"As the 'mother of feminism', Mary Wollstonecraft has been credited with establishing the terms for women's claims to equality on the grounds of reason at the end of the eighteenth century. However, if Irigaray's twentieth-century philosophy of sexual difference and subjectivity holds, the central feminist call for equality is put in a different light. This book poses the question of an intellectual colonization of women by an abstract maculinism passing itself as a universal. At the potent intersection between European Enlightenment, political revolution, literary culture, Romanticism, and feminist theory, Wollstonecraft is a crucial figure for the millennial feminist Imaginary. Tauchert contends that, under the pressure of sexual difference theory, Wollstonecraft's writings reveal a movement between 'Athenic' and 'Matrilineal' modes of female subjectivity. The argument poses some strong questions for women's literary history, critical analysis of women's writing, and our perception of this fascinating feminist icon."--BOOK JACKET.