Thoughts On The Education of Daughters - Reception

Reception

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.