ABSTRACT
Almost two centuries of feminist activity and debate have passed, two hundred years in which women's understandings have been widely exercised, yet most of Mary Wollstonecraft's modest proposals for female emancipation are still demands on a feminist platform. The negative meanings which have been historically associated with women's sexuality have been a major impediment in their fight for liberation. Historians suggest that the 'ideological division of women into two classes, the virtuous and the fallen, was already well developed' by the mid-eighteenth century. When feminists sought to appropriate liberal humanism for their own sex they had to contend with the double standard prominently inscribed within radical tradition, as well as with its suffocating and determining presence in dominant ideologies. The reputation of Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Women, the founding text of Anglo-American feminism, generally precedes and in part constructs our reading of it.
