Editor’s Introduction 13will make it a helpful resource for students and scholars of democratiza-
tion, development, and global justice.
Editorial Policy
With the assistance of the editorial staff at Yale University Press and four
of my Glynn Family Honors Program students at the University of Notre
Dame, I have reprinted the authoritative second (London) edition of the
Rights of Woman published by Joseph Johnson. Wollstonecraft edited the
second edition herself soon after the publication of the fi rst edition in early
- The third London edition, though produced in her lifetime, was
not authorized by Wollstonecraft and thus was not used as a source text
(Hardt 1982).
To establish the text for the new edition, my Honors students Courtney
Biscan, Lindsay Dun, John Gibbons, and Patrick Cruitt and I worked in
pairs and proofed each other’s editorial work on the second 1792 London
edition in several rounds. We have corrected only a handful of minor mis-
takes in the original typesetting. We modernized archaic English spelling,
mainly turning the eighteenth-century long “s” (which looks like “f”) into
the short “s” for the sake of readability. Otherwise, the text is the same as
the public encountered it in late 1792. Wollstonecraft provided her own
footnotes, which are reproduced verbatim. In order to preserve the feel of
the book as Wollstonecraft last edited it, I have not added any further foot-
notes to the Rights of Woman.
New editorial annotations are confi ned to the scholarly apparatus that
surrounds the text of the Rights of Woman. With the adept coauthorship of
my doctoral student Madeline Cronin, I provide two historical timelines
to frame the signifi cance of Wollstonecraft and her book. One charts the
life of Wollstonecraft and her family alongside the major political events
from 1688 to 1818 (from England’s Glorious Revolution to the publication
of her daughter Mary Shelley’s groundbreaking novel Frankenstein). The
other timeline traces the place of the Rights of Woman in the “women’s
rights as human rights” tradition from 1739 to 2015 (from the publication
of Sophia’s Woman not Inferior to Man in London to the anticipated fi rst
year that Saudi Arabian women will exercise a limited right to suffrage).
Cronin has also contributed a biographical directory of the major philo-
sophical, historical, and literary fi gures referenced in the Rights of Woman.
The directory provides substantial background on each fi gure and their
import within the book. We hope that these editorial features, alongside