From revolutionary Paris to Nootka Sound to Saint-Domingue: The international politics and prejudice behind Wollstonecraft’s theory of the rights of humanity,1789–91

Wollstonecraft and the rise of the French Revolution, 1788–90

When the French Revolution formally began in the summer of 1789—with the establishment of the National Assembly and the storming of the Bastille (Hunt, 1996: 14, 71)—Wollstonecraft was in London, working as a translator for Joseph Johnson’s radical publishing house and an anonymous book reviewer for his Analytical Review. She had watched the economic crisis unfold in France that led to the revolution of its third estate—or common people, comprised of the bourgeoisie and the poor—against the nobility and clergy who held most of the Roman Catholic nation’s political power, wealth, and land. France had incurred crippling debt during its mid-century wars with Britain and its colonies over control of trade and territory in North America (Whatmore, 2012: 144–154).

Jacques Necker, a finance minister for Louis XVI, defied tradition by making the national debt public knowledge. He lost his position in the court for the bulk of the 1780s. In 1788, the King reinstated Necker in a last-ditch effort to save the regime from financial ruin (Whatmore, 2012: 239–242). Also in 1788, Wollstonecraft published a translation of Necker’s Of the Importance of Religious Opinions, and a positive anonymous review of its religious principles in the Analytical Review (Wollstonecraft, [1788] 1989: vol. 7, 60). Necker’s ongoing feud with the King over the dire financial situation of France was one reason why a mob stormed the Bastille to release its political prisoners (Hunt, 1996: 14).

Through her work for Johnson, Wollstonecraft kept abreast of the revolutionary events in France and their impact in Britain and beyond. In 1790, she authored an anonymous review of a political sermon by Price, “A Discourse on the Love of Our Country” (1789), in which the minister defended the French Revolution. He compared it favorably to the relatively peaceful Glorious Revolution of 1689 that led to a limited constitutional monarchy in Britain (Wollstonecraft, [1790] 1989: vol. 7, 185).

In late November of 1790, Wollstonecraft published the first major book-length response to Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France, published on the first of that month. ¹ Burke had attacked Price for using the pulpit to support a dangerous political cause. First released anonymously and then with her name, Wollstonecraft’s Rights of Men challenged Burke by defending and extending her mentor’s theologically-grounded political philosophy. Like Price, she vindicated the French Revolution due to its advancement of the “rights of humanity” for those oppressed under the aristocratic class system and colonialism, especially “the poor” and “slaves” (Botting, 2016: 52–57; Wollstonecraft, [1790] 1989: vol. 5, 50, 57).

Moving beyond Price, Wollstonecraft added a woman’s perspective to the international political debates on the French Revolution. In December 1790, Wollstonecraft published an anonymous review of one of the first histories of the French Revolution, by English expatriate Helen Maria Williams, who was writing from Paris. She lauded Williams’s sweeping yet realistic account of the “tyrannies” of the Bastille and other “prison-houses” of the French aristocratic class system (Wollstonecraft, [1790] 1989: vol. 7, 322). Under the hierarchies of the old regime, even “parents” subjected their children to oppression in the family (Wollstonecraft, [1790] 1989: vol. 7, 322).

A month earlier, Wollstonecraft had made a similar point in her reply to Burke. The aristocratic class system—whether in France or Britain—perpetuated “tyranny and oppression” in all levels of society, beginning in “families” ([1790] 1989: vol. 5, 12, 17, 22–24). This oppression was worse for “women” and “children,” especially among “the poor,” and worst for those people “lashed” in the “infernal slave trade” ([1790] 1989: vol. 5, 23–27, 50, 58). The laws and customs of European and colonial societies had codified male privilege, compelling women and children to follow the commands and wishes of kings, fathers, husbands, eldest male heirs, estate owners, and other legally established patriarchs ([1790]1989: vol. 5, 12, 22, 50–51, 56–57).

In the Rights of Men, Wollstonecraft mocked Burke’s concern for the decline of the aristocracy after the French Revolution. In the Reflections, he recalled Queen Marie Antoinette as “glittering like the morning-star” when he had glimpsed her on the horizon at Versailles years ago (Burke, 1790: 112). By contrast, Burke demonized the violence of the women’s march of 5 and 6 October 1789. Poor market women led a mass of people from Paris to storm Versailles. Some of the marchers were armed and threatened the lives of the Queen, the King, and their children. This pivotal revolutionary event forced the royal family to remove to Paris. In Burke’s dramatic analysis, the women’s march foretold the destruction of the hierarchical family from the aristocracy on down (Botting, 2006: 69–100).

Against Burke, Wollstonecraft defended the rights of the poor market women to march on Versailles to protest the price of bread. She insisted that people should “pity” women “great and small”—from “the Queen” to the “women who gained a livelihood selling vegetables and fish”—because all women “have almost insuperable obstacles to their progress toward true dignity of character,” due to the inequality of the sexes at all levels of society (Wollstonecraft, [1790] 1989: vol. 5, 30). Their distinctive social stations differentiated women’s experiences of oppression in revolutionary France and beyond, even as their status as women presented the whole “sex” with obstacles to “freedom,” “virtue,” and “happiness” (Wollstonecraft, [1790] 1989: vol. 5, 10, 23, 30, 33, 41).

