1 Rough Equality, Rougher Inequalities, and the 'Jostlings of ...

Rough Equality, Rougher Inequalities, and the 'Jostlings of Equality'Response to Sylvana Tomaselli's lecture on Wollstonecraft and InequalityBy Eileen Hunt Botting, University of Notre DameTogether with my teacher Sylvana Tomaselli, I shall argue that Wollstonecraftgrounded her theory of universal human rights on an ethical/metaphysical conception ofthe absolute moral equality of human beings. On Wollstonecraft's reading, women'shuman rights were grounded in women's natures as God's human creatures. Regardlessof sex, human creatures were equally subject to their divine Creator's universal, rationalmoral law. As moral equals, men and women were obliged to put the rational moral lawof their divine Creator into practice through the dutiful respect of each other's humanrights. For her and many Kantian feminist ethicists since, the recognition and realizationof human rights required the practice of the principle of equal respect.Wollstonecraft's a priori conception of humans as absolute moral equals did notstand in the way of her pragmatic and liberal account of their other equalities andinequalities. Wollstonecraft had a principled (and, I will add, Hobbesian) conception ofthe rough equality of human individuals in comparative intellectual, physical, social, andcivic terms. In principle, such rough (or relative) human equality was a sufficient startingpoint for a realistic utopian approach to liberal political justice. She was, however,concerned with the urgent moral and political problem of the rougher (or hurtful)inequalities that harm us all in society, especially through the pernicious feedback loop ofpatriarchy, and the vicious cycles of its master-slave dynamic.To address this problem, Wollstonecraft imagined that the "jostlings of equality"between the sexes, beginning on the playing fields of public primary schools, would help1

to counteract over time men's and women's adaptation to pernicious gender norms inlove, family, and society at large. Such deep, egalitarian reforms in education wouldgradually trigger a paradigm shift in the way that men and women saw and treated eachother. As lifelong friends who had roughhoused on the playground according to the samerules, adult men and women would be psychologically primed to put into practice themoral principle of equal respect. Given the political advances in the legal recognition ofthe natural rights of humans during the American and French revolutions, Wollstonecraftharbored a reasonable hope that equally educated adults could learn to work in tandem toinstitutionalize human rights in law and culture. Taking the long view, she posited equalpublic education as the means by which the principle of equal respect would become thebasis for institutionalizing the rough equality of humans, thereby remedying, over time,their rougher and arbitrary experiences of inequality.So, yes, I agree with Tomaselli that Wollstonecraft began the non-ideal dimensionof her political theory with the fact of human inequality. To paraphrase her interlocutorRousseau, she began with women as they are, to theorize what they might become. But itwas in the practical yet principled spirit of Hobbes that she did so. Humans were notequal in practice, nor would they ever fully be so. But they were equal enough: all thingsconsidered, they were roughly equal. A smart woman could outwit a dumb man, and astrong man could dominate a weak woman, any day...or night. It all evened out, whenyou looked at human capabilities from a comparative perspective.Yet, like John Stuart Mill after her, Wollstonecraft allowed the possibility thatgirls and women might, over time, through greater opportunities in physical educationand health care, develop themselves to achieve the same or greater physical strength as2

oys and men. This Amazonian outcome was of course Rousseau's greatest nightmare, ormost cherished sexual fantasy (I'm not sure which). Unlike Rousseau, Wollstonecraft didnot fear this potential outcome of equal education. She didn't even care so much aboutthe achievement of a perfect equality between the sexes (in strength, in intellect, or inwealth), as much as she cared about the establishment of a perfectly equal standard ofmorality in law and culture. As much as she thought it would be best to mitigate theinequalities of class among people, she did not think it was morally necessary (orpolitically realistic) to eliminate all forms of inequality from economics, as long aspeople practiced charity and governments provided equal rights to rich and poor alike.Her absolute standard of moral equality, which demanded the elimination ofdouble standards in law, religion, and culture, derived from her moral perfectionism. Herontology of the human being is the starting point for her perfectionistic account of humandevelopment, which understands the ultimate purpose of human life as the learning andpractice of moral virtue in social relationships. Although she was not a perfectionist whenit came to establishing human equality in society, she was a perfectionist when it came todefining human morality and how its universal principles ought to be realized in society.Her justification of universal human rights was an expression of her moral universalismand moral perfectionism. The establishment of a universal human rights standard in lawwas one important practical step toward enabling a rough equality to flourish in factamong humans. This universalistic moral standard demanded the abolition of slavery,coverture, and the aristocratic class system, as a prelude to the establishment of equal"civil and political rights" for all adults in a representative republic. These sweeping3

