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ABSTRACT
Wollstonecraft's name and work have been invoked repeatedly since Dobbs, not only because she wrote the first major political treatise defending women's rights but also because several leaders of the so-called “prolife” movement have sought to reclaim the label “feminist” by enlisting Wollstonecraft in the contemporary antiabortion, anticontraception, and heterosexual family-centered cause. The article challenges these anachronistic and revisionist histories, which ignore Wollstonecraft's life experiences and wider corpus. Especially in her late novel, The Wrongs of Woman, abortion is both a prominent metaphor for the book as a whole and a crucial narrative event for both heroines. I argue that Wollstonecraft's life, work, and ethical commitments, particularly her advocacy for “rights against domination” and “for the cause of virtue,” make her a fitting historical ally to contemporary advocates of reproductive justice who see women's rights to abortion and maternity as among the many important issues for women's health and reproductive justice.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Quotes are taken from an email exchange with the editor of the journal, Anton Sorkin, (August 27th and 29th 2023) who noted that he had tried to advocate for “broadening the conversation on reproductive justice, but at the end of the day, I do not have the final authority on what we publish and the article just goes against the core mission of Christian Legal Society.”
2 As examples of the former see, MacIntyre, After Virtue; MacIntyre, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity; Gregory, The Unintended Reformation; and for the latter see, Conly, “Why Feminists Should Oppose Feminist Virtue Ethics”; Conly, “Flourishing and the Failure of the Ethics of Virtue”; Snitow, “A Gender Diary”; Snitow, The Feminism of Uncertainty.
3 For my more extensive elaboration of this argument see Dumler-Winckler, Modern Virtue, Ch. 4.
4 Wollstonecraft, Works, 1989, vol. V, 65. All references to VRW in this essay come from this text.
5 For more about this conception of freedom, domination, and arbitrary power see: Dumler-Winckler, Modern Virtue, 203.
6 For a recent argument to this effect, one that seeks to enlist Wollstonecraft for the cause, no less, see Bachiochi, The Rights of Women.
7 For a recent argument to this effect see, Peters, Trust Women; Kamitsuka, Abortion and the Christian Tradition.
8 As Jill Lepore notes, “Alito’s [originalist] opinion rests almost exclusively on a bizarre and impoverished historical analysis … . Women are indeed missing from the Constitution. That’s a problem to remedy, not a precedent to honor. Alito cites a number of eighteenth-century texts; he does not cite anything written by a woman, and not because there’s nothing available. ‘The laws respecting woman,’ Mary Wollstonecraft wrote in ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,’” in 1791, “make an absurd unit of a man and his wife, and then, by the easy transition of only considering him as responsible, she is reduced to a mere cypher.” Lepore, “Of Course the Constitution Has Nothing to Say About Abortion.” See also, Armstrong, “Draft Overturning Roe v. Wade Quotes Infamous Witch Trial Judge With Long-Discredited Ideas on Rape.”
9 See Foster, “The Feminist Case Against Abortion” and https://www.feministsforlife.org/herstory/ as well as Bachiochi, “Opinion | What Makes a Fetus a Person?” Bachiochi, The Rights of Women. For my review of her book see Dumler-Winckler, “A Lost Feminist Vision?”
10 For an introduction and primer to the reproductive justice movement see Ross and Solinger, Reproductive Justice. Also see the other six books in the series “ Reproductive Justice: A New Vision for the 21st Century.”
11 Price’s article was published in 2010 and again in 2020. All citations here draw from the 2020 piece. Price, “What is Reproductive Justice?” March 1, 2010; Price, “What is Reproductive Justice?” December 1, 2020, 340.
12 For a recent attempt to enlist Wollstonecraft in the anti-abortion cause see Bachiochi, The Rights of Women; my alternative account here draws substantially from my book Dumler-Winckler, Modern Virtue.
13 Woolf, The Second Common Reader, 257.
14 For Wollstonecraft, virtue is in a sense graced (along with the rest of nature) and acquired but not inherited. She refuses to consider inherited privileges—“factitious merit,” “hereditary honours” or “virtue and wisdom, actual or presumptive”—as “genuine acquired virtue” (VRM 33).
15 Since antiquity, lists and catalogues of the virtues have been continually revised and contested. Nonetheless, the four-part scheme of the cardinal virtues, traditionally attributed to Cicero, and echoed in Augustine’s City of God, have been common since Thomas Aquinas’s treatment of the four in the Summa Theologica II-II. They include courage or fortitude (fortitudo), prudence or practical wisdom (prudentia), temperance (temperantia), and justice (iustitia). See, for example: Saint Augustine and Dyson, The City of God, IV, 20, XIX. Aquinas, The Summa Theologica, II-II 47–170 and I-II 61).
16 Aquinas, ST, (I-II:60.1, 56.3).
17 Wollstonecraft, Works, 1989, vol. VII, 162.
18 For a list of such thinkers and my more substantive engagement with their arguments and concerns see, Dumler-Winckler, Modern Virtue, 181–2.
19 For a summary of such thinkers and themes see, Dumler-Winckler, Modern Virtue, 9–11. I also provide more substantive engagement throughout.
20 Cannon, Katie’s Canon, 3.
21 Schneider and Young, Queer Soul and Queer Theology, 10–11.
22 Much of this section of the essay uses material previously published in Dumler-Winckler, Modern Virtue, Ch. 1.
23 Erasmus, The Praise of Folly and Other Writings; Bible NRSV. See 1 Corinthians 1:23.
24 Bible NRSV, 2 Corinthians 12:9. Some have speculated about whether Wollstonecraft was a Socinian like many of her fellow dissenters, but she never explicitly denies the divinity of Jesus. In the Female Reader she includes the passion of Christ, the crucifixion narrative in Luke, poems about the resurrection, and her own devotional prayers.
25 Cooper, “Reading the Politics of Abortion,” 736.
26 Dumler-Winckler, Modern Virtue, 139.
27 Dumler-Winckler, Modern Virtue, 276–7.
28 For my review of her book see Dumler-Winckler, “A Lost Feminist Vision?”; Bachiochi, The Rights of Women.
29 Her central argument is that the radical Christian feminist does consider chastity a virtue for men and women and thinks that many social problems follow from lack of chastity on the part of both.
30 Godwin, Godwin on Wollstonecraft.
31 As Dorothy Roberts notes, “A caucus of Black feminists at a 1994 pro-choice conference coined the term ‘reproductive justice’ a framework that included not only the human right not to have a child, but also the right to have children and to raise them with dignity in safe, healthy, and supportive environments.” Roberts, Killing the Black Body, xix.
32 Roberts, Killing the Black Body, 5.
33 See Peters, Trust Women; Peters, “Listening to Women”; Kamitsuka, Abortion and the Christian Tradition.
34 Traina, “Between a Rock and a Hard Place.” Reimer-Barry, “Another Pro-Life Movement Is Possible”; Flores, “A Response to Emily Reimer-Barry’s ‘Another Pro-Life Movement Is Possible’—Power, Politics and the Pro-Life Movement”; Rubio, Hope for Common Ground; Kaveny, A Culture of Engagement, Introduction and Ch. 5.
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Emily Dumler-Winckler
Emily Dumler-Winckler is an associate professor of Christian Ethics and Constructive Theology at Saint Louis University. Her areas of research include ethics, politics, religion, science, and women and gender studies. Her first book, Modern Virtue: Mary Wollstonecraft and a Tradition of Dissent (Oxford University Press, 2022), is the first sustained treatment of Wollstonecraft's religion and theology in the context of the Revolution debates of the 1790s. Her second book traces the role of radical religious traditions in abolition movements in America within the global context.