The Books
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
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Who grew up in poverty watching her mother suffer, worked as a governess and teacher, and wrote the first major philosophical argument for the equal rational capacity of women — in 1792.
I do not wish women to have power over men; but over themselves.Mary Wollstonecraft — A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792
Mary Wollstonecraft was born in London in 1759, the second of six children of a failed farmer who drank and was violent. She watched her mother suffer under her father's cruelty and spent her childhood intervening between them. She left home at eighteen to work as a companion to a widow in Bath, then helped support her family as a governess, then founded a school with her friend Fanny Blood. When the school failed and Fanny died in childbirth in Portugal — Wollstonecraft had traveled to be with her — she returned to London, desperate, and turned to writing.
She became a reader for the publisher Joseph Johnson and began writing reviews, translations, and original work. A Vindication of the Rights of Men, a response to Edmund Burke's attack on the French Revolution, was published anonymously in 1790. When Burke dismissed it as the work of a woman, she revealed her authorship and published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1792, at thirty-two. It was the first major philosophical argument for the equal rational capacity of women and their right to education, written at a time when women were legally the property of their husbands and denied almost every form of public participation.
She went to Paris to witness the French Revolution, fell in love with the American Gilbert Imlay, had a daughter, was abandoned, attempted suicide twice. She recovered, fell in love with the philosopher William Godwin, became pregnant, married him (reluctantly — both were opposed to marriage as an institution), and died eleven days after giving birth to her daughter Mary, who would grow up to write Frankenstein.
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman makes a single, clear, and radical argument: if women appear irrational, frivolous, and dependent, it is because they have been educated to be irrational, frivolous, and dependent. Give women the same education as men, subject them to the same rational discipline, hold them to the same moral standards, and they will demonstrate the same rational capacity. The limitations attributed to women's nature are the product of their circumstances, not their biology.
This argument belongs in this library because it is, at its root, an argument about human potential and the conditions required for its development — the same argument that Samuel Smiles makes about working-class men, that Booker T. Washington makes about formerly enslaved people, and that Napoleon Hill makes about anyone who applies his principles. The category changes; the structure of the argument is identical: the capacity exists; the circumstances prevent its expression; change the circumstances.
Wollstonecraft also anticipated much of what later psychological research would confirm: that the qualities attributed to nature are frequently the product of environment and expectation, that people tend to become what they are expected to become, and that the person who is never expected to develop rational discipline rarely does. Education — genuine education that develops the capacity to reason rather than the capacity to please — is the prerequisite for any genuine development of human potential.
Strengthen the female mind by enlarging it, and there will be an end to blind obedience.Mary Wollstonecraft — A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792
The foundational text of Western feminism. More rigorous and more philosophically interesting than its reputation suggests. Begin with the Introduction.
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