The trailblazing advocate for women’s rights studied deeply the ideas of the era’s leading classical liberal theorist.
Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) produced influential writings on topics ranging from the schooling of children to political thought and personal freedom. She is widely celebrated for her seminal work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), which stands as a foundational text in the emergence and growth of feminism alongside liberal theory.
Perhaps less commonly recalled is that Wollstonecraft’s landmark argument for women’s equality drew a significant intellectual debt from the political thinker John Locke (1632–1704), who contended that government exists to safeguard the natural rights people possess from birth.
Some contemporary scholars and commentators mislabel Locke as conservative. Yet in his own era his views were regarded as remarkably radical. For the then-teenage Wollstonecraft, Locke’s radical liberalism tasted as refreshing as nourishment after a period of severe deprivation.
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The year was 1775 and Wollstonecraft was 15 years old. She was a brilliant and independent-minded young woman, increasingly outraged by the vile behavior of her drunk, domineering father. He abused Wollstonecraft’s mother and maintained a strict, sexist hierarchy at home, favoring her brother while she was made to suffer.
It was at this low point in her life when Wollstonecraft first read Locke. Certain passages from his greatest work, The Second Treatise of Government (1689), caught hold of her mind and never really let go. A properly constituted social order “gives the husband no more power over [his wife’s] life than she has over his,” Locke wrote. “The power of the husband being so far from that of an absolute monarch that the wife has, in many cases, a liberty to separate from him, where natural right or their contract allows it, whether that contract be made by themselves in the state of nature, or by the customs or laws of the country they live in.”
In her superb book, Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley (2015), the historian Charlotte Gordon memorably described the far-reaching effect that Locke’s ideas had on the teenaged Wollstonecraft:
She had always felt that her father had no right to tyrannize her family and that the preferential treatment he and her mother bestowed on [brother] Ned was unjust. Now, after reading Locke, she had an ethical foundation for her feelings. Not only was it her right to shape her own future; it was everyone’s right. In fact, Locke’s social contract made protest seem the only rational response to injustice; it was humanity’s obligation to overthrow tyranny.
One of the reasons why Locke is sometimes mislabeled as a conservative today is because of his writings in favor of property rights, an issue that we now associate with conservative and libertarian thinkers. But it is worth remembering that Locke’s whole case for property rights began with the idea that “every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has any right to but himself.”
Is it any wonder that Locke’s radical case for self-ownership would appeal to a young woman like Wollstonecraft, who longed to break free from the sexist laws and cultural strictures that held her back? Nobody was going to convince her that she did not have a right to her own body.
We might say something similar about the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass (1818–1895), who also drank deep from the principles of Lockean liberalism. “You are a man and so am I,” Douglass wrote in his famous open letter to his former enslaver. “In leaving you, I took nothing but what belonged to me, and in no way lessened your means for obtaining an honest living. Your faculties remained yours, and mine became useful to their rightful owner.” That is about as clear and effective a restatement of Lockean self-ownership principles as you are going to find.
Locke’s influence on the American Revolution, particularly on Thomas Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence, is well-known. That Locke also had a key influence on both the women’s rights and abolitionist movements is perhaps worthy of further remark.