Wollstonecraft, native Americans, and the Nootka Sound crisis, 1788–91

Though relatively peaceful compared to Robespierre’s Reign of Terror of 1793–94, the early phase of the French Revolution had ripple effects upon international affairs. In 1790, the Nootka Sound crisis arose from conflict between Spain and Britain over land, shipping, and fishing rights around Vancouver Island (Evans, 1974: 611–612). In the summer of 1789, conflict grew between British and Spanish shipping vessels on the Pacific coast of North America. The Spanish had long asserted control of the coast, through a papal grant dating to 1493, and maintained diplomatic relations with the “Mowachaht people” of Nootka Sound (Berg, 2019: 51). These native Americans were “part of the larger Nuu-chah-nulth language category,” a culture that went back “four thousand years” on Vancouver Island (Berg, 2019: 51).

The British captain John Meares claimed to have bought land in 1788 from Maquinna, the chief of 4000 indigenous people in Nootka Sound (Berg, 2019: 55). Threatened by the invasion of Britain and other nations in its historic trading region, the Spanish seized three of Meares’s ships in 1789, alongside some American ships (Evans, 1974: 611–612). Because the weakened French monarchy could not support its ally Spain in defending the papal claim to the Pacific coastline, Spain had to negotiate a treaty with Britain in order to avoid war (Evans, 1974: 621–622).

In June 1790, Thomas Paine wrote a series of letters to his British friend William Short about the crisis, in which he expressed concerns about the growing conflict over shipping near Nootka Sound; the prospect of war between England, Spain, the United States, and possibly France; and the implications for the Baltic, where the Russian and Swedish navies were at loggerheads (Landin, 1941: 358–362). Paine’s fears of a massive international war did not materialize. On the 28th of October 1790, representatives of Britain and Spain signed the first Nootka convention (Evans, 1974: 635). It diffused the threat of an international war by breaking the Spanish monopoly over land and water claims in the Pacific Northwest.

Because Louis XVI was not in a position to lend France’s military or financial assistance to its ally Spain, Britain gained the upper hand in the treaty negotiations (Evans, 1974, 621–622). While the signing of the first Nootka convention dispelled the threat of war between Spain, Britain, and the United States, the Nootka Sound crisis stirred political tensions between European and American ships and settlers, as well as the Nuu-chah-nulth peoples of Vancouver Island. These peoples, also known as Nootka, had historically allied with Spain and its imperial fleet, but grew to distrust them when a native leader, Callicum, was shot during a diplomatic exchange on a Spanish ship during the summer of 1789 (Meares, 1790: 108).

In January 1791, Wollstonecraft penned an anonymous review of British captain John Meares’s travel memoir, Voyages made in the Years 1788 and 1789, from China to the North-West Coast of America (1790). The controversy over Meares’s book in London brought the Nootka crisis to a head in Europe. Wollstonecraft’s review mentioned the “capture of the [British] vessels at Nootka Sound by the Spaniards,” the event which had brought Britain, Spain, and the United States to the brink of war (Wollstonecraft, [1791] 1989: vol. 7, 336). Perhaps because the crisis had been resolved by treaty, the review focused more on the cultural value of Meares’s narrative for “landsmen” to learn “the face of a coast, and the manners of its inhabitants” ([1791] 1989: vol. 7, 336). She quoted from Meares’s descriptions of the cultures of native peoples of the “Sound,” including their “women,” who resisted advances of the European men for “meretricious submissions” ([1791] 1989: vol. 7, 335). She highlighted the “Nootka” peoples’ distinctive gender norms relative to Europeans: “natives of the Sound, of either sex, keep their hair rather short” ([1791] 1989: vol. 7, 334–335). Wollstonecraft’s interest in the culture of the Nootka peoples resurfaced in her Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796), wherein she favorably compared rural life in Norway to what she could “almost fancy” life at “Nootka Sound” would be ([1796] 1989: vol. 6, 293). Her fascination with the Nootka people placed her opposite to Paine, whose five letters during the height of the crisis only engaged the trade and military interests of European states with regard to Nootka Sound (Landin, 1941: 363–374).

Wollstonecraft’s sympathy for native and enslaved peoples of the Americas, and interest in the social conditions of their women, ran through her early work for Johnson’s publishing house. Completed in the aftermath of the first Nootka crisis, her loose English translation of Christian Salzmann’s Elements of Morality, for the Use of Children (first edition 1790, second edition 1791) announced in the “Advertisement” that she had altered one of the German-language stories so that it would “lead children to consider the Indians as their brothers, because the omission of this subject appeared to be a chasm in a well-designed system” (Ferguson, 1993: 14; Todd, [1976] 2014: 3; Wollstonecraft, [1791] 1989: vol. 2, 6). The revised (and purportedly true) story recounted how an injured “white” soldier (of unspecified nationality) during the American revolutionary war against Britain was saved by one of the “natives” in the North American wilderness (Wollstonecraft, [1791] 1989: vol. 2, 28–29). Despite the soldier’s fear of “those men whom we Europeans with white complexions call savages,” he found to his surprise that his native American rescuer was “humane” in “heart” (Wollstonecraft, [1791] 1989: vol. 2, 28–29). The native American not only returned the white man in good health to his camp, but also “prayed the Great Spirit to take care of him, and conduct him safe to his own country” (Wollstonecraft, [1791] 1989: vol. 2, 28–29). Wollstonecraft’s twofold revision of Salzmann, in the advertisement and in a story, exposed the neglect of native Americans—especially the lack of concern for their humanity, their perspectives, and their freedom—in contemporary European political discourse.

