THE FEMINIST RESPONSES TO MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT: A READING

Abstract

According to the well-known study on Wollstonecrafts reception in the early 20th century, some feminists embraced her unusual life experience as a personal model for their own experiments with, and literary reflections on, love, sex, and marriage. She frequently used the first-person plural to refer to herself as a part of the greater community of women who endure patriarchal oppression in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. There is evidence that many intellectuals regarded Wollstonecrafts contributions to modern women largely from a biographical and literary standpoint. Examples include Virginia Woolf, Ruth Benedict, and Emma Goldman. Numerous important biographical studies of Wollstonecrafts life and literary critiques of her writing have been produced since the 1970s. The second wave of feminist researchers, however, were undoubtedly most influenced by this symbolic interpretation of Wollstonecraft as a personal figure. In this research paper, we aim to investigate the feminist theories of Wollstonecraft as well as her experiments with gender, life, marriage, literature, and society. KEYWORDS: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft, Feminism, Radical Feminist, Modern Feminism