Politics
1759 to 1797, England
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman and the founding argument of liberal feminism.
Start learning Mary →In 1792 Wollstonecraft turned the Enlightenment’s own logic on the Enlightenment itself: if rights rest on reason, and women are rational beings, then women have the same rights as men.
Wollstonecraft’s deepest claim was that women’s apparent weakness was no fact of nature but the manufactured product of a corrupt education designed to make them charming, dependent, and unfit to reason.
Wollstonecraft’s boldest metaphysical claim was that reason and virtue have no sex - that the human soul is one, and that any ‘separate’ female virtue is a contradiction in terms.
Wollstonecraft delivered a searing critique of marriage as it was - a system that left women economically dependent, legally powerless, and reduced, she charged, to a respectable form of bondage.
Before she vindicated the rights of woman, Wollstonecraft vindicated the rights of men - the very first published answer to Burke’s attack on the French Revolution, defending reason and natural rights against reverence…
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