264 Eileen Hunt Botting
rhetorical idiom and theoretical approach that unites a variety of feminist
schools of thought, then and now.
“Yet, because I am a woman”: Wollstonecraft’s
First-Person Arguments for Women’s Human RightsThe dedication of the Rights of Woman opens on a personal and political
note: “SIR, Having read with great pleasure a pamphlet which you have
lately published, I dedicate this volume to you; to induce you to recon-
sider the subject, and maturely weigh what I have advanced respecting
the rights of woman and national education” (21). Wollstonecraft here ad-
dressed Talleyrand-Périgord, the former Bishop of Autun turned French
revolutionary. Talleyrand-Périgord had published Rapport sur l’instruction
publique (1791), which contained a national plan for coeducation in the
new French republic. What his otherwise admirable proposal lacked was
an overarching defense of women’s rights, beyond the limited right of or-
phan girls to the same government-sponsored education as boys (Tomaselli
1995, 320).
Talleyrand’s exclusion of women from the full slate of “civil and politi-
cal rights” was, in Wollstonecraft’s view, a contradiction of the republican
principles of the French Revolution: “But, if women are to be excluded,
without having a voice, from a participation of the natural rights of man-
kind, prove fi rst, to ward off the charge of injustice and inconsistency, that
they want reason — else this fl aw in your new constitution will ever
shew that man must, in some shape, act like a tyrant” (23). She person-
ally challenged Talleyrand, and by implication any progressive male read-
ers who identifi ed with his politics, to move beyond the assumption that
women could not and should not be citizens due to their supposed natural
inferiority of mind. Unless Talleyrand and other statesmen could provide
evidence of women’s lack of reason, and hence their inability to be self-
governing citizens, they could not resist her charge that the French republic
was a tyrannical and patriarchal sham like the rest of eighteenth-century
Europe’s governments.
Wollstonecraft built a strong personal bond with her readers through
copious use of fi rst-person narration in the dedication and introduction of
the Rights of Woman. As Sen notes, her rhetoric effectively expresses her
“wrath” for the injustices that face women of her time, and inspires sym-
pathy in her readers for a cause that they might otherwise fi nd foolish or
marginal at best (2009, 392). In addressing Talleyrand “as a legislator,”