Mary Wollstonecraft, Jonathan Swift, and the Passion in Reading

This essay traces Mary Wollstonecraft’s use of three texts by Jonathan Swift in her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) to develop a mode of analysis attentive to the effects of rhetoric within conventional approaches to women’s education. Challenging the complacency of an epistemological tradition that turns women into predictable clichés, Wollstonecraft deploys a mode of impassioned rhetoric that derives its power from disrupting gendered binaries and that creates a space in which women become active readers of the language that shapes their lives.