counterparts, and their shared interest in putting Wollstonecraft’s theories into social and
political practice. These theorists and activists helped criticize existing laws and advanced the
arguments that undergirded new laws that would eventually challenge the patriarchal structure of
the family, property law and marriage in successive stages of legislative reform in the United
States, Europe and beyond. With a portrait of Wollstonecraft hanging on the wall of the office of
their women’s rights newspaper The Revolution in 1868-9, Stanton and Anthony reprinted the
entire text of the Rights of Woman in that serial (Sapiro, 1992, p. 276; Stanton & Anthony,
1991). In the 1875, Anthony scripted the words of the constitutional amendment for women’s
suffrage that was repeatedly rejected in the United States Congress for decades before its
eventual passage and subsequent ratification by three-quarters of the states in 1920. In the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Wollstonecraft would also make a mark on the thinking
of leading anarchists and socialists who moved between Russia, Europe and the United States,
including Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Voltairine de Cleyre and Emma Goldman, all of whom
understood their radical politics as intertwined with a commitment to women’s freedom from
enslavement to patriarchal familial, cultural and legal norms (Gilman, 1991, p. 216; Marso,
2003).
In 1929—just a year after the granting of universal suffrage in the United Kingdom—
Virginia Woolf reflected that Wollstonecraft’s political thought had permeated and transformed
British society to the degree that her ideas were accepted as “so true that they are seen now to
contain nothing new in them—their originality has become our commonplace” (1932, pp. 170-
71). While Woolf recognized that many of Wollstonecraft’s radical views now were part of the
common social imaginaries of her time, she also understood that her predecessor’s ideas had yet
to be fully realized and implemented. The perception of Wollstonecraft’s ideas as commonplace
had obscured the need to further their penetration of the modern social order. Woolf, in
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Convention