Mary Wollstonecraft’s Translational Afterlife: French and German Rewritings of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in the Revolutionary Era

It has long been a critical commonplace that, following the publication of William Godwin’s well-meant but injudicious Memoirs of the Author of the Rights of Woman (1798), the name of Mary Wollstonecraft became synonymous with moral opprobrium and her feminist texts taboo for respectable women in even the most progressive nineteenth-century circles. Recent research has begun to contest that view, uncovering evidence that translated versions of Wollstonecraft’s works influenced the development of ideas about women’s rights across the European continent and beyond (Bour, “New Wollstonecraft”; Botting; Kirkley, “Feminism”). Eileen Hunt Botting sums up the trend of this revisionist research, suggesting that Wollstonecraft’s “philosophy navigated an influential course through nineteenth-century European political thought” (510). To exemplify the ways in which Wollstonecraft’s feminist thought was reshaped by its passage into different national and cultural contexts, I focus here on two strikingly different translations of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792): the anonymous Défense des droits des femmes (1792), published in Lyon and Paris, and Rettung der Rechte des Weibes (1793–94), a collaborative work by Christian Gotthilf Salzmann, a well-respected German pedagogue, and Georg Friedrich Christian Weissenborn, a teacher at Salzmann’s school who would later marry his daughter. I have previously connected the different strategies of Wollstonecraft’s translators with their different ideological contexts, suggesting that Revolutionary France represented a readership likely to be more receptive to feminist ideas than the comparatively reactionary German Empire or the Netherlands, and that the translators consequently “domesticated” their versions to appeal to their target readerships. This article will nuance these broad-brush comparisons, complicating the notion of any single target culture as an ideological monolith.

I conceive of “translation,” in its broadest sense, as a process whereby a given sign system passes from one (con)text into another. This process is invariably non-linear: when one sign system comes into contact with another they are almost always mutually transformative, although the degree and type of transformation depends on the context of the exchange and the power dynamics at work within it.Footnote¹ The translators are co-creators of meaning who, in engaging with and rewriting their source texts, also expose their target languages and cultures to potentially transformative influences. As André Lefevere puts it, “translation is a channel opened, often not without a certain reluctance, through which foreign influences can penetrate the native culture, challenge it, and even contribute to subverting it” (2). According to this model, if domesticating translational strategies assimilate Wollstonecraft’s Vindication to foreign target systems, the translations will nonetheless retain traces of difference with the potential to alter the literary and cultural make-up of those systems. The French and German versions of the Vindication undoubtedly reflect the relative positionalities of the translators in Revolutionary Europe, but neither translational strategy is uniform. Wollstonecraft constructed her seminal feminist text at the nexus of existing transnational discourses, including discourses of natural rights, sexual difference, and maternity; the different translations variously amplify, support, distort, or suppress these different discursive elements in the source text, making her meaning new. The translators evince the influence—or constraint—of their ideological contexts, but they also interpret Wollstonecraft’s heterogeneous text in ways that exceed easy categorization as either sympathetic or hostile to her feminism.

The rights of woman in Revolutionary France

Wollstonecraft addresses her Vindication to Talleyrand, inviting readers to interpret her feminist text as a product of its French Revolutionary context. After the fall of the Bastille in 1789, women became voluble spectators in the national legislature and the section assemblies representing the (increasingly militant) subdivisions of Paris. Many women also joined republican clubs and societies. This is not to say that women’s rights were ever a political priority, but women did enjoy a brief period of comparative freedom and feminist possibility until the ascendancy of the virulently misogynist Jacobin faction in 1793. Manon Roland and Sophie de Condorcet exerted discreet but perceptible influence in the public sphere; others made bolder calls for female emancipation and empowerment. As early as October 1789, Olympe de Gouges proposed a reform programme in the National Assembly which encompassed legal equality for the sexes, admission of women to all occupations, and a state-funded alternative to the dowry system. In 1790, Condorcet contended that women should be granted full citizenship in Sur l’admission des femmes au droit de cité and Marie-Madeleine Jodin, a former protégée of Diderot, published the first female-authored feminist work of the Revolution, her Vues législatives pour les femmes. In 1791, Gouges’s Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne demanded full political and civil rights for women. Théroigne de Méricourt called upon women to fight in the army and the expatriate Dutchwoman Etta Palm campaigned effectively for no-fault divorce, which was legalized in September 1792.

Wollstonecraft’s Vindication differs from the works of her prominent French contemporaries in focusing less on structural change than on pedagogical reforms designed to enable female self-improvement and economic independence. Apart from some tantalizing asides, she does not argue for women’s active participation in the masculine sphere of politics and, despite vehement arguments for gender and sexual equality, she makes few practical suggestions for improving women’s condition outside the sphere of pedagogy. In the Advertisement, she claims to have planned a second volume which examines “the laws relative to women, and the consideration of their peculiar duties” (Vindication 70), but this volume was never completed. The fragments published in the posthumous Hints suggest that, as in the extant volume, the text was to alternate between theory and polemic rather than demanding particular legal or institutional changes. By contrast, the texts of French Revolutionary feminists such as Gouges, Jodin, and Palm advocate specific measures to address the social and political inequalities that disadvantaged women. These include: protecting women’s assets in the event of divorce; providing legal and financial support for single mothers and illegitimate children; rehabilitating prostitutes; and supervising midwives. In short, whereas Wollstonecraft constructs a polemical argument for women’s natural rights and access to education, her French contemporaries construct practical manifestos for legislative change and speeches calculated to move mass audiences. Nonetheless, their activism and publications provided an ideological and literary context for French readers approaching Wollstonecraft’s feminist text.

