A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

In 1792 Mary Wollstonecraft answered a French politician who had proposed that girls receive only a limited domestic education. Women, she argues, are not naturally weaker in mind; they seem so because they are denied education and taught that their only purpose is to please men. Give them the same rational education, she says, and they will be better wives and mothers, and better citizens.

The book takes particular aim at Rousseau's ideas about women in Emile, and it is one of the founding texts of feminism. Wollstonecraft died in 1797 after giving birth to her daughter, Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein.

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) grew up with a violent father and worked as a companion, a schoolmistress and a governess before she made her living as a writer in London. She answered Edmund Burke's attack on the French Revolution with A Vindication of the Rights of Men, and two years later wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

She lived in Paris during the Revolution, travelled in Scandinavia and wrote a fine book of letters about it, and in 1797 married the philosopher William Godwin. She died eleven days after giving birth to their daughter, Mary Shelley, the future author of Frankenstein.