ABSTRACT
This essay begins with the popular notion that Wollstonecraft is a liberal political thinker who made room for women in that theory and thus helped develop liberal feminism. But it problematizes those easy categorizations, and argues both that liberalism needs to be redefined to encompass the bold ideas of Wollstonecraft, and that liberal feminism needs to be recast as a much more robust theory to do justice to her. Using her thoughts on adult–child relations and on the ‘miserable conditions’ that set the agenda for politics, the article advocates celebrating Wollstonecraft as a founding theorist of liberalism, seeing her as a contending voice who centered the marginalized and developed a communitarian liberalism.
