A Vindication of the Rights of Women

By Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary Woolstonecroft is now regarded as one of the founding feminist philosophers, and her writings are a key voice in a feminist conversation that still continues today. Writing in a time when men were asserting their rights in revolutions in America and France, Wollstonecraft produced her own declaration of female independence in 1792. Passionate, eloquent and forthright, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman launched a scathing attack on the understanding of women - as docile, domestic figures - and instead laid out the tenets for a new vision. An equal education for girls and boys, an end to prejudice and a chance for women to become defined by their profession, not their partner, were all some of Wollstonecraft's ideas. Whereas Mary Wollstonecraft's work was received at the time with a mixture of admiration and outrage, she is now rightly viewed as a powerful matriarch of modern feminism.

This book is part of a range of highly designed fiction and non-fiction classics. With bold, eye-catching graphic covers by Evi O Studio, this collection aims to introduce a selection of the most celebrated works of the last thousand years to a new audience. Featuring tales of adventure, fiction from the 19th and 20th centuries, feminist writings, and reflections on art, politics, philosophy and the origins of man, this is a small, wide-reaching and essential collection.

Evi O Studio is led by Evi, a designer with over 10 years' industry experience. She has worked as a designer at Penguin Books, and her work has won a number of publishing and design awards, including Young Designer of the Year and Book of the Year. Evi is also a well-known artist, exhibiting her abstract paintings regularly in Sydney and Melbourne.

• Language: English
• Publisher: OH Editions
• Release date: Nov 29, 2022
• ISBN: 9781914317835

Mary Wollstonecraft

Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) was an English writer, philosopher, and feminist. Born in London, Wollstonecraft was raised in a financially unstable family. As a young woman, she became friends with Jane Arden, an intellectual and socialite, and Fanny Blood, a talented illustrator and passionate educator. After several years on her own, Wollstonecraft returned home in 1780 to care for her dying mother, after which she moved in with the Blood family and began planning live independently with Fanny. Their plan proved financially impossible, however, and Fanny soon married and moved to Portugal, where, in 1785, she died from complications of pregnancy. This inspired Wollstonecraft’s first novel, Mary: A Fiction (1788), launching her career as one of eighteenth-century England’s leading literary voices. In 1790, in response to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Wollstonecraft wrote Vindication of the Rights of Men, a political pamphlet defending the cause of the French Revolution, advocating for republicanism, and illustrating the ideals of England’s emerging middle class. Following the success of her pamphlet, Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), a groundbreaking work of political philosophy and an early feminist text that argues for the education of women as well as for the need to recognize them as rational, independent beings. The same year, Wollstonecraft travelled to France, where she lived for a year while moving in Girondist circles and observing the changes enacted by the newly established National Assembly. In 1793, she was forced to leave France as the Jacobins rose to power, executing many of Wollstonecraft’s friends and colleagues and expelling foreigners from the country. In 1797, she married the novelist and anarchist philosopher William Godwin, with whom she bore her daughter Mary, who would eventually write the novel Frankenstein (1818). Several days afterward, however, Wollstonecraft died at the age of 38 from septicemia, leaving a legacy as a pioneering feminist and unparalleled figure in English literature.

Reviews for A Vindication of the Rights of Women

[akbouterse · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

3.5 stars
I read this for a class but I did enjoy it. I found some of the ideas within this book really interesting. The reason I didn't rate this higher is that I personally found some of the writing to be a bit repetitive and clearly some of the ideas in this book are outdated. There is still some expectation that women and men are inherently different while I think the modern idea is more that there may be some physical differences between men and women but most differences we see is more the result of societal influence rather than inherent differences.

Wollstonecraft proposes education and education of boys and girls together as being the solution to a lot of problems with inequality. While I don't disagree with education being very helpful with promoting equality and probably at the time, fighting for girls to have access to education was very important and novel, I do think that now that we, at least in the U.S., have an education system that does educate girls and boys together, it is clear that it takes more than integration to promote equality between men and women.

I did really enjoy reading some early theory on this topic but I definitely can get a little frustrated when I'm reading theory that is so clearly outdated, especially when I am not super familiar with the theory expanding on a topic that came later. I would recommend this book. It has a lot of influential and interesting ideas. Just know that feminist political theory has advanced after this book was written.

