Academic literature on the topic 'Wollstonecraft'
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Journal articles on the topic "Wollstonecraft"
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Carroll, Ross. "Wollstonecraft and the political value of contempt." European Journal of Political Theory 18, no. 1 (July 23, 2015): 26–46. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1474885115593762.
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In her Vindication of the Rights of Men, Mary Wollstonecraft accused Edmund Burke of having contempt for his political opponents. Yet she herself expressed contempt for Burke and did so unapologetically. Readers have long regarded Wollstonecraft’s decision to match Burke’s contempt with one of her own as either a tactical blunder or evidence that she sought merely to ridicule Burke rather than argue with him. I offer an interpretation and defence of Wollstonecraft's rhetorical choices by situating the Vindication within eighteenth-century debates about the dangers of elite contempt and the best methods for stifling it. Rather than countering Burke’s contempt with more of the same, Wollstonecraft’s Vindication marks a distinction between two forms of contempt. The first expresses the false sense of superiority experienced by elites who owe their social elevation to arbitrary differences of wealth or family. As such, it represents both an abuse of privilege and an anxious recognition among elites that their claims to dignity may be unfounded. By contrast, the contempt Wollstonecraft directs at Burke represents a dignified withdrawal of esteem which signals that one’s opponent is unworthy of the dignity to which they lay claim. If Wollstonecraft appeared to treat Burke abusively it was because she came to consider this second form of contempt as an antidote to the abusive contempt of the privileged. I conclude by spelling out some implications of Wollstonecraft’s analysis of contempt for recent debates in political theory over the importance of dignity to democracy.
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Kopajtic, Lauren. "Mary Wollstonecraft and Adam Smith on Gender and Self-Control." Journal of the History of Philosophy 61, no. 4 (October 2023): 627–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/hph.2023.a909127.
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abstract: Mary Wollstonecraft is an early and important critic of Adam Smith, engaging with his Theory of Moral Sentiments in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman . Given Wollstonecraft's arguments against moralists who "give a sex to virtue," what did she make of Smith's use of gender-coded language and the oft-cited passage where he claims that "humanity is the virtue of a woman, generosity of a man" ( TMS IV.2.10)? This paper revisits the scholarly debate over gender essentialism in Smith, arguing that Smith's view of virtue is not gender essentialist, and that Wollstonecraft saw this and did not target Smith with her critique. Instead, Wollstonecraft affirms Smith's claims, leveraging them in order to advocate for educational and social reform. Reading these texts together corrects the tenacious reading of Smith as a gender essentialist, while also illuminating the differences between Smith's and Wollstonecraft's conceptions of self-control.
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Hunt, Eileen M. "The Family as Cave, Platoon and Prison: The Three Stages of Wollstonecraft's Philosophy of the Family." Review of Politics 64, no. 1 (2002): 81–119. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0034670500031624.
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Twentieth-century feminist scholarship has largely ignored the foundational role of theology in Wollstonecraft's moral and political philosophy, and its role in shaping the development of her philosophy of the family through three distinct stages. Wollstonecraft was a traditional trinitarian Anglican in her early writings, a rationalistic unitarian Christian Dissenter in her middle writings, and a Romantic deist, skeptic and possible atheist in her late writings. The early Wollstonecraft views the traditional family as a cave that traps humanity in a morass of corruption with no hope of escape except in the next life; the middle Wollstonecraft believes that once the family takes a new, egalitarian form, it can serve as a “little platoon” (to use Burke's phrase) that instills the moral, social and political virtues in each generation of citizens; while the late Wollstonecraft fears that the traditional family is a prison from which women have little hope of escape, either in this world or through passage to the next.
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Ahmed Cronin, Madeline. "Mary Wollstonecraft’s conception of ‘true taste’ and its role in egalitarian education and citizenship." European Journal of Political Theory 18, no. 4 (December 12, 2016): 508–28. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1474885116677479.
