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This paper investigates Wollstonecraft’s reconfiguration of motherhood in context of contemporary republican discourse of civic sovereign personhood. Although sharing the same basis of Lockean republican discourse that is dependent upon the idea of possessive subjectivity with contemporary thinkers, Wollstonecraft foregrounds gender to the conditions of the seemingly universal civic subject and politicizes the seemingly apolitical space of the republican family to create space for women in the nation-state. In addition, she attempts to redefine and reinforce women’s cultural and biological potentials to secure women’s right to citizenship. The first section of this paper discusses how Wollstonecraft politicizes republican subject model in terms of gender. The second part traces her work to see how she reconfigures femininity and the female body to reconcile with the existing discourse of republican citizenship. In the third section, I argue that the kind of motherhood Wollstonecraft celebrates is a highly politicized model of citizenship that revises the model of the republican sovereign citizen who owns land. I believe that Wollstonecraft’s reworking of individual sovereignty affects not only the contemporary women who were involved with various social reforms and other political matters but also participates in the advent of the bio-power of the state that manages the creation and maintenance of the lives of individual subjects.
