On Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman : The First of a New Genus

Mary Wollstonecraft’s __A Vindication of the Rights of Woman__ (1792) made a pioneering and durably influential argument for women’s equality. Drawing on extensive experience teaching and writing about Wollstonecraft, Susan J. Wolfson provides fresh perspectives both for first-time readers and those seeking a nuanced appreciation of her achievements. "Wollstonecraft is best known as the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the first systematic analysis of the oppression of women, categorically, across history and across cultures. Its vigorous argument for a reform in female education and social valuation was so sensible, so forcefully reasoned, that Virginia Woolf could say in 1929 (just after women gained the vote in England) that its "theories and convictions...are so true that they seem now to contain nothing new in them-their originality has become our commonplace." If Woolf may have spoken too soon (given the culture wars still raging in the 2020s), it is still surprising to learn that this champion for the education of women who was in disdain of amiable social "finishing" and in favor of intellectual, moral, and solidly practical virtues could end up for decades under a cloud of disgrace. Why was this advocate of rational sense, chastity (sexual restraint in the era long before birth control) for men as well as women, for the study of science, history, philosophy, and government (even for school uniforms and physical exercise) as well as the aim of producing responsible wives and mothers, cast as a radical menace and monster, an atheist, a slut, and a pathologically castrating threat to masculine authority? What went wrong? Rising to the complexity and knotty complications of her subject with intellectual verve, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman persists as a work of stimulating international consequence. Wolfson has written a sustained, focused, generalminded account that situates this major work in a decade marked at one end by the French Revolution, and at the other by Napoleon's coup d'état, with reactionary resonance in British letters and national policy. While Wollstonecraft bears strong affinity to other progressive thinkers, she defines her own method, by bringing gendered polemics to the infrastructure of revolutionary politics. Wolfson has spent her career studying Wollstonecraft and her contemporaries, and the resulting book is a pleasure to read"-- Provided by publisher Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) made a pioneering and durably influential argument for women's equality. Emerging from the turbulent decade of the French Revolution, her vindication delivered a systematic critique of the treatment of women across time and place. Drawing on extensive experience teaching and writing about Wollstonecraft, Susan J. Wolfson offers new insight into how Wollstonecraft's particular methods, style, and energy make this case for her readers. Wolfson places this polemic in its political and literary contexts and in relation to Wollstonecraft's other works about political rights. She considers how Wollstonecraft balanced advocacy for the seemingly universal ideals of the French Revolution with analysis of the gendered exclusions in the vaunted rights of "man." This book pays particular attention to Wollstonecraft's literary craft, highlighting the force of her close reading. Wollstonecraft pinpointed the role of gendered phrases and concepts in political discourse, both in her opponents' metaphors and received ideas and in her own efforts to craft a new political language with which to defend women's capabilities. Wolfson reveals her as a pioneer in decoupling sex from gender and shows how she provided an enduring model of how to be a female intellectual. Sharing the excitement of reading Wollstonecraft's work with care for her literary as well as political genius, this book provides fresh perspectives both for first-time readers and those seeking a nuanced appreciation of her achievements.