1 Rough Equality, Rougher Inequalities, and the 'Jostlings of ...

legal reforms would mitigate the pernicious influence of the rougher, hurtful, man-madeinequalities that precluded the perfectionistic moral development of humanity.For Wollstonecraft, friendship ought to function as a symbiotic relationshipwithin which moral equals inspire each other to strive for moral perfection. For example,boys and girls who played the same games together would inspire each other to practicethe same virtues, such as respectful competition and amiableness. Despite this egalitarianideal of higher friendship, she acknowledged that it was certainly possible, evenprobable, that one would gravely misjudge one's friends and their intentions. Her first,unofficial, husband, Gilbert Imlay, was a case in point. Despite her loving him as hereternal spiritual partner, he turned out to be a cad: a man who cared more for mere"commerce" (in economic and sexual traffic) than for the needs of the mother of hisinfant daughter and their future as a family. But Wollstonecraft had other, dear friends inher life, including her only true (and legal) husband, William Godwin, who showed heranother way.Wollstonecraft's philosophy of higher friendship has both Aristotelian andKantian dimensions. Yet she moves beyond each of these philosophical models of interrelationalequality by emphasizing the redemptive power of higher friendship for andamong people beyond elite men. Wollstonecraft democratizes higher friendship byaccommodating a place for everyone within it. Everyone could and should inspiresomeone else to the higher virtues through friendship: spouses, peers, siblings, parents, aswell as parents and their children.One of the most redemptive forms of friendship could be between women ofdifferent classes. In her final novel, Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman, Wollstonecraft4