Mary Wollstonecraft Research Articles

역사적 관점에서 본 여성의 시민권: 아리스토텔레스의 정치사상을 중심으로

This paper examines women’s citizenship from a historical perspective, focusing on Aristotle’s The Politics where Athene was the first democratic regime in western political history to allow citizens the right to vote. As a biologist, Aristotle believed that the female was a defective male; thus, the superior rational man had to govern the inferior woman. Aristotle sought to differentiate the superior from inferior in political life, and the duality of the sexes was necessary for the best political community. The issue of women’s voting and property rights had not been discussed until the French Revolution. Mary Wollstonecraft attempted to initiate her own revolution, focusing on women’s equal education. The latest women critics of the 20th have criticized the ideology of “the duality of the sexes” in Aristotle’s The Politics as a false one and have suggested a new idea grounded on the rational capacity and equality of woman.

Frankenscription, a natural history of poetry

Learning to read as a young child, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin would trace out the letters inscribed on the headstone of her mother’s grave in St Pancras: “MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT GODWIN / Author of / A...

The spacetimemattering and Frankenstein-esque nature of interview transcriptions

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore the ways in which transcription is creative work, the degrees to which current literature elides or explores these creative elements, and the ethical implications of researchers’ standard disacknowledgement of transcription as an intra-active suturing together of verbal exchanges, personal understandings, and texts.Design/methodology/approachThe authors’ analysis is based on a review of literature, with this paper putting specific sections of qualitative inquiry into conversation with one another, along with Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s novel Frankenstein and Karen Barad’s concept of spacetimemattering.FindingsFirst, in a preliminary literature review of 200+ articles, the authors found that few researchers acknowledge the creative and decision-making processes that are inherent in transcription. Second, building on that finding, the authors explore the ways that others have discussed transcription as creation/creative and the ways that Barad’s concept of spacetimemattering – which directly influences our use of Shelley’s Frankenstein – has influenced qualitative inquiry.Research limitations/implicationsTranscription is pervasive in qualitative research, with some researchers finding that upwards of 60 percent of research is based on transcribed interviews. However, there is little examination of the creative processes inherent in transcription and the ethical implications of those processes. In terms of limitations, because this is a conceptual paper, it is based on a discussion of various aspects of the literature rather than specific findings demonstrating what the authors argue.Practical implicationsThere is real risk in transcription being positioned as merely a task to be completed, to get to the “good stuff” of analysis and writing. Transcription carries implications bound with the responsibilities of creation and interpretation, and researchers who aim merely to achieve and work from a “verbatim” transcript skip over all of the parts that make this common process matter, both to researchers and the researched. The authors argue that qualitative researchers find before them a range of options when they begin the seemingly mundane task of transcription. The keystrokes begin the suturing process, binding together word, action and emotion in a document. Perhaps more importantly, though, the process of creating a transcription is a continuation of the range of ethical implications that research has for participants and researchers.Social implicationsThe authors suggest a similar degree of responsibility for researchers who transcribe and/or work from transcriptions, though the concerns are the inverse of Frankenstein’s creature’s. Researchers are focused on the final product – the transcript itself. That document becomes the basis of analysis, of arguments, of understandings. Researchers need to be as aware of the sutures, cuts and stitches that form their transcription as they are of the final product. There are ethical implications of not exploring the degrees to which the transcripts themselves are creatures – born of decisions, of available resources, of researchers’ own assumptions and understandings.Originality/valueWhile Barad’s concepts of spacetimemattering and Frankenstein have informed qualitative inquiry, there is no scholarship linking this theoretical discussion to the process of transcription, which is an important element of a substantial amount of qualitative data.

