SOURCE: Badowska, Ewa. “The Anorexic Body of Liberal Feminism: Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.” Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 17, no. 2 (fall 1998): 283-303.

In the following essay, Badowska analyzes the image of the “appetitive body” in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and explores how Wollstonecraft links the image with notions of femininity in her work.

Every day [Wollstonecraft] made theories by which life should be lived. … Every day too—for she was no pedant, no cold-blooded theorist—something was born in her that thrust aside her theories and forced her to model them afresh. … She whose sense of her own existence was so intense … died at the age of thirty six. But she has her revenge. … [A]s we … listen to her arguments and consider her experiments … and realise the high-handed and hot-blooded manner in which she cut her way to the quick...