SOURCE: "Daring to Dialogue: Mary Wollstonecraft's Rhetoric of Feminist Dialogics," in Reclaiming Rhetorica: Women in the Rhetorical Tradition, edited by Andrea A. Lunsford, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1995, pp. 117-36.

In the essay that follows, Barlowe examines Wollstonecraft's use of different genres as an effort to engage in dialogue with the male-dominated intellectual tradition, in the larger service of achieving the practical social ends of feminism.

Of the many remarkable aspects of Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797)-—best known for her feminist manifesto, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)—perhaps the most remarkable was her steadfast belief in her right to participate in dialogues with the philosophers, politicians, educators, historians, and artists of her day as an informed, capable, rational thinker. Such public dialogues were not generally considered to be a woman's province, but Wollstonecraft neither questioned nor apologized for her own intellectual self-assurance. Whether she was challenging...