ABSTRACT
Attempts to read Wollstonecraft's feminism through the prism of Kantian critique usually get no further than drawing surface analogies between the two. Such analogies may define an active dialectical reason as synonymous with the gender stereotyping that Wollstonecraft urges her age to overcome, or conversely they may describe her attempt to think her way out of restrictive gender roles as a bit like the scene of dialectical reason. Wollstonecraft is to overcome the contradictions of her early sentimentalism by accepting that the only proper use of reason for her is sentimental. In the Rights of Woman Wollstonecraft engages with what might be described as the predicament of human embodiment. Through their embodiment, virtues which may be properties of the human character as they appear to the "centre of perfection" have been gendered through history, such that our embodied encounter with virtue is always understood in sexual terms.
