Over the centuries: a history of Wollstonecraft reception

ABSTRACT

Both Wollstonecraft’s fame and infamy are attributable to her lived experience as the woman author of the only radical republican feminist text published in the pamphlet war of the 1790s. Yet, her radical republican politics were divorced from her gender politics in the early reception. This paper argues that this separation was subsequently sustained in part by interpretive practices that rest on the suppression of the original split. It shows that over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, both outside and within academia, the dominant interpretive tendency of neglecting Wollstonecraft’s radical republican politics has deradicalized both her historical political thought and her iconic image. This conventional reception has both enabled and limited the resources made available through Wollstonecraft to feminists throughout history.

KEYWORDS:

• Wollstonecraft reception
• radical republican politics
• historical feminist theory and practice
• pamphlet war of the 1790s
• William Godwin’s Memoirs
• political feminism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. It has achieved the status of a cultural object in an Arendtian sense. Cultural objects, according to Hannah Arendt, have at least two distinguishing features: the ability of arresting and moving us, and the ability of lasting through the centuries (Arendt, 2006).

2. For a fuller articulation of this, please see my book manuscript, ‘Revolutionary Rhetoric: Wollstonecraft’s Transformative Enactment.’

3. As Myers puts it, ‘the women of the bluestocking circle were determined to combine their learning with virtue – a term which covers such traits as chastity for single women, fidelity for married ones, and Christian piety. As with earlier generations of learned women, the bluestockings’ reputation for virtue shielded them from some deliberate attacks by those prejudiced against learned women’ (Myers, 1990, p. 3).

4. As Burke wasted no words in explaining, ‘a perfect democracy is […] the most shameless thing in the world’ (Burke, [1790] 1987, p. 82).

5. Unlike, for example, Olympe de Gouges who was guillotined in 1793 in part because of having written her ‘Declaration of the Rights of Woman and Citizen’ (Scott, 1997, p. 38).

6. Characterized as a masculine woman and an ‘unsex’d female’ as Richard Polwhele phrased it in his 1798 poem, Wollstonecraft was ascribed a reputation as an ‘unnatural’ sort of woman, the type of perverse woman that she had assured readers of Rights of Woman would not be produced by having access to the public sphere with a strengthened mind and body.

7. This is likely not unrelated to the fact that only very few women were allowed into universities in the nineteenth century.

8. Later she writes, ‘We cannot hold on to the assumption that gender is the object of feminism and sexuality is the object of queer studies’ (686).

9. For Binhammer, masculinity is at once neutral, that is, genderless, and defined by male heterosexuality.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Angela Maione

Angela Maione is a Lecturer on Social Studies at Harvard University. She is a political theorist who holds a PhD in Political Science from Northwestern University. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College and is currently completing a book manuscript on the political thought of Mary Wollstonecraft.