The Rights of Woman and the Equal Rights of Men

Introduction

A popular view of the history of political thought represents feminism as a late eighteenth-century development and an adaptation of the theory of the equal rights of men. A characteristic statement is found in Anthony C. Grayling’s Towards the Light in a chapter on “Slaves, Workers, Women,”

The story of the struggle for women’s rights goes back to isolated but remarkable voices in the seventeenth century and before . . . but the first major feminist voice belongs to Mary Wollstonecraft, whose A Vindication of the Rights of Woman marks an epoch in the cause. ¹

Coming after the French declaration of the rights of man, Wollstonecraft’s tract, like Olympe de Gouges’s Les droits de la femme, is taken to represent a decisive turn, extending a tradition of political philosophy, which previously had nothing to do with them, to include women. ² Influential feminist historians have also accepted that the doctrine of abstract universal rights was developed by men and have therefore questioned its validity in the face of bodily difference. ³ Grayling’s history of the rise of liberty charts the defense of religious toleration through the works of Desiderius Erasmus, Sebastian Castellio, John Milton, and John Locke. He does mention marriage, and he implies that it is Milton’s 1644 defense of divorce that stands at the origin of the later transformation of marriage from a contract for reproduction to a bond of companionship. ⁴ Women only enter the story with Wollstonecraft, so that earlier women’s literary and political interventions must be presumed to have been as ineffectual as Simone de Beauvoir assumed, when she dismissed earlier female defenders of women as “isolated individuals” who had “protested against the harshness of their destiny” but were unable to achieve anything without male authorization. ⁵

Women are even more thoroughly absent from Quentin Skinner’s influential Foundations of Modern Political Thought. He highlights the masculinity of the early Italian republics and explains how Cicero’s representation of virtus as the highest kind of excellence, along with his emphasis on the need for rhetoric to instruct and incite virtue, is extolled by Petrarch and results in the revival of the vir virtutis. Augustine’s insistence on humanity’s sinful nature and incapacity to deserve grace, so dominant during the medieval period, comes to be replaced with a new renaissance optimism that virtue and excellence can and should be achieved in this world, through the acquisition of “honour, glory and worldly fame.” ⁶ Skinner’s second volume, like Grayling’s, traces reformation developments, through Martin Luther and John Calvin to George Buchanan, focusing on Protestant challenges to the right of princes to enforce religious belief, and the development of works asserting citizen’s right to conscientious resistance to a monarch. ⁷

Even scholars who have worked on historical women have tended to endorse the standard, historical account. ⁸ Margaret King concluded her 1991 discussion of Christine de Pizan (1364–1430), Moderata Fonte (1555–92), and Mary Astell (1666–1731) by noting that they were social conservatives.

They challenged the tyranny of men but not the tyranny of class or potentate. Within the structures their critique left undisturbed there was no place for women: no role for women in cities where only men could be citizens or kings. Until those ancient structures fell to male assault in the name of civil rights and natural law in the revolutions of the late eighteenth century, no truly modern feminist claims could be made. ⁹

Certainly, if one reads the history of political thought we have inherited, this is the impression that results. But that history ignores the growth, during the period surveyed by Skinner, of critiques of patriarchal marriage developed by women, which arose in tandem with the growing critique of monarchy. What follows traces the development of this contestation over marriage and argues that it played an underappreciated role in the dissemination of the language of rights and demands for equal liberty.

At the beginning of the period surveyed, both the state and the family were patriarchal, both monarchy and marriage were assumed to be political while political and natural subordination were not sharply distinguished. Thomas Hobbes, for instance, followed patriarchal assumptions in identifying “a great Family” with “a little Monarchy” but was original in grounding authority, in both cases, on consent rather than procreation. ¹⁰ Actual monarchies incorporated a nested structure of hierarchies, based on inheritance and custom, in which the monarch was represented as the paternal head of the realm. A state, like an extended family, was represented as unified through ties of loyalty, fidelity, and natural relationships of status and subordination.

