Mary Wollstonecraft and Liberalism

Abstract

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-97) was a significant and wide-ranging moral and political philosopher of the late Enlightenment period whose work remains relevant today. She is most well-known as an early feminist and author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), and her analysis of the social condition of women, and the structural nature of their subjection, retains much of its radical force. Her feminist arguments, of course, are both derived from, and in turn shape, her overall philosophical framework which is often seen as being located within the liberal tradition. This is a reasonable attribution, though it must be made both cautiously and with qualification. As we shall see, Wollstonecraft did not passively absorb or merely apply the intellectual concepts around her but consciously critiqued them and innovatively extended them.

Keywords: Mary Wollstonecraft, Liberalism, Republicanism, Freedom as Non-Domination, Freedom as Nondomination, Feminism, History of Feminism, Women in the History of Feminism