ABSTRACT
This essay considers the idea of freedom in Wollstonecraft’s work. Critiquing republican readings of Wollstonecraft as promoting an understanding of freedom as non-domination, we argue that Wollstonecraft can be read productively as an early social constructivist, and argue for an ideal that we call “subjectivity freedom.” Reading Wollstonecraft in this way, we show her anticipating contemporary understandings of the self as a choosing subject produced by its particular social context. Grappling with how women’s subjectivity is constructed in patriarchal societies such that they desire the conditions of their own subordination, Wollstonecraft sought to envision an alternate reality. Paradoxically, while noting how women’s senses of self were profoundly and intimately shaped by the patriarchal structures they inhabited, Wollstonecraft’s own argument was limited by these same constructions. Nonetheless, she struggled to conceive a radically emancipatory vision of women’s lives, aspirations, and desires from within the confines of a context and discourse premised on their devaluation. A social constructivist approach shows that Wollstonecraft sought not simply to change women or specific structures of male dominance, but rather the processes within which men and women defined gender, the family, and personal identity: in short, their subjectivity.