Défense des droits des femmes was published in Paris by François Buisson, one of the most successful publishers of the period. He had launched an international fashion magazine from London in 1786 and, through his connections in the British capital, he came to specialize in translations of English works, including Thomas Paine’s infamous political pamphlets. Judging by his collaboration with Condorcet and the periodicals he printed, his political sympathies lay with the Gironde: he issued Brissot’s Patriote français, the Cercle Social’s Bouche de fer, and Carra and Mercier’s Annales patriotiques et littéraires de la France. Regardless of his private sympathies, though, he kept his business “closely attuned to the pulses of the revolutionary movement” (Hesse 188). By Thermidor, he was well established as a major publisher of enlightened philosophy and literature, and he knew a commercially viable work when he saw it. The anonymous translator of Défense des droits des femmes uses the grammatical constructions of a male writer and, although one cannot entirely rule out a woman concealing her identity, the gender politics informing the paratextual commentary suggest that the translator writes from a position of male privilege. Broadly speaking, the footnotes embed Wollstonecraft’s text even more firmly in the French Revolutionary context, expressing fierce republican and anticlerical convictions which also appear to inform his translational choices. In June 1792, Wollstonecraft reported that the French version had been “praised in some popular prints” (Collected Letters 200); significantly, an advertisement in the Gazette nationale and positive reviews in the Almanach littéraire, the Chronique de Paris, and the Journal encyclopédique emphasized the catalyzing influence of the Revolution in the development of her ideas.Footnote²

A common feature of French Revolutionary feminist discourse, exemplified by Gouges’s parody of the Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen, is the attempt to include women in the spuriously universal discourse of natural rights which, in fact, accorded the rights of citizenship to men alone. Wollstonecraft argues that so-called feminine flaws are social constructs stemming from systemic gender inequality. Her pedagogical credentials give her some authority to intervene in the French debate on national education and she criticizes Talleyrand for neglecting the education of women in his Rapport sur l’instruction publique (1791). Describing the exclusion of women from government as indefensible in principle, Talleyrand falls back on custom to justify their subordination as conducive to the mutual happiness of the sexes (118). Wollstonecraft sharply observes that “tyrannic kings and venal ministers” also resort to custom when reason can furnish no pretexts for oppression (Vindication 114). Her crucial insight is that the resulting tyrant-slave binary self-replicates: women are “stripped,” by their abject condition, “of the virtues that should clothe humanity,” and compensate by attempting, with beauty as their weapon, to “exercise a short-lived tyranny” over men (105). Limiting women’s education and role in society, she warns, simply encourages them to exert power covertly. Denied “legitimate rights,” they will strive to obtain “illicit privileges,” “neglecting private duties only to disturb, by cunning tricks, the orderly plans of reason that rise above their comprehension” (68). In this light, Wollstonecraft argues, education for women appears not as a distraction from the principles of the Revolution but as a guarantor of their implementation and success; taught to regard themselves as rational subjects, women will be worthy of the citizenship that is their natural right.

If rights are said to derive from “nature,” however, their universality is contingent on the intrinsic parity of male and female human subjects. It is now widely accepted that Wollstonecraft’s unconventional Christian faith played a crucial role in the development of her feminism (Khin Zaw 103–12; Taylor 3–4) and, in her second Vindication, her arguments are derived from what Susan Khin Zaw calls a “gender-inclusive” philosophical position rooted in rationalist theology (81). Convinced that both sexes were part of a “natural order” ordained by God (Reuter 93), Wollstonecraft regarded human subjects as perfectible through the development and interplay of three divinely implanted attributes: reason, passion, and imagination. Where the promptings of these finely balanced internal monitors came into conflict with gender-specific social imperatives, she held that the primary concern of any individual should be the moral health of their sexless human soul. Without equal rights, however, few women would be able to overcome the political, social, and psychological constraints holding back their moral development and, along with it, the progress of the entire human race to a state of enlightenment (Khin Zaw 98–103).

In making these arguments, Wollstonecraft explicitly rejects the gender politics of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose bestselling pedagogical treatise, Emile, ou de l’éducation (1762), argues that women’s reproductive role destines them for subordinate civic and social status, a belief that took deep root in French Revolutionary society through the increasingly revered status of republican motherhood. This maternal ideology, which encouraged women to take pride in raising committed citizens, ultimately confined them more securely than ever to domesticity, but ironically found favor with almost every prominent woman of the Revolutionary period. Jodin founds her appeal to the Revolutionary legislators on a “domestic ideal,” in which women “shoulder a maternal role within the public realm” (Gordon and Furbank 164). In Gouges’s Déclaration, Marie-Antoinette is exhorted to remember that she is “mère et épouse” ‘a mother and a wife’ and advised to use her influence in the domestic sphere for the public good, working behind the scenes to avert war in Europe and promote a constitutional monarchy (8).Footnote³ This private influence comes perilously close to the courtly machinations Wollstonecraft despised, but its feminist significance lies in the fact that Gouges is attempting to adapt women’s conjugal and maternal role to a wider public function. Both Jodin and Gouges credit women with specific aptitudes favorable to the Revolutionary cause; but, in attempting to harness the new maternal ideology to their own ends, they risk undermining women’s claims to a shared nature—and therefore common rights—with men.

