ABSTRACT
Like de Sade, Wollstonecraft’s political imagination was powerfully influenced by Enlightenment materialism and the pre-Revolutionary oppositional culture of sensibility. Because of her own social and subjective formation in the margin of the gentry and upper middle class, and her philosophical and political opposition to a property system that trivialized women, Wollstonecraft rejected marriage as an institution and saw female sexuality as an ideology and practice used by the hegemonic order to oppress women in all classes. Her personal life, like her works, was a succession of essays in reformulating female sexuality for a revolutionized society of the future, necessarily requiring of her the risky role of revolutionary vanguard. That the risk sometimes proved too great should not prevent us from valuing and learning from the endeavour.
