Mary Wollstonecraft
Reason as the human birthright; if it belongs to men it belongs to women — the rights of woman are the rights of man
Wollstonecraft's "A Vindication of the Rights of Men" (1790) was the first published reply to Burke's "Reflections on the Revolution in France"; "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman" (1792) extended the same Enlightenment-republican argument to the question of women's education and political standing, and is the founding text of liberal feminism. The "Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution" (1794) was the first English-language history of the Revolution by an eyewitness. She died at 38 of complications from the birth of her second daughter, Mary Shelley (the future author of Frankenstein); her husband William Godwin's candid posthumous memoir damaged her public reputation for nearly a century before her recovery as the first major modern feminist theorist.
Key works
- Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787)
- A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790)
- A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)
- An Historical and Moral View of the French Revolution (1794)
- Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796)
- Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman (1798, unfinished, posthumous)
Declared Influences
Rationalism 40%
Empiricism 25%
Lutheranism 15%
Pragmatism 20%
Wollstonecraft's central argument is that reason is the defining human capacity and the foundation of moral and political claims; women possess it equally with men and are accordingly entitled to the same education and standing.
"I do not wish [women] to have power over men; but over themselves." (Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ch. 4)
A Lockean empiricism about the mind's development — what women have been called is the product of how they have been educated, and changes in education will produce changes in capacity.
"Strengthen the female mind by enlarging it, and there will be an end to blind obedience." (Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ch. 3)
The framework groups confessional Protestant Christianity here. Wollstonecraft was a Dissenting Anglican / Unitarian in her religious orientation; the moral seriousness of her writing draws on the rational-religion tradition of English Dissent.
"It is justice, not charity, that is wanting in the world." (Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ch. 9)
A working pragmatism about social institutions: marriage, education, and political arrangements are to be judged by what they produce in the character and lives of those subject to them.
"Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison." (Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ch. 3)
Internal Tensions
Wollstonecraft's combination of universalist Enlightenment rationalism with a sharp eye for the specific historical situation of women has been read as both too universalist (insufficiently attentive to embodiment and difference) and not universalist enough (specifically a middle-class English programme) by subsequent feminist theorists. Her own biography — the unconventional marriages, the suicide attempts, the death in childbirth — was used against her philosophical reputation throughout the nineteenth century and contributed to her near-disappearance from the canon before the twentieth-century recovery.
I. Time
Linear, uni-directional, non-deterministic. Wollstonecraft's political thought has a strong developmental dimension — institutions can be reformed, human capacities can be expanded, the present arrangement is not the only possible one.
Attributes
II. Space
Conventional Newtonian.
Attributes
III. Matter
Conventional Newtonian.
Attributes
IV. Observer
Single embodied person, plural among others, actively engaged in self-cultivation and political action. Personal metaphysical agency: a rational-religious theism in the Dissenting tradition.
Attributes
V. Energy
Conventional Newtonian.
Attributes
VI. Information
Conserved at both scales. Wollstonecraft's programme of education and writing assumes that recorded knowledge compounds across generations.
Attributes
Classified works
Works in the atlas that Mary Wollstonecraft authored or that draw on this persona's writings, with full attribute fingerprints of their own.
Computed school proximity
The persona's attribute fingerprint scored against all 202 schools using the same quiz scorer. Useful as a sanity check on the hand-curated influences above.
Philosophical neighbors
Other personas whose attribute fingerprint sits closest to Mary Wollstonecraft's — intellectual neighbors across traditions and eras.
How Mary Wollstonecraft resolves each dilemma
53 resolved positions across 4 dimensions, including 1 distinctive where the majority of schools go the other way · 4 unaligned.
Each dimension is sorted so minority positions come first. Mainstream positions are folded into an expandable list.
Time · 9 dilemmas, all mainstream
Matter · 7 dilemmas, all mainstream
Observer · 37 dilemmas · 1 distinctive
Mind, agency, and the knower's relation to the known.
32 mainstream positions
4 unaligned
Information · 4 dilemmas, all mainstream
Films Referencing This Persona (8)
Either directly referenced in the film, or reading the film through one of this persona's top schools.
Experiments Engaging This Persona's Schools
Surface via influence-schools that respond to the experiment. Each entry shows the school through which the connection runs.