Like her French contemporaries, Wollstonecraft gives considerable weight to women’s maternal role but, in doing so, she advances her theologically inspired argument for the equality of the sexes. At her most radical, she insists that women’s biological design should not preclude participation in the work force, arguing that they might obtain economic independence from men by acquiring knowledge and skills in medicine, midwifery, or the management of business. On the other hand, she accepts maternity as a near-inevitable fact and duty of female existence as she understood it, commenting that “the rearing of children … has justly been insisted on as the peculiar destination of woman” (Vindication 261). A fervent advocate of breastfeeding and hands-on parenting, like Condorcet she implies that even educated women will be predisposed to marriage and domestic life: “Let there be then no coercion established in society, and the common law of gravity prevailing, the sexes will fall into their proper places” (68). At the same time, as Khin Zaw observes, Wollstonecraft “refused to allow the image of motherhood to be defined by prevailing gender associations” (88). In her Vindication, as in the rest of her œuvre, mothers are first and foremost perfectible human beings with moral duties which both incorporate and transcend domesticity. Her exemplary maternal figures are not immune to the tenderness integral to Rousseau’s maternal ideal, but they are also rational educators, teaching their children to moderate their passions through the cultivation of their (traditionally masculine) faculty of reason, and exercising temporary authority over them until they become capable of self-government. This appropriation of supposedly masculine attributes challenges the gender boundaries often demarcated by women’s domestic roles, inviting the reader to draw parallels between the moral authority of mother-educators in the domestic realm and that of the legislator in the public sphere.

Wollstonecraft argues that, if mothers wish to fill their “proper place[s]” within the social order effectively, they should not confine themselves to the practical concerns of childcare; on the contrary, they should comprehend the ideological foundations of democratic republicanism in order to inculcate “the true principle of patriotism” in their offspring (66). For Alessa Johns, Wollstonecraft undermines her feminist position by encouraging citizen-mothers to revel in their “natural” maternal role because, as long as women continue to be defined by their domestic duties, their participation in social and political change remains “removed and conceptual” (72). Crucially, however, the well-ordered and virtuous domestic realm does not simply stand in Wollstonecraft’s works as a “paradigm for successful political government” (Mellor 45). On the contrary, Wollstonecraft also identifies a thread of influence running from domestic life to the public sphere, claiming that “private virtue” is “the only security of public freedom and universal happiness” (68). As Mitzi Myers has demonstrated in her analysis of Wollstonecraft’s Original Stories from Real Life (1788), her texts exemplify “a resilient and purposeful maternal discourse, a female mode of cultural reform directed toward improvement of both self and community” (55). Yet if Wollstonecraft suggests that maternal authority has transformative potential in both the private and public spheres (Mellor; Myers), Johns’s reading highlights the difficulty of adapting overdetermined maternal discourses to communicate an emancipatory feminist message—a difficulty exemplified by the French and German translators’ interpretations of her Vindication.

Défense des droits des femmes

We have established that Wollstonecraft’s argument for women’s rights rests on the relationship between domestic concerns and interrelated political, religious, and pedagogical convictions. Her French translator endorses the political and pedagogical claims of her text and emphasizes the relevance of her feminist perspective to the Revolutionary context. Testifying to the anticlericalism of that context, however, he is openly dismissive of the theological foundations of her feminism and thereby risks destabilizing her argument for the equality of the sexes. Moreover, his interpretation of the discourse of republican motherhood seems to be shaped by the culturally pervasive influence of Rousseau, giving houseroom to the notion of essential femininity and distorting Wollstonecraft’s analysis of sexual difference.

The French translator shadows his source text closely, favoring cognates to the extent that, in certain passages, he risks distorting its meaning (Bour, “Boundaries” 498–99). I have argued elsewhere that the translator’s alterations make the prose more forceful, and there is undoubtedly a critical mass of changes made to that effect. Wollstonecraft often adopts a measured style commensurate with rational argument, whereas the translator injects the prose with the fervency of Revolutionary polemic (Kirkley, “Feminism” 191). Thus conditional clauses become unequivocal statements: “if it be fully proved that reason calls for this respect [for women]” (69) becomes “sur-tout lorsqu’il sera bien prouvé, comme cela ne peut manquer de l’être, que la raison exige qu’on fasse attention à leurs plaintes” ‘especially when it is proven, as it cannot fail to be, that reason demands that we pay attention to their grievances’ (16). Indeed, the translator’s rhetoric is so vehement that one is reminded of the speechifying of Wollstonecraft’s French contemporaries, for it seems designed to spur readers not simply to agreement but also to action (Kirkley, “Feminism” 191). In keeping with this pattern of emphasis and reinforcement, the translator’s footnotes tend to expand on Wollstonecraft’s arguments, supplying anecdotal evidence or references to the French literary canon to back up her claims. His paratext consistently links the cause of women’s rights to the political ideology of the Revolution. In this vein, one of his footnotes connects female disenfranchisement with various bêtes noires of the ruptured feudal hierarchy, such as patrician landlords and Catholic priests, depicting women’s rights as the logical conclusion of popular Revolutionary reforms (Kirkley, “Feminism” 191). In short, the translator presents women’s rights as a sign and symptom of the French progress to enlightened democratic government.

