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COPYRIGHT 2003 Indiana University, Purdue University of Fort Wayne
By Saba Bahar. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, and New York: Palgrave, 2002. viii + 220 pages.
The subtitle to Saba Bahar's illuminating book on Mary Wollstonecraft indicates Bahar's assessment of the goal and impulse behind Wollstonecraft's writing career: to recreate Western culture's canonical images of woman, women, and femininity in order to create a world that is more conducive to the lives of women and men. This goal constitutes the grounds for Wollstonecraft's acknowledged status as the founding mother of western liberal feminism. For Wollstonecraft's writings are fearless in challenging both components of the archetypal woman that are familiar to us from Genesis and Paradise Lost: Eve's status as second, and secondary, to man--his helpmate, love object, and pleasure principle--and her status as the origin of sin in the world. All of Wollstonecraft's writings feature "the mind of a woman, who has thinking powers," connect these powers to her autonomy and morality, and seek to compose a world in which rationality is seen as a primary and desirable trait of women (Advertisement to Mary: A Fiction [1788]). The main title of Bahar's book specifies Wollstonecraft's chief means of effecting this goal: forging links between social and aesthetic philosophies in order to (a) foreground the extent to which western writing oppresses, by misrepresenting, women, and (b) alter this condition by writing new stories, and thereby creating new possibilities, for women.
Mary Wollstonecraft's Social and Aesthetic Philosophy places primary emphasis on Wollstonecraft's...
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