page_title: Thoughts on the Education of Daughters
section_title: Reception
hierarchical_section_title: Thoughts on the Education of Daughters / Reception
caption_attribution_description: Mary Wollstonecraft
context_page_description: Thoughts on the education of daughters: with reflections on female conduct, in the more important duties of life is the first published work of the British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. Published in 1787 by her friend Joseph Johnson, Thoughts is a conduct book that offers advice on female education to the emerging British middle class. Although dominated by considerations of morality and etiquette, the text also contains basic child-rearing instructions, such as how to care for an infant.
  An early version of the modern self-help book, the 18th-century British conduct book drew on many literary traditions, such as advice manuals and religious narratives. There was an explosion in the number of conduct books published during the second half of the 18th century, and Wollstonecraft took advantage of this burgeoning market when she published Thoughts. However, the book was only moderately successful: it was favourably reviewed, but only by one journal and it was reprinted only once. Although it was excerpted in popular contemporary magazines, it was not republished until the rise of feminist literary criticism in the 1970s.
context_section_description: Thoughts  was only moderately successful: it was reprinted in Dublin a year after its initial publication in London, extracts were published in The Lady's Magazine, and Wollstonecraft included excerpts from it in her own Female Reader (1789), an anthology of writings designed "for the Improvement of Young Women". The English Review noticed Thoughts favourably:
  These thoughts are employed on various important situations and incidents in the ordinary life of females, and are, in general, dictated with great judgment. Mrs. Wollstonecraft appears to have reflected maturely on her subject; … while her manner gives authority, her good sense adds irresistible weight to almost all her precepts and remarks. We should therefore recommend these Thoughts as worthy the attention of those who are more immediately concerned in the education of young ladies.
  However, no other journal reviewed the book and Thoughts was not reprinted until the late 20th century, when there was a resurgence of interest in Wollstonecraft among feminist literary critics.
  Alan Richardson, a scholar of 18th-century education, points out that if Wollstonecraft had not written A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, it is unlikely that Thoughts would have been considered progressive or even worthy of notice. One critic has even said that the text reads as if it were simply trying to please the public. Although some scholars have argued that there are glimmers of Wollstonecraft's radicalism in this text, they admit that the "potential for critique remains largely latent". Thoughts is therefore usually interpreted either teleologically, as a first step towards the more radical Rights of Woman, or dismissed as a "politically naïve potboiler" written prior to Wollstonecraft's conversion to radicalism while she was writing the Rights of Men.
caption: Mary Wollstonecraft by John Opie (c. 1791)
exif: {"Image Copyright": "Photo (c) Tate"}