Document Type

Article

Publication Date

9-1-1999

Department

Journalism

Abstract

Recent scholarship on Mary Wollstonecraft portrays her as either a liberal who disrupts the boundaries between public and private spheres or as a proto-socialist paving the road for a class-based feminism. Neither of these characterizations adequately captures the radical quality of her work. A close study of her views on class and family place her squarely within the liberal tradition of political economy. While she politicizes these institutions and, in so doing represents a threat to the latenineteenth-century British ruling classes, she neither disrupts the basic tenets of liberalism nor seriously anticipates the class insights of socialist feminism.

Comments

This article was originally published in Canadian Journal of Political Science, 32(3): 427-450. © 1999 Cambridge University Press

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