Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) was the first champion of women's rights in the modern Western world. Wollstonecraft's experience teaching young women in London led her to write her first book, in which she argued for equal education for girls and boys. The moderate success of her autobiographical novel Mary, A Fiction convinced her to start writing full-time. Under the tutelage of her publisher and mentor Joseph Johnson, she joined a circle of liberal intellectuals which included poet and artist William Blake, chemist Joseph Priestley, and political thinker William Godwin.In 1790 Wollstonecraft penned A Vindication of the Rights of Men, an impassioned reply to conservative criticism of the French Revolution and a call for social equality. She developed her ideas further in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which extended the notion of natural rights to include women's rights as well. Going so far as to suggest that women should be allowed to vote, Wollstonecraft's revolutionary ideas garnered her overnight fame--and notoriety. She traveled to Paris, lived through the Reign of Terror, fell in love with an American, and gave birth to her first daughter. Though the love affair ended tragically, resulting in her thwarted suicide attempt, she happily wed William Godwin in 1797. That year she gave birth to her second child (the future author of Frankenstein Mary Shelley). She died a few days later from complications of childbirth.Wollstonecraft's writing inspired leaders of the American woman suffrage movement, such as Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and moved one admirer to call her a "pioneer of modern womanhood.
At a time when women were regarded as second-class citizens, Victoria Woodhull (1838-1927) led a life of many "firsts." She was the first woman stockbroker, the first woman to speak before Congress, and the first woman to run for President of the United States.
A critical history of the gendered politics of rhetoric and the rise of composition. By tracing the persistence of gender issues in rhetoric and composition texts, Brody argues that the seemingly innocuous, unpretentious, and often homespun advice teachers and textbook authors typically have given to fledgling writers is in fact part of a complex agenda for maintaining power. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
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