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Is the possession of taste relevant to the practice of moral and political judgement? For Mary Wollstonecraft and many of her contemporaries, the formation of taste was increasingly significant for both ethics and politics. In fact, some of the key contributors to the debate, which I have termed the ‘politics of taste’, believed that fostering existing standards of taste promised a palliative to modern democratic ills that they diagnosed. Wollstonecraft is an immanent critic of such positions. Although she shares some of Edmund Burke’s and David Hume’s assumptions, she proposes dramatic revision of the extant model of refined taste driven by the spread of rational education. In this way, she attempts to rescue ‘true taste’ from its sentimental context – one permeated by false assumptions about femininity and class. For Wollstonecraft, ‘true taste’ must be the product of refined understanding. Only then can it be deemed a support rather than a hindrance to the practice of moral and political judgement. Although recent Wollstonecraft scholarship has emphasised the depth of her engagement with Scottish Enlightenment thought, using Hume as a primary interlocutor with Wollstonecraft, especially on the question of taste, is yet unprecedented. This approach, Wollstonecraft’s immanent critique of taste, yields arguments about taste that are especially complex and philosophically interesting, both in her time and ours.
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ANTAL, Éva. "Sensibility and Progress in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Rationalised “Sentimental Journey”." Studia Universitatis Babeș-Bolyai Philologia 68, no. 3 (September 30, 2023): 169–86. http://dx.doi.org/10.24193/subbphilo.2023.3.10.
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Sensibility and Progress in Mary Wollstonecraft’s Rationalised “Sentimental Journey”. Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) was an ardent believer in individual freedom and self-development; consequently, she frequently discussed the possibilities of women’s ed
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Williams, Valerie. "Mary Wollstonecraft on Motherhood and Political Participation: An Overlooked Insight into Women's Subordination." Hypatia 34, no. 4 (2019): 802–26. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/hypa.12486.
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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 Woman uses Wollstonecraft's works and draws upon recent claims made by Sandrine Bergès in The 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.
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Engh, Catherine. "Natural Education in Wollstonecraft’s Wrongs of Woman and Rousseau’s Emile." English Language Notes 57, no. 2 (October 1, 2019): 43–57. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00138282-7716136.
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Abstract This essay places Wollstonecraft’s late novel Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman (1798) in conversation with Rousseau’s thought on natural education in Emile (1762). In both texts, aesthetic sensibility is a foundation of religious belief and a crucial feature of a program of natural education that aims at freedom. Education falters, however, as Rousseau’s student and Wollstonecraft’s heroine are consigned to exile by a prejudiced society. Though Rousseau and Wollstonecraft make strong claims for the moral and liberating possibilities of aesthetic sensibility, they differ in their interpretation of exile. Wollstonecraft rewrites Rousseau’s portrait of the self-sufficient exile to highlight her outcast heroine’s estrangement from the vital forces that animate life and the mind. Natural education fails in Wrongs of Woman because the cultivation of sensibility remains separate from the work of reforming the social structures that discredit women’s reason.
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Hirschmann, Nancy J., and Emily F. Regier. "Mary Wollstonecraft, Social Constructivism, and the Idea of Freedom." Politics & Gender 15, no. 4 (December 11, 2018): 645–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1743923x18000491.
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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.
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Gates, Amy L. "Redeeming Professions: Wollstonecraft, Austen, and Vocational Choice." Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 55, no. 1 (March 2022): 31–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/mml.2022.a913839.
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Abstract: Jane Austen’s novels insist that readers notice characters’ professions and vocational choices. This essay argues that Austen’s ideas develop from—and expand on—Wollstonecraft’s claims about the power and potential of vocational choice to benefit self and society. In A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Mary Wollstonecraft famously critiques clergy, soldiers, and sailors because too often men in these professions were—like women of the time—without choice of career and without self-determination within those careers. Austen illustrates novelistically many of the complaints Wollstonecraft levels against men in clerical and military professions, but she also offers examples that redeem these professions and the men who intentionally adopt them. Previous studies of Wollstonecraftian influence on Austen have largely overlooked Austen’s insistent attention to men’s careers and the ways in which they affirm Wollstonecraft’s critiques as well as extend the possibility of moral and social benefits to be realized from vocational choice, equipping men, too, to be better marriage partners and citizens. This essay provides an overview of Wollstonecraft’s theories about vocational choice and Austen’s fictional echoes of these theories within the context of contemporary ideas of vocation and the professions. Then it turns to two case studies from Austen’s fiction and two characters who most directly and extensively discuss their choices of profession: Edward Ferrars in Sense and Sensibility (1811) and Edmund Bertram in Mansfield Park (1814). Bringing these elements together not only illuminates another aspect of Wollstonecraft’s influence on Austen that has received scant critical attention but also reveals Austen’s contribution to changing notions of profession and egalitarian marriage partnerships.