As early as 1789, Wollstonecraft may have been gathering and publishing some of the West Indian inspirations for the strong abolitionist position she would voice against Burke. In his posthumous Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798), her husband William Godwin attributed to Wollstonecraft a literary anthology for girls, The Female Reader (1789) (Godwin, 1798: 65). Though she compiled its contents, The Female Reader was published by Johnson under the name “Mr. Creswick,” a children’s book author of the period, for unknown reasons (Wollstonecraft, [1789] 1989: vol. 4, 54). This compendium contains two significant accounts of the injustices of European imperialism in the Americas, particularly in the colonies of the West Indies, where settlers competed for territory and resources via slave traffic and the sugar trade.

The Female Reader presents Voltaire’s scathing satire of Columbus’s “Discovery of America”—as drawn from an English translation of his “Essai sur les mœurs et l’esprit des nations” (1756)—which recounts the Spanish conquest of the “American natives of Hispaniola” (Wollstonecraft, [1789] 1989: vol. 4, 110). It quotes the leading philosophe of the French Enlightenment as openly wondering, “if we may call the conquest of America an obligation, which proved so fatal to its inhabitants, and at times to the conquerors themselves” (Wollstonecraft, [1789] 1989: vol. 4, 108). Just preceding this entry is an excerpt from an equally dark and ironic eighteenth-century story of British imperialism and slavery in the West Indies, the “History of Inkle and Yarico.” It recounts the reportedly true tale of a late seventeenth-century Englishman who betrays the native American “Indian” who saves him from the attack of her people by escorting him from the mainland to safety in Barbados (1989: vol. 4, 98). The duplicitous Inkle not only seduces Yarico before arranging to sell her into slavery as soon as they arrive, but also maliciously raises the price when he learns she is “with child by him” (1989: vol. 4, 99). Inkle’s cold manipulation, sexual exploitation, and enslavement of this native American woman proves Voltaire’s broader point: the European “discovery” of America is in fact a history of “conquest” that has been “fatal” to its “inhabitants.”

The inclusion of Yarico’s story in The Female Reader is suggestive of Wollstonecraft’s early interest in highlighting the economic and sexual dimensions of slave traffic in the West Indies, and its deleterious effects upon indigenous women and children of different racial and cultural backgrounds. In the Rights of Woman, composed in late 1791, Wollstonecraft would refer to the infamous “Inkle” as the sort of vicious man that parents ought to beware of raising ([1792] 1989: vol. 5, 179). In the context of the book’s broader argument, Inkle’s manipulation and enslavement of Yarico was an immoral violation of the indigenous woman’s rights to freedom, happiness, and justice as a human being.

Wollstonecraft’s philosophical and political commitment to abolitionism was ultimately rooted in her theologically grounded belief in the unity of the human species amid its diversity of colors, climates, cultures, habits, manners, and laws. One of the anonymous Analytical Review pieces attributed to her is a 1788 review of the American philosopher and Presbyterian minister Samuel Stanhope Smith’s An Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species, published that same year in Philadelphia and Edinburgh. Wollstonecraft agreed with Stanhope Smith’s (then radical) anthropological view that all humans belonged to the same species, made in the moral and rational image of their benevolent “God” ([1788] 1989: vol. 7, 55; Juengel, 2001: 905; O’Neill, 2007: 119; Tomaselli, 2020a: 65–68). Stanhope Smith wrote his treatise on the unity of the human species against those natural historians of the period, like Lord Kames of Scotland, who claimed that differences in complexion and other bodily traits differentiated many species of humans.

Stanhope Smith argued on the basis of his comparative observations of native American and European peoples that skin “color” and other physical differences among people were long-term products of cultural differences (O’Neill, 2007: 119; Wollstonecraft, [1788] 1989: vol. 7, 51). Humans developed different “habits,” “manners,” and “national” cultures over time to adapt to different climates and other environmental factors ([1788] 1989: vol. 7, 51). “Color” and “figure,” Stanhope Smith posited, were not inborn traits of species, but rather “habits of the body” that accrued in a population over centuries, giving it “distinct national characters” ([1788] 1989: vol. 7, 50–51).

