Structure and composition
At the end of the eighteenth century, conduct books became one of the dominant genres of literature. They integrated the styles and rhetorics of earlier genres, such as devotional writings, marriage manuals, recipe books, and works on household economy. Conduct books offered their readers a description of the ideal woman (or man or servant, depending on the audience) while at the same time dishing out practical advice. Thus not only did they dictate morality, but they also guided readers' choice of dress and outlined "proper" etiquette.

Genre: the conduct book
Political radicals at the end of the eighteenth century, such as Wollstonecraft, focused their reform efforts on education, because they believed that if people were educated correctly, Britain would experience a moral and political revolution. Religious Dissenters, especially, embraced this view and Wollstonecraft's philosophy in Thoughts and elsewhere resembles very closely that of the Dissenters she met at Newington Green, such as the theologian, educator and scientist Joseph Priestley and the minister Richard Price. Dissenters "were most concerned with molding children into people of good moral character and habits".

Pedagogical theory
Thoughts advocates several educational goals for women: independent thought, rationality, self-discipline, truthfulness, acceptance of one's social position, useful skills and faith in God.

Themes
Wollstonecraft envisions the "daughters" in her book as one day becoming mothers and teachers. She does not propose that women abandon these traditional roles because she believes that it is as pedagogues that women can most effectively improve society. Wollstonecraft, and other writers as diverse as the evangelical moralist Hannah More, the historian Catherine Macaulay and the feminist novelist Mary Hays, argued that since women were the primary caregivers of the family and educators of children, they should be given a sound education. They decried the traditional and what they saw as decadent "accomplishment"-based education, which focused on "skills" such as dancing.

Education of women
While Wollstonecraft's comments on female education hint at some of her more radical arguments in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, the religious tone of the text, also found in Mary: A Fiction, is generally interpreted by scholars as conservative. The religion presented in Thoughts is one of the "pleasures of resignation", a belief that the afterlife is awaiting and that the world is ordered by God for the best.

Religion
Thoughts was moderately successful; it was reprinted in Dublin a year after its initial publication in London, extracts were published in The Lady's Magazine, and Wollstonecraft included excerpts from it in her own Female Reader (1789), an anthology of writings designed "for the Improvement of Young Women". The English Review noticed Thoughts favorably:
These thoughts are employed on various important situations and incidents in the ordinary life of females, and are, in general, dictated with great judgment. Mrs. Wollstonecraft appears to have reflected maturely on her subject; . . . while her manner gives authority, her good sense adds irresistible weight to almost all her precepts and remarks. We should therefore recommend these Thoughts as worthy the attention of those who are more immediately concerned in the education of young ladies.

Reception and legacy

Timeline of Mary Wollstonecraft See also

Modern reprints

Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. ISBN 0195061608.
Jones, Vivien. "Mary Wollstonecraft and the literature of advice and instruction." The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft. Ed. Claudia Johnson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. ISBN 0521789524.
Jones, Vivien. "The Seductions of Conduct: Pleasure and Conduct Literature." Pleasure in the Eighteenth Century. Eds. Roy Porter and Marie Mulvey Roberts. London: Macmillan, 1996. ISBN 0814766447.
Kelly, Gary. Revolutionary Feminism: The Mind and Career of Mary Wollstonecraft. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992. ISBN 0312129041.
Myers, Mitzi. "Pedagogy as Self-Expression in Mary Wollstonecraft: Exorcising the Past, Finding a Voice." The Private Self: Theory and Practice of Women's Autobiographical Writing. Ed. Shari Benstock. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988. ISBN 0807817910.
Poovey, Mary. The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. ISBN 0226675289.
Richardson, Alan. "Mary Wollstonecraft on education." The Cambridge Companion to Mary Wollstonecraft. Ed. Claudia Johnson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. ISBN 0521789524.
Sapiro, Virginia. A Vindication of Political Virtue: The Political Theory of Mary Wollstonecraft. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. ISBN 0226734919.
Sutherland, Kathryn. "Writings on Education and Conduct: Arguments for Female Improvement." Women and Literature in Britain 1700-1800. Ed. Vivien Jones. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. ISBN 0521586801.
Taylor, Barbara. Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. ISBN 0521661447.
Todd, Janet. Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2000. ISBN 0231121849.