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Abbott, Don Paul. "“A New Genus:” Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminization of Elocution." Rhetorica 36, no. 3 (2018): 269–95. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/rh.2018.36.3.269.
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Mary Wollstonecraft is significant figure in the development of women's literature yet her importance in the evolution of rhetoric has yet to be fully recognized. Relatively little recognition has been accorded her work The Female Reader. Yet that text is the first elocutionary text written by a women, specifically for women, and which includes numerous selections from writing by woman authors. As such, Wollstonecraft's work initiated a place for women in the influential and enduring elocutionary movement. The Female Reader also inspired other authors, female and male, to continue the production of elocutionary manuals intended for women throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. Thus Wollstonecraft and her Female Reader were significant in establishing a tradition of women's participation in rhetorical theory and pedagogy.
Dissertations / Theses on the topic "Wollstonecraft"
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Kirkley, Laura Anne. "Mary Wollstonecraft and the translation of Europe." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2009. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.611641.
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Bahar, Saba. "Mary Wollstonecraft's social and aesthetic philosophy : "an Eve to please me" /." Basingstoke [etc.] : Palgrave, 2002. http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/fy02/2001054887.html.
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Wolter, Ingrid-Charlotte. "Mary Wollstonecraft und Erziehung eine Erziehungskonzeption zur Entkulturation." Trier Wiss. Verl. Trier, 2006. http://d-nb.info/98872930X/04.
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Stanley, Michelle Joelene. "Mary Wollstonecraft : forerunner of positive liberty and communitarianism." Thesis, University of British Columbia, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/2429/44246.
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This thesis explores the extent to which Mary Wollstonecraft can be associated with the philosophical conversation about liberty, in which John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and John Stuart Mill are familiar names. Wollstonecraft was a woman whose appearance in this discourse was well-known during her lifetime; however, due to her unorthodox lifestyle and her gender, she was discredited after her death. My research corrects this omission by placing her within the canon as a philosopher of liberty. In particular, an analysis of her A Vindication of the Rights of Men, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution, and Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark in light of Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor’s work, reveals Wollstonecraft’s position as an early proponent of what comes to be called positive liberty and communitarianism. Positive liberty, loosely defined, is the idea that freedom requires more than the absence of restraint; there are certain actions that government and society need to take to ensure citizens’ freedom. Communitarianism, which proposes that true freedom may only be found in a certain form of society, is closely linked with ideas of positive liberty. Indeed, Wollstonecraft’s call for national public education and the restructuring of the property system, in conjunction with her recognition of the public and political nature of the ‘private’ family, is evidence that not only was she a proponent of positive liberty and communitarianism, but her philosophy was ahead of its time.
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Wanklyn, Wendy. "The feminisms of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Thompson." Thesis, University of Oxford, 1988. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.290948.
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Ross, Elizabeth Ann. "Mary Wollstonecraft and Jane Austen - opponents or allies?" Thesis, University of Reading, 1991. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.315361.
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Tauchert, Ashley. "Mary Wollstonecraft in her time and our time." Thesis, University College London (University of London), 1997. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.264200.
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Fontes, Janaina Gomes. "A voz materna : Mary Wollstonecraft e Michèle Roberts." reponame:Repositório Institucional da UnB, 2008. http://repositorio.unb.br/handle/10482/2681.