Wollstonecraft and slavery, 1788–1791

In the Rights of Men, Wollstonecraft expressed cognate ideas to Stanhope Smith’s views on the unity of “humanity” as she called for the “abolition of the infernal slave trade” ([1790] 1989: vol. 5, 50). She blamed the “laws” of European nations for creating the economic incentives “that induced the planters to purchase their estates” in the West Indies ([1790] 1989: vol. 5, 50). She demanded that “British senators” defy “the planters and negro-drivers” who would appeal to those same laws to maintain the arbitrary, manmade inequalities of their colonial societies ([1790] 1989: vol. 5, 51). “But is it not consonant with justice, the common principles of humanity, not to mention Christianity,” she asked, “to abolish this abominable mischief?” ([1790] 1989: vol. 5, 50–51). Only when “all men were allowed to enjoy their birth-right” of “liberty,” she predicted, would slavery’s “stigma on our nature” be “wiped off” ([1790] 1989: vol. 5, 51). The racial and class inequalities in the West Indies were not predetermined by nature, but rather produced by European imperial politics, laws, and customs. The overturning of these inegalitarian laws and customs, Wollstonecraft insisted, was necessary for the liberation of slaves and humanity as a whole from conditions of oppression.

Marilyn Butler and Janet Todd (1989) attributed to Wollstonecraft a total of eight anonymous book reviews on topics related to the social and political conditions of “Indian” and “slave” peoples of the Americas, which were published in the Analytical Review between 1788 and 1791 (Wollstonecraft, 1989: vol. 7, 50, 100, 168, 185, 332, 355, 375, 390). Among the earliest was a review of a major African slave narrative, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself (1789).

Gustavus Vassa’s book offered a first-hand account of West Indian slavery by an African. The author only used the nom de plume Olaudah Equiano in this autobiography. He kept his given name in the title to signal that he was at once the subject and the author of the slave narrative. Wollstonecraft’s 1789 review of Vassa’s/Equiano’s memoir revealed the blood-curdling horrors that faced men as well as women in African slavery: “Many anecdotes are simply told, relative to the treatment of male and female slaves, on the voyage, and in the West Indies, which make the blood turn its course” ([1789] 1989: vol. 7, 100). Indeed, once freed, Vassa/Equiano described his dread of re-enslavement in terms of his fear of bloodshed: “I would sooner die like a free man, than suffer. . .my blood drawn like a slave” (Vassa, 1794: 197).

Akin to Vassa’s graphic anti-slavery literary voice, Wollstonecraft used gothic and bloody metaphors to condemn slavery in the Rights of Men and the Rights of Woman. She opened her reply to Burke by describing slavery as a form of institutionalized cannibalism or vampirism by which the rich and powerful prey upon their fellow human creatures: “slavery was authorized by law to fasten her fangs on human flesh” ([1790] 1989: vol. 5, 32). In her Rights of Woman, she compared the “sanctioning” of the “abominable traffic” of slavery to the cannibalistic, even incestuous, behavior of a vampiric parent “as it sucks in its children’s blood” ([1792] 1989: vol. 5, 214). She returned to this disturbing blood-drinking imagery to implicate those supposedly civilized British and European people who derived wealth, power, and pleasure from the imperial sugar trade and its slave-based economy. “Is sugar always to be produced by vital blood?” she archly queried ([1792] 1989: vol. 5, 215). On this pointed analogy, those who took sugar with their tea were effectively drinking the blood of the slaves who labored, suffered, and died to produce it (Macdonald, 1992: 48).

Marking the overlay of racial and sexual domination, Wollstonecraft compared women (“one half of the human species”) with “the poor African slaves,” since both groups of oppressed people lived solely to “sweeten the cup of man” ([1792] 1989: vol. 5, 215). The metaphor of the “cup of man” could be read plainly (as a tea cup, flavored with the sugar made with the sweat and blood of slave labor, and served to a man by a woman in his parlor), or in a more sexually suggestive sense (as men taking pleasure in women’s service, or even subjection, to their bodily thirsts). This cascade of images suggested that powerful white men were the real monsters, for they used slaves of both sexes, as well as their wives, daughters, and female servants, as mere tools—sweeteners or vessels—to serve their selfish desires for pleasure and luxury.

Wollstonecraft’s literary works before and after her Vindications used the concept of slavery to make a similar point about the sexual exploitation of women by men. Wollstonecraft’s children’s book Original Stories from Real Life (1788) described children—especially girls—as slaves due to their tyrannical control by their parents in the patriarchal family: “why then do we suffer children to be bound with fetters, which their half-formed faculties cannot break?” ([1788] 1989: vol. 4, 359). Her semi-autobiographical novel Mary, a Fiction (1788) had represented marriage as a form of slavery for those women forced into loveless (yet economically profitable) marriages by their fathers under the English common law. “I will work,” the heroine Mary cries as she faces an arranged marriage, “do any thing rather than be a slave” ([1788]1989: vol. 1, 55). In the British legal practice of coverture, women were “covered” by their husbands and subsumed under his legal identity as the sole (male) head of the family unit (Macdonald, 1992: 48). The husband represented the wife in court, legally held all of the property of their family, and had sole custody of the children if the marriage fell apart. Any children of the marriage were also subsumed under the male head of household and represented by him in law. Coverture reinforced male power and privilege in other dimensions of family life. For example, fathers exerted control over arranged marriages for their children (especially girls), so that the family benefited from the choice, regardless of the feelings of the betrothed.