legal reforms would mitigate the pernicious influence of the rougher, hurtful, man-madeinequalities that precluded the perfectionistic moral development of humanity.For Wollstonecraft, friendship ought to function as a symbiotic relationshipwithin which moral equals inspire each other to strive for moral perfection. For example,boys and girls who played the same games together would inspire each other to practicethe same virtues, such as respectful competition and amiableness. Despite this egalitarianideal of higher friendship, she acknowledged that it was certainly possible, evenprobable, that one would gravely misjudge one's friends and their intentions. Her first,unofficial, husband, Gilbert Imlay, was a case in point. Despite her loving him as hereternal spiritual partner, he turned out to be a cad: a man who cared more for mere"commerce" (in economic and sexual traffic) than for the needs of the mother of hisinfant daughter and their future as a family. But Wollstonecraft had other, dear friends inher life, including her only true (and legal) husband, William Godwin, who showed heranother way.Wollstonecraft's philosophy of higher friendship has both Aristotelian andKantian dimensions. Yet she moves beyond each of these philosophical models of interrelationalequality by emphasizing the redemptive power of higher friendship for andamong people beyond elite men. Wollstonecraft democratizes higher friendship byaccommodating a place for everyone within it. Everyone could and should inspiresomeone else to the higher virtues through friendship: spouses, peers, siblings, parents, aswell as parents and their children.One of the most redemptive forms of friendship could be between women ofdifferent classes. In her final novel, Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman, Wollstonecraft4

for they all struggled in some terrible way with the grim realities of patriarchy. Byspeaking in the collective and critical voice of her friends, family, and fellow women,Wollstonecraft acts as a political prophet for the human status and human rights of "theoppressed half of the human species". She clears a way in the wilderness for women torethink their pernicious relationships with one another, so that future generations of girlsmight grow up to see each other more as genuine friends and less as punishing rivals.Through such amiable relationships, girls might grow up to respect not only others but,first and foremost, themselves.Wollstonecraft wrote in her Rights of Woman that any woman deserves the choiceof a "single life with dignity" instead of marriage. While she was a 32-year-old virginwhen she made this case, her defense of the "single life with dignity" is not necessarilysmall-p puritan or asexual in moral import. Most of her arguments about the dangers ofsex for women have to do with the all-too-real eighteenth-century problems ofprostitution, marital infidelity, venereal disease, marital rape, involuntary motherhood,and death from miscarriage and childbirth. Similarly to the Kantian feminist ethicistLara Denis, she thought the principle of equal respect required that marriage should be arespectful friendship in which sex was never exploitative but rather reflective of mutuallove. This is one reason why Wollstonecraft favored marital pairs over polygamy.Marriage primarily ought to be a relationship between "equal moral beings," andsecondarily a relationship that concerned natural functions such as sexual reproduction.Polygamy or polyandry might be permissible if marriage was meant to be like a businessor corporate contract, in which maximum productivity for the group was the goal.Despite the Kantian limits she laid down for ethical sexual behavior, Wollstonecraft6

thought there was nothing intrinsically wrong with sex or having a female body. Whileher Rights of Woman issued some warnings about the dangerous moral and physicalconsequences of pre-marital (hetero- or homo-) sexual behavior, especially for childrenor early adolescents, she had a generous view of the gender roles we might play insociety. For example, she praised the famous French transvestite and diplomat, CharlesD'Eon, as a woman who "acquired courage and resolution" from "from having received amasculine education."Wollstonecraft often spoke of the "sober pleasures" of rational thought andphilosophy, while always insisting that these pleasures suited the sexless minds of menand women alike. Unlike Kant, who has been criticized by feminist philosophers forpositing an "idealized" conception of a rational male agent at the core of his ethicaltheory, Wollstonecraft's approach to ethics resists such a built-in sex bias. Herphilosophical anthropology of human beings specifically accounts for biological sexdifferences across the species. She proceeded from the naturalistic fact of femaleembodiment in her theory of the girl-child's human development.Like Martha Nussbaum, Wollstonecraft also had a capacious understanding of thevariety of capabilities that define the human experience, such as sympathy, love, play,and bodily integrity. This rich view of the physical joys and freedoms of embodiedhuman life was captured in her Rousseau-inspired account of child development: "Everyyoung creature requires almost continual exercise, and the infancy of children...should bepassed in harmless gambols, that exercise the feet and hands." Although she was morelike Kant in her deontological theory of the foundations of human rights, Wollstonecraftparallels many of Nussbaum's views on the moral importance of conceptualizing humans7

