Waterstones appropriating Wollstonecraft

[Spitspotsput]

To sell trans-positive books.

I really don’t think that in despairing of how her sex disadvantaged her, she wanted men to trample over the wee rights of women. 😡

Can you elaborate?

Unfortunately my phone was without power, so I couldn’t take a photo. In the middle of a pile of books promoting the idea of being trans, something I am trying so hard to protect my impressionable daughter from, there was a quote by Wollstonecraft sticking up complaining about how she wished there were no such thing as sex. She was an amazing woman, if hard to read, and most certainly would not be in favour of being told that her existence was an idea in a man’s head.

Waterstones can truly get fucked at this point. Women have always been oppressed and limited by their sex, and continue to be so that is WHY our sex based rights are so important - how fucking DARE they appropriate that to celebrate removing those rights and leaving us more vulnerable to oppression and limitation.

Also their non-stocking/hiding of Joyce et al.

Seriously, I will never fucking buy from there again.

#cancelwaterstones

there was a quote by Wollstonecraft sticking up complaining about how she wished there were no such thing as sex

She means "gender roles" and 'gender stereotypes' if you read The Vindication of the Rights of Women.

It is appalling & a travesty that Waterstones are using Wollstonecraft to promote extremist trans ideology. Ignorant & uneducated - I doubt they've actually read Wollstonecraft.

OP: I was reading a review the other day by Mary Harrington of a book about abortion in which she elucidated Mary Wollstonecraft's thinking about women and men, set in the context of the time. Her comments support your contention in your opening post.

To give a flavour:

"Wollstonecraft’s 18th-century world vibrated with new thinking on reason and individual liberty... . ... these debates also wrestled with an intractable fact: autonomy is a more straightforward proposition for men than women. Women, in Wollstonecraft’s day, had little control over their fertility, save by practising sexual abstinence. Babies and children take a lot of looking after. How, then, were ideals of individual liberty to be balanced with the evidently asymmetrical burdens of human reproduction? ...
Rousseau solved the question of sex asymmetry in Emile (1762) by excluding women. Only men were eligible for autonomous liberal subjecthood... . Wollstonecraft demurred...But she didn’t do so by arguing that men and women were indistinguishable. ...
Rather, she acknowledged men and women’s asymmetrical physiology, especially where reproduction is concerned...."
herd.com/2021/12/the-feminist-case-against-abortion/

It would be helpful to know the exact quotation used by Waterstones, so that it could be identified and viewed in its context.

Next time I’m in there, I will note it down

Abitofalark Thanks for that article, I usually make a point of reading what Harrington writes, but I missed that one.

^I found this paragraph really interesting and it reminded me very much of the thread where we were discussing motherhood recently:
And this means, in effect, that the central political demand of feminism is for women’s rights to enter a “marketplace” of notionally free, unencumbered individuals on the same terms as men. To compete in the workplace without asymmetrical reproductive handicaps; to live without strings. In other words, to be functionally indistinguishable from the most Hobbesian vision of men at their most radically rootless.^

Waterstones would do well to take Mary Wollstonecraft more seriously, lest they wish to be seen as an organisation that doesn't care about women at all. It's an appalling insult to appropriate her in this way, not to mention completely ignorant of the fact that being female was ultimately the cause of her death - 11 days after childbirth.

Shop at Blackwells , don’t give your money to Waterstones!

I live nowhere near blackwells and I do not like to shop online

I'm also interested to know what the actual quote was, but just taking what you've said, OP, as a starting point, it strikes me that it's understandable for someone to wish that there is no such thing as sex (e.g. a woman experiencing sex-based oppression, someone experiencing gender dysphoria) but that's not the same thing as saying there is no such thing as sex, or that we should act as if there is no such thing as sex.

Been out in the sticks for xmas. When I go to Brum tomorrow, I’ll see if I can find the quote.

Agree - wishing there was no such thing as sex makes perfect sense if it’s what’s being used to hold you/women in general back. It’s not the same thing at all as saying sex doesn’t exist or matter - the opposite in fact.