SOURCE: Smith, Amy Elizabeth. “Roles for Readers in Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.” Studies in English Literature 32, no. 3 (summer, 1992): 555-70.

In the following essay, Smith examines A Vindication of the Rights of Woman to determine the intended audience of the work and argues that the treatise addresses both male and female readers.

Critics who have sought to characterize the implied audience for Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) have been unable to reach a consensus. Most take one of two positions, arguing either for a primarily male or a primarily female audience.¹ Elissa S. Guralnick claims that the work's “rambling, uneven” nature results from being aimed at an audience “unused and unreceptive to rational discourse—an audience of middle-class women,” and Cora Kaplan shares this position.² Having assessed Wollstonecraft's tone, textual examples, and the rhetorical distance she creates between herself and...