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Wollstonecraft and More

Seminar Questions
  • What impact did Wollstonecraft and More have on understandings of gender? Are either of them 'feminists'?
  • What are the differences between Rousseau's, Wollstonecraft's and More's views on women and education?
  • Are Wollstonecraft's.More's novels or pamphlets better representations of their contributions to the issue of women's rights and duties?
  • Do Wollstonecraft's and More's lives and careers help explain their ideological positions?
  • What contribution did the Enlightenment make to early feminist thought?

Key Texts


  1. Hannah More, Strictures on the modern system of female education (1811) Chaper 2 'On the Education of Women'
  2. Hannah More, Coelebs in Search of a Wife 
  3. Mary Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) Chapter 12 'On National Education'.
  4. Mary Wollstonecraft, Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman 
  5. Karen O'Brien, Women and Enlightenment in eighteenth-century Britain (Cambridge, 2009) Especially introduction

Further Reading

Caroline Franklin, Mary Wollstonecraft: A Literary Life (ebook)

Pam B Hirsch, ‘Mary Wollstonecraft: a problematic legacy’ in Clarissa Campbell Orr (ed.), Wollstonecraft’s Daughters (Manchester, 1996)

R. M. Janes, ‘On the reception of Mary Wollstonecraft’s "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman"’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 1978

Claudia Johnson (ed.), A Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft (ebook, 2002)

Harriet Devine Jump, Mary Wollstonecraft (London, 1994)

Kirsten Hanley, Mary Wollstonecraft, Pedagogy and the Practice of Feminism (ebook, 2013)

Gary Kelly, Revolutionary Feminism (Basingstoke, 1992), chap 5

Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor (eds), Women, gender and enlightenment (Basingstoke, 2005 and e-book)

Anthony Lavopa, 'Women, gender and the enlightenment: a historical turn', Journal of Modern History, 80 (2008)

Mitzi Myers, ‘Reform or ruin: a revolution in female manners’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 1982

Anne Stott, Hannah More (Oxford, 2003)

Barbara Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the feminist imagination (Cambridge, 2003)

Hannah MoreMary Wollstonecraft