How can women’s rights be seen as a universal value rather than a Western value imposed upon the rest of the world? Addressing this question, Eileen Hunt Botting offers the first comparative study of writings by Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill. Although Wollstonecraft and Mill were the primary philosophical architects of the view that women’s rights are human rights, Botting shows how non-Western thinkers have revised and internationalized their original theories since the nineteenth century. Botting explains why this revised and internationalized theory of women’s human rights—grown out of Wollstonecraft and Mill but stripped of their Eurocentric biases—is an important contribution to thinking about human rights in truly universal terms.

This book focuses on women’s human rights in India. Drawing on case studies, it provides a clear overview of the key sources on gender and rights in the country. Further, it contextualizes women’s rights at the critical intersection of caste, religion and class, and analyses barriers to the realization of women’s human rights in practice. It also develops strategies for moving forward towards greater recognition, protection, promotion and fulfilment of women’s human rights in India. Drawing on critical pedagogical tools to analyse groundbreaking court cases, this book will be a key text in human rights studies. It will be indispensable to students, scholars and researchers of gender studies, sociology, law and human rights.

One of The Tablet's Books of the Year 2021 Portraits of Wollstonecraft collects and introduces 102 texts and artifacts that document Mary Wollstonecraft's public reception in art, literature, philosophy and feminist politics. Each portrait is a milestone in her depiction in culture. From William Blake's 1803 poem 'Mary' to Maggi Hambling's contentious sculpture in 2020, these sources validate the monumental place Wollstonecraft holds in not just one but many canons. The color images in Part I: Public Sightings trace her earliest reception in portraiture, from 1785 to 1804, with detailed analysis paired with each of the illustrations. Arranged chronologically, these landmark images are followed by the reviews of Wollstonecraft's books that appeared during her lifetime in Jamaica, Madrid, Amsterdam and London. Part II: Global Afterlives, examines her multifarious posthumous reception and features diary entries, excerpts from English-language biographies, letters, articles and introductions to her books. From Olive Schreiner's introduction to the Rights of Women composed in Cape Town in 1889 to the translator's preface to the first Czech edition of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1904, they showcase an impressive sweep of cross-cultural perspectives on her life and writings. The sources in Part III: Making an International Icon chart the depth and breadth of her legacies on a global scale. Feminists, philosophers, and social scientists-from Ruth Benedict to Virginia Sapiro to Amartya Sen-have written and spoken with conviction about the emotional power of looking into the eyes of the author of the Rights of Woman. This section includes major thinkers from across the 19th and 20th centuries who responded to Wollstonecraft's theories on virtue, love, gender, education, and rights: Mary Shelley, Emma Goldman, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Susan Moller Okin, Barbara Johnson and Martha Nussbaum. We see how Wollstonecraft gained traction in feminist politics, both as a philosopher and as a transcultural icon of the cause, beginning with English suffragist Millicent Fawcett's centennial edition of the Rights of Woman in 1891 and extending through feminist art in The Paris Review during the age of #MeToo. Assembling responses from Ireland, Continental Europe, North and South America and across the former colonies of the British Empire, this one-of-a-kind collection tells a compelling story of Wollstonecraft's watershed contributions to human rights debates throughout the modern and contemporary world.

A compelling portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft that shows the intimate connections between her life and work Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, first published in 1792, is a work of enduring relevance in women's rights advocacy. However, as Sylvana Tomaselli shows, a full understanding of Wollstonecraft’s thought is possible only through a more comprehensive appreciation of Wollstonecraft herself, as a philosopher and moralist who deftly tackled major social and political issues and the arguments of such figures as Edmund Burke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Adam Smith. Reading Wollstonecraft through the lens of the politics and culture of her own time, this book restores her to her rightful place as a major eighteenth-century thinker, reminding us why her work still resonates today. The book’s format echoes one that Wollstonecraft favored in Thoughts on the Education of Daughters: short essays paired with concise headings. Under titles such as “Painting,” “Music,” “Memory,” “Property and Appearance,” and “Rank and Luxury,” Tomaselli explores not only what Wollstonecraft enjoyed and valued, but also her views on society, knowledge and the mind, human nature, and the problem of evil—and how a society based on mutual respect could fight it. The resulting picture of Wollstonecraft reveals her as a particularly engaging author and an eloquent participant in enduring social and political concerns. Drawing us into Wollstonecraft’s approach to the human condition and the debates of her day, Wollstonecraft ultimately invites us to consider timeless issues with her, so that we can become better attuned to the world as she saw it then, and as we might wish to see it now.

