The Personal Is Political 2632005, 52; Botting 2006, 160; Taylor 2007, 89). As Karen Offen has argued,
Wollstonecraft “insists on and draws extensively on her own experience
and her observations of experiences of other women” in developing an em-
pirical basis for her feminist critique of patriarchal oppression (2010, 16).
The legacy of this model of feminist argumentation is vast. Virtually
every early nineteenth-century feminist of note — from Hannah Mather
Crocker in the United States, to Frances Wright in Scotland, to Flora
Tristan in France —had read Wollstonecraft and employed a similar blend
of personal narration and abstract arguments for women’s rights (Botting
and Carey 2004; Botting 2009). It is not fair to say that Wollstonecraft was
the only, or major, infl uence for this rhetorical and philosophical approach
across all cases. However, the study of her turn-of-the-twentieth-century
reception illustrates how she became a foundational fi gure in the develop-
ment of modern feminism’s idea that the “personal is political.”
Although Carol Hanisch coined this famous feminist slogan in 1969,
some of its philosophical roots originate in Wollstonecraft, the Rights of
Woman, and their international reception by major feminist leaders from
the 1890s through the First World War. It was in this time that feminism
came to be internationally known as the formal (organized, public, and
collective) national and transnational social movements devoted to spe-
cifi c women’s rights issues, such as suffrage, or to the general liberation of
women from patriarchal oppression (Cott 1987, 3, 14; Offen 2000, 19 –20;
Holton 2010). It was also in this era that feminist interest in Wollstonecraft’s
the Rights of Woman, as well as her biography, experienced a renaissance.
For a diverse range of thinkers and activists — such as the colonial
South African feminist Olive Schreiner; the leader of the British women’s
suffrage movement Millicent Fawcett; the expatriate American and Woll-
stonecraft biographer Elizabeth Robins Pennell in Budapest; the founder of
the Jewish women’s movement in Germany, Bertha Pappenheim; and the
Czech translator of the Rights of Woman Anna Holmová of Prague —Woll-
stonecraft’s the Rights of Woman and her life story served as rich sources
for a new generation of personal and political argumentation on behalf of
the liberation of women. Each of these thinkers was inspired to write an in-
troduction to the Rights of Woman, and, in some cases, edit or translate the
volume as part of the centennials honoring Wollstonecraft’s life and death
in the 1890s. Often citing her life and writings as a muse, these intellectual
descendants of Wollstonecraft blended fi rst-person narration and abstract
arguments in developing their own distinctive conceptions of feminism
and readings of the Rights of Woman. Together they helped to establish a