QuestionsWhat is a just society?The rights of half the human race
What is a just society?Equality

The rights of half the human race

Mary Wollstonecraft 1759 · 1797Women share the same reason: educate them accordingly.
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What it claims

Women are entitled to the same natural rights as men. Excluding them without proving they lack reason is to act like a tyrant: reason "loudly demands justice for one half of the human race".

Why

Men's rights rest on reason, which women share, and the degree of reason is not what measures rights.

In short

"The rights of half the human race" is an argument by Mary Wollstonecraft (Rights of Woman, dedication to Talleyrand) on the question "What is a just society?" (answer: equality). Its claim: Women are entitled to the same natural rights as men. Excluding them without proving they lack reason is to act like a tyrant: reason "loudly demands justice for one half of the human race". According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P3). AskPhilosophy presents 3 objections, 3 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

Rights of Woman, dedication to Talleyrand
Valid with an implicit premise

In 1791 revolutionary France proclaimed the rights of man but shut women out of political life. Talleyrand, in a report on public education, planned only a domestic education for girls. Wollstonecraft dedicated her book to him and turned the Revolution's own principles against him: if rights rest on reason, women are entitled to them as much as men.

P1The natural rights men claim (to be free, to judge their own happiness for themselves) rest on reason. By "a parity of reasoning", every being with enough reason is entitled to them.
P2Women share with men the gift of reason.
P3 · implicit premiseHaving reason is enough, whatever its degree: men do not all have the same amount either, and their rights are not measured by their intelligence.
Therefore women are entitled to the same natural rights as men. Excluding them without proving they lack reason is to act like a tyrant: reason "loudly demands justice for one half of the human race".

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P3, the computer finds a situation where rights come from reason and women have reason, but a certain level of reason is required for rights, a level women would not reach: then they would not have the rights.
Valid with P3. P3 is needed because Wollstonecraft herself does not rule out that women might have, on average, less strength of mind: she only asks that their virtues be "the same in kind". So it must be reason, not a certain level of reason, that grants rights. This is where her opponents of the time attack (see Sieyès).
Analogy. A school announces: "Every pupil who can read may use the library." It cannot turn away the pupils of one class by saying they read a little slower: the rule is about being able to read, not reading fastest.

Objections

3

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

T
Talleyrand (report on public education) 1791 · attacks premise 1

Talleyrand grants that excluding half the human race from all government is "impossible to explain according to abstract principles". But politics is not ruled by principles alone: it must aim at the happiness of all, including that of women, whom domestic life makes happier.

Wollstonecraft replies
Wollstonecraft
When men contend for freedom and the right to judge their own happiness for themselves, is it not inconsistent and unjust to subjugate women, even while sincerely believing one acts for their happiness? Who made man the exclusive judge, if woman shares with him the gift of reason?
T
The argument from tradition ("prescription") attacks premise 2

Everywhere and always, women have been subject to men. So universal and ancient a fact shows they are not made to govern themselves. She notes that this argument ("prescription") is the one used in France to justify the oppression of women, and in England to reject the rights of man themselves.

Wollstonecraft replies
Wollstonecraft
The argument recoils on men. The few have always enslaved the many, and men of worth have always bowed to mediocre kings. Until it is proved that the courtier who gives up his rights is not a moral agent, it cannot be shown that woman is inferior because she has always been subjugated.
S
Sieyès (active and passive citizens) 1789 · attacks premise 3

All inhabitants have natural and civil rights: safety, liberty, property. But political rights require a capacity to take part in public affairs. Women, "at least in the present state", children and foreigners will be "passive" citizens: protected by the law, without a vote. The 1791 Constitution follows this distinction.

Wollstonecraft replies
Wollstonecraft
If women are to be excluded, without a voice, from the natural rights of mankind, let it first be proved, to ward off the charge of injustice and inconsistency, that they lack reason. Otherwise the first constitution founded on reason will show that man still acts like a tyrant.
The debate goes on (our summary) Sieyès does not deny that women have reason: he says "in the present state", which points precisely to their lack of instruction. So he and Wollstonecraft agree on the facts; they differ on the consequence (wait, or educate and include). Frenchwomen first voted only in 1945, British women on equal terms with men only in 1928.