Mary Wollstonecraft Research Articles

The Place of Animals in Wollstonecraft's Early Educational Writings

Abstract Thomas Taylor's parody of Mary Wollstonecraft's support for rights of women and humans raises a question: does his satire unwittingly propose a defence of animal rights found in Wollstonecraft's arguments? While Wollstonecraft's later works do not mention animal rights, her early educational writings offer arguments on animal ethics. These works explore the value of animals from moral, theological, and consequentialist perspectives, emphasizing both their instrumental and inherent value. This article argues that Wollstonecraft's moral psychology and theology highlight a benevolent attitude towards animals, underscoring their value beyond their utility.

Feminism in 18 Century

The 18th century marked a pivotal era for the early stirrings of feminism, laying the groundwork for future movements seeking gender equality. During this period, societal roles were rigidly defined, with women predominantly relegated to domestic spheres. However, the Enlightenment, with its emphasis on reason and individual rights, began to challenge these traditional norms. This intellectual movement inspired a reevaluation of women's roles and their capabilities. ioneering voices emerged, advocating for women's education and rights. One of the most influential figures was Mary Wollstonecraft, whose seminal work, "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman" (1792), argued for women's rationality and the importance of education. Wollstonecraft's treatise challenged the prevailing notion that women were inherently inferior to men, advocating instead for equal opportunities in education as a means to achieve true equality.Other women, such as Catherine Macaulay and Olympe de Gouges, contributed to the discourse, with de Gouges penning the "Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen" in 1791, a bold statement calling for women's rights during the French Revolution. These early feminists laid the intellectual and philosophical foundation for future generations to build upon.Despite their efforts, the impact of 18th-century feminism was limited by cultural and institutional barriers. The movement did not result in immediate societal change; however, it ignited a conversation about gender equality that would gain momentum in the centuries to follow. The ideas and writings from this era inspired later activists in the 19th and 20th centuries, who continued to fight for women's suffrage, legal rights, and social reforms.

NARRATIVE ORGANISATION AS A RECEPTIVE STRATEGY: BASED ON THEODORE ROSZAK’S THE MEMOIRS OF ELIZABETH FRANKENSTEIN

The article provides a comparative analysis of the narrative structure of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus and its rewrite – Theodore Roszak’s The Memoirs of Elizabeth Frankenstein. The ‟concentric” composition of Shelley’s novel, in which the three main narratives – Captain Walton’s, Victor Frankenstein’s and the Creature’s – were placed one inside the other, can be viewed as a variation on the popular gothic “found (discovered) manuscript” motif and were employed to enhance the emotional impact on the reader by blurring the line between fact and fiction. Roszak reproduces this structure in general, but bestows upon Walton (the primary narrator) an auctorial function, significantly expanding his “presence” in the main body of the text, represented by Elizabeth Frankenstein’s diary. While ultimately pursuing the same artistic objective as his literary predecessor, Roszak produces a more intricate system, in which each of the main characters has several functional roles; he also includes numerous inserted narratives in the text, thus complicating the structure in comparison with the elegant composition of Shelley’s novel, yet, however, meeting the same artistic goal more effectively: by intertwining fact and fiction, Roszak comes close to destroying the very fabric of the diegetic world and invading the extradiegetic reality of the reader and thus multiplies the emotional impact of the narrated events.

Review of Emily Dumler-Winckler, Modern Virtue: Mary Wollstonecraft and a Tradition of Dissent

Review of Emily Dumler-Winckler, Modern Virtue: Mary Wollstonecraft and a Tradition of Dissent

Reproductive Justice: Mary Wollstonecraft on Women’s “Rights Against Domination” for the “Cause of Virtue”

