In a frequently cited essay, Joyce Zonana characterizes “feminist orientalism” as the displacement of “the source of patriarchal oppression onto an ‘Oriental,’ ‘Mahometan’ society, enabling British readers to contemplate local problems without questioning their own self-definition as Westerners and Christians.” This articulation of feminism and orientalism is epitomized by Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), which pronounces,

Wollstonecraft's Vindication, that is, confirms the tendency within anglocentric feminism towards the displacement of patriarchal oppression from the normative “freeborn” English woman onto an orientalized other. Such distancing premises the self-definition of the English nation as exclusively western and Christian, with its normative woman incorporated into the cultural and racial exclusions constituting the generic, though implicitly masculinist, subject position. As “the founding text of Western liberal feminism,” Wollstonecraft's Vindication thus presents “the fullest explicit feminist orientalist perspective.” Yet, to assume that feminist orientalism begins with Wollstonecraft, or that the alliance between feminism and orientalism is inherent to the English tradition, ignores the previous century of feminist debates.