Mary Wollstonecraft And The Public Sphere

By the time Mary Wollstonecraft arrived in London to work for Joseph Johnson, she had already been exposed to several “educational literatures, conduct books, novels, and poetry”—some of which had been written by women, which indicated to Wollstonecraft that women were at least beginning to have their voices heard in some type of public sphere—however small it was. Though those publications were written by women and enjoyed by a small audience, Mary Waters writes in her essay “’The First of a Genus’ Mary Wollstonecraft as a Literary Critic and Mentor to Mary Hays,” that often times they were published with apologies “...on the grounds of financial need for the transgressive immodesty of going public...” (415). The tension between public and

Her public persona was defined by her public voice, which often times conflicted with her private reality. What constituted the public and the private sphere? In his book The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, Jurgen Habermas defines the public sphere as being “conceived above all as the sphere of private people come together as a public” (Habermas 27). According to Habermas, the “private” sphere was “a distinguishable entity in contrast to the public as each family’s individual economy had become the center of its existence” (Habermas 19). In Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft illustrates the way the private sphere becomes even smaller for women because they are denied “all political privileges, and not allowed ...a civil existence,” so that a woman’s attention is “naturally drawn from the interest of the whole community to that of the minute parts... The mighty business of female life is to please, and [females are] restrained from entering into more important concerns by political and civil oppression” (Wollstonecraft 330). In other words, women could not, theoretically, affect the same kind of influence on the “public” sphere as men, meaning that women do not speak with the same authority as men, as their “sphere” remains private, and even within the private sphere, their influence and authority are limited. This notion was personally unacceptable to