ABSTRACT Wollstonecraft's name and work have been invoked repeatedly since Dobbs, not only because she wrote the first major political treatise defending women's rights but also because several leaders of the so-called “prolife” movement have sought to reclaim the label “feminist” by enlisting Wollstonecraft in the contemporary antiabortion, anticontraception, and heterosexual family-centered cause. The article challenges these anachronistic and revisionist histories, which ignore Wollstonecraft's life experiences and wider corpus. Especially in her late novel, The Wrongs of Woman, abortion is both a prominent metaphor for the book as a whole and a crucial narrative event for both heroines. I argue that Wollstonecraft's life, work, and ethical commitments, particularly her advocacy for “rights against domination” and “for the cause of virtue,” make her a fitting historical ally to contemporary advocates of reproductive justice who see women's rights to abortion and maternity as among the many important issues for women's health and reproductive justice.

On Becoming Human and Being Humane: Human Rights, Women’s Rights, Species Rights

This essay focuses on the nexus of vulnerability and rights. It argues that in transforming vulnerability from a stigma that alienated women from their humanity to the signature of human dignity, women bridged the gap between the liberatory promise of human rights and its exploitative patriarchal politics. It finds that the ideas of Mary Wollstonecraft, Simone de Beauvoir, Drucilla Cornell, and Jean-Luc Nancy were/are crucial to this transformed idea of dignity. Religious ideas have played a complex role in this transformation. Wollstonecraft appealed to theological ideas of the soul to contest men’s claims that the Bible enshrined women’s subordination to men. Current abortion politics in the U.S., and the Iranian women’s Women, Life, Freedom rebellion continue to show how sacred texts have been used to defend and reject women’s demands for rights. Religious and secular arguments for the dignity of vulnerability, used by feminists to re-write the sexual difference, direct us to rethink our exploitative relationship to the earth and the multiple species it harbors. As we take up the task of confronting the environmental crisis of our times, they call on us to see ourselves as stewards of the earth’s bounty who are morally obliged to create humane relationships with our other-than-human neighbors.

The Monies will not Answer: Mary Wollstonecraft and Catrina Davies on property, freedom and precarity

ABSTRACT This paper explores the writing, and lives, of two women, Wollstonecraft and the contemporary writer Catrina Davies. It focuses on their experience of trying to live independent, creative and worthwhile lives under social and economic conditions of precarity and debt which curtail their aspirations to freedom. Wollstonecraft’s critique of property relations and of commercial society echoes through Davies’s experience of navigating the current housing crisis and struggling to make a decent income from her writing. In Newington Green in the 1780s and a coastal Cornish village in the 2010s, the paper explores what it means for women’s freedom when the monies will not answer.

Mary Wollstonecraft’s Influence on French Revolutionary Educational Reform

ABSTRACT When Mary Wollstonecraft travelled to Paris in December 1792, she was already well-known there as a republican writer, and a defender of women’s rights, particularly to education. Her philosophy of education was very closely tied to her republican beliefs – to educate a child in the right way was to preserve her from domination. In Paris, Wollstonecraft became friends with several famous Girondins, including Madame Roland and Jacques-Pierre Brissot. She was asked to participate in the drafting of Nicolas de Condorcet's report on the reform of education. Condorcet was himself an early proponent of women's rights in France and unlike his predecessor, Talleyrand, he did not want to leave women out from French educational reforms. Although her notes on this report did not survive, I argue that Wollstonecraft did in fact influence French educational reforms. Looking at the reception of Wollstonecraft's work among the Girondins, and Condorcet's early drafts of the reform proposal, I argue that Wollstonecraft's legacy in the final years of the Revolution can be traced in particular to the 1795 Loi Daunou and its corresponding report, by Joseph Lakanal, on girls’ primary education.