Book Review: The Social and Political Philosophy of Mary Wollstonecraft, by Sandrine Bergès and Alan Coffee

Book Review: <i>The Social and Political Philosophy of Mary Wollstonecraft</i>, by Sandrine Bergès and Alan Coffee

Betwixt and Between: The Biographies of Mary Wollstonecraft by Brenda Ayres

<i>Betwixt and Between: The Biographies of Mary Wollstonecraft</i> by Brenda Ayres

The Loss of Maidenhead: Rape and the Revolutionary Novel

Inspired by William Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793), revolutionary novels of the 1790s candidly depict the violence of rape and express the physical loss that victims endure. Rather than alluding to sexual assault through coded innuendos, as in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1748), these late eighteenth-century novelists represent rape with unsettling clarity. Authors Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Hays, and Charles Brockden Brown emphasize the body in their respective texts to challenge conceptions of women as the property of fathers and husbands. The presence or absence of the hymen was used as evidence in rape trials during the final decades of the century, and many women without intact hymens were ostracized from society. Revolutionary novels, including The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria (1798), The Victim of Prejudice (1799), and Ormond, or The Secret Witness (1799), helped trans form this narrative about women’s bodies, leading to nineteenth-century reforms that partially restored women’s physical subjectivity. Brown’s Ormond, especially, indicates that women’s writing ought to be used as a weapon for revolution.

Traveling as the “Art of Thinking” in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark

This article examines Mary Wollstonecraft’s epistolary travelogue Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796) in the context of conjectural history. By illustrating how she borrows the methodology of conjectural history to trace the improvement of manners in Sweden, Denmark, and Norway, the article analyzes the utopia (or dys -topia) Wollstonecraft imagines based on the social progress she observes during her northern travels. It demonstrates that despite her initial faith in human industry and economic prosperity as the driving forces behind civ ilization, Wollstonecraft later expresses grave reservations about the “future improvement of the world” by drawing attention to the harmful effects that commerce can bring to societies. It suggests that such con cerns largely derive from her status as a female traveler who does not enjoy the privileges of the leisured male traveler and is therefore in a more favorable position to reflect on the conditions of the socially disen franchised such as women and the laboring poor. By exploring how Wollstonecraft’s unstable status leads her to critically examine stadial the ory and use various criteria in assessing a nation’s state of civilization, the article examines how she ultimately envisions the world as a “vast pris on” in her travel narrative, thereby anticipating the pessimistic turn in her political vision and later writings.

‘Writing Reading & Walking’: The Shelleys in 2017

ABSTRACTThis paper, by the organiser of The Shelley Conference 2017, explains the motivations behind the conference and emphasises the importance of studying Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley together. It also gives a survey of the papers that appear in this special issue.

Mary Wollstonecraft on Motherhood and Political Participation: An Overlooked Insight into Women's Subordination

Scholars consider Mary Wollstonecraft an early feminist political theorist for two reasons: (1) her explicit commitment to educational equality, and (2) her implicit suggestion that the private‐sphere role of motherhood holds political import. My reading of Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Womanuses Wollstonecraft's works and draws upon recent claims made by Sandrine Bergès inThe Social and Political Philosophy of Mary Wollstonecraft to connect these points: educated women are better at performing motherly duties and, therefore, of greater benefit to society. Although many scholars have read Wollstonecraft's arguments for educational equality as a starting point for greater equality, Bergès does not. In this article, I further Bergès's claims and argue that Wollstonecraft's project is limited and likely to reinforce inequality between the sexes. Specifically, I show that Wollstonecraft's educational reforms incentivize women to become nothing more than highly educated housewives. In the process of fulfilling their social and political duty to instill public spirit and private virtue in future citizens, women are re‐entrenched in domestic affairs instead of being freed for public pursuits. This realization, I contend, should cause us to be wary of panaceas for women's subordination that rest on increasing their education.

The Press and Brazilian Narratives ofUncle Tom's Cabin:Slavery and the Public Sphere in Rio de Janeiro, ca. 1855

