While Wollstonecraft does call for equality between the sexes in particular areas of life, especially morality, she does not explicitly state that men and women are equal. Wollstonecraft hurried to complete the work in direct response to ongoing events she intended to write a more thoughtful second volume but died before completing it. From her reaction to this specific event, she launched a broad attack against double standards, indicting men for encouraging women to indulge in excessive emotion. Wollstonecraft was prompted to write the Rights of Woman after reading Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord's 1791 report to the French National Assembly, which stated that women should only receive domestic education. 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. 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. In it, Wollstonecraft responds to those educational and political theorists of the eighteenth century who did not believe women should receive a rational education. Mary Wollstonecraft's work was received with a mixture of admiration and outrage - one critic called her 'a hyena in petticoats' - yet it established her as the mother of modern feminism.A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects at WikisourceĪ Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (1792), written by British philosopher and women's rights advocate Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797), is one of the earliest works of feminist philosophy.

Passionate and forthright, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman attacked the prevailing view of docile, decorative femininity, and instead laid out the principles of emancipation: an equal education for girls and boys, an end to prejudice, and for women to become defined by their profession, not their partner.

Writing in an age when the call for the rights of man had brought revolution to America and France, Mary Wollstonecraft produced her own declaration of female independence in 1792. 'She is alive and active - we hear her voice and trace her influence even now' Virginia Woolf

A vindication of the rights of woman