The Monies will not Answer: Mary Wollstonecraft and Catrina Davies on property, freedom and precarity

This paper explores the writing, and lives, of two women, Wollstonecraft and the contemporary writer Catrina Davies. It focuses on their experience of trying to live independent, creative and worthwhile lives under social and economic conditions of precarity and debt which curtail their aspirations to freedom. Wollstonecraft's critique of property relations and of commercial society echoes through Davies's experience of navigating the current housing crisis and struggling to make a decent income from her writing. In Newington Green in the 1780s and a coastal Cornish village in the 2010s, the paper explores what it means for women's freedom when the monies will not answer.