A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects is a 1792 essay by British philosopher and women's rights advocate Mary Wollstonecraft. It is considered a feminist or, more precisely, proto-feminist piece, and one of the pioneering works in the tradition now known as feminist philosophy.

In this essay, Wollstonecraft refutes those educational and political theorists of the eighteenth century who did not believe women should receive a full education. She argues that women ought to have an education commensurate with their position in society, claiming that women are essential to the nation because they educate its children and because they could be "companions" to their husbands, rather than mere wives. Instead of viewing women as ornaments to society or property to be traded in marriage, Wollstonecraft maintains that they are human beings deserving of the same fundamental rights as men. Wollstonecraft specifically calls for equality between the sexes in particular areas of life, especially moral responsibility and educational access. Uncertainty regarding whether she believed women should have full voting rights or other political rights make it difficult to classify Wollstonecraft definitively as a modern feminist; furthermore, the word feminist did not emerge until decades after her death.

A spiritual sequel to Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), Rights of Woman was inspired after she read Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord's 1791 report to the National Assembly in revolutionary France, which stated that women should only receive a domestic education. From her reaction to this specific event, she launched a broad attack against double standards, indicting men for encouraging women to indulge in excessive emotion. Wollstonecraft hurried to complete the work in direct response to ongoing events; she intended to write a more thoughtful second volume but died before completing it.

The Rights of Woman was generally received well when it was first published in 1792. The modern assumption that it was unfavourably received is a misconception. In fact, Wollstonecraft was reviled only after details emerged of her personal life after her death, based on the publication of her husband William Godwin's Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798). Biographer Emily W. Sunstein called Rights of Woman "perhaps the most original book of [Wollstonecraft's] century". Wollstonecraft's work had a significant impact on advocates for women's rights in the nineteenth century, particularly the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention which produced the Declaration of Sentiments, laying out the aims of the women's suffrage movement in the United States.