Reigning queens fitted anomalously into this structure. Just as widows (at least in Europe) could become heads of households and a daughter could become heir to an estate or duchy, a woman could, in certain circumstances, become regent or monarch. In doing so, her status as ruler of men conflicted with the general subjection of women in marriage. Thus, at the beginning of the period in question, arguments for women’s capacity to act as regents, or to inherit as reigning queens, attacked the prejudices—according to which women were tainted by sin and thus lacking in virtue and prudence—that were generally used to justify both women’s natural subjection within marriage and their exclusion from succession. Views initially developed to justify the right of women to rule as queens, in certain circumstances, thus undermined the case for women’s subjection within marriage. ¹¹ This is one clear sense in which the claimed rights of women, their right to rule countries, preceded any claim for the equal rights of men. Whether this already counted as a form of “feminism” is a moot point, depending on one’s definition. It is nevertheless clear that arguments intended to establish women’s right to be sovereign queens undermined Aristotelian justifications for women’s lifelong subjection to men and ultimately undermined the assumptions used to justify wives’ subjection to husbands. Women’s insistence on their equality in prudence and virtue resulted in a critique of male tyranny, both as fathers and as husbands, and helped transform the representation of ideal marriage from a form of monarchical rule into a contract based on inclination and loving friendship between equals.

Initially, both marriage and the state were represented as political and patriarchal. Now, both marriage and the state are represented as (ideally) egalitarian. During the intervening period, arguments for the incompatibility of women’s equal capacity for virtue with their justified arbitrary subjection within marriage mirrored those that proposed that men’s equal capacity for virtue was incompatible with their arbitrary subjection to other men. The hypothesis of this essay is that the popularity of the former arguments, in works often penned by women, fostered the transition from the aristocratic Republicanism of the fifteenth century into those democratic forms, established by the end of the eighteenth century. This has been obscured because, during the intervening period, the political character of marriage began to be denied, and economic factors were often assumed to be the fundamental drivers of political change. Both trends are manifest in the assumption that the influence of works, written by women, which focused on sexual relations, was negligible. In order avoid the marital implications of women’s egalitarian arguments, male republicans, from the seventeenth century, turned to representing marriage as private and apolitical. Subsequently, political theorists overlooked the political import of the marriage relation and dealt almost exclusively with property, class, and men’s relationship to the state. ¹² Once one removes the blinkers that have prevented the recognition that historical works penned by women are political, one sees that arguments for women’s right to rule, and the application of these arguments to women’s justified relationship to fathers and husbands, developed earlier than—or at least as early as—the doctrine of the equal rights of men. This much is incontestable. More boldly, the essay proposes that just as it was natural, initially, to treat both marriage and the state as similarly hierarchical, so too rejecting hierarchy in marriage encouraged an image of the state as equally a compact among friends. The analogy between domestic and state government is commonplace of the period, and the language of tyranny and contestation in marriage ubiquitous in comic drama. ¹³ Alternatively, universal benevolence might reign in both spheres. Thus, it is no accident that a female republican, Catharine Macaulay (1731–91)—a beneficiary of the discourse promoting women’s equality—was inspired by the promise of a utopian commonwealth, in which the common good would be the common care, and took up the task of ensuring that “the ideas of the Levellers passed into the radical tradition of the seventeen-sixties and played their part in preparing the American and French Revolutions.” ¹⁴ A long history of women’s contestation of their rights had prepared the way for her defense of the equal rights of men, and she would, in turn, inspire Wollstonecraft to pen her Vindication of the Rights of Woman. ¹⁵

Christine de Pizan and a Woman’s Right to Rule

Let us begin with Christine de Pizan. She was writing at a moment in history when the question of women’s capacity to rule was of crucial import. The recent exclusion of female heirs from the crown of France was being bolstered by a tendentious new reading of the old Salic Law, as well as by all the standard Aristotelian and biblical explanations of women’s moral weakness, lack of prudence, and intellectual incompetence. Such arguments stood in the way of the queen Isabeau of Bavaria effectively exercising powers of regency during her husband’s periods of insanity, interfering with one possible solution to the political crises brought on by this madness. ¹⁶ Christine’s major defense of women, her 1405 Le Livre de la cité des dames (The Book of the City of Ladies), was composed during this crisis and attacked the misogyny of the male authorities head on, challenging the tradition that women suffer from moral and intellectual defects, which justified their exclusion from political authority.

