Antebellum Women’s Rights and Natural Law E. P. Hurlbut Essays on Human Rights and their Political Guaranties First Edition 1845

E. P. Hurlbut

First Edition

Hurlbut, E. P. Essays on Human Rights and their Political Guaranties, 1845, a forceful antebellum treatise defending natural rights philosophy and explicitly advocating the legal equality of the sexes within American political thought. Written in the context of intensifying debates over democracy, reform, and the authority of utilitarian political theory, Hurlbut directly challenges Jeremy Bentham’s rejection of natural rights, warning that such a denial places “man's destiny in the hands of his fellow-men, rather than in the hands of his Creator. Here is spread wide the grand entrance-door of tyranny….” Moving beyond abstract political theory, he applies natural law reasoning to the condition of women under American law, arguing for “the legal equality of the sexes,” insisting that “woman is deprived of her natural dignity when the laws depress her below the level of man… Man was not ‘born to command,’ nor woman ‘to obey.’” Appearing three years before the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, the work anticipates and intellectually aligns with early women’s rights arguments grounded in universal moral equality rather than purely legislative reform.

Hurlbut, E. P. Essays on Human Rights and their Political Guaranties: By…Counselor at Law in the City of New-York. New York: Greeley & McElrath, 1845. First edition. Comprising 219 pages, the volume advances a theory of government as necessary to restrain harmful individual action in accordance with “reason and natural morality,” while simultaneously critiquing legal systems that fail to safeguard women’s rights. The text represents an important strand of American natural rights constitutionalism in the decades preceding the Civil War, linking debates over sovereignty, moral law, and gender hierarchy. Bound together with George Croly’s Salathiel (New York: Greeley & McElrath, 1845). Contemporary half leather and marbled boards with rubbing; text clean and sound. Overall condition: very good.

Item #15167

Price: $1,500.00