8 Editor’s Introduction
of the book. In the fi rst comprehensive treatment of Wollstonecraft’s po-
litical theory —A Vindication of Political Virtue (1992) —Virginia Sapiro
charted how Wollstonecraft’s Rights of Woman and broader oeuvre were a
complex product of the eighteenth-century republican tradition. Accord-
ing to the political scientist Sapiro’s infl uential interpretation, Wollstone-
craft blended the ancient Roman and Rousseauian concerns for popular
self-government and strong community values with the Whig and Lockean
concerns for individual natural rights and progressive social reform.
Led by the editorial work of Janet Todd and Marilyn Butler in their
seven-volume Works of Mary Wollstonecraft (1989), scholars have been
able to comprehensively study the development of Wollstonecraft’s ideas
over the course of her career. Comparing her early and more traditionally
religious works such as Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787)
with the Gothic realism of her posthumously published novel Maria, or
the Wrongs of Woman (1798) has pushed scholars to recognize Wollstone-
craft’s shift toward a more “radical” kind of feminism near the end of her
young life (Lorch 1990; Taylor 2003, 243). In Barbara Taylor’s landmark
work of intellectual history, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagi-
nation (2003), Wollstonecraft emerges as a British radical whose Platonic
Christian religiosity was never lost, but always animated her quest for so-
cial justice for women, chattel slaves, and the poor.
However labeled for its political ideas, the Rights of Woman is generally
categorized as a treatise. From its early positive reviews in 1790s London
literary journals, it has often been placed in the genre of educational theory
(Janes 1978). This label is appropriate if educational reform is understood
as a basis for Wollstonecraft’s broader political project. After all, the penul-
timate chapter of the book contains an apparently unprecedented proposal
to establish government-sponsored, free, public, coeducational, local, el-
ementary day schools, for “rich and poor” children alike, as part of a mod-
ern republican society (199). She imagined the public policy as follows:
“Day schools, for particular ages, should be established by the govern-
ment, in which boys and girls might be educated together. The school for
the younger children, from fi ve to nine years of age, ought to be absolutely
free and open to all classes” (198 –199).
Nearly two centuries later, the 1989 United Nations Convention on the
Rights of the Child similarly recognized free primary education as a uni-
versal human right of children. Remarkably, Wollstonecraft’s plan for “na-
tional education” overlaps with the contemporary defi nition of universal
primary education used by the United Nations in its second and third Mil-
lennium Development Goals: enabling all children, boys and girls, to com-