This volume attests to the continuing relevance of Mary Wollstonecraft to twenty-first century feminist thought. Making connections between Wollstonecraft's efforts to think within and beyond Enlightenment principles of liberal humanism and various significant issues and debates in contemporary culture from the impacts of social media to the impasses in theories (and practices) of social justice, the essays collectively address questions about what counts as feminism(s) now. Mary Wollstonecraft Even Now explores the range of concerns its contributors take up in considering the feminist afterlives of Wollstonecraft’s controversial writings and ideas.
Abstract
This volume attests to the continuing relevance of Mary Wollstonecraft to twenty-first century feminist thought. Making connections between Wollstonecraft's efforts to think within and beyond Enlightenment principles of liberal humanism and various significant issues and debates in contemporary culture from the impacts of social media to the impasses in theories (and practices) of social justice, the essays collectively address questions about what counts as feminism(s) now.
Abstract
“Care: For Wollstonecraft” situates the feminist legacy of Wollstonecraft’s life works in contemporary discourses and practices of care in order to foreground the still-radical implications of her concepts of mothering, women’s writing, and passional activism. Fictional works frame her critiques of marriage within the broad context of care, both for impoverished communities and against the social institutions that diminish especially women’s capacities to care.
The Philosopher and Her Poor: Wollstonecraft, Rancière, and the Rights and Duties of Humanity
Lynn FestaAbstract
“The Philosopher and Her Poor: Wollstonecraft, Rancière, and the Rights and Duties of Humanity” argues that Wollstonecraft asserts rights not as the corrective of localized wrongs (and thus the mirror image of the dominant order), but as the necessary correlative of duties. By formulating women’s work as duty—a form of rational, voluntary obligation that entails reciprocal relations, including rights—Wollstonecraft recasts the ostensibly apolitical obligations of women as the actions of the political subjects they already are.
Abstract
This essay takes up the longstanding association between Wollstonecraft, feminism, and joylessness via feminist critic Sara Ahmed’s ironic appropriation of the term “feminist killjoy.” I argue that Wollstonecraft’s specific claim to being a killjoy can be traced to the mid-twentieth century, when two American ego psychologists, obsessed with what they called Wollstonecraft’s “twisted personality,” seized on her personal biography with a determined vengeance in their book Modern Woman: The Lost Sex (1947), and forged the still unbreakable link between Wollstonecraft
Abstract
This essay theorizes the conceptual and iconic power of the feminist meme, from Mary Wollstonecraft's writing and reception to twenty-first-century presidential and election politics in the age of the internet.
The Radicalism of Queenship: Mary Wollstonecraft and Alternative Sources of the Rights of Women
Arianne ChernockAbstract
“The Radicalism of Queenship” calls attention to Mary Wollstonecraft’s engagement with exceptional historical women, focusing especially on her comments on royal women such as Queen Caroline Matilda of Denmark and Norway. In highlighting how Wollstonecraft found it useful to think with royal women, the paper suggests the importance of placing Wollstonecraft—and feminism more broadly—within many different and often complimentary philosophical approaches and traditions.
Abstract
This essay uses recent feminist work on Antigone to investigate a feminist poetics within Wollstonecraft's Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, her last completed work. It simultaneously understands the Antigone we have inherited from the early nineteenth century as, in fact, following in Wollstonecraft's wake. The shared feminist poetics of these two works holds together grief and rage (as grievance) in forms that resemble melodrama and voices that claim to live always.