ABSTRACT
This chapter explores about Mary Wollstonecraft and sex education. An unpromising topic, perhaps, given the scarcity – and, on occasion, the notorious prudishness – of Wollstonecraft's explicit comments on the subject. In Vindication of the Rights of Woman, however, pleasure carries notoriously less weight, and duty – particularly the duty of motherhood – considerably more. Vindication of the Rights of Woman is part of the instructional tradition, with all its ambivalences and overlaps. Hence Wollstonecraft's concern to establish clear distinctions between various influential writers on the education of women: from Rousseau, to James Fordyce and John Gregory, to Catharine Macaulay and Mme de Genlis. But in the ten or more years since feminist critics defined their different, postmodern, agenda by focusing on Wollstonecraft's, and Enlightenment feminism's, resistance to the possibilities of pleasure, the context within which feminists address the pleasures and dangers of sexual identity has significantly shifted.