[alsocass · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book changed everything, and opened my eyes to a whole world

[helenliz_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I'm torn on this one. One the one had, this is the founding document of feminism, of which I am a modern day beneficiary. On the other hand, I found a lot that I could not relate to. It's a single volume of what was intended to be a 3 volume treatise, this isn't a fully finished article. It also has the feel of having been written swiftly, it doesn't follow an entirely logical sequence, and it repeats itself more than once. On the other hand, this gives it an impression of being written with feeling (which is ironic, when reading the view on emotions expressed in this). What I didn't relate to:The reasons for wanting to educate women is so that they can use reason to supplant emotions. Passion is a sign of weakness. Women should be equal so that they can gain merit in heaven for their soulsAn educated women makes for a better mother to her childrenThat marriage & motherhood should be a woman's ideal. There's a lot in there that I found impossible to relate to. It seems to me that she wants to make women into female men. The trouble with that being that she then wants to assign women to a set role in life, that of wife and mother. I can't see that suppressing emotion to reason is ever a good idea, it strikes me as a recipe for mental health issues. Life is a balance between head and heart, not the suppression of one to the other. And to argue that passion is not worth the same as reason is to ignore the impact that emotion can have on a life. It also strikes me that her life is not an example of practicing what she preaches. Her attempt to commit suicide after Imlay deserted her and her marriage to Godwin suggest, to me, that she would, herself, be unable to meet her own expectations. It strikes me as an argument that only works in the abstract. The call on religion is, clearly, of its time and is something that makes a lot of this hard to take seriously. I also note that she fails to take issue with the attribution of God as male, which is something I find unpalatable. The limitation of the women's role to the sphere of wife and mother is somewhat inexplicable. Mary Wollstencraft would seem to be an example of a woman who wanted a life outside that sphere, as she didn't fit that role herself. It seems an odd contrast again. On the other hand, there is a lot of ambition in this. She wants equal opportunities for education of both sexes, in fact going as far as to propose primary schools on a national basis. There is the call for women to be represented in parliament (along with the point that the franchise is still very small at this time, and that the majority of the poor are also disenfranchised). There's the wish to change the law to allow women to have civil rights, to be able to hold their own property and have control of their own income. The other oddity in this was that this is directed purely to middle class women. It's not intended as a broad rallying cry for women. I'm not sure I can understand the logic of this.It's difficult to rate books from a different era, their starting point is so different from where we are now. I wanted to love this, to find it as a rallying cry that I could take up. It didn't work out like that, there was a lot of good, but there was too much that I found hard to get behind.

[crazymamie · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I had been wanting to read this for a long time, so when I saw it narrated by Fiona Shaw last year, I snapped it up. The narration is brilliantly done - perfectly delivered, and I loved that they used a male narrator (Jonathan Keeble) to narrate the parts where Wollstonecraft quotes from Fordyce's Sermons and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. This is basically one long essay that is divided into chapters, each addressing or responding to a different theme. While it is dated, as one would expect anything from 1792 to be, it is also still relevant. Definitely recommended - not sure I would have made it through the print version, but the audio is fabulous.

[devil_llama · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Sometimes it's difficult to know how to rate such a classic. This work blazed trails for women, so one doesn't want to be too harsh on it, but it is difficult to read and turgid by today's standards of writing. The author focuses way too much on keeping women moral as the reason for educating them, though one suspects that is more to sell the idea to the men of the time, since she herself had a life that did not fit with what she described as a proper role for a woman in this book. The book appeared about the time of the French Revolution, and the idea of equality was being shouted both in France and across the pond in the former colonies; this author references both countries frequently in her desire to spread the idea of equality a bit further, and include women in the boundaries. Overall, worthwhile more for the history than the ideas, since most of us have moved on much beyond her modest (by today's standards) proposals. One real downside is that the book focused relentlessly on the idle classes; one who has read any history at all can hardly imagine her descriptions of the follies of poorly educated women applying to the rank-and-file of the hard-working women who didn't have time for the frivolous pursuits she decried. Such things may seem petty or picky as critiques, but these are the critiques that are always being leveled at feminists, whether they are true or not, and it would be nice to be able to point to a founding document and say, "see? we were always concerned about all women, not just rich women", so it's quite disappointing when such an important author gives fodder to the naysayers.

