ABSTRACT
Mary Wollstonecraft's insistent representation of God as paternal had many meanings, of which the most obvious was as a rhetorical weapon against secular male authority. We love and worship God, Wollstonecraft argues, for these virtues, rather than for His omnipotence. Worship is not a submission to divine power; it is a product of our own impassioned rationality and idealising imagination which bring us to the loving comprehension of our Divine Father's righteousness. Throughout Wollstonecraft's writings this moral privation is attributed chiefly to the cultural inscription of femininity as a state of eroticised infantilism. Little women are trained to become 'coquettes', in the term most often used in the Rights of Woman; the 'pretty play things' of men, as Wollstonecraft dubbed them in Mary, a Fiction. Ethical submission to God will free women from masculine pretensions to moral hegemony, amorous subjugation of the feminine heart to divine love will redeem women from the corrosive power relations of human sexuality. '.
