uch major works as Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. Thus, the Vindication of the Rights of Woman is just contemporary with a series of other political and intellectual works that proclaimed and defined a doctrine of rational, Enlightenment liberalism. This strand of thought, though it matured in the late eighteenth century, has its roots considerably earlier; as a world view, it received its essential underpinning a century earlier in the works of Sir Isaac Newton (Donovan, 1992, p. 2).
The Newtonian physical universe was an orderly and rational one, a "clockwork" universe. God had been exiled to an indefinite distance in time and space, and the characteristic achievements of Newtonian physics were the precise measurement and prediction of the motions of planets. The liberal conception of humanity, or at least of "Man," corresponded to this orderly and logical view of the physical world. Reasoning power was the highest human attribute, and every human problem could best be solved by giving unfettered freedom to the development and application of reason. Whatever interfered with the reign of unfettered reason--for example, traditional social heirarchies and religious beliefs--was in the liberal view a holdover from a barbarous past, and to be done away with, the sooner the better.
Liberals thus believed, at least in principle, in equality, as expressed in the Declaration of Independence (Donovan, 1992, p. 2). Donovan suggests (1992, p. 3) that women were seen as nonrational, and therefore as occupying a naturally lower station. It is not clear, however, that this assumption was implicit in liberal thought. It is perhaps more accurate to say that liberal Enlightenment men failed to draw the implications of their own ideas as they applied to women, just as they failed to draw the implications as applied to people of color. (Thus, for example, Jefferson owned sl...