1 Please note that this is an earlier version of a paper that is now published in The Wollstonecraftian Mind, edited by Sandrine Bergès, Eileen Hunt Botting, and Alan Coffee (London and New York: Routledge, 2019), pp. 25–35. Please cite the published version. THE EARLY MODERN PERIOD: DIGNITY AND THE FOUNDATION OF WOMEN’S RIGHTS Jacqueline Broad Introduction In a key passage of her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Mary Wollstonecraft declares that ‘It is time to effect a revolution in female manners—time to restore to [women] their lost dignity—and make them, as a part of the human species, labour by reforming themselves to reform the world’ (Wollstonecraft 2008, 113). The restoration of women’s dignity, in her view, amounts to women being treated equally with men as members of the same species. She contends that women should be accorded the high rank or elevated status that comes with being human rather than part of ‘the brute creation’ (71–2, 76, 78–9, 98). More than this, for Wollstonecraft the restoration of dignity amounts to the recognition that women are not ‘bent beneath the iron hand of destiny,’ but have been granted free will for the purpose of reforming themselves through their own efforts (113). Dignity is, in an important respect, connected with women’s capacity for self-perfection through the free exercise of their will. In this chapter, I show that a remarkably similar concept of dignity plays a significant role in defences of women prior to Wollstonecraft’s ground-breaking treatise. To support this claim, I examine a number of texts calling for the recognition of women’s dignity in the early modern era (c. 1650–1750), namely those of Mary Astell (1666–1731), Mary Chudleigh (1656–1710), the author known as Sophia (fl. 1739–40), and (to a lesser extent) François Poulain de la Barre (1648–1723). Their writings are valuable, I maintain, for shedding light on a distinctive pre-Kantian concept of human dignity as a moral ideal in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In recent times, the topic of dignity has been undergoing a substantial revival of interest among ethicists and political theorists, especially those concerned with the grounding of universal human rights. Historically speaking, dignity was once a term associated with inegalitarianism: it was accorded only to those with a high social or ecclesiastical rank, such as members of the nobility or the clergy, who were entitled to special treatment or special privileges on account of their status. The Latin word dignitas partly captures this traditional meaning: to have dignitas in ancient Rome was to warrant the respect and deference due to one’s special rank or office in civil society. But following Immanuel Kant’s Groundwork to the Metaphysics of Morals (1785) and the French ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen’ (1789), there was a decisively egalitarian shift in thinking about dignity. That is to say, a new concept of dignity emerged that extended the elevated status once accorded to the nobility to all human beings in general. Wollstonecraft taps into this new egalitarianism when she observes how unjust it is that women ‘are treated as a kind of subordinate beings, and not as a part of the human species, when improveable reason is