SOURCE: Davidson, Jenny. “‘Professed Enemies of Politeness’: Sincerity and the Problem of Gender in Godwin's Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.” Studies in Romanticism 39, no. 4 (winter 2000): 599-615.

In the following essay, Davidson compares Wollstonecraft's treatment of insincerity in politics and social life in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman with William Godwin's less gendered political arguments in An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice.

Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) identifies dissimulation as a specifically female problem. Attacking modesty as the embodiment of insincerity, Wollstonecraft aligns femininity with deceptiveness and suggests that as a consequence, women have an obligation to be not less but more truthful than their male counterparts: this is the ultimate “revolution in female manners” for which she calls.¹ Her call emerges from a historical moment characterized not just by its perception of a crisis in the manners...