ABSTRACT
Rights of Woman (ROW) was widely embraced, discussed, and commended in America. She was touted as a prophet in The New-York Magazine, The Columbian Centinel (Boston), The Philadelphia Monthly, The Massachusetts Magazine, and Philadelphia’s Lady’s Magazine and Repository of Entertaining Knowledge. The sales were so good that Johnson brought out a second edition within the first year and had it translated into French and German. In a letter to The Christian Observer, a reader complained that Wollstonecraft’s book was so much in demand through the circulating library that “there [was] no keeping it long enough to read it leisurely.” There were five separate publications of ROW in America between 1792 and 1833. Despite the ignominy attached to her name because of Memoirs, it was ROW that could be found on Lucretia Mott’s coffee table. In a letter to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mott mentioned how impressed she was with ROW and pronounced it the leading manifesto for freedom. In her many references to Wollstonecraft in her speeches, Mott deliberately refocused the attention on Wollstonecraft’s work and thought and away from her life. More than that, she extolled that work as inspired by God and grounded in biblical truth. This chapter explains why Wollstonecraft’s revolutionary ideas were readily accepted in America after they were ignored in Britian.
