“I Have Looked Steadily around Me”: The Power of Examples in Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

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Notes

¹ Janet Todd aptly refers to Wollstonecraft as “an Enlightenment feminist” in her article “Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters.”

² Christine Skolnik examines how the categories of gender and the sublime intersect in Wollstonecraft’s gesture “for the cause of social equity” (207). See her article “Wollstonecraft’s Dislocation of the Masculine Sublime: A Vindication.”

³ Andrew McCann notices that Wollstonecraft at times has to recourse to “the sentimental idiom” (151) when she creates an “account of flawed femininity” (151); however, she does so only to show how “a certain kind of language” “marks the limit of feminist politics in the culture of radical sentimentality” (162).

⁴ In her article “Roles for Readers in Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,” Amy Smith has argued that the text “clearly anticipates both male and female readers” (556). Smith has suggested that Wollstonecraft addresses both women and men because she sees both sexes as necessary for the “REVOLUTION in female manners” (292).

⁵ In one of her letters, Wollstonecraft highlights the connection between intellectual and moral improvement: “Indeed intellectual and moral improvement seem to me so connected—I cannot, even in thought separate them” (120). “To the Reverend Henry Dyson Gabell.” The Collected Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft. Ed. Janet Todd. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003: 119–122. Vivien Jones notes this connection between intellectual and moral improvement in Wollstonecraft’s The Female Reader: “The anthology’s juxtapositions invite her readers to reflect on the relationship between rational improvement and moral responsibility […]” (133). Chris Jones situates Wollstonecraft within the republican tradition of virtue, but emphasizes her individualistic approach: “The goal of Wollstonecraft’s political morality is the happiness and self-determined advancement of each individual” (43).

⁶ In her article “Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and the Women Writers of Her Day,” Anne Mellor situates Wollstonecraft in relation to her contemporaries “across the entire feminist spectrum, from the radicals Mary Hays and Mary Robinson through the more moderate Anna Barbauld, Priscilla Wakefield, Maria Edgeworth, and Jane Austen, to the conservative Hannah More” (156–157).

⁷ Gallagher ascribes the charismatic mode of legitimation to J. J. Rousseau.

⁸ For a discussion of Thomas Holcroft’s, Maria Edgeworth’s, Charlotte Smith’s, Mary Wollstonecraft’s, and others’ interest in Johann Caspar Lavater’s Physiognomy see John Graham’s article “Lavater’s Physiognomy in England,” Journal of the History of Ideas 22.4 (1961): 561–572.

⁹ Janet Todd, in her article “Mary Wollstonecraft and Enlightenment Desire,” and Vivien Jones, in her article, “Mary Wollstonecraft and the Literature of Advice and Instruction,” discuss Wollstonecraft in relation to the genre of conduct books for girls. While in A Vindication she rejects the prejudices behind this tradition, Wollstonecraft wrote several conduct books herself. However, as Jones argues, she “modifies the conventions of advice literature” (120).