The Expanding Circle

In 1965, a married woman in France could not open a bank account, get a passport, or sign a work contract without her husband’s permission. The French parliament changed the law the following year. Hundreds of thousands of women got bank accounts, and while bobody declared a revolution, it was one. (And before anyone makes any jokes, Canada didn’t pass the Married Women’s Property Act until 1964.) The circle of people we recognize as fully human has expanded over the last two and a half centuries—slowly, and with catastrophic reversals, but steadily. Enslaved people were property in most of the world in 1800. Women moved from legal nonentities to property owners and voters. People under colonial rule won formal independence, LGBTQ+ people went from being criminals to being legally recognized in many countries, and people with disabilities moved from institutional confinement towards recognition of their rights and needs. Telling this as a story of inevitable progress is tempting and…