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.