[setnahkt · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Might seem like an odd combination, but there’s method. Mary Wollstonecraft is the author of Vindication of the Rights of Woman (although she may be more famous for being the mother of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, who eventually became Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly). At any rate, Ms. Wollstonecraft may have been the first radical feminist; she was nicknamed “The Hyena in Petticoats” by contemporaries. It’s true that the lot of women was pretty miserable for 18th century Englishwomen; women could not own property, and the only grounds for divorce for women was desertion. (A man could get a divorce for adultery, but a woman couldn’t; as long as her husband kept supporting her he was free to consort with all and sundry, and many did). Alas, despite its importance, this book is pretty tedious. Ms. Wollstonecraft is not a talented writer, and it took a lot of patience to get through this. To her credit, her main point is that woman should get the same education as men; but she gets sidetracked so often on questions of feminine beauty, details of educational methods (she sometimes sounds annoyingly like a NEA representative) and various other diversions that her main point gets lost. (I was once a member of NOW, until I read an editorial in the NOW newsletter stating NOWs position on land claims of the Hopi. I was a little puzzled as to what NOW was doing getting involved in Native American rights; a friend explained that “Native American Rights are a women’s issue”. Well, perhaps, but I decided that self defense was a women’s issue too, noted that there are more women in the NRA than the NOW, and transferred all my donations there). This is the same problem Wollstonecraft has, if you make everything “a women’s issue”, then nothing is a women’s issue.
Wollstonecraft’s personal life was interesting given her political views. Her first husband (they never actually married) was Gilbert Imlay, an American. Mr. Imlay lost interest after the birth of their child, and took up with an actress, whereupon Wollstonecraft jumped off a bridge into the Thames. She was dragged out by a passer-by. She then took up with an old friend, William Godwin, who was of the opinion that marriage was an artificial institution unnecessary to virtuous individuals while Wollstonecraft had argued that cohabitation was evil. They did marry after Wollstonecraft’s second pregnancy, but never lived together; Wollstonecraft died in childbirth.
So what does this have to do with Georgette Heyer, who is more or less the inventor of the Regency romance novel? Ms. Heyer was prolific with I think around 50 works to her credit; they all have more or less the same plot (unlikely girl attracts the attention of rich but accomplished English gentleman who falls in love with her virtues rather than her beauty). There are a number of fairly pedestrian mystery novels, and she sometimes leaves her time period for the medieval, Elizabethan, Restoration or Georgian settings. All that said, she’s pretty enjoyable. Her historical research is meticulous to the extent that it’s sometimes difficult to figure out character’s dialect without recourse to the dictionary. The plotting, despite its basic predictability, has enough surprises to be entertaining, and her characters manage to be individuals despite being all essentially the same. Oddly, she seems to spend more time on her male’s character development than her females, and she has a disturbing tendency to let her heroes get shot in the arm so the heroine can prove her worth by nursing them back to health, possibly showing that while her history is otherwise immaculate she had a poor idea of what happens when you get hit by a 0.79” lead ball (to be fair, Charlotte Bronte gets away with this in Shirley, so I suppose it’s alright).
Now then, I mentioned above that Vindication is slow reading, and I often pick a lighter book as sort of a “palate cleaner” to take a break better the heavy chapters. Thus, I was reading Heyer’s The Quiet Gentleman at the same time as Vindication, and lo and behold heroine Drusilla Morville is acquainted with Mary Wollstonecraft and even recounts her suicide attempt with a mix of amusement and disapproval. Must be something to coincidences after all.

[engpunk77 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I read this during my last quarter as an undergraduate English major. The class was on revolutionary women writers and it was AWESOME. I was more interested and involved in that class than most of my other classes--I kept up a double-entry journal for all of the reading so that I was constantly analyzing and writing down my thoughts. I had a great relationship with the professor and other girls in my class. It was during this class that the big protest in Seattle was going on, and we were all motivated to take a bus up there together because of the women about whom we were reading. This class motivated me to be an activist.

As for this particular book, it was great in the beginning. Wollstonecraft is difficult, dense reading. She had some great ideas that spurred deep intellectual discussion, but after a while you want to stop reading. She makes her point early on and the rest is too much. Also, it's hard to be motivated to trudge through it when her dream is somewhat old news to us now.

[rrainer-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I think everyone should read this book. Everyone. Sometimes I reread it just to remind myself how fiercely this battle was being fought in the eighteenth century, and how hard we still have to fight. A little righteous fury goes a long way.

[wonderperson · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Apart from Class ridden snobbery condemming working classes to manual work and paying attention to current social mores, Wollestonecraft makes a reasoned case for women to shove off the fripperies of womanhood and get into some solid educational DIY.
Her thesis is a woman is a better wife etc if she is educated rather than an uneducated bimbo who is more concerned with the latest fashion than by the state of her brain. I think this holds true.
Well worth reading, well written and an easy read in comparison to other philosophy texts.

[unreachableshelf · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a valuable tool for understanding late 18th century thought, and how a real live woman ahead of her time framed her opinions on the rights and education of women long before modern feminism.

