Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, published in London in January 1792 by Mary Wollstonecraft, is one of the founding works of modern feminism. Written in about six weeks amid the excitement of the French Revolution, it argued that women are rational beings whose apparent weakness comes from poor education, not nature. The book demanded that the principles of rights and reason being debated across Europe be applied to women too.

Background: Wollstonecraft before 1792

Mary Wollstonecraft was born in Spitalfields, London, on 27 April 1759. Her family’s fortunes declined under a violent, spendthrift father, and she had to earn her own living, one of the few paths open to women being work as a companion, teacher or governess. In 1784 she opened a school at Newington Green with her sisters and her friend Fanny Blood, where she came to know the Dissenting minister Richard Price and his circle.

After a period as governess to an aristocratic family in Ireland, she settled in London as a professional writer for the radical publisher Joseph Johnson. Her early works included Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787) and a novel, Mary: A Fiction (1788).

The Revolution debate

In November 1790 the politician Edmund Burke attacked the French Revolution and Richard Price in Reflections on the Revolution in France. Within weeks Wollstonecraft answered with A Vindication of the Rights of Men, one of the first replies, defending reform and criticising inherited privilege.

The revolutionaries’ Declaration of the Rights of Man did not extend political rights to women. In 1791 the French statesman Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand presented a report on national education that proposed only domestic schooling for girls. Wollstonecraft dedicated her new book to him, urging France to reconsider.

The argument of the book

Wollstonecraft’s central claim was that reason is the same in men and women, and that virtue depends on reason. If women were taught only to be pleasing, delicate and obedient, they could not be truly virtuous; they would be dependent, frivolous or cunning, not because of their sex but because of their upbringing.

She attacked the authors who shaped ideas about girls’ education. Her chief target was Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose novel Emile (1762) described an ideal wife, Sophie, educated solely to serve and please her husband. She also criticised popular conduct books, such as James Fordyce’s Sermons to Young Women and John Gregory’s A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters, for teaching women to cultivate weakness.

Her remedies were practical. She proposed national day schools in which boys and girls of all classes would be educated together, with subjects including science, history and politics. She argued that women should be able to pursue professions such as medicine and business so that they need not marry for financial support, and she described marriages made for money in harsh terms.

The book was not a call to abandon family life. Wollstonecraft insisted that educated women would make better wives, mothers and citizens. She briefly suggested that women should have political representatives, while acknowledging that her readers might laugh at the idea.

Style and structure

The Vindication is a long polemical essay in thirteen chapters, written quickly and with passion. It moves between philosophical argument, criticism of other authors and sharp observation of everyday life, from the idle routines of wealthy women to the way girls were taught to value appearance above understanding. Critics then and since have noted that it can be repetitive, a result of its hasty composition.

Wollstonecraft presented the book as a first volume. She planned a second part on the laws affecting women, such as those that gave a husband control of his wife’s property and person, but she never wrote it. Some of those themes appear instead in her unfinished novel Maria, or The Wrongs of Woman, published after her death in 1798.

The book’s tone is often moral and religious. Wollstonecraft argued from the belief that God had given women and men the same rational souls, so that keeping women ignorant was an offence against their nature and their Creator. This religious framing is sometimes overlooked by modern readers.

Reception

The first reviews were mixed but often respectful, and a second edition appeared in 1792, along with American editions, and translations into French and German soon followed. As fears of revolution grew in Britain, however, radical writers came under attack. The writer Horace Walpole, in a 1795 letter, called her a “hyena in petticoats”.

In late 1792 Wollstonecraft went to Paris to observe the Revolution. There she began a relationship with the American adventurer Gilbert Imlay, with whom she had a daughter, Fanny, in 1794. In 1797 she married the philosopher William Godwin. She died on 10 September 1797, aged 38, from infection after the birth of their daughter Mary, later Mary Shelley.

Godwin’s candid Memoirs of her life, published in 1798, scandalised readers. For decades her name was associated with immorality, and many women’s rights campaigners were cautious about citing her.

Legacy

Even in the years of neglect, some reformers kept reading her. In the United States, the first volume of the History of Woman Suffrage (1881), edited by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and Matilda Joslyn Gage, was dedicated to the memory of Mary Wollstonecraft among other pioneers. Her reputation recovered more widely in the late nineteenth century. The suffragist Millicent Garrett Fawcett wrote an introduction to a centenary edition in 1891, and Virginia Woolf praised her in an essay of 1929. By the twentieth century the Vindication was widely recognised as a classic of political philosophy and feminist thought.

Historians also see it in a wider context. Other writers, such as Olympe de Gouges in France with her 1791 Declaration of the Rights of Woman, and the historian Catharine Macaulay in Britain, made related arguments in the same years. In 2020 a sculpture in her honour by Maggi Hambling was unveiled at Newington Green.

Myths and facts

Wollstonecraft is sometimes described as the first feminist writer. She was not: earlier authors such as the French philosopher François Poullain de la Barre in 1673 and the English writer Mary Astell in the 1690s had argued for women’s reason and education. What made the Vindication distinctive was its link to the revolutionary language of rights and its confident, sweeping attack on the culture of female dependence.

It is also a myth that she rejected marriage and family outright. Her book praised companionate marriage based on friendship and respect, and she herself married Godwin when she became pregnant. Nor was the Vindication chiefly about the vote; its main demand was education.

Timeline

• 1759, 27 April: Mary Wollstonecraft is born in London.
• 1784: She opens a school at Newington Green.
• 1790, November: Burke’s Reflections appears; she replies with A Vindication of the Rights of Men.
• 1791: Talleyrand presents his report on education to the French National Assembly.
• 1792, January: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is published in London.
• 1792, December: Wollstonecraft travels to Paris.
• 1797, 29 March: She marries William Godwin.
• 1797, 10 September: She dies in London after the birth of her daughter Mary.

Why it matters

The Vindication made the case, in the language of Enlightenment reason, that education and opportunity, not nature, explained the inequality of the sexes. That argument underpins later campaigns for girls’ schooling, women’s professions and the vote, and it remains a starting point for debates about equality today.