in a holistic way that captures the affective richness of their ethical and political lives.Reason has priority in Wollstonecraft's ethics but it is not exclusive of other human traitssuch as passion. As Amartya Sen has noted, one of Wollstonecraft's great contributions topolitical philosophy is her modeling of rational yet wrathful argument, spurred by moraloutrage at wrongs done to oneself and others, in "loudly" demanding "JUSTICE for onehalf of the human race."While Tomaselli has accurately placed Wollstonecraft within the sometimeslower-case "spartan" republican discourse of the late eighteenth century, her rights-based,representative republicanism is both too pacifist and too liberal to be upper-case"Spartan". Wollstonecraft was not so much spartan as Athenian, just as she was not somuch puritan as she was a rational Christian Dissenter in the school of the ReverendRichard Price. She was a radical advocate of the Socratic method in primary education.Like her contemporary and fellow Englishwoman Jane Austen, her Christian feminismled her to appropriate Aristotelian ethics. For Wollstonecraft, modesty was not theconventional feminine virtue of coquettish sexual self-restraint, but rather a universalhuman virtue of sober-self-judgment. Modesty was a mean between the extremes ofmisguided confidence and excessive humility. Perhaps this is why many people readAusten's smart yet amiable Elizabeth Bennett as the Wollstonecraftian heroine of Prideand Prejudice.As Tomaselli insightfully explores, the intellectual influence of Plato andChristian Platonism runs deep in Wollstonecraft's philosophy of love and education. Iread Wollstonecraft's Platonic model for education to be the female philosopher Diotima,who points the way for the young Socrates to climb upward to the "sea of beauty" and8

truth. For me, Wollstonecraft's debt to the Symposium shines most clearly through herLetters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. Thiscourageous autobiographical reflection on her struggle to move past her unrequited lovefor Imlay was a record of her psychological return to a "single life with dignity".Wollstonecraft thought we ought to strive to transcend the rougher inequalities in love.For her, we climb Diotima's philosophical ladder to rise to the level of the sea of beauty,not to reject love itself, but rather to comprehend the beauty of the knowledge gained bythe rougher struggles of loving.For Wollstonecraft, our modern Diotima, this ladder climb to self-knowledgebegins with the "jostlings of equality," the rough-and-tumble play which we experienceon the horizontal playing fields and equal starting lines of primary education. In herpractical philosophy of education, Wollstonecraft's moral perfectionism meets herpolitical egalitarianism. She envisioned universal primary education as operatingaccording to three core moral principles that would together undermine the rougherinequalities by instilling an egalitarian ethic of mutual respect among children. Theseprinciples are universalistic holism, dutiful individualism, and, most vitally,psychological optimism in the human capability for positive development. Applied inconcert in a "national system" of free, mandatory, public, coeducational, primary dayschools, these three principles would enable children to eschew the damaging genderstereotypes that their culture had afforded them.Her universalistic holism entailed an education that developed, rather than"stunted," the potential of the "body, heart, and understanding." By playing togetherduring hourly recess in the grounds surrounding the school, girls and boys would learn to9

see and treat each other as embodied human equals. Differences in body or sex did nottranslate into differences in moral status or rules. The only rule specified for theircoeducational outdoor play ought to be "national" in scope: the general prohibition ofbrutality toward animals. Unlike Kant's rule against animal cruelty, this prohibition wasfor the moral and physical benefit of humans and animals, not solely for the moralrectitude of humans. By learning to treat animals benevolently in their games, childrenwould discern the Rousseauian idea that all embodied, sentient creatures (includinghumans) had natural rights to respect of their bodily integrity. Finally, holism demandedday schools because children needed their families for a complete moral education.Dutiful individualism was not about inculcating a sense of social isolation butrather a sense of moral responsibility to oneself and others. Integrating boys and girls ofdifferent class backgrounds was the key to the deeper psychological transformation oftheir images of themselves and each other. As she wrote in the Rights of Woman, "theyshould be sent to school to mix with a number of equals, for only by the jostlings ofequality can be formed a just opinion of ourselves."Optimism, or a belief in one's capability for positive development, would beinculcated through a standard yet stimulating curriculum. Girls and boys would be taughtbotany, mechanics, astronomy, reading, writing, arithmetic, natural history, and simpleexperiments in natural science, but such intellectual training would "never encroach ongymnastic plays in the open air." In Socratic conversation with their teachers, they wouldlearn elements of religion, history, anthropology, and politics. In this way, optimisticteaching methods and goals reinforced the holistic dimension of universal primaryeducation.10

Nearly two centuries later, the 1989 United Nations Convention the Rights of theChild similarly recognized free primary education, including physical education, as auniversal human right of children. Remarkably, Wollstonecraft's plan for "nationaleducation" overlaps with the contemporary definition of universal primary educationused by the United Nations: enabling all children, boys and girls, to complete educationfrom grades one through five. In 2012, the United Nations has reported significantprogress in realizing gender equity in primary education in developing countries, yet "tenmillion more girls than boys" remain out of primary school and "nearly two-thirds of theworld's 780 million people who cannot read are women." Alongside Kant's 1795argument for a peaceful world federation of rights-based republics, Wollstonecraft's 1792demand for a universal human right to primary education remains farsighted in boththeory and practice. Her arguments for the egalitarian transformation of the family,friendship, and primary education, combined with her philosophy of universal humanrights, make her the most consistent defender of the ideal of political equality during theEnlightenment.11