Mary Wollstonecraft’s Female Imbeciles

Abstract

ABSTRACTMary Wollstonecraft’s invectives against women in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ostensibly an argument for improved female education, have long troubled readers. Why does Wollstonecraft rely on rhetoric that shows contempt for women’s “imbecility” to convince her readers of women’s capacity for intelligence? By placing Wollstonecraft’s use of the term in the context of both her model of mind and the late-eighteenth-century discourse on cognitive disability, I show how Wollstonecraft’s indictment of female “imbecility” functions as part of her larger rhetorical project to link the problem of unequal female education to the inequities of the monarchical state.