A Vindication Of The Rights Of Woman

The Personal Is Political 279

Making the Personal Political, Again

The well-known scholarship on Wollstonecraft’s reception in the early
twentieth century has showcased how a variety of feminists embraced her
unconventional life story as a personal model for their own experiments in,
and literary refl ections on, love, sex, and marriage. There is plenty of evi-
dence that a range of thinkers — such as Emma Goldman, Ruth Benedict,
and Virginia Woolf — took a primarily biographical and literary approach
to reading Wollstonecraft’s legacies for modern womanhood (Wexler 1981;
Gordon 2005, 451). It was this symbolic iteration of Wollstonecraft as per-
sonal icon that was likely the most infl uential on feminist scholars of the
second wave, who have produced numerous important biographical studies
of her life and literary analyses of her work since the 1970s.
But we should not forget the political and philosophical impact of the
Rights of Woman on fi rst-wave feminists, as the comparative study of the
forewords to the centennial-era editions of the Rights of Woman reveals.
The treatise’s witty rhetoric and fi rst-person style of argument became an
inspiration for nineteenth-century feminists’ own refl ections on how the
personal is especially political for “the most oppressed half of the species”
(60). As Wendy Gunther-Canada has noted, each generation of feminists
has turned back to rediscover Wollstonecraft and redefi ne her meaning for
their time (1996, 215). First-wave and second-wave feminists tended to
miss Wollstonecraft’s humor in their serious devotion to excavating her life
and personal style of argument for their social movements. The next wave
of women’s human rights advocates might fi nd in her Rights of Woman a
refreshingly witty source for their new brand of mimetic, sardonic, and
self-referential social criticism (Kort 2011).

notes

1. Nicolas de Condorcet’s 1790 essay “On the Admission of Women to the
   Rights of Citizenship” and Olympe de Gouges’s 1791 pamphlet “Declaration
   of the Rights of Woman and Citizen” asked for women to be granted the same
   civil and political rights as men in the new French republic.


2. Wollstonecraft also appears to indirectly reference Descartes elsewhere in
   the Rights of Woman, when she explains why she is “inclined to laugh at
   materialists” (143).


3. Wollstonecraft cites Jonathan Swift several times in the Rights of Woman,
   including his “disgusting description of the Yahoos” in Gulliver’s Travels
   (1726) (138).