Mary Wollstonecraft and Feminist Republican Freedom

I argue that Mary Wollstonecraft should be read as a feminist republican and draw out the implications of that interpretation. Regarding her as republican is to emphasize that freedom for her is conceptualized in terms of independence. By referring to her as a feminist republican I aim to draw attention to a crucial aspect of her philosophical method, reasoning through experience from a first person perspective: What liberty is and requires can only be articulated by “poor men, or philosophers”, as she puts it. The “poor man” here represents the philosophical vantage point; the disinterested, impartial view is the view of those with no wealth or titles to lose. The job of the philosopher is to reason from the perspective of, or to represent in thought, the unprivileged. In this paper I analyse the radical implications of theorising about freedom in this way.