14 Editor’s Introduction
the new set of interpretive essays by leading scholars of Wollstonecraft’s
life, thought, and legacies, will make this edition accessible to students yet
helpful to experts. The careful reading of early versions of our essays by
leading Wollstonecraft scholars Elizabeth Frazer, Lyndall Gordon, Anne
Mellor, and Natalie Taylor enhanced our commentaries and kept them
fresh and current. Finally, I owe a tremendous debt to the historian Mary
Copeland for copyediting the entire scholarly apparatus to the volume.
notes- Her extended proposal for universal primary education (as well as more
class-infl ected forms of secondary education) is set forth over the course of
chapter twelve of the Rights of Woman. - She decries both “common and legal prostitution,” but especially the fate of
those “poor and abandoned creatures” who are economically compelled to
sell their bodies for the sexual gratifi cation of their male clientele (177). - The destitute young servant Jemima’s story of her desperate use of “the po-
tion that was to procure abortion” after her expulsion from the home of the
master who raped her is Wollstonecraft’s most effective illustration of this
moral problem. See Wollstonecraft, Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman, in
Works, vol. 1, 112. She also speaks of the problem of women who “destroy
the embryo in the womb” in the Rights of Woman (168). - In section I of chapter fi ve of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft critiques
Rousseau’s dangerous confl ation of sex and rape with an evocative metaphor:
if Rousseau is right that women are designed by nature to fulfi ll men’s desire
for forced sex, then women are chained to an “iron bed of fate” (106). - In chapter eight of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft argues that the “pro-
miscuous amours” of men produce “barrenness,” miscarriage, and abandoned
children, and strongly implies that their spread of “contagious” venereal dis-
ease is an underlying cause of such “destructive” social consequences (168). - For such positive human rights of women, see her proposals for girls’ rights
to a scientifi c form of sex education (151, 155, 199, 208), married women’s
rights to property ownership (177–178), and women’s rights to employment
beyond the home (177–178) in chapters seven, nine, and twelve of the Rights
of Woman. Her novels Mary, a Fiction and Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman
respectively confront the need for women’s property rights in marriage and
women’s rights to divorce and custody of their children. See Works, vol. 1,
18 –22, 179 –181. - For an abstract analysis of the right not to be raped, see her critique of Rous-
seau in section I, chapter fi ve of the Rights of Woman (105 –107). Even more