Lecture 16
Women and Sexuality
Mary Wollstonecraft
1. Bluestockings
- Elizabeth Carter
- Fanny Burney
- Elizabeth Montagu
- Mrs. Thrale
- Mrs. Barbauld
- Hannah More
2. Mary Wollstonecraft
Before the Vindication on the Rights of Woman
Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1786-7)
Biography
Vindication of the Rights of Men
reply to Burke's Reflections on the French Revolution
Burke's position on landed property
Wollstonecraft's position
The condition of women and the values of the whole society
3. Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)
Readings of the Vindication
civic virtue and rational citizenship
critique of divide between public and private
gendered discourse
4. The text
addressing the middling classes
critique of Rousseau
definition of knowledge - denied to women
women's occupations
military virtue and republican motherhood
critique of court culture
education
5. After Wollstonecraft
Repudiation of Wollstonecraft
Owenite feminists
William Thompson, Appeal of one Half of the Human Race, Women against the Pretensions of the other Half, Men, to Retain Them in Political, and Thence in Civil and Domestic Slavery; In Reply to a Paragraph of Mr. Mill's Celebrated `Article on Government'. (1825)
Decline of the feminist initiative
Rehabilitation of Mary Wollstonecraft
Reading:
Barbara Taylor, MaryWollstonecraft 1759-1798' New DNB http://viaoxforddnb.com/articles/10/10893-article.html?back
Barbara Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (2003)