A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

First published in 1792, ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Women’ is a work of crucial importance in intellectual history written by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, an English novelist. Considered by most as Western feminism's central heroine, Wollstonecraft argues that women must be educated to develop their reason in order to throw off the frivolous, debilitating role of man's plaything. Rather than cultivating power from sexual allure, women should be honest, intelligent, and independent. Her concern about how women's innate worth is denigrated by improper definitions of the feminine in novels, in advice literature, and in educational systems has inspired women for over two centuries to contemplate the connections between power and femininity. Mary Wollstonecraft’s work was received with a mixture of admiration and outrage—Walpole called her ‘a hyena in petticoats’—yet it established her as the mother of modern feminism.