SOURCE: MacKenzie, Catriona. “Reason and Sensibility: The Ideal of Women's Self-Governance in the Writings of Mary Wollstonecraft.” Hypatia 8, no. 4 (fall 1993): 35-55.

In the following essay, MacKenzie argues against interpretations of Wollstonecraft that stress her commitment to a liberal philosophical framework and valuation of reason over passion, claiming that in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and other texts Wollstonecraft exposes the inadequacies of traditional liberalism.

When morality shall be settled on a more solid basis, then, without being gifted with a prophetic spirit, I will venture to predict that woman will be either the friend or slave of man. We shall not, as at present, doubt whether she is a moral agent, or the link which unites man with brutes.

(Wollstonecraft 1975, 120)

I.

In a letter written in 1795 while she was traveling in Scandinavia doing business on behalf of Gilbert Imlay, the man who had recently abandoned both...