Mary Wollstonecraft

Résumé du livre

The question of gender is a topical issue and it might therefore be useful to get familiar with the great figures that made the history of feminism. Mary Wollstonecraft: the Beginnings of political and social Feminism is aimed at a non-specialized French readership. It offers a synthesis of the thought of Wollstonecraft, who is widely regarded as the "mother of Anglo-American feminism" as well as translated excerpts from her works. Her analyses are strikingly modern and show that she was a visionary in both ideas and method. Her method consists in deconstructing the then-prevailing representations of feminity so as to denaturalize ideological constructs. She envisaged such a deconstruction as the necessary prelude to any kind of social reform and as a freeing of minds, an "unfolding of the imagination" that, alone, could lead to freedom.