262 Eileen Hunt Botting
The phrase “rights of woman” was bandied about in French, American,
and British public discourse — more often comically than seriously — in
the early 1790s. In 1791 the United States Chronicle published a poem that
mocked the nascent demand for women’s rights by referencing the age-old
patriarchal idea of women’s arbitrary, sexual manipulation of men: “But
have not women greater rights than these; / Do they not rule and govern as
they please?” (Anonymous 1791). Beyond the revolutionary-era works of
Condorcet and de Gouges in Paris^1 , there were more mocking than serious
invocations of women’s rights until Wollstonecraft’s Rights of Woman pre-
cipitated an international shift in public discourse, in Britain, Europe, and
especially the young democracy of the United States (Botting and Carey
2004; Zagarri 2007, 44).
Wollstonecraft’s personal insights into female oppression, combined
with her wry sense of humor, made the abstract and radical arguments
of the Rights of Woman easier to understand and accept, especially by a
conservative male audience. Her primarily autobiographical and literary
writings, such as her letters and Maria, are simply a different expression of
her creative use of personal narratives in feminist argumentation (Mellor
[1975] 1994). The fi rst-person narration of the Rights of Woman helps to
shape a model of female personal expression that has become integral to
modern feminist discourse.
As Janet Todd argues, “she dedicates herself to expressing her Self. In
Wollstonecraft’s writings a new female consciousness comes into being....
The huge sense of the ‘I’ in Mary Wollstonecraft’s work is often infuriat-
ing but it is undeniably modern” (Todd 2000, ix). Although I agree with
Todd’s assessment of Wollstonecraft’s fi rst-person narratives as forging a
“new female consciousness,” I intend to show that her wry sense of humor
also makes her a “modern” voice for women’s rights. While her heavy use
of the “I” makes her appear self-centered at times, perhaps especially in
her letters, Wollstonecraft’s mastery of irony and understatement in the
Rights of Woman enables her to rhetorically retreat into the background as
she foregrounds the social problem of the general oppression of “one half
of the human race” (24).
In what follows, I explain how Wollstonecraft’s the Rights of Woman
sets up a rhetorically sophisticated and politically infl uential model for
women’s rights arguments. Her treatise draws on abstract arguments for
human rights, grounded in the Enlightenment liberal and Protestant phi-
losophies of John Locke and Richard Price, as well as her own personal ex-
periences and observations of patriarchal oppression (Taylor 2003; Gordon