As is well known, Christine’s origins were Italian, and this gave her unusual access to contemporary Italian works, in particular Dante, whose influence is most notable in Le Chemin de logue etude (The long path of learning). ¹⁷ She describes in her L’Advision Cristine (Christine’s Vision) how she came to love wisdom and to recognize that without study she could never aspire to a knowledge of philosophy. She consequently educated herself through reading, first works of history, and then the poets, whose style delighted and came naturally to her. ¹⁸ Her philosophy hovers at the margin of the medieval and renaissance world views. Augustine is a persistent presence and the figure of philosophy, who consoles her in L’Advision, reminds her that the tribulations of this world should be counted as nothing in comparison to the promise of paradise, which sinful humanity can never deserve. ¹⁹ Yet, at the same time, she has absorbed sufficient classical learning to subscribe to the view that virtue is the highest kind of excellence and that knowledge is necessary for virtue. She reminds her reader that Aristotle says that just as it is natural for the soul to govern the body, so it is natural for the wise to govern the ignorant. ²⁰ In her political Livre de Paix (Book of Peace), intended to educate the dauphin, she assumes that what is to be aspired to is virtue and repeats Cicero’s dictum, that virtue is self-sufficient and should be the basis of living nobly and well. ²¹ Seneca is also quoted for the idea that virtue is right reason, from which prudence follows, which rewards men with a nobility that is greater than that inherited from a well-established family line. ²² These classical tropes are, nevertheless, given a Christian eudaemonist inflection, for philosophy tells her that “nothing is worthy of being called ‘happy’ if it is not perpetual,” and so it is only virtue and good conscience that can make us truly happy, and these reside in the one thing that Augustine tells us we should love, which is God. ²³

In the Cité des dames, Christine questions reason in relation to the purported saying of Cicero, that a man should not serve a woman, because to do so would be to debase himself, since the higher should not serve the lower. Reason then teaches her that it is the man or woman in whom the greatest virtue resides, who is highest, because excellence lies in the perfection of conduct and virtue. ²⁴ In this work she sets out to demonstrate that the sexes are equal in their capacity for virtue and are equally members of the same species. Woman is not a defective man, but a sexually somewhat different member of the same species, fully intended by God and equally endowed by Him with an immaterial soul and capacity for salvation. ²⁵ It is the soul, not the body, that is made in God’s image. Thus, it is not inappropriate that women should rule countries, in some circumstances, since they are equally capable of excellence, exemplified by virtue and prudence. Refuting the Aristotelian heresy that the female is a defective male, she places the mulier virtuta by the side of the vir virtutis as equally a potential citizen of the city of God and actual citizen of the terrestrial city.

One could argue that Christine was doing no more than insisting on Christian orthodoxy, against ancient, Aristotelian error, a gloss that she herself suggests. For it was Christian doctrine that grace was extended equally to both sexes, and since, from the Augustinian perspective, virtue only exists at the level of grace, Christian orthodoxy accepted that the sexes are equally virtuous. ²⁶ But she subtly transforms this orthodoxy by defending the active life and by adopting elements of the ancient idea of virtue, which ties it to knowledge and excellence in active practical works. Thus, in her advice to princesses, Le Livre des Trois Vertus (The Book of Three Virtues), she assumes that women can acquire virtue through education and good works, so the equality she envisages is not just an equal capacity to receive salvation as a gift of grace, but an equal capacity for excellence, obtained through self-discipline and wise judgment. ²⁷ This is a doctrine of the equality of the sexes, which is independent of the idea that all men are equal. For it is quite compatible with the view that not all humans are equally capable of achieving excellence and with the Aristotelian position that the wise and virtuous rightly govern the ignorant and base. ²⁸ It claims, however, that the capacity for excellence and virtue is as equally distributed among women as it is among men, and this has implications for the relationship between husbands and wives, which was given new impetus by the rediscovery of more of the Platonic corpus, during the Renaissance, and the growing emphasis on the importance of individual conscience and the guide of inner light, during the Reformation. The political significance, for the institution of marriage, of arguments intended to establish the right of queens to rule is already remarked on by Jean Bodin, who objects to the acceptance of reigning queens on the grounds that men who subject themselves to a woman in the state will soon be ruled by women in the family. ²⁹

