The Personal Is Political 277Her purpose in translating the treatise was to clarify “the defi nitions of
women’s duties and rights” with the “vibrant wish” that Wollstonecraft’s
thoughts would “encounter a better overall understanding today than they
ever could one hundred years ago” (1899, xx). Speaking in the fi rst-person
plural about the legacies of the treatise for women, Pappenheim wrote,
“when we consider the importance of its doctrines, and the eminence of
genius it displays, it seems not very improbably that it will be read as long
as the English language endures” (1899, xii).
Like Fawcett, Pappenheim stressed that Wollstonecraft did not advocate
women’s rights without emphasizing their corresponding domestic duties.
She paradoxically characterized Wollstonecraft —who philosophically re-
jected the notion of gendered virtues and called for a “revolution in female
manners” (210) that would recognize both sexes as subject to the same
moral standards — as a “a woman, lovely in her person, and in the best and
most engaging sense, feminine in her manners” (1899, xiii). Strategically
desisting from any discussion of Wollstonecraft’s avant-garde romances
with Gilbert Imlay and William Godwin, Pappenheim mentioned Woll-
stonecraft’s relationship with Henry Fuseli only to say that it awakened
her “womanly senses,” without referencing the ensuing scandal of her sup-
posed infatuation with this married man (1899, xiv).
By selectively using Godwin’s Memoirs in her editorial commentary
on the Rights of Woman, Pappenheim depicted the meaning of Wollstone-
craft’s life and work in allegorical terms that would personally appeal to the
conventional German women of her time: Wollstonecraft overcame a dif-
fi cult early family life to assert her independence as a woman while retain-
ing her feminine identity. As leaders of feminist movements, Pappenheim
and Fawcett’s common tactic was to remake Wollstonecraft into a political
symbol of the “womanly” character of the women’s rights advocate. They
deployed Wollstonecraft as the iconic feminine feminist, to assuage public
fears and misunderstandings of their goal to reform traditional gender roles
along the more egalitarian lines imagined in the Rights of Woman.
Anna Holmová was the Czech translator who introduced Wollstone-
craft’s Rights of Woman to Prague in 1904. Against the background of the
vibrant philosophical reception of John Stuart Mill’s Subjection of Women
(1869) by Czech feminists in the 1880s and 1890s, she represented Woll-
stonecraft as more of an enduring emotional touchstone than a contem-
porary theoretical resource for feminist reform in Austria-Hungary (Fein-
berg 2006, 22–23). Like Schreiner, she interpreted the Rights of Woman
as an expression of Wollstonecraft’s lived, and “poignantly felt,” personal