“The Tranquil March of the Revolution”: German and German-American Reverberations of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Writings

This chapter considers the reception of Mary Wollstonecraft’s work by German-speaking authors. Several of her books were translated into German by Friedrich Christian Weissenborn, a teacher at the Erziehungsanstalt, an innovative philanthropical school in Schnepfenthal founded by the pastor Christian Gotthilf Salzmann, whose Moralisches Elementarbuch (1783) Wollstonecraft had translated into English in 1790. In his introduction and footnotes to Weissenborn’s 1793–94 translation of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Salzmann attempts to tone down some of Wollstonecraft’s more radical feminist ideas and anti-aristocratic sentiment. In both his translations and his own writings, however, Weissenborn supports her views about women’s roles, though he emphasizes her gradualist vision of social change. Johns concludes by considering the reception of the work by the German-American Forty-Eighter Mathilde Franziska Anneke, who embraces Wollstonecraft’s more radical feminist ideas.