author
Jacob Bouten
1880–1940
Best remembered for a detailed 1922 study of Mary Wollstonecraft, this Dutch scholar wrote in English about early feminist thought and helped bring Wollstonecraft’s ideas to new readers.
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About the author
Born in Dordrecht in 1880 and died in 1940, Jacob Bouten was a Dutch scholar and university teacher. Records from the University of Amsterdam’s Album Academicum identify him as a private lecturer in nineteenth-century English literature and the literature of the United States from 1933 to 1940.
He is most closely associated with Mary Wollstonecraft and the Beginnings of Female Emancipation in France and England, published in 1922. That book, issued as an academic dissertation in Amsterdam, examines Wollstonecraft’s place in the history of women’s rights and remains the work for which Bouten is most often listed in library and public-domain catalogs.
Little biographical detail appears to be widely available online beyond those basic facts, but the surviving record suggests a serious literary historian with a strong interest in English-language intellectual history and the origins of feminist thought.