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Mary Wollstonecraft's Feminist Critique of Property: On Becoming a Thief from Principle

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Lena Halldenius
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Abstract

The scholarship on Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) is divided concerning her views on women's role in public life, property rights, and distribution of wealth. Her critique of inequality of wealth is undisputed, but is it a complaint only of inequality or does it strike more forcefully at the institution of property? The argument in this article is that Wollstonecraft's feminism is partly defined by a radical critique of property, intertwined with her conception of rights. Dissociating herself from the conceptualization of rights in terms of self‐ownership, she casts economic independence—a necessary political criterion for personal freedom—in terms of fair reward for work, not ownership. Her critique of property moves beyond issues of redistribution to a feminist appraisal of a property structure that turns people into either owners or owned, rights‐holders or things acquired. The main characters in Wollstonecraft's last novel—Maria, who is rich but has nothing, and Jemima, who steals as a matter of principle—illustrate the commodification of women in a society where even rights are regarded as possessions.

Type
Cluster on Mary Wollstonecraft
Information
Hypatia , Volume 29 , Issue 4 , Fall 2014 , pp. 942 - 957
Copyright
Copyright © 2014 by Hypatia, Inc.

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Footnotes

My thanks to Sandrine Berges, Ulrika Björk, Alan Coffee, Susan James, Avi Lifschitz, Martina Reuter, Quentin Skinner, and the participants at the History of Political Ideas Seminar, University of London for valuable comments, and to Riksbankens Jubileumsfond for financial support.

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