ABSTRACT
This essay considers Wollstonecraft’s engagement with the family and her arguments for its egalitarian transformation. Many writers have considered the tension within Wollstonecraft’s writing between women as virtuous citizens and women as rational mothers, and what that means for their virtues, duties and substantial qualities. In terms of Wollstonecraft’s legacy for modern feminism, this has often been framed in terms of the ‘equality’ versus ‘difference’ debate. This chapter takes a different approach, focusing on the ideals and beliefs about the family that Wollstonecraft develops in the Vindication of the Rights of Woman and exploring the ideological context within which those stories acquired their strength and meaning. The imagined symbolic role of the family in its corrupted form reveals the damage done by the power of hereditary property, while Wollstonecraft’s ideal of the improving bourgeois family centred around the individuality of women carries with it its own ghosts. Using Avery Gordon’s concept of haunting, we can see how Wollstonecraft’s vision of the family brings together a complex staging of the past with the story of the present.
