GenderHPT

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.

2024

2026