ABSTRACT
The state of degradation is the feminine state, the position to which women are consigned through the designs and designations of male desire. The male writer whose objectifying desire is the principal target of Mary Wollstonecraft's polemic is her mentor, Rousseau. Wollstonecraft was indeed deeply influenced by this position, as her reiterated evocation of the ideal citizen-mother demonstrates. Commentators who view Wollstonecraft's feminism merely as an offshoot of a class-based democratic radicalism, and her sexual theory as essentially in service of bourgeois reformism, have forgotten that feminism has its own wild wishes, its complex agenda which Wollstonecraft helped to shape. In women, as in men, Wollstonecraft argues, desire arises from the 'heated imagination' which paints for itself 'grand ideal objects of passion' and enslaves women to these objects, as they are themselves enslaved by the objectifying images men construct of them.
