Mary Wollstonecraft and the Accent of the Feminine

Book Description:
Tauchert revisits the work of Mary Wollstonecraft through the lenses of sexual difference theory to pose the question of one woman's struggle against abstract masculinism. Caught between discourses of European Enlightenment, political revolution, Romanticism, and feminist theory, Wollstonecraft is central to Millenial feminism's self-imagining. Under the pressure of sexual difference theory, her writings reveal a movement between "Athenic" and "Matrilineal" modes of female subjectivity.

A state-of-the-art critique of one of the "Founding Mothers":
Ashley Tauchert has brought the best of contemporary feminist scholarship to bear on Mary Wollstonecraft, one of the mothers of feminism. I was fortunate to get a copy of this book just before my own recent biography, "Theodosia Burr Alston: Portrait of a Prodigy" (Corinthian Books, 2002) went to press. Vice President Aaron Burr, for all his flaws, was the first prominent American man to enthusiastically embrace and publicly endorse Wollstonectaft's radical feminist views on the equal education of women. He used her principles to give his teenage daughter, Theodosia, a "man's education" which would equip her for the three roles in life he envisioned for her: queen, president, or empress. Although Tauchert's work deals with the cutting edge of contemporary feminist theory and my own work dealt with how Wollstonecraft's philosophies affected the education of Vice President Aaron Burr's daughter more than a century ago, I found Ms. Tauchert's work extremely insightful and enormously useful in understanding Wollstonecraft herself and the theories she conceptualized which were used to shape Theodosia Burr Alston's life in the mid-to-late 1790s. -- Richard N. Côté