Editor’s Introduction 3in the fi rst few decades of the nineteenth century. Up and down the eastern
seaboard in 1818, American newspapers published a humorous piece on
the right of women to wear “breeches”— signed, with droll comic effect,
“Mary Wollstonecraft, Jr.” (Botting 2013b, 283).
Beginning in the late 1820s, there was a broad resurgence of public use
of her name, ideas, and work, especially among women’s rights advocates.
Her warm and steady reception in the United States grew even more enthu-
siastic, while it gained steam in continental Europe and Latin America. Her
fame meant that her married name (“Mistriss Godwin”) could be used to
market and sell a fake edition of her Rights of Woman in 1826 Paris, which
was subsequently translated into Portuguese and published in three further
editions in 1830s Brazil (Botting 2013a, 506 –507).
However, her cooler homeland of Britain kept its distance from its most
famous female philosopher. The legends of the scandals surrounding the
Godwin-Shelley circle — including the suicide of Wollstonecraft’s fi rstborn
daughter Fanny and the elopement of her younger daughter Mary to the
married Percy Shelley — fueled British prejudices against experiments
in expanding women’s freedom. This Victorian bias likely explains why
John Stuart Mill, the author of The Subjection of Women (1869), never
referenced Wollstonecraft despite his awareness of her infl uential work on
women’s rights.
The centennial of the Rights of Woman was the occasion for several
new editions and translations of the book, including those edited by lead-
ers of national-level women’s movements, Millicent Fawcett of Britain and
Bertha Pappenheim of Germany. Wollstonecraft’s struggles as an indepen-
dent woman plus her visionary theory of universal human rights meant
that she was quickly taken up as a source and symbol of the nascent femi-
nist cause —by both critics and supporters alike — at the turn of the twen-
tieth century. As the feminist historians Karen Offen and Nancy Cott have
shown, the term “feminist” was invented in France around 1870 but soon
became the global descriptive term for arguments and activism against pa-
triarchy (or arbitrary male privilege) on behalf of the welfare of women as
a group (Cott 1987, Offen 2000).
Early feminists from every school of thought — from the Russian émigré
anarchist Emma Goldman, to the American anthropologist Ruth Benedict,
to the British modernist novelist Virginia Woolf — found deep personal
inspiration in Wollstonecraft’s singular life and egalitarian ideas, especially
concerning sex, love, and marriage (Wexler 1981; Sapiro 1992, 6; Gordon
2005, 451). Even as new philosophical sources for feminism emerged dur-
ing the movement’s second and third waves in the mid-to-late twentieth