The forgetting of Mary Wollstonecraft’s religiosity: teleological secularism within feminist historiography

ABSTRACT

Religious concepts and themes are central to many of Mary Wollstonecraft’s writings, yet rarely feature within popular representations of her life, work and legacy today. This paper examines the forgetting of Wollstonecraft’s religiosity in light of the broader narratives that western feminism circulates about its past and present, focusing particularly on the historiographical practices and temporal tropes that construct feminism as a quintessentially secular project. It also considers the potentially transformative impact that unforgetting Wollstonecraft’s religiosity could have within feminist historiography and politics in the present, in terms of parochializing the political certitude of secular feminism and the politics of division conducted in its name.

KEYWORDS:

• Mary Wollstonecraft
• feminist theory
• historiography
• religion
• secularism
• teleology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I should stress here that I am referring to the field of gender and feminist theory; in English literature and feminist literary criticism, Wollstonecraft is seemingly more widely read, especially in terms of her contribution to Romanticism. For more on the vicissitudes of Wollstonecraft scholarship within feminist academia, see Kaplan, 2002.

2. For a fascinating discussion of the influence of the Church of England on Wollstonecraft’s early work (especially Thoughts on the Education of Daughters), of Rational Dissent upon the ‘leftward’ turn of Wollstonecraft’s political thought, and of Christian Platonism upon her notion of the imagination as a ‘sacred’ faculty and celebration of ‘earthly affections as the vehicle for transcendent devotion’, see Taylor 2003.

3. One of the key claims within this debate is that the very idea of ‘religion’ as an autonomous sphere, separate from other cultural or social phenomena, is a western construct that makes little sense in the context of various nonwestern worldviews and ways of life. For more on this see McCutcheon (2003) and Masuzawa (2005).

4. For elaborations on the meaning of ‘Enlightenment,’ see the collection What is Enlightenment? (ed. Schmidt, 1996), which presents a variety of perspectives from both the late eighteenth and the twentieth centuries, including Kant’s famous essay ‘An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?’. Here he defines Aufklärung as a continuous process leading to emancipation from prejudice and superstition, and a capacity for independent thought and ‘mature’ judgement, rather than an already enlightened ‘age’ (Kant, 1996).

5. Wollstonecraft has as much to say here about what might be called ‘soft’ forms of sexual politics or gendered power relations as she does about rights and legal reform – arguably more, given that the majority of the Rights of Woman is devoted to analysis of the tyranny of ‘female manners’ or normative femininity. Further, Wollstonecraft’s political philosophy can be understood as a fore-runner to the Owenite British socialist movement of the nineteenth century, rather than as part of the liberal tradition (see e.g. Taylor, 2003: 3; Tims, 1976, p. 356).

6. For example: Wollstonecraft’s ‘comparative reflections’ in her Letters clearly favour Norway of the three countries, yet in the Appendix, she contends that both Sweden and Denmark are nevertheless ‘advancing; and the gigantic evils of despotism and anarchy have in a great measure vanished before the meliorating manners of Europe’ (Wollstonecraft, 2009, p. 132). For more on the ties between speculative Enlightenment philosophies of history and imperial logics, see, for example, Dussel 1995.

7. See http://www.ukip.org/manifesto2017).

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Notes on contributors

Victoria Browne

Victoria Browne is a Senior Lecturer in Politics at Oxford Brookes University and the author of Feminism, Time and Nonlinear History (Palgrave 2014). She is also a member of the editorial collective for the journal Radical Philosophy.