12 Editor’s Introduction
fi rst-person feminist voice, which enabled her to ground her arguments
for women’s human rights on her personal experiences of patriarchal op-
pression. By sympathetically identifying with the oppression of women in
general—“O my sisters”— she turned her personal style of narration into
a rhetorical model for the modern feminist movement (159). Through the
fi rst comparative study of the fi ve introductions to centennial editions of
the Rights of Woman, I show how thinkers from the United States, Brit-
ain, colonial South Africa, imperial Germany, and the Austrian-Hungarian
empire similarly employed fi rst-person narration to promote the idea of
global female solidarity during the time that feminism was becoming an
international social movement.
Continuing in this centuries-old tradition of understanding Wollstone-
craft’s life and writings as sources and models for later iterations of femi-
nism, Virginia Sapiro’s essay revisits her predecessor’s well-known biog-
raphy as an inspiration for her own intellectual development as a scholar of
women and politics. Sapiro’s biography of Wollstonecraft transitions into
an autobiography of her own career in political science since she found
a copy of the Rights of Men in the stacks of the University of Michigan
library in the early 1970s. She offers a case of what Wollstonecraft argued
would happen if women were granted the same rights as men in education,
careers, and politics. Indeed, the Rights of Woman had proclaimed that
women ought to “study politics” as part of their exercise of equal civil and
political rights (177). As female intellectuals entered the fi elds of literature
and the social sciences in greater numbers over the course of the twentieth
century, Wollstonecraft was rediscovered as a personal and philosophical
model for negotiating the norms of womanhood and women’s rights in
academia, the professions, and family life. Wollstonecraft’s writings, as
well as the many readings of her life’s meaning, have become foundational
texts upon which women and other marginalized groups have justifi ed their
presence and advancement in democratic politics as well as in fi elds of
humanistic and scientifi c inquiry.
By focusing on the Rights of Woman’s philosophical, literary, and po-
litical legacies, the four scholarly essays provide much-needed context for
seeing why Wollstonecraft deserves an even fi rmer place in the Western
canon. Students will appreciate the volume’s scholarly guide to understand-
ing why Wollstonecraft is as important to read as the political thinkers she
engaged, such as Locke, Rousseau, and Burke. Feminists will fi nd an up-
to-date overview of Wollstonecraft and the Rights of Woman’s signal con-
tributions to their powerful global social movement. The volume’s general
emphasis on Wollstonecraft’s impact on human rights theory and advocacy