Vindication of the Rights of Woman
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‘My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone.’
In the midst of revolution, when fundamental social upheaval was reshaping France and America, writer and philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft made an impassioned argument for women to have a place in this new world. Her demands laid out in this 1792 essay, to treat women as human beings deserving of a rational education, self-determination and equal rights alongside men, laid the foundation for modern feminism.
Wollstonecraft has been admired and loathed: called a ‘hyena in petticoats’ by Horace Walpole and an inspiration to writers and feminists such as George Eliot and Millicent Fawcett. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is a key text to understand the making of the modern world.
Born in 1759, Mary Wollstonecraft was a writer and philosopher whose most enduring text, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, laid the foundation for modern feminism. She travelled to revolutionary France as a young woman to witness and participate in the radical social change taking place there. Throughout her life she wrote in favor of equal rights and women's rational education, her work inspiring authors and thinkers including Jane Austen, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot and Millicent Garrett Fawcett. She died aged 38, soon after giving birth to her daughter Mary Shelley, a pioneering and radical author in her own right.