In his efforts to amplify Wollstonecraft’s anti-royalist sentiments, however, the translator weakens the intellectual framework supporting her text, turning her sophisticated analysis of the tyrant-slave binary into a simpler formula—wicked king versus oppressed subjects—which heightens her denunciation of hereditary power. With this strategy the translator effectively pits Wollstonecraft’s feminism against that of Gouges, whose expression of royalist sentiments in the Déclaration may partly explain the minimal impact of her text. Gouges appears to regard the elevated status of the monarchy as conducive to moral elevation: “Je n’ai jamais pu me persuader qu’une Princesse, élevée au sein des grandeurs, eût tous les vices de la bassesse” ‘I have never been able to convince myself that a Princess, raised in the bosom of greatness, could have all the vices of degeneracy’ (7). Unlike Gouges, Wollstonecraft had a strong theoretical commitment to republicanism and saw social inequality as morally corruptive (Halldenius 3). Her politics are clear in her claim that the king’s “very station sinks him necessarily below the meanest of his subjects” (85), an allusion to the fact that hereditary privilege removes the obstacles human subjects should encounter and overcome in their pursuit of virtue. The French translator turns this brief allusion to the effects of arbitrary power into an indictment of the king’s character. He is a man “que ses vices rabaissent presque toujours au-dessous du dernier de ses sujets!” ‘whose vices almost always sink him beneath the meanest of his subjects!’ (14). Similarly, Wollstonecraft’s neutral term “regal character” (85) becomes “le despotisme royal” ‘royal despotism’ (12). Monarchs, described in the English text as “dead weights of vice and folly on the community” (86), become “des masses accablantes de vice et de folie dont le poids écrase la Société” ‘oppressive loads of vice and folly whose weight crushes Society’ (17).Footnote⁴ On the whole, the French translator makes very few significant cuts, but at the beginning of chapter 4, a subtle elision reinforces the republican tenor of his translation. Wollstonecraft refers to “a conclusion, which [she has] frequently heard fall from sensible men in favour of an aristocracy: that the mass of mankind cannot be any thing, or the obsequious slaves, who patiently allow themselves to be penned up, would feel their own consequence, and spurn their chains” (121). The translator drops the reference to “sensible men,” thereby removing any suggestion that a reasonable individual might defend hereditary privilege. Taken together, such translational changes work cumulatively to fuse Wollstonecraft’s feminist arguments with republican propaganda; the perspectives of author and translator diverge, however, when it comes to the issue of religion.

Wollstonecraft’s twin beliefs in the equality of human souls and the imperative to develop their moral potential furnished her with a strong argument for female education; but they conflict in Défense des droits des femmes with the translator’s ideological agenda which, in common with that of many committed Revolutionaries, is virulently anticlerical. In a footnote that critiques the British university system, he condemns the religious foundations of collegiate institutions:

For Isabelle Bour, the translator signals his respect both for Wollstonecraft and for women in general with the capitalization, throughout the text, of the word “Femme,” whether used to mean “woman” or “wife” (“Boundaries” 498). Granted the translator is, in many respects, receptive to Wollstonecraft’s claims for gender equality; but where she rejects the idea of innate femininity, his footnotes evince considerable reluctance to jettison the patriarchal vision of women’s “natural” qualities of delicacy and gentleness and their supposed incompatibility with life in the public sphere. Dismissing female political participation in a subordinate clause, he emphasizes women’s crucial but fundamentally domestic role in the success of the Revolution: “si la nature paroît leur refuser les droits politiques, elles ont autant de titres que les hommes aux droits civils; en un mot, c’est à elles à affermir le nouveau régime” ‘if nature appears to deny them political rights, they are just as entitled as men to civil rights; in a word, it falls to them to consolidate the new regime’ (449). Like Wollstonecraft, the translator argues that effective mothering demands education—“les mères sont les premiers maîtres que la nature et la société donnent aux enfants” ‘mothers are the first masters that nature and society give to children’ (449)—but the motive force behind his feminist stance is his ideological investment in the Nouveau Régime:

Evidently conscious that she is straying into divisive territory, Wollstonecraft raises the possibility of women filling political posts: “I may excite laughter, by dropping an hint, which I mean to pursue, some future time, for I really think that women ought to have representatives, instead of being arbitrarily governed without having any direct share allowed them in the deliberations of government” (217). In raising this idea, Wollstonecraft invites controversy; in failing to pursue it, she produces a less radical text, in this respect, than her most outspoken French contemporaries. Despite this relative moderation, however, the translator devotes an extensive footnote to defending traditional norms of feminine behavior. His position suggests that his support for Wollstonecraft’s feminist arguments depends on his belief in the female biological imperative to mother future citizens. He applauds Wollstonecraft’s demand that women strengthen body and mind, but he balks at the idea of their complete estrangement from the supposed essence of femininity, conceived as a titillating kind of fragility:

Women in the German Empire

Rettung der Rechte des Weibes was published in the duchy of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg, which comprised areas of Thuringia held by Duke Ernst II of Gotha, and formed part of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. Christian Gotthilf Salzmann, the editor, was a disciple of Johann Basedow’s Philanthropinist educational movement, which drew on the pedagogical theories of Rousseau. Convinced that most of the world’s evils could be traced to faulty systems of education, he founded the Salzmannschule in 1784 in the Thüringen hamlet of Schnepfenthal, replacing rote-learning with a progressive empirical method. In 1790, Wollstonecraft published a creative translation of Salzmann’s Moralisches Elementarbuch nebst einer Anleitung zum nützlichen Gebrauch desselben (1782–83) and the success of her version, Elements of Morality for the Use of Children, prompted an exchange of letters between them. Regrettably, the correspondence is lost to history, but it seems probable that they discussed their progressive views on women’s education. Although the early Philanthropinists used Rousseau’s construct of woman to restrict female education, Salzmann agreed with Wollstonecraft that children of both sexes could be taught using the same pedagogical principles; in fact, in 1786 he had founded a girls’ school next to the original Salzmannschule. In her Advertisement, Wollstonecraft praises the pedagogical and ideological content of the Elementarbuch and aligns it with her own children’s conduct-book, Original Stories from Real Life. Nonetheless, she adapts Salzmann’s text not only to appeal to her Anglophone readership, but also to move certain passages closer to her distinctively feminist moral perspective. A full discussion of Wollstonecraft’s translational strategy is beyond the scope of this article. For our purposes, however, it is worth noting that her rewriting tends to amplify maternal voices and extend the moral purview of their commentary, enabling subtle critiques of (gender) political and social norms absent from the source text (Kirkley, “Elements”; Johns 61–75).

