Mary Wollstonecraft: The Honest Educator (with Sylvana Tomaselli)

About this episode

The episode discusses Mary Wollstonecraft's views on education and her critique of societal norms regarding marriage and power.

By her death in 1797 at the age of 38, Mary Wollstonecraft had produced a body of work unmatched for its honesty and critical acumen. In a society where marriage often amounted to legal prostitution, Wollstonecraft confronted the ways in which property and power distorted lives and corrupted our most essential relationships: as human beings, men and women, mothers and children. Following a revolution in France that failed to deliver, Wollstonecraft came to see education as the only viable route to a world in which love and liberty could flourish. How we might imagine this world — which of Wollstonecraft's ideas capture it best, and how her vision was different from our own — are questions addressed by Sylvana Tomaselli, a historian who has long been critical to our understanding of Enlightenment political thought, and the role played by women within it. Hosted by Sam Tchorek-Bentall Produced by Joshua Shortman

People in this episode

Host: Sam Tchorek-Bentall

Guest: Sylvana Tomaselli

Topics covered

• Mary Wollstonecraft
• education
• Enlightenment
• women's rights
• political thought

Keywords

• Mary Wollstonecraft
• education
• Enlightenment
• women's rights
• political thought
• Sylvana Tomaselli
• honesty
• liberty
• society

Mentioned in this episode

Books & works: Enlightenment political thought

More episodes of Interventions | The Intellectual History Podcast

• Decomposing Historians (with Elise Garritzen) · May 29, 2026 · 1h 5m
• Plato’s Political Ideas: From Limited Rule to Tyranny (with Melissa Lane) · March 30, 2026 · 1h 15m
• Sketching Characters: from Ancient Moralists to the Mansplainer (with Katie Ebner-Landy) · February 10, 2026 · 1h 1m
• The Curious Case of Martin Crusius (with Richard Calis) · December 8, 2025 · 40 min
• African-American Ideas about Race (with Mia Bay) · September 17, 2025 · 1h 0m
• Liberty as Independence (with Quentin Skinner) · July 21, 2025 · 1h 1m