The Personal Is Political
Wollstonecraft’s Witty, First-Person, Feminist Voice
EILEEN HUNT BOTTING
Wollstonecraft’s novel Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman (1798) has been
widely identifi ed as an early radical feminist text that inventively deploys
fi rst-person narration to share women’s personal stories of oppression at the
hands of men (Lorch 1990; Taylor 2003, 242–243). Some scholars have
pitted Maria against Wollstonecraft’s earlier A Vindication of the Rights
of Woman, preferring the former’s style of fi rst-person narration, sense of
female solidarity, more open sexuality, and radical sympathy for the poor
to the latter’s rationalistic arguments, defense of chastity, and middle-class
bias (Poovey 1984, 81, 104; Eberle 2002, 33 –53, 242). Such a contrast
misses the underlying unity of philosophical argument and literary tech-
nique across these texts, as well as the overall consistency in Wollstone-
craft’s feminist political thought.
The Rights of Woman is better understood as sharing philosophical, po-
litical, and rhetorical common ground with her autobiographical and liter-
ary works (Sapiro 1992). Her literary methods — especially irony, satire,
understatement, gendered wordplay, and fi rst-person narration — enable
her to broach the controversial issue of women’s equal human rights along-
side men in a wry, personable, and compelling way. Wollstonecraft’s witty,
fi rst-person, feminist voice clearly rings out of the fi rst major philosophical
treatise on women’s rights in the wake of the French Revolution. This voice
inspired later thinkers to turn their personal experiences into a foundation
for feminist political arguments against patriarchy and for women’s benefi t
as a group (Offen 2000, 19 –20; Offen 2010).
The Rights of Woman strategically and often humorously employs
fi rst-person arguments in favor of women’s rights, in order to win over
her skeptical audience on an issue that was largely seen as a joke in 1792.