SOURCE: Furniss, Tom. “Nasty Tricks and Tropes: Sexuality and Language in Mary Wollstonecraft's Rights of Woman. Studies in Romanticism 32, no. 2 (summer 1993): 177-209.

In the following essay, Furniss offers a deconstructionist reading of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and questions its relevance for modern struggles for rights.

The following discussion of Mary Wollstonecraft's Rights of Woman necessarily raises general questions about the textual analysis of texts which have become important in the history of a political movement. It is intended as a deconstructive reading of Rights of Woman which traces and analyzes the contradictions of its project by situating it within a network of texts which constitutes one of its discursive contexts. In this way, it attempts to restage the text's crucial intervention in the Revolution Controversy and its bid to influence the deliberations of the National Assembly. But although the reading thereby suggests that Wollstonecraft's feminism...