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Dissertação (mestrado)—Universidade de Brasília, Instituto de Letras, Departamento de Teoria Literária e Literaturas, 2008.Submitted by Priscilla Brito Oliveira (priscilla.b.oliveira@gmail.com) on 2009-09-09T20:59:14Z No. of bitstreams: 1 Dissert_Janaina Fontes.pdf: 962665 bytes, checksum: d3e9bfcb2facb6d6d8d11970f7ce2ec6 (MD5)
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A experiência da maternidade tem suscitado complexos sentimentos desde os mitos existentes nas primeiras sociedades, que comparavam a capacidade reprodutiva das mulheres às forças da natureza. Durante os séculos, tal comparação foi distorcida pela sociedade patriarcal para satisfazer seus interesses, causando a opressão e o sofrimento de milhares de mulheres. Esse processo está presente também na literatura, que é capaz de refletir e perpetuar essas distorções ou desconstruí-las, contribuindo para novas visões dessa complexa experiência. Neste trabalho, analiso a representação da maternidade em romances de autoria feminina, mais precisamente, Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman e Mary, a Fiction, de Mary Wollstonecraft (escritora inglesa do século XVIII), e Fair Exchange, de Michèle Roberts (escritora inglesa contemporânea), auxiliada por exemplos em diversos textos teóricos de como o papel da mãe foi construído ao longo do tempo e pela contribuição dos estudos feministas para a desconstrução dos mitos patriarcais sobre a maternidade. _________________________________________________________________________________________ ABSTRACT
The experience of motherhood has roused complex feelings since the myths existing in the first societies, wich used to compare women’s reproductive capability to the forces of nature. Throughout the centuries, such comparison was distorted by the patriarchal society in order to satisfy its interests, causing the oppression and the suffering of thousands of women. This process is also present in literature, which is able to reflect and perpetuate these distortions or deconstruct them, contributing to new views on this complex experience. In this work I analyze the representation of motherhood in novels written by women, more precisely, Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman and Mary, a Fiction, by Mary Wollstonecraft (eighteenth-century English writer) and Fair Exchange, by Michèle Roberts (comtemporary English writer), assisted by examples in different texts of how the mother’s role has been constructed throughout time and by the contributions of the feminist studies for the deconstruction of patriarchal myths about motherhood.
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Et-Taousy, Mohammed. "L'Education féminine chez Jean-Jacques Rousseau et Mary Wollstonecraft." Paris 4, 2002. http://www.theses.fr/2002PA040044.
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Gourdon, Stéphanie. "Normes et formes dans les écrits de Mary Wollstonecraft." Aix-Marseille 1, 2009. http://www.theses.fr/2009AIX10100.
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Dans les années 1970, la critique littéraire occidentale, mue par des prises de parti ancrés dans l’évolution des mœurs, a fait redécouvrir Mary Wollstonecraft en la présentant comme la « mère du féminisme ». L’analyse des écrits composant une œuvre hétérogène a souvent été laissée de côté au profit d’une approche idéologique. L’étude considère au contraire le système générique des textes en faisant l’hypothèse que sa complexité, marquée par une pratique de l’hybridation, résulte d’une démarche expérimentale. L’objet d’une telle stratégie serait de mettre à distance les modèles canoniques et partant, de créer une nouvelle forme d’écriture. Les mutations socio-culturelles du XVIIIe siècle sont propices à l’émancipation et de la femme et de l’esthétique de l’œuvre. Aussi faut-il considérer ce que le fonctionnement des textes dit de la femme et si Mary Wollstonecraft parvient à relever les défit qu’elle se lance.
Books on the topic "Wollstonecraft"
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Franklin, Caroline. Mary Wollstonecraft. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2004. http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/9780230510050.
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Jane, Moore. Mary Wollstonecraft. Plymouth, U.K: Northcote House in association with the British Council, 1999.
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Johnson, Patricia Altenbernd. On Wollstonecraft. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Thomson Learning, 2000.
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Jump, Harriet Devine. Mary Wollstonecraft, writer. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994.
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Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Wollstonecraft anthology. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1989.
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Harold, Bloom, ed. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. New York: Bloom's Literary Criticism, 2008.
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Devine, Harriet. Mary Wollstonecraft : writer. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994.
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Wollstonecraft, Mary. A Wollstonecraft anthology. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990.
Find full textBook chapters on the topic "Wollstonecraft"
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Coffee, Alan. "Mary Wollstonecraft and Wollstonecraftian Philosophy." In The Oxford Handbook of American and British Women Philosophers in the Nineteenth Century, C1S1—C1N10. Oxford University Press, 2023. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197558898.013.1.
