Selected as one of The Tablet's Books of the Year 2021 Mary Wollstonecraft's watershed contribution to theories of women's human rights and her international reception by both Western and non-Western intellectuals has ensured she continues to shape contemporary human rights debates around the world. Bringing together over 100 individual responses to Wollstonecraft's life and work, Portraits of Wollstonecraft documents her international and cross-cultural reception from the late 18th-century to the early 21st-century. Reflecting on over two centuries of responses to her political ideas, writing, and philosophy, it counters the persistent myth that she ceased to be read in the aftermath of the publication of her husband William Godwin's scandalous posthumous Memoirs of her life in 1798. Beginning with her earliest portraiture and the first reviews of her published writings from the late 1780s, Volume I traces her emergence as an international public figure of women's rights in her life, work, and philosophical, literary, and artistic reception throughout Britain, Ireland, Continental Europe, North and South America, and across the British Empire and its former colonies from Jamaica to India to South Africa. Volume II focuses on Wollstonecraft's posthumous philosophical, literary, and artistic reception, especially within modern strands of feminism, by assembling responses from China, Japan, and South Korea as well as writing by Mary Shelley, Emma Goldman, Ruth Benedict, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan, Susan Moller Okin, Barbara Johnson, Martha Nussbaum, and Amartya Sen that discusses her theories of virtue, love, gender, education, and rights. Bringing to light many forgotten accounts and images of Wollstonecraft, pieces by major thinkers from across the history of philosophy, and 31 annotated illustrations showing her development into a feminist icon, Portraits of Wollstonecraft achieves what no other work on Wollstonecraft has yet to do. This comprehensive collection charts the depth and breadth of her legacies for philosophy, political theory, ethics, literature, art, and feminism on a global scale.

There has been a rising interest in the study of Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) in philosophy, political theory, literary studies and the history of political thought in recent decades. The Wollstonecraftian Mind seeks to provide a comprehensive survey of her work, not only placing it in its historical context but also exploring its contemporary significance. Comprising 38 chapters by a team of international contributors this handbook covers: the background to Wollstonecraft's work Wollstonecraft's major works the relationship between Wollstonecraft and other major philosophers Wollstonecraftian philosophy Wollstonecraft's legacy Essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy, Wollstonecraft's work is central to the study of political philosophy, literature, French studies, political thought, and feminism.

From her youth, Mary Shelley immersed herself in the social contract tradition, particularly the educational and political theories of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as well as the radical philosophies of her parents, the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and the anarchist William Godwin. Against this background, Shelley wrote Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, first published in 1818. In the two centuries since, her masterpiece has been celebrated as a Gothic classic and its symbolic resonance has driven the global success of its publication, translation, and adaptation in theater, film, art, and literature. However, in Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child, Eileen Hunt Botting argues that Frankenstein is more than an original and paradigmatic work of science fiction-it is a profound reflection on a radical moral and political question: do children have rights? Botting contends that Frankenstein invites its readers to reason through the ethical consequences of a counterfactual premise: what if a man had used science to create a human life without a woman? Immediately after the Creature's "birth," his scientist-father abandons him and the unjust and tragic consequences that follow form the basis of Frankenstein's plot. Botting finds in the novel's narrative structure a series of interconnected thought experiments that reveal how Shelley viewed Frankenstein's Creature for what he really was-a stateless orphan abandoned by family, abused by society, and ignored by law. The novel, therefore, compels readers to consider whether children have the right to the fundamental means for their development as humans-namely, rights to food, clothing, shelter, care, love, education, and community. In Botting's analysis, Frankenstein emerges as a conceptual resource for exploring the rights of children today, especially those who are disabled, stateless, or genetically modified by medical technologies such as three-parent in vitro fertilization and, perhaps in the near future, gene editing. Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child concludes that the right to share love and community, especially with parents or fitting substitutes, belongs to all children, regardless of their genesis, membership, or social status.

Artificial Life After Frankenstein brings the insights born of Mary Shelley's legacy to bear upon the ethics and politics of making artificial life and intelligence in the twenty-first century. What are the obligations of humanity to the artificial creatures we make? And what are the corresponding rights of those creatures, whether they are learning machines or genetically modified organisms? In seeking ways to respond to these questions, so vital for our age of genetic engineering and artificial intelligence, we would do well to turn to the capacious mind and imaginative genius of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851). Shelley's novels Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) and The Last Man (1826) precipitated a modern political strain of science fiction concerned with the ethical dilemmas that arise when we make artificial life-and make life artificial-through science, technology, and other forms of cultural change. In Artificial Life After Frankenstein, Eileen Hunt Botting puts Shelley and several classics of modern political science fiction into dialogue with contemporary political science and philosophy, in order to challenge some of the apocalyptic fears at the fore of twenty-first-century political thought on AI and genetic engineering. Focusing on the prevailing myths that artificial forms of life will end the world, destroy nature, and extinguish love, Botting shows how Shelley modeled ways to break down and transform the meanings of apocalypse, nature, and love in the face of widespread and deep-seated fear about the power of technology and artifice to undermine the possibility of humanity, community, and life itself. Through their explorations of these themes, Mary Shelley and authors of modern political science fiction from H. G. Wells to Nnedi Okorafor have paved the way for a techno-political philosophy of living with the artifice of humanity in all of its complexity. In Artificial Life After Frankenstein, Botting brings the insights born of Shelley's legacy to bear upon the ethics and politics of making artificial life and intelligence in the twenty-first century.

