declaration of women's rights and the female citizen

Writing from within the tradition of moral education which is committed to control over the passions, Wollstonecraft is often thought of as troubled, even disgusted, by the body and the burden of sexual difference - hence her ready appropriation of the Enlightenment discourse of masculinist reason. An unpromising topic, perhaps, given the scarcity - and, on occasion, the notorious prudishness - of Wollstonecraft’s explicit comments on the subject.

This essay is about Mary Wollstonecraft and sex education. The effect of this study is twofold: to show how developments in eighteenth-century women’s literature reflected and engaged with Enlightenment discussions of emotion, sentiment, and commercial and imperial expansion and to provide new literary and historical contexts for contemporary conversations that continue to use “women’s progress” to assign cultures and societies around the globe a place in universalizing schemas of development. Likewise, it tracks discussions of “women’s progress” and historical and commercial development from the rarified atmosphere of mid-eighteenth-century Bluestocking salons and the masculine domain of the Scottish university system to the popular Minerva Press novels of the early nineteenth century. Beginning with Smith’s philosophical meditation on feeling in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and reaching into the early nineteenth century, A Feminine Enlig htenment connects Smith’s theory of feeling to the sentimental poems and novels of Anna Seward and Regina Maria Roche. By reading women’s literature alongside history and philosophy and moving between the eighteenth century and Romantic era, this book challenges conventional historical and generic boundaries. A Feminine Enlightenment argues that women writers shaped Enlightenment conversations regarding the role of sentiment and gender in the civilizing process.

Declaration of women's rights and the female citizen