Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination

Drawing on all of Wollstonecraft's works, this 2003 book provides a compelling portrait of this profoundly influential thinker.

Barbara Taylor (Author)

9780521004176, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 13 March 2003

352 pages, 4 b/w illus.
23.2 x 15.3 x 2.2 cm, 0.55 kg

'… for anyone familiar with her work and the ideas of the Enlightenment, this is an interesting and thought-provoking read.' International Socialism

In the two centuries since Mary Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), she has become an icon of modern feminism: a stature that has paradoxically obscured her real historic significance. In this in-depth 2003 study of Wollstonecraft's thought, Barbara Taylor develops an alternative reading of her as a writer steeped in the utopianism of Britain's radical Enlightenment. Wollstonecraft's feminist aspirations, Taylor shows, were part of a revolutionary programme for universal equality and moral perfection that reached its zenith during the political upheavals of the 1790s but had its roots in the radical-Protestant Enlightenment. Drawing on all of Wollstonecraft's works, and locating them in a vividly detailed account of her intellectual world and troubled personal history, Taylor provides a compelling portrait of this fascinating and profoundly influential thinker.

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Mary Wollstonecraft and the paradoxes of feminism
Part I. Imagining Women: 1. The female philosopher
2. The chimera of womanhood
3. For the love of God
Part II. Feminism and Revolution: 4. Wollstonecraft and British radicalism
5. Perfecting civilization
6. Gallic philosophesses
7. Women vs. the polity
8. The female citizen
9. Jemima and the beginnings of modern feminism
Epilogue: the fantasy of Mary Wollstonecraft
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: fiction, novelists & prose writers [DSK], Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH]