ABSTRACT
This essay explores Wollstonecraft’s intimate understanding of the social power of patriarchy in family and polity through an analysis of what she termed the “unfortunate” situation of girls born in a society organized around primogeniture and the sexual domination of women by men. Scholarship on Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) and Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) often locate the origins of her rights claims in the struggles of a second daughter from a financially troubled family pained by domestic violence. Her arguments for gender justice emerged in Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787) in the identity crisis and role conflicts of girls educated, but without the financial means, to enter fashionable society as marriageable women. The corpus of Wollstonecraft’s writing speaks to and through her lived experiences of sex prejudice, culminating in a pioneering form of theory building through storytelling to evidence how girls become women among legal codes and social customs designed to keep them second to brothers and dependent on fathers and husbands. This is compellingly portrayed in the entangled narratives of Jemima and Maria in the Wrongs of Woman (1798), where a captive Maria scribbled lessons from a “mother schooled in misery” for a child she hoped would survive her absence and grow into a freedom denied her parent.
