Mary Wollstonecraft and Feminist Republicanism

This book is part of a collection, ‘The Enlightenment World’, published under the general editorship of Michael T. Davis, which features monographs on topics ranging from English Deism to Ballooning in Europe. The series includes works more closely related to the subject of the book under review, such as David O’Shaughnessy’s William Godwin and the Theatre (2010) and Emma Macleod’s British Visions of America, 1775–1820: Republican Realities (2013). Drawing extensively on Wollstonecraft’s novels as well as her political writings, Lena Halldenius’s book provides an examination of the author’s concepts of freedom, rights and agency, and her overall aim is to make a case for ‘regarding Mary Wollstonecraft as a feminist republican’. Placing Wollstonecraft in ‘a broadly republican camp is not a terribly radical choice’ in Halldenius’ own estimation (p. 2). Depending on what one takes the ‘republican camp’ to stand for, it may well be true that most interpreters have considered her in relation to one form or other of republicanism. Yet Wollstonecraft has not been unequivocally labelled a republican virago—unlike, say, Catherine Macaulay in Bridget Hill’s seminal work on the once-renowned eighteenth-century historian. With Wollstonecraft, the extent of her republicanism very much hangs on what one takes that ideology to be. Halldenius engages with some of the scholars who read, or come close to reading, Wollstonecraft through this prism, qualifying her own interpretation against theirs. She is particularly, albeit summarily, critical of Virginia Sapiro for suggesting that the language of republicanism and that of legal rights might be mutually exclusive, and is closest to the positions of Alan Coffee and Sandrine Berges on social domination and independence in Wollstonecraft

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