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Abstract This chapter traces the development of one of Wollstonecraft’s central insights, that women’s natural and political rights can only be realized in a supportive cultural environment, into the nineteenth century. It does this by looking at the work of two other Wollstonecrafts, Nancy Kingsbury Wollstonecraft and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and by examining the application of Wollstonecraftian ideas about racial justice in abolitionist writing. Kingsbury develops a Wollstonecraftian line in addressing the question of why women appear not to take advantage of the increasing number of educational opportunities becoming available to them in the early nineteenth century, arguing that structural inequalities make it rational for women to make the decisions they do. Shelley takes the republican framework that Wollstonecraft uses and tests it against a range of human failings, such as selfish ambition and factional loyalty and identity. Throughout the nineteenth century, abolitionists frequently made extensive use of Wollstonecraftian ideas. Frederick Douglass is one example. Harriet Jacobs adds the perspective of a feminist and slave, particularly with respect to sexual violence and family relationships.
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Washington, Chris. "Werewolf Wollstonecraft." In Material Transgressions, 253–74. Liverpool University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/liverpool/9781789621778.003.0012.
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The judicial bestiary at the heart of eighteenth-century politics has long been evident in Enlightenment social contract debates, as Michel Foucault’s and Giorgio Agamben’s theories of biopolitics show. In this essay, I argue that Wollstonecraft is nonetheless the first thinker of ‘true’ werewolf out-lawry in her final novel, Maria, Or the Wrongs of Woman and in her letters to Godwin. In the novel, Wollstonecraft leverages what we now call new materialism as a feminist critique of heteropatriarchal society. Wollstonecraft’s new materialist thinking also scrambles gender across even human and nonhuman distinctions. To counter microcosmic familial and macrocosmic state heteropatriarchy, Wollstonecraft theorizes what I am calling, following the example of wolves and werewolves, not a family but a ‘pack’. The pack manifests as new spacetimes through what Karen Barad terms “quantum entanglements” that produce love between subjects and subjects but that never strives to reproduce binaristic pairings that reproduce the sovereign family. A pack, as Wollstonecraft’s texts demonstrate, emerges from processes of co-creation that iterate new subjects and objects without dynamic power structures structured around stable gender identities or human and nonhuman power relations.
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Ellermann, Greg. "Wollstonecraft in Ruins." In Thought's Wilderness, 70–85. Stanford University Press, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.11126/stanford/9781503628489.003.0005.
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This chapter reads Wollstonecraft’s Scandinavian Letters as a significant contribution to poetics. Throughout the Letters, she joins intricate figurative descriptions of the Scandinavian landscape with philosophical reveries on the origin and end of human life and language. Wollstonecraft’s thinking about poetry pivots on the figure of anthropomorphism. Long seen as integral to the romantic lyric, anthropomorphism signifies the appropriative humanization of nature. In the Letters as well as the closely related essay “On Poetry,” Wollstonecraft registers the damage wrought by anthropomorphism while reconceiving it as a memorial to violence. According to Wollstonecraft, this figure attests to the ruinous history of nature in “commerce”—her term for the circulation of raw materials, commodities, and human bodies. Her experiments in anthropomorphism present, with surprising specificity, “an image of human industry in the shape of destruction.”
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Kirkley, Laura. "‘A More Enlightened Moral Love of Mankind’: Philanthropy and the French Revolution." In Mary Wollstonecraft, 101–29. Edinburgh University Press, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781399503099.003.0005.
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Written from Terrorist France An Historical and Moral View of the Origins and Progress of the French Revolution (1794) is marked by the tension between Wollstonecraft’s democratic ideals and their cataclysmic implementation. This chapter demonstrates that Wollstonecraft compares her cosmopolitan model of patriotism with the ‘false’ or ‘mock’ patriotism on display in the National Assembly. She attributes this phony love of country to self-interestedness ingrained in French cultural life by centuries of arbitrary power, identifying moral and psychological parallels with jingoism, imperial enterprise and hardnosed commercial exchange. By contrast, her cosmopolitan ethic privileges philanthropy over narrow allegiances and self-aggrandisement in all its forms. French Revolution therefore defends democratic and republican principles but, with its emphasis on human fellowship, also implicitly rejects Robespierre’s political genocide. Alternating between ironic detachment, Revolutionary polemic and interludes of high sensibility, Wollstonecraft lays claim to universalist impartiality but also constructs a sentimental textual persona who bears witness to the situatedness and subjectivity of her writing project. Wollstonecraft’s discursive shifts call attention to the complexities of her argument, inviting us to scrutinise its central paradoxes, not least her competing injunctions to philosophical detachment and compassion.