A comprehensive analysis of Christian influences on Western family law from the first century to the present day.

For one hundred years women fashioned different dreams of equality, autonomy, and dignity; yet what is Canadian feminism? In Demanding Equality, Joan Sangster explores feminist thought and organizing from mid-nineteenth-century, Enlightenment-inspired writing to the multi-issue movement of the 1980s.She broadens our definition of feminism, and – recognizing that its political, cultural, and social dimensions are entangled – builds a picture of a heterogeneous movement often characterized by fierce internal debates. This comprehensive rear-view look at feminism in all its political guises encourages a wider public conversation about what Canadian feminism has been, is, and should be.

Interest in the contribution made by women to the history of philosophy is burgeoning. Intense research is underway to recover their works which have been lost or overlooked. At the forefront of this revival is Mary Wollstonecraft. While she has long been studied by feminists, and later discovered by political scientists, philosophers themselves have only recently begun to recognise the value of her work for their discipline. This volume brings together new essays from leading scholars, which explore Wollstonecraft's range as a moral and political philosopher of note, both taking a historical perspective and applying her thinking to current academic debates. Subjects include Wollstonecraft's ideas on love and respect, friendship and marriage, motherhood, property in the person, and virtue and the emotions, as well as the application her thought has for current thinking on relational autonomy, and animal and children's rights. A major theme within the book places her within the republican tradition of political theory and analyses the contribution she makes to its conceptual resources.

Over the course of the past twenty-five years, feminist theory has had a forceful impact upon the history of Western philosophy. The present collection of essays has as its primary aim to evaluate past women’s published philosophical work, and to introduce readers to newly recovered female figures; the collection will also make contributions to the history of the philosophy of gender, and to the history of feminist social and political philosophy, insofar as the collection will discuss women’s views on these issues. The volume contains contributions by an international group of leading historians of philosophy and political thought, whose scholarship represents some of the very best work being done in North and Central America, Canada, Europe and Australia.

A Theory of African Constitutionalism asks and seeks to answer why we need a new theoretical framework for African constitutionalism and how this could offer us better theoretical and practical tools with which to understand, improve, and assess African constitutionalism on its own terms. By locating constitutional studies in Africa within the experiences, interactions, and contestations of power and governance beginning in precolonial times, the book presents the development and transformation of African constitutional systems across time and place, along with the attendant constitutional designs and practices ranging from the nature and operation of the African state to its vertical and horizontal government structures, to its constitutional rights regime. This title offers both a theoretically and comparatively rich, historically and contextually informed, and temporally and spatially extensive account of the nature, travails, and incremental successes of African constitutionalism with detailed case studies from Nigeria, Ethiopia, and South Africa. A Theory of African Constitutionalism provides scholars, policymakers, governments, and constitution builders in Africa and beyond with new insights for reimagining the purpose, substance, and scope of constitutions and constitutionalism.

Appreciation of the context that advances or hinders the enjoyment of human rights would provide the basis for developing relevant strategies, including the use of concepts, laws and mechanisms to promote human rights protection. With this aim, this book facilitates reflection on the theory and practice of human rights. It deals with the historical evolution of human rights ideas, traces the evolution of international human rights law, examines the UN and other human rights protection mechanisms, discusses the growth of human rights NGOs and their contribution, and studies the changing contours of the human rights movement. Human Rights in Theory and Practice: An Overview of Concepts and Treaties includes detailed examination of the provisions of major human rights treaties. It is a revised and updated version of the 1998 publication, Human Rights Praxis: A Resource Book for Study, Action and Reflection, which was widely used by activists and other readers and was translated into Bahasa Indonesia, Thai and Tamil. The present book will similarly be of interest to human rights activists and scholars of politics, law, sociology, history, international relations and peace studies.