Wollstonecraft continued her dramatization of the problem of married women’s enslavement under coverture in her last major work, her novel Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman, left unfinished upon her death from a childbirth infection in 1797. The female protagonist Maria finds herself trapped in an asylum by her abusive husband, who steals their baby away from her according to the rules of coverture. “Is not the world a vast prison,” she asks, “and women born slaves?” ([1798] 1989: vol. 1, 88).

While she maintained that coverture turned married women into “cyphers” under English common law, Wollstonecraft in the Rights of Woman differentiated between degrees and forms of girls’ and women’s oppression on the basis of race, rank, nation, poverty, and other “unnatural distinctions established in society” ([1792] 1989: vol. 5, 72, 93). Chattel slavery—the buying and selling of human beings as property—was the worst and most extreme form of oppression because it wholly denied “independence. . .the grand blessing of life” to the enslaved (Coffee, 2012: 120; Wollstonecraft, [1792] 1989: vol. 5, 65). Female slaves, as in the Female Reader’s story of Yarico in Barbados, faced the most brutal form of physical and sexual exploitation. They were captured, bought, used, manipulated, raped, impregnated, and sold for their masters’ profit and pleasure. Even more horrifying was the fact that their children were born slaves at their masters’ economic, sexual, and reproductive disposal. While other forms of oppression did not cause as much suffering to their victims as did chattel slavery, Wollstonecraft insisted that they were wrong, at base, for the same reason. Following the “Commonwealthman” civic republican tradition of Price, she held that domination—the denial of freedom required for true human flourishing—was always wrong (Coffee, 2012: 117–118). “Domination”—or what she more typically called “dependence,” “oppression,” “tyranny,” or “despotism”—was especially wrong when it denied freedom to the enslaved, the poor, the relatively powerless, and other vulnerable persons in society, such as women and children (Coffee, 2012; Wollstonecraft, [1790] 1989: vol. 5, 57; [1792] 1989: vol. 5, 113, 121, 244).

Wollstonecraft used her platform at Johnson’s publishing house to take part in the international debate on the slave trade. The anti-slavery cause had ramped up in Britain and France in the wake of the 1789 revolution. The evangelical Christian William Wilberforce, the leading English abolitionist, brought to Parliament a series of “truth” inquiries into the colonial system of slavery, only to be dealt the legislative defeat of the Abolition Bill in April 1791 in the House of Commons (Ferguson, 1993: 14). In September 1791, Johnson published Wollstonecraft’s anonymous review of Jacques Pierre Brissot’s Nouveau Voyage Dans Les Etats-Unies de L’Amerique (1790). Brissot was a founder of the French abolitionist Society of the Friends of the Blacks in Paris in 1788. Wollstonecraft’s piece on Brissot’s Voyage remarked that this French revolutionary leader’s “humanity is particularly conspicuous in the long account which he gives of the treatment of slaves, and the attempts made by the Quakers to abolish that infamous traffic” ([1791] 1989: vol. 7, 392).

Almost a year earlier than this public defense of Brissot’s “humanity” on the abolition issue, her Rights of Men used similar language to question Burke’s “humanity” for implying that “the slave trade ought never to be abolished” ([1790] 1989: vol. 5, 14). She provocatively contended that Burke’s critique of the French Revolution “settles slavery on an everlasting foundation,” due to his traditionalist view that “reverence for antiquity” and “proper submission to the laws” were the cultural basis of a stable, secure, and just society and government ([1790] 1989: vol. 5, 14). If this were true, she claimed, then we ought to uncritically perpetuate the “inhuman custom” of slavery simply because it was “sanctioned” by our “ignorant forefathers” ([1790] 1989: vol. 5, 14). Although for most of his political career Burke in principle had supported the abolition of the slave trade (Bourke, 2015: 596), he in fact had sustained in practice those trade policies that continued slavery’s benefits for British elites like himself, African traders, and colonial planters (Marshall, 2019: 161–175, 178; O’Neill, 2016: 81–83). It was not until April 1791—a few months after Wollstonecraft publicly attacked his complicity in perpetuating the institution of slavery—that the Whig MP voted in the minority in favor of the Abolition Bill sponsored by Wilberforce (Bourke, 2015: 596).

A radical political implication of Wollstonecraft’s critique of Burke is that the French Revolution not only entailed, but could only be justified vis á vis, a public commitment to outlaw the international slave trade and the imperial European institution of slavery as practiced in the West Indies. For the “cosmopolitan” Wollstonecraft, the French Revolution would not fully realize its principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity for humanity without the abolition of slavery and its human traffic by all nations (Botting, 2016: 12).

