ABSTRACT
While the ‘sex/gender’ distinction did not enter feminism’s conceptual lexicon until the mid-1970s, feminists have been engaged in the critical interrogation of purportedly ‘natural’ norms of masculinity and femininity for centuries. This chapter explores how Mary Wollstonecraft, an eighteenth-century feminist, employed the Scottish Enlightenment’s discourse of ‘morals’ and ‘manners’ to denaturalize and deconstruct the oppressive norms of masculinity and femininity promoted by ‘the culture of sensibility.’ The chapter also assesses recent efforts by both conservative and feminist interpreters to discount this aspect of Wollstonecraft’s thought and paint her as a gender essentialist and defender of traditional gender roles. Ultimately, I conclude, such interpretations are not sustainable. When Wollstonecraft’s writings, particularly her thoughts on paternal and maternal duty, are considered carefully and in historical context, it becomes clear that Wollstonecraft is, by all rights, a feminist theorist of gender deserving of a place in the intellectual history of this vital feminist concept. Long before Beauvoir declared, ‘One is not born, but rather becomes, woman’ or Judith Butler described gender as ‘a performative accomplishment compelled by social sanction and taboo,’ Wollstonecraft offered a theorization of femininity as a discursively naturalized social construct that exerted a pernicious normalizing power over the subjects it enveloped. Dismantling this debilitating gender construct by exposing its foundations in convention rather than nature was as integral to Wollstonecraft’s feminist project as it is to feminist politics and theory today.