Reading Wollstonecraft after Godwin’s Memoirs: Wollstonecraft in Circulating, Subscription, and Private Libraries, 1799–1842

ABSTRACT Following Mary Wollstonecraft’s death in 1798, her grieving husband William Godwin made public many of the details of Wollstonecraft’s highly unconventional life. The ensuing backlash seemed to ensure that Wollstonecraft’s major works ceased to be reprinted for a period of roughly forty years. This article contributes to efforts to revise narratives of Wollstonecraft’s early nineteenth century reception by asking how and where readers, in the absence of new editions, might have accessed the books themselves. A survey of 41 circulating and subscription library catalogues dated between 1799 and 1842 reveals that, despite scholarly assumptions otherwise, Wollstonecraft’s works remained widely available. Even when books left the library, they did not necessarily disappear, as a copy of Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman that moved from a circulating library into a private collection attests. Placing the information in these catalogues in conversation with what can be gleaned from this copy of the work, this article argues that the durability of the hand-press book complicates the narrative of Wollstonecraft’s posthumous reputation.

Mary Wollstonecraft and Richard Price: The Theological and Philosophical Foundations of Freedom as Independence

ABSTRACT In Wollstonecraft’s early writings, she articulates the foundational theological and philosophical principles that would underpin her work throughout her career. One difference between her early and later work lies in the way that the values to which she refers are combined. Whereas Wollstonecraft at first appeals to the separate ideals of independence, equality, and virtue, from the 1790s onwards she integrates these into a characteristic republican framework that was in common use amongst dissenting theorists at the time. The set of values on which Wollstonecraft draws, and the version of the republican framework that she develops, closely resemble those of Richard Price with whose work she was familiar. Examining the structural similarities between their respective models, I argue, gives us an insight into the systematic manner of aspects of Wollstonecraft’s own thought. It also allows us to see how Wollstonecraft goes beyond the republicanism of Price and others as she develops her own feminist solutions to the problems of structural domination.

“L’Esprit de Charité”: Imaginative Action and Universal Benevolence in Wollstonecraft’s Of the Importance of Religious Opinions

ABSTRACT This article analyses Mary Wollstonecraft’s Of The Importance of Religious Opinions (1788), a translation of De l’Importance des Opinions Religieuses (1788) by Jacques Necker. I demonstrate that Necker’s text resonates with Wollstonecraft’s early works and those of her mentor, Dissenting theologian Richard Price, both for its Providentialism and for its onus on caritas, or “l’esprit de charité”, a love of God expressed through love of our neighbours. For Wollstonecraft, Christian charity was coextensive with justice and could embrace the entire human family. I argue that Necker’s text initially appealed to her for its representation of religion cultivating this expansive benevolence through sentiment refined by the imagination, depicted as a sacred faculty channelling our errant desires towards the divine. Whereas Necker envisages only celestial rewards in an incurably unjust society, however, Wollstonecraft subtly revises his text to foreground the imagination as the impetus to moral actions that participate in God’s plan for human improvement. She thus imagines political justice in the form of a cosmopolitan ideal of universal benevolence, a heartfelt principle of action equally consonant with Christian charity and the demands of justice.

Wollstonecraft and the Burghs of Newington Green

ABSTRACT This essay investigates the importance of Mr and Mrs James and Hannah Burgh of Newington Green for Mary Wollstonecraft’s life and career during the 1780s. Newington Green was a hugely productive environment for Wollstonecraft, but the Burghs offered a particular combination of support and provocation. Hannah Burgh was Wollstonecraft’s mentor and financial supporter from 1784, during her residence in Newington Green, and until she became the protégée of Joseph Johnson in 1787. Through Hannah Burgh, Wollstonecraft accessed the works of the late James Burgh, who had died in 1775. Burgh’s pedagogical writings were important intertexts for Wollstonecraft’s early works, especially in their account of female education, their “rational” treatments of scripture, and their responses to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Wollstonecraft builds on Burgh’s writings in her pedagogical works, and he continues to be an important interlocutor even after Wollstonecraft’s departure from Newington Green. Burgh’s anthology The Art of Speaking (1761) is a model and probable source for one of Wollstonecraft’s first publications for Johnson, The Female Reader (1789). In her own anthology, however, Wollstonecraft offers a distinct account of reading as a tool of improvement, and builds a new canon of reading texts for women and girls.