In March 1855, a literary newspaper in Rio de Janeiro printed the first installment of Nísia Floresta's “Páginas de uma vida obscura,” a serialized short story inspired by Harriet Beecher Stowe'sUncle Tom's Cabin(1852). Seven more chapters followed, keeping “Páginas” in the public eye for months. TheJornal do Commercio, arguably the national paper of record, mentioned the story in its announcements. Floresta (pseudonym of Dionísia Gonçalves Pinto, 1810–1885) centered her storyline on the Congo-born Domingos, the “Brazilian Tom,” who exemplified the attributes of Christian virtuosity and resignation found in Stowe's internationally famous novel. Set in the nineteenth century, “Páginas” begins with the ten-year-old Domingos's enslavement on the African coast, and highlights the human devastation of the internal slave trade through his movements across Minas Gerais and on to Porto Alegre and Rio de Janeiro. It ends with Domingos's death, at age 54, grief-stricken over his son's recent passing. In part, Floresta's “Páginas” emerged from the Brazilian schoolteacher's longstanding critiques of patriarchy, nation, and education. Twenty years earlier, Floresta had drawn from Mary Wollstonecraft'sA Vindication of the Rights of Womanto writeDireito das mulheres e injustiça dos homens(1832), a book that went through three editions in its first decade. More directly though, Floresta had connected to the so-called “Tom mania” while living in Paris in 1852. The following year, back in Rio, she wrote a pamphlet on women's education—Opúsculo humanitário(1853)—that parsed key aspects ofUncle Tom's Cabin, among a larger discussion of women's achievements internationally. Two Rio newspapers excerpted the pamphlet, and, boldly, published the chapters focused on Uncle Tom. This attention in the press raised the profile of a book the public already knew to be controversial, as newspapers had earlier carried reports of port authorities seizing shipments ofUncle Tom's Cabinin Rio, Salvador, and Fortaleza. In writing “Páginas,” then, two years after theOpúsculo, Floresta not only carried forward her literary dialogue with Stowe, but also posed the work as a challenge to the status quo. “Páginas” was necessary, she explained, because “slavery is not an issue of concern in the press.” If overstated, given that the topic of slavery was quite prevalent in public discourse, Floresta's assertion nonetheless signals an opportunity for scholars to probe further into the relationship between slavery and the public sphere in the mid nineteenth century. More specifically, it suggests connections to be explored between the press and the early reception ofUncle Tom's Cabinin Brazil, and, more broadly, connections between the representations of slavery in the press, and the institution's enduring legitimacy.

Genre and the Mediation of Political Economy in Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France and Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Men

This paper explores the generic fluidity of Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France within the context of the rise of political economy at the end of the eighteenth century and the crisis of the concept of value at that time. It argues that the generic mix of Burke's text can be read as a rhetorical strategy which at once conveys but also mystifies the perceived truths of a labour economy in thrall to the circulation of goods. At the same time, Burke's text seeks to maintain a fiction of the beauty of the social order through a sensationalist and aesthetic terminology and style, thus establishing political economy as a science to be mediated by the aesthetic. Some attention is also paid to Wollstonecraft's response to Burke in her Vindication of the Rights of Men, especially her attack on his gentlemanly authorial persona, and her resistance to Burke's desire to separate the aesthetic and the affective from the realms of political and economic life.

Mood, Provisionality, and Planetarity in Mary Wollstonecraft's &lt;em&gt;A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark&lt;/em&gt;

Mood, Provisionality, and Planetarity in Mary Wollstonecraft's &lt;em&gt;A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark&lt;/em&gt;

Women and Liberty 1600–1800: Philosophical Essays ed. by Jacqueline Broad, Karen Detlefsen

