A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft | Amy Elizabeth Smith (essay date summer 1992)
Amy Elizabeth Smith (essay date summer 1992)
SOURCE: Smith, Amy Elizabeth. “Roles for Readers in Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.” Studies in English Literature 32, no. 3 (summer, 1992): 555-70.
[In the following essay, Smith examines A Vindication of the Rights of Woman to determine the intended audience of the work and argues that the treatise addresses both male and female readers.]
Critics who have sought to characterize the implied audience for Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) have been unable to reach a consensus. Most take one of two positions, arguing either for a primarily male or a primarily female audience.1 Elissa S. Guralnick claims that the work's “rambling, uneven” nature results from being aimed at an audience “unused and unreceptive to rational discourse—an audience of middle-class women,” and Cora Kaplan shares this...
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