Project description
Exploring gender and anti-slavery in British political thought
In the landscape of political philosophy, the discussion has long revolved around liberty, equality, and justice. However, the interplay between gender and race in shaping these ideals remains unexplored. This gap hinders a comprehensive understanding of how these notions have evolved in tandem and respond to each other. Supported by the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) programme, the GenderHPT project aims to study writers like Mary Hays and George Wallace to unveil the origins of proto-feminist and anti-slavery ideas in British political thought. While Hays laid the groundwork for a tradition of European feminist free thought, Wallace reshaped interpretations of law. By shedding light on these historical insights, the project will foster critical discourse on gender, race, and emancipation.
Objective
The overall goal of this research is to offer a novel account of the origins of proto-feminist and antislavery ideas in British political thought based on hitherto overlooked writers and sources.
Political philosophers have been long discussing the concepts of liberty, equality, and justice, and political theorists are now rethinking urgent questions of gender and race. Yet there is still little conversation between them or investigation of how these notions have always been structured in response to one another. The discipline of history of political thought is well placed to bridge this gap and to trace the intertwined development of these ideas, as this research aims to show.
At the centre of this project stands Mary Hays (1759–1843), one of the first advocates of women’s rights in Britain. Hays, it will be argued, should be considered a major starting point of a tradition of European feminist freethought which championed radical pro-women, anti-racist, and antislavery arguments and integrated them with new and nuanced conceptions of equality, liberty, and emancipation. A second case study of this research is George Wallace (1727–1805) who published the first essay in Britain which explicitly advocated total and immediate abolition of both slavery and the slave trade (1760). Wallace, too, offered an innovative and utopian account of equality, and his categorical rejection of slavery entailed a historic shift in common interpretations of Roman law, natural law, and the law of nations.
Among the outputs of this research will be a monograph, provisionally titled Politics of Freethinking: Religion, Gender, and Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Britain, as well as a series of individual chapters and articles aimed at leading peer-reviewed journals. Several academic and public activities will be held in collaboration with scholars of gender and critical race studies at Jyväskylä to disseminate and communicate these findings.
Fields of science
- humanitieshistory and archaeologyhistory
- social scienceslawhuman rightshuman rights violationshuman trafficking
- humanitieslanguages and literatureliterature studiesliterary genresessays
- agricultural sciencesagriculture, forestry, and fisheriesagricultureindustrial cropsfodder
- humanitiesphilosophy, ethics and religionreligions
Keywords
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.2 - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-TMA-MSCA-PF-EF - HORIZON TMA MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships - European FellowshipsCoordinator
40100 Jyvaskyla
Finland