SOURCE: "Nasty Tricks and Tropes: Sexuality and Language in Mary Wollstonecraft's Rights of Woman," Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 32, No. 2, Summer 1993, pp. 177-210.

In this essay, Furniss examines Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman in an attempt to understand her feminism, at least in part, as an extension of the middle-class struggle for the "rights of man" and the establishment of a bourgeois society—both of which, Furniss claims, problematize Wollstonecraft's relevance to contemporary social issues.

The following discussion of Mary Wollstonecraft's Rights of Woman necessarily raises general questions about the textual analysis of texts which have become important in the history of a political movement. It is intended as a deconstructive reading of Rights of Woman which traces and analyzes the contradictions of its project by situating it within a network of texts which constitutes one of its discursive contexts. In this way, it attempts to restage...