Revising the Professional Woman Writer: Mary Wollstonecraft and Precarious Income

Abstract

Mary Wollstonecraft's experience as a female staff writer in the publishing workplace was apparently unique in her time. This essay examines debate on the category of the professional woman writer and reconsiders its relevance to Wollstonecraft's authorial career, using correspondence with her publisher, Joseph Johnson, to argue for the applicability of the concept of the precariat. Focusing on precarious income in the literary marketplace enables a new appreciation of Wollstonecraft's feminism at the intersection of gender and class, particularly of the way she foregrounds issues of workplace sexual discrimination and harassment in her final publication, The Wrongs of Woman: Or, Maria (1798).