Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dsjbd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-27T13:44:51.205Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Valerie Williams
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

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.

Type
Articles
Information
Hypatia , Volume 34 , Issue 4 , Fall 2019 , pp. 802 - 826
Copyright
Copyright © 2019, Hypatia, Inc.

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Bergès, Sandrine. 2016. Wet‐nursing and political participation: The republican approaches to motherhood of Mary Wollstonecraft and Sophie de Grouchy. In The social and political philosophy of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Bergès, Sandrine and Coffee, Alan. Oxford: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brace, Laura. 2000. “Not empire, but equality”: Mary Wollstonecraft, the marriage state, and the sexual contract. Journal of Political Philosophy 8 (4): 433–55.Google Scholar
Clark, Alice. 1982. Working life of women in the seventeenth century. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd.Google Scholar
Coffee, Alan. 2014. Freedom as independence: Mary Wollstonecraft and the grand blessing of life. Hypatia 29 (4): 908–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ferguson, Moira. 1992. Mary Wollstonecraft and the problematic of slavery. Feminist Review 42 (Autumn): 82–102.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ferguson, Susan. 1999. The radical ideas of Mary Wollstonecraft. Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique 32 (3): 427–50.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Finke, Laurie A. 1987. “A philosophic wanton”: Language and authority in Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the rights of woman. In The philosopher as writer: The eighteenth century, ed. Ginsberg, Robert. Selinsgrove, Pa: Susquehanna University Press.Google Scholar
Halldenius, Lena. 2016. Mary Wollstonecraft and feminist republicanism: Independence, rights, and the experience of unfreedom. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Hirschmann, Nancy J. 2010. Choosing betrayal. Perspectives on Politics 8 (1): 271–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Juengel, Scott. 2001. Countenancing history: Mary Wollstonecraft, Samuel Stanhope Smith, and Enlightenment racial science. ELH 68 (4): 897–927.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Mandeville, Bernard. 1988. An essay on charity, and charity‐schools. In The fable of the bees: Or, private vices, public benefits, ed. Kaye, F. B. Indianapolis, Ind.: Liberty Fund.Google Scholar
McCormack, Kathleen. 1984. The sybil and the hyena: George Eliot's Wollstonecraftian feminism. Dalhousie Review 63 (4): 602–14.Google Scholar
Mellor, Anne K. 1994. Introduction. In Maria: Or, the wrongs of Woman. New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc.Google Scholar
Phillips, Anne. 2000. Feminism and republicanism: Is this a plausible alliance? Journal of Political Philosophy 8 (2): 279–93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sapiro, Virginia. 1992. A vindication of political virtue. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Smith, Amy Elizabeth. 1992. Roles for readers in Mary Wollstonecraft's A vindication of the rights of woman. Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 32 (3): 555–70.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stetson, Dorothy Mc Bride. 1996. Women's rights and human rights: Intersection and conflict. In Feminist interpretations of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. Falco, Maria J. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.Google Scholar
Stone, Lawrence. 1977. The family, sex and marriage in England 1500–1800. New York: Harper & Row Publishers.Google Scholar
Taylor, Barbara. 2003. Mary Wollstonecraft and the feminist imagination. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Vlasopolos, Anca. 1980. Mary Wollstonecraft's mask of reason in a vindication of the rights of woman. Dalhousie Review 60 (3): 462–71.Google Scholar
Wilcox, Kirstin R. 2009. Vindicating paradoxes: Mary Wollstonecraft's “woman”. Studies in Romanticism 48 (3): 447–67.Google Scholar
Wollstonecraft, Mary. 1994. Maria: Or, the wrongs of woman. New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc.Google Scholar
Wollstonecraft, Mary. 1995. A vindication of the rights of men with a vindication of the rights of woman and hints, ed. Tomaselli, Sylvana. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar