Republican Elements in the Thought of Mary Wollstonecraft

This chapter provides a background for the discussion of Wollstonecraft’s republicanism presented in the second half of the volume. The opening section looks at the sort of republican theory that dominated the English-speaking world in Wollstonecraft’s lifetime. The second appeals to Ibsen’s play A Doll’s House to raise the question of whether a woman who lives under the power of her husband can count as a free person. The third sketches two established, non-republican views of freedom under which she can. The fourth section makes a case in defense of the republican way of thinking about freedom as an alternative to those views. And then the fifth section looks at the answer to the freedom question that that view of freedom would support.