From her youth, Mary Shelley immersed herself in the social contract tradition, particularly the educational and political theories of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as well as the radical philosophies of her parents, the feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and the anarchist William Godwin. Against this background, Shelley wrote Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, first published in 1818. In the two centuries since, her masterpiece has been celebrated as a Gothic classic and its symbolic resonance has driven the global success of its publication, translation, and adaptation in theater, film, art, and literature. However, in Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child, Eileen Hunt Botting argues that Frankenstein is more than an original and paradigmatic work of science fiction-it is a profound reflection on a radical moral and political question: do children have rights? Botting contends that Frankenstein invites its readers to reason through the ethical consequences of a counterfactual premise: what if a man had used science to create a human life without a woman? Immediately after the Creature's "birth," his scientist-father abandons him and the unjust and tragic consequences that follow form the basis of Frankenstein's plot. Botting finds in the novel's narrative structure a series of interconnected thought experiments that reveal how Shelley viewed Frankenstein's Creature for what he really was-a stateless orphan abandoned by family, abused by society, and ignored by law. The novel, therefore, compels readers to consider whether children have the right to the fundamental means for their development as humans-namely, rights to food, clothing, shelter, care, love, education, and community. In Botting's analysis, Frankenstein emerges as a conceptual resource for exploring the rights of children today, especially those who are disabled, stateless, or genetically modified by medical technologies such as three-parent in vitro fertilization and, perhaps in the near future, gene editing. Mary Shelley and the Rights of the Child concludes that the right to share love and community, especially with parents or fitting substitutes, belongs to all children, regardless of their genesis, membership, or social status.

How can women's rights be seen as a universal value rather than a Western value imposed upon the rest of the world? Addressing this question, Eileen Hunt Botting offers the first comparative study of writings by Mary Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill. Although Wollstonecraft and Mill were the primary philosophical architects of the view that women's rights are human rights, Botting shows how non-Western thinkers have revised and internationalized their original theories since the nineteenth century. Botting explains why this revised and internationalized theory of women's human rights-grown out of Wollstonecraft and Mill but stripped of their Eurocentric biases-is an important contribution to thinking about human rights in truly universal terms.

This book moves beyond traditional readings of Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-59) and his relevance to contemporary democracy by emphasizing the relationship of his life and work to modern feminist thought. Within the resurgence of political interest in Tocqueville during the past two decades, especially in the United States, there has been significant scholarly attention to the place of gender, race, and colonialism in his work. This is the first edited volume to gather together a range of this creative scholarship. It reveals a tidal shift in the reception history of Tocqueville as a result of his serious engagement by feminist, gender, postcolonial, and critical race theorists.

The volume highlights the expressly normative nature of Tocqueville's project, thus providing an overdue counterweight to the conventional understanding of Tocquevillean America as an actual place in time and history. By reading Tocqueville alongside the writings of early women's rights activists, ethnologists, critical race theorists, contemporary feminists, neoconservatives, and his French contemporaries, among others, this book produces a variety of Tocquevilles that unsettles the hegemonic view of his work.

Seen as a philosophical source and a political authority for modern democracies since the publication of the twin volumes of Democracy in America (1835/1840), Tocqueville emerges from this collection as a vital interlocutor for democratic theorists confronting the power relations generated by intersections of gender, sexual, racial, class, ethnic, national, and colonial identities.

In addition to the editors, the contributors are Jocelyn Boryczka, Richard Boyd, Christine Carey, Barbara Cruikshank, Laura Janara, Matthew Holbreich, Kathleen S. Sullivan, Alvin B. Tillery Jr., Lisa Pace Vetter, Dana Villa, Cheryl B. Welch, and Delba Winthrop.

Compares the role of the family in the political thought of Rousseau, Burke, and Wollstonecraft.

From science to politics, the era of the the Enlightenment is widely recognized as a crucible for modern Western culture. It has shaped vast portions of the Western world view, including our conceptions and experiences of happiness, family life, the nation-state, and religious and ethnic identities. However, in recent years, scholars from both the sciences and the humanities have debated the question of how we should understand, and to what extent we should endorse, our debt to the Enlightenment. The January 2006 issue of American Behavioral Scientist offers rigorous engagement of pro-Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment perspectives, continuing a debate that began in the late eighteenth century. The opening essays by James Schmidt and Graeme Garrard offer historically and linguistically nuanced defenses of plural uses of the term "enlightenment" especially to capture the distinction between the process of enlightenment and the era of the Enlightenment. The remaining articles more closelyexamine several questions about the Enlightenment's legacy for contemporary life: Are we living out the aspirations of the Enlightenment in a critical or tacit manner? Are we witnessing the end of the Enlightenment's pervasive influence on intellectual paradigms, social practices, and nation-states or making room for its further articulation? Which, if any, of these relationships to the Enlightenment are sociologically accurate or normatively preferable?

The remaining essays by Darrin M. McMahon, Eileen Hunt Botting, Adam Sutcliffe, Russell Arben Fox, and Damon Linker review these questions from different perspectives and assess the value of the Enlightenment's legacy in various spheres of human life. McMahon's essay focuses on the Enlightenment s impact on the modern understanding of happiness and social welfare. Botting's essay concentrates on how Mary Wollstonecraft s Enlightenment philosophy contributed to the development of the "modern social imaginary" of the egalitarian family. Sutcliffe and Fox illustrate how Western conceptions of religious, ethnic, and national identities have been shaped in critical dialogue with, or in opposition to, the rationalistic, universalistic strands of Enlightenment thought. Linker argues that we should resist Heidegger's rejection of the philosophical process of enlightenment and that we should instead embrace the Enlightenment s promotion of the normative ideal and political practice of critical public discourse about our relationships to one another and the world around us.

This issue of American Behavioral Scientist offers an accessible survey of current research on the contemporary relevance of the Enlightenment and should be in the library of every political scientist, sociologist, historian, humanist, philosopher, and student "

Compares the role of the family in the political thought of Rousseau, Burke, and Wollstonecraft.