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Kirkley, Laura. "Introduction." In Mary Wollstonecraft, 1–25. Edinburgh University Press, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781399503099.003.0001.
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Drawing on modern theorists of cosmopolitanism, most notably Martha Nussbaum, the introduction defines the term ‘cosmopolitan’ and explains its application to Wollstonecraft, who not only lived and worked transnationally but also engaged consistently with the moral questions raised by our shared membership of the human family. Situating Wollstonecraft in the context of transnational literary exchange between radical and Dissenting circles in London and Revolutionary Paris, the introduction examines her key cosmopolitan influences. The first is the rationalist theologian Richard Price, whose Discourse on the Love of Our Country advocated ‘Universal Benevolence’ over narrower loyalties. The introduction demonstrates that Price’s radical theology brings to Wollstonecraft’s Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787) a cosmopolitan ethical vision that surpasses its apparently modest aims. Wollstonecraft advocates ‘Goodwill to all the human race’, or ‘philanthropy’, a moral duty to subordinate local loyalties and personal attachments to the practice of impartial benevolence. Yet she also acknowledges that philanthropic feeling germinates from intimate bonds of affection. The introduction contends that, having espoused Price’s universalist principles, Wollstonecraft drew on the works of Rousseau to scrutinise the human reflex to form close-knit communities and the power of sentiment both to thwart and further the ends of justice.
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Kirkley, Laura. "‘The Most Sublime Virtues’: Wollstonecraft’s Philanthropic Personae." In Mary Wollstonecraft, 26–51. Edinburgh University Press, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781399503099.003.0002.
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The importance Wollstonecraft ascribes to philanthropy, or love of humankind, is embodied in her semi-autobiographical personae, whom she constructs to invest her life experiences with ideological value. This chapter focuses on Mrs Mason, the accomplished pedagogue of Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories from real life (1788), and the eponymous heroine of her first novel, Mary, a Fiction (1788), arguing that both personae reflect Wollstonecraft’s close engagement with Francophone literature. Mrs Mason shares significant characteristics with the Legislator of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract (1762), a figure of supreme authority, while Mary takes her DNA from the sensitive maverick of his life writing. In Original Stories, Rousseau’s influence is both augmented and offset by that of Stéphanie-Félicité Genlis, a bestselling author in French and English. Read intertextually, Wollstonecraft’s personae articulate complementary aspects of an argument for refusing convention in favour of personal authenticity. By adhering to their divinely implanted internal monitors, they retain the innate benevolence that makes philanthropy possible.
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Kirkley, Laura. "‘Original Spirit’: Translating the Maternal Educator." In Mary Wollstonecraft, 52–73. Edinburgh University Press, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781399503099.003.0003.
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This chapter focuses primarily on Elements of Morality, for the Use of Children (1790), Wollstonecraft’s interventionist translation of Christian Gotthilf Salzmann’s Moralisches Elementarbuch (1782-3; new edition 1785) in which she ‘domesticates’ the German source text for her British readership. This translational strategy, in which she gives her version ‘the spirit of an original’, reflects her effort to make her target audience receptive to the moral and cultural value of the German text. The chapter demonstrates that Elements should be read as a creative work which bears witness to Wollstonecraft’s critical agency in a male-dominated transnational public sphere where the cosmopolitan exchange of enlightened ideas was offset by a struggle, between nations, for cultural pre-eminence. Wollstonecraft’s interpolated material brings a transnational dimension to the narrative that reflects both her British resistance to French cultural hegemony and her cosmopolitan broadmindedness. Through the character of Mrs Jones, Wollstonecraft also establishes a connection between Elements and Original Stories from Real Life, transforming Salzmann’s maternal figure into a Mrs Mason-like mouthpiece for her developing feminism and reformist politics as well as her philanthropic philosophy.
