Mary Wollstonecraft’s Enlightened Legacy

Abstract

Charles Taylor recently used the term modern social imaginary to describe dominant sets of norms, practices, and expectations—such as the market economy or the public sphere—that are rooted in the philosophies of the European Enlightenment and have since permeated the common experience of life in the contemporary Western world. Building on Taylor’s argument, this article charts how Mary Wollstonecraft became one of the major philosophical sources from the Enlightenment era to shape the emergent modern social imaginary of the egalitarian family that increasingly serves as the background against which debates about the family take place today.