraft, Human Rights, and the Care of the Self

In this article I propose that Mary Wollstonecraft puts forward an original and powerful conception of human rights in Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). Drawing on Michel Foucault’s later work on ethics and the care of the self, I argue that Wollstonecraft sees the great promise of human rights as helping individuals (and women in particular) to overcome their attachment to a culture that devastates any chance they may have to lead a happy, full life. Writing at the origin of the human rights 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.