A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and
Moral Subjects (1792)
Written by the eighteenth-century British feminist Mary
Wollstonecraft, is one of the earliest works of
feminist philosophy. In it, Wollstonecraft responds to the educational and
political theorists of the eighteenth century who wanted to deny women an
education. She argues that women ought to have an education commensurate with their position in society, claiming that women are essential to
the nation because they educate its children and because they could be
"companions" to their husbands, rather than mere wives. Instead of
viewing women as ornaments to society or property to be traded in marriage,
Wollstonecraft maintains that they are human beings deserving of the same
fundamental rights as men.
Wollstonecraft was prompted to write the Rights of Woman by Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord's 1791 report to the French National Assembly which
stated that women should only receive a domestic education; she used her
commentary on this specific event to launch a broad attack against sexual
double standards and to indict men for encouraging women to indulge in
excessive emotion. Wollstonecraft wrote the Rights of Woman hurriedly in
order to respond directly to ongoing events; she intended to write a more
thoughtful second volume, but she died before completing it.
While Wollstonecraft does call for equality between the sexes in
particular areas of life, such as morality, she does not explicitly state that
men and women are equal. Her ambiguous statements regarding the equality of the
sexes have since made it difficult to classify Wollstonecraft as a modern
feminist, particularly since the word and the concept were unavailable to her.
Although it is commonly assumed now that the Rights of Woman was unfavourably received, this is a modern misconception based
on the belief that Wollstonecraft was as reviled during her lifetime as she
became after the publication of William
Godwin's Memoirs of the Author of A
Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798). The Rights of Woman was actually well-received when it
was first published in 1792. One biographer has called it "perhaps the
most original book of [Wollstonecraft's] century".
URL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Vindication_of_the_Rights_of_Woman