[ariadnearanea · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Mary Wollstonecraft is often credited with being the world’s first feminist. That may be something of an exaggeration, but her 1792 treatise A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is certainly renowned as the earliest, most powerful, most overtly feminist tract in the English language – despite having been written long before the word “feminism” was coined.The dense wordy style of an eighteenth century political tract is easily enough to put off the majority of modern readers, but – for the brave or committed reader – this work more than repays the effort required. Indeed, what struck me is how much of what Wollstonecraft says in A Vindication resounds in the modern world.Her argument (addressed primarily to the position of middle-class women) is that a lack of effective and appropriate education, and a distorted view of women’s purpose in life, have combined to render many or most women weak, foolish, vain, selfish, cunning and unfit for what Wollstonecraft sees as their peculiar (but not primary) duty – that of motherhood.[Aside: much to my satisfaction, there are a number of pro-breastfeeding remarks in A Vindication, and Wollstonecraft repeatedly makes the point that beauty requirements and other foolish demands on women make them averse to breastfeeding with potentially disastrous consequences!]She argues powerfully that society (by which she means, primarily, men – since they have all the education and the political and economic power) fails women in a number of ways.For one thing, it makes them utterly dependent financially on men – fathers, husbands, brothers or other relatives. The effect is that for self-preservation women must adopt a subservient, self-abasing attitude to men. This degrades them twice: once in dignity; and then (which makes me think of Dickens’ Uriah Heep!) by forcing them to use cunning – those famous “womanly wiles” – to get what they want or need but cannot obtain for themselves.Secondly, society assigns to women an obligation to please men, and to be pleasing to them. This springs in part from their aforementioned dependence on men, and is reinforced by the fact that precious little other outlet is given them for their emotions and ambitions. The consequence is that women, being admired far more for their persons than for their minds, expend all their care and effort on the former at the expense of the latter. They become vain, and bitchy, and obsessed with “beauty”, by which they mean weak delicate bodies decorated in whatever ornaments are currently in fashion.More than all this, what women suffer is a total lack of any education worth the name. It is their want of a proper education which narrows their horizons and reinforces both their dependence on men and their inordinate concern for petty things such as their dress or (by outward show, if not in practice) maintenance of the one virtue that no woman must be without – chastity.Such women as this, Wollstonecraft argues, inevitably become hopelessly caught up in “vice” – vanity and cupidity if nothing else – and will inevitably lack any real virtue such as genuine chastity, proper affection, loyalty or generosity, selfless friendship, or sound understanding. Moreover, such women as this will also invariably either neglect their children in favour of pursuing the “necessary” activity of continuing to please men by maintaining their beauty and other charms – or they will devote themselves excessively to their children but, because they lack both judgement and sound understanding, they will be unable to respond to their children properly and thus will risk spoiling either their health or their tempers, perhaps irremediably. In either case, such a woman as this will be unable to carry out her peculiar (but not primary) duty: to bring up children who are healthy, happy, well-behaved and suitably educated.Wollstonecraft’s primary aims in A Vindication are twofold.Firstly, she endeavours to sweep away the lingering idea – by making clear how nonsensical and self-contradictory it is – that Woman was made by God to be a plaything and propagator for Man, and that she has no true rationality or personhood of her own.Secondy, she makes a strident plea for proper education for women. If women were given a level playing field and still fell behind men, she says, it would be appropriate to charge them with inferiority. Unless and until that happens, she insists that no man can prove women inferior. But, she says, even if we believe that women are in some way less than men, they are still human beings, still rational creatures, and still (as she says) given an immortal soul which it is their sacred duty to expand and develop. It is wrong for women to be oppressed and prevented from meeting this sacred duty, merely because of an (unproved!) idea that women will or may not actually achieve their aim in the same degree as men. Indeed, if that were not argument enough, it should be remembered that failing to educate women properly will prevent them from meeting their secondary duty – that of mothering – because it renders them unfit for the job.In short: Women are Human! and Education for All!More than that, Wollstonecraft anticiaptes, by around two centuries, a surprising number of modern feminist ideas. Women as sex class? The beauty myth? Socially constructed gender roles? The seeds of all these ideas and more can be found in A Vindication. Wollstonecraft even suggests – although tentatively, aware of the response that she would get for it – that perhaps women might at some point have a legitimate claim to taking some part in the government of their country. So we can credit her with “Votes for Women!” too.Superb.

[seldombites · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

This book is way too hard to read. It is reputed to be one of the most important books ever written, but I simply could not get through it. The language is extremely convoluted and reads as though it has been written for the chardonnay set. It would be difficult for the average layperson to read. I have been reading this book for months and I am not even half-way through. I think now is the time to give up!

[bookcrazed_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Wollstonecraft waxes eloquent in defending the intellectual and spiritual capacity of women, but was somehow still a woman who made a bad choice about who to love and wasn't quite liberated enough to openly give birth to an illegitimate child. All that is just a footnote. The body of the text is a sound piece of philosophical discourse that deserves its place on a shelf with the classics.