The Discovery of Mary Wollstonecraft's "The Female Reader"

Abstract

Taken as a unit, these original contributions and the anthology itself freshly expose the uneven quality of Wollstonecraft's thinking. Explicitly laid bare is the central tension in her early works between her conviction that women must be educated and her acceptance, before the French Revolution, of a social view of women that affirmed and perpetuated their subjugation. Her long preface and the prayers add further testimony to her involvement in education. The prayers also tender proof of her religious orientation on the eve of the Revolution. Education was Wollstonecraft's lifelong concern. Her first work addressed that of daughters (1786); her second, Mary: A Fiction, narrated, among other things, a young woman's struggle for self-knowledge (1788). In her third full-length piece, Original Stories (1788), she patched together a quilt of moral tales for young females. The Female Reader emerges as both a variation and an advance on these early works. Wollstonecraft's plan was to provide a pragmatic guide which would enable women to function as intellectual adults. It illuminates her reac-