Mary Wollstonecraft

by Susan Laird, Richard Bailey (Editor)

Overview

Mary Wollstonecraft is indisputably a major thinker in education. Susan Laird's volume offers the most coherent account of Wollstonecraft's educational thought.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780826484147
Publisher:	Bloomsbury Academic
Publication date:	05/15/2008
Series:	Continuum Library of Educational Thought , #15
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Susan Laird is Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies, Women's and Gender Studies, and Human Relations at University of Oklahoma, US, where she is also graduate program coordinator in Educational Studies. She is a past president of the Philosophy of Education Society and co-founder of the Society for Educating Women. Editor of Philosophy of Education 1997 and author of many articles and book chapters, she is best known for her philosophical and literary studies of education, gender, aesthetics and food ethics.

Table of Contents

Series Editor's Preface
Foreword
Acknowledgements

Introduction

Part I: Intellectual Biography
1. A Revolutionary Self-Education

Part II: Exposition of the Work
2. Coeducational Thought
3. Monarchist Miseducation
4. Republican Coeducation

Part III: Reception and Influence of the Work
5. Coeducational Thought after Wollstonecraft

Part IV: Relevance of the Work
6. The Art of Coeducational Thought

Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

Susan Laird's superb study of Mary Wollstonecraft succinctly examines her biography and role as a pioneer of feminism in order to fill in a neglected area in discussions of her achievement by addressing her revolutionary theories of coeducation. Laird masterfully analyzes her subject's prescient argument for the free national education of children that integrates students without regard to gender or class. She demonstrates the ongoing relevance of Wollstonecraft's legacy for 21st century educators, offering them a fresh perspective on traditional and contemporary educational thought.

Susan Laird's sympathetic reading of Wollstonecraft guides non-specialist readers through the stylistic and contextual challenges of Wollstonecraft's writing, and her insightful and imaginative analysis of Wollstonecraft's influence on the development of co-educational theorizing invites contemporary readers to reflect on the problem of influence in feminist educational thought.

There can be little doubt that Laird's book will itself, become an integral and important part of future conversations about the life and philosophy of Mary Wollstonecraft. To my knowledge, there is no more careful, imaginative, provocative scholarship on the coeducational thought of Mary Wollstonecraft than Laird's.

From the Publisher