Some Overlooked Extracts from Mary Wollstonecraft’s Writings Published in Britain, 1792–1795

Some Overlooked Extracts from Mary Wollstonecraft’s Writings Published in Britain, 1792–1795

Between Virtuous Trust and Distrust: A Model of Political Ideologies in Times of Challenged Political Parties

Abstract The analytical model of political ideologies offered in this article describes the connection between rising levels of distrust towards societal institutions in modern democracies and how such developments has challenged traditional and long-standing political parties in the Western world, such as the Danish political party Radikale Venstre [the Danish Social-Liberal Party]. Through use of a tripartite model of trust developed by Arman Teymouri Niknam during his interpretation of Mary Wollstonecraft’s attitudes towards trust brought together with different aspects of Axel Honneth’s social-philosophical framework, Teymouri Niknam and Leif Hemming Pedersen show how distrust may be able to act as a progressive tool in the creation of a more just, diverse and equal future and also how a virtuous and healthy form of democracy is an ideal that can be challenging to realise in practice. Teymouri Niknam and Hemming Pedersen are thus able to point to the ways in which a healthy democracy needs a balance of virtuous trust and distrust in order to achieve a good amount of both stability and progress, thus pointing to a difficult balancing act that many traditional political parties find themselves struggling with especially at this point in time in many contemporary democracies.

Turgid Bombast or Economic Reason

This research paper delves into the contrasting interpretations of the muse by Mary Wollstonecraft and William Wordsworth, as evidenced in their seminal works A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, respectively. The paper critically evaluates how each interpretation shapes contrasting truths about the production and consumption of literature. Wollstonecraft, advocating for reason as her muse, challenges societal norms and seeks to empower women through education. In contrast, Wordsworth embraces feeling as his muse, aiming to directly communicate with the heart of his reader. Through a comparative analysis, this paper explores how these distinct muses inform the authors’ approaches to subjects such as education, uniformity, and gender. Furthermore, it examines the Rousseauvian influences on their views, and how each author’s position of power shapes their narrative. Ultimately, it highlights the radical nature of both texts in the democratisation of poetry and the elevation of the female sex.

Gender, Borders and Boundaries in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre

The concept of borders and boundaries is one of the important themes in English literature. It might refer to national borders or divisions within countries or symbolize physical barriers, societal divisions or personal limitations. Metaphorically, borders and boundaries might mean the boundaries based on caste, color, creed or sex or represent expectations and prejudices or search for selfhood and identity. Writers from the marginalized communities take up the themes of construction of identity in their writing. Similarly, African-American writers, while addressing the issues of race, gender and class, illustrate their struggle and experiences. Their own lives serve as an inspiration to write about the trauma of displacement and slavery. The English novel in the 18th and 19th century largely focused on women primarily confined to the roles of wife, mother and homemaker. However, some novelists such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Aphra Behn challenged gender stereotypes and advocated for greater female autonomy and intellectual freedom. Similarly, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, Thomas Hardy, Charlotte Bronte etc. questioned the prevailing attitudes and provided a fresh perspective on gender issues. Whereas Jane Austen celebrates intelligent and strong-willed female characters who resist societal pressures, Gaskell delves into the lives of working-class women and those on the margins of society. Similarly, Hardy chooses the sub-title A Pure Woman for his novel Tess of the D’Urbervilles in order to question the Victorian norms. The paper discusses Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and analyses how the novel embodies rebellion against societal constraints by presenting an unconventional heroine who is able to move beyond boundaries and carve her path amid restrictions imposed by society in which she lives.

