Catharine Macaulay's Influence on Mary Wollstonecraft
The Wollstonecraftian Mind, Sandrine Berges, Eileen Hunt Botting, Alan Coffee (eds.), London: Routledge, 2019
15 Pages Posted: 24 Aug 2019
Date Written: August 18, 2019
Abstract
Although they were never to meet and corresponded only briefly, Catharine Macaulay and Mary Wollstonecraft shared a mutual admiration and a strong intellectual bond. Macaulay’s work had a profound and lasting effect on Wollstonecraft, and she developed and expanded on many of Macaulay’s ideas. While she often took these in a different direction, there remains a great synergy between their ideas to the extent that we can understand Wollstonecraft’s own feminist arguments by approaching them through the frameworks and ideas that Macaulay provided. These included the principles of classical republicanism, particularly in its understanding of the values of freedom, equality and virtue, and an understanding of reason as grounded in immutable principles that apply equally to both sexes. On the question of women’s freedom and social equality with men, I argue that though Macaulay sets up the problem in far richer and more detailed philosophical terms, in the end it is Wollstonecraft that has the more compelling account of its far-reaching social implications and of how this might be addressed.
Keywords: Catharine Macaulay, Mary Wollstonecraft, Republicanism, History of Philosophy, Women in the History of Philosophy, Feminism, Non-Domination, Virtue
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