Marguerite of Navarre and the Elevation of Married Love

There are latent Platonist hints in Christine de Pizan’s oeuvre, transmitted to her through Augustine and by one of her favorite works, Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, but the rediscovery of many more Platonic texts, during the fifteenth century, resulted in a new authority for women’s intellectual equality with men and a new configuration of the relationship between heterosexual love and virtue, quite different from that found in classical authors. ³⁰ The Christian condemnation of homosexuality meant that the doctrine of love in Plato’s Symposium was generally given a heterosexual twist. The result was a reevaluation of heterosexual love, which built on and complemented the position developed by Christine, according to which the sexes are equally capable of acquiring virtue. This is particularly evident in the Heptameron, written by Marguerite of Navarre (1492–1549), whose mother had been educated at the French court, where Christine’s works directed at women had retained their influence. ³¹ In the Symposium, Diotima represents heterosexual love and biological reproduction as manifestations of the desire to reproduce beauty but also as inferior to the kind of love that exists among men. ³² Men come to recognize through their love of the beauty and virtue of a male lover that what they really love is the form of virtue, goodness, and beauty, inherent in the individual, and they then aspire to reproduce these qualities through the establishment of laws and cities. The neo-Platonism that one finds in the Heptameron transposes this idea into a heterosexual and Christian register, so that the pure love of an individual of the opposite sex can be a step on the path to the love of transcendent beauty and goodness, now identified with God. Indeed, Marguerite suggests that a woman’s love is in general closer to this pure love than is a man’s, since a man’s love is often merely carnal. ³³ Her neo-Platonism results in the elevation of the status of marriage, for rather than it being represented as a second-best remedy for fornication, available to those for whom the complete rejection of sexuality is too difficult, it becomes a legitimate pathway from creaturely love to love of the divine. In her theology, this renaissance neo-Platonism coexists with the reformation revival of a strict Augustinian emphasis on grace, found in Calvin, whom she protected. This is most evident in her Mirror of the Sinful Soul and in the posthumously published Les Prisons, in which the soul, having aspired to worldly glory and learning, comes to recognize its incurable ignorance and dependence on God’s grace. ³⁴

Despite their coexistence within Marguerite’s works, neo-Platonism and early Protestantism were not very natural allies, and during the following century these two doctrines develop independently, though in ways that continue to impact the understanding of marriage. Heterosexist neo-Platonism opened up the question of the possibility of and conditions for virtue friendship between the sexes. Protestantism raised the question of the limits of a husband’s authority over his wife’s conscience. Protestantism posited the spiritual equality of believers in ways that fostered secular assertions of political liberty, as emphasized by Skinner and Grayling. Yet, statements such as Milton’s, “all men naturally were born free, being the image and resemblance of God himself,” equally encouraged wives to claim confessional independence from husbands, a development that these theorists ignore. ³⁵

The “rights of man, considered as a free agent”

Astell’s language recognizes the distinction between notions of liberty that equate it with power—as does Hobbes, for whom liberty is the ability to achieve ends, free of constraint—and the Platonic/Stoic notions of liberty, thought of as rational self-government, and its political cousin, which deems government to be arbitrary when not constrained by laws that conform to reason and morality. As she says, arbitrary power is an improper method of governing rational and free agents, and this anticipates William Blackstone’s mid-eighteenth-century claim,

The absolute rights of man, considered as a free agent, endowed with discernment to know good from evil, and with power of choosing those measures which appear to him to be most desirable, are usually summed up in one general appellation, and denominated the natural liberty of mankind. This natural liberty consists properly in a power of acting as one thinks fit, without any constraint or control, unless by the law of nature: being a right inherent in us by birth, and one of the gifts of God to man at his creation, when he endued him with the faculty of free will. ⁶⁰

Here the negative element, freedom from “constraint or control” is limited by the law of nature, which guides and constrains the choices of a free, moral agent. This right to natural liberty, or moral self-determination, was already claimed by Leveller women. Equally, Astell and her female contemporaries responded to the marriage sermon of a Reverend Sprint, who had argued that wives owed their husbands a complete and unquestioning obedience by asserting wives’ right to liberty of conscience. ⁶¹ This positive concept of liberty differs from the masculine neo-Roman concept, emphasized by Skinner and Pettit, in that what is claimed is not the equal might and vigor of arms-bearing men, nor the equality of natural power, hypothesized by Hobbes, but the equal status of individuals as rational, moral agents. As we have seen, this kind of equality was already asserted to hold between the sexes by Christine. Both Christine and Astell assume that this kind of equality is compatible with monarchical or husbandly rule. This essay hypothesizes that the transition from neo-Roman republicanism, within which citizenship and liberty is a status restricted to arms-bearing men, to the modern, democratic, enlightenment concept of liberty, according to which political liberty ought to be extended to all reasoning humans, is as much encouraged by texts focusing on the rejection of this compatibility in the husbandly case as by those focusing on the state. The incompatibility of the exercise of women’s moral self-determination with the absolute subjection, implied by contemporary marriage law, is insisted on by Astell and Scudéry. A like incompatibility underpins both objections to slavery and claims for women’s political rights at the end of the eighteenth century. But the influence of arguments relating to women’s status in marriage on those for universal political equality is complex. Astell, since she does not want to undermine passive obedience to the state, recommended the avoidance of marriage for women who would preserve their personal freedom. Scudéry, by contrast, while denying that husbands should be monarchs, moved in the direction of representing equal marriage as an apolitical, sentimental friendship; an implicit rejection of the political character of marriage, later explicitly elaborated by Rousseau.

