Tomaselli describes her approach as enabling Wollstonecraft to ‘speak for herself for as long as is possible within her own personal, intellectual, social, and political contexts’. To this end, she reads Wollstonecraft’s texts holistically, diverging from the tendency to approach the second Vindication, the famous A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), in isolation. This method reveals the breadth of Wollstonecraft’s intellectual habitus and its unifying features. Labels – republicanism, liberalism, feminism – become reductive epithets from this perspective as they ‘obscure more than they reveal’ and are likely ‘anachronistic’.

For Tomaselli, Wollstonecraft’s arguments regarding women constituted one component of a broader critical project, better expressed in the earlier A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790). Tomaselli previewed this argument in the 1995 Cambridge University Press edition of the Vindications, claiming that Wollstonecraft’s works demonstrated a unified system of thought. This system held that God created men and women to ‘unfold their faculties’. As eighteenth-century England denied the ‘natural rights’ necessary for this unfolding, reform was necessary. Men and women were to be educated to develop the rational capacity to live independent lives, enabling them to marry by choice and to fulfil their duties as citizens and parents.

Drawing together Wollstonecraft’s Vindications, reviews, letters, and other works of fiction and non-fiction, the monograph’s first half focuses on her pedagogic prescriptions. An artistic education was crucial, within particular strictures. The theatre could lead an insufficiently cultivated mind to affectation. Similarly, to produce works original and true to nature, artists must balance their reasoning and imaginative faculties. These educational dictates were universal, a corollary of her providential world view that all humans were created with the same faculties. None was ‘inherently evil’; everyone could realise his or her ‘moral potential’ if appropriately educated. Parents and educators were thus to foster a balanced comportment in children through mental and physical training.

The second half of Wollstonecraft centres on what is traditionally considered her political philosophy: class, women’s status, property, and the history of civilisation. In treating these subjects as interlinked with Wollstonecraft’s pedagogic and providential commentary, Tomaselli implicitly challenges those who might overlook Wollstonecraft’s wider works. These are inextricable from her political philosophy, a genre Tomaselli reveals to have been much broader in the late eighteenth century than today, including theology and child-rearing, and spanning fiction and non-fiction.

Wollstonecraft critiqued society through a historicised world view. Attacking Rousseau for preferring ‘the state of nature to civilisation’, she accused him of impiety for endorsing a ‘stationary’ state that provided no scope to ‘unfold human reason’. Relationships of domination had stymied this unfolding. For Tomaselli, Wollstonecraft understood domination as arising from defective psychological comportments. Against Edmund Burke’s view that the French Revolution entailed a dangerous breach with prevailing customs, Wollstonecraft considered such radical transformation necessary to undo ‘the psychological impact of depending on others for wealth, power, employment, or good opinion’. Male primogeniture encouraged arranged marriages, which produced vanity. Wealth fostered idleness. Human fulfilment, in contrast, required ‘striving and effort’. Alleviating domination was principally the responsibility of ‘individual men and women or society more generally’. At a minimum, though, the state must provide an equal right to education for boys and girls of all classes as a precondition for psychological reform.

Wollstonecraft closes with an attempt to sketch the eponymous author’s ideal future society through ‘taking together some of her hints, expressed desires, and critical comments’. In this utopia, men and women would be recognised as independent humans, capable of living virtuously and attaining fulfilment through their duties. Marriage would be grounded in respect. On the basis of ‘Wollstonecraft’s profound critique of commerce … the society of the future would have little of it’. Although private property would remain, economic inequality would be reduced. Religious belief would survive, but the Church may not.

In distilling the lineaments of Wollstonecraft’s ideal society through inverting her critical commentary, Tomaselli diverges from her professed method of letting Wollstonecraft ‘speak for herself for as long as is possible’. Tomaselli justifies this as offering ‘a taste of what might be viewed as [Wollstonecraft’s] overall enterprise’ or what this enterprise would have been had Wollstonecraft’s life been longer and ‘easier materially and emotionally’. But although Wollstonecraft’s works share a singular premise – appropriate universal education enables the realisation of God’s munificence through creating dutiful and independent men and women – she expressed the components of her argument inconsistently. In these sections, Tomaselli struggles to manage this tension.

In the fourth chapter, for example, she claims Wollstonecraft wanted the ‘breakdown of oppositions’, particularly ‘femininity and masculinity’, before writing that ‘in [Wollstonecraft’s] ideal world, men and women would not be effeminate, but manly’. Both Vindications used feminine connotations pejoratively. Rather than dissolving masculine and feminine oppositions, Wollstonecraft at times ossified them. Moreover, Tomaselli’s technique of inferring Wollstonecraft’s ideals from subjects of condemnation presents dangers. Certainly, Wollstonecraft condemned primogeniture. But would her ideal society avoid preferential inheritance? Not obviously: Wollstonecraft defended the preferential treatment of some children over others when based on ‘superior merit’. In exceeding the documentary record, Tomaselli risks inserting herself into the aperture between what Wollstonecraft wrote and what she may have written had she lived differently.

Regarding Wollstonecraft’s legacy, Tomaselli emphasises her commentary ‘about individual relations and … our relation to our own self and sense of identity’. Close adherence to Wollstonecraft’s written record reveals other reasons why reading her remains important. Wollstonecraft’s inconsistencies reflect the vicissitudes of, as Tomaselli has written elsewhere, her ‘tumultuous world’. As a political philosopher, Wollstonecraft applied her account of natural rights to this world’s detail. Her recommendations, for example, addressed the appropriate clothing for students and the timing of exercise during the school day. Alongside other writers, she rejected Burke’s adherence to custom by advocating a philosophical approach that utilised abstraction while remaining connected to the real world. This debate continues to frame Australian native title jurisprudence. The Love v Commonwealth (2020) judgment discussed the ‘natural’ and ‘customary’ rights of First Nations people. Two hundred and twenty-four years after her death, we continue to encounter the residuum of Wollstonecraft’s world.