In her book, Eileen Hunt Botting offers a genealogy of the women’s rights discourse in Western political theory. Her study centers on Mary Wollstonecraft and J. S. Mill as two of the early philosophical architects of a critical tradition forged by a later group of liberal thinkers, such as Amartya Sen, Martha Nussbaum, Charles Beitz, and Kwame Anthony Appiah. These scholars have developed a research program that focuses on human rights as a political framework best located for achieving global social justice. Written in a liberal feminist vein, this study—as well as some of the work it engages with—aims to critically investigate the Western “biases” of this tradition and show the possibilities of a “cross-cultural dialogue” between Western and non-Western feminism (p. 25). Unlike most of the liberal accounts of human rights, this study seeks to substantially discuss limitations of liberal theory, such as its universalism and disregard for gender and affective analyses. In doing so, it offers two main contributions. First, it identifies two discursive logics of women’s rights that have articulated a rational Christian feminism (which the author draws from Wollstonecraft) and a secular utilitarian feminism (which she takes from Mill). Second, it advocates a culturally sensitive feminism that is grounded in local and national non-Western political traditions.

To achieve its first goal, Hunt Botting’s book focuses on early feminists’ political and rhetorical strategies. While Wollstonecraft and Mill are located at “the origin” of the modern concern with women’s moral and political rights, their arguments had a different impact on the the development of a progressive rights narrative. The reasoning behind these foundational arguments is not only shaped by the authors’ ideas but also has to do with the texts’ circulation and reception. The two thinkers, she shows, offer different logics about why these rights matter, which impacted their influence. For instance, while Wollstonecraft justifies women’s rights on the basis of Christian and rational assumptions, Mill draws on a secular and rule-utilitarian framework to advocate for the political rights of women. For this reason, Wollstonecraft’s brand of rational and Christian rhetoric was important to early abolitionists, especially among Unitarians in England and Quakers in the United States, but its influence remained fairly limited. Mill’s secularism, in turn, became the most influential version of secular feminism, and it has been adopted as part of an international language of human rights of women. Reasoning matters, but emotional appeals also present a powerful argument for women’s rights. Together, the author suggests, Wollstonecraft’s and Mill’s literary writings had “the narrative sophistication and emotional power to become universal human stories” and constitute models of feminist advocacy (p. 206).

The book’s second goal is directed at finding a stronger, non-Western women’s rights standpoint, which would supplement the feminist logics of Wollstonecraft and Mill. In her critical reconstruction of these two thinkers, Hunt Botting notices that they worked with a Western European model of human and political development that devalues many non-Western cultural standards. Unlike the two thinkers, other feminist liberals, such as Mara Tsebrikova of Russia, Martina Barros Borgoño of Chile, and Elvira López of Argentina, adopted a “rooted” view of women’s rights, which, in Hunt Botting’s view, may achieve “a partial yet sufficiently ethical transcendence of cultural bias in women’s human rights advocacy” (p. 23). Critics such as Tsebrikova, Borgoño, and López are better located to make their feminist critiques because they do not share the Western prejudices of Mill and Wollstonecraft (or if they do, this happens to a lesser extent). The value of “rooted” feminism derives from the claim that these non-Westerners make the same argument as imperial feminists, but better, because they come from a position of cultural sensitivity.

This book is a strong defense of a liberal feminist conception of womanhood, politics, and human rights, but some may contest its basic assumptions. For the author, a liberal feminist tradition is a “family of philosophical approaches to the problem of women’s subordination that prioritize women’s and gender issues” among other liberal democratic goals (p. 8). This position is based on the distinction between sex as biological and gender as constructed (this distinction is “social scientific” as opposed to its “postmodern” contestation; see notes 19 and 252). In this account of feminism—as opposed to a feminism that engages with materialist, queer, and critical race critiques—the categories of man, woman, and homosexual are left uninterrogated, and like “sex,” they are removed from history and cultural production. If gender derives from sex, then Hunt Botting’s assumption is that political views represent a given identity (for instance, Wollstonecraft’s feminism derives from her experience of being an insider and woman, whereas Mill’s ideas represent his position of being a man and outsider [p. 15]; Foucault has overcome some cultural biases as a homosexual, but he still has problematic views because he is male [p. 164]).

If sex, culture, and homosexuality are historically produced, however, then decolonial genealogical work not only criticizes Western colonialism but also dismantles and rethinks its categories. This scholarship moves away from finding “rooted” feminists and aims to grasp how subjects are formed by imperial strategies of govermentality. As part of this project, Inderpal Grewal asked us to think that “America produced subjects outside its territorial boundaries through its ability to disseminate neoliberal technologies” (Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalism, 2005, 3). These genealogies show that women’s rights discourses have constructed American feminists as “saviors” and rescuers of the oppressed “women” within a global economy (Ibid., p. 152). Likewise, a decolonial project criticizes an imperial logic of gender exceptionalism because it produces certain racialized and queer subjects (Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Time, 2007, 5). As opposed to liberal search for rooted feminists, a decolonial scholarship investigates how feminism and queerness already function as biopolitical projects and produce illegitimate women, black, Muslim, gay, and queer subjects. Moreover, if liberal feminism is grounded in the opposition between secularism and religion, a decolonial genealogy asks us to consider that this opposition was deployed to advance the interests of the West in certain contexts.

Liberal feminism displays an investment in producing secular feminist heroes who fight against bad cultural traditions. One such that emerges in Hunt Botting’s book is Malala Yousafzai of Pakistan, who, on the basis of her non-Western identity, has a privileged position to fight against women’s rights abuses (p. 248). In Hunt Botting’s book, the choice of Malala as a new figure of feminism does not seem to be shaped either by Western political investments in fighting the Taliban in Pakistan or by the growing number of international human rights associations. Saba Mahmood’s work on secularism represents a starting point for interrogating how secularism is deployed as imperialism. Rather than looking at alternative forms of modernity and feminism, Mahmood draws on Talal Asad to suggest that the issue of Western or non-Western origins of concepts is less important than “the forms of life that articulate them, the powers they release or disable” (Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report, 2016, 11). In this regard, analyzing how Malala’s role in Pakistan creates or suppresses political possibilities for local feminisms is key to a genealogical project.

Wollstonecraft, Mill and Women’s Human Rights is an important step toward a decolonial feminist genealogy. However, to advance this project, two additional steps are necessary. First, this genealogy needs to interrogate why the works of two British thinkers such as Wollstonecraft and Mill became canonized as the “origins” of modern feminism and to analyze their role in the formation of the feminist canon. Second, it needs to ask us to reflect on how various figures in the history of political thought have become complicit and associated with narratives about the superiority of a liberal mind-set.