Supporters of the French Revolution began to debate this abolition issue even before the Fall of the Bastille. Frenchwoman Olympe de Gouges raised the question of the rights of freed and enslaved blacks and mulattos in her 1788 pamphlet “Reflections on Black People” (Williams, 1999: 36–37, 317). She printed this essay in Paris with a popular anti-slavery play, Zamore and Mirza, that she had written then produced around France (Bergès, 2018). This play, she recalled in 1790, helped spark the birth of the French abolitionist movement and the formation of Brissot’s Society of the Friends of the Blacks (Bergès, 2021). De Gouges would go on to publish her gendered critique of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen—titled Rights of Woman: Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Female Citizen (1791)—which she presented before the Legislative Assembly and dedicated to Queen Marie Antoinette (Williams, 1999: 317).

Wollstonecraft and the Haitian Revolution in 1791–92

As soon as the revolution in France began in 1789, it shaped public dialogue on slavery, abolition, and rights in the West Indies. On the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, Saint-Domingue was France’s most profitable sugar colony, powered by the lives and labor of an estimated half a million slaves at its peak (James, 1963: 56). Free mulattos and white planters heatedly debated the implications of the revolution unfolding in France for their colonial economic and political system (James, 1963: 66–67). The free mulattos sent a delegation, led by Vincent Ogé, to Paris. Ogé helped to represent the case for the citizenship rights of mulattos and the abolition of slavery before the National Assembly in 1790, but the republic’s economic interest in the preservation of the colonial social order held sway (James, 1963: 69–70). The Society of the Friends of the Blacks, alongside abolitionists and revolutionary sympathizers in London and the United States, assisted Ogé in returning to Saint-Domingue to lead an ultimately unsuccessful rebellion of roughly 300 slaves against the white planters on 21 October 1790.

The Parisian legislators did not listen to Ogé’s plea until he was brutally executed by the white planters in February 1791 (Scott, 2018: 136). In May 1791, the French Legislative Assembly finally agreed to grant full civil and political rights to free blacks and mulattos born of free mothers and fathers—only about 400 people (James, 1963: 84). The planters in Saint-Domingue not only refused to implement the law, but also outright revolted against French rule. As the Trinidadian historian C.L.R. James vividly recounted, “They lynched Mulattos, they stamped upon the French flag, they abjured France” (1963: 84). These white colonial acts of retaliation instigated a systematic and violent revolution of slaves, free blacks, and free mulattos against the planters in August 1791. This seismic political event came to be known as the Haitian Revolution. It led to the establishment of Haiti (the former French colony Saint-Domingue) as a sovereign state in 1804, through its declaration of independence from foreign rule (Armitage, 2007: 115).

Although there is no direct reference to the Haitian Revolution in her extant corpus, Wollstonecraft would have most likely been aware of “the most successful slave revolt in the Western hemisphere” (Armitage, 2007: 115). ² News of it spread quickly to Europe via slaves, merchants, mail, and newspapers departing on ships from Caribbean seaports (Scott, 2018: 118). Even before the mass slave revolt of August 1791, Europeans were already nervously following the racial struggles in the French colony. In May 1791, the London Morning Chronicle quoted Burke as reciting the latest “alarming” report from the French Legislative Assembly on “St. Domingo”: “that the troops that had been sent from France had joined the insurgents, and that their General was cut to pieces by his own men” (Burke, 2016). When 100,000 slaves, free blacks, and free mulattos rose up against the white planters, starting on 21 August 1791 (Raupach, 2004: 21), the news of the world’s first successful mass colonial slave rebellion reached Britain by mail in September (Scott, 2018: 142). By October 26th, the “gory” reports of violence in Saint-Domingue had hit the British press (Geggus, 1982: 123). On November 12th, a London newspaper reported on the British colony of Jamaica’s relief of “the planters of San Domingo from the horrors of famine” and resupply of them with “military arms” to contain their “rebel Negroes” (St. James’s Chronicle, 1791). France’s Legislative Assembly, the paper noted with some surprise, had publicly thanked its rival Britain for its support.

As the latest news on the international political response to the slave revolt in Saint-Domingue trickled into the London papers, Wollstonecraft was writing and preparing for publication her Rights of Woman in the autumn and winter of 1791. Moira Ferguson found two key passages in this book that indicate Wollstonecraft’s increasing moral and political concern with slave rebellion (1993: 22, 29). In the introduction and chapter one, Wollstonecraft set up the framework for her systematic critique of “arbitrary power,” including the major “hereditary distinctions” of modern European society: the patriarchal family, in which women were “immured. . .groping in the dark;” the Catholic and Anglican churches, which forced children into blind submission to their beliefs; standing armies that exploited the bodies and lives of poor young men; monarchies and aristocracies that served the rich at the expense of the poor; and, most monstrously, slavery, which brutally abused human beings like chattel raised for slaughter (Wollstonecraft, [1792] 1989: vol. 5, 67, 81–87). While reflecting on the injustice of military impressment, she used language resonant with the violent uprising in Saint-Domingue to predict that mass oppression will trigger mass rebellion. “The strong wind of authority pushes the crowd of subalterns forward,” she ominously predicted, “they scarcely know or care why, with headlong fury” (Wollstonecraft, [1792] 1989: vol. 5, 86). Perhaps the “subalterns” she had in mind—Ferguson hypothesized—were the slaves, free blacks, and free mulattos of Saint-Domingue, who had mustered their “headlong fury” against the tyrannical rule of the French colonials.

