SOURCE: "The Female (As) Reader: Sex, Sensibility, and the Maternal in Wollstonecraft's Fictions," Essays in Literature, Vol. XIX, No. 1, Spring 1992, pp. 36-54.

In the following essay, Maurer contends that, in her fiction, Wollstonecraft attempts to develop an active subjectivity for women "that is constituted in direct relation to a woman's role as mother."

The weakness of the mother will be visited on the children.

—Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Wollstonecraft would educate woman to subjugate herself

—Gillian Brown, "Anorexia, Humanism, and Feminism"

In the "Author's Preface" to her unfinished novel, The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria (edited and published posthumously by William Godwin in 1798), Mary Wollstonecraft declares her intention to exhibit "the misery and oppression, peculiar to women, that arise out of the partial laws and customs of society."¹ In writing the history "of woman," rather than "of an individual," Wollstonecraft subjects all of the...