Mary Wollstonecraft and Political Economy

Why was Wollstonecraft’s landmark feminist work, the Vindication of the Rights of Woman, categorised as a work of political economy when it was first published?

Taking this question as a starting point, Mary Wollstonecraft and Political Economy gives a compelling new account of Wollstonecraft as critic of the material, moral, social, and psychological conditions of commercial modernity. Offering thorough analysis of Wollstonecraft’s major writings – including her two Vindications, her novels, her history of the French Revolution, and her travel writing – this is the only book-length study to situate Wollstonecraft in the context of the political economic thought of her time. It shows Wollstonecraft as an economic as much as a political radical, whose critique of the emerging economic orthodoxies of her time anticipates later Romantic thinkers. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

Catherine Packham is Professor of Eighteenth-Century Literature and Thought at the University of Sussex. She is the author of Eighteenth-Century Vitalism: Bodies, Culture, Politics (2012) and the co-editor of Political Economy, Literature and the Formation of Knowledge, 1720–1850 (2018). She was the recipient of a Leverhulme Research Fellowship and has published widely on Wollstonecraft and eighteenth-century political economy.