A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
€0,00
First published in 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman is a landmark of political and philosophical writing, composed in the ferment of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Challenging the assumptions that confined women to ornamental roles and denied them intellectual independence, Wollstonecraft argues that women are not naturally inferior to men, but are made so by an education designed to cultivate beauty and obedience rather than reason. Addressing the philosophers, educators and social conventions of her time, she makes the case for equal education and for women’s place as rational, independent members of society.
Passionate, incisive and often sharply satirical, the book reaches beyond a plea for individual advancement to question the foundations of marriage, family life, social hierarchy and political citizenship. Wollstonecraft insists that virtue and reason cannot be divided by sex, and that a more just society depends upon the intellectual and moral freedom of women. One of the foundational works of modern feminist thought, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman remains remarkable for the force of its arguments and its refusal to accept inherited inequalities as natural.
From the book
“I do not wish them to have power over men; but over themselves.”
— Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
On A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
“The central text of feminism from her time to our own.”
— Ellen Moers, The New York Review of Books