Abstract
This essay reclaims Mary Wollstonecraft as a deeply religious thinker whose defense of women’s rational capacity corrects modernity’s flawed, disembodied notion of reason and its damaging effects on views of women. Echoing Pope Benedict XVI’s critique of such rationality, I argue that the “masculine” reason often criticized by modern feminists is actually an erroneous conception of reason itself—one Wollstonecraft challenged more fundamentally than later feminists. Contrary to the common portrayal of Wollstonecraft as a secular Enlightenment radical, and building on my 2021 book The Rights of Women, I show she was a religiously inspired moral thinker. Her ideas rest on the biblical truth that women and men are equally rational beings made in God’s image, destined for eternal communion with Him. I trace depictions of women’s rationality from Christine de Pizan’s early fifteenth-century pre-Reformation defense through the errors of Catholic nominalism, Reformation voluntarism, and Enlightenment abstraction. Wollstonecraft used available intellectual resources to reject voluntarist views of divine, political, and patriarchal authority. Instead, she reclaimed a richer, authoritative reason grounded in theological anthropology, emphasizing moral formation and personal virtue. Her vision for women prioritizes virtuous self-governance, guided by good parents, teachers, and books. This integrates—albeit imperfectly—women’s rational capacities with their embodied duties, especially motherhood. Though theologically distinct from Benedict’s Catholic synthesis of faith and reason, body and soul, Wollstonecraft’s virtue-centered framework corrects modern feminism’s liberal-autonomy models. It affirms women’s full humanity and rationality, honors embodied sexual difference, and elevates the private and public value of caregiving.