Teresa Rodriguez

Laureana Wright (1846–1896), a prominent Mexican writer and intellectual, was born in Taxco and raised in Mexico City. Her essays The Emancipation of Women through Study and The Erroneous Education of Women and Practical Means to Correct It establish her as a pioneering theorist of women’s education in Mexico. However, her work reveals an ambivalent stance regarding women’s roles, as she simultaneously advocates for intellectual equality and traditional domestic responsibilities. In this paper, I argue that the ambivalence present in her essay The Erroneous Education of Women and Practical Means to Correct It is a direct result of her reception of French social romanticist theories about women, particularly those advanced by Eugène Pelletan.

In this article I analyze the different historiographical models that have contributed to the ‘interpretative heritage’ of Anne Conway. I argue that, due to the current state of scholarship on the history of women philosophers, the main mission of this scholarship is to increase the interpretative heritage of their works in general and of Anne Conway in particular. For this purpose, it is necessary to apply a pluralistic perspective regarding models. A pluralist perspective would argue that there are different historiographical models that apply to the study of the text and that each model, even the failed ones, increases the interpretative heritage. In this sense, I identify six main models used in the study of Conway’s Principia and propose that the sixth, the contextual/eclectic model, is more fundamental for the study of Anne Conway because it assists us in laying the foundations for other more restricted or specialized models.