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Abstract
This dissertation investigates the relationship between revolutionary republicanism and feminism in the political thought of Mary Wollstonecraft in order to recover the radical democratic project that animates Wollstonecraft's political writings. It argues that Wollstonecraft's political thought must be understood both in relation to the Pamphlet War of the 1790s as well as in relation to the eighteenth-century condition of women under the law, within society, the economy, and politics in which Wollstonecraft wrote as a woman. Resituating Wollstonecraft's two most famous works, A Vindication of the Rights of Men and Vindication of the Rights of Woman , within this multifaceted historical context enables the rhetorical style and strategies of those texts to be understood as constitutive of their arguments. It also enables the texts to be seen as political acts that reflect the practice of democracy for which they advocate. Viewed as a rhetorical and political artifact, Wollstonecraft's appeal to rights, for example, is figured as a claim for revolutionary feminist and republican transformation where rights themselves are understood as part of a broader democratic project that is seldom explored.
While Wollstonecraft and her writings sometimes serve as productive sites for both contesting the evolving condition of women as well as for staging feminist debates, the weight of changing contemporary issues projected onto Wollstonecraft both as person and author over centuries of critical reception has buried the radical project of Rights of Woman in particular as well as its revolutionary tradition which has been suppressed, ignored, fragmented, or forgotten.
This dissertation finds that the various challenges posed by Wollstonecraft's political texts to the distinct yet inseparable subjugations of men and women under patriarchal, hereditary monarchical rule in eighteenth-century Britain are constituted rhetorically through a feminist revolutionary republicanism. This unfamiliar view of the historical Wollstonecraft's political thought may hold valuable yet overlooked resources for contemporary democratic theory.