In his discussion of the new negative concept of liberty developed by Hobbes, Skinner gives the impression that, historically, it supersedes the Platonic/Stoic concept of liberty as rational self-government. ⁶² However, both are found in later authors, particularly in the works of eighteenth-century, democratic republicans. In the influential republican histories and tracts, published by Catharine Macaulay, it is the positive, Platonic/Stoic concept that predominates. She claims, “the true love of Liberty is founded in virtue.” ⁶³ She quotes, for instance, a Mr. Pierpont, who claimed that “the best lovers of their Laws and Liberty, the most honest, suffer most by an unjust judge; they most oppose his vices.” ⁶⁴ She speaks of “governments formed on principles which promise the equal distribution of power and liberty” attaching “to their service every generous inclination which subsists in the human character.” ⁶⁵ Her reasoning indicates a division among natural law theorists, which hinges on assumptions about human nature. According to Hobbes, Bernard Mandeville, and David Hume, our natural impulses are not fundamentally benevolent. Morality and politics involve systems of conventions adopted for reasons of rational self-interest, in order to foster social coordination. Such theorists are represented by Macaulay as adopting “the interested scheme.” Against such schemes she promotes “the self denying dictates of equity and justice,” which involve that “moderation in regard to self interest which the principles of a general benevolence inspire.” ⁶⁶ Her use of the phrase “general benevolence” suggests the influence of an understanding of natural law promoted by writers such as Richard Cumberland—whose De legibus naturae disquisition philosophica had originally appeared in 1671—who associate the law of nature with the benefits of benevolence. In his work Cumberland had attempted to prove that there is a law of nature, which implies the universal precept that

the greatest Benevolence, of each and every one individual Agent in the rational System, fully exercised and exerted towards all, essentially forms the happiest State which each (single Person of Individual) from his own free Capacities and Powers is capable of: which (Benevolence) is moreover, the only Method or means indispensably necessary, towards effectually promoting the happiest State, which each can possibly enjoy. ⁶⁷

An English translation of this Latin treatise was the basis of James Tyrrell’s A Brief Disquisition of the Law of Nature, and two other translations had appeared during the eighteenth century, making Macaulay’s familiarity with the work plausible. ⁶⁸ Other contemporary natural law theorists, such as Catharine Trotter Cockburn (1679–1749), also assumed, as Cumberland and Macaulay did, that God had created us as ethical creatures whose happiness consists in acting in accordance with a rational, benevolent morality. ⁶⁹

In her Treatise on the Immutability of Moral Truth, Macaulay makes abundantly clear that, like these theorists, the rationality that she has in mind is not simply rational self-interest but is rather the self-fulfillment of a rational, moral agent. ⁷⁰ Her account of freedom of will is close to that of the Stoics and to that developed earlier in the century by Samuel Clarke, whom she discusses with approval. She identifies freedom with “moral necessity,” arguing that to be free is not to act arbitrarily, nor to be subject to physical compulsion, but to be caused to act by one’s rational judgment of what is best. The unfree are slaves to their passions. What may “be esteemed the self-good of a liberal and noble minded creature,” is “to enjoy the higher felicities which arise from the exercise of the exalted virtues.” ⁷¹ The acts and principles required by these virtues are assumed to be knowable on the basis of reason, and they include caring for the interests of others. In refuting those who believe that “the rule of interest is the only criterion by which we are to judge of the nature of virtue,” she points to the unenviable situation of women and children in those places where it was assumed that in “the word might, was contained every idea of right.” ⁷² She declares that justice will be misunderstood by any who believe that

it is agreeable to the wisdom and goodness of an all-perfect Being to form two species of creatures of equal intelligence and similar feelings, and consequently capable of an equal degree of suffering under injuries, and should consign one of these species as a kind of property to a different species of their fellow-creatures, not endowed with any qualities of mind sufficient to prevent the enormous abuse of such a power. ⁷³

Although this comment is made in a context in which she is referring to men and women, it is noteworthy that she also extends her reasoning to include other species of animals. ⁷⁴ Macaulay thus assumes that equality in capacity to suffer implies being an object of moral concern, whereas equality in intellect is not justly compatible with arbitrary, political subjection. She refuses to accept the natural inferiority of women as moral agents, thus insisting on their right to equal marriage and the same education and independence as men. Consequently, she rejects Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s attempt to deny that marriage is a political relationship, condemning him as making a “moral person of the union of the two sexes, which for contradiction and absurdity, outdoes every metaphysical riddle that was ever formed in the schools.” ⁷⁵

