SOURCE: Abbey, Ruth. “Back to the Future: Marriage as Friendship in the Thought of Mary Wollstonecraft.” Hypatia 14, no. 3 (summer 1999): 78-95.

In the following essay, Abbey analyzes Wollstonecraft's views on the political nature of the family and marriage in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and her attitude toward sexuality in her unfinished novel, Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman.

According to the feminist political theorist Susan Moller Okin, the challenge facing liberal thinkers is to incorporate fully issues of gender and the family into their thinking about justice. She insists that “We can have a liberalism that fully includes women only if we can devise a theoretical basis for public policies that, recognizing the family as a fundamental political institution, extends standards of justice to life within it” (Okin 1989, 53). Those who share Okin's belief that for liberal theory to move forward it must take the political nature...