"A Woman Whose Life and Thought Were Both Revolutionary"

"What follows from this? Any apparent inequality is the result of historical or social circumstances–nurture, not nature, if you like. If, for example, women or Africans are seen as inferior, that is because society has made them so. Society can make them better. Wollstonecraft, like many of her radical contemporaries, believed in human perfectibility. She continued to place her hopes in the French Revolution, writing in 1794 that she was 'confident of being able to prove, that the people are essentially good, and that knowledge is rapidly advancing to that degree of perfectibility, when the proud distinctions of sophisticated fools will be eclipsed by the mi[l]d rays of philosophy, and man be considered as man–acting with the dignity of an intelligent being'. Tomaselli urges us to see Wollstonecraft's feminism as part of a larger project of rethinking and reshaping both men and women so they could reach their potential as intellectual and moral beings."

At Literary Review, Judith Hawley reviews Sylvana Tomaselli's Wollstonecraft: Philosophy, Passion, and Politics.