Journal of the History of Ideas

Abstract:

I compare the notion of natural right in the work of François Poulain de la Barre and Gabrielle Suchon. Poulain defined right in terms of possession like Grotius, Hobbes, and Locke, but limited the equality it established between men and women to private spaces beyond the state's gaze. Suchon gave the natural right of freedom strong impetus by grounding it in Aristotelian teleology, but this framework made it a dead letter for the Enlightenment. This analysis demonstrates the importance of early modern feminist philosophy to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political philosophy as well as to present-day discussions of human rights.