Reviewed by: Women and Liberty 1600–1800: Philosophical Essays ed. by Jacqueline Broad, Karen Detlefsen Sandrine Bergès Jacqueline Broad and Karen Detlefsen, editors. Women and Liberty 1600–1800: Philosophical Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. xi + 252. Cloth, $65.00. This book, comprised of thirteen essays and an introduction by the editors, is an exploration of the concept of liberty—moral and political (part 1), theological and metaphysical (part 2)—in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The topic in itself is interesting, raising the question of the extent to which moral and political liberty are related to metaphysical liberty. With the possible exception of Catherine Cockburn (1679–1749), these types of liberty seem harder to separate in the centuries under discussion than they would be now. This could be because moral and political liberty were more of an omnipresent concern to philosophers generally then than they are now, but it is also relevant that all but one of the philosophers discussed in the volume are women. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century women were more likely than men to be deprived of liberty, not just through the accidents of politics—war, life under a tyrant—or luck—being born to poor or enslaved parents—but because women were systematically denied liberty regardless of their social status. This means that women philosophers’ writings on liberty have a particular poignancy as well as a distinct epistemic value and authority. Margaret Cavendish (1723?–1773), for instance, has a different and perhaps richer understanding than does Thomas Hobbes of what counts as an external constraint (153). What is truly striking about this collection is not only the variety of perspectives on liberty expressed by the women of the period in their own arguments and theories, but also the different interpretations that contemporary contributors give to those expressions. For instance, Mary Astell (1666–1731) favored a sort of internal freedom that consisted in mastering one’s own unruly passions and developing one’s reason. But how did this affect her view of women’s lack of external freedom? Broad (chapter 4) argues that the internal affected the external to some extent when women were successful in building internal lives that helped them bear their external ones: if it helped them make decisions that would minimize their loss of freedom (e.g. to remain unwed, as Gabrielle Suchon [1632–1703] also recommended), or if it softened their tyrants—husbands—by helping them to become more reasonable. But Alice Sowaal (chapter 11) interprets Astell rather differently, arguing that, for Astell, internal freedom is sufficient and nullifies the evil of external tyranny; it is achieved not just through the cultivation of reason, but with the help of the love of God; and women who become internally free are like Christian martyrs, able to face external evils with joy and love. In contrast to both readings of Astell, Émilie du Châtelet (1706–1749) defines free will as a causal capacity, so that freedom cannot be simply an internal condition, but must include a capacity to act. Another thing to note is that this collection shows a marked development between the discourse of seventeenth-century women, still very much tied to the institution of marriage and having to make the best of it, to the more political discourse of late eighteenth-century [End Page 166] philosophers, Catharine Macaulay (1731–1791), Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797), and Sophie de Grouchy (1764–1822), who were engaged in efforts at reform that were centered on liberty: it may have seemed to them that they themselves might be liberated through reform. Moreover, while Mary Astell and her contemporaries predicate their arguments about liberty on the idea that women have equal rational capacity to men, François Poulain de la Barre (1648–1723), for instance, had to assert and defend such equality before he could begin to argue for liberty through the development of reason. All this would make for a nice and optimistic account of the historical development of women’s freedom and the way in which it became gradually more accepted, if it were not for a chilling passage from Benjamin Constant, written at the beginning of the nineteenth century, which Broad and...

Mary Wollstonecraft’s “Love of Mankind” and Cosmopolitan Suffering in Letters Written During A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark

Mary Wollstonecraft’s “Love of Mankind” and Cosmopolitan Suffering in Letters Written During A Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark

Epistolary Form in the Age of the Post Office

This article examines the 1790s epistolary novels of radical women writers Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Hays in light of the British post office's rise to power under the Pitt administration. At a time when many writers abandoned letters in fiction because of mail's association with state surveillance, this particular community of radicals innovated a kind of epistolarity in which letters emphasized and exploited their association with the post's political power. Reading these novels in light of the emerging post and its effects on mail as legal evidence, I consider how such changes transformed the epistolary novel even as the genre lost popularity.

A ciência monstruosa em 'Frankenstein': aspectos do pós-humano

Este trabalho tem por objetivo investigar de que maneira as descobertas e o pensamento científico do final do século XVIII e início do século XIX (período conhecido como Segunda Revolução Científica) influenciaram a escrita do romance Frankenstein (1818), de Mary Shelley, assim como analisar como essa obra apresenta aspectos que contribuem para o estudo do pós-humano. Frankenstein foi escrito em meio a um contexto de profundas revoluções no pensamento filosófico-científico que informaram diversos elementos presentes no romance: as teorias sociais de William Godwin e Mary Wollstonecraft, as hipóteses sobre o princípio da vida de Erasmus Darwin, os experimentos com eletricidade de Luigi Galvani, entre outros. Por outro lado, em uma perspectiva contemporânea, Frankenstein é uma obra que inaugura vários aspectos que viriam a ser lidos pelo prisma do pós-humano. Ao descrever as possíveis (e terríveis) consequências da junção da esfera do humano com as do animal e do tecnológico, o romance problematiza a posição privilegiada do homem na natureza. Considerando as características físicas e biológicas do monstro, o desejo de Frankenstein em ultrapassar os limites da natureza, e a complexa relação de ambos os personagens no que se refere ao binômio desejo/liberdade, o romance pode ser lido como um dos grandes representantes do conceito de pós-humanidade na literatura. ---DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.22409/gragoata.2018n47a1173