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Brooks, Ann. "‘Uncompromising politics’: Mary Wollstonecraft and Catherine Macaulay." In Women, Politics and the Public Sphere, 23–48. Policy Press, 2019. http://dx.doi.org/10.1332/policypress/9781447330639.003.0003.
Full textAbstract:
This chapter focuses on Catherine Macaulay and Mary Wollstonecraft, which are considered to be the two most important women writers on politics and society in late 18th-century England. Both were instrumental in the development of feminist political thought and by the 1790s, ‘Catherine Macaulay and Mary Wollstonecraft had achieved a kind of political articulacy and a degree of public audibility that are central to the emergence of modern feminist politics in Britain’. This was not seen as an area that women should comment on. Both Macaulay and Wollstonecraft showed that women as public intellectuals could defend republican political principles. In addition, both contributed to debates on education and both believed in the same education for women and men. Wollstonecraft argues that the education of women should be about giving them more independence. Similarly, Wollstonecraft maintained that women should work and become independent. As such, Wollstonecraft's feminism can be located in a general trend towards sexual liberation.
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Kirkley, Laura. "Coda ‘ Out-Laws of the World’: Cosmopolitanism in The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria." In Mary Wollstonecraft, 200–214. Edinburgh University Press, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781399503099.003.0009.
Full textAbstract:
The Coda argues that, in her unfinished draft of her final novel, The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria, Wollstonecraft re-examines the cosmopolitan ethic of caring, delineating the mechanisms that cultivate or suppress philanthropy and constructing a symbolic model for world citizenship. The chapter contends that, when the eponymous protagonist, Maria, leaves her marriage, she embarks on a project of symbolic expatriation, rejecting a home nation where patriarchal laws and prejudices keep her oppressed. Through the solidarity between Maria and the former sex worker, Jemima, Wollstonecraft depicts two ‘stateless’ women committing to an ethic of caring which, although confined to an enclosed sentimental community, crosses class boundaries, represents the human capacity for philanthropy and palliates wrongs perpetrated under a British legal system demonstrably at variance with the universal framework of justice. The coda concludes with reflections on the different aspects and implications of Wollstonecraft’s cosmopolitan ethic as it develops in the course of her oeuvre.
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"Front Matter." In Wollstonecraft, i—iv. Princeton University Press, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv12sdwhj.1.
Full textConference papers on the topic "Wollstonecraft"
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De Jorge-Huertas, Virginia, and Miguel Ángel Ajuriaguerra Escudero. "Talleres preuniversitarios: itinerarios, bitácoras y mapas con niñxs." In Jornadas sobre Innovación Docente en Arquitectura. Grup per a la Innovació i la Logística Docent en l'Arquitectura (GILDA), 2023. http://dx.doi.org/10.5821/jida.2023.12233.
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The three epochs of education are originated by several forerunners of changes in education in different periods: From Mary Wollstonecraft to Nel Noddings. Additionally, since the 2000s, another of the revolutions for innovation in teaching has been the incorporation of the Internet in the educational world and the new ICTs and CATs. With these paradigms in mind, a workshop was conducted with 45 students of 4th year of Compulsory Secondary Education at the Fuenlabrada campus of the URJC university. The methodology applied was qualitative and ethnographic, mapping and drawing were carried out with three pedagogical tools: i) the interpretation of their room; ii) the series of drawings based on chromatic perception, iii) the construction of a collective map applying the knowledge previously learned. Las tres épocas de la educación están originadas por varias precursoras de cambios en la educación en periodos distintos: Desde Mary Wollstonecraft a Nel Noddings. Adicionalmente, desde la década de los 2000, otra de las revoluciones para la innovación en la docencia, está siendo la incorporación de internet en el mundo educativo y las nuevas TICs y TACs. Con estos paradigmas en mente, se realizó un taller con 45 estudiantes de 4º de Educación Secundaria Obligatoria en el campus de Fuenlabrada de la universidad URJC. La metodología aplicada fue de carácter cualitativo y etnográfico, se realizaron mapeos y dibujos con tres herramientas pedagógicas: i) la interpretación de su habitación; ii) la serie de dibujos basados en la percepción cromática, iii) la construcción de un mapa colectivo aplicando los conocimientos aprendidos previamente.