ABSTRACT
In the advertisement to A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (VRW), Mary Wollstonecraft claims that the work was originally conceived as a single volume 'divided into three parts'. However, with 'fresh illustrations occurring' as she wrote, she decided to eventually add a second volume that would become a companion to the first. Wollstonecraft develops a discourse on the feminine and, within the pages of VRW, a new model of feminine subjectivity is envisioned. Mary Wollstonecrafl's VRW has produced a wide range of scholarship. Some of it focuses on its attempt to revise feminine manners and morals according to various paradigms: a masculine model of feminine desire which eventually 'fails'; the inculcation of self-control of both women's and men's desires; or the effort to 'revolutionize' feminine and domestic manners. The production of discourses which seeks to improve women, the middling and lower classes, and mankind in general, constitutes the goals of vocational philanthropy.
