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Mary Wollstonecraft is an under-appreciated thinker of the Western Canon. Her influence (through feminism) has been enormous. And her ideas only seem more prescient as time goes by. Great article!

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Great stuff. I was just reading Mary Shelley's lesser-known The Last Man last month and I definitely need to read Caleb Williams and the Memoir someday and to reread the Vindication. I recall that there's some historically complex material in the latter to frustrate today's reader, as when she proposes state-funded co-ed day schools—progressive!—as a way of cracking down on boarding-school homosexuality—reactionary! The movie Poor Things has a character semi-based on Godwin, though this is clearer in the source novel, a postmodern pastiche on Frankenstein themes.

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Yes the Vindication is a favorite nowadays of right-wing pro-family types like the Compact crowd, because, as you know, her target was primarily the romantic mystique--the idea that a woman should find her fulfillment primarily in romance. So they're like, see, Wollstonecraft would've hated contemporary dating culture. Like, for pre-20th century feminists, there are two answers to the question of "why do women seem self-evidently weaker and less intelligent than men"--the first was to rattle off lists of accomplished women to prove that the point wasn't self-evident at all, while the second was the accept the premise of the question and to say, "If women were educated differently and better, you would see that we are likely to be the equal to men. And if we are not men's equal, then your natural superiority will allow you to rule anyway, but whether we are equal or not, it is silly for us to be treated like this". Wollstonecraft took the second route, which seems much better rhetorically if I am being honest. I can't imagine that if Wollstonecraft was alive today, she would leave open that kind of rhetorical space for women's inferiority and for the idea that perhaps women are best made for the domestic sphere, but who knows?

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Right, "reactionary feminism" and all that. While acknowledging the difficulty of her historical and rhetorical position, I'm not that sympathetic to the Vindication. I think the second route you posit leads to definitions of greatness and equality modeled on a reductive idea of masculinity, which is for example, to return to my perennial concern, why art gets equated to the feminine sphere and marginalized and/or instrumentalized as such (by conservatives, yes, but also by Wollstonecraft's feminist heirs). She (and Margaret Fuller in America) had such an exaggerated if understandable recoil from "the feminine" as a form of culture imposed on women that they seem to denounce art, leisure, beauty, etc. per se. Fuller even praises Sparta, though its gender-equality-within-a-fascoid-military-ruling-caste does not sound so appealing to me. Hence, I think, the relative conservatism of her daughter's novels, but also why this conservatism (implying, at its most utopian, difference but not hierarchy) was amenable to the postmodernists who durably canonized Mary Shelley.

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Mary Shelley did have some conservative tendencies, interesting point. Margaret Fuller is an interesting figure, definitely deserves more recognition.

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