Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Mary Wollstonecraft, a London writer and former teacher and governess, published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792, during the debates of the French Revolution. Two years earlier she had answered Edmund Burke's attack on the Revolution with A Vindication of the Rights of Men. Now she applied Enlightenment principles to women. If reason is what makes humans moral beings, she argued, then denying women education and independence keeps them weak, dependent and focused on pleasing men, which harms families and society.

She directly attacked Rousseau's view that women should be educated only to please, and she dedicated the book to the French statesman Talleyrand, urging him to include girls in France's new education system. Wollstonecraft called for coeducation and for women to be able to earn their own living; some contemporaries mocked her, and her reputation suffered after her death when details of her unconventional private life were published. Today she is widely seen as a founder of modern feminism.