Near the end of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft returned to assess the “problematic” of rebellion against authority (Ferguson, 1992). She invoked history’s “fearful catalogue of the crimes” that the “cunning” of “weak slaves” has produced ([1792] 1989: vol. 5, 238). These crimes arise, she contended, when “slaves” have had “sufficient address to over-reach their masters” ([1792] 1989: vol. 5, 238). In other words, when slaves have been oppressed beyond toleration, they would retaliate with crimes orchestrated with cunning, in order to circumvent or overcome their powerful masters. Given the frightening reports of slaves rising overnight to slay their white masters, rape and kill white wives and daughters, and parade the mutilated heads of white children on pikes in Saint-Domingue, Ferguson thought, she may have had the “crimes” of these “cunning” slaves in mind (James, 1963: 85–89).

In the next sentence, Wollstonecraft singled out “France” among “many other countries” for creating despotic cultures in which “men have been the luxurious despots, and women the crafty ministers” ([1792] 1989: vol. 5, 239). Here and throughout the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft defined slavery in relationship to despotism (Brace, 2016; Coffee, 2012). Despotism was the tyrannical or arbitrary abuse of power to limit or abolish the freedom of another. Despotism in its most extreme forms produced conditions of slavery for those who were abused by it.

In these and other passages in the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft expressed ideas similar to G.W.F. Hegel’s later, famous articulation of the “master-slave” dialectic (Macdonald, 1992: 52). In his Phenomenology of Mind (1807), and the Jena texts that came before it in 1803–06, Hegel argued that the master shaped the slave’s experience of unfreedom as much as the slave shaped the master’s experience of “independence” (Buck-Morss, 2009: 48, 54). One crucial difference between Hegel’s master-slave dialectic and Wollstonecraft’s account of the dynamic relationship between despotism and slavery is that hers is explicitly gendered both masculine and feminine. According to her historically informed conception of the despot-slave relationship, it is men who “have been the luxurious despots,” while the “cunning” slaves and “crafty ministers” either are women or act like them by slyly undermining the tyrannical power of their lords and other patriarchal masters. “Fifteen years” before the Phenomenology of Mind, Wollstonecraft explained the master-slave dynamic “in terms of social and economic reality rather than in Hegel’s idealist terms” (Macdonald, 1992: 52). Part of this eighteenth-century “social and economic reality” was the gendered and sexualized power dynamics between women and men.

The gendering of slavery as feminine and despotism as masculine in the Rights of Woman suggested to Ferguson that Wollstonecraft was more concerned with defending the rights of women—specifically, “white,” European, “bourgeois” women like herself—and less concerned with addressing the perspectives and conditions of chattel slaves such as those in the French colony of Saint-Domingue (1993: 32–33). Ferguson’s reading, however, missed how Wollstonecraft’s commitment to abolitionism drove her overriding concern with identifying and condemning slavery and despotism in all of its oppressive forms, including those suffered and perpetuated by women of all backgrounds. Some of her harshest words are reserved for women aristocrats, and other relatively privileged and powerful members of the “fair sex”—an eighteenth-century English term for white women (Schlosser, 2005: 53–82; Wollstonecraft, [1792] 1989: vol. 5, 93). No one was exempt from her far-ranging criticism of “gendered despotism,” especially her primary reading audience: English-speaking men and women of the growing, literate, middling class like herself (Brace, 2016: 118).

To illustrate how her dual commitments to abolition and women’s rights intersected, Wollstonecraft bookended the Rights of Woman with illustrations of her theory of slave rebellion. According to her political formula, rebellion (by any group) was a dynamic outcome of (any form of) despotism left unchecked ([1792] 1989: vol. 5, 86, 239). Both women and chattel slaves had good reasons to rebel against authority, or to resort to “illicit sway,” if they saw no relief to their oppression ([1792] 1989: vol. 5, 239). “When therefore I call women slaves,” she clarified, “I mean in a civil and political sense”— as in, women were literally slaves under the law, not merely slaves by analogy (Coffee, 2012: 122; [1792] 1989: vol. 5, 239). Women’s subjection under patriarchal laws and cultures had made them slaves de facto and de jure, just as European imperialism had made Africans culturally and legally slaves in the West Indies. She concluded that women could either be driven to rebellion or granted the rights and liberties that they deserved.

Given this stark choice, especially in the wake of the startling news from Saint-Domingue, Wollstonecraft called for a “revolution in female manners” instead of a continuation of the “state of warfare which subsists between the sexes” ([1792] 1989: vol. 5, 114, 239). This revolution would be cultural at base, as it would gradually change the manners of girls and women, primarily through the establishment of a more egalitarian system of education. At the same time, it would be peaceful and politically legitimate, because it would begin with a majoritarian legislative reform to the “CONSTITUTION”: the granting of equal “civil and political rights” to the sexes, as de Gouges, Condorcet, and others had proposed for the French republic (Bergès, 2021; Offen, 2003: 45; Wollstonecraft, [1792] 1989: vol. 5, 67–68). It required concurrent revolutions in the manners of men and, crucially, gender relations in culture and law. This multi-level revolution would take “generations,” Wollstonecraft thought, but once it was complete, men would no longer treat women as “abject slaves,” nor would women regard men as masters to be outsmarted or overturned ([1792] 1989: vol. 5, 145).