Locke is an important source for Macaulay’s acceptance that moral truths are rationally demonstrable, but she resolutely denies his assumption that wifely subjection is natural. ⁷⁶ Most early republicans agreed with Locke, though the Leveller John Lilburne may have been an exception, for in The Freeman’s Freedom Vindicated he asserted that all men and women were by nature equal and alike in power and dignity, authority, and majesty. ⁷⁷ More generally, however, it was assumed that the commonwealth was a masculine affair. For instance, Margaret Cavendish, in her Sociable Letters (1664), proposes that their differing political allegiances should not sour the friendship between two women, for, she says, women are excluded from meddling with governments and are “not bound to State or Crown . . . we hold no Offices, nor bear we any Authority therein; we are accounted neither Useful in Peace, nor Serviceable in War, and if we be not Citizens in the Commonwealth I see no reason why we should be Subjects to the Commonwealth.” ⁷⁸ Hilda Smith reads this passage as showing that Cavendish recognized that, in general, political theory is grounded in a “false universal.” Yet, it is noteworthy that Cavendish is writing in the context of the recent Republican experiment, and it is particularly in a commonwealth, where citizenship depends on active participation in public affairs, that women are not deemed citizens, and so their status as subjects might be questioned. Neither Christine nor Astell had thought to question women’s status as citizens, since they believed that women, like men, were subordinates in a hierarchy of allegiances culminating in the crown. Citizenship in monarchies neither depends on, nor gives a right to, active political engagement, so the subordination of the good wife can be taken to be a model of citizenship. But when citizenship is conferred only on those who are arms-bearing men, or independent property owners, women become marginal within the polity. The male republican Rousseau made active, military participation necessary for full citizenship. His female contemporary, Macaulay, believed that rational, moral agency was sufficient.

Macaulay’s stance, I argue, derives from, or at the very least is influenced by, the contemporaneous development in ways independent of economic factors and the male case for republicanism, of the reimagining of marriage as equal friendship, grounded in the moral and intellectual equality of the sexes. Central to this development are the works of Madeleine de Scudéry and later female novelists and playwrights. The relative independence of this discourse from republican theories of government can be seen in the fact that Scudéry actually makes it a virtue of monarchies, from women’s point of view, that their status within them was higher than that accorded them within republics. Writing in the aftermath of the Fronde, the unsuccessful attempt by the French to limit the absolute power of their monarchs, she became disillusioned with republican-inspired, popular insurrection and turned her talents toward transforming the relationship between women and men. It is no accident that Clelie is subtitled “histoire romaine” and follows the story of Brutus and the Tarquins, so central to neo-Roman republicanism, while subverting its message by questioning the outcomes of rebellion in ways not dissimilar to Astell. Unlike her later English admirer, Scudéry places far more emphasis on ideal male/female relationships and “a woman’s right to choose” her husband, based on merit and inclination, than does Astell. ⁷⁹ Her very popular novels and later moral conversations bring together the themes of Platonic love, friendship between the sexes, and the possibility of egalitarian marriage. Arguably they were far more significant for the development of the concept of equal marriage than was Milton’s discussion of divorce, and they explicitly address the question of how the moral and intellectual equality of the sexes might be made compatible with marriage. Arguably, however, like contemporary male Whigs, Scudéry can be read as denying that the state and marriage are to be equally understood as political. Unlike Whigs, she accepts the inherited, political subordination of all to the legitimate authority of an absolute monarch. But she transforms the ideal relationship between a husband and wife into an amorous, gallant, and implicitly apolitical, virtue friendship.

