Mary Wollstonecraft

In an age of ferment, following the American and French revolutions, Mary Wollstonecraft took prevailing egalitarian principles and dared to apply them to women. Her book is both a sustained argument for emancipation and an attack on a social and an economic system. As Miriam Brody points out in her introduction, subsequent feminists tended to lose sight of her radical objectives. For Mary Wollstonecraft all aspects of women's existence were interrelated,...

Thoughts on the education of daughters: with reflections on female conduct, in the more important duties of life is a conduct book that offers advice on female education to the emerging British middle class. Although dominated by considerations of morality and etiquette, the text also contains basic child-rearing instructions, such as how to care for an infant. As an early version of the modern self-help book, the 18th-century British conduct book...

Wollstonecraft's 1792 work sets out all the chief principles of feminist thought developed by later feminist writers and activists. Written in the aftermath of the French Revolution, which made radical change seem possible, Wollstonecraft challenges the idea that society's oppression of women is entirely natural. While her male contemporaries happily argued for the fundamental freedoms of all men, few were interested in extending these revolutionary

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