Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination: 56 (Cambridge Studies in Romanticism, Series Number 56)
Cambridge University Press
Edition: Illustrated, 3/13/2003
EAN 9780521661447, ISBN10: 0521661447
Hardcover, 352 pages, 23.1 x 16.4 x 2.6 cm
Language: English
Originally published in English
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.