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Rather, the underlying rationale for women’s rights – for civil and political freedom and equality as such – has shifted profoundly. But this shift has occurred subtly and over time, such that many now falsely assume that an unbroken line can be traced from those who today agitate for women’s rights to those who argued that women had the right to do so in the first place.
This shift can be detected in the changed meanings of words used in the mission statement of the Women’s March: words that have long represented American ideals such as “self-determination,” “liberty,” and “dignity,” even “love” (rendered “charity” in 1913) do not mean today what they signified in prior days. Today, these words connote an indeterminacy that would strike prior generations of women’s rights advocates as bereft of noble purpose, and ultimately, dangerous. Self-determination and liberty – for what end? Dignity – according to what measure? Love – as evident in what kinds of acts? The moral vacuity implicit in the present meanings of these age-old terms is something altogether new.
To be sure, the Woman Suffrage Procession in 1913 was itself not morally impeccable, and the women’s suffragist movement as a whole did not perfectly embody the noble ideals they depicted imaginatively that day. Although key leadership had drawn inspiration for their cause from participation in the abolitionist movement, other leaders wished the parade, and the movement too, to be racially segregated. The nation’s original sin had infected its people deeply, and the cause of women’s civil and political freedom and equality was sadly no exception.
Yet, the parade’s ideals, manifest in both word and dress, spoke a paramount truth to the nation and its leaders, the truth that had prevailed – albeit imperfectly – in the nation’s founding era, and then also among the Congress and ratifying states in the decades following the Civil War. The truth was this: the nation was founded upon and is ever measured by the moral proposition that all human beings are of equal dignity and worth.
The women suffragists had argued, like the black suffragists before them, that by excluding women from full participation in civil and political life, the nation was not living up to its own founding principles. More, the suffragists suggested, in the later years of their campaign especially, that by their engagement in the public realm, women would raise the moral tenor of politics and help a still young nation to embrace more faithfully those principles. The rancorous and occasionally violent reaction to the suffragists’ high-minded procession would prove the suffragists right that day. By 2017, one could no longer be so sure.
While much has been gained for women’s rights in the last century, something essential has been lost. It’s worth pondering what that something is, and whether it is worth recovering today.
Mining the intellectual history of the cause of women’s rights can shed light on how a philosophical and political principle – equal citizenship for women – has morphed into something that nearly contradicts its original moral vision, a vision first fully articulated by British philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman more than two centuries ago.
For Wollstonecraft, political freedom and legal equality were not ends in themselves but necessary means to higher human ends: the common human pursuit of intellectual and moral excellence.
The political and civil rights Wollstonecraft claimed for women in the late eighteenth century have been over time and with great struggle steadily secured in modern democracies around the world. In the West, however, the ennobling moral vision upon which she built her rights claims has largely been abandoned.
With the stark moral failures of so many of our political, economic, and cultural leaders, the sexual exploitation of women and children through pornography and sex trafficking, the relentless violence that increasingly targets the most vulnerable human beings, the abject poverty of so many even amid ever-growing wealth, and the materialism and consumerism that works to corrupt the soul of the West, Wollstonecraft’s substantive vision is needed now more than ever.
For Wollstonecraft, women’s capacity to reason, and thus to pursue reason to its proper ends – virtue (imitation of divine perfection), and wisdom (imitation of divine reason) – was the very foundation for women’s just claims to political freedom and equality. But not just for women: freedom as such was a necessary means to these higher human ends. It was the forgetfulness of these noble ends – on the part of men especially – that facilitated the subjugation and victimization of women, even in their own homes.
A freedom bereft of wisdom and virtue would reduce men to beasts, Wollstonecraft claimed. And this was especially true in intimate relations between men and women, the fertile well-spring of the domestic affections she recognized as the source of every public virtue. Chastity was then not to be abandoned in the pursuit of equality between the sexes, nor was this virtue specially required of women, as was the convention of the day. Rather, it was men who, in pursuing self-serving indulgence without habitual respect for women or a regard for the noble purposes of sex and the goods of shared domestic life, had too often failed to treat women with the dignity they deserved. Women, for their part, had too often acquiesced, fashioning themselves more pleasing to the eyes than strong in the mind. Indeed, the eighteenth-century philosopher identifies want of chastity in men as the single most consequential offense against women. Wollstonecraft’s radical vision of sexual integrity for both sexes – with a view toward virtuous friendships of mutual trust and collaboration – poses an especially striking challenge to a modern-day women’s movement shaped, since the 1970s, by a very different kind of sexual revolution.