It seems that Salzmann was, at the very least, receptive to discussing Wollstonecraft’s feminist reinvention of his maternal characters because, when the Vindication was published two years later, she sent him a copy (Godwin, Memoirs 226). Rettung der Rechte des Weibes appeared in two volumes published consecutively in 1793 and 1794. German readers could also buy a separate portrait of Wollstonecraft for four Groschen, which implies that she was already enjoying some renown. The text was translated by Weissenborn but accompanied by Salzmann’s introduction and thirty-seven detailed footnotes, some of which suggest that he paid close attention to the translational process.Footnote⁵ His paratext amounts to a critical commentary on the Vindication, one which I have previously suggested willfully misinterprets and undercuts the feminism of Wollstonecraft’s text. But my view on this score has been altered by further analysis of Rettung der Rechte des Weibes in relation to Salzmann’s later publication of William Godwin’s Memoirs, Denkschrift auf Maria Wollstonecraft Godwin, die Vertheidigerin der Rechte des Weibes (1799). In this article, I want to suggest that Salzmann’s interventions are part of a valiant attempt to introduce feminist ideas into an inhospitable socio-political system. From this perspective, his translation plays an important role in the transmission of Revolutionary feminist principles beyond their immediate ideological context.

Until 1806, the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation was comprised of secular and ecclesiastical states, Reichsstädte (“imperial free cities”), and Reichsritter (“imperial free knights”). To some extent, the “geographical, political, and technological barriers that divided Germans into separate social and economic units kept them apart culturally,” but by the 1790s, the rise of print culture had created a public sphere that transcended these barriers and often “linked islands of cultural contact” (Sheehan 146). Broadly speaking, one area of common ideological ground, shaped by the Lutheran, Calvinist, and pietist religious beliefs prevailing across northern Germany, was the belief that women should be confined to domestic life. Accordingly, women’s education was limited to the skills deemed necessary to fulfil their supposed biological destiny as dutiful wives, devoted mothers, and careful managers of the household realm. Yet a translator’s footnote in the Denkschrift refers to the “deutsche Uebersetzung [of Wollstonecraft’s Vindication], die ebenfalls häufig gelesen worden ist, and noch gelesen wird” ‘German translation which has likewise been frequently read, and is still being read’ (69). This claim for the success of Rettung der Rechte des Weibes is supported by cautiously positive reviews around the time of its publication (Gibbels 83–84). I ascribe this positive reception to the joint translational strategy of Salzmann and Weissenborn, which simultaneously disseminated and diluted Wollstonecraft’s feminism.

In the course of the eighteenth century, exceptional women occasionally wielded political power and cultural influence in the German Empire. These included the Hapsburg Empress Maria Theresa, who tried to improve female literacy in Austria, and Duchess Anna Amalia of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, whose court became one of the leading cultural and literary centers in Europe. A handful of women also excelled in the fields of academic study or authorship; but they were neither as numerous nor as well-known as the French précieuses and femmes savantes or the British Bluestockings. Gifted women such as Sophie von La Roche, Friederike Unger, and Sophie Mereau shied away from the label “gelehrt” ‘learned’ (Sotiropolous 42–47), and there was no German equivalent to Wollstonecraft or Gouges. In 1742, Dorothea Leporin, the first German woman to be awarded a medical degree, had written Gründliche Untersuchung der Ursachen, die das weibliche Geschlecht von Studiren abhalten (Thorough Investigation of the Causes Which Prevent the Female Sex from Studying), in which she argued for coeducation at the highest level and access for women to all professions. Despite positive reviews, this radical treatise was virtually unknown by the nineteenth century. Not until 1802, when Amalia Holst published Über die Bestimmung des Weibes zur höhern Geistesbildung (On Woman’s Suitability to Higher Education), did the German states see significant debate on die Frauenfrage, “the woman question,” and even the nineteenth-century women’s movement did not envisage women moving beyond domestic life.

The only distinctly Revolutionary feminist text to come out of the German Nation in the 1790s was written by Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel, a respected Prussian statesman, writer, and social critic who studied under Kant. Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Weiber (On Improving the Status of Women) (1792) apotheosizes the most progressive—if peripheral—attitudes to women in the German states at the time; it also shares many features with the Vindication, not the least of which is the connection drawn between women’s rights and the universal rights discourse of the French Revolution. With the notable exceptions of Goethe and Schiller, German intellectuals were largely sympathetic to the egalitarian ideals of 1789, which seem to have had an impact on Hippel’s attitudes to women. In the first edition of his bestselling Über die Ehe (On Marriage), published in 1774, he had advocated wifely submissiveness, but by the time the third edition appeared in 1792, he was calling for female emancipation and gender equality. In Verbesserung der Weiber, he connects the Revolution with the progress of enlightenment, but also claims that Frenchmen have erred by denying women their natural rights. Refuting common prejudices about women’s intellectual and physical limitations, he cites, to prove his point, the achievements of Frenchwomen, who have “shown that they understand the value of liberty and that its flame is still able to blaze brightly among them” (121). Echoing Condorcet, he rejects the claim that women’s reproductive role and comparative physical weakness destines them to exclusion from the body politic, arguing that the female body is designed to cope with menstruation and pregnancy, and that women’s capacity to withstand childbirth is, in fact, an indication of strength (72).Footnote⁶ Unlike Wollstonecraft, he stops short of conceptualizing sexual difference predominantly as a social construction, depicting what she calls the “negative virtues”—“patience, docility, good humour, and flexibility”—as quintessentially feminine; but he insists that these qualities befit women for specific professions, such as midwifery or obstetrics, and argues that they should have the same access to university education as men (127).

Although Über die Ehe was almost as popular as Goethe’s Leiden des Jungen Werthers, Verbesserung der Weiber failed to sell, and this failure may be partly attributed to the explicit connection Hippel draws between women’s rights and the Revolution. The enthusiasm of the German intelligentsia was offset by equally vehement opposition to Revolutionary ideas in the wider population, and some reactionaries even “identified the Aufklärung itself as the root of all current problems” (Whaley 597). In August 1791, the Reichstag had introduced new censorship legislation to prevent German Jakobiner from spreading democratic principles. Since 1790s feminism was a Revolutionary phenomenon, many states would have banned the publication or sale of feminist works, especially those rooted in democratic republicanism. Between 1789 and 1799, some 2000 French pamphlets and commentaries were nonetheless translated into German, but 70% expressed a moderate Revolutionary position that was broadly associated with the Gironde and “congenial to the German reformist mentality” (Whaley 597). In 1792, the same year that Verbesserung der Weiber appeared, the Duke of Brunswick led Prussian troops over the French border. By this time, even Revolutionary enthusiasts were beginning to balk at news of the violence erupting in France and, although Hippel’s text does not condone violence, a hint of irony at times undercuts his expressions of disapproval. This could not have endeared him to his Prussian readership. As we shall see, Salzmann emphasizes the pedagogical thrust of Wollstonecraft’s text at the expense of its Revolutionary import.

Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg was a comparatively liberal duchy. Duke Ernst was an enlightened ruler who promoted education, natural sciences, and all aspects of art and literature. Indeed, he helped to fund the Salzmannschule which also housed Salzmann’s printing press. His duchy also shared a border with Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, where Duchess Anna Amalia’s generous patronage brought a stream of eminent writers and artists to her court at Weimar, among them Herder, Goethe, the Schillers, and Wieland, as well as talented women such as the artist and writer, Amalia von Helvig, and the English artists Elizabeth and Emily Gore. Salzmann was evidently operating in an enlightened milieu, but given the reactionary attitudes to women prevailing across the German Empire, his decision to publish a translation of the Vindication suggests that he was remarkably forward-thinking. Considering the fate of Hippel’s text, he was also taking a financial gamble.

Rettung der Rechte des Weibes was clearly more than an act of courtesy from one correspondent to another: if Salzmann had felt more obliged than eager to publish the translation, he need only have produced a smattering of copies before letting the book drop out of sight. On the contrary, he advertised it in a range of newspapers and periodicals. In his introduction, he expresses confidence that his German readership will find in the translation an edifying work full of “Beweise von dem helldenkenden Verstande und dem edeln Herzen der Verfasserin” ‘proofs of the lucid understanding and noble heart of the author’ (1: xii). This seems an unnecessary endorsement for a product of courtesy, suggesting that Salzmann was determined to promote Wollstonecraft’s text. Even more significantly, however, Salzmann’s publication of the Denkschrift confirms that his admiration for Wollstonecraft was sincere enough to survive the controversial details of her private life. The probable translator, Weissenborn (Niedermeier 611), never sanitizes Godwin’s narrative, reproducing almost word-for-word the account of Wollstonecraft’s unconsummated passion for Henry Fuseli; her love affair with Gilbert Imlay; the birth of her illegitimate daughter; her suicide attempts; and her unconventional marriage to Godwin, which took place after she fell pregnant with his child. Salzmann published the first edition of the Memoirs, which means Weissenborn was working from the version Godwin would later revise in response to an outcry from his readership. It speaks to Salzmann and Weissenborn’s shared respect for Wollstonecraft that the translation retains in full every section that Godwin would later tone down or expunge, including his criticisms of the institution of marriage and erotic imagery evoking the affair with Imlay. Weissenborn even strengthens Godwin’s vehement defense of Wollstonecraft’s idiosyncratic moral code. Godwin writes:

Salzmann could publish the Vindication with impunity in his own duchy, but he had to present the text with some caution. He was, after all, living in a politically conservative empire without a free press, and he had to ensure that Rettung der Rechte des Weibes would be sold and distributed in other states and principalities. The original subscription list shows that he achieved just that, for it totals some fifty (mostly middle-class) readers hailing from all corners of the Empire, from as far north as Kiel to the southern duchy of Würtemberg. According to Elisabeth Gibbels, the initial readership probably numbered some 1000–2000 people at a time when 1800 readers could make a profit for the publisher (85). This success is partly due to Salzmann’s paratext. Although he praises Wollstonecraft in his introduction and footnotes, he also underplays certain controversial aspects of her feminism, a strategy that is subtly reflected in Weissenborn’s translation. Their combined efforts may reveal that Salzmann’s German version of the Vindication was intended to promote a reformist pedagogical agenda that was, in the end, less radical than Wollstonecraft’s Revolutionary feminism. Given their promotion of Wollstonecraft and her works even after the publication of Godwin’s Memoirs, however, it seems more likely that it indicates an attempt to introduce feminist ideas to the German Empire in a subdued form acceptable to the target readership.

Rettung der Rechte des Weibes

In 1792, Weissenborn was teaching classics and modern languages at the Salz-mannschule. He was a student of theology in the universities of Jena and Göttingen, both known for their interest in British intellectual life and for large numbers of British students. In Göttingen, there was also some sympathy towards women’s intellectual advancement amongst the academic community. Weissenborn met Enlightenment scholar Christian Gottlob Heyne, whose daughter, Therese Huber, was one of the five Universitätsmamsellen, proficient female scholars educated by academics at Göttingen. The most famous of these is probably the Jena Romanticist and French Revolutionary Klubbist, Caroline Schelling, who helped her husband A. W. Schlegel to translate Shakespeare. In 1796, Weissenborn married Wilhelmine Salzmann, a geography teacher at the Salzmannschule and daughter of its founder. His subsequent authorship of a proto-feminist article, Über die bisherige Zurücksetzung des weiblichen Geschlechts (On the Present Neglect of the Female Sex) (1800), suggests that he would have approached Wollstonecraft’s Vindication as a receptive reader.

The German translation shadows the source text as closely as possible. Weissenborn appears keen to pinpoint the precise meaning of idiomatic words and phrases, often using two German adjectives to render a single English one. The extent and importance of his respect for Wollstonecraft is particularly evident in his translation of controversial statements. In chapter 7, for instance, Wollstonecraft inserts a provocative footnote: “I have conversed, as man with man, with medical men, on anatomical subjects” (193). This claim aligns her knowledge and intellect with those of her male contemporaries, fanning the flame of conservative anxiety that female emancipation would “unsex” women. Weissenborn translates the footnote virtually word for word, although he does insert the qualifying adverb “zuweilen” ‘now and then’: “Ich habe mich zuweilen, wie ein Mann mit Männern, mit Aertzten über anatomische Gegenstände unterhalten” ‘I have now and then conversed, like a man with other men, with doctors on anatomical subjects’ (2: 119). Similarly, when Wollstonecraft insists that “it is time to separate unchangeable morals from local manners” (114), Weissenborn expands the sentence, ostensibly to clarify that a longstanding tradition of patriarchal supremacy cannot be equated with universal moral standards: “Es ist Zeit, die ewigen und unveränderlichen Grundsätze der Sittlichkeit von Gebräuchen und Gewohnheiten, die nach Verschiedenheit der Orte verschieden seyn können, zu unterscheiden” ‘It is time to separate the perpetual and unchanging principles of morality from the usages and customs which can vary according to the difference between places’ (1: 158).

Nevertheless, there are also significant passages in which Weissenborn mutes the feminist voice of the source text. His alterations are subtle in comparison to those of many interventionist translators of the period, but they are nonetheless conspicuous insofar as they signify departures from his broad attempt to stay close to the English text. He may not have been as progressive as Wollstonecraft; he may have decided that German readers would find certain passages off-putting; or he may have been adhering to a strategy agreed with Salzmann. The German version of the Vindication is generally more verbose than the English original, a prolixity that comes mainly from Weissenborn inserting qualifiers into contentious passages. In doing so, he adds a tentative note to Wollstonecraft’s analysis, giving her textual voice the softness and restraint associated with femininity in the period.

As well as muting Wollstonecraft’s bold self-styling as a “philosopher” and a “moralist” (Kirkley, “Rescuing” 167–68), Weissenborn is careful to avoid language that calls her femininity into question. In her introduction, Wollstonecraft refers briefly to her sex when she makes a false promise to respect conventional notions of sexual difference: “Yet, because I am a woman, I would not lead my readers to suppose that I mean violently to agitate the contested question respecting the equality or inferiority of the sex” (74). In the German translation, Weissenborn’s semi-colon introduces a hiatus that draws closer attention to Wollstonecraft’s sex:

The impact of Weissenborn’s translational choices must be weighted with that of Salzmann’s paratext, which attempts to steer the reader towards particular interpretations. One of the most prominent features is his attempt to divorce Wollstonecraft’s arguments from their Revolutionary context, conspicuous in his decision to cut the dedication to Talleyrand. Wollstonecraft saw democratic republicanism as the endpoint of humankind’s progress to political perfection and, although she advocated gradual reforms, she also believed that the cultural degeneracy wrought by absolutism had made the French Revolution inevitable (Halldenius 12). Salzmann shared Wollstonecraft’s moral perfectibilism, but in his preface he predicts dire consequences following from accelerated political change:

Since Wollstonecraft repeatedly equates patriarchal oppression with political tyranny, Salzmann’s interventions often interrogate the analogy and diminish its feminist import. In his introduction, he claims that a wise ruler never acts without consulting his people, just as a reasonable husband never acts without consulting his wife, which means that both of these potential despots should teach their subordinates to reason (1: xviii). Salzmann thus argues for improvements in female education but, in doing so, he emphasizes that, just as vindicating women’s rights need not connote enthusiasm for democratic politics, so educating women need not lead to any seismic shift in the political and social status quo. This pattern continues in the main body of the text. In chapter 3, Wollstonecraft remarks caustically: “The divine right of husbands, like the divine right of kings, may, it is to be hoped, in this enlightened age, be contested without danger” (110). Salzmann appends a long footnote to this statement, interpreting the meaning for the reader in a bid to play down its radical connotations:

Framing Rettung der Rechte des Weibes as advice literature for male readers, Salzmann assures them that a proper education will equip their female relatives to become the capable guardians of a tranquil home and hearth. Presenting women, not as self-defining individuals, but as agents of the happiness or misery men, he opines that there is no greater blessing for any man, “als ein gesundes, munteres, rechtschaffenes, verstaendiges Weib” ‘than a healthy, cheerful, honest, sensible woman’ (1: xx). Salzmann brings a similar perspective to his discussion of motherhood. Advocating pedagogical reform that will ensure the health of women’s bodies as well as their minds, he bases his argument on the need to guarantee good quality breast milk as well as rational and knowledgeable childcare:

As Gibbels observes, because Salzmann’s footnotes often dominate the page, his arguments can appear to take priority over those of the main text (167). Each time he contradicts Wollstonecraft, he prefaces the footnote with an apology, striking an uncertain note somewhere between respectful disagreement and overweening courtesy. In chapter 2, he writes ruefully: “Ich kann nicht umhin hier der würdigen Verfasserin zu widersprechen” ‘I cannot here avoid contradicting the worthy authoress’ (1: 121); and again in chapter 9: “Die Mrs. Wollstonecraft verzeihe mir, dass ich hier widersprechen muss” ‘May Mrs. Wollstonecraft excuse me, I must contradict her here’ (2: 214). The need for contradiction arises when Weissenborn’s softening of the textual voice does not sufficiently mitigate Wollstonecraft’s most inflammatory statements, which might risk alienating the German readership. For instance, when she claims that reason has a greater claim to sovereignty than men, Salzmann objects that women owe their husbands obedience because they depend on them for material comfort and protection. Unlike Hippel, he argues that women’s essential qualities destine them for the domestic sphere, where their maternal duties can leave them little time for public life:

