Gary Kelly (Essay Date 1997)

SOURCE: Kelly, Gary. "(Female) Philosophy in the Bedroom: Mary Wollstonecraft and Female Sexuality." Women's Writing 4, no. 2 (1997): 143-54.

In the following essay, Kelly examines Wollstonecraft's personal life as well as her writings and argues that Wollstonecraft was a forerunner in reimagining women's sexuality outside of traditional marriage structures. In doing so, Kelly also defends Wollstonecraft from criticism of her relationships with men and her seemingly extreme behavior.

At a certain point in Sade's La Philosophie dans le boudoir (1795), the relentless pedagogical exercises in the Sadean grammar of sexuality are suspended by, or perhaps culminate in, the reading of a revolutionary polemical tract. Despite the apparently revolutionary sexual and textual articulations in Sade's novel, the pupils are female, the instructors male, and the novel could be claimed to reproduce a gender hierarchy inherent in the courtly ancien régime. This was just what Mary...