![]() ![]() ![]() She was also a novelist, short story writer, devoted lover of nature, educator, and, at times, amateur theologian. How can we understand Wollstonecraft’s theory of society, human development, and the interrelation of sexual and social equality? How is human reason to be fostered, the family to be constituted, and social duties and labor to be distributed? What are to make of Wollstonecraft’s feminist theory of society today?īut Wollstonecraft was more than just a social theorist. Exceptional in their time, Wollstonecraft’s writings remain a radical challenge to liberal thinkers and feminists even today. For Wollstonecraft, women’s liberation -and, necessarily, men’s, too -calls for nothing less than a wholesale social revolution in human relations. Anticipating Marxist-feminist arguments by nearly 200 years, Wollstonecraft identified the patriarchal family as the means for the reproduction of a society devoted, in her eyes, to the accumulation and display of property. Partly a riposte to a sexist proposal for female education, partly a slashing critique of the conservative Edmund Burke, Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women marshaled the empiricism of John Locke and David Hume to argue that the sexual inequality considered “natural” by most Western men, even the French revolutionaries, was in fact, like all social phenomena, a product of historical contingency. Mary Wollstonecraft replied to vindicate the rights of women. ![]() The French Revolution proclaimed the Rights of Men. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |