“Genius will educate itself.” 259Literary Ladies of England. When the two leading educational campaign-
ers, Emily Davies and Barbara Leigh Smith, met in Algiers in 1858, Leigh
Smith told Davies to read Wollstonecraft’s Rights of Woman. The English
Women’s Journal, founded that same year, argued for what Wollstonecraft
had argued for: education for women and useful work.
But it was not until the twentieth century that an assertive feminist
writer celebrated Wollstonecraft’s achievement as a thinker and novelist.
For Virginia Woolf in 1929, Mary Wollstonecraft was a live and active
presence. We “hear her voice,” Woolf wrote, “and trace her infl uence even
now among the living” (Woolf 1986, 163). Cora Kaplan writes of Woll-
stonecraft’s “mutable legacies,” reminding us there is no single legacy, be
it “problematic” as Pam Hirsch defi nes it or not, but a plurality: a rich,
unstable mix of “traceable infl uences and uncanny resemblances” (Kaplan
2002, 246). In her essay “Mary Wollstonecraft’s reception and legacies,”
Kaplan offers a thoughtful examination of Wollstonecraft’s reception in the
twentieth century, from Virginia Woolf in the post –First World War era
to second-wave feminism in the 1970s and beyond. After a long struggle
women had the vote, and hence the door was open for progress toward
civil and economic equality. But it was already clear that political equality
was only part of the answer. The emphasis in the Rights of Woman on edu-
cation, independence, and rational thought had been readily incorporated
into the emancipation agendas of Victorian feminism, but the voice women
writers and thinkers in mid-twentieth-century Britain heard when they read
Wollstonecraft directed them to the more “equivocal” issues concerning
the emotions. They noted Wollstonecraft’s insistence that “the most perfect
education... is such an exercise of the understanding as is best calculated
to strengthen the body and form the heart” (Kaplan 2002, 251). It was not
clear what kind of education was required to form the female heart in rela-
tion to sexual desire or maternal feeling, nor was there agreement about
what Wollstonecraft said, or might be understood to have said, about it; but
the question of whether emotions were gendered became important once
again, this time in the context of the call for sexual liberation.
Debates about the gendered division of thinking and feeling preoccu-
pied the women’s movement, a revisiting of eighteenth-century preoccupa-
tions that for Kaplan was “both moving and distressing” (Kaplan 2002,
257). While the Wollstonecraft of the Rights of Woman came to be reincar-
nated as a founding foremother of Western feminism, it was her life rather
than her writing that attracted initial attention. It was generally agreed that
Wollstonecraft’s life represented a paradox: the spokeswoman for rational
thinking seeming to have proved herself to be irrationally passionate. For