“I Could Almost Wish for the Madman’s Happiness”: Escape, Escapism, and Madness in Wollstonecraft’s Novels

ABSTRACT In Mary Wollstonecraft’s two novels, Mary, A Fiction (1788) and The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria (1798), women are continually on the run, moving from one form of imprisonment to another whether it be physical, mental, or symbolic. In this article, I examine this perpetual motion in both novels, focusing on the futility, cyclicity, and social implications of the characters’ movements. In Mary and Maria, Wollstonecraft presents only two options for women in contemporary society—subjugation or perpetual attempts at escape—neither of which grant them freedom or true mobility. During instances of Mary’s and Maria’s greatest distress, both characters express a longing for one provocative form of release: madness. Wollstonecraft shows how a movement away from reason is the only option for total mental liberation afforded to the heroines in the cultural moment in which she is writing. Ultimately, I propose a feminist perspective on women’s insanity as a form of escape and a reading of this madness as an assertion of agency.

P. B. Shelley, George William Tighe, and the Irish Roots of ‘The Sensitive-Plant’

This essay investigates the literary exchanges between the Irish poet and agronomist George William Tighe and Percy Bysshe Shelley in Pisa, where the former lived with Margaret King Mount Cashell, alias ‘Mrs Mason’, a radical Irish writer and former pupil of Mary Wollstonecraft. After moving to Pisa in 1820, Shelley began daily visits to the Mason-Tighe household, sourcing from Tighe's library a wealth of reading material on agricultural chemistry and botany, alongside Irish political and historical titles. Tighe's previously unexamined papers showcase his interests in Irish and Italian literature, republicanism, botany, and agriculture and reveal his links with the Lunar Society of Birmingham. Taking as a case study the first poem Shelley composed in Pisa, I argue that Tighe's agricultural pursuits shaped Shelley's political and botanical imagination in ‘The Sensitive-Plant’ and exerted a significant influence on Shelley's later poetry as a whole.

Beyond Social Barriers: Empathy versus Socioeconomic Factors in Pride and Prejudice

This paper observes the role of empathy and equality in overcoming social barriers in Pride and Prejudice. More specifically, I argue that the novel shows that empathy plays a more significant role in creating a successful marriage than socioeconomic factors do. Austen’s significance as a groundbreaking women author of interesting ideas and genres during a time when authors were predominantly male has left a remarkable impact on the literary world and therefore spread a message about feminism and women’s rights discourse to young female readers, even in the modern day. Thus, this paper analyzes Pride and Prejudice alongside other feminist works of the time, such as Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Throughout the novel, the need to marry well to live a successful life is emphasized through the characters’ actions and dialogue and reflects on the desires and problems of many young women during the time period that the novel was published. I challenge the idea that Austen was only concerned with showing how socioeconomic factors determined a woman’s future in the Regency Era. Rather, Austen utilizes the written word to comment on the need for empathy in marriage, which she implies is more important than socioeconomic factors.

MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT’S PROJECT FOR A REFORM OF THE MINDS

In my investigation, I analyse aspects of Mary Wollstonecraft’s thought regarding the traditional education of women, her programme of education, the question of women’s rights, and the condition of women. I moreover investigate Mary Wollstonecraft’s proposal of new theological foundations for religious belief. Mary Wollstonecraft aims to propose a revolution in female manners. Her revolution is a revolution of minds: she aims to reach a complete reform in the education and the formation of individuals, in general, and of women, in particular. Mary Wollstonecraft’s revolution is a revolution for the spiritual independence of individuals. To reach the condition of independence, traditional education ought to be criticised and refused since traditional education is the system through which women are transformed into dependent entities. Power over oneself, liberation from passions, and autonomy of judgment are the main targets of Mary Wollstonecraft’s programme of education. The correct foundation of the individual ought to be reason. Mary Wollstonecraft proves to be a deeply religious thinker: she steadily connects the promotion of the dignity of mankind to a new way of worship of Deity. The centrality of reason profoundly influences her theological assumptions: Mary Wollstonecraft refuses all forms of reverence based on blind submission to God. The main texts of my inquiry are A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and A Vindication of the Rights of Men.