In various discourses, Scudéry takes up the neo-Platonic themes, found in Marguerite of Navarre, in order to develop an ideal of glory as residing in an equal, loving, virtue friendship. In others, she discusses tender friendship between the sexes. In yet others, she explores the ways in which such a tender friendship, based on respect for the other’s good qualities, can transform into love. Sometimes, in particular in the story of Sappho, she doubts whether the moral and intellectual equality of the sexes is compatible with marriage, which she represents as tyranny. At others, she explores an idea, that is also found in Cavendish’s letter and adapted by Rousseau, that virtuous women in fact govern men through love and affection. ⁸⁰ Ideal marriage was coming to be seen as a relationship between moral equals, based on love and inclination, and novels such as Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa were disseminating and domesticating both the neo-Platonic image of the transformative moral potential of a virtuous woman’s sexually modest love and the tyranny of forced and unequal marriage. Already at the beginning of the eighteenth century a female Whig, such as Catharine Trotter Cockburn, could bring together the language of Scudéry with that of Locke, as she does in her play The Revolution of Sweden, in which the relationship between the central female character, Constantia, and her husband, Arwide, is represented as virtuous friendship. ⁸¹ Nevertheless, Constantia, having been tricked into believing in the treachery of her husband, also acts as a virtuous republican citizen and reveals her husband’s supposed treachery to the leader of the revolution. Like Scudéry, Trotter Cockburn might be read as making a distinction between the state and the family and as assuming that tender friendship is not a political relationship so that ideal marriage does not imply political subjection to a husband. More plausibly, she sees marriage and the state as different forms of political friendship, with sometimes conflicting demands. Her heroine has her own direct and equal relationship to the state and its political leader. In letters written to her own husband to be, during their courtship, Trotter Cockburn uses the names of these characters “Arwide” and “Constantia” to court her somewhat reluctant friend, who (although we don’t have his side of the correspondence) seems concerned that marriage and love of the creature is incompatible with love of the Creator. ⁸² She, however, “is not of his opinion, that pleasure is inconsistent with a serious frame of mind, much less that the satisfaction, which proceeds from friendship joined with tenderness (which is indeed what Constantia means by pleasure) is unsuitable to your design [of living an exemplary life].” ⁸³ In her language one finds terms from Scudéry combined with Lockean political theory and the relationship of marriage as equal tender, friendship between the sexes assumed to be appropriate, within a republic fully committed to the assumption that equality in moral status is incompatible with justified subjection. Nevertheless, Scudéry’s ambiguously political, tender friendship became, in Rousseau’s hands, a method to sweeten women’s marital subjection by hijacking the neo-Platonic trope of women’s moral influence on carnal men in the manner that offended Macaulay.

If one considers only works in which the citizens’ relationship to their sovereign is described and contested, then the standard account, according to which “the idea that all men were equal came before the idea that men and women were equal” has some plausibility. However, women’s immediate political subjection was to their husbands, not to the state. Once one takes political history to include women’s contestation of their moral and political subjection to men in marriage, it can equally be claimed that the idea that women and men are moral and intellectual equals developed prior to or, at least, in tandem with the idea that all men are equal. Early republican theory was not grounded in the general equality of men. Florence and Venice were aristocratic republics in which political rights were restricted to a select group, possessing the power to prevent their own subjection to other men. While such men abhorred the idea of being slaves, they accepted that the servitude of others, in particular women, was grounded in nature. Modern egalitarian theories reject this proposition. Prior to the rise of republicanism in Europe, a discourse had developed that challenged women’s moral inferiority in the name of women’s right to rule. Belief in women’s moral equality with men was then the basis for the rejection of their arbitrary political subjection within marriage. Aristocratic republicanism is transformed into modern, liberal, democratic republicanism once this argument is generalized and equal moral capacity is taken to confer a right to political equality, grounded in the “rights of man, considered as a free agent” as established by the middle of the eighteenth century. Bit by bit, as a result of the Christian eudaemonist tradition, the Christian doctrine of women’s equality as recipients of God’s grace grafted onto Roman civic ideas, resulting in the enlightenment, democratic republicanism that lay latent in the hybridization. Or, to put matters simply, the development of relations of equality within the family fostered the development of equality in the state.

This is not to say that the acceptance of marriage as virtue friendship immediately resulted in the acceptance of women’s political equality. Clearly it did not. Many men and women denied that marriage and the state are equally political institutions and fell back on the existence of an apolitical private sphere. ⁸⁴ This position was developed, with great sentimentality, by Rousseau. But those, like Macaulay, who understood both marriage and the state to be political, recognized that equality in moral agency and capacity for virtue implied not just a right to equal marriage but also a universal right to political equality and liberty in the state.

Macaulay and the “Equal Rights of Men”

I will conclude with an observation that I find highly suggestive. The exact phrase “the equal rights of men” was introduced into the corpus of English political writing by Macaulay in passages from the third volume of her History of England from the Accession of James I. ⁸⁵ There it is firmly associated with “the independency and free agency of man.” As a woman who had benefitted from earlier defenses of women’s moral and intellectual equality with men, she did not feel the need to belabor that point. Instead, she turned to extolling the virtues of the English Republicans, interpreting their republicanism, perhaps incorrectly, as not limited to the vir virtutis of neo-Roman theory, but implicitly, at least, as extending to all reasonable moral agents, thus implying the equal rights of humanity as we now interpret them. As mentioned, she was the immediate inspiration for Wollstonecraft’s political writings. ⁸⁶ For, while Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) did precede her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the equal rights of men and women, grounded in their equal status as morally accountable agents rather than their equal power, on which she insisted, had been emphasized by Macaulay in the Letters on Education (1790), which Wollstonecraft had reviewed immediately prior to penning her response to Burke. Women’s claim for equal status, as morally accountable agents, stretched back as least as far as Christine de Pizan. What differentiated the later from the earlier writer was that the theory that moral accountability implied spiritual equality had been transformed into the general principle that moral accountability should also underpin equal, political rights for all.

