Wollstonecraft's Philosophical Impact on Nineteenth-Century American Women's Rights Advocates

This article challenges the thesis that the publication of William Godwin's scandalous Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1798 minimized the philosophical impact of Mary Wollstonecraft's 1792 work the Rights of Woman in nineteenth-century American political thought. Instead, we demonstrate that leading nineteenth-century American women's rights advocates—Hannah Mather Crocker, Lucretia Mott, Sarah Grimké, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony—understood themselves to be in a critical, philosophical dialogue with the text of the Rights of Woman , and in some cases, the Memoirs , and defined their own, distinctive philosophies of sex equality partly within this context.