International politics and prejudice

Wollstonecraft began and ended her Rights of Men with calls to “abolish” the “Hell” on Earth that was the master’s “lash” on the “slave’s naked sides” and “the infernal slave trade” that enabled this “inhuman custom” (Wollstonecraft, [1790] 1989: vol. 5, 14, 51, 58). She began and ended her Rights of Woman with sharp analogies between women and slaves (Wollstonecraft, [1792] 1989: vol. 5, 86, 238). She envisioned a “revolution in female manners” that would use education to gradually and peacefully overturn the tyrannical dynamic between men and women such that greater freedom and equality would prevail in society, economics, and politics in the future.

At the same time, Wollstonecraft employed prejudicial metaphors of Eastern despotism to frame her Rights of Woman (Botting, 2016: 155–173). In the opening pages of the introduction, she deplored that men “in the true style of Mahometanism” have sought to treat women as “weak beings. . .only fit for a seraglio” ([1792] 1989: vol. 5, 73, 76). In the last sentence of the book, she threatened that European men would be “worse than Egyptian task-masters” if they continued “to deny the rights of reason” to women ([1792] 1989: vol. 5, 266). Edward Said exposed how the invocation of such “Orientalist” imagery of slavery and tyranny in Eastern cultures was common among writers of the Western Enlightenment (Said, [1979] 1994). The French Baron de Montesquieu, the Scottish economist Adam Smith, the English minister Price, and the Irish statesman Burke shored up the superiority of their civilizational visions for human progress by using the supposed backwardness of the East as a conceptual foil for the bright future of the West (Botting, 2016: 165, 278; O’Neill, 2016: 168). For Said and other theorists of race and culture after him, these Orientalist tropes betrayed deep Eurocentric and racist biases that compromised the supposedly universalistic and humanistic political principles of the leading figures of the Western Enlightenment.

Wollstonecraft should be negatively judged for her resort to Orientalist stereotypes for two reasons. First, these prejudicial images of “Eastern” peoples contradicted her philosophical defense of human rights for each and all, across genders, races, and cultures. ³ Secondly, her perpetuation of these Eurocentric biases in political discourse contributed to the formation of a “contradictory rhetorical model” for women’s and other human rights, which still emerges in political discourse to the present day (Botting, 2016: 170). Orientalism’s ethnocentric—and often implicitly or explicitly racist—model of argumentation relies upon stereotypes of non-Western women and oppressed peoples to promote the superiority of Western (typically meaning, white and privileged) people’s understanding of what freedom, equality, and justice ought to look like in practice. This Eurocentric and “liberal imperial” rhetorical approach to defending women’s and other human rights stands at odds with its own anti-slavery roots (Botting, 2016: 174).

By applying an international lens to Wollstonecraft’s political thought, we have seen how she critically responded to many British and Western European cultural prejudices toward women, the poor, nonwhites, and slaves. Although she was hardly free of religious and other cultural biases (Botting, 2016: 155–203), she followed Stanhope Smith in resisting those eighteenth-century theories of human nature that denied full human status to indigenous and other nonwhite peoples (Juengel, 2001). Most importantly, she modelled a way forward for grappling with “deeply rooted prejudices” both rationally and cross-culturally (Wollstonecraft, [1792] 1989: vol. 5, 81–82). She used three of the major international political issues of her time—the French Revolution, the Nootka Sound crisis, and colonial slavery in the West Indies—as frames for reformulating inherited political ideas such as “rights” so that they might be used to liberate people from conditions of demoralizing oppression in the future.

The international historian Samuel Moyn (2018) has made the provocation that human rights are “not enough” to support justice for each and all, because the gradual, national and international institutionalization of legal and political ideas and practices of rights in the twentieth century did not pay enough attention to the persistent problem of economic inequality. Looking backward even further, we can see that “the rights of men” were not enough for de Gouges, Vassa, Wollstonecraft and other abolitionists, rights advocates, and republicans of the revolutionary era, especially those concerned with the injustices of the slave economy in the Caribbean (Armitage, 2007: 107). Responding to the early phase of the French Revolution, the Nootka Sound crisis, and Caribbean slavery and slave revolts, Wollstonecraft developed a range of arguments for equal rights and international justice that explicitly covered not only men, but also women, children, the poor, native peoples, and slaves of any color or culture.

By 1792, Wollstonecraft’s political thought had evolved in sophistication such that she made a conceptual shift in the prevailing international public discourse on the rights of “men” and “humanity.” Paradoxically, she had come to use the abstract gendered term the “rights of woman” as a synonym for “the rights of humanity” to be free from oppression. Though tarnished by her appeal to Orientalist prejudices, Wollstonecraft’s international political theory of the “rights of humanity” nevertheless set a robust standard for the inclusion of the poor, women, slaves, and African and native American peoples in any truly global account of rights and justice.