As mentioned, neo-Roman republicanism did not extend liberty to all those who resided within the city. Like its Roman precursor it was aristocratic or oligarchic rather than democratic. Freedom was contrasted to slavery, but the existence of servants and slaves was accepted, and women were taken to fit naturally within these classes, even when nominally free. When the first opponents of slavery arose, during the eighteenth century, they used a new argument, clearly formulated by Catharine Macaulay’s friend James Ramsay, who says in his call for the abolition of slavery and account of the horrible treatment of the slaves,

I will not insult the reader’s understanding, by an attempt to demonstrate it to be an object of importance, to gain to society, to reason and religion, half a million of our kind, equally with us adapted for advancing themselves in every art and science, that can distinguish man from man, equally with us made capable of looking forward to and enjoying futurity. ⁸⁷

Here one sees, extended to the situation of slaves, an argument from equal capacity for moral improvement and salvation, to an equal right to self-determination, which had been so important in the history of women’s assertion of their liberties. Republicans had always contrasted liberty with slavery, without extending liberty to all. ⁸⁸ It is the argument that women had insisted on, in aspiring to transform their political relationship with men, that naturally universalizes. The transformation of men’s relationships with women that took place in Europe, from the sixteenth century, resulted in the reimagination of marriage. What was once a relationship of political subordination became an equal, tender, virtue friendship. This occurred in the West contemporaneously with the transformation of monarchies into modern, democratic republics, in which political relationships are imagined as holding among equals and friends. The claim of this essay is that the basic premise of the first transformation—that men’s greater power could not justify female subjection—was grounded in two more basic premises, women’s equal worth and capacity as ethical subjects, and the assumption that equal moral capacity, positive liberty, was not consistent with blind obedience but implied the kind of equality of liberty and respect found in virtuous friendship. This last inference, from equal moral capacity to equality of liberty, provides the basic assumption of liberal, democratic republicanism and was operating in early defenses of the rights of women to more egalitarian marriage, before the language of the equal rights of men proliferated.

There is nevertheless a significant element of truth in the view that the French Revolution was a watershed moment in the struggle for women’s rights. Because the immediate site of women’s political subjection had been domestic, few women had directly considered their relationship to the state. Even Gouge’s Equal Rights of Women concentrated on a new marriage contract rather than on political representation. Rights to respect and an equal relationship within marriage did not immediately transform into equal political rights. Indeed, rather rapidly, the counter-narrative of the naturalness of wifely subjection, sweetened by neo-Platonic elements, as characterized by Rousseau, became dominant. ⁸⁹ New virulent biological arguments for women’s natural inferiority grew up to replace outdated Aristotelian and biblical authorities. Women’s retreat to domesticity was undoubtedly helped by the fact that female authors, who had opposed wifely subjection, had replaced it with ambiguously political images of equal, tender, virtue friendship, and the virtue they imagined encompassed sexual modesty—the care of children, spouse, and family. ⁹⁰ Even as women campaigned for and achieved political rights, the myth that marriage and the family lay outside the public, political sphere and were governed by love and natural, affective relationships lived on. ⁹¹ The radical implications of the argument from equal moral capacity to the injustice of arbitrary domination and the right to equality of liberty were too much for most men and for many women to accept. The apolitical character of marriage then reemerged in the new class politics developed by socialists, which no longer assumed the family to be natural but treated it as an epiphenomenon of changing economic relations among men. Thus, political theorists have ignored the debate over women’s status as wives, which emerged at least as early as, and arguably earlier than, claims for the equal rights of men. They have failed to notice the existence of an independent tradition of sexual politics or its wider influence. While marriage was imagined as private and effective, works penned by women were consigned to romantic literature rather than read as integral to the history of political thought. Once marriage is restored as a site of political contestation, one sees that the debate over equal rights developed along far more complex trajectories than a simple progress from the rights of men to the equal rights of women, as popularly presumed.

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