Mary Wollstonecraft and the Right to Air

Abstract

Air flows through all Mary Wollstonecraft's writings, from her first novel Mary, through her treatises and letters, and to her last novel Maria. She was attuned to the medical importance of a change of air, but also developed a more philosophical notion of a right to air. Her attention to everyday air and smell unavoidably reaffirmed her key intellectual questions of commonality, individuality, equality and freedom. For Wollstonecraft, air was both a metaphor for freedom and also a literal condition for its development. This article situates her numerous remarks on air alongside medical sources, racialized climatological theory, slavery cases, and the pneumatic chemistry of the 1790s. Such a reading of Wollstonecraft's aerial philosophy, and comparisons with Burke, Rousseau, Godwin and Kant, contributes to an ecological reading of her work and to a forgotten history of air rights, with relevance to current debates on air quality and inequality.

Air and atmosphere studies: Enlightenment, phenomenology and ecocriticism

“…A chapter linking Brontë's Villette, Dorothy Richardson and Virginia Woolf argues that the realist novel's 'ethereal woman character' inaugurates the modernist stream of consciousness: '[t]he atmosphere becomes, in other words, a feminine space where spirit and matter meet ' (2019, p. 192). The notion that women's overdetermined materiality gives them an overdetermined relationship to climate is a compelling one chiming with other recent work on gender, air and immateriality (Boyson, 2021;Rigilano, 2016).…”

“…Key Romantic aesthetic traditions -Ossian's Celtic culture (Kaminski-Jones, 2021), Gilpin's picturesque (Lafford, 2021)-are re-read through their mists and fogs, showing the medico-environmental attitudes that dominated the culture. The contribution of air and atmosphere to ideas of freedom, history and modernity is considered in essays focusing on the philosophy of Wollstonecraft, and Marx, Babbage and Ruskin (Boyson, 2021;Ford, 2021).…”

“…Environmental justice also draws attention to the ethical claims and legal rights of non-humans. This is important for historical air studies too, which begin to chart the way that air has been differentially experienced by classes and ethnicities in the past, as well as the present (Boyson, 2021;Choy, 2020;Hsu, 2020). Scholars of 19th-century culture, as Jeremy Davies has trenchantly argued, must now "embrace the world-historical significance of the time and place that [they study].…”

Edward Heath: Leadership Competence and Capability

“…There was, for example, the appearance (from 1969 onwards) of the 'Black Papers' on education. Coinciding with the advent of the Heath government, Rhodes Boyson joined with Ralph Harris and Ross McWhirter to set up the 'Constitutional Book Club' in 1970, publishing pamphlets challenging 'progressive thinking' and making the case for capitalism and free enterprise and against the welfare state, nationalisation and the 'socialistic' approaches adopted by both main parties over the postwar period (Boyson, 1970;Cockett, 1995: 176-177). The failures and the fall of the Heath government, together with the course of events under the Labour government after 1974, seemed to vindicate these alternative ideas and to finally open the door to a politics of reconstruction under Margaret Thatcher.…”