Thus far, we have concentrated on interventions that attenuate Wollstonecraft’s feminist argument and affirm women’s domestic role as their biological destiny. It is important to recognize, however, that Salzmann also devotes part of his introduction and several footnotes to sanctioning and expanding on Wollstonecraft’s progressive pedagogical principles. These additions characterize him as a broadminded and committed educationalist, one who is determined to win the argument for improvements in female education. Controversially, footnote f in the second volume advocates teaching young women about the reproductive organs of plants, even suggesting that such lessons might facilitate candid sex education (2: 117): “Eine Mutter, die über diesen Punkt mit ihrer Tochter nicht sprechen kann, ist nur halbe Mutter, und setzt sie der Gefahr aus, aus Unwissenheit und Mangel an Belehrung, Gesundheit und Ehre zu verliehren” ‘A mother who cannot talk to her daughter on this point is only half a mother, and puts her in danger of losing her health and her honor from ignorance and lack of instruction’ (2: 117). Unlike many of his contemporaries, Salzmann here attributes female sexual errors to deficient education rather than inherent depravity. Indeed, he is at his most broadminded when he touches on the controversial topic of female sexual virtue. Reinforcing Wollstonecraft’s criticism of the sexual double standard, he not only expresses sympathy for fallen women, but also points out how gendered rules of conduct make them vulnerable to unscrupulous suitors:

Conclusions

The rewriters of Wollstonecraft’s Vindication engage with her constructivist account of gender and the maternal ideology which both informs her feminism and threatens to undermine the discourse of natural rights integral to it. To some extent, the translational strategies of the anonymous French translator and Salzmann and Weissenborn respectively are conditioned by their positionality, and, as Wollstonecraft defines the Vindication as a French Revolutionary text, their different versions reflect the impact of the Revolution on their particular political contexts. In Défense des droits des femmes, paratextual commentary and subtle but significant lexical changes highlight the connection between women’s rights and the Revolutionary project. The translator’s sympathy for her arguments appears to stem from his conviction that women—especially mothers—will play a pivotal role in preventing a counter-revolution and consolidating the Nouveau Régime. From this distinctive ideological perspective, which views women rather as instruments of the Revolution than as independent subjects, the translator gives a qualified endorsement to Wollstonecraft’s constructivist theory of gender. Her insistence on the Revolutionary principle of universal natural rights is complicated, however, by her emphasis on republican motherhood, which risks implying that women are predisposed to domestic rather than public life. This tension at the heart of her text is heightened by the translator’s reluctance to abandon the concept of feminine essence altogether and his eagerness to promote women’s maternal role, which he regards as a biological determinant that excludes them from the realm of politics. Thus the French readership is encouraged to interpret women’s “natural rights” as civic rather than political. In Rettung der Rechte des Weibes, Weissenborn subtly tones down Wollstonecraft’s textual voice but nonetheless produces a largely uncensored version of the Vindication. Salzmann uses his footnotes to set up a dialogue in which he rejects Wollstonecraft’s republicanism and alternatively endorses, redefines, and refutes her feminist views. The dialogue is weighted in his favor, for his introduction encourages particular interpretations of the text, inviting the German readership to approach it as a conduct-book rather than a Revolutionary manifesto. Salzmann seizes the opportunity to support Wollstonecraft’s progressive sexual politics, but he also heightens the discourse of maternal duty already present in the source text and draws out its essentializing potential. It is clear that Salzmann and Weissenborn distort the Revolutionary accent of Wollstonecraft’s text; by tempering her feminist voice, however, they also ensure that it is audible in the reactionary political climate of the German Empire.

Both Défense des droits des femmes and Rettung der Rechte des Weibes proved influential texts. As Bour has demonstrated, the French reviews were almost uniformly positive (“New Wollstonecraft” 576–80). In 1826, a M. César Gardeton purportedly published a new translation of the Vindication which was, in fact, a translation of an earlier feminist text, Woman not Inferior to Man (1739); it would seem that Wollstonecraft’s name guaranteed sales (Botting 506–07). The anonymous French version became the source text for Julian de Velasco’s translated excerpts and review in the Diario de Madrid, which added Wollstonecraft’s voice—stripped of its antiauthoritarian tenor—to the debate about women in reactionary Spain (Kitts 354). The Salzmann/Weissenborn version is thought to have served as a source text for Ijsbrand van Hamelsveld’s Dutch translation, Verdediging van der rechten der vrouwen (1797), and Jøgen Borch’s Danish translation, Qvindekjønnets Rettigheder forsvarede (1801–02), which also incorporated Salzmann’s preface (Kloek and Mijnhardt 230–31; Kirkley, “Feminism”). The success of Rettung der Rechte des Weibes meant that nineteenth-century German feminists could look to Wollstonecraft as a foremother: in 1832, four years after Hippel’s publisher complained that unsold copies of Verbesserung der Weiber were still crowding his shelves, Henriette Herz completed a new translation of the Vindication (Diethe 23; Simon 61). Recreated in different ways that by turns amplified and muted its most controversial political and gender theoretical aspects, Wollstonecraft’s feminist thought travelled and infiltrated the literary systems of Western Europe. If scholars have already begun to acknowledge her relevance in studies of nineteenth-century gender political thought, this article offers some insight into the complex trajectory of influence of just one work in her extensive corpus. What is needed now is large-scale comparative analysis of the many texts which appropriated and transformed Wollstonecraft’s feminism in the different languages and changing national and cultural contexts of nineteenth-century Europe. Only then will we comprehend the full significance of her translational afterlife.