The resurgence of feminist activism and scholarship in the 1960s and 1970s gave rise to many different feminisms and strands of feminist thought. These encompass issues ranging from campaigns for equal political, civil and social rights for women to issues concerning feminism’s intersections with race, class, sexuality and queerness to contested understandings of the very idea of ‘woman (-hood)’ and ‘man (-hood)’. Yet far from these issues being the province of late twentieth-century feminisms and movements like #MeToo, they can be found in the writings of a number of British thinkers some two hundred years earlier. In the 1790s and early 1800s, a time in which women ceased to be legal persons upon marriage, the writings of five political thinkers advocating women’s right to enjoy the same civil and political rights as men stand out. The thinkers in question were Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797), William Thompson (1775-1833), Anna Doyle Wheeler (1780-1848), Harriet Taylor, (1807-1859) and John Stuart Mill (1806-1873). It will be argued that their respective positions, though framed from differing perspectives, nevertheless agreed that women’s lack of political and civil rights, and the social privileges those rights enabled, was a matter of societal dynamics. In their view women were encouraged or educated to behave in ways deemed to be appropriate for their sex. Law, custom and social etiquette further reinforced perceptions and practices as to how and what women should be. Central to the critiques of these thinkers was a questioning of the dominant ideas of their time about what it meant to be a woman and a man, and by extension the meaning of ‘womanhood’ and ‘manhood’. These thinkers challenged (and rejected) the idea that women (and men) were the sum total of their physiology, that women’s (and men’s) presumed natures were fixed at birth such that their capacities, opportunities, and station in life were circumscribed by nature. They posed questions as to why women lacked the rights enjoyed by men, why women were considered lesser beings in comparison with men, and why custom and law made it so. They posed alternative visions of what women (or men) could be and what social changes might be necessary to realise women’s full political and civil equality with men. Although their answers were framed from differing assumptions and perspectives, it will be argued that each in their way challenged the dominant gender order of their time (and the various dogmas that served to justify it). To demonstrate this claim is one of the aims of this paper. A second aim is to argue that such challenges are why their ideas remain relevant in the twenty-first century for feminist political thought. In many respects these challenges amount to the sine qua non of contemporary feminist political thought.
