The Personal Is Political 265she played on the ambiguity of whether this phrase modifi ed the “I” or
the “you”: “Consider, I address you as a legislator, whether, when men
contend for their freedom, and to be allowed to judge for themselves re-
specting their own happiness, it be not inconsistent and unjust to subjugate
women, even though you fi rmly believe that you are acting in the manner
best calculated to promote their happiness?” (23). She implied that she
had as legitimate a claim to being a citizen, and even a legislator, as he.
With a similar sense of irony, she used the fi rst person to assure her readers
of her feminine deportment despite the “contested question” she engaged:
“Yet, because I am a woman, I would not lead my readers to suppose that I
mean violently to agitate the contested question respecting the equality or
inferiority of the sex” (30).
Showing the rhetorical quality of this disclaimer, she quickly dispensed
with the idea of the natural basis of gender roles for men and women.
Rather than argue that women should become like men by practicing the
so-called “manly virtues,” Wollstonecraft argued that all humans should
become more virtuous by adhering to the God-given, universal, rational
moral law (30). With sarcasm made palpable with her dramatic use of ital-
ics, she intoned, “I presume that rational men will excuse me for endeavor-
ing to persuade them to become more masculine and respectable” (32). An-
ticipating the postmodern idea of gender as a social construct, she playfully
construed masculinity as a mere hobgoblin: “Indeed the word masculine is
only a bugbear” (32; Wingrove 2005). With this economical metaphor, she
demoted gender to a product of the overheated imaginations of overgrown
children. By peppering the dedication and introduction with such word-
play, irony, sarcasm, and fi rst-person voice, Wollstonecraft enabled even a
hostile audience to develop a sympathetic interest in her witty, emotionally
riveting, and personally revealing style of feminist analysis.
Chapter one begins with a summary of her abstract arguments for
women’s human rights: the idea that women have the same rights as men
because they are both human (Okin 1998a). In likely homage to Descartes’s
1637 Discourse on Method, she states her philosophical objective: “it ap-
pears necessary to go back to fi rst principles in search of the most simple
truths” (37).^2 As with Descartes, she frames her return to fi rst principles
in an authoritative fi rst-person voice: “I must be allowed to ask some plain
questions, and the answers will probably appear as unequivocal as the axi-
oms on which reasoning is built” (37). She reminds the reader that these
principles, while true in the abstract, can be contradicted by the “words or
conduct of men” (37). Here, it is clear she is using “men” in the gender-
specifi c sense, to emphasize their culpability for patriarchal oppression.