that she will “not condescend to cull my words to avoid the invidious phrase, nor shall I be prevented from giving a manly definition of it.” In a world where women were expected to be coy, polite, and deferential to male intellect, she aims for the exact opposite. She will be direct and hence, as she puts it, “manly.”

In turn, a few paragraphs later, she ridicules Burke for adopting traits associated with women, noting that his “[s]ensibility is the manie of the day, and compassion the virtue which is to cover a multitude of vices, whilst justice is left to mourn in sullen silence, and balance truth in vain.” Elsewhere, she refers to his “deluge of false sentiments.” Indeed, it is she who claims to possess the characteristics associated with men, as she “quit[s] the flowers of rhetoric” to “reason together.” It is telling that she aligns herself metaphorically with mathematicians—a field that was viewed then and now as masculine:

And, when you are examining your heart, if it would not be too much like mathematical drudgery, to which a fine imagination very reluctantly stoops, enquire further, how it is consistent with the vulgar notions of honesty, and the foundation of morality.

Note that immediately afterwards she accuses Burke of being “unmanly." Although this word is intended to cast aspersions on his honesty, it also bears that sexualized connotation of feminine weakness.

Her claim to a more masculine style—at least compared to Burke—is reinforced several paragraphs later when she again aligns herself with mathematicians and “metaphysical sophists” while decrying Burke’s lack of consideration for the poor. Here, too, she refuses to prettify her phrasing:

Animated by this important object, I shall disdain to cull my phrases or polish my style;—I aim at being useful, and sincerity will render me unaffected; for, wishing rather to persuade by the force of my arguments, than dazzle by the elegance of my language, I shall not waste my time in rounding periods, or in fabricating the turgid bombast of artificial feelings, which, coming from the head, never reach the heart.—I shall be employed about things, not words!—

Her immediately following work, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), can arguably be said to reveal a stronger effort at adopting masculine aesthetics as she makes a case for girls to receive an education and upbringing that is on par with boys’. Wishing to “treat them [girls] like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces,” she calls for women “to acquire strength, both of mind and body” and to eschew “the soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste, are almost synonymous with epithets of weakness.”

It is here that Wollstonecraft embarks on a series of brief and abrupt sentences: a style that would have been associated more with the rhetoric of rationality that was perceived as masculine. Seeking to avoid anything that smacks of effete femininity, she declares that she

shall disdain to cull my phrases or polish my style;—I aim at being useful, and sincerity will render me unaffected; for, wishing rather to persuade by the force of my arguments, than dazzle by the elegance of my language, I shall not waste my time in rounding periods, or in fabricating the turgid bombast of artificial feelings, which, coming from the head, never reach the heart.—I shall be employed about things, not words!—

This directness is no less apparent when she announces that it “is time to effect a revolution in female manners—time to re-store to them their lost dignity—and make them, as a part of the human species, labour by reforming themselves to reform the world.”

Not least, notice the way in which Wollstonecraft uses simple, declarative sentences beginning with “I shall,” “I inveighed,” and “I assert”: all of which are direct—and would have been viewed as masculine by eighteenth-century standards.

Perhaps not surprisingly, then, contemporary reviewers of her publications praised them in masculine terms, admiring Wollstonecraft for her energy, rationality, and intellect.