Abstract

This chapter provides the first analysis of Mary Wollstonecraft as a proto-intersectional political philosopher. Wollstonecraft’s major contributions to modern political philosophy stem from her visionary use of the concept of intersectionality to diagnose the causes, symptoms, and remedies of gender-, race-, and class-based inequality and oppression. Wollstonecraft’s theory of social justice—the most egalitarian of the Enlightenment era—aimed to eliminate such arbitrary inequalities, in part through the legislation and protection of rights for women and other historically oppressed groups. Wollstonecraft should thus be understood as a philosophical forerunner of contemporary third-wave feminists, who use intersectionality as a foundational concept for theorizing social justice.