SOURCE: "The Vindication of the Writes of Women: Mary Wollstonecraft and Enlightenment Rhetoric," in Feminist Interpretations of Mary Wollstonecraft, edited by Maria J. Falco, University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996, pp. 105-23.

In this essay, Brody analyzes Wollstonecraft's rhetoric as an inversion of the bodily imagery that had been used during the Enlightenment to describe sound writing; through this rhetorical transformation, Brody contends, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman "dramatically vindicates that a woman may write polemically."

Mary Wollstonecraft intrigues us all. Consigned to oblivion after her death (her relationship with Gilbert Imlay had embarrassed many of her friends and the times were uncongenial to political rebels), at her two-hundredth birthday she has been richly re-read. Her life has been turned into a novel, her childhood has been examined for trauma, and her writings, finished and unfinished, have been made available for close scrutiny and scholarly...