Civilization and the rights of woman: liberty and captivity in the work of Mary Wollstonecraft

Abstract

Recent scholarship has shown how, in her political writing, Mary Wollstonecraft developed a troubling evaluation of femininity – one that ironically brought her sexual politics into line with those she attacked in Edmund Burke's account of the French Revolution. This article identifies a different contradiction in her feminism. It argues that her challenge to the lingering conservatism in Enlightenment philosophy relied on a model of social history that put reasoning women at the center of a “civilized” culture threatened by a “savage” periphery. It suggests that Wollstonecraft's strong critique of the contradiction in Enlightenment political thought, which saw women as lacking in civic character, is organized rhetorically around the contrast between polished civil subject and violent savage. Because this distinction rests to a large extent on the assumption that domestic virtue is a central feature of more advanced societies, her argument finally locates women in a morally invigorated domestic sphere rather than in public life. In the second half of the article, the author examines how Wollstonecraft's fiction shows her political philosophy depending, to a large extent, on the logic of the captivity narrative – a logic according to which female virtue must be protected against the horrors of a savage wilderness. By reading both the Vindications side by side with Maria, we can see how Wollstonecraft's political arguments are tied to the domestic plot of conjectural history and how, as a result, she is unable to free women entirely from the sentimental narrative of captivity that defines and limits their civic lives.