SOURCE: Gubar, Susan. “Feminist Misogyny: Mary Wollstonecraft and the Paradox of ‘It Takes One to Know One.’” Feminist Studies 20, no. 3 (fall 1994): 453-73.

In the following essay, Gubar analyzes Wollstonecraft's feminism and her often unflattering portraits of women in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and other texts.

In a self-reflexive essay representative of current feminist thinking, Ann Snitow recalls a memory of the early seventies, a moment when a friend “sympathetic to the [women's] movement but not active [in it] asked what motivated” Snitow's fervor.

I tried to explain the excitement I felt at the idea that I didn't have to be a woman. She was shocked, confused. This was the motor of my activism? She asked, “How can someone who doesn't like being a woman be a feminist?” To which I could only answer, “Why would anyone who likes being a woman need to be a...