Book Description

In Mary Wollstonecraft: Social Reproduction Pedagogy, I offer a new perspective on the marxist-feminist attributes of early feminist writer Mary Wollstonecraft. Focusing on the pedagogical aims of Wollstonecraft's writings across her lifetime, I respond to existing scholarship that has variously labelled Wollstonecraft as a radical, a liberal, or a conservative, respectively. I demonstrate that Wollstonecraft's concerns with futurity, education, gender, and economics reveal a preoccupation with what today might be called a nascent theory of social reproduction, a primary interest of contemporary marxist feminists. Wollstonecraft was particularly preoccupied with pedagogy as a tool for radical changes to social and economic inequities in eighteenth-century Britain. Through education, Wollstonecraft imagined a future in which men and women, the landed and the indigent, would have better claim to equity. By looking into Wollstonecraft's choices of genre and the revisions made to an array of writing projects, I show how Wollstonecraft's methods and aims suggest a marxist-feminist approach that has been largely unnoticed in the literature. I am also careful to examine how Wollstonecraft's emphases on concerns related to class and gender occluded any concern with race and disability, both areas that in Wollstonecraft's day became increasingly significant (and studied) in public culture. In Chapter One, I introduce my premise that Wollstonecraft had a coherent theory of social reproduction that evolved throughout her lifetime, and which was guided by her interests in social and economic inequity. In Chapter Two, I consider Wollstonecraft's explicitly pedagogical writings and how her writing developed to incorporate more radical and experiential forms of pedagogy for children and their tutors, building upon the didactic traditions she inherited from the eighteenth century. Chapter Three moves into Wollstonecraft's two novels, which function as consciousness-raising documents about the material conditions of women, while still conforming to the aesthetic standards of the sentimental novel. Chapter Four considers Wollstonecraft's most famous works, including her vindications and the travelogue published at the end of her life, as a form of public pedagogy. This chapter argues that by playing off expectations of gender and genre, Wollstonecraft's philosophical arguments in favor of gender and social equity were generally well received by an elite male readership. I conclude by noting the legacy of Wollstonecraft's marxist-feminist theory of social reproduction as found both in the writing of her surviving family and in contemporary feminism.