A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Mary Wollstonecraft 1792
This extended argument calls for women to receive an education that develops their reason. Wollstonecraft challenges Rousseau's claim that girls should be educated mainly to please men.
317 pages 6h 10m reading time
- One of the founding works of modern feminism, and among the first books in English to argue at length for women's equality.
- Argues that women only seem weaker in mind than men because they are denied a real education, and that both sexes have the same power to reason.
- Argues that women should be treated as full human beings with their own minds, and not as ornaments or as men's property, and that society as a whole suffers when half its people are kept ignorant.
- Inspired the women's rights movement of the 1800s, and later campaigners for women's votes and education looked back to it as a key early text.
Answered a French politician
She dedicated it to Talleyrand, a French leader whose plan for national schools kept girls' learning mostly at home.
Written in six weeks
She wrote it in about six weeks, and the printer set early pages while she was still writing later ones.
A promised second part
She planned a second volume on women's rights under the law, but she never wrote it.
Harmed by her husband's memoir
After her death, her husband's honest account of her love affairs shocked readers, and the book lost favor for decades.