Mary Wollstonecraft, Social Constructivism, and the Idea of Freedom

AbstractThis article considers Mary Wollstonecraft as a theorist of freedom for women through the lens of social constructivism. Previous republican readings of Wollstonecraft as promoting a vision of freedom as independence or non-domination are compromised by their underpinnings in liberal individualism. Instead, we suggest her theory displays elements of positive liberty and particularly what we call “subjectivity freedom.” Reading Wollstonecraft as an early social constructivist, we show her grappling with how women's subjectivity is constructed in patriarchal societies such that they desire the conditions of their own subordination. This troubles the very notion of domination and its putative opposite, freedom-as-independence. Paradoxically, while noting how women's sense of self was profoundly and intimately shaped by the patriarchal structures they inhabited, Wollstonecraft's own argument was limited by these same constructions. Nonetheless, she struggled to conceive a radically emancipatory vision of women's lives, aspirations, and desires from within the confines of a context and discourse premised on their devaluation. A social constructivist approach shows that Wollstonecraft sought not simply to change women or specific structures of male dominance, but rather the processes within which men and women defined gender, the family, and personal identity: in short, their subjectivity.

Horrid Mysteries of Cl Cl 26: A Tale of Mothers and Daughters

Claire Clairmont (1798–1879), her journals and letters brilliantly edited, is in no danger of being lost to history. However, a significant quantity of her writing remains only partially published, autobiographical memoranda and (apparently) copies of letters that she prepared in the 1870s at the urging of E. J. Trelawny. These manuscripts, 159 pages in total, are catalogued as Cl Cl 26 in the Pforzheimer Collection at the New York Public Library. Extracts, with warnings to readers not to trust these papers, have appeared in biographies and editions; they narrate some of the most dramatic and painful episodes of Clairmont’s life: her 1814 elopement with Mary Godwin and P. B. Shelley; the suicides of Harriet Shelley and Frances Imlay Godwin; the life and death of Allegra, her daughter by Byron, who died aged five. In the aggregate they are repetitive, incoherent, untruthful, and deeply informed by anger at Byron and Shelley. Perhaps the most mysterious component of Cl Cl 26 is a series of letters purporting to be from Clairmont’s mother, Mary Jane Godwin, to Margaret Moore, Lady Mount Cashell, in childhood Mary Wollstonecraft’s pupil and in adulthood a friend of the Shelleys and Clairmont’s special protector. Like Clairmont, both these women gave birth to daughters out of wedlock. The letters, concerned with the 1814 elopement and its aftermath, contain details found nowhere else. Clairmont tells Trelawny that she was given them by Lady Mount Cashell on Clairmont’s last visit to her in Pisa in 1832. Comprised of two sets of drafts, they survive only in the copies in Clairmont’s hand and contain errors pointing to composition much later than 1814. Nonetheless, most editors have accepted that Mary Jane Godwin did indeed write the letters and that her daughter then doctored them. Andrew Stott has suggested in an unpublished essay that Clairmont simply wrote them herself. In this article I follow the implications of this idea, first by reviewing Claire Clairmont’s life to understand why, in its evening, she might have impersonated her mother and by proxy her mother’s supposed correspondent, in writing this version of the decisive events of her youth; and second, to explore where this, her most fully realized work of fiction, might have come from. If we accept her as the sole author, we gain a new view of her: Clairmont as a writer. We know from her journals and letters that she tried intermittently to write fiction; she did publish one short story. She was keenly aware that writing was the family business and that she had not come up to scratch. We may see, then, in these letters, a final effort to tell her story. Much of the work of this article will be to attend to her inflections as she writes and rewrites, and to learn from the physical evidence offered by the manuscripts. With or without originals, in her work on this project Claire Clairmont would have felt herself, aged seventy-seven, sheltered again by the only two women whom she had ever experienced as protectors.

A Woman’s Place Is in the Morgue: Understanding Scully in the Context of 1990s Feminism

A Woman’s Place Is in the Morgue: Understanding Scully in the Context of 1990s Feminism

Mary Wollstonecraft - first philosopher of feminism

Mary Wollstonecraft is sometimes called the “Mother of Feminism”. Basically, all her work is related to women's rights. In her book “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman” (1792), now considered a classic of feminist history and feminist theory, Mary Wollstonecraft argued primarily for the rights of woman to be educated. Through education would come emancipation.