Abstract Recent scholarship has shown how, in her political writing, Mary Wollstonecraft developed a troubling evaluation of femininity – one that ironically brought her sexual politics into line with those she attacked in Edmund Burke's account of the French Revolution. This article identifies a different contradiction in her feminism. It argues that her challenge to the lingering conservatism in Enlightenment philosophy relied on a model of social history that put reasoning women at the center of a “civilized” culture threatened by a “savage” periphery. It suggests that Wollstonecraft's strong critique of the contradiction in Enlightenment political thought, which saw women as lacking in civic character, is organized rhetorically around the contrast between polished civil subject and violent savage. Because this distinction rests to a large extent on the assumption that domestic virtue is a central feature of more advanced societies, her argument finally locates women in a morally invigorated domestic s...