272 Eileen Hunt Botting
how its ideas spread to the United States and beyond (Lopez 1901, 206).
By 1914 “feminism” was the dominant term used to describe activism on
behalf of women, including the now global movement for women’s right to
suffrage (Cott 1987, 3, 14). The fi n de siècle development of this interna-
tional culture and language for feminism was indebted to Wollstonecraft’s
life, her Rights of Woman, and her fi rst-person (plural) approach to feminist
reasoning and narration.
After being fully translated into French, German, Dutch, and Danish
and excerpted in a Spanish periodical within a decade of its debut in 1792,
the Rights of Woman appeared in fi ve more English editions in the fi rst half
of the nineteenth century, in London and New York (Kitts 1994; Botting
2013a). In 1869, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony reproduced
the entire text in their feminist newspaper in the run-up to their attempt to
include women’s suffrage in the fi fteenth amendment to the U.S. Constitu-
tion (Botting and Carey 2004). The centennial of the book’s publication
sparked two competing editions with introductions by Englishwomen Mil-
licent Fawcett and Elizabeth Robins Pennell. Their editions went through
multiple printings in London and New York from 1890 to 1892; copies
of each were inscribed and donated by American women’s suffragist Car-
rie Chapman Catt to the U.S. Library of Congress. They were followed
by a new German translation by Bertha Pappenheim in 1899 and the fi rst
Czech translation by Anna Holmová, in 1904. Comparative analysis of the
forewords to the centennial-era editions of the Rights of Woman reveals
the enduring power of Wollstonecraft’s fi rst-person style of argument for
feminists’ self-understandings of their movement.
Making Mary Wollstonecrafts, Making Modern
Feminisms: Five Introductions to Centennial
Editions of the Rights of WomanOlive Schreiner, the South African writer famous for her 1883 feminist
novel Story of an African Farm, penned a draft of an introduction to a
never-completed centennial edition of the Rights of Woman. As Burdett
has shown, the colonial expatriate was active in Karl Pearson’s “Men’s and
Woman’s Club” (which originally was to be named after Wollstonecraft) in
London in 1885 and 1886. In Pearson’s circle, she was introduced to the
publisher Walter Scott.
Presented with her interest in theorizing the late Victorian “sex ques-
tion,” Scott encouraged the young feminist to introduce a new edition of